“The Fusil de Chasse.” Girard took it. “It’s a hunting gun. Do you know how to load it?”
“No.”
“You will. Let’s take a walk, shall we?” He matched his gait to hers and positioned himself to block the sun from striking her face. His simple kindness brought immediate relief to her eyes as they strode into the swamp behind her cabin.
“It takes a minute or so to load this musket, so you want to take careful aim and make your shot count. You may not have time to load again for a second chance. An attacker may be able to catch you while you’re busy with the barrel.”
Julianne nodded but hoped such a lesson would never be put to the test. A squirrel darted across their path as they penetrated deeper into the trees. Spanish moss draped branches with greenish-grey fringe, and shadows darkened Girard’s features.
A breeze whistled through the shade, stirring the smell of decomposing leaves and warm, fallen cypress needles. She looked around, imagining all the places a hunter could hide if she were ever the prey. She shuddered. Such a predator could be anywhere.
“Look here,” the captain was saying, and she refocused on the barrel. “You’ll remember this better if you do it yourself.”
With the walnut stock of the gun on the ground, the five-foot-long Fusil de Chasse was only a few inches shorter than she was. Julianne grasped the barrel and tipped it toward her so she could look into its open mouth.
“Measure the powder into this gold cap, then pour the powder down the barrel,” he instructed. “Now comes the paper wadding, and you’ll tamp it down with this ramrod.”
She drew a piece of folded paper from the shot pouch and dropped it into the barrel, then pulled out the metal stick and rammed it down.
“Next comes the ball, and you’ll tamp that down too. And then more wadding.”
“And tamp it down,” she said as she accomplished the tasks.
“That’s right. The order is very important. Remember: powder, wadding, ball, wadding. And tamp down everything but the powder. It’s very important,” he said again.
Julianne refrained from asking what would happen if she misremembered any of it.
“Last step before you’re ready to fire. Hold the gun like this, barrel pointed away from you. Open this little hatch here under the cock, pour a small amount of powder in the pan, then close it again. The flint inside will last several shots before it wears down enough to need replacing. Now lift it to your shoulder.” He stood behind her as she did so. “Place your other hand here.” His left hand cupped hers and brought it beneath the gun to support its weight. It was seven pounds, she guessed, the same as a healthy newborn baby. He released her hand and quickly stepped away from her.
The flintlock steady against her shoulder, she cast him a sideways glance in time to see the color rising in his complexion.
“Your range is about a hundred yards. There’s a bead sight on the tip of the barrel. Line that up on your target, then cock it and squeeze the trigger. You’ll feel two explosions—in the pan when the powder ignites, and the ball firing from the barrel. I want you to know how it handles.”
Heart hammering, Julianne closed one eye and aimed at a cypress tree in the distance. She rolled her lips between her teeth, held her breath, and fired. As the barrel spewed spark and smoke, the gun recoiled, slamming into her shoulder.
The captain steadied her from behind. While his hands warmed her waist, embarrassment scorched her cheeks for being knocked off-balance by the blast. Her shoulder throbbed where the pointed corner of the gun’s butt had rammed it. She’d not be surprised to find a bruise there. “Well, I won’t be doing that again any time soon.” She lowered the Fusil de Chasse and peered into the trees, not at all certain she’d hit any of them, let alone the one for which she’d aimed.
“The recoil is powerful, but now you’ll know how to better brace yourself for it.”
She turned to face him, and only then did he release her from his hold. Heat spread up her neck at the earnestness in his gaze. “You speak as though I’m to make a habit of it.”
“You will fire if you need to.” His tone leaving no room for debate, Captain Girard’s expression sharpened into severity again. “Promise me. You will defend yourself if the need arises, Julianne.”
Her breath caught at his intensity. “Is that an order, Officer?”
His lips twitched in a smile, but his eyes remained grave. “It is.”
Chapter Fourteen
MISSISSIPPI RIVER
LATE SEPTEMBER 1720
The sun’s slanting rays beat upon Marc-Paul and bounced off the river. After wiping his palms on his buckskin breeches, he switched his paddle to the other side of the pirogue and continued rowing upstream along with Red Bird and the three soldiers who could be spared from New Orleans. They had joined an eight-vessel convoy of voyageurs returning north for the winter in their birchbark canoes but would part ways with them soon. Marc-Paul’s mission was not in Illinois Country or New France but in Red Bird’s Choctaw village, about a hundred miles north of New Orleans. A few reports had trickled in about Chickasaw raids on the river, but those had occurred north of where the Yazoo River met the Mississippi.
Red Bird’s ebony hair blew free in the wind. Sunlight glinted on the copper spools in his earlobes, which hung almost to the gathered shoulders of the French linen trade shirt he wore. His lips drew thin and tight, an unsettling contrast to the jaunty verses the voyageurs sang in the pirogues ahead of them.
“Alouette, gentille alouette, Alouette, je te plumerai. Je te plumerai la tête. . . .” Lark, nice lark, Lark, I will pluck you. I will pluck your head. . . .
The hair on Marc-Paul’s neck stood up. Red Bird’s warning still resounded in his ears: “They say only the British can supply us properly. . . . We can fire British muskets as well as French.” His gaze dropped to the canvas-wrapped packages wedged between his knees and the soldier in front of him. The pirogue was loaded with French muskets, powder, game-shot, and balls to trade, among other items such as trade shirts, vermillion, and blankets. Lots of blankets, thanks to Pascal. With this shipment, the soldiers would procure bulk quantities of maize, beans, and pumpkins for the garrison. And the Choctaw would have more munitions for the war.
Up ahead, the French-Canadians grew more boisterous with every round of their song. “I will pluck your wings. And your neck! And your eyes!”
“It’s our colony’s wings that are being plucked by not growing our own food,” Marc-Paul muttered.
Joseph, a young soldier rowing in front of Marc-Paul, tossed a confused look over his shoulder. “Why should we till the soil ourselves when we get everything we need from the Indians by trade? Besides, they need our textiles and weapons too.”
“Ah, but do you never wonder if we need the natives more than they need us?”
Joseph just shrugged and joined in the singing with gusto. “I will pluck your tail!” Behind Marc-Paul, the other two soldiers, Andre and Gaspard, laughed and added their voices to the song as well.
“There.” With one low word from Red Bird, the soldiers’ exuberant singing fell away. The Choctaw pointed to a clearing along the riverbank, the place where they would haul their pirogue ashore. After shouting farewell to the voyageurs ahead of them, Marc-Paul and his soldiers followed Red Bird’s directions and steered their vessel toward land.
The river slapped against the pirogue as the men pulled it halfway up on shore. After unloading it, Red Bird and Marc-Paul tied the paddles with leather thongs to the planks that had served as seats. Then they piled rocks into the pirogue, pushed it back into the water, and let it sink to the riverbed so it was completely submerged. Confident it would remain hidden until they came back for it, Marc-Paul distributed the bundles of trade goods to his soldiers. Andre shouldered fifty pounds of powder, Gaspard took fifty pounds of game-shot, and Marc-Paul wore fifty pounds of balls on his back. To Joseph, who was still somewhat weakened by his recurring fever, he gave the lightest load: a package of blanke
ts, trade shirts, and vermillion to wear on his back, and the three muskets for trading to carry by hand. Red Bird carried naught but his bow and a quiver of arrows, a sheathed knife hanging round his neck. The soldiers followed him into a mass of pine trees.
The shade offered respite to Marc-Paul’s eyes, which had strained against the river’s glare for more than a week. After sitting on the hard wooden bench for thirteen hours a day, walking was a relief to his stiff muscles, even with the burden he carried. Sweet pine sap and the tang of damp soil cloyed in the humidity. Somewhat absently, he kicked a pinecone from his path and wondered if Julianne searched for slippery elm and cat’s foot along the bayou during his absence. He prayed she’d taken her gun.
Grunting, Gaspard labored beneath the game-shot on his back. He nodded at Red Bird. “If the savages are so keen to have these muskets, why does he not shoulder one himself?”
“Firing a gun gives one’s position away,” explained Marc-Paul. “Most Indians attack unseen. And think of how long it takes to load your weapon. Red Bird can launch an arrow in mere seconds.” And by the time one saw an enemy in the woods, mere seconds was all one had.
“How far is it to Red Bird’s—” Joseph halted. “What is that?”
Red Bird stood before a tree. The bark had been stripped away, and one side of the trunk was painted black. The other side red. The rest of the soldiers gathered around it.
“It means a war party has been here.” Marc-Paul met Red Bird’s wary gaze. Images burst upon his memory of shaved heads painted red with scalp locks hanging down their backs. Of eyes blinking at him from behind a mask of black paint just before their owner released an arrow from his bow. Of Benjamin, just before he turned his back on Marc-Paul and ran.
“A war party?” Andre repeated and wiped the cuff of his shirt across his brow.
“They spend two or three weeks in hiding, waiting for the perfect chance to strike a good blow,” Red Bird said in French. “If there is no such opportunity, they emblazon the tree as a sign they were here and that they will return again soon.”
Gaspard spun in a slow circle. “How soon?”
A flash of crimson bloomed at the edge of Marc-Paul’s vision. The closer he moved toward it, the tighter his gut twisted. “They’ve already come back.” He pointed to a soiled red sash on the ground.
“The canoe that left a day ahead of us,” said Joseph. “They must have stopped here to make camp last night.”
The stench of rotting flesh crept into Marc-Paul’s nose and throat. As he followed it, the whirring of insects swelled in his ears until he saw them. Facedown in a bloodstained bed of needles sprawled a voyageur and the indentured servant he’d hired to help him bring supplies to Fort Rosalie, near Natchez, on their way north. They’d been stripped naked and scalped. Mosquitoes feasted in the ragged, tomahawk-shaped holes in their backs. Five arrows rose from the men’s bodies, and Marc-Paul cringed to imagine them trying to run, terrified, from their attackers.
He took his bundle from his back and lowered it to the ground. Bending, he pulled each shaft from the flesh, but the arrowheads remained buried in the corpses. The soldiers came close enough to see and then immediately backed away, cursing and covering their noses.
Red Bird scooped up a wooden club on the ground beside the bodies. “Chickasaw.” He held out the club for Marc-Paul to examine. The symbols carved on it matched Chickasaw heraldry. This club claimed the deaths as their doing. “And now they have the supplies meant for the French soldiers at Fort Rosalie.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t Choctaw?” Andre’s words were muffled by his hand, which he held over his nose and mouth. “I thought the Chickasaw were much, much farther north.”
Red Bird pinned him with his gaze. “Why would we kill the very people who supply us? No. Chickasaw can travel far. They have horses. In fact, they usually exchange French captives for horses, at a ratio of one to one. In this case, I’m sure whoever did this didn’t want the trouble of taking two captives across the wilderness to British lines. This could have been the work of just one lone raider.”
Red Bird’s words sounded far away. Marc-Paul envisioned two scalps flapping against some warrior’s breechcloth and wondered if he would keep them for his own glory or take them to the British, who were without a doubt backing the Chickasaw. The thought lodged like a stone in his chest.
By the time he and his soldiers finished burying the bodies and emerged from the woods, the sun was sinking on the horizon. The sky to the west, above the trees, seemed awash with brandy. The soldiers marched in silence the remaining distance to Red Bird’s village.
Night fell as they approached, and fireflies pulsed in the darkness. Marc-Paul could hear the Choctaw before he could see them. Both men and women sang to the rhythm of rattles made from gourds and pebbles.
“We should wait until they are finished before we go any closer,” Red Bird said. “It is a ceremonial dance around a sacred fire.”
“Do you want to join them?” Marc-Paul studied the smooth planes of Red Bird’s face.
“I would not leave you outside, unprotected.” Drawing an arrow from his quiver, he peered into the dark. “Not again.”
Music filled Marc-Paul’s ears from inside the village as he stood in a small circle with Red Bird, Joseph, Andre, and Gaspard. “A life in the wilderness,” the Choctaw sang, “with plenty of meat, fish, fowl, and the Turtle Dance, is far better than our old homes, and the corn, and the fruit, and the heart-melting fear of the dreadful Europeans.”
“What are they singing?” Joseph whispered.
They are singing that they are better off without us. Instead of translating, however, Marc-Paul simply told him to keep vigil. Soon they’d be home in New Orleans with provisions to share. But for now, they were strangers to be wary of, even among the very allies they had come to supply.
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
OCTOBER 1720
In a cramped, dim room in the back of the tavern, Julianne soothed her client, who lay on a sagging bed in the corner. She was six months along with child. “The bleeding has stopped. You must stay abed, Yvette, resting, but I believe your baby may yet reach full term.”
“Do you—do you have any way of . . . ending it early?” The prostitute’s voice could barely be heard. On the other side of the river cane door, a fiddle played, sharp and frantic, accompanied by out-of-tune voices. The floor shook with the rhythmic pounding of dancing feet not ten yards away.
“Pardon me?” Julianne frowned. A crash sounded, only slightly muted by the door, then a shattering and a roar of laugher. The reek of spilled corn liquor wafted into the room.
“It’s no good for business, you know. And what would I do with another mouth to feed, anyway? I’d be a terrible mother, I would. You can’t deny it. It would be better if . . .”
It wasn’t the first time a woman had requested a miscarriage. “My job is to keep you and the baby healthy until it is safely delivered into this world.”
“And what in heaven’s name will we do after that?” Tears traced Yvette’s rouge-smudged cheeks.
No answer Julianne could think of would suit. There was no house of industry to which she could turn, no orphanage. There was no Salpêtrière. And no family.
“You’re right lucky, you know, that you didn’t have to pick up this line of work to survive here, like I did. Lucky you have your own job, no need to rely on any man. Lucky no one cares you were branded for murder.”
Julianne’s heart jolted. “What did you say?”
“Right, then, am I? Helene said as much.” Yvette stared at her, unblinking.
Slowly, Julianne released the breath she’d been holding. She’d forgotten how much of her story she’d shared with an orphan named Helene while they made the crossing from France those long five months. Her pulse trotted. The less said about her past, certainly the better.
“Your services are no longer needed.” Yvette burrowed down under her thin blanket. “Leave me.”
“W
ell then, I’ll check on you tomorrow.”
“I said I don’t need you.”
Pressing her lips together, Julianne simply nodded, shouldered her midwifing satchel, and picked up her lantern. Rather than exiting through the back door, she slipped into the public house to find Helene, who was draped over some man’s shoulder.
“You were right to come for me. The baby may still do well, but it’s important Yvette keep to bed rest. Could you urge her to stay abed?”
Helene scoffed. “Staying abed is what she does best.”
“You understand my meaning perfectly well. One more thing. I’m sure you meant no harm by it, Helene, but please do not mention my criminal case to anyone else. It’s difficult enough to overcome the stigma already hovering over me; I can’t imagine what would happen if the details came to light.”
“You want people to think well of you, is that it? The way they all think so well of me?”
Julianne frowned at the bite in her tone.
“If the nuns who raised me could see me now . . .” A dark chuckle broke from Helene’s lips.
“I know. I’m sorry.” Julianne truly was. Her head ached, and it wasn’t just with the noise and odor stuffing the tavern. The sight of Helene wearing her long hair loose and her stays even looser, when she’d once been a devout and meek girl, was painful to behold.
“You don’t know. And you’re not sorry.”
Julianne gasped. “Helene, I—”
But she had already turned her back to refill someone’s drink.
Elbowing her way out of the tavern, Julianne plunged into the night air, grateful to be shed of the place. A welcome breeze cooled her. As stung as she’d been by Helene’s prickly words, her concern for Yvette and her baby eclipsed it.
A raccoon crossed her path, startling her from her reverie, and scampered toward the barracks. Taking a deep breath, she gripped her lantern tighter and headed for home. The hour was late—well after midnight. Exhaustion quickly overtook her, but she was less than half a mile from her cabin. She’d be in her own bed soon enough.
The Mark of the King Page 15