Raised By Wolves 3 - Treasure (32 page)

She nodded with a little sob.

“Well it will hurt less if you do not see her, and you will like her better when it is done if she has not spent days cursing you.”

“I suppose, my Lord,” she said.

“I am quite serious, Henrietta,” I said and shook her shoulders gently until she looked up at me. “I will dismiss you if you go near her without my permission. And God forbid what I will do if she receives a drink from anyone.”

She swallowed and nodded quickly. “I understand, my Lord.”

“Now, go and see if you can assist Samuel, if you please. It might take your mind off the matter.”

This suggestion seemed to relieve her, and she hurried off. I hoped Samuel viewed her arrival in his cookhouse as a blessing and not a curse.

I went to join the rest of the household where they sat about the remaining tables in the atrium.

“Well, that is seen to,” I said. “I will see to her. I have ordered Henrietta not to.” I looked to Agnes sternly. “I do not wish you to go near her, either.”

The girl regarded me with wide eyes. “Why would I do that?”

“Smart girl,” I said, and dropped into a chair next to Gaston.

“She does not like me,” Agnes said.

“She will if she thinks you’ll bring her rum,” Striker said.

“I am not stupid or naïve,” Agnes said primly.

Several of us fought the need to smirk.

“Now that we have destroyed the parlor,” I said. “What should we attempt next?”

Sarah chuckled mirthlessly. “Well, our rooms on this wing are not so very bad, but…”

“I have seen our room,” I said. “I imagine all the rooms on that side of the house are black.”

She nodded. “They need to be cleaned and repainted.”

I looked to Gaston and he nodded. “We will set upon it in the morning.”

“I have been wondering where everyone will sleep,” she said.

She indicated the Marquis and Dupree, as well as Gaston and me.

“Thankfully, Uncle is still at the plantation, as his room is in ruin, too. If she is not to be near Lady Marsdale, Henrietta can sleep in the servants’

quarters. And I know Will and Gaston are used to far worse conditions, and I suppose they will sleep in the stable, but my Lord, I do not know where we will put you,” she said to the Marquis. “I would have said the parlor, but…”

We looked to the Marquis: Dupree was just finishing his translation.

He shrugged. “We rested in the dining room today. On the floor,” he added, as if it amused him that he had done such a thing. “However, I would not deny the house its use…”

“Non,” Sarah said quickly. “We can move the table and find cots.

That will be fine. We can eat here.”

“We Got Hammocks,” Pete said. “Might As Well Make More Holes Ta String ’Em . Not Like We Won’t Be Fixin’ It All Anyway.”

“I am sorry,” I said to all.

“It is not your fault,” Sarah said. “Fires happen even when extremely drunken women do not tip over lamps.”

Sam and Henrietta brought us corn cakes and more of the soup I had seen the others eating earlier, and we ate and began to talk merrily of all that needed to be done to repair each room of the house.

We at last succumbed to lingering exhaustion, and left the pool of warm lantern light about the tables. I went to check on Vivian while Gaston went to salvage what he could from our room.

Vivian had been unable to do much to destroy the furniture, but I was thankful I had left nothing of value in her reach. I found her curled on the end of the settee, with her arms about her knees. She made no move when I lit a lamp on the far side of the room.

“Go away,” she muttered when I approached. Her eyes opened, and she squinted at the lantern light and winced.

“Do you need anything?” I asked. “And spare me the sarcasm such a question can well engender in these circumstances.”

“I am thirsty,” she said bitterly after a long pause. “And there is no chamber pot.”

“All right,” I said. “Are you hungry? I am sure you must be quite starved. Would you like some soup or bread? That is all we ate.” She had not eaten since probably before the fire, and she had vomited several times during the birthing.

She shook her head, and pushed herself up to sit. “I am filthy and bleeding. I would like a clean gown and rags.”

“I do not believe any of your clothing remains,” I said with a sincere shrug. “Perhaps Agnes or my sister can loan you a gown and the other.”

“And,” she added. “I will need Henrietta to help with my hair and…”

“Nay,” I said.

Her eyes hardened, but she bit her lip to keep her initial words in.

“Why?”

“She loves you,” I said. “Perhaps enough to do what must be done, but she has been raised a servant, and I cannot trust that that will not win out. You will need to attend to yourself, or I will assist you if there is a thing you cannot do alone. I will find a brush or comb for your hair.”

“Damn you,” she spat.

I shrugged. “I will bring you water in a cup you cannot break, and a pot.”Her curses followed me out the door.

“Has she gotten the shakes yet?” Striker asked with concern as I joined them.

“Nay, not yet,” I sighed. “I think she is finally no longer drunk, and now she feels its bite.”

I asked the girls for a spare nightgown and comb, and rags for the bleeding, and went to find water in a tin cup and a chamber pot. Agnes met me at the door to the parlor with a brush, a comb, some ribbons, and a gown and ladies’ rags. In the parlor, I set everything where Vivian could reach it.

“Should I leave the lamp?” I asked.

“Go fuck yourself.”

I sighed. “I will leave the lamp turned down low for a time, so that you might see what you are doing and place things so that you might find them in the dark.”

“As long as you leave, I care not,” she said.

I sighed again. “I know it is very small consolation, but I do not hate you. I am sorry I did not tell you of my change in plans; that I left you worried and concerned for your future… such that you would believe the rumors that spread through the servants after the party. I understand why you burned the house. And it was just a house. And… I feel you meant no harm to the child, if indeed the drinking is what caused the harm.”

“She is my baby,” she sobbed into the arm of the settee. “She is all I have. She is my little Jamaica, my little piece of Jamaica. She is not yours. You had nothing to do with her. Nothing.” She turned to glare at me. “I dressed like a whore and went out every night after you sailed, and fucked any man who would buy me a bottle, until I missed my bleed. I made her. I decided who I would fuck. Me. Me. Not you. Not my father. She is mine, and you have no right to take her from me.”

I was surprised and amused, and yet saddened as I heard a thing in between her words that confirmed what I had long sensed about her: that she was as scarred as I, though perhaps not in the same way.

I righted a chair and sat. “You do not know who the father is? Her father is some nameless buccaneer? You did not have an affair?”

She raised her chin and shook her head with dignity.

“You are not stupid and indiscreet or…” I said with wonder. “I had thought, or rather, I had heard you had an affair with some planter’s son who looked like me. I thought you were a complete idiot. But no one has said a word about what you really did, which if they had known would have been the talk of the town. So you were quite careful and sly.”

She snorted disparagingly, but she was frowning at me with speculation and hope. “Do you still not hate me?” she asked sarcastically.

I smiled. “Nay, I do not hate you. This confession here has raised you considerably in my estimation.”

She shook her head. “You are daft.”

“Nay,” I chuckled. “Mad perhaps, in that I do not choose to always see things as others do. Let us get you sober, and then you can have…

Jamaica… back, and we… “

“Do not mock me,” she said.

“I am not,” I said reassuringly. “I think Jamaica is a fine name.

Jamaica Williams. We can call her Jaime. Unless you had some other name for her.”

“Nay,” she said with wonder and a pained frown. “I always thought of her as my little Jamaica. Wait, you will give her your name?”

“Aye.” I decided I would not tell her this was due to my matelot and not her: that would only make her angry again.

She rubbed her temples angrily. “Damn it, my head hurts so. I will not remember all this in the morning. I will think it a dream.”

“Then I will say it again in the morning,” I said kindly. “Drink the water.” I stood and handed her the mug. “I will bring more. I will leave the lantern for now. See to yourself as you can. You will be miserable for days, and giving you anything to mitigate it will merely make it worse in the end, but it will pass.”

She gazed up at me with teary eyes. “I do not understand you.”

I smiled. “Well, many would say you are in good company. I would not, though, because generally people who do not understand me are people I do not like. Perhaps you will understand me in time.”

She shook her head with a rueful smile.

I took the medicine chest and left her. I found Gaston in the stable.

He had taken our weapons and all else we might need for the night from the chests in our room, including a hammock, and he was in the process of stringing it from the beams in the half of the stable designed to be a stall, where someone would have to enter the structure to see it. I decided the place would do nicely, even though it was enclosed and had no breeze. However, we would need to acquire some of the netting if we wished to stay here.

I began to assist him and quickly relayed all that Vivian had said. He regarded me with first surprise and horror, and then perplexity.

“Jamaica,” he said at last, as if the word were suddenly unfamiliar to him. “Can one of her names be Angelique?”

“Angelique? That is a pretty name. I.. Is that what…? I thought her mother should name her, I did not know you wished to.”

He shook his head. “I was just trying to think of a name for her. It holds no great meaning for me. I like Jamaica. It is fitting. And it is a pretty name for a girl.”

“Good, then she can be Jamaica Angelique Williams.” It felt strangely ominous to name another so, with the name they would go by throughout their lives.

He smiled. “As soon as your damn wife is able, we will need to go and have her baptized.”

“I would rather not,” I sighed. “If there is a Heaven, I do not see where it should be required that we pay a priest to say words over her in order for her to reach it. If God truly requires that for one so young and innocent, He can hang Himself.”

“But Will,” Gaston protested. “It has nothing to do with God. It will mean you legally claim her as yours in the Kingdom of Men.”

“I know, I know,” I sighed. “And that is not why I am reluctant. It does have little to do with God, and all to do with placing her on the tax roll for the parish and legitimizing her as my child, but… I feel I am angered that I have to pay a priest for that, too, and by so doing, pretend God has a hand in the matter when all know it to be a lie, another shadow on the cave wall. There should be some office of the Crown that keeps such records.”

“There is,” Gaston sighed with a rueful smile. “It is called the Church. And your good King Henry made that even clearer in your country.”

I grinned. “You sound like a Protestant. Hell, we both do.”

“Non, we sound like atheists,” he said.

“Except for that part about God,” I teased.

“I have only been in one chapel where I felt the presence of… some great power not of this world, and that was at the monastery,” he said.

“I have been in great cathedrals. I stood in them in awe; but not in awe of God, but in awe of the men who built them.”

I smiled at him with great regard that we ever thought so alike.

“That is always what I feel when I stand in them. And when I stood in the Sistine Chapel and saw that wondrous art, I saw the hand of man, not God.”

We finished arranging our new home and I went to look in on Vivian one last time for the night. I found her sleeping on the settee. She had donned the clean gown and combed and plaited her hair. I took her soiled gown and rags away, and the chamber pot, which she had filled.

When I returned, I was sure she was awake, but she held still and made no move to turn toward me. I left the empty chamber pot, a fresh mug of water, and some boucan and an apple for her, and turned out the lamp.

Gaston was naked and coating himself in grease to keep the insects at bay when I returned. I quickly joined him in that endeavor, and it soon became a thing of such pleasure we used the grease elsewhere.

When Heaven’s light receded from behind my eyes and we at last sought to move from the sated tangle we had become, Gaston shook my shoulder and regarded me with concern in the dim lantern light.

“What?” I asked.

“You must speak to the Gods,” he said earnestly. “About Jamaica.”

“What?” I asked.

“Pray,” he said. “That she lives. Claim her.”

He appeared to be in a curious state, and I saw much of the Child about him, so I did not argue that I felt I had said as much in my heart and surely the Gods had heard me and understood my intent.

“Must I do this alone?” I asked gently.

He thought on it and shook his head. Then he was prodding me to move until we sat like tailors facing one another. He took my hands. As I gazed into his eyes I could see he had fully adopted his childish mien now, and I wondered at it.

“What should we say?” I prompted him.

He gripped my hands tightly and closed his eyes; when he opened them he gazed upward toward the ceiling. “We wish to claim Jamaica Angelique Williams, the girl born of Vivian this morning, as our daughter. We promise to care for her, and we wish for her to remain with us and become healthy.”

“Oui,” I said, because amen seemed oddly inappropriate.

He smiled and regarded me with great love, and then he was crawling into my lap and pushing me back on the hammock to kiss me earnestly and sweetly. We cuddled together and I felt him drift to sleep in my arms. I lay awake until I was sure he slumbered soundly.