Evermore: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 3) (18 page)

With a weak smile, Nicolette capitulated. “Perhaps William
wouldn’t mind,” she said. “You’ll see he gets a good breakfast when he comes
back?”

In sodden boots, Captain McKee whistled under his breath as
he mounted the stairs to the telegraph office. He repeated her name silently,
Nicolette Chamard, letting the French syllables roll in his mouth.

At the door he paused to shake out his rain slicker. He
hooked it on the coat rack in the hallway, then ran a hand through his
hat-flattened hair. He heard humming. She was humming as she worked.

Finn leaned against the door jamb, taking in the creamy skin
at the back of her neck. A wisp of raven-black hair had wriggled free of the
cloth on her head, and she absently wound it around her finger. Finn wondered
again why she didn’t dispense with the calico head-covering in this heat, at
least here inside the building. He’d like to see the rest of that black hair.
Did she curl it, even if it was to be worn under the cloth? Back home, his
sisters would spend hours curling their hair, and then cover it all up with a
bonnet.

“Top o’ the morning to you, Captain,” Wallace said.

Miss Chamard twisted in her chair to see him. No smile, no
twinkle in her eye. “Good morning,” she said, her voice flat, her mouth a
straight line. She turned back to the table and her yellow slips of paper.

He was disappointed, but not surprised. He knew he had not
won her approval the night before, much less her affection. But that didn’t
mean she couldn’t be won. He remembered that long moment under the umbrella
when she’d tipped her chin up, almost inviting his kiss. And, this morning, she
at least took the trouble to scowl at him.

He hovered near her for a moment, and finally she raised her
face.

He bowed slightly. “
Bon
jour
, Mademoiselle.”

Suddenly, her face flushed. Ha. She
had
nearly let him kiss her.

“Miss Chamard,” he said. “I regret I could not see you
safely from your home this morning. However, I have arranged for a very
trustworthy young man to accompany you in the mornings when I must be at the
Park. Corporal Peach. I will see you home this evening, if I may, and Peach
will escort you tomorrow morning.”

Her face shut him out. “Captain, that is not necessary.
Apart from the doubtful wisdom of being seen with a Union soldier on the street,
I have an escort, for mornings and evenings.”

Who could that be? The able-bodied men had left the city,
leaving the halt, the lame, the very young, and the very old.

“Someone who can assure your safety?” he persisted.

Her smile had an amused edge to it. “William more than
adequately discourages whatever ruffians cross our path, Captain.”

A gentleman friend? “I hope I may meet your protector?”

She studied his face, and he felt the heat rise up his neck.
Lord, he felt as transparent as the raindrops on the windowpane.

“He’ll come for me at six.”

He dipped his head.

Wallace had the office well in hand, and Finn left the three
of them to their duties. He had a thousand things to do before he could return
here at six o’clock. If her escort was a mere boy of twelve or thirteen, no
protection at all, he’d see her home himself.

He left, hoping her champion still had peach fuzz on his
cheeks.

Once the North had discovered the Rebels were reading their
signals, every effort was put forth to devise more clever ways to thwart them.
Finn’s unit was trying out a new system for changing the flag codes. His men
used a disk with moving outer and inner rings so that the flag signals could be
rotated to align with the alphabet in unique combinations. He spent the day
drilling the men so they’d be able change code at will, even mid-transmission.

As six o’clock neared, Finn turned the men over to
Lieutenant Dobbs. If Miss Chamard’s William was some narrow-chested swain too
feeble to join the Rebels, he’d send him packing. Finn had a month’s pay in his
pocket. He’d prefer to walk her home, it would take longer, but if it rained,
he’d hire a carriage every day and ride in it with her from Canal all the way
to Pauger Street. Only next time he would not sit in the opposite corner.

A block from headquarters, the church bells tolled six
o’clock. Finn spurred his horse down Iberville to come at the back of the
Custom House. Several knots of soldiers, both officers and enlisted men, stood
about on the Union’s business, but no elderly gentleman in out-of-fashion knee
pants, no pale-faced youth with hat in hand waited at the doorway. No one who
looked like a William.

Finn tied his horse to the post, took off his hat and wiped
the sweat from his face with a damp handkerchief. It would be another two hours
before the sun slipped behind the treetops and roof lines. Another two hours of
headache teasing the backs of his eyes, of sweat prickling the skin under his
collar.

A black mountain of a man strode up to the back entrance and
looked around, then leaned against the building near the door. His calico
shirt, mended and patched, had a dry strip at the top of each shoulder and
along the top of the sleeves. The rest was stuck to the man’s body, dark with
sweat. One of the largest men he’d ever seen. Big as André Cailloux. And what
an ogre. Face a mass of scar tissue, one eye gone white.

Miss Chamard appeared at the door. Finn stepped toward her
at the same time the monster Negro shoved himself off from the building. She
saw the black man and bestowed on him an open, freely-given smile of affection.

This
was William?
Not some fancy suitor, but a . . . what? Was the man a slave?

Finn advanced the last yards between them. “Miss Chamard.
You’re ready to go home.”

Nicolette halted, her belled skirt defining the distance
between the two men. The captain, his handsome face red from the sun, streaked
with sweat, came so close that his legs brushed against her skirt. Had he come
back to headquarters just for her?

“Captain McKee. I hope you haven’t gone out of your way for
me.” She gestured toward William on her left. “You see I will not be alone.”

“Yes, I see. He is your . . .” The captain hesitated.

She had not been in this situation before. One did not
introduce slaves to white men, but William was not a slave. William was in fact
her friend.

“This is William, Captain McKee.”

William kept his eyes on the ground. Of course he would.
He’d been a freeman such a short time. “William, this is the officer who taught
me to use the telegraph.”

“Yes, sir,” William said, and returned to studying the
ground.

“You see, Captain, I need not fear a few boys in the street
with William looking after me.”

The captain’s gaze flickered over William, head to foot. “As
you say. And tomorrow morning? Corporal Peach will wait on you at your home if
he may walk you here.”

What a generous offer, a white soldier with other duties,
directed to protect a colored woman on the street. And the captain himself? Was
the offer really as impersonal as he made it seem?

Taking courage from William’s presence, Nicolette boldly
looked into the captain’s attentive face. His eyes, a rich chocolate brown, met
hers.

There was nothing impersonal in the depth of those eyes. She
would love to walk down the tree-shaded street with this man. Her hand on his
arm. His steps matching hers. She would listen to his Boston baritone sliding
over the r’s and broadening the h’s. She would imagine the cool ocean breezes
he described coming off the Atlantic.

Moments like these, as they held each other’s gaze, she was
tempted to forget her ancestors were black Africans, his white Europeans. If he
knew, maybe he too could forget. No. Even Alistair Whiteaker, who was in love
with her, never forgot for long.

“Thank you, Captain. William will see me safely here in the
morning.”

The captain took a step back and bowed slightly. “Tomorrow,
then.”

Nicolette turned toward William, her hooped skirt rotating
with her like a twirled dinner bell. William followed her to the far side of
Levee where the arching trees created a shady arbor down the length of the
street.

Thirty yards down the road, Nicolette yielded to the urge to
look back. She turned, expecting the captain would be on horseback by now.
Mounted he was, but motionless, watching her.

She raised her hand. He answered with his own.

Nicolette and William stopped at the French market past
Jackson Square. Three months ago, before General Butler imposed order and
brought in foodstuffs, there had been no corn meal, meat, or rice. By the time
Admiral Farragut rammed through the Confederate barriers downriver, flour was
sixty dollars a barrel.

New Orleans had been in chaos before the Union arrived. With
rumors that liberating Federal forces approached, hundreds, then thousands, of
runaway slaves, contraband, General Butler called them, fled from the
countryside into the city, starving, sick, half-naked, and desperate. There
simply had not been enough food to feed them and the poor white population.
People of means barricaded themselves and their provisions behind locked doors
as marauding bands prowled the streets. Women wept and sold themselves to feed
their children.

Once General Butler took control of the occupation, he put
whites and ex-slaves to work, cleaning the streets, draining the ditches,
repairing the levee. The “unwashed mob,” he called them, but he fed them. He
brought in provisions, some of it paid for out of his own deep pockets.

In the market, a hand-lettered sign over the bin of flour
read seven and a half cents per pound. A one pound cut of corned beef, ten
cents. Fresh bread loaves, five cents. Rice, eight cents a pound. However
heavy-handed the general was, he had restored order and sustenance in New
Orleans.

Nicolette shooshed the flies away
to pick out red-blush peaches, then pulled off green bananas from a hanging
stalk. Fat purple grapes went into her string basket on top of the bananas.
Across the cobbled floor, the last of the season’s watermelons floated in a
stock tank like green islands in a pond. Nicolette thumped to find a ripe one.

“This one,” she declared, and William hoisted the two-footer
to his shoulder.

Two blocks up, they approached the kiosk erected to display
the lists of Confederate casualties as they came in. Nicolette’s mood darkened.
Always, one or two, sometimes a dozen parents, sisters, sweethearts gathered
when a new list went up, praying their boy’s name did not appear. Always, there
were wails as someone discovered her loved one was hurt, maimed, maybe killed.

An elderly man read out the names. “Antoine Henning,
captured.”

The plump woman next to Nicolette threw her apron over her
face and burst into tears. Her husband patted her shoulder. “Now, mother, he
ain’t killed,” he said. “He’s just caught.”

“Pierre Valjean, killed.”

A gray-haired woman, surely Pierre’s old grandmother,
collapsed into the arms of a big black woman. The slave, maybe the lost
soldier’s own mammy, wept as she supported her mistress.

The doors of all these people would be draped in black
tomorrow, their windows shuttered, their mirrors covered.

Nicolette had forgotten the war, for a moment, as she’d
picked out peaches and grapes. But men were dying in Virginia, in Kentucky, in
Tennessee. And soon, if she understood General Butler’s intentions, they would
be dying on the Bayou Lafourche. 

On a routine reconnaissance, Marcel led his half-dozen
cavalry down a shady lane, flies buzzing the horses’ ears, grasshoppers
chirruping in the high grass. About to enter the bright heat of the river road,
he spotted a man on a dark bay mule. He raised his fist for the men to hold.

The mule ambled toward them, the man himself the picture of
an at-leisure hayseed. He wore butter-colored canvas trousers and an orange and
yellow calico shirt open at the throat. Even from fifty yards, Marcel could see
a corn cob pipe in his mouth.

Could be the rider was a local farmer with a small parcel of
land off the bayou.

Marcel waited, observing, thinking. That was a good looking
mule. Prime stock. And the man wore close-fitting boots, not a farmer’s heavy
brogans. Something about the way the man sat in his saddle didn’t seem right
either. Farmers didn’t put in the riding time to sit a horse, or a mule, with
that kind of ease.

Could be he wasn’t a farmer. Could be he was a Union scout
come to assess the Bayou.

The mule rider pushed his straw hat back on his forehead at
a jaunty angle. Curly golden hair caught the sunlight where it grew down over
the man’s collar. Didn’t often see hair as gold as that. Marcel waved away a
cloud of gnats and squinted.

I’ll be damned. Dix Weber.

Sunshine, they used to call him. Marcel and Yves, Dix and
his brother Anton, they’d had good times when they were boys. Dix was the
youngest, the one with all the fun in him. It had been his idea to sneak out of
the
garconniére
at school up in
Opelousas and slip down to the brothel on Orange Street. He’d been the one to
finagle their way inside. That was a night to remember, thanks to their
fair-haired friend with the face of an angel and the glib tongue of the devil.

A horse behind Marcel snuffled and jangled its bit, giving
them away. Abruptly, Weber yanked his mule around and took off, digging his
heels into the mule’s belly, slapping its butt with his hat.

Hell of a fast mule. But no mule could outrace a good horse.
And after weeks of tedious vigilance, Marcel damn well meant to prove it.

“Yeeahhh!” Marcel put his weight
in the stirrups and leaned into Hercule’s neck. The
thunder of the horses’ hooves, dirt clods flying – damn, it felt good, his
blood scouring the cobwebs from his veins.