Louisiana History Collection - Part 1

by Jennifer Blake

  Reynaud did not come to bed. She heard the sounds she had come to recognize as the others going to their bedchambers, readying for bed. Perhaps he and his friend had required some time alone to conduct whatever business it was that brought Pierre — if there was any business at all, which she doubted. There was no way to guess how long they might sit over their wine and discussion. In any case, it did not matter. Resolutely she closed her eyes.

  Her slumber was fitful, filled with dreams. Once she woke from a nightmare with her heart pounding and her hair damp with perspiration as if she had been running for miles. She could not quite catch the sense of the dream, nor did she try. She reached out her hand to touch the other side of the bed. It was still empty. She slept again.

  When she awakened next, there was daylight in the room, seeping around the curtains with the pale yellow glow that meant that the sun had risen. Elise stretched, then remembered and turned her head. Reynaud lay beside her on his stomach with his head on one arm and the other resting, relaxed, on the mattress. She eased a little higher in the bed, pushing her pillow behind her head, and lay watching him.

  His breathing was deep and even. His face was closed in, self-contained, its dark copper-bronze a startling contrast to the white of the embroidered pillowcase. There were fine lines at the corners of his eyes and deeper indentations at the corners of his mouth. His lashes lay thick and black, but somehow ragged in their different lengths, on his cheeks. His hair had loosened from its queue, the dark strands roughened, falling in a deep wave onto his temple. His muscles were relaxed so that the line of his arm and shoulder was smoother than normal.

  Slowly she grew aware of the need to touch him. She wanted to trace his brows and the turn of his jaw with her finger, to smooth back his hair, and to lean over to press her lips to the pulse that throbbed in the column of his neck. She would like to push the coverlet aside and run her palm over his shoulder and down his spine, to the small of his back and lower to where the lean contours of his hips rose. The longing inside her was intense, coupled with a tingling fullness in her loins and a swelling in her breasts. She bit her bottom lip and curled her fingers one by one into her fist as if to prevent temptation.

  How long had it been since she had done these things? She was not quite sure. He had only requested it of her twice since they had reached his home and even then had stopped her almost before she had begun. At first she had been relieved, but then she had begun to miss that closeness, to yearn for it. It was stupid of her. She had castigated herself, telling herself that it was the reaction of one of those daughters of joy that she had once suspected might have visited him here. It had done no good.

  He stirred. Her heart lurched as if it would leap into her throat. She drew back as stealthily as possible and closed her eyes. She must not be caught hanging over him like some lovesick idiot. If he found her so, he would have every right to think she would welcome his advances. Just the thought of such a misunderstanding was enough to bring hectic color to her face. She lay quietly, fiercely concentrating on her breathing in the hope of making it fade.

  Then came the rustle of the bedclothes, the creak of the mattress ropes as Reynaud sat up. He was still for a moment and she wondered if he were staring down at her. She realized abruptly that her nightgown was twisted around her, the neckline pulled awkwardly across her chest. So cool was the flesh of her left breast that she had a grim foreboding that it was exposed in its entirety. She dared not move, however.

  Reynaud sat, looking down at her. She was so lovely with the flush of sleep on her cheeks, her slender white arms emerging from the lace sleeves of her gown, and the delicate mound of one breast, gently rounded and coral-rose-tipped, revealed where the neckline was awry. He inclined his head, irresistibly drawn to that sweet globe. Then, with neck-wrenching effect, he drew back. No. If she awoke with the sick terror in her eyes that he had seen there once before, he would never be able to forgive himself. He must wait. It was too important to do otherwise. And yet time was growing short.

  He eased from the bed and gathered up his clothes. Moving to the door, he let himself out and closed it quietly behind him.

  Elise heard him go and for some reason she felt like crying.

  She could not sleep again. She got up and dressed in a gown of yellow-and-white-striped challis with a fichu and apron of lace-edged dimity and a small, matching cap to cover her hair. In the dining room she discovered that Reynaud and Pierre had gone riding and the others were not yet up. She drank a cup of chocolate and crumbled a roll in her plate; then, thinking Reynaud and his friend might return before she was finished, she accepted more fresh chocolate. Henri emerged, greeting her with a subdued air, but with every sign of pleasure. She managed to engage him in a discussion of the merits of the life of a trader and even won a smile or two from him, but his heart was not in it.

  “What will you do when you reach Fort Saint Jean Baptiste?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he burst out. “That’s the problem. I have no family, nothing. I know no trade since I was apprenticed so short a time at the cooperage. What am I to do.”

  “There will be employment of some kind for you. Perhaps someone else will accept you as an apprentice.”

  “Maybe. I can think of no trade that I would like, though, and some I would hate.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, the tanning of hides, for one.”

  “Not too pleasant,” she agreed.

  “It smells,” he said with simple truth.

  “What about as a cobbler or a baker?”

  He shook his head. “I like to work out of doors; that much I discovered. If I could get to New Orleans, there would be more opportunities.”

  “Perhaps you can do that then,” Elise said, smiling in an attempt to cheer him.

  His expression did not lighten, however.

  The direction of Henri’s thoughts was caused by his assumption that Pierre was the friend for whom Reynaud had been waiting and that they could now proceed on their journey. After his meeting with Reynaud that she had witnessed, the trader had done nothing to disabuse anyone of the idea. She discovered when she went to visit Madame Doucet that she, too, was laboring under the same conception.

  “I don’t know if I can go on with the rest of you,” the older woman announced.

  Her voice was stronger this morning, but her color was still far too white and pasty. She was not alone. Reynaud’s cousin Madeleine was with her. His housekeeper and Madame Doucet had struck up a firm friendship, perhaps because the first recognized in the older woman a weaker character, one who was not in any sense a rival. It may also have been, to give the woman her due, that she was drawn to Marie Doucet because she was in need of bolstering and had no self-consciousness about showing it.

  “Not go on?” Elise asked as she closed the door behind her. “What do you mean?”

  “I feel such a need to go to my poor daughter. She will be distraught. She did love her son so and for him to die in such a terrible way, I — I fear for her!”

  Elise watched as the older woman dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, mopping up the tears that began to pour from her eyes. “I don’t understand. Have you had more news?”

  “Oh, Elise, chère, it came to me in the night. The child who was killed, it was my own precious sweeting, my grandson. The age is the same and he was such a beautiful child. I know he was chosen by the Sun woman to be her son’s playmate. How could it be otherwise?”

  “But you don’t know; no one has said it.”

  “Sometimes we know these things without being told. I feel it here, in my heart.” She clasped her hand to her chest, then bowed her head to wipe her eyes once more.

  Elise exchanged a glance with the housekeeper, who gave a slight shake of her head. Then she moved to sit beside the older woman on the bed, reaching to take one of her hands and holding it firmly in her own. “It may be; we cannot know for sure. But even if it is true, there is nothing you can do. You must go on. The b
est thing you could do for your daughter is to reach the authorities and urge them to go to the rescue of all the women. They will, anyway, I know, but if they can be hurried by even as much as a day, it may help.”

  Madame Doucet blinked, wiped her nose, and looked at Elise. “You are so sensible, ma chère, so strong. One has always felt it in you, but never so greatly as now. How lovely it must be always to know what is best to be done, never to know fear. I have never been constructed so.”

  Elise drew back a little, staring, but there was no sarcasm in the words. She forced a smile for this woman who had probably never felt more than a slight nervousness at the nearness of a man, something that could strike Elise with stark dread. “Things are not always as they seem. But forget me. You must turn your mind to what you may do among your acquaintances in New Orleans that may be of aid to your daughter and grandson.”

  “Were you listening, Elise? He is dead, my beautiful boy, strangled in his tender youth. I hope he did not know what was to be done. I hope he was brave and did not cry. Oh, my boy, my boy, and my poor, poor daughter.”

  Madeleine came forward with a cloth scented with lavender water. Fearing that she was only making matters worse by her attempts to reason with the grieving woman, Elise left the housekeeper in charge and went away.

  8

  IT CAME TO Elise in the middle of the morning that in a few short days it would be Christmas. So much had happened that she had lost track of the normal march of time. The weather had been so mild, with pleasant days and nights barely cool enough for a fire. Now it was nearly upon them. Christmas. So amazing was the thought that she spoke it aloud as she sat drinking a small glass of tafia with Madame Doucet and Madeleine.

  “Yes,” Reynaud’s cousin said. “It gives me great pleasure that Reynaud is here. He isn’t always, though last year he came on Christmas Eve, bringing with him a priest of the Jesuits who was bound on a mission to the Caddo. The holy father gave us a beautiful midnight mass.”

  “And then,” Madame Doucet said, her voice breaking, “It will be New Year’s and Epiphany.”

  New Year’s Day was the most festive holiday on the calendar. On the night before there was feasting, merriment, and toasts as the new year arrived; then, on the day itself, gifts were exchanged, with special ones for the children. Young men made visits to all the ladies of their acquaintance, bringing small presents of flowers and candy and always accepting refreshment from the steaming bowl of punch that stood ready. It was not unusual for a popular young man to stagger home, singing, in the dark. Epiphany was a day of visiting friends and relatives, with the roads thronged with carts and people on horseback and with much good food enjoyed by all.

  Madeleine reached to pat the older woman’s hand. “You must not think of it, ma chère.”

  “How can I not? Last year we were so happy. I made a small stuffed horse for my little grandson with a mane of twisted yarn. He slept with it always. And my daughter and her husband and my own dear husband were together, and my slave women and I prepared such a meal as you never tasted, so delicious it was.”

  To give a new direction to her thoughts, Elise said, “I wonder where we will be this year, for New Year’s and Epiphany, and even Christmas?”

  “You do not expect to be here?” Madeleine asked with a lifted brow. Her manner toward Elise had warmed somewhat, but was still formal.

  “I don’t really know. We wait on Reynaud,” she answered with a small shrug.

  “All of you?”

  Did the woman expect that she would stay behind? She must not be as much in Reynaud’s confidence as Elise had assumed. Had no one told her of the situation? Did she not know why Elise was there, why they were all there? Elise found that it made a difference. What must Madeleine think of her intimacy with Reynaud? She could hardly be blamed for putting the worst construction upon it.

  “Yes, certainly,” she answered. But if she expected Madeleine to show any sign of relief or even acceptance, she was disappointed.

  Just before noon there was some excitement. It was discovered that a panther that had been prowling near the house had carried off a sheep. A tracking party was immediately formed, with much calling of dogs and arguing about the benefits of mounts, as opposed to going on foot, in the swampland where the beast was sure to be heading. All the men joined in, with the exception of St. Amant, who preferred to remain behind reading in the library. He had found an edition of Procopius’s Anecdota, he said, and could not bear to leave this marvelously scandalous account of the romantic triangle between the Roman emperor Justinian, his prostitute-queen Theodora, and his general Belisarius. So, with a great racket of shouting and baying hounds, the hunting party swept away from the house and quiet descended.

  It was some hours later that Elise wandered into the library in search of something to occupy the time until dinner. St. Amant, sitting in a velvet armchair near the window, looked up and nodded at her entrance, then went on reading. She wandered along the shelves, scanning the titles and running her fingers over the leather spines with their embossed designs: thick, heavy tomes; thin ones; short and tall ones; in Greek, Latin, and even English, as well as French. Madeleine saw that they were, kept well dusted, but there were a few with spots of mildew on the bindings from the damp climate. She smiled over a copy of Charles Perráult’s collection of fairy tales, Histoires ou contes de temps passé, with its frontispiece subtitle, “Contes de ma mère loye “; it was so incongruous to think of Reynaud having it. She skipped over volumes of Racine and Voltaire to pick up a novel by the Comtesse de La Fayette.

  She had turned to go when St. Amant clapped his book closed and got to his feet. He moved to place it on the shelf.

  “Don’t tell me the scandal has palled,” Elise said.

  “I’ve finished it, worst luck.”

  “Then you can regale me with the details over a cup of chocolate since I don’t read Latin.”

  “That you read at all I find most interesting.”

  “I was taught as a child by my mother, who had learned from her father. It seems that my grandfather was a scholar who could not bear to see a mind untutored. I later went to convent school. The nuns taught a little history, a little study of the globes, but mostly embroidery, household tasks, music, attention to duty, and piety. They did not allow me to help in my spare time with their correspondence and accounts since I was already corrupted by instruction in those matters.”

  “That explains your fine grasp of the business of running your farm then.” He moved ahead of her to open the door.

  “I see that you are walking without a stick,” she commented as she passed before him into the salon.

  “Yes, my ankle is much better.”

  Elise put the book she carried down and excused herself, going in search of a servant to bring the chocolate. She looked around for Madeleine or Madame Doucet to invite them to join St. Amant and herself, but they were not to be seen. When she returned, she said, “We seem to be by ourselves. The other ladies must be lying down on their beds for a nap.”

  “It will be good for Madame Doucet.”

  Elise nodded. “She dwells too much upon the massacre, though I suppose there is no wondering at it.”

  “Perhaps we all do that.”

  “You lost someone perhaps? You never said—”

  “No, not in the way you mean. And yet … Yes, there was a woman.”

  “She was killed?”

  “I don’t know, that’s the terrible thing about it. I was not there. I could not reach her.”

  “I see.”

  He sent her a wry smile. “I doubt it. She was married to another man.”

  “Ah,” she said after a moment. “Justinian, Theodora, and Belisarius.”

  “The explanation of my interest? I never thought of it that way. The situation is entirely different, of course.”

  “You loved her?”

  He bowed his head in acknowledgment.

  “It must be very painful for you, not knowing.”<
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  “Yes,” he said, clasping his hands together so tightly that the fingers turned white. “To make matters worse, she was to have a child, my child.”

  “Oh.”

  What was there to say to a man when the woman he loved could be dead or a slave to savages who might not consider her awkward condition, a condition that must make any hardship doubly hard to bear?

  St. Amant sent her a grim look. “But the most terrible thing of all is this: I find myself praying that neither of the men who escaped to New Orleans was her husband. I pray that he is dead and that she is a captive, for that will mean a slim hope for me where before there was none.”

  Their chocolate arrived then. When the serving girl had gone, Elise poured, then set a cup before St. Amant. She picked up her own and, keeping her lashes lowered in order to give him time to recover himself, sipped at the hot, sweet brew.

  He came to his feet so abruptly that he brushed the table where his cup sat, splashing chocolate into the saucer. “Forgive me, Madame Laffont, for burdening you with my problem. I should not have spoken. I don’t believe I feel like chocolate just now. You must excuse me.”

  “Certainly,” Elise murmured. Then, when he was nearly at the door, she called out, “M’sieu St. Amant?”

  “Yes, madame?”

  “I — I’m sorry, so sorry.”

  As the door closed behind him, Elise set down her cup. She should be shocked at the tale she had just been told, she supposed. But somehow she could not be. How much more human it made St. Amant to know that he had his own private torments. They all had them: Madame Doucet and her children; Henri with his fears of the future; and even Pascal with his fury over the loss of his merchandise and worries of starting anew. And herself, especially herself. They were all separate people with their own problems that must be solved, or endured, in their own separate ways. They were eternally alone within themselves; still, the recognition that their worries and heartaches were only a part of the natural condition of human beings made it less of an ordeal.