The Pelican Bride (4 page)

All four spilled forward and introduced themselves with a rush of giggles and curtsies.

“Barbe Savarit!”

“Ysabeau Bonnet—
bon jour
, m’sieur.”

“Élisabeth le Pinteaux.” Poor Élisabeth, shy and still weak from the fever, looked as if she might faint.

Aimée took the girl’s arm and gave a regal nod. “We are pleased to make your acquaintance, m’sieur. I am Aimée Gaillain.”

Dufresne kissed each girl’s hand in turn. “Enchanted,” he murmured, lingering over Aimée’s slim fingers. He released her only when she gave an impatient tug. With a small smile, Dufresne addressed the priest. “If you will escort your fair charges to the end of the pier, we shall begin boarding as soon as all have arrived.” He bowed, then returned to his duties without a backward glance.

Sensing trouble, Geneviève glanced at her sister.

Clearly piqued, Aimée shrugged. “Come, girls, let us watch to make sure these oafs don’t drop our baggage into the ocean.” Lifting her skirts, she flounced toward the activity near the gangplank.

The other three girls hurried after her, leaving Geneviève to follow on the arm of the priest. Oafs? From whence had her common-born little sister arrived at the notion that she was better than anyone else, particularly men who were doing her a service? Her assumption of Aimée’s naïveté might be a bit over-hopeful. Father Mathieu would have his work cut out for him, keeping those four on a leash.

3

T
he sixty-foot, seven-ton barque Tristan used for transporting supplies upriver fought the current despite the best efforts of the oarsmen to set her course. It was going to be a long trip, especially if the women kept rocking the boat off-balance. He regretted his capitulation to Marc-Antoine.

For the last two hours he’d kept an eye out for alligators slumbering in the marshes alongshore. He could just imagine the uproar if one of his passengers spied one of the slippery monsters gliding along in the shallows.

Glancing over his shoulder, he caught the wide-eyed gaze of Mademoiselle Geneviève. Her lips trembled upward at the corners, though her face looked pinched. He hoped she wasn’t going to succumb to the seasickness that often followed a sudden shift in motion after a long voyage.

Leaving the wheel to one of his mates, he jumped over piles of cable and rigging and made his way to the stern, where the seven women and the priest sat holding on to their benches as if a typhoon might sweep them overboard at any moment.

“I trust you are still comfortable,” he said, addressing the elder Mademoiselle Gaillain. He couldn’t seem to avoid looking
at her first. She was not as staggeringly lovely as her sister, but despite her pallor, the intelligence and humor in her expression drew his gaze.

She touched Aimée’s rumpled golden head, which lolled against her shoulder. “Quite,” she said, then laughed when her sister groaned and clutched her stomach. “At least, I am. Have we provisions aboard, or shall we haul to for the noon meal?”

“Can you really anticipate food so soon?” He glanced around at the other women, who all looked a bit green about the mouth. Father Mathieu knelt fanning one girl’s face with a palm frond.

Mademoiselle Gaillain’s chin went up a fraction. “Are you calling me a glutton?”

He saw that she was teasing and grinned. “If the slipper fits . . .”

She laughed. “I confess to a bit of queasiness at the outset, but I find myself enjoying the—” she paused, choosing her words carefully—“ peculiar scenery.”

Tristan followed her gaze to a pelican bobbing awkwardly in and out of the marshgrass that lined the scrubby shoreline. He tried to remember his first impression of this alien landscape. He’d been quite a young man then—or perhaps he’d grown up quickly in order to survive the hair-raising events of mapping Bienville’s colonial adventure.

He smiled. “You’ll get used to it. And fish is our version of manna, so I hope you like it.”

“I could eat just about anything, as long it doesn’t have worms or smell like rot.” She shuddered.

“No guarantees,” he said, turning to brace his back against the rail. “The journey must have been difficult. Why choose to come to the other side of the world to find a husband?”

She stiffened and looked away, and he could have sworn terror had flashed in her eyes. “It is a . . . private family matter, sir,” she finally said in a suffocated little voice.

He waited for a moment, but her lips remained firmly pressed
together. Apparently the subject was closed. “Forgive me, mademoiselle, I must return to my duties. I will let one of the mates know that you desire something to eat.”

But as he turned, she sighed and caught his wrist. “Wait. You are kind, and I thank you.”

He stared at the dainty fingers which lay like flowers against his sun-darkened skin. “I haven’t any drawing room manners. I don’t mean to offend.”

She quickly withdrew her hand. “I know.” There was a long pause. After an awkward moment, the fine green eyes narrowed. “What is that place up there? Are we passing the fort already?”

He turned to follow her gaze to the top of a huge bluff, where the French flag flew next to a ten-foot wooden cross. “That is my plantation.” He couldn’t keep the pride from his voice.
Mine.
He’d bought the land from the Indians with the finest of Canadian furs—rich, well-watered, protected land, perfect for raising corn and sugar, just right for grazing cattle.

All the better that Bienville had ignored his advice, choosing to build the fort twenty-seven miles upriver. The Indians had never seen Tristan as a threat, and he’d settled with little fanfare on a five-mile square just outside the transient Mobile clan’s winter quarters.

“Do you not live at Fort Louis? Why?”

He shrugged. “It’s a long tale. In short, I prefer to provide for my own livelihood without interference from the Crown.”

“Yet you fly the French flag. You are a strange man, Monsieur Lanier.”

He chuckled. “Which is perhaps the truest reason for my solitude.” He glanced at the younger girl, who had fallen into a fitful sleep against Mademoiselle Geneviève’s shoulder. “Please let me know if your sister requires anything for her comfort. I shall send someone back with food.”

He executed a curt bow and headed for his quarters. A woman would never understand his aversion to walls.

Geneviève stared at the sliver of salted fish in her hand and braced herself to put it in her mouth. Somehow she had expected the food to improve once they left the sea behind. Fish for breakfast. Fish for the noon meal. Fish for dinner. Manna indeed.

She leaned against the outer cabin wall, settled Aimée’s head more comfortably in her lap, and nibbled at the dubious meal. The memory of fragrant aromas from Papa’s bakery wafted across her palate, somehow covering the pungent mess in her mouth. Yeast, that inimitable substance of her childhood, had left an indelible impression that no amount of bad food could erase. Perhaps the jar of leaven she’d managed to secrete beneath her Bible had survived the journey.

The hope sustained her better than a hundred fine meals. If she could find a way to bake her pastries, she and Aimée would do well.

Swallowing misgivings, she peeked around the corner of the cabin, where Tristan Lanier stood with feet braced wide against the rocking lunge of the boat. When he turned suddenly and caught her staring, she ducked back out of sight, heart pounding. He didn’t want a wife, she reminded herself. There was nothing to fear.

F
ORT
L
OUIS
DE
LA
L
OUISIANE

What I need is a wife
, Julien Dufresne thought as he shepherded the last of the
Pélican
girls through the stockade gate and ordered it closed and locked. The spindly-legged cadet on guard, with a longing glance at the girls’ well-padded backsides, saluted and moved to obey.

Julien drew his kerchief from the inside pocket of his jacket and mopped his face, cursing the heat, cursing the mud caked on the expensive Russia leather boots he’d had shipped from Paris last fall, and cursing the mosquitoes that found their way through three
layers of clothing into his smallclothes. Most of all he cursed his nonexistent birthright—which was the reason he found himself in this godforsaken outpost, instead of comfortably ensconced in one of his father’s salons.

He cheered himself by imagining the raw streets as they must one day appear. Bricked and lined with shops they would be, with clusters of brightly dressed women fluttering in doorways and carriages pulled by fine horses trundling under sunny skies. One of those carriages would be his, and one of the women would be carrying his child—a son born of legitimate union, blessed in the cathedral which he would endow.

One of the girls he had just safely delivered would be privileged to become his bride. Maintaining a legacy of education, refinement, and landed privilege required the finest of bloodlines, and he must begin as he meant to go on.

Several of the women had proved to be young and quite beautiful, which was frankly astonishing; one had to wonder what would motivate a gently bred female to voluntarily cross the ocean to this unsettled bog. Lack of virtue would be unacceptable in the wife of the son of the Comte de Leméry—regardless on which side of the blanket he had been conceived.

One of those women would discover that she had made a most fortuitous decision in emigrating to the New World.

“Which canary did you swallow, Dufresne?”

Startled, he turned to find brick mason Jean Alexandre, a grin curling his thin-lipped mouth.

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” Julien stuffed his kerchief back into his coat. “When are you fellows going to have enough bricks made to turn this quagmire into a decent thoroughfare?”

Alexandre shrugged. “Soon enough. Like most things, brick must dry before it is useful.” There was a sour silence which Julien refused to fill. Finally Alexandre chuckled. “Come down off your
high horse, Dufresne. You know we’re all calculating which of the brides we can draw into the net.”

“Twenty-five women to two hundred men.” Julien passed Alexandre a sidelong look. “The odds aren’t favorable for a mud-slinger with a face like a trowel.”

The mason laughed outright. “This particular trowel-faced mud-slinger has been saving against just such a contingency. I may be able to afford considerably more than can a penniless rooster-crowned by-blow!”

Julien snarled under his breath and put a hand on his sword hilt, but Alexandre swung onto a side street, whistling. Fuming, Julien stared after him, but common sense cautioned him not to abandon his assignment. He could always deal with Alexandre at a later date.

He turned his steps once more in the direction of the L’Anglois home, located nearly a mile from the water’s edge, whence he was to deliver his lovely freight. He observed the women from the rear, watching for reactions to their surroundings. The bare bones of a town were lines marked off with flagpoles bravely struggling to stay upright in the face of daily thunderstorms. Still, it would be hard for the uneducated eye to discern order in the muddy streets and thatched cottages built precariously upon stumps in an optimistic attempt to escape the incessant flooding.

At the largest of these homes—and the only one finished—the young soldiers leading the procession halted and turned. The taller of the two presented Dufresne with a smart salute.

The cottage door burst open, spitting out a stout little woman who bowled down the steps and pushed between the two soldiers as if they were a couple of wooden pins. “Oh dear, you are here!” She rolled to a breathless stop before the Gaillain sisters and grabbed a hand of each. “I am Madame L’Anglois, you precious ones! It has been my delight to arrange lodging for you until you are all, shall we say, situated.”

The elder of the sisters gave Madame her friendly smile. “We are all grateful to have arrived safe and sound.”

Madame L’Anglois made the rounds of the younger women, kissing cheeks, patting hands, and clucking like a biddy. “Come in, come in, and we shall manage a cup of tea, though it’s that nasty Indian brew that isn’t fit for man nor beast. But here, it’s all we have, so I shan’t apologize, though I’m sorry as can be.”