Abruptly, the Spanish lady switched her attention to Natalie. “Ah, Madame de Gautier, I hate you already.”
Natalie looked startled.
“Not only are you a woman of compelling beauty, but you have captured our settlement’s most eligible bachelor. But I am relieved to have another female to grace our largely male-populated settlement.”
Natalie smiled. “Thank you, madame.”
“I know how you must feel,” Emanuella said, “so far from your home, but do not despair. In time, Natchitoches will seem more your home than France ever was, especially since your husband is here.”
Nicolas doubted if anyone but himself noted how Natalie tensed at the mention of her husband. He watched her more closely as Emanuella talked gaily on.
“I was but a young girl at San Juan Bautista when my husband arrived to trade with our outpost on the Rio Grande. But outpost though it was, there were still fresh, crisp linens to sleep between; silver to drink from; delicious, highly seasoned food cooked by skilled, patient women; leisurely, clever conversations with men of state and polite small talk with women of breeding.
“When my husband brought me here, there was only the fort. Much has changed since then. Each year brings new settlers and more trade. Give yourself time and you won’t find it nearly so desolate here.”
“Meeting you has already made Natchitoches less desolate,” Natalie said graciously.
“You omitted the romantic part,” François told Emanuella, relaxing visibly in her easy company. “About how your grandfather had St. Denis taken prisoner and sent to Mexico City. And how you pestered your grandfather and pleaded for St. Denis’s release, until he consented to not only his release but also your wedding.”
Emanuella dimpled. “Now, how did you know that, señor?”
Françoise winked, and he was once again the roguish gallant. “The people of Natchitoches gossip, Madame St. Denis.”
At that moment, Emanuella’s maidservant entered with a silver tray bearing goblets. No more than fifteen, her skin was as black as Nicolas’s eyes, her hair short and kinky. There was something in her bearing that reminded Nicolas of Natalie—a regal, aloof, and graceful glide that proclaimed that Jasmine could have been a Senegalese princess before she was enslaved.
“Jasmine,” Emanuella said, “tell Joseph to set the table for three more guests.”
Natalie protested, but Emanuella insisted, decrying the long damp, rainy winter that had prevented such pleasurable socializing.
From behind lowered lashes, Nicolas studied Jasmine as she served Françoise first. Nicolas wondered if his instinct could be wrong in sensing some kind of unspoken beseechment on the part of la negresse? When the girl paused before him, he scanned her closed countenance. Her molasses-colored eyes, fringed with thick lashes, watched him warily as if warned by her own primitive instinct.
“Nicolas, Françoise,” St. Denis said from the doorway, “what a pleasure.”
Twenty-five years Emanuella’s senior, the forty-seven-year-old St. Denis looked much younger. Tall, with a bearing of cool, silent dignity, he wore a gaudy vest, cut from the finest velvet, in brilliant blue and green and a yellow taffeta waistcoat with silver braid piping. All those above breeches of bright scarlet. Even in the wilderness, the commandant wore an elaborately coiffed curly wig.
Nicolas did not make the mistake of judging the man as merely a vain peacock. They both had in common their Canadian birth. A man born in the silent Canadian woods had a natural bond with the Indians, who considered the frugal use of words a fundamental virtue. St. Denis also knew that the Indians were more impressed by stately bearing and a bright cloak than by diplomatic phrases. More than once, he had expressed to Nicolas that the man who controlled the Indians controlled the wilderness.
The commonality of their Canadian birth ended there, for Nicolas was a natural son, a bastard, while Louis Antoine Juchereau was the son of a noble Frenchman.
St. Denis now bowed before Natalie, who responded with a deep curtsy that obviously took him by surprise. He glanced at Françoise with approval. “You’ve been to court, Madame de Gautier?”
"Oui, monsieur,” Natalie said. Once again, Nicolas detected that guarded look in her eyes. Had she told the truth about a relative imprisoning her? Or had she been a mistress to someone who for some reason had taken revenge? A prince of the blood, mayhap? Whomever, the man had to be highly influential to instigate a search that reached clear to the backwaters of the Louisiana colony.
“Françoise,” St. Denis said, “let me offer you my congratulations. You have made an excellent choice.”
“It would seem I have,” François said with a disarming smile, but Nicolas didn’t miss the agonized look of yearning, quickly veiled by his friend’s lowered eyelids.
Dinner turned out to be an elaborate affair with capon and a meat pie with truffles and a crust so flaky it melted like the first prismatic flakes of snow, followed by a sponge cake spread with raspberry jam. The food was too rich for Nicolas’s taste but he ate a little of everything while listening to the rapid flow of conversation—and watching, always watching.
Natalie sat opposite him, beside François, and St. Denis and Emanuella sat at either end. It was Natalie who attracted his gaze. Stimulated by the company, and perhaps by a little wine, her eyes—her whole face—glowed with animation. She was in her element. And just what was that element? he wondered not for the first time.
“Nicolas,” Dona Emanuella said with teasing eyes, “now that François has taken himself a bride, you must be thinking of doing likewise. Surely you found yourself a sultry Spanish beauty to woo in San Antonio?”
Recalling Carmencita, the lusty young wife of an aging hacendado, Nicolas said only, “None who compared to your ravishing beauty, Madame St. Denis.”
She trilled a pleased laugh but said, “With your fierce chieftain’s visage and eloquent tongue, I don’t think you will have any problem when you do settle on one.”
François lifted his cut-glass goblet and twirled the stem between his fingers. “An excellently light and delicate wine, St. Denis. Spanish?”
St. Denis raised his own glass. “Oui, my friend. Xeres from Cadiz, in southern Spain. Acquired through our trade with Mexico.”
“Without official government sanction,” Nicolas added with a sardonic grin.
“You’ve started your own trading expedition, I’ve noticed— without official government sanction,” St. Denis retorted amiably, and raised his glass of sherry. “A toast. To your new enterprise—Louisiana Imports-Exports, isn’t it? May it prosper!”
Joseph, hovering discreetly, his handsome face bland, refilled the glasses. This time, St. Denis said, “And now another toast. To our new king, long may he live.”
“New king?” François asked, and was echoed by the others. “That’s right. I heard the news only an hour ago when a boat arrived from New Orleans. Louis the Fifteenth has been king for several months now.”
Natalie’s hand flew to her mouth. The others were chattering with excitement about the news, what difference it would make politically and what consequences it would have on the affairs of Louisiana, so only Nicolas caught the elated relief that blazed in her eyes.
“Still, I doubt that we’ll see any change in colonial policy,” St. Denis drawled. “The Duc d’Orleans may no longer be regent, but Louis has appointed him as minister of the government, so the duc still holds in his hands the reins of power for who knows how long—perhaps as long as a half century, as Crozat did.”
Natalie shot to her feet. Her wineglass dropped to the floor and shattered. Behind her, the chair toppled. “No!” she screamed. “No!”
Then she fainted. François barely caught her before she could hit the overturned chair behind her. He eased her onto the fur rug. Immediately, Emanuella bent over Natalie and began patting her bloodless face with a wine-dampened napkin.
“What is it?” François asked, looking at the other woman for some source of guidance. “Will
she be all right?”
“François, my dear,” she said calmly, “I’m sure it is nothing more serious than the usual. Your bride is probably enceinte.”
§ CHAPTER FIFTEEN §
By Natalie’s reckoning, it was nearing three in the morning. Another sleepless night. She silently cursed the armada of mosquitoes that circled her, pricking her sensitive flesh and sucking her blood.
The rest of her life! She couldn't do it. She could not survive this kind of existence for the rest of her life!
Her fingers curled into the sheet. Since the evening four weeks before at St. Denises’, when she had learned that the Duc d’Orleans—and thus Fabreville—still held the reins of power and would do so indefinitely, she had been living in utter desolation.
How long? How much longer would she have to wait before Fabreville was out of power and Philippe was free?
The clump of sheet was a damp knot in the palm of her hand, and she released it. She didn’t need to peer into a stream’s reflective surface to know that dark splotches rimmed her eyes, that her body was growing emaciated, that she looked even more haggard than when she had emerged from the hold of the Baleine.
What if the duc ruled as minister for twenty years more? Bon Dieu!
She drew a long, steady breath, afraid that she would start screaming and awaken François and Nicolas. If she started screaming, she’d never stop! The thought terrified her as she recalled all too well the inhumane treatment of the insane at La Salpêtriére.
She forced herself to think of something, anything, to distract her from the growing hysteria locked inside her. About François snoring steadily across from her. Philippe had never snored, but she liked the sound. It gave her a safe, secure feeling there in the isolated wilderness where the only sounds one ever heard at night were the howl of the coyote or the scream of a spotted cat.
She didn’t know if Nicolas snored or not; she had never heard him. But then did he ever sleep? Sometimes, she would swear she thought she heard him leave the cabin in the deep of night.
Nicolas’s presence lightened the dreary succession of lonely days; he was someone with whom she and François could talk since they obviously couldn’t talk to one another. Soon Nicolas would complete the cabin he was working on, then he would be leaving on another journey to San Antonio or Mexico City or Santa Fe. After that, what would be left for her and François? Years of emptiness stretched before her.
She was young! How could she possibly waste away her best years in this hinterland? Seeing few people, toiling all day long, making soap and candles and . . . She would endure it not a moment longer!
Stealthily, she slipped from between the coarse bedcoverings and searched in the dark beneath her bed for the small casket she had brought with her from France. Her fingers located the brass handle on one end and pulled. The casket’s metal frame grated against the puncheon floor, and she shot an apprehensive glance at François. His soft snoring reassured her. She dressed quickly, silently.
On cat’s paws, she crept into the kitchen, past Nicolas asleep on his Spanish-moss-stuffed mattress spread before the fire-banked hearth. Stretched out on his stomach, he was shirtless, oblivious to the mosquitoes. Her lips pursed with frustration. It wasn’t fair that her pale skin so attracted the winged beasts and Nicolas’s dusky body did not.
Casket under one arm, she turned and lifted the leather thong from the door latch. She was leaving with no more than she had when she came. Quietly, she eased out the door. The silver stream of moonlight beckoned, and she almost skipped like a child as she hurried to her freedom.
Nicolas missed the northern lights. But that was all he missed. Louisiana supplied the freedom that in Canada the mother country had managed to suppress. The waters to the north whispered of intrigues by France, Spain, and England: a transplanting of ancient feuds to this primeval world, a political seething.
He wondered, though, if he would ever be able to settle down as François had. He yearned for far places, for long trips into the wilderness.
In the other room, he heard Natalie stirring restlessly. He knew it was she and not François by the small sounds she made, by the shifting of her light weight on the mattress. Unwillingly, he let himself dwell on his friend’s wife, how she turned in her half-sleep as his running dog used to, turning several times in a circle before settling itself down for the night.
But she wasn’t settling down. He tensed, sensing her approach. Eyes closed, he listened as she paused before him, her scent reaching him with the faint rustling of her gown. A combination of scents, really: her own particular one, which he could identify in a room filled with the odor of humans; the scent of crushed lavender she had added when washing her hair; and the scent of green bay berry wax that clung to her hem, leftover from her candle making two days earlier.
He waited while she slipped into the night, giving her time to put some distance behind her. Then he rose and, thrusting his pistol and tomahawk into his sash, set out on her trail. It led out across the field and into the encroaching forest. Beneath the bright southern moon, her pale hair was easy to spot as she flitted in and out between the oaks and pines like St. Elmo’s fire, that apparition created by marsh gases.
She was fleeing, he realized, and had no sense of where she was going or the danger in which she was placing herself. Stubby palm fronds grew like mushrooms over the soft earth. Bordering them, just beyond, were cypress knees that protruded above inch- high water. Farther into the forest, the water was imperceptibly deeper.
He lessened the distance between them. The leafy branches filtered out the moonlight, and his eyes refocused, absorbing every bit of refracted light. Once or twice, he almost caught up with her with the intention of halting her flight, but he knew she’d have to halt of her own accord, return of her own free will.
She seemed to skirt the swampier areas instinctively. She took no precaution to soften the noise her feet and skirts made against the undergrowth. A thin fog swirled off the swamp bottom but didn’t completely conceal the coral-blotched viper curled up beneath the fan-shaped ferns. Natalie paused to look around her, perhaps realizing for the first time that she had no sense of where she was going. She was breathing heavily, and he doubted if her untrained eye had noticed the venomous reptile. Its bullet-shaped head swung close to her ankle and drew back to strike.
Hissing like the coral snake, the tomahawk winged through the air. Its impact rustled the fronds. She whirled, her hand at her throat. A scream trembled on her lips, then died as a muskrat scampered away through the undergrowth.
She moved more slowly now, more carefully, yet more uncertainly. He figured the casket had to be getting a little heavy. He retrieved his tomahawk, not far from the twin halves of the colorfully banded, deadly snake, and moved off in the wake of his quarry.
The pulse of pounding drums reached his mind’s core, vibrating along his bloodstream, before she even became audibly aware of their rhythmic noise. Unknowingly, she let her footsteps carry her toward the primitive music that seeped like fog through the trees.
She paused at the edge of a clearing, which was starkly lit by the moonlight, and he halted several yards behind her. Before them, fifteen to twenty black people, arranged in a haphazard circle, swayed in unison to the steady, irresistible beat of a drum. Their shadows danced on the ground before them like drunken spirits.
In the center of the circle was an impromptu stone altar. The opiatic incense that smoldered at each end of the altar cloyed the night air. He recognized the ceremony. The Conjure religion. It was a heritage of black Africa and the West Indies. The magic had become entwined with a sort of perverted Catholicism like the Black Mass. The low mumblings of the African slaves accompanied the roll and thump of the drum.
Upon the altar was a piece of black wax in the crude shape of a snake. If he correctly recalled what Jean-Baptiste had told him, the symbol of the snake was similar to the phallic worship found among other primitive nations of Africa and India. The snake represent
ed the all-powerful supernatural being from which all events derived their origin. The creature was vast and terrible, not unlike the God of the Old Testament; all-powerful but at the same time frivolous and malicious. The participants of such orgiastic rituals had to be intensely emotional and possess a childlike credulity and an imagination easily inflamed in order to understand the black magic.
The adoration of the serpent started when the king, or shaman, began a weird African chant. His shiny black loins were girded with red handkerchiefs, a blue cord encircled his muscled stomach, and a cloak of multicolored feathers mantled his shoulders. Nicolas recognized him—it was Joseph, St. Denis’s house servant and Jasmine’s brother. With a high, intelligent forehead, flaring cheekbones, and strong, albeit tattooed, chin, the Senegalese prince was handsome.
Nicolas’s gaze moved among the worshippers and located Jasmine. Her slender figure, clad in a guinea-blue wrapper, twisted sensually to the mounting tempo of the vodu drum.
Joseph stepped before the altar and held aloft a large rooster that beat its wings frantically as it squawked with terror. The drumming ceased, and the chanting lowered to an underlying hum. From the scabbard attached to his blue cord, Joseph withdrew a long, slender blade that glinted in the moonlight. The knife slashed the struggling rooster time and time again. Blood squirted everywhere. A chorus of muttering approval arose from the worshippers.
Joseph held the dying but still faintly struggling bird over the upturned face of the nearest worshipper, a stoutly built man with the mashed-flat features of the Congo tribes. Avidly, the man opened his mouth to catch and swallow the warm gore.
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 17