The Sacred Shore

by T. Davis Bunn

  Charles’s confused mind was certain he had made a mistake; he could not have heard what he thought Andrew had cried. But the words were repeated in a voice that sounded almost strangled. “Charles, oh, thank God, thank God.”

  Then his brother embraced him with arms hard as iron, and said once more the words that left Charles utterly paralyzed. “Thank God!”

  Andrew led his brother back up the lane, warmly welcoming him and saying how sorry he was over not being there for his arrival in Georgetown. Andrew explained that he had been away visiting an outlying hamlet and only returned to the news this very hour. He had rushed out to find him the moment he heard.

  When they approached the manse, the door opened and Andrew warmly introduced his wife, Catherine. She bade Charles welcome. But her expression was cautious, her voice so subdued it scarcely could compete with the morning wind. As Andrew seated his brother by the fire, Charles noted that the daughter was nowhere to be seen.

  “Are you comfortable, brother?” In his excitement, Andrew’s words tumbled over each other. “Will you take something to drink?”

  “Brandy, if you have any. If not, ale.”

  “I’m sorry, brother. We do not have either. Will you settle for cider?”

  “Yes. All right. Cider, then.”

  Andrew waited as Catherine poured the cupful from their kitchen jug, then gave it to Charles. “I cannot tell you what a joy it is to have you appear, brother. A miracle. Truly.”

  Charles accepted the mug, running a finger over its rough surface. “I confess this is not exactly what I expected to hear,” he finally said slowly.

  “No, I suppose not.” Andrew reached a hand out to his wife. “Come join us, dear.”

  “I must see to … to things,” she replied quietly and moved for the doorway.

  “Very well.” Andrew turned back and settled into the bench on the fire’s opposite side. Charles endured the silence and his brother’s intense gaze. He knew full well what his brother saw—a man who wore his power and his wealth with careless ease, dressed in clothes that would have cost more than what Andrew probably earned in a trio of hardscrabble years. The frill on his chest was stitched with silver threads, the buttons on his coat solid gold, the buckles on his shoes sterling silver. Charles knew himself to be wide of girth in the way of one used to eating more than was good for him, and doing so often. There was strength, yes, but well padded and sagging with the weight of years and care.

  Andrew asked, “How are you, Charles?”

  “Tired. It has been a long journey.”

  “Yes. That I can imagine.”

  “Two months on the high seas. There were days when I doubted I would ever see land again, I can tell you.” Charles drained his mug and set it on the floor by his feet. “Nothing but the most urgent affairs would ever have forced me to board that ship.”

  Andrew leaned forward and spoke with deep earnestness. “Before telling me of your business, I must tell you something of my own. I have wanted to speak these words for years.”

  Charles felt his body grow stiff and cold as stone. He knew exactly what Andrew was about to say, here in the privacy of his home. He knew because it was precisely what he would say himself. “Yes?”

  The fire’s crackle sought to fill the silence as Andrew lowered his head for a moment. He seemed to gather himself, as though intending to leap across the distance separating them. Charles felt a growing dread over returning to the conflict of his youth. So much depended upon this connection. So many hopes, the ambitions and plans of generations to come. Charles steeled himself further, willing himself not to give in to an angry counterattack.

  But when Andrew lifted his gaze from the stones ringing the fireplace, the words were, “Charles, I wish to ask your forgiveness.”

  Charles felt his hold upon himself waver slightly. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I deserved your malice. I realize that now. Had I the opportunity, I would have treated you with far more cunning and hatred than you showed me.” Andrew’s voice sounded taut with compressed passion. Yet there was no anger, no bitterness, no wrath. “Competing with you drove me to scale heights that would have otherwise been impossible. The fact that I could never win, never gain your titles or your power, filled me with a loathing that ate at me like a chancre. I was glad to leave England and the endless undeclared battles behind. Yes, glad.” Andrew leaned back, looking drained. “For all that happened between us, for all I thought, for all I wished I could do to you, I humbly ask your forgiveness.”

  Charles inspected him with a frankness borne on Andrew’s own words. “You have thought of this for some time.”

  “Years and years,” Andrew agreed. “And prayed for a day I thought would never come so I might tell you so. I wrote you. Twice.”

  “I never received your letters.”

  “No, mail from the colonies is notoriously unreliable. And after all the time that had passed before I put pen to paper, well, I feared I had left things too long.”

  “Time and events both.” Charles hesitated, then said, “I heard you were drummed out of the regiment.”

  “I resigned my commission. But what you say is true enough. Had I tried to remain, I certainly would have been court-martialed and most probably hanged.”

  “Hang a Harrow?” Charles was hotly indignant. “They would not have dared!”

  Andrew smiled. “Dared and done, my brother. I deserved no less. I refused a direct order in time of war.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “I refused to round up defenseless Frenchmen and women from homes they had occupied for over a century and send them off to fates unknown.” Andrew’s features showed the pain of those old wounds. “At least, I would have refused. But the Lord in His infinite mercy saw fit to rescue me in time.”

  Charles shifted in his chair, uncomfortable at the turn of the conversation. “You speak … well, differently.”

  “My life is now God’s.” Andrew nodded. “Do you have it within you to forgive me, Charles?”

  “Of course, of course.” Charles recognized it as the opening he had hoped for, but for some reason found it difficult to press forward. He was unable to hold his brother’s frank gaze. “That is … well, I come asking for a favor of my own.”

  “A favor?” Andrew glanced over to the sunlit doorway, empty still of his wife and daughter. “A strange way to describe your request for my only child.”

  “You heard, then.”

  “Catherine and Anne tried to tell me when I returned this morning. They both were distraught, but I think I understood what you wish.”

  “My second wife died last autumn. She left me childless. I have no heir. You know as well as I that our father’s only brother died without children. Your daughter is my only living blood kin.”

  Suddenly Charles could remain seated no longer. He rose and began pacing the room’s confines. “I am desperate for an heir. Anne would lack for nothing. You know our land, our holdings, our wealth. There must be an heir to inherit—or it will all be lost. Lost for all time, Andrew. We Harrows cannot let that happen. We cannot.”

  “There was a time when that thought would have disturbed me as much as it does you, but now …” Andrew paused, in deep thought. “It must have cost you dearly to make this journey.”

  “You have no idea.” Charles’s pacing turned swifter still. “She would inherit everything. I would hire the finest tutors, present her at court, wed her to the noblest family. She could perhaps marry into the royal line, Andrew. Think of that! Your daughter wed to the court of St. James!”

  “I imagine,” Andrew replied mildly, “that Anne would have something to say about that herself.”

  “Of course she would. I’m not a barbarian. She would not be forced into some loveless union. I come seeking an heir, not chattel. It is not merely for my benefit. Think what it would mean to the girl.” Charles stopped in the middle of the room. When Andrew did not stir, Charles spun to face him. “I must have your answer,
Andrew. I must.”

  “Come sit down, Charles.”

  Andrew’s calm riled Charles. “Don’t play games with me!” His hands clenched into fists. “I have to know!”

  Andrew rose. As he stepped forward, Charles had the sudden impression that his brother was breaching barriers formed over years, over oceans, over the world’s trappings. Andrew settled a hand on his brother’s shoulder. Charles flinched but did not move away.

  “Charles, listen to me. I know what you are thinking. I know you are seeking my permission to let Anne go with you. To allow her to leave her home and go to a strange land—filled with wealth and power, yes, but foreign all the same. But that is a decision that, thank God, I will not be forced to make.” After a long moment of silence, Andrew finally said, “Anne is not who you think.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “She is my daughter—yes. But she is not of Harrow blood.”

  “Adopted? But I heard … the reports were that you had a child.”

  “I did. I do.” The sigh sounded as though it came from the depths of Andrew’s heart. “But she is not Anne.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t.” He drew his brother over, and this time Charles did not object. “Come sit down. I will tell you of the circumstances, of the tragedy that has shaped our lives.”

  Chapter 8

  Nicole sat amidships in the village’s largest skiff, willing to let others do the paddling upriver against the Vermilion River’s current. Normally she disliked sitting quietly by, as though a woman was not able to handle a boat as well as any man. She could paddle, sail, net, and fish as well as the next. The long pikes used for stabbing the huge catfish in the shallows, no, she did not have the strength for that. But normally when she entered a skiff or canoe, she faced its challenge with the best of them. Not today, however. This skiff held three adults and the pile at her feet—their three guns and the crossbow.

  She had asked the other two to come because she had not wanted to say her farewell to Jean Dupree alone. She did not want to risk breaking her decision to leave, find herself turned from the chosen course by his compelling words and convincing smile. Part of her still hoped that he would come over to her side, confess he had been wrong to ever become involved with such evil men, and agree to rejoin the community and her. But when they had arrived at his dwelling, set in a sheltered alcove several miles downriver from the village, it had been empty. Nicole knew instantly that this was the answer to her hopes, and that his decision was already made. Even so, she needed to see him a final time. Because she also knew where he would be found, she was very relieved to have the company of these two men. At her direction they had turned upriver past their village to continue the search.

  “Turn in here,” she now said quietly.

  Guy himself handled the bow, and he turned to look doubtfully back at her. “Are you sure?”

  “This is it,” Nicole confirmed. “You may trust me on this.”

  “You have been here before?”

  “Many times.” There was no longer any need for secrecy. No need for hiding what she had carefully held about Jean.

  Guy’s oldest son handled the stern, a strapping lad of seventeen, already a head taller than his father. “I have fished down here before. It ends a hundred yards ahead in a small pool.”

  “This is the turning,” Nicole insisted.

  Looking resigned, Guy turned the boat and started down the small bayou. They were perhaps ten miles from the village—it was hard to tell exactly. The Vermilion River meandered and backed upon itself constantly, opening into great swampy reaches, splitting time after time into so many bayous only the largest had even been named.

  Swamp cypress lined their way, the roots reaching out like black arms and branches crossing overhead, hung heavy with Spanish moss. Cypress and moss—they intertwined every aspect of life here on the Louisiana bayous. The skiff’s rope was knit from Spanish moss. The boat itself was hollowed from a single cypress trunk. Even the houses were built with these two materials. Buildings were beamed in cypress because termites and beetles did not devour this wood. The moss was mixed with mud and shaped into wattle, which filled the spaces between the beams. Cypress shingles formed the roof. Nicole looked upward at the sunlight flickering through the branches and the hanging moss. The morning was green and beautiful and filled with the scent of springtime. The water flickered and danced, an emerald mirror that reflected their passage with timeless beauty. She took a deep breath, another, and missed this world already.

  Guy seemed to understand her mood, for he said over his shoulder, “I would never have thought you would be the one to leave.”

  She studied the broad back of her mother’s brother, his quiet strength, and knew she had to be honest with him. She was joining her own life to his family’s. She was traveling all the way back to the mythic land of her beginnings. There was no one to rely upon, except for Guy and Emilie and their children. A whole world of strangers, and only these to be known as clan and friend.

  So she spoke with all the honesty she could muster from a heart torn by the coming departure, by the meeting that waited just up around the bend. “You know the story of my birth?”

  Guy hesitated, his paddle poised dripping over the emerald green waters. “I do.”

  Pascal, his son, asked, “What story is that, Papa?”

  “Another time, my son.”

  In a roundabout fashion, so as not to arouse further suspicion from Pascal, Nicole wondered aloud, “How did they arrange the name change?”

  Guy must have understood her perfectly, for he answered in kind. “There were few of us Minas folk on the boat after the expulsion. Henri and Louise discussed the naming with Papa, Emilie, and me. We simply changed it and that was that. The others were so exhausted and distraught, no one had time to think much over a baby’s new name. Perhaps they thought it was a fitting act after what we had endured.”

  The bayou passed through a gentle bend, widening further in the process. “I have long felt as though I’ve never had a home,” Nicole went on. “For the longest time I thought it was simply because of the time we spent moving from one place to another.”

  “I know this feeling,” Pascal said quietly from behind her. “All too well.”

  “I thought perhaps I had been so branded by years of wandering that I would never belong anywhere.” Nicole surprised herself, both by the secrets she confessed and the ease with which she spoke. “Even before I knew how to put this into words, I felt as though I had never really had any sense of home, anywhere.”

  With Guy’s paddle again suspended in midair, he paused, this time turning to study her. His gaze said he was seeing her not as the child he had known, but as the woman she had become. Nicole went on, “When the letter arrived and you decided to return to Acadia, and then again when Papa spoke with you about the treasure, I felt as though I had finally found a purpose, something to do with my life. I would travel up, I would bring back your report, I would carry the treasure. If I cannot have a home, then at least I can scout for the clan.” She took a deep breath at the effort of revealing her innermost thoughts. “Perhaps I will never find a place where I belong, but at least I can still have a life of worth.”

  “I hope,” Guy said quietly, “the future proves you wrong.”

  She was saved the need to respond by Pascal’s saying, “Papa, the bayou ends up ahead.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Nicole answered, pointing. “Between the two trees there.”

  Both men showed astonishment. “In there?”

  Her terse nod was the answer. She felt herself tensing as they approached the pair of giant cypress, both so thick three men could not link hands around either base. The roots appeared to join in a snakelike tangle. But on closer inspection, a sliver of open water appeared between them, scarcely broader than the skiff.

  The branches overhead became so intertwined the day grew dim like twilight. The water broadened once
they had passed the trees, but the light remained as dusk. The bayou opened farther still, until it was twice the boat’s length from bank to bank, almost as broad as the Vermilion in front of the village. But the water here was utterly quiet, the silence broken only by a pair of hunting hawks. Where the Vermilion banks boasted grassy slopes and wild flowers, here the bayou was edged with black mud and roots, the water as dark as the banks. High branches clustered overhead, filtering out all wind and almost all light. The two men looked about in astonishment. This was an unfriendly, hostile place, a world utterly different from the light-filled delta where they lived.

  They rounded a gloomy bend, and the water broadened yet farther. Faint sounds carried in the still air, men calling out, and raucous laughter. Guy’s shoulders stiffened as they heard a fiddle strike a tune. Nicole understood perfectly. This was not the sound of festivities at the end of a hard day’s work.

  “Hold there!” A figure rose from his place by a pair of fishing poles, drawing up a rifle and fumbling for the hammer. As one, Guy and his boy reached and pulled up their own long-barreled hunting rifles. The man froze in midmotion.

  Nicole was the one who called out a response. “I seek Jean Dupree!”

  “Nicole?” The man squinted across the broad black waters. “That you, cher?”

  Another figure, stocky and squat, stepped from the gloom. “You know better than to bring strangers out here!” His voice held fierce anger.

  “I have nothing to say to you, Daniel!” It pleased her to feel the rush of fury burn so harsh she could not be frightened. She gripped the gunnel with both hands and shrilled over the waters, “You are the reason I had to come here at all!”

  “Nicole?” A third man joined them at the water’s edge, taller than either of the others. “What are you thinking of, bringing outsiders here?” Jean Dupree sounded incredulous.

  “I needed to see for myself!” Tears of rage and sorrow burned hot behind her eyes, but she held them back by will alone. “I could not believe that your love was so small, and your will so weak!”