The Mark of the King

by Jocelyn Green

  Bewilderment unmoored him. With Bienville’s call dimly echoing in his ears, compassion and denial both tugged his heart. Lily was half-French, marked clearly enough by her complexion and the sharper angles of her features, but how could he know if she was his? And yet the instinct to protect her overtook him. Would he abandon her here on the gulf shore if he knew beyond a doubt her father was some other Frenchman?

  He studied her beautiful face. Her brown eyes, sparkling with tears, stared expectantly back at him. Waiting for his answer.

  “Congratulations, monsieur.” Julianne smiled at the new father, a wigmaker from Paris, as she held open the door to his bedroom so he could see his wife and newborn twins. “You see, good things come to those who wait.”

  It had taken two days, but the babies and mother fared well, an exhilarating accomplishment for both midwife and mother. After witnessing such dangerous labor, Julianne’s own longing for a child bowed to the grim reality that every birth also opened the door for death. She would not wish the pain of bereavement upon anyone.

  After giving instructions to the parents and a promise to visit later, she took her leave. Since the French engineer, Adrien de Pauger, had finally come to New Orleans, the settlement now boasted a grid of streets with names like Iberville, Bienville, Chartres, and Royal. Decatur Street took Julianne toward home.

  Just over the levee, the Mississippi churned around its crescent turn toward the gulf. Dragonflies glittered between gossamer wings. As Julianne covered a yawn with her hand, her own words floated back to her on the roar of the swollen river. Good things come to those who wait. . . .

  In truth, waiting only suited her when the birthing process required it. And yet waiting was all she seemed to do of late. Wait for a baby. Wait for Marc-Paul to return home. Wait for Benjamin to appear again. Wait for a client to call her for a birth. Between deliveries, the days wore out and fell away, and Julianne was wearing out with them.

  As she approached the center of town, the noise of activity buoyed her. Children chased each other in the cleared space called the Place d’Armes. Between the barracks and the levee, soldiers on barrels slapped cards and knees and snuck sips of eau-de-vie. Julianne could not see them without thinking of Benjamin and Marc-Paul.

  In the weeks since she’d sworn to keep her brother’s life hidden from her husband, the secret had burrowed into her soul like a crayfish slowly working its way through a levee. Quietly. Treacherously. It scared her. For as one crayfish’s path created a fissure that would eventually break apart the embankment and flood the town, couldn’t one secret allow a trickle of distrust that could grow and destroy a marriage? This was the question that raked its teeth through her mind.

  The end of Decatur Street brought the end of New Orleans, and Julianne’s path curved, following the river’s bend, until she saw the house that had been Pascal Dupree’s. Turning left, she took the footpath past it and away from the Mississippi, skirting the swamp that separated Pascal’s home from her own. A little more than half a mile later, her house came into view.

  Marc-Paul emerged, shielding his eyes from the shimmering sun. His body was taut with purpose, his movements pulled between staying and searching. He was looking for her.

  Julianne’s skirts billowed out in front of her as the wind fairly pushed her toward him, and with long strides he strode to meet her.

  “Ah, mon amour,” he murmured as he neared, “how I’ve missed you.”

  Before she could reply, he drew her into a fierce embrace. She dropped her midwife’s satchel at her feet and circled his waist with her arms. He smelled of the ocean and sun and tobacco. Gently, he tipped her chin up. His brown eyes were as warm and deep as velvet.

  “Welcome home, husband.” Julianne exhaled, pulse quickening.

  The intensity of his gaze heated her cheeks. He smiled as he twirled a ringlet of her hair around his finger. “Ma belle,” he said, as if she were the most beautiful woman in King Louis’s court and not a bedraggled midwife coming home from two days’ work. When his lips met hers, she allowed herself to melt against his chest, to be enveloped by his strength, his scent, his love. Benjamin’s defaming words dissolved in the heat of her husband’s kiss.

  “Come.” Marc-Paul took her hand and slung her satchel over his shoulder. “Let’s get you home.” Once they were standing on the gallery before the front door, however, he paused. “Before we go in, I must tell you. We have a guest.”

  Julianne blinked. “A guest?”

  “A little girl, eight years old. I do hope you’re not displeased. She had no other place to go, you see. Her mother died.”

  “And her father?” she asked. “Where is he?”

  He dropped his gaze and rubbed the back of his neck before looking up again. “Lily is half-French. Half-Indian.”

  Comprehension filtered through Julianne’s fatigue. Of the babies she had delivered of Indian slave women, none who were mixed race were cherished by their fathers. None were even claimed by them. “You found her in Mobile?”

  A lump shifted in his throat. “Her uncle brought her to me. The bruises on Lily’s arms are from him. He was only too eager to be rid of her. I realize it’s a terrible shock, but I—I would like her to stay with us.”

  “Until?”

  Marc-Paul lowered her satchel to the floor before returning her gaze. “Indefinitely. Permanently.”

  Julianne tried to keep up. “As our house servant?”

  “No, ma chérie, as a member of the family.”

  Her eyebrows hiked in surprise.

  “Would you sit down please?”

  Fatigue pressed down on her, and she drooped into a chair. Something was building inside her husband. With bated breath, she waited for it to rise higher, higher, until finally it spilled out into the open.

  “I might know who her father is.” He winced.

  “What?”

  “I can explain. I vow I have never loved another woman as I love you.” Marc-Paul paced the gallery as he spoke. “You must believe that. When I wintered with Willow’s family, I was twenty-three years old. On the brink of starving or freezing to death, whichever would have come first. They took me in, sheltered me, fed me—”

  “Gave you a bed,” Julianne whispered and watched him flounder in his own memories.

  “I resisted her overtures. I was meant to be a man of the cloth before my father enlisted me—I know God’s rules about fornication, cultural customs notwithstanding. I had no desire to break my vow of abstinence before marriage.” He marched away from her, then back again.

  “Then what happened?”

  Marc-Paul’s nostrils flared as he exhaled. His jaw bunched. “Her father made me her bedfellow that winter, and I shared her bed. She understood I wanted only sleep. Then one night I drank. Too much, apparently, for whatever I imbibed overpowered me.”

  “Your inhibitions?”

  “Perhaps. My memory, certainly.” Three paces away. Three paces back.

  “You speak in riddles. Be still. Be clear.”

  Brow creased, he stopped before her. “When I awoke the next morning, I had no recollection of the night before. Pascal Dupree, who slept in a nearby cabin with her brothers and father, told me that he heard Willow and I—” He looked away. “It’s his word against the gap in my memory.”

  “I see.” A wave of heat scorched Julianne’s face. She rose and strode to one end of the gallery. A songbird trilled in the quiet that yawned between them. “You don’t remember it, truly?”

  Marc-Paul didn’t follow her. “I remember Willow . . . offering. But I don’t remember accepting. The fact that Lily was conceived during the winter I was there doesn’t prove she is mine.”

  “But you also can’t prove she isn’t.” It was the same logic that had condemned Pascal to the front lines of the war. Julianne rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.

  “You’re exhausted. Forgive my insensitive timing. Forgive me if I’ve hurt you. But, mon coeur, it happened almost nine years ago. No m
atter who her father is, she needs a home. I want her to stay.” Compassion filled his voice.

  Desperately, she picked at the snarls of jealousy in her mind until her thoughts untangled. She might cringe at the thought of him with another woman, but how could she condemn him for taking Lily, when so many men refused responsibility for children they knew were theirs?

  His eyes pleaded as he crossed to her and grasped her hands. “One day, God grant it, we’ll welcome our own baby into the family. But in the meantime, is your heart not big enough to love Lily too?”

  Julianne’s thoughts shifted dramatically from Marc-Paul’s past to the future now stretching out before them. A child in the home, so suddenly! It nearly took her breath away. “Of course,” she whispered, overcome. “Introduce us, if you please.”

  “She’s inside.” Marc-Paul ushered Julianne through the door.

  Without bothering to remove her lace cap, she swept past him and into the house.

  “I told her my old bedchamber could be hers now.”

  Julianne’s back straightened, as if braced against his words. Only then did he realize that room would have been almost sacred to her. The only place she had held her son before they put him in the ground. “I’m sorry.” He reached to touch her, but she raised her hand, and he dropped his arm to his side.

  “It was empty,” she said, nodding, and he heard the pain in her admission. “I understand.” When she turned toward him, her nose was pink, and her eyes glimmered like grey pearls.

  Marc-Paul ached with her disappointment. “I know it’s not what we had in mind. . . .” Julianne’s life was measured by the births of other women’s babies. She deserved a husband who would give her children—and not like this. But he could not bring himself to admit as much aloud for fear of her resounding agreement.

  Shame burned in his gut and heated his blood. Turning from his wife, he led the way to Lily’s chamber and knocked quietly at the door.

  “Lily, I’d like you to meet my wife.” He spoke first in Mobilian and then repeated the sentence in French before entering.

  Lily’s eyes rounded, and she backed away, her shell necklace swinging against her bare chest. The unbrushed mass of her hair overwhelmed her small face as she bowed her head and sank to the floor. She hugged her deerskin skirt to her legs as she pulled her knees to her chin.

  “Enchantée.” Julianne dropped a curtsy, then looked imploringly at Marc-Paul. “What do I say?” She lowered herself to the floor as well, and her gown pooled around her. Marc-Paul told her the words of greeting, and she repeated them awkwardly.

  Lily blinked at Julianne, then reached out and touched her silk hem. Suddenly the child recoiled and pushed herself farther away. “I miss my mother,” she wailed. “I want my mother! I don’t belong here!”

  Julianne’s hand trembled as she touched her lips. “What? What did she say?”

  Hesitantly, Marc-Paul told her the truth and watched the color drain from his wife’s face. After a moment, she rose silently. When he murmured to Lily, Julianne faded from the room.

  A week after returning from Mobile, Marc-Paul shoveled earth from the ditch he was digging in preparation for the inevitable spring flood. All along Decatur Street, his soldiers were tasked with the same assignment. Their laughter told him they were taking a break. Again. Their laziness grated his patience.

  Straightening, he thrust his shovel like a pike into the ground and marched toward Matthieu Hurlot and Raphael Le Comte, who stood a full head taller than almost every other soldier in the garrison. “Your idleness is a disgrace,” he growled. “Have I truly been gone so long that you don’t remember how to string two hours of labor together?” He should not need to point out that these canals were mandatory and critical. The Mississippi, already swelling with melted snow from the north, rushed around its crescent bend even now.

  The two soldiers glanced at each other and then back at him, amusement twinkling in their eyes.

  Frustration needled Marc-Paul. “Discipline yourselves, or I’ll do it for you. You’ll not be laughing after a few weeks behind bars.” He hated that threatening jail time was the only way to extinguish their smirks. “If I can’t trust you to follow these simple orders, how can I trust you to follow my command should New Orleans be attacked? Prove that you’re worthy to be a soldier of the king.”

  Raphael nodded, the broad expanse of his face suddenly serious, while Matthieu only looked to be holding his breath.

  “No more breaks until I say so. Understood? We work until this is done.” Marc-Paul turned and strode back to his shovel.

  “Well, he’s in a fine temper!” Matthieu said loudly enough to be heard.

  “Can you blame him?” Raphael countered. “When the cat was away, how his mouse did play! I feel sorry for him, really.”

  Marc-Paul about-faced and hiked back to the soldiers. “What did you say?”

  Raphael gripped his shovel. “Your trouble at home, sir. It’s not your fault, and you have our sympathies. Unless—perhaps you’ve worked it out already, in which case—congratulations.” His frame strained the seams of his uniform as he began digging.

  “What trouble at home? What rumors have bent your ear?”

  “No rumors, sir,” Matthieu said. “We’ve been very quiet about it, haven’t we, Le Comte?”

  Marc-Paul held up his hands to stop their work. “The mouse at play. You can’t be referring to my wife.” He should walk away now. He should not listen to whatever these fools had to say. But neither could he let them slander Julianne.

  Matthieu shrugged. “You were gone a long time. That is, your wife was home alone for a long time.”

  Suspicion flowed coldly through Marc-Paul. “Exactly what are you saying?” When answers were not forthcoming, he added, “I order you to speak plainly.”

  Raphael glanced at Matthieu, who offered nothing. “We—we went singing with a group of other soldiers and sailors for Lundi Gras. We went to your house.”

  Marc-Paul stepped closer. “And?”

  “Your wife came out to hear us, and then we moved on after our song was over.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  Matthieu cut his voice low. “When she went back inside, she wasn’t alone.”

  “What the devil do you mean?”

  “One of the singers had slipped away from the group,” Raphael explained. “When we looked back, he was going inside your house. With your wife. They closed the door in a hurry, but it sure looked to me like they knew each other.”

  “Who?” Fire burned through Marc-Paul’s limbs as he snapped his gaze to Matthieu. “Was it you? So help me, if you attacked my wife in my absence—”

  “It wasn’t me!” Matthieu cried, rubbing at the arm she had shot. “If it was, do you think we’d tell you about it?”

  Marc-Paul stared at him, then at Raphael, gauging their expressions. “You’re lying.”

  “Don’t you think she gets lonely, waiting for you to come home? No children to keep her busy . . .”

  The words pummeled him. She’d said she missed him, he knew she longed for children, but Julianne would never be unfaithful to him. “Were you drinking? Before you went out singing—were you intoxicated?”

  Both soldiers colored. “Captain,” Raphael tried, “be reasonable. Who doesn’t drink during Lundi Gras? That doesn’t discredit our report.”

  Marc-Paul disagreed. But he’d play along. “Then who went inside my house? Could it have been Etienne that you saw?”

  “Your manservant? The one shorter than me?” Matthieu laughed. “No, this fellow was taller. He wore a pirate costume. I don’t know who he was. A widower of some woman who died in childbirth, perhaps? A rogue sent here by lettre de cachet? Look around, Captain—we’ve plenty of bachelors to choose from. And she does bear a mark that—”

  “If there were a thousand princes at her door, she’d never let one in,” Marc-Paul said, cutting him off. “I trust my wife, and that’s the end of it. Not another word against her chara
cter. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” they both replied at once.

  “Now dig this ditch, and don’t let me hear your voices again.”

  Marc-Paul stormed back to his own post along the road, wrenched his shovel from the ground, and drove it into the ditch with renewed vigor. The accusation against Julianne was so baseless that he wouldn’t even bother mentioning it to her. Doing so would only distress her when she was already fatigued with trying to parent a little girl she didn’t understand. A girl who may have been born from Marc-Paul’s own sin. That in itself was surely more than enough to handle. Soil sprayed the side of the road as Marc-Paul tossed it from the trench.

  But why would Matthieu and Raphael invent such a story when they knew he was already cross enough to toss them both in jail? The question dug into his mind even after the ditch was complete. They are fools, he told himself, and buried his doubt down deep.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  APRIL 1722

  Lily felt better as soon as her bare feet hit the sand. Houses were fine for sleeping in, if she had to, but days should be spent outside. Now that the sun had lifted the morning fog, she closed her eyes and raised her arms toward the sky, forming a funnel to catch all the rays she could. Warmth and light soaked her skin. But not enough of it.

  She looked down at the French dress Madame made her wear, then glanced back at the house. Saw no one. As she scampered along the ridge, she unfastened her buttons down to her waist and peeled the fabric off her arms and chest, letting it flap against her skirt as she ran. The familiar bounce of her mother’s shell necklace on her bare skin brought comfort and ache all at once. Just weeks ago, she was in her old village, where girls and women wore only deerskin skirts. She wondered what her friends were doing today.

  “Lily!” Madame Girard’s voice was far away.

  Lily ran deeper into the swamp before pausing to catch her breath. She looked up. The trees towering up out of the water were enormous. Masses of matching cones pushed up through the water at the bases of their trunks, like little worshipers paying homage to their tree-god. Bright green feathers sprouted from the tips of their branches. Their limbs were hung with pale grey tendrils that swayed in the wind like witches’ hair. Arching her back, Lily held out her arms, looked way up at the tops of the trees, and rocked side to side, smiling as her hair brushed against her naked back.