“Oui?” he drawled.
She ignored the amusement in his voice. “Damn you, Nicolas, why must you act as a—a—”
“Espionage agent for certain English colonies?” he supplied, and she could imagine that sardonic lift of one black brow.
“Mais oui! As a spy! What happens in the English colonies is their business, not ours. You’ll end up getting your neck stretched at the end of a rope—all for some foreigners!”
She felt the mattress give as he rolled from atop her and strode to the open French doors. That summer, Nicolas had added two more rooms to his cabin, one this spacious bedroom designed expressly by herself and the other a bedroom for the child she desperately hoped for.
His back to her, hands on his hips, he casually watered her recently planted cape jasmine. Exasperation filled her. “Nicolas, you’re not listening to me!”
He half turned, his jutting shaft silhouetted against the moonlit night. “Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans—we all have to live together on the same continent, Natalie.” Amusement no longer tinged his baritone’s voice. “The only way we can do that is as free men, not under the thumb of another country.”
“What about me? What about us?”
He padded over to her. “We have now. We have this moment. Can anyone say for certain that he has more than that?”
He was right, this man of hers. In reply, she took his callused hand and drew it down to that part of her that evidenced her want of him.
§ CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR §
New Orleans, Colony of Louisiana
May 1744
In the governor’s immense ballroom, gaily uniformed officers danced with bejeweled women dressed in satins and silks. The glittering light of hundreds of candles shimmered off Natalie’s fuschia taffeta. Lustrous pearls beaded the ball gown and lace draped from its sleeves. Additional pearls were looped through her elaborately arranged and powdered curls. Though she was nearing her forty-fourth year, she still drew the masculine approval of every man in the room.
She wanted only one man’s approval, and that wasn’t likely to be forthcoming under the circumstances.
The new governor of the Louisiana colony, the grand Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, flirted outrageously with her as he paraded the slender beauty through the steps of the minuet. Angry with Nicolas, she laughingly encouraged the governor’s attentions—and studiously ignored Nicolas.
In less than two years in the post, Vaudreuil had set a new precedent for graft and corruption under a lax and venal administration. He was accused of favoring the soldiers, who bullied and insulted the citizens, and was said to surround himself with a small group of favorites who flattered him and thus received many economic privileges.
When dinner was served, Natalie covertly appraised him from her end of the immense rosewood table, adorned with the best silver and crystal. He seemed of a genial and kindly nature, and she thought it paradoxical that the man was capable of the vile acts rumored about him. Especially when he had established a court where court dress for his grand balls was de rigeur. She counted his soldierly courtliness and great dignity a plus for the backwoods capital. He had created out of the far-flung outpost a fashionable little court closely resembling that at Versailles.
He was fond of pomp and splendor, especially in military display. The upper class of the colony vied for an invitation to his sumptuous dinners. The fact that he had issued an invitation to two of Natchitoches’s Canadian entrepreneurs, St. Denis and Nicolas, amused her. The governor would have been astonished to know that Nicolas Brissac’s lovely wife of fourteen years had been a felon at La Salpêtriére—and even more surprised to learn that the erudite Nicolas was a half-breed. Over the years, most of Natchitoches had managed to forget the fact, not that Nicolas gave a damn.
Emanuella, who sat two people away from her, swore she had heard that Vaudreuil took money from the city treasury to deal in liquor, which he sold to the lazy and undisciplined soldiers, Negroes, and Indians.
“Madame Vaudreuil keeps right here in her house every sort of drug,” Emanuella had whispered when the two women were having their hair powdered before dinner. “They say the drugs are sold by her steward.”
Natalie lifted the powdering mask over her face, and the Vaudreuil family’s hairdresser sifted the powder from the dredger over Natalie’s crown of white-gold curls, which was now invaded by strands of silver, giving her hair the appearance of sun-streaked highlights. “Whatever Vaudreuil’s done in Louisiana,” she mumbled from behind the mask, “it’s an improvement over twenty years ago.”
She could still remember her first sight of the dismal little settlement of huts that was supposed to be the capital of the vast colony.
“Bah,” Emanuella said. “New Orleans is notorious as a town of loose morals. Why, murder and robbery are commonplace here!”
“Is that why you pleaded with Louis to take you to one of the gambling dens along the riverfront?”
Emanuella’s lightly painted lips pursed in a moue. At forty- three, the Spanish aristocrat had plumpened but still possessed a sultry Latin beauty that was counterpoint to Natalie’s slender, golden loveliness. “Arguing with you is futile, chérie."
Natalie recalled her friend’s words as she partook of one of the little candied orange peels topped with sugared rose leaves. Nicolas had said almost the same words to her the evening before as they dressed for dinner. They had disagreed over something unimportant, so unimportant she couldn’t remember what, but underlying it all was her continual worry for his safety. His work as an agent for the English colonies had led him even deeper into espionage.
“What good will it do me if you’re hanged as a spy?” she had demanded. It was the same argument, the old one, between them. Their life together certainly wasn’t placid, would never be so.
He had paused in unbuckling his stock. His black eyes had passed scathingly over her. “As a wealthy citizen of a French colony, you lead a fashionable, social life of ease, Natalie. Have you forgotten what it was to be an outcast, to enjoy no privileges— especially freedom? At least the English courts feel that a person is innocent until proven guilty.”
Wearing only her camisole and pantalettes, she had whirled on him, hands anchored about her wisp of a waist, and spat, “I haven’t forgotten anything, especially how it felt all the times when you were gone on those—those secret assignments, not knowing if I’d ever see you again!”
He had grunted with exasperation. “You knew I was in the English colonies.”
“Nicolas, you’re not English, you’re French! Why must you hobnob with these English colonists?”
“I’m neither English nor French. I am a free man. And until every man is a—”
“You are a married man, a detail I sometimes think you’d like to forget!”
“It’s impossible to argue with you,” he had snapped. “You’re irrational and illogical when you argue.”
“You think this—this spying is rational? What do you think will—”
“Shut up!” He had grabbed her arms and shook her. “Do you want every servant in Vaudreuil’s household to hear you?”
At that, she had flounced into the adjoining dressing room and had refused to speak to him since.
Now her eyes sought out his leonine head, three seats away. At her glance, he made some excuse to the flirtatious brunette on his right and rose from the table. Despite the voluble conversation about the table and his discreet leave-taking, more than one feminine glance followed the departure of that broad back.
Age had rendered his formidable features impossibly handsome. The white that streaked his hair made him appear terribly distinguished. Unlike most men of fifty-odd years, he had not added a paunch but was still lean and hard. In comparison, Louis St. Denis, on her left, looked peaked and unwell. The great man was getting on in years, she realized. He was nearing—what?— sixty-eight?
“Do you know,” gossiped the heavily rouged woman nearest her, “that the king’s mistress
is said to be frigid?”
Natalie forced her attention back to the pretentious matron. “Ah, well, a man can be happy with any woman as long as he doesn’t love her,” she said, and reached for the cut-glass goblet of wine.
“Oui,” replied the woman, slightly flustered by the non sequitur, “but La Pompadour only keeps her place by procuring the king’s numerous mistresses. Imagine!”
“Imagine,” Natalie parodied. She watched Nicolas return to his seat, wondering what it was that could have taken him from the room for less than the span of two minutes.
The painted woman seemed unaware of Natalie’s disinterest in continuing the conversation. “Why, it is said the king prefers the very young and preferably virginal because he fears diseases. And I have been told firsthand that he houses the young women who serve his pleasure in a hotel he keeps on rue Saint-Merderic in Deer Park.”
“Our cloven-hoofed king should call the place Stag Park,” Natalie replied distractedly.
The woman tittered behind her swishing fan. Natalie was relieved of continuing the conversation by the gentle prodding of St. Denis’s elbow. When she looked down, he was holding folded scrap of parchment. “For you,” St. Denis said with a sly smile. “From your husband.”
She took the note and opened it, holding it below the table, out of sight of her feminine neighbor’s prying eyes.
I think you are being unreasonable, and I think days from now you will agree. However, I am thoroughly miserable at being out of sorts with you. I confess that I love you, you bitch!
She looked up and caught Nicolas’s dark eyes watching her. She flashed him a glorious smile. Tonight, somehow she knew with a certainty that tonight she would conceive.
The wild peaches were in bright, casual bloom, and the soft spring breeze played with the fuzzy puffs of dandelions. Gently, Quin-Quin blew on the dandelion held between her fingers, and the laughing eighteen-month-old Reinette toddled on dimpled legs to catch the floating puffs.
From the cool shadows of the gallery, Natalie watched the two playing. An affectionate smile nudged at the corners of her lips. Quin-Quin was as handsome as her mother. Natalie thought it strange that the young woman carried herself with the same regal command her mother had, yet the twenty-two-year-old Quin-Quin had never really known Jasmine and thus had no example to follow.
It never occurred to Natalie that she also moved with that same stately grace peculiar to aristocracy or royalty.
Her gaze drifted to Reinette, and a deep surge of love tugged at her heartstrings. Nature had been contrary, leaving her infertile that night in New Orleans she had been so certain she would conceive. Instead of giving life, nature had taken that of their old friend, St. Denis. For nearly two years, she remained barren, until a night when Nicolas had roused her from her sleep and she barely recalled the coupling the next morning. So unfair. Yet looking at the results, that adorable mite of humanity, she forgave nature the trickery.
She thought, If only I can hold this moment in my memory, my daughter’s pudgy little hands grasping for the elusive dandelion puffs.
Late in life had come Natalie’s greatest blessings. First Nicolas—or, at last, Nicolas, she rephrased her musing—and then their daughter. After all the heartache of her earlier years, she realized that a person could only appreciate the miracle of a sunrise when he has waited in darkness.
She wanted to tell that to Nicolas. He would understand, after wandering through the darkness of his childhood. As always, at the thought of her sauvage, she felt the urgent welling of love and wanting deep within her.
“Quin-Quin,” she called out joyously, “I’m going down to the river. Keep an eye on Reinette.”
“Oui, madame,” the pretty black girl called out, and waved.
Concern wrinkled Natalie’s brow with lines as faint as those crow’s-feet at the corner of her eyes. Quin-Quin’s future was uncertain. The girl was neither fish nor fowl. As a gens de couleur libre, she had the right to put the initials F. W.C. after her name— free woman of color—but she wasn’t accepted by the rest of her race, enslaved there in Louisiana’s wooded wilderness. The few Negro males of her own age who managed to obtain manumission early in life were usually sent off to France by their benefactors for further education. Such a step was unheard of for a female.
Natalie shook her head. She would not let the slight shadow of worry invade her jubilant mood. Picking up her crepe skirts, she strolled across the well-manicured lawn toward the dock, out of sight below the roll of the wisteria-wooded hills. Beyond, the pink tailfeathers of the day were fluttering at the western horizon.
Through the fragile wands of cattails, she glimpsed the dock and knew that Nicolas was somewhere close by fishing. She had practically pushed him out the door that morning, insisting that he take the day off. Between the demands of the export-import-business empire they had created and that “other activity,” as she uneasily referred to his subterfuge work with the English colonies, he had little time for relaxation.
Rustling among the crepe myrtle brought her spinning around. It would be just like the Indian in Nicolas to sneak up on her. She saw not Nicolas, however, but a stooped, bony man. The upper half of his face was a colorless membrane stretched over the skull. He looked old and young at the same time, like a hundred-year-old newborn infant. A scraggly beard concealed the lower half of his face. A stained red cravat drooped about his scrawny neck like a noose about a skeleton.
“Natalie.” His voice was a croak.
A small frown creased two vertical lines between her brows. Something about the man was familiar. Bon Dieu! She felt as if she were wading through a nightmare. Distance and fog rushed in on her.
“What do you want?” she rasped.
“My wife. I’ve come for my wife.”
She saw in his eyes the insanity, turned down like a lamp wick but ready to ignite. She was looking at a man who, after years in prison, was twisted in body as well as soul. “Philippe . . .” A silence trembled with her whisper. “I’m not the same Natalie you married. I’m no longer your wife. Forgive me.”
His eyes glowed in the sockets cratered by time and torture. “I know. I know about your bigamous marriage!”
She shrank back from his windmilling arms. “And that half-breed you’re living with.” From somewhere, the wildly flinging hands produced two pocket pistols.
“Philippe,” she said shakily, “let’s talk about this.”
“I didn’t spend a quarter of a century in prison waiting to talk! Fabreville died before I could take my revenge, but did you know his son has been granted my title of Marquis de Marchesseau— and my estates of Maison Bellecour?”
“No, I didn’t.” If she could keep him talking . . .
“I have nothing left but you, and you—even you have deserted me!” He backed away from her, walking jerkily like a puppet moved by unseen strings.
For an eternal moment, she stood rooted, staring past him, past the present moment toward the dark future that tapped insistently on her temples, begging to be let in.
Reaching the line of cattails, Philippe turned and lurched toward the dock with a celerity surprising for the rickety frame.
Nicolas! He was going to kill Nicolas! “No!” she screamed as she hurtled down the slope after him.
For years, Philippe had apathetically accepted his imprisonment in the Bastille’s almost luxurious cells, those reserved for victims of lettres de cachet. He had been allowed to shave and bathe regularly and was served good food.
One day, he had always told himself, one day he would be free. One day he and Natalie would return to his beloved Maison Bellecour, once again they would be the Golden Couple . . . one day. That thought had been his lifeline. Something he could cling to. One day the political situation would change. Nothing ever remained status quo. Things could be much worse, he had told himself. For instance, if he forced a prison break and was caught.
One day. Be patient. One day.
Then word had filtered thro
ugh the fortress walls of the Bastille that Louis XV had at last been crowned king. Philippe’s joy was short-lived. He had learned the Duc d’Orleans had merely exchanged the powerful position of regent for that of minister.
The days slipped into weeks and months and on into years. Always he worried: What had happened to Natalie? Had she escaped Fabreville’s talons? Often he had awakened in the night, her name on his lips, his sheets soiled like those during his puberty.
Rumor came that the duc had died of apoplexy some time before in his mistress’s arms. In truth, he had died of excesses—too much liquor, too much food, too many and too varied bed partners.
Philippe had learned that the opposition, the Duc de Burgogne had taken d’Orleans’s place as minister and advisor to Louis XV. For a while, Philippe had held out hope that his lettre de cachet would be rescinded. Then he had learned that his arch foe, Fabreville, had inveigled himself into the intimate confidence of the Duc de Burgogne.
Someday became forever.
He knew then that his period of apathy had ended. Someday, somehow he would escape or die trying—just as the half-breed who now called himself Natalie’s husband would die.
Philippe pushed Natalie’s grappling hands away and shoved through the undergrowth toward the riverbank. If he had hoped to take the half-breed by surprise, Natalie’s scream, as well as his own noisy approach, brought the Indian spinning where he knelt on one knee.
“She’s mine, not yours,” he told the man called Nicolas. It was all he could do to control the fury that palsied his hands so that the two pistol barrels waved erratically.
The half-breed merely watched him with steady eyes, but prison life had taught Philippe enough about cornered men to know that this one looked like a caged cat about to spring. At once, his thumbs cocked both pistols—at the same time that Natalie thrust herself between him and the savage.
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 26
