Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (102 page)

“What are you thinking of?”

Cyrene turned her head sharply to find René awake beside her. He was watching her, his eyes filled with shadows as he lay on his side with his head resting on his bent arm.

“Nothing,” she answered in haste. “Just… this and that.”

She thought he was not going to speak again, that he might be drifting back to sleep, for his eyelids closed and his chest slowly lifted and fell. She was wrong.

His lashes swept upward, and he put his question quickly, as though he might not otherwise ask. “If I were to say, Come with me, return with me to France now, on the next ship, how would you answer?”

Her heart jarred inside her chest. The muscles in her stomach clenched. She thought of France as she had last seen it, a cool and gray-green country filled with bustle and noise, hauteur and irascibility, pastries and smiles. Dear France, bright, medieval, glorious France.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“Why?”

What could she say? I hardly know you, and what I know I cannot trust? I don’t belong in France anymore; I’ve outgrown its narrow ways? I would rather be a lady smuggler, unfettered, unconfined, than your precious, cosseted mistress? Here I have love and family of a sort, and there I could depend only on your uncertain desire?

“I just can’t. How can you think that I could?”

He made a soft sound that might have been a laugh or a sigh. “I didn’t think it; I only wondered.”

She turned her head sharply. “Then you weren’t asking?”

“Does it matter?” he said, reaching out to her, brushing the peak of her breast in a delicate caress that sent a frisson of delight along her nerves before drawing her toward him. “I have my answer, and it’s enough.”

Had she made a mistake? That question remained with her long after René had dressed and gone. Sometimes it seemed so, seemed that she was a fool to discard so easily the prospect offered her. To be the chosen woman of a man of wealth and position in Paris had its benefits, even a certain quasi-respectability. There would have been a town house and a carriage, the latest fashions, visits to the theater and to the opera; a circle of friends of the same position, long hours of René’s company, his lovemaking, perhaps even his children. Or if he preferred to return to his father’s estate, there might be a cottage in the country of her own not far away, a place where she could read and sew and make a garden, a place of beauty that he could share. Some such liaisons lasted for years, even a lifetime.

And some lasted a few weeks or months before the man grew tired and, if the woman was lucky, found her another protector to take her off his hands.

René was not known for his constancy in affairs of the heart. Rather the opposite, if anything.

She did not think she could bear being paid off, shuffled away as an irksome responsibility. To live always with that possibility over her would destroy some essential part of her, making her like so many other women under such conditions, hard and suspicious and grasping.

Why did it have to be so difficult? Why could René not have been more ordinary, more common? Or she herself less so?

The street vendor came by at midafternoon, a stooped old crone wrapped against the misting rain in an ancient velvet cloak with tarnished gilt trim, shiny with wet and bare spots where the nap had rubbed away. She cried of her scallions and garlic in a quavering monotone, but her smile was cheery and she smelled of fresh earth and pungent herbs.

It was Martha who called the woman in, being in need of a handful of scallions to cast over the chicken she was cooking for dinner. She left the old vendor standing under the protection of the gallery while she stepped into the salon to speak to Cyrene. M’sieur usually gave her adequate money to buy from such chance peddlers, she said, but had neglected to supply her of late. Did Mademoiselle have a livre or two by her?

René had given Cyrene a purse with coins to use for the little things she might require. So far there had been none, and in any case the purse itself was an embarrassment to her, too much the sign of the kept woman. She had tried to refuse it, but since he would not have it, she had stowed it away in the armoire. When she went to look for it there, she could not find it at first. It had been shuffled to the back, wedged in a corner on a lower shelf. As she searched it out, she had to push aside René’s coats. There was a faint crackling sound as she touched one of them. She paid it scant attention but retrieved the purse and went out to Martha and the woman on the gallery to attend to the domestic crisis.

It was later that the memory of the odd rustling sound in René’s coat returned to puzzle her. René was a meticulous man, more so than most, or that was her impression from her limited experience with her father and the Bretons. He seldom left his belongings scattered around, and unless the clothing he removed was in need of Martha’s services, he always put it away. Martha washed and ironed his linen and, since he had no valet, cleaned and polished his boots; she brushed his coats and pressed the wrinkles from them. There had never been any need for Cyrene to rummage through his shelves in the armoire. If she had been asked, she would have said they held no secrets, for his shirts and coats and breeches, his cravats and his hats were stacked in neat piles and could be easily seen at a glance when the doors of the great armoire were thrown open. Nor were the shelves particularly crowded. Whatever he might have boasted in the way of a wardrobe in France, René had brought with him only a modest assortment of clothing for a gentleman: a half-dozen coats, a score or less pairs of breeches, and no more than three dozen each of shirts and cravats.

Cyrene approached the armoire with misgivings. Prying into other people’s belongings, she had been taught as a child, was ill-bred, a sign of servants’ manners. To ignore that teaching went against the grain to an amazing degree. Circumstances changed matters, she told herself. That did not keep her from feeling guilty and looking over her shoulder for Martha as she delved into the armoire, lifting René’s shirts and pushing his cravats aside. When the dry crackling of paper she had heard came again, she practically snatched the coat from which it issued off the shelf. She thrust her hand into one pocket after the other. Nothing. She must have missed one, she thought, and searched them all again. They were empty.

She gave the coat, a
justaucorps
of peacock blue satin, a shake. The crackling came again. She traced it, grasping at the section of the coat skirt from which it came.

The paper was sewn into the lining. Cyrene stood still, hovering in indecision for the space of several heartbeats. It was not unknown for travelers to sew their valuables into the linings of their clothes, especially when venturing to distant lands over routes known to be dangerous. It could be, at times, a sensible precaution. Her own mother had told of how she had sewn her few jewels into the lining of an old fur robe on the voyage from New France to France as a young woman, and then had been horrified to find that her maid had used the robe to line a bed for her little lap dog.

Regardless, René did not strike Cyrene as the kind of man to depend on such a subterfuge to protect what he owned. There must be another explanation.

There was no such thing as a sewing basket in this bachelor household. Cyrene searched for something to slit the stitches with, at last finding a paper knife used to cut the bound pages of books. Sitting before the fire in the bedchamber, she began to open the seam of the coat lining. In a short time, she had a space large enough to insert three fingers. Gingerly, she slipped them into the lining, touching the small paper bundle she could feel through the cloth. She caught the bundle and drew it out.

Money. It was a thin sheaf of treasury notes. Crisp and new, their denominations were not large, but together they represented a substantial sum. She turned them this way and that, studying the engraving that marked them.

Various kinds of paper money, all of it much less valuable than the same amount in gold, were common tender in the colony. Hard gold or silver were, in fact, hardly ever seen, and when they were, they usually wound up in someone’s stocking or mattress. The paper money, however, was usually crumpled, dirty, indelibly creased, and imbued with the smell of sweat. Crisp new notes were suspect. Too often they turned out to be counterfeit.

So it was with the ones Cyrene held in her hands. She had not seen a great deal of money in her life, more often bartering for her needs in the last few years or having them attended to by her parents and grandparents in the times before. Still, the few worthless notes she had seen had made a lasting impression; money was too scarce, too dear, for a person to be taken in by such a thing more than once. On these notes, the engraving was too fancy, yet not quite clear, the paper too flimsy. The notes were counterfeit. She would wager her life on it.

She had expected better of René. In spite of the way he had used her and the things he had done, she had somehow clung to the idea that there was something strong and fine in him. To discover that there was not was such a disappointment it made her feel physically ill. She drew back the hand that held the notes, aiming it toward the fire before her.

Slowly she lowered her hand once more to her lap. There would be no satisfaction in destroying the notes. Moreover, it would be a stupid gesture. What she held in her hand was not just pieces of counterfeit money; they were her passport to freedom. If there had been any doubt that she was able to leave René without repercussion, there was none now.

She gazed down at the notes, trying to think. She must send a message to Gaston, tell him that she was leaving, that he must make arrangements for them to journey into the wilderness to rejoin Pierre and Jean. She should get up and begin to gather her things, decide what she would take with her to wear among the finery that was all she had. It would be a kindness to say good-bye to Martha; she had become fond of the woman with her hard work and willingness to please. And she should compose some message for René.

There were things to be done. Still, she didn’t move.

She sat turning the notes over, fighting a terrible urge to cry. She was an idiot. Somewhere inside herself, hidden, unacknowledged, there had been a lingering dream that René would realize how he had wronged her, would discover that his life would be barren without her at his side as his wife, the mother of his children. Foolish, foolish, foolish.

There came a quick, hard knock on the front door of the house. She jumped, startled, and panic ran in a swift current along her veins. She stuffed the notes back into the lining of the coat and began to fold it. The knock came again. Martha was in the kitchen and could not hear. Cyrene hurried to the armoire and slid the folded coat onto the shelf, then closed the doors on it. With one hand going to her hair to smooth any stray strands into her chignon under her lace coif, she picked up her skirts and went quickly into the salon.

It was only Armand at the door, come on his afternoon call. She railed silently at herself for being thrown into such disorder. Who had she expected? The authorities come to take her away for the crime of rifling through her lover’s belongings? Hardly. René? He would not have knocked, and so she would have known if she had been in her right senses. It was too ridiculous.

She left Armand in the salon and went through to the pantry, calling down the stairs to Martha for chocolate for herself and wine for Armand. Returning to her guest, she took her place as hostess.

It felt strange, sitting making pleasant conversation when her mind was entirely elsewhere. She wished that she had never encouraged Armand or that he would have the sensitivity to sense he was not wanted and be gone. Instead he talked on and on of the ball, his inquisitive gaze upon her face.

At last he fell silent. He sipped his wine, watching her closely. She could think of nothing to say and so took refuge in her chocolate cup.

“Forgive me if I pry,
chère,”
he said finally, “but you seem distraught. What can the trouble be?”

She had been wishing he would show more sensitivity. The moment he did so, she wished he were not nearly so observant of her state.

“Nothing at all,” she said.

“It would relieve my mind considerably to believe it, but I have the evidence of my eyes. You are extremely pale, if you will permit me to say so, and on your cheek there is a bruise that — that sickens me to the soul. I have no right to ask, but I must. What has happened? Were you struck in the altercation with the lieutenant last night? Or can it be that Lemonnier became violent over the governor’s attentions?”

“Oh!” she said, relief pouring over her in a wave. “You don’t know.”

His face lightened at her dazed exclamation. “No, but I’m endeavoring to find out.”

“But of course,” she said, and went on to tell him of the attack upon René and herself.

Armand clenched his hands on his wineglass, shaking his head as he stared down at it. “Useless, I have been so useless to you. First I was too far away to come to your aid when you were insulted by the pig of an officer, could only watch from afar as I tried to reach you. Now this. I long to be your protector, but I fail you in your need.”