Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 (6 page)

When she had given her assent, Elise was left alone, alone with her fears and her memories. She did not want to think about Vincent Laffont, not now, not ever. It was easier to think of France and of her father and their house on the Quai Malaquais.

Her mother had died when she was thirteen, a difficult age to lose one’s maternal influence. For a year she and her father had consoled each other, then her father had begun to keep company with a certain Madame Rouquette. The Widow Rouquette had had a child, a boy of eight years with beady eyes, a large moist mouth, and a nature that took pleasure in petty spite. He was the image of his mother. Within weeks, her father and Madame Rouquette had married, and the widow and her son had moved into the house that Elise had still thought of as belonging to her own mother.

The months that followed were miserable. Elise’s father was completely under the thumb of his new wife, as much from an addiction to her overripe sensuality as from any overt domination. Her stepmother had disliked Elise on sight, partially because she was a constant reminder of her predecessor, but primarily because Elise, according to her father’s will, would inherit two-thirds of the estate on his death, should there be no issue of the new marriage. There had begun a slow campaign to make it seem that it was Elise who resented the new order and in time that was certainly true.

The situation became harder and harder to bear, especially since her father, after a time, ceased to take her part. A month before her fifteenth birthday there had been a terrible quarrel over a lace shawl that had belonged to Elise’s mother. Her stepmother had taken up a broom handle to beat Elise and she had wrenched it from the older woman, striking back. The woman had run screaming from the house with blood pouring from a cut on her cheek. She had summoned the
gendarmes
and demanded that Elise be taken away to a house of correction.

The days and weeks had passed. Elise had finally given up hope of being removed from the terrible correction house by her father. All she could think was that her stepmother must have told him she had run away. She hadn’t wanted to consider that he would allow her to be kept where she was, without protest, when his word alone would have been enough to secure her freedom. She had refused to think that it might be so.

She had begun to listen to the women who were crowded into the correction house. Their tales were often, or so she suspected, a strange blending of fact and fancy, and yet there was enough horror in them to famish years of nightmares. A common thread running through them seemed to be the perfidy of men: men who took what they wanted with force or threats, without thought for the damage they caused; men with smooth tongues and consummate guilt who lied and cheated, then left the women behind. Much was made of their cruelty also, of their senseless rages and tortures, both physical and mental. As the stories she heard blended with the pain of her father’s betrayal, Elise came to despise the male sex.

Then one day there had been a great bustle. Men had appeared with a proclamation that declared that they had the right to choose from among the correction girls, brides for the colonists of Louisiana. Those chosen would be given a small bundle of clothing, taken to the coast, and put on a ship for that distant colony. Once they had been signed up, there was nothing — no representation from parents or guardians, no bribe or legal maneuver — that could save them from the long journey to the new world. They had a quota to fill and none were exempt, though they preferred young females without vices or diseases. They had chosen a score or more of the women. Elise had been among them.

The journey to the coast had been a trial of endurance. It had taken place in the dead of winter in an open cart. The women had been inadequately clothed, most wore thin summer stuffs, without capes or cloaks. They had been chained together at the waist, herded in and out of ordinaries and inns like cattle with little privacy from the soldiers guarding them while they attended to their physical needs. A fever had struck while they waited at Le Havre for a ship and several of their number had died. Other women had been brought to join the ship: women snatched off the streets and from the farmyards of small villages; women from the prisons of scattered towns, many branded with the fleur-de-lis that marked them murderesses, traitresses. Many more of them had failed to survive the storm-wracked voyage aboard the
Mutine
, and the rest were only half-alive when they finally reached port at Mobile.

They had rested for a time, regaining their strength before continuing the voyage to New Orleans. In that city, the women had been taken in by the director of the Company of the Indies, Monsieur Jacques de la Chaise. Their wants had been attended to and they had been allowed to bathe, to wash their clothing, and to rest for a few days. During this respite, many men had come to stand before the director’s house, craning to get a look at them or to approach it with some trumped-up errand. At the end of a week, the women had been put on view at a reception.

The women had been told that they would be able to choose their own life partners from the assembled men without coercion. It had not been that way for Elise. Vincent Laffont had swaggered into the room where the women were standing, looked them over like slaves at a market, and advanced at once upon Elise. He had given her no chance to refuse him, had not bothered to make a formal request for her hand, but had taken her at once to the director where he had made his choice known. Due to the unusual circumstances, the banns had been waived and the ceremony performed within the hour.

Her husband, she had discovered, was a scoundrel. A man twenty years her senior, he was a merchant of sorts, though a more accurate title might well have been smuggler. His authority came directly from the offices of the Company of the Indies in France, as did his backing, so that he was able to circumvent the regulations — the regulations dig forbade trade with any except French vessels from French ports — of Governor Etienne de Perier and the Superior Council, and even of the company itself. It was this authority that had also permitted him to take piece-dence over the other men in his choice of bride. A swaggering man much given to food, drink, and the company of traders who shared his own lack of scruples, Vincent had made a fortune for the company trading with the Spanish and had also gained one for himself.

He had given his bride no time at all to adjust to her new state. He had bedded her within minutes after the toasts to their healths had been drunk. It had been a painful and degrading experience. Vincent had not expected a virgin and so had used her like a common woman of the streets, without preparation or consideration. As she came to know him, Elise was not certain that it would have made any difference had he known it. He had enjoyed her shrinking and cries of anguish, had taken pleasure in forcing himself upon her. The act of sexual coupling had become a thing of horror for her. Long after it had ceased to be actively painful, it had been an invasion of her innermost being that left her sickened, something to be avoided at all costs. The coldness that she had adopted as a defense had only excited him, however. He had cared not at all for her passions, but had delighted in arousing her to anger and defiance just for the amusement of beating her into submission.

He had overreached himself with the company, however, shortly after their marriage. Following an investigation into his affairs, instigated by the director, de la Chaise, his authority to trade was revoked by order from France. His ship and the goods that were on it at the time were impounded and sold, and he narrowly escaped charges of smuggling. He had been allowed to purchase land in the Natchez country near Fort Rosalie, the stockade and settlement named for the wife of the minister of state under Louis XIV, the Comte de Pontchartrain, and had retreated there to nurse his wounds and to plot ways of regaining his lost position.

It was at this time that Elise had begun slowly to lose her fear of the man she had married. She had discovered that, in common with most bullies, he was a coward. So great was the rage that he had inspired with his spiteful comments and careless blows that she had ceased to care what damage he might do to her. She had refused to sleep in the same bed with him, and when he had tried to compel her, she had fought back, kicking, clawing, using whatever weapon came to hand. Once she had poured a pot of boiling sagamite, containing cornmeal, pork fat, ham, and beans, over his head. Another time she had chased him out of the house with an axe. It was after she had crushed three of his fingers with the heavy pestle she used in the pounding trough for turning dried corn kernels into meal that he had brought Little Quail into the house to serve his needs.

Elise had lived for five of the seven years she had been in the colony unmolested by a man. In that time, the abhorrence she felt for the physical act of love had grown rather than subsided. That it threatened her now filled her with as much terror as impotent age.

Reynaud Chavalier was not the same kind of man that Vincent Laffont had been; she recognized that well enough. He was no braggart, no bully. The half-breed was a man of obvious strength, of implacable will, of deep-running desires that he controlled without effort. It would not be so easy to defeat such a man. There would be no bluster in his anger, no wavering in his determination to subdue her. That he was a half-breed mattered not at all, except that it was his Indian heritage that gave him the stoic hardihood that hid his emotions and made him, therefore, doubly dangerous. To use a man’s weakness, one must first find it, and as far as she had been able to tell in her brief acquaintance with Reynaud, he had none. It was these things that frightened her, these that she must add to the illogical terror she felt when she was near him because he was tall, overbearing, and had shown a flicker of interest in her as a woman; because the blood that ran in his veins had a fierce taint; but, most of all, simply because he was a man.

3

B
Y THE TIME the early dusk of November deepened into darkness, the small group under the magnolia was thirsty, hungry, and near dagger-drawing with each other from the tight stretch of their overwrought senses. They were no longer speaking. Elise, driven close to madness by the barrage of angry demands and strident pleas for her to rescue them with her cooperation, had withdrawn to sit alone with her back to the tree trunk and her hands clasped between her knees. Madame Doucet, told in a savage undertone to cease her moaning or be strangled, was sitting, staring at nothing, while her hands pulled and patted her dress as if it was a child’s blanket. Exhausted by his terror of the morning, Henri had fallen into a jerking, twitching sleep while St. Amant sat rubbing his injured leg and Pascal strode up and down, ostensibly on watch.

It did nothing for their state, particularly that of Pascal, to have Reynaud suddenly step up to them from the tree shadows. The merchant started back with an oath. Recovering, he demanded, “Where the hell have you been?”

Reynaud ignored the question. “We will go now.”

“I asked you a question,” the merchant said, squaring up to the half-breed with his musket held in front of him.

Reynaud paused, then looked down at him. When he answered, his voice was deep and deliberate. “Listen and hear me well. I owe you nothing, not duty, not explanations. I care not whether you live or die and know no reason why I should. I will lead you away from my brothers the Natchez for the sake of the blood of my father and for the favors of the woman I have requested. As we go you will do as I say, instantly, without question, because your life may depend on it. If you fail, if you seek to put yourself over me, I will leave you behind because you will have become a danger to all. This I promise. Heed me and you will be safe. This I swear. Come with me now if it is still your will, for this is the last time I will tell you.”

“You haven’t asked if Madame Laffont agrees to your proposition.”

“She is still here.”

Elise met the gray gaze he directed toward her. Caught in its dark intensity, she could not look away. She had the feeling that Reynaud Chavalier knew how near she had come in the past hours to running away. A half-dozen times she had fought the urge to leap to her feet and flee through the woods, to try to make her way to the river’s edge in the frail hope of finding a boat to take her downstream away from the Natchez country. It had not been fear that restrained her so much as the certainty that that way led to death. She did not want to die, though the choice offered to her seemed only marginally better.

Reynaud moved toward her, ducking under the magnolia limb with a graceful twist of his body and leaning over to offer her his hand. She wanted to refuse it; any other time she would have done so instantly. Instead, she stared at him, noting that he had donned more protective clothing, wearing beaded leggings and a heavier, thigh-length cloak of soft buckskin. His crown of feathers and topknot of hair were gone, replaced by a simple queue tied with a leather thong. She felt an odd constraint, as if she were held by the force of his will, while in her head beat the cadence of the words he had spoken to the merchant and the need to know to what extent they applied to her.