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

Another gash, and she was finished with the sutures. She
packed a poultice of crushed pewterwort stems around each puncture wound, which
she left unsewn. The other wounds she covered with comfrey poultices.

Marianne plunged her arms to the elbow in the bucket of warm
water Evette had ready for her. Only then did she realize she’d forgotten her
canvas apron. Her maid Hannah would shake her head -- another skirt and blouse
ruined.

Peter cried out, still not really conscious, and clawed at
the poultice on his neck. Marianne took his hands to quiet him. At least he
showed some strength. Only God knew if he would survive.

With Pearl’s help Marianne wrapped Peter in linen so that he
seemed more bandage than boy. Then she said a silent prayer as the men
carefully moved him to a stretcher to take him to his cabin. “Stay with him,
Pearl. I’ll come down in a while.”

Drained, Marianne retreated to her room where she pulled off
her clothes and slipped into her dressing gown. Freddie wanted to explore the
bloodstained heap, but Marianne pulled him into her lap. She could have cried,
from nerves and pity for the boy, but Marianne believed tears had little use in
this world. She nuzzled Freddie’s soft fur and took comfort in his adoring
kisses, holding him close until he wiggled to be let loose.

While she waited for Hannah to heat a bath, she sat at the
rosewood desk which Hannah had graced with a crystal bowl filled with
gardenias. Freddie settled in, his tiny mug on her foot, and Marianne opened
her medical log. Writing the particulars of the morning’s surgery helped her
put some distance between her feelings and that poor boy. Next she pulled her
leather-bound journal to her and dipped her pen again.

During her sixteenth year, Marianne had gone to finishing
school in New York. Everyone was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Marianne cried
her way through it, horrified. A terrible, heartbreaking story. But slavery
wasn’t like that, not in reality. She knew no one like that Legree, no one so
desperate as Eliza. Yet the city had been full of men and women preaching in
strident voices on street corners, filling churches and halls with their
ringing indictments of slaveholding. Earnestly, passionately, the abolitionists
reasoned and railed against slavery and the evil men who profited from it. They
were very convincing, except that her own father profited from it, and so then
did she, and everyone she knew back home.

Certainly Father was a good man. Marianne’s father’s
friends, some of whom owned more than two hundred slaves, were good men. These
people in the East, all her Southern friends assured her, they simply don’t
understand the Southern way of life. Her friends must be right. Slavery was not
a simple thing. The truth was much more complicated than the abolitionists
claimed.

Thus with the innate human capacity to hold two conflicting
ideas at once, Marianne returned to Louisiana, where life resumed its
comfortable rhythms. Magnolias was a happy plantation, she was sure of it.
Father was good to his slaves. She herself ministered to them, wormed their
children, treated their ear aches, and brewed the potions that cured their
fevers.

And so Marianne filled her journal with the many ways her
family took care to run a compassionate plantation. Yet, as she matured to a
woman of twenty, doubts increasingly nagged her. The ringing voices of those
stirring abolitionist orators Julia Ward Howe and Henry Stanton lingered in her
mind; the pages of her journal reflected her growing unease.

And now – here was Peter.

Bathed and dressed, Marianne ate a hurried and solitary
dinner. At Hannah’s insistence, she donned cuff guards and a heavy apron. She
checked her pocket for the Keys to the Realm, as she called them, and took the
path through the garden to her personal storeroom. Here she had herbs drying
from the rafters, pots of salve and the makings for more, and her well-used
mortar and pestle.

She chose the bark and leaves of the willow to grind small
enough for an infusion to fight the fever she knew would come. She cut down
more witch hazel leaves, ground them to a powder, and mixed it with lard to
make a greasy salve. Peter was going to require quantities of both. Reaching
overhead, she untied a bundle of comfrey, then shredded and pounded the roots
and leaves into a gluey mass to use for additional poultices.

With her pots of medicinals, Marianne walked down to the
quarters. The reek of witch hazel and pewterwort coming through the open door
led her to the cabin.

Pearl sat on the only stool, fanning the flies from Peter’s
face.

“Has he wakened?”

“Yes’m, he in and out.”

Marianne put her hand to Peter’s forehead. Already he was
hot to the touch. “Who are his people?”

“He old Lena’s youngest grandbaby.”

Marianne nodded, but in truth, she didn’t know which one
Lena was. Nor what had happened to Peter’s mother. She felt ashamed of herself
for not knowing, but there were so many slaves on the place.

“I reckon she know Petie caught by now,” Pearl said, “but de
overseer, he don’t let her come.”

Marianne’s mouth tightened. That was cruel, to keep the
woman away. With Father in Saratoga and her brother Adam at the Lake, she’d
have to deal with Mr. McNaught herself. Well, she’d handle him. Later.

She handed Pearl the pot of crushed willow bark. “Tell
Evette to make a tea out of this, let it steep a good while. Then go on to the
house and ask Charles to bring me paper and pen.”

While Marianne waited for the aged Charles, who’d been in
charge of the house even when Father was young, Marianne unwrapped the bloody
bandage on Peter’s maimed foot and washed the wound again. Peter groaned and
opened his eyes.

“Lie still,” she told him. With the witch hazel salve rubbed
into a gauzy cloth, she layered the bandage over the flesh to stop the oozing.
Then she tied linen strips round and round his foot. There’d be no flies
lighting on these wounds if she could help it.

 Charles came in, elegant as always in his butler’s livery.
She wrote a note, much more polite than she felt, asking Mr. McNaught to send
Lena in from the field to sit with her grandson. That taken care of, she cooled
Peter’s hot skin with astringent until Pearl returned with the willow bark tea.

Marianne lifted Peter’s head and held the tea to his lips.
He sputtered at the evil taste. “I know it’s foul, but you need to drink it all,”
she told him.

To Pearl she said, “You can clean up now. Then go on back to
the kitchen. I’ll stay until Lena comes.”

Pearl left Miss Marianne with her hand on Peter’s forehead.
Petie have a chance of living through dis wid her tending him.

Pearl still wore Peter’s blood on her hands and arms and
dress. At the well, the sand at her feet turned pink as she washed.
I make sure
Luke see how Petie all chewed up.
John Man all de time talking, make it sound
easy to get away. Now maybe Luke think on it some mo. She checked her nails
were clean. Till I gives him a baby. A baby on de way, he stay put here wid me.

Pearl drew another bucket and took it to her and Luke’s
cabin. When had she ever been alone in the middle of a day? Sunlight through
the window caught the dust motes and cast shadows in the corners. She stilled
herself to listen to the quiet house. The peace bled the tension from her
shoulders. A body could rest, alone, with nothing to hand. If Luke could rest
like dis, find a little peace in de day, he not be so ready to run.

She stripped off the faded gray sack dress and sluiced the
cold water over her belly, as flat now as the day she and Luke first loved each
other.
Lord, I needs a chile,
she reminded Him.

Every day she drank the concoction Mammy Lewis made for her.
Squaw vine and chaste berries, dandelion and nettle leaves – “It shore to give
you a baby,” Mammy promised her. But her flow came just the same.

How long Luke gone stick wid me widout no chile? He say he
gone stick, but mens wants babies much as womens do. She tilted her head as if
she could see through the roof to God’s domain. Lord, don forget me down here
praying for a baby. She crossed herself the way she’d seen Miss Marianne do,
and the master’s wife had done it too back before she died. Maybe that made the
prayers stronger.

Pearl pulled on the only other dress she had, threadbare and
too tight across the shoulders, but it would do while the other one soaked. She
hurried on to her work in the cookhouse.

In the other cabin, Marianne put her fingers to Peter’s
throat where the pulse pumped under the brown skin. Should it be that fast? She
pressed her own throat until she found the pulse. Peter’s vein throbbed so much
faster, she was sure it couldn’t be good for him. She roused him and held the
cup to his lips. She’d added peppermint to sweeten the bitter willow brew, but
he still grimaced at the taste. “I’ll try some honey in the next batch,” she
promised him.  “Go back to sleep.”

She checked each bandage to be sure blood wasn’t still
oozing from his wounds. His limbs were so thin. She wiped his face. Thick dark
lashes curled against his cheek, fine brows arched across a smooth high
forehead. A handsome boy, this Peter. Or he had been. She wondered what he was
like. Did he sing in the evenings with the others? Did he make jokes and tell
stories? Did he follow some girl around and pick daisies for her? She dabbed
the healing salve on his dry lips and wished she knew more medicine. She’d
re-read The Mistress’s Essential Medical Book and see if there was another
remedy she should try.

This poor boy wouldn’t run away again, she thought. Not with
his legs and foot like they were. But his brother was still out there. God
protect him.

Why had these two run now? This new man, she thought. McNaught.
He was too harsh. She didn’t remember having any runaways when Mr. Smythe had
been in charge. But abolition was in the air; the slaves were bound to be
roused. And who could blame them?

Marianne dipped her cloth into a pan of water and wiped the
heat away from Peter’s brow. There couldn’t be, there mustn’t be, any more boys
brought home like this.

But Father wouldn’t listen to her. He loved her and spoiled
her, but he took no counsel from his daughter. How could she do anything more?

Gabriel Chamard stepped from the gangplank onto the wharf
and took in the first breath of home. Not the lemon scented air he remembered,
nor the rich aromas of Creole cooking – the docks smelled of the fetid river
and mules and sweating men. But it was home.

A head taller than everyone else, Gabriel moved through the
hive of working stevedores to gain the soil of Louisiana. He arranged for his
trunk to be delivered, then shook his head at the for-hires, eager to stretch
his legs after weeks on the sailing ship. With long-legged strides, he set out
to reacquaint himself with New Orleans.

The streets around the wharves were mucky, laden with trash
and filth, the leavings of dogs and horses. Watching where he placed his fine
Parisian shoes, Gabriel bumped into a yellow-haired man with shit on his
hobnail boots and dried blood on his apron.

“Beg pardon, sir . . .” the man began. Gabriel prepared to
offer his own apology, but the fellow looked into the liquid dark eyes of
Gabriel’s African ancestors. “You a damn colored,” he said. He reached out a
filthy hand and fingered Gabriel’s velvet collar. “Dressed up like your
betters.”

Gabriel settled his shoulders, ready if the man should touch
him again. He was as tall as Gabriel and broader across the chest. But Gabriel
noted the softness in the belly, the lines in the man’s red face. He could take
him.

“Excuse me,” Gabriel said and moved to the side.

The man’s little pig eyes lit up. He grabbed Gabriel’s right
arm. “You think you a mighty fine gentleman, don’t you? But you just a ni --.”

“Release me.” Gabriel looked at the butcher’s beefy hand on
his arm and then into the blood-shot blue eyes.

A couple of working men stopped to watch, their arms
crossed, ready for a show. The question was, could he take the three of them
and stay out of the muck on the street? Probably he’d ruin his jacket, but if
that was the price of being a man in New Orleans, so be it.

The big fellow grinned now he had an audience. He probably
expects to enjoy this, Gabriel reflected.

The butcher yanked the lapel of the fine wool coat.

Gabriel drove his left fist into the man’s gut. From the
corner of his eye, he saw the two gawkers move in on him, both on his left
side. Gabriel whirled, took the nearest one with his right. The second man got
in a blow near Gabriel’s eye, but paid for getting too close -- Gabriel caught
him under the jaw with his fist.

The butcher was up, coming for him, but first Gabriel had to
fell the first spectator who was still standing. A powerful, well-placed punch,
and the man went down.

Gabriel turned his attention to the pig-eyed butcher. The
big blond had assumed the fighter’s crouch, but he hadn’t the discipline to
wait for the moment. He lunged at Gabriel, arms spread to grapple him to the
ground.

Gabriel stepped aside, put out a foot, and the man’s own
force landed him in a sprawl face-down in the filthy road.

Gabriel glanced around. No more takers? The Paris Région’s
champion in fisticuffs three years running shot his cuffs, straightened his
collar, and proceeded on his way.

Unfortunately, by the time he strolled through New Orleans
and into Le Vieux Carré, his eye had swollen from the spectator’s blow. What a
nuisance. His mother would no doubt make much of it and resume the lectures
she’d delivered so many times in his youth: Don’t look for trouble. Don’t look
those people in the eye. Walk away. You get yourself killed, you don’t settle
down. Thus the three years in Paris to better his manners and his disposition,
or so his mother thought. And here he returns with a blackened eye. Gabriel
smiled. It’d be a pleasure to hear his mother carrying on once again.