Jasmine’s slow, contemptuous smile made a razor-thin line of white in the darkness. “You are weak-willed,” she spat.
“Get out! Now! Before I change my mind.”
The black woman backed out of the room, her cat’s eyes never leaving Natalie’s face.
Natalie stood at the top of the stairs and watched until Jasmine was gone. Then she collapsed against the wall, her knees buckling as she slid downward. Shaking with deep sobs, she buried her head between her knees. Why did she stay? Why didn’t she try to find refuge elsewhere, in another country? But she knew the doublefold answer.
Guilty gratitude to François; abiding secret love for Nicolas.
§ CHAPTER TWENTY §
Natalie accompanied Emanuella and her young daughter, Marie des Neiges, to what had been intended originally as the house of the commandant within Fort St. Jean Baptiste. Used by St. Denis as an office, the commandant’s house was a mere frame packed with adobe mud with earthen floors. A powerful odor pervaded the stockade, seeping from the latrine that ran along the staked wall nearest the barracks.
“Now you can understand,” Emanuella said, holding a scented handkerchief to her nose, “why I insisted Louis build our home outside this fort!”
Natalie wrinkled her nose. After all the years at Natchitoches, this was the first time she’d set foot in the fort and hoped it would be her last. She had only entered the fort because, while browsing with Emanuella at the small shops and temporary stalls that had sprung up along Bayou Amulee, word had come that Joseph had at last been arrested and was being held at the fort. With a shudder, Natalie recalled her fight with Jasmine nearly six months before. After that, it was many nights before Natalie was able to fall asleep without wondering if Jasmine was waiting in the dark with a knife.
“Where is my husband?” Emanuella asked pleasantly of Charles Didier. The poor, balding bookkeeper seemed more harassed than usual. His little mouth was quivering.
“What is it, Monsieur Didier?” Natalie asked.
“My wife, madame. They found Solange beneath the brush of Bayou Amulee. She had been . . . strangled.”
Emanuella gasped. Natalie asked, “Do they think that Joseph is res—”
Outside, a sudden jabbering and shouting in the direction of the guardhouse drew the two women and the bookkeeper to the door. At the thunderous roll of drums, the fort’s raggedy troop of soldiers stood at attention. “Natalie, look! That’s Joseph between those two soldiers!”
Natalie followed in the direction Emanuella’s parasol was aimed. The handsome black man stood tall and stiff, his hands bound behind his back. He was naked to the waist, and his skin was crisscrossed by thin, red stripes. About his neck was a two-inch spiked collar. It was difficult for Natalie to believe that the dignified Joseph was capable of butchering humans, but the blaze of hatred in his eyes was irrefutable.
St. Denis, dressed as brilliantly as a parrot in a lime-green satin coat and purple knee britches, stepped before the man, said something to the soldiers that Natalie couldn’t hear, then moved out of range.
“Bon Dieu!” Natalie breathed. “The soldiers are going to execute him!”
Emanuella looked at her as if she were out of her mind. “Why, you sound regretful, Natalie. Joseph ordered the deaths of scores of people. Women and children were hacked to death in their beds. Why, it could have been Louis and I and our children who died in our sleep!”
“Joseph’s death will only stir up more resentment among the slaves. His execution is not the way to solve the problem.” Against the relentless July sun, she raised her blue-striped parasol, which matched her organdy bodice. “Let’s leave, Emanuella. I don’t think either you or I, or your child, should watch this.”
“Maybe they won’t actually kill him,” Emanuella offered tentatively.
“Ready . . .”
Natalie gathered up her skirts and shoved her way through the gathering of the fort’s contingent of Indians and other men and women from the settlement. They reminded her of carrion birds, waiting avidly for the final throes of an injured animal to end before feasting. Emanuella and Marie followed her as far as the warehouse, where the warehouse keeper jostled them in his haste to witness the rare spectacle.
. . . aim . . .
Natalie shuddered at the command.
. . . fire!”
When the rifle fire boomed, she had to swallow hard to keep the rising nausea in her throat. “I’m going home, Emanuella. François and—” Again she nearly gagged. “—and I will see you at supper tonight.”
She circumvented the dispersing crowd, carefully keeping her head averted from the execution site. She got no farther than the newly constructed St. Francis chapel, where more and more of the men and women had drifted, eagerly sniffing the scent of additional bloodletting. Father Hidalgo, his cadaverous face aglow, held a bound Jasmine before him. Like her brother, she carried herself proudly.
“Harlot! Jezebel!” the priest declared in stentorian tones. “Renounce your wicked ways!”
The slave woman laughed and spat on his brown cassock.
A gasp went up from the throng of watchers at what was tantamount to desecration.
A black child, no more than eighteen months old, toddled out of the church to cling to Jasmine’s leg. The hooting and jeering of the people drummed out whatever Jasmine told her daughter.
“What’s going to happen?” Natalie asked of the bewhiskered man next to her.
“The whipping horse.” He spat tobacco juice on the dry, baked earth. “A slow death for de Gautier’s whore.” Only then did he look at Natalie, and she saw the dawning recognition in his eyes. “Please excuse me, madame,” he mumbled sheepishly, and scurried away.
Between the shoulders of the people in front of her, Natalie watched as two soldiers prodded the barefoot woman over to a wooden edifice that did, in fact, resemble a horse. What happened next Natalie could only think of as something obscene, something out of one of Marguerite’s pornographic stories. The woman was stripped to the waist and tied hand and foot to the horse’s barreled torso.
The child, sensing the threat of danger, began to whimper. Father Hidalgo swooped down on the toddler, his wide sleeves flapping like a giant crow’s wings, and lifted the child high. “This slave’s daughter shall be redeemed from the life of sin her demon worshipping mother has instilled in her. She shall be raised in the church to glorify the Almighty.”
Jasmine lifted her head. Her eyes flashed fire. “You do that, Priest, and I curse you, I bring Satan and all his demons down to hound you for the rest of your life!”
“Put the lash to the wench!” a muleteer shouted. Others joined in until their demands became a rising chant for Jasmine’s torture.
Natalie should have taken some kind of pleasure in the demonstration of justice meted out, but the memory of her own public torture was still as fresh as the day it had happened years before. She could almost smell her own flesh burning again, feel the hideous pain that welled with the blistered, seared skin. Now there was the shriveled purplish patch between her breasts to remind her.
A corpulent soldier stepped up to the whipping horse to lay on the bullhide lash, complete with tail, and an excited murmur ran through the spectators. The lash flicked through the air. A collective intake of breath from those watching rustled the stillness of the moment. When the lash descended, Jasmine’s back arched with the impact. No sound escaped her lips. A thin red line appeared. Once more the lash came back. The procedure would be repeated until the spine and rib cage were stripped of flesh. Afterward, her ears would be sliced off, and the victim would be left to endure the harsh sun and chill night air until death ended her torturous pain.
The lash sliced downward several more times before Jasmine screamed out, an animal’s agonized wail, then fainted. Nevertheless, the whipping continued. The skin was flayed until only a mass of raw flesh dotted with flecks of white bone could be seen.
Glancing around at the tense mob, Natalie knew there
was nothing she could do to stop the torture. Her impotency infuriated her. Then her gaze landed on the fear-stricken face of Jasmine’s daughter. The toddler cowered at Father Hidalgo’s feet. Natalie knew the child didn’t understand what was happening but sensed in some way that it threatened her security.
Natalie pushed her way through the people around her. The young priest watched the lashing with an almost celestial enrapture and didn’t notice as she scooped up the child and fled.
“What’s she doing?” a soldier’s aproned wife called out.
A few turned to see what was going on, but most were so intent on the whipping that they missed the abduction of the child.
With the infant cradled against her chest, Natalie fled through the empty streets. Her mind worked feverishly. Though the priest was Spanish, he still wielded influence through the papacy. He could conceivably demand that she return the child.
Where could she go? Skirting a lumbering wagon, she turned her feet in the direction of Emanuella’s house. Legally, the child belonged to Louis Antoine Juchereau de St. Denis since it was an offspring of a slave he owned.
But in the mood the crowd was in, a confrontation between the priest and the commandant could bring problems down about St. Denis’s head.
Mired by indecision, she instinctively redirected her steps away from the settlement. In the twilight, she started south along the riverbank, always keeping herself in the shadows of the leafy trees. On a bluff, she paused once, breathless. The little girl was heavy in her tired arms. Somewhere along the way, she had lost her parasol.
She looked behind her. A faint reddish glow appeared in the area of the settlement. Torches were being lit, the better to watch the whipping—or to find her and the child?
The tiny girl was squalling now, and Natalie tried to quiet her as she hurried through the dusk. Three more miles; safety couldn’t be much farther. Then she saw it: Nicolas’s cabin, crowning a hill that sloped off to the willow-bordered Red River. His log house, set against a backdrop of mulberrys laden with Spanish moss, wasn’t as large as the original one he and François had built. Now, though, Nicolas’s cabin served only as a layover when his travels brought him back to the base of operations for Louisiana Imports-Exports. The smoke curling from the clay chimney told her he was at home.
Even as she approached, a wedge of light showed at the front, and she knew that he had sensed a visitor and stepped out to investigate. A long rifle was cradled in one arm. When she drew near, within a yard, she looked up into the formidable face. His inscrutable eyes were black coals against the toast color of his skin. She marveled at his shoulder-length hair. He had to be nearing forty, but no gray threaded through the raven strands.
What if he turned her away?
The girl whimpered, and she shifted her in her arms. As usual, Nicolas said nothing, only waited for an explanation. “The child is Jasmine’s daughter.” Her breath labored in her ears.
Apparently, her simple statement was enough for Nicolas. He stepped aside, saying, “Come in.”
The hearth’s small fire reflected here and there, giving the place a reassuring warmth. Nicolas laid the rifle in the bracket of stag’s antlers anchored above the fireplace, then crossed to her to pry the child gingerly from her protective embrace.
“Sit down,” he told her, nodding toward one of the two rush-bottomed chairs before the fire. Its light cast into shadow the dark skin stretched tautly along his jaw.
She felt sudden shyness before this fierce-looking man who knew more about her than any man, even Philippe. Nicolas knew almost everything about her. And he understood her all too well.
Grace a Dieu, though he might know she wanted him, she didn’t think he knew that she loved him.
She watched him hold the toddler with the same gentleness and assurance with which he cradled his rifle. “What is her name?” he asked.
“Deborah. At least that’s the name Father Hidalgo baptized her with. I think Jasmine calls her Quin-Quin, or something like that.”
He took the other chair and balanced the girl on his knee. Her pudgy fingers reached in fascination for the shiny, worn quills that decorated his soot-blackened buckskins. “Tell me what happened, Natalie.”
She inhaled deeply to steady herself, and the pungent odor of brewed coffee reached her, along with the tempting odor of cooked meat. She should have been hungry, but the day’s earlier events made even the thought of food repugnant to her.
“Joseph and Jasmine were captured sometime during the night. Joseph was shot this afternoon.” She paused, waiting until the words came more easily. “But Father Hidalgo had Jasmine tortured on the whipping horse. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”
“Par Dieu!" Nicolas muttered.
“Ba-ba,” Quin-Quin cooed, turning one of the quills in her tiny hand.
“And the child here?” Nicolas asked.
“Father Hidalgo was going to turn the child over to the church. If he had his way, the child would be a cowering fool by the time she is ten.”
“I’ve always thought the church had too much control,” he murmured, pushing the child’s curls out of her moon-shaped face. “I had hoped here in the wilderness of Louisiana it would be different.”
Anxiety propelled Natalie out of the chair. She walked about the room, carefully keeping her face averted from him. “I didn’t tell you everything. You’re gone so much of the time that I’m not sure how much you’re aware of. Quin-Quin’s father is François.”
“Yes,” he said quietly, “I know.”
Her hands rubbed against each other. To conceal her agitation, she lightly fingered the stag’s antlers. “We both know that my marriage to François has only brought pain to everyone. It was the wrong thing to do at the time, but it seemed the only solution.”
Nicolas said nothing. The little girl had fallen asleep, and he rose and took her into the next room to lay her on the bed. Natalie browsed about the room, trying to think of a way to phrase what she really meant to say.
“You can’t change past mistakes, Natalie.”
Startled by his voice, she looked behind her. He stood with a shoulder braced against the doorjamb, watching her.
Her fingers deserted the antlers, wandered past the powder horn and bullet pouch suspended from a peg, then traced the tattered binding on a copy of Ovid. She lowered her voice to little more than a whisper. “If I could make something good come out of all the terrible things that have happened . . .”
She whirled on him. Now the words spilled out of her mouth. “I know it sounds insane, Nicolas, but I have this desperate notion that the redemption of François’s bastard daughter, a slave at that will somehow be my own redemption. By purchasing Quin-Quin from St. Denis and obtaining her manumission, I might somehow be purchasing my own way back to my former life.”
He shoved off the oak door frame and crossed the room in two strides to catch her shoulders. He shook her with rough impatience. Her head bobbled, and her mirror necklace bounced against the hollow of her throat. His eyes were slits of anger that burned fear into her. “You’re still thinking of yourself! Going back— leaving François. Damn it, Natalie, you’ve married him! For life!”
“And what if”—her teeth rattled with the shaking— “if I was still legally married to someone else when I married François?” she blurted out.
The shaking stopped, but his powerful fingers dug into her shoulders. “My God, what kind of woman are you?” he said between clenched teeth.
His contempt knifed through her. “You do what you have to do at the moment! I had to survive—you had to kill your father.”
His breath hissed in. “There’s nothing you wouldn’t stoop to, is there?”
“And you?” she countered. Tears blurred her eyes. She saw only the grim scythe of his mouth. “Are you so virtuous? Do you lie to yourself, Nicolas, denying that you want me? Do you run from yourself and run from the truth? That you love your best friend’s wife?”
“I could wan
t a trading-post whore,” he gritted, “but that doesn’t mean I could love her.”
She slapped him. Sudden silence sizzled the air in the room. Aghast, she stared at the white imprint that gradually mottled his swarthy skin. Her mouth opened to form some sort of apology, but his hands fastened around her upper arms. He jerked her against him, and she whimpered in anticipation of unidentified fear. His mouth silenced her outcry. Like those days of starving in La Salpêtriére, her lips opened hungrily against his. She pressed against his length, seeking his essence, seeking the source of his power, seeking recognition of a mutual need in him.
His tongue invaded her mouth, striking little sparks in the core of her. Her arms wrapped about his neck, and her tongue invited him farther. Bon Dieu, she couldn’t help herself. She loved Nicolas Brissac like she had never loved another man. She loved him as a fully enhanced woman, not as the child-woman who had married Philippe.
“God, yes, I want you,” he murmured against her feverish lips. “I want to do all the things to you that a man does to a woman.” His mouth stroked the hollow of her neck. At the touch of his lips on the bare flesh where one breast burgeoned, her entire frame trembled with the yearning that rippled through her. “I’ve loved you . . . all these years.”
Her head lolled to one side, allowing his lips access to that forbidden part. Instead she felt only the slip of air over her skin as he set her from him.
She looked up into his face for a clue and saw the self-disgust she had glimpsed there several times before. She was sickened by what she had allowed to happen. Before, her love for Nicolas had been her own secret. Now, not only was it exposed, but it had been made to appear cheap.
Her regret at her weakness thundered in her ears, drowning out everything . . . drowning out the creak of the cabin’s door swinging open on its taut leather hinges.
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 22