Long Knife (21 page)

“Them Frenchies down there is at heart a lazy, good-for-nothin’ breed,” John Duff observed. “It’s a land o’plenty, and they work about half the time. Their niggers do most o’
that
. Git in their gardens with no effort a-tall, an’ drink an’ gossip the afternoons away. Never saw the like fer gossip. Guess they have a lot of fun, but I wouldn’t give y’ a shillin’ fer the lot of ’em as men.”

“I hear tell they git along famous with th’ Indians,” remarked a woodsman.

“’Course they do,” agreed Duff. “Just like ’em. Cunning. No ambition. They sell their furs and what little else they produce downriver in New Orleans and bring finery up by boat. But they act like the lilies of the field. Whatever the Lord sees fit t’ give ’em that’s all they ‘spect. You won’t often see a Frenchie out clearin’ land fer corn. Grapes and herbs, maybe, but not corn.” He spat.

“What kind of finery d’you mean, Mr. Duff?” one of the Virginians asked, laving his hands.

“Oh, high falutin’ stuff. Like lace and silverware, candlesticks, delicate underwear, even jewelry. Imagine jewelry out here ‘twixt nowhere an’ nowhere else!”

“Them French ladies wear jewelry?” exclaimed a frontiersman with four front teeth absent. “They pretty? Worth a-chasin’ down?”

“Barefoot most o’ the time,” Duff chuckled. “But they put on their trimmin’s fer special times, and you never seen nothin’ so saucy.”

He pointed out to them the big house within the fort where Philippe de Rocheblave lived, and the men stared down at it with malignant fascination.
Rocheblave
. They had memorized the French commandant’s name from Colonel Clark’s contemptuous pronunciation of it the night of their big powwow on Corn Island. And now, incredibly to their minds, here they were, two weeks and three hundred miles later, looking down from concealment onto the house of the notorious Rocheblave, just as his hireling Indians had so often lurked in the wilds around their own Kentucky and Virginia settlements waiting to attack and murder. Colonel Clark had made Rocheblave a proper villain for them to set their vengeful thoughts on, and it seemed to them neatly and wonderfully just that they should be stalking him now.

And it was their young colonel who had made this nice piece of justice possible. They glanced at him now and then, at that handsome and likable but sometimes soul-chilling young man who somehow, it seemed, could do the craziest things with the best of horse sense. They watched him study his Kaskaskia town map with his officers in the waning light. It was a map he had obtained a year ago from spies he had sent up here from Kaintuck, all on his own, a total secret.

“Daggonedest thing I ever did see,” Sergeant Crump was saying to Duff. “He runs at things lookin’ like a blind bull, then you find out he’s done planned every step of ’t.” He rubbed his breastbone, which still ached whenever he recalled the fight Clark had coaxed him into on Corn Island. “B’lieve me, I
know,”
he added.

“He always drive folks this hard?” Duff asked.

“Aye, oh, it ain’t easy, Mr. Duff. It ain’t easy. But all in all, I wouldn’t a missed it fer anything.”

In the meantime, George had been briefing his captains in a perplexing vein.

“Make every man understand that I’ll tolerate not one act of plunder or savagery of any kind. There’ll be no scalping, there’ll be no looting, there’ll be no raping, or even an ungentle gesture at any woman there. They’ll use only what force they
need to keep the civilians out of the way, and there’ll be no intercourse of any kind with the inhabitants until I say so.”

The captains looked at each other with raised eyebrows, then back to him. “No looting?” said Helm. “Th’ boys won’t like that; takes th’ fun out of it. To th’ victor goes th’ spoils.”

George gave him a hard, level look, indicating that such remarks deserved no comment. Then he went on:

“There is one other caution, most important. We’ll take pains never to reveal how few we are. We must never be all together where we could be counted. If we can, we must seem a thousand. We’ll simply have to be everywhere. You can negotiate only from a dominant posture, and that’ll be no mean trick where we’re outnumbered ten to one, But it has to be that way.”

The officers looked confused, and a momentary apprehension flickered across their faces. They had not really let themselves think about numbers. “What d’you mean ‘negotiate,’ George?” asked Bowman.

“I mean first, their surrender. Then, this.” He drew out Campbell’s letter about the French-American alliance and showed it to them for the first time. They studied it with great curiosity, then looked back at him.

“It means,” he said, “we invade them as enemy. Then with the help of God and what wisdom we have, we turn their loyalty around.”

The officers scratched their scalps, squinted, grimaced. They had come all this way inspired by him into a simple raiding mood. And now he was giving them responsibilities far more complicated than that. He had had this treaty thing in his pocket for weeks and had waited until now to tell them about it. It was like the other trick of his, bringing them all the way down to Corn Island under a simpler pretext.

It was pretty perplexing, this matter of dealing with a man who always knew more than they did. But what choice was there, besides doing what he decided? And so the four captains shrugged, nodded, and agreed once again to do it his way.

He looked over the violet twilight in the valley, and pointed. “Y’see that big farmhouse just this side o’ the river, below the old abandoned fort? Duff tells me there’s a ferry of sorts there and we can acquire boats for the crossing. Now tell your companies what I said about their conduct, and tell ’em violations will be on pain of death. In ten minutes we’ll move down the bluff to that farmhouse …” The severity of his tone suddenly
softened, and in the dusk they could see him smiling. “Thank you, gents. Let’s be about it now.”

D
ON
F
ERNANDO DE
L
EYBA, LOOKING MOST GUBERNATORIAL IN HIS
long coat of black velvet, sat in the chair at Teresa’s right, and his wife Maria, in a dress of black silk, sat on her left. It seemed to Teresa, who wore taffeta the color of old ivory, that their somber mien and sentry-like flanking positions must make any of the young Kaskaskians fearful of approaching her. The violins squeaked away busily at a minuet; many of the French militiamen and dandies gazed longingly her way as they danced past with their partners, but not one had dared to approach.

The de Leybas were being entertained as guests of honor by the wife of the merchant Gabriel Cerré. Monsieur Cerré was, as usual, away trading. The de Leybas had sailed down the river from St. Louis on a week-long excursion, and this ball was the culmination of their visit. They were to embark for their return to St. Louis the next morning.

Though Teresa was impressed by the elegance and voluptuousness of the French social life, she remained somewhat uncomfortable in the midst of it, never quite sure how far to unbend from that quiet reserve in which she had been conditioned since earliest memory. She had noticed that her brother’s careful formality and studied hauteur were being eroded little by little as the weeks went by here in this remote little Franco-Spanish society strung along the banks of the Mississippi, but still, in comparison with the French, he was quite controlled, and a zealous warden especially of the properties surrounding a maiden sister.

No Frenchman had managed to penetrate the fine sieve of Don Fernando’s discrimination, though there were four or five
rather handsome and respectable ones who had, or whose fathers had, accrued substantial fortunes through trade in furs, hemp, tobacco, and grain. The few soldiers in the Spanish garrison at St. Louis were a rather coarse lot, some of them part Indian, and of course only an officer would have the right to play suitor to Teresa. Besides Don Fernando, who commanded the garrison, there were only two other Spanish officers, one of them, Cruzat, being middle-aged, married, and overfed. The other, Francisco de Cartabona, lieutenant of militia, was youthful, slender, and nearly as handsome as her brother. Teresa had met him but once before, at her brother’s office in St. Louis.

At this moment, as if her thoughts had summoned him, Lieutenant de Cortabona appeared in the doorway at the far side of the ballroom. His intense gaze swept around the room and came to rest on her, and with a flush of self-awareness, Teresa lowered her eyes, and the lace-webbed fan in her hand began to fibrillate against her bosom. Maria, noticing these slight motions, sat up straighter, like a sentinel sensing danger; her sunken black eyes darted to the far side of the room just in time to see the lieutenant gather himself up and start making his way toward the de Leybas around the end of the ballroom, his cocked hat tucked under his left arm, his sword scabbard hanging from his belt. He stopped at attention before Don Fernando, bowing quickly and snapping his boot heels. “Good evening, Excellency,” he said, not yet permitting himself to look at the ladies.

Don Fernando rose, returning the bow with a smile. “Good evening, Lieutenant. We see you so seldom. You’ve been seeing to the militia over at Ste. Genevieve, have you not? How do they stand?”

“Quite well, Excellency. For militia,” he added with a mocking half smile. Then he turned to the ladies. “What a great pleasure to see you,” he said, bowing again, now looking directly at Maria for just an instant, then at Teresa’s eyes for a perceptible second longer. Teresa dropped her gaze with proper modesty.

Such fine skin and eyes, she thought. And so graceful. What a shame he is so little, no taller than I. She produced a guarded hint of a smile which, as she knew from a thousand past
glimpses
in her bedroom mirror, bowed her lips to the slightest degree and surely created a puzzle in the mind of any young man who saw it.

Lieutenant de Cartabona paused for a moment, as if interpreting that very enigma, then looked to Don Fernando. “It may be
a little forward of me, Excellency, but would you allow your sister to dance with me in the next
cuadrilla?”

“With her permission, gladly.”

“Señorita?”

“Sí,” she replied after a moment of conscious fan-fluttering which, she was sure, had its desired effect upon the anxious little lieutenant.

The next dance was indeed a quadrille. Being the sort of square dance that occasioned no more touching than that of hands on shoulders, it nevertheless permitted a succession of coquettish looks and other facial signals in passing, as well as the kind of innocent exuberance which allowed the partners to glimpse every few seconds each other’s open-mouthed smiles and grace of movement. Lieutenant de Cartabona was indeed a lithe and exciting figure in movement, and would now and then introduce a manly Spanish stomp and fiery narrowing of the eyes, suggestive of flamenco. The lieutenant knew well how to project his fire.

By the time the quadrille was over, it was obvious to everyone that the sister of Lieutenant Governor de Leyba was involved in the process of courtship, to that limit of discretion imposed by the old Spanish code but modified by the casual circumstances in this remote outpost of Upper Louisiana. As the night wore on, Teresa admitted to herself that she was at least as happy as she had ever been in New Orleans.

T
HERE WAS A LAMP GLOWING IN ONE END OF THE FARMHOUSE WHEN
Colonel Clark’s little regiment filed silently in through the gate of the farmyard and squatted in the shadows along the foot of the stone wall. Beyond the dirt road outside the wall the Kaskaskia River sighed and gurgled among the pilings of the
farm’s landing dock. On the other shore of the river, just a few hundred feet away, lights of the town straggled up the bank. Now and then lanterns could be seen moving among those town buildings, and muffled voices or snatches of song and the yipping of village dogs would drift across the river. From somewhere in the town there came faint sounds of violin music, filtered through the constant din of frogs and crickets.

When his men were all concealed, George took Captain Bowman and two soldiers, with Sanders as interpreter, strode to the front door of the house, and knocked on it with his fist. There was a long moment of silence, then a query was called from within, just audible through the stout oak portal. Sanders answered:

“Ouvrez! Nous sommes les soldats de Rocheblave.”

The sturdy French farmer who drew the iron bolt and swung the door open might have been surprised enough at a visit from Rocheblave’s militiamen; he recoiled and almost fell backward over his family when a gigantic, gaunt, fierce-eyed, red-haired savage, pistol in hand, sweat and dirt burnishing the slabs and knots of muscle on his naked torso, pushed in, followed by others equally ferocious looking and bristling with weapons.

The family was herded into the parlor and seated, and huddled there wide-eyed, trembling in fear of their lives, as the leader of the intruders, without giving any explanation for his presence, began a rapid and demanding interrogation. The farmer was so awed by the man’s glittering eyes that he dared not lie to him. George learned that a few days earlier Rocheblave, hearing rumors of a possible attack by the river raider Willing, had summoned all the militia and able-bodied townsmen to arms, but that the guard had been relaxed when no enemy appeared. Yes, the farmer assured him, the fort surely would be under minimal guard now. What would explain the music coming from the town? he was asked. He did not know, but presumed it might be the town’s Negroes having one of their frequent entertainments. Would there be Indians about the town and the fort? Always, he replied, but one never knew how many; they constantly came and went in war parties and trading bands, dealing with Rocheblave and the traders.

“Consider yourselves prisoners,” they were told by the intruder, “until our business in town is completed.” A lieutenant entered the house and reported that five small boats had been procured, in addition to the two that lay at the farmer’s landing.