Elene and the others had eaten early and retired to their bunks. So violent was the motion of the ship that lying in that impromptu cradle was the safest place to be. Ryan moved about the ship, checking for damage, soothing fears, returning now and then to check on Elene. As the worst of the wind eased off, however, he pronounced himself satisfied with the way the Sea Spirit was holding in her sheltered anchorage. In the cabin once more, he pulled off his wet clothes and flung them into the corner. Then he climbed into the bunk with Elene.
He was chilled, his skin rough with gooseflesh. Elene, in a welling of sympathy and tenderness, held him close, drawing up her nightgown to drape one leg over his. Shivering in reaction to her warmth, he dropped a light kiss on her forehead before relaxing against her. She rested her temple against his chin, staring blindly into the dark that glowed now and again with the blue-white flashes of lightning through the porthole. The rain drummed overhead, running from the decks to fall in splattering rivulets into the waters of the bay.
In the days since Ryan had crossed swords with Durant, Elene and the privateer had shared this cabin and the bunk in which they lay. They slept together, ate together, walked and talked and made love together, but they had not talked again about New Orleans except in the most general terms. Elene assumed that he still meant her to live with him in the same way in New Orleans. Certainly his desire for her showed no sign of abating.
He was an interesting companion when he wished to be. The two of them had spent many evenings reading from his purloined library and discussing the ideas they had come across. They had sometimes played at cards, staking pieces of their clothing, and he only cheated when the prize was rich enough to be irresistible. In bed, he was a strong and considerate lover, vocal in his encouragement, his appreciation, and his praise. He never failed to be protective of her before the others, nor did he neglect her for his responsibilities aboard the ship. He soothed her nightmares and checked her healing feet. He was still fond of her perfume and responsive to it. Yet he never spoke of love.
Elene did not really expect it of him. For all that they had endured together, they were strangers. He owed her no avowals, no promises, nothing; if anything, she was in his debt. The warm rapport between them was of the flesh alone, without the complications of sentiment.
She wondered if Ryan would be the same once they reached New Orleans. There among his friends and past companions he might discover that she was a hindrance, a reminder of a period of time he would as soon forget. He might find another woman and cast her and Devota out, so they would be forced to make their own way, without his help.
At least if he did that, she would know once and for all whether it was the perfume that held him. She could, of course, put it to the test at any time by ceasing to use it. The results would not be conclusive, however, as long as they were on the ship. There was nowhere else for her to sleep if he did not want her beside him, and sheer propinquity might cause him to turn to her. In any case, she did not quite dare chance it. She was in no position to risk losing his aid just now.
Ryan, sensing her tense contemplation, smoothed his hands over her back as he tested her stillness. He bent his head, his warm breath stirring her hair. “What is it, chérie? Is something wrong?”
She sighed without sound. “No, nothing.”
A frown creased Ryan’s brow, but he did not persist. He held her, he thought, by the most tenuous thread. To put strain of any kind upon it might be to have it break in his hands. It would be time enough to force the issue between them when they reached New Orleans and he could show her what she would be losing if she did not stay with him. Until then, he would wait.
For the moment, she was warm and pliant and incredibly seductive beneath the cotton of her nightgown. The movement of the ship rocked her gently against him, and the thunder of the storm was in his blood. He kissed her eyelids in the darkness to seal them shut. He found her lips, teasing them until they opened for him, until he tasted the honeyed sweetness of her response and felt beneath his hand the echoing thunder of her heartbeat. It sufficed, for the moment.
Barataria Bay, as the sun rose clear, bright, and hot next morning, was seen to be a large body of water like a brackish lake surrounded by marshland. The thin beach was edged with spiny, waving grass and palmetto and littered with water-blackened logs in grotesque shapes and the decomposing body of a dead porpoise. Birds called, wheeling and diving, their cries carrying in shrill thinness on the air. Frogs croaked, mosquitoes whined in maddening persistence, and now and then there came the bass roar of an alligator. The men and women of the Sea Spirit lined the rail, pointing out the log-like shapes of the primitive beasts that now and then floated into view, watching them in their desultory search for a meal of fish.
While they passed the time with such sport, Ryan was busy overseeing the unloading of the ship. The longboat made a number of trips to the ramshackle warehouse that sat back from the water’s edge. There were a few other makeshift shacks nearby built of driftwood, palmetto fronds, and pieces of woven jute. A tail of smoke rose from just outside one such shack to stain the morning sky, but there was no sign of movement for some time.
Finally, as the unloading was nearing completion, a man emerged from the largest of the scruffy dwellings. He stood stretching and scratching at himself as he turned slowly to survey the ship at anchor. He shouted something. An Indian woman ducked through a doorway covered by a hanging animal skin. She looked at the ship, at her man, then turned and went back inside. It was as total a dismissal as any Elene had ever seen.
The occupants of the shacks, it seemed, were fugitives from the law, thieves and murderers and sometime-pirates. Barataria was remote from New Orleans, separated from it by endless miles of water and mud and soggy marsh. Men came in the late fall and winter to hunt the ducks and geese that flew in from the north in massed waves one behind the other, and sometimes they came to fish, but the bay was usually deserted in the heat of summer.
The men knew Ryan well; that was plain from the way they came to greet him when he had himself rowed ashore. They were more than willing to let him have the use of their pirogues to haul his passengers to New Orleans, though for a small fee, of course. If they felt any sympathy for those on board as refugees, however, they failed to show it, but sat around watching them climb into the boats, looking for a glimpse of ankle and shapely calf while they jeered and laughed and made crude jokes. It was no more than a sensible precaution that Captain Jean was left on the Sea Spirit, along with a skeleton crew, to protect the ship.
The trip through the maze of waterways to New Orleans was not one Elene wanted to remember. As they left the waters of the bay, the wind died away and the hot sun of mid-June and wide reaches of water combined to form a steamy heat that brought streams of perspiration and made it difficult to breathe. Mosquitoes and gnats rose from the grass and weeds in a black fog, biting, stinging until every inch of exposed skin was covered with red welts and smeared with the black stickiness of dead insects and sweat they had wiped across their faces. Not a great deal of skin was left uncovered, of course, not only because of bites and stings, but for protection from the burning rays of the sun.
Hour after hour they rode the waterways, trending ever to the northeast with the men wielding the paddles dipping and pulling with hardly a splash. Snakes made arrow-shaped wakes in the water as they darted around the boat. Alligators lay half buried in the mud, watching them pass with unblinking indulgence. At intervals in the morning someone would break into song to match the rhythm of the paddles and pass the time, but as the hours lengthened the silence of endurance fell over them.
Now and then they stopped to rest and refresh themselves, though they avoided wading far into the water for its coolness because of the leeches that might like a taste of their blood. They spent a night hiding from the mosquitoes and starting awake at the roar of alligators and, once, the scream of a hunting swamp panther. With dawn they were in the pirogues once more. Finally they came to the g
ates of New Orleans.
Elene, seeing the sentries on duty, expected trouble. There was none. Ryan slapped the men on the back and inquired after their families or their women. There was the glint of gold passing from one hand to the other and the unloading of a keg of rum. The gate opened and they were inside.
It was, in large part, a new town. There had been three fires in the past fifteen years, two of them disastrous. The last, only nine years before, had destroyed more than two hundred buildings, creating losses that totaled well over eight million piasters. Because of the danger, as well as the huge cost of these fires, a building code had been passed requiring that any structure of more than one story be built of brick or adobe and roofed with tile, and that roofs replaced on existing structures must be of tile. The result was a town that, in the central area, had many predominantly Spanish features, including inner courtyards, balconies, windows and doors covered with gratings, and porte cochères, or openings under the second story through which carriages and pedestrians could pass to the inside courtyards. The local bricks were so soft that it had been necessary to cover them with plaster. This plaster was lime-washed in white or yellow, but the action of sun and rain in leeching color from the brick clay, and in encouraging the growth of mosses, molds, and mildews, had created a hundred shades of green and gray, rust and gold and peach.
New Orleans was not a large town, holding no more than ten thousand people. The earthen embankment with its six-foot-high palisade that surrounded it enclosed an area a half mile long and a little over a quarter mile wide. There was a fort at each of the four corners of the palisade, plus another on the back wall, and batteries and guarded gates set into the sections in between them. For added protection, there was also, outside the palisade, a ditch twenty feet wide and four feet deep. These fortifications had been brought to their present strength in 1796, when the colonists of Louisiana had feared that their slaves, many of them imported from Saint-Domingue, might imitate their island brothers and stage an uprising. The walls were not intended to hold off the army of a major power, for which they were clearly inadequate, but to offer protection in case of an insurrection.
Inside the walls, the streets were mere dirt lanes between the houses, though fairly wide and straight, and with a gutter down the center. Drainage ditches, clogged with weeds and refuse, had been dug around each block of houses, turning the sections in wet weather into islands. These ditches and street gutters drained into the Carondelet Canal to the rear of the city. Regardless, the streets were ankle deep in mud.
The houses nearest the palisade were the most neglected. Here were the one-story wooden dwellings from the French days that had escaped the fires, many of them succumbing to the ravages of the damp climate, too far gone to warrant, or with an owner too tightfisted to bear, the expense of repairs with brick and tile.
The town bore a decided stench, though not more than most tropical ports. Horse and mule dung was churned into the mud of the streets. Kitchen refuse from vegetable peelings to fish heads, also bits of rags and rotted leather and an occasional dead animal, either floated in the green-scummed water in the gutters or lay piled outside the back doors of houses. All of it was steadily ripening in the heat of the sun.
Some of the women among the refugees made faces and covered their noses. Elene breathed with shallow care and thought of perfume.
Ryan lived on Royal Street, which was both the main commercial artery and most favored residential thoroughfare of the city. Lined with houses of two and even three stories, most with balconies railed with lace-like wrought iron, the thoroughfare was important enough to warrant street lanterns slung diagonally from house corner to house corner on ropes. The residences and shops were intermingled in the European fashion, with the business establishments occupying the ground floor and the owners either living in the space above or else leasing it to other individuals as private quarters.
The ground floor of Ryan’s house was shuttered and locked, but carried no hanging sign advertising wine or candles, cloth or hats. The rooms, he said, were used instead for storage most of the time, but for the moment were empty. As evening was drawing near, he offered the weary group of travelers the hospitality of his home.
The offer was accepted with gratitude. Together, they all piled from the wagon Ryan had borrowed from a farmer on Bayou Saint John outside the city where the boats had landed. They trooped through the porte cochère and into the stone-paved courtyard, skirting a fountain surrounded by ferns and geraniums, and headed toward a flight of stairs that led up to a gallery that ran around three sides of the court. Before they reached it, a black man stepped forward with grace and dignity to meet them.
The manservant, blue-brown of skin and with white in his curling dark hair, might have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty years of age. His name was Benedict and he served as Ryan’s majordomo. Effortlessly, he took them in charge, clapping his hands to bring maids and footmen running, offering refreshment, parceling out rooms. He missed nothing. Not only did he place the Mazents and Germaine in a set of adjoining chambers, but he also, by some strange means of communication with his master, appointed a maid to lead Elene and Devota to what was without doubt the master suite.
There was no uncertainty about whom the room belonged to because Ryan’s small sea trunk was delivered by a footman moments after Elene and her maid entered. It was placed on the floor beside a marble-topped table with gold-leaf encrusted legs upon which sat a silver tray piled with cards of invitation addressed to Ryan Bayard. Prominent among them was one requesting his presence at a dinner to be given that evening by Pierre Clement de Laussat, colonial prefect of France, the man who would be governor when France regained Louisiana once more.
By sunset, the passengers from the Sea Spirit were comfortable. They had bathed and donned the changes of clothing that had been found for them, their insect bites and sunburned skin had been seen to, and food and drink set before them. Their host excused himself for the evening. He felt that the dinner with the future governor, a man who had only just arrived in New Orleans when Ryan had left it for the Caribbean, would be too good an opportunity to catch up on the latest news to be refused. He would not be back before morning. The city gates were locked at nine o’clock, and the house taken by Laussat was located just outside the gates. Ryan would find a bed with friends who lived nearby.
Elene wondered where Ryan found the stamina to go off visiting after the two days just past. She was weary to the bone, and wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed, close out the damnable mosquitoes with a nice thick baire, and sleep for a week. The others seemed of the same inclination. It was not long before Elene said her good-nights and sought the room she had been given.
Devota was not there. As much as Elene loved her maid, the privacy was welcome. She stood for a moment looking around the room, at the dark oak armoire of English manufacture, four-square and heavy, the washstand not unlike that on the ship except it was made to fit into a corner, and also the shaving stand of French design and a Flemish carpet that harmonized with the tapestries on the walls. It was a large chamber, extending across the width of the house, with a set of glass-paned doors at one end opening onto the gallery overlooking the courtyard, and another set at the opposite end giving onto the balcony that faced the street.
Elene’s gaze came to rest on the bed that was the focus of the room. Raised on a platform for coolness, its carved headboard and footboard were touched with gold leaf. Above it hung a draping of white mosquito netting, while ecru-colored linen sheets covered the mattress stuffed with Spanish moss and the pillows fat with goose down. She thought of lying in that bed with Ryan, and then looked quickly away, moving toward one of the French doors which stood open to the evening air.
The door gave onto the balcony that looked down on the street. It was cooler out there in the open, where the breeze off the river wafted over the tiled rooftops. The light of evening was going, gradually fading to a dull and melancholy purple, the color of h
alf mourning. Elene thought of her father lying near the ruins of Larpent House, the place he had loved so well. It was fitting, somehow, that his bones would be scattered among the ashes. A hard lump formed under her breast bone, pressing against it with aching force, but she refused to cry. She had discovered in France, when her father had left her behind, that crying did not help.
She thought of Ryan instead, and of his absence for the evening. Was it true that the gates would be closed? Surely if the guards had turned their heads once for money, they would do so again. It was possible the curfew was no more than an excuse to be away for the evening. Perhaps there was a woman he must see, someone to whom he wanted to explain the presence of his new mistress. She herself had no right to complain if he chose to stay the night. None at all.
Up and down the street, other people were enjoying the respite from the warmth of the day. Older couples, courting couples, families that included grandparents, mother and father and children in ages from early teens to babes in arms, lined the railings of balconies decked with ferns and swordlike yucca in clay pots, or else sat in chairs on the front stoops. They called back and forth to each other, exchanging greetings and gossip and friendly waves. Somewhere nearby a suitor played a sweet air on his guitar. A young girl laughed in pleasure and excitement. Friends and neighbors, they all belonged.
Elene did not. She wondered how long it would be before she would cease to feel disoriented, uprooted. She was a stranger in a strange place. She had nothing except her own intelligence and strength of will. There might be those who would help, Devota and perhaps even Ryan between his own concerns, but the only one she could depend on to make her way was herself. But she would make it. She would.
Louisiana History Collection - Part 2 Page 52
