“Sacre bleu, if you don’t look more like Lucifer every day!” Jean-Baptiste exclaimed, pounding the taller, bigger man’s shoulders. “It’s that wicked moustache. You must give up your wild life, mon ami, and settled down and marry.”
“I am already married,” Damien said drily, stepping back.
“Ahh, yes,” Jean-Baptiste murmured, tugging at his straggly grizzled beard with embarrassment. “So I forget. Then let us talk of other things. Come sit at the table while I pour us a tumbler of nectar, the best rotgut in Grand Portage. I have good news— six hundred of the most luxurious beaver skins ever taken out of the northwest country. And not just beaver. We’ve marten, fisher, lynx, fox, and mink! The plews are already at the warehouse waiting to be loaded.”
Damien sat back, loosened his coat, and studied his venerable friend, who continued to chatter on. The little man had a nose that was too long for his narrow face, but something benign shone in gray eyes that sloped from the weight of deep wrinkles. “A rich lode this time, Damien! With Paris—all Europe—raging over furred balles and busks and puffs . . . Why, Damien, you’ll be wealthier than you ever dreamed!”
“Jean-Baptiste.”
His partner halted his outpouring. “Oui?”
Damien plunked his tankard down, the raw whiskey tasting like brackish swampwater, and leaned forward. “You’ve never been so voluble. What’s wrong?”
The intelligent gray eyes ricocheted from Damien’s piercing dark brown ones.
“Well?” Damien insisted.
The other rose and went to the rear of the cabin where a ladder led to the loft. “Rema,” he called out. “Nicolas.”
Damien sprang to his feet as a thick-bodied Indian woman in soiled deerskins and leggings slowly descended the ladder, eyes averted. Behind her came a boy of nine or so.
Damien’s eyes flashed; his jaw clenched. “How dare you bring them here!”
Jean-Baptiste stepped quickly between his friend and the others. “Damien! He is your son, and it’s time you stopped denying him the right to know his father.”
Damien didn’t move. His voice was low and terse. “My son is in France.”
Jean-Baptiste’s crest of salted hair jutted forward.
“When are you going to acknowledge the truth—that Hélène is nothing but a courtesan, the Duc de Chartres’s harlot last time we heard; that your son by her knows nothing about you; that you will never see them again?”
Damien stormed toward the door, and Jean-Baptiste cried out, “Wait! Alors, mon cher ami, at least talk with the boy! You owe him that much. Or are you a coward after all?”
Damien spun, his teeth bared in a snarl. “All right, I will talk with the boy. Then you will return him and Rema to the Chipewyan village. Immediately. Tomorrow.”
Satisfied for the moment, Jean-Baptiste nodded and stepped aside. Damien, arms akimbo, glared down at the metis, the half- breed. The boy was thin, but above his prominent ribs lay a firm sheet of pectoral muscle. His dirty, shoulder-length hair was blue- black like his mother’s, as were his eyes. In fact, Damien found little to indicate the boy was half-white—let alone his. Except, perhaps, for his height, Damien’s height. The youth appeared tall for a nine-year-old Indian child. In his bony face, the eyes already seemed old and almost wizened.
In his mind, Damien counted the number of times he had seen the boy. Four—five, maybe, the last time three years before. But always either at the Chipewyan camp or at Jean-Baptiste’s lodge, both over five hundred miles to the northwest. Those times with the boy and Rema had been, for the most part, the early years, when he had gone native; when he and Jean-Baptiste were trying to put together their string of fur depots to start their profitable Fur Company of Canada, or Kanata as the Indians called the country the French had dubbed New France.
“Come here, boy.”
“His name is Nicolas,” Jean-Baptiste reminded him. “Nicolas du Plessis. I myself named him for Saint Nicolas.”
“I know that,” Damien snapped, hunkering on one knee so that he could better observe the boy. “Come here, Nicolas.”
The youngster’s opaque eyes flickered. The Indian woman, her cinnamon-colored face inscrutable, nudged her son’s shoulder, and the boy stepped forward. Damien frowned. The twisted foot was little better. He studied the boy as the boy’s black eyes studied him. The face held little of conventional beauty, all relentless angles that should have been softened by childhood. And the head seemed too large for the body.
“Where is France’s center of government?” Damien asked. Nicolas glanced at Jean-Baptiste. Receiving an encouraging nod, he replied, “Versailles, for the present.”
The boy’s melodious voice was disarming. “The center of government for New France?” Damien said.
“Quebec.”
Damien glanced at his partner’s smug face, then rapped, “Who wrote the Principles of Philosophy?”
“Descartes.”
Damien straightened to his feet. “You have done well, Jean- Baptiste. Better than you did by me, I believe.”
“It was the long, uninterrupted winters. Your son is even quicker than you, Damien. He has a keen mind. By the time I finish with him, he will have an education worthy of the Jesuit College at La Fleche.”
“For all the good it will do the little savage. Come, matters of business await us at the Trading Hall.”
Rema’s softly spoken Indian name for him stopped Damien in midstride. He turned to look at her. Ten years and a pregnancy had altered her once lithe figure into near plumpness. The beautiful bone structure of her face was obscured by thickening jowls, her skin coarsened by harsh weather and campfire smoke and poor diet. Her braids shone with bear grease. Well, at least she still had all her teeth, he noted, reminding himself of the persistent ache in one of his own back teeth.
She padded over to him and hesitantly touched his sleeve. Jean-Baptiste, seeing the look that passed between them, said, “The boy and I’ll wait for you at the Trading Hall.”
Suspended about Rema’s neck was a brass trading coin bearing the likeness of Louis XIV on one side and on the reverse a beaver to denote its value of one pelt. The coin was worn as an ornament until it was redeemed at the company store for goods. He had given it to her on his last trip into Athabascan country three years before.
Seeing his interest, she touched the coin with dirt-encrusted fingers and smiled fetchingly.
He didn’t return her smile. The sooty odor of her clothing, combined with the rancid bear grease on her hair, repelled Damien slightly, but those liquid black eyes called up the earlier times, the lust she had inspired in him—and everything else she had been to him. She had made those long, dark, northern winters livable when the gut-wrenching want of Hélène had deadened him to everything.
Rema had cooked, mended, and tanned leather and fashioned it into clothing and moccasins for him. She had dressed the game he shot and woven leather thongs into a supporting network for his snowshoes; had gathered firewood, berries, and wild rice— and had kept his bed warm. All for a very small purchase price. For a few blankets, her father, who had been of no particular rank, had sold him his twelve-year-old daughter.
Damien laid his hand gently on her cheek. “Yes, Rema,” he answered her unspoken question. He began to disrobe before her toil-worn hands stopped him and lovingly took over the task. Watching her, he felt a great sadness for her—and for himself. For the whole damn world.
All business in the Great Trading Hall was done on credit. Indians, on entering with their harvest of pelts, were disarmed and treated to a bit of tobacco and a few drams of Blackfoot rum. Any more than that and the Indians drank themselves into debauchery.
This year, more Indians than ever seemed to have journeyed to Grand Portage for the Summer Rendezvous: long-haired Miamis, uncouth Mascoutins, wild Kickapoos, gross and licentious Algonquins, and shaven-skulled Hurons. Most were dirty, practically naked, and outwardly sullen.
After the pipe had been passed about for some time,
they would relate whatever news they possessed with great deliberation, relaxing their usual reticence in proportion to the quantity of rum they had drunk.
Among them moved French competitors for their trade. Jean-Baptiste squatted amidst a group of the more friendly Hurons. The boy Nicolas, hunkered next to Jean-Baptiste, his bird-bright eyes intent on the robust negotiations—a gun for fourteen beaver skins or plews; a blanket for six plews; two plews for an ax, shawl, or beaver trap.
Damien joined the group, and Jean-Baptiste looked up, his rheumy gray eyes shadowed. “What is it?” Damien asked.
“Our friends here”—the old man gestured toward the bickering Indians—“talk of a great uprising among the Longhouse Iroquois after the corn harvest. The Mohawks are stirring up trouble.”
Damien’s thick brows drew together in a frown. Of the Five Nations, the Mohawks were the most belligerent and relentless. Their cruelty to captives was notorious. They were divided into three families: the Bear, the Wolf, and the Tortoise. The Bear was the most savage, and it was this clan whose trail often passed through Montréal and Damien’s seigneury.
“Then I shall cut short the month-long festivities and arrive back before late August.”
“Your voyageurs won’t like it.”
Damien shrugged. “We’ll need the extra time to improve Montréal’s defenses. They’ll go back.”
The older man’s voice lowered. “Damien, if we’re to stay partners—”
Damien’s brows arched. “If?”
“Yes, if. If we’re to stay partners, I ask you to grant me this one boon. Your son, Nicolas, here—”
Damien straightened to his feet and looked down at the old man with barely controlled annoyance. “I have told you, mon vieux: My son is in France.”
Persistent, Jean-Baptiste rose also. Looking like a bantam rooster who had participated in one too many cockfights, he said, “Nicolas must return with you. He has become like a grandson to me, and I want him to have a chance at something better than the degeneration of our noble savages here, sitting in a continual drunken stupor before some smoky campfire. You do owe me this favor, mon vieux!”
After a long time, tense moment, Damien looked down at the impassive boy sitting cross-legged at Jean-Baptiste’s feet. The boy’s twisted ankle was hidden from sight. With a grimace, he looked back at his partner. “I know you too well, old friend, and I know what you are plotting. It’ll never work. I’ll never acknowledge him as mine. He must understand that.”
Within the week, the du Plessis canoes, heavily laden with stacks of castor, or beaver, plews, pushed off from the shores of Grand Portage. Jean-Baptiste stood on the bank, his gnarled hand raised in farewell to Damien and the Indian youth tucked in behind him. Damien saw the sadness that tugged at the wrinkles in the old man’s face and cursed mankind. If he kept up this cursing, he told himself ruefully, he would soon be tongueless, should good King Louis’s minions have their way.
§ CHAPTER FOUR §
Montréal, New France
August l700
When Damien arrived home, his first task as governor was to strengthen the town’s defenses. He widened the moat and heightened the palisades. Two new bastions were added. The boom of cannon at dawn and sundown gave warning that vigilance was being maintained. He appointed a crew of men to cut wood from the forests for the winter’s provisions and ordered the women to see that their larders were well stocked.
In his spare time, he worked on the fortifications of his own seigneury, adding a gallery for patrol along the insides of the palisades and doubling the number of loopholes. He set Nicolas to work alongside him and his hired men. The boy worked stolidly but efficiently, his face as inscrutable as his mother’s. Occasionally, Damien made conversation, but only because he could see it piqued the boy to have to answer. A momentary guilt at baiting the boy would assail him at times, but he would shrug it off and reapply himself to the task of the moment. If he flagellated himself for every mistake in his life, he told himself, he would be a mass of scar tissue.
With the news of the planned Indian uprisings, the townspeople became nervous and jumpy. Each tree trunk rising in the water became a Mohawk warrior. Each bulrush, a hostile tomahawk.
Three times that fall the Iroquois, muskets in hand, had intercepted the mail boat, but the expected attack did not come.
Through that fall and winter, Damien and Nicolas barely tolerated one another’s presence. Damien rarely socialized, so when Nicolas awoke one morning to find Mother Marie in the chateau, he was unable to conceal completely his confusion and consternation at the religious visitor.
The fire had burned out in the inadequate braziers and Damien was rebuilding it when Nicolas entered the room. Mother Marie rose to her feet, saying softly, “Good morning. I have been wanting to meet you, Nicolas.”
The boy slid a quick glance at Damien but stubbornly said nothing. The nun continued, unperturbed. “At the hospital—the Hôtel-Dieu—besides making the beds, I bandage the patients’ sores and care for them, and they have talked of Montréal’s newest arrival. I suppose it is much like your drums—word travels fast.”
Listening to her talk, Damien half noted that she and Nicolas both had musical voices. Pleasant. From the corner of his eye, he watched her cross to the boy, her worn gray habit rustling on the puncheon floor. The boy tensed at her approach. From the folds of her habit, she withdrew a small dog-eared book.
“I also visit the ships in harbor and tend the ill members of the crew. One of them, a learned Huguenot, gave me this—a copy of Racine’s Andromaque.” The boy made no effort to take the proffered book. “Damien has told me you can read, and I had hoped you would enjoy it. I’ll leave the book on the mantel for you, if you care to look through it.”
The book remained on the mantel for over a week, but Damien suspected the boy had indeed leafed through it and restored it to its exact position. When the nun next visited Damien, the boy managed without prompting to exchange a few civil words with her. So it went through the winter.
“Damien?”
“Mmmm?”
Marie nuzzled her cheek against his thick mat of chest hair. “A woman was submerged on the dunking stool yesterday. Barbe Boulogne. You remember her, the pretty, little blonde with twin boys.”
Damien stroked Marie’s unbound hair. Streaks of white had invaded the brown. He stared into the darkness, trying to picture Barbe Boulogne’s face. But, of course, the only image he ever saw was that of Hélène. How do you stop loving someone, even when you know the person is not worth it?
Barbe Boulogne . . . He remembered several years ago when she and her husband had arrived in New France from Alençon. She had been wretchedly lonely and miserable in the frontier colony. And he was always lonely, would always be so. They had found momentary solace in one another’s arms, a passing affair.
“For infidelity?” he asked lazily.
“Yes. I don’t know if she’ll survive. When she was brought to the hotel, her body was frozen through, poor thing, and she wasn’t breathing at first. I can’t stay long. I need to get back to her.”
Damien’s thumb tilted Marie’s oval chin upward so that he could see her face better, but in the darkness only her eyes, deep and pure, were clearly visible. “You rarely talk of your patients— their problems and personal lives. Did you bring up this woman for any particular reason?”
She kissed his beard-stubbled chin and, with a small sigh, returned her head to its nesting place on his broad chest. “It seems to me that the wife’s status under French law is pretty much that of a prisoner.”
“Is that why you never married?”
“I’m not talking about myself.”
His voice was filled with lazy amusement. “Then just what are we talking about?”
Her fingers twined in the hair that snaked its way downward past his navel. “Doesn’t it seem a little bit unfair that infidelity on a husband’s part is overlooked as understandable? Or, ciel, that a husband may beat his w
ife as long as he doesn’t use a stick thicker than his wrist?”
Beneath her stroking fingers, he was feeling the renewal of passion. “Is all this leading somewhere, Marie?” he asked, his lips beginning a forage of their own along her widow’s peak.
“Only that not all people are meant for marriage—and you must love them for what they are.”
Something in her voice . . . His lips paused. “And . . . ?”
She lay very still. “And you must love your Hélène for what she was—a spirited, intelligent, lovely young woman, not for what you wanted her to be. She would have withered as your— or as anyone’s—wife.”
He rolled away from her and sat up. In the darkness, his voice was like a soft lash. “What do you know of my wife? I’ve never told anyone here.”
“You call her name often in your sleep. Ciel, Damien, you might have crossed an ocean, but still word travels. A love story like yours, do you think it wouldn’t have spread? All these years, most of Montréal has known. They call you the Marquis of Mystery—behind your back, of course. No one has the courage to ask you outright about your past, but a man as handsome as you, as silent as you, well, soon enough questions began to be asked.”
“If you’ve known all this time,” he asked resentfully, “why are you just now bringing her up?”
She reached out and touched his shoulder. Her voice was laced with compassion. “One of the king’s sailors—he brought the news. Hélène du Plessis—she died three months ago.”
His sharply indrawn breath sliced through the room’s silence. Outside, sleet pinged against the shutters, and in the distance, muted sleigh bells tinkled. Then, within the room could be heard dry little gasps. Beneath Marie’s hand his shoulder shuddered violently.
“How?” he asked after a long time.
“The disease of Venus.”
Damien sunk into a stupor during which time he didn’t shave or change his clothing for days. He was even less conscientious about his duties as Montréal’s governor and as the chateau’s seigneur.
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 4