The Creole Princess (23 page)

Lyse realized her hands were trembling as she fumbled for the flint and lit the bedside candle. She had no notion what could be so troubling for the virtuous Daisy. At first she’d had the horrifying thought that her friend might be with child. Once she had the candle casting its flickering pool of light, she slid to the rag rug beside the bed and crouched to peer underneath.

Books? Slowly she reached for a stack of three leatherbound volumes that had been shoved far back, toward the middle of the bed. When they were in her hands, she scanned the covers, setting them aside one by one. John Locke’s
Two Treatises of Government
, Adam Smith’s
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
, Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense
.

She looked up to find Daisy peering over the bed, watching her with reddened, tear-drenched blue eyes.

She sat back on her heels, pushing the books away hard. “Daisy? What does this mean?”

Daisy swallowed. “It means I’m a traitor.”

11

N
ATCHEZ
L
ATE
J
ANUARY
1778

During the last four months, the world had folded in upon itself. The days passed in a colorless wash of hopelessness until Scarlet found herself wishing for one of Madame’s backhanded slaps just to break the monotony. Today was Sunday, but her new master did not believe in educating or baptizing slaves. So this morning, like every morning, she got up when the overseer rousted everybody out of the quarters with a snap of his whip against the side of the building. Rubbing her belly, grateful to be past the morning nausea that had made her first months in Natchez miserable, she followed the other slaves out to the privy. That chore accomplished, they all trooped over to the overseer’s back porch, where they were served a minimal breakfast of bacon fat and cold cornbread.

Shivering in the wind that blew in from the bluffs, she huddled next to the steps, ignoring the old woman’s persistent attempts to draw her into conversation. They called her Blackberry, and she spoke decent English, but at the least provocation she would launch into long, involved, and improbable stories of the African village she had been taken from as a child—which, judging by the
depth and number of wrinkles upon her wizened face and her utter lack of teeth, must have been some fifty or sixty years ago.

Blackberry knew about the baby, of course, had guessed even before Scarlet’s belly began to swell. It was hard to ignore the old woman’s little kindnesses, but she was determined not to develop a fondness for anyone. Separation from Cain had been more painful than any whiplash, more prolonged and gnawing than the deepest physical hunger.

Even a glancing thought of her baby’s father brought weak tears to her eyes, and she angrily dashed them away, snarling at Blackberry as if she had caused them—which, in a way, she had.

Instead of hitting back, Blackberry narrowed her little raisin-colored eyes and pulled Scarlet’s resisting body close. “Little girl, little girl,” the old one crooned. “You think you abandoned? You think the Master don’t care? Well, you wrong, ’cause he got you right here in my arms.”

“The master don’t even know me,” Scarlet spat.

Blackberry’s raspy chuckle rumbled under Scarlet’s ear. “The Master that made you and your little one does.”

“Oh. You mean God,” Scarlet said flatly. “Well, he’s got a funny way of showing affection. I served him my whole life and I’m no more free today than I ever been. And now I got a baby to bring into this disaster. And look at you! Reckon you gonna die a slave?”

“I be God’s bondslave, true enough, child. But that makes me free to love, can’t nobody take that away. You a servant to hatred, and that’s the bitterest slavery of all.”

“See, this is why I don’t talk to you, ’cause you always turn my words inside out.”

Blackberry stroked Scarlet’s lice-infested head. “Somebody need to turn you inside out. All that poison gon’ make you sick and die.”

Scarlet turned her face into the bony ridge of the older woman’s shoulder. “Sometimes I think that’d be a good thing.”

“Now, now. You don’t want to cut off this little one’s chances
before he ever gets started. What if you got the future king of America riding in your womb?”

Scarlet felt a laugh bubble from her throat, but it quickly turned to a wrenching sob. “Old woman, you just crazy.”

“That what they said about Jesus too.”

“Yeah, and look what happened to him.”

“He’s seated at the right hand of the Father.”

Scarlet sat quiet for a minute. Clearly arguing was getting her nowhere. Besides, it was nice to be held in somebody’s arms.
Cain
. . . She sat up. “Overseer’s walking back this way. We better get up.”

“You didn’t eat nothing, honey. You need to feed that babe.”

“I don’t feel like it. You eat my biscuit.”

Blackberry just looked at her until Scarlet took a bite of the biscuit.

“You just like my maman used to be.”

Blackberry nodded. “That’s what mamas for. You’ll see.”

Yes, she would see, whether she wanted to or not. This baby was coming, right in the heat of the summer, probably drop in the middle of a cotton field.

Future king of America.
Smiling, she got to her feet and helped Blackberry to her feet. Nothing had changed, but maybe she should quit being so standoffish. Having somebody to talk to had somehow made the misery go away. Maybe God was looking out for her after all.

S
PRING
H
ILL
E
ARLY
M
ARCH
1778

“How much further, Lyse? I’m so excited!”

Smiling, Lyse looked down at Genny dancing along beside her like a small fairy maid. “Almost there,
cher
.” Luc-Antoine and
Denis had jumped the creek and run on ahead through the woods, and she could hear them shouting as the dogs barked in greeting.

Mardi Gras season of 1778 had come to Mobile. The first signs of azalea bushes flirted their lacy pink skirts along the old shell road which ran westward from the juncture of the three rivers that dumped into the bay. Through the trees Lyse could just see the red-tiled roof of Grandpére’s ancient two-story cottage.

It was a momentous occasion. Papa had finally relented and allowed her to bring the children to Grandpére’s annual Mardi Gras party. She and Simon used to come when Grandmére was still alive, but when she died soon after Uncle Guillaume was executed, the relationship between Papa and Grandpére had deteriorated beyond repair. It was too bad there wasn’t money for new clothes and shoes, but she had helped the children paint masks of papier-mâché they’d made at school, added a few shells and feathers picked up from the beach, and twisted up Genny’s hair and her own in fantastical braids, with knots of ribbon for a festive touch. Justine and baby Rémy would be along later with Papa.

At least, Lyse hoped they would come. One never knew with Papa.

Genny tugged on her hand. “Will there be a king’s cake? I hope I find the baby.”

Grandmére used to make the braided cinnamon sweetbread in the French tradition, twisted into a crown-shaped oval and glazed with sugar. A gilded fava bean tucked in from the bottom represented the baby Jesus, for whom the Wise Men had searched so diligently. Good luck was said to follow the child who found the trinket in his or her slice of cake. With Grandmére gone now, there might not be a king’s cake.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Genny. Maybe we can make one.”

Genny twirled her mask on its bamboo stick. “That would be fun. I’ve missed you, Lysette.”

And Lyse had missed her family to a painful degree. Since the night Rafa had come and gone so abruptly, and Simon had inexplicably deserted Daisy, life had taken on a whitewashed dullness that even her responsibilities at the grammar school failed to color.

She swept her little sister into a bear hug. “Did you miss getting squished like a jellyfish?”

“Yes! But don’t mess up my hair!” Genny giggled, squirming. When Lyse let her go, laughing, Genny ran ahead, ribbon-festooned pigtails bouncing. “Don’t worry, I won’t get lost!”

Lyse followed at a pace more suitable for a young lady, stepping carefully over rain puddles left from yesterday’s storm. There was still a nip in the air, a brisk wind whipping through the trees, and she was glad she’d chosen her good woolen dress and the matching shawl Daisy had helped her knit.

The thought of her friend brought on a fresh wave of worry. The two of them had become even closer since the night she’d discovered Daisy’s secret. Lyse had at first struggled to understand how the gentle, biddable daughter of a British officer had come to sympathize with the American rebels. She remembered the night she and Daisy had first entertained Rafael for dinner, and Daisy’s indignation when he’d told them the colonies had dared to declare their independence from the Crown.

Long conversations, often late into the night, revealed that Daisy’s convictions were neither easily arrived at nor lightly held. She had first encountered the Locke treatise, oddly enough, while arguing with Simon about the intellectual capacity of women. After daring her to read Locke’s work, which someone had given him, Simon was stunned to discover that not only could she comprehend it, but she could discuss it with him in concise and cogent terms.

And ultimately she had been persuaded that all men were endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights. Locke’s arguments concerning liberty and moral philosophy had pierced her, based as they were upon truths in Scripture.

Once the door was opened, there was no shutting it again.

Daisy had listened as the men who visited her father debated—or, rather, sneered at—colonials foolish enough to propose government without a monarch. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the like, madmen all. On a later trip, Colonel Durnford had left behind a copy of the Thomas Paine papers, scornfully bidding Daisy consign them to the ash heap where they belonged. Instead, she had hidden them in her room, devoured the treacherous, compelling words, absorbed their implications.

With no inbred loyalty to any king, particularly his British majesty George III, Lyse too found herself hungry to learn. Because Daisy was a gifted teacher, had always been Lyse’s mentor, they eagerly discussed the exciting possibilities of living in freedom, with no person of any more value than another, regardless of birth or income.

One day Lyse hesitantly asked what Simon thought about Daisy’s political conversion.

“I haven’t admitted to him that I support the colonists’ cause. He would be horrified at the thought of me flouting my father’s authority. He understands the consequences of treason.” Compassion filled Daisy’s gentle features. “Your uncle Guillaume . . .”

That reminder was enough to give Lyse pause.

And all these months later, nothing much had changed. When Daisy questioned her father as to Simon’s whereabouts, the major impatiently said he had no idea and advised her not to concern herself with what she couldn’t change.

The major himself was, in fact, busier than ever. After news of the British defeat at Saratoga reached the West Florida command in Pensacola, Major Redmond received orders to initiate refurbishment of Fort Charlotte. With fewer than three hundred regular soldiers, plus a handful of Loyalist refugees, to do the work, he had neither time nor inclination to worry about his daughter’s disappointed romance or her political leanings.

When by the first of March no word had come from Rafael or Simon, both girls had descended into a state of drifting numbly from one day to the next. With school suspended for the Mardi Gras holiday, Lyse had invited Daisy to the party, but she had elected to stay at home and take care of some spring cleaning. So Lyse made the trip over to Bay Minette to collect the children by herself—and here they were.

She stepped out of the shelter of the trees into her grandfather’s flower-decked yard, where Genny and the two boys were romping with Grandpére’s hounds, Castor and Pollux. She paused for a moment to enjoy the picture.

The cottage itself, which Grandpére and his brother Thomas had come into possession of when their father moved to Biloxi with the Sieur de Bienville in 1720, was like a grand old lady dressed for a tea party. Rising gracefully in the midst of a copse of live oak, magnolia, and dogwood beside a spring-fed creek, it had been constructed of local timber, its chinks filled in with the ubiquitous wattle-and-daub mud cement, and roofed with pine shakes. But possessing a flair for architecture, Grandpére had borrowed the Spanish preference for adobe and tile, adding to the original structure until it was now hardly recognizable as his father’s Creole cottage. Eventually, wealthy British landowners had built summer homes around the property, giving the surrounding area the cachet of exclusivity. Here in this little clearing, though, was the Lanier family heritage. Safety and home.