The man’s head was between her legs, one of his hands resting at the juncture of her thighs. She rolled, scrambling out from under him, and cursed under her breath, using phrases she hardly knew the meaning of but had heard the Breton brothers use. They helped to relieve her feelings. She had not bargained for this much labor, especially when there was little hope now of a reward since a live man would require his coat. Nor was there any way of knowing if the man was worth her effort.
It was irritation that gave her the strength to drag him, bumping, across the logs and into the flatboat’s small cabin. Leaving him in the middle of the floor, she moved to strike tinder and to light a tallow dip in an earthenware bowl. She stepped outside for the quilt she had abandoned earlier; then, inside once more, she added to it a length of linen toweling and a handful of clean rags. Dropping these things to the floor near the man she had rescued, she went down on her knees beside him.
Her hands were on his coat, tugging it open, when she looked at his face. Her movements stilled. A frown creased her brow. Reaching to catch his chin, she turned his head so that he faced the light. She drew in her breath.
René Lemonnier, the Sieur de Vouvray.
The community of New Orleans was a small one. There were fewer than two thousand people in and around the town, with half that number being soldiers of the king or African slaves. Everyone knew everyone else and most of their business. Any newcomer was an object of much curiosity and more speculation.
The attention paid to the man on the floor since his arrival a month before had been even greater than usual. A gentleman of noble family, he had been a favorite at the court of Louis XV, though with a far-reaching repute as a wastrel, gambler, and noted rake. The gossips would have it that he had somehow displeased the king’s maîtresse en titre, La Pompadour. The result had been a lettre de cachet issued in his name. He had disappeared into the Bastille, Paris’s prison for political prisoners, but there had been such a constant vigil of women, such wailing before the gate, that he had been deported instead to keep the peace.
His reception had not been that of a man in disgrace. Handsome of countenance, dark as a pirate, with the shoulders of a swordsman and the grace of a courtier, he had found favor with the Marquise de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, wife of the governor of the colony of Louisiane. Consequently, he had been much feted at the Government House in recent days. The bon mots he had let fall from his lips had been repeated everywhere. Boys had followed him as he swaggered along the streets, and the young men of the town had taken to wearing their wigs powdered and curled in the fashion he preferred and their garters tied with the knots that he affected.
None of which mattered now.
The man was bleeding.
Cyrene was brought to a sense of what she should be doing by the sight of red-tinged water trickling out of his hair. She explored his scalp, gently pushing her fingers through the wet and matted thickness of the dark waves that grew in such luxuriance over it. He had a great knot above his ear. The skin was broken, seeping blood, but the skull underneath seemed undamaged. Still, his face was gray and there was a white line around his mouth.
With more haste than care, she stripped off his coat, pausing for only a brief and regretful moment to touch the silver braiding on the lapels before laying it aside. It made a dull, clinking sound as she dropped it. The cause was quickly found. It was a monogrammed leather purse filled with coins as well as a large turnip watch in a chased gold case. That Lemonnier had not been robbed was amazing, unbelievable. She puzzled over it as she unbuttoned his waistcoat and slipped it down first one arm and then the other, casting it aside before dragging his shirt off over his head.
But either he had made enemies since his arrival in the colony or else had strayed into the wrong lady’s bedroom, for he had been stabbed. The wound was ugly, the result of a vicious blow. The blade had been inferior, however, for it had broken off as it struck a rib and was still embedded in the bone. The slash was oblique, a ragged tear that extended from the back to the side, as if the assailant had stabbed from behind just as Lemonnier turned to grapple with him. The court rake had been extremely lucky or else had the agility of a Parisian alley cat, for by all rights he should have been dead.
Cyrene made a pad of one of the rags. She shifted Lemonnier, pulling him toward her onto his side. With the pad in her hand, she grasped the broken and protruding upper half of the knife blade, settled her grip, then pulled. Lemonnier jerked convulsively and a sigh left his lips. Blood welled around the blade, but it remained stubbornly encased in the rib bone that held it. She reached for another of the rags, holding it firmly around the knife blade to staunch the flow. Pressing down hard, she pulled once more.
The knife came free. Cyrene rocked back on her feet, which were tucked under her, with the suddenness of it. She did not stop but went sprawling, twisting to the side, as Lemonnier wrenched himself up on one elbow and launched himself at her. Her breath left her in a rush as his weight pinned her to the rough planking. A hard hand caught her wrist, grinding the bones so that the reddened blade fell from her numb fingers and clanged onto the floor. Before she could cry out, before she could protest, the hard edge of a forearm was across her throat, cutting off her air and sending bright flashes of pain exploding behind her eyes.
“An assassin of uncommon beauty,” Lemonnier said, his voice tight, his breathing too controlled, as if it had to be measured against the pain it caused. “Would you care to try again?”
Cyrene stared up at him with disbelief skittering across her mind. He had been unconscious, she knew it. How was it that he could, on the instant, be so lucid, so dangerous? The last was there in his face beyond mistaking, shining in the icy gray of his eyes, showing plainly in the hard set of his cleanly molded lips. It left her cold, wary, and furious.
“I wish,” she said, her voice hoarse yet virulent in her constricted throat, “that I had let you drown.”
Surprise registered in René’s mind as he recognized the anger that thickened her voice and burned in the heated color of her face, saw the pure indignation that set sparks of fire gleaming in the rich golden brown of her eyes. A peculiar fog seemed to fade from his mind, and he realized that he was not only half naked but wet to the skin. Water dripped from his hair, wetting the thin material of the chemise that the girl under him wore. It created a quite interesting effect on the mound of her breast, one he was in no condition to appreciate properly. And there was the hot glide of what he suspected was his own blood circling his rib cage, soaking into the waist of his breeches.
The clarity in his brain lasted no more than an instant. The fog began to spread, bringing with it desperate and confounding weakness. He lifted his arm from the girl’s throat as best he could. His head was so heavy. He allowed it to droop until it rested on the wet yet soft and warm pillow of her breast. He closed his eyes. His tone calm yet immensely tired, he said, “I seem to have made a mistake. I tender you … my most abject…”
He did not finish, though Cyrene thought she felt his lips move against her in his apology. She was still a moment, floundering in a confusing morass of pity and rage, admiration, frustration, contempt, and something more that had to do with the sheer male force she had sensed inside this man during the brief instant he had held her at his mercy.
But there was warm blood seeping into her skirt where he had fallen against her. With an exclamation of mingled distress and disgust, she flung him from her. She found her folded pads once more and slapped them over his wound, holding them with firm pressure as she looked around for the linen toweling to tie them in place.
The flatboat rocked, a sure signal that someone had come aboard. Cyrene paused with an unaccountable surge of fear in her chest as a shadow fell across the deck outside the doorway. The thought of the two men who had tried to kill Lemonnier flitted across her mind.
A man stepped inside, then stopped and let fall a sharp curse.
“Gaston,” she cried, “and about time, too.”
“What in the name of all the saints have you been doing? A bit of butchering?”
The youngest of the Bretons came forward, a square-built youth of no more than medium height, with tightly curling brown hair tied back at the nape to show the gold hoop earring that he wore in his left ear only — the recoil of a musket when it was fired being likely to tear any such ornament out of a man’s right ear. There was a copper cast to his skin, evidence of his Indian mother, and his eyes were fiercely blue. In the gaze he bent upon her, there was a hint of censure but also an irrepressible teasing glint.
“I was fishing for a coat,” Cyrene said shortly before nodding at the pad under her hand. “Come and hold this while I tie the bandage.”
“You went out on the river for him? Are you mad?”
“The coat had silver lace.”
“Oh.”
It was explanation enough. Gaston stepped toward her and went down on his knees to help. His tone was resigned as he spoke. “Papa and Uncle Pierre will have my skin in little strips.”
“Serve you right for chasing after that skirt.”
“You are a woman with no heart. You have not the least idea how a man feels when he sees a beautiful and willing female.”
“Beautiful, huh?” Cyrene gave him a skeptical glance as she worked.
“Well, she was beautiful to me, at least until—”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
“But, chère, I was only going to say until I saw her in the light!”
“Certainly you were. Move your hand.”
He complied. “I would not sully your pure ears with the details of what transpired between me and this woman. Not only would it be no fun, since you no longer blush at such subjects as you used to, but it would be unmanly. Besides, Uncle Pierre would skin me like a squirrel if he should hear.”
“True,” she said pointedly. “Will you now leave off talking of your amours and look at this man?”
Gaston swung to do her bidding. His breath left him in an astonished grunt. “Sacré! It’s Lemonnier.”
“Precisely. Do you think that Madame la Marquise will give us a reward if we send to tell her he is saved?”
The younger Breton grinned. “She very well might, though I’m not sure Lemonnier will thank you. They say he’s avoided her invitations to a tête-à-tête with some success so far.”
The governor’s wife was a woman with an eye for younger men. Her husband, the marquis, was himself fifteen years her junior. Their marriage seemed to be one based on mutual respect, mutual avarice, and mutual ambition. It was the goal of the couple to obtain for the marquis the governorship of New France, a post that had been held by his father. The colony was also the place where the marquis had been born. There were whispers that the office was his. He was an able administrator with a sound knowledge of the shifts required to govern a far colony inhabited by savages, an ill-assorted collection of displaced French subjects, and a set of voyageurs and coureurs des bois who had been in the wilderness so long they had taken on its wildness. But the appointment was not yet official, nor would it be until a man could be found to replace him in Louisiane. In the meantime, Madame was swift to reach out for what riches and comforts she could discover in the colony.
The thought of René Lemonnier with Madame de Vaudreuil was distasteful. Cyrene pushed it from her mind. Her tone sharp, she said, “Hand me the quilt, and let’s get it around him. Then you may remove his wet breeches.”
“Remove his — Cyrene!”
Gaston’s expression of shock was, she saw, real, at least in part. “Well, he can’t stay in them, can he? He’ll never get warm!”
“If Papa and Uncle Pierre come back and find you not only with a notorious womanizer like Lemonnier, but a naked womanizer—”
“He’s half dead! Besides, he’ll be decently covered.”
“It won’t matter. They’ll kill me.”
“In that case, you may as well help me get him into my room.”
Gaston’s tone of resignation abruptly left him. “Your room? Never!”
“He can’t lie in the middle of the cabin floor forever. It’s the only place where he’ll be out of the way.”
The room she called her own was little more than a lean-to the size of an armoire built onto the side of the flatboat. It held her sleeping hammock, which was slung from wall to wall, and in one corner the trunk containing her clothes. The other corner was stacked high with animal traps and cages and a few extra trading blankets and rolled furs, along with various other debris of questionable usefulness from which the Bretons could not be parted.
Gaston protested and grumbled and composed epitaphs for himself both comical and profane, but he could find no alternative to her suggestion. At last, he helped her make a pallet of a buffalo fur, blankets, and a bearskin coverlet on the floor under her hammock and shift Lemonnier onto it. Only when he had covered the unconscious man with the bearskin did he strip off Lemonnier’s breeches and fling them at Cyrene.
They were of heavy brocade, like his coat. She stood, turning the garment right side out, smoothing the rich cloth with absent care as she stared down at Lemonnier. “I should have made him drink some brandy while he was awake.”
“Why didn’t you?” Gaston said in mock accusation, then gave a shout of laughter when she told him.
“It wasn’t funny!”
“Poor little Cyrene, caught in the arms of the master of rakes, and what takes place? Nothing. It isn’t fair.” His blue eyes danced with amusement that was only slightly lascivious, while the hoop swinging in his ear gleamed gold in the candlelight.
“Out,” Cyrene said between her teeth.
“Where’s your sense of humor?”
“Out!” She flailed at him with the breeches, following as he backed away into the main room and warded her off with his hands.
Then came the noise of a man clearing his throat that was half growl, half command for silence. Gaston and Cyrene swung to face Pierre Breton, who stood in the cabin doorway surveying the spilled blood and the ragged, bloodstained cloths scattered over the wet floor. “You will tell me, please,” the older man drawled with mildness that was belied by the hard light in his eyes, “just what is going on here?”
2
IT WAS CYRENE who explained, for Gaston, as always when faced by his uncle, was not only bereft of his facile charm but very nearly his power of speech, too. Jean Breton, Gaston’s father, walked in during the recital. When Cyrene was done, the two men looked at each other in a moment of steady and oddly significant communion.
The two men were alike and yet different. They both had eyes the clear blue color of the summer sky; both had the same rough-hewn features and brawny shoulders developed over years of paddling boats of every size and kind along the winding rivers from their birthplace in New France to the gulf. Their clothing, too, was similar, consisting of simple shirts of muslin tucked into loose woolen pantaloons reaching below the knees and Indian moccasins without stockings. But there the resemblance ended.
Pierre was the taller of the two, with a barrel chest, dark brown hair streaked with gray, and deep lines of past grief cut into his face. Jean was more blond than not and his hair curled in profusion over his head. His eyes often danced with merriment, and he was prone to wearing neckerchiefs brightened with huge polka dots in yellow and red that were paired with shirts striped in brilliant hues, and to covering his head with a knit toque that boasted a dangling tassel. Less serious than his older brother, he loved to dance and could sometimes be persuaded to play the concertina.
Regardless, the two men stood shoulder to shoulder against the world. To injure one was to injure both, to gain the friendship of either was to acquire a second ally. They were peaceable and law-abiding, so long as the laws were just, but had little respect for petty regulations. And they were always and without question fair.
“Let us see this gentleman,” Pierre said when Cyrene was finished.
He picked up the tallow dip and, hi
s steps heavy, walked to the cubicle Cyrene called her own. Holding the light high, he drew aside the drab curtain that was the sole concession to her privacy and looked down at the unconscious man. Cyrene moved in behind him, as did the others. There was a furtive movement at her side, and she turned to see Jean Breton cross himself as he stared at the long form on the pallet. She frowned in puzzlement at the expression, almost like some superstitious fear, that she saw mirrored on his face. Gaston’s father, catching her glance, summoned a smile and a shrug before looking away from her.
“It’s René Lemonnier, yes,” Pierre said. Once more he exchanged a long look with his brother.
“Did you think it would not be?” There was something here that Cyrene did not understand. Suspicion made her tone sharp.
The older Breton turned away, his face stolid. “It was possible. But tell me, how does it come about that he is on the boat? Why was he not carried to the bank, and from there to his lodgings where he belongs?”
“It might have taken forever to find help, and he needed tending at once.”
“But you had Gaston to do those things. Isn’t this so?”
Gaston made a gasping noise, like a landed fish. Cyrene, with a quelling glance at the younger man, countered with a question. “Do you not want Lemonnier on the boat?”
“I want no man here, as you well know, especially not a roué like this man.”
“He’s hardly in any condition to be a threat!”
“They are always a threat, his kind, even in their graves. Now, Gaston, you helped Cyrene, yes? You let her bring this man aboard the boat?”
Gaston was incapable of lying; it was one of his most endearing traits. He might stretch the truth about the attributes of some women, of course, but it was not the same thing. In any case, it almost seemed that to him all women were indeed beautiful.
The young man hung his curly head. “I wasn’t here all the time, Uncle Pierre.”
“Ah.”
“I was gone only the smallest half hour, no more! How could I know Lemonnier would be thrown into the river?”
Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 Page 44
