She reached up to put her hand in his. The touch, the voluntary contact of her palm with that of this man, sent a shudder along her nerves that spread through her body, lodging in the pit of her stomach. The warmth and strength of his grasp brought the dew of perspiration to her upper lip. There was a tremor in her voice that did not hide the bitterness as she inquired, “And will I also be safe?”
“None will be safer, since none will be closer.”
He drew her up to stand before him, then reached to steady her as he felt the trembling that shook her. She twitched away from him, turning her back. He stood, staring at her erect head and stiff shoulders, torn between anger and chagrin that she should find him so repulsive and yet more disturbed by the fine edge of panic he had seen in her eyes.
It took the best part of two hours to reach the river. The night was dark, without a moon. They moved with slow care, cutting straight through the woods by some reckoning Reynaud alone knew and avoiding the road. The half-breed scouted ahead every few hundred yards, ranging back to them to urge them forward, directing them with care over slopes littered with limestone shale or around thickets of wild plums. Their progress was slow but without incident.
They found the boat where he had left it covered with underbrush, a heavy craft hollowed from a great log. It appeared to be half full of provisions wrapped in strapped bundles to form packs. Elise was doubtful that it would also carry the six of them, but under Reynaud’s direction they were squeezed into it. It sank low in the water, wallowing as he shoved off, then leaped aboard, but once he had settled down and dug in his paddle, setting the beat for St. Amant and Pascal, it bore them well.
The women and Henri were spaced between the men with paddles, Elise sitting just ahead of Reynaud. She leaned forward to get out of his way as he changed his paddle from one side of the boat to the other. She looked back over her shoulder, glancing at his dark form, which moved with what appeared to be effortless ease to send them skimming over the water, before fastening her gaze on the receding shore. The hills and bluffs glowed with fires in the darkness. Back there was all that she owned now, her land, the only place to which she had any ties. She did not know when she would see it again, or if she ever would. She did not know what she would do when she reached Fort Saint Jean Baptiste, how she would live, where she would stay. None of it seemed to matter. The only important thing was getting away, and the price she must pay for that escape.
There was a movement on the bank they had left, then another. “I think they have seen—” she began.
A shout of anger rang across the water, followed by a shot and the whistling passage of a musket ball. Reynaud bent harder into his paddle. The others followed suit, grunting with the effort. Another shot exploded, echoing with a muffled booming over the river, reverberating from the wooded shore opposite, so very far away. The ball skipped away over the water on their right. It was followed by another, and yet another.
They were a shifting, uncertain target in the darkness on the river. Though the water was kicked up around them and the black and acrid smoke of spent powder swirled out to meet them, they were not hit. The Indians had the dugout canoes called pirogues by the French, but those that were not beached somewhere up at St. Catherine Creek were being used to harry the two Frenchmen who had fled down the river. Standing on the bank, the Indians fired at nothing, howling in frustration and impotent rage.
As she huddled in front of Reynaud, it came to Elise that his was the most exposed position, there in the stern, that he was in the greatest danger of being hit. As a member of the Sun class and the brother of their king, surely the Natchez would not shoot at him if they knew who he was, but they could not see him in the blackness of the night. He could have called to his Indian brothers and offered up the French settlers as his captives. In such a case, he could still have claimed her favors if that had been his object. That he did not, that he bent with tireless determination to pulling away from shore, served to indicate that he would live up to his sworn word. It only remained for her to live up to hers.
But she had not sworn. Her word had been taken by force, accepted without direct agreement. Could there be any reason to consider herself bound in such a case? If there was some way to remove herself from this obligation, then she had every right to take it, and with honor. Every right.
The Mississippi was wide, more than a mile across. As the boat scraped the mud of the west bank, Pascal hung over the side with his paddle trailing in the water and his breath rasping in his chest from the long strain of fighting the current. St. Amant dropped his paddle in the bottom of the boat and sat slumped, unmoving. It was Henri who scrambled to his feet and leaped out, dragging the heavy craft onto the shore. Reynaud stood, taking Elise’s arm and urging her forward. His breathing was deep, but far from labored.
“Must … rest,” St. Amant said as Elise’s skirts brushed against him and he turned his head to see them waiting for him to move.
“There’s no time. They may decide to come after us. We must leave no sign that we did not continue down the river.”
St. Amant nodded his understanding of Reynaud’s words; still, it was a moment before he could find the strength to surge to a standing position and weave his way toward the shore. Pascal also heaved himself from the boat in time to remove himself from Reynaud and Elise’s path. The two men then stood to one side while the half-breed and Henri unloaded the supplies and stacked them in a pile. Reynaud pushed the heavy dugout back into the river’s flow, letting the current take it on downstream before he turned to face them.
In an amazingly short span of time, the packs were sorted out and assigned and an order of march established. They all stood waiting a short distance into the encroaching woods while Reynaud obliterated the signs of their landing, then he hefted the heaviest, hide-wrapped load to his back along with his bow and a quiver of arrows and a musket slung from a braided leather strap. He took his place in the lead. In silence they set out, Pascal behind Reynaud as double protection from the front should they run into any trouble, Elise next, with Madame Doucet behind her, followed by St. Amant with his crutch, and Henri bringing up the rear. They had nothing to say and much to think about, all of them. In any case, they were well aware of the need to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Natchez. If when morning came the Indians did not go chasing their boat down the Mississippi, if instead they searched the riverbank on this side, then it would be just as well if they were as far away as they could be. A party of Natchez warriors would move as swiftly as the flight of an arrow, far faster than their band, slowed by women and a wounded man. Time, then, was their greatest ally.
“Say, half-breed,” Pascal called after a time, “what’s your brother the Great Sun going to think when he finds out you took off in the middle of their little party?”
“It will not be unusual.” The answer was calm, without a trace of apprehension.
“What about when he hears that you showed up at Fort Saint Jean Baptiste with us? That ought to make you a traitor, the way I see it.”
“I owe allegiance to none.”
Elise heard the firmness of the words, but she could not help remembering that Reynaud had sought to warn Chepart and the French.
Pascal laughed. “Let’s hope the Great Sun sees it that way. The way I understand it, your people have no more liking for a turncoat than anybody else.”
“I have no people,” Reynaud said.
His words echoed in Elise’s mind long after the two men ceased to speak. They had been without consciousness or self-pity and yet they touched some fragile cord of response in her. They made Reynaud Chavalier seem less forbidding somehow. Everyone had people. The half-breed’s misfortune was that he did not know which were his, the Natchez or the French.
The hours passed. They walked for league upon league, stumbling along with eyes grown accustomed to the darkness and a slowly developing instinct for avoiding the whip of released branches or the dangle of brier vines. They stopped to rest when Madame Doucet sank, groaning, to the ground, but were up again and moving as soon as she was able. Toward dawn, they made a cold camp to slake their thirst and take a bite of food, then sank down to sleep for a few short hours. By the time the sun rose they were moving again.
The day was fine, even a little warm, for the exercise of hard walking. The autumn had been a long one. They had had one or two light frosts, but the days had continued pleasant; cool enough for a fire at night, requiring nothing more than light sleeves during the day. As the hours slipped by, they fell into a routine, learning to place one foot in front of the other without thought. Madame Doucet complained of blisters, sagging under her load until Reynaud relieved her of it and thrust it upon a disgruntled Pascal. Elise, tired of the constant fight to keep her skirts from under her feet, asked Reynaud for a thong, which she tied around her waist and then pulled the hem of her skirts up through it in the front in imitation of the washerwomen of Paris. She was tempted to catch the back hem of her habit skirt and draw it up between her legs, also tucking it in, as was sometimes done, but decided that the bulk of the heavy velvet habit and petticoat she wore under it would make for uncomfortable walking. After sleeping in it on the ground, snatching a hundred small tears in the fabric on briers, and soaking it in the many small streams they were forced to cross, dragging it in the mud hardly mattered.
The air grew warmer as the day advanced. The country they were traveling in was low and swampy with a high canopy of enormous cypress, oak, and maple trees; hickory, sweet gum, ash, bay, dogwood, and a dozen others, all hung with the swaying gray moss the French had named Capuchin’s beard. Creeks and branches wound through it in such snakelike curves that they forded the same streams again and again. As perspiration gathered under Elise’s hair, trickling down her neck and between her breasts, she came to look forward to wading in the cool water, despite the necessity of pulling her knit stockings and half boots on and off and getting the black alluvial mud between her toes. She considered doing as Pascal and St. Amant did, tramping through the water with her shoes on, but she was afraid that walking in the wet footwear afterward would make the blisters rise quickly on her tender feet. The most bothersome thing was the mosquitoes that hovered in the air under the tall trees of the forest swampland. They were black and vicious, with a keening whine that grated on the nerves like a high-pitched scream.
They had crossed a clear-running creek lined with white sand at the bottom and overhung by dark green moss and ferns that had not yet felt the blight of frost. On the opposite bank they stopped to rest. Elise sat down against a tree and began to dry her feet on the tail of her habit. She shook out a stocking and slipped it over her foot, slapping in idle irritation at a mosquito before smoothing it up over her calf, tying a garter in place, and then rolling the stocking and fastening it over the garter just below her knee. Reaching for her other stocking, she surveyed the hole beginning to show in the heel with rueful dismay. There was nothing to be done except to put it on, however.
She was smoothing it upward with her skirts bunched just above her knees when an odd self-consciousness moved over her. She glanced up to see Reynaud leaning against a tree a short distance away, his gray eyes shuttered as he watched her. His gaze followed the slender turn of her ankle, the gentle swell of her calf. She was still for a moment as she felt the rise of hot color. She did not like the sensation. Setting her teeth, she lowered her eyes and, with a great pretense of unconcern, continued with what she was doing. She was fervently glad when she could roll and knot her stocking above her knee and lower her skirts, however, and there was unnecessary violence in the slap she used to kill the next mosquito that landed on her wrist.
Reynaud pushed away from the tree. He moved to one of the packs that had been piled by the group. Loosening it, he rummaged inside, then stood with a small clay pot in his hand. He came toward her, dropping to one knee as he held out the pot.
“What is it?” Elise asked, making no move to take it.
“Bear grease. It will discourage the mosquitoes.”
Elise frowned, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t doubt it, but, no, I thank you.”
“It isn’t as bad as you think.”
“I’ve smelled rancid bear grease before and I don’t think it’s something I want to put up with all day.”
“This is fresh. I’m wearing it now.”
His voice was quiet, without inflection, and yet that very lack of expression was both a reminder that she had once accused him of being malodorous and a challenge to her to say the same again. A chill rippled over her skin, followed by a flush so intense that she felt sick with it. Her lips parted as she stared into his eyes, but she could not make a sound.
“In any case,” he said easily, “it was not a suggestion, but an order. The medicine woman of the Natchez claims that the bite of the mosquito can cause illness and she may be right.”
He dipped one finger into the grease, whitish, semiliquid with the day’s warmth, not unlike olive oil, and reached out to draw it down the soft curve of her cheek. She flinched, snapping her head back, her embarrassment turning quickly to defiant anger.
“You can do it, or I will.”
The words were no less of a threat for being softly spoken. Elise held his gaze for a moment longer, then reached to snatch the small pot from his hand. He inclined his head, then his lithe muscles flexed as he got to his feet. Moving away, he said over his shoulder, “When you are done, give it to Madame Doucet and the others.”