BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis (3 page)

The old quarter of Blois, a picturesque medieval city high above the Loire, had to be approached by steep flights of stone steps. Above it, on a crest, the magnificent Marchesseau chateau dominated the entire valley. Its grounds were said to be as vast as Paris. The splendidly decorated palace was known all over the province simply as Maison Bellecour. Rich Gobelin tapestries, as well as expensive blue wallpaper, kept out the drafts. The woodwork shined like mirror glass, the porcelain doorknobs gleamed against the carved oak doors, and the Carrara marble was polished enough to satisfy a Medici.

More than one nobleman with a duchy title in Louis XIV’s court coveted the enormous Maison Bellecour and would willingly have married off a son to the provincial marquis’s only child. But it was on Damien that such fortune fell.

From the chateau, Damien could watch the Loire flowing past on its way to the Bay of Biscay and the world of far-flung countries. Rare, though, were the restless nights when he stole to the deep-set casement window and viewed from there the moon-streaked black currents with an indefinable yearning.

Most nights, he found refuge in the arms of
Hélène from the staleness of his days. After his vagabond, baseborn life, his lively, aristocratic, young wife was a gift of new life to him, too good to be true. Sometimes he feared the gods might recant of their generosity, and he worked twice as hard to keep peace both at the chateau and at the silk factories.

The peace was a strained one. Gaston de Marchesseau, a big, blustering man, strove to contain his contempt for the uneducated soldier who was now his son-in-law as he introduced him to the workings of the factories; his wife Claudette, frail but without
Hélène’s handsomeness, did not get along well with her daughter. Where Hélène sparkled, her rustic mother wore a look of disenchantment with the world. Claudette was a dry, duty-bound woman. As for Damien, she refused to acknowledge his presence, never addressing him directly.

Hélène
suffered as well, though it was not so obvious until cousin Claude journeyed down from Fontainebleau to pay the Marchesseau family a visit. Over supper, she avidly questioned the knight about court happenings, laughing with a delight that was rarely heard those days when he would recount with his sly wit the passions and politics at court.

For the occasion, a fine Dutch linen cloth draped the table. A surtout, an exquisite piece of goldsmith’s art, dominated the table with its accommodation of salt,
pepper, spices, and ivory toothpicks. Utensils with white, bone handles had been laid.

“You will agree, will you not,” Claude asked of her, “that Racine’s plays all have the theme that reason is powerless to resist the swirl of passion?”

Did he intimate that his cousin had lost her power of reason in
la belle passion
for a common soldier? Damien, silent, chewed tender
petit pois
and listened with barely suppressed irritation. He was sorely tempted to destroy the effete handsomeness of the knight.

“Ah, but his heroes are men of passion,” she said, laying aside her spoon in her enthusiasm fo
r the discussion. “I prefer Corneille’s men of honor, where there is a sense of society as an ordered world.”

Her father presided from his high-backed leather chair, eating steadily, oblivious to the discussion between his nephew and daughter. Her mother’s mouth was set petulantly, her food barely touched.
Hélène belonged to a world her provincial mother could never understand. In that, her mother and Damien were nearly alike.

Jealousy of Claude simmered in Damien, for witty conversation did not come easily to him and became twisted in his mouth. He was no match for Claude’s eloquence. Still, instinct told him his wife’s cousin could offer no competition in the bedroom. There the love between husband and wife banished the outside threat of reality. After Claude left, Damien returned to the silk factories with a sigh of relief.

That fall brought no message of reprieve from the king; what it did bring was the confirmation of Hélène’s pregnancy. With the birth of a son, Philippe, Damien was at last able to put behind him his yearnings for the military life. When he saw children, most of whom were younger than seven, working at the silk factories’ warp webs and frames and looms, he was thankful that Philippe would not have to live that kind of life, nor the life he himself had led.

He loved watching
Hélène nurse their son, and would sit in the privacy of their bedroom, gaping upon the Madonna-like scene. Once Hélène said to him, “You never talk of your mother.”

“I told you, she died when I was young. I’ve been a soldier all my life.”

“But you never said how she died,” she persisted. “You tell me nothing of your childhood, where you lived in Anjou, what your father did.”

His fingers played with a vibrant swath of ivory-colored hair, twining it behind her shell-like ear. He carefully kept all bitterness from his voice. The past was behind him. “My mother was a prostitute. I don’t know who my father was, don’t even know if du Plessis is my real name. My mother died of the disease of Venus when I was fifteen.”

Somehow, the events of his life he never meant to tell slid past his tongue. “Her death freed me from my role as a thief. At fifteen, I sought out the life of a soldier, which at least promised daily food in my belly. A priest-turned-soldier is the closest I have to a family.”

He didn’t add that until he fell in love with her, he had trusted no one, made no friends. All his life, he had been a loner—and had been desperately lonely. Now he had her; now he had a son; now he had his own family.

“I was sent to the wars in the Netherlands,” he continued in a casual tone, “where I was fortunate enough to distinguish myself with the Normandy Regiment.”

“And since then,
mon petit
, your father’s rise through the ranks has been meteoric,” she said with a tender smile to the babe suckling at her breast. “Straight up to the captain of the Guard in the Black Musketeers, then grand equerry to the king. You see, I tried to find out all I could about the relentless young man who pursued me.”

The infant united both father and grandfather in a common interest, and life eased for Damien at Maison Bellecour. When his towheaded son began to crawl, both Gaston and Damien toasted the occasion. Damien’s mother-in-law carefully removed herself from their presence as
the two men grew pleasantly intoxicated.

He spent longer days at the factories, taking over some of Gaston’s more laborious tasks. His efforts at reforming the labor conditions for the children brought a mild but plaintive scoff from H
élène. “You want to change the world, Damien; I want to live in it.”

Not too long afterward, Claude paid the chateau another visit. Unable to abide the viper-tongued knight, Damien escaped to the chateau’s forest to hunt, returning at sunset. Claude had already retired to the room provided for him, and Damien, putting away his short-barreled arquebus, sought out
Hélène. He found her in their bedroom packing clothing into a trunk. She looked up at him where he stood frozen in the doorway and, unable to meet his accusing gaze, returned to folding her clothes.

“You’re leaving,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Why?” Agony rasped his voice.

At last she straightened, her expression locking with his. In the wavering candlelight, her eyes glistened. “Damien . . . ,” she began in a faint voice, then, more strongly, “Damien, I’m dying by degrees here. Can’t you see it? I miss the excitement of court life, the intrigues, the witty chatter of the salons.”

“The king—”

“He has given me permission to return, if I so desire.”

Her long, lovely fingers fidgeted with a chemise, and he knew there was more. “And I?”

The garment knotted beneath her fingers. Her voice was barely a whisper. “You have been refused.”

“You would leave me?”

At the stark look of incredulity on his lean face, she dropped the chemise and flung herself at him, burying her face against his chest where the quilted jerkin was unlaced. Her tears dampened the wiry hair matted there. “I don’t know . . . I didn’t know . . . that loving could be so horribly difficult.” She drew a deep breath and continued shakily, “I feel so torn, like two different women . . . and I feel so guilty . . . but I don’t know what to do. I feel like the blood is slowly being sucked from my veins by leeches. The chateau is so deadly quiet, so dark, so empty . . . so boring!”

He stroked her hair, staring at nothing over her head. “You were bo
rn here, Hélène, you grew up here. It just takes time to get used to the life here again after court life.”

She drew back her head and looked at him. “Oh, Damien, I’ve always hated it here! When I saw myself in the cheval glass, I knew I was destined to be more than wi
fe and mother in a provincial little town! When I was a child and Claude would tell his tales of the royal court, I knew with absolute certainty I would one day be a part of it.”

He set her from him. “And Philippe,” he blurted coldly. “You would leave him, too?”

“I’m taking him with me.”

“Is that any place for a child?” he demanded, trying to rein in his runaway anger. “Have you learned yet what happens to the boys who are raised there? They become playthings for those jaded fops!” he said, his voice rising in a mixture of fear and rage.

“I know, I know. Don’t you think I love our son and want the best for him? Claude has found a nurse in Chion to look after him. The village is close enough for me to visit often. Every day if I want. Oh, Damien, please don’t look at me like that!”

“You will not give away our son to be raised by a stranger. He is mine also. And he is your parents’ grandchild. I will raise him here at Blois.”

She turned from him, burying her face in her hands, and he knew there was more that she had not told him. “What else are you holding back?” he growled, jerking her around to face him.

Tears streamed down her cheeks. “You are being sent out with the Carignan-Sali
éres regiment to protect the frontier of New France.”

§
CHAPTER THREE §

New France

May 1700

The fort of Ville Marie de Montréal, a rude little settlement, perched on the west bank of the St. Pierre River just beyond the formidable St. Lawrence Rapids. The incredible growth of the fur trade due to the demand for beaver hats had resulted in a corresponding growth in population that had made it impossible to build within the fort walls. So Sieur Damien du Plessis had constructed a well-palisaded frame of two stories out where the rue St. Joseph ended. Once a muddy pasture, now the area was abustle with the trading post and warehouses of du Plessis and his partner.

His house, though larger than others on the oval-shaped island of
Montréal, resembled them in that it had a steep-pitched roof and was whitewashed. The industrious white of the houses was relieved by doorways painted in bright colors. Where other doors were red or blue or even purple, Damien had had his painted yellow—denoting a traitor or a cuckolded husband.

No one dared to ask the taciturn fur merchant what the color stood for. But he had brought no wife with him, nor had he taken a wife from among the women of the straggling colony, as had his fellow Carignan-Sali
ères soldiers, veterans of the Turkish wars who had settled New France like Roman legionnaires.

Not that the settlement’s women weren’t attracted to the man.

At forty-three, while other males his age slouched about with protruding bellies, he carried himself with the severe carriage of the soldier he had once been. He preserved the lean, muscled tone of his body by daily, arduous physical labor, despite the fact he was veritable ruler of a small fiefdom. His dark brown hair was peppered with silver, but his moustache, as well as other hirsute areas of his body, as quite a few women could verify, was still pure brown.

If he wasn’t, therefore, a deceived husband, the alternative of traitor remained. However the colonists had already ruled out that possibility. Du Plessis had served the colony well, first as a valiant officer of the Carignan-Sali
ères and later as a fur merchant, who, two years before, had been appointed governor of the colony by Frontenac, the governor of New France. Du Plessis now carried the title of baron.

Baron. The title and the wealth he had worked hard to acquire meant little to him; the two things that mattered most were both a great distance away. His wife and his son. For them, he had worked like an ant and made something of his life.

From the open shutters of the windows on the second floor of his house, he could view the wharves below Montréal’s sun-drenched slopes. The river ice was just beginning to break up, his cherry trees were swelling with buds, and the elder bushes were barely beginning to show their leaves. His grant had a frontage of ninety arpents and double that in depth. He had managed to purchase the immense grant with his yearly soldier’s pension of a mere two thousand livres because it was located on a dangerous neck of land through which Iroquois warriors passed on their way to and from the Richelieu River. No one else had wanted it.

With
Montréal becoming a great trading center, and since its rapids couldn’t be bypassed by canoes bringing the winter pelts down to market, his mercantile business had profited into a swiftly mounting fortune, enough for him to build the best home for leagues around. Fort and chateau all in one, his house was one of the most important seigneuries of New France. The main bedroom, furnished with imported French furniture, stood empty, waiting. . . .

He turned away from the small window toward his bed. On the goose-down mattress lay the woman who had dedicated her
life to serving the Ursuline nuns.
Mère Marie
. The middle-aged woman regularly wore a habit of her own design, an unrelieved gray, rather than that of the Ursulines since she was not officially of that order. At that moment, Mother Marie wore nothing. Her body was gaunt, lacking the fashionable dimples of the times, because she gave away everything she received at the Hôtel-Dieu, where she served the ill and needy.

Damien found her face a wonderful oval, remarkable for its harmony of line: an aquiline nose, a clearly defined and always smiling mouth, limpid eyes veiled by long, thick lashes. As he moved toward her, she opened herself to the monolith proclaiming his desire. For the past several
years, she had assuaged his insatiable sexual appetite, and he felt a curious sentimentality for the woman. He bent over her, his mouth beginning the erotic love play on breasts that had never known the mouth of an infant.

Later, as he held himself within her, waiting for a renewal of his seed, his thoughts turned with anticipation to the morrow. . . .