The Pelican Bride (34 page)

Dead?
Tristan
was dead? Father Mathieu too?

Numb, she looked up as Bienville shoved through the crowd. They stared at one another, the horror on his face reflecting her own.

Not Tristan. It could not be true.

“Please, Azalea, you cannot turn us away!” Nika was ashamed to find herself reduced to begging shelter from her oldest friend, but what choice did she have? Mah-Kah-Twah could go no farther in his weakened condition, and where else could she be certain of her children’s safety?

She and the Frenchman had made the last difficult mile into the Apalachee village, arriving in the still hours of the night. Nika had scratched upon the door of Azalea’s husband’s hogan, fortunately rousing only the light-sleeping Azalea, who had ducked outside without protest. But discovering Nika was accompanied by a feverish and weak Frenchman—
the
Frenchman who had selfishly caused her friend’s need for the doubtful protection of the brutish Mitannu—she had folded her arms and refused to let them in.

Even in the moonless darkness, Azalea’s frozen disapproval was palpable. “You will bring murder and rape upon us all. I could understand your weakness for the white boy when you were a child, but to bring him here now—you, a married woman, whose husband will rightly pursue you and punish your unfaithfulness!”

“I have not been unfaithful!” Nika bent her head, hot tears breaking past the barrier of her self-control. Perhaps her marriage had been an unfaithfulness in itself—a wicked attempt to cover up one sin by committing another. But Bright Tongue had deserted her, her frightened young heart had insisted. What if her baby should suffer the taint of her promiscuity? How could she have foreseen Mitannu’s brutality? How could she have known what pain awaited her with Mah-Kah-Twah’s sudden reappearance?

“Don’t—don’t turn the children away because of me.” Mah-Kah-Twah’s hoarse whisper penetrated Azalea’s cold silence. He had slumped against the side of the hogan, a boneless form in the dark. “Nika has done nothing wrong. If you’ll give us shelter for the rest of the night, I’ll be on my way at dawn.”

“Where will you go?” Azalea asked. Her voice dripped suspicion. “What will I do if Mitannu follows you here?”

“He might,” Mah-Kah-Twah admitted. “But he doesn’t know Nika was with me. You can tell him I passed through two days ago. That I’m already back at the fort.”

The slurred weakness of his voice frightened Nika. “You’ll never make it that far by yourself. I’m going with you.”

“No . . . ”

Nika, falling to her knees beside him, knew with despair that he had fainted again. She looked up, searching for her friend’s face in the stygian darkness. “Please, Azalea. Please help us.”

There was a long silence during which Nika prayed—a halting, desperate supplication that barely formed words.

At last Azalea moved away from the door of the hogan. “If he brings harm to my family, I will kill him myself.”

19

D
awn sent a pale prism of light filtering through the narrow window in the infirmary’s exterior wall as Geneviève woke sitting straight up in the ladder-back chair Lefleur had brought in for her last night. Bienville had decided not to send for Sister Gris, who had been in sickbed herself for several days, and curtly assigned Geneviève the role of nurse. Requesting that she let him know if Barraud awoke with further information, the commandant and his officers had since been holed up in his office, putting together a plan to deal with this new crisis.

Geneviève had been attending the surgeon-major alone for the last four hours, with a young cadet stationed outside the guardhouse to relieve her at intervals and to run for any supplies she required.

Barraud continued to breathe with labored irregularity, stirring every so often out of a feverish stupor into muscle spasms and unintelligible muttering. Geneviève had changed the dressing of his wound every couple of hours. Upon uncovering it for the first time, she had turned away at the stench of rotting flesh, certain that she would be sick. But she gathered her willpower and, with Cadet Foussé holding the surgeon down, cut away the blackened wad of damp pine resin with which Barraud had packed his own wound.

Despairing of his recovery, she had sent Foussé to Sister Gris for her recommendation of herbs with which to redress it. The ensuing hours passed in an endless cycle of checking the surgeon’s thready pulse, turning his pillow, washing the festering wound, and praying for some miracle to save the men Barraud had abandoned in the Alabama woods.

Tristan,
she thought, sitting rigid in the half-light of dawn.
My husband. My heart. How can it be that
you left me so soon?

It wasn’t possible to think of his vital flesh gone to dust. Surely God had not done this violence to her again. Surely Barraud was mistaken.

She reached out to place a finger at his neck again. He still lived.

Awaken, you wretched drunkard. Wake up and tell me my husband lives.

The wretched drunkard twitched and emitted a dense snore. Geneviève released him and put her hand in her lap. She heard music in her head and, unthinking, began to hum along.

Girls
are faithful like gold and silver, Mommy, boys are fickle
like rain and wind.

She lifted her head, which had drooped until her chin rested on her chest. That was a real voice, a thin, eerie soprano coming from the other side of the building. Ysabeau. She’d forgotten all about the poor girl, contained for her own safety in a guardhouse cell meagerly furnished with a bed, a washbasin, and a chamber pot.

She got up, glancing at Barraud, who lay still as death. She wouldn’t be away from him for long. She crossed to the open infirmary door and leaned out. The guardhouse cells were contained on the other side of a thick wall strengthened on the outside by forged iron bars and accessed through a steel door. Surely it would be locked.

But she crossed the breezeway between the two sides of the building anyway and rattled the latch of the guardhouse door. It lifted easily in her hand, so she pushed the heavy door inward and
slipped inside. There were three unoccupied cells, with Ysabeau in the fourth corner cell. She sat on the floor beside the cot, wearing nothing but her shift and corset, twisting her hair and singing.

Geneviève walked up to the bars of the cell. Compassion instantly seared her, flooding her eyes with tears. She sank to the floor, the cold iron bars sliding through her palms, until she was knee to knee with the prisoner. She thought of the way the women at the party last night had whispered about Ysabeau, mercilessly, as if she had voluntarily cast herself into madness and refused to come back. Having stared into that abyss herself, Geneviève knew it wasn’t that simple. Madness rooted itself in a garden of fear, growing to tangle about one like prison chains. Only by God’s grace had she found the strength to escape.

She began to hum with Ysabeau. She didn’t know all the words, but the tune was familiar, a song that her mother had sung while she sewed, cleaned, and tended the family garden. Beautiful, sad Mama, who had grieved herself into the grave when Papa was gone.

In the middle of the last verse, Ysabeau stopped singing. “He took my clothes away.”

“What?” Geneviève blinked away tears. “Who?”

“René. He was fickle too. He wed me and he left me. He said he would never come back. Because I wouldn’t do what he wanted.”

Geneviève could hardly bear the despair in Ysabeau’s eyes.
Tristan left me too. But not like
this, never like this.
“Ysabeau, no one can take your clothes. It’s not right that you—you uncover yourself like this. I’ll give you my other dress. I don’t need it.”

Ysabeau sighed and leaned her head on her hand. “Aimée tried to give me her dress too. But I want mine. I want the yellow one he tore when I said no.”

“He tore your dress?” Geneviève thought she might go mad herself from outrage. Why had Bienville not chased René Connard all the way to Pensacola and brought him back to be flogged? “Did you tell the commander this?”

Ysabeau shook her head sadly. “A wife should not say no. They would lock me up in the guardhouse.”

Geneviève wondered if Ysabeau knew where she was.

Before she could ask, Ysabeau continued, “I heard Aimée agree to marry Monsieur Dufresne. I don’t think she should. He’s a fickle boy too. He came in to visit me after she left.” She scowled. “I do not like Monsieur Dufresne.”

Neither do I,
thought Geneviève. “He won’t bother you again,” she said. “You may come to live with me and work in the bakery. And I’ll make you another yellow dress.” She had no idea where she would get the fabric. Neither did she know how to free Ysabeau from the guardhouse, but when she explained about Connard and Dufresne—

“There is someone drowning in the hall,” Ysabeau said, wrapping her arms around her knees. “We’re all drowning.”

Geneviève looked over her shoulder at the open door. “There’s no one—”

But a gurgling, raspy voice could indeed be heard faintly from the direction of the infirmary. Barraud had awakened. She’d forgotten all about him.

She scrambled to her feet. “I shall come back later,” she promised Ysabeau. Without waiting for an answer, she dashed across the hallway into the infirmary.

She found the surgeon attempting to sit up, wild-eyed, clutching at the bandage over his shoulder. It was already seeping greenish blood. Frightened, Geneviève pushed him down on his back again. “You mustn’t, sir! Lie still, I beg you.”

“Tell Bienville—the Koasati attacked—” Barraud gasped for breath, closing his eyes—“middle of the night,” he mumbled. “I knew we shouldn’t have—”

The broken report ended as Barraud fainted again.

Geneviève stared at him, one hand on his good shoulder, the other over her own pounding heart. She felt an insane urge to shake
him until his teeth rattled. “Oh, no. No no no. Wake up! What happened to Tristan?”

“I fear your husband is dead, Mademoiselle. I mean, Madame.” Julien Dufresne sauntered up from behind her to stand looking down at the surgeon, hands clasped behind his back. He looked concerned, as if he had just discovered a scuff on one of his shiny boots. “Those treacherous Indians.” He shook his head. “Barraud is right. We shouldn’t have trusted them.”

Tristan tied the pirogue off at the landing below Fort Louis, where a couple of young cadets waited to help him and his Indian companions ashore. He leaped onto the sandy beach without aid and stopped to stretch aching shoulder and chest muscles, relieved to have the long downriver journey behind him. Bienville would not be happy with his report, but Tristan was anxious to deliver it. In fact, he hadn’t even spared the time to bury the massacred members of his party.

All three Koasati boys he had met in the woods had been eager to accompany Tristan back to the French settlement. The chief had been reluctant to allow both his sons, Fights With Bears and Turtle Boy, to travel so far together, but he seemed to understand the necessity of sending representatives to demonstrate the good will of the clan. In the end, he decided to let them go, along with their tall, lanky cousin, Little Frog.

While Tristan had waited in unbearable impatience to be gone, the chief outfitted the youths in traditional ceremonial costume of fine deer-leather breechclouts and leggings, with heavy woven necklaces made of dyed river reeds clanking against their scarred chests and tufts of feathers tied into the formal topknots of their hair. He then carefully painted red-and-yellow streaks across the boys’ cheekbones, speaking to them of courage and pride and brotherhood. They must represent the Koasati village of the Alabama
nation well. And they must bring back presents to prove they had earned the respect of the French King.

Duly noted, thought Tristan, shifting from one foot to the other. Presents.

He had already given a set of stockings to each of the three boys, plus a blanket and a musket for the chief. He wondered what had become of the rest of the goods the contingent had brought upriver.

At the massacre site he had scared away the buzzards with a couple of musket shots and then assessed the scene. Two puddles of blood, one near the fire and one at some distance, indicated that Marc-Antoine and Barraud had either escaped or been taken prisoner by the attackers. The one farthest away seemed to have been dragged off into the woods, where Tristan lost the trail in a sudden rainstorm. The other trail of blood disappeared at the river. One of the pirogues was missing, so presumably either Marc-Antoine or Barraud had gotten away in it.