BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis (22 page)

The faces around Natalie were a blur. Shame reached down through her cracked-leather shoes and pushed through to take root. Was she safe nowhere?

“Has our comtesse shown you her brand yet?” Solange jeered. Her escort, the bookkeeper, tried to tug her past Natalie, but the woman continued to rile, “It’s the brand of a thief—burned between her breasts!”

Gasps arose from the guests, and a smile of satisfaction crossed Solange’s narrow face. Emanuella stepped forward and said bitingly, “You’re one to be calling the kettle black—a prostitute.”

“At least I work for my money!” Solange countered.

Natalie whirled and began to push through the crowd, but Nicolas’s solid frame arrested her abruptly. “Would you care to dance, Madame de Gautier?” His deep, melodious voice was like a balm.

He bowed over the hand he had taken, his crushing grasp giving her no further opportunity to bolt. “Always running away, aren’t you?” he said under his breath as he led her out onto the dance floor. The first strains of an English minuet signaled another round of dancing.

Other couples hurried to arrange themselves in lines facing each other for the stately and formal dance. Her lips compressed, Natalie went through the motions of the steps. Nicolas, for all his usual pantherish grace, performed the steps woodenly. Great concentration showed in his face. A half-wild savage and a branded thief dancing together. The effect had to be farcical, but not one person present dared to laugh.

She knew he had made the gesture of requesting the dance in order to preserve her honor. Still, she was furious. When she met him in the center of the parallel lines, she hissed, “Staying can only ruin François’s name!”

“Half the people here are former convicts.” He flashed her a cold, deliberate smile, for her and for all those watching.

It was not the dance she had yearned for, but somehow she got through it. When it was over, François waited to escort her to the buffet, a husband’s loving look on his face. Below his moustache, his mouth was set in a stiff smile. “Nicolas did what I should have done,” he said under his breath.

She knew, though, that the incident was only a secondary irritation to François. He had known about her past, almost all of it, anyway. Solange’s taunting words bothered him less than the evidence of his infirmity. He was suffering from the realization that dancing was just one more thing he could no longer adequately perform.

“You
are doing it now,” she pointed out. “You are defending my honor merely by being at my side. That is all I could ask for.”

The muscles in his jaw worked. “Don’t lie to save my feelings, Natalie,” he snapped in a low voice. “At least spare me that. To begin with, you could ask for a husband in all ways.”

She could tell he had been fortifying himself with deep drafts from the wine casks. She lifted her shoulders in a tiny shrug and fanned herself, all the while looking for Solange, but the woman had doubtlessly slunk off to entertain her escort since she hadn’t accomplished anything with her outburst about Natalie’s sordid past.

Some of the strain went out of
François’s face. He escorted her to one of the ubiquitous rush-bottomed chairs, where others had already adjourned to eat, and went to fill a plate for her. Jasmine stood behind the table serving, yet her demeanor was more like that of a queen receiving her subjects. At François’s approach, a desperate passion suffused the girl’s face so that her complexion became that of a black rose. Natalie wondered how François could be so blind to the love engraved on the girl’s naked face.

Not wishing to witness their private but different agonies, Natalie turned elsewhere, anywhere. As usual, Nicolas’s commanding height caught her attention, and she felt again that sharp tug deep inside, where she had locked away her own passion. He stood talking to Emanuella, and for once the vivacious woman was silent, charmed, as Natalie had been from the first, by that musical voice. It was so unexpected, coming from that craggy face.

François stepped into her view, walking with his badly uneven gait. He bore his refilled glass in one hand and in the other a plate with a green salad, galantines quaking in jellied seclusion, and little towers of nougats. “Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No.” He looked sourly into his glass. “I probably should. At this rate, I shall become quite drunk. I’d like that.”

“I wouldn’t, François,” she said evenly. “You’d only feel worse tomorrow morning.”

“You don’t give a damn how I’d feel.”

She stiffened at the harsh reproach. Laying her fork on her plate, she looked up and met his challenging stare. He wanted her to tell him she loved him. “I do care about you, about what happens to you. Very much.”

“Yes,” he said, a rueful smile tugging at the ends of his moustache, “I was afraid that would be your answer.” He took another deep swallow, emptying his glass. “Pardon me, Madame de Gautier, while I refill my glass and seek oblivion.”

Miserable, she picked at her food, finishing only the leafy salad. Later, when other men requested dances from her, she acceded. To refuse would only annoy François that much more. She knew he continued to watch her. So she danced the night away, even as he kept his vow to get drunk, although there he shared the companionship of quite a few other men. Come sunrise, she and Nicolas would have a time of it getting François home.

As it turned out, it wasn’t François but she who had to be borne home semiconscious. She wasn’t quite sure exactly when she began to feel a little queasy, but toward dawn pains began wrenching at her stomach. Once she had mounted the Appaloosa, she thought she might just make it home; after all, she was neither dancing nor walking.

But the pains became more and more violent. The last thing she remembered was calling out “Nicolas!” before sliding, sliding, into a deep void.

§
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN §

“Peristam sanctum unctionem
. . .”

Something deep within Natalie’s brain dimly recognized the Latin litany.

“. . . and His most loving mercy, may the Lord forgive you whatever wrong you have done by the use of your sight . . .”

Gradually, she became aware of what was happening. She was being given the Extreme Unction—the last rites! She tried to open her eyes, but her lids were as heavy as if they had already been weighted with gold coins.

Where was she? As the heavy voice intoned its ritual, parts of her brain assimilated bits and pieces. Louisiana. She was in Natchitoches. But the settlement didn’t have a priest.

She wasn't going to die! She couldn't! Not before she saw Philippe again!

“You’re only making her worse! Get the damn thing over with and get out!”

François’s voice. He had been drinking, she could tell.

“
Mi hijo, podias que tener . . .”

The priest had reproved François in Spanish. A Spanish priest? Was she hallucinating? What had happened to her? Her body hurt so, everywhere.
She felt the warm, moist pressure of his thumbs against her lids. The priest was anointing her with olive oil.
Mon Dieu
! What if they buried her alive?

She summoned the last particle of her depleted strength and willed her eyes to open. In a blur, she saw the priest leaning over her, then straightening, receding from her in a dark tunnel. The wide sleeves of his brown robe swung in and out of her vision. From somewhere she heard soft weeping mixed with slurred, muffled words.

Another pain twisted through her, leaving her gasping, too weak even to cry out. Everything darkened.

Time and space weaved patterns in and out of her subconsciousness. Then a point came where she faced the brink of infinity. She struggled against the soft earth being shoveled over her, against the inexorable suction pulling her down, downward, through the bottomless swamp. Morass filled her ears and nostrils so that she couldn’t breathe. She opened her mouth to scream, and slimy ooze gushed in. She was strangling!

Someone screamed. “Nooooo!”

Words completely foreign to her were being spoken in a low, resonant voice. Slowly, with difficulty, she opened her eyes. Nicolas’s cinnamon-colored face swam above her. He was speaking in some Indian dialect, almost crooning to her. When he saw that she was fully conscious, he ceased stroking the hair at her temple, and the strange Indian chant halted.

She fixed her gaze on the inky pools of his eyes, clinging to the promise of life she found there. “What has happened?”

“You’ve been very ill—you ate something poisonous at the birthday festivities.”

She blinked, trying to assimilate what he had told her, but she found being cradled in his arms a much more pleasant experience to contemplate. Unlike François, his swarthy chest was smooth, devoid of hair. “Where’s François?”

“He took the
curé
back to Los Adais.”

“So I wasn’t just imagining it. There was a priest.” She looked about her, saw that she was in her bed, that the dying sunlight filtered anemically through the linen window covering. She noted that a mosquito net was draped from the ceiling, enveloping the bed—and her and Nicolas. She also noticed that her hair lay unbound over her shoulders.

“You were on the point of death. You mumbled about absolution. François rode like the hounds of hell to Los Adais to fetch the priest for you.”

“Did I—did I mumble anything else?”

“You mean, did you enlighten him about your past? No. Your secrets are safe.”

His contempt hurt. But she was too weary, too weak to try to remonstrate with him. She closed her eyes, gathering strength from the blood that pounded through her heart at such a furious pace at Nicolas’s nearness.

“What did you eat the night of the party?” he asked her.

She opened her lids again. “Mostly salad.”

“What you ate could have contained hemlock.”

A disgruntled sigh fluttered
past her lips. “Someone’s carelessness could have cost a lot of lives.”

He frowned and shook his head. In the time she had been ill, his hair had grown, and the heavy curls were loose about his nape. “Except for quite a few nasty hangovers, no reports of illness or death have reached St. Denis.”

Her eyes flared. “You’re saying I was deliberately poisoned?”

He held a wooden spoon to her lips. “I’m not saying anything. Swallow.”

She lifted her head, trying to see what the spoon contained, and he said, “It’s not hemlock. It’s a Chipewyan antidote I’ve been giving you for the past ten days.”

“Ten days? I’ve been sick that long? Who—”

The spoon, prodding her lips open, cut off her questioning. Helpless, she swallowed. She gagged and screwed up her nose. “
Tiens
! That’s wretched-tasting medicine!”

His lean lips widened to emit
reluctant laughter. “An apothecary couldn’t do better.”

She liked his laughter. It had the sound of the wind rustling through the trees. She looked at him, really looked at him. The eyes were the entire man, she thought. An opaque flat black set in the fierce face, they were nevertheless luminous, eloquent with the gentleness inside the man. It was true, she thought, that nothing was so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.

She had seen only the rough-hewn face, but now she perceived the deep character sketched in its lines. So much he had never talked about—and so much he knew. And so much time she had wasted, pinning for Philippe, when she could have been getting to know Nicolas better.

As Nicolas had gotten to know her, she realized suddenly and uneasily. “You took care of me all of this time?” she asked.

“Most of the time.”

A deep flush rose like the tide, flooding her wan cheeks. He had to have performed the most intimate of tasks for her. Her hand crept up to her throat where the tie strings of her woolen nightrail lay loose, exposing the expanse of soft, white flesh that was faintly veined.

“The branding must have been horrible for you,” he said quietly.

Now was her chance to tell him the entire truth, that she had known only one man, her husband. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to mention Philippe. He belonged to another world, another time— and she was here, now, held in Nicolas’s arms. Her racing blood
whispered that, for just a little while, it couldn’t be such an act of infidelity to lose herself in this small pleasure.

Unconsciously, she traced the fleur-de-lis atop the nightrail’s fabric with her fingertips. “You must believe me, Nicolas,” she said in a voice even more husky than usual, “I have not been an immoral woman.”

He released her and rose, his features harsh. Under the straight slash of his brows, his eyes smoldered with the tension that coursed between them. “Did a rejected lover issue the
lettre de cachet
?”

Wordlessly, she shook her head and looked back up at him. “That was unfair, Nicolas. There’s been only one man in my life.”

“And it wasn’t François, was it?”

“I refuse to answer that!” Shakily, she pushed herself to her feet and faced him, swaying, her chin jutting. “How many woman have there been in your life?” she countered.

“None that I deceived.”

Jealousy coiled in her stomach. She hadn’t expected jealousy to strike; in fact, she had never experienced it before. Its impact staggered her. Her knees gave out, and Nicolas’s hands shot out to catch her before she collapsed. He lowered her to the bed, but
his hands released her arms at once, as if she were aflame. She lay there, the white frost of her hair cascading over the mattress. “Were you in love with any of them?” she asked in a whisper.

A tight smile lightened the dark face that hovered over hers. “The first one was the most memorable.”

“I really don’t want to know any more.”

He sat down beside her again. “Yes, you do. When I reached thirteen years, Jean-Baptiste decided it was time I became a man. He took me to the nearest trading post, more than four hundred miles away, and solicited the fattest, oldest, and ugliest Indian whore he could find. She was toothless in the bargain.”

One corner of his mouth crooked. “Shall I continue?”

She tried to make her voice light, knowing that anything else endangered the platonic relationship that had been carefully established. “If you don’t, Nicolas, I’ll never forgive you.”

“She left me with a host of crotch vermin that kept me scratching for months—and the vow I’d never take another woman.”

She raised a skeptical brow and said, “I don’t believe you.”

“Nevertheless, it’s true. I was genuinely astonished that more men didn’t elect to lead a priest’s celibate life-style. However, the instinct to mate was irrepressible, and at the next opportunity— almost six months later—I was driven to bed another woman. I searched and found a somewhat younger one this time. At least she had teeth.”

He paused, then said, smiling, “Jean-Baptiste had been a wise old man. The first time was so bad that after that every time had to get better.”

She knew she should act shocked, but unavoidable laughter escaped between the fingers she pressed against her lips. “Oh, Nicolas!”

At the stringent lines that abruptly deepened at either side of his mouth, her laughter dissipated. “Natalie, when François returns tomorrow, I’m leaving for the Natchez Trace. I’ll be gone for some time.”

The name meant nothing to her. “You don’t have to go.”

“I have to. I want to establish trading relations with the Cumberland settlements.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I want you to listen to me,” he said, ignoring her statement. “You must be careful when you visit the St. Denis household in the future. Eat only what François or the St. Denises themselves eat.”

“It’s Jasmine, isn’t it? She wants François’s love for herself.”

He stood and went to the door. She felt the distance between them as more than just a matter of space. In the darkness, his sensuous baritone voice reached her. “François loves you; you are his wife.”

“Yes,” she whispered, her fingers plucking at the sheet listlessly. “A wife chosen by his best friend.”