The Pelican Bride

by Beth White

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Mathieu smiled to smooth over the unintentional offense. “But now that you are an adult, wouldn’t you like to see what you could do with this extraordinary gift? Perhaps take a trip to France and see the wonders of Versailles?”

  Tristan looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “My home is here. My wife is here. Why would I want to see a noisy, crowded place like Paris?”

  “Take Geneviève with you.” He had been thinking this through. Geneviève was wanted for murder in the Cévennes, but the Comtess de Leméry would never be connected with the young girl who had harbored Jean Cavalier and shot a dragoon in the streets of Pont-de-Montvert.

  “Father, you are strange today.” Tristan shook his head. “In fact, I suspect there’s something you aren’t telling me. My brother has asked me some odd questions, and I know you watch me when you think I’m not looking. Perhaps you’d best come out with it.”

  Mathieu glanced toward the front of the boat, where Barraud was singing a drinking song in time with the motion of the oars, lazily doing his part to keep the pirogue moving upriver in the wake of the other boat. Mathieu closed the journal and swung his leg across the seat to face Tristan. “Yes. It is time. You see, I know your father, and his name is not Antoine Lanier.” He braced himself for an explosion.

  Tristan just looked at him, a sort of pitying inspection that seemed to strip away layers of divinity and penetrate to the man-soul of Mathieu Benoît. It was the sort of look he imagined Jesus might have given to Nicodemus, he of the priestly garments and childish questions.

  “Did you hear me?” He had not expected this nonresponse.

  “I heard you.” Tristan leaned into the oars, setting muscles to bunching along his arms and shoulders. His expression changed not a whit. “I’m waiting for you to tell me why it matters.”

  Geneviève recognized the Indian’s homely face, but if she’d heard his name, she couldn’t remember it. She crossed the gallery, taking her time, assessing the friendly expression, the lazy way he propped himself against the post that supported the roof, the European shirt and breeches. Strands of gray streaked his long black hair, which was tied back from his forehead with a strip of faded pink calico cloth.

  She stopped a few feet away from him. “I understand you asked to speak to me? I’m Geneviève Lanier.”

  The Indian straightened and smiled, transforming his face to something almost beautiful. “Yes. I see now.”

  He’d spoken French, but the words didn’t make one bit of sense. Perhaps he had misunderstood her. “Did you have me confused with—”

  “I am not confused. Tree-Stah is the crazy one, to leave such a pretty lady alone in this wolf pack.”

  “Tree-Stah?” Geneviève looked around, hoping Monsieur Burelle was within earshot. The Indian man’s French was good, if simple in syntax, and he didn’t seem inclined to hurt her, but she didn’t know what to make of his familiar way of addressing her.

  “Your . . . husband, I think is the word? He tells me to look after his Jon-a-Vev.”

  Husband. Tree-Stah was Tristan. Jon-a-Vev must be . . . me. “He . . . when did he tell you that?” Why would Tristan ask a man she’d never even heard of, especially an Indian, to look after her? Who was this man?

  “The day he marries you, he comes to the tavern and says he must travel upriver to be the peacemaker. I am left to feed his animals and guard his woman.” The broad smile gentled to twinkling dark eyes. “I am Deerfoot, of the Pascagoula clan. My family lives on the Massacre Island. Your commander pays me to run messages. Tree-Stah is my good friend who also marries my cousin.”

  Geneviève felt her mouth form an O. A relative of Sholani, Tristan’s friend.

  Deerfoot made a face. “I see he has told you little. This is a very smart, but also stupid man you have married.”

  Indeed. What other surprises has he left me, I wonder? “Please, will you come inside with me? I am baking today, and I don’t want to burn . . .” She looked over her shoulder at the tavern’s door, left open to catch any wayward breeze that might chance by. Remembering Burelle’s “smelly Indian” comment, she wondered if he might object to her bringing an Indian man through the front.

  Again, Deerfoot demonstrated his perceptiveness. “Burelle doesn’t mind me,” he said with a smile. “Commander Byah-Vee-Yah allows me free run of the place.”

  And what if Burelle did mind? She would not treat Tristan’s friend like a dog. She smiled. “I could probably find you a loaf of bread, if you’re hungry. Come with me.” She turned to reenter the tavern and was relieved to find that Burelle had disappeared, making explanations unnecessary. When she looked over her shoulder to make sure that Deerfoot followed, she was startled to find him close on her heels. “Oh!” She hit the doorfacing hard.

  “I am very quiet,” he said with a grin. “I teach Tree-Stah how to track and hunt in the woods.”

  “I’m sure you did,” she said, ruefully rubbing her bruised shoulder. “Come in. You can sit on that stool in the corner while I work.”

  After tying on her apron, she removed the tray of golden pastry puffs from the oven and set them on a trivet to cool. The room instantly smelled of warm bread and sugar. She skimmed the cream from a pitcher of milk, knowing Deerfoot was eyeing the pastry tray. “Would you like to try one?” she asked with a smile.

  His eyes lit. “Yes!”

  “Then help yourself.” She poured the cream into a clean bowl, added a teaspoon of sugar and a ground vanilla bean, and began to apply the whisk. The cream developed bubbles and froth, then thickened into a beautiful, snowy fluff.

  Deerfoot slid off the stool and inspected the pastry tray. “Tree-Stah has married a gifted woman this time.” With nimble dark fingers, he selected the biggest puff and popped the entire thing into his mouth. His eyes closed in ecstasy. “You will please teach my woman how to make this bread.”

  Geneviève showed him the whisk with its thick coating of whipped cream. “Wait until you taste it with the cream in the middle.”

  “Poor Tree-Stah.” The Indian shook his head. “He will return to find his Jon-a-Vev in great demand. You will be so busy making these little cakes you will have no time for him.”

  Knowing he was teasing, she laughed. For some reason she felt free to broach a question she had been burning to ask. “What was Sholani like? Did you know her well?”

  “I did. She was pretty—in a different way than you. Not so tall, maybe. She was dark like the earth, but her spirit was lighter than an ocean breeze. She brought joy to my friend Tree-Stah when he was so angry with Byah-Vee-Yah that he no longer wanted to live among his own people.”

  Geneviève nodded. She knew that kind of frustration and anger. Only her love for her sister and the deep awareness of God’s love for her had kept her from succumbing to hopelessness. “He wouldn’t tell me how she died,” she blurted. “Was it so terrible?”

  Deerfoot’s countenance darkened. “As terrible as death can be.”

  Death could be very terrible indeed. But she wanted to know the man to whom she had given herself. “Tell me.”

  15

  Ten days later, as he scrambled in the lead up the Koasati bluff, Tristan flexed his scarred hands, remembering the day many years ago when Marc-Antoine had burst into their father’s drafting studio, smelling of fish, spring air, and wet dog. Tristan, seated at the drafting table opposite the door, where he was occupied in copying a map of Lake Huron’s western shore, grabbed for his parchment before it could fly away with the sudden gust of wind. His ink pot fell over, ruining the map.

  Marc-Antoine, of course, paid no attention to Tristan’s growl of frustration. “Tris! Did you know Iberville is looking for a language expert for the southern expedition?”

  Mopping up ink as he avoided his father’s kindling gaze, Tristan shrugged. “No. Why would I care?”

  “You are good with languages! Your Latin is as good as your French—and you’ve even learned that barbaric English tongue!”

>   “Moderate your tones, if you please.” Father got up to take the stained parchment from Tristan with two fingers and set it aside for cleaning. “Where have you been today, to get so filthy and smelly? Your mother will have a fit of vapors.”

  Marc-Antoine waved a hand. “At the docks. Tristan, it’s your patriotic duty to join the marine. Bienville says they must have a full crew, or the expedition will be canceled. You should go talk to him now! He’s still at the tavern.”

  Tristan met his father’s eyes. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, the young Sieur de Bienville, had always had a knack for dragging his friends into adventure. Mad to prove himself the equal of his older, more celebrated brothers, he had joined the French marine when barely out of short coats, following his older brothers off to help wrest the great lakes of Illinois away from the Huron Indians. When King Louis XIV decided to extend his influence along the great rivers that bisected the American continent, the Le Moynes were chosen to lead the establishment of forts and settlements along the Mississippi and on down to the gulf coast. Bienville had apparently been chosen to visit all the local gathering places and recruit necessary manpower.

  Father scowled as he provided Tristan with a new parchment. “Bienville is a stupid young warmonger, and his brothers aren’t much better. You will stay away from him, Marc-Antoine, or I shall cut off your allowance.”

  Tristan could have predicted his brother’s reaction.

  “Why?” Marc-Antoine rounded on his father. “Bienville is only providing opportunity for advancement and fortune for men who would otherwise be stuck here in this frozen wasteland for years on end! You are afraid to leave, and so must be everyone else.”

  Father’s face went white as the parchment in his hand, and then flushed with fury. “What did you say to me?”

  Marc-Antoine’s extravagant eyebrows, so like their mother’s and Tristan’s own, met above his nose like the wings of an angry hawk. “I’m tired of playing at life like a child! I’m capable of choosing my own friends and making my own destiny. And that is exactly what I plan to do—beginning right now!”

  Tristan pushed back his chair. “Marc, be careful.”

  “Careful never got anybody anywhere.” Passion vibrated in every line of Marc-Antoine’s tall, gangly body. “If you won’t go with Iberville, then I will.” He glowered at his father. “And there’s nothing you can do to stop me!”

  Tristan’s hands stung with phantom pain as he recalled the lengths to which his father had gone in the attempt to keep Marc-Antoine from leaving home at the age of fourteen. In the end they had both gone—Marc-Antoine in wild-eyed resentment and Tristan with a promise to watch after the young prodigal. Only, unlike the protagonist of Christ’s story, the two of them had received neither inheritance nor tearful goodbye. Furthermore, far from coming to his senses in a foreign pigpen, the younger brother had discovered fame and fortune with the Le Moyne brothers and never spared a backward glance.

  Tristan, the elder, had met his own destiny in the beautiful dark eyes of Sholani—who bound him to this wild land as surely as his father’s whip had driven him from home.

  But—not his father, as Father Mathieu had just informed him. Deep in his spirit, he’d known it all along, had recognized a fundamental distance in his relationship with Antoine Lanier, compared to the blistering rage and unspoken pride that had pulsed in nearly equivalent measures toward Marc-Antoine.

  Was the dead Comte de Leméry his father in truth? A man he had never met, certainly never loved. A man who, far from loving his mother, had sold her, for the price of silence, to a Canadian mapmaker.

  Turning to give a hand up to the men behind him, Tristan pondered whether he should speak of his doubts to his brother. Would his parentage matter to Marc-Antoine? He suspected not. And, as he had said to the priest, it mattered little with regard to his life here in New France. Nothing fundamental had changed.

  His brother came over the edge of the bluff, rolled, and landed lightly on his feet, then helped Tristan assist the panting priest. When Mathieu was safely out of the way, the surgeon, followed by Saucier and Guillory, climbed onto the landing. They all took a moment to brush sandy clay off their hands and knees, somber now that they had arrived at their destination. It had been ten days since Tristan’s conversation with Father Mathieu, over three weeks since they had first set out on this journey. Since it was almost dark, the plan was to make camp for the night, then approach the Alabama village in the morning. None of them could predict how the natives might receive them, but experience had taught Tristan that the Indians would be less threatened, and therefore more receptive to gestures of friendship, during the early hours of the day.

  “What’s the matter, Tris?” Marc-Antoine pulled him aside, his expression quizzical. “I remember this place from my trip back four years ago, and it was a good camping spot because of the spring on the other side of those trees. You look uneasy.”

  Tristan shrugged off his brother’s worry with a smile. “No, just tired of fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’ll take my bow and see if I can get a rabbit or a deer before the sun goes down.”

  Marc-Antoine nodded, clearly not convinced. “Good idea. We’ll set up camp, build a fire. It will be good to sleep on dry ground.”

  Bow in hand, Tristan set off along the stream trickling through the woods. Dusk was falling, and he knew he wasn’t likely to find much in the way of game, but he needed the time alone. He was going to have to talk to Marc-Antoine about the priest’s crazy tale, get his take on it. He needed his brother to laugh and tell him not to be soaking in fairy tales. They were brothers, in the most important sense of the word, and nothing could change that.

  Shaking off his turbulent thoughts, he continued deeper into the woods, walking without a sound in the manner Deerfoot had taught him. Before long he heard the distant gabbling of a flock of turkeys. Slipping closer, he saw a broad-bottomed tom with brilliant comb and wattle. Drawing an arrow from his quiver, he nocked it against the string and aimed at the nearest fowl.

  A second later the turkey was dead, the arrow having clipped it through the eyes and gone to rest in the trunk of a pine tree. As the other birds in the flock flapped awkwardly and noisily away into the forest, Tristan retrieved his arrow, wiped its soiled head on a patch of moss, and returned it to the quiver. Picking the bird up by its feet, he swung back toward camp. He was perhaps a mile away when he stopped at a loud cracking sound perhaps thirty yards away. Something much heavier than any forest animal had stepped on a limb. Heart thudding, he listened to the stillness.

  He was alone and outside shouting distance of the rest of his party. Utterly foolish to have left on his own. He backed toward the closest tree, an ancient oak with a broad scarred trunk and mossy gnarled roots. Almost he thought he had imagined the noise, but then he heard a muffled but unmistakable sneeze. He slowly lowered the turkey to the ground, then reached over his shoulder for an arrow. Just as he got it nocked, three Indian braves in Alabama dress melted out of the forest with their own bows armed and aimed. He was surrounded.

  The hair on the back of his neck rose. The dark faces were inscrutable, the mouths clipped into tight lines, the eyes narrowed. They were young, perhaps still in their teens, each sporting a single combat feather in the light headdresses woven into their long, black hair. Come upon like this, apart from the village, they must be considered hostile. If he shot first, he could kill one, even as the other two sent arrows into his own heart. If he yielded, they would take him prisoner and torture him before murdering and scalping him.

  Frozen with fear, he prayed for wisdom.

  Nika ran through the darkening forest alone, but sometimes when she listened, the pounding of her heart sounded like someone running near her. Out of habit, she looked over her shoulder, though she was confident she was not being followed. Mitannu had left to go hunting yesterday, and her sister-in-law, Kumala, was busy tanning hides for winter use. Nika had told Kumala that she wanted to visit an old friend who now lived in the
village of the Apalachee, so that if she and the boys were missed, no one would come looking for them.

  When they had first left the Mobile village, Chazeh and Tonaw ran ahead of her. No matter how many times she had cautioned the boys to silence, they were too young to remember for more than a few minutes at a time. She hadn’t been able to tell them that this hunting game was deadly real. Frightening them would have done no good, and might even have slowed them down.

  The three of them had walked along the Mobile River toward the Apalachee village, skirting it for safety’s sake, then headed due north through the forest west of the winding Alabama River. Though paying someone to paddle her and the boys upriver would have been less tiring, the detour cut off several hours of travel. By the time they reached the Little Tomeh in late afternoon, both boys were whining about food, so she had gone directly to Azalea’s hogan.

  Nika and Azalea had grown up together in the Kaskaskian village of the Alabama nation, a loose confederation of clans located near the juncture of the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers, which together flowed south, forming the Alabama River. The two girls had been close friends until the young Frenchman called Bright Tongue came to live in their village. Nika’s father chose her to tutor their guest in the Alabama language, and that was that. Azalea had warned her that the beautiful white boy would not stay, but Nika didn’t want to hear it. She had swallowed his sweet words whole, eagerly fed him kisses in return, and soon the seeds of two little boys grew in her belly.

  Such grief and such joy she had known since those two were placed at her breast. She would sacrifice anything to keep them safe. Leaving them with Azalea had been the hardest thing she had ever done, even harder than leaving her home to follow Mitannu, the Mobile headman’s eldest son, all the way to the mouth of the big river, where it gushed into the bay that opened like a blessing into the wide waters. She had seen the great gulf once, and it was just like Bright Tongue described it—though even he could not do justice to the vastness, the power, the crashing noise of it. She had begged Mitannu to take her back to the Mobile village, and he had laughed at her—not kindly, as the Frenchman would, when he teased her about her funny way of saying his name. Mah-Kah-Twah.