BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis (23 page)

§
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN §

Across the bayous and through dense forests, the pack train traveled. Hummingbirds sparkled among the honeysuckle. Serpents tattooed by nature slithered through the flowers. The scents of summer exuded from the profusion of wild roses and azaleas. Crepe myrtle was bejeweled with its pink pastel bouquets, and acacias waved feathery green and gold leaves.

In some places, the juice of wild strawberries reddened the legs of the horses up to their knees and crimsoned the hem of Natalie’s apple green broadcloth riding habit, brought upriver from New Orleans. François had insisted on buying it, “to go with your eyes.”

The land seemed too intoxicating for her. Or perhaps it was being so close to Nicolas. Sleeping on the ground with only a few feet separating them . . . Touching his fingers when he passed her the fish or game he had prepared . . . Watching the play of the firelight on his splendidly barbaric features. It was almost like that first journey she had made with him—except that this time François accompanied them. Armed with a French fowling piece, he brought up the rear of the train, with her between him and Nicolas, who was riding scout.

She was fortunate even to be going. François had wanted to make the trip, and she suspected the only reason Nicolas had agreed was because of the poisoning incident several weeks earlier. Perhaps, he felt, as she did, that if Jasmine had indeed been responsible, time and distance might ease the girl’s bitterly jealous hatred.

As the pack train drew closer to its destination, Natalie grew more impatient. The Natchez Trace Nicolas had spoken of started at Fort Rosalie, and she was anxious to learn of Jeanne-Antoinette’s fate.

Fort Rosalie crowned a two-hundred-foot bluff. Its early settlers had chosen the spot as the river’s finest for a permanent settlement: healthful, exposed to a gentle breeze, and well above the murky swamps of its vicinity. Next to it
was the concession of St. Catherine, patron saint of wheelwrights and mechanics, some of whom had been among those early settlers.

All of Fort Rosalie turned out for the pack train’s arrival, and among the soldiers and civilian
s who crowded outside the stockade’s open gates was a face she would have recognized anywhere. Those sloping eyes widened in disbelief at the sight of her.

“Hervé!” she called, and pulled up on her reins to wave a gloved hand.

At that same moment, a girl pushed past the soldier and two blanketed Indians in front of her and shouted, “Angelique!” She grabbed the stirrup latigos. “I can’t believe it’s you!”

“Jeanne-Antoinette! I’m so relieved! You’re all right!”

The dark-eyed girl blushed. “I’m a married woman,” she said, a little proudly. She nodded over her shoulder at the blond Atlas, who strode up behind her.

A droll smile lightened Hervé’s
face. “I did as you asked, Marquise, and—”

Natalie saw Nicolas haul up on his prancing mount and wheel it back to join her. “Please,” she said, “my name is Natalie. Natalie de Gautier.” Then, in an easier tone, “I’m here with my husband and his partner.”

By the time Nicolas and François joined her, Hervé was bidding the three of them to stay with him and Jeanne-Antoinette while they were there at Fort Rosalie.

She introduced
François and Nicolas, explaining to them, “Hervé and Jeanne-Antoinette were passengers with me on the ship that brought us to Louisiana.”

She knew what François was wondering: first, how the young girl came to be a wife and, second, if the couple had been criminals. As for the inscrutable Nicolas, one never knew what he was thinking.

Hervé, who was apprenticed as a carpenter at the fort, had constructed a two-room French cottage that was admirably suited to the tropical climate. Single-story, it was built
poteaux enterre
, raised a few feet above the ground on piers. His high-pitched, thatched roof was modeled after those found in the West Indies. That night, the five of them sat drinking chicory coffee, with an excited Jeanne-Antoinette doing most of the talking.

Watching the thirteen-year-old wrinkle her nose in an adorable little gesture or toy with one of her fat braids, it was difficult for Natalie to realize that Jeanne-Antoinette was married, and to that brigand Hervé. Even so, the couple exchanged the intimate glances of lovers, the stolen glances that Natalie had once shared with Philippe, the kind she would never know with Nicolas.

Not if she valued the salvation of her soul.

She tried to shake off her melancholy and fastened her attention on the conversation. “I don’t understand,” Hervé said to François, his brow furrowed with a bloodhound’s multiplicity of wrinkles. Marriage had added a maturity to his demeanor. It was obvious to Natalie that he had the respect of François and Nicolas, which didn’t come lightly. “Why go all the way to the other end of the Natchez Trace to trade with the British colonies? Why not establish another trading post and warehouse right here?”

François fingered his moustache. “I suppose there’s enough traffic to warrant it.”

“Would you be interested in running the place?” Nicolas asked, one of the few times he had spoken that evening. Always, those narrowed jet eyes watched and evaluated. She longed to untie the leather thong that he used to catch back his hair, which had grown long again. The queue, however, did civilize the ferocious power of his features.

Hervé looked startled. “I don’t know . . . I’m not sure I know how to do—”

“Of course you do,” Natalie said. “You smuggled salt when to do so was unacceptable in France. You could sell smuggled goods when to do so is acceptable, in Louisiana.”

“As a minor partner, you would receive a percentage of the profit,” François said expansively.

From under sloping brows, Hervé glanced at his wife. She nodded enthusiastically, her braids bouncing against her little breasts.

It took four days to arrange the complex details needed to establish a subsidiary post of the Louisiana Import-Export Company of Natchitoches. On the final night before their return trip, the deal was consummated with several toasts of taffia, a crude rum made from the fermented juice of sugarcane. As usual, Nicolas abstained from drinking.

Apparently, Hervé and Jeanne-Antoinette did their own celebrating later that night in the bedroom, for Natalie, stretched on a pallet in the kitchen-main room, overheard the soft cooing and pleasurable growls of the girl and Hervé.

Natalie lay close to François, but in the confined area she had only to roll over and stretch her arm to touch Nicolas. How could she explain it, that just being near him made her blood swirl and eddy through her arteries so that she was alternately exuberant and weak-kneed—she, who had been so cool, of such even temperament, always composed? This primitive land did strange things to its inhabitants. It was like the lunacy that seemed to possess some people in the full of the moon, except this was always and everlasting.

Monsieur le Sauvage
.

Her name for him was a sigh on her lips. At once, she stiffened, afraid that his acute hearing might have detected that sigh, but she could hear only his steady, even breathing of sleep and François’s gentle snoring. Unable to withstand the intimacy of lying so close to Nicolas, of yearning to be held possessively against that lean and so decisively muscled frame, she quietly rose from her pallet.

Outside, the moon drenched the exotic landscape and the sultry summer night drew forth the intoxicating fragrances of wild roses and cape jasmine, her favorite flower. But here no orangerie was needed to enjoy its languorously sweet scent. The entire terrain was a hothouse.

Picking her way carefully down a shrubbery-strewn, rolling incline, she reached her destination, the cape jasmine clump. Its white flowers beckoned in the moonlight, and she leaned close to inhale their fragrance.

“You’re not running away again, are you?”

She spun around, at the same time stifling an inadvertent scream. Nicolas stood behind her, clad only in his buckskin breeches. The moon silvered the high, prominent bones of his cheeks. “No.” She swallowed and said huskily, “I was restless . . . couldn’t sleep.”

His heavy-lidded look seemed to linger on her lips as she spoke, and when his eyes raised to meet hers, she felt a great spasm of wanting ripple through her. “Neither could I.”

She could think of absolutely nothing to say. He was so close. Too close.

He reached around her, his arm brushing her shoulder and plucked a flower. With his mahogany skin, he could have been descended from the night. “They are wasted on the bush,” he said, and tucked it in her hair behind her right ear.

She closed her eyes, quivering uncontrollably at his touch, at the flower’s intoxicating scent. “Nicolas . . .” she breathed. Her eyes opened, her gaze locking with his dark, passionate one. Something hot and elemental passed between them.

“Nicolas . . .” This time it was almost a sob. “This mustn’t happen!”

A muscle along his jaw flickered. Then his hands closed over her shoulders, and he drew her against him to bend his head over hers. His mouth marauded her trembling lips, crushing them, as his hands, cupping her head, crushed the flower, releasing its aphrodisiacal fragrance.

Hungrily, she returned his kiss, not caring that his mouth bruised hers. She pressed her breasts and loins against the length of his lean muscles, needing urgently to feel a oneness with him.

With a shudder, like a great beast in fever, he
set her gently from him. His dark eyes, glazed by a mixture of barely repressed passion and self-disgust, stared down at her. “
Mon Dieu
, you’re married to my friend, my partner!”

A despairing gasp struggled up past her throat. Her deception was hurting so many innocent people. She shook off his hands. Tears welled in his eyes. Her clefted chin was inclined staunchly. “Then we must do everything we can,” she said in an almost inaudible voice, “to make certain this doesn’t happen again.”

His eyes held a wintry gleam, and his lips twisted in a contemptuous curl. “Do you really think it won’t? I don’t think you’re that naive, Natalie.”

§
CHAPTER NINETEEN §

Jasmine left the mass before the commencement of the Spanish
curé's
tedious and disagreeable sermon, delivered for two to three hours on end in atrociously mispronounced French idioms.

Once a month, since the summer before last—since delivering the last rites to Natalie de Gautier, the reverend father had been coming to Natchitoches to the military post where a large room had been fitted as a chapel. The good priest had two faces. While he preached against avarice, he also indulged in it. No longer did he affix to the church door the customary tax on burials, thereby concealing what he charged.

That the young Capucin priest was determined to obtain the salvation of her soul surprised her, for his blazing eyes glared at her with what she could only think of as utter hate instead of the compassion and fatherly love of a priest for his children.

Jasmine was only one generation removed from African civilization, where her parents had been herded onto a slave ship. Christianity had been forced upon her parents, then on her brother and herself, by the masters who had owned them. Though she fulfilled the duty required by St. Denis of attendance at the Christian Mass, she still clung tenaciously to the man she loved in defiance of Father Hidalgo and his Christian precepts.

Father Hidalgo preached of salvation and a glorious life to come. Jasmine simply yearned for the glory of her freedom—and François de Gautier. After almost a year of giving herself freely to the sophisticated French gentleman, she had finally convinced him to persuade her owners to hire her out—or “lease” her to him. In payment for her “services,” François had promised St. Denis to provide her room and board.

François had paid to have built a little house of
bousillage
, which she had designed. It bore a striking resemblance to a mushroom, with its bottom floor of massive slave-made bricks and the hip roof of cypress shingles with a twelve-foot overhang. Verdant Spanish daggers flanked the doorway. She called it her African House.

Natchitoches settlers looked upon it, separated from the other dwellings, as something mysterious, something hoary with age, though it was only recently constructed.

The bitter October winds buffeted her as her long strides took her with feverish anticipation to the little African house where François was waiting. Her public concubinage scandalized the good priest and some of Natchitoches’s more upright citizens. Even if François had not had a wife, a beautiful wife, Jasmine would never have been permitted to marry him. The law forbade either a Christian or an African marriage between the black and white races, referred to as a “natural” marriage.

Jasmine had other plans this time. On this particular day, she meant to implement them.

She closed the door behind her and leaned against it. François lay on the sleigh bed waiting for her. She wondered that he never noticed the image of the devil that was engrained in the rosewood head and footboards.

“Take off your clothes, Jasmine,” he said, and swilled another drink from the bottle beside the bed. He was naked to the waist, and he wasn’t wearing his peruke.

Her head held proudly, she crossed the nearly bare room to stand before him. Slowly, her fingers worked at the bodice laces of the black broadcloth, her Sunday dress. She wore no undergarments, and the dress slithered down her long, supple thighs to reveal the glossy, ebony body. As she knelt by the edge of the bed, her elongated breasts swayed low against her rib cage. Hungrily, like a child, François took one into his mouth.

While he suckled, she began to unbutton his breeches, seductively running her slender fingers along the muscled stomach and lower to the kinky, dark thatch. Her fingers wrapped around him, and he groaned. But she wasn’t about to pleasure him yet. First, she would tease and tantalize him until he was out of his mind with wanting her.

“Wait,
chérie
,” she told him, gently withdrawing her nipple from his mouth. Her tongue traced the veined length of thick flesh, even as her hands worked his pants gingerly over the mangled leg. Sometimes François’s attitude infuriated her. He felt no embarrassment at her seeing or touching the unsightly stump, yet he wouldn’t allow his wife to do so. His wife was a grand lady, while she—while she had François all to herself, she thought with a thin half smile.

Natalie was a fool to give up her husband so easily. Perhaps the close brush with death had put fear into the heart of the aristocratic Frenchwoman. The half-breed had saved Natalie de Gautier, but Jasmine was too smart to attempt the same thing twice. She wanted her freedom—and François—not the French whipping horse. There were other ways to get what she wanted.

François’s breeches joined her dress on the stone floor. She slid up over him, slowly, sinuously. Her tongue flicked out to taste his salty flesh. His hands cupped her head and drew her down onto him. “Jasmine, you’re a viper,” he rasped. “You would entwine yourself about me until you crush the very life from me.”

Her lips deserted his tubular flesh, and she stared up into the passion-wracked face. “No,
chéri
, I want you to put life into me. Now.” She sat up and, fitting herself onto him, began to rotate her hips, tightening vaginal muscles that possessed the strength of youth. She had been a virgin when François first bedded her.

Afterward, she lay beside him. His skin, the same shade as her palms and soles, glistened with the sweat of their lovemaking. His eyes were closed, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. Her finger played with one end of his neatly clipped moustache. He might get drunk some nights when he was with her and use the vile language of a sailor off a slaver, he might vomit all over himself the next morning, but in public he was always the immaculately dressed, well-bred Frenchman.