by Sandra Hill
“Many time.” Amelie’s eyes blinked back tears.
Hunkering down to eye-level, Harriet brushed a strand of dirty hair off Amelie’s equally dirty face. “Oh, honey! When was the last time?”
“Las’ Christmas.”
Less than a year ago. Oh, damn!
Harriet ruffled the girl’s hair, which stood out in spikes, hoping she wouldn’t come away with lice.
Then, taking the girl forcibly into her arms, Harriet went inside to get the clean garments and tell Cain about the mother’s other pregnancies. A moment later she was back outside, washing the surprisingly docile girl on the porch bench. As she worked, Harriet pondered the fact that the wretched, screaming woman inside already had four children and “many” miscarriages.
Boy, would Harriet like to give her some advice!
A short time later, Harriet sat in a rocking chair with the clean girl on her lap, trying to ignore the screams and curses—male and female—that came from the interior of the house. She couldn’t imagine what role Etienne was playing in the birthing.
Abel still held the switch in one hand and a pail of milk in the other as he approached from the barnyard area.
“You milked a cow?” she asked incredulously. Somehow the chore didn’t quite fit the image of the womanizing charmer.
He raised an eyebrow at her. “The nasty beast sure as hell didn’t milk itself.” Then he surprised her further by advising, “Maybe you should give the girl some milk, and I’ll see if I can forage some food. By the sounds of those screams, the mother isn’t going to be up to cooking a meal anytime soon.”
Harriet frowned. She hadn’t even thought about that. Abel went off then to tend to the two horses and three pigs he said were in the barn.
“Harriet, can you go help Cain?” Etienne stood in the open doorway. There was blood on his hands and a distraught expression on his face. Washing up with quick efficiency, he gazed at her imploringly. “I think you would do a better job in there than me.”
Harriet wasn’t so sure about that, never having been present at a delivery and having no medical background. But she stood and handed the little girl to Etienne, who gawked at her as if she’d handed him a bomb.
“Have fun.” she said, pushing him down into the rocker.
He frowned down at the child, who’d latched onto his middle finger, and was already closing her eyes sleepily.
The rogue master was staring down with amazement at the girl’s easy acceptance of him. And Harriet’s heart swelled at the sweet picture.
“Etienne…” she said softly, still leaning over him.
He glanced up.
“You look wonderful with a child.”
His face went flat, and his eyes revealed a bleakness that obviously stemmed from events far removed from her carelessly made comment. He immediately shuttered his eyes and shrugged. “I was sixteen when my sister Melanie was born. I used to hold her like this.”
“So you’re an experienced ‘father’?” she teased.
“Hardly. And don’t get any silly female notion that I’m going to father a few brats on you. Not even if you beg me.”
“Why you…you…” Harriet sputtered. “So, you have a lot of women dying to have your babies, huh?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“You’re delusional. In fact, I think you have a real problem facing reality.”
“No, I’ll tell you who’s afraid to face reality,” he said, reaching out an arm to her nape and pulling her closer. “It’s you. You can’t stop thinking about the way we made love. You hate the fact that I made you lose your precious control. And, even worse, you want it again. And again.”
Harriet’s heart was beating so fast she could barely breathe. Not just because of the words. Etienne’s face was so close she could feel his body heat, or was it his sexual energy?
“Lost for words, sweetheart?” Etienne chuckled. “Well, isn’t that just a ‘Miracle in the Bayou.’ Sounds like a great title for a book, if you ask me. Women who discover the secret of seduction—silence. Say that to your black box, honey.”
Harriet did, in fact, pull her tape recorder from her pocket and say, “MCP File, October 15. Subject A thinks women should be seen and not heard.”
“Flat on their back, naked, would be nice, too,” Etienne added.
“A nine,” Harriet declared.
“Is that all?”
Harriet clamped her mouth shut, forcing herself not to react. “Did you hear about the dumb man who went to a mind reader? No? Well, she only charged him half price.”
His laughter followed after her into the oppressive, pain-ridden hovel.
It was the last laughter a horrified Harriet heard for sometime to come.
Chapter Thirteen
“Honey, you have to stop fighting this birth,” Harriet told Solange Venee an hour later.
“Non, non, non! Me, I doan want this here chile,” the frail woman shrieked in vivid Cajun patois. “No more chillun, by God, no more!”
Hmpfh! A fine time to be coming to that conclusion! You play, you pay, sweetheart! You don’t need a PhD to learn that fact of life.
“Many women feel that way in the midst of labor,” Cain told her gently from his position at the foot of the bed, kneeling between Solange’s upraised knees. “After the birth, mothers forget the pain.”
Oh, damn! You’d think a doctor would know when to choose his words with more sensitivity. Even a male doctor.
Solange raised her head and glared at Cain through huge, dark brown eyes that appeared sunken in her stark-thin face. She spat out a venomous stream of French words. “What you said, Dr. Cain, that is not true, no. Women never forget the pain. It is only a say-so, a man say-so.”
A short time later, Cain’s shoulder’s slumped in despair. The only thing delaying the delivery, according to Cain, was the woman’s stubborn resistance. She’d had other babies. Surely this one should just pop out, even though she was rather slim hipped. And young.
“How old are you?” Harriet asked as she wiped Solange’s brow with tepid water, pushing strands of lank dark hair off her red face.
“Twenty,” Solange answered with a sigh.
“Twenty! That’s not possible.”
“I married up when I was thirteen.”
Harriet gasped, blinking back sudden tears of compassion.
Solange shrugged. “My Henri, he had a powerful lust for me then. He still does, yes-yes.” Her tone of voice didn’t reflect a reciprocal lust, or affection. But maybe that was a childbirth phenomenon. Often, in the midst of delivery, women exhibited a temporary hatred for the man responsible for their pain.
Solange added with fierce resentment, “Four children I have birthed, yes-yes, but ten times I swole up with my man’s seed. Ten times! May the Blessed Virgin weep for me!”
Ten pregnancies in twelve years?
“What plaisir is there for a woman in that, you think, chérie?” The whole time, Solange held Harriet’s eyes with an intensity bespeaking an age-old feminine need for understanding.
And Harriet did understand. If ever a person needed psychological help, this nineteenth-century baby machine did. But not now. Time was of the essence.
Harriet had changed the bed linens and bathed the poor woman’s pain-racked body, but already her naked, flushed body was soaked with perspiration again. The muggy room reeked of earthy, fetid odors…the primal animal scent of creation at its rawest.
“Here comes another one,” Cain warned. “I can see the baby’s head.”
With one arm under Solange’s shoulders, Harriet lifted her slightly. Solange had a death grip on Harriet’s other hand that would probably leave black-and-blue marks. The contraction rippled down the huge, hard mound of the woman’s stomach, where blue veins stuck out like fine Italian marble. Solange tensed once again, bracing, instead of bearing down as nature demanded. At what point would Solange’s body win in this tug-of-war with her overwrought mind? And would it be too late?
“Solange, you�
�re not panting, like Dr. Cain told you to do. And you have to push.”
“Help us, Solange. You have to help us,” Cain urged as another contraction began. They were almost continuous now, without break.
Solange shook her head vehemently. “I’m too weakified.”
“Let me catch the babe for you. Then you can rest and get your strength back.”
“Foolish man!” Solange clucked. “I was wore out afore I ever got enceinte again.”
“What if I could tell you how to prevent having more children?” Harriet asked tentatively.
Cain’s head shot up like a bullet.
Solange regarded her as if she were the Madonna granting her a heavenly gift. The hand that had been clutching hers relaxed and turned over, palm upward, in a beseeching fashion. A small, hopeful smile tugged at her bruised lips. “Is there a way? But, non, I am Catholic. The church would not approve.” Her smile collapsed before it even blossomed.
“I’m a Catholic, too. A pick-and-choose Catholic, to be sure, but there’s a birth control technique that even the pope approves of, honey. It’s called the rhythm method.”
Solange began to sob, big tears of relief. The squeeze she gave Harriet’s hand now was one of profound thanks.
Cain appeared thankful, too, and very interested in Harriet’s words. He would surely grill her later, but for now a panting Solange Venee had decided to have a baby, and it was coming fast and furious.
Five minutes later, Paul-Joseph Venee was born. A long, dark-hued Cajun boy with strong lungs and healthy, flailing limbs. When Cain placed the wailing baby in Solange’s exhausted arms, she embraced him gladly. Nuzzling the newborn close to her breasts, the young woman whispered, “Welcome, my little Paul, the sure-God last of the Venee children.” At the same time, she glanced over to Harriet, who was bundling up the dirty linens. Despite her bone-weary exhaustion, Solange demanded, “Tell me now before Henri returns.”
As Harriet sat down beside her on the edge of the bed, Solange noticed Cain packing up his medical bag and preparing to leave the room. “You’re colored!” Solange exclaimed, her eyes wide with shock.
Harriet and Cain both grinned and shook their heads. In all her pain and misery, Solange had apparently missed an important fact—Cain’s black skin.
“Henri, he is going to have a fit…that a colored man midwifed his bébé,” Solange pronounced with a surprising whoop. Then she burst out laughing.
“And in the end, E.T. returned to his home on that faraway star.” Etienne concluded his story as Amelie gazed up at him adoringly from her perch on his lap. Etienne was sitting with his back braced against a tree near the bayou stream.
It was the oddest sensation in the world, holding a little child. He pressed his lips down to Amelie’s downy head and inhaled deeply of her baby-skin scent. The two of them had bathed in the bayou stream a short time ago.
A deep yearning ballooned in Etienne’s heart, which he immediately deflated. There would be no children of his seed, if he could help it. Not with the possibility that the taint of his dead mother’s madness might run in his blood. No, he’d never hold his own child thus, or watch it grow to adulthood.
Although…
There was that one mistake. No, no, he wouldn’t think about that horrific possibility. The child was not his. It wasn’t!
“I think we’ve had enough of E.T. and aliens and planets for today, mon petit chou,” Etienne commented to the squirming girl. “Why don’t we go help Abel?”
Abel stood a few feet away catching crawfish for the evening meal. He was dragging a leafy branch under the water. When he pulled the branch up, the small, crablike creatures clung to the stems with their claws, and Abel shook them off into a basket. Etienne’s mouth watered in anticipation of the bayou delight. It was the one food he’d missed most when he’d studied at Oxford. In Andersonville, years later, he’d dreamed not of exotic women or great wealth. Bayou Noir and piles of succulent crawfish fulfilled his nighttime fantasies.
“Tell me the story about Casper again,” Amelie urged Etienne instead. “Casper the Bayou Ghost.”
Etienne exhaled loudly. Playing with children was fine…for short periods of time. Perhaps he should go find Harriet, now that the baby had been born. They’d heard a loud wail a short time ago.
With perfect timing, Etienne heard another loud wail come from the cabin. He, Abel and Amelie turned as one. And for the first time, Etienne saw Harriet standing in a secluded thicket of dense trees behind him. She was leaning against a live oak tree, weeping huge, silent tears.
Handing Amelie to Abel, he went to Harriet.
“Q’est-ce que c’est, chérie?” he asked, taking her by the forearms and bending his knees so he was face-to-face with her. “Is something wrong with the infant?”
She shook her head. “Nooo,” she blubbered. “The baby is a perfect little boy. Paul-Joseph Venee.” Seeing the concern on Amelie’s face, she added, “Dr. Cain said you can go see your mother and the baby for a minute.”
In a rush, Amelie ran screeching toward the house, Abel following in her wake.
“If not for the mother and baby, why do you weep so?” he inquired now that they were alone. With the pad of one thumb, he wiped the tears off her cheek, leaving white streaks on her dirty face. She was filthy and perspiration-damp from the humidity, as well as her various exertions that day. He knew of a lagoon not far from Bayou Noir that provided a private bathing place. Maybe tomorrow, after they’d finally arrived, he and Harriet could—
How could I ever imagine such a possibility? No, no, no!
“E.T.,” Harriet declared.
“What?”
“I’m crying because you were telling the story of E.T.”
He tilted his head with confusion.
“Oh, don’t you see? The character E.T. wasn’t created until the 1980s. There’s no way your stepmother could have told you that story unless…unless she really is Selene. And Casper the Bayou Ghost? Really! It has to be based on Casper the Friendly Ghost, a modern, twentieth-century children’s story.”
“And?”
“Your stepmother must have come from my time. And that means I really did time-travel.”
“But, chérie, this is nothing new. For days, you’ve been telling us that you must have time-traveled…somehow.”
“I know what I said, but I didn’t want to believe it,” she cried, leaning into his hand, which was brushing strands of her damp ebony hair back behind her ears.
Why did she have to do that? He felt the tingle of her breath all the way from his palm to his toes.
He would be very sorry tomorrow if he didn’t stop right now. Hell, he would be sorry five minutes from now. He must strengthen his defenses. He must.
Her clear green cat eyes gazed at him imploringly.
Etienne’s defenses shook with that mere visual assault.
“In the back of my mind, I hoped that this was all a dream. That I’d wake up on a modern Amtrak train headed for the Big Easy. The worst problem I would have then would be a disgusting rogue who was forcefully seducing me every night in my sleep.”
He chucked her under the chin playfully. “Now you have the disgusting rogue in person. Would you like me to forcefully seduce you, sweetheart?” Now, why did I ask her such a question? I’m worse than those dumb men in her jokes.
“No! I’m too tired to resist your tempting hands now.”
He smiled. He couldn’t help himself. It must be a dumbman reflex. “Do I tempt you, darlin’?”
She flashed him one of those “dumb men” looks she did so well. “Tremendously.”
He shouldn’t care. From a young age, Etienne had sensed his appeal to women, and used the knowledge blithely, to his advantage, along with an innate Creole charm. But for some reason, it pleased him inordinately that Harriet was drawn to him. And he didn’t feel at all blithe, either.
“Stop grinning. And do you have to keep using that lazy, Southern drawl? It’s so…so…”
&nbs
p; “Sexy?” he guessed.
“…revolting,” she finished.
Etienne knew she lied, and his male pride preened. So, she likes the way I talk and the way I ply my hands on her.
Harriet hiccoughed as she tried to stifle her continuing sobs. Wiping the remaining moisture off her cheeks with widespread fingertips, she looked down with distaste at the dirt. “I must look awful.”
“Unfortunately, you look too damn good.”
Her black hair, which had started the day in a neat plait down her back, now lay in tangles of damp waves. Her intelligent green eyes fringed with long, feathery lashes stared at him with honest question. Her lips, full and ripe and naturally pink, brought to mind all the things a man could do with a woman’s mouth. His sun-bleached homespun shirt clung damply to her womanly curves—curves he remembered with explicit detail.
Not that he was paying particular attention to her appearance.
“Why ‘unfortunately’?”
“Because unfortunately I’m about to give in to my own temptations.” Moaning, he succumbed to the arousal that had been pounding at his loins for days.
Putting his hands to her waist, he lifted her against the tree so her grimy feet dangled off the ground. Then, with exquisite finesse, he pressed his hardening need against her center and held her in place. There was something to be said for a woman in trousers, he thought as he cupped her buttocks. The woman did have a wonderfully full behind.
She blinked at him with surprise, probably preparing to wallop him between the eyes. But no, she put her hands on his shoulders.
He groaned and saw stars exploding behind his closed lids.
She sighed, “Oh, Etienne.”
Oh, Etienne, indeed! “We shouldn’t,” he breathed against her mouth.
“We shouldn’t,” she agreed and parted her lips for him.
It was just a kiss. A light, teasing excursion of flesh against flesh. That was all.
“Ummmmm,” she purred.
Etienne’s knees wobbled. Only le bon Dieu knew how he managed to remain standing with Harriet still pressed against him in all the important places. Chest to breast. Hip to hip. Thigh to thigh. And more. Much more.
