Louisiana History Collection - Part 1

by Jennifer Blake

  There rose inside Elise a terrible need to have him do precisely as he had said. Her eyes were wide and her lips parted, but the words that would grant him release from his vow would not come. An odd anguish ran with a shiver along her nerves. Her lashes flickered. Unable to sustain his gaze, she lowered her own to her hand, which was still pressed to him.

  He bowed his head and raised his fingertips to his lips, kissing them briefly before placing them in her lap. Rising to his feet with the swift flex of taut muscles, he reached to pinch out the candle flames in the candelabrum on the dressing table.

  “Come to bed,” he said, his voice weary.

  They lay together in the dark with a foot of feather-stuffed mattress between them. Outside could be heard the sighing of the night wind. Now and then the house creaked with the gathering cold. From the salon came the delicate ticking of the ormolu clock. It marked the minutes well and chimed the hours with a soft persistence.

  Two hours had passed and most of a third when Elise turned on her side, facing Reynaud. In the shelter they had shared on the trail it had been nearly impossible not to lie against each other. In her exhaustion the night before, she had not missed that closeness, but now she could not seem to rest without it. Casually, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary, she reached out to span the space between them, placing her fingers on the curve of his shoulder. He did not move. He must be asleep. She was glad. She closed her eyes and let her tense muscles relax.

  Reynaud, lying on his stomach because it seemed best in his present state of restless arousal, felt that soft touch and was barely able to control a start. Did she know what she was doing or had she turned to him again in her sleep? He was a fool to let it matter. Still, it did. He preferred to think that she knew. It gave him a small measure of peace to pretend that it was so. He slept.

  The days continued clear and the sun shone so bright that it dazzled the eyes. As always happened during that season, the earth absorbed the warmth and reflected it back at night so that the air grew mild once more and it began to seem as if winter might be held at bay indefinitely. A week passed, then another, and part of a third went by with hardly a ripple as they all in their various ways absorbed the tranquility of this backwater. The horror at Fort Rosalie faded until it took on the cast of a bad dream that could be forgotten for hours. The time was full, for Reynaud constantly had some outing or expedition that must be made: a duck shoot; a hunt for the wild pigs he had turned loose in the woods some years before to mate with those left by de Soto during his ill-fated meanderings nearly two hundred years ago; or any of a dozen other challenges to the marksmanship of a man. He offered the stimuli of games, whether it be an Indian form of dicing called “toss corn” where they took turns throwing out a number of kernels with one side painted black to see who could land the most with the black sides uppermost, or a race on scrawny Indian ponies traded from the Caddo, who had them from some tribe on the distant plains of the far west country.

  Sometimes Reynaud would take on all comers, one after the other, in a battle with buttoned épées, each man protected by a padded vest; at other times he would spend an idle afternoon trying to show Henri the finer points of wrestling Indian style or fighting with a knife. The activities seemed to provide some outlet for his energy and also for that of his guests, those of the male set, at least.

  There was food and wine in constant supply, ready at any hour. The greatest lure to forgetting the passing days was, however, the sybaritic comfort of his home.

  The refugees chafed and complained among themselves now and then, especially as the third week began to slip past, but they found Reynaud singularly unapproachable on the subject of their departure and no one was quite impatient enough to force the issue.

  Often their host went hunting with the other men, but he was just as likely to send one of the men Madeleine called her guards — dark, silent men proficient in tracking and crack shots with the muskets that were their greatest pride — with them. On those days when he remained behind, he usually sent to the stable to have horses saddled and took Elise riding with him over his lands.

  He took her down to the bayou to follow its slow windings between banks of rich, dark soil and its wide turns, which deepened into sunlit pools sheltered by trees and overhung with trailing vines. They visited the swamp nearby where his workers were felling cypress logs for more outbuildings, rode around the fields, and cantered along the cart track that wound from the house past the grist mill and cooperage at the bayou’s edge and into the dark, stretching forest once more.

  There was pride in the way he pointed out the smokehouse filled with meat, the cribs filled with corn, the pastures where sheep grazed to provide wool for cloth, and the pens where chickens and geese were kept from marauding foxes and weasels. He insisted on showing her the pantry stocked with barrels of cornmeal and nuts; crocks of eggs preserved in grease; smaller barrels called hog’s heads filled with rendered bear fat; pots of honey robbed from bee trees in the woods; and containers of jams, jellies, and pickles made by his cousin and the women she supervised. His was a self-sufficient estate, using little from the outside world except the wheat flour, olive oil, wine, and dried exotic fruits he could well have done without.

  Elise was warm in her praise, for she was genuinely impressed. She knew well the planning and sheer labor of the owner, as well as the workers, that it took to bring such plenty to so primitive and distant a piece of land. Here a man could live with little contact with the outside world, unheeding of its problems and fears, its greed and betrayal. It seemed an inviting prospect and, remembering the ashes that now drifted over her own holdings, the unlikelihood that she would be able to reclaim them at any time in the near future, and the work it would take to make them prosper again, she envied Reynaud Chavalier with all her heart.

  Late one afternoon, they sat their horses on the path that ran past the house and through the fields. Reynaud, squinting against the slanting rays of the setting sun, had been pointing out to Elise the weaving house where the great loom was kept, trying to give her some idea of the size of the wool harvest by calculating the number of bags of wool his cousin had carded and spun the spring before and of how many yards of cloth had been woven for clothing for the slaves.

  “I don’t think Madeleine likes me very much,” Elise said when she had shown herself suitably appreciative.

  “Why should you think that?”

  “She looks at me as if I were one of the roaches she chases with such passion.”

  He grinned. “She does hate them, doesn’t she? I will have to get a kitten for her when I am in Natchitoches; that should help keep them down.”

  “Do so and she will worship you more than she does now.”

  “You exaggerate.”

  As she saw his smile fade, Elise regretted having spoken. “I believe not, but then it’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Madeleine came with me from France, from Combourg. It may be she has a right to be concerned for my welfare.”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “No, but I would not have you misunderstand. She is like a sister to me, an older and dear sister.”

  “It’s none of my affair, really.”

  He ignored her protest. “She was living as a poor relation at the chateau, tending to the whims of my father’s wife. There had been a scandal years before, something she would never speak of but that left her without prospects. She was kind to me, a stranger to France, and saw to it that I was treated as my father’s son rather than as the ignorant savage that I undoubtedly was in many ways. She used to listen when I talked of Louisiana, would sometimes say how exciting it must be to begin a new life in a new country. When I decided to leave Combourg, I asked her to come with me. She agreed. It wasn’t my wish that she become my housekeeper, but that is the post she chose for herself and I can’t take it from her.”

  “You might tell her I have no designs upon it.”

  “I doubt,” he said, his voice har
d, “that the occasion will arise.”

  She sent him a perplexed look. “You are certainly testy of late. I meant no harm.”

  “Did you not? If I could be sure of that, I would feel a great deal easier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You so enjoy — Never mind.” He looked away abruptly, gathering his reins as if he would leave her.

  She put out her hand to catch his arm. “You think I would find fault merely to — to test your temper?”

  “And my good intentions.”

  “That’s absurd!”

  “Is it? Can you say you have never done so?”

  The heat of a flush rose to her face, but her eyes were steady. “Not in some time.”

  “I wish I could think,” he said after a long moment, “that you were so innocent — so without guile.”

  She drew back her hand. With sudden clarity, she knew that he was speaking of that morning when he had awakened to find her sleeping in the curve of his arm with one leg drawn up over his thighs. His start, though instantly stilled, had roused her and she had disentangled herself with as much dignity as she could muster. It had not been the first time it had happened, though usually it was he who reached out to her.

  “And what of you?” she asked, her voice tight.

  “Oh, I make no secret of my campaign against your defenses. But if I am guarding mine unnecessarily, I would like to know it.”

  His last words carried a sting of sarcasm. It was this that prompted her answer. “Why? Are you in danger of surrender?”

  “Against an equal force, the best way to lift a siege is to attack.”

  Swinging the head of his horse around, he rode away from her. She watched him go in some confusion. She had known full well that his temper was thin these last days, had realized something of the cost of his stringent control, but there had always been about him a feeling of hard and limitless purpose. Had she depended too much upon the tempered steel of his will? Had she in her dependence, her need, undermined it? Or was it simply that his invincibility was a myth she had created for herself because she wanted so badly to believe in it?

  7

  ELISE COULD HAVE let him go. She might have if she had not seen him draw in his horse some distance away beneath the limbs of a spreading tree. He sat for long moments, his gaze on the ground ahead of him. It occurred to her that he might have something more to say. Lifting her reins, she kicked her horse into a walk.

  When she was only a few feet from Reynaud, he dismounted, his well-cut doeskin riding breeches clinging to the firm musculature of his thigh as he swung his leg over the saddle. Without glancing in her direction, he began to walk his horse, bending now and then to pick something up from the dry brown leaves that covered the sere and broken grass edging the beaten trail. Elise watched him for a moment, then looked up at the tree above them. It was a wild pecan.

  Getting down from her horse, she looped the reins around her wrist and scuffed through the leaves, too, picking up the pecans. They were small and well hidden, but plentiful. Looking for them had a certain fascination, like searching for any hidden thing. Going nutting in the fall had always been one of her favorite chores, that and picking wild berries. She scrubbed the blackened hulls that clung damply to the pecans on the side of her legs with little regard for her habit. Though Madeleine had cleaned the velvet outfit and aired it well, it was so disreputable with its bald spots that it hardly mattered. Elise soon had an overflowing handful that she had to hold against her chest. Whenever she bent to collect another nut, she dropped one or two.

  “Here. Allow me.” Reynaud took her nuts, adding them to the store he had gathered, which caused his breeches pockets to bulge. “I know where a persimmon tree is, if it appeals?”

  It was, perhaps, a peace offering. She agreed, and side by side, with their horses trailing after them, they walked on along the track. It was not far. Their approach frightened away an opossum that had been already foraging among the fallen fruit. The ungainly creature trundled off into the woods with his hairless tail dragging behind him.

  It was a marvelous blending of flavors and textures: the crisp, slightly bitter pecans and the soft, mellow ripeness of the orange-fleshed persimmons. Reynaud cleared a place under the tree and they sat with their backs against the trunk, eating. He cracked the pecans in his hands and Elise picked out the meats, each stopping now and then to bite into a persimmon. The seeds were large and slick and they spat them out, but Reynaud cracked one to show her the flower design of the kernel inside. Then they broke open others, each kernel different.

  It was a curiously peaceful interlude after their quarrel. At first there was some constraint between them, but it gradually faded away. It returned again once as Elise, instead of handing a nut meat to Reynaud, who had his hands full of cracked pecans, had popped it into his mouth. He had stared at her for a long moment, then lowered his thick lashes and reached to pour the broken shells and nut meats he held into her lap.

  What a strange man he was, Elise thought as she busied herself once more. Which was his real personification: the gentle savage or the irascible gentleman? He had abandoned his silks and satins, his wigs and jewels since that first night, opting instead for the casual clothing of a landed squire and his own hair tied back in a queue. She sometimes wondered if this was yet another facet of his character, that of the farmer with pride in his holdings and love for the rich and spreading arpents that had been made fruitful by his labors. She could not be sure, for despite the closeness of his company when they retired for the night after the daylight hours they had spent together, she felt no nearer to understanding him. He could be amazingly perceptive as he had been on the evening when Pascal had tried to lay hands on her. How had he known that what she needed at that moment, that all that she could bear, was his strength to hold onto without the confinement or obligation of being held in return. He could also be extremely obtuse, as in his failure to understand that his cousin Madeleine felt threatened by the presence of another woman in his house and was especially resentful of one who had no legal or moral right to be there.

  It had become natural to speak something, if not all, of her thoughts when with Reynaud. Now she said, “This house, the land, do you share it with your brother?”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s mine alone.”

  “He is perhaps a half-brother then?”

  “Not at all. In fact, he is my twin.”

  She stared at him. “You mean that the ruler of the Natchez now, at this moment, has half-French blood in his veins?”

  “You find that so hard to believe?”

  “But he allowed the killing of his own people!” So hard were her hands clenched on the pecan she held that she felt the sharp edge of the shell cut her finger.

  “It was not his choice; the chief of war decides such matters. But the origin of his blood makes little difference. He was raised as a Natchez and is now the Great Sun. He rides in a litter of state wherever he goes, never touching his foot to the ground. He communes alone with the spirits of the temple, who are symbolized by the three swans that guard the roof. He resides in his house on the highest mound of the village, only slightly lower than the temple itself, with his two wives and his children. And his only concern is for the welfare of his people.”

  “But you escaped.”

  “It wasn’t a question of escape. My mother, Tattooed Arm, saw the justice of my father’s request for one of his sons when he returned to France. Until then she had considered as mirror images, exactly the same — she had long since forgotten which had been born first. But she forced herself to evaluate us for intelligence, strength, independence, confidence, and a hundred other things. She chose.”

  “She chose your brother to be the Great Sun?”

  “In part. Primarily she chose me to go with my father because she thought I would have the best chance to survive the submersion in another culture, to benefit from it, and to return to her. It was later that my brother became the Grea
t Sun on the death of our uncle. The next Great Sun is always the eldest son of the eldest sister of the dead ruler.”

  “Then if you had not gone to France, you might have been chosen since you and your brother were twins?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “Was it — very difficult, adjusting to life in France among your father’s people?”

  He leaned his head back against the tree trunk, a faint smile lifting a corner of his mouth. “The hardest thing was learning to pronounce the letter ‘r.’ There is none in the Natchez language.”

  Was he telling the truth? She would have liked to probe deeper, but could not find the words to ask if his father’s half-Indian bastard had been made welcome or instead had found scorn and rejection. Finally she asked, “Do you regret going?”

  “No.”

  The negative was bald, perhaps out of loyalty to his mother and the choice she had made, perhaps as a defense of his brother who had stayed to preside over the massacre of his father’s people. At any rate, she did not doubt it. “It seems odd that your mother was given the choice.”

  “She was not given it, but rather exercised it as her right.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She is of the Sun class, the ruling class. My father, being a Frenchman, was considered of the Noble class only, which made it proper in the beginning for her to marry him. A Sun cannot marry in their own class, but must find a mate in the lower ranks. Because of this, however, my mother was superior in status to my father, at least by the lights of the Natchez. The decision was her privilege.”

  The children of a female Sun retained their mother’s rank, though the children of a male Sun became Nobles, Elise knew. Therefore Reynaud and his brother were of the Sun class, their rank reckoned through the female line. It often happened that a female Sun would marry a Stinkard, merely to avoid any challenge to her superior standing. The Stinkard husband of a Sun could not sit in her presence, could never walk before her, and must ever obey her commands. Since it was also the custom for the spouses of the Suns to be strangled and buried with them, it sometimes happened that a Stinkard husband outlived a Sun wife and was sacrificed. There had been a great scandal in the Indian villages not so very long before when a Stinkard husband, on the death of his Sun wife, had run away, escaping his fate. The most outraged people in the village had been his own relatives, who would have been exempt from such a death for the rest of their lives if he had taken his rightful place in the funeral procession.