Ever My Love: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 2) (17 page)

“Yes, sir. Daddy sent me to tell you they found the rowboat.
It come ashore way downstream, past the Morgan place. It had a hole in the
side. Daddy said it looked like a bullet done it.”

Nicolette balled her handkerchief in her fist and pressed it
against her mouth.  Yves did not take it amiss when Adam Johnston comforted her
by taking her other hand and speaking softly to her.

“He’s taken then,” Marcel said with finality.

“Now we know where to look for him. Adam,” Yves said,
“you’ll be needed in New Orleans to cover all the little auctions, and there
are the wharves where the captains grab up any able-bodied man they can to sail
their ships. You know the docks?”

Adam nodded.

“Let’s go then,” Yves said. Every man stood, ready to leave
on the instant. Cleo, startled at the suddenness of their move, grabbed at
Pierre.

“Sweetheart,” Pierre said. “I’m going north with Mr.
Chamard.”

Yves crossed the room to Cleo’s side. The grief on her
beautiful face broke his heart.

“Monsieur Lafitte,” Yves said. “I would take it as a
kindness if you stayed with my sister and Madame Cleo.”

“Please, Pierre,” Cleo said to him, her eyes wide and
fearful. “I don’t think I can bear this without you.”

Pierre looked at the younger men, all of them white. Yves
knew he would realize a dark-skinned freedman like himself would be a
hindrance, not a help.

“Truly, Monsieur,” Marcel said, “we will cover New Orleans,
inside and out.”

Yves saw it galled him, but Pierre relaxed his stiff posture
and nodded. “Very well.”

“Have you a pistol in the house, Monsieur LaFitte?” Marcel
asked. “I should like to borrow it, if I may.”

Marcel, Adam, Mr. Gale, and his nephew rode south. Yves let
them think he rode to Natchez simply to cover all the possibilities. In truth,
he had a stop to make first. If anyone had heard about rogue slavers, it would
be Joseph and his network.

Gabriel’s head ached perpetually from dehydration and the
glare of the sun. He’d thought he knew what the life of a slave was like, but
nothing had prepared him for the abject subjugation he endured. Chained to more
than a dozen slaves, there was no “I” separate from the other miserable souls.

The boss, Monroe, moored to some big trees every evening,
and he and a couple of others left the raft to go hunting. They needed meat,
but he stalked another prey as well. In the morning, he generally came back
with one or two slaves he’d highjacked from the nearest plantation. This
promised to be a most profitable trip, Monroe boasted. Once in New Orleans,
he’d break up the raft and sell the timber like in the old days before the
steam boats. Then he’d take all this chattel to auction. A very profitable
trip.

When Gabriel began to tan rather than burn, the boss ceased
kicking him. He might make a sale of the dandy Negro after all. “Wilson, strop
your razor. Get this girly hair off him, see if it don’t grow back kinky like
it ought to.”

His shorn scalp taking the full brunt of the sun, Gabriel’s
head pounded. They were all suffering without even hats to protect them, but
Hunter, Gabriel thought, shrank every day. His flesh wasted from the short
rations and the inadequate water Monroe allowed them. Worse, though, Hunter sat
cross-legged on the deck with bowed head and bent back. He had given up.

Marie, a tiny woman farther down the chain, moaned and
babbled. She’d been carrying a basket of eggs along the river road, she’d told
them, when the thugs grabbed her. Three children she’d left behind. Now grief
and the unrelenting sun made her delirious.

“We need water over here,” Gabriel called to the group
playing cards on top of a hogshead. His voice cracked, his throat was so dry.
The men ignored him. “She needs water, or she’ll die!” he shouted

The raftsmen had already made it clear when Gabriel had
protested the slaves’ treatment earlier that they would not heed a colored man.
The dandy was “uppity,” that’s what they said, and now they ignored him,
studying their cards.

Gabriel turned to Hunter. “Stand up.” The man stared at him
with glazed eyes. Gabriel pulled at the chain. “Stand up, damn you! All of you,
stand up.”

He pulled on the chain, reached across Hunter and yanked
hard at the next slave. “Get to your feet. You’re men, not beasts. Get up!”

The men and women roused as if coming from hibernation. They
raised themselves one by one, each helping the other manage the shackles.

Wilson, twenty feet away, slapped his cards down. “What the
hell?”

Gabriel had the slaves on their feet, even Marie, but now
what? His head ached so he could hardly think. He stepped toward the men
lolling around the card game. Hunter necessarily followed him, and then the
others. The line advanced, one stumbling step at a time.

Several of the white men tossed their cards and jumped to
their feet, fumbling for their guns and stepping back and away from the
hollow-eyed slaves. Wilson drew his pistol and brandished it at the coffle.

Gabriel kept coming. Wilson pointed the gun at his chest.
Gabriel swayed on his feet, but he stopped. The others halted alongside him.

“We’ve got to have more water. What good are we to you, we
all die before you can sell us?”

Monroe emerged from his tent and assessed the situation. He
stepped around the kegs of goods piled on deck and pushed Wilson’s gun hand
down. “They ain’t no use to us dead. Get ’em some water.”

“And shade,” Gabriel said. “This woman has sunstroke, and
the others aren’t far from it.”

He met Monroe’s narrowed eyes. Never in his life had he
lowered his gaze because a white man looked at him. And it could be, Gabriel
thought, that never in this man’s life had a Negro stared back at him.

Monroe finally spoke. “I got my eye on you, pretty boy.” He
headed back to the shade of his tent. “Rig a tarp, and give ’em a bucket with a
line on it,” he said to the raftsmen.

Once the tarp was up, Gabriel had the slaves coil themselves
under its shade. He managed to keep Marie near him, and their first ladle of
water was for her. The second and third ladles Gabriel poured over her head and
chest to cool her. Only then did he pass the bucket along to the others. When it
was empty, he refilled it himself, pulling two men along with him as he
stretched the chain to the edge of the raft. He lowered the bucket into the
river and passed it amongst the people again and again. Once they’d had their
fill, they poured bucket after bucket over their bodies.

Clear-headed once more, Gabriel began to plan. He did not
see how the rogues could sell him in New Orleans. He was educated. His hands
were soft, his manners as refined as any white planter’s. He had a tongue in
his head.

Gabriel shuddered at the image that passed through his mind.
There was a way to silence a slave. With sufficient brutality, and a knife, the
man Monroe could ensure he never spoke again.

How could Monroe make a profit from a man like him? He could
put him out as a boxer. There were arenas for such sport between desperate men.
But Gabriel did not intend to show them any more of his physical talents until
the time was right for escape.

There were always ships in the harbor at New Orleans. Maybe
Monroe meant to sell him to a ship’s captain who had lost too many sailors to
the yellow jack to be overly nice about whom he took on. Gabriel saw himself
jumping ship, swimming through the river, his fear of the deep moving water
inconsequential compared to his desire to be free.

But what if they kept him chained until the ship sailed? He
might labor for months before he could return. No, once away from New Orleans,
Gabriel could bargain with the captain. His father would ransom him for far
more than a mere slave sailor could profit him. He’d offer to serve as ship’s
surgeon until they docked in England or France. Gabriel would be free,
eventually.

But he didn’t see how he could save the other poor people
caught in this trap. This man Monroe would take them to one of the lesser slave
markets in and around New Orleans, one where the brokers did not examine the
false documents of ownership too carefully. Equally unscrupulous buyers would
take up the bargains one by one, enriching Monroe’s pockets and gaining for
themselves despairing, but seasoned, laborers.

They would need their hope if they were to survive. Gabriel
began to talk to the people around him, to ask them where they were from and
how they were taken, to remind them they were husbands, wives, mothers,
fathers. They were more than this man’s slaves.

Yves retraced his dusty journey from the Magnolias, turning
over all the possibilities. He knew his brother. Gabriel was proud. And he was
a fighter. It would not be easy for anyone to subdue him.

How would a slaver unload a commodity like Gabriel? Too
high-toned, too soft-handed to pass as a laborer. Even if you could stop him
from talking. Once Gabriel opens his mouth, Yves thought, the slave brokers
won’t want anything to do with him. Gabriel would be nothing but trouble for
the brokers if they were caught with a freedman, a literate, articulate
freedman in their auction.

That worried Yves. What would they do with him then? The
easiest course would be to knock him over the head and toss him in the river.
It was hard to keep his hopes up as he urged his horse back to Magnolias.

Gas lights lit the windows of the lower floor when Yves
arrived. He passed by the house, though he strained to catch sight of Miss
Johnston, perhaps reading or sewing in the parlor. He left his tired mount at
the stables to be looked after. From there, he took a lantern to light his way
to the quarters.

People were still about, talking, whittling, tending to the
last of the day’s chores in the twilight. Children ran through the alleyway
chasing a ball somebody had made for them out of old cowhide and sinew.

Yves recognized Joseph’s cabin as the one with the
hydrangeas on either side of the steps. He knocked on the door, aware of the
slaves’ eyes on him. He wondered if they knew who he was, what he did. It was
better for him if they didn’t, but he couldn’t worry about that now, not with
Gabriel missing.

Joseph opened the door. “Come inside, M’chie.”

Yves set his lantern on the table and quickly told Joseph
all he knew. “What have you heard?” he asked the old man. “Any word of a
light-colored man taken?”

“Dey’s plenty a news. Folks missing all up and down dis
river, seem like. And dey ain’t runaways. I’d know dat. Dey’s been taken.”

“Where are they headed?”

“Dey’s goin down river all right, cause dat’s how the
missing word come, one after de other down de river. Must be five or six gone
below here. Dey’s a bold gang, dey is.”

“What about Dr. Chamard? You hear anybody say they’ve seen
him?”

“Nobody say nothing bout a white man. Nor a near-white man
neither.”

They kept their thoughts to themselves a few minutes, and
then Joseph said, “What dey can do wid a man like Dr. Chamard?” He shook his
head.

“Exactly,” Yves agreed.

“Les us go on down to Foreman’s place. You wid me, we can
use de lantern and it be faster. We talk to Rufus, de butler dere, if we can
get him out de house. He know bout everthing goin on, and he likely to tell me
more dan he would a gentleman coming to de door.”

They lured the butler out with a ruse about raccoons getting
into the underhouse. People on the Foreman place, Rufus told them, had sighted
a barge, a raft nearly big as the big house, floating downstream a few days
back. Don’t see many barges like that anymore, he said. It was mid-day though,
the barge was out in the main stream, and nobody noticed what cargo it carried
except a few bales of cotton and some hogshead caskets piled high.

With the days marked out for him in the lantern-lit sand,
Rufus connected the disappearance of a slave from the Foreman’s and another
from the next place down with the night after the barge floated past.

Back at Magnolias, Yves made his decision. Marcel, Adam, and
Mr. Gale had New Orleans covered, and Marcel could find willing hands to help
them. He’d try to pick up Gabe’s trail on the Natchez Trace.

The flatboat men used to travel south on the river, and then
return north on foot by way of the trail to Natchez. If the slavers had no luck
unloading Gabriel in New Orleans, they might try to get rid of him in some out
of the way part of the Trace, no questions asked. First light, he’d be on his
way.

He left Joseph in the quarters. The lights were still on
downstairs at the house. Charles would let him in, fix him a late supper. His
boot heel clacked on the brick veranda. and a movement in the shadows startled
him.

Marianne had not seen Yves’ approach. She’d been stargazing,
a light shawl over her head protecting her from the mosquitoes. When she heard
the intruder’s steps, and from the corner of her eye saw his sudden movement,
her reaction was faster than thought. She realized it was not a bear or a puma
or any other beast – indeed, she recognized Yves Chamard’s figure almost
immediately -- but the yelp was out of her before she could stop it.

 Yves strode to her chair and knelt at her side. He put a
hand out as if to touch her. “It’s me, Marianne.”

Flustered and embarrassed, she stood up and drew away from
him. “I’m not accustomed to being snuck up on, Mr. Chamard.”

Yves stood and stepped back two paces. “I’m sorry to have
startled you, Miss Johnston.” He made his bow, as stiff a one as she’d ever
been offered.

Marianne knew she had been harsh, rude even. But rudeness
should not perturb Yves Chamard! Still, she was glad the dark hid what must be
a raging blush, for her skin was afire – just from his almost-touch. Damn the
man, she thought. And I’ll damn well cuss in my own head if I want to.