BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis (18 page)

The snow melted, but drizzling rain mixed with occasional sleet continued to fall during the following weeks, and Natalie wondered if spring would ever come. The tension in the cabin was stifling. She knew that Nicolas was aware of what had happened the night she had gone to Françoise. How could he not be when François’s shouted banishment of her from his bed had rung in her ears? Even if Nicolas were deaf, François’s coldness toward her ever since was obvious.

How Françoise must hate her; she was a symbol of his impotence. It would be best if she left, if only for his sake. She knew
Nicolas would be relieved. Her presence had disrupted their friendship. As it was, whenever weather permitted, he stayed away during the daylight hours, trapping or hunting with his bow of acacia wood and quiver of reed arrows. With her gone, he would have his bed back and wouldn’t be forced into building a place of his own, come spring.

Spring. Come spring, the chestnut trees would be blossoming in Paris. She yearned for the things she had taken for granted: a night at the opera, a hothouse camellia in winter,
café au lait
, good wine. One day she would go back, one day . . .

Late in February, on a day when the rains had ceased but the sky was left overcast with one last threat of a winter storm, visitors arrived. She stood at the door watching them approach, their red clothing flashing among the dead brown of the trees on the stream’s far side.

“Françoise!” she said. “Visitors!”

He looked up from where he sat, fastening the wooden extension to his leg. Uncertainty played across his handsome face. She knew he wasn’t ready to face anyone. He had only just managed to walk on the stump without wincing when the wood rubbed against flesh not yet fully callused.

When she turned her attention back to the approaching visitors, she saw Nicolas off to her left, loping from the drying racks toward the cabin. “Did you see—” she began.

He cut her off, saying brusquely, “Four of the men wear the uniforms of the Royal Musketeers.”

She blanched. Her fingernails dug into the door’s wood.

“What do you think they could want?” Françoise asked, his high forehead wrinkled. “Do you think they’re investigating St. Denis’s smuggling activities?”

“They want me,” she said tonelessly. A terrible fear grabbed hold of her spine and rattled it. Her gaze darted from Nicolas to Françoise like a moth in a frantic search for a safe place to alight. They would now be rid of her.

Françoise glanced at Nicolas, then switched his gaze back to her. “Why?”

“Tell him later,” Nicolas said. “The soldiers—”

“The furs!” Françoise said. “Hide her beneath the furs.” Stunned by François’s unexpected protective attitude, she could only watch as Nicolas yanked the bearskin from the bed and returned to enfold her in it. Sweeping her up, he strode out of the cabin. Even bundled in the shaggy pelt, she could hear the muffled voices of the soldiers drawing nearer. Moments later, she was dumped on a pile of furs in the lean-to. She wiggled about, easing her body’s cramped position, and he warned, “Be still!” Her concealment pressed down on her as he added more furs atop her. “Nicolas, I can’t breathe!”

“Shut up, and you’ll have enough air.”

She didn’t know how long she could stand it before panic would make her dig her way out of the furs frantically. She tried to think of other things, wondered what had become of Hervé. And Jeanne-Antoinette. Was Madeleine still imprisoned? And still writing pornography?

With the coming of spring, the smelly pelts attracted flies. One found its way down to where she was burrowed and buzzed loudly near her ear. She tried to swat at it, but she couldn’t move her hand up that far. Then she heard voices growing louder and froze.

Above her, the pelts were poked with something, and a high- pitched voice said, “Furs of this quality will provide felt hats for some time to come. His excellency will be pleased to learn that this province is not a total loss.”

“
Helas
!” cursed another man. “My trip was a total loss.”

“I don’t think His Excellency will be too disappointed,” said the first.

“
Eh bien
, I suppose you’re right.”

Their words grew indistinguishable as they moved on. When she didn’t think she could stand the physical constraint another second, the pelts were thrown back and she was rolled from the bearskin. She blinked at the sudden light. Nicolas sat on his heels, studying her.

“They’ve gone?”

“Françoise told them you had not taken to the domestic life of the colony, that you had run off with a Spanish trader.”

“They believed him?”

“Who knows? I think they were tired of looking for you.”

She shifted uneasily under his scrutiny. Behind him, she saw Françoise hobbling toward the shed. She rose and, with shaking hands, brushed the dirt from her skirts and tucked the loose tendrils about her nape under her comb.

Nicolas didn’t relent. “So why would an emissary of the king, accompanied by four musketeers, come all the way from France solely in search of a thief named Angelique la Croix?”

“I, too, am curious,” François said, joining them. His eyes narrowed on her suspiciously. “You’re no mere thief, are you?”

She went absolutely still. Her severe composure fell like a mantle over her. Her head poised on her neck in a way that indicated, as no word could, that the righteousness of her position was beyond dispute. She was finished with lying. “Angelique isn’t my name—it’s Natalie. And I am the Marquis
e de Marchesseau.”

She saw that the name meant nothing to them, as she had expected. That part of her secret, her marriage to Philippe du Plessis, was safe. “The Marchesseau family estates were taken from me by unusual circumstances. A relative, Claude Fabreville, who wanted control, issued a
lettre de cachet
against . . . my family. I was imprisoned and unjustly scarred with the brand of a thief.” Unconsciously, she touched the woolen material between her breasts. “To escape, I signed on as a
fille à la cassette
. That is all there is to tell, all that I wish to tell.”

François looked stunned at her revelation. Nicolas—he never allowed his features to express his thoughts, but she was aware that he knew that was not the whole story. He knew that she was not a virgin, that she had borne a child.

How long would he keep his counsel?

§
CHAPTER FOURTEEN §

Natalie arranged the dried lavender in the basket on the table. Françoise had mentioned that he liked the fragrance. When he had been just a name without a face, it had been easy to enter into her deception. Now, every time she sat across the table from him, she felt such awful guilt. One day, she would have to confront him with the truth of her misdeed.

With a basket of laundry balanced on one hip, she stepped outside. The hated country of exile now looked like a fairyland, a veritable Eden. The peach and plum trees were in bloom, and the April breeze animated the waving patches of delicate white and pink. The ripening grapes glistened in the morning dew like scattered jewels, and new magnolias scented the air. Beyond the corrals Nicolas had built, a tangled, sweet-smelling hedge ran wild in a most amiable way.

She lifted her face to the sun, reveling in its warmth. If she must be an exile from Paris, there could be worse places, she decided. Though this No Man’s Land was supposed to be dangerous, a haven for outlaws and thieves and cutthroats, she had seen only a few bands of Indians, passing single file across the field on their way to the San Antonio Trace. Françoise had re assured her that they were harmless enough, that they were allies of the French.

She certainly couldn’t complain about her life there. After all, she was treated well by her husband. Second husband, she
reminded herself with a twinge of conscience that threatened to ruin her perfect mood. And husband in name only.

She also reminded herself that he could have sent her back with Fabreville’s emissary and soldiers, and hadn’t. She still didn’t know if Françoise believed her. Or, for that matter, if Nicolas did. Of course, one never really knew what Nicolas was thinking. To feel that one knew Nicolas Brissac was only to fool oneself.

Even with him off somewhere in Texas, hunting wild horses, the strain between her and Françoise had not eased; if anything, it had intensified without Nicolas’s calm presence to serve as a buffer. For six weeks now, she and Françoise had skirted each other, avoided looking at one another as they ate at the same table, and made only the most superfluous comments. He became spuriously irritable if she attempted to ease his tasks in any way, preferring to do everything by himself.

Nicolas’s absence was easier on her in a way, for his uncanny perception made it difficult to fool him. Relaxing her masquerade was more difficult around him. She smiled wryly, thinking that sometimes her efforts at pretense only provided him with secret amusement.

She went back to draping the freshly washed clothes over the bushes to dry. She never complained about the hard work, about the way the small of her back ached or about her red, roughened hands. She may have been a
grande dam
e and had been waited on by a multitude of servants, but she had also been branded a felon and had lived through that hell on earth at La Salpêtriére.

Over at the lean-to,
Françoise worked with the furs, packing them for shipment to New Orleans, and from there on to France. The sunlight reflected off his red-brown curls. He raised his head, and his gaze locked with hers before he turned away. He was a truly handsome man, she mused, and when he smiled, he was charming and disarming.

She tried to imagine Philippe’s handsome face—and couldn’t. Perspiration beaded on her brow. Her inability to recall the man she loved frightened her. She dropped the wet gray dress and stood erect, looking around her. The land had the power to make
one forget. The rolling hills and innumerable, log-jammed rivers and misty swamps and limitless trees blotted out the existence of civilizations beyond.

She wouldn’t let it happen to her; she wouldn’t let herself forget Philippe and the beauty of Maison Bellecour and the Paris theaters and . . . Oh, God. God!

Reality was here. Reality was Nicolas’s splendid height. Reality was the thud of François stomping around the house. She covered her face, drawing deep breaths.

“Natalie? Are you all right?”

She looked over to where François sat, watching her. When she nodded, he shrugged indifferently and went back to his work. She knew, though, that he was not indifferent to her. How long before his injured masculine pride goaded him into making her his wife in all ways?

The neighing of mules in harness interrupted her thoughts. Both she and Françoise pivoted toward the sound. A string of seven mules forded the stream one by one, driven by Nicolas, who was mounted on a sturdily muscled Spanish mustang. He rode the prancing animal magnificently, she thought, recalling her father at the head of his troops, easily controlling his nervous mount.

At once, she and François deserted their work. François, waving both arms above his head, hobbled toward the mule train as fast as the artificial leg would permit. Unaccountably shy, she hung back to watch Nicolas dismount and greet his friend.

François slapped Nicolas on the back, and the two men conversed volubly as they strode toward her and the cabin. She waited until they neared and then said, “Welcome back, Nicolas.”

The half-breed’s eyes rapidly searched her face. Had he been hoping to find some sign in her expression that she and François had reconciled their differences? If Nicolas was contemptuous of her for passing herself off as a virgin, what would he think if he knew that she was a married woman twice over?

Despite the seriousness of her deception, she had to smile, and Nicolas smiled back, displaying the perfect white teeth, the only thing physically perfect about him. That wasn’t true, she thought, as she preceded the other two into the cabin. He had a superb physique that the worn buckskins couldn’t hide: tall, lean, with ropy muscles. That realization, something that hadn’t occurred to her in all the time she had spent with him, suffused her pale cheeks with a delicate blush.

While Françoise questioned Nicolas with the first enthusiasm he had demonstrated since the amputation, she warmed the stew over the banked embers, adding a pinch of the pungent, ground sassafras plant to it.

No longer did she recall with longing the pleasure of being waited upon and served instead of doing the menial labor, as she now did. If she could have realized the commonplace experiences she had once taken for granted and now forgotten, she would have been astounded, so easily had she accommodated herself to her environment.

“How did you manage it?” Françoise demanded, exhilaration animating his face and brightening his usually lifeless eyes.

She felt the same way; after six weeks of seeing no one but
Françoise, six long weeks, day following upon day, without variation, Nicolas represented communication with the outside world. He represented excitement and a change of pace.

“I sold the wild horses the Comanches helped me capture to Mexican merchants in San Antonio,” Nicolas explained between bites. “With the profits, after I paid off the Comanches, I bought bars of silver from the Mexican mines, more skins, and, of course, the mules.”

Mexican mines . . . Comanches . . . San Antonio. To her, the names conjured societies, people, civilization. Eagerly, she waited for Nicolas to elaborate on his journey, but he was the master of brevity.

“Tomorrow,
Françoise, we’ll purchase silks and cotton goods from the traders at Natchitoches and resell them either in Nacogdoches or San Antonio.”

Impatience got the best of her. “May I go? May I go with you to Natchitoches tomorrow?”

Both men turned to stare at Natalie.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve talked with another woman,” she explained, feeling as if she had just asked for the moon.