BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis

by Bonds, Parris Afton

  They bypassed the Parc aux Cerfs, where Louis XIII once raised stags for his favorite sport of hunting and which acreage Louis XIV had now broken up into hotels and gardens for noblemen who had either no place of their own or for whom there was no room at the palace. Hélène sat the sidesaddle competently upon the little palfrey, and Damien began to suspect that her request for riding instructions had been a ruse—that pleased him greatly.

  “I have heard you are from Anjou,” she said, casting him a sidelong glance, “the home of hardheaded men.”

  He grinned. He was enjoying himself immensely. “I am told the Loire Valley produces the most beautiful girls in France.”

  “Do not flatter me, monsieur. Beautiful I am not. But . . . perhaps pretty.”

  “When the beauties of the court fade with age, you will still be lovely, mademoiselle.”

  She reined in her palfrey and stared at him wonderingly. “Why, I believe you’re serious!”

  “Never more so,” he assured her gravely.

  “You should have been a troubadour from Languedoc,” she told him without any of the brittle, jesting tone she displayed in the salons.

  He was amazed at himself; his earlier cynicism was no match at all for the purity of this first love. Two days later, he submitted himself to her tutoring. They found a stone bench beneath the chestnut trees that bordered the Allée de Bacchus in the Versailles gardens and removed from the noise of the constant construction work. Masons and other workmen, almost forty thousand of them, were everywhere. Only the year before had Versailles been completed sufficiently for Louis to move his court from the Louvre.

  “Aristotle, Socrates, Plato,” she said earnestly, “you must read these philosophers to understand the true nature of man.”

  He wasn’t interested in the nature of man, only of woman, in particular, this very appealing woman. He was paralyzed by the power of his feeling for Hélène. It was as if he’d never developed his profound knowledge of women. The heat of the afternoon sun enhanced the scent of her skin, exciting him further. He had discovered early how important the true smell of a woman’s skin was to the overall attraction she held for him, and the cloying perfumes the women of the court wore usually concealed this natural stimulant.

  “Your cousin, mademoiselle. Your family entrusts him to find a suitable bridegroom for you?”

  She eyed him surreptitiously, then trilled a little laugh that made him catch his breath. “If I ever marry, monsieur, it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man slits his own throat.”

  He studied her, intrigued. “Marriage terrifies you that much?”

  “A wife is nothing but a chattel. I told you, monsieur, I shall be a femme savante. I shall have my own salon and hold small theatricals and balls. Only the most entertaining will be admitted. In truth, the only thing that terrifies me is being bored.”

  From that point in their relationship, Damien strove to be unfailingly entertaining. In the early hours of the morning, when most of the court still slept, he induced her to meet him in the billiards salon, where he taught her the rudiments of the game. Sheer paradise awaited him when she leaned over the table to make a shot and exposed the delectable V of her lace-bound breasts.

  At a reception for a Spanish grandee, he boldly led her through the figures of a quadrille with the grace that came from his soldier’s agility. Their shoulders touching beneath upraised hands, Hélène said, “My cousin does not approve of my dancing with you.”

  Damien flicked a careless glance at the slit-eyed knight and said, “I don’t approve of his relationship with Monsieur.”

  Hélène gasped, laughed, then slid away into the next steps.

  On another day, in a secluded grotto of the gardens, he played the troubadour to which she had compared him and sang to her: first, romantic odes of ancient heroes; then, at her pleas, the soldiers’ songs, omitting the bawdier versions. In return, she read to him from Descartes and Locke and Scarron.

  Sometimes her freethinking startled him. Once she exclaimed to him, “Have you ever noticed, Damien, that it is the male who is the peacock, who is encouraged to exhibit and accentuate his lines? Why we females don’t even possess legs!”

  At a time when it was common to encounter couples locked together in darkened alcoves of the palace, the noblewomen’s skirts hitched up like country wenches, Damien’s courtship of Hélène was curiously chaste. Even so, his insides were strung as tightly as lyre strings by her nearness and the need to capture her for his own, to couple with her until they became that mystical one that so far had eluded him in endlessly meaningless affairs.

  Everything about her blared unawakened passion and sexuality: the full lower lip untempered by any ingénue smile, the almond-shaped eyes whose lashes could not disguise untapped sensuality, the breasts that heaved rapidly when he dared to brush them with his fingertips.

  At times, he was certain he could make her his, could possess her and have done with it. But he wanted more. He wanted her as his wife and as the mother of his children. Bourgeois ideas, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. So he bided his time, hoping the king would keep his promise of a reward for Damien’s performance on the battlefields of Flanders and confer on him a title that would recommend him to the Marquis de Marchesseau.

  On lazy, sunny afternoons, he and Hélène strolled easily along the Grand Canal where jets d’eau flung two walls of water thirty-five feet high, or they wandered among the flowered parterres rolled out on both sides of the walkway like great Oriental rugs. “Did you know that the color of your eyes is the color of infinity,” he said, tucking a blossom of lavender behind her ear, “and the color of your soul? Beautiful.”

  “You speak more like a courtier than a soldier,” she teased lightly, but he heard the breathlessness in her voice.

  Sometimes they visited the village where the hunters rendezvoused, and carters and wagoneers halted, their vehicles laden with beef from Normandy bound for Les Hailes market in Paris. He would take her hand in his and feel a happiness he had never known.

  “Your cousin?” he asked as they were riding one spring day along the outskirts of a bosquet, where the leafy shadows concealed them from prying eyes. “Does he object any more when you ride out with me?”

  For a long moment, Hélène said nothing, and there was heard only the brittle crunch as the horses’ hooves disturbed leftover winter leaves. Then she raised her eyes, a blinding blue. “He has been keeping my family informed of our meetings. My father has ordered my return when the court journeys to Fontainebleau this summer.”

  “I see,” Damien said.

  He dismounted and came around to her palfrey. Hélène watched him with an inquiring lift to her thick, straight brows, but he reached up and caught her under her arms, drawing her off her mount. Instead of releasing her, he held her against him. She barely reached his chest. His nostrils flared with the heady scent of her flesh, and through the material of her peach-colored riding habit, he could feel her heart pounding erratically.

  “Marry me now,” he demanded.

  The deep blue of her eyes darkened perceptibly. Then she pulled gently away and turned from him for a moment to tug off her plumed hat, a masculine affair with a silk-lined apricot brim. He wanted to release her elaborate coiffure, to tangle his fingers in her ivory-brown hair. “You didn’t answer me.”

  She twirled around to face him. “And what shall we live on, Damien? Do you win enough at the gaming tables to support us both?”

  “If I leave His Majesty’s service, I have a soldier’s pension. To supplement it, I could find work as a mercenary in the Dutch or Austrian army. I could take you to the capitals of the civilized world, Hélène. You would never be bored.”

  “You are an innocent,” she said. And then, more wearily, “Damien, I don’t want to leave Paris. All my life I’ve dreamed of court life, of attending the—”

  He caught her by her upper arms, pulling her against him and delighting in the feel of her soft woman’s breasts pressed f
lat against the muscular plates of his chest. His lips nuzzled the tender white flesh of her neck, and he heard the soft little moan she made.

  “Marry me,” he repeated.

  “My father would never countenance it,” she said in a breathless murmur.

  “Then we will wed without his consent,” he growled, and, unable to contain his passion, captured her trembling lips, pressing them apart until she capitulated and granted his tongue entry. The shyly hesitant parry of her own tongue excited him beyond any polished erotic performance by his past bed partners.

  When his mouth at last released hers, she drew away from him, her passion-flushed face weighted with sadness. “The king will never grant his permission. We can’t fight the entire world, Damien.”

  “The king is not the entire world.”

  § CHAPTER TWO §

  Paris

  January 1684

  The church of St. Pierre aux Boeufs disregarded all rules imposed on matrimonial candidates. The Gretna Green of Paris, its priest performed marriages without the publications of banns and without the consent of parents.

  Wearing pink as usual, a pale rose velvet, Hélène du Plessis had never looked more radiant as she and Damien made their way by unlit coach back to Versailles that night. Dawn had not yet broken when, in his little attic room, he tenderly let down her hair and removed her layers of clothing to expose her delicate white flesh shadowed by tufts of soft, springy coils beneath her arms and at the enticing fork of her legs. With infinite gentleness, he strove to initiate the first virgin he had ever known into the rites of Venus.

  Their heated passion staved off the chill of the room. After three days closeted away, with only Hélène’s maidservant to bring them food, Damien knew Hélène was not his first love but would forever be his grand love. In possessing her, he was also possessed. Once the intensity of the pleasure ebbed into the relaxing afterglow of lovemaking, she enchanted and entertained him with animated stories of her childhood adventures and escapades, and songs that she had learned to play on the harpsichord—and with her own hesitant inquisitiveness. Never had a paid whore satisfied him as much as this woman, his wife.

  “When I was nine, I fell in love with my cousin Claude and was desolate when he became a knight of the Maltese Order.” Languidly, her forefinger tatted the wiry hair that whorled around one of Damien’s rapidly hardening nipples. “Now I am glad he did, or I might never have spent such a pleasurable three days abed.”

  His voracious kiss silenced her laughing lips.

  Their respite had to end, and Damien found himself summoned the following morning to the cabinet of His Majesty. From the warmth of their rumpled bed, Hélène clutched his hand. Fear glazed her eyes, and her bottom lip was white with the imprint of her teeth. “I knew this would happen. He will be furious that we have wed without his permission. Please, Damien, you must placate him, or it will mean banishment from court.”

  With her pale brown nipples peeking through the twin ocher veils of her hair, it was difficult for Damien to be overly anxious about the royal summons. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to join her in the warm bed that was so redolent of their lovemaking.

  “And would banishment be so bad, ma mignonne, my pretty?” he joked. “I am weary of the constant round of court fetes, divertissements, and plaisirs. I feel like I am cooped up in a perpetual house party.”

  For what seemed an eternity, Damien paced the oeil-de-boeuf, the antechamber to the king’s cabinet. The melancholy eyes in a portrait of a prominent Florentine woman, Lisa del Giocondo, seemed to follow him, and he turned his back on the portrait. At last he was admitted into the presence of le roi soleil.

  Though physically plain and below medium height, with the purple veins of a dissolute life cobwebbing his skin, the Sun King still managed to reduce the court’s most gifted speakers to tongue-tied muteness. An indomitable egoist, he could thoroughly intimidate with his Bourbon characteristics: the harsh gaze and hooked nose. A receding chin, caused by the removal of his teeth, made him appear no less fierce. Especially when he was irate, as he was at that moment. Beneath hooded lids, his dark eyes flashed.

  Damien’s plumed hat swept the carpet with his bow, but when he fixed his eyes on Le Grand Louis, he did not quail. Although his sovereign had domesticated France’s nobility into a framework of servility, Damien was a man of basic philosophy. Between the whorehouses and the army, he had learned that all men are the same, with only the pomp of clothing to elevate their status. Louis’s skinny legs, his thinning hair hidden by enormous wigs, his rotund girth could be risible—if anyone dared such a reaction.

  “Your Majesty?” Damien said.

  Louis snapped his fingers, and from behind a tapestry that partitioned his cabinet from a private apartment emerged his painted and powdered brother, the Duc d’Orléans, and the black-robed knight, Claude Fabreville, who inclined his head, his smile thin and mocking.

  “My brother and his . . . companion,” Louis said, “inform me that you have contracted a marriage.”

  Damien never took his eyes off Claude. Other than tattling, what was the knight’s part in this—and why? “That I have, Your Majesty. With the knight’s cousin.”

  “And without my sanction,” the king said. He raised his gold- knobbed cane and tapped it on the parquet floor before Damien. “Last year, my Turkish ambassador was foolish enough to marry a native of that backward country. And one not of the noblesse at that. A woman below his birth and rank. Do you know what happened?”

  “You had the ambassador recalled, 1 believe,” Damien said. He refused to cringe, but the feeling of independence that gives a man his identity was being threatened, and he didn’t know what he could do about it. He had felt he was his own man, but now he couldn’t simply disappear to lose himself as a mercenary in the service of some foreign army. Love and Hélène had complicated his life—and at the same time enriched it.

  “And had him banished from court, Monsieur,” the king’s brother, purred.

  Damien bowed. “I am yours to command, sire.” For him, the punishment would almost be a reward.

  “I find your attitude commendable,” the king said. “But I am not finished. You are to retire to Blois, your wife’s family estate, where you will engage in the work of the silk industry until I feel inclined to change my mind.”

  Damien said nothing, could say nothing. To be forced into a trade, when he was a born soldier, would be the unmaking of him, he was sure.

  Hélène waited for him in his garret, her hands twisting together. “What happened, Damien?”

  He caught her small hands between his. Her flesh was cold, and he chafed her hands while he talked. “Your cousin is working mischief, ma mignonne. We have been banished to your family estate until Louis’s anger passes. Only a matter of months, I am sure.”

  The old quarter of Blois, a picturesque medieval city high above the Loire, had to be approached by steep flights of stone steps. Above it, on a crest, the magnificent Marchesseau chateau dominated the entire valley. Its grounds were said to be as vast as Paris. The splendidly decorated palace was known all over the province simply as Maison Bellecour. Rich Gobelin tapestries, as well as expensive blue wallpaper, kept out the drafts. The woodwork shined like mirror glass, the porcelain doorknobs gleamed against the carved oak doors, and the Carrara marble was polished enough to satisfy a Medici.

  More than one nobleman with a duchy title in Louis XIV’s court coveted the enormous Maison Bellecour and would willingly have married off a son to the provincial marquis’s only child. But it was on Damien that such fortune fell.

  From the chateau, Damien could watch the Loire flowing past on its way to the Bay of Biscay and the world of far-flung countries. Rare, though, were the restless nights when he stole to the deep-set casement window and viewed from there the moon-streaked black currents with an indefinable yearning.

  Most nights, he found refuge in the arms of Hélène from the staleness of his days. After his vagabond, b
aseborn life, his lively, aristocratic, young wife was a gift of new life to him, too good to be true. Sometimes he feared the gods might recant of their generosity, and he worked twice as hard to keep peace both at the chateau and at the silk factories.

  The peace was a strained one. Gaston de Marchesseau, a big, blustering man, strove to contain his contempt for the uneducated soldier who was now his son-in-law as he introduced him to the workings of the factories; his wife Claudette, frail but without Hélène’s handsomeness, did not get along well with her daughter. Where Hélène sparkled, her rustic mother wore a look of disenchantment with the world. Claudette was a dry, duty-bound woman. As for Damien, she refused to acknowledge his presence, never addressing him directly.

  Hélène suffered as well, though it was not so obvious until cousin Claude journeyed down from Fontainebleau to pay the Marchesseau family a visit. Over supper, she avidly questioned the knight about court happenings, laughing with a delight that was rarely heard those days when he would recount with his sly wit the passions and politics at court.

  For the occasion, a fine Dutch linen cloth draped the table. A surtout, an exquisite piece of goldsmith’s art, dominated the table with its accommodation of salt, pepper, spices, and ivory toothpicks. Utensils with white, bone handles had been laid.

  “You will agree, will you not,” Claude asked of her, “that Racine’s plays all have the theme that reason is powerless to resist the swirl of passion?”

  Did he intimate that his cousin had lost her power of reason in la belle passion for a common soldier? Damien, silent, chewed tender petit pois and listened with barely suppressed irritation. He was sorely tempted to destroy the effete handsomeness of the knight.

  “Ah, but his heroes are men of passion,” she said, laying aside her spoon in her enthusiasm for the discussion. “I prefer Corneille’s men of honor, where there is a sense of society as an ordered world.”