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

by Bonds, Parris Afton

  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 Hélène. “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 born 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 wife 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-Saliéres 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-Salières 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-Salières 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. . . .

  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 monotony 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 man 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 men 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 partner 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 mercanti
le 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 partner 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.