Heaven in His Arms (14 page)

His hands slid down to her shoulders and lifted her up. From between their bodies rose a fresh wave of the the stench, fetid and strong, warmed by the joining of their bodies.

She couldn't help it. The coughing erupted. She turned her head away and pinched her nostrils together to clear her head of the acrid stink, all to no avail, for the stench had intensified in the close warmth of their limbs. He coughed, too, and she rolled off him, clutching her face as the full effect of the stench rose in the air.

He rose to his elbows. "It smells worse on my deerskin than it does on your broadcloth."

"Good!" she said petulantly, the mood long broken between them. "It's no less than you deserve."

"Mmm. Maybe it's divine justice." He stood up and brushed the dirt off his thighs and leggings. "In spite of the stench, that skunk did us both a favor."

His gaze slipped over her. "You have a way of making me forget myself, Genevieve."

She wiped her teary eyes and silently cursed the striped creature. She wanted Andre to take her in his arms again, to make her feel that strange way again, but her eyes watered and her nose stung and she felt about as attractive as a woman with the ague. And with the air thick with the stench, the clearing was about as romantic as a pile of rotting meat.

He held out his open hand. "Come, let's get back to the campsite."

Reluctantly, she took his hand. He pulled her to her feet, then shook his head and stepped abruptly away.

"Do us all a favor tonight,
ma mie
." His lips twitched. "Sleep downwind."

***

Andre hooked his carved pipe between his lips and drew the stinging smoke into his lungs. The rich scent of tobacco rose in the air as the end of the pipe glowed like a ruby. He had taken to smoking his pipe more frequently since the incident with the skunk four days ago, in a vain attempt to mask the stench, and had discovered in the process how much he enjoyed the pungent taste of tobacco. Now, among a handful of his men, he leaned back on a stone just above the muddy edge of the shore, resting his sore shoulders and the cramped muscles of his legs after a rugged portage past Chat's Falls, a crescent-shaped dam of primitive rock that surged from the bed of the Ottawa River.

Through half-closed eyes, he watched the end of the path. For the first time in the ten days of the journey, Genevieve was late in finishing a portage. But he wasn't worried. Not really. He told himself he was just enjoying the familiar sight of his men emerging from the forest, laden with goods, not waiting for a certain spirited, auburn-haired wench in a ragged pink dress to finally make an appearance.

Andre half-listened to the conversation going on around him.

"Geese just don't twist their own necks and waddle into the cook's canoe." Anselme Roissier glared at the men as they crinkled open their
sacs au feu
and stuffed their pipes with tobacco. "Someone is not confessing. Someone here had to have trapped and killed that goose."

Gaspard, Anselme's brother, shrugged. "Whoever the hunter is, I'd like to raise a glass of brandy to him for giving us meat for dinner."

"But no one has admitted it. Doesn't that mean anything to you, to any of you?" Anselme raised his arms in a dramatic gesture of frustration. "It didn't just drop from the sky and land neatly in the cook's canoe. This bird was trapped and its neck was broken and it was planted there."

Andre frowned. He had his own theory about who had planted a freshly killed goose in the cook's canoe that morning, a theory he wasn't willing to share. His gaze shifted to where Julien stood, thigh-deep in the rivcr, wearing nothing but a garland of orange winter-berries around his neck, while Simeon droned in Latin nearby. From the start of the voyage, Julien had gazed upon Genevieve like a lovestruck puppy. Though the boy always staggered in exhaustion at the end of each day, he had long assumed the responsibility of gathering fir boughs for Genevieve's bed at night, and now that the nights were growing colder, he'd assumed the duty of setting up a makeshift tent for her from the tarpaulins that covered the merchandise on the canoe. Genevieve's complaints about the food and the availability of game had become insistent these past few days, and it would be just like Julien to hunt to please that saucy-eyed wench.

Hunting and killing fresh meat. Bloodying his hands and feeding his woman. Bringing a woman freshly killed meat was the most primitive courtship, and it angered Andre more than he liked to admit. This woman was spoken for, even if their relationship remained unconsummated. The men thought otherwise, for when she had been sprayed with the skunk, he had returned to the campsite to face the mirth of two dozen voyageurs, all wondering aloud, in bawdy language, exactly how his lively, vengeful wife had marked him so thoroughly with scent. At the time, he had shrugged it off. Let them think he had torn off her clothes and tumbled her in the forest. Nothing would be more in character. The truth was, had the rank stench of skunk not interrupted what had begun between them, he might have forgotten himself and taken what she so freely offered.

The thought burned in him more harshly than the smoke burned his lungs. He kept thinking that there were other ways they could please one another without consummating their marriage. Blood rushed to his loins. There were ways. There were ways for an inventive man and a willing woman . . . . Christ, what was he thinking? He was going to leave the witch on Allumette Island. To caress her, to taste her in the most intimate places, to feel all that quivering energy against his naked body and then abandon her. . . . No, no, it was too wicked for even him to do.

Almost.

"Who do you think killed the goose,
frere
?'' Gaspard raised his voice and waved his smoking pipe in the air. "If you know who did it, tell us, otherwise, shut up and talk of other things."

"All I know is we're still in Iroquois country." Anselme glanced nervously toward the edge of the forest. "There could be hundreds of them out there, sneaking around our camp, and we wouldn't even know it."

Andre knocked his pipe against a rock. Glowing red embers scattered all over the surface. "If they're sneaking around our camp, they wouldn't be hunting for geese. If they were here, you'd know it by now."

The young man shrugged. "Maybe they rubbed the bird with nightshade or filled them with poisonous fungus to weaken us."

"That is not the Iroquois way." Wapishka blew a blue stream of smoke into the air and stared down at his fingertips, still scarred from his experience with the warlike tribe. "The Iroquois are warriors. They would attack, not weaken us with poisoned game."

"You white men ..." The Duke shook his head.

"You always look for reasons. There are not always reasons. It may be that a
manitou
is looking over us."

Wapishka leaned toward the Indian. "Why do you think such things?"

"I had a dream. I did not know the meaning until this morning, when we found the goose in the cook's canoe."

Andre frowned at the dark visage of The Duke. Dreams were considered divine revelations to the Indians of these parts. Andre had begun to wonder if some Indian fertility god had snaked into his own head and purged all Christian teaching, for the revelations he'd been receiving lately were not in the least holy. They all involved Genevieve in various states of undress and in various stages of sexual ecstasy.

"I dreamed of a bird."

He tore his attention away from his dangerous thoughts. They were part of his torment, as if the gods, angry that he spurned their revelations, tortured him by making him want her all the more. It didn't help that she grew more beautiful with each day. After a portage, her auburn locks sprung from their chignon, straggling down her back and flying wildly about her face. The sun had darkened the spray of freckles across her nose. With her skirts ripped and sullied, her headrail loose over her shoulders, exposing the white flesh of her glistening chest, she looked common, attainable, and so very, very approachable.

He wondered where she was now and why she was taking so damn long to finish this portage.

"This bird had plumage the color of blood." The Duke closed his eyes, summoning the memory. "It was hungry and weak, but an experienced hunter. It knew that it would do better to hunt in the night than in the broad light of day, where its enemies could see it and take advantage of its weakness. It saw a snow-white goose, and when the goose saw this blood-red bird, it raised its neck to sacrifice itself. And so the red bird survived by the sacrifice of the goose."

"Don't let Simeon hear you," Gaspard whispered to the Indian. "He'll call that devil's talk."

"Your black robes tell me that the fish sacrificed themselves in Peter's net to feed the people. Is that not the same as what is happening now?"

Gaspard's smile dimmed. "That was a sacred miracle from God."

"You white men flaunt your faith and then have none." The Duke drew on his pipe. "The animals are sacrificing themselves for our sake.
Manabus
made it so"

Andre straightened when he saw Tiny emerge from the portage path, his face flushed and shining with sweat behind his bushy blond beard. Tiny was always one of the last men to finish the portages. Andre swiftly counted the voyageurs on shore and realized only two men had not yet arrived—two men and Genevieve.

"By the beavers of Saint Francis!'' The giant caught sight of a naked Julien in the bay. He trudged to where the boy's buckskins lay, discarded in a heap in the mud, and kicked them toward the water. "Enough of this baptism! Blossom's going to be here any minute. .. . Have you no respect for a lady?"

Andre shoved his pipe in the beaded sack hanging from his waist and broke from the circle of men to approach Tiny. Blossom was the name the men had given Genevieve when she'd flounced back into camp after the incident with the skunk. There was another name he preferred for her, a name Wapishka had suggested, but few men could get their tongues around such a twisting Indian word.
Taouistaouisse.
Little-Bird-Always-In-Motion.

He caught up with Tiny as the giant shrugged the load off his shoulders. "Where is she?"

"By Saint Peter's stones!" Tiny rolled his massive arms. "You'd have her on a leash if you could."

"If it would keep her out of trouble—"

"She didn't look in any trouble when I passed her some ways back." He massaged his arms with meaty hands. "She should be slogging through the trees soon."

The hair prickled on the back of his neck. Despite the ruggedness of the terrain, despite the brutal pace he always set, she always managed to make it to the end of the portage, usually before the last few voyageurs. He had become accustomed to finding her curled up in a ball on a rock, dirty and dozing, her hair gleaming like raw copper in the sun.

Andre paced, willing her to appear between the tree trunks. When the last two voyageurs arrived and told him they hadn't passed her along the trail, he pulled his pistol out of his sash.

"She's probably preening somewhere." Tiny appeared at his side, his pipe smoking in his hand. "You know women."

He remembered her as she had been this morning, utterly unconscious of her own glorious dishevelment, barraging him with questions with all the vigor of a lawyer in the royal courts as to why they must rise before dawn.

"She's not preening."

"Then maybe she's resting." Tiny's bushy blond brows lowered. "She's barely been able to keep pace with us this past week."

Andre checked the priming of his pistol. He hoped she had stopped in exhaustion and it was nothing more than that. Despite her spirit, despite her continuing stubbornness, she was weakening fast. She had slept through some of the jerkiest stretches of rapids, so deeply that Andre had allowed the voyageurs to relieve themselves over the sides of the canoe while she reposed. Perhaps she had collapsed and even now lay unconscious somewhere on the forest floor.

The thought brought a grim sense of deflated triumph. This is what he had waited for, this is what he had planned since she had whirled into his room at the inn at Montreal. He'd intended to leave her at Allumette Lake, a few days upstream. If she had collapsed, it was for the best, for if she lasted much longer, he would be forced to take more drastic measures to wear her out. Yet even as he imagined her asleep somewhere in the bushes, he remembered her flashing eyes, the stubborn way she clutched that wretched case of worldly goods, and sensed that mere physical weariness would not defeat her—at least, not yet. The witch was made of stronger stuff than he'd thought.

Then he thought of other possibilities, more disturbing possibilities. He had spent the last week waiting for the all-too-familiar cry of
casse-cou
and the flash of a hatchet or the whir of an arrow. He knew it wasn't the Iroquois way to capture a single woman and not ambush the rest of his men, but a defenseless, copper-haired woman might prove too much to resist, even in a time of peace.

"By all the blazes!" Tiny stared at him as if he could read his thoughts. "There's a treaty, you know."

"The Iroquois abide by treaties as well as French priests abide by their vows of chastity."

"They haven't broken it in three years."

He strode toward the opening to the trail, heaving Ins pistol aloft. "Let's hope they haven't broken it now."

Andre edged silently along the path, his ears straining for sound. He heard Tiny's footsteps behind him as the giant followed. His gut had twisted into a knot as uglier and uglier possibilities roared through his mind. He shouldn't feel like this. She had brought this upon herself, but he had given up trying to explain why he suddenly felt so protective of this
Taouistaouisse.
It was all the more reason to leave her at a Jesuit mission long before Chequamegon Bay..

He wandered slowly down the path, scanning the muddy surroundings, searching for her distinctive imprint. She always hummed the voyageurs' songs when she walked, but he heard none of her music in the silent forests, nothing but the wind in the dry leaves and the muted rush of the Ottawa River. The leaves on the forest floor were crushed from so many footsteps, and he couldn't distinguish any single imprint. He couldn't even distinguish the scent of skunk, which had almost entirely worn off in the clean, crisp air.

Then he saw something. He lifted a hand to capture Tiny's attention, then pointed to a broken fern off to one side of the trail and a few spots of flattened grass beyond. He could tell by the pattern of the footsteps—a small, round toe and a deeper heel— and they were his wife's. There was no sign of struggle. There was no sign of animal markings. By all signs, she had willingly wandered off the path—something he had expressly forbidden her to do. As he followed the trail, Andre heard the quiet trickle of a brook and knew, instinctively, that this was the reason his wife had deviated from the path. He broke through the. verdure and saw the silver thread of a stream.