Louisiana History Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  The second parade of Comus contained more than thirty floats representing the “heathen gods,” as a contemporary newspaper account called them. Among the gods depicted was Pan, though there is some doubt as to whether the man costumed as a pagan god of love rode on a cart or walked among his fauns. Lacking a reliable guide, the descriptions of the costume worn by Ravel and his bower of greenery on a cart pulled by white goats are my own invention. Under most circumstances, I am a willing slave to provable fact, but, being inescapably romantic and reposing implicit faith in the lenient and gracious spirit of Mardi Gras, I feel that the shades of maskers past will forgive the substitution and even, perhaps, agree that if this isn’t the way it was, it’s the way it should have been…

  Jennifer Blake

  Sweet Brier

  Quitman, Louisiana

  1

  THE BAYING OF THE BLOODHOUNDS on a warm trail was faint at first. It grew louder as the dogs neared the house, becoming a deep and clamorous howling with an undertone of such doleful menace that it chilled the blood. Mingled with it was the thin ring of shouts and the pounding of hoofbeats.

  Letitia Margaret Mason looked up from the letter she was writing as her attention was caught by the sounds. An expression of amazement followed by disgust and distress rose in her wine-brown eyes. No doubt the dogs were being followed by men in white sheets, men intent on riding down some poor black man running pell-mell and terror-stricken through the warm summer night. She had been told that Louisiana was a place of violence and danger just now, while it was undergoing the chastening process of reconstruction. She had not expected to have evidence of it the first evening of her arrival.

  She had also been warned that the state was no place for a woman traveling alone, particularly a Northern woman. She might well be subjected to insult and ostracism, it was said, if not worse. The protective attitude of Southern gentlemen toward ladies might not extend to females from above the Mason-Dixon line, certainly not to those who were headstrong and argumentative.

  Her elder sister, and especially her sister’s husband, had been astonished, even aghast, at Letitia’s need to journey to the South. They had considered it madness enough when she had insisted on getting a teacher’s certificate after the war, since there was no financial need for it. This new start of hers was beyond anything. It was her mother who had supported her. “Leave Lettie alone,” she had told them. “She’s only doing what she must.”

  Lettie had begun to think the tales and warnings greatly exaggerated. She had received nothing but courtesy and kindness during the long trip by train and stage here to Natchitoches. Inquiring about accommodations of the stationmaster on her arrival, she had been told about the large, square-columned, two-storied house called Splendora that was three miles out of town, where she was now settled. The man had even commandeered a seat in a wagon for her from a farmer going in that direction.

  It seemed that only that morning the lady of the house, Mrs. Emily Tyler, had decided to take in a boarder. The older woman, who was plump and kindly, with graying hair and snapping blue eyes, had accepted Lettie at once. She had been so afraid, she had declared, that she would have to give houseroom to a swearing, tobacco-spitting carpetbagger! Lettie must tell her if anything was wrong — she had never been a landlady before. But she had decided that money must be obtained somehow or the house that had been in disrepair since halfway through the War for Southern Independence was just going to fall down around their ears, those of herself and her nephew. She did hope that Lettie liked her front bedchamber. She must make herself at home, use the veranda and hall sitting room as she liked, and if she needed anything or if there was anything lacking for her comfort, she must not hesitate to say so.

  So warm had been Aunt Em’s welcome, so natural her chatter, that within five minutes Lettie had been made to feel that she was an invited guest, “company,” instead of a boarder. The older woman had insisted on being called Aunt Em, since she was known that way to one and all, and Letitia had quickly become Lettie. Though used to more formality on first acquaintance, Lettie hadn’t had the heart to repulse so friendly an overture. She had been pleasantly relaxed in her new surroundings, until she heard the hounds.

  The sound of the bloodhounds came closer. They seemed to be on the road that ran before the house. The need to see what was happening brought Lettie to her feet. She glanced down at herself. She had already dressed for bed in a nightgown of pink cotton flannel and had taken down her hair so that it fell in a mass of golden-brown waves down her back. The nightgown, with a high neck and long sleeves, was heavy for the climate, so heavy and warm that Lettie had not been able to bear the thought of putting on her dressing gown. Still, as totally covered as she was, the risk of being seen in her present state of dishabille was not one she cared to take; her Puritan ancestors would rise up as a body from their graves to condemn such wanton disregard for decency. The problem was easily solved, however. Leaning toward the lamp on the table at which she had been sitting, she cupped her hand at the top of the chimney and blew out the flame.

  Lettie moved swiftly toward the open window. It was a jib window that gave onto the long veranda that fronted the upper floor of the house. By unlatching and opening the small jib doors that formed the sill, then pushing the sash up as far as it would go, one could step through the opening as if it were a door. Brushing aside the muslin curtains, Lettie ventured out onto the dark canvas matting that covered the floor. The darkness of the night was a good cover for her. She moved to the railing and leaned over it.

  There was an excellent view across the picket-fence-enclosed front yard of Splendora to the road stretching in either direction. The dogs had already passed the house and could just be seen — long, lean shapes in the darkness — loping away down the road to the left. Almost directly in front of the house was the troop of horsemen, two of them carrying pine-pitch torches that flared with the wind of their passage, the sparks flying back over their shoulders. In that orange glow could be seen, not the white of bed sheets, but the dark blue of uniforms. The men following the dogs were soldiers of the Union army, the occupation troops of the area. They thundered by with their faces forward, intent on their quarry, though there was no sign of who that might be.

  Lettie stared in perplexity after the soldiers. After all the things that had been said before and during the war about the cruelty of hunting down human beings with bloodhounds, after the way it had been condemned in the papers, after the speeches against it at abolitionist meetings where the Southerners who practiced it were categorized as monsters, it seemed impossible that bloodhounds would be used for any such purpose by Union troops. It seemed unlikely that their quarry was of the black race. If he was white, however, the use of the dogs must be deliberate, a taste of their own medicine for the people of the area, or else there was hypocrisy involved. Both explanations were equally disturbing.

  The noise of the pursuit died away. Silence returned, a silence with an undertone of the whirring of peeper frogs, crickets, and katydids. The night was balmy, with a soft, silken feel to the air. The moon had not yet risen. The stars shone bright, so close they looked as if she could gather a handful in a single sweeping grasp. The shadows under the trees were dense, gently moving in the breeze that meandered here and there. The night wind wafted across the veranda, and on its breath came, now faint, now strong, the rich lemony smell of the magnolias that starred the great dark-leaved tree on her left, just beyond the veranda.

  By degrees, Lettie relaxed once more, lulled by the warmth and fragrance and caressing softness of the air. The soldiers forgotten, she stared around her at the Southern night, feeling it about her like an enveloping and seductive aura. It was entrancing, enticing, with a promise of hidden joys tinged with danger. Lettie felt the rise inside her, totally unbidden, of a slow, sweet yearning.

  It was not a sensation she could acknowledge with comfort. Turning sharply, she moved back inside her bedchamber. She closed the small jib doors and straightened t
he muslin curtains, though she left the window open for air. She hesitated for a moment, thinking of her unfinished letter to her mother. It would wait until morning; her brain was too drugged with weariness and unaccustomed nighttime warmth to concentrate. She turned toward the bulking shadow of the tester bed, which was turned down for her comfort.

  There came the scrape of a footstep outside on the veranda. It was a quiet sound, not furtive but not quite forthright. Lettie turned with quick alarm racing along her veins. A man’s shadow loomed at the window, a black shape against the pale glow of starlight. In a single swift movement, he put his leg over the sill of the open window, batted aside the curtain, and eased into the room.

  Lettie drew in her breath with a strangled sound. In an instant, the man was upon her, clamping his hand on her mouth and catching her against him in a grip so tight that she felt her ribs bend. There was a flash of fiery pain where her hipbone struck the holstered gun at his belt, then she was pressed to him, molded against his hard length.

  Shock and surprise and something more vibrated between them. The man felt the slender, yet well-rounded form in his arms, smelled the warm female scent of her — both things he had not experienced in some time. His first thought was for who she might be; his second and most virulent was for what in the name of living hell she was doing there in that room, at that hour.

  “Keep quiet,” he said, his voice a whisper that had a rough edge to it, yet was soft in its menace. “Don’t make a sound, and I’ll let you go.”

  Lettie, her throat aching with her trapped scream and her heart a pulsing knot in her chest, managed to nod. By slow degrees the pressure on her mouth lessened. She forced herself to remain still, though she was aware with every particle of her being of her breasts pressing against the intruder’s hard chest and her thighs brushing the muscled lengths of his legs, of the vital strength and height of him. She was a woman of average size, even perhaps a little taller than average, and yet she felt overwhelmed in a way she had never known before by the sheer force of will she sensed in the man who held her.

  It affected her like the scrape of a fingernail on a slate. The instant she felt his hold relax, the moment his hand left her lips, she twisted from him with a cry of outrage bursting from her.

  She was whirled back against his hard body. He captured her mouth with his, stifling her outcry. She struggled, writhing, pushing at him, trying to turn her head away. His grasp was firm, inescapable. He brought his hand up and tangled his fingers in the thick silk of her long hair, holding her head immobile as he plundered the sweetness of her lips. His kiss was burning, implacable, and yet seemed to hold a trace of reluctant curiosity. The hard pressure grew less. She felt the brush of a mustache as his lips, warm and smooth and sure, moved on hers, soothing, savoring. He tasted the full, gently molded curves, awakening their sensitivity, testing the smooth, resilient surface of them, from one delicate corner to the other.

  Lettie’s movement slowed, then stilled. She felt disoriented, light-headed with the sudden leap of sensation along her veins. There crept in upon her a strange, primeval languor that seemed to promise an answer to her earlier yearning. She swayed, wanting, needing to move closer to the man who held her, though she fought the urge, tried to repress it. Desire and revulsion warred inside her, beating up into her brain until she shuddered with reaction, trembling uncontrollably.

  The man released her with a quiet imprecation. There was a moment when the only sound was their breathing. Abruptly, he caught her arm and pulled her toward the table that had served as her, writing desk, pressing her down into the chair beside it. Before she could gather herself to protest or even to make a sound, he had removed some kind of scarf from his neck and was tying it over her mouth. She reached up to catch his arms, half rising. He grasped her wrists, pulled them down behind her as he forced her back into the chair, then fastened them to its back with lengths of grass rope that he took from his pockets. A moment more and he was kneeling in front of her to wrap the twisted rope about her ankles and tie them to the front rung of the chair.

  Lettie tried to speak, to call him a dog, a sneak thief, an unprincipled ruffian. The words were muffled, though the intent was in her voice.

  The man laughed, a low sound of real mirth that sent a strange quiver along her nerves. He rose to lean over her. Though she drew back as far as she could, he brushed a swift kiss across her forehead while one hand rested in a feather-light caress on her breast. Lettie stiffened with a sound of protest. He gave another soft chuckle, then straightened, backing away. His footsteps whispered on the Turkey carpet, there was a flickering shadow at the window, and then he was gone.

  For an instant Lettie went limp with relief, then pure rage stirred inside her, rising in a rush to her head. She felt hot all over, and tears sprang into her eyes. The nerve of the man, the sheer, unadulterated gall! She had never been treated in such a way in her life. Never! How dare he mock her as well as attack her and truss her up like a sheep ready for slaughter. Who was he? Who was he?

  So great was her fury that it took little effort to rock her chair against the table so that it butted the wall, then tip it forward again and again to make a regular thudding noise.

  Everyone was sound asleep. No one was going to come. She was going to have to sit in this chair until morning, or later if no one thought to look for her when she failed to appear for breakfast. The ropes chafed her skin, rubbing it raw as she moved, but they were securely knotted. There was little hope of freeing herself without help.

  A faint light shone into the room, coming from the crack under her bedchamber door. The glimmering brightness grew and there came the shuffling sound of footsteps. A soft knock sounded on the door. “Lettie? Are you all right?”

  Lettie banged the table harder, making indignant noises around her gag. The door opened and Aunt Em put her head around it.

  “Good gracious!” she exclaimed, her eyes widening. “Oh, my stars!”

  She bustled into the room with her dressing gown of limp batiste flapping around her, the faded ribbons of her nightcap fluttering and the gray braids of her hair swinging on either side of her face. She set the oil lamp she carried down on the table, then began to work with energy to unknot the scarf around Lettie’s mouth.

  “What happened, child? Who did this to you? I just can’t believe it. That such a thing could take place in this house with me not two doors away makes me so mad I could spit.”

  The gag fell away. Lettie answered the older woman as best she could while Aunt Em worked at the knots that held her hands.

  “Came through the window? Well, I never! You must have been scared half out of your wits. Oh, dear, I may have to get a knife — no, it’s a slip knot. Right thoughtful of him.” Lettie’s hands were freed. Aunt Em moved around in front of her and plumped down on her knees to untie Lettie’s feet.

  “That’s not the word I would use,” Lettie said with some asperity. “The man was vile, utterly base. He meant to rob you, I’m sure.”

  “He wouldn’t have got much. But whatever he intended, you seem to have changed his mind, and for that I’m grateful.” The older woman loosened the last rope and looked up, her mouth opened to speak. She made no sound, however, but sat gaping as she stared at the front of Lettie’s pink nightgown.

  Lettie, rubbing her chafed wrists, looked down. There was an object clinging to the cotton flannel just over the soft and rounded peak of her right breast. Fragile-looking, a light tan-gold in color, it appeared to be the empty shell of some insect. It clung by its desiccated claws, which were still intact. It was quite whole except for the split down its back where the insect had emerged. Thrust into that split so that it came out the bottom was a tiny tapering spike that was polished to a shining black.

  “What is it?” she asked as she detached the shell, turning it this way and that in the lamplight.

  “A locust shell and a thorn.”

  The blood drained from Lettie’s face. She dropped the shell to the table as
if it had been a scorpion. A locust and a thorn, left attached to her where the man who had entered the room had touched her last. They were symbols of the man known simply as the Thorn, the vicious murderer who had killed her brother, the man she had come South to find.

  The name rose unbidden to her lips, a soft whisper.

  “It must have been him the hounds were after,” Aunt Em said in agreement.

  “Yes.” Somehow, Lettie had not connected the man with the pursuit by the Union troops and their bloodhounds. It seemed obvious now. He had given his pursuers the slip by some trick and doubled back, looking for a place to hide. He must have thought he had found it until he discovered her. She had been close, so close to him. He had held her, kissed her. She raised the back of her hand to her lips, wiping them in sudden disgust.

  “He might have killed me,” she said in strained tones, “or — or worse.”

  “Oh, no, my dear! Never think such a thing!”

  “But I’ve heard such stories!”

  Aunt Em shook her head. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, or where such things get started for that matter, but the Thorn has done as much good as harm around here. I can’t believe he would hurt a woman.”

  “You can’t know that,” Lettie protested. “The soldiers were after him. That must mean something.”

  “Humph. Probably means their officers needed something to keep them busy.”

  A quiet knock fell on the bedchamber door that Aunt Em had left standing ajar as she entered. Two people appeared in the opening, a man and a young boy. Lettie, her nerves still disordered, looked up quickly as the man spoke.