The Pelican Bride

by Beth White

  The weight of what she must surrender pressed her forward. What you must do, do quickly. First she must purchase fabric and thread with which to patch Tristan’s clothes, as his lengthy journey had left him all but in rags. No time to sew him a new shirt herself, but perhaps she could buy one with the money in the little pouch in which she kept her bakery earnings. Jingling the coins for reassurance, she straightened her spine.

  She was no traitor, no matter what the French legal system said.

  The dry-goods shop seemed to be more crowded than usual this afternoon. Geneviève could hear the rumble of loud voices even before she reached the corner where the shop sat cheek-by-jowl with the locksmith’s. As she approached the entrance, the door burst open and a uniformed soldier backed out, hauling a woman by the arm. The woman screamed, the soldier moved, and Geneviève recognized Ysabeau.

  “Leave her alone!” She rushed toward the two. “What’s going on?”

  Foussé, the young soldier who had helped her tend Barraud, gave her a harassed look as he tried to hold on to the wriggling and screeching Ysabeau while backing into the street. “Out of the way, Madame! I have orders to arrest this madwoman.”

  “But why is she here? Who let her out of the guardhouse?” Abandoning her errand, Geneviève followed the soldier’s awkward progress with his prisoner away from the dry goods. “Ysette, stop struggling or you will injure yourself!”

  Foussé glanced over his shoulder. “All I know is, someone reported a disturbance here, and I was sent to settle it.”

  “Please, Foussé—You do remember me, don’t you?—Please, take her into Burelle’s for a moment so I can talk to her. Let’s at least get out of the rain!”

  The soldier growled something rude, but apparently saw sense in her suggestion. In less than five minutes they had reached the tavern porch. Unfortunately, the altercation had drawn a crowd. Madame Burelle was not going to like this at all.

  Foussé let go of Ysabeau’s arm and aimed his bayonet at the gawking onlookers. “Get out of here, the lot of you! Official business! Go home!”

  Everyone obeyed, grumbling, except Françoise Dubonnier, who happened to be near the back of the crowd. They gradually peeled away, leaving her standing arms akimbo, heedless of rain, mud, and leveled bayonets. Expression horrified, she addressed Geneviève. “What’s the meaning of this nonsense? Are you hurt?”

  “No, of course not—I’m just trying to help Ysabeau.” Geneviève gripped her trembling hands together. “Someone let her out of the guardhouse.”

  Geneviève, Françoise, and Foussé all looked at Ysabeau, who burst into tears. “I didn’t mean to! It was an accident!”

  “Stop sniveling, Ysabeau,” Françoise snapped. She picked up her skirts and marched up the porch steps. “And you—put down that gun, before I take it away from you and use it to search your head for brains!”

  Ysabeau dried up and dropped down cross-legged on the porch, while poor Foussé executed a disorderly parade rest.

  Françoise’s normally immaculate appearance was rather the worse for wet feathers hanging limply about her coiffure and mud splashed up to her knees, but her haughty expression would have cowed the queen herself. “I’m waiting for an explanation,” she said, staring down at Foussé.

  “They—they said it’s my fault she escaped,” he stammered. “Aide-Major Dufresne came to relieve me last night. He says he found her cell open and her missing. He didn’t want to get me in trouble, so he looked for her all night. Turns out she was sleeping on the gallery of the dry-goods store when Rivard came to open up.” He caught his breath and met Geneviève’s eyes, looking desperate. “You know how hard it is to talk sense into her, Madame. She wouldn’t go away, kept saying she just wanted a yellow dress.”

  “I promised her one,” Geneviève remembered with a pang. “But I forgot it when the surgeon-major died and Tristan came back. I’m so sorry, Ysette,” she said, kneeling to take the girl’s hand. “Let’s go back to the guardhouse where you’re safe, and I’ll bring you a new dress. Foussé won’t hurt you.”

  “Could I have another cream puff?” She looked up at the young soldier, red lips pouting. “Please?”

  He was already shaking his head, but Geneviève said hastily, “Yes, of course—there were some left yesterday afternoon. Let me get one before we leave.”

  But she had barely gotten to her feet when another disturbance arose from the direction of the river. This time, the noise traveled up the rue de Bienville, becoming louder and louder until it suddenly burst past the two Juchereau establishments that flanked the east side of the square.

  Tristan was at the head of the group marching toward them. He carried something over his shoulder—no, someone. It looked like one of the Indian boys he had introduced to her this morning after she offered to bring them breakfast.

  Something was terribly wrong. The body Tristan carried appeared to be lifeless. And the other native boy seemed barely able to walk, stumbling along with his arms wrapped about his midsection and his head bowed to his chest.

  Geneviève forgot Ysabeau, forgot Foussé, forgot everything except her husband. Tristan’s face was a study in tragedy.

  “What is it?” she cried, running toward him. “What has happened now?”

  He stopped, bending to let the body of the young Indian slide from his shoulder to the ground. They stared at one another over the inert body. He shook his head, hands raised, empty, shaking. “I found Little Frog on the pirogue, dead. Foam about his mouth, curled up as though—as though in agony. Fights With Bears says his cousin wouldn’t eat the gruel you brought this morning, because he had already eaten the—the pastries you left earlier.” He stared at her. “How is this, Geneviève? Explain this to me!”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I didn’t go down to the river until you took me with you.”

  Tristan turned to speak to the tall young Koasati with the Roman nose, a brief command in the guttural Alabama tongue.

  The boy looked at her then, and the hatred in his almond eyes should have burned her to cinders. She flinched as his brown hand opened to reveal a squashed mass of cream and cake which might once have been one of her delicate cream puffs.

  She looked at Tristan. “I don’t understand,” she repeated. “How did he get that? Is it poisoned?”

  Tristan glanced down at the younger Indian, lifeless at his feet. “I would say so. Fights With Bears and I went to buy a couple of replacement oars and some rope, leaving Little Frog to watch the boat. When we came back, he was lying on the foredeck, dead.”

  Geneviève felt numb. “This makes no sense at all. Maybe he was bitten by a snake.”

  “Perhaps he was.” Grief suffused his face. “I found this in the basket with the one pastry left uneaten.” He reached into his shirt to withdraw a small scrap of paper and flicked it at her.

  Startled, she grabbed it. It was a piece of the waxed paper she used to protect her pastries, covered with what looked like her own handwriting. A surprise for you, my darling. Eat these and think of me.

  “Of course I made the pastries, but I did not write that note!” Geneviève sat in a chair in the center of Bienville’s office, her hands knotted in her lap. Her face was the color of the waxed paper Dufresne had produced as evidence of her crime.

  Treason.

  The rest of them encircled her like wolves baiting a trapped doe, but Tristan stood back against the wall, searching her face for anything that would tell him the truth. Despite her secrecies, he had thought he knew her. Had thought he could trust her with his life.

  In fact, he still held out hope that there was some mistake. It was at his request that she had been granted this interview before Bienville put her in the guardhouse along with her simple-minded accomplice, Ysabeau Bonnet.

  It went without saying that he didn’t trust Dufresne, but he couldn’t deny the corroboration of so much outside evidence. The poison had been found in her bedroom above the tavern, a little vial that matched the jar o
f yeast-starter she had brought from France. Her sister, brought in by Bienville, identified it, reluctantly. Aimée now sat in a corner of the office, shivering like a kitten in a cold bath.

  “Where would I get poison?” Geneviève said with tears in her eyes. “I don’t know anything about poison! I’m a pastry chef!”

  Dufresne cleared his throat before Bienville could respond. The commander, seated at his desk, nodded, giving him silent leave to speak.

  The red-haired warehouse clerk spread his hands. “My dear, everyone knows you spend hours with Nika in the Mobile village. Those little boys of hers are always hunting with poison arrows—they make it from the manchineel plant, which is common in the woods around their camp. Don’t you remember the arrow that went past my ear the first day you went with me?” Smiling, he touched a recently healed notch in the top of his left ear.

  Geneviève’s face paled even more. “We were grinding corn that day!”

  “Perhaps.” Dufresne shrugged. “Perhaps not. Commander, you might be interested to know that one reason I went to see the Mobile chief that day was to warn him he’s been harboring a British spy since his son took the lovely Nika to wife. Her periodic absences from the village have been noted and watched. She seems a most dangerous companion for our secretive Mademoiselle Gaillain, who practices the Reformed religion and, worse, is an intimate of their notorious commander Jean Cavalier.”

  Bienville sat up. “Can you prove this?”

  “As it happens, I can.” Dufresne reached inside his uniform coat and withdrew a closely written and crossed paper.

  Aimée emitted a strangled squeak.

  Bienville’s attention snapped to her. “Do you recognize this document, Mademoiselle Gaillain?”

  “No!” Aimée’s pink cheeks flamed.

  Dufresne gave her a tender look. “There is no need to lie for your sister, cherie. You know this letter from Cavalier was hidden in her Reformist Bible.”

  Feeling ill, Tristan snatched the page from Dufresne’s hand. It was addressed to Geneviève. He skimmed it, down to the scrawled signature: “Cavalier.”

  Instructions to write to him when she reached New France. A plea to live quietly but faithfully, eyes and ears open. What did that mean?

  It meant Geneviève Gaillain was a fugitive, running from His Catholic Majesty’s dragoons. She had every reason to hate both the Sun King and his Papist government. He could see it on her face: her terror, her betrayal.

  But he loved her in spite of everything and longed to protect her. He could feel her raised scars on the pads of his fingers, against his lips.

  “Bienville,” he said, forcing calm into his voice, “these are serious charges. But Little Frog’s death, whoever caused it, makes it even more critical that I journey north with the other two boys to reassure the Koasati of our friendship, make restitution for the loss of their young warrior, and enlist their help in punishing the perpetrator of the massacre of our men. I beg you not to decide my wife’s fate until I return.” He looked around at Bienville’s officers, crowding the office, all staring at him with a variety of anxious, angry, and skeptical expressions. “And in the absence of my brother, I offer my counsel—that you band together, put aside revenge, and prepare yourselves for the onslaught of enemies from the north and the east. Deerfoot tells me that he sees signs of violent weather closing in as well. You’d do well to prepare to move the entire settlement to higher ground—I invite you to make use of my plantation on the south bluff.”

  He waited, knowing that Bienville could have Geneviève executed on the spot. Such was his power.

  Bienville stirred, always uncomfortable with interpersonal, relational questions. He was a man of action, at home commanding ships or making business deals. He slapped his hands upon the desk and pushed himself to his feet. “All right, Lanier. Lock her in the guardhouse for now. I’ll make sure she’s treated well until you return.” He speared Tristan with a penetrating look. “I hope you understand that all past debts are hereby paid in full.”

  Tristan nodded and reached a hand to Geneviève. “Come with me,” he said gently.

  “How could you possibly believe I would p-poison you?” Shivering, soaked to the skin from the rain, Geneviève followed Tristan across the drill green. He held her by the hand, but he was so silent that she may as well have been chained and boxed in a prison wagon. It had started. Everything she had dreaded since her father’s arrest had come to pass, compounded by her love for this man.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said without looking at her. “But you are so-called Reformist, are you not?”

  She’d thought her broken heart could feel no more pain. “Do you know what that means?” She jerked her hand from his. “It means I am of a people persecuted for centuries for obeying Scripture and for refusing ritual worship. It means I am under the rule of God rather than any man, be he king or archbishop or dragoon. It means I must forgive you because Christ first forgave me. Tristan, I love you!”

  When he turned, she saw the clashing emotions in his eyes. “Do I know what it means? I don’t care about theological debates or parsing Bible verses to shore up political loyalties. I know you’ve suffered for those things. But I also know that your Jean Cavalier is in bed with those British dogs—enslaving the Indian nations to gain control of French and Spanish territories. The woman I loved was a victim of that abomination.” He closed his eyes. “You forgive me?”

  They stood in the beating rain on the deserted green, together but oceans apart.

  At last Geneviève summoned the strength to move. Nothing worse could befall her, now that the truth was revealed. “Come, let me tell you how it happened.” She turned and dragged herself up the guardhouse steps, Tristan’s slow footfalls behind her.

  She went into the open cell next to Ysabeau, who lay fast asleep on the floor, curled like a kitten on a blanket Geneviève had brought her several days ago. Water dripped from Geneviève’s dress, forming a puddle as she sat on the cell’s military cot and waited for Tristan to follow.

  He sat beside her and stared at a broad crack between the boards of the flooring.

  “You are Canadian,” she began, “so you don’t know the traditions of the Cévennes, the mountains where I grew up.”

  “I am Canadian,” he said evenly, “but that doesn’t make me ignorant. I know the King tolerated the Huguenots for some time, allowing them to settle in a place where they would cause little damage.” He shot her a glance. “Which worked until the rise of Black Camisards like Cavalier.”

  “I know Jean. He didn’t do half what he’s accused of. He was in our home the day the Abbé of Chaila was assassinated.”

  “Your family hid him?”

  “Yes.” Geneviève swallowed tears. “Someone told. By the time the dragoons came, Jean was no longer there, so they took my papa instead. I followed them with Papa’s—the gun was so heavy without Jean there to help me—but I was angry and frightened. I knew what they were going to do, and it wasn’t right! So when the soldier said he would—I knew he meant it, and the gun went off. I can’t remember the rest of the day, except they said I killed him and they cut off Papa’s head and burned the village. They would have executed me too, but for Jean. He got me out of the prison in Fraissinet-de-Lozère and took me to Father Mathieu.”

  “Father Mathieu was no Reformist! He was a Jesuit!”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “But he is—was, I mean, sympathetic to the doctrinal questions of Reformed believers. He didn’t approve of the persecution, and he was even friends with Cavalier. They knew of the Pélican and persuaded me to take Aimée and go. I didn’t want to run, but Jean said he could help other Reformists get out of France if I saw that there would be tolerance in the new colony. You saw the letter. I was to keep quiet about my beliefs and get a message through to the Huguenots in Carolina, reporting on the political and religious climate of Louisiane.”

  “Then you did come as a spy.” His voice was heavy, his expression pained.

&
nbsp; She sat up, straightening her spine. “I came first of all to protect my little sister from execution as a traitor. She had nothing to do with my crime. That I could also repay the man who risked his life for mine—it is an honor.”

  For a long moment, Tristan sat looking at the wet floor, elbows on his knees, fingers plowed into his hair. Finally he heaved a sigh. “Geneviève, you are a good woman, but what you’ve done is a serious thing. It won’t be easy to make Bienville understand the provocation.” He looked at her then. “For now, I must go. The death of Little Frog makes the situation even more complicated, and I have to know what happened to Marc-Antoine.” He rose, drawing the key from his pocket, and looked at her soberly for a moment, then bent to kiss her cheek. “You will be safe here until I return. God be with us both.”

  21

  Aimée sat in her corner chair in Commander Bienville’s dirty, cluttered office, half listening to the men argue over their next course of action. Probably they had forgotten her. Why could men not talk about their problems, as women did, until they worked them out peacefully? They must always be producing a gun or a knife, or setting fire to something, as if the violence would not inevitably cause some man on the other side to react with bigger guns and longer swords and hotter fires.

  A spasm of worry for her sister disturbed the carefully constructed unconcern that was her only protection from the sort of insanity that had swamped Ysabeau. She had tried to tell Ginette to leave behind her Bible and all else that stank of their old life in Pont-de-Montvert. But Geneviève was always the hardheaded one. Just like Papa, she must always stick to principles, no matter the consequences to everyone around them. And look where that had gotten Papa. Now they had hauled her off to the guardhouse.

  Ginette should have been more careful. If she’d already burned the letter from Cavalier, Aimée could have gone back to Julien and truthfully said there was nothing to worry about. But he had made her swear to bring it to him. So while Ginette was in the Burelle kitchen baking, she had slipped upstairs and unlocked the identical trunk with her own little key and extracted Cavalier’s note from the Bible. It was too bad Julien had been obliged to produce it as proof of the poison.