Skye wanted to ask a lot more questions, but Red Gill had clammed up, and the grim set of his mouth warned against any more talk about a matter so incendiary.
Skye found himself wondering about Pierre Chouteau and his methods. For all his time in the mountains, he had heard tales about the ruthless Mr. Chouteau, and his effort to erase the Opposition, especially the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, Jackson, Sublette, Bridger, Fraeb, and the rest of the old coons. Chouteau had succeeded, too. Nothing remained in the northern and central plains but the American Fur Company, technically the Upper Missouri Outfit, now called Pratte, Chouteau and Company. And the Bents were almost the sole survivors in the southern plains.
It had grown very dark, and houses no longer rose cheek by jowl, or even with their doors on the street.
“Getting close,” Gill said. “It’s that there.”
A brick-walled enclave rose before them.
“You think he’ll see us now? Not at his chambers in the morning?”
“Mister Skye, old Pierre, he’d be mad at me if we waited one spare minute. I’ve come all hours, sometimes right in the middle of dinner, or he’s been in bed half a night, or when he’s having some Frenchy priest saying the mass to the family, and he just excuses himself and glides out and we go to his study and he lights the wick and we palaver until he’s squeezed everything I know out of me.”
Skye noticed that Victoria was uncommonly quiet, but she was cruising not only through utterly new turf, but also through a world she didn’t understand.
Gill reached an iron-grilled portico, and rattled the closed gate. An old black man in black livery emerged at once from the darkness.
“Got to see old Pierre,” Gill said.
The man squinted, surveyed Skye and Victoria from liquid brown eyes, and opened the gate.
“Massah’s in,” he said.
A slave. Skye hadn’t much thought about slavery until he was suddenly confronted with it here in what the Yanks called a Border state. Skye had been a slave; the Royal Navy had made him one, pressing him off the streets of London and locking him into ships of war for seven years. He hated slavery in all shapes and forms, whether open and blatant, like this oppression of Africans in America, or just slightly less blatant, like pressing seamen into the navy and paying them a bare pittance and keeping them for as long as it pleased the lord admirals.
But of course Chouteau would have slaves. A man like him would think nothing of it.
They walked through a flower-decked yard, past magnolias and chestnut trees, toward a gleaming, black lacquered door with a brass knocker. Within, laughter erupted. Light spilled from casement windows, some of them open to the evening breezes. The tongue was French, fluid and soft and amused. Skye saw men in brocades and silk, black pantaloons, waistcoats, high collars, and women in summery white cottons and Brussels lace and pleated muslin.
Gill knocked.
A black woman opened to them. She was ancient, white-haired, sharp-eyed, sorrowful. She wore a black cotton gown rimmed with white, and a large porcelain crucifix on her heavy bosom.
“Mr. Chouteau,” Gill said.
“Cadet?”
“Yes, junior. I’m Red Gill.”
Skye wondered what that was about.
The black woman nodded and ushered them into a white foyer gilded with gold leaf and lit by six oil lamps in a crystal chandelier. The woman limped heavily, with a world-weariness that could not be concealed.
Another slave. Skye watched her lumber toward the salon where all the festivities were brightening the world, and saw intuitively a will not commanded by her own self; a dream lost and hope squashed by a terrible institution. And what for? Because the Chouteaus chose to keep her as chattel rather than pay her a wage for a lifetime of servitude? Suddenly he hated the abominable institution of the Americans, and thought ill of any human being who enslaved another, including the man who had employed him.
The venerable slave reappeared, this time with stocky, jet-haired, square-faced Pierre Chouteau, Jr., in a handsome blue waistcoat with brass buttons.
“Ah, ah!” he said, a small smirk lighting on his lips. “Ah, at last, messeurs and madame.”
He motioned them toward another part of the manse, this area black and shadowed, and steered them into a chamber lit only by a faint light from outside.
“One petite moment,” he said, scratching a lucifer. He lifted a lamp chimney and lit the wick and blew out the match with a small, whimsical puff.
“Here we can meet in private,” he said, his soft assessing gaze raking in everything visible about Skye, Victoria, and Red Gill.
forty–three
“Permit us,” Chouteau said in a soft, gallic voice, shaking hands. “We are Chouteau. And you, mon ami, are Mister Skye. And madame?”
“This is my wife, Victoria,” Skye said.
“Ah! Enchanted, madame. And Mr. Gill we know.”
He shook hands with Gill, neutrally, revealing nothing.
“We trust you had a pleasant and uneventful trip?”
Skye found himself wary of this man who was setting snares. It was not an uneventful trip, and Marsh would have told him so, long since.
“I fear we’ve interrupted a party. We can return in the morning,” Skye said.
“Non, non, you must tell us everything. Leave out nothing. We have private business with Mr. Gill here, for some other time—”
“No, it ain’t private, Mr. Chouteau. I’m getting out of my business and want to settle up.”
Chouteau stared at the riverman, not entirely blandly. “Ah, some other time, our friend Gill. Now we must celebrate the arrival of our colleague and his beauteous wife, yes?”
Gill turned surly. Skye was certain that there would be some harsh exchanges, with Gill demanding his peltries back and maybe threatening Chouteau with exposure if he didn’t get them. But if trouble was looming, Chouteau was too much of a master to reveal it.
He smiled graciously.
“My friend Skye, we have heard much of you for years; the reports of our bourgeois in the field, the brigade tallies that reach my desk, the impressions of our men, all add up to the best of recommendations. When it came to choices, your name was at once placed high on our list, and over the names of so many others who have neither your experience nor your judgment. You see? We meet for the first time, but mon ami, we have been keeping watch over you and know more than you might expect. That is the privilege of the senior partner, oui? But tell us about the long trip? And where, mes amis, is Alexandre Bonfils? Did he not start out with you?”
“He’s coming along on a flatboat belonging to Gill,” Skye said, wondering if he could ever sort out for Chouteau just what happened.
“Extraordinary! Your flatboat, Gill?”
“Yes, with a Cheyenne squaw and her girl,” Gill said. “We were all together until Sarpy’s Post.”
“We are astonished. You must explain this,” Chouteau said, directing himself to Skye.
“The Cheyenne woman’s the wife of an Opposition trader named Simon MacLees,” Skye said. “She hadn’t heard from him for some while, and found the courage to come out of the mountains to look after him. She brought her children … her child now. I understand he’s my rival for the trading position.”
Chouteau pursed his lips, stared into the flame, and sighed. “Your information is very old, and you must have heard it filtered many times over many tongues, beginning perhaps with our Captain Marsh, and maybe others?” He paused, seeing Skye nod. “We did consider Monsieur MacLees for the position. He’s a veteran trader and a gifted man, and gave us a very difficult time in Opposition.
“But you see, when we first approached him, he told us he was soon to marry the lovely Sarah Lansing, one of the great beauties of this city, and had no wish to go out into the West again. He tells us he will live in St. Louis. He has secured work elsewhere, we understand with Robert Campbell, brokering hides and pelts.”
“Goddam,” said Victoria.
Chouteau’s gaze flicked in her direction, and then away, some faint amusement in his face. “Fort Cass will go either to you or Alexandre Bonfils. You are both eminently qualified to trade with the Crows. It is not a large post, but an important one to us, because the Crows are good buffalo hunters, and the future of the fur trade lies in hides, not beaver. And how is your health, Mister Skye?”
“I am doing better.”
“You received injuries, did you not?”
“Captain Marsh has been here ahead of us, and you must have the story, sir.”
“Ah, indeed, one story. But we like to hear the story from each person.”
“Maybe that should wait until morning, sir. We’ve come a long way.”
“Non, non! We have all the time in the world. Who is here tonight? My Gratiot relatives, whom we see all the time. They are partners in the company, you know. We don’t see our men from the field but once in a long while, and so, our friend, we want you to divulge the whole story of the trip down the river, beginning at the time you and Bonfils boarded the Otter at Fort Union. But first, may we pour you some brandy? And by all means, sit yourself.”
Skye nodded. A snifter would drive away some of the aches and cares of travel. And that yellow silken settee looked inviting.
And so the story came out. Skye didn’t know what to say, or how much to say, and decided on a bare recitation of the facts, without the slightest shading. He would be especially careful describing Bonfils, and the reckless discharge of grape shot into the Sans Arcs—and others:
Chouteau settled himself in a wingchair with crewelwork covering it, and sipped his brandy, listening intently, and no doubt forming sharp impressions. Skye knew he was being assessed, measured, weighed, and examined. He described the moment when he and Victoria spotted the Cheyenne woman and persuaded Marsh to pick her up; the moment when Marsh ejected her from the vessel without repaying her, over Skye’s protests. The moment when Skye and Victoria found themselves afoot at Fort Pierre, and their meeting with Red Gill and Shorty Ballard, and their switch to the flatboat to continue their journey.
“Ah! My capitaine, he told us he was beside himself when he discovered that the Cheyenne woman was MacLees’s mountain wife! MacLees was about to become his son-in-law! He did what he had to do to prevent the woman from ever reaching St. Louis—scarcely realizing you would take the woman’s part!”
Pierre Chouteau seemed much amused, though none of it had been very funny.
Skye saw the moment looming when he would have to describe his rival’s reckless conduct at the place where the Otter had grounded and the Sans Arcs had appeared one foggy dawn, and decided to let Red tell that part of it.
“Red,” he said, “please tell Mr. Chouteau what happened during the time we were helping the steamboat.”
“I damn well will,” Red snapped, in a voice that wiped Chouteau’s perpetual smirk off his face.
Red’s bitter story flooded out, beginning with the shot across the bow of the flatboat; Shorty’s determination not to stop; Skye’s intervention; the rescue operation, in which the Otter’s cargo was removed until the boat floated; the arrival of the Sans Arcs before dawn on a foggy morning; Skye’s negotiation with them to ferry them across the wide Missouri; Bonfils’s reckless cannoning of the group with cannister; the dead and wounded; the harsh treatment of the wounded and dead by Marsh, while the steamboat was reloaded, and then the grief-laden trip downriver.
Pierre Chouteau sipped brandy, twirled the amber liquid in his snifter, stared into the lamp, and grunted.
The rest of the narrative came easily to Skye. He described his own struggle with grave wounds and nausea and pain; Bonfils’s astonishing appearance and presence among them; the man’s scheming at Sarpy’s Post, the theft of the flatboat, and the acquisition of the small sailboat from Sarpy, with which they passed Bonfils in the night and beat him to St. Louis.
The more Skye talked, the more agitated he became. And when he finished his narrative, that shadowed study was plunged into a portentous silence.
“My dog is dead. I came close to the brink. We buried Shorty Ballard in a canvas shroud, weighted with rock, and said good-bye to a good man. We buried my dog. We buried that Cheyenne boy, Sound Comes Back After Shouting, innocent child, eager to see his father. The Sans Arcs took their own with them, but I’m sure they’d buried a few.”
“Four,” said Chouteau. “Seven more gravely injured. Eight more less injured. We’ve received an express. They are agitating the Teton Sioux against the company.” He cocked his head. “Marsh said you were negotiating ferry passage for that war party on the Otter without authority to do so.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You might have asked him.”
“I did what I had to do.”
Chouteau waved a hand. “It was the right thing to do. We just wanted your answer to Marsh’s accusation. Exactly the right thing to do. Most admirable, and it shows what a veteran of the fur trade you are, Mister Skye. Now, if you will excuse us, we will closet ourselves with Monsieur Gill for a few minutes. We will have Bertha show you to the foyer, where you may wait. We wish to talk further. Meet us at the offices, tomorrow at ten, yes?”
“Ten, at your firm,” Skye said.
Chouteau rang a bell, and the ancient, stooped servant slave appeared.
“Take them to the foyer, and Mister Gill will join them shortly,” Chouteau said.
The woman silently led them back to the foyer, and they could hear the festivities in a nearby room, where light spilled from a dozen lamps.
Gill joined them in a few minutes, and they plunged into a dank night.
“Old Pierre, he didn’t even wait for me to speak my piece. He says my pelts are in the warehouse and I can pick ‘em up anytime. He had Marsh put them in a separate place. I guess Shorty’s family gets half of the price, when I get them sold. I told him that sonofabitch Bonfils was a disgrace to the company, blood relative of his or not, and that if he had any goddam brains, he’d better put his chips on you.”
Skye listened to all that, but he felt detached, as if this was all about someone else. They plunged into the night, and Skye wondered where he and Victoria would spend it. Chouteau’s hospitality had not extended to accommodations. Even his slaves had a bed.
forty–four
Skye reported to the brick headquarters of Pratte, Chouteau and Company the following morning, feeling tired. He and Victoria had ended up in Gill’s airless cubicle, making a bed by stretching out their blankets on the hard grimy floor.
Victoria intuitively chose not to accompany him this morning, and he resolved to tell her everything that transpired. He had no secrets from her, and the company would not impose any if he had his say about it.
He felt an odd trepidation about the position, not at all what he expected so long ago at rendezvous. But he refused to let those worries rot his resolve or spoil the moment he had struggled toward for so long. If all went well, he would soon be heading for the mountains with a paid position, bonuses for meeting or exceeding goals, the chance to bless Victoria’s people, and the prospect of success in the company. Not bad for a poorly schooled refugee trapped in a world not of his making.
He found the warehouse and factor’s rooms hard by the riverfront, an austere brick building that radiated none of the opulence of the Chouteau residence. A small plaque, gilded letters on black, announced the company. The cathedral bell struck ten as Skye opened the creaking door and pierced into an unfathomable gloom. The acrid odor of furs and hides permeated the dark corridor. A varnished oak door beckoned, and it opened upon an austere office that shouted business. Chouteau was not present. A porcine clerk hunched over a rolltop desk, putting figures into a gray-backed ledger book, by the gloomy light of a wall of tall windows of wavery glass that faced west, away from the majestic Mississippi.
Skye hesitantly lifted his top hat, which was as well brushed as he could manage, and waited. Eventually the clerk deigned to study him.
“Tradesme
n use the other door,” he said.
“Mr. Chouteau is expecting me. I am Mister Skye.”
“I can’t imagine why,” the man said, surveying Skye as if he were a side of hanging beef.
But the man sidled off his stool and vanished through a door with pebbled glass in it, and soon emerged from it and beckoned Skye.
“Monsieur Chouteau has arrived and will see you,” he said.
The fur magnate’s inner sanctum was as spartan as the warehouse, save for large windows admitting generous light.
“Ah, Skye, close the door please,” he said.
Skye did, gently. What secrets had spun out here, behind that closed mahogany door?
“We should like to know exactly how you would proceed with business at Fort Cass,” Chouteau said, after the barest of preliminaries.
“I would proceed, sir, with an intent to earn a profit. This requires loyalty, I to the Absarokas, and they to the company. I intend to give them good measure, exactly what the company has agreed to give for each sort of pelt and grade. As is usual, I will give the chiefs and headmen gifts of some value, to assure that they do not take the tribal trade elsewhere …”
Skye noted that Chouteau was dimpled up again, tha amused, impatient look he had seen the previous evening. He looked bored, as if he had heard all this many times.
“Yes, yes, yes, Skye. But we are in the business to make a profit. To spend as little as possible to get as much as possible That requires a certain, ah, delicacy.”
Skye waited silently for more, and Chouteau did not disappoint.
“My friend Skye, there is only one goal: profit. Get us every pelt you can, drive off the Opposition by whatever means, and give as little as you can for what you get. It is clear, is it not? Crystal dear. If an Opposition trader arrives you must drive him off: temporarily, offer more for pelts thar he does; and don’t hesitate to use other measures. Your pos will be supplied, as always, with the means to attract Indians and affect their judgment. Entertain, my friend, entertain lavishly and buy every pelt in sight even as the savages dance and sing.”
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