Tainted Lilies

by Becky Lee Weyrich

  Nicolette looked away from her aunt, ashamed of herself for using such an intimate confidence against this woman she loved and admired—even more now that she knew her own father was the great love of Gabrielle’s life, the man she’d longed for all these years.

  “I’m sorry, Tante,” she murmured. “But I must get word of this to Jean. Raymond Ranchier may be here. If so, he can take me back to Grande Terre right away. That’s where I belong… with Jean! Not here in New Orleans, trying to pretend I’m something I’ve never been.”

  “Very well.” Her aunt nodded. “But be quick with you. I’ll keep watch out here.”

  Nicolette entered the shop, where the aromas of exotic spices mingled with the heavy fragrance of French perfumes. The tables and showcases glittered with jewelry and fine brocades from Spain. The usually quiet establishment clattered and clanked with unidentifiable sounds issuing from a back room. A tinkling bell alerted the men in back to a customer’s arrival. Nicolette heard the grating noise grind to a halt and Raymond Ranchier himself came out to greet her.

  “Why, Madame Boss! How good to see you. I trust you’re well,” the tall, sandy-haired courier said, smiling.

  “Not well at all, Raymond, and neither should you be! Haven’t you seen this?” She thrust one of the rumpled notices under his rather long nose.

  “Oui, Madame!” he said with a frown. “And let me tell you, the Boss is plenty mad that Governor Claiborne has offered such a picayune amount for him! He said, if I remember correctly, ‘Blast the man! I’m worth ten times that much!’” Ranchier ended with a hearty laugh at his own imitation of Laffite, which really wasn’t half bad.

  Nicolette smiled in spite of herself. “Well, what are you planning to do about it? Just ignore the governor’s insult?”

  Raymond chuckled over his juicy secret. “No Madame. Far from it! Come with me.”

  He showed Nicolette through the shop to the dim backroom. There the odd noises she had heard earlier were explained—a printing press.

  “Read for yourself, Madame!”

  He held up a freshly printed broadside between his ink-stained thumb and forefinger.

  Nicolette scanned the page and her cobalt eyes lit up with merriment. Her laughter began as a quiet ripple, but soon tears of mirth were rolling down her cheeks. She hugged her sides to belay the pain of her laughter.

  When she recovered her composure, Nicolette said, “Do you have some old sailor’s togs about the place, Raymond?”

  He looked quizzically at her and said, “Aye.”

  “Get them for me, please, and tell me where and with whom I’ll meet tonight to help distribute these!”

  Raymond Ranchier clicked the heels of his scuffed boots and bowed. “Oui, Madame Boss!”

  The cathedral bells had tolled midnight only moments before Nicolette, dressed in canvas britches and a sailor’s striped shirt and knit cap, slipped out of the pantry door to the courtyard of the Toulouse Street house. She had confided this planned escapade to no one—not even her Aunt Gabi, who might have insisted on joining her.

  Exiting to the alley through the back gate, she soon found several others—boys and old men mostly—hurrying toward the back entrance of the Royal Street showroom. Within a half hour, a gang of a hundred or more were skulking through back-passages and hiding in dark doorways throughout the city. By the time Governor Claiborne stretched and yawned himself awake, the city would be papered with new broadsides.

  At first, Nicolette felt nervous. None of the men realized she was not just another boy, scurrying about in the night to avenge his hero. She tried to stay with a group, but soon found that impossible. These men knew how to vanish into the shadows, darting out only long enough to hang a notice and then be gone again.

  Nicolette worked along Bourbon Street and then Royal, feeling this a safer area for a woman than the red-light district along the levee or the alleys around the cathedral.

  She was down to the last ten of her hundred sheets when a noise from the black depths of an alley made her jump and caused her skin to prickle all over. She knew that the Kalmucks often wandered into this part of town when they had had too much whiskey. The sound came again—something between a scream and a strangled cry.

  She crouched in a doorway and waited, her heart pounding fiercely. Surely, if the man found her, he would take her for a boy and leave her alone. Then some sordid whispers she had overheard among the men at Grande Terre popped from her memory. Some men, it seemed, relished young boys…

  She drew back more. Suddenly, the screaming seemed ail around her. Something brushed her leg and she leaped up, ready to kill to save herself. In her terror, she let the remaining broadsides fly out of her hand to litter the banquette.

  Just then two toms moved into a lighted area. One was yellow with stripes and the other a motley gray. Their claws and teeth ripped and tore fur over a feline lady friend. “Cats fighting,” Nicolette said, and allowed herself to breathe. But a hand gripped her shoulder suddenly, spinning her around.

  “See here, boy…” a gruff voice began, but her scream cut off his words.

  Nicolette sank her teeth into the hand holding her arm and pounded at the dark figure, trying to fend him off. But he grabbed her roughly, tearing the ragged shirt. He shook her by the shoulders until her stocking cap fell off, releasing her long hair.

  “Mon Dieu!” the man gasped. “Nikki?”

  Nicolette’s sobs caught in her throat, not allowing her to speak for a moment. All the fight drained out of her—relief replacing it.

  “Jean?” she asked, hardly daring to believe it.

  “All five hundred dollars’ worth!” he said with a laugh, pulling her into his arms and bruising her tear-salted lips.

  They went, not to the house in Toulouse Street or Laffite’s mansion on Bourbon, but to the little blacksmith shop with its small attached sleeping quarters.

  “It’s always been my favorite home in New Orleans,” Jean confided, lighting an oil lamp in the plain but tidy room. “I love the smell of hickory smoke embedded in these old walls. And besides,” he continued, pressing Nicolette down onto the red, white, and blue patchwork quilt, “I want to make love to you everywhere so that no matter where I am, I can remember you there with me… wonderfully naked…” he added, slipping the remains of her shirt from her shoulders, “deliciously warm…” his lips pressed into the valley between her breasts, “all mine!”

  They had been apart almost a month. It seemed a lifetime of chaste endurance to Nicolette. Anxious as she was, she made her lover lie back while she covered his face, his chest, his whole tense body with kisses.

  “God, don’t let me die now!” he moaned, then strained back against the pillows, lifting his hips, and gasped, “Oh, Nikki… Nikki! Not that! I can’t take it… don’t stop… I love it… love you… so… so much!”

  Then he forced her mouth away from his flesh and pressed her down—his victim of love. She sighed and begged him to quench her fires with his own.

  The passion-drugged couple still clung to each other as the rose rays of dawn struck the governor’s bedroom windows.

  William C. C. Claiborne lay alone in his bed. Madame Claiborne had deserted him weeks before for a guest chamber, saying, “Willie, I will not share you with Jean Laffite! Let me know when you’re in better temper and ready to give me your full attention. Until then, you may thrash about with your bloody pirate all night alone!”

  Claiborne awoke disgruntled and dyspeptic. “But when am I not these days?” were his first words, followed by a weary sigh. He lay in bed, wishing his wife were next to him. Her Creole upbringing wouldn’t allow her to make love after the sun came up, but still, there was something reassuring about having one’s wife close by in those first waking moments.

  He heard a hubbub below in the street and rose to see what was going on. A knot of excited people were gathered around the lamp post reading his broadside. Quickly, he got into his dressing gown. Perhaps something had happened. Laffite migh
t have been captured during the night and could even this minute be locked behind bars in the Cabildo.

  He ran fingers twitching with nervous excitement through his sparse, reddish hair. He smiled for the first time in weeks, contemplating Laffite’s arrest. The expression gave his puffy face an almost youthful look.

  “By God, if we’ve got that bandit at last, I’ll pop the champagne’s cork… and my wife’s… this very night!”

  Claiborne hurried to the door to see if any messages had arrived from the Cabildo while he slept. Jacob, the butler, stood in the hallway, about to knock, when the door flew open. The old servant’s face looked the color of dead ashes, a sure barometer of bad news to come.

  “What is it, Jacob?” Claiborne snapped, dreading the answer.

  “This, Monsieur Gouverneurr Jacob said, handing his master a long sheet smudged with barely dry ink.

  Claiborne’s eyes widened as he scanned the page. His heart thundered. His hands trembled with rage.

  I, BOSS OF BARATARIA, OFFER A REWARD OF FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS WHICH WILL BE PAID OUT OF MY TREASURY, TO ANY PERSON DELIVERING GOVERNOR CLAIBORNE TO ME AT ISLE DU CHAT WEST OF GRANDE TERRE, NEAR THE MOUTH OF BAYOU LAFOURCHE.

  Given under my hand at Grand Terre on the 26th day of November, 1813

  Jean Laffite

  Governor Claiborne remained in his bed that day, ill with the realization that he had been bested once more by Jean Laffite, and knowing that New Orleans loved it.

  Toward noon, he answered a knock at his bedroom door, but sent Jacob and the tray of food he offered away. Claiborne strode to his window and looked out absently. A man and a woman stood on the banquette below, perusing Laffite’s reward offer. The governor barely noticed the woman’s elegant, burgundy velvet gown and the matching bonnet covering her long, Creole-black hair, but something about the way her tall companion carried himself—with a sort of arrogant grace—made him take a second look.

  “Damn!” he cursed, still watching the couple. “Must every person in town read Laffite’s outrageous words?”

  He heard laughter from below and looked down again. “They’re all making fun of me!” he moaned.

  Just then, the expensively clad pair turned their faces up toward his second-storey window. They were smiling and they waved to him. His lower jaw dropped, forming his mouth into a wide O.

  “Laffite!” he hissed. “That goddamn, cocky bastard!”

  “Isn’t this dangerous, Jean?” Nicolette whispered, a thrill of excitement charging her blood when she spotted the governor watching them.

  “Not in the least, my love. The man won’t dare show his face today. I’ve called his bluff. From here on out the game is mine. And I always hold aces!”

  He tucked Nicolette’s gloved hand into the crook of his elbow and they continued their stroll down Royal Street toward the river.

  The Place d’Armes was crowded with people wanting to bask in the bright November sun. Many were hoping to catch a glimpse of Jean Laffite. His arrival the night before had not gone unheralded. Laffite had not meant for it to!

  “We’re through hiding,” he told Nicolette as they strolled the walkways in the shade of the sycamore trees, acknowledging nods and smiles from all sides. “You see, the good people of New Orleans hold no grudge. They’re on our side.”

  Nicolette had relaxed at first when she saw that no soldiers came rushing forward to arrest Laffite on the spot. But soon she realized that the warm smiles and friendly greetings were for her escort—none for her. More than once she detected a fleeting look of disdain cast in her direction. These people could forgive a man his smuggling, but not a woman her passions!

  No! she thought. They’re not on our side, my darling. They are only on your side. To them I am only…

  She couldn’t even repeat the phrase in her mind, though she knew it was spoken openly by the good citizens of New Orleans.

  But a dirty, bearded drunkard, leaning out of one of the flatboat brothels tied out of earshot upriver from the Place d’Armes, spied Nicolette and finished the phrase for her: “Filthy pirate’s whore!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  During the early months of 1814, two conflicts, an ocean apart, were striking fear in the hearts of Louisiana’s citizens. The aggressor in both cases was the “British Dragon.”

  While red-coated land forces hammered away in France, the king’s navy continued to block shipping from American ports and bum cities at will.

  Those people in New Orleans who had always thought of France as the mother country and some who still had relatives there hung on every scrap of news from across the sea, hoping to hear of a French victory. They resented the others, who said, “As long as the Dragon’s busy chasing after Napoleon, it won’t have time to whack its tail at us!”

  But, resented or not, the statement was true. Jean Laffite worried more than most that France might fall to the British. Since the attack on his two ships the summer before, all had been quiet. But he continued to stock arms and munitions, preparing to defend his territory and all of southern Louisiana, if need be.

  When the axe fell, Laffite’s men were the only ones prepared.

  “Look here, Nikki,” Laffite said, holding a copy of Le Moniteur de la Louisiane. It’s news from France, over two months old. “The paper says Napoleon has abdicated. The Treaty of Fontainebleau was signed on April 11, exiling him to Elba.” He stopped and took a deep breath, as if trying to digest what he had just read. When he continued, his voice was as frighteningly serious as Nicolette had ever heard it. “Our wait won’t be long now.”

  Nicolette, who had been thinking in her first waking moments what a lovely day it would be for a picnic on the beach at Grande Terre, felt her sunny fantasies dashed like so much driftwood in a storm. She blinked the sleep out of her eyes and sat up in bed, clutching Jean’s arm.

  “What have we been waiting for, darling? And why do you sound so grave? We all knew Napoleon had to fall sooner or later.”

  “Nikki!” he huffed, rising, naked, from the bed. “You’ve listened to all the war talk. You know the British will come here now.”

  Nicolette tried to tease him out of his abysmal mood. “And will they rape every woman and hang every man when they breathe their Fire on New Orleans, my darling?” she asked brightly. “I’m sure the men will flee in terror. But I know many a wife who would welcome an amorous, red-coated dragon into her bed in place of her stodgy husband!”

  Laffite glared at her. “This is no joking matter, Nicolette! The city of New Orleans is the key to the entire United States through the river. My men and I are guardians of that key! I plan to declare martial law on Grande Terre this morning. If you don’t wish to remain in an armed camp, feel free to return to your family!”

  He turned away from her abruptly. Nicolette felt a deep ache in her heart and a twisting pain in her stomach. They hadn’t argued once since their reunion at the blacksmith shop—until now.

  “Darling,” she cried, running to catch him at the door. “I didn’t mean to make light of this trouble. And you know I’ll never leave you again. I promised!” Tears were filling her eyes.

  He clutched her suddenly in his arms and smoothed her hair. His voice grew gentler. “I know you promised. But maybe it would be best. I told you a long time ago that there would be times when I would have to go away from you. This could be one of those times, Nikki.”

  “What do you mean? Go where?”

  He shook his head and bent down to kiss a tear from her cheek. “I don’t know yet, ma chère. I’ll go when I’m called to wherever I’m needed.”

  “And I’ll wait for you!” she said desperately, hurting inside.

  “Of course you will. I never doubted that.”

  He enfolded her bare shoulders with his arms and kissed her deeply. Nicolette closed her eyes and let her other senses drink him in. She couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from him—not even for a short time. He had become her whole life. Loving him was her reason for existing
.

  And now, she thought, more than ever, we should be together. Perhaps if I tell him…

  “Jean, darling,” she began.

  “Boss! Boss!” Dominique You’s voice, coming from outside, interrupted her words. “They got Pierre! They took him away!”

  Laffite froze in Nicolette’s arms for an instant, then he threw on his clothes and dashed out of the room toward the sound of his brother’s voice.

  Nicolette pulled on her dressing gown and followed him. She reached the veranda in time to hear Dominique finishing the story.

  “They arrested him right in the street, near the Place d’Armes. He’d been to visit Marie Louise and overslept so he didn’t get out of the city before daylight.”

  “Don’t worry, Dom. We’ll have him bailed out in time to visit his lady again this evening,” Laffite answered.

  Nicolette could tell from the looks on both brothers’ faces that Laffite feared his words were not true, and Dom knew they were totally false.

  Youx shook his head sadly. “Not this time. He’s in the Cabildo… in chains! Bail has been denied. His case will be heard… when they get around to it… by a secret grand jury. No witnesses allowed in his defense!”

  “Sweet Mother of God!” Laffite groaned. “He’ll die in there!”

  Nicolette touched Laffite’s arm, trying to console him. “Other men have survived the Cabildo.”

  He looked at her with great sadness in his eyes. “You don’t understand. Pierre was very sick the year before we met. Marie Louise nursed him back after the stroke, but he’s never been the same since. He has the fortitude of an old man. The weight of the chains alone could sap what remaining strength he has in a very short time. We must free him!”

  “Can you?” Nicolette’s voice quavered as she asked the question.

  “Claiborne hates me!” Laffite replied bitterly. “Ever since the affair with the broadsides, he’s sworn his revenge…” His voice broke with emotion. He cleared his throat and went on. “He couldn’t get at me, so he’s taking out all his wrath on Pierre. Still, there might be a way.”