The Creole Princess (39 page)

“Only for you,” she said with a giggle that felt very odd. She hadn’t laughed in a long time.

19

N
EW
O
RLEANS
, F
ORT
S
AN
J
UAN
DEL
B
AYOU
A
UGUST
14, 1779

Little Nardo, strapped to Scarlet’s front with wide strips of soft cloth, babbled a long string of nonsense as his mother squatted to lift the full, heavy laundry basket onto her head, then rose with it balanced just so. Nardo, a year old in July, could stagger successfully across a room on his own two fat legs, but carrying him was the only way to get anywhere fast. She followed Daisy and Lyse, similarly laden with baskets, down the footpath from the old fort to the Bayou San Juan, which meandered between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

Scarlet had been thinking all morning of the stories the old slave Blackberry had told as the two of them worked side by side, picking cotton on the plantation in Natchez. Those stories, of village women singing as they washed their clothes in African rivers, their children tied to their chests, had kept Scarlet from going mad from grief. Of course, that was before the wild American who called himself Willing had snatched up Scarlet and twenty or so other healthy slaves and took them to the market in New Orleans. Poor Blackberry had been left to undoubtedly die of starvation,
with nobody there to mash or chew her food soft enough for her toothless gums.

Remembering Blackberry always made Scarlet sad, until she remembered to sing the old woman’s favorite songs. Songs about going to the Promised Land, about eating manna in the wilderness, about seeing dry bones come to life. At first she’d thought them crazy, nonsensical songs, until Lyse explained the Bible stories behind the words. Then they made perfect sense.

Stories, always stories. Life, too, was a story, Scarlet could have told anybody that. Her own life had a beginning, a middle, and an end to come. There was glory to look forward to, but first you had to endure the fire, like the three Hebrew boys who dared to defy Nebuchadnezzar. Scarlet had survived a couple of fires of her own and come out golden. She couldn’t imagine heaven being any better than this.

Just look at her, she thought, crouching to set the basket down at the edge of the water. She had a place to sleep with two good friends in a tidy little house the soldiers had built for them in the shadow of the fort. They had work to do and plenty to eat. Her little boy was healthy and happy and brought her unspeakable joy. Just looking in his bright eyes or patting his bottom when he slept made her think of Cain, and she was grateful all over again to have known love like that. Best of all, she was free. No matter what happened, no one could take that away.

“The bayou’s higher than ever today.” Daisy splashed into the water with a few shirts slung over her shoulder. Her skirt, like those of the other women, was hitched between her legs and tucked into the front waistband. “Much more rain and the whole fort will wash away.”

“True dat,” Scarlet said, tipping her head back and using her hand to shield her eyes against the glaring sun. Patchy, angry clouds, pink-tinged, hovered to the south. A storm was coming, like it or not.

Daisy shook her head. “Simon says another transport ship came
in yesterday morning. That makes six. Where will they put more men on this little patch of ground? There are camps along the lake as far as you can see already.”

“Plenty work for us,” Scarlet said contentedly. She didn’t mind it, though she knew it was hard on Daisy, who had never done anything more strenuous than lift a textbook before Simon brought her here.

In fact, Daisy had been in a state of such shock that it was a whole week before she could talk about her escape from Mobile. Some things she still wouldn’t talk about—like what happened to Mr. Antoine. Lyse had questioned Simon, but he’d just said, “It’s bad, Lyse” and refused to say more. He did say they tried to get Luc-Antoine and Cain out, but they’d already escaped, and there wasn’t time to look for them. But every time Simon came around—which wasn’t often, because of his duties in the governor’s service—Daisy came a little farther toward normalcy. Simon would eventually marry her, and she would be fine.

As she soaped, scrubbed, rinsed, and wrung uniforms, Scarlet watched Lyse. She had been so quiet since they came here to live and work. Too quiet. Of the three of them, this new chapter of their lives had been hardest on her. After all, she had been treated like a daughter in the Gonzales household. But once it was discovered her mother was a slave, just like Scarlet’s, that indeed they were first cousins—and it seemed she had lied to cover it up—there had been no mercy. She had been termed a colored gold digger, and with Rafael gone, there was no one to plead her case.

All the pretty dresses were taken away, her few belongings tied up in a scarf and handed to her. With her own eyes Scarlet had seen the coldness and confusion mask Sofía’s face—and it was not a pretty sight.

Lyse had taken it in silent hurt, because there was nothing she could say to reverse the truth. Besides, she didn’t want to live in a house where she wasn’t wanted. By the time Simon came back
with Daisy, Lyse and Scarlet had gone to Rafa’s friend Oliver Pollock for help. He was a busy man, but he had helped them find this house and this position—though notably not offering to take them into his own home.

None of their circumstances were fair. But Scarlet had given up on fair a long time ago.

Still, the three of them were fighters. If they were meant to be laundresses, they would be the best laundresses in New Orleans, they would strengthen and pray for one another, and they would play their small part in birthing a free, independent nation. Even Lyse, as grimly as she held onto hope, prayed aloud daily for Rafael and Simon’s safety, for the success of the Continental army, for the leaders of the Congress to make wise and good decisions.

Nardo suddenly grabbed both her ears and planted a sloppy, drooling kiss on her chin. As Scarlet laughed and hugged him, she met Lyse’s smiling gaze. God had a way of bringing encouragement into the darkest of days, and she would hold onto that.

N
EW
O
RLEANS
, G
ONZALES
MANSION
A
UGUST
15, 1779

“What do you mean—she’s gone?” Rafa regarded his mother with horror, trying not to put too much meaning in the way she avoided his eyes, the way her hands pleated her skirt into a mass of wrinkles.

He had found her in her sitting room, sorting dried flowers laid out on a table: lavender to the right, progressing to pinks, then blues, and deep indigo on the left. She was arranging flowers, and Lyse was somewhere out in the city, while a strengthening hurricane lashed the coast with a fury of wind and waves. Even now, he could feel the house rocking on its pilings against the onslaught of the storm.

“I offered to let her stay,” Mama said, “her and Scarlet and the
baby—but she would have none of it. I told her you would sort it all out when you returned, but she insisted on leaving. I suppose we weren’t good enough for her after all.”

“Mama, Lyse wouldn’t leave without a good reason. What did she
say
?”

“Why, she said hardly anything at all. After we had been so good to her, Sofía even treating her as a sister.” One more pleat went into the dress.

Rafa stood tapping his fingers against his thigh for a moment. Every moment he wasted, Lyse could be in greater danger. He didn’t know what had happened while he was gone, but clearly his mother wasn’t going to help. “Where is Sofi?”

Mama circled a hand. “In her room, I suppose. You know how Sofía feels about thunderstorms.”

Yes, he knew. As a child, Sofi had been caught in a storm in an open carriage that had been hit by lightning, killing the horse right in its traces. She would be somewhere in a corner, too petrified to speak.

“All right, Mama. I’m going to the Cabildo to report in. Maybe Simon will know where Lyse is.” He turned, then hesitated. “Listen, if this gets worse, if you start seeing water in the house, you and Sofi should get all the servants and go up to the attic to wait it out. Already the water is over the road.”

She nodded apathetically, and he left, frustrated. He stood for a minute on the porch, trying to judge the state of the turbulent sky. All hurricanes had their own personalities. Seven years ago, the family had lost most of its roof when a cyclone thrust a large pine tree through it. Two years later, all the upstairs windows had blown out as if with cannon fire. This one seemed to be a deadly combination of wind and rain, with long, intermittent squalls followed by brief eerie silences. He knew not to assume a pattern, however.

Taking a deep breath, he stepped off the porch into the swirling water.

Two hours later, he was back, this time with his father in a boat. He still hadn’t found Lyse—a fact which he tried not to find terrifying—but he hadn’t been able to withstand his father’s plea to help move Mama and Sofía to the fort, which was on higher ground. He prayed that Simon had been able to get to Lyse, as well as Daisy and Scarlet, before navigating in the storm became impossible.

By now, the entire city was in danger of blowing away before the fury of the storm. Gálvez’s expensive fleet from Havana had been scattered in the Gulf, hundreds of the troops drowned or battered by flying wood and stone. The confiscated British warship
Rebecca
—Oliver Pollock’s pride and joy, which he’d had fitted out as a transport ship—was now a mass of broken timber piled, ironically enough, atop the rubble of Pollock’s mansion on Chartres Street.

They found Mama and Sofi leaning out an attic window screaming. Coaxing them down to the boat was about as frustrating a task as he had ever taken on. Even when they were all safely settled, Rafa and his father battling the oars through the roiling water in the streets, he couldn’t relax for fear one or the other of the women would capsize the boat.

By the time they made it to the fort, Rafa’s muscles ached with tension, and he knew his father must be exhausted as well. But no sooner had they handed the women off to a subaltern keeping watch for refugees at the southeast bastion, than Rafa was hailed by Major-General Girón from another large boat.

“Rippardá!” Girón shouted. “All officers needed back at the Cabildo—Governor’s orders!”

Rafa responded with a wave, then turned to his father. “Ready, Papa?”

His father’s smile was more of a grimace, but Rafa took it for acquiescence.

As he shipped the oars again, he glanced up at the water sluicing
down the walls of the fort into the bayou below. He could only hope that Lyse, Daisy, and Scarlet had made it here safely. They were all in for a long night.

N
EW
O
RLEANS
, F
ORT
S
AN
J
UAN

Every fiber of her being wanted to run. Lyse clenched her hands on the doorpost to keep her feet from carrying her back into the other room.

They were here, Doña Evangelina and Sofía, where she could not get away, not until the floodwaters surrounding the fort subsided. She didn’t know how they had gotten here, but she supposed someone’s boat must have brought them—the same way hundreds of refugees had been pouring into the safety of the fort like ants escaping a collapsed hill and running to another.

“Lyse, you don’t have to speak to them,” Daisy whispered. She knew what had happened, how as soon as Rafa left to find Simon and send him on his way to rescue Daisy, then departed for his Texas cattle assignment, the Gonzales women had launched question after question at Lyse, until she had been forced to tell the whole story of her parents’ marriage and exile.