Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (83 page)

“But perhaps you only want what you can’t have? There are men like that, I’ve heard it said; they don’t value what is given too freely.”

A laugh totally lacking in amusement left his chest and he lifted his hands to catch her wrists, pulling them away from his neck. “If I thought you would not draw yourself up in a knot like a cat who has seen a snake, I would take you inside there and strip away every stitch you are wearing before pressing my lips to your soft skin from your forehead to your toes. I would taste your mouth and your breasts and drink the very essence of you. I would take you with me into worlds of joy and explore you to the very core, if I thought you would let me. I don’t think it. And so I won’t.”

Annoyance flooded through her along with a strange, aching regret. She tightened her lips into a thin line and pushed away from him to stand alone. She pulled her wrists and he let them go with an instant, open-handed gesture that emphasized his utter detachment.

“If you had tried,” she said in soft venom, “I would have had your eyeballs for my bodice buttons.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he answered. He made her a short bow, then swept aside the leather curtain of the shelter and ducked inside. Then, in the concealing darkness, he went to one knee with his fists pressed against each other at his thighs, crushing his knuckles together until the pain became an antidote for the torment of desire. And on his hands lingered the smell of roses.

Outside, Cyrene stood irresolute. She could not meekly follow him into the shelter now, could not lie beside him in the night trying to hold this wild need inside her without letting it show, without permitting him to know if they should touch in the night by accident. But neither could she bear to return to the fire and pretend that nothing had happened, that everything was still the same. Slowly she sank down onto the sand, turning so that her back was to the shelter. She stared out over the dark, heaving surface of the water, shaking with the hard beat of her heart.

After a time it seemed that if only the beat of the drum and the lament of the Indian warrior that echoed her disturbance would cease, then she could return to the way she had been before she had pulled a half-drowned man from the river, before the expedition had left New Orleans, before this night when she discovered she had fallen in love with a rake and ne’er-do-well known as René Lemonnier. The wild and mournful song did not stop. It still assaulted the night when, stiff with the increasing cold and exhausted by her distress, she crawled into the shelter and settled beside René. It was throbbing yet, mingling with her fevered dreams, when she slept.

A pile of trade goods was found on the beach when the camp began to stir. Pinned to them was an invoice in Captain Dodsworth’s hand made out to Cyrene and carefully totaled. Of the
Half Moon
there was no sign anywhere on the calm face of the bay. The ship had sailed on the morning tide.

Pierre and Jean broke camp early. They wanted to move out ahead of the Choctaw, they said. That did not appear to be a problem of moment. After the feasting of the night before and the many rounds of rum and tafia, the Indians were barely stirring. The only thing that might move them before the middle of the day would be the appearance of a Chickasaw raiding party.

There were farewells to be made and listened to, gifts to be exchanged, and a future rendezvous to be arranged. It was closer to midmorning than to daybreak when at last the Breton party was allowed to depart. They gave a final wave and then nosed their pirogues out into the marshy waterway leading north. The pirogues were loaded to the rough-hewn gunwales. Each dip of the paddle, each surge forward seemed certain to make it necessary to bail. Somehow the lap of the water was always an eyelash too low. They stayed dry, if more than a little crowded. They settled down, with Pierre, Cyrene, and René in the lead boat as before and Gaston and Jean following.

The current, as sluggish as it was here in these lowlands below sea level, was still against them. There was not much breath left for talking or singing as they pulled into the ceaseless flow. Their paddles rose and fell in unison, digging into the muddy brown water, flinging bright droplets forward. The swing became monotonous, untiring. The miles began to drop behind them.

They stopped for the noon meal on another
chêniere
,
but they did not linger. The trip upstream would take longer than it had coming down. They were soon back on the water again. The hours moved on. The bubbles of their wake flowed ever backward, the water rippling slowly outward behind them in a giant inverted vee that eventually lapped the shore. They left the marshlands and entered the more narrow and winding course of the bayou. The short winter day began to wane.

It was at that hour when the sun is just disappearing and the light takes on a melancholy blue shading tinted with the dying gold rays that a man appeared on the bank. He stepped from a thicket of evergreen myrtles that grew down to the water and called out, waving. Just in front of him at the bayou’s edge could be seen the prow of his pirogue thrusting up, as if it had sunk stern first. A stroke more of the paddles and the face of the man became plain. It was Touchet.

René sat in the prow of the pirogue, where he had been since their last stop. He glanced over his shoulder at Pierre, his brow raised in query. There could be little doubt of the answer. A
voyageur
did not leave a man stranded on land in the wilderness any more than a ship at sea failed to stop for a shipwrecked mariner at sea, no matter how great a rogue he might be.

The two boats swept as one toward the bank. Touchet called out to them, saying how glad he was to see them and how much he had depended on them to be behind him, cursing his luck, thanking his saints. His voice rang across the water, a thin, almost shrill sound that seemed to frighten every other creature into silence. The steady and quiet dip of their paddles seemed loud. Nothing moved in the blue afterglow as the sun sank behind the trees and the shadows along the bank deepened. Nothing except Touchet as he stood with one hand on his hip and the other waving them in toward him.

“I don’t like it,” Cyrene murmured, almost to herself. She stopped paddling, resting her paddle against her knee as she searched the shoreline with narrowed eyes.

There was nothing to be seen. Closer the boats came. Closer. The prow of the first pirogue, that of Cyrene with René and Pierre, grounded on sand. René leaped out, splashing in the shallow water as he leaned over to pull the boat higher onto the bank. The other pirogue glided nearer under its own momentum, Jean and Gaston holding their paddles at rest.

It was at that moment that the French soldiers rose one by one from the myrtle thicket. Their uniforms were nondescript, faded by the semitropical sun until they were more gray than blue where they were not tattered or replaced in part by bits and pieces from the armies of a half-dozen other countries. They were small in stature and lacking in discipline, as evidenced by their ragged advance, but the muskets they held were primed and steady.

Touchet made a sweeping theatrical gesture. “Behold my friends the welcoming party! You are under arrest, all, for the crime of smuggling. Be so good as to come ashore and give yourselves up. Even the lovely Cyrene. Especially the lovely Cyrene?”

10

IT WAS A TRAP.

If it closed upon them, they would be taken as smugglers with the evidence against them almost in their laps. The penalty was too terrible to be faced.

In immediate, unthinking reaction, Cyrene thrust her paddle deep, pushing it into the mud of the stream’s bottom. The forward motion of the pirogue slowed, stopped. It reversed. She felt Pierre’s strong back paddle surging also, felt the craft respond, floating free of the shore once more.

René was standing ankle-deep in water, poised between the pirogue and the soldiers with indecision on his face. Cyrene shouted at him with fear cracking her voice, “Get in! Get in the boat!”

“Come back,” he called. “It will be all right, I promise.”

Behind him, Touchet turned to the soldiers. “On my order you will commence firing.”

“No!” René whirled on him. “No, you bungling fool!”

His words carried the hard edge of command. Amazingly, they were obeyed, though Touchet muttered something that did not reach them.

René swung back toward the pirogue, lunging after the prow. He did not mean to get in but to catch it, to pull them back to land. Cyrene saw him lay hands on the pirogue, saw his purpose. For a brief, confused instant, her brain refused to function as she saw the soldiers lower their muskets.

Abruptly she cried out, a sound of rage and acknowledged betrayal, “Traitor!”

She plunged to her knees, thrusting out with the muddy blade of her paddle and pushing it into his chest. She shoved with all her strength. He let go of the pirogue, catching at the paddle to keep his balance. Once more she rammed the paddle at him, men she let it go as the pirogue shot backward.

René staggered, off balance. Pierre dug deep, and the long, narrow craft leaped out into the stream. A boatman above all others, he swirled his paddle and the pirogue spun around, heading back the way they had come.

“Downstream,” the older Breton called to his brother Jean. “Their longboat will be waiting around the bend the other way.”

On the bank of the bayou, René was snapping out an order. The soldiers broke formation at a run. Touchet, cursing, snatched a musket from a man lagging behind. The marquise’s agent raised the weapon. He fired.

The booming report rolled over the water. Before the sound reached the racing pirogues, there was a high-pitched whine overhead. Cyrene flinched but did not stop paddling. Risking a glance behind her, she saw a gray cloud of powder smoke floating out over the water and Touchet lying on the ground, nursing his jaw with one hand. Of the soldiers and René, the only sign was their retreating backs as they raced toward their concealed boat.

Bend, dip, pull. With aching muscles and back-wrenching effort, they sent the pirogues speeding over the water. The distance separating them from the place of attack lengthened. Ahead of them lay a winding curve. They began to take it, cutting across it to save precious time.

Behind them, there was a yell. They looked back to see a longboat just bursting through the pall of smoke. It was crowded with soldiers plying the long, sweeping oars that jutted out along the sides. They worked in unison, sending the laden craft skimming over the surface of the bayou like a waterbug skating down a drainage ditch. The soldiers yelled as they caught sight of their prey. The speed of the boat increased.

The two pirogues leaped ahead as fear pumped new strength into the veins of the Bretons. Cyrene scrambled forward to snatch up the paddle René had put down, then took her place once more, bending, dipping, pulling. They swept around the lower bend. They were lost to sight behind the trees.

Cyrene snatched a quick look at Pierre. He was scanning the bank, his gaze anxious. Before she could speak, Jean called out across the space of water that separated the racing pirogues.

“We leave the bayou?” he shouted.

Pierre gave a short nod. “Around the next bend, it may be.”

“If we make it! Touchet will go after the pirogues with the goods if we turn them loose.”

“So he would, but Lemonnier is in charge,” Pierre returned.

Jean shrugged, his dark gaze never losing its bright light. “We can only hope.”

The chance, or so it seemed to Cyrene, was a paltry one. The bigger boat with its superior crew was moving so fast it might well overtake them before they could put whatever plan it was that Pierre had into action. The trade goods were important as evidence and must be retrieved by the governor’s soldiers, but it could be done at their leisure after they had taken their prisoners. Even if they managed to make land, there was nothing to keep their pursuers from giving chase and running them down. Nor was there anything to prevent them from shooting them on sight. René had held the soldiers back from firing before, perhaps for her sake, but he could not be expected to do that again, not if he expected what was apparently his mission to stop the smugglers to be a success.