The Pelican Bride (13 page)

Tristan hauled on the reins of the plow, forcing his ox to halt midfield. He yanked at the kerchief loosely knotted about his throat, untying it and swiping it across his sweaty face. Why he had failed to bring a canteen of water with him he would never know. Well, perhaps he did know and didn’t want to admit it. His thoughts these days always seemed to land where he had strictly forbidden them to go—twenty-seven miles north in Fort Louis.

Not since Sholani’s death had he been so preoccupied, so . . . uncontrollably dreamy. He was reminded of days when his mother would find him perched in a maple tree drawing pictures of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne’s sister Catherine-Jeanne. Tall and strikingly lovely, socially as far above shy young Tristan Lanier as the stars in the heavens, Catherine had also possessed a kind heart. She never failed to greet him and give him her slow, curving smile when she passed in church.

Jogging the reins with a shout to the ox, he pushed the plow down the row of squash, a rueful smile tugging at his lips. The romanticized charcoal drawings inspired by Catherine Le Moyne would never hang upon the walls of Versailles, but they had at least convinced his father that he had sufficient talent to enter an apprenticeship with one of the greatest cartographers of the age, Charles Levasseur. Thus had begun his adventures with Levasseur, Iberville, and Le Sueur, and his deep friendship with the flamboyant young Bienville.

He sometimes wondered where life’s road might have taken him had he chosen to stay in Canada, rather than joining the expedition to explore the Gulf of Mexico. A safer path, no doubt. But to have never loved Sholani? Never to have seen the ocean’s roaring surf or stand in a field knowing that the land as far as his eye would reach belonged to him?

No, despite the pain of betrayal and grief so deep that it still sometimes clawed him awake at night, he would not go back.

One regret lingered . . . that he would have no son to come behind him, a hardy lad with whom to plot next year’s garden, to teach the use of sexton and compass, to fill with stories passed down from his own father. The child he had created with Sholani had perished with her. Marc-Antoine would inherit this plantation, if he ever left off gadding about at Bienville’s behest, so perhaps his sons would bear with the tales of crotchety old Uncle Tristan.

If that thought struck a minor chord of dissatisfaction, it was no more than he deserved. He should never have left her that day. She had begged to come with him, but he’d convinced her it would not be good for the baby. A pregnant woman, daily purging her breakfast, craving sleep every afternoon, would only slow him down. He’d wanted to discharge this one last long mapping mission for Bienville and get home, the quicker the better. Perhaps he had gotten too comfortable with the Indian way of ordering women about. Perhaps he’d grown a bit weary of the tears that seemed to lurk close to the surface and spill over whenever she was crossed. In the end he’d left her sobbing in their thatched cabin, shutting the door with just a bit too much force, striding off toward the river with a couple of soldiers assigned him by Bienville.

The last time he’d seen her alive, he had only kissed the top of her head and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.
You are my heart
, he’d been thinking but could not say it.

The dull ache in his breast was threatening to turn into a knife wound, so it was a relief to espy a figure approaching over the eastern horizon. He squinted against the bright morning sun, and finally made out the dark head of one of his Pascagoula Indian neighbors. Bienville employed several of them as runners between Massacre Island and Fort Louis, paying them in ammunition, cloth, or whatever European sundry they might be in need of. It had been several days since a brave named Hatchet had passed through on
his way to the fort, stopping only to accept a dipper of water from Tristan’s well and promising to return with any word from Marc-Antoine, whom the Indians called Bright Tongue.

As the Indian got closer, Tristan saw that this fellow didn’t have the sharp-boned face of the lugubrious Hatchet. He was on the short side, even for the small-statured Pascagoula, bowlegged but fleet, running over the soft ground that Tristan had struggled to clear all by himself in that season of blinding pain after Sholani was taken from him. The Indian easily loped toward him, raised an arm in greeting, and he recognized Deerfoot, a man who had taught Tristan much about hunting the dense coastal woods.

Leaving the ox standing with a handful of grass to occupy him, Tristan walked toward the Indian and when he got close enough hailed him in the Mobilian tongue.

“Tree-Stah!” called Deerfoot, giving his best approximation of Tristan’s name. “Greetings on this beautiful day! You will have sunstroke if you stay out here with nothing on your head.”

Tristan grinned, giving him a whack on the shoulder for greeting. Deerfoot had tried unsuccessfully on many occasions to talk Tristan out of his handsome tricorn. “I left my hat in the cabin to keep crazy Indians from stealing it. What brings you up from the island today?”

Deerfoot, part of a distant clan of Sholani’s family, made his home at the east end of Massacre Island. He had a sweet wife and four little girls who adored “Uncle Tree-Stah” and delighted in decorating him with wildflower crowns and feeding him their mother’s thick soup made of venison broth, crabmeat, and okra, with panfried corn bread to sop up the gravy. Very different from Geneviève Gaillain’s delicate French loaves, to be sure, but tasty and filling.

“I’m on my way to the fort. Did you know that a supply ship has come from Martinique?”

“No! But that is good news. Can you wait for me to gather up a few things and come with you?”

Deerfoot tapped his chin in pretended reluctance. “I don’t think you can keep up with me.”

“And yet I beat you in the island footrace not ten days ago.” Tristan began to unhitch the ox.

Deerfoot jumped up onto the animal’s broad, shaggy back. “I was nursing a twisted ankle that day. I am well now.”

“Then you will have no excuse when I outrun you today.” Tristan gave the ox a good-natured swat with his hand to get him moving and picked up the reins to lead him toward the barn.

“I’ve already run thirty-six miles this morning, but I’ll be waiting for you at Burelle’s tavern when you drag in.” Deerfoot crossed his legs and leaned back on his elbows, lounging on the ox’s muscular haunches as if he lay on a blanket next to his wife’s cookfire. “What I don’t understand, Tree-Stah, is why you hide out on this bluff, when you could live with us on the island, where there is at least an occasional game of dice—or up the river with your own people. Hatchet tells me the white women who came over the ocean are handsome to look at, even though they don’t know how to cook a meal that will fill a man’s belly.”

Tristan could think of at least one Frenchwoman who was both handsome to look at and knew her way around an oven. It was a moot point anyway. Three weeks since her arrival, she was undoubtedly already married. He shrugged. “I like to be alone.”

“You didn’t like it so much in the days when my pretty cousin threw back her blanket for you. Sholani is dead for two years, my friend. It is unnatural for a young man to live out his days with nobody for company but a fat French cow.” Deerfoot shoved the ox in the back of its square head with his foot.

Tristan scowled over his shoulder. “You gossip like an old woman, Deerfoot. Leave me alone, or I will send you on to the fort without so much as a drink of water, while I come in the boat.”

Deerfoot snorted. “We will both go in the boat, otherwise you might never get there.”

He fell silent as Tristan led the ox into the spacious corral he had built to keep the animal from wandering too far. Deerfoot slid to the ground and helped Tristan feed the chickens and find some scraps for the pig. The animals would forage for themselves until he returned in a day or two.

As he gathered items he would need for the trip, answering Deerfoot’s lighthearted insults and closing down the cabin, he couldn’t help anticipating what he would say to a certain green-eyed Frenchwoman when he saw her. Married. She would be married and possibly even with child. Someone else’s child.

The dull ache of his heart was so familiar that he hardly noticed it was a different sort of pain, accompanied this time by a fizz of anticipation. He would at least see her and speak to her. He would congratulate her and offer to . . .

What? Draw her a map?

Rolling his eyes at his own ridiculous mental perambulations, he slid the bolt across his cabin door to keep out roaming wild animals and followed Deerfoot to the riverbank below the bluff. Maybe the Indian was right. Yes, a beautiful woman like Geneviève Gaillain would certainly be married by now, but perhaps one of the less attractive girls remained unclaimed. One who wouldn’t mind coming to keep house for a sour, lonely former mapmaker with a hole the size of Canada in his heart.

8

I
t seemed to Geneviève, seated between her sister and Raindrop halfway back in the fort’s tiny chapel, that every event of importance that occurred in the colony of Louisiane must be celebrated inside these rickety walls. If today’s events—a burial, a wedding, and a baptism—were a harbinger of days to come, the walls were like to explode before the year was out.

It was the first Sunday of September, and the newly wedded Madame and Surgeon-Major Barraud, who had been chosen to serve as godparents for the infant to be baptized, were seated in a place of honor up front, on the only real pew in the chapel.

Father Henri, recently appointed as official pastor of the as yet unbuilt parish church, threaded his way through the dense congregation with a dignity that would have graced the cathedral of Versailles. Judging by the yellow tinge of his skin and a slight tremor of his hands, he was not fully recovered from the fever that had taken Levasseur.

The infant’s parents, prosperous young locksmith Zacharie Canelle and his wife Céline, who had emigrated from Rochefort nearly a year ago, followed close on the priest’s heels, beaming with pride in their screaming progeny. As the first white native-born
Louisianan, or
créole
, their son would hold an important place in history, and the baptismal record book waited upon the vestry table for the signatures of parents, godparents, priest, and commander.

Geneviève smiled as Raindrop reverently kissed her little cross-shaped piquet necklace, mimicking Father Henri’s dramatic salutation of the ebony crucifix upon his white surplice. Geneviève had tatted the ornament and given it to her in honor of her baptism last Sunday; as far as she knew, Raindrop had yet to take it off.

As Father Henri called the godparents forward to remove the baby’s blanket and hold him naked, squirming and wailing as if he were under torture, over the baptismal bowl, Geneviève looked for Father Mathieu. She found him standing near the wall to her left, his sober black robe in stark contrast to the white seminary garb of perpetually irritated Father Albert, the third pastor of the community. Now that Mathieu had come to fill the post of chaplain to the soldiers, and with Father Henri named pastor outside the fort, Father Albert suffered from lack of sheep to guard. She had heard gossip about his reluctance to return to his mission among the Tunica west of the river, which he had abandoned two years ago after coming upon a couple of fellow missioners left with their heads bashed in by hostile Indians.

Geneviève increasingly felt her heart tugged toward the native peoples whom she encountered as she went about the settlement. Their vulnerability to the blandishment of white traders, intimidation by the military forces, and even manipulation in spiritual matters for political advantage had made some quite understandably suspicious. She had been working with Raindrop to learn a few words of the Mobilian tongue. So far she had learned enough to send the little girl into fits of giggles, but she was determined to keep trying.

Other than that, her days had been filled with helping Father Mathieu and the two nuns tend the sick in the community—most of them yellow fever victims—and the evenings trotting from one
social engagement to another with Madame. Remembering Commander Bienville’s blunt stricture, she felt obliged to entertain one awkward advance after the other from young Canadian soldiers and French artisan bachelors. She was not so naïve as to think one must be head-over-heels in love with one’s husband, but it seemed only reasonable to hope for a compatible life partner. Remembering her mother’s descent into grief and despair after her father’s murder, she was almost afraid of that kind of all-consuming love.

She studied Barbe Savarit, standing beside her miraculously sober new husband, looking proud and nervous and excited all at once. Did she expect to be happy, tied to a man who spent every waking moment at Burelle’s tavern, when he wasn’t pulling rotten teeth or treating fever victims with what amounted to sugar water? At least Barbe had a home of her own to go to at the end of this day. And hopefully soon she would have a child of her own to pour herself into.

A muffled sob drew her gaze to Ysabeau Bonnet, who sat a few feet away on a packing box, dabbing at her eyes with a sodden handkerchief. Aboard the
Pélican
, Ysabeau and Aimée had become bosom friends, which meant that Geneviève had also come to know her quite well. Ysabeau was only fifteen, younger even than Aimée, but she had managed to snag the well-connected bachelor Levasseur. This coup had given her quite a lofty status among the women of the colony.

Now he was dead, and poor Ysabeau was inconsolable. The wealthy Levasseur had neglected to include her in his last-minute will, which meant that she must start all over in her search for a husband, with nothing to show for her cleverness and coquetry. The richest and most influential men—with the exception of Bienville, who occupied a level of desirability to which only the truly delusional aspired—had either already married or died from accident or the fever, leaving the same list of eager but penniless and unproven young men from whom Geneviève would have to choose.