Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (59 page)
Jennifer Blake
Sweet Brier
Quitman, Louisiana
1THE MISSISSIPPI FLOWED wide and deep, rippling gently with its current, reflecting the pale light of the quarter moon with a dancing silver sheen. The water gurgled around the edges of the flatboat that rode high on its flood. It tugged at the heavy craft so that it strained against its mooring ropes, nudging the levee with a slow and regular rhythm. The motion lulled Cyrene Marie Estelle Nolté where she sat on a low stool with her back to the unpeeled logs of the flatboat’s cabin. She yawned and settled deeper into the quilt she had wrapped around her against the damp chill of the night.
A low laugh sounded from somewhere on her right. The moonlight caught a faint golden gleam from the thick braid trailing over her shoulder as she turned her head. A quick grin tilted one corner of her mouth. Gaston was at it again. What a satyr he was becoming, forever chasing after women. Not that the one he was talking to there in the tree shadows minded being caught, for the right price. The question was, did Gaston have the fee? Livres were not particularly plentiful just now.
It appeared that he had struck a bargain of some kind; he was leading his light-o’-love toward the rear of the pothouse where the woman had her accommodations, just down the muddy track beyond the levee. It was not unknown, of course, for Gaston to trade on ready compliments, his engaging smile, and the promise in his brawny shoulders to win a woman’s favors. He was a charming rascal.
But he would be lucky indeed if he was able to charm his way out of the trouble he would be in if his father and his uncle were to catch him away from his post. It was Gaston’s turn as her guard, and Pierre and Jean Breton did not brook dereliction or excuses. Not that the two older men were so far away themselves, any more than they ever were. They had gone to the pothouse for a drink or two and a few hands of faro.
From the flatboat, which was riding on the flood behind the embankment of the levee as if it were on a high road, Cyrene could just see the pothouse with the track of the river road like a pale ribbon before it. The bulk of the building was dark except for the stray gleams around the shuttered windows and the occasional long yellow shaft that was flung into the darkness as the door opened and closed with the coming and going of customers. Beyond it, through the trees to the left, the rooftops of New Orleans made a jumbled pattern of moonlit and shadowed squares and angles. To the right and behind the pothouse lay the swamp, a dark, far-reaching stretch of uncleared land with trees so big that it took four men to reach around them, strange and too-luxuriant plants, green-scummed water, and a singing silence in which lived vicious insects and slithering creatures.
The night was black, the hour late. Cyrene was alone, a fact she realized with dawning amazement. She was not afraid, any more than she feared the river or the swampland beyond. What she felt was sudden joy. Alone. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, savoring the rare experience. She was alone.
It was not that Cyrene didn’t appreciate the reasons for the close watch kept over her; she knew well enough the dangers of the riverfront, especially for an unattached female. Still, there were times when the constant surveillance kept on her made her want to do something desperate, to slip away and go sauntering through the streets in her lowest-cut bodice, to take the pirogue tied to the flatboat and paddle away down the river—anything to gain some sense of freedom. How long had it been since she had felt truly free, when she had been without one of the Bretons at her elbow? It must have been years. The best part of three years.
They had done their best, Pierre and Jean Breton and Jean’s son Gaston. It had not been easy, having a young woman thrown among them. No one had thought, when the Bretons had taken Cyrene and her parents in after they had stumbled off the vessel from France shaking with ship’s fever, that it would be so long. But first her mother had died of the illness, then her father had sought to lose his sorrow and shame for their exile because of his debts in drink and gambling. There never seemed to be enough money for other lodgings, or else the time was never right to shift their place of abode. Her father’s evening hours were spent staggering from one gambling den to another with friends, if such they could be called; friends who were as indigent as he and as full of wild schemes for easy riches and a glorious return to France. His daylight hours were devoted to sleeping off the excesses of the night before.
Cyrene had seen little of him, hardly more than she had as a child in France when her days had been spent in the company of her nursemaid and governess. It mattered little; she and her father had never been close. She had hardly mourned at all when he had disappeared one night nearly a month before. It was assumed that he had missed his step and fallen overboard on his return to the flatboat, since his friends had seen him winding that way. His body had not been recovered, though that was not unusual. Few men were found once they vanished beneath the rippling surface of the river. The Mississippi had a habit of keeping its dead.
Cyrene had remained with the Bretons. She earned her way by helping with the cooking and laundry and by keeping the account books in which the trading transactions of the two brothers were set down. The latter was something she was good at, something she enjoyed nearly as much as the trading itself: the give and take of bargaining, the challenge of turning a profit. Her father had said that she had a bourgeois soul like her grandfather, her mother’s father who had been a respected and wealthy merchant from Le Havre. She could not deny it.
Life on the river suited her also. She liked dressing as she pleased: going without a coif, or cap; wearing her hair braided down the back of her head; and rolling the sleeves of her chemise to her elbows like an Indian woman or a peasant. She loved the smell and the movement and the ever-changing face of the great waterway. She did not think she could sleep, now, without the rocking of the flatboat to lull her. Nor could she envision living without the convenience of a constant source of water flowing past the doorway, water that did not have to be drawn laboriously from a well, water that swiftly bore away even the worst accumulation of slop and garbage.
Cyrene allowed her gaze to drift over the river and along the levee toward the wide crescent bend that swept around the town. She stiffened, sitting erect. There was movement in that direction, in the shadows just beyond the pothouse. Two men were emerging from the trees. Though indistinct in the pale moonlight and distance, they appeared to be carrying a cumbersome burden. Portions of it flopped and dragged as they struggled up the slope of the levee. There could be little doubt that it was the body of a man, and even less of what the two men meant to do with it.
Cyrene got to her feet, shrugging the quilt from her shoulders so that it crumpled to the stool. She flung her long braid back over her shoulder and, with her hands on her hips, stepped to the front of the flatboat. The night wind caught the fullness of her rough skirt, flapping it about her bare ankles, and molded the sleeves of her chemise to her arms. She ignored the chill, narrowing her eyes as she stared into the glimmering darkness.
The pair wrestled the dead man over the top of the levee, slipping in the mud, then gave the body a slow swing back and forth. At the top of the final swing, they heaved. The body arched out over the water, turning slowly. There was a glint of silver, then it struck the surface with a great splash. Water rose in a sparkling fountain, cascading, faintly splattering, closing over the long, lean shape. There was a quiet moment, then the body rose, gently bobbing to the top as it began to move downstream toward the flatboat. The two men swung away from the river, then strode away, leaping back down the levee in the direction from which they had come.
Cyrene did not hesitate. Her face alight with purpose, she whirled and ran toward the pirogue at the flatboat’s stern. The flash of silver she had caught meant one of two things. It had come either from a piece of jewelry or else from silver lace, the ornamental braiding on a man’s coat, probably a gentleman’s
justaucorps.
It was unusual in the extreme for a body to be disposed of without having had the valuables and clothing removed. She did not actually hope for jewels, but she would be glad of the coat. Garments of any kind were costly since they had to be imported from France—there was a royal edict against spinning and weaving in the colonies of New France and Louisiane—but anything with gold or silver lace was dear indeed. A man’s coat with such decoration was worth well above a hundred livres even secondhand.
It would not be Cyrene’s first experience with a “floater,” as the bodies disposed of in the river were called. Pierre and Jean Breton, as well as being traders, were good
voyageurs
bred and trained in New France, which was located far to the north. They hated waste and dearly loved to get something for nothing. They were forever pulling things from the river, from logs and broken crates for use as firewood to kegs of sour wine and wads of tangled rope. There had been at least five bodies in the past three years that they had hauled aboard the flatboat to strip, throwing Cyrene the clothing to launder and also to mend where violence had been done to it in dispatching the victim. But even they had never retrieved a coat with silver lace.
Cyrene kept her eye on the floating body as she stepped into the pirogue and pushed away from the flatboat. Taking up the paddle that lay in the bottom, she pulled toward the long dark shape on the shining river’s surface. The current was faster than she had thought it would be in its winter flood stage; the body was racing down toward her, rolling slightly in the swift current.