The Sacred Shore (3 page)

He nodded solemnly. “I can. With them, anything is possible. Even a revolt against the English.”

And there in the words was the reason why her father was right, and she was wrong. Nicole looked at the only man she had ever loved and said with the sorrow of a broken spirit, “A man who plots revolt is not a man I can marry.”

His body stiffened as though she had reached across the distance and slapped his face. But again there was no anger. Only the careful watchfulness of a hunter stalking prey. “I will think on what you have said, Nicole. Only tell me once more.”

This time she shook her head sadly and turned away in silence. As she walked away she brushed tears from her eyes at the sound of him calling her name. But she did not turn back. For if she had, she knew her will would have snapped. She would have rushed to him and flung herself into his arms and let him take her away. Anywhere, so long as they would remain together. Even if she knew it was wrong, knew that it would end in tragedy. Her love for him was that great.

Nicole pretended not to hurry as she walked the white-sand road back into town. And then she wished she had not turned away. Wished she had given her promise to Jean, turned a deaf ear to her parents' warnings, and done what she longed to do.

Then her step faltered, for there upon the trail leading into Vermilionville she realized that just like Jean, she was a person of two natures. She was strong and certain and willful and brave. Yet she was also weak and frightened and lonely and aching. If that was so, how could she ask Jean to refuse one side of his nature? How could she expect him to be what she herself could not be?

Such lingering regret was not like her. Nor the inability to make a decision and stick to her course. But as she entered the village and hastened toward home, her heart keened like a lonely hawk, circling far overhead, searching for the man she had sent away. A man she had denied for reasons she could no longer recall.

Jean Dupree was the most handsome man in all the southern Acadia province. She thought this because it was true. She had seen her own impression reflected in the gazes of all the local girls, lasses who would never have resisted his urgings. Jean was tall and strong and darkly beautiful, his looks so powerfully attractive they would almost have been effeminate on someone less virile. He suited her perfectly. Even her mother admitted as much, and her mother disliked Jean Dupree so intensely she would not permit him into her home. Nicole herself was tall with red highlights to her hair and eyes green as the Vermilion's water. No one in all Acadia had eyes like hers. Nor the will to match. For Nicole was not only headstrong, she was willful and impatient with the weak meanderings of most men. Only Jean was strong enough and man enough to have won her heart. A heart that now felt as if it were being squeezed to nothing. She sighed as she turned down the lane to her home. Only Jean.

She shooed the chickens back before opening the front gate, then was fastened to the spot by a sudden impression. She gazed up at the red-brick chimney rising from her home's north wall and had a fleeting vision of its being painted white. A white-painted chimney was the Acadians' way of proclaiming that within that home resided an available maiden on her way to being an old maid. Hunters and fishermen treading the bayous would pass word on to other outlying clans, and soon enough the men would appear, silent and often hostile from living too long alone. The swamps and bayous worked strange effects on those who lived solitary existences, painting their beards the dark gray of Spanish moss and twisting their bones like contorted tree limbs.

Some families painted their chimneys as soon as the daughter reached her eighteenth birthday and remained unwed. When Nicole had turned eighteen three months earlier, she had heard someone jokingly ask her father whether they should mix up the limewash and prepare the rags. But her father was head of both the village and the outlying clans, and he had the strength and position to say that no, his daughter was slow in choosing, though she could have had any young man in the village. Henri Robichaud had added that she was too special, too precious, to let go easily, and she could stay home as long as she wished. He had spoken with such conviction Nicole had almost believed him.

“Nicole?” Louise, her mother, appeared in the kitchen window. “Do you wish me to do all the work of dinner myself?”

She collected herself as best she could. “I thought I saw some new eggs.”

“We have enough for today. Come inside. I need you.”

“All right.” She cast a final glance at the unwashed chimney and repressed a shiver. She climbed the stairs, her mind sadly chanting one word in time to her steps. Over and over her mind and heart intoned the name of Jean.

Louise worked alongside her daughter and knew Nicole had been with Jean once more. Against her express orders, her daughter had visited the man Louise had forbidden to step over the threshold of their home. Louise pounded and kneaded the dough she was preparing, working her ire into the flour. She knew there was nothing to be gained from saying anything more. Nicole was a child no longer. Almost a head taller than Louise, her determination halted any further conversation. And then there was the matter of her beauty. Just the previous week Louise had seen it happen. Together the family had attended the Plaquemine festival. Louise had sat beside her husband and watched every young man at the gathering follow her lovely Nicole wherever she moved. Yet this same beauty was also a barrier, for Nicole's loveliness was matched by a strength that cowed men twice her age. She was headstrong and intelligent and unwilling to hide either trait.

Louise picked up the rolling pin. Her anger left the dough flat as a sheet. Why would she not accuse her daughter of defying her specific orders? Louise folded the sheets over and over, then began stamping out circles for biscuits, rapping with the strength of hammer blows. She knew she remained silent because she feared what Nicole might do. If Louise gave the ultimatum that swelled her chest almost to bursting, Nicole could very well turn and walk from their home without a backward glance. She was that headstrong a daughter.

In her heart, Louise often wondered what Nicole would have been had she been shaped by different circumstances. Forced, with family members, to flee like chased rabbits from place to place, eking out an existence from the forests, or working dawn to dusk for enough poor food to be called an evening meal, often dodging shouts and even hurled stones of village children, being eternally unwanted. Those early years had stamped an indelible mark upon their souls, one the serene life they now enjoyed along the bayou could never erase.

Louise began placing the biscuits on the baking tin. A quick glance at Nicole halted her movements. “Daughter, what's wrong?”

Nicole did not respond. She leaned over the vegetables she was meant to be washing, her tears falling silently. A more tragic sight Louise had never seen. The daughter who never wept, who never showed anything but willful strength, was now stooped like an old woman. Nicole seemed unable even to tremble. She did not cry aloud, did not sob, did not speak. She stood with her shoulders bowed and body unmoving. She looked more than sad. She looked tragic.

Hastily Louise wiped her hands on her apron and rushed over. She put her arms about her daughter and hugged her with the will to draw this sorrow out into the light. “Tell me, Nicole. Tell me
now
.”

“Jean has asked me to marry him.” The voice that spoke was a full octave below that of her mother's. A voice full of defeat and woe. “I love him so, Mama.”

Louise bit down on the angry retort that pressed her stomach into a hard knot. Jean was not good enough for Nicole. But saying that now would do nothing. So she held her daughter close and trembled with the struggle to hold back her thoughts.

“I know what you're thinking. That Jean is a bad man.” The tears came faster now and finally the sounds of weeping. “But he's not. He has … pain and angers and rages, just like all of us. But he is also strong and gentle and good.”

The desire to dispute this pressed up so hard Louise coughed to keep from speaking.

Nicole shrugged out from the arms that held her and turned her tear-streaked face. “I always thought that if he loved me enough, he would be the good man I know he has inside him. But today, today …”

Louise bunched her apron up in her hands and could only whisper, “Tell me.”

“Today we talked like we have never talked before. And I told him he had to give up the friends, the ones Father hates so.”

“Your father hates no man.”

Nicole conceded with a tip of her head, then hurriedly amended her words. “The ones he thinks are so dangerous. Jean said he would think on it.”

This was enough to shock Louise to stillness. First that her daughter would be so perceptive, to see the need to extricate her beloved from the threat of such companions. And second that the headstrong and dashing Jean Dupree would love Nicole so much as to be willing to consider such a change.

But Nicole was not finished. “He will not do it. I know him because I love him, and I know he will not do it. He will not, and because of this I cannot marry him. I
must
not.” The sobs seemed almost to choke her, and the effort of trying to breathe and speak must have debilitated her physically, for Nicole collapsed into her father's chair at the head of the kitchen table. She bowed over her hands, leaning down until her hands and her face rested upon her knees. Her voice was muffled, but the words were clear. “I love him, but I must not marry him. I must not. For the children I will never have, I must not.”

Louise only realized she was crying as well when the figure who appeared in the doorway wavered in and out of focus. Her husband of twenty-one years seemed to swell and recede as he approached. Henri Robichaud rested one hand upon his daughter's shoulder and the other reached toward his wife. She moved into his embrace and was comforted by his strength. As always. Henri did not smile and laugh so easily as he had when they were younger, but his strength remained unvanquished both by the years and all the hardships they had endured. Here in her husband's embrace, Louise Robichaud could be weak, could be uncertain, could be threatened by doubts and sorrow. Henri would keep her safe and strong. Henri would know what to do.

“My two beautiful ladies,” he murmured. “The jewels of my life. Look at you now. Both of you crying is enough to break my heart. I think it must be a man that is the cause of so many tears. Am I not right?”

Through spates of tears, Nicole managed to give a brief explanation. When she had ended the telling she whispered, “I wish I knew what to do.”

Henri spoke in a tone to match his daughter's. “Have you prayed of this?”

“So much,” she sobbed. “So often.”

“Ah, wait and hear me now,” he said, stroking Nicole's hair. “I know you have prayed for Jean to know a change of heart and be your man. But have you asked God to show you His
will
?”

Louise clutched her husband's homespun shirt, grateful for his strength and his calm. The storms of life had etched their way deep into his face and his soul, turning what once had been deep smile lines into creases that folded more easily downward. But his quiet and gentle nature had only been increased, his wisdom solidified.

Nicole drew a deep breath. “I think so.”

“You
think
.” The work-scarred hand stroked their daughter's hair with impossible tenderness. “You
think
. Something this important, don't you think you should
know
?”

She looked up then, her tear-streaked gaze as open as a child's. “But I want him. So much.”

Louise's mother-heart lurched at the depth of honesty and of sorrow in the admission.

Henri said, “I know you do. And if I know this, in all my impossible worries as a father and an imperfect man, don't you think our Father knows as well?” Nicole gave a tiny shiver of a nod, and he went on, “Don't you think God would give him to you if he was indeed right? Yes? So perhaps the wisdom you showed in your talk with him today was God's hand at work in your life. Did you think of that?”

“Yes.” The words were soft as a spring wind through the year's new leaves. “Not in those words. But yes. I thought that.”

“Then you also know what is God's answer here to your dilemma, yes?”

Her tears spilled faster once again. “I think that is why my heart aches so.”

Henri's arm around Louise tightened instinctively, and Louise knew their hearts yearned as one over their grief-stricken daughter.