But as he drove the caleche into the Natchitoches business district, he reflected that somewhere his life had gone awry. With the one woman he loved, his own wife, he was impotent. A morbid smile lifted the ends of his moustache. How ironic. The old Greek dramatists would have appreciated his dilemma. His hands clenched around the reins. The worst of it was, he was beginning to suspect that Nicolas was falling in love with Natalie, and she with him. He felt at once like weeping and cursing the fates that had brought his life to this impasse.
The oblong-shaped log cabin that served as the offices for Louisiana Imports-Exports squatted on a ridge along with the rest of the mercantile establishments, overlooking Riviere Rouge’s placid arm, Riviere aux Cannes. Watching the slow-moving ripples in the brown water, François felt some sense of calm being restored to his warring soul. He had grown up on the coast and had served in the navy, and the love of water was ingrained in him.
Inside the office, two male slaves, Samuel and Jeremiah, worked at a table. In the large jars he had obtained from the Mediterranean, they sealed the grease taken from bears trapped in the wilderness beyond Natchitoches. Bear grease in Europe was a valuable commodity, vitally needed to keep coaches, wagons, and artillery working smoothly.
The idea of exporting it had been his, and Nicolas had agreed to put it into effect. That winter, Nicolas had hired trappers and Indians to prod the bears out of hibernation. He and Nicolas had always worked well together, complementing one another.
However, between establishing a lucrative trade route to both Mexico and the English seaboard colonies and setting up a vacherie, grazing land for the wild cattle driven back from Texas, Nicolas was now away from Natchitoches more often than not.
The few times Nicolas had visited him and Natalie, the unspoken tension was so strong that everyone felt uncomfortable. François was certain that nothing had happened, that Natalie was faithful to him, that Nicolas was his friend, a man of integrity, a man he admired.
But how long could it continue like this for them?
His wooden peg thudded hollowly against the floor of the back room as he moved among the crates of pelts and barrels of tobacco due to be shipped the next day. He was counting and marking on a ledger when the door of the front office slammed and Father Hidalgo shoved aside the curtain that partitioned the two rooms. Within the pointed hood, the young curé’s complexion was mottled with zealous outrage.
He pointed a trembling, bony finger at François. “I command you to put away your concubine and I forbid any further resumption of this unsanctioned—scandalous—alliance with the Negress Jasmine!”
François set down the ledger and stared at the young priest in mild surprise. French society considered the Africans more or less exotic, and even the illustrious King Louis XIV had reportedly had a Negress for his mistress in the amorous days of his youth. “Is there some reason why you should just now consider this a great scandal?”
“At confession, she admitted to carrying your child!”
François concealed his astonishment. “Is the reverend father ready to accuse all masters at the post whose slaves have produced such children?”
“That is not the point,” the priest said indignantly. “Furthermore, you have not complied with the requirement of annual confession and communion.”
François shrugged. “Before the priests came, we didn’t do so, and I don’t think our souls were any more jeopardized than they are now.”
Father Hidalgo sputtered, “If you don’t do as I command, I shall take this matter to higher authorities. To Bishop Remant in Quebec, if need be!”
Sudden comprehension dawned on François. The poor priest was waging his own inner conflict. He himself lusted after Jasmine! François’s spark of sympathy immediately evaporated. “You might consider well at this point the matter of the furnace and mill that Louisiana Import-Exports donated to the parish.”
The priest spun around to leave, and his brown robes swished past the rustling curtain.
François finished his inventory and drove over to the African House. Jasmine met him at the door, slipping her arms up around his shoulders and pressing her hips against him suggestively. He grasped her wrists and removed them from about his neck, stretching them out to either side of her. He looked down into her face. Her nostrils flared with his scent, and her wide lips parted in hunger. Her eyes flashed challengingly up into his. The primitive savage inherent in her fascinated him—and for a while had superimposed itself over his unconsummated love for Natalie. “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?”
Her teeth gleamed against her black skin. “I was going to. It just occurred to me at confession how enjoyable it would be to shock the young priest.”
He let her wrists drop and went over to the small commode, where he uncorked a half-empty rum bottle. “Well, you seem to have stirred up a hornet’s nest, Jasmine.”
She came up behind him and looped her arms about his shoulders again. She nibbled at his neck, raising little goose bumps of pleasure. “François, chéri, our child must not be born with the stigma of slavery.”
He swallowed a mouthful of rum and said, “I will buy the child from bondage, Jasmine, but do not expect me to acknowledge it publicly as mine. The child will never inherit my assets.” Fiercely, she sank her pointed little teeth into the flesh at his nape. With a yelp of pain, he dropped the bottle and spun on her. She jumped back out of reach of his lashing hand. Her eyes narrowed to slits, her teeth bared, and she spat, “Just what children of yours do you think will inherit your assets? Your children by your wife? Ha! You can’t even manage to make your manhood ready for her!”
Her venomous outburst distracted her momentarily, and the back of his hand slammed against her cheek. “I’m sending you back to the St. Denises and selling this house,” he gritted. “I don’t ever want to hear of you—or the child—again!”
Tears of pure rage glistened against the whites of her eyes. “What other woman do you think could bring herself to touch your hideous deformity?” She hurled the words after his departing back. “Not even a paid whore!”
An early-morning breeze rustled the orange and brown leaves along the winding little dirt street that paralleled the Cane River. Besides the unsightly warehouses and stores that banked one side of the river road, a few stylish homes had actually sprung up, boasting wide porches, or galleries, laced with wrought iron imported from France and tall doors and windows to capture cooling breezes. Louvered shutters, called jalousies, protected against sun and rain, or other jealousies, because a lady might look through the slats without being seen.
Natalie stood behind one louvered window of the recently completed house and watched François limp up the shrub-bordered path. His gait was unsteady, not because of his wooden leg but from drinking. She knew where he had been. With the lieutenant’s widow, Marie Duclos. Thin, intense, and pretty, the well-born woman from Normandy had the morals of a bitch in heat. Like the others, she had fallen under the spell of François’s charm and tried her best to seduce him away from Natalie.
As ever, a deep surge of pity for François welled up in her. She knew he would soon drop Marie, just as he had the other women, Solange included, in the year since he had broken with Jasmine. He amused himself with them, treated them rather shabbily, and then deserted them for a new face. Somewhere there was always a woman ready to be his mistress, but none of these would-be mistresses seemed to realize that it was François’s frustrated love for his wife that drove him to them in the first place.
Natalie didn’t bother to move from the tall, narrow window when he entered the parlor. “Ah, the devoted little wife waited up for me,” he slurred, and attempted a clumsy bow.
“Do you want any breakfast?” she asked calmly.
His hand came up to stroke her throat. “Do you never worry that I might not return from my nocturnal forays?” he asked softly. “Or do you hope that I won’t?”
“You know that’s not true.”
His fingers ti
ghtened at the base of her throat. “I wonder.” He pivoted from her and started toward his bedroom, which he had converted from the Stranger’s Room: originally intended in the colonial homes for any sojourner lacking a place to sleep, the Stranger’s Room had a separate entrance. “Don’t go out today. Last night the slaves on the Poydras plantation butchered him and his wife and children. The slaves were planning on mounting an army of blacks and marching downriver to New Orleans.”
She followed him into his bedroom. “Then they were stopped?”
“St. Denis caught twelve of them. His soldiers are still looking for the rest. They’ve fled to the swamps with their leader.” He removed his sword belt and laid it across the shaving duchet, then shrugged out of his ruffled linen shirt, before he continued. “Joseph.”
“Jasmine?” she asked.
He pulled off his boot. “She’s with them.”
“The child?”
François looked up at her. “Her child’s with her also.”
Her child. Did François really believe she didn’t know who the father of Jasmine’s daughter was? Father Hidalgo may have reluctantly recorded the father as unknown, but Natalie knew the father’s identity, as did everyone else in Natchitoches.
She wondered why it was that there was a word for a husband whose wife was unfaithful—cuckold—but no term for the wife whose husband kept other women. People might pity the wife, but she wasn’t scorned. An unfaithful husband was acceptable, expected.
In the days that followed, Natchitoches appeared deserted but for the mangy dogs and an occasional chicken or pig that had escaped its owner. At nights, even François slept at home. Emanuella came over to visit once, accompanied by two soldiers from the fort. Dressed in their shabby blue uniforms, they stood guard on the gallery. With the Company of the West Indies bankrupt, they were going as much as a year without pay; it had been that long or more since a French ship had put into New Orleans. They existed only on what St. Denis managed to eke out and on their own small grants of land.
“Would you believe,” Emanuella said, “Solange has given up her calling and married our bookkeeper. Charles Didier is such a bland, unprepossessing young man. Myopic and balding to boot.”
Natalie poured lemon-scented punch and passed a cup to Emanuella. “His myopia will be good for the marriage. It might make him blind to her past.”
While the women chatted, the guards shifted from one foot to another, uncomfortable in their roles as escorts. They much preferred to be in on the chase, scouring the woods and swampy areas for the bloody insurrectionists.
Eventually, as the days dissolved into weeks and no arrests were made, the settlement was forced to conclude that the slaves had made good their escape. Life resumed its normal pace, unhampered by a mild winter.
Natalie’s days were filled with occasional visits and domestic chores. She could have had a maidservant to perform the menial duties, but she remembered her own freedomless days all too well. So she preferred the chores and neighborly visits that kept her busy and pleasantly tired.
Sometimes, in the deep of night, though, she would awaken, a terrible loneliness gnawing at her body, which was as white and wracked as a martyred saint’s. She ached to be held, to be touched. The ache was not sexual. Over the years, her body had nearly forgotten that need. No, it was a purely human need to be touched. In some cases, if that need went unfulfilled, a person had been known to die eventually. Natalie felt as if she had already died and was shriveled up inside.
Whatever beauty her features were proclaimed to have certainly didn’t permeate through to the core. Inwardly, she felt old and ugly and haggard. Life was slipping by, and she was astonished to realize she really didn’t care. Rarely did her thoughts ever turn to Philippe. He was part of her ancient past. She even doubted whether he was still alive after all those years. Her indifference frightened her.
One January afternoon, when a burst of sunlight finally drove away a dismal, week-long drizzle, Emanuella arrived, full of news. “Solange has left poor Didier! Now ask me, just ask me, who she ran off with!”
With a curve of amusement twisting the ends of her mouth, Natalie arranged dried rosemary, lavender, and thyme in a delicate porcelain Sevres vase. “I give up, Emanuella. Who?”
The Spanish woman’s lips made a little moue that Natalie had put forth no effort to guess the identity of Solange’s lover. “She ran off to join our former slave Joseph no less!” she said, triumphant at having elicited a lift of Natalie’s finely defined brows, which were darker than her hair. “I swear it’s true. Heard it from Madame Duclos, who saw them together not six months ago. They were, well, doing you know what in back of the old market house.”
“Well, Joseph is undeniably a handsome man,” Natalie commented idly, “if one could overlook the hideous tattooing on his chin.”
“And his color!” Emanuella said.
Natalie bristled slightly but made no rejoinder to her friend. Color mattered little when one was in love. Didn’t she herself love a redskin, as the Indians were called there in the New World?
But Emanuella’s next statement did bring her up short.
“Nicolas is back. He stopped by the house to talk with Louis. From what I overheard, it seems Nicolas has established a lucrative trade with St. Genevieve in the Illinois country. Your husband is going to be very happy at that news. You know, I wonder that Nicolas has never taken a wife. Probably too much the coureur des bois in him. Even when he’s in town, he holes up out at his cabin. I’m so pleased, Natalie, that you and François finally moved into town.”
Nicolas!
As Emanuella continued her recitation of local gossip, Natalie’s body clock had ceased to function. Seven months ago when last she saw him, he had presented her, in François’s presence, what appeared to be an inconsequential gift. A tiny looking glass suspended on a thin gold chain.
“The Apache counts it a great privilege to stare in the looking glass and see himself reflected there,” he had told her and François at dinner. “He believes this means that the wearer always keeps him in his—or her—heart.”
She wore the necklace constantly. Seven months may have intervened since she last saw him, yet the excitement that curled deep within her was as powerful as that last kiss they had shared . . . how long ago? Years before.
“Natalie? Are you listening?”
Natalie blinked, trying to whisk away the passionate thoughts that surely glistened in her eyes. “I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
“Only that I’m expecting another child.” She sighed. “Toujours coucber, toujours grosse, toujours accoucher!” Always being bedded, always pregnant, always bearing babies!
A twinge of jealousy twisted through Natalie. Ever since the night she gave birth to the stillborn son at La Salpêtrière, she had felt that her female organs were condemned to barrenness.
That night, after she donned her gauzy nightrail, she studied the reflection in the tiny looking glass suspended on the thin gold chain about her neck. Smoky green eyes stared back at her. Was there truly a woman inside that body? Or was she as lifeless as the wooden statue of the Madonna at the little church?
A scraping noise from the direction of the parlor spun her around. François never returned from his amours until nearly sunrise. Wild hope flickered in her. What if Nicolas . . .
The door swung open, and Jasmine stood there. The candles in the socket flickered off her sleek black skin, the short, kinky, glossy hair, and the blade of the wickedly curved knife she held in her hand. Jasmine’s eyes gleamed in the sputtering light of the candle that dwindled in its socket. Natalie imagined that the Angel of Death must look just so. But it was more than that. The blood lust Natalie had witnessed the night of the vodun crazed the woman’s face.
“You turned François against me,” the black woman purred, stalking closer to Natalie.
Natalie looked frantically about the room. Jasmine stood between her and the bedroom door. The only other escape, the gallery doo
r, was on the far side of the room. “That’s not so, Jasmine,” she countered in a reasoning tone. “Your name was never mentioned between us in that context.”
“I have borne François a child. You never will. I mean to make certain of that. I mean to make certain François’s daughter inherits what is rightfully hers.”
Jasmine slid nearer. The knife she brandished before her swished back and forth through the air like a snake’s head prior to its strike.
Natalie whirled and swatted blindly at the candle stub in the wall socket. The flame hissed and sputtered out. At first, the room was as black as the Baleine’s hold. Then as her eyes adjusted, slivers of moonlight slipped through the jalousies to limn the dim silhouettes of the two adversaries.
Jasmine laughed softly and advanced. “Perhaps I shall slit your throat as I would a chicken.” Her knife carved the air. “And watch the blood seep out until you’re as white as wax.”
Step by step, Natalie retreated until her thigh brushed the bedstead. Her fingers clutched at the blanket. Fear strangled her throat, but she suppressed the urge to flee. So she waited. Jasmine’s small white teeth gleamed triumphantly in the dark. She took another step forward. Natalie’s nostrils detected the musky scent of the young woman. At that moment, Natalie whipped the blanket from the bed. Like a net, she tossed it over the black woman. Jasmine screamed a snarl of fury.
Before she could throw off the blanket, Natalie hurled herself at the woman. They rolled on the floor, entangled in the blanket. They grappled for possession of the knife. The nails of Jasmine’s free hand raked crimson tracks down Natalie’s cheek. Natalie grasped a handful of wiry curls and jerked. The black woman’s head arched backward, and she screeched with pain. Both hands came up to tug at Natalie’s wrist, and the knife clattered to the floor. Natalie swooped down on it and came up in a crouch over Jasmine.
Common sense told her that it was either her or Jasmine, that if she didn’t kill the woman now, the woman would yet find a way to kill her. Yet Natalie couldn’t bring herself to do it. She struggled to her feet and pushed the hair out of her face. “If I ever see or hear of you in Natchitoches, I swear I’ll find a way to have you killed.”
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 21
