There were times, however, when she would watch Claudette waddling about at the center of her home and family, secure in her husband’s affection, needed, swelling with new life, and her envy would be blighting. There would be no child born of her Indian idyll with Reynaud. She should have been relieved under the circumstances; instead, she was bitter. That much, at least, she could have had. Instead, she was left with thoughts and memories that haunted her waking moments and left her lying rigid, with clenched teeth and knotted fists, in the dark hours before dawn.
Reynaud had been forced to choose, for nothing, for nothing. His choice had not saved Madame Doucet, would not save the Natchez. And he had known, even as he made it, that it was useless. Gone. He was gone, swallowed up by the wilderness. He had renounced her for her own sake, forcing her to adhere to the choice he thought she had made when she walked out of the Natchez fort. And yet it had been against his will, she would swear it. He had not wanted to leave her, any more than she had wanted him to go.
She had so many regrets. She wished there had been more time for love, for laughter. She wished that she had made him know that she loved him with words and deeds. She wished that she could call back the night they had spent on the trail so that she could draw close to him once more, could take back the moments of scorn and anger. She wished—
Dear God, how she hated lying alone.
She felt so puny, caught in something beyond her control. They were all people, weren’t they? What then did the differences matter? Why could they not all live together without greed and fear, pain and death, and the terrible wrenching of the soul caused by duty and honor? She was French, but she felt bound by invisible cords to tins half-breed Reynaud-Hawk-of-the-Night-Tattooed Serpent. The cords were drawing tighter, strangling her as surely as if he had died and she must follow him into the afterlife. Her throat ached, and her heart, and mind, and body.
He was gone, and it was for nothing.
News came from the French expedition at the Grand Village. The French had been shocked, taken totally by surprise when they had approached the Natchez forts the morning after the capitulation and discovered that the tribe had fled during the night. There were charges leveled against Loubois and his men of incompetence at best and collusion with the Indians at worst. The Natchez had not only vanished; they had taken with them every pot and pail, every scrap of booty taken from the French during the massacre except for the useless cannons and a few rounds of shot. They must have made several trips during the night to remove such heavy pottery and ironware, such a storehouse of goods. That the soldiers and their Choctaw allies should have slept on, unknowing, seemed impossible. It was suggested in whispers that some of the gold taken from the colonists and the paymaster’s stores at Fort Rosalie might have been slipped into the pockets of those guarding the Natchez to persuade them to turn a blind eye to the escape.
As for the captive French women and children, they had indeed become the hostages of the Choctaws. Loubois had naturally refused to pay the ransom demanded at first, but as the plight of the women became more pitiable, he had entered into negotiations. Having no gold or goods with him, he had given the Choctaws time to feel that their demands would be met so that they allowed the prisoners a little more freedom. Loubois had then moved in secret to load the women and children onto the small ship, a half galley, that had brought him and his men upriver, then he had given the order to set sail for New Orleans. The only prisoners left in the hands of the Choctaws had been one man and a number of Africans.
The situation had been dangerous for some moments after the departure of the prisoners was discovered, but finally the Choctaws had accepted promises of payment and left in a dignified dudgeon. The French soldiers under Loubois had set themselves to the task of burning the forts of the Natchez and rebuilding Fort Rosalie on the bluff above the river.
The same source that brought the news of what had taken place after Elise and the others had gone also gave a thorough report of the earlier events. From being something of a pariah, Elise found herself a heroine for her part in leading the French women and children into at least partial freedom. The women of the community dropped in to visit, to satisfy what was apparently a long-standing curiosity about her. They asked infinite questions concerning her own experience among the terrible Natchez and stared at her as if expecting that she would be different from them somehow because of what she had been through. None dared ask directly what it had been like to be the woman of a tattooed war chief, albeit one half French, but the question lingered unspoken in the air as they fanned themselves on the porch in the warmth of the evenings.
The spring advanced into summer. It was heard that the children from Fort Rosalie who had been left unclaimed by family or friends, some twenty-four of them, had been taken in by the Ursuline nuns, an order only two years old but already making its presence felt in the colony. The surviving men and women had been given other grants of land closer to New Orleans, though a few had returned to their old lands near the Grand Village despite occasional raids by small Natchez war parties. Elise sometimes thought of going back herself, of starting over on her own lands. They were so far from the fort, however, that it would be dangerous, and, in any case, she could not seem to find the heart for the enterprise.
In June an itinerant priest passed through the Natchitoches country, going to minister to the Caddo. He paused long enough to baptize Little Quail and then to perform a ceremony of marriage between the Indian woman and Pierre Broussard, trader. The service was brief, the celebration not much longer. When it was over, the couple loaded their horses and rode away along the trail into the forest. Little Quail had ridden proudly on her own mount. It was an honor not often accorded to the women of the Adaes and Caddo with whom she and Pierre would trade or to any but the Sun women of the Natchez, but one that she now accepted as her right.
“Do not be sad,” the Indian woman had said to Elise. “We will return soon and often. And we will bring to you what word of Tattooed Serpent we can.”
They did, indeed, bring word, though other news seemed to spread on the air, “to take the wind,” as the Indians phrased it. It was said that Reynaud had joined his brother, the Great Sun, and his mother at their camp on the side of a lake somewhere up the winding reaches of the Black River. They were engaged in building a fort on a bluff above the lake and were planting crops to feed the people. The new location was only fifteen leagues, straight across the Mississippi and over a swamp, from their old village; and not much more than twenty, south and cast through the forest, from the fort at Natchitoches. It might as well have been a thousand for all the good the knowledge did Elise.
The defeat of the tribe had caused a splintering so that while most of the Natchez gave their allegiance to the Great Sun and his war chief, some followed Path Bear, and others had sought sanctuary among the allied tribes, the Yazoo and the Ouachita. The men under Path Bear were the ones responsible for the attacks on the new Fort Rosalie, as well as the ambushes of French military patrols and traders on the rivers in which a number of men had been killed.
On a sweltering day in mid-July, Claudette’s sixth child was born, a girl. Elise was named the godmother. She spent the days that followed tending the baby with anxious care while Claudette alternately laughed at her fascination with the small, red-faced infant and sighed that the baby had delayed her entrance into the world too long to be blessed by the priest.
A trader paddling up the Red River, which lay sluggish and thick with mud in the August drought, brought word that a ship named the Somme had come from France bringing Alexis, Sieur le Perier de Salvert, the brother of the governor, who had been appointed the king’s general in charge of quelling the Indian uprising. This energetic gentleman took a few weeks of rest to recover from the long voyage, then began to gather and outfit an expedition to hunt down the Natchez.
There was a tale, brought perhaps by someone aboard the newly arrived ship, that the Company of the Indies, which had been the most su
ccessful of the many bodies established to colonize Louisiana, was ready to throw up its hands and admit defeat. Their stated reason was the depredations caused by the savages. In truth, the company had been looking for an excuse to be released from its charter for some time due to the lack of profit compared to the enormous expense of the project. It was supposed that the crown would be forced to take over the colony once more, should the rumor be verified.
The weeks and months slipped past. With little appetite, Elise grew thinner. She also became restless, a condition that progressed to an irritable boredom and finally to a desperate need to do something, attain something, to change things in some way. She spent her spare energy while not tending her god daughter studying Jules’ fanning methods and trading methods and sometimes made small suggestions for improvement. In token of her good advice, he made her a gift of a bolt of material, thinking that she would like to stitch herself a dress. Instead, she gave it to Pierre to trade for Indian pottery and baskets of the kind she had found most useful while among the Natchez. These she sold to the women of her acquaintance and with the money bought more goods to be traded.
The activity helped to pass the hours, but did little to stop the restless turning of her mind in its cycle of worry. Moreover, it was so unlike the usual occupation of women that it caused a ripple of censure through the village around the fort. The community was small and insular, rife with petty jealousies, quarrels and feuds. There was nothing a person could do that everyone did not know about immediately; nothing they could say that everyone did not repeat and someone resent. A single woman was an object of close scrutiny, of much discussion and a fair amount of manipulation. It was assumed that, rather than useful work, her greatest need was a husband or at the least a man.
Pascal, swaggering, cap in hand, had come to call on Elise. He had cornered her on the porch, suggesting that she should be well pleased to be asked to walk with him along the river. They would take a bottle of wine, some bread and cheese, and a blanket. It was some time since she had had the attention she needed; she must be ready and he was equally ready to supply it.
He had reached to fondle her breast. Elise had struck him an open-handed blow in the face and sent him away with heated words. Claudette, who had been shamelessly listening from inside the house, had come out carrying her babe to watch his departure and to call out spurious encouragement mixed with laughter. With the knowledge that his dismissal would be common gossip by morning, Pascal had packed his belongings and gone into the Tejas country to trade among the Spanish. He was not heard from again.
He was not the only man who thought Elise must welcome his advances, however. Every day they grew bolder, particularly those who could not understand why she did not leap at their offers of marriage while shouting hosannas to the Virgin. She tried to tell them that she was already married, but they only hooted, accounting the Indian rite she had shared with Reynaud as no more important than their own relationships with their Indian and African slave women. If they were willing to overlook so sordid an episode, why could she not do the same?
It was to escape such badgering, such close watch over every detail of her life, that Elise persuaded Pierre and Little Quail to take her with them as far as Reynaud’s home when next they traveled to the lands of the Caddo. She would visit with Madeleine for a few weeks until Pierre and Little Quail returned; the two of them, she and Reynaud’s cousin, could exchange news and perhaps comfort each other. And in the house where she had discovered a precarious happiness, where Reynaud had worked, eaten, and slept, she might feet closer to him. She would lie for a few nights in the bed where they had lain together and she would dream.
Madeleine had not changed. She was as thin and composed as ever. She welcomed Elise, gave her chocolate and cakes while speaking of trivialities, and showed her to her room to rest. They did not talk of Reynaud until the second day after Pierre and Little Quail had gone.
They were sitting on the loggia, enjoying the cool of the evening as the sun settled slowly behind the dark line of the trees behind the house. They waved palmetto fans and kept their feet under their skirts to prevent the mosquitoes that were beginning to gather from getting at their ankles. At their elbows were glasses of mint tea, an aid to digestion, or so Madeleine said, while on the air floated the aroma of baking bread and roasting pork. The smells of the food did not quite cover the strong, yet delicate scent of the small pale brown and white flowers with the look of fungi known as Indian pipes, which came from the surrounding woods.
The air was growing cool as September waned. They looked up at the sound of fluttering wings and saw a flight of passenger pigeons overhead. The sound grew louder and the sky darkened with the bodies of the birds for long moments before they finally passed and it was quiet again.
“Soon it will be fall,” Madeleine remarked.
“Yes. Nearly a year.” There was no need to elaborate; they both knew that Elise could mean nothing except nearly a year since the massacre.
“I haven’t told you how much I felt for your hardships during the siege. It cannot have been an easy time.”
Elise’s lips curved in a wan smile. “It wasn’t, of course, and yet I would change nothing.”
Madeleine nodded. After a moment, she said, “You are a different woman from what you were when your first came here.”
“If I am, it’s because of Reynaud — Oh, Madeleine, I’m so afraid for him!”
“As am I. There is no point, for he is a law unto himself, and yet—”
“Yes.” Elise was silent for long moments, waiting for the other women to go on. When she did not, she said, “I have been fearful about what might happen to you if he is caught. Will they not confiscate his property as a traitor?”
“If you mean this house and land, no, chère, though it is kind of you to be concerned. This property was placed in my name as a safeguard against such an eventuality some years ago since the laws are liable to change concerning the property rights of those of mixed French and Indian blood. As a spinster and a native-born Frenchwoman, there is not one who can challenge my ownership. Naturally I hold it only for Reynaud, as it is his birthright.”
“His birthright? I understood it was a gift from his father.”
“A legacy rather.”
“But as an illegitimate son, surely he had no birthright?”
“Who said he was illegitimate, pray?” Madeleine demanded, coming stiffly upright.
“Why, I assumed, as he is the son of Tattooed Arm—”
“You assumed that his parents were not married except, perhaps, in the Indian manner? I assure you, Tattooed Arm was baptized as a Christian and the union between Reynaud’s father and herself was solemnized with all possible pomp by a priest, who duly recorded it. This Natchez woman was my uncle’s first, his only legal wife.”
“Then, the woman in France—”
“Regrettably, she was but a — a concubine to my uncle, though in France she is known as his widow.”
Elise stared at her for long moments. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Not at all, though I will admit that I am surprised Reynaud should not have told you.”
“We touched on it briefly once, but I think — it may be that he did not care to go into it just then and there was never another opportunity.”
He had deliberately allowed her to think the worst of him in those early days. Why? Did he think she would not believe him or had he feared she would use it against him in some way? There had been Madeleine to consider and his half brothers and sisters in France.
“You are thinking of the title, I expect,” Madeleine said. “Reynaud is, of course, the count, or perhaps the man they call the Great Sun should be so designated; I doubt that Tattooed Arm herself could say with accuracy which is the elder. But it was Reynaud who renounced that title. He had no use for it here, nor did his brother. Neither cared for the estates in France or the position at court that they might have gained. The Great Sun considered himself a k
ing and had power over the life and death of his subjects greater, perhaps, than our own King Louis. What use had he for property or titles? All he requested from the estate was a chased silver musket and a throne chair. Reynaud brought these things to him when he returned to take up these holdings that had been his bequest.”
“And you came with him.”
Madeleine took the comment as an inquiry into her motives. “I was tired of the strain of living as a poor relation, keeping a lie alive, being grateful to a false countess for her condescension knowing full well that she had no right to the title she bore. My disposition is not frivolous, but neither is it contemplative or as self-sacrificing as is necessary for a vocation as a nun. I discovered in myself, in fact, a positive longing for adventure, and here in this new world with Reynaud, I have not been disappointed.”
“You are not lonely here?”
“Never. There are always people coming and going: the guards, the traders, sometimes others visiting between the settlements, both Saint Jean Baptiste, and the Prairie des Canots on the Ouachita River above us.”
“And you have had no trouble here with all the unrest?”
“None to speak of. Oh, there have been a few stragglers, but they were soon sent packing. This house has always enjoyed the protection of Reynaud’s Indian alliance, of course, but more than that it is solid, a fortress once the shutters are closed, and is well protected.”
“I expect it is reassuring to Reynaud to know you are here watching over everything.”
“What else should I do? This is my life.”
“It would not be the same if you were to leave, but do you never think of marriage?”
A barking laugh left the Frenchwoman. “Who would have me at my age?”
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