Ever My Love: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 2) (5 page)

“Who can this be?” he teased as he set her down. “No gaps in
her front teeth, no freckles, taller than a belt buckle – this can’t be
Ariane?”

She twirled in her nearly full-length dress to show him how
grown she was and smiled at him with no more shyness than if she’d seen him
only the week before, for Ariane had written him long misspelled letters while
he’d been gone, and he’d taken the time to write her about the Paris a child
could love.

“And you’re how old now? Sixteen?” he said.

She laughed at him. “I’m almost twelve, you silly.”

Gabriel cocked his elbow for her to take his arm and they
bantered their way to the house, up the stairs to the gallery, and into the
parlor.

“No one else saw you get off the boat,” Ariane whispered.
“They don’t know you’re here yet.”

“Shall we surprise them?” he whispered back.

With a grin and exaggerated tip toes, Ariane led him to the
back gallery where her maman and sisters sat with their sewing. At the doorway,
she held a hand up for Gabriel to stop. Then, with all the flair of a Creole
and Cajun offspring, she leapt onto the gallery, arms spread wide, and said, “I
present to you . . .”

Gabriel stepped out, eyes searching for Simone.

Tante Josephine yelped and let her rocking chair bang
against the wall as she reached for her darling Gabriel. A little gray showing
at her temples, he noticed, but she’d leapt from her chair with the vigor of a
young woman. He opened his arms for her, and she hugged him and laughed and
cradled his face in her hands. “
Mon cher
Gabriel, home at last.”

Gabriel held his aunt to his side as he turned to Musette.
She hung back a little, though she smiled at him. Sensitive to the shyness of a
fourteen year old girl still uneasy in her womanhood, Gabriel held out a hand.
Musette took it, relenting gladly when he pulled her to him with his free arm
and kissed the top of her head.

With Ariane dancing around them all, Musette and Tante
Josephine on either side, Gabriel looked to the remaining cousin. Simone stood
beside her chair, her hands at her sides. Not shy, as Musette was, nor
delighted, as her mother was. Was that determination he saw in her eyes? Or
anger, after all this time?

Simone’s eyes locked on his as she stepped off the distance
between them, no smile at all on her face. Would they ever have peace between
them?

She stopped only inches from him. He tried to still the
tremble in his limbs, to pretend his heart didn’t thud inside his chest at the
sight of her. She stood on her toes, placed a hand on his arm for balance, and
kissed him firmly on the mouth.

“Welcome home, Gabriel,” she said.

He couldn’t take his eyes from her. His aunt had let go of
his arm and was staring at the two of them, but all he could see was Simone,
the high cheekbones and arched brows framed by her dark hair. And in the depths
of those eyes, Gabriel found the other half of his soul.

Simone broke their gaze. She looked at her mother, an
unspoken message in her eyes, and then returned to her chair, picked up her sewing,
and sat down.

Gabriel turned to his dear Tante. The joy had gone out of
her face, and he grieved at that.

He had accepted Father’s offer to send him to medical school
in Paris in order to spare the family the combustion of his attraction to
Simone. Medicine had called him, too, but he would have been content to finish
his schooling in the States.

Honor, and love, had decided him. Simone was seventeen when
he left. During his years in Paris, he planned, Simone would forget her
infatuation with him, move on with her life, marry, perhaps even become a
mother before he returned. Why else had he exiled himself from his home?

Gabriel leaned over and kissed his Tante Josephine’s cheek.
As complicated as their family was, white, colored, half-sisters,
half-brothers, all of it – there had never been any doubt his aunt loved him as
she loved her own children. It pained him to see the pleasure at his homecoming
fade from her eyes.

“Mother sends her love,” Gabriel said. “I’ve met my
step-father, heard him play, heard Nicolette sing.”

“Tell us,” Ariane burst in. “What did Nicolette sing? What
did she wear? Did she do that number with the naughty lyrics?”

“Ariane!” Musette scolded. Showing grace beyond her years,
Musette said, “Sit down, please, Gabriel. I’m sure you have many things to tell
us about Paris.”

“First about Nicolette, though,” Ariane insisted.

Gabriel told all. What she sang, how she made the audience
laugh by raising a single eyebrow. He even remembered what she’d worn. Through
it all, Ariane sat rapt, Musette and Tante Josie asked pertinent questions, and
Simone stared at him mutely. He would have to leave as soon as decently
possible. He hadn’t the nerve for a private confrontation with the woman whose
touch made him burn. Three lonely years spent abroad for nothing? He wanted her
as badly as he ever had.

All through noon dinner Gabriel amused the ladies with his
store of tales about life in Paris. Josie was particularly interested in
hearing about the places she and her husband Phanor had visited two years
before he died. What of the Tuileries, the Louvre? Did they still display the
Mona Lisa in the great hall? She and her Phanor had seen it themselves, she
told them. Such a small portrait for so much fuss, Tante Josie observed,
laughing to acknowledge her ignorance.

Sated with all the favorites Tante Josie had asked cook to
prepare, the crawfish pie, the stewed okra – delicacies not even Paris had to
offer – Gabriel pushed his chair away from the table. “No more, please,” he
groaned as Tante Josie offered him pecan pie.

They sat together on the front gallery and watched the tall
stacks of the steam boats plying the river. So much traffic nowadays. When he’d
been a boy, they might sit for hours without a boat passing by. He and
Nicolette had used to run to the levee from Maman’s house to see them trailing
black sooty smoke, hoping the pilot would toot his horn for them.

Gabriel savored his cigar, responded to his cousins, and
laughed when he should, yet all the while his mind and heart were in turmoil.
Simone sat not six feet away, her slippered foot tapping the floor. Her pale
blue dress fit her bosom closely and the summer neckline revealed an expanse of
dewy skin. The fingers she rested on her chair arm sometimes gripped the wood,
sometimes drummed. Beautiful fingers, the nails rounded, white tipped, buffed.
The last time he’d kissed those fingers, they’d smelled of jasmine.

Simone’s unblinking eyes bored into him every time he looked
her way. Soon he guarded his glances, but the heat of her gaze brought the
blood to his face.

His hand trembled as he ground his cigar butt in the crystal
ash tray. He had to get away from here. Coward he might be, but he didn’t know
what to say to her.

“I must be off,” he said, rising.

“You’ll come to supper tomorrow night?” Tante Josie asked.

“I will. And I’ll bring the baubles I’ve brought from
Paris.”

“Oh, I love baubles,” Ariane breathed. She held her cheek up
for Gabriel’s kiss and followed Musette and her mother inside.

That left him alone with Simone. She stood close enough he
could have reached out and grabbed her, but he willed his hands to hang
uselessly at his side.

“Well, until tomorrow,” he said.

Simone crossed her arms. “Afraid to be alone with me for
even a moment?”

Gabriel measured the angry tilt of her chin, the bitter note
in her voice. “Yes,” he said. But he did not leave her.

She leaned against the porch rail. “You’ve not brought a
wife home with you.”

“No.” Gabriel felt pinned, as if he could not move until she
took her eyes from his. “Nor have you married.”

“My choice turned me down,” she said. “Perhaps you
remember.”

“Simone.” He could only whisper her name. “I had to go.”

“No. You didn’t. I would have gone away with you. We could
have made a life in the North, in Canada, even France.”

“You were –.”

“Too young, yes, so you said.”

Gabriel swallowed. Behind her resentment, he read the hurt
still burning. If he could only hold her, kiss her, tell her he loved her. But
that was why he’d gone away. He must not love her, and she must find a suitable
husband, not a colored man who would never be accepted in her world.

“You can’t forgive me?”

She dropped her arms and walked past him into the house.

Gabriel walked the short way to his mother’s home. Tante
Josie, Maman’s half-sister and one-time owner, had deeded her ten arpents on
the edge of Toulouse, enough for Cleo to build a bungalow and keep a garden.
This was where Cleo brought her family in the summer time when New Orleans all
but closed down. Her paramour, Bertrand Chamard, his plantation on the other
side of Toulouse, wore a path from Cherleu through the back fields of Toulouse
to his heart’s home with Cleo and their children. And so this was Gabriel’s
true home, where mother and father, Gabriel and baby Nicolette were a family
together, where they picked the sweet warm scuppernongs in the evenings, where
father put them to bed and Maman played her piano and sang softly as they fell
asleep.

Gabriel stopped at the old oak with the branch hanging far
out over a strip of river cut off from the main current by a wooded sandbar. A
rope, now darkened and frayed, hung from the branch and swayed in the wind. One
July morning, Gabriel had tied that rope to a stone and, a hero to his younger
brothers, had tossed it impossibly high, up and over the branch. The three of
them, Gabriel, Marcel, and Yves, spent the summer swinging out over the water,
dropping, yelling and whooping and splashing. The world had been smaller then,
and simpler.

 As Gabriel approached the bungalow, Cleo’s caretaker, Old
Ben, was in the front yard scything the grass, wielding the blade with enviable
strength.  Ben’s aged wife Claire shook a hook rug over the gallery rail and
saw him first. She cried out and hurried down the stairs to grab him and hug
him. Another warm and wonderful homecoming for Gabriel. So many loved ones
here, so many connections.

At twilight Gabriel propped his feet on the gallery rail and
watched the summer sun leave the sky, the aroma of his Havana cigar
discouraging the mosquitoes. When his father rode up on the latest of his fine
black stallions, Gabriel hurried out to meet him.

Father and son embraced, trying to express three years of
love and affection. “
Mon Dieu,
it’s good to see you,” Chamard said.

“Come sit with me, Papa. I’ve brought a fine brandy home
just for you.”

The two put their feet up and listened to the crickets,
drank their brandy, smoked their cigars. Chamard inquired about his neighbor
Josephine and her children and received Gabriel’s amazed report of girls grown
into young ladies.

“And your maman?” Chamard said into the dark.

Gabriel knew from Nicolette’s letters that their father had
not let go of Cleo willingly. Papa was still in love with Maman, she wrote, but
what could he do? Maman was her own woman, freed by Tante Josephine, made
independent by her own talent and perseverance. And, Nicolette added, Pierre
LaFitte would belong to Maman alone. They shared a life in music, and Cleo
would never have to wait for Pierre to come to her from his other family.

“She’s well,” Gabriel said.

Chamard shifted in his chair, drank his brandy. “What did
you think of LaFitte?”

I hardly know the man, Gabriel thought. And what does Papa
want to hear? That he beats her, that she’s sorry she married him? “He seems a
good man,” Gabriel said. “He’ll take care of her.”

Chamard nodded. “You must let me know if she ever needs
anything.”

Talk turned to the years they’d been apart, what Chamard had
done with Cherleu, how his pony had run in the last race. And then they
explored all the deeds and exploits, and even the studies, of Gabriel’s years
in Paris.

Late in the evening, Chamard put his brandy snifter down.
“Son, you could have remained in Paris,” he said. “It would be easier there for
you. You could even pass for white, I think, if you wanted to. Yet you’ve come
back.”

“Father, I’d rather be here on this river than anywhere else
on earth. I’m home to stay.”

While Marianne tended to Peter, his Grandmama Lena sat on
the floor, her hand on her grandson’s foot, her head on his bed, asleep.
Charles dozed on the porch in a rawhide chair tilted back against the wall.

When Peter had intermittent spells of peace, Marianne’s
tired mind wandered. Moonlight beamed between the boards of the walls, making
silver bars on the floor. When a wet wind blew from the northwest, this house
must be nearly as cold as being on the levee. At least it had a floor. Over at
the Morgans’, she understood, the slave cabins had packed dirt instead of board
floors.

Six pegs in the wall for the slaves to hang their meager
belongings on. One stool, a few cots. Not a scrap of paper, not a picture on
the wall. No crystal vase filled with roses. No books on a polished table.

But of course the slaves couldn’t read. She had heard some
of them could learn to, but it was against the law to teach a slave to read.
Ridiculous law. Maybe, if Petie survived, she’d try him with chalk and slate.
No one would have to know.

Has Petie ever dreamed of being able to read? What might a
slave do if he had leisure? They worked most of the daylight hours, more than
that at harvest time. But everyone has a dream.

When Lena woke, Marianne lay down on the swept boards. Hard
as the floor was, she fell asleep instantly. Late in the morning, when the sun
beamed through the window and warmed her face, she sat up, stiff and sore.

Lena smiled at her, showing the three or four teeth she had
left. “Petie better, Miss. Feel for yoself.”