The Pelican Bride (17 page)

Poor Ysabeau—Geneviève noticed that “poor” seemed to have become a permanent part of Ysabeau’s name—had no such romantic embarrassment to sigh over. She had lost one fiancé to yellow fever, and the second had gambled her away over a faro board, earning his own fare to the guardhouse. The third man to claim her, Ensign René Connard, was also currently under arrest.

Ysabeau sat on the floor of the gallery, hugging her knees and sniffling into a yellow lawn handkerchief. “I want to go home,” she said over and over, making Geneviève wish she could stuff the handkerchief in the girl’s mouth.

Geneviève herself perched barefoot on one of the broad rails of the gallery with her skirt lifted to her knees, perhaps not a particularly ladylike posture, but more apt to catch a chance breeze. She had passed on the sassafras tea, preferring to occupy her hands with her tatting.

“You cannot go home, Ysabeau,” Françoise said with far more patience than Geneviève felt. “We all agreed to come for our own reasons and, for most of us, circumstances in France were worse than they are here anyway. If you can’t find a suitable mate here, where the men outnumber us ten to one, what hope do you have of contracting a husband at all?”

“I don’t know,” Ysabeau wailed, “but I wanted to marry Denis Lafleur! He is so good-looking, and he even has a pretty name!”

“Do you really want to marry a man who would gamble you away on the turn of a card?” Aimée frowned. “As if you were a possession like a horse or a pig, for heaven’s sake? Have you no pride?” When Ysabeau promptly burst into fresh tears, Aimée lifted her hands. “Ysabeau, you know there was no betrothal contract with Monsieur Lafleur, no matter what he told you.”

“Perhaps Monsieur Connard will turn out to be the best husband in New France,” Noël said. A shy, plain girl with stick-straight brown hair, hazel eyes, and freckles sprinkled across a blunt nose, she was the only one who had received no marriage offers at all as of yet. She tended to hide in corners at social functions, and would turn an unattractive orange if unexpectedly addressed. “You are so pretty—just think, you have had six offers already.”

Ysabeau gave Noël a tremulous smile of gratitude, but her answer was cut off when their governess swept to her full, statuesque height.

“Girls, this is getting us nowhere,” Françoise said. “What concerns me most is Monsieur le Commandant’s highhanded attempt to strong-arm us into making hasty decisions about this serious and delicate matter. If we do not choose mates by a certain time, he says he’ll cut off the financial support of the Crown.” She paused, hands on hips, and looked around at her companions. “I for one don’t plan to stand for this—this—interference!”

Geneviève suspected that some of Françoise’s dudgeon could be attributed to the commander’s failure to be reeled in by her less-than-subtle lures.

Aimée bounced to her feet. “I agree! It is not fair that he removes himself from the list of eligible bachelors, when he has perhaps the greatest income and property in the entire settlement! And then to send the next greatest catch off on some ridiculous Indian mission—!”

“I don’t know, Aimée,” Thérèse said, looking over her shoulder as if she expected a savage to come bounding out of the forest at any moment. “I shouldn’t like to be carried off and made to wear those shapeless tunics the Indian women wear.”

“They don’t wear them because they’re Indians, ninny, they wear them because they are slaves.” Edmé wrinkled her forehead. “At least I think so.”

“Do you think the Indians are people in the same sense that we are?” Noël asked. “The King does not want us to intermarry with them because they are heathen.”

Geneviève had heard enough. She slid off the rail onto the soft ground below the gallery and stood with her hands clenched behind her back, trying to gain control of her temper. The King had sent dragoons into her home in the name of God. He had beheaded her father in the name of God—when everyone knew Louis kept more than one mistress and had more illegitimate children than legitimate. Despite that contract she had been forced to sign, she was not going to marry the next Catholic bachelor who offered, just because Bienville said she must.

God in heaven, I came here by faith. I came
because Father Mathieu made a way, and I trust him.
Help me see your will in this muddle. Help me
take care of my sister . . .

The other girls were staring at her. She took a breath and let it out. “Noël, of course the Indians are people. Their language is different, their skin is darker, but don’t you think those women are just as afraid of change as you are? Still, they’ve lived here longer, which means we can learn from them.”

Edmé looked skeptical. “Would you marry an Indian man, Geneviève?”

“I don’t know.” Geneviève looked away. “There’s little chance one would ask me.” She thought of the man with the string of human scalps she had encountered in Roy’s kitchen—the day Tristan Lanier bought her bread. She remembered Tristan’s intervention between
her and the Indian, the genuine alarm in his eyes, the measured way he had spoken to the man in that harsh, alien language. She had not understood the words, but clearly they had been discussing the scalps—in a businesslike tone, as if they had been animal pelts brought in for sale.

In a wash of clarity, she was in Pont-de-Montvert, on the day the Abbé of Chaila was assassinated. Three dragoons in full regalia had come for her father—young men like these boy soldiers who stood guard here with Bienville. They were laughing at her mother, who had flung herself to her knees begging for mercy, flirting with Aimée and promising to come back for her, even as they dragged her father from the kitchen through the bakery shop. Two of the young men had her father by the arms, and the other walked behind them, prodding their prisoner with his sword.

Standing at the top of the stairs, listening to her mother scream, she knew she must do something. She went for her father’s rifle leaning in the corner beneath the stairs, then found his powder horn and shot in a small cupboard. Jean Cavalier had thought it amusing to take her hunting on Sunday afternoons; he had shown her how to prime and load it, how to aim and brace herself for the kickback. They had killed rabbits in the wooded hills beyond the village, bringing them back for her mother’s stew pot, and she had thought little of it—until she stalked those young dragoons headed for the green, where their officers waited to deal with traitors and heretics who had dared to “reform” the King’s religion and murder the Abbé. Cavalier was elsewhere now, and she was on her own.

Who had murdered the Abbé? Geneviève wouldn’t be surprised if it were Cavalier himself. But it was not her gentle father, who rose every morning when the sky was still dark, to read the Scripture and kneel for half an hour in prayer. Father, who spent his days creating beautiful and mouth-watering pastries for the loyalist elites in the neighboring village of Fraissinet-de-Lozère.

The laughing young dragoons did not suspect they were followed by the chef’s older daughter. The pastry shop was at the edge of the village, and it was a long, circuitous walk along the road to the green. With the gun under her arm, Geneviève cut through the candlemaker’s yard, ducked under some laundry hanging in the summer breeze, then ran parallel to the main road until she darted to the right and came out a hundred yards ahead of the dragoons. Panting, she planted herself in the middle of the road, raised the gun and waited. She could hear them coming, heard the cursing when one of them tripped on the rut that always washed out in front of Monsieur Malbècq’s pigsty. Her heart thundered like a millstone rolling downhill. It had not occurred to her at the time that she could only shoot one of them with the musket, and that the other two were certain to take reprisal. She only meant to stop them from taking her father away.

By the time they rounded the bend that followed the boundary of Madame Babin’s property, her resolve was steeled.

Her father saw her first. “Ginette!” he groaned. “No! Go home!”

The dragoons halted for a moment, no doubt nonplused by the sight of the crazy girl in flour-dusted cap and apron, aiming a gun at them. The one with the sword stopped scraping pig slop from his boots and burst out laughing. He came around in front of her father and his companions, playfully thrusting the sword at her. “Come here, little one, and I will teach you the duel of love.”

She shot him first.

And that was how she came to be aboard the
Pélican
.

“We’ll take two pirogues.” Marc-Antoine stood behind Tristan, who was seated at a table in officers’ quarters. He leaned over Tristan’s shoulder to unroll the map and flatten it on the table. “The Alabama villages begin about three hundred miles upriver, the first one on the Koasati bluff. We hope to make an average of
ten miles a day, which should put us back here within a couple of months.”

Tristan followed his brother’s finger as it traced the river bends on a map he himself had drawn during that last fateful mapping expedition nearly two years ago. He had traveled with the parchments, a bottle of ink, several quills, and his sextant packed in a cleverly designed map case his father had given him the day he left with Iberville. Father had made it himself out of a pine log cut in half, then hollowed out and lined with cedar. It had been flattened slightly on top and bottom so that it could function as a seat, and was finished with leather hinges and a hand-worked iron hasp.

The chest was under his bed at home. He didn’t remember giving the maps to Marc-Antoine, but he supposed he must have done so sometime before the discovery of Sholani’s disappearance.

He blinked away memories and looked up at his brother. “Who’s going with us?”

“Barraud, Guillory, Saucier, and Father Mathieu. Bienville’s plan is to take enough arms and manpower to provide force, with the priest along to give an impression of good will.” Marc-Antoine’s smile was sour. “God only knows why Barraud will be along. The man is useless as a surgeon and a soldier.”

Tristan nodded, remembering last night’s tavern scene. “Has Bienville provided gifts for the Indians?”

“Shirts and blankets for the chiefs, strings of beads, bells, a few pairs of red stockings. We don’t want to overload the pirogues.” Marc-Antoine paused. “What do you think?”

“Sounds about right.”

Marc-Antoine’s expression was peculiar. Something besides trinkets and clothing was clearly on his mind. It was not like his gregarious brother to hold back his thoughts.

“What is it?” Tristan braced himself.

There was a long pause during which sounds of the garrison
filtered in through the open window: someone firing a musket in the distance, the clanging of iron from the forge, muffled conversation and laughter as a party of soldiers passed. Marc-Antoine finally shrugged and looked away. “Nothing.” He took a breath. “Tris, how well do you know Father Mathieu?”

Tristan blinked. “But little. We spoke a bit on the trip up from the island when he and the women first came. Why?”

“He’s a good man. You should spend some time with him.” Marc-Antoine looked a bit anxious, the kind of expression he’d had when they were children and he knew a secret he couldn’t tell.

What business could the priest possibly have with his little brother? Marc-Antoine would be the last man alive to profess any religious bent. And there had been nothing particularly mysterious about Father Mathieu that Tristan could discern.

Tristan smiled. “We’ll be traveling together for several weeks. I’m sure we’ll get acquainted.”

“Yes.” Marc-Antoine looked relieved. He picked up the map and rolled it up. “That’s true.”

Tristan pushed his chair back and rose. “If we’re leaving at daylight, I need to give Deerfoot some instructions about feeding my animals and closing up the cabin. He’s waiting for me at Burelle’s.” He cuffed his brother with rough affection. “Maybe I’ll buy Father Mathieu a pint as well.”

He exited the headquarters building, rolling that peculiar, understated conversation with Marc-Antoine around in his head. Tristan had had little interaction with priests of any sort, so he had paid scant attention to the newest black robe, as the Indians termed the Jesuit missionaries.

He understood Bienville’s use of priests as one peg—military force and bribery being the other two—in the tent of political commerce. The Indians were a deeply spiritual people who accepted the concept of Father God, and generally respected the authority of his earthly representatives. However, the village
medicine man, quite understandably, sometimes came to resent the priest’s power—with potentially violent results—and Tristan had learned to be cautious when traveling into Indian territory with a Jesuit or seminarian in tow. Father Mathieu being an unknown quantity, Tristan was doubly curious about the motives of Geneviève’s mentor.

He crossed the drill ground without incident, then passed through the chapel without encountering Father Mathieu or either of the other two priests presently living in the settlement. As he went out the secondary entrance at the back of the fort, however, he nearly crashed head-on into Geneviève herself.

“Mademoiselle! I’m so sorry!” He caught her by the shoulders and set her away from him, scanning her face for signs of injury or distress. “If you’re in such a hurry, perhaps I could hoist you over my shoulder again and take you there faster.”