Water Song (Once Upon a Time (Simon Pulse)) Read online

  The horrible, pointed bayonets at the ends of the soldiers’ rifles gleamed in the early afternoon light. Emma’s words were spoken in the excellent German she’d learned at the Hampshire School. She hadn’t planned to speak them either, but they came almost on their own. The ability to quickly concoct an impromptu cover story when under pressure was a skill she’d had the chance to hone during her many mishaps at the boarding school.

  “First, let me begin by saying that this is my property and I have every right to go down my well if it pleases me to do so. Second, this man is no soldier. He was out hiking yesterday and wandered into a cloud of your unspeakable gas. Look what it did to him,” she scolded indignantly. “Stumbling home in pain, he fell into our open well. He spent the entire night there before I found him just now.”

  The German colonel looked sharply from the injured soldier and back to Emma. “Who is this man to you?” he asked in German.

  “My husband,” Emma replied with the first lie that sprang to her lips.

  “I see no wedding ring,” the colonel snapped, making Emma wish she had said he was her brother. But that might not have worked. If they figured out that he was American, they would know it was not true.

  “I sold it,” she replied. “We are cut off from our home by your wretched submarines, and food is in short supply here. The farmers charge a very inflated price, but we get hungry and need to pay whatever they demand.”

  The colonel studied Emma. “I can tell from your accent that you are English. What about …” He jerked his head disdainfully toward the soldier who seemed about to collapse as he hung there between the two German soldiers. “Also English?”

  “American.” Since he actually was American, it seemed like a good idea to let the colonel know that. The Americans had no troops here, as far as she knew. The fact that he was American would make it more believable that he was not a soldier. “And I am American because I am his wife,” she added. “I want nothing more than to wait out this war and go home with my husband to America.” She hoped he would not ask her exactly where in America, since she had no idea.

  “You do not think America should join the war?” the colonel inquired suspiciously.

  “Absolutely not!” she replied. “Just because some Serbian lunatic shot the kaiser’s cousin? It’s insanity! My husband and I want our country to have no part in this war! We have even marched with the isolationists.” This last bit she took from a newspaper article she’d read recounting the widespread feeling among Americans that they wanted to stay out of the war.

  He still didn’t seem convinced as he strode arrogantly over to the soldier. “Tell me your name!” he demanded in English.

  The soldier began to cough.

  “Your name!” the colonel barked harshly.

  “Jack Sprat,” the soldier said, spitting out the words.

  That can’t be his name, Emma realized, remembering the old nursery rhyme: Jack Sprat would eat no fat. His wife would eat no lean. But together, the two of them would lick the plate quite clean.

  The colonel did not make the connection, however, and accepted his answer, convinced by the American accent. He turned his attention back to Emma, speaking in German again. “Who owns this estate?”

  “I do.”

  “We will be using it as a base, and my men will be garrisoned here.”

  “What?” Emma cried indignantly.

  “This mountain ridge gives us a perfect vantage point from which to see the enemy advancing across the fields.”

  “But I don’t want you here,” Emma protested. “I won’t allow it!”

  The colonel laughed. “What you want doesn’t matter. My men have already begun to move in. You and your husband can stay on in your chambers as our guests.”

  “We don’t want to stay here with you,” Emma insisted angrily.

  “We can shoot you. Would you prefer that?” he snapped, clearly losing patience with her.

  “Are we free to leave?” she dared ask, her tone chastened by the harshness that had come into his voice.

  He considered this a moment. “No. I think not. You know the running of the place. We might need information from you. And I don’t want you leaving to tell the enemy all about us. To be blunt: You and your husband are our prisoners. We will need your caretakers to stay, as well.”

  He spoke sharply to his two men. “Take them into their chambers and lock them inside.”

  Emma shivered as the lock bolt in the door clicked shut behind her. The soldier, her “husband,” had been roughly shoved to the floor and lay there in a heap.

  “Come on,” she said gently, getting into a squat position and sliding her arms under his armpits. “Let’s get you into the bed.” She attempted to drag him but, although trim and athletic, he was remarkably solid and heavy. It took all her effort to get him next to the bed.

  When she tried to lift him up into it, she found it impossible. She kept nearly lifting him onto the bed only to drop him to the floor at the last second.

  “Sorry,” she apologized in embarrassment the second time she bumped his head against the wooden foot of the bed.

  The thump seemed to rouse him a bit, and his bulging, slitted eyes opened slightly, revealing deep brown pupils.

  “Hold on there, sug,” he croaked, pronouncing the endearment like the first part of the word sugar.

  Reaching up, he gripped the foot post and pulled himself up onto the bed. He sat at the bed’s edge a moment, supported by his arms, before toppling onto his back with his legs still dangling over the side.

  Emma scrambled onto the bed beside him, putting her face close to his. “Can I get you anything?” she offered.

  He turned so that they were face-to-face. “How about a kiss, sug?”

  Emma sprang back as though a firecracker had exploded between them. “Did I hear you correctly? Did you just ask me for a kiss?”

  Improbable as it looked on his battered, scorched, swollen-eyed face, a grin spread across it. “Yeah, you right, I did. How ’bout it?”

  “You’re disgusting!” she cried, outraged. “I just saved your life, you know! And that’s how you thank me?”

  “Aw c’mon, sug. Don’t be that way,” he said, his voice fading into a whisper. “I bet you have the sweetest kisses, and I ain’t been kissed in the longest time… .” His last words trailed off as he shut his eyes and fell asleep.

  “Well, that’s certainly not surprising,” Emma replied before realizing that he was asleep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Bayou Magic

  Jack knew he had traveled very far away. Although he had once sworn he would never return home, in this time of greatest distress, that was exactly where his spirit had instinctively come.

  He sat on a large, gnarled root of a tree jutting from the murky, dark water. He was in a flooded forest of towering, bald cypress under a lush canopy alive with calling, cawing birds. Spanish moss and vines hung above him.

  Was he really back in Louisiana? Was this a dream or was it real? His mam always said it didn’t really matter. The dream world was a real world too. She walked through both worlds with practiced ease, which was one reason—but not the only reason—that some called her a witchy woman.

  The water rippled as an alligator moved just below the surface. He watched the line it etched in the water, making sure it was going away from him rather than heading in his direction as he had done many times in his boyhood. It was never a good idea to take alligators for granted no matter how familiar you became with them.

  When he stopped watching the alligator he turned to find his mother sitting on the root beside him. As she’d been in life, she was a tall, regal woman with chocolaty skin and high cheekbones, her black hair caught in a circle of braids atop her head. “You’re hurt badly, son,” she observed, taking his hand.

  Looking down, he saw that the skin on his hands was no longer peeling. Bending forward, he gazed at his reflection in the dark water. His eyes were large, dark, and completely norm
al, his lips smooth and no longer blistered.

  “I rose above it, like you taught me,” he told her. “I jumped into the muddy ol’ Mississippi and swam for my life.”

  She stroked his hair tenderly. “You’ve learned well.”

  “You always said I was a frog.”

  She laughed softly. “You are surely that, but so much more.”

  Reaching into the water, she pulled up a handful of thick mud. Still cupping the mud, she broke off a shelf of lichen growing on the bald cedar tree and crumpled it into a fine powder over the mud.

  He flinched as she plucked two hairs from his head and stirred them into the mud and lichen powder.

  He knew what she would do next and so shut his eyes to let her smear the mud across them. The cool mud soothed him as she whispered words of healing he’d often heard her murmur over the sick and wounded poor.

  In their small town outside the city, where no licensed physician ever ventured, she was no witch. There, she was a queen, the only hope the people held for release from suffering. And she never failed them.

  She had learned all the ancient remedies; the ones the old people had carried with them from Haiti, from Africa, from Romania, France, and even the knowledge the native Indians brought, especially the Natchez tribe—the once great civilization from the Mississippi Valley—the great mound builders whose blood ran in her veins: It was all in her.

  She came from a long line of practitioners: medicine men and women, shamans, midwives. If she could not cure an illness, she could at least relieve the suffering.

  Sometimes she did this with her herbs and roots. Other times her understanding of age-old wisdoms enabled her to help the sufferer lift above and beyond the physical realm. She had chants and songs that helped her with this.

  His mother placed her hands over the plaster of mud, lichen dust, and hair on his eyes. In a high, piercing voice she chanted a song she’d learned from her Natchez great-grandmother. It was a plea to the Great Spirit to restore her son’s health.

  When she took her hands away, she wiped off the medicine pack, tossing it into the swamp. She lifted her head, listening, as though she’d caught a faraway sound. “Your body is calling your spirit to return,” she told him. “You cannot be separated from it for long. But if its pain becomes unbearable, you come back here. If I cannot make the journey, do as I did now. Cure yourself. I have taught you. You have the power. I have given you much magic.”

  The breeze in the trees overhead began to speed up. The cardinals and red-winged blackbirds darted among the branches in alarming swift flight. The alligator lifted its head and spread its jaws.

  Clouds raced past.

  It was day, then night, then day again.

  He lay in bed in a room much grander than any he had ever seen before. His eyes were so swollen, he could only view the room around him as though seeing through a chink in a wall. Then he remembered the beautiful young woman who had saved him from the well and brought him in here.

  Where was she?

  Turning his head, he saw her standing by the window, gazing out. He had never seen so exquisite a young woman. And when she’d spoken to him in the well her voice was like honey or velvet or a warm Louisiana sunset.

  Would a creature so elegant ever look fondly on him? Was it too impossible to consider? Back home the girls had liked him but they were not like this, so fine and lovely.

  As he lay there gazing at her with half-closed eyes, he knew he wanted her love more than he’d ever desired anything else in his life.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Water and Escape

  Emma felt deeply relieved an hour later when the door opened and white-haired, stout Claudine was unceremoniously shoved inside. In her arms she held towels and a blue ceramic bowl. The pockets of her ruffled white apron bulged with supplies from the kitchen. She cast a look of resigned misery at Emma and said something consoling in Flemish.

  The kind, motherly words, although unintelligible to Emma, made unexpected tears spring to her eyes. Part of her longed for Claudine to wrap her in a hug, but that was not their relationship and Emma quickly wiped her eyes.

  With a glance at the lightly snoring soldier on the bed, Claudine crossed to the small, closet-size bathroom in the back of the bedroom, an addition Emma’s mother had had installed three summers past. That same summer she’d had electricity and running water installed. She’d been so excited by the improvements, saying that just because the estate was built in the 1600s, it didn’t mean they had to live like they were still in the past.

  Settling in next to the soldier on the bed, Claudine began to gently wipe away the grime on his face. She folded a dry hand towel and laid it over his puffed eyes, fixing it there with white surgical tape.

  Emma watched Claudine tend the American while she sat curled in a large, upholstered chair. Claudine tended the soldier so efficiently, her old-woman’s hands moving deftly as she stripped his clothing while keeping him covered modestly with the blanket and cleaning him without his even awakening, that Emma wondered if she’d ever been a nurse. From a tall chest of drawers, the old woman produced a pair of Emma’s father’s pajamas and practically swept them onto the soldier’s body while he continued to slumber under the blanket.

  Claudine finished by running a brush through his coarse, black hair. Putting down the brush, she stroked his forehead and spoke kind words to him in her own language. She was moving away from the bed when the soldier’s hand snaked out from under the blanket and encircled her wrist.

  The sudden, unexpected gesture made Emma gasp sharply, but Claudine seemed unfazed and leaned in to hear the young man better. Her hand over her thumping heart, Emma bent closer to hear.

  “Merci beaucoup, madame,” the soldier whispered to Claudine.

  A German soldier came into the room and signaled for Claudine to come with him. Emma continued to sit in the chair after Claudine departed, watching the sleeping American, his face illuminated by a patch of sunlight pouring through the window.

  I wonder what he looked like before he was so injured, she thought. She really couldn’t tell. Why was he fighting with the British? Surely only a very strange person would sign up to fight in a war that he didn’t need to enlist in.

  She thought about his request that she kiss him, and a glance at his blistered lips made her shudder at the idea. What kind of person could think of kissing while in such a state, nearly dead and a prisoner? And of kissing a woman he didn’t even know, at that?

  Maybe he’d been delirious or shell-shocked or something similar, she thought, softening toward him slightly for a moment. But then she threw off the charitable benefit of the doubt she’d granted him. She shouldn’t give him too much credit. Most likely he was just a crude lowlife who enjoyed making her uncomfortable with his rude remarks, even while lying at death’s door. He no doubt thought her an English prig and found it a great laugh to see her squirm.

  She should have left him there in the well for the Germans to find. Maybe he’d have gotten away if she hadn’t hauled him up and then she wouldn’t have to be bothering with him now at all.

  You went all the way down into the well and you didn’t even get your locket back, she chastised herself. Thinking of the locket still down in the well made her wonder anew what was in that sealed compartment. If there was ever an emergency—a valid reason to break it open and finally discover what precious thing was inside that might help her—this was it.

  On the fifth day of her captivity, Emma awoke at dawn from the wide, upholstered chair that she’d been sleeping in to find the American lying on his side in the bed staring at her. For the first time, the towel that Claudine replaced three times daily when she came in to tend him and bring meals did not cover his eyes.

  “Stop staring at me,” she snapped. “It’s rude.”

  “A cat can look at a queen,” he replied smoothly, and again she heard his low, scratchy, Southern-inflected voice.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”


  “It means there’s no harm in lookin’, especially at someone as pretty as you.”

  “Well, I’m no queen, and you are certainly not a cat,” she said. No indeed, she thought. You’re ugly as a frog! Didn’t I find you at the bottom of a well? No such luck that you’d be something as lovely as a cat!

  In the last five days he’d mostly slept. While he slumbered he’d sometimes broken out in a feverish sweat and had wild, frightening dreams that caused him to cry out. He’d awoken Emma in the middle of the night screaming in a way that brought to her mind the agonized sounds she’d heard the evening of the gas attack.

  “You’re feeling better?” she asked, pushing a lock of disheveled hair from her face. She’d decided to try again to get on a better footing with him. They were stuck there together, after all. It would be more bearable if they could be civil to each other.

  He opened his mouth to reply but before he could, the sound of a terrible explosion made him look at her with questioning, alarmed eyes.

  “They’ve been fighting out there for five days,” she told him. “The shelling has been relentless. Ground troops fire machine guns at one another all day. Hand grenades, too, I think. I don’t know more than that because I haven’t seen a newspaper since the Germans took over the estate.”

  “So I guess I’m a prisoner of war,” he surmised.

  “No. They don’t know you were fighting with the Allies because you had no uniform on, only your long underwear. They know you’re American from your accent. I told them that you lived here with me. By the way, what’s your real name?”

  The slightest smile appeared on his lips. “Jack Sprat.”

  “Oh, do come on,” she chided.

  “John W. Verde, from New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. of A., but serving in Her Majesty’s army.”

  “Don’t say that too loudly,” she warned, glancing anxiously at the closed door. “As I said, they don’t know you’re a soldier. I told them that you’re my … my …”

  “Your what?” he asked.