Louisiana History Collection - Part 1
Page 79
“Except this René. When I heard he was in New Orleans, I knew why he had come. The notes. Should never have used the same ones. But I had a trunk half full, hidden away; a man can never tell what might be needed. Your mother didn’t know. She wouldn’t have come with me if she had known. She was like that.”
“René traced you to Louisiane by the notes you passed in town.”
“After three years, he tracked me down. He won’t give up.”
Louis Nolté rambled on, repeating himself, damning himself. It had been Jean who had arranged for Louis to stay with Little Foot. He had been with her and her daughter on their journey to the gulf to meet with Pierre and Jean; that had been the reason why the Indian woman would not let Cyrene into her hut. Little Foot had been too knowing, too sharp of tongue for his liking. He had seduced her daughter Quick Squirrel with trinkets and fine words. That had amused him for a time, especially since it enraged Little Foot. But it had soon begun to pall. He had been elated when Cyrene became René’s mistress. He had thought Lemonnier would be satisfied with that revenge and go away at last. But no, he had settled deeper into the society of the town and he still sent out his spies.
“So you hired thugs and attacked him again,” Cyrene said, “as you hired the assassin to creep up on him while he lay injured on the flatboat.”
“You ruined it for me. Why did you do that? I just wanted to get you out of the way so mat the others could kill him.”
Had he? She touched her fingers briefly to the bruise that still lay under her cheekbone. It was impossible to be sure, impossible to know what he might have done to her if she had obstructed his purpose. In any case, it no longer mattered.
“Listen to me. Pierre and Jean and Gaston are being held in prison, but it’s really you that René wants. He has the authority to pardon them and it’s possible he might do that if you will give yourself up to him.”
“Give myself up!” He stared as if he thought her mad.
“You owe this to Pierre, to them all.”
“I owe them nothing!”
“You wronged Pierre in New France all those years ago; you sent him to the galleys, took his furs, took his wife. Now René is after us all for what you did to his brother and Pierre is once more taking the blame for your crimes in order to protect me. If you are any kind of a man, you will do what is right.”
“Do you take me for a simpleton? What do I care what happens to Pierre?”
“They know he escaped from the galleys. He’ll hang! You will at least be returned to France for your trial for counterfeiting.”
“Yes, and then be hanged or sent to the Bastille, which is a death sentence itself.”
“You would let Pierre die in your place?”
“But of course!”
“I won’t, not after all he has done. If you aren’t willing to give yourself up, then I will have to tell René where he can find you.”
“My own daughter?” he cried, his gaze wide, staring.
She stood looking into his watery eyes, and something she had begun to suspect as she listened to René’s summation before the council became a certainty. “But that’s just it,” she said slowly, “I am not your daughter.”
“What nonsense is this? Of course you are!”
“Legally, perhaps. But I have always known you were married to my mother a bare month before I was born. I thought it was a forced trip to the altar as with so many others, that I was the reason you and my mother weren’t happy. But it wasn’t that, was it? How long was it before she began to suspect what you had done?”
A smile twisted his face. “Not long, but she wasn’t a fighter like you. She blamed herself, thought she must have done something to make me love her enough to try to kill Pierre.”
“It was really my grandfather’s money and the furs.”
“How little you know of men, or love, if you think so — though they counted, oh, yes, they counted. But your mother is dead. And if Lemonnier doesn’t go back to Paris soon, so will he be dead. Your grandfather, stingy old bastard that he is, can’t live forever. I wonder what would happen then to his estate if you were to die in the wilderness, a victim of the savages and the recent unrest among the Choctaw? And if I was to wander into New Orleans from downriver, miraculously alive?”
He was not sane, perhaps the effects of the pox but probably a tendency of long-standing. It was so quiet Cyrene could hear the wind sighing through the branches of the trees outside, the murmur of voices from the next hut and the distant barking of dogs.
He was becoming restive. She must speak. “You would be the heir, I suppose, since everyone considers you my next of kin, but I am not going to die.”
“Aren’t you, chère? Aren’t you? You are so headstrong and so foolhardy for venturing out here alone, and life is so uncertain.”
She watched him bring the long knife out from under the bearskin, saw the blade of polished steel gleam in the dim light of the hut, and she felt no fear, no anger, no surprise, nothing except cold, exacting contempt. She reached for the knife in the sheath that hung from her waist, hidden among her skirts. The hilt was solid, giving the weapon a comforting weight in her hand as she brought it out and turned the winking tip toward Louis Nolté.
“You were right,” she said, “I am a fighter.”
He laughed as he came up off the bed wearing only a pair of breeches. “Maybe, but no match for a man.”
“You think not?” She eased away from him to give herself room, her quick glance looking for obstacles that would have to be avoided, measuring the distance to the door as Gaston and Pierre had taught her in the lessons they had thought sufficient to discourage importunate suitors.
“I am taller, heavier, and have longer arms.”
“You tried once to kill Pierre and three times to kill René, and they still live. I expect I will, too.”
He lunged for her, his knife a silver arc cutting toward her belly. She leaped aside and felt the waft of air sliced by the blade. A fierce and fearful joy surged in her veins. He had none of Gaston’s strength and agility and little of his watchful cunning.
“You’re getting old,” she taunted, “old and sick.”
“I should have put you out of my way years ago.” He feinted, then slashed at her in a backhand swing.
She whirled, putting the fire between them, giving him a mocking look across it. As he started around it toward her, she thrust her toe in its rough leather moccasin into the piled ashes and kicked upward, flinging bits of hot coals and roiling smoke into his face. He yelled, throwing up his free hand. She followed her advantage, thrusting toward his knife arm. He wrenched backward, but her knife tip sliced through flesh, leaving a welling red streak behind.
“You little bitch,” he gasped, and plunged toward her, his eyes wild.
She could have finished him then. It was just a matter of stepping to one side, ducking under his blade, and letting him impale himself on her own. But she had been right; he was crazed and ill. Whatever he might have done in the past, whatever he might intend to do, she was not his executioner.
She sidestepped, diving away from him toward the sleeping bench and the bearskin that lay half on it, half on the floor. She scooped it up in her left hand, whirling it over her arm. This was the moment of her greatest danger, she realized, when she had lost her willingness to kill, when all she wanted was to disarm the man before her and take him back to explain to the governor and the council who he was and what he had done.
Louis Nolté had thought to overpower her with strength and speed. He could not do it. The pain she had inflicted was so humiliating and her elusiveness such a frustration that he dropped his cocky assurance to concentrate on showing her she could be bested. He became crafty, and so more deadly.
Cyrene retreated before him, her movements smooth, her gaze intent. Twice she fended off his flashing blade with the bearskin. Twice she avoided the traps he set: the corner of the hut, the support arm for the pot over the fire. The weight of the coverle
t was tiring, making her shoulder ache. An end slipped, drooping ‘ the packed earth floor. Her foot come down on it. She stumbled.
Nolté leaped at her. In a flash, she swung the bearskin so that it flared out like a thick net, enveloping his head and arms in its folds. Bending swiftly, she shot out her left leg and hooked her foot around his ankle. He plunged forward. She twisted aside, trying to evade his fall. His flailing arm caught her. She staggered headlong and was carried to the hard earth floor with him.
Her breath was jarred from her in a soundless grunt as she struck the packed dirt. Pain radiated through her shoulder and hip and also in her knees where he landed on them. She wrenched herself over, trying to get away from him. Gasping curses, he grappled with her, then whipped the bearskin from his head. It landed in the fire. Breathing the acrid smell of burning fur, Cyrene wrestled with the man she had once thought of as her father. He raised his knife arm. She caught his wrist with her left hand. His teeth were bared in a grimace. Sweat beaded on his forehead, clinging to his brows. Her arm began to tremble with the effort to keep the knife from her.
Little Foot was outside somewhere beyond the hut. The Indian woman would come to her aid if she knew it was needed. Or would she? In any case, Cyrene had no breath, no time to call out.
She struggled back and forth, trying with desperation clouding her mind to roll Nolté from her, pushing with her feet for purchase. He could not be dislodged. Her foot touched the flaming bearskin. She hooked the toe of her moccasin under it and kicked, rolling once more and dragging it over them.
She felt the heat through her skirts, saw the flare as the material began to catch fire. Nolté’s legs were bare to the knee. He gave a hoarse yell, jerking away from her as he kicked at the bearskin. Cyrene shoved him and scrambled away as he tumbled backward. She pushed to her feet, swaying, beating out the blue flames that licked at her skirt without taking her eyes from Nolté.
Nolté tried to get up, then collapsed on the dirt floor. He let his knife fall to the floor as he clutched his leg, gasping, “Cyrene… help. Help me.”
She straightened a little, watching him carefully. Her grasp on her knife tightened. The bearskin lay in a smoldering heap beside him.
“There’s a coal stuck to my leg.” He was jerking in spasms. “Get it off, get it off!”
She moved a step closer.
“Hurry… please.”
She didn’t trust him, but that distrust was new and he had been a part of her life for long years. She held her knife ready but stepped closer, dropping to one knee at his side.
His eyes narrowed. He let go of his leg, at the same time reaching like a striking snake for his knife. Beyond them the door of the hut opened, and in the light Cyrene saw the sheen run along his blade’s edge as he turned it upward, ready to rend and eviscerate when he stabbed.
It was a trick. She was ready. She began her thrust, aiming for the heart with her shoulder muscles knotted and every ounce of her strength behind it.
“No!”
The agonized shout came from the doorway. There was a fluttering sound like the wings of pigeons, followed by a dull thud. Nolté fell back with a strangled cry, his arms outflung. A knife hilt quivered in his chest just under the breastbone.
Cyrene’s blade met only air. She recovered, turning to stare.
It was the elder of the Bretons who crouched half in, half out of the low door. Behind him was René, and also Jean and Gaston.
“Pierre,” she whispered, then added the word that rose unbidden in her mind. “Papa.”
His face twisted. He moved forward into the hut a step, then another. He stopped. Cyrene rose to her feet. She moved toward him, then came to a halt, uncertain. She searched the face of the man who had fathered her and saw the slow rise of tears in his fine blue eyes.
“Papa,” she said again.
He opened his arms. She ran to be caught in them, held close in their gentle solace, their tempered and solid belonging.
It was a week later, after Touchet had been sentenced to the galleys, when René came to propose.
He was most formally attired in wig and justaucorps of blue velvet. His silver shoe buckles gleamed and the tricorne tucked under his arm was trimmed with a white plume. He looked as out of place in the flatboat cabin as a diamond in a dung heap. Not that Cyrene considered the cabin a dung heap by any means, but his splendor seemed excessive, a pointed reminder of the inescapable differences between them.
She was cooking the evening meal, making biscuits to go with the squirrel stew that simmered over the fire. Pierre was out on the front deck, whittling wooden spoons. Jean and Gaston had gone to set out hooks for catfish to add to their provisions since it had been agreed that their days of smuggling were over, at least for some time.
Cyrene was standing at the worktable with flour to her wrists and biscuit dough in her hands as René came through the door. She stared at him until her eyes began to burn, then she lowered her head and went on with what she was doing, placing the raw biscuit she held in a greased Dutch oven, squeezing off another one from her bowl of dough.
“How are you, Cyrene?” he asked. She was thinner, her face more angular. He had done that to her, and the knowledge was an ache inside him.
“Well enough. Would you care for something to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
Something in his voice made her hurry into speech. “I’m glad you came. I’ve been thinking of sending a note to tell you how grateful I am — we all are for the pardons.”
“It was little enough. I trust there have been no repercussions among your father’s friends?”
“No. I believe they consider that if the Bretons received their freedom for favors given, it was not Pierre who paid.”
Her voice was carefully neutral, which was more telling, René thought, than the most bitter resentment. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged without looking at him.
“I’ve discovered that Pierre, wily old fox that he is, didn’t tell me much that I couldn’t have discovered for myself given time, except, of course, for where Nolté was hiding.”
A smile flickered over her mouth. “I’m not surprised.”
“No.”
It made her uneasy, his standing there before her so formally. “There’s a stool there by the fire if you care to sit down.”
“Not while you stand.”
“I don’t mind, really.”
He gave her a smile. “I do.”
She finished the biscuits and cleaned her hands by rubbing them together until the dough rolled up and fell off, then rinsing them in a pan of water. Then she spooned a little melted lard over the tops of the biscuits to help them brown evenly, put the lid on the Dutch oven, and carried it to the fireplace. Raking aside the coals, she set the heavy oven on a bed of hot ash and ladled coals on top of it. She checked her stew, stirring the rich brown gravy with its aroma of onions, garlic, and peppers. It was doing well, the meat becoming nicely tender. She returned to the table, where she began to clear away the things she had been using.
“Could you leave that a moment?” René said. “I would like to talk to you.”
“I thought that’s what we were doing.” She reached for a damp cloth and began to wipe up the dusting of spilled flour. She refused to look at René for fear of what she might see. What could he want? He sounded so serious and yet personal. If he had the effrontery to ask her to become his mistress again, she would not be responsible for what she did.
He drew a deep breath. “Very well. You know, don’t you, that there was never any danger, to any of you, when you were brought before the council, that I could never, would never, harm you and yours?”
“I may know it now. I didn’t then, none of us did.”
“I am more sorry than I can say for having to put you through that, but I had a job to do. It was important to know what the Vaudreuils would do and say when confronted with Touchet’s guilt.”
“And now you are satisfied?”
“Then I suppose your gambit was successful.”
“Not if I lose you by it.”
“You cannot lose me,” she said evenly as her brown eyes clashed with his. “In the sense that you mean, I was never yours.”
“That may be so; I won’t quibble over it. I am only trying to say that I want you with me always. I want you to become my wife.”
“That is the most insulting — your what?”
He had roused her from her damnable calm, at any rate. It made him feel better for her to show at least a little disturbance since his own heart was pounding in his chest. “I want you to become my wife. I have spoken to your father. He knows that I’m a second son with few prospects for some time beyond the income to a piece of land given me by my father, but I believe that the king will grant me a concession here in Louisiane in return for my services to him. I would like for you to share it with me, to help build something worth having here in the New World. It’s what you spoke of once, to have a piece of land. Your father and the others would always be welcome there. If you will agree, I will spend my life making recompense—”
“No.”
“I know that you have no reason to trust me as a husband. It was the king’s idea to give me a reputation as a womanizer, a ruse to make my supposed disgrace greater and my appeal to the governor’s wife more certain. It also amused him, I think, to turn me into a libertine for the good of France when so many had accused him of the same to her ill. But I swear to you it isn’t in my nature; I pledge that I will be faithful to you.”
She threw down the cloth she was holding and turned away from him. “Your pledges, like your repute, are of no interest to me. I don’t want recompense from you.”
“I know you have a right to be bitter, but I never meant to hurt you. I just want to take care of you. I want—”
“Please!” she said, her voice raw and her hands, hidden among her skirts, clenched into fists. “I can take care of myself. You owe me nothing. Whatever is done, is done. You did what you came here to do; your brother is avenged and your duty is completed. The best thing now would be for you to go back to France and forget about it.”