The Pelican Bride (46 page)

The commander stared at her blankly, and for a moment Nika feared he might cast off Jon-a-Vev’s opinion. But a slow smile grew in his eyes, spread to his lips, and created a charming grin that suddenly
explained his popularity with both men and women. “As you led Aide-Major Dufresne last night, madame? With a stockade pike?”

“Perhaps,” Jon-a-Vev said, eyes twinkling. “One makes do with whatever God provides in the moment.”

Byah-Vee-Yah laughed. “Yes, Madame, there is much wisdom in your words.” His gaze cut to Nika, so suddenly that she flinched. “But there is one more question I would ask of my friend Nika. Do I understand that you are turned from your loyalty to your mother’s people? That you will no longer carry messages for British agents planted among the Kaskaskians?”

With an effort, she did not turn to look at Mah-Kah-Twah. But she felt his fingers move to her shoulder. Their gentle touch sent a message she was afraid to hear. “I . . . do not want to carry messages for anyone.”

“Then you are a woman without a people.” Byah-Vee-Yah’s voice was matter-of-fact but not cruel. “You are welcome here.”

“Welcome?” With nothing to lose, Nika decided to be equally forthright. “Your priests would not say so. Many of the Mobile people are Christian, but Father Henri and Father Albert resist providing the sacraments for us—for them, I mean. ‘It is so expensive,’ they say. And you—” She felt Mah-Kah-Twah’s cautioning squeeze of her shoulder but laughed and kept going. “You discourage your men from marrying our women, even when they make children together.” She rose. “Forgive me, Commander, if I doubt the sincerity of your welcome.” She turned and looked up at Mah-Kah-Twah, took a moment to memorize his face—though there had never been any danger of forgetting it, as it was limned in her children’s eyes—and glided from the room.

“Nika!”

She was at the gallery steps when she heard him call her, but she barely faltered.

“Nika, stop! You know I can’t keep up with you without starting the bleeding again!”

Her feet slowed against her will, then refused to move another step until he took her by the shoulders. “Let me go,” she said, bracing herself.

“No. Not again. Never again.” He wrapped his arms all the way around her and pulled her back against him.

She stiffened her body. “Mah-Kah-Twah, I am not your plaything anymore. Did you not hear anything I just said?”

He pulled her hair back and bent his head to press his warm mouth against her neck. “I heard. I heard what you didn’t say as well. Nika, I love you. I’ve waited for you all this time, and I didn’t even know it.”

She closed her eyes as warmth flooded every part of her, even while her mind screamed that she must get away before it was too late. “I am a Christian woman. I will not live with you in sin.”

“But you do love me.” There was swagger, confidence in his quiet voice.

“I—do not.” She all but choked on the lie.

“Yes you do. And I don’t want a plaything. I want a wife. I want one specific wife, the strong one who can dress a wound and tan hides and make baskets and beads and feed a village full of children and still be so beautiful as to break a hundred hearts.” He turned her to face him, his sleepy eyes begging her to come in to him. “I want you,” he whispered. “Don’t go, Nika. Stay with me.”

She felt her eyes fill. “All right, I love you,” she said angrily, “but Byah-Vee-Yah will never allow you to marry me. Do you want to be an exile like your brother?”

“The commander knows when he has met the stronger man—or woman, as the case may be.” A smile crept into his eyes, making him so dangerous that she almost turned to run. “We will go to Father Henri, who will marry us to spite the commander, and Bienville will soon be so busy moving the settlement that he will forget to be angry.”

She had one more defense to put up. “I won’t leave my children. They are very noisy, rambunctious, and disobedient.”

“You mean, like teenage cadets of the marine?” He grinned at her. “Find something else to scare me with, Nika. I laugh at your threats.”

To her enduring shame, she could no longer resist burying her face against his chest. “You are a very hard man to argue with, Mah-Kah-Twah.”

“You’ll find that I am not much like the selfish youth who walked away from you five years ago.” His voice left its teasing and went soft and deep with serious intent. “God knows I’m not a perfect man, Nika, and I’ll make mistakes, I’m sure. But I’ll never intentionally hurt you or abandon you or our children. I promise this from my heart.”

She sighed and lifted her face to him. “All right. I give up.”

“It’s about time,” he said and kissed her.

25

I
t was time, she thought, to tell him.

On the afternoon of Marc-Antoine and Nika’s wedding, she and Tristan sat on the gallery steps of Charles Levasseur’s house, eating a simple supper of crusty bread and cheese. Bienville had given the house to them to live in until the move to the southern bluff could be completed. Tristan would be useful to the commander as architect and draftsman of the new fort and settlement, which would be called Mobile for its location on the bay.

Cutting her a sliver of cheese with his knife, he had just asked her for the fourth time in as many days if she objected to staying in town. Each of the previous times she had kissed him and said patiently, “Where you are is home.”

This time she hesitated.

“What is it?” he asked quickly. “I know there is something bearing on your mind. You seem happy, but if there is something else you need—”

She stopped the words with her lips, hands on his face. “I have everything I need.” She watched his mouth curl up and kissed him again. He seemed to like that she was bold, purring like a lion.
Taking a deep breath, she drew back a little. “But there’s something in Father Mathieu’s journal I want you to see.” He had given it to her as a memento of her absent friend.

“I don’t want to read right now.” He tipped her face up with his thumb.

Geneviève laughed and wriggled away. “It’s broad daylight, monsieur, and we mustn’t scandalize the neighbors.” A pleasant cool snap had followed the spate of rain earlier in the day, and several inhabitants had already wandered past on their way to market, smiling at the two of them sitting so close together. When Tristan sighed and sat back, she reached into her pocket for the little book.

She had enjoyed looking at her husband’s drawings almost as much as reading Mathieu’s lively descriptions and comments on the experiences of his journey up the river. Now she flipped past them to one of the last entries in the book.

“Here,” she said, squinting at the priest’s crabbed writing. “‘I pray for my dear Geneviève and her Tristan,’ he says, ‘that they will find peace together, whatever the outcome of my quest here in New France.’ Had you read this?” She glanced at Tristan and found him regarding her, chin propped on his hand, the cheese and bread set aside.

He shook his head. “I’ve been very . . . busy lately.”

“Yes, you have.” She teasingly bopped him with the book. “Pay attention.”

“Yes, madame. Whatever you say, madame.”

She cleared her throat. “‘This peace they will never know, unless they come together as one in Christ, bearing each other’s burdens in the mundane as well as the spectacular events of life, as the letter to the Galatians admonishes. There are things about the confessional that Geneviève as a Reformed, and Tristan as a nominal believer, may miss. I pray that they will be freed to uncover every secret so that love may cast out all fear.’” She paused and closed the book on her finger. “Tristan, I—”

“He is wrong about that.” Tristan took her hand. “I am no longer a believer in name only.”

“I know. And I’m glad.” She looked away. “But he is right about confession. I’m burdened with something I must tell you. You know most of what happened to me in the Cévennes, but the longer I stay, the more I fear that my presence here puts you in danger.”

He kissed her fingers. “Then we will leave on the morrow and move to my plantation in Mobile.”

“No, this is—something that will follow me as long as we are in a French colony.” She clasped his hand between both of hers urgently, letting Mathieu’s journal fall into her lap. “Tristan, I am wanted for murder in France. I k-killed that dragoon who arrested my father.” Her lips trembled in spite of her determination to be brave. “I shot a man! Do you hear me? I was in prison awaiting sentencing when Jean Cavalier and Father Mathieu got me out of the country.”

“My heart, I am glad you tell me these things that worry you.” Tristan caressed her face, smearing the tears away with his thumb. “But you must let the guilt go. You know you are long forgiven, and surely you have paid whatever price God asked of you.” With a deep groan, he folded her close and held her until her storm of tears had passed. “I’ve seen your scars, and they are beautiful to me because they brought you to me. As mine brought me to you.”

With her head still on his shoulder, she stroked the silvery stripes across the sun-browned hand he gave her to hold. “Will you tell me how?”

He was silent for a long moment. Then, “I came between my father’s whip and—my brother.”

“Ah, beloved. . . .” She pressed his hand to her lips. “May God preserve us from more of such violence. Surely it grieves his heart.”

“And our new family will honor him, I promise you.”

As Tristan held her close, she let her lingering guilt and fear roll
away like the river that flowed past Fort Louis. Father Mathieu was right—true love cast out fear, replacing it with hope and faith. He had brought her to a man of courage, strength, and honor, a man who would love her in deed as well as words.

I choose
joy
, she thought with a smile.

A Word to the Reader

T
here is a lot of little-known American history in this book.

I ran across a brief mention of the “
Pélican
Girls” while researching a previous work of fiction set in Mobile; thought, “Hmmm, that’s interesting,” and tucked it away for later study. When the opportunity came to write a whole series based on the colorful history of my birthplace, the logical place to start seemed to be with the larger-than-life Le Moyne brothers—Canadian explorers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and swashbuckling adventurers, who placed their stamp upon a whole territory in the name of Sun King Louis XIV of France.

Because my storytelling “sweet spot” is romance, my curiosity was drawn to the women who married and civilized those first French-Canadian settlers of Louisiane. Who were they and where did they come from? Why take on a three-month journey across an ocean to what would have been little more than a hostile, mosquito-infested bog for the sole purpose of marrying a stranger? How did these mainly convent-raised young women, teenagers with few practical survival skills, manage to establish homes and
raise children? What kinds of relationships did they build with the native peoples, and what influences did they bring to one another?

Those were some of the questions I brought to my initial research. Little did I realize the depth of knowledge required to build that world from the ground up, people it with compelling characters—some of them historical figures with documented biographies, some purely conjured from my imagination—and cast my protagonists and villains into book-length conflict. By the time the basic story line had bloomed into a ten-page synopsis, I had begun to realize the challenges of writing in English about characters who spoke and viewed life through a French and/or Native American lens—over three centuries ago! I found some primary resources—baptismal and burial records, letters, contracts, journals, maps, and the like—plus historical internet sites and a few good nonfiction books (I’m largely indebted to Jay Higginbotham’s wonderfully detailed and readable
Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisane, 1702–1711
).

I visited local museums and read the Higginbotham book before beginning to write the manuscript. Still, I daily found myself stumped by questions about things like refrigeration, funerals, midwifery, baking, grinding corn, shooting a musket . . . and on and on. I’m pretty much the ultimate history geek, so I found myself loading the story with way too much information for the average fiction reader (I suspect I’ll have critics on both ends of the spectrum). At my editor’s suggestion, I decided to put some of that information here, to keep from bogging down the action in the novel.

The Pelican Bride
is essentially a romance, embedded in a particular political, religious, and economic historical climate. So who were the big players on the North American continent in 1704?

England controlled the Atlantic seaboard, from Massachusetts south to Georgia, with the Appalachian Mountains forming the western border. Spain held Florida, Texas, the Caribbean, Mexico,
and Central and South America. France had claimed Canada and the Great Lakes. If you look at period maps, it’s clear that whichever power could lay claim to the rivers bisecting the continent from the Lakes to the Gulf Coast would gain a chokehold on American commerce. No wonder all three were anxious to find and claim the mouth of the Mississippi River.

The courage, cunning, and sheer persistence of such explorers as La Salle, Levasseur, Iberville, and Bienville—under the leadership of Minister of Marine Pontchartrain—gave the edge to the French. They established Fort Maurepas at present-day Biloxi, Mississippi, then Fort Louis twenty-seven miles up the Alabama River north of present-day Mobile; eventually, New Orleans became the capital of the Louisiana Territory. But at the turn of the eighteenth century, Iberville—commander of the French outpost on the Gulf—found himself a political juggler responsible for maintaining alliance with the Spanish in Pensacola, keeping the British from encroaching from the east, and courting trade with the natives.

The local Mobile Indians were generally friendly to the French settlers, who brought European commodities such as guns and ammunition, farming and building implements, and textiles. However, the French faced constant threat of attack from the more warlike northern Alabama clans who had discovered the value of slave trade with English tobacco farmers. The Indians as depicted in
The Pelican
Bride
are as accurate as I could make them from available resources. Records kept by the Catholic Diocese of Mobile indicate that there was a good deal of intermarriage between natives and Europeans at the turn of the eighteenth century, as well as mutual leveraging of resources and economic power.