Louisiana History Collection - Part 1

by Jennifer Blake

  “I had no idea, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not for sale!”

  “I don’t want to buy you. I want to love you.” He put out his hands to take her shoulders.

  She ducked underneath his arms. Her shoulder caught the perfume vial he still held and knocked it from his hand. The liquid cascaded down the front of her bodice, inundating her with the overpowering smell of roses before the tiny glass bottle clattered to the floor and spun away toward the opposite side of the room. She whirled after it, backing away once more from Dodsworth’s slow advance.

  “I don’t want to be loved!” she declared with a vigorous shake of her head.

  “You are just saying that. Don’t be so skittish. Sit down and let’s talk this over.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  She made a dive for the door and pulled it open. He was right behind her. He caught the door panel with the flat of his hand and slammed it shut again. His spread arms were braced on either side of her, hemming her in.

  “Let’s talk,” he said, his voice threaded with triumphant amusement, “about what you’re going to do now.”

  “Try this,” she said, and doubling her fist as she stood with her back to him, she spun around, bringing it up from below her waist and smashing it against the point of his chin. Her knuckles stung, but she had the pleasure of feeling his skin part under her blow.

  He staggered back, stunned. Cyrene did not wait for his reaction but jerked open the door and stumbled into the ship’s dark companionway. Behind her, there came a roar of anger. She plunged into the blackness. The thud of her footsteps was loud in her ears, as was the pounding of her heart. Then drowning them out was the heavy, booted footfalls of the captain. She scurried up the short ladder and pushed out on deck. Looking neither left nor right, she ran to the side and pulled herself up, ready to drop down the ladder to the boat that rose and fell below.

  “Wait, damn you, Cyrene!”

  The captain’s voice was loud with bluster though threaded with rasping need. She did not answer.

  René did.

  “Wait for what?” he asked, and the syllables were frosted with such shards of icy danger that Cyrene went still and Captain Dodsworth halted in his tracks.

  The faint glow of lamplight from below shown through the doorway. It cast the shadows of the two men, long, dark, and threatening, across the deck. The only sounds for long seconds were the creaking of the ship and the faint slap of a rope waving in the wind somewhere forward.

  “I thought you had gone,” the Rhode Islander said, the words like the bleat of a startled sheep as he stared at René.

  “You tried hard enough to be rid of me. It’s easy now to see why.”

  The exchange made it evident that Dodsworth had not expected to see René and therefore could not have told him that Cyrene was on the ship. The perfidy of it was breathtaking, especially since she had thought the captain to be so upstanding a family man and a straightforward trading associate. He was no better than Touchet; worse, in fact. Touchet did not hide behind a front of respectability.

  The red-haired man licked his lips. “It — it isn’t what you think.”

  “No? Tell me what it is,” René invited.

  “Cyrene misunderstood a little joke.”

  “Joke?” she said in fiery disgust. “If I were a man I’d knock your teeth down your throat.”

  René looked from Dodsworth’s bloodied mouth to Cyrene. “Somebody seems to have made a start. You, I presume?”

  “Me.”

  “Do you require that I finish it?”

  “Require?” She sent him a startled look.

  “Some women do.”

  Would he fight Dodsworth at her behest? Would he set himself as her champion? He stood there on the gently tilting deck, his shoulders square and his face hard with purpose and darkened by a shadow of what might have been self-blame, and offered her that favor as if it were no more than the picking up of a dropped handkerchief. But he showed no sign of having fought Touchet, the task he was supposed to have been engaged in here on the ship.

  “I am not some women,” she said.

  A short laugh left him. “Shall we go, then?”

  “Cyrene, don’t,” Captain Dodsworth protested. “Your indigo, it’s still here.”

  “Send it in the morning.”

  “But our business—”

  “Or send fair value for it.”

  “Please, I wish you would let me make amends.”

  She sent him an unsmiling glance. “Make it in merchandise. I will know then that you mean it.”

  Cyrene went over the side and dropped with ease into the boat. René followed. They pulled for shore in silence, nor did they speak until they stood outside the shelter they shared.

  René stepped in front of her, putting out his hand to bar her entrance. “Would you mind telling me what that was about? I thought you had more sense than to go out there alone, and at night at that.”

  The accusation in his tone acted as pitch to the fire of her temper, which was strained by the fright Dodsworth had given her. She faced him with scorn in her eyes. “You were wrong, then, weren’t you? Fancy that!”

  “I could well be, about more things than one. What was all that about amends in merchandise? Was it payment in kind?”

  “How dare you!”

  She doubled her fist and brought it up as the shock of what he had said struck her. Before she had time to use it, or even to be sure she meant to, his hand shot out to close his fingers around her wrist, dragging her toward him.

  “I wouldn’t try that. I’m not Dodsworth.”

  She refused to flinch from the force of his grip. “Oh, I know that well enough. What I don’t know is what makes you think you have the right to question me. And if you mention the word protector I may show you a trick or two I didn’t have to use with the English captain!”

  “Whore’s tricks?” he asked softly.

  She drew in her breath. “Why is it,” she said in bitter, flashing rage, “that all men take an unattached woman for a whore?”

  René was brought up short. He stared down at her pale, proud face and her bright hair, disheveled by the wind and her struggles aboard the ship and haloed by the fire somewhere behind her. He looked at her and recognized the black emotions that ate at him as jealousy and fear. Jealousy of even the glances of other men that fell on this woman. Fear of her vulnerability to other men and their base desires, which he had caused. Jealousy because some other man might reap the richness of her favors that he had denied himself. Fear that he might never recover from the denial. The rich scent of roses, mingled with her own unique and sweet fragrance, enveloped him like a haunting memory, one of vivid and scarifying pain.

  At the fire a lone Indian chanted to himself, beating the drum with a quick and hard rhythm mat matched René’s heartbeat. And the song was a lament.

  He released her. His voice controlled, barely, he asked, “Dodsworth?”

  “And Touchet,” she said, her voice laden with scorn. “I was told you had gone to the ship to chastise the little man. Isn’t that funny?’”

  “For molesting you?”

  “For trying. It seems to be all that men think of.”

  “Including me.”

  The strained words hovered between them. He had not meant to say them. They seemed to spring from some innermost recess of his being. And he waited to see what their effect would be in a confusion of longing and dread.

  She lifted her chin and there was the lash of disdain in her voice. “Especially you! Maybe you would like repayment for your protection just now? Maybe that’s the gratitude you require for such a grand gesture! Could that be it, my gallant protector?”

  “And would you pay?” he inquired, the look in his eyes that of one who tests the limits of his own control.

  “Who knows? My appreciation is great, I assure you. A few more threats and I might even hang on your neck, all trembling and pleading. Like this.” She moved toward
him as she finished speaking and lifted her hands to clasp them behind his head, pressing against him. Her eyes were bright with malice and something more that gathered inside her, spreading, tingling along her nerves.

  René did not move, not so much as the twitch of a muscle. Neither did he look away from her provocative gaze. “That would, of course, gratify me.”

  “I thought it might.”

  Her eyelids were heavy with a languor that was not entirely a pretense as she watched him through her lashes. What she had expected, she was not sure, but it had not been this frozen lack of response. Impatience shifted in her mind, taking hold. When he did not reply, she spoke again.

  “But perhaps you only want what you can’t have? There are men like that, I’ve heard it said; they don’t value what is given too freely.”

  A laugh totally lacking in amusement left his chest and he lifted his hands to catch her wrists, pulling them away from his neck. “If I thought you would not draw yourself up in a knot like a cat who has seen a snake, I would take you inside there and strip away every stitch you are wearing before pressing my lips to your soft skin from your forehead to your toes. I would taste your mouth and your breasts and drink the very essence of you. I would take you with me into worlds of joy and explore you to the very core, if I thought you would let me. I don’t think it. And so I won’t.”

  Annoyance flooded through her along with a strange, aching regret. She tightened her lips into a thin line and pushed away from him to stand alone. She pulled her wrists and he let them go with an instant, open-handed gesture that emphasized his utter detachment.

  “If you had tried,” she said in soft venom, “I would have had your eyeballs for my bodice buttons.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he answered. He made her a short bow, then swept aside the leather curtain of the shelter and ducked inside. Then, in the concealing darkness, he went to one knee with his fists pressed against each other at his thighs, crushing his knuckles together until the pain became an antidote for the torment of desire. And on his hands lingered the smell of roses.

  Outside, Cyrene stood irresolute. She could not meekly follow him into the shelter now, could not lie beside him in the night trying to hold this wild need inside her without letting it show, without permitting him to know if they should touch in the night by accident. But neither could she bear to return to the fire and pretend that nothing had happened, that everything was still the same. Slowly she sank down onto the sand, turning so that her back was to the shelter. She stared out over the dark, heaving surface of the water, shaking with the hard beat of her heart.

  After a time it seemed that if only the beat of the drum and the lament of the Indian warrior that echoed her disturbance would cease, then she could return to the way she had been before she had pulled a half-drowned man from the river, before the expedition had left New Orleans, before this night when she discovered she had fallen in love with a rake and ne’er-do-well known as René Lemonnier. The wild and mournful song did not stop. It still assaulted the night when, stiff with the increasing cold and exhausted by her distress, she crawled into the shelter and settled beside René. It was throbbing yet, mingling with her fevered dreams, when she slept.

  A pile of trade goods was found on the beach when the camp began to stir. Pinned to them was an invoice in Captain Dodsworth’s hand made out to Cyrene and carefully totaled. Of the Half Moon there was no sign anywhere on the calm face of the bay. The ship had sailed on the morning tide.

  Pierre and Jean broke camp early. They wanted to move out ahead of the Choctaw, they said. That did not appear to be a problem of moment. After the feasting of the night before and the many rounds of rum and tafia, the Indians were barely stirring. The only thing that might move them before the middle of the day would be the appearance of a Chickasaw raiding party.

  There were farewells to be made and listened to, gifts to be exchanged, and a future rendezvous to be arranged. It was closer to midmorning than to daybreak when at last the Breton party was allowed to depart. They gave a final wave and then nosed their pirogues out into the marshy waterway leading north. The pirogues were loaded to the rough-hewn gunwales. Each dip of the paddle, each surge forward seemed certain to make it necessary to bail. Somehow the lap of the water was always an eyelash too low. They stayed dry, if more than a little crowded. They settled down, with Pierre, Cyrene, and René in the lead boat as before and Gaston and Jean following.

  The current, as sluggish as it was here in these lowlands below sea level, was still against them. There was not much breath left for talking or singing as they pulled into the ceaseless flow. Their paddles rose and fell in unison, digging into the muddy brown water, flinging bright droplets forward. The swing became monotonous, untiring. The miles began to drop behind them.

  They stopped for the noon meal on another chêniere, but they did not linger. The trip upstream would take longer than it had coming down. They were soon back on the water again. The hours moved on. The bubbles of their wake flowed ever backward, the water rippling slowly outward behind them in a giant inverted vee that eventually lapped the shore. They left the marshlands and entered the more narrow and winding course of the bayou. The short winter day began to wane.

  It was at that hour when the sun is just disappearing and the light takes on a melancholy blue shading tinted with the dying gold rays that a man appeared on the bank. He stepped from a thicket of evergreen myrtles that grew down to the water and called out, waving. Just in front of him at the bayou’s edge could be seen the prow of his pirogue thrusting up, as if it had sunk stern first. A stroke more of the paddles and the face of the man became plain. It was Touchet.

  René sat in the prow of the pirogue, where he had been since their last stop. He glanced over his shoulder at Pierre, his brow raised in query. There could be little doubt of the answer. A voyageur did not leave a man stranded on land in the wilderness any more than a ship at sea failed to stop for a shipwrecked mariner at sea, no matter how great a rogue he might be.

  The two boats swept as one toward the bank. Touchet called out to them, saying how glad he was to see them and how much he had depended on them to be behind him, cursing his luck, thanking his saints. His voice rang across the water, a thin, almost shrill sound that seemed to frighten every other creature into silence. The steady and quiet dip of their paddles seemed loud. Nothing moved in the blue afterglow as the sun sank behind the trees and the shadows along the bank deepened. Nothing except Touchet as he stood with one hand on his hip and the other waving them in toward him.

  “I don’t like it,” Cyrene murmured, almost to herself. She stopped paddling, resting her paddle against her knee as she searched the shoreline with narrowed eyes.

  There was nothing to be seen. Closer the boats came. Closer. The prow of the first pirogue, that of Cyrene with René and Pierre, grounded on sand. René leaped out, splashing in the shallow water as he leaned over to pull the boat higher onto the bank. The other pirogue glided nearer under its own momentum, Jean and Gaston holding their paddles at rest.

  It was at that moment that the French soldiers rose one by one from the myrtle thicket. Their uniforms were nondescript, faded by the semitropical sun until they were more gray than blue where they were not tattered or replaced in part by bits and pieces from the armies of a half-dozen other countries. They were small in stature and lacking in discipline, as evidenced by their ragged advance, but the muskets they held were primed and steady.

  Touchet made a sweeping theatrical gesture. “Behold my friends the welcoming party! You are under arrest, all, for the crime of smuggling. Be so good as to come ashore and give yourselves up. Even the lovely Cyrene. Especially the lovely Cyrene?”

  10

  IT WAS A TRAP.

  If it closed upon them, they would be taken as smugglers with the evidence against them almost in their laps. The penalty was too terrible to be faced.

  In immediate, unthinking reaction, Cyrene thrust her paddle deep, pushing it into
the mud of the stream’s bottom. The forward motion of the pirogue slowed, stopped. It reversed. She felt Pierre’s strong back paddle surging also, felt the craft respond, floating free of the shore once more.

  René was standing ankle-deep in water, poised between the pirogue and the soldiers with indecision on his face. Cyrene shouted at him with fear cracking her voice, “Get in! Get in the boat!”

  “Come back,” he called. “It will be all right, I promise.”

  Behind him, Touchet turned to the soldiers. “On my order you will commence firing.”

  “No!” René whirled on him. “No, you bungling fool!”

  His words carried the hard edge of command. Amazingly, they were obeyed, though Touchet muttered something that did not reach them.

  René swung back toward the pirogue, lunging after the prow. He did not mean to get in but to catch it, to pull them back to land. Cyrene saw him lay hands on the pirogue, saw his purpose. For a brief, confused instant, her brain refused to function as she saw the soldiers lower their muskets.

  Abruptly she cried out, a sound of rage and acknowledged betrayal, “Traitor!”

  She plunged to her knees, thrusting out with the muddy blade of her paddle and pushing it into his chest. She shoved with all her strength. He let go of the pirogue, catching at the paddle to keep his balance. Once more she rammed the paddle at him, men she let it go as the pirogue shot backward.

  René staggered, off balance. Pierre dug deep, and the long, narrow craft leaped out into the stream. A boatman above all others, he swirled his paddle and the pirogue spun around, heading back the way they had come.

  “Downstream,” the older Breton called to his brother Jean. “Their longboat will be waiting around the bend the other way.”

  On the bank of the bayou, René was snapping out an order. The soldiers broke formation at a run. Touchet, cursing, snatched a musket from a man lagging behind. The marquise’s agent raised the weapon. He fired.