The Mark of the King

by Jocelyn Green

  Etienne emerged from his quarters and looked from the light to Julianne. “What the devil?”

  “Lundi Gras singers,” she explained. In Paris, the day before Mardi Gras included carolers in disguise, reveling from house to house. “C’est bon.”

  “Are you sure, madame? They sound a wee bit tipsy.”

  “Not at all!” a voice called as they approached the house. “We’re just French and merry!”

  Julianne laughed, and a group of ten or so singers came prancing up to the house, masquerading in all manner of makeshift costumes, from a shepherdess to a peacock to a pirate, so thorough that she didn’t recognize their true identities.

  Vesuvius, yapping, barreled into the group.

  “Vesuvius!” Julianne called. “Come!”

  He ran the opposite direction instead, into the gardens.

  Exasperated, she clapped her hands and called again, to no avail. Meanwhile, Etienne ushered the musicians and singers off the property and then headed back to his quarters. “Bonne nuit, madame! See you in the morning!”

  “Bonne nuit, Etienne! Merci!” She waved from the front door, then went inside to slip on her shoes so she could retrieve the ill-trained pug.

  Julianne threw open the door once more—and nearly ran headlong into a man holding Vesuvius.

  “Looking for this?”

  She reared back in surprise, then recovered herself. It was merely a youthful Lundi Gras singer in a pirate costume, delivering her wayward pet. “I thought you’d gone.”

  He looked at her with one grey eye, the other covered with a patch. “I came back, Julianne. Didn’t I tell you I would?”

  Her heart lurched into her throat. It couldn’t be. She stepped aside, allowing the light to spill around her and onto the young man’s features. “What game are you playing?”

  “It’s me.”

  A breeze raised the hair on her neck as confusion churned through her. Every sense stood on tiptoe as she fought to gather her wits. Details leapt at her. The scuff of his boot on the doorstep. The smell of tobacco on his breath. That chestnut hair splaying from under his cap with the wildness of a coureur des bois. One grey eye, piercing her heart with a saber’s point.

  “Take off your patch.” Julianne heard the shaking in her voice, felt it in her limbs. But it was nonsense. It was madness, and surely he would refuse her request. He was on masquerade, enjoying his anonymity. To reveal himself would spoil his game. He was no one. Surely. Only a fool would think otherwise.

  “You are alone?” The stranger’s tone held no hint of menace as he peered over her head into the house.

  Julianne nodded, for she was no longer able to form a single word.

  “Make no sound,” he whispered, then slowly removed his hat and pulled the disguise from his head. And there it was. The V-shaped scar above his eyebrow, still visible twenty years after the doctor used spoons to pull him into the world.

  With trembling hand, Julianne reached up and feathered its groove with her fingertip. Shock stole all speech. Had she lost her mind? Was she dreaming? He was a dead man. A ghost. He was Lazarus, back from the dead. Impossible!

  Without waiting for her to speak, he guided her back into her house, then closed and locked the door behind them both. Vesuvius jumped from his arm and trotted away, sneezing. “Surprised to see me, aren’t you?”

  “Benjamin,” she breathed at last. “Is it really you?” She gripped his arms and looked at him across the distance of the last six years. The softness of boyhood had melted away, revealing the lean angles and planes of a young man’s jaw and cheekbones. His shoulders were broader. He stood a head taller than he had at fourteen. But it was him.

  Benjamin pulled her to himself, wrapped his arms around her. She clutched him with the irrational fear that he might slip away again if she didn’t make him stay. Tears squeezed past the shock, and she stood back to look at him once more.

  Smiling, he wiped the tears from her cheeks with his handkerchief. “Please don’t cry.”

  “I thought you were dead!”

  He nodded. “And deeply do I regret the pain it caused you. If there were another way . . .”

  Julianne flinched. “You knew? You let me believe I’d lost you? But why? And how did you know you’d find me here?” Other questions rushed to mind with the crush of a tidal wave. What have you been doing? Why is there a grave for you if you’re still alive? How did you find me? They frothed and swirled together, roaring between her ears.

  Benjamin guided her to the sofa. “You’ve suffered a terrible shock. Nothing I say may account for it right now.”

  A log crumbled in the fireplace as she sank onto the cushions and drank in the sight of the grown man sitting beside her. The clock on the mantel chimed, and she realized this moment would not last forever. The minutes marched on with no regard for her inability to keep up. Furtively, she clasped his hand in both of hers.

  “Am I now your captive, sister?” He chuckled, but a softness in his eyes belied his casual tone. “Be at ease. I won’t disappear quite yet.”

  “Yet?” The single word cut through all other questions in her mind, driving them in one direction like a river carving a canyon. “Will you not stay?”

  “I’d love nothing more than to sit at your knee and exchange stories as we did when we were children. I missed you more than you’ll ever know.” His voice suddenly hoarse, he raised her hands and brushed a kiss to her knuckles. Then his gaze fixed upon her wedding ring. “But I mustn’t tarry.”

  “Marc-Paul would rejoice to see you again!”

  “He’s not here, though, is he?” Alarm laced Benjamin’s whisper.

  She shook her head, and the lines in his face relaxed.

  “No. No, Julianne, on this we must agree. You must not speak of me to anyone. Especially to your husband.”

  She released Benjamin’s hands, felt her palms grow damp as they rested on the oriental pattern of her gown. “How is it you know of my marriage? And why should he not know you are well? He speaks so fondly of you.”

  “Does he? Then he hasn’t told you everything. A master of secrets, that one.” Benjamin twirled the eyepatch on its string around his finger.

  “And so are you, I see.” Julianne chafed her arms, suddenly cold. She watched silently as Benjamin knelt to add a log to the fire. “You’d better explain yourself.”

  “Captain Girard thinks I’m dead because his testimony against me resulted in a death sentence. Your husband wants me dead, Julianne.”

  “What?” she gasped. A headache swelled beneath her skull, throbbing with every pulse.

  “You can see why he must never know I’m still alive. He’ll kill me. He’ll say it’s simply carrying out orders, but he’d as soon murder me in my sleep and call it lawful.” He remained on one knee for a moment, gazing in the fire.

  “No. No.” Julianne pressed her cool fingers to her temples. “How dare you come into my house and say such wretched things! You, who have kept me in grief for you all this time—is that not deception? How do I know you’re not lying to me now?” But why would he?

  “It’s no lie. I vow it’s the truth.” Brushing his hands on his breeches, he returned to her side and sat.

  “Then what did you do to prompt such condemning testimony in the first place?” Her brother was charming but no saint, this much she knew.

  Benjamin held her gaze. “It’s not what I did that matters, but what he says I did.”

  She licked her lips. “Then what did he say?”

  “That I deserted.”

  Julianne leaned back against the cushions. The conditions the troops faced were horrid indeed, but running from duty and country was dishonorable. Shameful. And punishable by death. “Did you? Desert?”

  Benjamin pulled a toothpick from his pocket and stuck it between his lips, chewing the end of it as he had as a child, though she had urged him not to. The quiet sound of his teeth on the narrow stick grated on her ears.

  “Tell me.” She fought to k
eep the scold from her tone, but having raised him herself, she couldn’t help but feel like his mother as much as his sister.

  “I would spare you the details.”

  “You would keep secret the details. Have a care, mon frère. For all my love for you, Marc-Paul is my husband now.”

  Benjamin crunched the toothpick in one corner of his lips. “What did he tell you about me?”

  “He said you were intelligent and quick to learn native tongues. He said he taught you all he knew until your knowledge rivaled or surpassed his own.”

  Mercifully, he took the toothpick from his mouth, broke it in half with two fingers, and tossed it into the fire. “And that is the crux of it. Have you ever seen, dear sister, what jealousy can do?”

  Julianne kept her face a mask. But in her mind, she saw Adelaide Le Brun, the midwife she had surpassed in both skill and reputation, and poor Marguerite’s still body. “Yes.” Her chest constricted, and the heat from the fire suddenly grew intolerable. “I have seen what jealousy can do. But I beg you, speak no ill of my husband.”

  “Then I will say no more.” Benjamin stood and wandered about the salon, observing the patterns on the rug, the clock and candlesticks on the mantelpiece, as if he were in a museum. Then he stepped into the adjoining dining room and headed for the sideboard. “You don’t mind, do you?” he said as he lifted a pewter pitcher of water and poured himself a cup.

  She narrowed her eyes at him as he drank.

  “Will you tell me how you came to be here? In New Orleans?” he asked. “Married to the captain?”

  Bewildered and exhausted as she was, Julianne relayed to him the scaffolding of events that had led her there. She added the epilogue to John Law’s colonizing scheme she had learned last summer. “It finally collapsed, his investors ruined. Law disguised himself as a woman to flee France with his life.”

  Benjamin’s eyebrows raised. “Serves him right. And how does New Orleans fare now?”

  “We’ve had few new colonists since the forced immigration stopped. The worst of the famine ended when a few ships finally arrived with provisions, but the Company of the Indies abandoned the colony, and many concessionaires likewise abandoned their plantations, freed their indentured slaves, then left them here while they returned to France.”

  “Did they?” His eyes gleamed strangely.

  She frowned. “Where have you been that all of this is news to you?”

  “Never mind that. Tell me, are you happy now?” His voice gentled as he asked it. “You, above all others, deserve every joy life can bring.”

  Julianne’s thoughts flew to her baby, named for her brother, in the tiny coffin in the levee. She considered her empty womb and the healthy babies given to Denise, Lisette, and prostitutes, servants, and slaves. Happy? It would be glib to say she was.

  Vesuvius ambled back into the salon, and she reached down, holding her hand out so he would trot to her. He nuzzled his velvet face into her palm.

  “What are you doing here, Benjamin? Why have you come back to me? Why now, especially if you cannot stay? Will you stay in the shadows for the rest of your days?”

  He smiled, obviously keen to her diversion. “It’s in the shadows where I can be of most help to my country.”

  “I don’t understand.” Struggling to orient herself, Julianne nestled back once again on the sofa while the pug sat on the hem of her skirt.

  “You don’t need to. Where is the captain?”

  “Mobile,” she answered. “The annual gift-giving ceremony with the leaders of the Choctaw villages.”

  “That’s right.” Benjamin nodded as if he should have already known this. “Very important, with the war on, eh? Remind me, what is the rate for each Chickasaw scalp? Something like one gun, one pound of powder, and one pound of balls for each?”

  “No, two pounds of balls, plus the gun and a pound of powder,” Julianne corrected. “And eighty livres of merchandise for each Chickasaw slave.”

  Benjamin’s eyes glimmered as he swirled the water in his cup. “Yes, that’s what it was.”

  She rose and walked toward him, the better to read his features. But before she could ask any more questions, he downed the last of his drink and replaced the cup on the sideboard, then wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

  “I’ve missed you, Julianne. I love you.” He released her and tugged the eye patch back over his head. “But I must away.”

  “When will I see you again?” She grazed his sleeve with her fingertips, then dropped her hand behind the pleats of her gown.

  “When it’s time. Do not look for me. And remember, you mustn’t breathe a word to anyone—not to Girard, not to anyone—that you’ve seen me. Either they will believe you, and I’m a dead man, or they’ll label you insane as well as criminal.” He pressed a kiss to her cheek. “Bring me to God in your prayers, ma sœur. Perhaps He will listen to you.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  MOBILE, LOUISIANA

  APRIL 1722

  Outside Mobile, sunrise dazzled the gulf waters as Marc-Paul and Caesar finished loading the flat-bottomed barque with the canvas that had been their tents for the last several weeks. The spring breeze skimming his skin smelled and tasted of the ocean. After seemingly endless gift-giving while Bienville smoked the calumet of peace with Choctaw leaders, Marc-Paul was as grateful for their alliance as he was ready to return to Julianne.

  He hated being away from her, but relations with the Choctaw were more critical now than ever. The Chickasaw had been attacking French and Canadian boatmen on the Mississippi already this spring. If it continued, the wheat harvests in Illinois Country wouldn’t get down to the coastal settlements, and Mobile and New Orleans wouldn’t be able to get provisions and ammunition to the posts up north, near the fighting. If the attacks worsened, they would block the flow of furs and deerskins, Louisiana’s only major export. Ironic, Marc-Paul mused, since it was Bienville’s jealousy of British trade that sparked this war in the first place.

  Bienville marched double-quick down to the shoreline. “Ready.”

  “Yes, sir.” Marc-Paul chafed the salt from his hands and arms where the gulf waters had splashed him and prepared to follow the commandant into the boat.

  “Stop!”

  Bienville groaned, and Marc-Paul turned and shaded his eyes with his hand, in search of the voice’s owner. “I’ll see what he wants.”

  Leaving Bienville and Caesar in the boat, he approached the tawny figure in leather breechcloth and leggings striding toward him, half dragging a little girl by her upper arm.

  “Peace, friend,” Marc-Paul said in Mobilian. A sense of urgency propelled his steps over the sand until he was close enough to see the beads and shells woven into the man’s long black hair.

  “They told me you were here.” He shoved the girl at Marc-Paul with a scowl. “Take her.”

  Marc-Paul had seen this man before. The broad span of his chest and shoulders, his tapered waist, even his frown rang familiar. Frantically, he scrolled through his memory until recognition sliced through him. “Standing Bear.” Marc-Paul and Pascal had wintered in his family’s home. With his younger sister, Willow.

  “Willow is dead. Now her burden is yours. As it should be. She’s your daughter.” He turned and walked away.

  “What? Standing Bear, wait!”

  Standing Bear laid his hand on his tomahawk and slowly swiveled on his bare feet. “You French. You say ‘friend,’ but you are no friend to us. We deprive ourselves of grain, of game, and of fish so that you may survive. You need us to live, you need us to fight your wars, but what need do we have of you?” He pounded his chest with his fist. “Is it your guns we need? We lived on bow and arrow before we’d ever seen one, and never lacked. Is it the blankets of red, blue, and white that we cannot live without? We are warmer with animal skins. Before you came, we were men who knew what to do. Now we walk like slaves to do your wishes. You are no friend of my people. Take the fruit of your seed and be gone.” He flicked his hand t
oward the child crouching behind Marc-Paul’s leg. “The sight of her pale skin makes me sick.” Standing Bear strode away, his black hair swaying freely across his back.

  “Girard,” Bienville called from the boat, “we mustn’t tarry.”

  The words barely registered. Stunned, he knelt in the sugar-white sand beside the girl. If she was indeed conceived during the winter he’d spent with Willow’s family, her age would be about eight years. Head bowed, she sniffed, and he wondered if she was crying behind that curtain of dark hair. Say something, he told himself. But what could words do? What could he possibly say?

  “Please don’t take me back,” she whispered in Mobilian. “He hates me.” With one thin hand, she parted her hair and looked Marc-Paul full in the face. Bruises mottled her arm.

  “He did this to you?”

  “He is very strong. I displeased him. I always do, somehow, but it was worse after my mother died. I tried not to anger him, but my skin . . .” She peered thoughtfully at the backs of her hands. “My name is Lily, for the white flower.”

  The flower of France, the fleur-de-lys, was a lily, Marc-Paul mused, and he wondered if her name was one more reason Standing Bear could not abide her presence.

  “Captain, we must away.” Bienville’s voice inserted itself again. “Leave the half-breed. She’ll find her way back.”

  Marc-Paul waved toward the boat in acknowledgment but could not take his eyes from Lily.

  “I tried staining my skin darker with coffee beans and tobacco juice, but he didn’t like that either.” She glanced slyly at Marc-Paul’s hands, then laid one of her own across his, comparing their coloring. She tilted her head and met his eyes. “Are you really my father?”