Bienville squinted at her, and she returned it with a hard stare. If he was unaccustomed to being opposed, so much the pity.
“Surely you understand my dilemma,” she went on. “I could carry disease into the birthing chambers. Certainly this is not what you want.”
“I want a midwife. And a doctor.” His razor-sharp tone sliced through the tension in the air.
Julianne spread her hands. “I’m no doctor. I know birthing, and that is the extent of it!”
“Then I suggest you learn.” Bienville glowered at Girard, a clear sign they had been dismissed.
Lightly, the captain touched Julianne’s elbow and led her from the room.
Once outside, she strode away from the residence as if she could not be shed of it fast enough. The sun beat mercilessly down on them, but a light breeze ruffled the edge of her cap and the lace at her sleeves.
“Outrageous!” She nearly spat the word. “Tell me, Captain Girard, if your wife was about to give birth, would you allow her to be tended by someone who surrounds herself with contagious diseases?”
“I—I have no wife.”
She pursed her lips. “But if you did. You would want to protect her, wouldn’t you?”
“With my life.”
“And if you had a slave woman who was ready to deliver, would you allow a midwife to help ensure the mother and baby’s safety?”
“It would be my duty.”
Slowing her hasty pace, Julianne shook her head. An apologetic smile slanted her lips. “Forgive me, Captain. You are not on trial here, after all.” But her smile stiffened and drooped into a worried line. Halfway between Bienville’s home and the edge of the city, she came to a complete stop.
From their position on the high ground, they could see the Mississippi glittering in the sun, could hear the boatmen yelling to each other as they anchored by the docks, could smell the fishermen’s catch. But all of that fell away when Julianne looked at Captain Girard. She had to know.
“Captain.” The wind teased a curl from its pin, and it bounced against her cheek. “I never told you I started attending births when I was fifteen.”
He looked everywhere but into her eyes. “Didn’t you?” he murmured.
“Please. The truth.” Her hand fluttered up and lighted upon his forearm.
“Benjamin must have told me, then. He spoke of you often, and with great affection.”
Hope sparked. “You know my brother?”
He looked down at her hand on his sleeve. “I knew him. Quite well, in fact. He had a special talent for languages. As soon as I noticed, I taught him as much of some of the tribal tongues as I knew, until he surpassed even my own ability. I recommended to Bienville that he be embedded in a Choctaw village to learn about them by immersion. He agreed, and Benjamin was thrilled at the opportunity. You must understand, this practice has precedent in Louisiana. Certain boys of Benjamin’s age—he was fifteen at the time—are handpicked to leave the garrison and live with a native tribe to become our expert in that people’s language, customs, and religion. We wanted to learn their ways of farming, tracking, fishing, hunting, cooking, and warfare. Sending one nonthreatening boy with a keen mind has proven to be the best way to do it. Benjamin was only too eager for the challenge.”
Julianne inhaled sharply as Benjamin’s last letter scrolled through her memory. A grand new adventure with the natives, he had written. This must have been it. “But for how long? A year? Surely you wouldn’t just abandon a fifteen-year-old boy for a year?”
“No one abandoned your brother, I vow. As I said, he wanted to do it, and we checked on him at regular intervals. Each time, he was well and faring better than the rest of the soldiers. He spent fourteen months in a Choctaw village north of Lake Pontchartrain.”
Fourteen months. He would have been sixteen years old by the end of his sojourn. “And then he came back to the garrison?” She knew Benjamin had a particular capacity for languages. Knowing she couldn’t understand him, at times he would speak in Latin or Italian just to taunt her. But she could not imagine her little brother living as a Choctaw as he grew into a man.
“He did. But he was weakened by a recurring fever that plagued him. Still, whenever men in my company went on foraging expeditions or as armed protection for traders, he was there, eager to practice the language with the natives. When there were calumet ceremonies—when chiefs and big-men came from different tribes to smoke a peace pipe with Bienville—Benjamin was always close at hand. He was a skilled and useful interpreter, and imparted much knowledge to us about native ways of living. You have reason to be proud.” A sad smile curved on Girard’s face. He looked toward the sun-spangled river below.
Julianne followed his gaze until the brilliance bounced off the water and flashed painfully into her eyes. Sweat prickled her skin as she stood rooted to her spot of earth, but she could not move, not to seek shade, nor even to release the captain’s arm, until she knew the rest of the story. “What happened?”
“He was so young.” Girard’s voice trailed off. “I was genuinely fond of him.” He rubbed the small copper buttons on his waistcoat with his thumb.
Julianne tightened her grip on his arm. Wind tugged at her skirt as she searched Girard’s tense face. A muscle bunched in his jaw. “Where is he now? Do you know?” She caught his other arm, slid her hands down until they rested in his. Her hands were unreasonably cold, while his were burning hot. “Is he well?”
Girard’s eyes softened as they finally met hers.
“Or perhaps you don’t know.”
“I know.” He said nothing more. He didn’t need to.
Julianne stepped back from him unsteadily. Dread went to her head like cheap brandy until she was dizzy with it. A profound ache soon took its place. “Oh.” She pressed her fingertips to her temples. “He’s not well.”
“Madame, I would to God I could say otherwise.” The captain stepped toward her.
“But at least he isn’t dead. He recovered from that fever. You’re not telling me my little brother is dead.” She backed up again, as though she could distance herself from the horrible fact she refused to believe. A crayfish chimney tripped her heel, and she stumbled. Girard caught her by her shoulders. No. No. He lives.
Unable to bear the finality of the captain’s grave expression, she squeezed her eyes shut. Instantly visions of Benjamin surged. After their mother died, he’d become her purpose and her joy. Then the mischievous tot grew into a little boy who longed for his father’s approval and received only blame instead. In vain, Julianne tried to conjure up an image of him at sixteen, in a military uniform or Choctaw breechcloth. Instead, she saw him lying alone on a pallet, soaked with fever. Without her.
She covered her face with trembling hands. If only she hadn’t asked, she could go on believing she’d see Benjamin again, that he was off hunting deer or alligator, or exploring unmapped regions of the territory. Was there any harm in that? Tears spilled down her cheeks. The truth was so much harder than hope.
Girard’s voice was hoarse when he spoke again. “I would spare you this pain if I could.”
When Julianne’s knees buckled, Girard cinched his arm around her waist and caught her to his chest. She made no sound as she sobbed.
NATCHEZ, LOUISIANA
With the vessel unloaded and the merchandise safely stored in the trading post outside Fort Rosalie, Simon lingered outside the fort’s palisade walls. No one he had spoken with today knew anything about Benjamin Chevalier. Here on the outside bend of the Mississippi, and on a bluff about one hundred eighty feet above it, Simon could see a mile in each direction—and all he saw was the gold-brown river curving between the white cliffs that guided its path. Wind whispered through wild grasses that undulated like the sea. Simon had never seen anything like it.
Popping the last piece of dried deer meat into his mouth, he ambled north along the river into an area he’d not explored yet. Strange, he mused, that he should sense such peace in an area filled with savages.
Natchez, he corrected himself. They certainly looked fierce enough as they helped the boat dock at the landing, with black and red tattoos decorating their sinewy bodies in dots and stripes. The men’s short black hair covered their heads like bowls, except for circles they shaved around topknots that held feathers sticking straight up from their heads. The women’s hair, from what he had heard, fell in waves down to their bare feet. But they grew tobacco just like the French colonists did and traded with the settlers for European-made goods, including shirts some men wore above their breechcloths. The Natchez weren’t as “savage” as Simon thought they’d be.
His shadow fell to his side, and the bluffs flared purple and russet in the lowering sun. If his fellow boatmen were true to their word, they’d be looking for willing Natchez girls to bed down with for the night right about now. He had his doubts about Jean Villeroy, however. Simon suspected he would stay true to his wife, Denise, just as Simon would stay true to Julianne. In any case, Simon wasn’t ready to sleep yet.
Squinting at the fiery sun, he judged he had plenty of time to venture farther north before night dropped its curtain. Come morning, he’d be rowing all day. Now was the time to stretch his legs.
Slung over his shoulder, his Fusil de Chasse tapped his leather breeches with every step, reassuring him he was prepared for danger. The Natchez were a peaceful people, anyway, with deer as their primary prey. It took twenty neatly tanned deerskins to trade for a French gun, according to the commissary clerk, and more for balls and powder. The Indians who took a gun on credit this summer would stay quite busy using it to pay off the debt by spring. If anyone is hunting in the half-light, it’s deer they want, Simon told himself. Not me.
By the time he had put a few miles between himself and Fort Rosalie, fireflies throbbed in the air, the warm yellow blinking a silent summer lullaby. The river shushed between the bluffs like a mother soothing her babe. Unbidden, thoughts of Julianne with child emerged in his mind, and his heart quickened. One day he’d have a baby of his own, an eternal soul that would bind him and Julianne forever. The family he never had.
A branch snapped. Simon turned, scanning the land behind him. Other than a few pine trees standing sentry, he saw nothing. Adjusting the leather strap of his gun across his chest, he pressed forward with roving gaze and tingling ears.
Another snap. A trick of the wind, he told himself, but he took the musket off his back and carried it in his hands all the same.
Up ahead, smoke spiraled heavenward in grey columns. Natchez huts. Perhaps there were Frenchmen or Canadian voyageurs there who hadn’t yet taken their pick of native daughters to share their bearskins. As he approached, he slung his gun back over his shoulder so as not to appear hostile.
Behind one of the huts, a packhorse grazed, obscuring its rider, who stood on the opposite side of the beast, talking to another man. One of them wore tall black boots. The other was brown and wore moccasins. Unable to see their faces, Simon strained to decipher their words.
“You have the scalps?” The language was French, but a foreign accent reshaped the syllables. “How many this time?”
Simon stopped. This was no ordinary bartering for deerskins or glass beads. Suspicion kindled in his gut. Jaw tense, he soundlessly moved closer.
“Ten Choctaw.” Clear native French, although the way the name of the Choctaw tribe was spoken indicated the speaker had mastered native intonations better than most. “You have ten guns for me? And powder, balls?”
Simon looked closer at the Indian’s legs as the two obscured men presumably made their trade. Conspicuously absent were the dotted tattoos he’d seen on every other native today. This native was no Natchez.
“And do the survivors believe it to be the work of the Chickasaw? Or the French?”
“There were no survivors.” The Frenchman, again.
Simon’s mind spun. What sort of briar patch had he stumbled into now? Pitting Indian tribes against one another was more than enough reason for war, as far as he could reckon. And whoever was behind that horse was not like to believe Simon was just out for an evening stroll and not an enemy spy. His heart throbbed against the strap holding his gun to his back. If he moved to shoulder his weapon, would they hear it? Would he find an arrow in his chest before he even had time to load a single shot?
The voices switched to a tongue Simon couldn’t understand, but the Indian voice, now speaking a native language, sounded remarkably familiar. Simon peered again at the Indian’s moccasins. Didn’t natives go barefoot except when traveling? He squinted until he was convinced he recognized them. Relief rushed through him. It was Running Deer.
With one more glance behind him, Simon boldly approached the pair. Now that shadows were unfurling, he did not fancy the hike back to the camp in the dark, wondering if he was still being followed, imagining what an arrow would feel like in his back. Whatever the conversation had been about, Simon was not privy to the extenuating circumstances. If Running Deer was part of it, surely it could be nothing too nefarious.
When he was close enough to be heard, Simon spoke Running Deer’s name. “It’s me. Simon LeGrange, one of the rowers.”
A violent shift took place across Running Deer’s features, from surprise and anger to a complete absence of emotion. Then, “You this far should not be. Not safe.”
Something was wrong. This broken, halting French was a dramatic change from the fluency Simon had just heard Running Deer speak to his companion. Palms sweating, he kept his observation to himself. “Care to keep me safe on the way back?”
Running Deer’s eyes burned with intelligence. His mouth remained a tight, flat line.
“How rude of me.” Simon thrust his hand out to the Frenchman, who soundly ignored it. “I’m Simon LeGrange. Just came up from New Orleans with a Company boat. Couldn’t help but overhear you speak French. Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for a young man—my wife’s brother, actually, whom she hasn’t seen in years. She believes he may still be in Louisiana somewhere. Have you any information on the whereabouts of a—”
The young man looked at Simon with eyes the color of gunmetal. They were Julianne’s eyes. The reddish-brown hair, the scar above his right eye—the exact shape of the tip of a spoon, just like Julianne had said. He looked about twenty years old, but the wilderness aged one so much, he could actually be younger. He could be eighteen. He could be Benjamin Chevalier.
“What did you say?” the young man asked, and Simon realized he’d breathed the name aloud.
“Benjamin? Your sister is Julianne? Now twenty-six years of age, a midwife from Paris . . .”
Running Deer cut short his inquiry with a splintering tone. Benjamin held up his hand to halt the interruption, and Running Deer backed away from view. Benjamin’s fingers were long and slender, like Julianne’s.
I’ve found him. Simon could scarcely believe his good fortune.
“Who are you again?” Benjamin whispered.
“Like I said, I’m your brother-in-law.”
Benjamin shook his head as if to clear it. Raked Simon with his gaze from head to toe. “Julianne is here, in Louisiana?”
“New Orleans.”
Suddenly, both air and time stretched taut. Simon felt the atmosphere parting behind him, the whirring of metal rushing at him, end over end. Heard the thud that cracked his spine and drove him to the earth. Numbness and agony crashed together. Blood filled his mouth, trickled from his lips. Simon tried to breathe through suffocating terror but only gurgled and rattled instead. God in heaven, save me.
Simon’s body was losing its tenuous grip on his soul. As his blood watered the grass, he slipped further from one life to the next. Dangling between, he saw himself broken on the ground. Saw Running Deer plant his foot on Simon’s back, wrench his tomahawk free, wipe the blade on the grass.
Benjamin rolled Simon over and peered into his dimming eyes, resignation and regret chasing across the young man’s features. “I’m sorry.”
Voices churned, distant and muff
led, as though underwater. Simon was sinking.
“No one can know you live, Many Tongues.”
“But my sister . . .”
“No one.”
A brown hand seized Simon’s hair at the front of his scalp, and he shed the bonds that fettered him to his mortality.
Chapter Ten
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
AUGUST 1720
“Shhhh, it’s all right. I’m here.”
Kneeling on the hard-packed dirt floor, Julianne dipped her sponge into a bowl of water, squeezed out the excess, and bathed a young soldier’s face. The air thick and sour inside the broiling barracks, her chest strained against her stays as she inhaled, yet she could scarcely draw a satisfying breath. Still, there was no place she would rather be at this moment than tending her delirious fever patient, a young man named Joseph surely no older than seventeen.
Nursing the garrison was not the work she’d had in mind when she traded Salpêtrière for Louisiana. But healing was a life-giving practice too, if she could only master the art of it. There were a scant forty soldiers stationed in New Orleans, eight officers, and no fort. Any reduction of the garrison through illness or death courted danger. The entire settlement was at risk when soldiers were too ill to defend against potential attack. Though branded for murder, Julianne was here to preserve lives—whether they were mothers, babies, or soldiers. Such a fulfilling occupation would please not only herself but the governor, the Regent, and most importantly, the King of Kings who ruled over them all.
She’d requested a number of medicines from the warehouse, but while she waited for the Superior Council to approve them, she decided to visit the ill with what she could put together on her own. There were fewer than sixty French women in New Orleans—less than half the number of men—and none of them approaching full term, so any risk resulting from exposure to sick soldiers would be limited to her own person.
How odd, she mused, that the very thing she had so resisted when Bienville had demanded it of her would be the working out of her own grief. For in nursing this soldier, she did for him what she gladly would have done for Benjamin when it was he who suffered fever. She could not have foreseen, that morning in the governor’s house, the significance this role would take on.
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