Ever My Love: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 2) (3 page)

Number 24, Rue de Royale. The door robin’s egg blue. The
brass knocker polished and gleaming. Gabriel knocked. Footsteps clattered down
the staircase inside. Not the butler, but his own mother threw open the door
and rushed into his arms.

He held her tight until she drew back to gaze at his face.
“I’ve been watching out that window the live long week expecting you any
minute. Let me look at you.”

Gabriel watched his mother take in the bruise and grinned at
her. Her eyes darkened. Here it comes, he thought.

“Why’d I do without you for three years and you still
getting into trouble?” she said.

Gabriel took her in. Still a beauty, her face unlined, her
brown skin clear and bright. She could pass for a woman half her age, though
she’d grown a little plump. “You going to let me in?” he teased her.

“Cleo, that him?” a man called from within.

“Come in and meet your step-father, son.”

Gabriel’s smile faded. He knew his mother had married, of
course, but he didn’t know the man and he had no need of a step-father.
Bertrand Chamard was all the father he’d ever needed or wanted.

A tall, slender, very dark man met them in the hallway. He
smiled, showing beautiful white teeth, and taking Gabriel by the shoulders, he
kissed him on both cheeks in the French Creole way. “
Bienvenu,
Gabriel.”

“Monsieur LaFitte,” Gabriel returned.

“Come in, come in,” Pierre said and gestured to the parlor.

Gabriel’s mother clung to him, smiling and blinking at tears
as she sat with him on the golden yellow settee. Cleo touched his bruise with
one finger. “He’s already been in a fight, Pierre. Can you believe it?”

“It was nothing. Just a butcher looking for some amusement.”
Gabriel took his mother’s hand and held it.

Pierre nodded and offered him a Cuban cigar. Gabriel gave
him credit for not pursuing the matter. His mother’s husband had likely had
run-ins with white men in his time. He sized LaFitte up as a man who didn’t
step aside easily. There’d been iron in the man’s grip.

“Where is Nicolette?” Gabriel asked.

“At the Lake, staying with Pierre’s family. Your sister is a
great success, Gabriel, singing at Chez Louis four nights a week.”

“Tante Josephine and the cousins?”

“Waiting for you at Toulouse.”

Gabriel nodded, eager and apprehensive both at seeing
Simone. After three years, she had still not married.

“And now you’re
un médicin,
” Pierre said. “You don’t know
how proud your mother is to have an educated son.”

A knock on the door called the butler, and a moment later
Yves Chamard strode into the room, his hand outstretched. “I heard there was a
French boat in!” Gabriel took his younger brother’s hand and pulled him into a
bear hug. They kissed cheeks, laughed and hugged again.

Yves broke away to bend down to Cleo. “
Bon jour, ma belle.
” 
Cleo lifted her face to be kissed and beamed at him. Pierre had his hand out
and the men shook hands genially. Yves was no stranger in this house, Gabriel
observed.

“So tell me everything,” Yves said.

“He’s been in a fight this very morning,” Cleo reported.

Gabriel smiled, a little rueful, but Yves grinned. “So you
haven’t changed? Wonderful.”

“What about you? Papa wrote the ladies follow you around
like flies on honey.” Gabriel winked at Cleo. “Like father, like son?”

Too late, Gabriel realized he had been indelicate. Yves’ and
Gabriel’s white father had kept Cleo, a quadroon, for many years, had loved her
in fact, and Bertrand Chamard too had had to fight the women off, not always
successfully.

Gabriel’s family was a tangle: his father had two children,
Gabe and Nicolette, with Cleo; Papa also had two sons, Marcel and Yves, by his
two wives, both deceased now. And then there was his mother’s white Creole
half-sister, Tante Josie. A complicated family, though not uncommon in
Louisiana.

Unoffended, Gabriel’s maman laughed, smiling at Yves. “He is
like the hummingbird, flitting from one flower to the next, never settling on
one for more than a taste. You can’t deny it, Yves.”

“I have no intention of denying it, Tante Cleo. And what of
you, my monkish brother? No wife in tow?”

Gabriel had indeed come home to New Orleans as he left it, a
bachelor, his heart as firmly bestowed now as it had been when he sailed for
France. “That may have been a mistake,” Gabriel said. “You’ve no doubt ruined
all the ladies in New Orleans for anyone else.”

As the foursome passed an hour catching up on news, Gabriel
watched his brother. Yves had been, what, twenty, when Gabriel left for Paris?
What kind of life was Yves making for himself? Did he while away his time with
the usual pursuits of wealthy young men, gaming, racing, and hunting? It’s not
what he would expect of Yves.

Yves had always had a streak of passionate idealism.
Whatever he read, he espoused vigorously to his brothers and to Papa. One month
it would be Emerson’s essays on Transcendentalism, the next, Thoreau or Oliver
Wendell Holmes. Even that radical Shelley and his tracts on social bondage.
Gabriel wondered if his intellectually inclined, morally astute brother had
read Charles Darwin’s scandalous treatise on the origins of species. In their
devoutly Catholic family, the book would be branded wicked, heretical, and
blasphemous. Not that that would stop Yves from reading it.

Gabriel shifted his attention to his mother. She had gained
a little weight, just enough to soften the lines of her face. Clearly, she was
happy with this man Pierre. She’d been happy with Papa, too, and miserable as
well. May Pierre be the man she needed.

Cleo rang the bell and asked for mint juleps before dinner.

Gabriel Chamard leaned back into the settee and sighed. A
mint julep. He was truly home.

The fever consumed Peter’s flesh, in spite of every remedy
Marianne concocted from the plantation’s medical books. Corruption seeped from
his wounds, and he wakened less and less.

Afraid to leave him, Marianne spent the afternoon, the
evening, and the night at his bedside. In the hours before sunrise, she lay
down on the dusty boards to rest a few minutes. She didn’t dare lie on one of
the four other cots in the room, fearing bedbugs. This was a bachelor’s cabin,
she realized. Where did those other young men sleep tonight?

She woke to find Lena had removed her shoes and rolled up a
feed sack to make a pillow for her. The candle still burned, casting a yellow
glow over the bent old woman kneeling at Peter’s bedside, her hands clasped in
desperate fervor as she prayed.

As Lena’s entreaties to God whispered through the cabin,
Marianne felt Peter’s skin. Hot and dry. They’d used all the water and brews
made up for the night. Marianne pulled her shoes on, picked up the bucket, and
stepped out.

A snore from the moon-shadowed corner of the porch startled
her. “Who’s there?”

With a snort, the man wakened and let his tipped chair fall
back to the floor.

“Charles? What are you doing here?”

He ran a hand over his face. “Master wouldn’t like you being
down here by yourself all night.” He rubbed the kink in his neck. “Strangers
coming through here this time of year.”

“Strangers?”

Charles stood up, dwarfing her he was so tall. An imposing
man, even now with gray in his short kinky hair. Marianne waited for him to
explain, but he stared out at the moon-soaked yard, then shook his head. He
took the bucket from her hand.

“Who are you talking about?”

“Just an old man dreaming, Miss Marianne. I’ll get you some
water.”

When Charles returned with the bucket, she woke Peter to
drink from the gourd. Lena sat on the floor with her head and arms on the
corn-husk mattress, sleeping a little at last.

She was too old to stay up all night like this. And her
other boy gone too. John Man, they said. Marianne wondered if Lena had
daughters to take care of her, other grandchildren to help her bear the loss of
two grandsons. No, Peter wasn’t gone yet, she reminded herself. He might pull
through. Had Lena known they were going to run? Had she tried to talk them out
of it?

As the sun rose, Peter moaned and turned his head from side
to side, the fever roiling his brain with delirium. Eyes staring wide, he
screamed, “Dey gone get me! Lawd, help me!”

Marianne tried to speak over him -- “Peter, you’re safe!
It’s just a dream.” She couldn’t get through to him, but his grandmother could.

Lena held his head and kissed his face. “Petie, boy,” she
said softly. “It’s all over. Dem dogs cain’t get you no more.”

Peter’s eyes cleared. Marianne could see he knew his
grandmother, knew where he was again. His face contorted, pain and grief
wrenching sobs from deep in his chest. Lena pulled him to her bosom and rocked
him.

Marianne put a hand to her mouth, fighting sobs. Mother had
held three year old Elizabeth just like Lena held Peter, clasping her to keep
her from going. But nothing old Dr. Benet had been able to do could save her.
And only months later, Mother.

On the porch, she leaned against the post and gave herself
to the grief welling up. She hadn’t cried for Mother in such a long time, and
now the loss seemed as fresh as Lena’s fear. That was part of her grief, too.
Fear for Peter. And rage. His foot, his leg, and the poor mangled hand. What
the men had let the dogs do to his poor body -- he’d never be the same, if he
survived.

Straightening her shoulders, she stanched the useless sobs.
There was nothing else she could do for Peter at the moment. By the gray and
yellow bar of light on the eastern horizon, she walked through the quarters to
the garden, to be among her roses.

This, the dawn, was the best time of day, every leaf and
stone bedewed, the tiny drops needing only the rising sun to gleam like pearls.
The moisture in the air kissed her skin, and the river breeze cooled her after
the breathless, hot night in the cabin.

She rested on the cypress bench in the center of the garden.
This had been her mother’s favorite spot, and Father had had Violette carved
into the back of the bench. Mother had plotted the paths and laid out the
original beds.

Marianne’s passion was the search for the perfect cross-bred
rose. Monsieur Vibert, the noted cultivator of roses in Europe, had
corresponded regularly with Mother, and out of kindness, Marianne presumed, he
continued to do so with her. She would write him soon to tell him what her
latest crosses had produced. A Chinese descendant red and one of her hardy
European pinks had yielded blooms with a curious white streak.

Joseph appeared across the garden. Dear Joseph. His hair was
grizzled and his black skin deeply wrinkled from a life spent in the sun. She
knew his gnarled hands hurt him too.

Joseph was a partner, not just a minion, in this tending of
the garden. He had been among the slaves Mother directed in setting out the
original garden paths. Now, illiterate as he was, Marianne was sure he knew as
much about crossbreeding as she did.

“Morning, Miss Marianne.” He stopped in front of her bench
and squinted at her. “You been up all night with that boy Peter, look like.”

Marianne glanced at her rumpled clothes. She put a hand to
her hair and discovered it was more down than up. “I’ll sleep later. Right now,
I’d rather transplant those cuttings.”

They consulted Marianne’s markings about each bush’s
parentage and decided which new canes to pot together. The roses would
pollinate one another when the time came, and then she and Joseph would see
what qualities the new bushes inherited.

“They tell me that boy bit up pretty bad,” Joseph said as he
mixed compost into the black soil they used in the pots.

“I never saw --,” Marianne began.

“Missy!” Hannah called. She trotted through the garden
waving Marianne’s hat at her. “You forget Mr. Adam bringing company in a few
days? You be red-faced and ugly as a turnip you don’t put you hat and gloves
on.”

Father often chided Marianne for letting Hannah talk to her
like that. Too familiar, he told her. No way for a slave, or a mistress, to
behave. But how formal can you be with someone who once wiped your snotty nose
and who now launders your pantaloons?

“Thank you for the compliment, Hannah,” Marianne said with a
laugh. She tied the hat ribbons under her chin and pulled on the gloves. Too
late, really, for the gloves. She already had dirt under her fingernails and a
thorn scratch on the back of her hand. “Run me a bath, will you, please. I’ll
be up in half an hour.”

With Hannah gone, Joseph picked up the conversation. “Petie
gon’ be able to work?”

“This place here,” Marianne said, showing him her own
Achilles tendon, “is nearly torn through on one leg. I don’t see how that’ll
ever be right again.”

“No’m, I don’t reckon it will.”

Marianne pushed hair off her face. “Joseph, I don’t remember
Mr. Smythe having dogs to hunt slaves.”

“Das right, honey. Dese dogs come wid dis new man.”

Marianne scooped rich loam into another pot. Finally she
said, “At least I could get rid of the dogs.”

“Mr. Adam, he planning to use dem hounds hisself in deer
season. Das what I heard.”

“Even dogs that have tasted slave blood?”

Joseph looked at her. Not as a slave looks at, or rather
avoids looking at, his mistress. As one human being looks at another.

Marianne set her trowel aside. “I better do it today before
Adam comes home.”

After she’d bathed and breakfasted, Marianne dressed in her
brown silk day-dress. She put up her wavy hair and surveyed herself in the
mirror. She was aiming for an authoritarian look, not easy for a young woman of
twenty. I still look too young, she thought. She added a lace cap, which she
detested, and a crocheted shawl. Hot, but she did seem older.