Sister Marie Madeleine sighed heavily. “Very well. Rest for this evening. I will bring you back some bread and cheese.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
“I am quite certain you will be yourself tomorrow,” Simonette called before Sister Marie Madeleine closed the door gently behind her.
Lenobia let out a long breath and tossed back the hood of her cloak along with her silver-blond hair. Not wasting any of her precious time alone, she dragged the large chest that was engraved in gold with CECILE MARSON DE LA TOUR D’AUVERGNE over to the far side of the room near the sleeping pallet she had chosen for herself. Lenobia positioned the trunk under one of the round portholes and then she climbed atop it, pulled the little brass hook that held the glass closed, and breathed deeply of the cool, moist air.
The thick trunk made her just tall enough to see out of the window. In awe, Lenobia gazed at the endless expanse of water. It was past dusk, but there was still enough light in the enormous sky for the waves to be illuminated. Lenobia didn’t think she’d ever seen anything as mesmerizing as the ocean at night. Her body swayed gracefully with the movement of the ship. Sick? Absolutely not!
“But I will pretend to be,” she whispered aloud to the ocean and the night. “Even if I must keep up the pretense for the full eight weeks of the voyage.”
Eight weeks! The thought of it was terrible. She had gasped in shock when the always-chattering Simonette had remarked how hard it was to believe they would be on this ship for eight whole weeks. Sister Marie Madeleine had given her a strange look, and Lenobia had quickly followed her gasp with a moan, and clutched her stomach.
“I must be more careful,” she told herself. “Of course the real Cecile would know that the voyage would take eight weeks. I must be smarter and braver—and most of all I must avoid the Bishop.”
She reluctantly closed the little window, stepped down, and opened the trunk. As she reached in to begin searching through the expensive silks and laces for a sleeping shift, she found a folded piece of paper lying atop the glittering mound. The name Cecile was written in her mother’s distinctively bold script. Lenobia’s hands shook only a little when she opened the letter and read:
My daughter,
You are betrothed to the Duc of Silegne’s youngest son, Thinton de Silegne. He is master of a large plantation one day’s ride north of New Orleans. I do not know if he is kind or handsome, only that he is young, rich, and comes from a fine family. I will pray with every sunrise that you find happiness and that your children know how fortunate they are to have such a brave woman as their mother.
Your maman
Lenobia closed her eyes, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and clutched her mother’s letter. It was a sign that all would be well! She was going to marry a man who lived a day’s ride north of where the Bishop would be. Surely a large, rich plantation would have its own chapel. If it didn’t, Lenobia would make quite certain it soon would. All she had to do was avoid discovery until she left New Orleans.
It shouldn’t be so difficult, she told herself. For the past two years I have been avoiding the prying eyes of men. In comparison, eight more weeks is not long at all …
* * *
Much later, when Lenobia allowed herself to remember that fateful voyage, she considered the oddness of time, and how eight weeks could pass at such differing speeds.
The first two days had seemed interminable. Sister Marie Madeleine hovered around her, trying to tempt her to eat—which was a torture because Lenobia was absolutely ravenous and wanted to sink her teeth into the biscuits and hot sliced pork that the good nun kept offering her. Instead she nibbled on some hard bread and drank watered wine until her cheeks felt hot and her head was spinning.
Just after dawn of the third day, the ocean, which had been placid, changed utterly and became an angry gray entity that tossed the Minerva to and fro as if she were a twig. The Commodore made a grand show of coming to their rooms and assuring them that the squall was comparatively mild and, in actuality, fortuitous—that it was pushing them toward New Orleans at a much faster rate than was typical for this time of year.
Lenobia was pleased about that, but she thought it even more fortuitous that the rough seas caused more than half of her shipmates—including the poor, unfortunate Bishop—to become violently ill and to keep to their quarters. Lenobia felt bad for being relieved at so much sickness, but it certainly made the next ten days easier for her. And by the time the sea had become placid again, Lenobia’s pattern of preferring to keep to herself had been well established. Except for occasional bursts of Simonette’s irrepressible chattering, the other girls mostly left Lenobia to herself.
At first she’d thought she’d be lonely. Lenobia did miss her mother badly, but it was a surprise to her how much she enjoyed the solitude—the time alone with her thoughts. But that was just the first of her surprises. The truth was, until her secret was discovered, Lenobia had found happiness, and it was due to three things—sunrise and horses—and the young man she’d chanced upon because of them.
She’d found the way to the Percherons the same way she’d discovered how peaceful and private it was in the wee hours just before and during the rising of the sun—by finding the path least frequented by the rest of the people aboard.
None of the other girls ever left her sleeping pallet before the sun was well into the morning sky. Sister Marie Madeleine was always the first of the women awake. She rose when dawn’s light changed from pink to yellow, and went immediately to the little shrine she’d created for the Virgin Mary, lit one precious candle, and began praying. The nun also came to her altar mid-morning for Marian litanies, and to recite the Little Office of the Virgin before she went to bed, instructing the girls to pray with her. In truth, every morning the devout Sister prayed so fervently—eyes closed, counting her rosary beads by touch—that it was a simple thing to slip into or out of the room without disturbing her.
That was how it began—Lenobia’s pattern of waking before all the others and roaming silently around the ship, finding pockets of solitude and so much more beauty than she had ever imagined. She’d been going mad, stuck in that one room, hiding from the Bishop and pretending to be ill. Early one morning, when all the girls, even Sister Marie Madeleine, were sound asleep, she’d taken a chance and tiptoed from the chamber and into the hallway. The sea was rough—the squall just really setting in—but Lenobia had no trouble keeping to her feet. She enjoyed the pitch and roll of the Minerva. She also enjoyed the fact that the bad weather was keeping even many of the crew in their quarters.
Listening as hard as she could, Lenobia had moved from shadow to shadow, making her way up to a dark corner of the deck. There she’d stood near the railing and breathed great gulps of fresh air while she stared out at the water and the sky and the vast expanse of emptiness. She hadn’t been thinking anything—she’d just been feeling the freedom.
And then something amazing happened.
The sky had changed from coal and gray to blush and peach, primrose and saffron. The crystal waters magnified all those colors, and Lenobia had been captivated by the majesty of it. Yes, of course, she had often been awake at dawn at the château, but she’d always been busy. She’d never had time to sit and watch the lightening of the sky and the magickal lifting of the sun from a distant horizon.
From that morning on it became part of her own religious ritual, and Lenobia was, in her own way, as devout as was Sister Marie Madeleine. Each dawn she would steal above deck, find a spot of shadow and solitude, and watch the sky welcome the sun.
And as she did, Lenobia gave thanks for the beauty she had been allowed to witness. Holding her mother’s rosary beads, she prayed fervently that she be allowed to see another dawn in safety, with her secret undiscovered. She would stay above deck as long as she dared, until the noises of the waking crew drove her back below, where she slipped into her shared room and went back to the charade of being an ill, delicate loner.
It was just after she’d watched her third dawn and she was retracing what had become the familiar path to her room that Lenobia found the horses, and then him. She’d heard the men coming up from below just as she was about to enter the stairwell hallway, and had been almost certain that one of the voices—the one that was gruffest of them all—had belonged to the Bishop. Her reaction was immediate. Lenobia lifted her skirts and ran as quickly and silently as possible in the opposite direction. She flitted from shadow to shadow, always moving away from the voices. She didn’t pause when she found the little arched doorway that led to steep, narrow stairs dropping down and down like a ladder. She simply climbed down until she came to the bottom.
Lenobia smelled them before she saw them. The scents of horse and hay and manure were as familiar as they were comforting. She probably should have paused there only a moment—she was quite certain none of the other girls would have paid so much as an instant’s attention to the horses. But Lenobia was not like other girls. She had always loved animals—all types of animals, but especially horses.