“What happened?” she whispered.
He shrugged his shoulders. “We—my mother and my brothers—were put into the debtors’ prison. I alone have stayed alive,” he finished simply. “After five years, I was released.”
“How did you come to be in La Force?”
“Salt smuggling.”
Her eyes widened. “You should have stayed with stealing fish.” Salt smuggling was a serious crime. Salt was taxed at twelve times its value, and those smugglers caught were usually condemned to a lifetime of hard labor.
“You can’t steal enough fish to put clothes on your back,” he said bitterly.
Perhaps she was foolishly trusting. Claude Fabreville’s success at treachery would confirm her foolishness. Nevertheless, she pulled the big brigand into her arms and rocked him against her breast as she would her own baby. When she awoke later, it was she who was cradled in Hervé’s arms. She lay there, eyes closed, pretending that it was Philippe who held her, that their complacent world still existed. Tears slipped from between her lids and she angrily wiped at them.
When Hervé stirred, she scooted away. Above her, the faint light peeked through the patches of roof. She sat up and tried to make herself presentable, combing the shreds of straw and leaves from her tangled hair. Some part of vanity was still intact.
With daylight, she and Hervé left the shelter of the hut and the camaraderie of the four brigands. They kept to the edges of the forest, skirting the villages, and made for the Poissy Convent to the south. Natalie was not used to walking. One of her silver heels broke. The raw spring wind stung her face. By midafternoon, she would have given her cloak in exchange for the abandoned wagon, but she had to agree with Hervé that to travel on the road might draw unwanted attention.
He had explained that he was not worried as much about the soldiers as he was about the thousands of unemployed who roamed the countryside. Nearly a tenth of the rural population went begging from farm to farm, asking for even a morsel of bread. Natalie was somewhat conspicuous in her ermine cloak, tattered and dirt-stained though it was.
By dusk, they came in sight of the cobblestoned village of Poissy and its gray convent walls. Outside its great wooden doors, Hervé paused and gave her a crooked grin that was surprisingly shy for the cocky young man. “I’m almost sorry to end our journey so soon.”
Weary beyond words, she summoned a grateful smile. “You’ve been very kind, and I won’t forget you. Somehow, I will repay you for . . .” Her words trailed off.
“I know,” Hervé said softly, and, embarrassed by his unexpected display of sensitivity, turned to pull the convent’s bell rope. A moment later, the door creaked open to reveal not the benevolent features of old Sister Beatrice but a row of implacable faces of the Garde Royale—and the thoroughly pleased countenance of Claude Fabreville. He stuffed a pinch of snuff up one nostril and said languidly, “I had thought you would seek out the nearest familiar place.”
“God! God!” Natalie lifted clenched fists that were shackled at the wrists. Her muttering wasn’t a prayer or a beseechment but a curse that was lost in the babble of prison inmates.
At first she had prayed for strength, but she wasn’t certain who answered, God or Satan. She remembered thinking that nothing could be worse than La Salpêtriére’s section reserved for the women interned by royal order. But life in the Great Prison, which housed thousands of habitual women criminals, had become, as Madeleine had warned, a living nightmare after only ten days.
Still, at the moment, even the discomforts of searching for an occupied corner to sleep in, of scratching at the body lice until her skin was raw, of picking through the bowl of watered rice to remove the pebbles and worms, seemed infinitely preferable to the horror that awaited her.
The women around her, mostly coarse-faced prostitutes, parted before the flank of guards. Here and there, a few of the braver women dared to hiss obscenities at the soldiers. The soldier in front, whose eyes had lost whatever compassion might have been found there years before, growled at Natalie, “Come along, you’re next.”
“Take your hands off me,” she said coldly, haughtily. She drew away her emerald velvet skirts, now tattered, for the gown was the same one she had worn when first arrested. “I’m not a thief.”
The guard chortled. “You’re here doing charitable works, I suppose?”
“You must listen! I’m the Marquise de Marchesseau!”
He swept her a low, mocking bow. “Yes, and I’m his grace, the regent.”
He, no doubt, thought her tete de bois, as mad as the stringy- haired, teenage girl who stood in a corner of the cavernous room the entire day, day after day, eyes vacant, picking or playing with herself in a distracted form of self-abuse.
He signaled to the soldiers, and they took Natalie by her arms and hauled her along the dark, slime-musty tunnel that led out to the moat surrounding La Salpêtriére. Even though it was dawn, the faint winter sunlight blistered her unaccustomed eyes. Before her was the cart that would take her and nineteen others accused as thieves to the Palais de Justice.
The cart rolled through filthy streets that were beginning to stir with life. Odd, she had never noticed how ugly and dirty Paris was.
The layout of Paris was that of a village that had overgrown its islet boundaries established three hundred years before Christ— narrow streets that surrounded houses of rich merchants and ennobled lawyers known as the noblesse de robe, very much despised by the noblesse de épée and noblesse campagnarde, the old feudal families such as the one from which Natalie professed to come.
The lame, blind, and maimed were already begging on the streets. Come nightfall, these miscreants would return to the Court of Miracles, a place out of reach of the authorities. There, they would shed their wooden legs and eye patches and other props, and indulge in nocturnal orgies. It was these nightly miraculous cures from infirmity that gave the court its name.
At the Palais de Justice, the women prisoners were herded into a courtyard dominated by a scaffold. Though it was early yet, a great crowd had assembled to watch the weekly spectacle. People filled every window space and stood on roofs. A tile, knocked loose, shattered on the cobblestones below, only a few feet from where Natalie stood, the first in line.
She pressed her lips over chattering teeth and steeled herself to behave with dignity, to endure what was to come in stoic silence. Although disaster after disaster had befallen her, she was still naively hopeful of some heavenly intervention.
The sight of the branding iron, spitting in the forge erected on the scaffold, sent fear rattling down her spine. Her throat felt raw from the screaming inside her trapped body. Her teeth were clenched so tightly her jaws ached. Despite the dawn’s wet chill, sweat, rank with body odor, oozed through her pores.
When the guards took hold of her, cheers erupted from the atavistic spectators. All of her good intentions to comport herself with noble bravery vaporized in the cold morning air along with the breath that carried her silent screams.
She struggled between her captors, kicking and clawing as they mounted, stair by stair. Thrust onto the scaffold, she could feel the heat from the forge. Only that morning, in the bone-chill of La Salpêtriére, she would have sold her wooden shoes to feel the warmth of a fire again. Now she cringed away from the fierce heat. She didn’t see the avid expressions of those nearest, only the red-hot sizzle of the branding iron moving inexorably toward her.
At last her voice exerted itself. She threw back her head and screamed, the agonizing wail of a beast in torment. She writhed between the two soldiers. In her struggles, her breast was bared instead of her shoulder, and the fleur-de-lis burned into her flesh. The branding iron’s hiss left a putrid stench of smoking flesh. Her pain-stunned body reacted. Her nails gouged flesh from her palms. Her eyes rolled upward. Her womb heaved in sudden, violent contractions. Finally, her brain willed her into merciful unconsciousness.
In desperation, the Scotsman John Law sent his hirelings into France’s
gaols and hospitals and bagnios in search of involuntary settlers to populate the torpid French colonies administered by his Compagnie des Indes—the Antilles, Louisiana, and other lands beyond the sea. In addition, it was an easy way for France to rid herself of undesirables.
Sometimes, even innocent or respectable persons were kidnapped. A purse of gold slipped into a hand, a whisper in an ear went a great way to get rid of a competitor in the realm of either love or business.
Law’s ruffian, quasi-military police came to scour the dregs of La Salpêtriére early in June. They came in search of prospective brides for the many bachelors in the vast Louisiana wilderness. The female felons they indiscriminately picked were to be provided with a chest of clothing and linens as a dowry so that they might marry with all possible dispatch. Of these assembled filles à la cassette, or casket girls, few were favored with either youth or beauty.
Natalie’s beauty was virtually unrecognizable beneath the prison filth, and at twenty-one she felt her youth was gone, robbed from her by Claude Fabreville. The unshed tears for the baby she had miscarried had turned to venom. She watched the police move among the filles de joie, thieves, orphans, and murderesses, singling out one here and there for a casket girl.
She came to her decision easily. She faced the rest of her life confined to La Salpêriére’s Great Prison, for who, other than Fabreville, knew of her incarceration? Should Philippe be released from the Bastille, he would learn only that she had escaped from that section reserved for prisoners by lettres de cachet. When she did not return to him with the passage of time, he could only come to believe that she had died in the process of escape.
Her one hope—for herself, for Philippe—was to insinuate herself within the circle of selected casket girls. In a matter of months, the Duc d’Orléans would no longer be regent; upon Louis XV’s ascendancy to the throne, she could return to France and Philippe.
Surely for a period of a few months or so she could evade the expected marriage. She could support herself by giving Italian or English lessons. The Company of the Indies posters told of a settlement that almost equaled Paris. La petite Paris it was called, though the official name was Nouvelle Orleans. Her lips twisted mordantly at the name given in honor of the Duc d’Orléans. She hoped that was the extent of similarity between the man and the settlement.
The send-off of the bride convoy from Paris was quite festive. Thirty tumbrels, escorted by archers, bore the three hundred and fifty-three gaily waving women sentenced to transport to French Louisiana. Eighty-seven of the women were from La Salpêtriére. Some of them, like Natalie, bore the red brand of the fleur-de-lis.
The émigrées were accompanied by a curé and two Ursuline nuns. The church had provided a yellow ribbon bow for the coiffure of each virtuous maiden, as it chastely designated the female émigrées. Who was to contradict the church’s choice of description?
Behind the carts walked half that number of male deportees, who wore cockades of the same yellow shade in their hats. Most of this contingent, grouped by pairs in chains, comprised the riffraff recruited from all of the depots of the capital, but some, mainly yokels and simpletons, had been seized off the streets. Among them also straggled the lame and the blind.
In crossing Paris, the wenches sang as though without care and hailed passersby, inviting them to come along on the voyage aux isles, meaning Louisiana. Natalie stood in the rear, her face lifted to the bright, blinding spring sunlight. For this alone, she would have become a casket girl. She was leaving her beloved Paris and her beloved Philippe; yet she was free, free to return when it was once again safe.
Outside Paris, the female émigrées were deprived of their transportation and forced to proceed afoot, along with the male deportees. Bound for the port of La Rochelle, they were herded like cattle along the roads of France. At night they were locked up in barns, and when shelter could not be found, they were forced to lie down in ditches, while guards stood over them with pikes or bows and arrows.
That first night Natalie lay down to sleep, but sleep would not come. The ground was hard and damp, and the nights cold, not so different from La Salpêtriére really. She lay there and planned. Planning was good; it eased the hate.
Those three months in the infamous Great Prison had become an ordeal of constant struggle to hold herself together as a person under conditions that were totally subhuman. She hadn’t hardened like the others yet, and found such simple things as lack of privacy when attending to the body’s natural functions during the march excruciatingly embarrassing.
Along the way, additional deportees, mostly kidnapped children or waylaid servant girls, were added from foul-smelling collection centers that were crawling with vermin. During the journey, two men escaped into nearby fields. Not Natalie. She wanted to go farther than Fabreville’s long arm of power could reach.
She was still susceptible to the misery of others and ended the second day of travel by comforting a tearful, delicate-featured girl of no more than twelve years, who had two thick braids hanging down her back. A shopkeeper’s wife had taken covert revenge on the pretty, dark-haired maidservant and arranged for her kidnapping.
“I don’t—don’t want to marry.” Jeanne-Antoinette sobbed.
Natalie replaited one of the girl’s braids. “Of course you don’t. And you won’t have to, I’m certain.” Surely the church would refuse to perform such a marriage?
At the end of the third week, the émigrés straggled lamely into La Rochelle. Crowds turned out along the shabby streets of the sordid port to watch the arrival of the deportees. At the waterfront stood two towers, the Tour de la Chaine and the Tour St. Nicolas, between which was suspended a heavy chain when the port was closed. Here, the five hundred or so prisoners were separated and consigned to one of the three ships that made up the bridal convoy. Natalie was assigned to the Baleine and managed to keep Jeanne-Antoinette at her side.
To her joy, she discovered that Hervé was among those waiting on the rotting wharf to board the Baleine. She had often wondered what had become of her mighty rescuer. When she called his name, he stared at her without recognition. Why would he recognize her, she thought sadly. Instead of elegant clothes, she wore rags and wooden shoes. Her shining hair of pale gold was matted, and straggled from the soiled yellow ribbon in dark, dirty lanks about her shoulders. Not even rouge adorned her dust-smeared face.
“It’s Natalie,” she said, her dimpled chin tilted arrogantly.
Despite his manacled wrists, his large hands encircled her waist and lifted her into the air. He grinned whimsically. “Natalie, la comtesse!"
“La marquise,” she corrected, catching his broad shoulders for balance.
Those about the two snickered with contempt at the airs the young woman put on. He set her down, his gaze slipping to her midsection. “The babe?”
“Stillborn.”
“That swine Fabreville—he was the one who had us arrested?”
She nodded, her hatred so keen that words were impossible. A soldier prodded Hervé with the butt of his musket and ordered him back in line. “At least,” the brigand called over his shoulder, “the swine will never find you in Louisiana.”
The Baleine was a three-master with a lateen mizzen. Before Natalie was herded below to the orlop deck, she surreptitiously pulled the yellow bow from her hair and leaned over the side. The soiled ribbon fluttered briefly between her fingers before twirling into the foamy, gray sea.
§ CHAPTER EIGHT §
Montréal, New France
June 1722
For years in New France, French government had discouraged free enterprise by individual trappers in favor of its Company of the Indies. If the tendency to roam couldn’t be eradicated, it could at least be controlled. A compromise measure was reached regarding those bold vagabonds of the woods and waterways known as coureurs des bois.
If they wanted to hunt and trap, they were required to purchase permits. Naturally these congés were hard to come by. The permits were obtai
ned by friends of high-placed officers in the colony and then resold secretly to the highest bidder. In the early years, those caught trapping without permits had been whipped and branded the first time, then set to the galleys for life the second time. The latest French practice was to impoverish the successful trappers with fines in order to support the excesses of the French court.
Nicolas Brissac was one of these renegade coureurs des bois—but then, being a half-breed, he was a renegade to begin with. He merely turned to doing business with the English, smuggling his pelts out of the country in the false bottoms specially made in the hulls of their ships by enterprising captains.
With the arrival of spring, he was coming out of the frozen wilderness with twice as many furs as his canoe could carry. The day before, he had cached the surplus of superb dark pelts to await his return.
Three half-naked, top-knotted Chipewyan warriors traveled to Montréal with him. Between the four of them, they carried the canoe and its supplies in short relays across the rugged twelve miles of Methye Portage, which separated Hudson Bay and the Arctic watershed.
The watershed was an immense wilderness few white men had seen. It contained the greatest fur bonanza on the continent, an incalculable quantity of beaver, marten, mink—and the prized ermine, which, though brown in color in the summer, changed to yellowish white in winter. Only in areas of extreme cold did the ermine’s fur turn pure white, areas such as that where Nicolas had wintered, north of the treeline where a mighty river snaked into the remote Arctic Ocean.
First with Jean-Baptiste Brissac, from whom he had taken his surname, and then later on his own, he had explored and mapped the labyrinthine waterways, rugged mountains, bleak tundra of the Artic north, and the innumerable twisting streams that crossed desolate portages.
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 8
