Merline Lovelace (7 page)

“That changes our plans,” the lieutenant declared. “If martial law has been declared, things must be at a serious impasse. My father will want my report as soon as possible. We, too, will go to New Orleans.”

Huddleston voiced an immediate protest. “The hell you say! We left our kits and our families in St. Louis. We figured on returning there.”

“And so you will, after New Orleans.”

“Now, look. I didn’t sign on for—”

“You signed on for the duration of the expedition,” Daniel reminded him sharply.

“Didn’t you hear Duval, man? The general’s declared martial law. You know what that means. Foot patrols and barricade duty all day, every day, with not a penny of extra pay to show for our efforts.” Huddleston’s red-rimmed gaze darted from face to face. “I say we head back to St. Louis, where we set out from, and forget New Orleans.”

“My orders are to deliver the report of our expedition directly to my father,” the lieutenant said with an attempt at authority. “We leave first thing in the morning for New Orleans.”

Lifting an arm to swipe the sweat from his brow, Wilkinson missed the sneer that twisted Huddleston’s mouth. Daniel saw it, however, and barely refrained from planting a fist in the man’s face.

Gritting his teeth, Daniel reminded himself that the private was bone-tired and ready to be done with this damnable expedition. They all were. God knew Daniel would be happy to see the last of this ragtag band.

Or so he thought, until he glanced at Louise and saw the quiet desperation in her blue eyes.

Reluctance seeped into him, replacing the weariness. They’d come so far together these past weeks. He’d grown used to taking her into the woods each morning, to seeing her face across a campfire. Her low, musical voice and lilting accent were a part of his day now. And, he suspected, memories of how
her lithe young body had curved against his would fill his nights for a long, long time.

Understanding her worry at being left in a strange outpost, Daniel turned to Duval. “Do you know of a good family who would take Madame Chartier in for a few weeks? I’ll reimburse them for her keep when I draw my pay.”

“She can stay here, in my storeroom. It has a bed. My woman is from the Caddo Tribe,” he added. “She’ll be glad to have the company of another female.”

“Good. It’s settled then.”

“Come with me,” Duval said with a smile for Louise. “I’ll show you where to put your things.”

She gathered the straps of the haversack that contained all she now owned. With a nod that included the lieutenant and the others in the troop, she stopped before Daniel. Her extraordinary eyes lifted to his.

“I thank you for your care. You have kept your promise to Henri.”

“Not quite. I’ll send you funds as soon as I collect my pay.”

“Perhaps our paths will cross again someday.”

“Perhaps they will.”

His gut tightened. Like a sharpened blade, need knifed into him. He ached to lift his hand. To draw a knuckle down the smooth curve of her cheek. To keep her with him for the rest of their journey, wherever it took them.

Deliberately, he stepped back. He had a wife waiting for him in St. Louis. A wife who clung to the
shadows more than she clung to him. But the vow he’d made to her was more compelling than the one he’d made to Chartier, more urgent than the hunger that now fired his blood.

Louise left him with a smile and a soft wish. “May you walk with the sun and ride with the wind.”

Daniel spread his blanket on the hard-packed dirt floor of the trading post later that night and drifted into sleep thinking of her smile.

He jerked awake some hours later to the shrill of her screams.

P
rimed pistol in hand, Daniel burst through the door to Duval’s storeroom a half step ahead of the trader himself. A single glance at the two figures facing each other across a sack of dried beans told the story.

Huddleston was drunk. So drunk he spewed brandy fumes into the musty air with each enraged bellow.

“Bitch!” Hand clamped to his bloody face, he roared with pain and fury. “You damned near cut off my nose!”

Louise waved her red-stained skinning knife, her screeches every bit as loud and infuriated as the thick-necked private’s.

“Snake! Son of a snake! Touch me again and I will cut off more than your nose!”

Daniel was sorely tempted to stand back and let her make good on her threat. He’d had a bellyful of Solomon Huddleston. With Pierre Duval, a sickly faced lieutenant and the rest of his men shoving at his back, however, he had no choice but to stride
across the storeroom, grab the bull-like private by the nape of his neck and fling him toward the door.

“Get him out of here,” he told the gaping men. “I’ll deal with him in the morning.”

“It’s her,” Huddleston bellowed as Wilson and Boley hauled him out. “Her and her damned eyes. She’s put a curse on me, just like in the legend. On all of us!”

Louise started after him. Just in time, Daniel threw out an arm and hooked her around the waist. She fought his hold but couldn’t break it. Incensed, she screeched at the man being dragged away, his heels digging ruts in the dirt floor.

“I did not curse you before, but now I will pray to the spirits to shrivel your sack! I will sing songs to the sun and the wind and the fire to dry your seed so you cannot spawn any more like you! I will—”

“That’s enough.”

“Pig! Son of a pig. I will—”

“Enough, I said!”

Daniel had recalled shouting the same command into this hissing, spitting she-cat’s ear the first time they’d met. Then, as now, he was forced to use brute strength to subdue her. Tightening his arm, he cut her off in mid-screech. She responded with a kick that damned near shattered his shinbone.

“If you don’t shut your mouth and still your thrashing,” he ground out through a jaw clenched so tight he thought it might crack, “I swear to God I’ll do what your husband was no doubt forced to do many a time!”

“Hah!” Her eyes flashing, she twisted in his hold until they were face-to-face. “You want to do what Henri did to me? Here? With all watching? You would not do it when we lay belly to belly, but if that’s your wish—”

The taunt leaped between them like live sparks from a blazing fire, torching the air. She knew, damn her! She knew how viciously he wanted her. Knew how he ached to slam the door on the gaping crowd, throw her down on her blanket and drag up her tunic.

Disgusted with himself, with her, with the wide-eyed spectators, he loosed his hold and thrust her away. “I’ll deal with you in the morning, too.”

The small crowd fell back as he stalked toward them. With a crash that rocked the storeroom’s rickety wooden door on its leather hinges, Daniel shut the girl from their view and, he vowed savagely, from his own lascivious, licentious thoughts.

He woke the next morning feeling as friendly as a bear with a broken tooth. It didn’t help his temper any to find the lieutenant lying once again in a pool of feverish sweat and Private Huddleston gone.

“Not just him,” Private Wilson reported glumly. “John Boley and Sam Bradley lit out during the night, too. They took the dugout with what was left of our supplies and one of the canoes.”

“Damned fools! They’ll take a hundred lashes each for desertion.”

“If they’re lucky.”

The Rules and Articles of War laid out by the
Continental Congress in 1776 still governed crimes committed by men in uniform. Although the maximum punishment for just about every misdeed, from falling asleep on sentry duty to stealing whiskey to desertion, was death by firing squad or hanging, court martials could impose lesser penalties. Often they ordered branding, running the gauntlet, head shavings, wearing a uniform coat inside for extended periods or being drummed out of the corps. The standard punishment, however, was flogging with a wire-rope whip.

Hardier souls boasted of their ability to withstand the beatings. One of the men in Daniel’s regiment was a member of the “Damnation Club,” an informal group consisting of those who carried five hundred or more scars on their backs. Huddleston and his two cohorts would undoubtedly face the whip when they returned to the ranks.

“Unless the lieutenant orders them shot,” Wilson muttered.

Young Wilkinson wouldn’t issue any such order. Not if Daniel had any say in the matter. Huddleston and the others might have taken French leave, but they’d gone through more hardships in the past three months than any soldiers should be asked to endure.

And, he reminded himself, they’d done what no other American soldiers had. They’d followed the Arkansaw to within twenty miles of its mouth. In the process, they’d help chart a river and a region that would figure large in the westward expansion of a young, hungry nation.

But when he caught up with them, he swore silently, he’d tear a yard-long strip off each of their hides.

“One Eye and Wind That Cries leave us here in Arkansaw Port,” he reminded Wilson. “Looks like it will just be you and me ferrying the lieutenant to New Orleans.”

“And me.”

He spun around, swallowing a growl when he saw Louise standing at the open door to the storeroom. He wasn’t ready to deal with her. Nor was he in any way prepared for the feeling that assaulted him when she calmly announced that she had decided not to remain at Arkansaw Post.

“Henri, he speaks often of a friend in New Orleans. A trader who buys his furs. Me, I have never met this man, but I think perhaps he will let me stay in his lodge out of friendship for my husband.”

“Why the devil didn’t you tell me about him before now?”

“I did not know you go to New Orleans,” she said with a shrug. “But now that you go, I have decided I will go, too.”

Daniel wasn’t happy about the prospect of spending more weeks in her company. Hadn’t he just passed a whole damned night trying to force her out of his head?

“You’ve decided,” he echoed, sour-tempered. “Just like that?”

“
Oui.
Just like that.”

“And I’m supposed to jump to your command, princess?”

Her brow furrowed. “What is this ‘princess’?”

“Didn’t McFarlane say your husband could trace his blood back to a king? That makes you a princess. The wife of a great chief,” he explained sardonically.

“Of this I know nothing. I know only that I will go with you and help you care for your lieutenant.” Her gaze dropped to the young officer lying in a twist of sweat-drenched blankets. “He is very sick. You will have need of my moonflower leaves, I think.”

Daniel thought so, too, which was the reason he agreed to take her with him to New Orleans.

The only reason.

Within hours of departing Arkansaw Post, young Wilkinson’s face grew so flushed and his fever rose so high that Daniel wasn’t sure he’d survive the twenty miles to the Mississippi, much less the journey downriver to New Orleans.

The lieutenant lay in the center of the one canoe left to the expedition, too weak to even twitch. Louise took his head in her lap and wiped his face with a strip torn from what remained of his uniform.

“Rest easy,” she murmured. “I will soak the moonflowers and put them on your brow.”

Her compress of jimsonweed leaves seemed to give him some relief. He opened his eyes and stared up at her blankly for some moments, then essayed a weak smile.

“I…I thank you for your care of me.”

She smiled down at him. “It is I who must thank you for allowing me to journey with your expedition.”

Blinking the sweat out of his eyes, he looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time.

“You really…are quite…beautiful.”

Her smile softened. She murmured some idle nonsense until he sank back into sleep with his head in her lap. Louise brushed a strand of lank brown hair from his brow and wondered how this man and Daniel could be so much alike and yet so very different.

They both had hair the color of tobacco, but Daniel’s was rich and dark while the lieutenant’s was like the leaf when it first turns from green to dun. They both were warriors, soldiers in the army of their country. The officer carried the rank, but the sergeant carried the authority. They both had been kind to her, in their own way.

The lieutenant could have ordered her left behind at the Quapaw camp or at Arkansaw Post. Daniel could have refused Big Track’s demand for payment of a bride price. Yet here she was, on her way to a city she had heard of many times but had never thought to see. Crooning softly, she stroked the lieutenant’s cheek to keep him calm.

Neither the crooning nor the compress worked for long. The officer’s fever peaked, and by the time Daniel spotted a settler’s cabin built close to the bank and begged a place under the sturdy shingle roof for the night, Wilkinson had sweated out so much they all thought him gone for sure.

Daniel, Louise, Private Wilson and the settler’s wife took turns spooning weak tea and venison broth into him that night and all the next day. The fever finally broke the morning of the second day, leaving the officer so weak and drained he couldn’t lift his head.

“You’d best leave him here,” the apple-cheeked goodwife suggested. “He’ll need careful nursing and plenty of stout food to regain his strength.”

The lieutenant agreed with her. “You go on,” he urged Daniel. “Take my journal and the report I wrote out at Arkansaw Post. My father is waiting for it.”

Daniel was caught squarely between two poles. He’d been charged to keep an eye to the general’s son. But he was aware that their assessment of the navigability of the Arkansaw could well factor into the movement of army troops in the event of a war with Spain—or a rebellion fomented by Aaron Burr, former vice president of the United States.

“You have your orders,” Wilkinson said in a thin, reedy whisper. “You’ll leave immediately. Take Madame Chartier with you, but leave Private Wilson to accompany me when I’m able to travel.”

Take Louise. On a journey of some weeks. Alone. Feeling as though he was about to forfeit his soul, Daniel slowly nodded.

“Yes, sir.”

February 25, 1807
New Orleans
Capital of Orleans Territory

D
aniel and Louise arrived in New Orleans by flatboat on a rainy February afternoon. She greeted the city with wide-eyed wonder, he with profound relief.

The weeks since they’d left Lieutenant Wilkinson and Private Wilson had been the worst kind of hell. He’d held to his marriage vows. That much of his honor at least he’d salvaged. But the days and nights spent alone with the young widow had brought him to a state of near desperation.

She was so much like the woman his wife had once been. Brimming with energy. Curious about everyone and everything they encountered on the trip down the Mississippi. And brave. So very brave. She looked out on the world with clear, fearless blue eyes.

Her courage alone would have won Daniel’s heart. Glimpses of her lithe young body, revealed more and more as they left the cold behind and packed up their buffalo robes, kept him surly by day and aching at night.

He wanted nothing more than to settle the woman with this friend of her husband’s, make his report to General Wilkinson and head back to St. Louis before he gave in to the craving that clawed deeper at his gut with every hour he spent in Louise’s company. Slinging his haversack over one shoulder, he helped her onto the stone quay.

She stood transfixed, a small figure in a buckskin tunic and leggings, almost lost amid the barrels and bales stacked high on the quay. The heavy mist dewed on her hair and gave it a glossy shine. Her eyes wide, she looked around in wonder.

“It is so big, this village.”

“Yes,” he replied, hefting his musket. “It is that.”

“With such great lodges!”

His gaze followed hers and swept the plaza facing the busy riverfront. The Cathedral of St. Louis dominated the square. The first time Daniel had seen the structure, he’d gawked very much as Louise now did. Constructed by the French when this city first served as their capital in the New World, it had been destroyed once by hurricane and once by fire. Rebuilt in the Spanish style, it now thrust twin, rounded turrets up to the pewter sky.

“The governmental offices are there,” he said,
nodding to the building to the left of the church, “in the old Spanish
cabildo
.”

In that rambling, two-story building the treaty transferring Louisiana Territory to the United States had been signed. There, Daniel knew, W.C.C. Claiborne conducted his civil duties as governor of Orleans Territory. And there, he’d learned, Major General Wilkinson now exercised military authority over the city he’d put under martial law.

As Daniel escorted Louise down the length of the stone quay, he saw ready evidence of that war-ready state. Barricades had been thrown up across the major streets. Long lines of people and carriages waited impatiently for armed guards to pass them through. Two-man squads patrolled the square, the riverfront and the narrow alleys intersecting the city. Notices posted on tree trunks and fence posts warned citizens to adhere to a dusk-to-dawn curfew or risk being taken into custody or shot.

Yet despite these measures, Daniel didn’t get a sense of a city on the brink of invasion by a hostile army. Vendors thronged the streets, hawking everything from painted fans to skewers of spiced shrimp. Merchants in frock coats tipped their hats to one another. Women in high-waisted gowns, plumed bonnets and mutton-sleeved coats shopped the market stalls crowding the square.

The bonnets especially caught Louise’s attention.

“But look! Big Track himself does not wear so many feathers in his war bonnet. And that woman’s robe. It is of such colors!”

The scarlet and yellow demi-dress she referred to cloaked a particularly well-endowed whore. She leaned over a second-story wrought-iron railing, advertising her abundant wares to the men in the plaza. Her face was caked with white lead paint and her hennaed hair hung in lank curls over one plump shoulder. Louise stared at her, fascinated, before announcing that she, too, must have such a robe.

“If I’m to live for a while among my father’s people, I will dress as they do.”

Daniel’s mouth opened, then shut again with a snap. She wouldn’t be his responsibility much longer. She could dress herself up in scarlet and yellow silk if she wished. He only hoped this friend of Chartier’s possessed a wife with a strong enough sense of fashion to guide the trapper’s widow in her choice of gowns.

As Elizabeth might have guided her. Clenching his jaw, Daniel tried to summon the image of his wife when he’d first courted her. Her merry smile was only a dim, distant memory, but he remembered the sunlight gilding her hair to fine-spun gold and the cherry-pink bows on the muslin dress she’d worn the first time he took her walking.

“Daniel?”

Blinking away the memory of a cobbled street shaded by chestnut trees and the tinsmith’s daughter who’d stolen his heart, he frowned down at a face framed by hair the color of darkest night.

“Does something disturb you?”

“No.”

“Then why do you hold me so?”

With a start, he realized his fingers had dug into her upper arm. Muttering an apology, he loosened his grip.

“The customs office is in the
cabildo,
” he said, shepherding her toward an entrance at one end of the building’s elaborate facade. “We’ll inquire there about this friend of Henri’s, then I must make my report to the general. He should be—”

He stopped, his eyes narrowing on the guard posted at the entrance. The soldier wore a coat of army blue with red facings over his white trousers and smalls. Daniel didn’t need to read the insignia on the pewter plate attached to his black leather shako to identify him as Second United States Regiment of Infantry.

“Iverson?”

The guard snapped his head around. He stared at the figure in travel-stained buckskins for a moment or two before recognizing the face behind the beard.

“Rifle Sergeant Morgan! By damn, we about gave up on you and the others! When did you reach New Orleans?”

“Just this morning. Is the whole regiment here?”

“Most of it. The old man left Major Thomas and one company in St. Louis. The rest of us shipped down here when that bastard Burr escaped custody in Natchez. Now that he’s been recaptured, though, we’re thinking the martial law will be lifted soon and the regiment will move out again.”

“Is the general here at the
cabildo?
”

“No. Didn’t you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“His wife died two days ago. He’s keeping to his quarters.”

“Where are his quarters located? I have news of his son he’ll want to hear.”

“Don’t know where the old man’s bedding down. Some big plantation on the river, I think.” Iverson jerked his thumb toward the entrance to the
cabildo.
“Colonel Matthews is inside. He’ll tell you.”

Pushing his way through the crowd thronging the outer offices of military department headquarters, Daniel collared a clerk and requested an audience with Colonel Matthews, General Wilkinson’s harried chief of staff. The colonel sent word that he would see Sergeant Morgan immediately. Leaving Louise with the clerk, Daniel straightened his stained buckskins as best he could and reported to the senior staff officer.

Matthews welcomed him distractedly. He was a tall, rail-thin officer who wore a perpetually pinched look. Daniel supposed his own face would take on the same sour lines if he served as chief of staff to a wily old bastard like Wilkinson. Keeping up with the general would tax any man’s wits.

Matthews accepted the oilskin-covered package containing Lieutenant Wilkinson’s journal and written report. “I’ll see these are delivered to the general right away. I’ve no doubt he’ll want to speak with you personally. Report to your company, draw what
pay and uniform items you need and hold yourself ready.”

“Yes, sir. And when that’s done, I’d like a few weeks leave to go back to St. Louis and see to my wife.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible. We’re in a state of martial law here. We need every soldier under arms, particularly a sergeant with your rank and experience.”

“I understand, sir, but I’m hearing martial law might soon be lifted now that Colonel Burr’s back in custody.”

“He may be in custody, but this city—this whole territory—is in a precarious state.”

Setting aside the journals, the colonel rose and clasped his hands behind his back. “I think you should know we received word only yesterday that the Spanish have taken Lieutenant Pike and the rest of his detachment into custody. They’re holding them prisoner in Santa Fe.”

“The devil you say!”

“The Spanish seem to think your expedition was part and parcel of the Burr conspiracy. That Lieutenant Pike and his men were sent west to incite those citizens living in New Mexico territories to rebel against their Spanish rulers and become citizens of a new, grandiose empire.”

“Why would they think that? General Wilkinson himself chartered our expedition. From what we heard, he was the one who uncovered the Burr conspiracy and denounced it to the president.”

“Yes, well…”

The colonel glanced away. When he brought his gaze back to Daniel, his face wore a grim cast. “I suppose you’ll hear this soon enough. It’s only barracks talk, mind you. Gossip rising from the scurrilous rumors put about by these damned Creoles who resent the restrictions we’ve imposed on them. But, well, there are those who claim General Wilkinson was part of the conspiracy. That he plotted the scheme with Burr, then turned on him when word about it began to leak.”

Robert McFarlane had hinted at the same possibility. Hearing the rumor repeated by the general’s chief of staff made the skin on the back of Daniel’s neck itch.

Matthews hesitated, looking as though he wanted to say more, and Daniel’s gut tightened. He had a guess what was coming.

“You spent six months and more with the general’s son,” the colonel said slowly.

“Yes, sir.”

He stopped short of asking whether the son had by word or deed, in any way implicated his father. Instead, he issued an oblique warning.

“If Colonel Burr goes to trial, as it appears he will, the barristers will be looking for anyone who might have information about his scheme to carve a private empire out of Louisiana Territory.”

Daniel looked him square in the eyes. “I have no such information.”

“Good.”

“But—”

“But what, Sergeant?”

It was Daniel’s turn to hesitate. His sense of duty warred with a bone-deep reluctance to plunge Louise in the dark, swirling waters of a traitor’s schemes. Every instinct warned him to keep his mouth shut, to let the lawyers delve into the matter of Aaron Burr’s coconspirators. Fourteen years of service to his country forced him to speak.

“There’s a woman,” he said slowly. “The wife of a French trapper. We came upon her near the end of the expedition. She mentioned a Spanish agent. Someone with an interest in stirring up the Osage, as well as the French and Spanish in the area. She said the trappers spoke of this man coming up the river with boats and men.”

“Did she give a name?” Matthews asked sharply.

“No, sir.”

“Where did you leave this woman?”

“Her husband died and, well…” He let out a breath. “I brought her here.”

“To New Orleans?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The general will want to know about her.”

Daniel could only nod. With a feeling that he’d stepped into waters far too dark and deep for a mere rifle sergeant, he took his leave.

The adjutant seated in the outer office supplied him with authorization to draw funds from the paymaster, a requisition for a new uniform from the quartermaster and the location of his company, quar
tered only a few blocks from the
cabildo.
Daniel’s thoughts whirled so fast that he walked right past the small figure seated on a bench beside the door. Jumping up, she hurried after him.

“Daniel! What has happened? Why do you wear the face of a dog with a thorn in his paw?”

He couldn’t begin to explain the momentous events that seemed to be occurring by the day, if not the hour. He hadn’t yet fully grasped them himself.

“I’ve given the lieutenant’s report to the colonel,” he told her. “I’ve told him about you. He thinks General Wilkinson may wish to speak with you.”

“Bien,”
she said, not particularly concerned by the prospect. “But before I meet with him, I must buy a scarlet and yellow robe such as the woman with the so-white face wears.”

That alone was enough to wrench Daniel’s thoughts from his interview with Colonel Matthews. He fixed them squarely on the need to get Louise settled, preferably with someone who possessed a sense of fashion.

“Let’s find this friend of Henri’s,” he said, taking her elbow to steer her through the crowd. “Then you can think about a dress.”

A tax collector at the customs office searched the ledgers for information about one Bernard Thibodeaux, merchant. Twenty minutes and a dozen twisting turns later, Daniel located Thibodeaux’s establishment.

The narrow, three-story building was situated on
Doumaine Street, close to the river. The ground floor served as a shop and warehouse. The upper balconies provided a sweeping view of the flatboats plowing through the wide, gray waters. Wrought iron painted a bright turquoise lavishly adorned the building’s facade.

When Daniel followed Louise through the door into the ground-floor shop, the scents of a lively and profitable trade enveloped him. His nose twitched with the dark flavor of coffee beans, the rich aroma of exotic spices and the stink of tightly baled pelts. Louise found the rack of muslins and silks more to her interest. With an exclamation of delight, she fingered a bolt of shimmering ruby silk.

A clerk in brown gaiters and a loose-cuffed linen shirt stepped forward. “Be careful, if you please! That silk is very costly.”

His tone was no more to Louise’s liking than to Daniel’s. He started to put the bespectacled little toad in his place, but she took matters into her own hands.

Her chin came up. Her brows lifted. In a haughty manner that would have done justice to a duchess, she flicked a hand over the bolt of silk.