Tears stung Julianne’s eyes as his thoughtfulness clashed with the horror of her wedding night in the stable. In his own way, Simon had been thoughtful then too. Her heart ached with the weight of all it held. She struggled to disentangle the forebodings that wrapped her spirit, but their tendrils clung like ivy to brick. She met her husband’s eyes again. “But where would you sleep?”
Marc-Paul pointed to the chaise in the corner and crossed to it. Taking off his winter uniform coat, he laid it on the back of the chair. His linen shirt gleamed white behind his deep blue waistcoat. “I promise to behave, but I do insist on staying in the room with you after what happened the other night in your cabin. If someone has designs on you, for any reason, I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you under my own roof. That is, our roof. Your well-being is my foremost concern. It has been since the moment I met you.”
Julianne’s lips parted in surprise, but Marc-Paul wasn’t finished.
With a few steps, he went to the small table near the bed and lifted a book from it. A Bible. Reverently, he held it in his hands. “I was an altar boy once.” The ghost of a smile softened his chiseled face. “My mother wanted me to be a priest. I grew overfond of robes and rules. I watched myself and others so closely, looking for missteps that needed correcting. It was wrong of me, and it disgusted my father so much that he yanked me from the church and enlisted me in the army.” He chuckled. “He was ready for me to become a man and thought soldiering would do it.”
“Which it did,” she offered.
He smiled. “Yes, but it’s not enough. I don’t want to be just a man. I want to be a man of faith. I’ve come back around to this book, Julianne. I’m no priest, and to tell you the truth, the Capuchins here are more interested in politics and status than they are in souls. I’ve no interest in confessing to them. But I do want this house, our house, to be a house of faith. I want to try to follow these teachings.” He thumped his finger on the cover. “I want grace and peace for you and for me. No condemnation. Grace. And peace. From God, and from each other. This is my prayer.” Marc-Paul searched her eyes. “How does that sound to you? Have I shocked you with my religion? Or does it sound like blasphemy instead?”
“Grace and peace?” Julianne repeated. “I am marked by condemnation, and in truth, I worry its curse will never leave me. Yet I can think of no better way to live, and no better way to treat each other than with grace and peace.” She took the Bible from his hands and ran her finger along the spine before opening it. “I never wanted to be a nun, I confess.”
“Why does this not surprise me?”
Julianne warmed beneath his gentle gaze. “But I do want what Francoise has. She prays so easily, and life doesn’t scare her. She knows God, which is different than just knowing about Him. That’s what I want.”
“To know God, and to be known by Him. Yes.” His brown eyes glimmered in the candlelight.
She nodded. “And to know His grace and peace, though storms rage and nations fight and food is scarce and France has forgotten us. And though I wear judgment on my very skin.”
“You never deserved it.”
The pain and guilt of losing Marguerite washed over her afresh. “I’m not innocent, Marc-Paul. I don’t claim to be.” Mustering her courage, she unveiled to him the bloodstained day that haunted her still. “Maybe it was my sinful pride that kept me from calling for a surgeon right away. If a doctor had been present—” She swallowed the catch in her voice. “I loved Marguerite. She would have lived if Madame Le Brun had not bled her so dangerously, but she also may have lived had I not believed so much in my own capability. Because I failed to prevent her death, her son is motherless, and her husband bereaved. May God forgive me.” Her throat closed over the words.
Marc-Paul cupped his hands around her shoulders, covering the fleur-de-lys. “He does forgive you, as far as the east is from the west. He doesn’t see that when He looks at you, and neither do I.”
Julianne laid the Bible upon the table and looped her arms around his waist. “And what do you see?”
“Don’t you know?” A lump bobbed behind his cravat before he smiled, sending warmth to the tips of her toes. “I see my wife.”
Chapter Nineteen
NOVEMBER 1720
Marc-Paul pulled his paddle through the mat of duckweed covering the bayou, vigilant for alligators. Mist muted both sound and color so that the pirogue floated in eerie quiet. Grey Spanish moss dripped from blackened branches, ghostlike in the fog-bleached air.
Here on the Bayou Saint-Jean, halfway between New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain, misgiving nipped at him. He’d managed to speak with Dancing Brook, but her observations about Pascal’s demeanor and activities brought more questions than answers. Whatever he was up to, Running Deer seemed part of it, from what she’d shared. Since the Chitimacha slave and his master had joined the hunting party this morning, it had been easier to leave Julianne alone in New Orleans.
Still, suspicions dogged Marc-Paul. Perhaps he was too distrustful of his fellow settlers. But ever since Simon’s gun had been stolen right out from under Julianne, and because he still couldn’t identify the thief, he’d begun to think of New Orleans by its Choctaw name. Town of strangers.
The ache in his neck crept upward until it filled his head as well. He couldn’t decide whether it was the constant strain of the Chickasaw war on their resources or merely a casualty of sleeping on the chaise for two weeks while Vesuvius snored beside Julianne.
Red Bird rowed noiselessly in front of him. He’d come to New Orleans to trade more scalps for merchandise on behalf of himself and other Choctaw who knew no French, but his presence on the hunt was a kindness unpaid for by trade goods.
The pirogue emerged from the swamp and into dawn’s half-light as they neared the lake. After beaching the vessel, the hunters slung their flintlocks over their shoulders and climbed out.
The rising sun lifted the fog, revealing wild geese—tens of thousands of them, if not more—covering Pontchartrain fifty yards ahead. Marc-Paul’s stomach rumbled at the sight. After months of eating corn, the colonists were hungry for meat, and he could almost taste the game. Andre, Gaspard, Jean, and Laurent quietly headed west, keeping their distance from the shoreline until they were ready to move in.
Marc-Paul and Red Bird trailed Pascal and Running Deer. No words passed between them, lest they disturb the waterfowl. The ground became soft and wet beneath their steps as they closed in on the geese.
When he was close enough to the water’s edge, Marc-Paul staked his spot in a band of cattails. Pausing, he indulged in the tranquility of the moment. The sun radiated its bloodred glow through the thinning vapors lingering above the water. A great blue heron browsed among the pickerel weed spiking up through the shallows of the lake. Aware that others would be firing their muskets soon, he reached for his powder horn and shot pouch.
“Gaspard!”
Frowning, Marc-Paul turned toward Andre’s reedy voice. He was running toward Gaspard, who dropped his gun and fell to his knees.
Then a blood-curdling cry ripped through the mist. A war cry. In the same instant that Marc-Paul whirled around, thousands of geese exploded from the lake behind him, honking and flapping their wings in a cacophony that only added to the bedlam. The hunting party, exposed and backed up against the lake, had become the prey.
Red Bird’s neck arced as tight as the bow in his hand as he drew back his arrow and let it fly. “Get down!” he shouted in French, his voice barely audible above the rioting geese filling the sky.
Crouching, Marc-Paul loaded his gun with a ball rather than game shot, cursing the precious seconds ticking by. He looked up. Saw an arrow strike Andre in the leg. The young man’s mouth opened, but any cry that issued forth was swallowed up by the geese’s frantic clamor. He dragged his leg behind him as he tried to run. Another arrow struck him in the back. Then a third. He was fifty yards from Marc-Paul when he collapsed next to Gaspard.
A native darted fro
m the swamp and across the marsh toward Andre, hair flying behind him as he ran. His tomahawk was in one hand, his scalping knife in the other. Blood rushed in Marc-Paul’s ears as he trained his sights on the moving target. He squeezed the trigger, absorbed the recoil in his shoulder, and watched the ball tear through the native’s tattooed throat. The knife and hatchet dropped to the ground just before he fell.
“Look out!” Pascal’s words drove Marc-Paul to duck just as an arrow sailed over him.
Between geese and guns, he could not untangle the noise between his ears. Shots fired, but were they French or British balls peppering the air? At least one other native fired from between the trees still wreathed in haze, but how many there were, he couldn’t guess. Urgency washed over him in a wave of heat. He reached for his powder and shot once more. Sweat slicked his palms. Red Bird had disappeared from view, but Marc-Paul dared not look for him now, lest he spill his powder or drop the wadding into the marsh. The minute it took him to arm the weapon seemed to last an hour.
Someone was shouting. Jean? Laurent? Surely Andre and Gaspard were already gone. Hunched over one bent knee, Marc-Paul scanned the edge of the swamp, musket to his shoulder. A red-painted face flashed between the cypress and tupelo gum trees. Marc-Paul swiveled, his sights trained on the movement, grinding his knee into the chill, wet ground. An impossible shot. He might as well have been aiming for a woodpecker.
The relentless squawking and flapping overhead scraped his ears. Then the native in the swamp drew an arrow from his quiver, and the noise fell away.
A blast sounded from behind, and the thick smell of sulfur choked the air. A scream filled with terror and pain exploded from Pascal. Rattled, Marc-Paul lowered his flintlock for an instant, then suddenly fell backward into the marsh.
Fire combusted inside his chest. Eyes squeezed shut against the white-hot pain, his hand instinctively moved toward it and stopped when it bumped something smooth and hard. Groaning, he opened his eyes and closed his fingers around the dogwood shaft of an arrow rising from his flesh. He stared blankly into the sky above him, where the last of the geese flapped away.
Julianne sat at the work table in Etienne’s quarters and ground corn into meal while Vesuvius slept on her feet.
“When the captain said to keep an eye on you, I’m quite certain he didn’t mean for you to do my work.” Etienne wrapped his hands around his cup of coffee, and Julianne winced inwardly at the sight of his swollen knuckles. Surely his arthritis made grinding corn a painful task, though he never complained.
“Nonsense. I enjoy your company, and I enjoy being useful.” She let the pestle rest in the mortar and sipped her coffee.
“If the hunting is going as planned, we’ll have roast goose for dinner! But in the meantime . . .” Etienne wiped the coffee from his mouth with the back of his hand and went to the fire. With a grunt, he knelt on one knee and stirred among the ashes with a poker until he uncovered four small bundles and rolled them onto the hearth. “A little something your husband taught me. It’s called paluska holbi. It’s the Choctaw’s most basic cornbread.” He placed them on the table before her, then wiped his hands on his breeches. “Your light repast, madame.” His eyes twinkled with accomplishment.
“Merci, monsieur!” Julianne smiled. Each bundle was wrapped tightly in cornhusks and tied with a strip of the same. Taking one, she carefully peeled the husks away to reveal a neat roll of cooked cornbread. “How very clever! Marc-Paul taught you this?”
“He learned it from a young man who lived with the Choctaw for more than a year. Learned everything about them, and brought it back to share with us. Clever, indeed.” Etienne beamed.
A lump formed in Julianne’s throat. Merci, Benjamin. Tears glossed her eyes as she tore off a piece of the steaming bread and placed it in her mouth. It was a connection to her brother, however small, and she was grateful.
Etienne eased himself onto the bench and drummed the three fingers of his right hand on the table. “I do hope the hunt is going as planned.” Deep furrows carved his brow.
“You worry?”
Etienne took a slow drink of his coffee. “It’s that Pascal Dupree character. I never trust a man with dimples.” He shook his head with conviction. “It just doesn’t suit.”
Julianne chuckled. “There are more substantial reasons not to trust a man than his appearance.”
Frowning, Etienne tilted his head. “True, true. But the dimples—the way he flashes them about like a coquet—no self-respecting man does that unless he’s up to no good. At least, no Canadian. No offense to you or the captain.”
Laughing, Julianne resumed grinding the corn.
Her hand stilled.
Shouts ricocheted between the house and Etienne’s quarters. She knew those voices. Jean. Laurent. But Marc-Paul’s baritone was not among them.
Dropping her bowl, Julianne leapt up and hastened outside to see her husband stumbling toward the house, supported by Jean. His face contorted in obvious pain, his complexion was the color of death itself. He held the shaft of an arrow steady in his chest.
Gasping, she dashed ahead of them and opened the front door to the house. Everything else in the room blurred, and every sound muted as Jean helped Marc-Paul stumble through the salon, then heaved him up onto the dining table.
Julianne rushed to him, aware of Etienne close behind her, and laid her hand on his brow. His eyes were ringed with dark grey bands.
“It must come out, ma chérie,” he rasped. His hand moved, and she grasped it. The cold of his skin seeped into her palms. “Don’t pull the shaft or it will release the arrowhead. It will burrow deeper, and you’ll have to fish for it. Cut it out. Now.”
Shock numbed her. The air stretched thin and tight as she struggled to grasp whether this was actually happening or if it were only a vivid nightmare. The feathers at the top of the arrow’s shaft were bold and stiff, a flag of conquest staking its claim. No. You will not have him.
“Etienne, set some water to boil, then bring brandy and clean rags.” Her voice sounded distant. She gave orders as though she were removed from the patient, as though he were only another ailing soldier at the garrison. As though the arrow in his chest did not pierce her very heart as well.
“What the devil happened out there?” Etienne growled on his way out the door.
“A raid,” Jean shot back. “Is he going to make it, Julianne?” His face was blotched with pink and red.
“He’s strong. He’ll make it.” Show them, mon coeur.
Etienne burst back in with a bottle of brandy.
“Help him drink it.” Julianne hurried from the room, donned her birthing apron, and retrieved her midwifing kit. Scissors, small knife, suturing needle, string, probe. Help me now, Lord, she prayed but did not wait for her hands to stop shaking before returning to the dining room.
Shadows drooped beneath Etienne’s eyes. “He won’t drink.”
Julianne stifled a groan. She knew of Marc-Paul’s aversion to alcohol but had no idea it precluded medicinal purposes as well. “Hold him fast.”
Jean paled but laid his hands on one of Marc-Paul’s arms. Etienne held the other.
“You can do this,” Marc-Paul whispered, his brown eyes glazed.
Julianne nodded. “It’s going to hurt. Please drink the brandy.”
“Don’t need it. Make the incision wider than the arrowhead.” His gaze landed on the feathers at the end of the shaft. “The small feathers mean it’s a small arrowhead.”
Jean looked away, but Etienne remained steadfast, talking to Marc-Paul to distract him. The Canadian slipped into his French patois as he spoke, and the current of his words kept Julianne moving. After tucking her lace flounces up into her sleeves at her elbows, she cut away his shirt until his entire chest was exposed.
“Julianne,” Jean said quietly above Etienne, “if you could bring Angelique from Denise’s womb without so much as looking, you can pull an arrowhead from his chest.”
Confidence crept cautiously ba
ck into place, and she gently probed the wound with her fingers. She needed to know the orientation of the arrowhead before she knew which direction to make the incision. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and slipped her index finger down into the wound until she felt the sharp edges buried there. Dark red rivulets of blood flowed from the open wound and down Marc-Paul’s side, and Etienne caught them with rags.
Knife steady in her hand now, Julianne clenched her teeth and incised her husband’s skin to make wider the passage. The cords of his neck pulled taut as she separated his flesh, and he groaned between gritted teeth. Then he relaxed, unconscious.
“Enough,” she said, and laid down her knife. Once more she reached into his body, this time with her finger and thumb, and more blood seeped out, filling her nostrils with its sweet, metallic smell. Firmly she grasped the slippery arrowhead, and the feathers quivered in response. “Almost there.” Slowly, she pulled straight up until the arrow was completely free and laid it on the table at his feet. So narrow a weapon, yet how frail the human body beneath it. “Done,” she pronounced, and pressed a rag to stanch the scarlet flow from the wound. “The worst is over, mon amour.” Even in his unconscious state, pain lined his handsome face. She pressed a kiss to his brow before straightening.
Etienne exhaled. When he looked up, his blue eyes were glossed with tears. “I was right to worry. Hang it all.”
“It happened so fast. Red Bird was with him, and so were Pascal and Running Deer.” Jean rubbed his eyes and shook his head.
Julianne met Etienne’s troubled gaze before turning back to Jean. “What happened?”
“The fog—we must have paddled right under their noses when we passed through the swamp.”
Her heart lodged in her throat. “Here? So close?”
The Mark of the King Page 20