The Pelican Bride (31 page)

“Madame, you are banging the pots loud enough to awaken the entire town!”

Geneviève turned to find all three Burelle girls, still dressed in
their night rail, standing in the kitchen doorway. Laure and Yolande each held a hand of four-year-old Fleurance, who somehow managed to pout and yawn at the same time.

“I’m sorry to have woken you.” Geneviève smiled. “I will have your eggs ready in just a bit. Would you like one of the blackberry tartlets I made last night? I think there were three left.”

Laure and Yolande looked at each other, big-eyed. Yolande started to speak, but Laure shook her head in warning. “We promised not to tell,” she whispered.

“Tell what?” Fleurance demanded.

“Hush, Fleurette.” Laure squeezed her little sister’s dimpled hand.

“Oops,” said Yolande.

Geneviève couldn’t help laughing. “Girls, it’s all right if you ate the tartlets. We can have toast for breakfast.”

Fleurance started to weep. “I didn’t get a tartlet! I want one!”

“None of us got one,” Yolande blurted. “Aimée took them all.”

Geneviève put her hands on her hips. “
Aimée
took them? When?” She had been at the Lemays’ house with Sister Gris, attending the still grief-stricken Angela and her little boys.

“We’re not telling,” said the conscientious and stubborn Laure.

Yolande had less scruples. “After supper. Mama said it was scandalous for her to take them to the guardhouse without a chaperone, but Mademoiselle Aimée paid for them, so Papa took the money and told Mama to mind her own business.” She wrinkled her freckled nose. “What does ‘scandalous’ mean?”

Laure reached around Fleurance to yank Yolande’s braid. “It means ‘mind your own business.’”

“Ow!”

“Girls, please, your papa is right. You mustn’t tattle.” Geneviève was too worried to laugh. “Laure, help me slice the bread for toast. Yolande, you and Fleurette find your mama and see if she needs help making the beds.” She clapped her hands. “Come, hurry!”

Breakfast and chores provided just enough distraction to keep the little girls from asking too many unanswerable questions, and soon Geneviève herself nearly managed to stop fretting about her sister’s more-than-strange behavior. As she prayed and baked and cleaned and prayed some more, it occurred to her that she had been trying to manage Aimée almost as if she were her mother instead of her sister.

Had her own mother been this anxious when the handsome and reckless young Jean Cavalier came to be Papa’s apprentice in the bakery? There had been no real danger of Geneviève committing any serious indiscretions with him, for Jean was good in the same way that the early saints had been good. He was eager to spend time with Geneviève—as he was with her entire family, for they were to him a part of the body of Christ. Geneviève had been miserably aware that her adoration of Jean had been reciprocated by the affection of a teacher for one of his disciples.

As a result of Jean’s eventual leadership of the militant Black Camisard party in the violent civil wars of the Cévennes, Papa had been the martyr, but the whole family had suffered. Geneviève suspected that something had happened to Aimée during that time, something so terrible she couldn’t speak of it except in the nightmares that still shook her awake a year later. Something so terrible that she couldn’t tell Geneviève, who loved her more than life.

At least . . . at least they were safe from persecution here in the colony of Louisiane. Yes, safe, unless the oh-so-accommodating Julien Dufresne found a way to exploit their vulnerability.

After tucking the last loaf of bread into its waxed paper wrapping, Geneviève took off her apron and hung it on the hook behind the kitchen door. Her work was finished for the morning. She went to her bedroom in the attic above the tavern and stood for a moment, irresolute. The little room was small and rather Spartan, but it suited her needs for the moment. There was a narrow bedframe pushed against the interior wall, with just enough room
left over for her trunk, a tiny oaken desk, and a matching wooden ladder-back chair. Her chamber pot was stowed under the bed, with a small white pitcher and basin for washing up perched on one corner of the desk.

She continued to keep her Bible hidden away beneath her winter undergarments in the trunk. Personal reading of the Bible was looked upon as freakish in the Catholic society of the colony, but she tried to pull it out for a refreshing read at least once a week. Perhaps it was time to do so now, since she found herself in such a quagmire of uncertainty. Looking over her shoulder to make sure she had not been followed by one of the curious little Burelle girls, she dropped to her knees before the trunk.

She drew the key, suspended on its fine silver chain, from beneath her bodice and opened the padlock that fastened the trunk. Lifting the lid, she searched for and found the thick unwieldy book inside a pile of woolen ruffles. It had been one of Papa’s most prized possessions, purchased with some of his first profits from the bakery, and protected like the jewels of the queen’s crown. She held the Bible in her lap, enjoying its weight and the smell of the leather cover, exquisitely decorated with a silver filigree Huguenot cross. She lightly touched her finger to each of the eight points of its four arms, reciting the Beatitudes they represented.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they
shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall
inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and
thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are
the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the
pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are
the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of
God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Papa had taken ownership in the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps the whole family had. Certainly she felt kinship with those who
had endured the dragonnades. But it was peculiar to find herself safely away from that persecution and peering back at it dimly as if it had happened in a dream.

With her thumb she rubbed one of the four fleur-de-lis which joined the arms of the cross. France, the mother country, overshadowed her life, even here in Louisiane—but it also seemed, in truth, a distant reality. She no longer felt the consuming rage toward the King who had burned her home and murdered her father—only sorrow.

Still, she would never go back there.
Never.

Except for worry about the safety of her children, Nika would have had no qualms about attending Bright Tongue. But if Mitannu lingered near the ambush scene and should hear the Frenchman’s feverish raving, the hollowed-out bluff under which she had taken shelter would provide little protection, no matter how much camouflage she pulled across the opening.

Quaking with fear lest her husband’s men should return and discover her, she had first cleaned the nasty hole in the unconscious Bright Tongue’s upper shoulder—the bullet had gone clean through and exited out the back—with water from her gourd. In other circumstances she would have made a fire and cauterized the wound and packed it with softened pine resin as Mitannu’s mother had taught her—but the danger of attracting unwanted attention made that impossible. Instead she ripped a strip of fabric from the tail of his shirt, wrapped it under his arm, and tied it round the shoulder. She would just have to hope that it would not fester and rot.

As a married woman, one of her main chores had been dressing the carcasses Mitannu brought home from his hunting trips. Some of those had been eight-point bucks weighing as much as a hundred and sixty pounds. Still, dragging her former lover’s dead weight to safety took all her strength and determination.
She had forgotten how tall and muscular was his body—or maybe he’d grown since leaving the Kaskaskian village five years ago as a lanky teenager. In any case, once he regained consciousness, he thrashed about so that she was hard pressed to keep those long legs and arms out of sight.

“Mah-Kah-Twah,” she whispered, kneeling above him, pressing with all her might into his good shoulder. “You must lie still. You will reopen the wound.”

He mumbled something unintelligible in French, twisting his head back and forth, and tried to jerk out from under her.

“No,” she pleaded, switching to French, “listen, I will lie beside you, but you must be quiet. Please, beloved, lie still.”

Instantly he quieted. His eyes opened. They were glassy, too bright, the pupils contracted. “Nika?”

What had she said? “I’m here,” she whispered. She drew back, but he caught her arm with his good hand.

“Don’t go.” His voice was hoarse, urgent.

“I won’t, but be quiet and don’t move. He might come back for you.” She checked the opening of their shelter. The camouflage was still in place.

Following her gaze, he lowered his voice. “Who? What happened? Why are you here?”

She picked through those questions. “I am traveling to visit my family.”

He tried to rise on his elbow to peer at her, but his color drained on a gasp of pain, and he lay back again, eyes closed. After catching his breath, he looked at her, his expression more lucid. “Your family in Kaskaskia?” When she nodded, looking away, he touched her face. “Were you with the Indians who attacked us? The Koasati?”

Almost she shouted at him, but remembering just in time, she whispered, “No! Of course not. And they weren’t Koasati. They were Mobilians, in disguise.”

He frowned. “How do you know that?”

“They were—the leader, the one with the gun—that was Mitannu . . . my husband.”

They stared at one another for a long moment, worlds of unspoken emotion between them. They had been all but children when they had loved one another. Nika for one had felt the weight of adult responsibility for so long that she could barely remember that young girl. However, she had not forgotten the magnetism of Bright Tongue’s personality, the candor and fearlessness in his gaze. And this new maturity that had settled into the bones of his face, the way he looked beneath her words for nuances of meaning, drew her damaged heart like the tongue going to a sore tooth.

“I would have gone back for you.” He said it as if the words were dragged from him.

“I waited for a month, and you did not come. I was afraid to wait longer.”

“Nika, I was a young fool. When I saw you in the Mobile village, I thought you had followed me. I strutted like a cockerel and bragged to Tristan that I had won the princess. And then I saw that you belonged to the Indian and—and had his children.” He sighed and looked away. “You have beautiful children, Nika. I’m glad you’ve been happy.”

Tears blinded her, and her throat clogged with bitterness. She wished there were anyplace else she could go. But no, she must face him,
lie
with him here, bear the consequences of their childish folly. “I saw your brother in the village often. I never saw you.”

His expression clouded. “I have some pride. Besides, my religion forbids me to covet another man’s wife. How could I come there and watch you serving him?”

You blind fool,
I would have left him for you!
the soft side of her heart screamed. But the reasoning part of her mind reminded her that to have left Mitannu for the white man would literally have brought war to them all.

As, in the end, had come to pass anyway. But how in the world
had Mitannu found her out? She had never let on, by word or expression, that she still loved Mah-Kah-Twah. She had been faithful in action if not in her secret heart.

Suddenly, utter weariness and despair claimed her mind, her face, her body. She laid her head down on her forearm as the storm built into silent, soul-shaking sobs.

To his credit, Mah-Kah-Twah made no attempt to stop her. Or perhaps he was in too much pain to speak.

When her grief had spent itself, she heaved a broken breath and said in a small voice, “I’m sorry. I’m worried for my sons.”

“Where are they?”

“I hope they’re with my friend in the Apalachee village. Unless Mitannu took them.”

“You should go and find out. I can manage.” He hesitated. “How many bodies did you find at the campsite?”

“Three. The priest and two soldiers.”

“Two soldiers? There should have been a third—two ensigns and a medical major. Describe the uniforms,” he demanded.

She tried to think. “Plain gray breeches, blue coats, plain buttons.” She shuddered. “Their throats were cut, but they didn’t seem to be important men.”

“Then Barraud must have gotten away,” he muttered. “My brother had gone into the Koasati village for the night but would have come back by now. Unless they murdered him too.” He grew restless again, jostling her as he struggled onto his elbows. He panted for a moment, caught his breath, and with his good hand felt for the bandage she had contrived around his wound. “I don’t understand why the Koasati would attack, when they had been friendly the night before. They shared meat with us and promised to smoke peace with Tristan.”