56
I have so much of you in my heart.
John Keats
Will bid farewell to his chainmen and markers at the forks of the Rivanna, turning toward home.
Home.
It had taken a while before he’d felt in his spirit that the settlement was home. He’d been rootless and roaming for so long he’d begun to think he’d never attach such a sentiment to any particular place. Sylvie had helped change that. But only God Himself could have arranged for such a fine house, even a garden, as if to make up for their rootlessness. Will couldn’t have provided Sylvie with anything better, and she had the company of her fellow Acadians too.
As he rode through open fields that Indians once set fire to for planting, he wondered what had transpired in his absence. Had Sebastien returned? Aside from that, hope and a hard-won happiness lightened the journey. If he kept a steady pace, he’d not have to overnight again in the woods. Bonami loped alongside him, fully recovered, always at his best running free in the open.
By midafternoon a hard, punishing rain slowed him, lightning slashing sky that had been blue an hour before. Continuous thunder turned Bonami nervy. As they took shelter in a hollow sycamore to keep his gunpowder dry, Will waited, chafing till he remembered the crops in need of a drenching. When the weather worsened, he dozed, waking at what he reckoned was nearly four o’clock in the morning. Yellow glimmered on the eastern horizon. Since the trail was sodden and muddy, sure to slow him, he sought higher, drier ground.
At last he smelled the smoke of the settlement and heard the ring of a blacksmith’s hammer. In the distance, men worked the fields and women the kitchen garden. Bonami gave a sharp bark as if alerting the settlement to their return while a beat of expectancy quickened Will’s movements. He dismounted near the stable, seeking Sylvie, but only Dubois met him. His downcast expression told a woeful tale.
“Needs be I speak with you in private, Major Blackburn,” he began.
Wary, Will left his horse to a stable hand while they went up the hill, his pulse thudding in his ears like distant thunder as he pushed open the front door and led the way to his study. Cool and shadowed, the house felt emptier than usual.
Dubois pulled something from his weskit pocket. “I’m sorry, Major, to greet you with this.”
Will took the paper. A letter?
“I found it on the table in Mademoiselle Galant’s cottage soon after she left.”
“And when was that?”
“Ten days ago.”
Ten days? A sudden coldness gripped him. He opened the paper and began reading as Dubois went to stand by a window, granting him privacy. He studied the looping, inked words, dread welling in his belly. It struck him hard that he’d never seen Sylvie’s handwriting before.
Forgive me for leaving without warning. I couldn’t tell you face-to-face.
The Rivanna settlement is not the home I am looking for. I have cast my lot with Sebastien now and desire to find my loved ones, wherever that might lead. Do not attempt to find me. Eulalie can help with the children.
Thank you for all you have done for my people along the Rivanna. I pray it goes well for you.
Sylvie
He blinked, disbelief giving way to a welling pain that clawed at him so savagely it felt like an assault. He forced himself to read the letter a second time as if it could somehow lessen the blow. But the sick sense of all that had happened in his absence remained.
How had they parted?
In the garden they’d said a temporary goodbye, counting the days—nay, the minutes—till his return. She’d been sewing his wedding suit, her head and heart—and his—full of orchard blooms and their wedding. Their future.
Where had that Sylvie gone?
Pummeled by exhaustion, Sylvie rode on a plow horse unaccustomed to the wilderness. Soaked by rain and scorched by the sun in turn, she stared at her soiled linen garments that seemed to rub her sunburned skin raw. Even her scalp seemed on fire. In the melee of her departure, she’d lost her cap, though strangely, a few of her belongings were gathered into one cumbersome sack.
How had it been when the settlement found her gone? What lies had Liselotte told? What had the children thought? Her heart twisted. They’d suffered enough loss in their short lives. And Will? Had he returned from his survey to find her missing? Would he not come after her?
Sebastien turned more brooding, so moody it scared her. His countenance was as dark as storm clouds. With every league they traveled, the more disturbed he seemed.
Her pleading with him had been for naught. Seemingly deaf to it, he trudged on, and then the second night, when they’d both collapsed atop the muddy ground, he looked at her from where he sat, chewing on a piece of dried meat she had no heart to eat. Someone had supplied him well with jerked beef. Liselotte? She had a key to the kitchen stores. Sylvie looked away as a flicker of fury burned through her.
“Your brother will be glad of your coming.”
She looked back at him, exhaustion sharpening her temper. “What do you know about my brother? I have more than one.” Or did have.
He shrugged. “I am a Broussard, remember. And all Acadie knows of Bleu.”
Hearing her brother’s name spoken after so long was startling. Under any other circumstance she would have smiled. Truly, Bleu was well known by many, both enemies and allies. How many times had she thought of him, remembering his words to her at the last? Like Will, Bleu had known what was coming and tried to warn her and her entire family before the great evil had been done, scattering them all to the winds.
“I would give almost anything to see Bleu again. But it shouldn’t be this way, Sebastien.” She marveled at how calmly she spoke when she was so wretched, dirt caked into every crevice, light-headed from lack of water and nourishment, her sunburn like a fever.
“You will see him when we get to the Forks of the Ohio. I discovered he is working for French officials there.”
“Oui. It is the howling wilderness, but it will be worth the distance.”
“Some hundred leagues or more?” She stared at him in disbelief. “And what happens if we meet English soldiers like the ones who turned us out of Acadie?”
He shrugged. “We will make up a story of how we are man and wife, trying to find our way home.”
His simplistic reasoning was but one of the concerns she had about him. “And what if we encounter Indians instead?”
“My scalp is hardly worth having, but yours . . .” His eyes slid to her loose braid a-tangle with twigs and leaves.
In that instant she felt his strange attraction for her. Will had duly warned her. What if Sebastien acted on that? Revulsion took root as she looked down at her tattered petticoats, torn from the hazards of the woods and revealing her pale, scratched legs. She waved a fly away, desperation building to a wide, frantic ache inside her.
Soon that dullness overtook him again, and Sebastien simply turned on his side, a saddlebag beneath his head, and went to sleep. His low snoring gave rise to how she might escape. But she was not Bleu, who seemed to have been born with a compass inside him. Other than the sun’s trail, she knew not which direction to go. With night gathering them up in dark, sultry folds, she’d be completely helpless if she ran.
For now, her hands blessedly untied, she slapped at insects intent on devouring her. Images of the Rivanna tumbled through her mind, one after another. She missed the children with a growing ache. Was anyone tucking them in and kneeling for prayers? Was Henrietta’s skinned knee better? And the sore on Nolan’s lip? Such small matters loomed large in her absence. She was engulfed by a homesickness she’d not known since Acadie. That world was gone, but the Rivanna house and garden were vivid and real, not stolen or ravaged.
Unable to keep her eyes open, she lay down on her blanket, tormented by an incessant thirst. When she slept fitfully, she dreamed of Will. Will and Bleu.
Father God, please let them find me.