Ever My Love: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 2) (15 page)

In the heat of the afternoon, Marianne retreated to her room
for a respite. She began to hear how still the house was with only Hannah and
Charles and a few more slaves about. There’d be no conversation at supper. No
lovely attention from Marcel. No rudely overt gazes from Yves. The man was
insufferable. He made her distinctly uncomfortable. Not nearly as fine-looking
as his brother. Why, that faint scar running into his lip completely spoiled
his looks. He seemed not so much to smile as to smirk at her. Sometimes it was
all she could do not to stare at his mouth, waiting for that little half smile.
Marianne ran her tongue over her upper lip. He was an outrageous flirt, and if
Lindsay Morgan told the truth, a presumptuous lover. She was glad he was gone.

She threw herself onto her lounge and opened Jane Eyre to
where she’d left off. Jane was entangled with this man St. John, and Marianne
could not like him. So bloodless. Jane would be better off with the arrogant
Mr. Rochester. Except for the inconvenient detail of the crazy wife in the
attic. There was that. But still. Rochester had passion and vigor and . . .
Well. It was fiction. Well-bred young women did not in real life marry such
overbearing, dangerous men. And she had no interest in a man as indifferent to
human suffering, and to the opinions of womankind, as a man like Yves Chamard.
Hadn’t any sympathy for Peter, hadn’t even asked about Sylvie.

Marcel, however – he was handsome, and he was kind. Nothing
domineering in his manner. Marcel was the one who crossed the river in the
night to bring Gabriel to Sylvie’s side. He was the man she should encourage.

Actually, she didn’t want to marry. And why should she? She
was wealthy herself. She didn’t need a man’s money, nor his name. And a wedding
would mean submitting herself to a husband. No way around it, the husband ruled
the marriage.

But loneliness did have its weight in this decision. Adam
had his own life. Father had his friends and his work. She did not like the
vision of herself dried up and virginal and alone. But neither did she want
merely to be some man’s ornament, some man’s breeder. Surely Marcel displayed a
mild temperament, was not of a dictatorial nature.

Well, if I do marry eventually, and Father seems to think
I’ve dallied too long already, Marcel would do very well.

The sensual and heavy scent of magnolias, ever present from
May until August, weighed on her. The perpetual light sweat from living through
a Louisiana summer dampened the chemise between her breasts and made her
acutely conscious of her body. Again she rubbed her palm where Yves Chamard had
so boldly stroked it.

She shook her head. I should bestir myself. She retrieved
her sketch pad and began to draw. A quirked smile with a small straight scar
quickly took shape under her pencil. She tossed the pad aside. She’d go riding.
No, it was too hot. She’d take a bath. Wash her hair.

“Hannah?” she called. And so the day passed, Marianne as
unaccustomed to discontent as she was to idleness.

In the cool of the evening, Marianne wondered what to do
with herself. Her fingers were damp on the piano keys, so she abandoned the
sonatina she was learning. No one to talk to. She missed Adam. And Father. And
Marcel. But not his brother, she assured herself. Maybe she’d wander down to
the garden. Joseph would be there and they could talk a while.

Or she could look in on Peter. That’s what she’d do.

With new purpose, she strode across the hall to the old
schoolroom where Adam and she had been miserably instructed in their youth by a
series of pinched-nosed tutors. One very proper, very starchy lady had even
taken a switch to Adam’s bare legs. She’d been trying to teach him how to eat
like a gentleman. He’d gotten the giggles and snorted milk out his nose all
over Madam’s best brown frock. To this day, Adam declared it had been worth a
switching to see the look on her face.

Slate and chalk in hand, Marianne marched down to the
quarters. There were no idle hands on a plantation, not among the slaves. She
had to find something Peter could do with his crippled feet and mangled left
hand. Of course, it was illegal, this teaching a slave to read. But once he
already knew how, what could anyone do about it? It seemed a small risk. Who
would know?

It’ll be fun, she thought.

The thick horde of buzzing flies had dissipated from Peter’s
cabin now he was healing. What set his cabin off from the others was that it
was inhabited before dark. This time of year, the slaves toiled fifteen hours
through the long days, and they still labored in the fields in the last hour of
daylight.

Marianne heard Peter’s voice as she approached. “I’s full,
Mammy, I keep telling you. You gon’ make me fat as a hog, you don quit dis
now.”

Marianne stepped into the room and Lena got up from her
chair. “Evenin, Miss Marianne. You come in and set, I’ll get you a piece of dis
pie Pearl brung over,” Lena coaxed.

“My Mammy gots to feed somebody, Miss,” Peter said.

“I’d love a piece. Look here, Peter,” she said. “I’ve
brought you a slate. You know what this is for?”

“No’m, I don.”

“I’m going to teach you to read, and this is how we start.”

Lena and Peter looked at her stunned. “You gon teach Petie
to read?” Lena’s eyes were huge and alight. “You gon teach him to read?” she
said again.

“Yes. What kind of pie?”

“It peach. Don’ nobody down here in de quarters can read.”

“Evette sent blackberry up to the house.” Marianne reached
for the thick slice of pie, so dense it kept its shape in her hand. “First,
Peter, take the chalk. Try drawing a little to get the feel of it.”

Peter held the slate against his knees with his bandaged
hand, took the chalk in the other. He looked at the Mistress. “You gon let me
read?”

She nodded at him, pie bulging one cheek. “Go ahead.”

The only drawing Peter had ever done was with a stick in the
sand. He pressed down so hard that the chalk broke, and he dropped the slate on
his bed like it was hot. “Oh Lawse, Miss Marianne. I’s sorry.”

“Don’t worry. Chalk breaks all the time. Try it again.”

Lightly this time, Peter drew the chalk across the slate in
a smooth curved line. He held it up to show his grandmother, and Lena nodded.
The two of them might have been examining the Holy Scrolls, so solemn were
they.

Marianne finished the pie and wiped her hands on the cloth
Lena offered. “Now let me show you.” The first lesson began as she drew a large
A on the slate.

It was nearly dark when they stopped. Marianne knew there
were no secrets in the quarters, so she didn’t ask Peter and Lena to keep this
to themselves. They were both exhilarated; they’d need to talk about it.

She stepped across the alleyway to Joseph’s cabin to ask him
to walk her through the gloaming back to the house. She wasn’t afraid, but she
too was excited. She’d tell Joseph how smart Peter was. Already he could draw
the first five letters perfectly.

Joseph was gratifyingly speechless when she told him what
she was up to with Peter, and she chattered on happily. When they reached the
edge of the veranda., the gas lights from the house spilling their glow out the
parlor doors, Joseph stopped. “You sho dis be all right wid de Master?”

She squeezed her old friend’s arm. “It distracts Peter from
his pain. Anyway, Father isn’t here, Joseph, remember? By the time he comes
home the end of August, Peter will be reading.”

The next several days, Marianne hurried down to Peter’s
cabin first thing after breakfast to continue the lessons. They broke in the
heat of the day for Peter to rest. He was a long way from being whole yet.
After supper, Marianne reappeared at the cabin with more chalk and a kerosene
lantern. The two of them were nearly breathless at the thrill of this illicit
project. Lena sat with them after she’d finished her tasks for the day,
marveling that a boy of her own was learning letters.

After corncakes and fried trout, Gabriel took leave of Tante
Josephine, Musette, Ariane, and his Simone. He was off to collect his mother
and sister from the lake, and when he returned, he and Simone would become man
and wife.

The others granted the two of them only a moment’s
semi-privacy to say their good-byes, so Gabriel contented himself with a rather
chaste kiss. He walked down the oak alley to the levee and turned back to look
for Simone on the gallery. She touched her lips with her fingers and held her hand
out to him.

At the levee, he hesitated, suddenly anxious. He wanted to
go back, to hold Simone to him one more time, but of course that was nonsense.
He’d be back in three or four days.

With two men to row him across the river, he set out for
Magnolias Plantation. He’d borrow a horse there, and he hoped Marcel and Yves
were still Adam Johnston’s guests, and that they would ride with him to the
Lake to gather Maman and Nicolette. And Pierre, of course.

No sooner was the boat running downstream than the two
slaves, George and Hunter, threw off their shirts. Their dark skin shone with
sweat in the heat, and they wiped their faces with their kerchiefs. Gabriel
pulled his hat low to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare and from sight of
the rapid swirling brown water at the boat’s sides. His hands gripped between
his legs, he began to recite the 206 bones of the human body to distract
himself from the incomprehensibly massive river.

Half an hour downstream, the slaves began to angle the boat
across the width of the river to reach the east bank. A flatboat riding the
central current began to close in on them. George and Hunter murmured to
themselves, and Gabriel looked up at the tension in their voices.

He followed their gaze to the fast-approaching flatboat. It seemed
typical enough, if not so common these days: a large platform of logs tied into
a raft to transport goods and the logs themselves to New Orleans. “What’s the
matter?”

George and Hunter began to pull hard toward the nearer
shore, their own west bank, but they were only two in a small boat with little
surface to accept the river’s push. “Them’s bad ’uns,” George panted.

Gabriel looked again. Certainly the flatboat men had a nasty
reputation as rogues and rapscallions, but they appeared to be rather idly
guiding the boat in the current. What did George and Hunter see that was so
alarming?

“Look dere, M’sieur,” Hunter said. He nodded his head again
toward the raft. Gabriel looked more intently. There, along the back edge of
the flatboat, black women and men sat chained together in a row. “Dem’s
slavers, sho.”

“But you’re with me,” Gabriel began to explain and then
stopped as the men on the raft, with surprising efficiency, launched a large
row boat with six men in it over the side. The helmsman pointed the boat right
at them.

Hunter and George put their backs into the oars, but the
other boat closed the distance rapidly. The pursuers had plenty of river to run
them down, it being as wide as four cane fields along here, and the six
flatboat men were fresh and determined.

The boat approached and Gabriel stood to his full height. He
wore a gentleman’s breeches, waistcoat and frock coat. His boots were fresh
polished, and he himself was often mistaken for white. Protection enough for
George and Hunter, he was sure. The slavers would go on their way once they
understood these men were not runaways but slaves from Toulouse on their
mistress’s bidding. As he assumed a stern and authoritative expression, he
wondered if Tante Josie had remembered to write the men a pass.

“’Hoy there,” one of the raft men called. As the larger boat
bumped into theirs, Gabriel pushed at it with his foot.

“Gentlemen, you seem to have deliberately run us down.
Account for yourselves.”

A filthy, yellow-toothed man in the bow grinned and tilted
his head at the man nearest him, who jumped into Gabriel’s boat without so much
as a good morning to you.

“You will leave this boat at once,” Gabriel began, but the
boarder, shorter than Gabriel and therefore with a lower center of gravity,
ignored him and caught a line the grinning man tossed him. The raft man secured
the line to the oarlock, ensuring the boats would not drift apart.

“This is no more than piracy. You will disembark,” Gabriel
commanded.

He simply could not grasp the man’s lack of fear, his total
indifference to his authority. When the boarder clapped a hand on Hunter’s
shoulder, Gabriel at last understood Hunter and George had been right to run
for shore.

 “Let me go,” Hunter hollered. “I don be no runaway. You –.”

Gabriel swung the boarder around and ducked as the intruder
threw his fist at Gabriel’s head. Gabriel then delivered his renowned right
punch to the man’s jaw. The slaver reeled, falling back on Hunter. With
George’s help, Hunter heaved the brute up and threw him into the river.

The man’s confederates paid no heed to his screams and pleas
for rescue as he whirled away into the current, sinking, struggling, and
sinking again. Four of the remaining five men flooded onto Gabriel’s boat,
kicking and fisting and cursing. Gabriel landed many a blow, Hunter and George
struggled, and all the while Gabriel was conscious of the swift current pulling
the boats along, a current that could suck a man under in less than a minute.

Two of the rafters grappled Gabriel to the bottom of the
boat and another trained a pistol on him. The other two had George and Hunter
in headlocks, knives held at their throats.

“This is a mistake,” Gabriel said, wiping blood from his
mouth. “These men belong to my aunt, Mrs. DeBlieux of Toulouse Plantation, not
more than ten miles upriver. If you’re looking for runaways, these are not
they.”

“What we gone do with the fancy man?” one of the rafters
said. “He ain’t worth nothing to us.”

The man with the pistol spat over the side. “Let Monroe
decide that.” He tossed the men a rope. “He’s a fighter. Best tie him up. Them
others too. They’re prime stock.”