Ever My Love: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 2) (28 page)

“Yes. And so would you have, Maman, if it were Papa.”

Josie handed her an envelope. “A hundred dollars.”

A lot of money. Maman loved Gabriel too. “Thank you, Maman.”

Simone hurried down the steps. She fastened her satchel onto
the saddle, mounted, and rode out of the courtyard. In five minutes she was at
Tante Cleo’s.

That morning, the mail boat had delivered Yves’ notes to Cleo
and to Bertrand Chamard. Cleo had rushed to tell Josie and her family the news.
Then Simone went directly to Monsieur Chamard. He’d only returned from his
search in New Orleans the day before. Now he looked at her as if she’d lost her
senses. Of course he would not take a young lady with him. It would not be
proper. She was not needed. She would slow him down. He held her mother in high
esteem and would not wish to offend her. No, and no, and no.

But Simone did not accept no. She didn’t cry. She didn’t plead.
She simply explained, again, that she was going with him. Perhaps the stubborn
tilt of her chin persuaded him, or that she had become so thin her cotton frock
hung on her. The interminable waiting, the sleepless nights and restless days
had taken their toll.

“I’m leaving within the hour,” he’d told her in
capitulation. “But if you fall behind, I will leave my man Valentine with you
and go on alone.”

“I understand.”

“Meet me at Cleo’s. If you’re late, I’m leaving without
you.”

“I will not be late.”

Cleo paced in her front garden, waiting to say good bye to
Bertrand. Whatever else was between them, they loved their children. And they
loved each other. That she had left him for Pierre didn’t change that.

Simone rode into the yard first, in riding clothes, with
saddle bags full, plainly ready to travel. “Simone!” Cleo said. “What does
Josie say?”

“What you would expect. But I am going, Tante. Gabriel needs
me, and I’m going to him.”

“Bertrand won’t take you.”

“I’ve already convinced him. He’s taking me.”

Bertrand and Valentine came into view. The three houses, the
Chamards’, then Josie’s, then Cleo’s, spread along the length of the river
road, making them close neighbors if not always comfortable ones. But they were
a family, all of them, especially in bad times.

Bertrand dismounted for a final word with Cleo.

“Bertrand, you can’t mean to take Simone? She has no proper
chaperon, no business rushing off --.”

“Hush, love. She’s dying here, can’t you see?” He took
Cleo’s arm and walked her to the gallery steps. “We’ve known they would be
together for a long time. And they’ve done all we could ask of them. Three
years they waited. I can’t deny her this.”

“You will find him?” Cleo looked into her lover’s eyes for
hope. He did not disappoint her.

Bertrand raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “My
darling, never doubt I will find him. Yves may be with him now.”

She leaned into him and Bertrand wrapped her in his arms.
She sighed. It felt so right to press her face against his chest, to hear his
heart beating. She did love him. And Pierre. As Bertrand had so long ago loved
both her and Josie, then her and his second wife, Cleo now found her heart
divided. But not her mind. She chose Pierre, and would again.

Cleo stepped away. “Bring our boy home.”

Leaving Natchez, Luke followed the same path on which he’d
been brought to Forks-of-the-Road. This time, he was not afoot, not chained to
another poor soul. He rode a horse for the first time in his life, bareback,
one hand gripping the reins, the other in the horse’s mane. The man he knew as
the Shepherd led the way, followed by Miss Marianne from home, then Pearl and the
child. Luke brought up the rear.

His heart should be singing, he thought. Why I so down?
Dere’s Pearl. I out a dat coffle, out a dat place. He was glad to see Pearl, he
surely was. I should a held on to her a minute ’fore the Shepherd took us off
from dere.

That was it. The Shepherd de one in control. He de one
telling me when to move, where to go. He be a good man, but he own me same as a
bad man could if he pay de money.

The weeks Luke had been on the run had been terrifying.
Heat, rain, mosquitoes, snakes, even gators – and they were nothing to the
danger of soul drivers patrolling the roads. Sometimes too the stations had
signals out that meant Don’t Stop Here. He and Cat had run on empty bellies,
fear and exhaustion pushing them on. But they’d made their own decisions.
They’d been free, and the air they breathed had been sweeter for it.

Luke and Cat lost each other a few nights back, the slavers
chasing them with baying hounds. They’d come to a brook. Cat had gone upstream,
he’d gone down. Luke had been caught and manacled and chained to his fellows in
misery.

The chains were gone now, but he was still another man’s
property. I could turn dis horse around, make a run fo it. But Pearl’s heart
would break, he thought. She be so happy, I swear de air around her singing.

I try running dis horse, I likely fall on my head anyhow.
Dere time ahead.

They stopped for a quick break in the early afternoon.
Everyone gathered under the shade of an old live oak. Pearl mixed up corn meal
mash for the boy. Miss Marianne and the Shepherd ate sitting right there next
to him and Pearl. He’d never seen the like.

“We going north?” Luke asked. He’d learned that much on the
road, that Magnolias was south of here.

Pearl explained they were after Dr. Chamard. “Remember he de
one tried to save little Sylvie?”

Luke looked at Mr. Chamard half-way reclined in the shade.
“I reckon I say thank you for taking me from dat place.”

The Shepherd nodded. “You’re better off with us.”

Yves tore off a piece of the loaf in his hand and tossed it
at a squirrel. “Watch this,” he said to Miss Marianne. “Ever get a squirrel to
eat out of your hand?”

“You can’t,” she said.

“Is that a bet?” She stopped eating and waited to hear the
rest.

“If I do it,” he said, “I collect another one of those items
you gave me at the pond?”

The mistress laughed. “A stone?”

The two white people paid attention to each other and the
squirrel. Luke turned to look at Pearl’s happy face.

“What we gone call dis boy?” Pearl said.

Luke eyed the child. It could walk pretty good. It hadn’t
cried all morning. He seemed a likely boy. But it wasn’t the time for a child,
not when he’d be running again. And soon. “Why’nt you ask de man what give it
to you?”

Pearl looked at him, hurt in her eyes. What she expect? How
many time I told her I be leaving?

“Mr. Chamard,” Pearl interrupted the others. “You got
another name ’sides Yves?”

Yes, white mens likes naming de little black babies after
theyselves, Luke thought.

The Shepherd smiled. “Yves Stephen DuPree Maria Chamard.”

“Den I’s gone call him DuPree.”

Luke turned from her, but he listened as she talked to the
boy in low tones all the while she fed him mush. When she tried to excuse
herself for a private moment in the bushes, the boy clung to her. She glanced
at Luke, and he knew she needed him to take the boy, but he looked away.

The boy had no claim on him, and Pearl had no right to push
it on him. He’d been a free man once. He would be again, and he wasn’t going to
set foot in the trap of some other man’s child she’d got hold of.

By nightfall, they were deep into the Trace. They’d found
one half-overgrown path off to the east and investigated it, but it had petered
out two miles into the woods.

They bedded down in a glade. Pearl slept near the Mistress.
Luke supposed she had to do that to keep the Mistress safe from being with two
men in the forest. They had their rules, he thought. But I got mine.

He lay on his back and watched the stars. Dat one der, dat’s
de one. The North Star. Follow that star, and you reach Freedom Land. He listened
for the others to fall asleep. First Miss Marianne. A little later, the
Shepherd. Luke waited. If he tried to leave before Pearl fell asleep, she’d
make a fuss. It gone be hard to leave her again.

Pearl didn’t go to sleep. She left the little one snug
beside Miss Marianne and crept across the clearing to where he lay. She knelt
beside him and tugged at his hand. He rose and silently followed her deeper
into the woods.

They found a small glade among a stand of pines. When Pearl
turned to Luke and raised her hands to caress his face, he remembered all the
nights they’d loved and cherished each other. “God, I missed you, Pearl.” He
kissed her, soft as a butterfly on a daisy.

With their hands, their mouths, they told each other how
much yearning they’d suffered. The sweetness grew into heat and need, and Luke
laid her down on the bed of pine needles.

When they lay quiet in each other’s arms, Luke saw the stars
had wheeled around their pole. His North Star. His hope. This time, when he
ran, Pearl would come with him.

“You hardly say nothing dis whole day,” she said, her head
nestled on his arm.

He fingered her hand on his chest, but he didn’t answer. In
a little while, she said, “It wadn’t my fault you got caught, Luke.”

He shifted so he could see her face in the starlight. “No,
honey. It not you fault. But cain’t you see? I a slave again.”

“But we’re together, Luke. And we got a little one to raise
now.”

Luke disentangled himself. “Dat baby yours, Pearl. He ain’t
mine.”

Yves led the way up the Trace, all the while looking for a
trail off to the east. Surely it would appear around the next bend, he kept
telling himself. So close now. With every mile, his anxiety increased instead
of lessened. What would Gabriel be like? No longer the sweet-natured big
brother, but an embittered, angry man? Yves didn’t know how he would handle it
if his brother blamed him for his white skin.

Yves had known slaves all his life. Most of them had never
looked him full in the face. Many, especially the field hands, never smiled at
a white man, never spoke to a white man more than required. They wore masks,
he’d come to realize quite young. And though they hid their true selves from
him, he felt many of them had absorbed the idea that they were no more than
mules. It was only a feeling, and obviously he did not know their hearts, the
ones who kept their inner selves closed off from the masters.

But this man Luke, Yves mused. He’s nobody’s mule. In spite
of being treated like one all his life, he’s a man, and he can’t hide it. Can’t
or won’t. And Joseph -- a tribute to the human spirit. After a life-time of
being a slave, Joseph is a man of true dignity.

Marianne brought her horse up next to his. “Is that an
opening in the tree-line? That could be the trail!”

What she’d put up with the last few days on the road, and
she was still game. Who would ever have expected the Marianne Johnston of the
ballroom to be so tough? She had not complained once about the hours in the
saddle, about sleeping on the ground. That, however, had probably been harder
for him than for her: he’d imagined her sharing his bedroll, counting the
stars, snuggling, kissing . . . yielding. Wispy curls escaped her bonnet and
framed her sunburned face. There’s no one else like her, he thought. They reached
the trail and turned in. Wide enough for only one horse, it was quite
overgrown. This, Yves reflected, would be just the kind of path Monroe and his
gang would look for to dump Gabriel.

The woods closing in on the trail cut off the breeze; the
sun directly overhead beat down on their heads. Not even the birds moved in
this heat. The creaking of the leather saddles, the clop of hooves and the hum
of insects were the only sounds. No one drove a wagon, no one took produce or
beeves to market on this trail. Did anyone live this far into the forest?

Yves took heart when they came to a peach orchard. Beyond
that, a row of pecan trees. And then the clearing. Set back from the trail was
a large weathered farm house with a porch all around. There were hints of old
white wash, but now the boards were gray, and a few shingles from the roof lay
in the yard. The front door hung ajar, too crooked to close.

Most important, there was a dilapidated dovecote behind the
house. This was the place.

Yves held up a hand for the others to stop and listen. Bees
hummed in the shade of the house where untended rose canes climbed to the
eaves. Nothing else stirred in the heat and glare.

Yves dismounted and then helped Marianne down. They were as
quiet as the little farm, but watchful.

“Marianne,” he said softly, “stay with the horses.” He
reached for her shotgun.

“I’ll come with --.”

Dammit. He knew she’d argue. He fixed her with a hard look.
“Stay with the horses.” Her chin began to rise. “Please.”

Finally, she nodded. Yves loaded her shotgun and handed it
to her.

He checked his rifle was loaded and walked to the house,
stepped on the porch and knocked on the door jamb. Through the half-open door
he could see the place was inhabited -- flies buzzed over a half-eaten plate of
corn and beans -- but the stillness was too complete for anyone to be inside.

Yves walked around back. Off to the right were a couple of
out-buildings and beyond that a chicken yard with a dozen or so scrawny red
hens pecking in the dirt. A hog dreamed in the sty, perfuming the air with its
sickeningly sweet offal.

Yves stepped through a tangled patch that might once have
been a windbreak and came to the garden, a half-acre of spindly corn, okra,
tomatoes, squash – all of it in need of weeding. The smell of ripening tomatoes
and hot dry dust hung like a miasma over the field.

Eerie how quiet it is, Yves thought. But somebody lives
here. He headed back toward the house. Before he began to search the barn and
the shed, he looked toward the horses. Pearl and little DuPree were in the
shade on the edge of the trail. Luke was pouring water from his canteen into
his hand for his horse to drink. Damnation. Where was Marianne?