The compulsion to be doing something to better their position warred inside René with recognition of the wisdom of what Cyrene said. To sit still, tamely waiting for rescue, went against his every instinct. He might be able to overcome her objections, though it would make little difference. There was not a great deal from which to choose between dying of exposure somewhere downstream while trying to reach the English ship and doing it under the myrtle where they had been lying. Though he did not like to say so, the renegades could just as easily have failed to search them out because they had succeeded in what they were trying to do, rob the trading voyageurs of their indigo. On the other hand, though he had been here a month, this was not his territory. He did not fully understand its dangers. Cyrene did.
Cyrene, sensing his ambivalence, said with emphasis, “Pierre and Jean will come.”
“Ah, well,” he answered as he sank down beside her once more, “we’ll wait then if it means so much to you to stay a little longer in my arms.”
It seemed like a long time before the Breton men returned, though it could have been no more than an hour. As it was, Cyrene and René nearly missed their arrival, so quietly were they moving. By the time they disentangled themselves and stood, the pirogues were already grounded on the bank.
A pair of buffalo robes were unwrapped from the bedrolls for the wet pair, but all shoved off again without tarrying. It was miles deeper in the maze of marsh and bayou before Pierre gave the signal to land once more. They built a fire, though their exertions at the paddles had warmed them by that time and their clothing was so nearly dry that changing was a needless effort.
One thing Cyrene insisted on doing at once was tending the wounds of Gaston and Pierre. She had been worried about them for what seemed like hours, despite their unimpaired ability to send the pirogues skimming over the water.
The younger man’s arm had a jagged cut that would need to have the edges sewn together for proper healing. In common with most of the voyageurs of Cyrene’s acquaintance, Gaston made a great deal of noise under her ministrations with a needle, groaning and breathing curses as if he were being tortured, but held his arm out as steady as a cross beam without so much as a single flinch.
The arrow in Pierre’s back was more serious. Jean had broken off the protruding shaft, leaving a stub of some four inches as well as the flint head of the arrow embedded in the muscle just under the shoulder blade. The angle at which it had entered had prevented it from going deep, but had caused it to burrow under the skin at a long angle, encasing itself in a tight pocket. It was a freak occurrence. The arrow should have plunged straight in, burying itself in Pierre’s lungs. What had deflected the penetration of the arrow was the toughness of the skin of Pierre’s back, which was a leather-like matting of scars, hundreds of them crisscrossing one upon the other, that covered the upper part of his body.
Cyrene had seen the scars before, but never so close or at such length. The older Breton permitted few to view his back, nor did he talk about it. The reason was not difficult to understand. There was only one thing that could bring about such massive scarring and that was a sentence of life on the king’s galley, endless years of daily, even hourly, whippings. The men who carried that particular badge of penal servitude were few. Most men died after a year or two in the galleys; to escape was rare, indeed. Even then, the danger was not at an end. For an escaped galley slave to be taken up by the authorities meant hanging, and that after the imposition of such torture as the judge could devise, from breaking on the rack to drawing and quartering to the slow crushing of the head. The scars were more than a mark of servitude; they were a sentence of death.
Gaston and Jean were used to the sight and paid scant attention. If René found it unusual, it appeared he had the intelligence to deduce the cause and consequences, for he asked no questions.
Due to the barbed sides of the arrowhead, the only way to remove it was to cut it out. That would not be easy to do without inflicting more damage than had already been done.
Cyrene cleaned her knife in the sand, then buried the blade in the glowing red coals of the fire. She gave Pierre a beaker of brandy, then rinsed the blood from his back with more of the distilled liquor. There were some who recommended setting the brandy aflame to cauterize wounds, but she had never seen the necessity. Anything that burned so badly on its way down the throat need not depend on flame for its powers to stop putrefaction.
Gaston had lain down and promptly dropped off to sleep, exhausted from his labors and his endurance of her aid, no matter how careful. That left Jean to help with his brother. Cyrene had no thought of entrusting the knife to him, however, and was not certain of his usefulness otherwise. Jean might gut and skin a deer in less time than it took most to find the tail or scalp a renegade Indian for the bounty on his hair without a qualm, but the sight of the blood of those close to him, and more especially his own, turned him parsley green.
Watching her stitch up Gaston had already taxed his stomach. She noted a slight palsy in his hands as she beckoned him to come and pull the skin of Pierre’s back taut over the deep-burrowed arrow.
Jean did as he was instructed, but swallowed hard and turned his head away as she picked up the white-hot knife and waved it in the air to cool. She could not say that she blamed him; she didn’t exactly relish the task herself. She took a firm grip on the handle of the knife, shifting her index finger along the top of the blade for control.
Jean made the mistake of looking just as the first drop of bright red blood welled up around the tip of the knife. He swayed, giving a small grunt. His hands dropped to his sides. Cyrene’s free hand shot out, trying to grab him.
There was a swift movement and then René was there. He supported Jean to a seat on a tree trunk, then returned to stand beside Cyrene.
“Would you allow me to do it?” he asked, his gaze on her white face as he put out his hand for the knife.
“Can you?”
“I can try. I’ve seen a few wounds treated.”
Where could that have been, on a dueling field? It hardly mattered. She spoke to the injured man with only the barest glance over her shoulder before her gaze returned to René’s. “Pierre?”
The older Breton brother was watching them, his expression intent despite the grooves etched by pain on either side of his mouth. “Whatever you please, chère, so long as it is done quickly.”
Cyrene weighed the problem an instant longer. It may have been some surety she saw in the gray depths of René’s eyes, or else her own reluctance for the task that persuaded her. Whatever it was, it was decisive.
She passed the knife to him and took Jean’s place. They seemed to need no words. Together they exposed the arrow, making an opening for its removal, then plucked it from its bed. Cyrene cleaned the wound with more brandy, tacked it together with a few stitches, and bandaged it tightly.
When they were done, René moved to the brandy keg and refilled Pierre’s beaker, then splashed generous tots of the liquor into two more. He handed one to Cyrene, then raised his own in salute.
“Thank you,” Cyrene said.
“Don’t thank me, you earned it.”
“So did you.” She took a sip of the liquid heat, and as it burned its way down, it occurred to her where else René might have learned his skill with a knife blade and his stomach for wounds. Some men were born with such talents, but they were more often gained in use, such as on a battlefield or in prison.
The ship, the Half Moon, rode at anchor on the brown-tinted blue waters of the bay. It did not look particularly furtive. A merchantman with sails of utilitarian brown, it was English made and as rounded and thick-waisted as a burgher’s wife. It flew no flag, however, and stood in readiness for a swift retreat should a French patrol appear.
The Bretons did not approach at once; that would have been to appear too eager. Nor did they depend on the usual invitation to sleep on board the merchantman, which, Pierre contended, only gave the other man the advantage of doing busines
s on his home ground. Their first task when they arrived at the bay, therefore, was to set up camp on the beach. What remained unacknowledged among them was that the true cause of the rough bivouac was Pierre. He hated any floating craft larger than a keelboat. He could stay aboard a ship for only a matter of hours before his hands began to shake, and to sleep on one he had to be dead drunk. Even then he was haunted by terrifying nightmares of his days at the oar of a galley.
The beach stretched empty, edged with its ragged tide line of sea-blackened driftwood. There was no sign of other traders; they were the first. They unloaded the pirogues and built a fire, then set about building a pair of temporary shelters. The structures were far from elaborate, being little more than a pair of peeled poles for uprights and two more slanting to the ground to make a framework for a covering of brush and palmetto thatch. Still, they would turn the wind and protect them from any rain that might blow up at this season, though in milder weather a blanket roll would have sufficed.
As she tied palmetto fronds to the shelter pointed out as her own, Cyrene cast a critical eye over the other. It was a little bigger, but not that much. Pierre and Jean must have forgotten that René would have to share it, or else they expected him to sleep on the ship whether they did or not. If he decided on the beach, the four men were going to be crowded. Or perhaps not, since the Bretons usually took turns standing guard at night on these expeditions.
In anticipation of a meal on the ship, if not more, Cyrene had brought her best bodice and skirt and nicest coif. Not that they were a great deal different from her others. Luxury in clothing was not one of her preoccupations, though it sometimes seemed a passion in the colony. Possessing the most fashionable items that could be obtained, even if they were two years or more behind the styles of Paris and Versailles, seemed to make people feel less isolated, less condemned to eternal provincialism. When Cyrene and her parents had first come, she had been well supplied with clothing. Most of it had been outgrown during the first year. She had patched and pieced the rest — using one skirt to add a flounce to another, turning a too-tight coat into a bodice and a pair of pockets, making a coif and fichu from the good parts of a chemise, and other such necessities — but the constant wearing and washing in the river had turned much of what was left into near rags. Pierre and Jean sometimes bought a few ells of cloth for her, but for the most part it was coarse, rough stuff, traders’ goods in harsh colors and bold patterns.
It was seldom that Cyrene took much notice of what she wore beyond the fact that it was clean and reasonably modest. This evening, however, she discovered within herself an odd dissatisfaction with her appearance. She would like, just once, to see how she looked in a grande toilette, in powdered hair and panniers, in the silk and satin and lace-lavished costume required at court and at the governor’s house. René must be used to seeing women in such finery. Not that she cared for that. Her discontent was fleeting. She was actually happy as she was, without the bother of keeping such long skirts from trailing in the mud or the difficulty of breathing against the tight squeeze of a corset. As for panniers so wide that women had to turn sideways to get through doors and to take up the place of two people at a dinner table, wouldn’t she look funny in them on the flatboat or climbing the side of a ship?
Despite her derision, she took special pains with her appearance once the expected invitation from the ship’s captain arrived. She loosened her hair from the braid and brushed it until it shone with a soft golden sheen, then let it hang free down her back with a few tendrils escaping from her coif around her face in the style of young women who advertised their eligibility for marriage. She also borrowed their trick of loosening the tie at the gathered neckline of her chemise, exposing the smooth upper curves of her breasts. The purpose, she told herself, had nothing to do with fashion or with René’s expectations about women’s attire. Rather, it was another tactic for sharp trading. Anything that might serve to distract the English captain must be to the good.
The early dark of late January had closed in when they finally paddled out to the merchant vessel. Cyrene was first up the swaying ship’s ladder. She climbed with easy agility, though she was glad for the concealing darkness as the offshore wind billowed her skirts up around her waist.
The captain stood ready on deck to hand her aboard. He was a Rhode Islander and also the ship’s owner. Captain Dodsworth was tall and freckled, with carrot-colored hair and a ready laugh. His hospitality was generous, and he always listened to news of the events in the French colony as if they took place on the moon itself. Still, he was a sharp trader. The Bretons had dealt with him before, not always to advantage. Jean called him a cold-water pirate.
“Mademoiselle Nolté,” he said, bowing over her hand, “it’s always a pleasure to welcome you on the Half Moon.”
A smile of pleasure rose in her eyes. “Captain Dodsworth, as gallant as ever, I see.”
“If so, it’s because you bring it out in me.”
“The question is, do I bring out your generosity?”
He threw back his head to laugh. “Always!”
From the dimness beyond the captain, a man stepped forward. “If it isn’t the beauteous lady smuggler. There are few men, mademoiselle, who wouldn’t be generous to someone of your charms for the desired return.”
Behind her, Cyrene heard Gaston board, then René’s light leap down to the deck. There was no time to turn back, no time for a warning.
The newcomer, the man already entrenched on the ship like a wood worm in the planking, was one Touchet, though it was doubtful he had been baptized under the name. Short and thin, with the sinuous body of a hungry cat and a flat, avid face, he was known as a former cutpurse, petty thief, and peddler of forbidden brandy to slaves and Indians. He was also, according to most persistent rumor, the trading agent for the marquise, Madame Vaudreuil. And her paid informer.
7
IT WAS A WARY gathering that sat down to partake of Captain Dodsworth’s table fare. The meal was a plain one of bean soup and fish pan-broiled in butter followed by a main course of boiled beef seasoned with onion and thyme and served with boiled potatoes and cabbage. The Half Moon had come directly from the Bahamas where they had traded salted cod and ship’s timbers for the trade goods brought out from England on the deep-water frigates; they had also picked up the oranges they had for dessert and the rum they drank, along with the less alcoholic brew of sugarcane juice known as tafia.
They were eight in number. Cyrene, as the only woman present, had the place of honor at the captain’s right, with Jean beside her and Gaston on his other side. Across from her was Pierre, with René on his left and Touchet beside him, while the seat at the foot of the table was taken by the ship’s first mate.
The main occupation of the evening, if not the main purpose, was introduced early. Captain Dodsworth, raising his cup of rum to Cyrene, proclaimed, “To the blackest eyes and sweetest smile afloat tonight on the waters of the world!”
It was to be a drinking match. The winner of the contest would be the man with the strongest head and the prize would be the trading edge gained by the least-befuddled man. But there was more to it than that. Cyrene had the feeling, as she watched the captain, that he might also be playing the Breton party against the marquise’s agent, hoping to encourage a competition. Two could, perhaps, play such a game. The compliment to her being no more than a ploy, it could be accepted and used. Moreover, though she had no intention of entering the drinking bout, she could throw her weight to the side of the Bretons. She inclined her head with a smile of appreciation and lifted her cup of tafia. “To all seamen who risk so much in search of… smiles.”
The toasts came thick and fast, growing increasingly outrageous. They toasted George of England and Louis of France, the queens of both countries and the mistresses of both men. They drank to the damnation of excise men of any nationality and paid homage to the beauty of the color indigo blue; to La Pompadour’s favorite peach shade that might or might not be the colo
r of her nipples; and to the noble and supposedly rejuvenating, if not aphrodisiacal, qualities of the codfish and the catfish.
Cyrene gave the bantering and the deep drinking only a minor portion of her attention. The tale of their escape from the renegades was told with only a small comment from her thrown in now and again. The mulling over of the economic and political situation in Europe now that the war was at an end could not hold her interest for long. She watched instead the marquise’s agent, Touchet.
He was a small man with a hollow chest and the sharp, chinless features of a weasel. His skin was sallow and pockmarked, and his fingernails were as long and curving and yellow as cow’s horns, or like the nails of the Choctaw bone-pickers who removed the decayed flesh of the dead before burial. His expression was secretive and supercilious, and though he tossed off the contents of his glass with each toast there was no discernible effect. He joined in the general discussion, but there was an edge to his remarks that was as sharp and jagged as broken glass.
What troubled Cyrene’s mind was exactly why Touchet was on the ship. The worry was not hers alone. During a lull, Jean spoke across the table to the marquise’s man. “Are you setting up as a trader, Touchet, or do you act as an agent?”
The question that hung unspoken in the air was whether the man was acting for the marquise. It was not impossible, and the knowledge that it was so would considerably lessen their danger. If Touchet was representing the marquise in a deal with the Rhode Islander, it was unlikely, though not impossible, that he would inform on them for their dealings.
But Touchet was not so easily drawn out. “It depends,” he said with a small smile, “on the money.”
Jean sent Pierre a brief glance. Touchet’s answer could be taken to mean that he was open to a bribe to suppress his knowledge of their activities or simply that the decision to use that knowledge or engage in trade would depend on the amount to be made either way.
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