BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis (4 page)

Seated in the prow of the forty-foot birchbark canoe, Damien pushed away from the
Montréal wharves. Behind him, thirty two men paddled four more of his gaily painted canoes, all packed with supplies. The muscles of his arms and shoulders flexed as he flung his red-bladed paddle from side to side. It felt good to be battling with nature again.
Par Dieu
, it felt good just to be leaving Montréal!

True, the life of New France’
s seigneurial class and better-established merchants was similar to the opulence of the leisure classes in France. Shipments from France were no longer made up of sheer necessities.

Yet with the opulence came French governmental restrictions, a royal assertion of authority that had been missing when Damien had first arrived fifteen years earlier.

The lucrative fur trade was enticing men from their farms and from their duty to raise large families, the realistic activities that ensured a conquest of the new land. Habitants were now forbidden to move into town on pain of being fined fifty livres and having all goods and chattels confiscated.

It was also illegal for townspeople to rent houses or rooms to
tenants from the country. A farmer could not own more than two horses and a foal because cattle and sheep were more important. No one could trade in foreign goods. Anything purchased abroad, except from France, was seized and publicly burned.

Only books of a devout nature were permitted, and public profanity incurred punishment that could bring about the cutting out of one’s tongue. Rouge was immoral and forbidden to be sold to colonists, but somehow the wily females of Isle Royale found their own sources.

Le Grand Louis
had ordered bakers to make dark brown bread, though no one wanted it, because the king believed the bread to be doubly nutritious. Damien knew from experience that Louis never ate anything but white bread. But bake brown bread the bakers must.

Worst of all, no one could return to France without royal leave, and the king rarely gave such permission. To what would he have returned, anyway? Damien asked himself. He rationalized, not for the first time, that the mo
notony of domesticity would suffocate him.

He allowed himself the satisfaction of a magnificent string of profanities, which made him feel almost cheerful, then he devoted all his attention to paddling.

The Summer Rendezvous was one of the few pleasures he allowed himself, though the annual one-thousand-mile journey was a rigorous one. The extreme physical exertion it required made him too tired to think, and for several months each year, he was completely free of bitterness.

The rhythmic singing and shouting of his voyageurs halted as they neared the first of many
rapids. With quiet, cold concentration, Damien applied himself to the task of running the dangerous white water. The other canoes followed single file. As the guide of the canoe brigade, he plunged his craft into the foaming torrents. Icy water sprayed the paddlers. The canoe lurched and reared and plummeted like a wild horse through the tumultuous water.

In each boat, the middle m
an paddled furiously in order to hold a steady course, and the bowman and steersman in the stern flung their long paddles from side to side, shoving the craft away from menacing rocks and aiming it through the narrow chutes.

Clear of the rapids, the m
en broke into song again, this time the bawdy
Rossignolet Sauvage
. Each song, whether sacred or profane, ended with a piercing Indian yell.

That night, as the rest would be, was spent on the water with the canoes lashed together. During the next six weeks, Damien and his voyageurs traveled up the Ottawa River, down the French River into the
Mer Douce
, or Freshwater Sea, which the English called Georgian Bay. From there they traveled up the north channel of Lake Huron, then portaged across Sault Ste. Marie into Lake Superior.

On its shore each summer, Damien met with his par
tner at the village of Grand Portage. The old man would have spent the winter trading for furs and, come May, traveled south to Grand Portage with packs of pelts. They conferred and celebrated for a month, then exchanged cargoes and returned to their bases before the watery highways froze solid again.

As the birchbark flotillas entered Lake Superior, the paddling stopped momentarily so that the
Montréalers could exchange their homespuns for blue jackets, red-tasseled caps, and gaudy sashes.

Other canoe brigades, also headed for Grand Portage, dotted the lake. The rival voyageurs of Quebec were distinct in their red coats, as opposed to the blue ones from
Montréal.

Damien kept on his long-skirted blue coat with its turned-up cuffs and immense side pockets. His one concession to adornment was the scarlet worsted scarf tied about the coat’s waist. Ten years before, he had put away his soldier’s heavy armor, soiled doublet, highly polished breastplate, and casque with its frayed white plume to become a member of the mercantile class. Now he would dress no other way.

The post of Grand Portage spread out in a natural amphitheater of rocky hills surrounded by a palisade fifteen feet high, reinforced with bastions and a heavy gate. As the canoes neared shore, the men’s excitement became tangible. A week-long celebration of drink and cards and orgies was just ahead.

Inside the stockade were a dozen buildings: the Great Trading Hall, where both dining and business meetings took place, was surrounded by living quarters, shops, warehouses, and a stone powder magazine. One of the shops was the
cantine salope
, a harlots’ tavern, and it was there the voyageurs headed to blow their pay on liquor and on the large local complement of Indian and half-breed girls. Later, Damien would have to haul his men out of the jail, which the men called
pot au buerre
, butter tub.

On shore, Damien’s destination was neither the
cantine salope
nor the butter tub but a log cabin that served as his living quarters while he was at Grand Portage. Smoke whorling from the clay chimney told him his old comrade in arms cum-partner, Jean- Baptiste Brissac, was waiting.

When Damien threw open the door, he found his par
tner kneeling before the hearth helping himself to stew from the great black kettle. The little man in stained buckskins had received the abbe’s tonsure when he was nine and, after entering a Jesuit novitiate at seventeen, had renounced the calling at twenty-five. He was the only soul in the New World who knew everything about Damien, the only man Damien trusted. The two flung themselves at each other for a great bear hug.

“
Par Dieu
, if you don’t get scrawnier every time I see you,” Damien said, and stepped back to look at the lean ascetic. His partner’s frailness of physique had never been a handicap, for Damien had realized long before that men who lacked robust health often survived the strains and privations of the wilds better than those of rugged frame and greater strength.

“
Sacre bleu
, if you don’t look more like Lucifer every day!” Jean-Baptiste exclaimed, pounding the taller, bigger man’s shoulders. “It’s that wicked moustache. You must give up your wild life,
mon ami
, and settled down and marry.”

“I am already married,” Damien said drily, stepping back.

“Ahh, yes,” Jean-Baptiste murmured, tugging at his straggly grizzled beard with embarrassment. “So I forget. Then let us talk of other things. Come sit at the table while I pour us a tumbler of nectar, the best rotgut in Grand Portage. I have good news— six hundred of the most luxurious beaver skins ever taken out of the northwest country. And not just beaver. We’ve marten, fisher, lynx, fox, and mink! The plews are already at the warehouse waiting to be loaded.”

Damien sat back, loosened his coat, and studied his venerable friend, who continued to chatter on. The little man had a nose that was too long for his narrow face, but something benign shone in gray eyes that sloped from the weight of deep wrinkles. “A
rich lode this time, Damien! With Paris—all Europe—raging over furred
balles
and busks and puffs . . . Why, Damien, you’ll be wealthier than you ever dreamed!”

“Jean-Baptiste.”

His partner halted his outpouring. “
Oui
?”

Damien plunked his tankard down, the raw whiskey tasting like brackish swampwater, and leaned forward. “You’ve never been so voluble. What’s wrong?”

The intelligent gray eyes ricocheted from Damien’s piercing dark brown ones.

“Well?” Damien insisted.

The other rose and went to the rear of the cabin where a ladder led to the loft. “Rema,” he called out. “Nicolas.”

Damien sprang to his feet as a thick-bodied Indian woman in soiled deerskins and leggings slowly descended the ladder, eyes averted. Behind her came a boy of nine or so.

Damien’s eyes flashed; his jaw clenched. “How dare you bring them here!”

Jean-Baptiste stepped quickly
between his friend and the others. “Damien! He is your son, and it’s time you stopped denying him the right to know his father.”

Damien didn’t move. His voice was low and terse. “My son is in France.”

Jean-Baptiste’s crest of salted hair jutted forward.

“When are you going to acknowledge the truth—that
Hélène is nothing but a courtesan, the Duc de Chartres’s harlot last time we heard; that your son by her knows nothing about you; that you will never see them again?”

Damien stormed toward the door, and Jean-Baptiste cried out, “Wait!
Alors, mon cher ami
, at least talk with the boy! You owe him that much. Or are you a coward after all?”

Damien spun, his teeth bared in a snarl. “All right, I will talk with the boy. Then you will
return him and Rema to the Chipewyan village. Immediately. Tomorrow.”

Satisfied for the moment, Jean-Baptiste nodded and stepped aside. Damien, arms akimbo, glared down at the metis, the half- breed. The boy was thin, but above his prominent ribs lay a firm sheet of pectoral muscle. His dirty, shoulder-length hair was blue- black like his mother’s, as were his eyes. In fact, Damien found little to indicate the boy was half-white—let alone his. Except,
perhaps, for his height, Damien’s height. The youth appeared tall for a nine-year-old Indian child. In his bony face, the eyes already seemed old and almost wizened.

In his mind, Damien counted the number of times he had seen the boy. Four—five, maybe, the last time three years before. But always either at the Chipewyan camp or at Jean-Baptiste’s lodge, both over five hundred miles to the northwest. Those times with the boy and Rema had been, for the most part, the early years, when he had gone native; when he and Jean-Baptiste were trying to put together their string of fur depots to start their profitable Fur Company of Canada, or Kanata as the Indians called the country the French had dubbed New France.

“Come here, boy.”

“His name is Nicolas,” Jean-Baptiste reminded him. “Nicolas du Plessis. I myself named him for Saint Nicolas.”

“I know that,” Damien snapped, hunkering on one knee so that he could better observe the boy. “Come here, Nicolas.”

The youngster’s opaque eyes flickered. The Indian woman, her cinnamon-colored face inscrutable, nudged her son’s shoulder, and the boy stepped forward. Damien frowned. The twisted foot was little better. He studied the boy as the boy’s black eyes studied him. The face held little of conventional beauty, all relentless angles that should have been softened by childhood. And the head seemed too large for the body.

“Where is France’s center of government?” Damien asked. Nicolas glanced at Jean-Baptiste. Receiving an encouraging nod, he replied, “Versailles, for the present.”

The boy’s melodious voice wa
s disarming. “The center of government for New France?” Damien said.

“Quebec.”

Damien glanced at his partner’s smug face, then rapped, “Who wrote the
Principles of Philosophy
?”

“Descartes.”

Damien straightened to his feet. “You have done well, Jean- Baptiste. Better than you did by me, I believe.”

“It was the long, uninterrupted winters. Your son is even quicker than you, Damien. He has a keen mind. By the time I finish with him, he will have an education worthy of the Jesuit College at La Fleche.”

“For all the good it will do the little savage. Come, matters of business await us at the Trading Hall.”

Rema’s softly spoken Indian name for him stopped Damien in midstride. He turned to look at her. Ten years and a pregnancy had altered her once lithe figu
re into near plumpness. The beautiful bone structure of her face was obscured by thickening jowls, her skin coarsened by harsh weather and campfire smoke and poor diet. Her braids shone with bear grease. Well, at least she still had all her teeth, he noted, reminding himself of the persistent ache in one of his own back teeth.

She padded over to him and hesit
antly touched his sleeve. Jean-Baptiste, seeing the look that passed between them, said, “The boy and I’ll wait for you at the Trading Hall.”