The Creole Princess

by Beth White

  Rafa scrambled to keep from falling on his rear, as infuriated as he had ever been in his life—mainly with himself. How could he be so stupid as to lurch into action without a plan? Now he had drawn attention to himself—a disaster in itself—and probably ruined any chance he’d had of getting Scarlet released.

  Think, think, think. What was he to do?

  Slowly he straightened, drawing on every drill he’d ever endured in military school, every evening spent attending his mother’s endless receptions for dignitaries. He allowed his face to freeze over. “My dear fellow,” he said coldly, “you seem to have misunderstood my intent. I shan’t bid for this woman, because she belongs to the governor, and she has gotten into this lot by mistake.”

  “The governor?” The Englishman roared with laughter, but when Rafa continued to stare at him stone-faced, his amusement faded into uncertain bluster. “The governor, you say? I suppose you can prove that?”

  “As it happens, I can.” Rafa pointed across the esplanade to the tavern, where James Willing still stood, scratching his head. “You know that gentleman, I hope?”

  “That’s—that’s Mr. Willing, the fellow what brung in all this to be sold.”

  “Yes. And Mr. Willing sent me to make sure this woman is pulled from the lot and sent to General Gálvez as his wife’s personal servant.”

  “I can’t do that! The auction has already started!”

  Rafa resisted the urge to look over his shoulder at the platform, where the auctioneer was rattling off bids for the first slave in line, a tall, well-built young Negro male. He would undoubtedly fetch somewhere near twelve hundred pounds, and the bidding would be lively.

  He flicked a glance at Scarlet, just to make sure it was her. Because if he had made a mistake, this was going to be one fine mess.

  The girl’s thick, curly hair was a wild mess, her skin was dull from malnutrition, and there was a distinct bulge at her abdomen under the neat but ugly dress they had put on her. But it was Scarlet all right. The distinctive tip-tilted brows, the pointed chin and lush mouth—so much like her cousin that he wanted to howl with fury that she had been mistreated so.

  He thought of Lyse’s mother and Scarlet’s mother, probably standing side by side, right here, all those years ago, one to be ransomed by a lover and one to be enslaved by a vindictive shrew for life.

  He couldn’t rescue all these people right now, but God help him to take this one to safety.

  Giving Scarlet a warning look, Rafa spread his hands and played his trump card. “Mr. Willing will be unhappy if his desire to please the governor is frustrated in this—though I do see your dilemma. Perhaps the decision will become a bit more palatable if I . . . make it worth your trouble.” He reached inside his coat for the purse he carried for just such emergencies and opened its drawstring. The sweet rattle of golden coins sounded as he dropped a few, well beyond the usual price of a young female slave, into the handler’s palm. “There will be twice this, if you’ll meet me at the Pelican this evening.” He nodded at the tavern where Willing still waited. “I’ll put in a good word for you with my captain. He says he plans to make another raid up the river soon.”

  All three of those statements were individually true, even if the sum of them was not.

  The handler jingled the coins in cupped hands. He glanced at Scarlet, who stood stoic, eyes on the ground, hands clasped in front of that rounded stomach. He dared another look at Willing, then seemed to make up his mind. With a muffled curse, he stuffed the coins into his waistcoat pocket, pulled a knife from his belt, and swiftly bent to cut the rope around Scarlet’s ankles.

  Rising, he pushed her, stumbling, toward Rafa. “Take her and hurry, before I change my mind. Tell Mr. Willing he owes me a favor.”

  “I think it’s the other way round.” But Rafa took Scarlet by the arm and led her away as quickly as possible through the milling crowd. There was very little time. James Willing was waiting for him to return, and Rafa was going to need some explanation for this display of lunacy. When one was forced to lie, one had best stick as closely as possible to the truth.

  When he and Scarlet were at a safe distance from the Exchange, but still well away from the tavern, he slowed, sliding his hand to her wrist. “Scarlet, tell me how you came here.”

  When her eyes met his, he was surprised to see tears forming. “I prayed for someone to come,” she said. “I didn’t know it would be you.”

  He shrugged. “Why not me?”

  “It’s for Lyse, isn’t it? You love her.”

  “I—Never mind that. Did Willing really bring you here?”

  “The little man on the big boat? I don’t know his name. But he rolled into Natchez like a cannonball. Took all us slaves and anything else valuable to sell here, burned everything else in sight. Made the white masters prisoners so their families would promise loyalty to the—the other British—” She looked at him, eyes suddenly ablaze with hatred. “They’re free. Why do they fight each other?”

  Rafa started moving again. “It’s complicated. At any rate, Willing will not be particularly happy to find out that I have bought you with his name.” He glanced at her. “So, stay quiet and follow my lead in the conversation to come. Understood?”

  MOBILE

  APRIL 27, 1778

  Business had lately picked up at Burelle’s, which meant that Lyse spent a lot of time in the kitchen with Joony, learning her magical culinary arts. In companionable fashion the two of them prepared to help Zander serve the evening meal to the tavern’s guests. The kitchen smelled of seafood and spices and the mouthwatering odor of rich roux bubbling in the gumbo in the cast-iron kettle over the fire. The rattle of crockery and chink of silver plate provided a rhythmic accompaniment to which Lyse’s thoughts hummed.

  Life had been quiet for the last month or so since Daisy moved into the fort with her father—too quiet, like the hours before an April storm, clouds looming, full and ready to explode with noise and wind and flood. It had been hard to let her friend go, and Daisy had probably been the more grief-stricken of the two, but there was no help for it. A newly immigrated British family had moved into the Redmonds’ house, and Lyse suddenly found herself without a place to live. She might have moved to her father’s or grandfather’s house, but she wouldn’t abandon the children of the primary school. With Daisy gone, Lyse was the only teacher they had.

  When Major Redmond suggested she apply to the Burelles for lodging, she’d reluctantly agreed. Her tiny salary from the school gave her little enough to live on. But Brigitte seemed thrilled to have another woman to help Joony with chores in the kitchen, and they’d agreed that Lyse could work off her board and lodging in the evenings and on weekends. Grateful, she’d settled into a little attic room above the tavern, where she kept her few dresses in a tiny cupboard that left barely enough room to squeeze into the bed at night.

  When she did lie down to rest, her body was so tired and her brain so overloaded that she often lay awake into the wee hours, thinking, praying, wondering, wishing. Brigitte Guillory, Burelle’s daughter, was a jabber-jaws, and could be good company, but as a married woman, her first responsibility was to her husband. Lyse missed Daisy’s steady companionship, her ready laughter, her ability to balance Lyse’s own more mercurial temperament. On their last day together as they packed for the move, they had found a few moments for Daisy to put in Lyse’s hands the stack of books from under her bed.

  “Keep these for me,” Daisy had said, her blue eyes full of distress. “If my father found them . . .”

  “I will,” Lyse said quickly. “And I’ll read them all. I want to understand—”

  “You will understand, I know you will. But you mustn’t do anything . . . rash, do you hear me? Lyse, these are dangerous times, so please—be careful of what you say and who you talk to.”

  Kissing her friend’s pale cheek, Lyse had promised.

  But the more she read and understood the guiding tenets of the American rebels’ principles, the more ex
cited she became about the possibilities of living in complete liberty to choose one’s way in life, without interference from a powerful ruling class. As a practicing Christian, she believed the Bible’s assumption that all men and women—slave and free, male and female, all nationalities and cultures—were equal in value under God. It was a new concept, however, to imagine that intrinsic value functioning in political and everyday practice.

  As one who had grown up in the rather amorphous class of not-black, not-white, not-Indian but a strange hybrid of all three, Lyse had always struggled not to feel inferior to people like the Dussouys—and yet, she had instinctively recoiled at the subservience of the slaves around her. Her cousin Scarlet, Joony, Zander, and the Redmonds’ man Timbo—all were her friends. How could their value as human beings be less than her own, or less than Isabelle Dussouy’s, for that matter?

  She wondered and prayed about those things. Perhaps, she feared, she would never understand nor be able to live out the convictions that hounded her thoughts.

  And circling those weighty anxieties, like a bird seeking its nest in spring, that Mardi Gras conversation with Grandpére tormented her with longings she could barely express, even to God in prayer.

  Your Rafael will come for you, and you must go with him.

  The words were absurd, fantastical, like the heartbeat of a fairy tale.

  Until Rafa’s sudden, brief appearance in her life, no one had ever come to her rescue. She had always and only fended for herself. She had her little knife, she had her own thoughts and memories and intellect, she had her faith and prayers. Those things had always been enough. But would they always be? If Grandpére was right, terrible times were coming upon them all. To whom would she turn when that happened?

  And yet . . . and yet . . .

  “What’s that big ol’ sigh for, child?” Joony ladled gumbo into one of the bowls between them on the table. “You about to blow me off my feet.”

  Lyse smiled. Joony, short and stout as a cast-iron kettle, wasn’t likely to budge if a hurricane came through the kitchen. “It’s one of those I-don’t-know-what-to-do sighs. Do you think I should marry Niall? Everybody else does—well, except Grandpére.”

  “What difference does it make what anybody else thinks? You’d be the one gettin’ in bed with the rooster.”

  “Joony!”

  “Well, you asked.”

  Lyse laughed, her anxiety suddenly dissipated. “I guess that would make me the broody hen.”

  “Guess so.” Joony’s dark face was sly. “So if you ain’t hankerin’ to lay some eggs, you better get out the chicken yard.”

  Lyse dropped a spoon with a clatter. “You think I’m being unfair to Niall—not giving him an answer?”

  “I think you’re playing him like a cheap violin.”

  “Wait, is he a violin or a rooster?”

  “Don’t matter. You drivin’ this wagon, so you better think about where you going.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Listen, a lot of what happens in life, you don’t get a choice. When you got a decision puts you on one road or another, the least you do is think about the consequences in light of what you know. Has this boy ever physically hurt you?”

  “No!”

  “Hurt your feelings?”

  “No.”

  “Made you angry?”

  “No. That sounds like he might be the perfect husband.”

  Joony snorted. “I’d say just backwards of that.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, of course you don’t want a man beats you. But if you got a man never disagrees with you, one of you ain’t necessary.”

  And perhaps there was the very thing that made Lyse balk at saying “yes” to Niall, the thing she couldn’t put her finger on. She didn’t need him, except as a convenient way to prove her loyalty to the British crown. Niall had tried to convince her that the authorities would never question the wife of a British officer. Her conscience, or maybe her pride, had argued that that would be a terrible reason to get married.

  She thought of her great-grandmother Geneviève, who had married a man she’d met only a handful of times, a marriage of convenience in a time when the choices were far fewer than she herself possessed. She thought of her mother, who had had no choice at all: marry Antoine Lanier or remain in slavery. And she thought of Scarlet, who had been torn from a beloved husband.

  It seemed a powerful privilege and luxury to have the right to turn her back on a man who was “good enough”—but not the one she loved.

  And yet . . . and yet . . .

  There was no guarantee that Rafael would return to Mobile, no matter what he’d promised.

  “Come on, child, we got to get this food served before those men tear the tavern down.”

  Joony’s voice broke into Lyse’s rambling thoughts, making her suddenly aware of raised voices from the dining room. “What on earth?” She picked up the tray, heavy with soup bowls, and hurried to the kitchen door.

  But Zander moved in front of her just as she stepped inside the dining room. “Hold on, Miss Lyse. There’s some language in here you ought not hear.”

  “What?” She could hardly hear him over the shouting. “What’s going on?” She stood on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder.

  “Miss Lyse—go back in the kitchen,” Zander shouted. “Here, give me the tray.” He tried to take it from her, but she resisted.

  “Who is that man?”

  Zander turned to follow her gaze to the short, red-faced little man who stood on a chair in the center of the room. “That’s an American,” he said as if introducing a minion of the devil himself. “His name is James Willing, and he’s trying to read the Declaration of Independence to our folks.”

  Dressed in her nightgown, Lyse sat on her little attic bed, straining by the light of a tallow candle to see the broadside printed in four columns on a piece of cheap paper. She ran her finger across the smeary headline at the top of the page:

  In Congress, July 4, 1776, a Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, In General Congress Assembled.

  Because of these words, James Willing was in gaol.

  Zander’s attempts to keep Lyse out of the dining room had fallen on deaf ears. Even Joony wanted to hear what the crazy little white man had to say. So the two women had quickly served the tavern’s paying guests, then stood just inside the kitchen door, straining to hear the lively debate raging inside the public room. By the time someone pried himself away from the spectacle long enough to inform Major Redmond that “one of them demmed Continentals” had had the gall to show his face in West Florida, an undisclosed number of copies of Mr. Willing’s illicit document had been distributed all over town.

  And Lyse herself had managed to tuck one into her pocket.

  She continued reading, murmuring aloud the words Rafael had quoted on that long-ago day when she had first met him.

  Words to create a riot in a little town tavern and get a man locked up. Words to make neighbors and friends take aim and kill each other. Words of war.

  What did they mean for a girl like her?

  She wondered if Daisy had heard of this latest brouhaha. Would she care that James Willing was in gaol, and would she try to do anything about it?

  A little flutter of panic settled under her ribs. Please, dear God, don’t let Daisy do anything imprudent. Keep her safe.

  Blowing out the candle, she folded the broadside and slipped it inside her pillowcase. She heard it crackle as she lay down on her side and tucked her hand under her cheek. Perhaps she’d better try to see Daisy tomorrow.

  Daisy marched toward her father’s office, too angry to care what anybody thought. She didn’t give a farthing about James Willing—whoever that was—and Antoine Lanier undoubtedly deserved whatever happened to him, but Papa had locked up Lyse’s beloved grandfather.

  The world had gone completely crazy. Two men who had been friends for years, suddenly turned into enemies by the stubborn greed
of a monarch oceans away. Warm with shame and impatience, she hammered upon the door of the administration building, then stood fanning her face. Oh, certainly her father was doing his duty as he saw it. But—Charles Lanier? A criminal?

  She reached up to knock again and nearly fell into the room when the door was suddenly yanked open from the inside.

  Niall McLeod gaped at her. “Daisy! What’s the matter?”

  “Let me in. I have to talk to my father.”

  Niall didn’t move. “You can’t. He’s very busy.”

  “I don’t care. This is important.”

  “Is Lyse all right?”

  “I haven’t even seen Lyse in over a week.” Daisy paused, frowning. “Why would you ask that? Have you seen her recently? Has she been sick?”

  “No—at least, I don’t think so. It’s just—she hasn’t been following her usual routine, and I can’t—I can’t find her to talk to her. I think she’s avoiding me, so I wondered . . .” Niall’s ruddy complexion reddened even more. “Never mind. If this doesn’t have anything to do with Lyse, what do you need? I’ll relay any message to your father.”

  Daisy considered barreling past Niall. But she wanted to have a rational conversation with her father, and unnecessarily angering him would be counterproductive. Besides, she needed more information. Reining in her temper, she linked her shaking fingers at her waist. “Niall, is it true that Lyse’s grandfather is in the guardhouse with that American man, James Willing?”

  Niall looked wildly over his shoulder, as if looking for rescue. “I think so,” he mumbled.

  “Why?” The question came out perhaps more abruptly than she’d intended.

  Niall flinched. “Well, I don’t exactly know . . .”

  “Of course you know—I’m sure you saw it happen.”

  “We can’t talk about this here. Your father—”

  “My father can talk to me, if you won’t. I’ll just raise my voice a little—”

  “No!” Niall all but pushed her out of the way in his haste to step onto the porch with her and close the door behind him. “Come here, we’ll sit on the steps and I’ll tell you exactly what happened, just please—don’t interrupt the major right now, or I’ll end up in the guardhouse myself.”