She reached up to touch the muscle that throbbed in his jaw. He said tightly, firmly, “Don’t.”
She dropped the threatening hand to her side, blurting suddenly, “Nicolas, I love you!”
He caught her arms and shook her with exasperation. She didn’t care. At least he was touching her. “God, Natalie, are you so determined to have your own way that you can’t see François would always be between us!”
“François is dead! We’re alive!”
His angry glare left her to sweep around the parlor, taking in the damask wall hangings, the silver tea service, the spinet in the corner. His eyes returned to settle on her parted lips. “You and I are mismatched, Natalie. I’m not François. I could never settle down for long. The freedom of always moving on is strong in my blood. The lure of the horizon would soon beckon me like a siren.”
“I’ve waited for you for all this time. I would wait for you to return the next time, however long it might take to exorcise the wanderlust in your blood.”
The nostrils of his high-bridged Indian nose flared. “Are you so certain? How do I know that while I’m gone some handsome officer won’t keep the lonely nights away from your bedroom? Perhaps the Lieutenant Scoraille already has.”
She wanted to slap his barbaric face, to remind him of the indentured servant he had kept and all of the other women he had undoubtedly possessed over the years. Instead, she flung her arms about his neck and pressed her feverish lips against him. He grasped her arms to remove them, but she clung to him. “Nicolas, please,” she murmured against his mouth. “Don’t make me grovel.”
For an answer, he caught her face between his hands and kissed her ruthlessly, his mouth controlling hers. His teeth ground against her soft lips, and his tongue thrust between them with cold, brutal passion. Her bruised mouth returned his savagery. This was what she had waited for.
When he scooped her up in his arms and deposited her on the settee to thrust her dangling legs apart, she felt a liquid fire burn through her in anticipation. “Nicolas, I’ve waited so long for you. So long.”
What matter that his passion was ignited by anger rather than love? What matter if he hurt her? At least she was feeling something at last, if even it was pain. Years . . . years since she had even been kissed. Her breasts had forgotten their need to be touched by a man.
He straddled her with one knee and ripped the panel from her bodice. Her eyes closed. Her breathing thundered in her ears. His swarthy hands cupped each breast, his fingers biting into their milk-white softness. She entwined her fingers with his. “Nicolas, tell me . . . please tell me you love me.”
His breathing was harsh. “If I said no, Natalie, would you stop me from taking you?”
The moss-green depths of her eyes glistened. She shook her head. “No,” she said huskily. “No, I would still want you.”
Dark passion ignited in the depths of his pupils, and he lowered his head over her breasts. She arched her back and gasped when his tongue touched the purple welt of the fleur-de-lis between her breasts, burning his own brand over the old one.
His hand deserted one breast to push up her skirts, but his fingers discovered that she was already ready for him, already moist with the seepage of wanting him so desperately.
His hands came up to cup either side of her face, his fingers digging brutally into her scalp. The scent of her clung to hands. Bitterness warred with misery for dominance in the set of his mouth. “Do you understand that I won’t be coming back after this?”
“Yes, mon sauvage." Tears welled at the outer corners of her eyes at the certain knowledge, but her body demanded him no matter what the aftermath.
Again his mouth ravished hers, and she responded in kind— this would be the first and last time she would surrender herself to the man she had loved so long. Her hands worked frantically at the buttons of his breeches. Abruptly, she turned her head from his kiss and propped herself on her elbows. She pressed her face against the smooth skin that sheathed his muscled chest and hard stomach, inhaling deeply of his singular masculine scent.
When she nuzzled over him, his hand anchored in her curls and pulled her head backward. “I want you now, Natalie.”
She nodded, feeling the pull of her hair at the temples.
With that, he took her, filling her aching cavity with himself, a slow, sure plunging that increased in tempo until she felt engorged, close to bursting. She held on to the feeling growing in her. Too soon what she had waited for so long would be rapidly spent. The moment had to last forever. Oh, God, don’t let her forget the exquisite pleasure of this moment, united with Nicolas, at one with her own Nicolas.
Afterward, she lay still on the settee, her eyelids shut tight, and listened to him dress. She waited for him to leave so that she could cry, but he surprised her. He came over to her and rearranged the skirt that was bunched about her thighs, dampened by their lovemaking. Through a tangle of wet lashes, she stared up at his face. “Nicolas, please stay. Please.”
He bent over her and kissed the salty tears that spiked her lashes. "Adieu, Natalie.”
This time Natalie found the journey to Fort Rosalie less pleasant. For one thing, the caravan didn’t leave until two weeks later because of unseasonal rains. For another, everything seemed flat— the taste of food and wine, her usual joy in the autumnal colors, her anticipation of being with Hervé and Jeanne-Antoinette again. The company’s two freedman, Jeremiah and Samuel, did their best to ease the hardships of the journey, but by the time she had spent three weeks on the trail, with only an oilcloth to keep off the rain, she was thoroughly miserable.
A half-galley out of New Orleans, loaded with merchandise, was anchored below Fort Rosalie’s soaring bluffs. At word of the pack train, the soldiers mounted Fort Rosalie’s parapet to watch the stream of mules plod toward the village of St. Catherine. The musical sound of the bells tinkling on harnesses brought the people of the concession to their doorways.
Jeanne-Antoinette, leaning against the wooden balustrade on her narrow gallery, spotted Natalie astride the Appaloosa and waved one arm enthusiastically. The young girl started down the steps toward the pack train, her arms outstretched in greeting. Natalie realized that she was very pregnant, all stomach with two thin arms and a round, little face attached and, somewhere below, two feet.
Natalie waved Samuel and Jeremiah on to the company’s trading post and reined up before Hervé’s little house. Dismounting, she hurried to give Jeanne-Antoinette an affectionate hug. She stepped back, still holding the girl’s shoulders, and looked her over. “It appears you’re carrying a son as big as Hervé,” she teased.
The girl blushed. Natalie realized this was no longer the child who had come over as a casket girl with her on the Baleine. She was . . . Natalie mentally paused to figure Jeanne-Antoinette’s age. The girl was nearly twenty now.
Bashfully, Jeanne-Antoinette touched her mounded stomach. “Oh, Natalie, I was so afraid the rains would keep you from coming in time.”
“I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer,” she said with a pointed glance at the girl’s stomach.
During the rest of the afternoon, the two women gossiped, but when Hervé arrived that evening for dinner, the talk turned to a heated discussion about the newest restrictions France was placing on trade.
“Our business is off,” Hervé told her, his sloping brows furrowing down over the usually droll eyes. The hominy that Jeanne- Antoinette had cooked with rabbit might have been tasty, but Natalie’s stomach had been queasy for the last few days. “The British are besting us along the Natchez Trace for the trade of the Chickasaws.”
She laid down the wooden spoon, unable to eat another bite. “I understand your commandant’s stupidity and stinginess is not helping matters.”
Jeanne-Antoinette said, “Sieur de Chopart has demanded more land from the Natchez, including even White Apple Village, where their ceremonial pyramidal mounds are.”
“Did they surrender their village?”
“T
heir leader, the Great Sun,” Hervé said, “has said he would think about it.” The former brigand shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows, but a soldier who came to the post today said he had heard from his Indian sweetheart that the Choctaws were conspiring against us.”
“Why, the Choctaws have always been friends of the French,” Jeanne-Antoinette said with a dismissing motion of her little hand.
Over after-dinner brandy, talk turned to problems with the Indians at the trading post itself. Natalie, tired from the trip and sleepier than usual, went to bed early—this time alone on a box chair that folded out into a narrow bed.
Sleepy as she was, she lay, wide-eyed, tossing from side to side. Reluctantly, she let her thoughts drift to Nicolas. Abruptly, she bolted upright. Perspiration beaded her temples. With painful clarity, she realized she was pregnant. The queasy stomach, the inordinate sleepiness, the monthly flow that was several days late—the signs were all there. She counted back to the afternoon in the parlor. A little over a month. Sacre bleu!
She lay back down and, arm thrown across her forehead, considered the changes the baby would make in her life. Naturally, the fanatical Father Hidalgo would be up in arms about an unmarried white woman having a baby—a woman of property at that. It would be quite a scandal, but she knew she would be able to depend on friends like the St. Denises to rally around her.
Nicolas’s child!
She smiled to herself. Whether Nicolas liked it or not, he had given her a part of himself forever.
She would have to be careful. That first time, when she carried Philippe’s child, the trauma of the branding had caused her to miscarry. She had been a child herself then; this time, she swore to herself, would be different.
§ CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO §
Before the geese had honked southward that autumn, the corn dance was celebrated. It was the most joyous of traditions, one the Natchez had brought with them ages before when they migrated eastward from an Aztec influenced west.
The Great Sun of the tribe was borne swiftly on his litter by relays of bearers, taking him to the harvest celebration. Feasting and laughter, stately speeches and games filled the afternoon. Then as evening descended, cane torches blazed as brightly as the last rays of the sun on the lowlands beyond the river.
A drummer began to beat a skin stretched across a pottery bowl. Around him circled the young Natchez females, then the warriors. Each carried a gourd filled with pebbles. The women moved from left to right and the men in the opposite direction. During all this, they kept time with their bodies and their gourds to the beat of the drum. When the dancers wearied, they dropped out into the darkness beyond the torches and other men and women took their places.
Celebrating the harvest, fulfillment, and fertility, the dance continued until dawn. But this year what the Natchez Nation celebrated most was a harvest of hatred.
The Great Sun’s plan went into effect on the 28 of November 1729, reckoned by the Natchez as the ninth moon, that of the buffalo. By European concepts, the time specified for the attack, the fourth hour, would have been the fourth hour after midnight, but for the Natchez the time was the fourth hour after daybreak, or about nine o’clock in the morning.
Natalie was sitting on the gallery with Jeanne-Antoinette, shelling peas, when three Indians approached carrying baskets of dried and husked corn. Smiling broadly, they spoke with Jeanne-Antoinette in a mixture of French and Indian, and she explained to Natalie what she understood about the tribute the commandant had demanded.
“They carry arms for hunting, for a great feast, they say.”
Natalie couldn’t shake an uncomfortable feeling. While the Indians talked, she noted that small groups of other Indians entered other houses. Suddenly, from the commandant’s quarters, came musket shots. As if it were a signal, the three Indians fell upon Jeanne-Antoinette and Natalie. What happened next seemed to occur all at once.
From the basket, one Indian whipped out a wooden head-breaker and, with a mighty swing, brought it down on Jeanne- Antoinette’s head, caving in her skull as if it were an eggshell. Blood and brain matter flew everywhere. Natalie screamed and shot to her feet. The bowl in her lap thudded onto the wooden floor. Shelled peas rolled across the gallery like marbles.
One of the Indians, a short, stocky brave, pinned her arms behind her and prodded her down the gallery steps, but not before she saw one of the warriors take his hunting knife and slit open Jeanne-Antoinette’s bulging stomach. The red-fleshed baby was still kicking when the Indian swung it by its tiny ankles and bashed its head against one of the gallery’s cedar posts.
After that, Natalie’s body responded to the grunted instructions of her captor, but her mind was hazed over like the morning fog off the swamp. When she finally took note of where she was, she wasn’t certain just how much time had elapsed, perhaps a full day, maybe two. She only knew that she blinked and looked up from the hands that lay palms up in her lap to see that she was in another house much like that of Hervé and Jeanne-Antoinette’s. Other Frenchwomen, along with some Negresses, sat in the room with her or paced the floor. They all wore the same vacant look.
Natalie recognized a woman Jeanne-Antoinette had introduced several days earlier, the German widow Schneeweis. “I see you’re coming to yourself,” the stout woman said in her mildly accented French, leaning down to peer at Natalie.
Up close, Natalie could make out the widow’s faint moustache. “What time is it?”
“About four in the afternoon.” The widow nodded her head toward the window. “The massacre looks to be over. The red devils are dividing up the spoils among themselves.”
Natalie rose from where she sat on the planked floor and crossed to the window. She felt a sharp pain grind through her at what she saw. The heads of all the French dead were being brought into the public square. Disbelieving, she watched as Hervé’s houndlike face was mounted on a staff. Most of the heads lacked scalps. In the center of the square, the mutilated bodies, some of those children, were piled to be left to the dogs and buzzards.
Sometime between that grisly moment and the forced march to the Grand Village, Natalie miscarried for the second time in her life.
A woman’s blond scalp tied to a tree limb was the first of a series of gruesome warnings that Nicolas encountered on his trip downriver to New Orleans. A full scalp, taken just above the ears, could be made into several smaller ones, equally negotiable for ten ecus, if the scalp looked to be Indian. But a blond one . . . Clearly, an Indian uprising was in the air.
Three days after, word of the massacre at Fort Rosalie reached the capital along with a more accurate tally of the dead given by Father Philibert, Capuchin priest and missionary. Of about 500 settlers, 144 men, 35 women, and 56 children were killed.
Nicolas, sharing confidences in one of the New Orlean’s seedier rum houses with a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, heard the story as it passed in French from slurred lips to slurred lips. “To Governor Perier—and revenge,” toasted an older Frenchman whose wig was askew.
Nicolas, though seeming to have hefted his share of mugs, had actually drunk very little, yet the room seemed to expand, the customers and the walls fading away to be replaced by Natalie’s face. Often he had put miles and months between himself and Natalie, yet she still managed to claim comers of his mind at the most unsuspecting times. He would love her as long as there was breath in him. All his wanderings would never change that fact.
With painful clarity, he realized that as long as he had known she was alive and all right, he had been able to remove himself from her life. That independent woman with her cool, regal beauty, hadn’t she always been able to take care of herself, to adapt, even in the midst of a wilderness? But now . . .
It didn’t take him long to gather the few facts and learn that the governor was planning to unite the French forces with the Choctaws and attack. While revenge might be sweet, it could endanger the lives of the captives. Nicolas knew he had to reach the Grand Village ahead of the French
and the Choctaws. Le bon Dieu willing, Natalie had either escaped, though few had, or she was a captive. The chances of the latter were good since it appeared that for the most part the white women and the slaves, both men and women, had been spared.
He left at once, taking a pirogue, which, even going upriver, was faster than trying to guide a horse through the mire and swamp and tangled underbrush of the trackless forests. Fringed leggings had replaced his satin knee breeches and deerhide moccasins his gold-buckled pumps.
Before he drew near the village, he rechecked his musket’s firing pan and priming pin. His knife and tomahawk were fastened to his side like old friends but hung loosely enough. For nigh half a day, he patiently reconnoitered the area, gliding over the withered grass and brown leaves like a light bark canoe over water so that his passing left no trail. The woodsman in him summed up all in his field of vision as either being normal or else unnatural. When his woods sense sounded no alarm of suspicious signs, he at last approached the stockade.
The Natchez houses were made of mud and cane and were dome-shaped like the windmills of La Cadie. Those occupied by the nobility were approximately thirty feet square; those of the lower class were about half as large. The main temple faced east, squatting on a mound of earth about eight feet above the rest of the terrain. On another mound, the house of the Great Sun stood facing the temple.
The Great Sun emerged from the low doorway of his hut. His face was painted vermilion, and he wore a half-crown of flamingo feathers and a loincloth, along with a fur robe mantling his shoulders. In his head, he carried a red stick decorated with not white but red feathers—symbolic of war.
A war dance was already in progress. The warriors had painted different parts of their bodies with various colors of mud—black, red, yellow, gray, smeared from hand to foot. Their belts were ornamented with bells or shells filled with pebbles that clicked and clanked. The braves cavorted about the village’s central plaza. Meanwhile, the old men were coloring war clubs red, obviously preparing for a large-scale attack.
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 24