Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (62 page)

It was a strange thing, but she could not think of René Lemonnier as a rake and a scoundrel as he lay there. There was such strength in his face, in the square shape of his jaw and the jut of his chin. The width of his forehead hinted at superior intelligence. His mouth was firm and marked by a half-moon-shaped line on one side, as if he found much to amuse him, but there was nothing of the sensualist about the generous curves. Nor was his body that of a man given to self-indulgence. His shoulders and chest were swathed in muscle and his abdomen was flat and iron-hard, without an ounce of fat.

She combed his hair when it was dry, hoping that it would make him look less drawn. It was not as difficult as she expected, for it was cut short, the better to fit under the gentleman’s wig that he must wear as a habit — no doubt the same wig that had saved his skull from cracking, though he must have lost it when he fell or as he was thrown into the water. That he covered his hair was a pity, for it waved back from his face in a most entrancing fashion, the shining blue-black softness clinging to her fingers as she pushed it into place.

The Breton men did not leave the flatboat that day, but stayed close, mending traps, weaving nets, whittling out pegs and other useful bits and pieces. Gaston was subdued. What had been meted out to him for his dereliction of duty, no one said, but he had been taken out onto the levee by the two older men the night before and now moved with some stiffness and leaned back in his chair only with great care.

The doctor came again at dusk, entering with much more bustle than before. He had taken it upon himself, he said, to inform the governor and his lady of the whereabouts of M’sieur Lemonnier and had been instructed most particularly to use every skill at his command to make him well.

“I’m sure you meant to do that, anyway,” Cyrene said, standing over the man as he knelt and began to take his bleeding bowl and scalpel from his bag.

“But yes, of course. Still, one would not wish to fail the governor.”

“What about M’sieur Lemonnier?”

“Pardon?”

“He would be much more concerned at your failure.”

“Yes, yes. Now, if you would kindly step outside?”

“Why?” She could not bring herself to leave Lemonnier to the doctor’s mercy. She eyed the rust-stained blade of the scalpel he held and felt an odd frisson run through her, as if she must feel the bite of the blade in her own flesh.

“You are pale, mademoiselle. The sight of blood is objectionable to many, and I would prefer not to be forced to revive you.”

“It isn’t the blood, it’s your scalpel,” she answered. “Are you certain another bleeding is necessary? He has lost so much blood already.”

The doctor, a small man with a bagwig of enormous size on his small head, drew himself up. “Are you questioning my treatment, mademoiselle?”

Cyrene held her ground. “If need be.”

The doctor turned and cast his implements back into his bag. “I will not stand for this. Either you will depart, mademoiselle, or I shall.”

Cyrene glanced into the other room, but the Breton men were bent over their tasks as if deaf to the conflict. She would receive no help from them. The man on the pallet was her responsibility. She turned back to the doctor and crossed her arms over her chest. “You will do as you must, as will I.”

“Very well. Upon your head be it. I depart.” The doctor picked up his bag and strode out, his shoulders back and his nose elevated. A moment later, the flatboat dipped and rocked as he left it for the bank.

Cyrene stared down at Lemonnier with a sinking sensation in her chest. She had tended the Breton men in their rare illnesses, such as the malaria that sometimes struck Pierre or when one of them smashed a finger or overindulged in wine, but she had no idea what to do for a more serious case. She had a few herbs she had bought from the Choctaw Indian women who came to market, though she had no great faith in their efficacy. René Lemonnier was a strong man and, barring festering in his wounds, would doubtless recover with or without her. Still, it was frightening to think that his life was in her hands.

The cubicle was growing dim with the advance of evening and also cooler. Cyrene knelt beside the pallet, drawing the quilted coverlet up over her patient’s arms. She was leaning over him to tuck it under his shoulder when he spoke.

“I am in your debt, mademoiselle. I was lying here trying to decide whether to slit the pompous little man’s throat with his dirty blade or to just break his arm — and wondering if I had the strength for either.”

She sat back on her heels hurriedly. “You’re awake!”

“Something near it,” he agreed without opening his eyes.

She collected herself with an effort. “You must not waste your strength talking. I have some good broth on the fire. Wait, and I’ll get it.”

The ghost of a smile flitted across his features. “I can do no less, and certainly no… more.”

Of course he could not. How had she come to say something so silly? She ladled the broth into a wooden bowl, slopping half of it over the sides in her haste. She could not find a spoon or a clean dishcloth to use as a napkin, and when she turned toward the cubicle, she nearly tripped over the heap of woven netting beside Jean’s stool.

“Steady,” Jean said, the word shaded with warning as well as wry amusement.

Cyrene brought herself up short. What was the matter with her? Lemonnier was not going to expire if she did not get broth into him on the instant. It was a great thing that he was going to live but hardly something to overset her usual calm.

“He’s awake,” she said as prosaically as possible.

Jean opened his eyes wide. “Who?”

“You know who! Lemonnier.” She sent him a scathing glance.

“I’d never have guessed.”

She stepped past him without another word or so much as a glance at the others, though she could feel their gazes upon her as she ducked around the curtain and into the small cubicle once more.

René lay with his head turned toward the doorway. He watched as she put down the bowl and took up a bolster to thrust under his head and shoulders for support. When she ladled a spoonful of steaming liquid and extended it toward him, he looked at it, then at her, and opened his mouth.

He had not been spoon-fed since he was a child of five abed with the measles. It was a strange sensation, but not disagreeable. He felt he should protest but could not find the energy. There was something about the woman who tipped broth into him with such ease that troubled him. She wore no coif, the cap that usually covered a woman’s hair during the day, a sign of loose morals. Though she now had a striped bodice on over her chemise, he seemed to remember her without one, seemed to remember also the rose-peach gleam of a nipple through the cloth. She was with him here in this cubicle alone, while he was as naked under the covers as the day he was born, as if it was something she did every day of her life. She must, then, be some manner of harlot.

And yet there was not the slightest trace of paint on the smooth oval of her face, and her skin had the glow of health that spoke of wholesome food and drink and long, uninterrupted nights of sleep. Her gaze as she met his was without coquetry, and in her brisk, no-nonsense air there was more than a little reminder of a nursing sister of charity.

There was nothing of the nun about her, however. There was instead a little something of a Botticelli angel in her features and in the golden tendrils that escaped from her braided hair to lie against her cheeks. Or if not the master’s angels, then his depiction of
Primavera,
the feminine essence of spring. René paused in his thoughts, startled. He was not usually given to such maudlin fancies. He must be more drained of blood than he had thought. Regardless, he was fully conscious enough to realize that this woman at his side was unusual.

The females of the Louisiane colony were sometimes difficult to place. Most kept to accepted behavior, but there was now and then one who ventured to be independent. It came from their relative rarity; there were not enough of their sex to supply the demand, which tended to place a high value upon those available. Since men would condone anything in order to appease their desires, propriety was pushed to the limit. It would be best to tread warily.

He waited until the broth was gone and she was preparing to rise. His voice quiet, tentative, he said, “Who are you?”

Cyrene was well aware of his scrutiny and of the heat of the flush rising to her cheeks. She gave him her full name, then reached to blot a drop of broth from his chest before meeting his gaze.

He stared at her for long moments, his expression blank. At last he lowered his lashes and a soft sound escaped him that might have been a laugh or a sigh. “Mademoiselle Nolté, of course,” he whispered. “Who else?”

For forty-eight hours, the wound in René Lemmonier’s back seeped blood and fluid, and for that length of time it seemed dangerous to move him. On the third day, Cyrene began to wonder if he would not be more comfortable in his own lodgings than on the hard pallet beneath her hammock. Certainly it would be more convenient for her if he were to go; she could have her quarters to herself once more instead of having to be so careful not to wake him when she went to bed or when she dressed herself in the morning.

It could not be said that he was much trouble. The fever made him inclined to sleep; he woke only to eat the rich meat stews and bouillabaisse she cooked for them all. Gaston bathed him and attended to his more private needs as further penance for being absent from his post. And yet the man’s very presence put them all under constraint. There was no word spoken that he could not hear if he cared to listen and, since Pierre insisted that the curtain to the cubicle remain draped to one side, few actions that he could not observe. Cyrene was not surprised when on the morning of the fourth day Pierre called her out onto the levee.

“How long is this man going to stay with us? Is there no one else who can care for him, no place he can go to?”

In the bright winter sunlight, there were lines she had not noticed before on his weather-beaten face. There was also in the blue depths of his eyes the shadow of the old pain that she had seen before but never quite dared to question. “I don’t know, M’sieur Pierre,” she said, giving him the courtesy name he had suggested when she first came. “I could ask.”

He puffed on the reed stem of the pipe he held in his hand. “I don’t begrudge him his place, but there must be an end to it.”

“So many of the men who come to the colony have no one to help them when they are sick.”

“That’s what the hospital of the Ursuline nuns is for.”

There was a note both dogged and hard in his voice that made Cyrene search his face. “What is it you are afraid of? Do you think whoever tried to kill him will track him here?”

“I think he needs to be among his own kind, and away from you,
chère.”

The term of affection coupled with that same stringent warning was convincing. Cyrene wrinkled her nose at him. “You are mad on that subject.”

“With good reason.”

“None that I can see!”

“Look in the mirror.”

She shook her head with a smile. “Poor M’sieur Pierre! What a fate, to be saddled with the worry of someone else’s chick like a cuckoo in your nest.”

His eyes darkened, and he reached to put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re no cuckoo. Who said such a thing? Gaston?”

“No one needed to say it; I feel it.”

“Don’t. To look after you is my pleasure. I promised your mother.”

So he had. Her mother, ill not only with ship’s fever but with the disgrace of her husband’s exile, had died in Pierre’s arms while her father was out getting uproariously drunk to celebrate their safe arrival in the colony.

Cyrene had never quite understood how it had come about that her father had been shipped out to Louisiane, but she did know that it was only the influence of her mother’s family that had prevented him from going to debtors’ prison. She remembered well the quarrel over whether she and her mother would accompany her father to the New World. Cyrene’s grandfather, a merchant who had made his fortune in the fur trade in New France and retreated with it in middle age back to Le Havre, had wanted his daughter to abandon her husband, to let him go alone. The hardships of that rough land had killed his wife, he had said; he could not bear to think of his daughter returning to its dangers when he had thought her safe from them at last in France. Cyrene’s mother would not be moved, nor would she let her husband go into exile without her support. She had made her choice years before, she had said, and would not repudiate it now. It had been a costly decision. They had all been disowned.