Ever My Love: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 2) (21 page)

“Here, here. I’ve got you.”

The dead man was pulled off her and she sucked in the night
air. She couldn’t see for the hot blood covering her face.

Hands lifted her, set her on the bench. The metallic scent
of blood and something else -- sandalwood? Thumbs gently stroked her eyelids,
wiping away the blood, and she tilted her head back.  Palms cradled her face,
sweet breath caressed her mouth. “Are you hurt?” he said.

She opened her eyes. It was Yves, and that seemed right.
Then she had sense enough to wonder: “What are you doing here?”

“Rescuing a damsel in distress, among other things.”

Yves Chamard took out his handkerchief and wiped her eyes,
her nose. Then as tenderly as if she were a child, he cleaned her lips. She sat
as still as a porcelain doll, but not so unmoved nor unstirred as a doll. Her
heart and her breath came fast and heavy. When he’d finished with the
handkerchief, he slid his thumb across her bottom lip, lightly, delicately.
Dazed, she thought he was going to kiss her. She opened her lips, but Yves
stood up and leaned in to the back of the wagon.

“How’s the girl?”

“She breathing pretty good,” Joseph said.

Marianne brushed past Yves to climb into the back. “You
really are all right?”

Pearl swallowed and managed to whisper through her bruised
throat. “I alive, Miss Marianne.”

Sonny groaned and raised himself to his knees. Yves vaulted
to the ground and smashed his fist into the side of the man’s head. Sonny
collapsed again.

“Joseph, can you light the lantern?” Yves said.

“Wait,” Marianne said. “Where are the other men?”

Joseph climbed down and toed the body of Monroe, a black
hole in his forehead visible in the moonlight. “Here dat lanky one,” Joseph
said.

“There was a fourth,” Marianne said.

“He’s dead,” Yves told her. “Light the lantern so I can tie
this man up.”

Yves removed the braces from Sonny’s pants and wound them
around his ankles. His wrists he bound with the shoelaces from Sonny’s boots.
Once the thug was secured, Yves held the lantern over him to examine the
injuries to his head. Where the first rock from Yves’ slingshot caught him
there was a swelling big as a hen’s egg. Another swelling the shape of the gun
barrel ran into his hair. The other blow to the side of his head hardly showed
yet, but it would. “I’d hate to have this man’s headache in the morning.”

Marianne felt warm wet drops on her hand. “Pearl, you’re bleeding!”

Yves brought the lantern to the wagon and held it over
Pearl.

“I shot you!” Marianne pulled at the shredded fabric on
Pearl’s side. “Oh God, I shot you.” Buckshot had torn away the flesh just above
the waist on Pearl’s left side.

“I be dead, you didn’t pull dat trigger.”

“How bad is it?” Yves said.

With unsteady fingers, Marianne poured water from her
canteen over the wound and dabbed at it with her petticoat. “Thank God! It
isn’t deep. The shot just tore the skin away.” She tore a strip from her petticoat
to hold against the wound. “Joseph, I need the medical bag.”

He handed it to her, and she saw the blood trickling down
his arm.

“Joseph! You’re shot too?”

“I don think hardly. Maybe I got one or two pellets is all.”

Yves set the lantern on the bench and left her to tend to
Pearl and Joseph. When Marianne finished cleaning and bandaging the wounds,
Joseph’s being hardly worse than he’d said, she saw Yves and the runaway Elvin
carrying the fourth man between them. They laid him on the ground near Monroe
and Wilson. She sat on the back of the wagon, staring, the corpses not ten feet
away.

Three men. They had killed three men. Wilson, the one she’d
killed -- his ribs and part of the spine shone in the light, his middle blasted
nearly clean away. Marianne began to tremble. They’d had to do it. She wasn’t
sorry.

The trembling shook the wagon. “Missy, you be all right,”
Joseph said. He wrapped his arms around her. “You done fine.”  Pearl reached
for her hand and stroked it. Marianne whimpered once, and the trembling went
on.

Yves left the dead men and strode to the wagon. “Marianne!”
She could see him clearly, she knew who he was, but she couldn’t understand
what he was doing here.

Yves grabbed her shoulders and gave her a shake. “Marianne!
Come out of it.” He shook her again, and she thought he was about to slap her
face the way he raised his hand to her, and she began to cry.

Yves pulled her from the wagon and held her length against
his. She held on to him, the sobs racking her. His body rocked back and forth,
rocking her with him, and slowly she found herself again.

Steady now, no trembling, no sobbing, Marianne didn’t stir
from his embrace. She didn’t ever want to stir. Her face pressed against his
chest, her arms wrapped around his waist, she was safe. She couldn’t see the
dead bodies, she didn’t need the shotgun anymore.

Yves was kissing the top of her head. His hand rubbed her
back. Suddenly it was too much, it felt too good. She stepped away. With a long
shuddering breath, she said, “Thank you. I am recovered. Thank you. I never
cry. I never do.”

She wiped at her wet face, embarrassed. Joseph took her arm
and helped her onto the wagon. “Sit, Missy. Pearl and you, you stay in de
wagon. We gots work to do.”

Elvin brought his wife and child from the corn. He helped
Bess into the wagon, then boosted Clem up. The three women and the boy huddled
together, spent from fear.

The moon still sailed high in the sky. Marianne’s mind
cleared and her emotions settled. She climbed down from the wagon, trying to
gauge when sunrise would come. Not soon.

Elvin had already dragged one body away from the lantern
light, and he came back for the next one. Joseph was cutting strips from the
canvas tarp.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Gon tie this fellow to the wagon wheels,” he said, nodding
toward Sonny. “Don want him getting away from us.”

Marianne stared at the remaining body on the ground.
“Joseph, we killed three people.”

“Yes’m. We did. And dey needed killing.”

They would all go to jail. Or worse. They could hang them. But
not Pearl. Not Joseph. She and Yves. They were the killers. She was a killer.

Joseph looked at her hard in the lantern light. “Don you go
on bout it, Missy. You done what you had to do. Pearl be dead you didn’t fire
dat gun.”

Yves and a big man with a full beard and a black hat came up
the lane in the moonlight. She watched him, Yves Chamard, who’d held her while
she cried. She wished he’d hold her now.

The new man tipped his hat to her. “Ebenezer Rogers.”

“This is the gentleman whom you sought,” Yves said. “He has
agreed to loan us his shovels and a patch of ground.”

The men took the lantern, the shovels, and the remaining
body through the trees. Marianne waited, watching the moon pass its zenith and
begin sinking toward the earth.

By dawn, they were in the house where the farmer’s wife
Eleanor had hot coffee waiting. With Pearl’s extra set of hands, she soon had
ham on the table along with hominy grits, biscuits and red-eye gravy.

Yves took his second cup of coffee onto the back porch to
watch the morning mist hovering in the treetops. He was in his shirtsleeves,
one arm braced high against the porch post. Marianne stood at the door for a
moment, watching him. “Beautiful here,” he said without turning around.

She stepped on the porch to stand beside him. A day ago, she
might have sniped at Yves for interfering when she’d already persuaded Monroe
to leave. So like a man, to assume his heroics were needed. After last night,
however, Marianne was not so quick to judge, and so, not in accusation as much
as in puzzlement, she said, “Those men were leaving, you know.”

“No, darlin’. They weren’t.” He looked down at her. “The
first man? Elvin got him because he’d headed into the corn. He’d heard the boy,
I think.”

Then the slavers would have taken Elvin and Bess and Clem.
And Joseph and Pearl. She would likely be in the cornfield, dead.

“Thank you.”

He smiled at her. “You’re welcome.”

“You’re not a stranger here, to these people.”

“No.”

Marianne had been putting the pieces together all through
breakfast. “You’re the shepherd.”

He gave her that quirky grin. “Don’t know anything about a
shepherd.”

And she thought it might have been Marcel. Yves was part of the
Underground!

A light rain began to fall. Their host joined them on the
porch. “This keeps up, it’ll take care of any signs out in the field.”

Their captive, Sonny, didn’t get any breakfast. Far as they
knew, he hadn’t regained consciousness yet. They’d left him locked in the
corncrib with the farmer’s friendly corn snake, his wrists tied, his ankles
trussed so he could shuffle but not run.

“What will we do with that man? Will he take money to go
away? To keep quiet?” Marianne asked. How she wished he would ride off,
grateful to be alive.

Yves and Ebenezer exchanged looks. “Even if he said he
would, I wouldn’t trust him any further than I would a rabid skunk,” Eb said.

“We aren’t finished with Sonny Birch yet,” Yves said.

“You know him?”

“I’ve been following these men for three days. Caught up to
them last night here at the house.”

“Who are they?”

“They’re the ones took my brother.”

Marianne marveled how his eyes, so tender on her a moment
ago, turned hard.

“I intend to find out what Birch knows before I turn him
over to the sheriff.”

And then the sheriff would arrest her for murder. Marianne
nodded. There was nothing to be done. She had shot Wilson and killed him.
Surely the judge would be lenient since she did it to save Pearl.

“I’ll be ready,” she said.

“Ready?”

“For the sheriff. He’ll arrest me. And you, I suppose.”

One side of Yves’ mouth curved higher than the other in that
odd smile. “You are not going to jail, Marianne, and neither am I.”

Ebenezer snorted. “Not a jury anywhere send a woman to jail,
nor this fellow here, either, for protecting themselves. Rest your mind about
that, Miss.”

Marianne let out a long breath and placed her hand over her
heart. She’d known that, of course, but still . . .

“I seen some head injuries,” his wife Eleanor said, stepping
out on the porch. “Don’t rightly know how bad this one is hurt, but could be he
won’t remember nothing anyway. That’s the way it is sometimes.”

“He’ll remember where he left my brother,” Yves said, not
just determination but threat in his voice.

“Then they didn’t find Gabriel in New Orleans,” Marianne
said.

Yves shook his head. “I got word from Marcel when I was in
Natchez. They were seen trying, but they couldn’t sell him down there. He was
too conspicuous, we think. Then they were seen on the Trace. I’ve been trailing
them ever since.”

The rain came down heavier and Eb handed Yves a slicker.
“Let’s see if that fella’s waked up.”

Marianne followed Eleanor Rogers back into the kitchen where
a pot of water heated on the stove. “Your girl wants to wash you up some, Miss.
Sit down here and I’ll get you a towel.”

Pearl dipped a cloth in the warm water. “You got blood in
you hair, Miss Marianne. I gon get it out I have to wash yo whole head.”

Marianne touched the sticky mess above her forehead. “I
would appreciate that very much, Pearl.”

In the barn, Yves shook off the slicker and hung it on a
nail. His host was a Quaker, or his wife was, he wasn’t sure which. Quakers
didn’t hold with violence of any kind. That’s why Eb hadn’t come out to the
field until the shooting was over. Yves respected that. The Rogers took plenty
of risk helping slaves keep going on the way north. “Eb,” Yves said, “I know
how you feel about violence. Why don’t I go in the crib by myself?”

Ebenezer shook his head. “We haven’t even talked to the man
yet, Yves. We’ll try Christian patience first. Then, if it’s necessary, I’ll
leave you with him.”

They opened the door into the crib and heard the rustling of
the snake somewhere in the piled up corn. Or maybe it was an unfortunate mouse.
Sonny lay sprawled on his back, his wrists tied and a foot of rope between his
bound ankles. His eyes were closed and swollen.  A fly buzzed around his open
mouth.

“Looks like he stuck his head in a bee hive,” Eb said.

Yves squatted next to Sonny and turned his head this way and
that, trying to judge how deep the bruises went. He didn’t want the man’s
brains scrambled.

Gently, Yves slapped his cheeks. “Wake up, Birch.” He
slapped him a little harder.

Birch opened his eyes. One eye, blood-filled and gruesome,
didn’t focus, but the other eye found Yves’ face and beamed malevolence. Looked
like he had his wits.

As he realized he was bound hand and foot, Sonny’s eyes lost
their meanness. He looked around the corn crib, scared now. “Where’s the
others?”

“Dead.”

“By God,” he said. His face turned red and his eyes teared.
“By God, you killed Monroe?”

“By God, I did.”

Sonny’s face crumpled, his mouth wide and contorted.

Yves hadn’t expected this, a hardened man, tuning up to
blubber like a baby. Man’s mood changed fast as you could drop a hat. Yves looked
up at Eb, perplexed, and Eb shrugged.

“You sons of bitches, Monroe the only brother I got left,”
Sonny wailed.

“You’re alone in the world, then, Birch. I don’t imagine
your own mother would own you, the kind of man you are.”

Sonny gripped his head in his hands, rocking and sobbing.

“A little moonshine might calm him down.”

“Eb? You’ve got moonshine?”

Eb grinned. “Don’t mention it to Eleanor though.”

Eb went into his tack room next to the corn crib and shifted
some things around. When he came back, he carried a jug and a tin cup. He
poured out a dram for Sonny. “Here, fellow. It’ll ease your head.”