“They want me,” she said tonelessly. A terrible fear grabbed hold of her spine and rattled it. Her gaze darted from Nicolas to Françoise like a moth in a frantic search for a safe place to alight. They would now be rid of her.
Françoise glanced at Nicolas, then switched his gaze back to her. “Why?”
“Tell him later,” Nicolas said. “The soldiers—”
“The furs!” Françoise said. “Hide her beneath the furs.” Stunned by François’s unexpected protective attitude, she could only watch as Nicolas yanked the bearskin from the bed and returned to enfold her in it. Sweeping her up, he strode out of the cabin. Even bundled in the shaggy pelt, she could hear the muffled voices of the soldiers drawing nearer. Moments later, she was dumped on a pile of furs in the lean-to. She wiggled about, easing her body’s cramped position, and he warned, “Be still!” Her concealment pressed down on her as he added more furs atop her. “Nicolas, I can’t breathe!”
“Shut up, and you’ll have enough air.”
She didn’t know how long she could stand it before panic would make her dig her way out of the furs frantically. She tried to think of other things, wondered what had become of Hervé. And Jeanne-Antoinette. Was Madeleine still imprisoned? And still writing pornography?
With the coming of spring, the smelly pelts attracted flies. One found its way down to where she was burrowed and buzzed loudly near her ear. She tried to swat at it, but she couldn’t move her hand up that far. Then she heard voices growing louder and froze.
Above her, the pelts were poked with something, and a high- pitched voice said, “Furs of this quality will provide felt hats for some time to come. His excellency will be pleased to learn that this province is not a total loss.”
“Helas!” cursed another man. “My trip was a total loss.”
“I don’t think His Excellency will be too disappointed,” said the first.
“Eh bien, I suppose you’re right.”
Their words grew indistinguishable as they moved on. When she didn’t think she could stand the physical constraint another second, the pelts were thrown back and she was rolled from the bearskin. She blinked at the sudden light. Nicolas sat on his heels, studying her.
“They’ve gone?”
“Françoise told them you had not taken to the domestic life of the colony, that you had run off with a Spanish trader.”
“They believed him?”
“Who knows? I think they were tired of looking for you.”
She shifted uneasily under his scrutiny. Behind him, she saw Françoise hobbling toward the shed. She rose and, with shaking hands, brushed the dirt from her skirts and tucked the loose tendrils about her nape under her comb.
Nicolas didn’t relent. “So why would an emissary of the king, accompanied by four musketeers, come all the way from France solely in search of a thief named Angelique la Croix?”
“I, too, am curious,” François said, joining them. His eyes narrowed on her suspiciously. “You’re no mere thief, are you?”
She went absolutely still. Her severe composure fell like a mantle over her. Her head poised on her neck in a way that indicated, as no word could, that the righteousness of her position was beyond dispute. She was finished with lying. “Angelique isn’t my name—it’s Natalie. And I am the Marquise de Marchesseau.”
She saw that the name meant nothing to them, as she had expected. That part of her secret, her marriage to Philippe du Plessis, was safe. “The Marchesseau family estates were taken from me by unusual circumstances. A relative, Claude Fabreville, who wanted control, issued a lettre de cachet against . . . my family. I was imprisoned and unjustly scarred with the brand of a thief.” Unconsciously, she touched the woolen material between her breasts. “To escape, I signed on as a fille à la cassette. That is all there is to tell, all that I wish to tell.”
François looked stunned at her revelation. Nicolas—he never allowed his features to express his thoughts, but she was aware that he knew that was not the whole story. He knew that she was not a virgin, that she had borne a child.
How long would he keep his counsel?
§ CHAPTER FOURTEEN §
Natalie arranged the dried lavender in the basket on the table. Françoise had mentioned that he liked the fragrance. When he had been just a name without a face, it had been easy to enter into her deception. Now, every time she sat across the table from him, she felt such awful guilt. One day, she would have to confront him with the truth of her misdeed.
With a basket of laundry balanced on one hip, she stepped outside. The hated country of exile now looked like a fairyland, a veritable Eden. The peach and plum trees were in bloom, and the April breeze animated the waving patches of delicate white and pink. The ripening grapes glistened in the morning dew like scattered jewels, and new magnolias scented the air. Beyond the corrals Nicolas had built, a tangled, sweet-smelling hedge ran wild in a most amiable way.
She lifted her face to the sun, reveling in its warmth. If she must be an exile from Paris, there could be worse places, she decided. Though this No Man’s Land was supposed to be dangerous, a haven for outlaws and thieves and cutthroats, she had seen only a few bands of Indians, passing single file across the field on their way to the San Antonio Trace. Françoise had re assured her that they were harmless enough, that they were allies of the French.
She certainly couldn’t complain about her life there. After all, she was treated well by her husband. Second husband, she reminded herself with a twinge of conscience that threatened to ruin her perfect mood. And husband in name only.
She also reminded herself that he could have sent her back with Fabreville’s emissary and soldiers, and hadn’t. She still didn’t know if Françoise believed her. Or, for that matter, if Nicolas did. Of course, one never really knew what Nicolas was thinking. To feel that one knew Nicolas Brissac was only to fool oneself.
Even with him off somewhere in Texas, hunting wild horses, the strain between her and Françoise had not eased; if anything, it had intensified without Nicolas’s calm presence to serve as a buffer. For six weeks now, she and Françoise had skirted each other, avoided looking at one another as they ate at the same table, and made only the most superfluous comments. He became spuriously irritable if she attempted to ease his tasks in any way, preferring to do everything by himself.
Nicolas’s absence was easier on her in a way, for his uncanny perception made it difficult to fool him. Relaxing her masquerade was more difficult around him. She smiled wryly, thinking that sometimes her efforts at pretense only provided him with secret amusement.
She went back to draping the freshly washed clothes over the bushes to dry. She never complained about the hard work, about the way the small of her back ached or about her red, roughened hands. She may have been a grande dame and had been waited on by a multitude of servants, but she had also been branded a felon and had lived through that hell on earth at La Salpêtriére.
Over at the lean-to, Françoise worked with the furs, packing them for shipment to New Orleans, and from there on to France. The sunlight reflected off his red-brown curls. He raised his head, and his gaze locked with hers before he turned away. He was a truly handsome man, she mused, and when he smiled, he was charming and disarming.
She tried to imagine Philippe’s handsome face—and couldn’t. Perspiration beaded on her brow. Her inability to recall the man she loved frightened her. She dropped the wet gray dress and stood erect, looking around her. The land had the power to make one forget. The rolling hills and innumerable, log-jammed rivers and misty swamps and limitless trees blotted out the existence of civilizations beyond.
She wouldn’t let it happen to her; she wouldn’t let herself forget Philippe and the beauty of Maison Bellecour and the Paris theaters and . . . Oh, God. God!
Reality was here. Reality was Nicolas’s splendid height. Reality was the thud of François stomping around the house. She covered her face, drawing deep breaths.
“Natalie? Are you all right?”
&n
bsp; She looked over to where François sat, watching her. When she nodded, he shrugged indifferently and went back to his work. She knew, though, that he was not indifferent to her. How long before his injured masculine pride goaded him into making her his wife in all ways?
The neighing of mules in harness interrupted her thoughts. Both she and Françoise pivoted toward the sound. A string of seven mules forded the stream one by one, driven by Nicolas, who was mounted on a sturdily muscled Spanish mustang. He rode the prancing animal magnificently, she thought, recalling her father at the head of his troops, easily controlling his nervous mount.
At once, she and François deserted their work. François, waving both arms above his head, hobbled toward the mule train as fast as the artificial leg would permit. Unaccountably shy, she hung back to watch Nicolas dismount and greet his friend.
François slapped Nicolas on the back, and the two men conversed volubly as they strode toward her and the cabin. She waited until they neared and then said, “Welcome back, Nicolas.”
The half-breed’s eyes rapidly searched her face. Had he been hoping to find some sign in her expression that she and François had reconciled their differences? If Nicolas was contemptuous of her for passing herself off as a virgin, what would he think if he knew that she was a married woman twice over?
Despite the seriousness of her deception, she had to smile, and Nicolas smiled back, displaying the perfect white teeth, the only thing physically perfect about him. That wasn’t true, she thought, as she preceded the other two into the cabin. He had a superb physique that the worn buckskins couldn’t hide: tall, lean, with ropy muscles. That realization, something that hadn’t occurred to her in all the time she had spent with him, suffused her pale cheeks with a delicate blush.
While Françoise questioned Nicolas with the first enthusiasm he had demonstrated since the amputation, she warmed the stew over the banked embers, adding a pinch of the pungent, ground sassafras plant to it.
No longer did she recall with longing the pleasure of being waited upon and served instead of doing the menial labor, as she now did. If she could have realized the commonplace experiences she had once taken for granted and now forgotten, she would have been astounded, so easily had she accommodated herself to her environment.
“How did you manage it?” Françoise demanded, exhilaration animating his face and brightening his usually lifeless eyes.
She felt the same way; after six weeks of seeing no one but Françoise, six long weeks, day following upon day, without variation, Nicolas represented communication with the outside world. He represented excitement and a change of pace.
“I sold the wild horses the Comanches helped me capture to Mexican merchants in San Antonio,” Nicolas explained between bites. “With the profits, after I paid off the Comanches, I bought bars of silver from the Mexican mines, more skins, and, of course, the mules.”
Mexican mines . . . Comanches . . . San Antonio. To her, the names conjured societies, people, civilization. Eagerly, she waited for Nicolas to elaborate on his journey, but he was the master of brevity.
“Tomorrow, Françoise, we’ll purchase silks and cotton goods from the traders at Natchitoches and resell them either in Nacogdoches or San Antonio.”
Impatience got the best of her. “May I go? May I go with you to Natchitoches tomorrow?”
Both men turned to stare at Natalie.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve talked with another woman,” she explained, feeling as if she had just asked for the moon.
The Great Raft, or logjam, had helped to determine the location of the Natchitoches post, for the logjam extended more than a hundred miles upstream from the spot that became a rendezvous where the river trade from New Orleans met pack-animal trains from Mexico.
Natchitoches was a frontier outpost of the crudest sort, located at the edge of a boggy forest between the Riviere Rouge and one of its branches that the French had named Petite Riviere a la Bourguignon, sometimes called the Cane River for the thick cane-brakes along its banks. The settlement consisted of storehouses, a stockade, Indian wigwams, and log cabins, where traders lived with their merchandise.
The French soldiers had been sent to Natchitoches to guard that country’s hold upon the Red River, but the stockade could not have withstood any kind of concentrated assault. A mere four walls of six-foot-high stakes, the fort contained two dirt-floored barracks, one of which was rotten and beyond use.
The troops had been guaranteed wages of four hundred and fifty piastres yearly, and from that sum each soldier was to provide his own clothing and arms and purchase six horses to help establish a local herd. However, the pay was slow in coming, and a colonial ordinance was passed promising the troops daily rations of stale bread with one pint of wine and a pound of beef or mutton.
Thus, many turned to illegal trade with Spain. The fort’s commandant, Louis Antoine Juchereau de St. Denis, was the most adept at the fine art of smuggling.
Françoise meant to be as adept or more so, with Nicolas’s help.
Natchitoches’s small and motley population included soldiers and ex-soldiers, Indian neophytes, traders, wayward sons of good families whose parents had bought for them positions in the colonies that the youths were not qualified to fill, and a few women— squaws of the Caddo nation, a few wives of the French officers and traders, Saint-Domingue slaves, and, lastly, some of the women evicted from Paris.
At the river’s confluence with the wooded Bayou Amulee, he and Nicolas wandered among these people, with Natalie between them. Françoise felt a particular pride for his beautiful wife; Nicolas would have called it his Gascony boasting.
For the visit to the busy shipping port, Natalie had worn her freshly washed gray smock, and her summer-child hair glistened in its crown of braids. So absorbed was she in the provincial spectacle that Françoise was certain that she was unaware of the men and women who stopped to stare, to watch his bride moving majestically among them.
The three of them wandered amidst the trains of pack mules and horses, some of which numbered a hundred or more. Nicolas paused to talk with a muleteer, whose animals were tied to trees along the bayou banks, and he and Natalie strolled on. The little post was a riot of color and gaiety. After months of isolation, the sights and sounds and smells—trilling feminine laughter, the odor of roasting chicory coffee, luxurious silks of royal purple, French wines—François was ready to take his place in the world again.
A mild fracas was in progress between French and African boatmen on one side of the bayou and Spanish and Mexican teamsters on the other, and fractured French expletives rent the festive air.
François noted that his wife was paying little heed, for her attention seemed distracted. “What are you looking for?” he asked. “A length of silk, a lace mantilla?”
She shook her head. “No, I was looking for a familiar face, one of the girls who had shipped over with me as a convict.”
“Shhh!” he warned.
She looked at him oddly, and he explained, “No one need ever know you were in a prison.”
Disappointment—in not finding her friend?—deepened the pale green of her eyes, but she said nothing. Merde! She was so much like Nicolas, so cool, so self-contained. He never knew what she was thinking. Disgust at his inability to bed his own wife seeped through his veins, spoiling the rest of the afternoon for him. When Nicolas suggested they pay a visit to the commandant, he was more than ready.
On the western side of the river, to the south of the fort, Commandant St. Denis had built his home on high ground. To the east, across the river, lay the spreading lowlands and swamps of the Red River valley, reaching to the horizon; land matted with cane and reed and willow and webbed by unending bayous and lakes. Towering over all were mammoth cypresses looming majestically from sun-dappled, knee-studded waters.
To the west, toward Texas, were pine hills and streams in endless variety. Nicolas preferred the rolling hill country, where a man could ride a horse among the trees
without bogging or tangling; where flowers, berries, and grapes glowed in the sun; and where streams ran with a merry babble instead of creeping along snakily like the bayous.
St. Denis’s house had been built of briquette entre poteaux, or brick between posts, and was whitewashed inside and out. Candles set in glass chandeliers swung from crudely fashioned rafters, but the rough board floors were carpeted with fine furs edged so closely together that no boards could be seen.
Madame St. Denis greeted them. Dressed in the style of the French court, Emanuella Sanche de Navarro de St. Denis was a charming member of an old, distinguished Spanish family. There was a mother-of-pearl glow to her complexion.
She stood on tiptoe to kiss Nicolas on the cheek with easy informality, saying, “St. Denis is in his vineyards, but I’ve sent Jasmine to fetch him.”
Tired from so much walking, Françoise sat next to Natalie on the damasked sofa. Nicolas lounged against a wall—or seemed to. Instinctively, he preferred to remove himself from a group, moving off to one side to assess any situation first.
He relaxed his covert vigilance of his partner. He had detected a certain furtiveness in François’s eyes as if the man were checking to see if anyone was staring at him.
“Françoise,” Dona Emanuella said, coming to tap her fan on his shoulder, “I have only just heard of your accident.”
Nicolas liked Dona Emanuella. The two or three times he had been in her convivial presence, he had felt none of the paralyzing power of feeling that François’s bride inspired in him.
Dona Emanuella rattled on, and the lines of tension that curved downward with the dip of François’s luxuriant moustache eased somewhat under her charming discourse. Although young—in her twenties still—she was a motherly soul with a penchant for conversation. Wisely, rather than to avoid the obvious, she acknowledged his infirmity as a fact of life and nothing more.
“You are a naughty boy for keeping it a secret and depriving us ladies the privilege of nursing you back to health. Although it’s obvious your bride has done a magnificent job. You’re more irresistible than ever now with the marks of noble suffering etched on your handsome brow. Every female will swear you lost your leg this winter wrestling with an alligator or fighting off Indians or perhaps attacking pirates off the Gulf coast.”
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 16