Nicolas had learned enough about this particular tribe to know that captives were usually made to sing and dance for several days in front of the temple before they were delivered as recompense to the relatives of persons who had been killed. With the time that had elapsed, he figured that Natalie, if she was, indeed, alive, was no longer held in a communal building but had integrated into one of the households. Which?
Occasionally, a bedraggled Frenchwoman crossed the compound, weighed down with an armful of logs or toting heavy kettles of water. None of them was Natalie. Time was running short, and a stealthy search of each hut was out of the question.
A frown creased the high bridge of his bladed nose. He was attacking the problem as a white person would, looking at the problem from the aspect of the difficulties rather than searching for the simplistic approach.
It would be his manito against theirs.
He rose from his surveillance spot at the base of a twenty-foot canebrake and sauntered boldly into the village. At first, no one took note of him, but as his confidence-proclaiming strides took him nearer to the plaza, heads started to turn. The naked Natchez children ceased playing pelotte with the fist-size ball of deerskin packed with Spanish moss and stared at the buckskinned stranger. A weathered old woman grinding maize paused and flicked him an impassive glance. The village’s mangy curs snapped at his heels, and scrawny chickens pranced quickly out of his path.
Two painted warriors halted their dancing and descended on him. Ignoring their hostile looks, he walked directly to the temple and removed the white-clay peace calumet that hung from the tall red pole near the doorway.
“Mikilish hatak!” shouted the chief, demanding he halt.
Pipe still in hand, Nicolas, looking down from his greater height, asked guilelessly, “Am I not covered by the smoke of peace?” Purposely, he spoke in English.
The warriors slowed their charge. With the British as allies of the Natchez, they assumed he was an English trader. Safe for the moment, he launched into Creek then, which the Natchez understood for the most part, at least better than English. “I have trade goods that are both superior and cheaper than the French stock, and the English rum is as potent as the best French brandy.”
Invited into the Great Sun’s cabin, he accepted the calumet’s bowl, which was passed from the chief to four or five of the more distinguished princes. Atop their heads, they wore a tuft of longer hair, which hung over the left ear. After Nicolas inhaled and passed the pipe to the malodorous prince on his left, he proceeded to relate that his trade goods were in his canoe cached upriver beneath the riverbank underbrush. Deftly, he turned the discussion to the white captives he had noticed in the village.
The chief launched into a wordy description of the coup the Natchez had performed on the French. For all the Great Sun’s boasting, Nicolas could see that the chief was concerned about the consequences of having defied the mighty French nation. Eagerly, he questioned Nicolas about the possibility of support from the Cumberland settlements, which were English.
Nicolas let a suitably lengthy interval pass in which he seemed to be giving much consideration to the Great Sun’s question. At last, he drew dramatically on the calumet’s stem, exhaled, and replied, “Great Sun, I’d be willing to act as one of your emissaries on my travels back through the Cumberland to the English seaboard colonies. If I take one of your French captives with me, I could better convince my government of your magnificent feat against our shared enemy, the French dogs.”
The suggestion did not work quite as he had hoped, for the Natchez chief clearly meant to make the choice of the captive who would accompany Nicolas. After all, the chief explained, relieving one of the warriors of his reward could result in bitter feelings. The choice would have to be considered and Nicolas would be informed the following day.
That evening, he ate a rancid stew of dog meat and watched the monotonous ceremonial dancing about the smoky fires. The warriors wore water-repellent swanskins about their shoulders as mantles. The bucks were growing inebriated with the plunder of wines and liqueurs taken from Fort Rosalie. Syphilis, smallpox, and alcohol were gradually decimating the native population.
Casually, his gaze moved beyond the pall of smoke to the doorways of the various cabins. Did Natalie watch from within one of those cabins?
The pain of loving her and never having her had filled him with rancor over the years, making it difficult to think of her without anger. Now, all he could think was that she had to be alive. Or else he faced the yawning emptiness that had been his life before she came into it with her imperious little gestures and those quick flashes of humor that had wedged between the panels of emotional armor he had donned as the son rejected by Sieur Damien du Plessis.
When the earlier group of dancers withdrew beyond the ring of firelight and others took their places, Nicolas thought it time to seek out the cabin appointed to him, smaller than those of the nobility. Inside waited the Natchez maiden who was designated as his for the night. A banked fire gave off subdued light. He saw that she was tall and comely despite the tattoos that marked her chin. She wore a soft deerskin skirt that was beaded at the hem and a tunic banded with shells—and the mirror necklace he had given Natalie.
Pushing back her back curtain of hair, she rose from the fur-covered platform and crossed to him. “Tsitshia?” she asked. Her brown fingers indicated the area of her groin. Unselfconsciously, she took his hand and drew him back to her bed.
He lay beside her and stared into her sloe eyes, but it was pale green eyes and sun-drenched hair spilling over the platform that his mind’s eye saw. Nevertheless, the Natchez maiden was going to be insulted if he did not take advantage of the gift offered a guest by the host. And an insult wouldn’t prompt her to talk about the necklace.
Tentatively, she touched his crotch and said, “Atcha," referring to his sex organs in general, then asked, “Mishmish-kip táma’l?”
“No,” he told her, she wasn’t a homely woman. That wasn’t the reason for his soft manhood.
Satisfied, she set out to rectify the problem. Even with Natalie’s face haunting him, his body responded to her seductively manipulating hands and lips. He took her at once, feeling the intense but fleeting pleasure of muscle contractions that convulsed his entire frame. Afterward, she curled up, her back to him, prepared to sleep, but he began to talk to her, stroking her nape and occasionally plying her with seemingly aimless questions.
At last, he had the information he sought. A brave had given her the necklace. Four or five women with blond hair and of Natalie’s height and slenderness had been taken captive. Their ages could vary; it was difficult to tell from the Natchez descriptive term of years. Two captives were lodged with the same warrior and his family. Two or three more were distributed throughout the huts of the lower ranks of the Natchez. One was housed with a prince of the tribe.
Seeing that the Indian maiden was becoming aroused again, he ceased his stroking, which she dutifully accepted and went off to sleep.
He stepped out into the frosted moonlight and marked the hut where Natalie might be. Once again, he opted for boldness. He began to sing drunkenly in English and staggered along. At that time of night, few were sober enough to question him. At the predetermined cabins, he introduced Natalie’s name in a slightly louder singsong.
The first of the described huts elicited no response, but from the second he heard, “Nicolas, here!”
Abruptly, he halted before the hut. She was alive! A smart slap came from the cabin’s exterior, followed by the cursing of an old woman in the Natchez language, something about Natalie awakening the dead. Nicolas wasn’t that fluid in the Tunican dialect.
He sang again, introducing the French word patience several times between two bawdy English stanzas. He could only hope she understood. After a while of rambling drunkenly about the area, he circled behind the hut where Natalie was. Recalling the cabin he had just quitted, he tried to judge where the platforms would most likely be situated in N
atalie’s hut. With his knife, he passed a good hour and a half sawing as quietly as possible at the cane-and-mud wall. He dared not go any slower, for fear the cabin’s resident warrior would return from the dance. A two-foot square took shape, large enough for a slender woman to wriggle through.
Carefully, so carefully, he removed the loosened portion, hardly daring to breathe. When he perceived that a human back blocked the hole, he lost all his breath. Then Natalie’s face appeared. Incredibly, she was smiling, with tears glistening on her cheeks. He took her outstretched hands and pulled her through the aperture.
When she could stand, she flung her arms about him and wept silently, her narrow shoulders quaking convulsively. He held her for a moment and caressed her matted hair. She would need to draw strength from that small comfort before they began the arduous undertaking of making good their escape. That they would escape offered no problem; he was that sure of his capabilities. What he would do once he reached Natchitoches with Natalie, or without her, was the problem. The woman that had fascinated him from the first, and continued to do so after all these years, possessed a manito equal to his.
He wondered if she expected him to show a typical male’s concern for any possible violation that might have been inflicted upon her by one or several of the bucks. That she was alive was all that mattered; the white man put too much of a premium on a woman’s chastity. Still, around her he had to make himself think as a white man would.
“Are you all right?” he asked softly, his blunt forefinger soothingly stroking the intriguing cleft of her chin.
“I knew you’d come,” she whispered between breaths, still clinging fiercely to his shoulders.
He sighed. “Damn you to hell, Natalie.” But for a brief moment, he permitted himself the enjoyment of her lithe body molded against his.
§ CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
With abstraction borne of absolute exhaustion, Natalie squinted against the unforgiving sunlight, watching the sweat beads roll down Nicolas’s smooth flesh to seep into his belt line. The Natchez, she knew, would not give up a single captive easily. Their headlong escape from the Natchez Grand Village had taken five full days—and sapped her strength. For most of that time, the need for silence and haste had overshadowed all else. Only a few words were exchanged—mostly orders given tersely by Nicolas. Not until he was paddling the canoe up the Riviere Rouge did the tension lines about his mouth fade into their usual impassivity.
He wedged the canoe between the reeds and cattails. Unsteadily, she rose to her feet from her perch at the prow of the birchbark canoe. The hem of her calico dress hung in tatters with the skirt split up the front, exposing a thigh encased in a ripped and stained white cotton stocking. Nicolas was waiting for her, holding out his hand, but when she stepped onto mushy landfall, her stiff limbs gave way, and he caught her up in his arms, carrying her up the partially wooded, partially sandstone slope to his cabin.
At the kick of his moccasined foot, the door swung open. $he hated for him to reach the bed. This moment, cradled in his arms, was one that she wanted to stretch in her memory. Yet the moment her head touched his mattress, her lids involuntarily closed.
When next they opened, candlelight softly lit the room. Nicolas was standing at the foot of the bed, his forearm braced against the bedpost. He was still naked to the waist, but his dark face had been freshly washed, and his hair and lashes glistened with waterdrops. Those black eyes were staring at her with the old wanting—and frustration.
“Marry me, Nicolas.”
“No.”
She gambled. “I was carrying our child. During the Natchez raid, I lost it.”
His eyes flared in astonishment. His arm dropped from the bedpost and he straightened, arms akimbo. His eyes perused her as carefully as he would a war trail, searching for trickery. Then exasperation tightened the muscles about his mouth. He looked as if he wanted to shake her. “And what about that insignificant detail back in France—your first husband?”
She pushed herself up on one elbow, and her hair, matted with dirt and twigs, tumbled over one scratched, bare shoulder. Her hands knotted into fists, and her eyes stared up into his beseeching him to understand what she had to say. “Nicolas, I was scarcely sixteen when we married. We were both of the aristocracy—the Golden Couple, we were called.”
Nicolas turned from her and picked up his knife, brushing both sides of it across a whetstone in preoccupation. She understood Nicolas; she knew that he didn’t want to hear her story, and yet did. The velvet skin stretched over his broad back where two dark curves marked the ridges of strength in his shoulders.
“I was married to him for only four years!” she went on relentlessly.
It was now or never, for she knew he would drift out of her life, this time for good, unless she could somehow convince him otherwise.
“After Philippe’s uncle issued a lettre de cachet against both of us, we were never to see the light of day again! And I—” The words caught in her throat at the memory of the terror.
Nicolas put aside the knife and whetstone and paced before her, his fine lips taut. Impatiently, he ran his fingers through his damp, shoulder-length hair.
“I can’t tell you the horror that each day brings in one of those prisons. If Philippe is still alive, after almost eight years of being caged like an animal, he’s not the same man I married.” Her hands covered her face in an effort to hold back her old fear and anguish. “God, Nicolas, I’m not the same woman. Natalie du Plessis died the day she was branded.”
Abruptly, his pacing halted before her. He thrust aside her hands and jerked her chin up so that he could see her face exposed in the candlelight. The sinews of his neck stood out. “Du Plessis? Your husband is Philippe du Plessis?”
She nodded, her brow knit in perplexity. “You know of him?”
A bitter smile cracked the hard cast of Nicolas’s expression. She felt something as dangerous and silent as a grudge hovering over her. “He is my half-brother.” His voice had the brightness of a little boy’s knife.
She felt the lime-washed walls go liquid. They began to ripple and flow past her. A current tugged her down.
Not like this! she wanted to scream. Not out of anger and retribution!
The wedding was being held in the St. Denis home. As commandant of the settlement, he had the right to perform all ceremonies in the absence of the priest. Of course, Father Hidaglo wasn’t absent from Natchitoches, but Natalie quailed from taking religious vows of matrimony when the church refused to recognize divorce.
Nicolas was derisive and needled her while she dressed for the wedding. “You seemed willing enough to violate the tenets of the church the first time,” he said mockingly with a sardonic arch of one brow.
She whirled on him and hurled her pink damask slipper at his chest. He dodged it agilely. “I had no alternative, damn you!” she spat.
He crossed the room in two quick strides and grabbed her wrists, pinning them against her chest. He glared down into her ashen face. “Marrying you is going to give me great pleasure, your ladyship. I feel almost that le bon Dieu has a sense of justice.”
She had stretched on her toes and kissed him with a woman’s savage need to strike back in the most effective way she can. Only the gentle way his mouth dominated hers made her capitulation to the impending wedding bearable—that and the full, incredible story of Nicolas and Philippe. Now she could understand and forgive Nicolas his reprisal.
For the wedding, she wore an open robe of antique pink silk damask with a petticoat of silver lace flounces over a domed hoop. The silver lace also adorned her three-quarter-length sleeves and her stomacher. A furbelowed pink ribbon necklace graced her slender neck, and Emanuella’s silver lace mantilla, anchored in her upswept tresses, trailed the ground.
Natchitoches had never seen such a beautiful woman as on that day.
Nicolas was more sedately dressed in a black satin frock coat and knee breeches, but his waistcoat was of intricately embossed and embroid
ered scarlet velvet. He dominated the roomful of dandies.
When she and Nicolas knelt before St. Denis, her hand was icy in Nicolas’s. His warm fingers caressed hers reassuringly, as if to impart a message of love despite the circumstances of the solemn rite.
Behind her, she could hear the rustling of broadcloth and silks and the occasional clank of a sword. After all these years of waiting for Nicolas, she secretly feared that someone like Father Hidalgo would step forward to protest the marriage. She forced herself to listen St. Denis intone the words of the marriage ceremony.
“As Commandant of the Upper Cane River and by virtue of the power granted me by the King of France, His Majesty Louis XV, I do hereby declare Natalie du Plessis de Gautier the wife of Nicolas Brissac.”
With that, she looked up into the stern countenance of her half-breed husband and glimpsed the light of love shining in his dark eyes before the Indian in him erased all expression. Somehow, as she offered herself up to his gentle kiss, she felt certain that their love would make everything come right.
“You have my love,” Nicolas said. “Do not make me regret it.”
So different had Philippe and François been from Nicolas. She had been able to deal with the first two men in her life through the potent combination of intelligence and feminine wile. Nicolas she could not so easily manage, even after a year of marriage.
“Do I?” she countered. His face above hers was barely distinguishable in the dark of their bedroom. “Are you so certain I have your love? What if you don’t return from Williamsburg? What good then is this love of yours I have?”
“There is not—nor ever was—any woman in Williamsburg who had the love I give you.”
Her fists thudded his shoulders. “I’m not talking about other women, Nicolas! I’m talking about danger and death. I’d swear that you men think with your—”
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 25