The Pelican Bride

by Beth White

  “The Father already knows how you hurt,” Geneviève said around the knot in her throat.

  He looked over his shoulder, despair clouding his eyes. “I told you, Father Henri never came. It’s too late.”

  This was no time to argue over heaven, purgatory, and eternal damnation. “I meant your heavenly Father. Even Jesus wept when his friend Lazarus died.”

  Loisel frowned. “I don’t know what good weeping will do.”

  Madame L’Anglois insinuated her pudgy little person between Geneviève and the widower. “Clearly there is nothing else for us to do here. We mustn’t interfere in spiritual matters we know nothing about.” She grimaced at Loisel. “Surgeon-Major Barraud will be here soon with Father Mathieu.” She gave Geneviève a hand and pulled her to her feet. “Come on.”

  But just then a loud male voice, overlaid with a child’s soprano and a third unidentifiable murmur, carried from the direction of the street. “I tol’ you this is a waste of time,” the speaker declared in slurred tones as heavy footsteps clomped across the wooden portico. “If she’s got the fever again, all we can do is keep her comf’ble and wait it out.”

  “Monsieur!” came Raindrop’s carrying little voice. “Wait! You’re going to miss the—” A loud crash was followed by confused voices, a string of vigorous curses, and Raindrop’s giggles. “I’m sorry, Father, but he’s so funny with his hat upside-down!”

  Madame jerked open the door and gaped at the Indian child and lanky, black-robed Father Mathieu struggling to hoist a uniformed officer to his feet.

  “Hey, Loisel!” bellowed the physician, a curly-haired fellow of some thirty or forty years—it was hard to tell, due to the black tricorn crammed down over his ears wrong side out. “Tell this black crow to let go! He shoved me down the stairs!” The officer attempted to dislodge his escorts.

  Father Mathieu, red-faced with disgust, hauled Barraud to his feet. Raindrop ran past him up the steps and started to fling her arms around Madame, but the matron held her at a safe distance.

  “Mercy, child, your hands are filthy! Wait here on the porch while I talk to Father Mathieu and the—” Madame paused, eyeing the swaying doctor—“Monsieur Barraud.” She stepped back to allow the men to enter as Raindrop dropped cross-legged onto the wooden porch. “I’m afraid you’re too late. Where is Father Henri?”

  “With another family.” The Jesuit took Loisel’s hands. “When the child explained the situation, I came, thinking perhaps you wouldn’t mind the offices of a stranger. Where is your wife?”

  Speechless, the poor man’s red-rimmed eyes watered again.

  “Élisabeth’s body is here, Father.” Geneviève glanced toward the still form at the back of the room. “She died just before Madame and I arrived.”

  Expression compassionate, Father Mathieu knelt by the body with a faint grunt of discomfort. Geneviève knew the heat and humidity had worsened the aches in his joints. He crossed himself and closed his eyes. “We beseech Thee, O Lord, in Thy mercy, to have pity on the soul of thy handmaid; do thou, who hast freed her from the perils of this mortal life, restore to her the portion of everlasting salvation. Through Christ our Lord, amen.” Opening his eyes, he pulled a small brown vial from his pocket, uncorked it, and overturned it against a callused finger. He pressed his finger to Élisabeth’s forehead, chin, and both cheeks.

  As the sweet aroma of the oil overpowered the odors of illness and death, Loisel uttered a choked sob.

  “Doubt there was anything else I could’ve done,” the surgeon-major said, wandering over to peer at the deceased woman. He picked up her wrist, found no pulse, and dropped it. He gave Geneviève a charming if inebriated smile. “Would you like to get married, my dear? I have quite a neat little house next to the surgery.”

  She stared at him, robbed of words. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said—”

  “I know what you said. I mean, have you taken leave of your senses? My friend has just died, and this is—this is hardly the appropriate occasion for a marriage proposal!”

  Barraud shrugged. “No time like the present, I always say. The pig who’s present gets the slops.” He grinned. “I hope you’ll keep me in mind. But you’d better hurry, because there aren’t many officers still unattached.” He turned to the priest, who had struggled to his feet. “Which reminds me, Father, it seems you and I’ll be accompanying Captain Lanier to parlay with the upriver Indians. A man of medicine and a man of prayer—all eventualities covered, eh?”

  Geneviève’s outrage evaporated. Father Mathieu was leaving the settlement already? The priest was her friend, her protector. Why hadn’t he told her? Did he not trust her? “Upriver? This is very sudden, Father. When will you go?”

  “As soon as provisions can be pulled together. We wait upon the arrival of the supply ship that was to follow the Pélican. She should arrive in a few weeks.” Mathieu’s smile for Geneviève was apologetic. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “But, Father—!”

  “I know you worry for your little sister, Ginette. Perhaps it will be best if neither of you makes any life-altering decisions while I am gone.” A smile tugged at the priest’s lips as his wry glance flicked to Barraud.

  Geneviève couldn’t help returning the smile. “Little danger on that score, Father. But . . . I hadn’t realized you might take up a new mission so soon.”

  The priest cast a sympathetic look at the grieving widower. “Father Albert and Father Henri are capable of tending the flock here. You know our order’s passion for evangelizing. Someone must go and tell the heathen the good news.” He didn’t meet her eyes.

  Father Mathieu would not lie to her, but there was something he would not say in front of the others.

  Barraud puffed out his chest. “Someone has to try to talk sense into the savages. The only law they understand is ‘Blood must be avenged by blood.’ Bienville says the British have been stirring the Indians in the north into raiding the southern villages.”

  Geneviève nodded, wondering why Barraud would be chosen for such an important diplomatic mission. If she hoped to make sense of the undercurrents rippling below the colony’s surface, she had best begin to wade in a little deeper.

  “Monsieur Barraud,” she said, “perhaps there is something I could do to assist you in preparing Madame Loisel for burial?”

  Mitannu had been gone for six days, during which time Chazeh recovered from his fever and Nika’s bruised shoulder faded to a pale yellow. Camouflaging that with a judicious application of dye made from mashed and soaked sumac pods, she was able to join Kumala and the children for a swim in the creek.

  Floating on her back in shallow water while the boys swam and splashed nearby, enjoying their squeals and shouts, she looked up at the soft clouds drifting overhead. Soon she would have to dress and return home to prepare the evening meal.

  The water behind her rippled and sloshed, and a shadow fell across her face. She sat up, and as the water dripped from her ears, she realized the children had fallen into frightened silence. She turned.

  Mitannu stood thigh-deep in the cold water, his arms folded across his big bronze chest. He was still painted for hunting, and he smelled like a week without a bath. She made herself meet his eyes.

  Contempt froze his expression. “I have been gone for six days, hunting for the food in your pot, and come back to find you floating like a dead fish in the creek.”

  She flinched, and Kumala, sitting on the bank nursing her baby, gasped. But at least he didn’t hit her.

  Stung, Nika reached for her pride. “The work is all done. The boys and I just wanted a short—”

  “I don’t want to hear excuses. You are the laziest woman in the village. I don’t know why my father thought an Alabaman, especially of the Kaskaskian village, would be suitable for the chief’s son.” When she didn’t answer, merely stared at him in resentment, he jerked his chin toward the shore, where a deer carcass lay on a litter. “Come and see the most valuable trophy I b
rought back.” He wheeled and sloshed out of the creek, cuffing one of the boys across the back of the head on the way past. Tonaw laughed, but she wasn’t at all sure the blow had been affectionate.

  Nika slowly followed, avoiding Kumala’s anxious eyes. There was nothing her friend could do to help. When she stepped out of the water, Chazeh grabbed her hand as if to follow. “Go play,” she told him sharply, somehow sure that Mitannu had something unpleasant in mind. Chazeh reluctantly dropped her hand and plopped back down onto the bank. He was quickly absorbed in chasing minnows. Relieved, Nika swallowed her apprehension and walked toward her husband, who was kneeling at the litter, riffling through the hunting bag she had woven last winter. It was one of her most beautiful designs, the fibers and colors carefully chosen, the dyes pure and strong.

  She stood watching him, her hands loosely linked in front. He was a handsome man, his hair and skin healthy and his profile clean and strong. It was the custom of the Mobile clan for the men to pluck their beards, so his angular chin always seemed to jut cruelly.

  She searched herself for pride in his strength. All she felt was a knot in her stomach.

  He found what he was looking for and tossed the bag aside, then rose with a fluid movement. In his fist was some kind of dead animal.

  She blinked. Not an animal. A clutch of human scalps. She looked up at Mitannu. The practice of scalp hunting was not unheard-of, though their clan did not often resort to it. The Mobile were a generally agrarian band, far enough south that the more warlike northern clans left them alone.

  Mitannu shook the scalps at her like a dog with a bone. “For these, the French will pay in powder—great amounts of powder— ammunition for hunting.” He gave her a slow grin. “Do you recognize the beading and feathers?”

  Horror-stricken, she couldn’t look away. Her head moved back and forth in negation, but of course she recognized the dressing of those hair locks.

  Alabaman. Kaskaskian.

  Tristan had managed to avoid Geneviève Gaillain for nearly a week, but it was time to return home. He had traded furs, hides, and corn for forged items like hooks, hinges, and knives; and he was bringing home a set of finely constructed cabinets, as well as a table and four chairs the town carpenter had made from timber harvested from his plantation. He had been up since sunrise, loading the barque for the trip downstream. Her shallow hold was full of the provisions he had purchased at Massacre Island, and the new acquisitions from Fort Louis had been crammed into the cabin topside. Fortunately, slipping downstream would take half the time it had required to struggle twenty-seven miles up from the mouth of the bay.

  He dumped the last case of farm implements onto the rear deck and paused to wipe his sweaty chest with the shirt he had stripped off a couple of hours ago and left hanging in the cabin window like a flag of surrender to the heat. As he surveyed the crowded deck, his thoughts wheeled in self-disgust. Why had he blurted out that ridiculous request for homemade bread? Where in the name of King Louis’s mistress was he going to put it? If he had kept the flour, he could have lived on it for months; as it was, he would be forced to store a quite unnecessary number of French loaves, which would undoubtedly spoil before it could all be eaten.

  Perhaps he could give some of it to his Indian neighbors at the Mobile village, but they were going to think he had lost his mind. Or, worse, that he was trying to buy them off for some nefarious reason. He only prayed they wouldn’t see through his thin excuses to the truth.

  The Frenchwoman had bewitched him.

  No, he hastened to correct himself, the truth was that he had felt sorry for her. Sorry that she was going to have to marry one of the profane, woman-starved young cocked-hats that passed for soldiers here in Bienville’s soggy little outpost. Sorry that some tragedy had brought her across an ocean to this alien world.

  He spread his feet for balance and looked up at the top of the bluff, where the fort’s timbered bastions marched on either side of the gate, its fleur-de-lis stirring in a desultory breeze. The whole fort was succumbing to rot, not two years after the raw timbers had been seated into place. Mildew claimed the outer face of every wall, and every board was spongy to the touch. July had been mercifully dry, at least for the three weeks in the middle of the month, but August promised to lay a pall of heat, moisture, and mosquitoes.

  I tried to tell him.

  But Bienville never listened to anything he didn’t want to hear. He would simply thunder his arguments at greater volume until one had to give up or go deaf.

  Desiring to present his best work, Tristan had first shown his initial drawings—carefully executed maps of the Alabama river system—to La Salle. Seated at a drafting table in his warehouse office on the island, the commissioner had pored over the parchments, clicking his tongue as he ran an ink-stained finger over each detail.

  “The Indians are lying to Bienville. The settlement would better be located on the lower bluff.” He adjusted his wig in that nervous way of his. “I suppose they would have their own reasons for wanting the fort higher up the river.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” Tristan sighed. “But I can’t prove it.”

  “We’ll just have to make a good case. He can’t be that bullheaded.”

  But, as Tristan knew all too well, Bienville could and would insist on his own way. The fort had been built to Bienville’s specifications at the upper location, while La Salle dug in like a particularly vicious flea under the commander’s collar.

  It had been a mistake, Tristan now realized, to press La Salle’s support. So here he was, cramming supplies onto a too-small boat in preparation for another long season of isolation, while his only brother remained in service to the executor of his exile.

  Consoling himself that he no longer had to listen to their sniping and conspiracies, Tristan jumped onto the warped pier that spanned the marsh below the bluff. Wearily he climbed the wooden steps that staggered up from the pier to the landing at the top of the bluff.

  There he paused long enough to button his shirt and scrape the mud from his boots. Exile or no, he could pass for civilized when he tried. He almost removed the leather thong that tied his hair back at his nape, but opting for coolness over fashion, he set off at a brisk pace for the fort’s main gate, set a scant quarter mile back from the landing.

  It was odd to approach the stockade without bracing himself for disaster. The hole in his heart where Sholani had lived seemed to be shrinking to bearable size. Never would he forget her, nor could he forgive those who had taken her. But the hard-won return of sanity had brought with it a watchfulness that would surely protect him from the soft, insidious disease of affection.

  At the gate, Tristan saluted a young cadet named Lafleur, who responded with an insolent stare as the gate swung open. Everyone here knew him as Marc-Antoine Lanier’s brother and the commander’s nemesis. He wasn’t sure which gave him the most notoriety.

  Whistling, he strode toward the dining hall adjacent to the warehouse, where he found his brother wolfing down a plate full of fried eggs mopped up with a chunk of bread. Marc-Antoine hailed him with a tankard of ale and gestured toward the bench opposite him. “Thought you would be miles downstream by this time, my brother.”

  “Soon.” Tristan straddled the bench and accepted a tankard from a passing adjutant. He grinned as Marc-Antoine stuffed the remainder of the bread into his mouth and blissfully chewed. “I see Mademoiselle Gaillain has been sowing her talents abroad. I hope she hasn’t sold off what she promised to me.”

  Marc-Antoine’s eyes twinkled with mischief. “If I’d known she was for sale, I might have put in an earlier bid. Are you taking home a bride after all?”

  “Just her bread. And keep your voice down.” He looked around and found the handful of men there addressing their food with apparent absorption. “Where is she?” He lifted the tankard to his mouth.

  “Who?” Marc-Antoine’s expression was innocent.

  Tristan cuffed him. “Don’t be stupid.”

 
Marc-Antoine laughed. “She’s in the kitchen harassing Roy. He can’t quite admit that a woman makes better bread than he does.”

  “It wouldn’t take much.” Tristan eyed the doorway into the kitchen. If he sought her out, she might assume too much. But he could hardly sit here all day, hoping for a glimpse of the woman. He should have arranged for someone to deliver the bread to his boat. He glanced at his brother, who was openly grinning. “What are your duties today?” he asked, summoning his dignity.

  “Translating for some Chickasaw envoys who want to trade pelts for guns.” The grin faded as Marc-Antoine shook his head. “The Pélican brought Bienville a letter from Pontchartrain, warning him His Majesty is set on protecting the Quebec fur trade. As you said, La Salle watches him like a hawk, but he insists a few pelts here and there can’t hurt.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about Bienville. He enjoys walking in quicksand.”

  Marc-Antoine leaned forward and lowered his voice. “He does. And if anybody understands his weaknesses, I do—but, Tristan, if anything happens to him, this colony will fall apart. Bienville is the only man capable of holding off the British, the Spanish, and the Indians, and keeping the religious from cutting each other’s throats. Do you know he deliberately brought over this Jesuit Father Mathieu as chaplain, over Pontchartrain’s objections? Father Henri is near apoplectic.”

  Tristan steepled his fingers against his chin in thought. “I talked with Father Mathieu on the trip upriver last week. He’s a good man and seems to have no desire to take Father Henri’s place.”

  “Then why choose him to accompany us into Indian territory on the peace mission?”

  “Perhaps because he is neither fat, lame, nor speech deficient.”

  Marc-Antoine choked on his ale. “Could you be a little more forthright, my brother?”

  Tristan shrugged. “You asked.”

  “I did indeed.” Marc-Antoine pushed away from the table. “I just wish you were going with us. Nobody knows the river like you do, and another interpreter wouldn’t go amiss.”