* * *
There was a sound in the hallway, and Brianna hastily flipped the page of her sketchbook over, to a half-finished charcoal drawing of the river and its trees. The steps went by, though, and she relaxed, turning back the page.
She wasn’t working; the drawing was complete. She only wanted to look at it.
She’d drawn him in three-quarter profile, head turned to listen as he tuned his guitar strings. It was no more than a sketch, but it caught the line of head and body with a rightness that memory confirmed. She could look at this and conjure him, bring him close enough almost to touch.
There were others; some botched messes, some that came close. A few that were good drawings in themselves, but that failed to capture the man behind the lines. One or two, like this one, that she could use to comfort herself in the late gray afternoons, when the light began to fail and the fires burned low.
The light was fading over the river now, the water dimming from bright silver to the gentler glow of pewter.
There were others; sketches of Jamie Fraser, of her mother, of Ian. She had begun to draw them out of loneliness, and looked at them now with fear, hoping against hope that these fragments of paper were not the only remnants of the family she had known so briefly.
Tell you true, I don’t reckon Miss Jo thinks they going to find the man…Miss Jo knows about Indians.
Her hands were damp; the charcoal smeared at the corner of a page. A soft step sounded just outside the parlor door, and she closed her book at once.
Ulysses came in, a lighted taper in his hand, and began to light the branches of the great candelabrum.
“You don’t need to light all those for me.” Brianna spoke as much from a desire not to disturb the quiet melancholy of the room as from modesty. “I don’t mind the dark.”
The butler smiled gently and went on with his work. He touched each wick precisely, and the tiny flames sprang up at once, jinni called up by a magician’s wand.
“Miss Jo will be down soon,” he said. “She can see the lights—and the fire—so she knows where she is in the room.”
He finished and blew out the taper, then moved about the room in his usual soft-footed way, tidying the small disorder left by the afternoon guests, adding wood to the fire, puffing it into crackling life with the bellows.
She watched him; the small, precise movements of the well-kept hands, his complete absorption in the correct placement of the whisky decanter and its glasses. How many times had he straightened this room? Put back each piece of furniture, each tiny ornament precisely in its place, so that its mistress’s hand would fall upon it without groping?
A whole life devoted to the needs of someone else. Ulysses could read and write both French and English; could reckon numbers, could sing and play the harpsichord. All that skill and learning—used only for the entertainment of an autocratic old lady.
To say to one, “Come,” and he cometh, to say to another “Go,” and he goeth. Yes, that was Jocasta’s way.
And if Jocasta had her way…she would own this man.
The thought was unconscionable. Worse, it was ridiculous! She shifted impatiently in her seat, trying to push it away. He caught the slight movement, and turned inquiringly, to see if anything was wanted.
“Ulysses,” she blurted. “Do you want to be free?”
The moment the words were out, she bit her tongue, and felt her cheeks go red with mortification.
“I’m sorry,” she said at once, and looked down at her hands, twisted in her lap. “That was a terribly rude question. Please forgive me.”
The tall butler didn’t say anything, but regarded her quizzically for a moment. Then he touched his wig lightly, as though to settle it in place, and turned back to his work, picking up the scattered sketches on the table and tapping them neatly into a stack.
“I was born free,” he said at last, so quietly that she wasn’t sure she’d heard him. His head was bent, eyes on the long black fingers that plucked the ivory counters from the game table and placed each one neatly in its box.
“My father had a tiny farm, not too far from here. But he died of a snake’s bite, when I was six or so. My mother could not manage to keep us—she was not strong enough for farming—and so she sold herself, putting the money with a carpenter for my apprenticeship once I should come of age, that I might learn a useful trade.”
He set the ivory box in its slot in the game table, and wiped away a crumb of tea cake that had fallen on the cribbage board.
“But then she died,” he went on matter-of-factly. “And the carpenter, instead of taking me as an apprentice, claimed that as I was the child of a slave, I was by law a slave myself. And so he sold me.”
“But that’s not right!”
He looked at her in patient amusement, but didn’t speak. And what had right ever had to do with it? his dark eyes said.
“I was fortunate,” he said. “I was sold—cheaply, for I was very small and puny—to a schoolmaster, whom several plantation owners on the Cape Fear had hired to teach their children. He would ride from one house to another, staying in each for a week or a month, and I would go with him, perched behind him on the horse’s rump, tending the horse when we stopped, and doing such small services as he required.
“And because the journeys were long and tedious, he would talk to me as we rode. He sang—he loved to sing, that man, and he had a most delightful voice—” To Brianna’s surprise, Ulysses looked faintly nostalgic, but then he shook his head, recalling himself, and took out a cloth from his pocket, with which he wiped the sideboard.
“It was the schoolmaster who gave me the name Ulysses,” he said, back turned to her. “He knew some Greek, and some Latin as well, and for his own amusement, he taught me to read, on the nights when darkness befell us and we were forced to encamp on the road.”
The straight, lean shoulders rose in the faintest of shrugs.
“When the schoolmaster died as well, I was a young man of twenty or so. Hector Cameron bought me, and discovered my talents. Not all masters would value such endowments in a slave, but Mr. Cameron was not a common man.” Ulysses smiled faintly.
“He taught me to play chess, and would wager upon my success, playing against his friends. He had me taught to sing, and to play the harpsichord, that I might provide entertainment for his guests. And when Miss Jocasta began to lose her sight, he gave me to her, to be her eyes.”
“What was your name? Your real name?”
He paused, thinking, then gave her a smile that did not reach his eyes.
“I am not sure that I remember,” he said politely, and went out.
56
CONFESSIONS OF THE FLESH
He woke a little before dawn. It was still black dark, but the air had changed; the embers had burned to staleness and the forest’s breath moved past his face.
Alexandre was gone. He lay alone under the tattered deerskin, very cold.
“Alexandre?” he whispered hoarsely. “Père Ferigault?”
“I am here.” The young priest’s voice was soft, somehow remote, though he sat no more than a yard away.
Roger rose up on one elbow, squinting. Once the sleep had left his eyes, he could see dimly. Alexandre was sitting cross-legged, his back very straight, his face turned up to the square of the smokehole overhead.
“Are you all right?” One side of the priest’s neck was stained dark with blood, though his face—what Roger could see of it—seemed serene.
“They will kill me soon. Perhaps today.”
Roger sat up, clutching the deerskin to his chest. He was already cold; the calm tone of this froze him.
“No,” he said, and had to cough to clear his throat of soot. “No, they won’t.”
Alexandre didn’t bother contradicting him. Didn’t move. He sat naked, oblivious of the cold morning air, looking up. At last he lowered his gaze, and turned his head toward Roger.
“Will you hear my confession?”
“I’m not a priest.” Roger scrambled to his knees and scuffled across the floor, the skin held awkwardly before him. “Here, you’ll freeze. Get under this.”
“It does not matter.”
Roger wasn’t sure whether he meant being cold didn’t matter, or whether Roger’s not being a priest didn’t matter. He laid a hand on Alexandre’s bare shoulder. Whether it mattered or not, the man was cold as ice.
Roger sat down next to Alexandre, as close as could be managed, and spread the skin over them both. Roger could feel his own skin ripple into gooseflesh where the other man’s icy skin touched him, but it didn’t trouble him; he leaned closer, wanting urgently to give Alexandre some of his own warmth.
“Your father,” Alexandre said. He had turned his head; his breath touched Roger’s face, and his eyes were dark holes in his face. “You told me he was a priest.”
“A minister. Yes, but I’m not.”
He sensed, rather than saw, the other’s small gesture of dismissal.
“In time of need, any man may do the office of a priest,” Alexandre said. Cold fingers touched Roger’s thigh, briefly. “Will you hear my confession?”
“If that’s—yes, if you like.” He felt awkward, but it couldn’t hurt, and if it helped the other at all…The hut, and the village outside, were quiet around them. There was no sound but the wind in the pine trees.
He cleared his throat. Did Alexandre mean to begin, or was he to say something first?
As though the sound had been a signal, the Frenchman turned to face him, bowing his head so the soft light smoothed the gold hair of his crown.
“Bless me, brother, for I have sinned,” Alexandre said in a low voice. And with his head bowed, hands folded in his lap, he made confession.
Sent out from Detroit with an escort of Hurons, he had ventured down the river as far as the settlement of Ste. Berthe de Ronvalle, to relieve the elderly priest in charge of the mission, whose health had broken down.
“I was happy there,” Alexandre said, in the half-dreaming voice that men use for events that have taken place decades ago. “It was a wild place, but I was very young, and ardent in my faith. I welcomed hardship.”
Young? The priest couldn’t be much older than himself.
Alexandre shrugged, dismissing the past.
“I spent two years with the Huron, and converted many. Then I went with a group of them to Ft. Stanwix, where there was a great gathering of the tribes of the region. There I met Kennyanisi-t’ago, a war chief of the Mohawk. He heard me preach, and being moved of the Holy Spirit, invited me to return with him to his village.”
The Mohawk were notoriously wary of conversion; it had seemed a heaven-sent chance. So Père Ferigault had traveled down the river by canoe, in company with Kennyanisi-t’ago and his warriors.
“That was my first sin,” he said quietly. “Pride.” He lifted one finger to Roger, as though suggesting that he keep count. “Still, God was with me.” The Mohawk had sided with the English during the recent French and Indian War, and were more than suspicious of the young French priest. He had persevered, learning the Mohawk language, that he might preach to them in their own tongue.
He had succeeded in converting a number of the village, though by no means all. However, among his converts was the war chief, so he was protected from interference. Unfortunately, the sachem of the village opposed his influence, and there was continued uneasiness between Christian and non-Christian in the village.
The priest licked dry lips, then picked up the water jar and drank.
“And then,” he said, taking a deep breath, “then I committed my second sin.”
He had fallen in love with one of his own converts.
“Had you had women, before—?” Roger choked off the question, but Alexandre answered quite simply, without hesitation.
“No, never.” There was a breath there, not quite a laugh, of bitter self-mockery. “I had thought I was immune to that temptation. But man is frail in the face of Satan’s fleshly lures.”
He had lived in the girl’s longhouse for some months. Then, one morning, he had risen early, and going to the stream to wash, had seen his own reflection in the water.
“There was a sudden disturbance in the water, and the surface broke. A huge and gaping mouth rose through the surface, shattering the reflection of my face.”
It had been no more than a rising trout, leaping for a dragonfly, but the priest, shaken by the experience, had seen it as a sign from God that his soul was in danger of being swallowed by the mouth of Hell. He had gone at once to the longhouse and removed his things, going to live alone in a small shelter outside the village. However, he had left his lover pregnant.
“Was that what caused the trouble that brought you here?” Roger asked.
“No, not in itself. They do not see matters of marriage and morality as we do,” Alexandre explained. “Women take men as they will, and marriage is an agreement that endures so long as the partners are in amity; if they should fall out, then the woman may expel the man from her house—or he may leave. The children, if there are children, stay with the mother.”
“But then—”
“The difficulty was that I had always, as a priest, refused to baptize infants unless both parents were Christian and in a state of grace. This is necessary, you understand, if the child is to be raised in faith—for the Indians are inclined otherwise to view the sacrament of baptism as no more than one of their pagan rituals.”
Alexandre drew a deep breath.
“And of course I could not baptize this child. This offended and horrified Kennyanisi-t’ago, who insisted that I must do so. Upon my refusing, he ordered me to be tortured. My—the girl—interceded for me, and was abetted in this by her mother and several other influential persons.”
Consequently the village had been torn by controversy and schism, and at last the sachem had decreed that they must take Père Alexandre to Onyarekenata, where an impartial council might judge what must be done to restore the harmony amongst them.
Roger scratched at his beard;perhaps the Indian dislike of hairy Europeans was the association with lice.
“I am afraid I don’t quite understand,” he said carefully. “You refused to baptize your own child because the mother was not a good Christian?”
Alexandre looked surprised.
“Ah, non! She retains her faith—though she would have every excuse if she did not,” he added ruefully. He sighed. “No. I cannot baptize the child, not because of its mother—but because its father is not in a state of grace.”
Roger rubbed his forehead, hoping his face didn’t betray his astonishment.
“Ah. Is this why you wished to make confession to me? That you might be restored to a state of grace, and thus able to—”
The priest stopped him with a small gesture. He sat quietly for a moment, slender shoulders slumped. He must have brushed his wound accidentally; the clotted mass had cracked, and blood was once more seeping slowly down his neck.
“Forgive me,” Alexandre said. “I should not have asked you; it was only that I was so grateful to be able to speak in my own language; I could not resist the temptation to ease my soul by telling you. But it is no good; there can be no absolution for me.”
The man’s despair was so plain, Roger laid a hand on the priest’s forearm, wanting urgently to assuage it.
“Are you sure? You said that in time of need—”
“It is not that.” He laid his hand on top of Roger’s, squeezing tight, as though he might draw strength from the other’s grip.
Roger said nothing. After a moment, Alexandre’s head rose and the priest looked him in the face. The light outside had changed; there was a faint glow, a brightness in the air just short of light. His own breath rose white from his mouth, like smoke rising toward the hole above.
“Even though I confess, I will not be forgiven. There must be true repentance in order to obtain absolution; I must reject my sin. And that I cannot do.”
He fell silent. Roger didn’t know whether to speak, or what to say. A priest, he supposed, would have said something like “Yes, my son?” but he couldn’t. Instead, he took Alexandre’s other hand in his, and held it tightly.
“My sin was to love her,” Alexandre said, very softly, “and that I cannot stop.”