BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis (29 page)

He wondered if she expected him to show a typical male’s concern for any possible violation that might have been inflicted upon her by one or several of the bucks. That she was alive was all that mattered; the white man put too much of a premium on a woman’s chastity. Still, around her he had to make himself think as a white man would.

“Are you all right?” he asked sof
tly, his blunt forefinger soothingly stroking the intriguing cleft of her chin.

“I knew you’d come,” she
whispered between breaths, still clinging fiercely to his shoulders.

He sighed. “Damn you to he
ll, Natalie.” But for a brief moment, he permitted himself the enjoyment of her lithe body molded against his.

§
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

With abstraction borne of absolute exhaustion, Natalie squinted against the unforgiving sunlight, watching the sweat beads roll down Nicolas’s smooth flesh to seep into his belt line. The Natchez, she knew, would not give up a single captive easily. Their headlong escape from the Natchez Grand Village had taken five full days—and sapped her strength. For most of that time, the need for silence and haste had overshadowed all else. Only a few words were exchanged—mostly orders given tersely by Nicolas. Not until he was paddling the canoe up the Riviere Rouge did the tension lines about his mouth fade into their usual impassivity.

He wedged the canoe between
the reeds and cattails. Unsteadily, she rose to her feet from her perch at the prow of the birchbark canoe. The hem of her calico dress hung in tatters with the skirt split up the front, exposing a thigh encased in a ripped and stained white cotton stocking. Nicolas was waiting for her, holding out his hand, but when she stepped onto mushy landfall, her stiff limbs gave way, and he caught her up in his arms, carrying her up the partially wooded, partially sandstone slope to his cabin.

At the kick of his moccasined foot, the door swung open. $he hated for him to reach the bed. This moment, cradled in his arms, was one that she wanted to stretch in her memory. Yet the moment her head touched his mattress, her lids involuntarily closed.

When next they opened, candlelight softly lit the room. Nicolas was standing at the foot of the bed, his forearm braced against the bedpost. He was still naked to the waist, but his dark face had been freshly washed, and his hair and lashes glistened with waterdrops. Those black eyes were staring at her with the old wanting—and frustration.

“Marry me, Nicolas.”

“No.”

She gambled. “I was carrying our child. During the Natchez raid, I lost it.”

His eyes flared in astonishment. His arm dropped from the bedpost and he straightened, arms akimbo. His eyes perused her as carefully as he would a war trail, searching for trickery. Then exasperation tightened the muscles about his mouth. He looked as if he wanted to shake her. “And what about that insignificant detail back in France—your first husband?”

She pushed herself up on one elbow, and her hair, matted with dirt and twigs, tumbled over one scratched, bare shoulder. Her hands knotted into fists, and her eyes stared up into his beseeching him to understand what she had to say. “Nicolas, I was scarcely sixteen when we married. We were both of the aristocracy—the Golden Couple, we were called.”

Nicolas turned from her and picked up his knife, brushing both sides of it across a whetstone in preoccupation. She understood Nicolas; she knew that he didn’t want to hear her story, and yet did. The velvet skin stretched over his broad back where two dark curves marked the ridges of strength in his shoulders.

“I was married to him for o
nly four years!” she went on relentlessly.

It was now or never, for she knew he would drift out of her life, this time for good, unless she could somehow convince him otherwise.

“After Philippe’s uncle issued a
lettre de cachet
against both of us, we were never to see the light of day again! And I—” The words caught in her throat at the memory of the terror.

Nicolas put aside the knife and whetstone and paced before her, his fine lips taut. Impatiently, he ran his fingers through his damp, shoulder-length hair.

“I can’t tell you the horror that each day brings in one of those prisons. If Philippe is still alive, after almost eight years of being caged like an animal, he’s not the same man I married.” Her hands covered her face in an effort to hold back her old fear and anguish. “God, Nicolas, I’m not the same woman. Natalie du Plessis died the day she was branded.”

Abruptly, his pacing halted before her. He thrust aside her hands and jerked her chin up so that he could see her face exposed in the candlelight. The sinews of his neck stood out. “Du Plessis? Your husband is Philippe du Plessis?”

She nodded, her brow knit in perplexity. “You know of him?”

A bitter smile cracked the hard cast of Nicolas’s expression. She felt something as dangerous and silent as a grudge hovering over her. “He is my
half-brother.” His voice had the brightness of a little boy’s knife.

She felt the lime-washed walls go liquid. They began to ripple and flow past her. A current tugged her down.

Not like this
! she wanted to scream.
Not out of anger and retribution!

The wedding was being hel
d in the St. Denis home. As commandant of the settlement, he had the right to perform all ceremonies in the absence of the priest. Of course, Father Hidaglo wasn’t absent from Natchitoches, but Natalie quailed from taking religious vows of matrimony when the church refused to recognize divorce.

Nicolas was derisive and needled her while she dressed for the wedding. “You seemed willing enough to violate the tenets of the church the first time,” he said mockingly with a sardonic arch of one brow.

She whirled on him and hurled her pink damask slipper at his chest. He dodged it agilely. “I had no alternative, damn you!” she spat.

He crossed the room in two quick strides and grabbed her wrists, pinning them against her chest. He glared down into her ashen face. “Marrying you is going to give me great pleasure, your ladyship. I feel almost that
le bon Dieu
has a sense of justice.”

She had stretched on her toes and kissed him with a woman’s savage need to strike back in the most effective way she can. Only the gentle way his mouth dominated hers made her capitulation to the impending wedding bearable—that and the full, incredible
story of Nicolas and Philippe. Now she could understand and forgive Nicolas his reprisal.

For the wedding, she wore an open robe of antique pink silk damask with a petticoat of silver lace flounces over a domed hoop. The silver lace also adorned her three-quarter-length sleeves and her stomacher. A furbelowed pink ribbon necklace graced her slender neck, and Emanuella’s silver lace mantilla, anchored in her upswept tresses, trailed the ground.

Natchitoches had never seen such a beautiful woman as on that day.

Nicolas was more sedately dressed in a black satin frock coat and knee breeches, but his waistcoat was of intricately embossed and embroidered scarlet velvet. He dominated the roomful of dandies.

When she and Nicolas knelt before St. Denis, her hand was icy in Nicolas’s. His warm fingers caressed hers reassuringly, as if to impart a message of love despite the circumstances of the solemn rite.

Behind her, she could hear the rustling of broadcloth and silks and the occasional clank of a sword. After all these years of waiting for Nicolas, she secretly feared that someone like Father Hidalgo would step forward to protest the marriage. She forced herself to listen St. Denis intone the words of the marriage ceremony.

“As Commandant of the Upper Cane River and by virtue of the power granted me by the King of France, His Majesty Louis XV, I do hereby declare Natalie du Plessis de Gautier the wife of Nicolas Brissac.”

With that, she looked up into the
stern countenance of her half-breed husband and glimpsed the light of love shining in his dark eyes before the Indian in him erased all expression. Somehow, as she offered herself up to his gentle kiss, she felt certain that their love would make everything come right.

“You have my love,” Nicolas said. “Do not make me regret it.”

So different had Philippe and
François been from Nicolas. She had been able to deal with the first two men in her life through the potent combination of intelligence and feminine wile. Nicolas she could not so easily manage, even after a year of marriage.

“Do I?” she countered. His face above hers was barely distinguishable in the dark of their bedroom. “Are you so certain I have your love? What if you don’t return from Williamsburg? What good then is this love of yours I have?”

“There is not—nor ever was—any woman in Williamsburg who had the love I give you.”

Her fists thudded his shoulders. “I’m not talking about other women, Nicolas! I’m talking about danger and death. I’d swear that you men think with your—”

“
Oui
?” he drawled.

She ignored the amusement in his voice. “Damn you, Nicolas, why must you act as a—a—”

“Espionage agent for certain English colonies?” he supplied, and she could imagine that sardonic lift of one black brow.

“
Mais oui
! As a spy! What happens in the English colonies is their business, not ours. You’ll end up getting your neck stretched at the end of a rope—all for some foreigners!”

She felt the mattress give as he rolled from atop her and strode to the open French doors. That summer, Nicolas had added two more rooms to his cabin, one this spacious bedroom designed expressly by herself and the other a bedroom for the child she desperately hoped for.

His back to her, hands on his hips, he casually watered her recently planted cape jasmine. Exasperation filled her. “Nicolas, you’re not listening to me!”

He half turned, his jutting shaft silhouetted against the moonlit night. “Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans—we all have to live together on the same continent, Natalie.” Amusement no longer tinged his baritone’s voice. “The only way we can do that is as free men, not under the thumb of another country.”

“What about me? What about us?”

He padded over to her. “We have now. We have this moment. Can anyone say for certain that he has more than that?”

He was right, this man of hers. In reply, she took his callused hand and drew it down to that part of her that evidenced her want of him.

§
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR §

New Orleans, Colony of Louisiana

M
ay 1744

In the governor’s immense ballroom, gaily uniformed officers danced with bejeweled women dressed in satins and silks. The glittering light of hundreds of candles shimmered off Natalie’s fuschia taffeta. Lustrous pearls beaded the ball gown and lace draped from its sleeves. Additional pearls were looped through her elaborately arranged and powdered curls. Though she was nearing her forty-fourth year, she still drew the masculine approval of every man in the room.

She wanted only one man’s approval, and that wasn’t likely to be forthcoming under the circumstances.

The new governor of the Louisiana colony, the grand Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, flirted outrageously with her as he paraded the slender beauty through the steps of the minuet. Angry with Nicolas, she laughingly encouraged the governor’s attentions—and studiously ignored Nicolas.

In less than two years in the post, Vaudreuil had set a new precedent for graft and corrupt
ion under a lax and venal administration. He was accused of favoring the soldiers, who bullied and insulted the citizens, and was said to surround himself with a small group of favorites who flattered him and thus received many economic privileges.

When dinner was served, Natalie covertly appraised him from
her end of the immense rosewood table, adorned with the best silver and crystal. He seemed of a genial and kindly nature, and she thought it paradoxical that the man was capable of the vile acts rumored about him. Especially when he had established a court where court dress for his grand balls was de rigeur. She counted his soldierly courtliness and great dignity a plus for the backwoods capital. He had created out of the far-flung outpost a fashionable little court closely resembling that at Versailles.

He was fond of pomp and splen
dor, especially in military display. The upper class of the colony vied for an invitation to his sumptuous dinners. The fact that he had issued an invitation to two of Natchitoches’s Canadian entrepreneurs, St. Denis and Nicolas, amused her. The governor would have been astonished to know that Nicolas Brissac’s lovely wife of fourteen years had been a felon at La Salpêtriére—and even more surprised to learn that the erudite Nicolas was a half-breed. Over the years, most of Natchitoches had managed to forget the fact, not that Nicolas gave a damn.

Emanuella, who sat two people away from her, swore she had heard that Vaudreuil took money from the city treasury to deal in liquor, which he sold to the lazy and undisciplined soldiers, Negroes, and Indians.

“Madame Vaudreuil keeps right here in her house every sort of drug,” Emanuella had whispered when the two women were having their hair powdered before dinner. “They say the drugs are sold by her steward.”

Natalie lifted the powdering mask over her
face, and the Vaudreuil family’s hairdresser sifted the powder from the dredger over Natalie’s crown of white-gold curls, which was now invaded by strands of silver, giving her hair the appearance of sun-streaked highlights. “Whatever Vaudreuil’s done in Louisiana,” she mumbled from behind the mask, “it’s an improvement over twenty years ago.”

She could still remember her first sight of the dismal little settlement of huts that was
supposed to be the capital of the vast colony.

“Bah,” Emanuella said. “New Orleans is notorious as a town of loose morals. Why, murder and robbery are commonplace here!”

“Is that why you pleaded with Louis to take you to one of the gambling dens along the riverfront?”

Emanuella’s lightly painted lips pursed in a moue. At forty- three, the Spanish aristocrat had plumpened but still possessed a sultry Latin beauty that was counterpoint to Natalie’s slender, golden loveliness. “Arguing with you is futile,
chérie
."

Natalie recalled her friend’s words as she partook of one of the little candied orange peels toppe
d with sugared rose leaves. Nicolas had said almost the same words to her the evening before as they dressed for dinner. They had disagreed over something unimportant, so unimportant she couldn’t remember what, but underlying it all was her continual worry for his safety. His work as an agent for the English colonies had led him even deeper into espionage.

“What good will it do me if you’re hanged as a spy?” she had demanded. It was the same argument, the old one, between them. Their life together certainly wasn’t placid, would never be so.

He had paused in unbuckling his stock. His black eyes had passed scathingly over her. “As a wealthy citizen of a French colony, you lead a fashionable, social life of ease, Natalie. Have you forgotten what it was to be an outcast, to enjoy no privileges— especially freedom? At least the English courts feel that a person is innocent until proven guilty.”

Wearing only her camisole and pantalettes, she had whirled on him, hands anchored about her wisp of a waist, and spat, “I haven’t forgotten anything, especially how it felt all the times when you were gone on those—those secret assignments, not knowing if I’d ever see you again!”

He had grunted with exasperation. “You knew I was in the English colonies.”

“Nicolas, you’re not English, you’re French! Why must you hobnob with these English colonists?”

“I’m neither English nor French. I am a free man. And until every man is a—”

“You are a married man, a detail I sometimes think you’d like to forget!”

“It’s impossible to argue with you,” he had snapped. “You’re irrational and illogical when you argue.”

“You think this—this spying is rational? What do you think will—”

“Shut up!” He had grabbed her arms and shook her. “Do you want every servant in Vaudreuil’s household to hear you?”

At that, she had flounced into the adjoining dressing room and had refused to speak to him since.

Now her eyes sought out his leonine head, three seats away. At her glance, he made some excuse to the flirtatious brunette on his right and rose from the table. Despite the voluble conversation about the table and his discreet leave-taking, more than one feminine glance followed the departure of that broad back.

Age had rendered his form
idable features impossibly handsome. The white that streaked his hair made him appear terribly distinguished. Unlike most men of fifty-odd years, he had not added a paunch but was still lean and hard. In comparison, Louis St. Denis, on her left, looked peaked and unwell. The great man was getting on in years, she realized. He was nearing—what?— sixty-eight?

“Do you know,” gossiped the heavily rouged woman nearest her, “that the king’s mistress is said to be frigid?”

Natalie forced her attention back to the pretentious matron. “Ah, well, a man can be happy with any woman as long as he doesn’t love her,” she said, and reached for the cut-glass goblet of wine.

“
Oui
,” replied the woman, slightly flustered by the non sequitur, “but La Pompadour only keeps her place by procuring the king’s numerous mistresses. Imagine!”

“Imagine,” Natalie parodied. She watched Nicolas return to his seat, wondering what it was that could have taken him from the room for less than the span of two minutes.

The painted woman seemed unaware of Natalie’s disinterest in continuing the conversation. “Why, it is said the king prefers the very young and preferably virginal because he fears diseases. And I have been told firsthand that he houses the young women who serve his pleasure in a hotel he keeps on rue Saint-Merderic in Deer Park.”

“Our cloven-hoofed king shoul
d call the place Stag Park,” Natalie replied distractedly.

The woman tittered behind h
er swishing fan. Natalie was relieved of continuing the conversation by the gentle prodding of St. Denis’s elbow. When she looked down, he was holding folded scrap of parchment. “For you,” St. Denis said with a sly smile. “From your husband.”

She took the note and opened it, holding it below the table, out of sight of her feminine neighbor’s prying eyes.

I think you are being unreasonable, and I think days from now you will agree. However, I am thoroughly miserable at being out of sorts with you. I confess that I love you, you bitch!

She looked up and caught Nicolas’s dark eyes watching her. She flashed him a glorious smile. Tonight, somehow she knew with a certainty that tonight she would conceive.