BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis (19 page)

The Great Raft, or logjam, had helped to determine the location of the Natchitoches post, for the logjam extended more than a hundred miles upstream from the spot that became a rendezvous
where the river trade from New Orleans met pack-animal trains from Mexico.

Natchitoches was a frontier outpost of the crudest sort, located at the edge of a boggy forest between the Riviere Rouge and one of its branches that the French had named Petite Riviere a la Bourguignon, sometimes called the Cane River for the thick cane-brakes along its banks. The settlement consisted of storehouses, a stockade, Indian wigwams, and log cabins, where traders lived with their merchandise.

The French soldiers had been sent to Natchitoches to guard that country’s hold upon the Red River, but the stockade could not have withstood any kind of concentrated assault. A mere four walls of six-foot-high stakes, the fort contained two dirt-floored barracks, one of which was rotten and beyond use.

The troops had been guaranteed wages of four hundred and fifty
piastres
yearly, and from that sum each soldier was to provide his own clothing and arms and purchase six horses to help establish a local herd. However, the pay was slow in coming, and a colonial ordinance was passed promising the troops daily rations of stale bread with one pint of wine and a pound of beef or mutton.

Thus, many turned to illegal trade with Spain. The fort’s commandant, Louis Antoine Juchereau de St. Denis, was the most adept at the fine art of smuggling.

Françoise meant to be as adept or more so, with Nicolas’s help.

Natchitoches’s small and motley population included soldiers and ex-soldiers, Indian neophytes, traders, wayward sons of good families whose parents had bought for them positions in the colonies that the youths were not qualified to fill, and a few women— squaws of the Caddo nation, a few wives of the French officers and traders, Saint-Domingue slaves, and, lastly, some of the women evicted from Paris.

At the river’s confluence with the wooded Bayou Amulee, he and Nicolas wandered among these people, with Natalie between them. Françoise felt a particular pride for his beautiful wife; Nicolas would have called it his Gascony boasting.

For the visit to the busy shipping port, Natalie had worn her freshly washed gray smock, and her summer-child hair glistened in its crown of braids. So absorbed was she in the provincial spectacle that Françoise was certain that she was unaware of the men and women who stopped to stare, to watch his bride moving majestically among them.

The three of them wandered amidst the trains of pack mules and horses, some of which numbered a hundred or more. Nicolas paused to talk with a muleteer, whose animals were tied to trees along the bayou banks, and he and Natalie strolled on. The little post was a riot of color and gaiety. After months of isolation, the sights and sounds and smells—trilling feminine laughter, the odor of roasting chicory coffee, luxurious silks of royal purple, French wines—François was ready to take his place in the world again.

A mild fracas was in progress between French and African boatmen on one side of the bayou and Spanish and Mexican teamsters on the other, and fractured French expletives rent the festive air.

François noted that his wife was paying little heed, for her attention seemed distracted. “What are you looking for?” he asked. “A length of silk, a lace mantilla?”

She shook her head. “No, I was looking for a familiar face, one of the girls who had shipped over with me as a convict.”

“Shhh!” he warned.

She looked at him oddly, and he explained, “No one need ever know you were in a prison.”

Disappointment—in not finding her friend?—deepened the pale green of her eyes, but she said nothing.
Merde
! She was so much like Nicolas, so cool, so self-contained. He never knew what she was thinking. Disgust at his inability to bed his own wife seeped through his veins, spoiling the rest of the afternoon for him. When Nicolas suggested they pay a visit to the commandant, he was more than ready.

On the western side of the river, to the south of the fort, Commandant St. Denis had built his home on high ground. To the east, across the river, lay the spreading lowlands and swamps of the Red River valley, reaching to the horizon; land matted with cane and reed and willow and webbed by unending bayous and lakes. Towering over all were mammoth cypresses looming majestically from sun-dappled, knee-studded waters.

To the west, toward Texas, were pine hills and streams in
endless variety. Nicolas preferred the rolling hill country, where a man could ride a horse among the trees without bogging or tangling; where flowers, berries, and grapes glowed in the sun; and where streams ran with a merry babble instead of creeping along snakily like the bayous.

St. Denis’s house had been built of
briquette entre poteaux
, or brick between posts, and was whitewashed inside and out. Candles set in glass chandeliers swung from crudely fashioned rafters, but the rough board floors were carpeted with fine furs edged so closely together that no boards could be seen.

Madame St. Denis greeted them. Dressed in the style of the French court, Emanuella Sanche de Navarro de St. Denis was a charming member of an old, distinguished Spanish family. There was a mother-of-pearl glow to her complexion.

She stood on tiptoe to kiss Nicolas on the cheek with easy informality, saying, “St. Denis is in his vineyards, but I’ve sent Jasmine to fetch him.”

Tired from so much walking, Françoise sat next to Natalie on the damasked sofa. Nicolas lounged against a wall—or seemed to. Instinctively, he preferred to remove himself from a group, moving off to one side to assess any situation first.

He relaxed his covert vigilance of his partner. He had detected a certain furtiveness in François’s eyes as if the man were checking to see if anyone was staring at him.

“Françoise,” Dona Emanuella said, coming to tap her fan on his shoulder, “I have only just heard of your accident.”

Nicolas liked Dona Emanuella. The two or three times he had been in her convivial presence, he had felt none of the paralyzing power of feeling that François’s bride inspired in him.

Dona Emanuella rattled on, and the lines of tension that curved downward with the dip of François’s luxuriant moustache eased somewhat under her charming discourse. Although young—in her twenties still—she was a motherly soul with a penchant for conversation. Wisely, rather than to avoid the obvious, she acknowledged his infirmity as a fact of life and nothing more.

“You are a naughty boy for keeping it a secret and depriving us ladies the privilege of nursing you back to health. Although it’s obvious your bride has done a magnificent job. You’re more irresistible than ever now with the marks of noble suffering etched on your handsome brow. Every female will swear you lost your leg this winter wrestling with an alligator or fighting off Indians or perhaps attacking pirates off the Gulf coast.”

Abruptly, the Spanish lady switched her attention to Natalie. “Ah, Madame de Gautier, I hate you already.”

Natalie looked startled.

“Not only are you a woman of compelling beauty, but you have captured our settlement’s most eligible bachelor. But I am relieved to have another female to grace our largely male-populated settlement.”

Natalie smiled. “Thank you,
madame
.”

“I know how you must feel,” Emanuella said, “so far from your home, but do not despair. In time, Natchitoches will seem more your home than France ever was, especially since your husband is here.”

Nicolas doubted if anyone but himself noted how Natalie tensed at the mention of her husband. He watched her more closely as Emanuella talked gaily on.

“I was but a young girl at San Juan Bautista when my husband arrived to trade with our outpost on the Rio Grande. But outpost though it was, there were still fresh, crisp linens to sleep between; silver to drink from; delicious, highly seasoned food cooked by skilled, patient women; leisurely, clever conversations with men of state and polite small talk with women of breeding.

“When my husband brought me here, there was only the fort. Much has changed since then. Each year brings new settlers and more trade. Give yourself time and you won’t find it nearly so desolate here.”

“Meeting you has already made Natchitoches less desolate,” Natalie said graciously.

“You omitted the romantic part,” François told Emanuella, relaxing visibly in her easy company. “About how your grandfather had St. Denis taken prisoner and sent to Mexico City. And how you pestered your grandfather and pleaded for St. Denis’s release, until he consented to not only his release but also your wedding.”

Emanuella dimpled. “Now, how did you know that,
señor
?”

Françoise
winked, and he was once again the roguish gallant. “The people of Natchitoches gossip, Madame St. Denis.”

At that moment, Emanuella’s maidservant entered with a silver tray bearing goblets. No more than fifteen, her skin was as black
as Nicolas’s eyes, her hair short and kinky. There was something in her bearing that reminded Nicolas of Natalie—a regal, aloof, and graceful glide that proclaimed that Jasmine could have been a Senegalese princess before she was enslaved.

“Jasmine,” Emanuella said, “tell Joseph to set the table for three more guests.”

Natalie protested, but Emanuella insisted, decrying the long damp, rainy winter that had prevented such pleasurable socializing.

From behind lowered lashes, Nicolas studied Jasmine as she served Françoise first. Nicolas wondered if his instinct could be wrong in sensing some kind of unspoken beseechment on the part of
la negresse
? When the girl paused before him, he scanned her closed countenance. Her molasses-colored eyes, fringed with thick lashes, watched him warily as if warned by her own primitive instinct.

“Nicolas, Françoise,” St. Denis said from the doorway, “what a pleasure.”

Twenty-five years Emanuella’s senior, the forty-seven-year-old St. Denis looked much younger. Tall, with a bearing of cool, silent dignity, he wore a gaudy vest, cut from the finest velvet, in brilliant blue and green and a yellow taffeta waistcoat with silver braid piping. All those above breeches of bright scarlet. Even in the wilderness, the commandant wore an elaborately coiffed curly wig.

Nicolas did not make the mistake of judging the man as merely a vain peacock. They both had in common their Canadian birth. A man born in the silent Canadian woods had a natural bond with the Indians, who considered the frugal use of words a fundamental virtue. St. Denis also knew that the Indians were more impressed by stately bearing and a bright cloak than by diplomatic phrases. More than once, he had expressed to Nicolas that the man who controlled the Indians controlled the wilderness.

The commonality of their Canadian birth ended there, for Nicolas was a natural son, a bastard, while Louis Antoine Juchereau was the son of a noble Frenchman.

St. Denis now bowed before Natalie, who responded with a deep curtsy that obviously took him by surprise. He glanced at Françoise with approval. “You’ve been to court, Madame de Gautier?”

"
Oui
, monsieur,” Natalie said. Once again, Nicolas detected that guarded look in her eyes. Had she told the truth about a relative imprisoning her? Or had she been a mistress to someone who for some reason had taken revenge? A prince of the blood, mayhap? Whomever, the man had to be highly influential to instigate a search that reached clear to the backwaters of the Louisiana colony.

“Françoise,” St. Denis said, “let me offer you my congratulations. You have made an excellent choice.”

“It would seem I have,” François said with a disarming smile, but Nicolas didn’t miss the agonized look of yearning, quickly veiled by his friend’s lowered eyelids.

Dinner turned out to be an elaborate affair with capon and a meat pie with truffles and a crust so flaky it melted like the first prismatic flakes of snow, followed by a sponge cake spread with raspberry jam. The food was too rich for Nicolas’s taste but he ate a little of everything while listening to the rapid flow of conversation—and watching, always watching.

Natalie sat opposite him, beside François, and St. Denis and Emanuella sat at either end. It was Natalie who attracted his gaze. Stimulated by the company, and perhaps by a little wine, her eyes—her whole face—glowed with animation. She was in her element. And just what was that element? he wondered not for the first time.

“Nicolas,” Dona Emanuella said with teasing eyes, “now that
François has taken himself a bride, you must be thinking of doing likewise. Surely you found yourself a sultry Spanish beauty to woo in San Antonio?”

Recalling Carmencita, the lust
y young wife of an aging hacendado, Nicolas said only, “None who compared to your ravishing beauty, Madame St. Denis.”

She trilled a pleased laugh but said, “With your fierce chieftain’s visage and eloquent tongue, I do
n’t think you will have any problem when you do settle on one.”

François
lifted his cut-glass goblet and twirled the stem between his fingers. “An excellently light and delicate wine, St. Denis. Spanish?”

St. Denis raised his own glass. “
Oui
, my friend. Xeres from Cadiz, in southern Spain. Acquired through our trade with Mexico.”

“Without official government sanction,” Nicolas added with a sardonic grin.

“You’ve started your own trading expedition, I’ve noticed— without official government sanction,” St. Denis retorted amiably, and raised his glass of sherry. “A toast. To your new enterprise—Louisiana Imports-Exports, isn’t it? May it prosper!”

Joseph, hovering discreetly, his handsome face bland, refilled the glasses. This time, St. Denis said, “And now another toast. To our new king, long may he live.”

“New king?” François asked, and was echoed by the others. “That’s right. I heard the news only an hour ago when a boat arrived from New Orleans. Louis the Fifteenth has been king for several months now.”

Natalie’s hand flew to her mouth. The others were chattering with excitement about the news, what difference it would make politically and what consequences it would have on the affairs of Louisiana, so only Nicolas caught the
elated relief that blazed in her eyes.

“Still, I doubt that we’ll see any change in colonial policy,” St. Denis drawled. “The Duc d’Orleans may no longer be regent, but Louis has appointed him as minister of the government, so the duc still holds in his hands the reins of power for who knows how long—perhaps as long as a half century, as Crozat did.”

Natalie shot to her feet. Her wineglass dropped to the floor and shattered. Behind her, the chair toppled. “No!” she screamed. “No!”

Then she fainted. François barely caught her before she could hit the overturned chair behind her. He eased her onto the fur rug. Immediately, Emanuella bent over Natalie and began patting her bloodless face with a wine-dampened napkin.

“What is it?” François asked, looking at the other woman for some source of guidance. “Will she be all right?”

“François, my dear,” she said calmly, “I’m sure it is nothing more serious than the usual. Your bride is probably
enceinte
.”