Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (24 page)

She drew back to look up at him with lingering anger on her face. “Must you be so reasonable?”

“Forgive me. It’s only my nature.”

She sighed, laying her cheek against his chin and closing her eyes. He rocked her gently. Presently she started to speak, stopped, then went on anyway. “What of Fort Saint Jean Baptiste, what of when we get there?”

“We will talk about it soon, in a day or two, when Pierre goes.”

She gave a slow nod. The answer told her little, but still she was satisfied. She did not want to think of leaving this place, but neither was she anxious at this moment to delve too deeply into her own desires, her own wishes. They were far too confused.

9

T
HE BLOWS ON the door were thunderous in the morning quiet. They jerked Elise awake and she sat straight up in the bed. Reynaud, alert, grim, already had his feet on the floor when the panel burst open and the men poured into the room.

Elise’s nightgown had been discarded the night before. She snatched the sheet and comforter up to cover herself, embarrassed anger rising in her eyes as she stared at Pascal, St. Amant, and Henri.

“What the devil do you mean by this?” The rage in Reynaud’s voice was dangerously quiet.

“You bastard, you half-breed bastard!” Pascal shouted, shaking a fist. “I could kill you with my bare hands!”

“And I!” St. Amant’s face was stern.

Elise stared from one to the other, her gaze coming to rest on Henri’s flushed features and clenched hands, seeing their outrage with a sinking feeling inside. Her first thought was to wonder how they could know. Then it came to her that they could not, that they considered her fall from virtue assured long before. It was something more serious than the long hours of the night she had spent locked in passion with Reynaud that had incensed them.

It had turned colder. Their breaths fogged in the chill air of the room. Reynaud moved to put on his breeches, then stepped to the fireplace where he picked up a tinder box and prepared to kindle the wood left stacked ready to hand. He spoke over his shoulder.

“If one of you could tell me to what I owe the honor of this dawn visit, it might help me to understand your — displeasure?”

“We’ve found you out.”

‘‘Indeed?”

“We know, because we heard it from your friend, that this house sits less than ten leagues from Fort Saint Jean Baptiste. Ten leagues! That’s little more than a good day’s journey for us all, less without the women.”

There was a movement at the door. Pierre, holding a cup of chocolate as if he had been at the breakfast table, stepped into view. I’m sorry, Reynaud,
mon ami
. I didn’t know it was a secret.”

“You kept us cooped up here like geese in a pen,” Pascal went on. “We could have been at the fort long ago, even in New Orleans by now. Why did you do it? Damn you, why?”

The words were echoed by St. Amant and even by Henri. The younger boy looked at Elise, then quickly away again while the color in his face spread to the tops of his ears.

“Why do you think?”

“I think the reason is right there in bed with you.”

“We believe,” St. Amant said, “that it was Madame Laffont you were keeping with you; that the rest of us were included willy-nilly.”

Elise sat gazing at Reynaud’s broad back. Was it true? Had he deliberately misled them? If so, it was not for the sake of enjoying her favors a while longer, as the others seemed to think, but for the express purpose of seducing her to gain those favors at all. She waited for him to deny the accusation. She waited in vain.

The fire caught, crackling as it flared up the chimney, filling the room with the smell of the pine kindling and fresh burning oak. Reynaud turned and set his hands on his hips. “I gave you the option of going on.”

St. Amant stepped forward. “But you left us completely in the dark about the distance we must travel because you knew Elise, Madame Laffont, would have gone with us if we had set out. No, you wanted us all here and saw to it that we came. You kept us kicking our heels like fools, dependent on your hospitality while you dallied longer with the woman you had forced to share your bed. By your ruse you had condemned us before our friends as heartless wretches careless of the tragedy at Fort Rosalie and the feelings of those who must want news from there, as sybarites lounging here while everyone thinks we surely perished with our neighbors.”

“No, no, for the last at least I refuse responsibility. I told Commandant St. Denis that all of you were very much alive and were recuperating here with me from your ordeal.”

“You told—” Pascal began, then drew a deep breath to calm himself before rapping out, “When?”

“The afternoon of our arrival here I rode to the fort on a fast horse and returned by midafternoon of the next day.” His tone grave, Reynaud went on to explain. “It was necessary, you see, to provide Elise with something to wear and I know well a lady there who is near her size, one who enjoys a considerable wardrobe.”

As the magnitude of the perfidy of the half-breed struck them, they were stunned into silence. It lasted only a moment before Pascal began to curse and St. Amant’s eyes narrowed to a hard glitter.

Pierre looked from Reynaud to Elise, his gaze lingering with interest on her pale face and white shoulders, on the flowing mane of her honey-brown hair, which spilled over the covers around her. The trader turned to Reynaud, lifting a brow, smiling a little as he wagged his head back and forth in comic disbelief at the predicament of his friend. Reynaud, scowling, merely shrugged.

“Is it true?” Elise demanded, finding her voice before the others. “We could have reached the fort in the Natchitoches in a matter of hours if you had loaned us horses and set us on our way?”

There was pain in his eyes as Reynaud looked at her; still, he made no attempt to evade her question. “It’s true.”

Henri had stood, rigid, staring from Elise to Reynaud with as much adolescent jealousy and disillusionment as anger over what had been done. Now he burst into speech. “
Mon D-Dieu
, if no one else will p-punish this b-blackguard, then I w-will!”

St. Amant put his forearm out to block the boy’s way. “Softly, softly. Let us hear this out.”

Elise looked only at Reynaud as if they had not spoken. “But you must have known we would discover it?”

“Only when it no longer mattered, at least to you.”

“Such as after last evening?”

He made a swift, repudiating gesture. “No. In a few days, another week.”

When he had tired of her, Elise thought as she stared at him with features turned to stone. He had expected the pleasure of having her to last no longer than that. When it had gone, it would no longer matter what she thought, what any of them thought.

Pascal made a growling sound in his throat. “I say we take it out of his hide.”

“No violence before I’ve finished breakfast, I beg you,” Pierre said, waving his cup. “I cannot allow it.”

It was a reminder that Reynaud was not without someone to come to his aid, should they decide to trounce him together.

“There is no point,” St. Amant agreed. “All that we require is that he take us at once, by the fastest possible means, to our destination.”

“You may take yourselves, with my compliments,” Reynaud answered, inclining his head.

“You refuse—”

“As you pointed out, it’s only ten leagues. It happens there is a cart track right up to the gate of the fort.”

“Let me guess,” Pascal said with heavy, swaggering sarcasm. “You lied about the road out there, too.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t think to follow it while out hunting.”

“We did, for a way. You told us it only went to the edge of your land. Does that mean your land extends to the fort?”

Reynaud smiled. “Not quite.”

“We will leave within the hour,” St. Amant said and, with scant civility, bowed and left the room.

Henri began to follow the older man, then stopped and swung back. “M-madame Laffont, y-you will go with us?”

“Yes, I will go.”

Pierre stood aside as the others tramped out, then retreated also, his blond lashes tactfully veiling his expression as he closed the door. Elise and Reynaud were left alone in a quiet broken only by the crackle and hiss of the fire. Elise slid from the bed and went to the wardrobe, where she took out her old habit. Flinging it onto the bed, she began to search for her own petticoat and shift.

Reynaud watched her. Torn by the need to explain and an equal need to have her understand his motives without explanation, he allowed himself to be distracted by the pearly sheen of the morning light on the flesh of her hip and thigh, the long slender line of her back as it joined her narrow waist. He could still feel her softness imprinted on his flesh, taste her essence in his mouth. What he would not give to be able to reach out and hold her, to force her to stay. Reason was not nearly so certain a way to keep her with him.

“Elise, listen to me.”

She glanced at him, seeing in that brief moment the broad width of his chest with its dark and mysterious lines of tattooing highlighted with burnished copper, the sculptured columns of his legs in his doeskin breeches outlined by the orange yellow glow of the firelight behind him. She looked away again, her face shuttered as she pulled down the shift she had drawn over her head and stepped into her petticoat.

The shrill rasp of a scream cut through the cold air. Elise started before she realized that it was Madame Doucet. Had the older woman seen yet another Indian? That was the only thing that seemed to cause her such horror.

Then came a pounding on the door. It was Pierre’s voice that called. “Reynaud, you had better come out here!”

They gathered on the loggia, Elise still tugging at the habit she had donned so hastily. Behind them in the salon could be heard the sobs of Madame Doucet and the soft murmurs of Madeleine. No one took any notice of them. This time the alarm was real. The house was encircled by Natchez warriors: tall, massive men, their faces painted with white and yellow ochre and with leather-and-fur capes swinging from their shoulders. They carried muskets and bows and arrows, but held them at their sides, all in the same stiff position.

Coming straight toward the steps, marching in single file, were ten more warriors, each wearing the crown of swan feathers that marked the men of the Sun class. The man in the lead carried a calumet, holding the great pipe of peace, some four and a half feet long, out at arm’s length. A chill morning breeze caught the white eagle feathers with black tips, which hung in a spread fan between the long stem and the bowl, and the brilliance of the rising sun shone on the green iridescence of the duck-neck plumage with which the stem was decorated.

Elise, standing beside Reynaud, heard him give rapid and detailed instructions in an undertone to Pierre concerning the gifts that must be presented on this occasion and the feast of welcome that must be held. The next moment, the procession stopped and the calumet was solemnly presented. With deliberation, Reynaud detached himself from the others and moved down the flight of steps to accept the pipe. There was an exchange of compliments in the swift-moving Natchez tongue.

The Indians, though they were the finest warriors of the Natchez, were not a war party but members of a ceremonial procession, a delegation. They were here, it appeared, to make a request of Reynaud. It also appeared that his answer would have to please them or the delegation might well become a war party.

“It occurs to me,” St. Amant said softly, his tone dryly reflective, “that it must have been in truth a Tensas warrior following us across the woodlands, no figment of Madame Doucet’s overwrought imagination.”

Pascal cursed, but quietly enough not to be heard by their Indian guests. It was an instant longer before Elise remembered. The Indian Madame Doucet had seen that first time, soon after they had crossed the Mississippi, had been identified as being of the Tensas tribe, allies of the Natchez. It would seem that there had never been a time in their travels when they had not been under surveillance. What did it mean? Had Reynaud betrayed them? Had he let them think he was helping them escape, knowing all the time that they were being followed? Or had they been kept in view not because of their importance as possible hostages, but because of the prominence of the half-breed? There was no way of knowing.