Gwyneth Atlee (18 page)

Across the mule’s ribs, a hand gripped his arm. He bit back a yelp
as flesh pressed his burned flesh, but in a moment he forgot his pain
completely.

“Gabriel!” she cried.
“Je ne comprends pas!
How can this be, of all
these people? My float was sinking, and this was the only thing to
grab, and—”

He released the mule’s mane with one hand to stroke her cold
fingers. “Maybe we were meant to find each other. Oh, Yvette, I
thought I’d seen two men drowning you, but at that moment I was
pulled under as well.”

“Those ill-bred ruffians didn’t drown me, but it was not from lack
of effort on their part.”
“After I broke the surface, I couldn’t find you anywhere. I— Please,
marry me, Yvette. You didn’t answer me before, but do it now. Promise
that you’ll marry me when this is over. Promise me.”
When she didn’t answer, he continued, his words suddenly in
flood. “I’m sorry. I know I made a mess of that, but—”
“Let me guess. You neglected to read Miss Willington’s chapter on the
etiquette of proposals over a dead horse floating on the Mississippi River.”
Her absurd comment, in the face of all that had happened, took
Gabriel aback. But the moment passed, and he found himself
laughing, more from relief that they had found each other than at
her statement.
“I—well, I did read that one,” he said after he recovered, “but this
is different. It’s a dead mule, actually.”
“In that case, I shall forgive your ignorance,” she told him, her voice
now so hoarse that he could barely understand her.
“So will you? If we can get out of this?”
Another pause. As the water lapped at them, he tried to read her
face by starlight, but the moonless night had shrouded her expression.
Finally, she answered. “Yes, I will, Gabriel Davis. I
will
marry you.”
“I love you more than I ever believed it was possible to love
anyone, Yvette.” He squeezed her arm. “You’re so cold. Give me your
other hand. I don’t want you to slip off.”
“I can’t lift my left arm. I think it’s broken. Something must have
struck me when I fell from the boat.”
“You should have told me you were hurt! Are you injured
anywhere else?”
“I don’t think so . . . hard to tell with this chill. What about you?”
she asked.
“I’m not sure, either. Maybe a few burns.”
He released her fingers to unwind a length of rope he’d wrapped
around his upper arm. “I’m passing you the mule’s lead rope. Let’s
wrap this around your good arm in case you fall asleep. Don’t try to
tie it, though. If this animal goes under, you’ll want to be able to
break loose.”
She murmured her thanks and accepted his help.
“Will someone come for us?” she asked.
“They probably heard that blast all the way to Memphis. Don’t
worry. They’ll come for us. . . . I swear it.” He spoke with more
certainty than he felt, but the words helped reassure him, too.
“But what if they can’t find us? It’s so dark.”
“Look that way, where the sky is getting a bit grayer. That must be
the east, then. Once the sun’s up, they’ll find us for certain.”
“It’s a big, big river, Gabriel.”
“You found me, didn’t you?”
“I did. And I promise,
mon cher,
that I won’t let you go again.”

Grandfather’s voice kept Darien company, but it could not keep
him warm. By this time, he was shivering so violently that he could
barely keep hold of the two planks that he had killed to get.

His mind was playing tricks, too, pushing him again and again
into the past, forcing him to watch more of the things that he’d
been forced to do. Telling the old Creole he knew a way to make
profitable investments in Union industries secretly so that his
neighbors wouldn’t guess. Dropping poison into Lieutenant
Simonton’s drink. Choking the life out of Marie, the only woman
who had ever really loved him.

Out in the darkness, Darien heard a new sound, a deep, repeated
splashing, a pulling of oars through water, a distant voice shouting,
“Hallo! Call out if you can hear me!”

He felt such shock at it that he could not respond. Or perhaps the
cold and the long swim had numbed his mind.
The sounds drew steadily nearer. Darien was content to simply listen, without doing anything at all.
But he finally came to himself long enough to shout out, to wave
until they found him and hauled him from the water. He had to, for it
could only have been his destiny that provided this escape.
It must have been, or all his actions had a darker meaning than he
could bear to face.

Cold. So very, very cold. If she could only get dry, she might feel
better. Must get out of these rain-soaked petticoats. Must get out of
this rain.

Yvette woke with a start, wondering where on earth she was and
how she’d come to be there. One thing had certainly been right about
the dream. She was soaked through, but, she realized with a jolt of
horror, her condition had nothing whatsoever to do with any rainstorm.

She was floating in a broad, cold river. Her arms both ached
ferociously. The right, where it was wound up tightly in some sort
of rope. When she tried to move the left, pain shooting through her
elbow made her cry out sharply.

Fresh agony exploded upon her senses, and she remembered
that greater blast aboard the steamboat, the struggle to survive,
the clumsy swim with one arm injured. Finding Gabriel out here
floating, holding on to this dead beast. Promising she would
become his wife.

When he didn’t answer, fear coiled in her belly. She spoke his name
once more, her voice tight and anxious.
The sky had lightened somewhat, enough to turn the drowned
mule an indistinct dark gray, the color of a particularly wet fog.
She used her good arm to pull herself up slightly so she could see
over the hummock of the bloated equine corpse. She prayed that she
would be able to reach over the beast’s ribs to shake Gabriel awake.
But there was nothing save the water, which must have taken
Gabriel.
Yvette screamed, a long, painful shriek that fractured into sobs.
Gabriel was missing. Gabriel was gone!
Though her throat felt as if her grief were tearing it to pieces, she
sobbed with loneliness and loss. And all her losses crowded in upon
that drifting island in the Mississippi, an island made of misery and
death. The loss of her possessions, from all her clothing to poor Lafitte,
who surely must have died.
So many, many losses, but none worse than Gabriel. Yvette
screwed shut her eyes, now blinded by a haze of tears. Blinded to
anything except her horror. But closing them did nothing except
isolate her with her grief and make her wonder why on earth she
still held on.
“Hello out there! You fellas holler out if you can hear me!”
Yvette looked up, wondering if in her exhaustion she might have
imagined the man’s voice.
“Hello!”
The second shout convinced her, but the voice seemed to float
above the water, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. She
turned her head to try to see a boat or perhaps a nearby shore. She had
grown so stiff, the action caused her upper body to slide off the mule’s
back with a splash.
She tried to flail her legs, but her clumsy efforts had little effect.
Had it not been for the lead rope wound around her forearm, she
would have gone down like a stone. But even with it, she could barely
manage to push her face above the water’s surface. Once, then twice,
she fought her way to air, then coughed and sputtered with the effort
to breathe. She couldn’t think of shouting out; the struggle to keep
from sinking again consumed every ounce of energy. She could hold
nothing back.
But it wouldn’t be enough. The cold hours in the water had
weakened her too much to pull her head and shoulders up on the
dead mule’s back. Fight though she would, eventually the river
must win out, and someone far downstream, perhaps as far as New
Orleans, would find her, dangling from the lead rope of a drowned
army mule. Once more, she submerged.
Something snagged her hair, then pulled it sharply, yanking her
head free of the river’s grip. She could see a dark shape just above
her—a little boat, a man leaning far over the side. The man still
clutched her hair near the scalp.
It hurt badly, and she wanted to shout at him to stop it, to cease
tormenting her while she was dying. Instead, she felt him shift his
grip to her midsection. With one huge hand, the black man drew her
from the water and into the bow of a small sounding yawl.
“God’s sake, it’s a woman. And look at this. She’s got up like a
soldier. What do you suppose . . . ?” A bristle-bearded white man
wrapped her in a blanket as he spoke to his two mates.
Other drenched survivors were lying in the bottom of the yawl,
each one wrapped in a wool blanket. Some were moaning, maybe
crying. She raised herself up on her good elbow and tried to see
their faces.
“Gabriel?” she called out. Then more loudly, “Gabriel?”
No one answered.
Curling her body tightly within the blanket, Yvette wept until
exhaustion overtook her. Her last conscious thought was a fleeting
image of Gabriel, his hair waving in the murky waters of the
Mississippi, like Marie’s.

God forgive him, he had lost Yvette. Even now, Gabriel wasn’t quite
certain how it happened. Only that at some point cold and pain and
shock had conspired once more to lull him to sleep. His grip on the
mule’s mane must have eventually relaxed, and he’d slipped easily
beyond the safety of the float made by the creature’s air-filled lungs.

He awoke as water closed over his head and struggled to the
surface. But not before he’d taken in a lungful of the river, which
caused him to choke and cough so badly that several minutes passed
before he could call out.

He doubted that Yvette had heard him, that she had awakened. By
this time, the mule’s body had caught an eddy that spun it away from
the main current, which had swept Gabriel downstream.

He tried to fight the river to reach Yvette, but his limbs felt as if
they’d been cast in iron. Within moments, he realized that his mad
attempt to swim upstream would mean certain death. Shouting once
more to Yvette, he gave up and turned his gaze downstream to find
something—anything—he might hold on to.

A keg drifted not ten yards away. Even that felt like a mile as he
floundered toward it. When finally he reached it, he found it difficult
to hold. No matter how he tried to grasp its rounded sides, the blasted
thing rolled and spun and bobbed out of his grip.

“Over here!” a man’s voice shouted. “Get over here and hold on!”
Gabriel turned his head to see a trio of soldiers around a floating
bale of hay. They weren’t much farther than the keg had been, but to
Gabe the distance looked impossible.

“Come on, soldier! Swim for it!” another man shouted. “You’ll
drown for sure on that thing.”
He was right, Gabe knew. He had no choice but to try.
Summoning the last of his reserves of strength, he clumsily paddled
toward the raft.
He’d nearly made it when his legs cramped. He fought the pain and
with a flurry of his arms kept his head above the water’s surface. But
he could no more reach the hay bale than he could sprout wings to fly.
A hand extended outward from the hay bale. He focused his gaze—
and his efforts—on those fingers.
“God damn you, grab on!” the soldier screamed at him.
He did, and the soldier dragged him closer, so close that he could
grasp the twine that held the bale together. Two men, the soldier who
had offered him his hand and a man with a gash extending from the
corner of his mouth to his cheekbone, hauled Gabe up onto the bale.
“Rest up here a spell,” the third man told him. “We been
takin’ turns.”
“Damn awful cold up there,” the man with the cut said. “Breeze
cuts right through them wet clothes.”
He was right, Gabe realized. Though his exertions had sent warmth
flooding through him, it took only moments for him to begin shivering.
His forearms and hands, exposed to air once more, began to burn
intensely. He ought to crawl back in the water and just hold on to the
side. But he could neither move nor speak now, so within moments he
succumbed to his body’s desperate need for sleep.

Yvette was barely conscious of the strong hands that passed her
from the yawl to something larger. It might have been another steamboat,
or it may have been a military cutter. She knew little more than the
shivering that had overtaken her body, not a delicate shudder, as if she
had been chilled, but a powerful, palsied quake that threatened to
shake her all to pieces.

As more survivors were brought aboard the vessel, she began to
take some notice of the swirl of activity around her. Her thoughts
coalesced into concern, not for herself but for the one she’d lost.

She wanted to ask one of the men about Gabriel, whether they
had seen him, whether they would look. But no matter how she
tried, her jaws worked only at their chattering, and her voice failed
her completely.

By the pearl-gray light of early morning, she saw a man kneeling
beside her, his hair pale silver, his expression grim. She noticed he
wore a Union uniform. “We’ll have you feeling better in a trice, miss.”

But his words barely registered, for her gaze fell upon the wickedlooking knife in his right hand. Though her limbs lacked coordination,
she struggled as he moved the blade in her direction.