Evermore: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 3) (32 page)

“Whoa,” Marcel said. “How’d you get such cold feet?”

“I waited for you on the stairs.”

“Come here, iceberg. Let me rub some life back into you or you’ll
freeze me out.”

He shifted her around as if she had no more weight than a
child. First one foot, then the other, he rubbed and kneaded and caressed.

He did love her. She was sure of it. Deborah Ann’s blood
warmed her from the ankles up her calves, from her heart down into the core of
her. She was afire by the time he slid his hand up her thigh.

She twisted in his embrace so that she could see his face in
the bit of moon shining through the exhausted clouds. “All I want in this world
is you, Marcel,” she whispered. “And a baby.”

She kissed his ear, then his jaw, and his mouth. “Please,
Marcel, give me a baby.”

In December, a frigid wet wind rattled the windows. Tendrils
of damp seeped under the doors and threatened to freeze Cleo’s lemon tree, now
wrapped in burlap.

All of New Orleans felt the strain of war. The men drank to
ease their fears; the women frequented the Cathedral. Anxious families gathered
at the kiosk where the dreaded lists of dead and missing were posted. Every
day, the train brought a few coffins of boys fortunate enough to have been
identified and retrieved from the charnel of the battle field. Every day the
sounds of weeping and the slow cadence of funeral marches penetrated the window
curtains.

Everyone in the city seemed to have lost someone, except
Nicolette. Finn was safe, for now, Marcel and Alistair, too. Yet fear breathed
down her neck just as it did for every other woman waiting and hoping at home.

Beneath the ordeal of worry, Nicolette struggled to endure
her own heartache. Finn McKee’s smoldering glare of anger and disappointment,
once he realized what she was, tormented her. Yet, bruised and empty, she
missed his company. In her mind, she composed countless letters to him.
Sometimes she excused herself for deceiving him – hadn’t she worn the tignon,
always – but she knew he had not understood what that meant. Most often she
simply wanted to share her day with him. She wanted to tell him how she’d
climbed to the roof of the Custom House to see the ghostly topmasts poking
through the blanket of fog over the river. She wanted to tell him about the old
horse she saw on the street, its neck lovingly draped in a paisley shawl
against the cold wind.

Of course, he could not reply to a letter she composed only
in her head. Yet today, as she walked home from the Custom House in the dreary
damp, she again envisioned an envelope waiting for her on the hall table. He
would have written it weeks ago. It would be worn, the paper collecting chafes
and stains as it passed from mail bag to mail bag to make its way to New
Orleans and then to Pauger Street.

At her front door, she shook her umbrella and stepped into
the house, into the welcoming odor of peppers and onions frying in bacon
grease. Before Maman could realize she was home, she sifted through the post on
the table.

Of course there was no letter. Of course he did not write to
her. There was no reason for him to write.

Throughout dinner, Nicolette stifled her disappointment, but
afterwards, with every flick of the crochet needle, her disappointment grew
into resentment. She had done nothing wrong. She’d never said she was white.

None of this was her fault! How dare he judge her? How dare
he look at her like she had been the one to injure him!

“Nicolette, what ails you, darling?” Cleo asked.

Nicolette yanked the yarn through her crochet needle. “Not a
thing, Maman. It’s just a little stuffy in here.”

“Stuffy! With this draft?”

Nicolette concentrated on reworking the mess she’d made with
those angry stitches.

“You have dark circles under your eyes, Nicolette. You stay
at headquarters the live-long day. Are they working you too hard?”

“It’s war time. Everyone works too hard.” She gathered up
her yarn. “I’m going to bed.” She leant over and kissed Cleo’s smooth cheek and
then Pierre’s. “See you in the morning.”

In her room, she hung her brown wool dress in the wardrobe
and sat at the dresser to brush her hair out. Only a slight wave in her hair,
but it was black, as black as any slave’s. Yet that color was the only hint of
her Negro ancestors. Truly, her hair was no darker than Marcel’s. Her nose was
as narrow as his, her skin as fair. Her lips no more full than his bride’s
lips.

How could Finn have guessed she was not white?

The garnet cross caught the lamp light and winked at her
from the mirror, mocking her. Nicolette pressed her eyes against the heels of
her hands. Without hope, what was she to do with herself?

At the Presswood home, Deborah Ann’s gaiety lasted past
Christmas. Father rejoiced over the triumph at Fredericksburg, and surely,
Deborah Ann believed, she was pregnant now. She hadn’t heard from Marcel since
his clandestine visit disguised as a Cajun the first week in November, but she
hadn’t expected to. The war, of course.

She lightened her father’s house with high spirits and
entertained his friends with good beef dinners through the holidays. Sitting at
her window, she passed happy hours crocheting skein upon skein of cotton and
wool, building an entire layette for the baby. Her son would be born the end of
the summer, she calculated as she sewed infant gowns in muslin and lawn, every
stitch tiny, exact, and even. Her baby would be plump and pink and smiling, a
cherub with Marcel’s dark hair and her blue eyes, the most handsome coloring of
all in her estimation.

And then, in the night, the unmistakable cramping woke her.
There was no baby in her womb.

The ache in her belly gnawed through to her back. No baby.
Deborah Ann wept hysterically, so heedlessly that Mammy hurried into her room
frightened half to death.

“What the matter?” Mammy demanded, her candle held high. She
leaned her weight on the bed, and Deborah Ann hid her face from the light. “You
having a bad dream?”

With a grasping hand, Deborah Ann reached for Mammy, pulling
her down, clutching at her. “I’m barren,” she said, sobs shaking the whole bed.

Mammy pulled back the cover to see the tell-tale stain,
black in the candle light. “Let me light the lamp,” Mammy said. “Then we talk
about this.”

Deborah Ann heard the match strike, heard the hiss of the
gas lamp on the wall next to her bed.

The mattress sank with Mammy’s weight. “Now move over,
missy, my feets is cold.”

Deborah Ann allowed Mammy to roll over close and stroke her
back, but she didn’t want to talk. What was there to say? She would never have
a baby of her own. She was a failure.

“Now, sugar,” Mammy said, “I’m gone tell you what’s what
about getting babies. First off, though, you got to stop this moaning and
carrying on.” Mammy patted her back, then more gently began to rub between her
shoulder blades. “You always was the one to act out with you monthly, but you
got to take hold now, Missy, you hear me?”

Deborah Ann felt Mammy’s warm hand on her back, rubbing her
thumb along the spine just like she’d done whenever Deborah Ann had the megrims
growing up. Slowly, she let the frantic grief go. Crying wouldn’t help. Nothing
would help.

“That’s better. Now you listen to old Mammy. I birthed six chillen, and I reckon I know a thing or two you don’t.”

Deborah Ann stared into the shadows of the room. What did
Mammy know about being barren? Nobody could fix a barren woman.

Marcel would leave her. She’d heard of it once, a man’s wife
couldn’t give him any children, and he divorced her. The woman had had to leave
New Orleans, go away where no one knew her and live out her life in shame.

“Count up the days you husband been here to give you a
baby,” Mammy was saying. “What they come to? Four, maybe five? And say your man
some kind of great stallion who put it to you, say what, twenty times in them
five days? My stars, honey. That ain’t nothing.”

Deborah Ann’s swollen eyes ached and cramps rolled through
her belly. But she counted. Yes, about five days. Maybe ten times. No, nine.

“You ain’t a brood mare, honey, gets pregnant first time the
stallion gets at her. You gone need your husband here in the bed with you, a
month of Sundays, maybe, or maybe just a month. But you ain’t got no cause for
all this grief, no you ain’t.”

Deborah Ann shifted to look at Mammy over her shoulder. “I’m
not barren?”

“You ain’t barren. I bet my best petticoat on it.”

She wanted to believe Mammy. Mammy must know. But she’d been
so sure Marcel’s seed had taken hold inside her. She’d felt it. And yet, there
was no baby.

Daffodils pushed their way through the black earth, their
yellow flags waving against blue skies. Spring winds carried the scents of
jasmine and honeysuckle.

Deborah Ann dreaded the resumption of fighting now that the
roads were passable. She wanted the war to be over. She wanted her husband at
home.

Waking or dreaming, her head was filled with babies.
Whenever the mammy next door brought the children out to play under the oaks,
Deborah Ann paused to watch them from her bedroom window. The curly-haired boy
toddled with a toy duck on a string following behind him. The little red-haired
girl of four, constrained in a bonnet and long sleeves to protect her
complexion, served tea to her dolls. Heart-sick with yearning, she feared there
would be no babies in the nursery for her, no little boys with Marcel’s chin.

Clinging to the small hope Mammy was right, she threw
herself into spring cleaning, supervising the rolling up of the imported wool
carpets and the laying down of the heavy straw mats for summer time. When the roses
bloomed, she filled the house with sweet-smelling bouquets.

After having neglected the Chamard house on Rue Royale, she
attacked it with feverish energy. She had the chandeliers taken down, soaped,
and polished. The silver was beyond salvage, she decided, the shine so thin on
the teapot she could see hints of the underlying brass. She would order a new
silver service, choose a new pattern of tableware. Every day she came back to
her father’s house on Prytania Street exhausted but
gratified. When Marcel came home from the war, he’d be amazed at what she’d
accomplished.

As May advanced, the balmy air grew heavy with heat and
humidity.

“You best leave off cutting them flowers till the cool of
the morning, missy,” Mammy fussed.

“Oh, leave me be, Mammy.” Deborah Ann dabbed at her neck
with a dainty embroidered handkerchief, a basket of red roses in her other
hand. She was so irritable today, heavy and listless. The early heat, and Mammy
hovering like a bee over clover, no wonder she was vexed.

“Deborah Ann!” Father marched into the garden waving the
latest Picayune, his face aglow with excitement.

“We’ve done it again! Lee’s pushed that devil Hooker
back across the Rappahannock. We’re going to win this war.”

“Did you find out where Marcel’s unit is?”

“What? Oh, no, dearest. He’s with Col. Vincent somewhere.
Probably near Jackson if I had to guess, harassing the Union supply lines.
Don’t fret. He’s fine. No news is good news, you know.”

Deborah Ann sank onto the cedar bench to read the paper.
Even Confederate victories filled her with dread. More than 17,000 Union
killed, wounded and lost at Chancellorsville. Thirteen thousand Confederate
casualties. She read the line again. Not hundreds. Thousands of men, bleeding
and dying.

The numbers confounded her. Thirty thousand men. Were there
that many men in all of New Orleans? She tried to imagine thirty thousand white
tombstones laid out in rows, stretching as far as the eye could see.

Through supper, Father’s elation annoyed her. Had he no
thought at all for the dead boys on that field in Virginia? Of course, Marcel
was not among them. But what if he had been at Chancellorsville? Or at
Fredericksburg, or Murfreesboro?

That night, her body achy and swollen, Deborah Ann tossed on
damp sheets, the hair on her neck wet with perspiration. When she roused in the
morning, vague images of draped mirrors and widows’ weeds, coffins and empty
cradles lingered.

“You stay home from over yonder today, Missy,” Mammy said.
“You looking peaked this morning.”

She was light-headed, in fact, though her body felt bloated
and heavy. But today, she meant to tackle the nursery on Rue Royale.

“I just need my coffee, Mammy.”

She and Mammy, Jebediah along as
escort, took the omnibus to Canal and then walked up Rue Royale to the Chamard
house. Mammy and old Biddy set to work sorting linens. Deborah Ann climbed the
stairs to the nursery. Since she’d cleaned in here before, new spider webs
stretched from the walnut crib to the window sill. Not being one of those girls
who feigned horror at sight of a spider, she slapped the webs down with a rag.

Even with the windows open, it was stifling up here on the
top floor. Deborah Ann wiped the sweat from the back of her neck. The cradle
needed oiling before she made the new bedding. Blue satin and cream lace. Her
baby would have the most beautiful crib in all of Louisiana.

She pressed her hand to her swollen aching belly.

Unless she was barren. Unless Marcel never came home to her.

Under her too-tight corset, cramps twisted her insides,
squeezed her womb until she felt she would faint. Her knees buckled and she
ended up on the floor, her forehead resting against the walnut crib.

Those beautiful little boys, only blocks away. The older
one, as light a child as she could wish for, his chin carrying the hint of
Marcel’s dimple.

A sheen of oily sweat covered Deborah Ann’s brow. Pain
rolled through her in waves, mocking her empty womb.