Evermore: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 3) (39 page)

She didn’t need the gun on her hip. Just a flick of her
fingernail, the artery would open. Blood would spray all over her, but she was
used to blood. She stroked the quarter inch of exposed artery. So easy.

Franks had escaped her, but she could kill Murphy. Right
now. But he wouldn’t know who killed him. She wanted his eyes open. She wanted
to see his fear as he realized she was about to kill him. And then, she’d see
him die.

She pinched his ear lobe, gouging the tender flesh with her
thumb nail. She leaned over him so he could see her clearly.

Murphy stirred and blinked.

“You know who I am, Mr. Murphy? You remember me?”

Murphy let out a sigh. “Miss Sassy-pants.”
He said it as if it were a pet name for a favorite child. “Thank God,” he said.
“How bad am I hurt?”

Nicolette pulled back abruptly.
Thank God?
She took a step away. Thank God? He thought she was
going to save him?

What did he mean, calling her Miss Sassy-pants,
like they were friends?

Did he have no understanding how much she hated him? How
could he not know? Where was the fear in his eyes?

Thank God?

The shaking started at her fingertips, ran up her arms, down
to her knees. He thought she would save him?

Nicolette ran from the tent into the driving rain. Thunder
vied with heavy mortar, the rain drops pounded against the trees, the roofs,
the ground. Water streamed through her hair, between her breasts. Mud oozed over
her boot tops. She shuddered, cold to the bone, cold to the heart.

Instead of Murphy’s trusting face, what haunted Nicolette
was the serene, alabaster countenance of the Virgin Mary, tranquil but watchful
in her niche at the cathedral.

Murphy had looked at her as one living soul to another,
seeing no difference between them, sensing only their common humanity. A look
that Mary, Mother of God, would expect her to understand.

And she’d been about to kill him. Under God’s own eye, she’d
been about to bleed the life out of one of His children.

What had she become?

She raised her face, the rain spattering against her cheeks
and eyelids.
Mother of God. Help me
.

She didn’t know how long she punished herself in the rain.
By the time she climbed onto Mrs. Brickell’s porch, her legs barely held her
up. She opened the door, shaking so hard her teeth clicked together.

Lucinda leapt from her chair, spilling Charles Armand to his
feet. “My God, Nikki. You’re blue.”

Lucinda dragged her to the fire, started at the buttons of
her wet dress. “Charles Armand, get that quilt off the bed. Hurry.”

Lucinda stripped her to the skin and wrapped her in the
quilt. Nicolette couldn’t stop trembling.

“Sit in Nikki’s lap, Charles. Warm her up.” Charles Armand
climbed into Nicolette’s lap and wrapped his arms around her neck.

“I nearly killed a man, Lucinda.” Nicolette told her, tears
of shame rolling down her face.

“Blessed Mother, thank you.” Lucinda wrapped her arms around
Nicolette and Charles Armand together. “My dear Nikki, I feared you’d gone to
stone. You cry it out.”

The sun set behind a curtain of rain. Warm now, Nicolette
sat inert before the fire. She felt weak and strangely light. Her head ached
from crying.

Mrs. Brickell warmed up the rest of the soup, bits of
carrot and parsnip and bacon floating in it. Nicolette managed a bowl, but the
fatback, moldy peas, and biscuits repulsed her.

“Them boys at the ramparts would
give a sight to sit here tonight and eat this sorry dinner,” Mrs. Brickell
declared. “You eat up, hear?”

The back door into the room banged open and a tall figure in
dripping rain slicker loomed, his face hidden by the floppy hat. Charles Armand
screamed as if the devil himself had stepped in the door.

Marcel threw his hat off and reached for his son. “Here,
little man. It’s me. It’s just Papa.”

Charles Armand clawed to get away, grabbing at Lucinda,
heedless of the pillow case falling off his head.

“I’ll take him, Lucinda,” Nicolette said over the panicked
wailing. “Here, Charles, come with me. I’ll take you to bed and we’ll crawl
under the covers together. Come on,” she coaxed, grabbing up the pillow case.
“We’ll cover our heads and we’ll be safe under the quilt.”

Charles Armand leapt into Nicolette’s arms and buried his
face in her shoulder.

All her long-banished emotions welled up, threatening to
overcome her again, as they had in the rain. Her voice scratchy, she whispered
“Hello, Marcel” and took Charles Armand to burrow into safety.

Lucinda threw herself into Marcel’s wet embrace. He rocked her
in his arms, inhaling the scent of smoke and fear.

“I’m getting you wet,” he said into her hair.

She clung to his neck. “I don’t care.”

“Give me that slicker, mister,” Mrs. Brickell said,
“before you wet up the whole house. I reckon you’re staying a while.”

Lucinda led him to the parlor fire where Bertie slept in a
drawer. Marcel lifted him into his arms and gazed at him in the candle light.
“There were times . . . ,” he said, a catch in his throat.

“Sit down,” Lucinda said. “Tell me how you got here.”

He and Alistair Whiteaker had ridden through the rain
retreating from Grierson’s cavalry on the Clinton road. “We brought in about
forty men a piece. I figure we’re welcome. Adam Johnston was at the barricade.
He told me you and Nikki were here, with the children.”

Marcel reached for Lucinda’s hands. “Now, my darling. Why
are you here?”

She told him about that day. She even told him she had
beaten Mrs. Chamard and left her bleeding on the bricks.

Marcel listened, his eyes growing darker. He shook his head,
gazing at her lovely hands, rubbing his thumb over the smooth skin. “Come
here,” he said, and took her into his lap. “Tomorrow, my first task will be to
find these men, Franks and Murphy. They will never cross your path again.”

“Marcel, you won’t kill them? Please, they will be armed,
they’ll . . . .”

“Hush.” If he killed them, he would do it so that she would
never know of it. “I will begin with General Gardner. If he will undertake a
prison term, he may save them.”

“Please, Marcel. God will not forgive a murder.”

He placed a finger over her lips. “The next thing I will do
is write to my wife. To her father, and to my father. And lastly, to my
solicitor. The children will be yours, always. Whatever happens to me. You
understand? You need never worry this will happen again.”

Lucinda stroked his scraggly beard, pushed the hair off his
face, trying to hold in the sobs building up.

Marcel pulled her to his shoulder and held her while she
cried.

At sunrise, there was a lull in the fighting. The only sound
was a single bird singing in the china-berry tree at the front of the house.
Marcel tiptoed into the room where Nicolette had taken Charles Armand to bed.
Gently, he touched her shoulder.

She sat up and Marcel leaned down to hug her.

“Thank you, Nikki. For taking care of my family.”

“We took care of each other.”

He sat down on the bed. “These men, who are they?”

“Fanatics. Franks fancies himself an orator. Murphy, just a
thug.”

He eyed her suspiciously. “You seem very cool about having
been abducted, bound, and accused of treason.”

She nodded toward the gun on the bedside table, the
cartridges emptied beside it lest Charles Armand pick the pistol up. “I meant
to kill them both. But Franks slipped out a fortnight ago like the coward he
is. And Murphy.” Nicolette reached for her brother’s hand. “Marcel, I nearly
killed Murphy.”

She told him about the gaping wound, and how blessed she was
not to have lost her soul to vengeance.

Marcel gazed at her in wonder. He believed she could have
killed those men. She had a spine in her, and an uncompromising spirit. And
perhaps she had saved his soul, too. He didn’t see how he could in conscience
and honor not have killed those men. And now this Murphy lay in the hospital
with a fist-sized hole in his neck.

He took Nicolette’s hand, and together they said a short
prayer of thanks. Killing all around them, day after day, but they had neither
of them committed Cain’s sin.

He looked at her a long moment. “You’re really all right?”

She nodded. “Now that I can pray again. And feel again.”

“All right. Where’s my boy?”

Nicolette pulled the covers back to reveal Charles Armand
snuggled up to her, the pillow case around his head.

“Charles,” she said quietly, rubbing his back. “Charles, your
Papa has come to see you.”

Charles Armand raised his head. He began to cry, but this
time he reached his arms up for his Papa.

Marcel held him close, waiting for the sniffles to stop.
After a time, he picked at the pillow case covering his boy’s head. One corner
lifted so he could see Charles Armand’s face, he said, “Do we need this?”

Charles Armand gripped the cloth in his fist. “Yes, Papa.”

Marcel dropped the corner, covering his face again, and
walked his son out to the porch. He sat down in the rawhide chair and settled
Charles Armand on his lap. Peeking underneath the pillow case again, he said,
“If we pull back a corner here, you can watch the sunrise with me. Want to do
that?”

“Just a corner,” Charles Armand said.

Alistair Whiteaker showed himself as early as it was decent
to come calling. Waiving propriety, Marcel took his boys and Lucinda to the
back porch to give him and Nicolette a little privacy.

Nicolette wouldn’t have known him. His beard bushed out all
around his face, and there were lines in his forehead that were not there
before. His sapphire eyes bored into her.

Tears wet Nicolette’s cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying
to laugh. “I seem to cry at everything the last few hours.”

Alistair tossed his hat aside and swept Nicolette into his
arms. He kissed her hard, without relent. Nicolette’s first resistance melted.
For a moment, the loneliness lifted. For a moment, she felt safe. She held his
kiss, gloried in the sweetness of his lips.

Rifle fire cracked through the fort. Marcel marched onto the
porch putting his hat on.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Alistair touched her cheek. “I’ll come tonight.”

Day and night, the siege continued. Great numbers of dead
Union soldiers lay outside the ramparts in the mud, broiling in the summer sun.

Surely to God the Yanks would wave a flag of truce so
they could collect their dead and wounded, but none came. The bodies lying in
the sun swelled and turned black. The Rebs manning the barricades gagged and
tied kerchiefs over their noses against the fearsome reek.

“They can’t shoot us out of here, they aim to stench us
out,” Mrs. Brickell declared.

The Union’s callous disregard of their fallen soldiers
shamed Nicolette. These were the heroes who were to set her people free?
Lincoln’s toothless Emancipation Proclamation, the inept Union siege around
Port Hudson, and now this?

In the hospital tent, the quinine ran out. Nicolette mixed
poppy head elixirs and even made a weak tea from the deadly night shade for men
who were out of their heads with pain and fever. She learned to be alert for
the dreaded smell of gangrene that sent a man back to the operating table for
amputation, or sent him to his grave.

Murphy’s wound suppurated, as she expected. His neck grew
hugely swollen. Nicolette herself mopped the angry red stitches. Now, at last,
she saw fear in his eyes.

She did not feel the satisfaction she’d once imagined.
Instead, out of pity, she allowed him to grip her hand, begging her for
reassurance he would yet be well. But there was nothing more the doctors could
do for him. “Shh,” she said. “Don’t fret. It’s a small wound, Mr. Murphy.”

She peeled the soiled shirt off him to cool the fever. There
was the gouge in his upper arm, healed but deep and red. She had made that
wound. Opening Murphy’s vein with her fingernail, him no threat to her any
longer, that would have been cold blooded murderer. She thanked the Blessed
Virgin she had not done it, but defense was not vengeance. She was glad the
shot up her dark stairs had got him. She hoped it had pained him and scared
him.

The next morning, Nicolette again made the rounds of the men
laid out under the shade of a spreading oak. Six feet away, she smelled the
gangrene in Murphy’s neck. Her gorge rose at the putrid odor. The bandage
around his neck was slick with exuded pus.

Steeling herself, she knelt to tend to him, but what could
she do? She didn’t dare open the gauze over his neck. His breathing was shallow
and rapid, and his eyes were closed tight. The pain had to be awful. Pity,
blessed pity sent from Mother Mary herself, washed through her.

Murphy opened bulging, blood-shot eyes. It took him a moment
to focus on her. He gasped. His pupils widened as if he looked on a terrible
avenging angel come to claim him and take him to hell.

His eyes bugged out. “Get away!” he screeched. “Don’t touch
me!”

The doctor hurried over. “Gad,” he said. “I’ll never get
used to the smell. Get the chloroform.”

Nicolette quickly fetched a cone and the brown bottle of
precious anesthesia. The doctor held Murphy down, wild now, and she administered
the requisite four drops. Murphy still struggled.

“Two more,” the doctor said.

Murphy’s body slackened and went limp.

“Nothing else we can do for him now. If he wakes up, we’ll
fill him full of whiskey.”

Murphy never woke. By mid-day, he was gone.

Nicolette herself closed his eyes and made the sign of the
cross over his dead body.

Sustained by hope and extraordinary courage, the Rebels
endured days of heat, bombardment, and death. Rations grew shorter, and shorter
yet inside Port Hudson, but they still had a few ears of hard corn every day
and plenty of rats for meat. Nicolette and Mrs. Brickell colluded to keep the
identity of the stew meat from Lucinda else she would have starved herself.
Occasionally, Marcel or Alistair would bring a squirrel for Mrs. Brickell to
cook, but with near five thousand men within the fort, every edible creature
was soon taken.