Thus it was, when the Mohawks finally launched their attack at dawn one bitterly cold morning, that the chateau was taken by surprise. Nicolas tried to rouse Damien from bed and then, not succeeding, drenched him with the spirits of wine reserved for the washing of face and hands.
Damien leveled himself upright and blinked, bleary-eyed. “What is it?”
“We must leave,” the boy told him pointedly, calmly. He pushed open the shutter and pointed to the fires that lit up the night— as if to say, “See for yourself.”
The lane running crookedly between the rows of houses just between Damien’s stockade and the town was filled with shadowy wraiths setting fire to the homes. Damien knew that the lucky inhabitants would be those who died in their beds or were butchered in the first onslaught.
“The Mohawks,” Nicolas said flatly. “They have already scaled your walls.”
“No! Par Dieu, we will fight!”
The soldier instinct in him responded to the screeching blood-lust war cry, “Cassee kouee!" rising from below. He drew the great broadsword from its scabbard, where it hung over a chair. In the corner stood a little used bell-mouth blunderbuss. He handed it to the watchful boy. “Can you handle this?”
After a moment, the boy’s large head nodded.
Of course he could; Jean-Baptiste would have taught him. For all Damien knew, the child would turn it on him instead; the boy was, after all, half-Indian.
From the landing, Damien surveyed the pandemonium below. A dozen, maybe fifteen warriors, their faces smeared with ceremonial paint, were wrecking the furniture, which Damien had imported at a dear price, with vicious whacks of their tomahawks. One brave had found Damien’s bonnet rouge and was prancing about with the warm woolen head covering clamped over his closely shaven skull. Another had the chaussettes of wool used to cover the legs wrapped about his upper arm like bracelets.
In the same moment, several of the warriors sighted Damien and Nicolas. At once, Damien stormed down the stairwell. He swung his broadsword about him like an avenging angel. The two savages directly below him went down. Rapidly widening red gashes bisected their chests and necks. Where they fell, others leaped over their bodies to take their places. The assault continued, with Damien forced to retreat step by step.
“Fire the blunderbuss, damn you!” he called over his shoulder to the boy.
An explosion cracked Damien’s skull, and he crumpled backward on the steps.
It was a constant amazement to Damien that the Indian savages could trudge through silent, snowbound forests in semi-nakedness, oblivious to the cold that froze the toes and noses of the captives. Of all the tribes, the Mohawks were noted for their endurance.
He tried to keep up with the group of seven braves who had taken him prisoner. To stumble and be unable to rise meant instant death. What was so galling was the boy. Nicolas had little problem keeping up with the captors; of course, Damien rationalized, the boy hadn’t taken the whack of a tomahawk on his head as he had.
On the heels of that thought followed another. Had the blunderbuss’s pin misfired—or had the boy simply chosen the side of the victors?
Damien knew he wouldn’t find out the answer soon, anyway, since speech was forbidden by his captors. Two or three times, the braves halted the trek as their path crossed that of other war parties returning with their pitiful captives to their villages along the Finger Lakes. During those times, he and the boy were allowed to squat. At one halt, he spotted Barbe Boulogne’s battered husband among the captives before one of the warriors shoved him face down into the snow.
After a while, Damien lost track of time. The dense forest concealed even the grayest of sunlight; too, he became disoriented as low branches slapped him time after time. The effort of placing one foot ahead of another was all that his thoughts could hold on to—that and the crunch of his slow footsteps on the snow.
At last, their destination was reached. The Indian village consisted of two hundred lodges behind triple palisades thirty feet high. Pandemonium ruled within. The war kettle had been brought out and was simmering like a cauldron of wizardry in the center court. Mohawk braves from all quarters had been coming in for days. There had to be five hundred or more. Those who had arrived earlier were feasting and drinking and singing war songs. The squaws screamed and jeered, and the children joined in. Innumerable dogs, unlike the barkless canines of Montréal, snapped at Damien’s heels. Behind him, Nicolas savagely kicked one of the scurvy mongrels, and it went yelping off.
The Indian at Damien’s side laughed broadly, then jammed his club between Damien’s shoulder blades, thrusting him toward the nearest lodge, an oblong shelter of rough-hewn boards bent into an arch. Inside, smoke from the center fire lay in a heavy cloud over the malodorous room. Damien blinked at the fumes stinging his eyes. It was no wonder the Indians had so many eye problems.
A toothless and quarrelsome squaw took over duty as guard and with bravado shoved and kicked her two captives toward one of the platforms that lined each side. After she disappeared through the murky haze, Damien collapsed on the platform, too tired to care about what would happen next.
Only minutes later, a shrill scream rent the air, and he jerked upright. He looked at Nicolas. The boy’s eyes were expressionless. But they both knew.
After a while, Damien discovered that the platform had lice. He sat up again and tried to study their surroundings. He was still alive, so hope was still alive. In the drafty, upper reaches of the lodge, unshelled corn hung on long lines looped from section to section, along with family clothing and skins—cured and uncured. Hunger got the better of him, and he rose from the platform.
“No,” Nicolas said.
“Why not?” he asked irritably. “We’ll need all our strength.”
“The corn will only make you sick. Wait. They will feed us. They want to keep us alive.”
“For the stake,” Damien grumbled. He began to pace before the platform. The smoke was thicker when he stood, and tears burned his eyes. He sat back down again. There had to be a way out of this mess.
The haggard old squaw returned, bearing a wooden bowl of cornmeal mush and meat as dried and withered as she was. She shoved them at Damien. Then she turned on Nicolas and prodded him from the platform toward the door.
Damien shot to his feet. “Where are you taking him?” he demanded, but the haze of smoke enveloped them and then he was alone.
Whatever hunger possessed him evaporated as more tortured screams reached him. He set the bowl aside and crossed toward the doorway. A rapid survey of the scene showed several stakes piled high with faggots. He saw no victims, for which he whispered a fervent prayer of thanks, but the nauseatingly sweet odor of burnt flesh reached him. Barbe Boulogne’s husband? Or Nicolas? The thought made him ill.
Festive warriors danced or sat about talking and drinking. How did they endure the bone-chilling cold? Even in the doorway, the winter wind seeped through his clothing, seeming paradoxically to burn his exposed skin.
Where was Nicolas?
Should he try to escape now? If he waited, he might grow too weak; still, there was the hope his captors might eventually drink themselves into insensibility. He chose that possibility as the best option for a successful escape and returned to the platform. The mush was a thick ball in his throat, but he forced it down.
When night came, and the shouting and laughing grew louder, he deemed it time to make his bid for freedom. His guard, the squaw, was lax in her duty and had not returned to check on him since she had brought the bowl of mush and strip of meat. He felt a surge of hope.
He slipped outside, his body flattened against the side of the lodge, and began to ease his way around the far corner. Any hope of escape was shattered when the old squaw loomed up before him. Her toothless mouth gaped in an excited cackle. He would have strangled her on the spot, but he was suddenly grappled from behind. A furious snarl ripped from his throat. He exerted all of his strength, willing his muscles into preterhuman resistance. T
his would be his only chance, his last chance, to flee.
The ill luck that had greeted him on the day of his birth in a prison was still shadowing him. Two warriors wrestled with him, and he might still have gained his freedom, such was his determination, but the hoary squaw struck him with a savage blow of her club in the soft area just below his ribs. He collapsed, gasping, cursing at his helplessness.
He was dragged into the center court, his boots making parallel tracks over snow already pitted with moccasined footprints. Within a matter of minutes, he found himself bound to one of the stakes. Dazed, he watched other squaws rush to pile fresh faggots around him.
God grant that the end would come quickly.
He lifted his head, Anjou arrogance blazing in his eyes. He would give the savages no satisfaction of eliciting screams from him. With a little sickness in his heart, when he thought he could feel no further emotion, he saw Nicolas with a group of drunken warriors. The boy was laughing.
When several minutes passed and the torch was still not put to the faggots, he looked around, curious at the delay. Again hope welled within him. Perhaps his captors were reconsidering.
Then he understood when he saw the ancient squaw advancing on him. He was to undergo slow torture before dying at the stake, something worse than merely tearing off the nails, leaving the hands bloodied stubs.
She toted a leather skin filled with splinters of fat pine. He had heard of that particular grisly torture. His flesh was to be punctured with those splinters, like a porcupine with quills. The splinters would then be set on fire. He would be turned into a living torch. Men so executed lived long after the splinters had burned into their skins.
Something in his brain screamed and screamed. He shoved the scream back before it burst from his lungs. Tears he was unable to check poured down his cheeks. A soldier’s shame washed over him at his weakness, even as he felt the cosmos give way at his sphincter. Through the blur of tears he saw Nicolas raise an iron tomahawk, saw it spinning, blade over shaft, endlessly spinning toward him. His last thought was that with Hélène’s death, the twilight of his life had become night.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
PART TWO
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
§ CHAPTER FIVE §
Paris
February 1720
The dirty little street, rue Quincampoix, had become Europe’s finance center. In nearby Place Vendôme, tents and wooden shanties had sprung up as traders and gamblers poured in from all over Europe to get rich quick. Fortunes were sometimes made in a few hours by bankers and hotel waiters alike, by duchesses and prostitutes. All because of a Scotsman, John Law.
Philippe du Plessis, Marquis de Marchesseau, had first noticed the Scottish banker’s placards posted on the wall of the Café Parisienne the year before. Shares were offered by Law’s French Compagnie des Indes Occidentales for real estate in Louisiane, the land of Louis. The placards depicted Louisiana as a land of tropical beauty, of milk and honey, with gold and silver mines, equaling the dream cities of the Arabian Nights. In this land of palm trees and blue, moonlit nights, Frenchmen were said to live like kings, surrounded by beautiful, Nubian slave women of great beauty. Why, the very servants gossiped about the magic of Louisiana.
On his uncle’s advice, Philippe purchased a thousand shares from the Company of the Indies and then hurried in the light, two-wheeled calèche back to Hôtel de Gesvres, bought by himself just prior to his marriage. A cold, marble building with none of the warm charm of Maison Bellecour, it had the attraction of being near the Palais Royal, and it was centered among Paris’s places of amusement. Here, he and his young wife resided when the Blois silk factories did not demand his presence, which, grâce à Dieu, was not too often.
When he arrived at Gesvres, Natalie was already at her toilette. She turned from the gilt-edged mirror, relief and love brightening her eyes, the color of which was an uncommon silver-green matrix. But then nothing about Natalie was common. Not even her chin, which was blunted by an intriguing cleft, an irregularity without which mere beauty was vapid.
“Philippe! I was beginning to worry.”
“I must hurry and change, dearest. You know the duc—how he detests late arrivals.”
He had little respect for the degenerate regent who was even accused of entertaining an incestuous relationship with his own daughter. Still, there were court appearances to be kept up.
Philippe crossed to his wife and kissed her shoulder, over which lay an artfully arranged ringlet of hair, the pale blond shade of a summer child’s. Even after four years of marriage, he was still infatuated with his child bride. At sixteen, she had carried off his three-and-thirty-year-old bachelor’s heart because . . . Well, he still couldn’t put his finger on it.
Educated at the convent at Poissy, she was the daughter of the Maréchal de Camp de Villeroi. Louis XIV had seen to it that the daughter of the late field marshal of the French army received the best until she came of age. She had been taught to sing and recite plays by heart by the famed Jeliotte of the Comédie-Française. Through interminable lessons of elocution, the old master of drama had developed her husky voice into an unforgettable smoky contralto that charmed all near enough to hear.
Her cool beauty attracted attention in a court where beauty was mandatory. Only Philippe knew that her aloofness was a facade. Having been raised in the provinces, she had been unprepared for the unrestraint and sophistication of court. When dealing with the unfamiliar or when uncertain, she became increasingly cool and distant. She was clever by half, an attribute of which he sometimes despaired, but how could he fail to be enchanted by her?
Natalie tilted her head to one side, allowing his lips access to the depression created by her collarbone.
“Philippe,” she breathed.
“Oui, chérie?”
“I am with child.”
Her voice was so low, lower than usual, that at first he thought he had not understood her. One look into the clear depths of her eyes convinced him otherwise. His fingers tightened on her shoulders, pearly and bare. “Corbleu!” he gasped, then broke out in delighted laughter. “When?”
Though twenty, with more than three years spent at the most licentious court in Europe, a blush managed to deepen her adroit application of rouge. “I think August.”
He drew her upright from the cushioned stool and held her against him. “I can’t believe my good fortune, Natalie! I have always known I was born beneath a lucky star.”
She tilted her head, eyeing him beguilingly from beneath the heavy fringe of lashes. “Must we go tonight, Philippe?”
He chuckled. “Oui! How else shall I so rapidly spread the good news? My uncle must be the first to know!”
A double line of coaches, all loaded with guests, turned the broad rue de Richelieu leading to the Palais Royal into a river of light. Outside the home of the regent of France, the roof was covered with candles and the marble fountains flowed with wine.
The masked ball was by invitation only, yet, if the usual number were issued, a woman could depend on her dress being torn by the crush. At the last ball, several people had actually died of heat or cold or fatigue or asphyxiation—or at least so went the gossip of Paris.
Arm in arm, Philippe and Natalie entered the main ballroom. Outside it might be winter, but inside spring had blossomed. The walls of pink marble and trellis work were filled with vine leaves, bunches of grapes, and flowers. Real palm trees, trunks garlanded with roses, flanked buffets draped with pink velvet fringed in gold. Everywhere one looked there were pictures and statues of the royal family.
Upon their entrance, those closest to the couple turned to stare. The new arrivals might be wearing demimasks, but they were immediately recognized as the Golden Couple. Only a dolt would not have heard of the enviable pair.
Both were blessed with that white-gold shade of hair that powder could never duplicate. Philippe accepted his beautifully chiseled features and ivory skin with complacency. He had long been Paris’s—no, Fr
ance’s—most eligible bachelor until his marriage. That night Natalie thought he was particularly handsome in a coat of pale blue satin damasked within the bounds of good taste. Behind the matching demimask, his brown eyes caressed her with warm passion.
She counted herself more than merely fortunate to have married him. He was literally her paladin. Originally one of the Twelve Peers of Charlemagne’s court, a paladin had come to represent a heroic champion, a knight—and Philippe had been her knight since the afternoon he had ridden up to the Poissy Convent with his entourage of aristocratic ladies and their partners, noblemen of the court.
She had been gathering apples that had dropped from the branches outside the convent walls with Sister Beatrice. It had been impossible not to stare at the handsome Philippe, nor to be unaware of the tittering and sneers of the court ladies. Indignation had simmered in her. Why should she shrink? Was not her father of the noblesse campagnarde? Was she not a Mortemart on her mother’s side, and who, after all, were the Bourbons when compared with the Mortemarts?
Her head had come up imperiously, her back had straightened, and in that moment the apples had gone tumbling from her apron. As she scrambled to regather the apples, the ridiculing laughter of the visitors had shamed her. Heat had flushed her face. Then, suddenly, she had glanced up to see Philippe, sitting on his heels before her—helping her to collect the scattered apples!
From that moment, she was hopelessly in love. When he courted and married her in a whirlwind of a few weeks, she felt she was truly the most blessed of women. All of Paris was charmed by the Golden Couple. Well, not quite all. Among the court were the usual ill-wishers of a couple who seemed blessed with everything: good looks, health, wealth, and love.
For appearance’s sake, however, the outnumbered foes put on their best faces and mingled with the friends of the couple in greeting. Natalie counted the duc’s eldest and favorite daughter, the Duchesse de Berry, among her friends. When the poor woman had lost her husband five years earlier, she had simply added to her lovers—and her weight.
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 5