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

by Bonds, Parris Afton

  He studied the young woman’s face, which was turned up to his disdainfully. She was no dormouse. The church’s claim that the bride convoy contained only reputable young women was ludicrous. One had only to listen to the guttural French of the women to be certain of their previous environs. But this one, with her cultured voice, its smoky quality . . . Perhaps she was bagged with the other strumpets by mistake. He shrugged mentally. He was in haste to have done with his errand.

  The next morning, the nuptials were performed with all dispatch at the little Church of St. Louis by the Carmelite priest, with one of the Ursuline nuns as a witness. The casket girl’s face was pale as first Nicolas, then she, repeated the words that married her by proxy to François de Gautier. She looked as if she would cry at any moment. He supposed that all women felt like crying when they married.

  If he were marrying, he knew he would certainly feel like crying. He was a true wanderer; he felt driven to move about. The same faces, the same things, day after day—for him, nothing could be deadlier.

  She gave the curé her name, Angelique la Croix, in a low, almost inaudible voice.

  When it came time to sign the register and he expected the woman called Angelique—Angelique de Gautier now—to make her signature with an X, he was surprised at the flourish with which she wielded the quill. Her hands, he noted, were slender and without calluses, but the nails were dirty and jagged.

  He made no comment, merely lifted his brow. François had a surprise due him. His bride was certainly an enigma.

  When his turn came, he scrawled first the name of François de Gautier and then his own, as proxy, using the surname of Brissac. This time, it was she who was surprised by his obvious education, her mouth opened, then she shut it and, like him, said nothing. She gave him a quick sidelong glance as sharp and penetrating as the point of a needle.

  With her small dowry chest flung over his shoulder and her hurrying to keep up with his long strides, he set out for the palisade’s rear gate, which led to Bayou St. John less than half a league away.

  New Orleans was an island in a vast wilderness uninterrupted except for a scattered archipelago of modest plantations and hamlets. Somewhere canebrake was being burned to clear acreage for a concession. The burning cane crackled like rifle shot, and the young woman drew closer to him. His lips twisted wryly. François would repent of his impulsive desire to marry ere the month was out.

  Nicolas found the canoe where he had cached it beneath a layer of tough, fibrous cane laid horizontal by the tropical typhoons that periodically blew in off the Gulf of Mexico. He pulled the canoe from its matted covering and pushed it off the bank into the bayou, where it rocked gently. Inside, along with blankets, his leather “possibles” bag, and a fine French pistol of large bore, was his rifle, swaddled in hide to protect it. He thrust the pistol through his sash.

  He moved the rifle aside and held out his hand to François’s bride, this time with mocking gallantry. “Your ladyship.”

  Automatically, she placed her small hand in his big one and, lifting her skirts, stepped aboard. How calmly she accepted his homage, his exaggerated attention, as if it were only her just due.

  He shoved the canoe, which could almost float on dew, out into the sluggish water. With her sitting straight-backed in the prow as if it were a throne, he paddled along the shoreline, past the cattails that lined the bayou, the wisteria, and the sweet olive, whose delicate fragrance filled the air. Fortunately for the woman, the mosquitoes were few because of the wind, which quickened and sucked down between the forest-banked shores and encouraged the leafy tops into a susurration of gossip.

  For much of the morning, she sat silently in the prow, for which he was thankful. As the remnants of civilization drifted behind, a look of relief eased the strain about her mouth.

  They still had to cross lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas before they could enter the Mississippi by way of the Amite and Iberville rivers, which meant finding a place to camp before twilight.

  He picked a place to beach the canoe that offered high ground for a camp. She waited sedately in the prow for him to help her out, then made no effort to assist him in dragging the canoe ashore or packing the blankets and rifle up the bluff. She sat under a tall evergreen, her legs drawn up beneath her, while he procured bark and made her a shelter. His patience wore thin when he gathered the firewood and she watched from her dais of soft needles. She obviously wasn’t going to do squaw work.

  He dumped the load of firewood before her. “Do you think your ladyship could build a fire while I find us something to eat?”

  She looked up at him, surprise at his disgruntled tone blanking her expression. “Of course, Monsieur le Sauvage," she said after a moment.

  Ignoring her sarcasm, he proceeded to pile a small amount of the dry wood. Taking a small piece of cedar the size of his finger and a stick of mulberry, he put the two side by side between his hands and spun them together.

  Soon a little fuzz spun out of the cedar and caught fire. The young woman, who was watching him intently, said, “Why, it’s like making chocolate froth.”

  “I’ve never made chocolate froth,” he said drily, and was surprised when she responded with a smile of amusement. Despite the accumulation of filth, she was very attractive. He wondered what she would look like cleaned up.

  Such thinking was dangerous and he set himself to instructing her how to feed the fire so that he would have a hot bed of coals for cooking their supper.

  Taking his fishnet of linden-bark fiber and lines equipped with hooks of fish bone with him, he started for the bayou. “Where are you going?” she asked anxiously.

  He looked over his shoulder. She was a pathetic sight with her hair straggling down from the coronet of braids. He contained his impatience. “I hope to feed us. You will be safe enough here.” For more than twenty minutes, he fished in the bayou without receiving even a nibble. Behind him, the reeds shuffled. He pivoted to find her descending the slope. Thoroughly out of humor, he demanded, “I thought you were to tend the fire?”

  She lifted her chin in the way that was beginning to grate on his nerves. “I did not care for all the smoke.”

  He managed to keep the irritation from his face. “In that case, we won’t have enough coals for broiling the fish.”

  “The fish must be caught first” was her placid rejoinder. “Anyway, I already placed the wood on the fire.”

  “All of the wood?” he demanded more sharply than he intended.

  She bristled at the implied rebuke. “Wasn’t it for burning?”

  “Yes, but only a small amount at a time.”

  “La! There is nothing but wood. All around us. One should not have to grumble over using too much.”

  Sacre bleu, but he was saddled with an irresponsible child-woman! The tug at his line diverted his irritation momentarily. By the time he hauled in the catfish, he reconsidered explaining to her that the problem was not in sparing the wood but in the danger of a big fire and its resulting smoke attracting the notice of a foe. He could only hope she would learn from his example before they arrived at Natchitoches. She would have enough adjusting to do as it was.

  She sat on a log and watched him clean the fish with a little grimace of distaste. After he broiled the fish, he served it on two clean pieces of bark. He passed one to her. “I hope you are not overly fastidious.”

  At his last choice of words, a look of perplexity etched a faint line above the bridge of her little nose. “You have been educated, monsieur.”

  He shrugged. “Somewhat.”

  She made an imperious little gesture for him to be seated. Mulling over that gesture and what it implied, he dropped cross-legged on the ground across the fire from her.

  “Where?” she asked between daintily nibbled bites.

  “A priest-turned-soldier by the name of Jean-Baptiste tutored me.” He forestalled further questioning by retaliating, “Where were you educated?”

  Immediately, her face closed over. “Here
and there.”

  He set the bark plate aside. Bracing his forearms on his knees, he stared across at her and said, “I don’t think you have told me the truth.”

  “I have not lied,” she said grandly.

  He knelt on one knee and ran a finger about a small footprint she had left in the soft earth. “Shall I expound on the effect that childbearing has upon the way a woman holds her legs when she walks—and the evidence left by her footprint?”

  Her sharply indrawn breath was the only sound she made. He wondered what was going through her mind. Meanwhile, deep in the somber glades of the forest, the noisy chatter of squirrels could be heard.

  “No,” she said at last, quietly, thoughtfully. “I would prefer if you said nothing.”

  By remaining silent, by saying nothing to François of what he knew, he would be aligning himself with this woman. Yet it was not his place to accuse her of not being a virgin before François.

  He rose and began to bank the fire, then passed her a blanket. It smelled, but no worse than she did. “If a storm should blow through,” he told her, “the bark lean-to will keep you dry.”

  She watched him roll up in his blanket on the far side of the fire, then she did the same, stretching out beneath the bark shelter.

  When he thought she was asleep, she surprised him by asking, “Who are you?”

  With a sigh, he rolled over onto his back, hands behind his head. “Nicolas Brissac.”

  “I assumed that,” she said with a hint of exasperation. “I didn’t mean your name, but who are you?”

  “Should I ask the same of you?”

  She didn’t respond, but he knew that it was too much to hope that she had fallen asleep.

  “I am a fur trapper, a French-Canadian by birth.”

  “Ah, yes, a coureur des bois.” He could hear the smile in her voice. “Those daring cavaliers of the bark canoe and bold vagabonds of the woods and waterways. You see, your reputation has spread even to France. Tell me about your fellow woodsmen.”

  He deemed the subject safe enough, and boring enough, to put her to sleep. “I am afraid we are a superstitious breed,” he said quietly. “We believe the northern lights are marionettes that dance across the night skies. The magical aurora lights . . . they are something one never forgets. They whisper of the legend of the loup-garou, the hound of the skies that appears when death is near.” He paused, his thoughts drifting to other things, other people and events of his life, when he became aware that his intriguing tale had put his listener to sleep at once.

  Dawn’s sky was tinctured with a flamingo hue by the time he broke camp the next morning. As before, his charge sat silently in the canoe’s prow while he paddled. Sometimes, he pulled the pirogue ahead by hauling on the overhanging live oak and willow branches. By midafternoon, the scarcely moving Iberville River, which was more like a bayou, emptied them into the Mississippi.

  François’s bride sat absolutely still, her eyes large with excitement. She had looked upon the Father of Waters from the New Orleans levee, seeing the Mississippi only from a cross-section view. Looking upriver from a canoe was like gazing on an eternity of inexorable water. From that viewpoint it was a cumulative effect; the more one gazed, the more one realized the awesome power of that monster of rivers.

  Nicolas passed her some smoked beef to still the hunger pains of midday and put his efforts into paddling upriver by skirting the edges of the mighty current, where the paddling was easier along the shoreline. Sweat ran in rivulets through the valleys created by his flexing muscles. Overhead, the sun burned cruelly, rapidly pinking the clear ivory pallor of the young woman’s cheeks and nose.

  Sometime later, they passed a high bank where a tall pole stood. “What is it?” she asked, pointing to the stick, which was painted red and adorned with fish and bear heads.

  “Baton Rouge. It marks the boundary between the Bayogoula and Houma Indians, ou les rouges."

  “Indians?” She peered up warily through the dense growth that lined the bluffs.

  “They’re friendly enough. They’re allies of the French. We’ll make camp with them tonight.”

  She didn’t look too receptive to his plan, but he wasn’t about to explain that with bands of Chickasaws reported wandering in the area, he felt it safer to seek out a friend or two. He would spare her the grisly story of the Chickasaws’ recent raid on the Cote des Allemands, the German settlement twenty-five miles north of New Orleans. Only the week before, he had come upon a scalp of long blond hair posted to a tree as a warning against other immigrants.

  They reached the Houma village just about dusk. Set along a fingerlet of the river, the village consisted only of two or three rows of simple cane huts thatched with cornhusks. There were no palisades to protect the village. When he entered it with the woman called Angelique trailing close behind, the Houmas came out to greet him. He could tell the woman was repelled by them— by their facial tattoos, their filth and odor. They bathed daily but were in the habit of standing directly in fire smoke at night to drive off the mosquitoes.

  One of the older men greeted them with the customary “Ho.” He was dressed in a calico shirt and breechcloth and wore a Spanish conquistador’s tarnished breastplate, perhaps as a badge of distinction. Like the rest of the males, his hair was worn short. Nicolas understood only certain phrases and had to listen intently to the welcoming speech. At length, the man finished, and Nicolas responded with his thanks of a proffered hut for the night.

  A comely maiden in a fringed tunic woven from grass stepped forward, smiling to show teeth that were painted black. Beside him, François’s bride recoiled, her eyes wide, and she moved even closer to him, almost touching his buckskin sleeve.

  That she trusted him with her safety was foolish on her part. This was not a civilized village of France; he or some other backwoodsman could easily take her for the night and leave her for the Indians’ pleasure the next morning. He didn’t like this burden of responsibility that both François and she had placed on him.

  They followed the Houma maiden to a hut that was nearest to the cornfield. The hut was bare except for the bed: four short posts planted in the ground with a reed frame covered with a deerskin.

  His charge glanced at the bed, then at him. “We are expected to share this bed?” she asked in a tight, little voice that was as smoky as the room’s cane torch, which burned to ward off the mosquitoes.

  A diablerie came over him and he said, “Either this, your ladyship, or you share the bed of one of the Houma men. I told them you were my woman to spare you that.”

  He had expected her to swoon or to rail at him, but she said with feigned indifference, “Well, I suppose one sauvage is no different than another.”

  The frank humor in her eyes and the twitch of her lips implied no offense. For the first time, he noticed that her mouth was wide and untemperamental. Just when he thought he understood this woman, she showed him another dimension. He could turn about her question of him: Who was she?

  He swept her a courtier’s deep bow. “I thank you for the compliment, your ladyship.”

  At that moment, a crone of an Indian woman entered with food, sagamite, and he offered the bowl to the young woman. “Should I ask what it is?” she said, eyeing the cornmeal mush warily.

  He sat on the ground, his back propped against the cane wall and said, “Nothing more than a porridge with beans and maybe a little bear fat or deer tallow for seasoning.”

  She sat also, arranging her skirts about her in a grand manner, and followed his lead in eating from the bowl with her fingers. He wolfed the porridge down, but she ate with dainty, little gestures. Still, he realized with a start, she was actually enjoying the novelty of the moment.

  Without meaning to, he began telling her about an old Chipewyan who had scooped down what he thought was yellow porridge in one gulp. “It was mustard my father had brought with him from Montréal. Tears poured from the old Indian’s eyes.”

  Her chuckle was rich and throaty, b
ut a moment later she asked, “Your father was a Frenchman?”

  “Out,” he replied shortly, and rose, putting an end to the conversation. “I am going to the stream to bathe. Do you wish to do so also?”

  There was longing in her gaze, but she shook her head firmly. It made no sense. For someone so fastidious about everything else, why wouldn’t she want to wash off the offensive dirt and smell? He shrugged and turned to go, but she called out, “Wait, please.” She looked around the dimly lit hut uneasily and said, “I’ll accompany you.”

  Outside, the last of the sunlight had faded, and the sky was a deep chocolate. Along the trail, he detected the scent of violets, warmed by the sun earlier that day. The cool glitter of the evening’s first stars was caught in the acacia’s feathery branches that bowed over the pooling stream. At the bank, the young woman turned around. Most certainly she had lain with men . . . yet she was embarrassed by the sight of a male’s nudity?

  He stripped down and plunged into the stream. The water was warm but refreshing. When he surfaced and shook his shaggy head, spraying droplets like a wet dog, her back was still to him. Whistling a trill of clear, liquid notes, he fell to scrubbing himself all over with sand from the stream bottom.

  “Tell me about . . . my husband,” she said, her voice a mumble.

  “He is from the province of Gascony.” He tried to think of what else a woman would want to know. “From a noble family. He had a commission with the navy and ended up in New France.”

  “Is he . . . a good man?”

  Nicolas strode from the water and collected his buckskins for scrubbing in the stream. “He is honest enough, if that is what you mean.” The rock he rubbed briskly over the britches accomplished little in the way of washing, but at least it got rid of the ticks.

  She let out a little noise of exasperation. “I mean is he—would he— Oh, I don’t know! I don’t know why I came to this barbarous wilderness!”

  He struggled into the wet buckskins so that they would cling to his body and not shrink. “You came because you were seeking a husband, did you not?”