BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Read online

  PARRIS*AFTON*BONDS

  BLUE

  BAYOU

  Published by Paradise Publishing

  Copyright 2014 by Parris Afton, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

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  This is a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination. No part of this novel may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away.

  BONUS

  First chapter of Blue Bayou, Book II ~ Lions and the Ramparts is at the end of

  Blue Bayou, Book I ~ Fleur de Lis.

  Dedicated to the wild child of Nova Scotia

  Heather-Anne Stewart Gillis

  BOOK I

  § FLEUR DE LIS §

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  PART ONE

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  § CHAPTER ONE §

  Versailles-au-Val-de-Galie

  May 1683

  “Seven thousand pistoles, madame,” Damien du Plessis said. He pushed his wager onto the gaming table before the king’s former favorite, La Montespan. The painted face of the still beautiful courtesan remained impassive, but then she was accustomed to the loss of one hundred fifty thousand pistoles in a single evening at cards or cavagnole.

  Damien knew what to look for. When uncertain, she gave herself away by the unconscious tapping of the little finger of her left hand, that particular nail grown longer, as was the court custom, for scratching on a door at Versailles, where knocking was considered rude because there were simply too many doors in the immense palace.

  As a matter of course, the cynical young man scrutinized his opponents’ little habits—the absence or intensification of their movements under stress—because he made his expenses at Versailles, living on the losses of the royal relatives and attendant nobility at the appartements held three nights a week.

  Tonight, though, he was distracted by the young girl costumed in pale pink silk damask who stood behind La Montespan. A new face among the dames du palais, he was certain, for it was a face one did not easily overlook. Hers was not conventional beauty, though the features were certainly arresting. It was simply that her whole being radiated surplus energy.

  Damien was the most knowledgeable of young men when it came to seduction and to women in general. Twenty-six years before, he had been born to a prostitute in prison. At five, after he and his mother were released, he was taught to rob the customers with whom his mother had just lain. In the bagnios, he first encountered sexual pleasure and would endlessly reencounter it.

  Street life had taught the roughly handsome young man to laugh when others fretted and to remain at ease when most shouted their rage. Court life that past year had developed for him a catholic taste in women—from bored wives of noblemen to a scrub maid from the palace’s fifth kitchen, from a Moorish servant woman to her mistress, the wife of the Turkish ambassador.

  None of these adventures had prepared him for this young woman, who could not have been more than twenty. She watched him with laughing eyes, the deep, sparkling blue of the Zuider Zee, that challenged his agate-like brown ones.

  “Monsieur?” La Montespan said, her overripe lips compressed at his distraction. “I said, I am at the moment unable to match your wager.”

  Damien drew his attention back to the opulently beautiful blonde across from him. It was whispered that the marquise had submitted to the Black Mass, offering her naked body on the altar to Satan and drinking menstrual blood in exchange for the promise of the king’s affection; that now, with the king’s waning interest, she had become involved in an affair of poisoning. Nevertheless, she still wielded some power through the illegitimate children she had borne the king.

  “Madame,” Damien said, “I would accept a wager of equal value. Your lady-in-waiting.” He inclined his powdered dark head toward the enchanting demoiselle behind La Montespan.

  The young woman’s blue eyes widened, then fired salvos of disgust and indignation at him. Courtiers gathered about the table gasped at the young man’s audacity. One of the players, the old Comte de Polignac, tittered gaily behind a beringed hand.

  La Montespan glanced over her shoulder at the woman, then said indifferently, “She is not mine to wager, or I would.”

  Her gaze returned to her opponent and flickered over the span of his shoulders beneath the dark green velvet coat that had faded in the creases, before lifting to linger on his sensitive, wind-marked face. Here was no court fop but a former soldier with the physique of a gladiator, as evidenced by the turn of calves that needed no padding to fill his white silk hose with powerful muscles.

  Vaguely, she was aware that he had seen service with the Mousquetaires and been promoted to captain of the Guards. For the past four or five years, he had served as Louis’s grand equerry. Her calculating smile revealed teeth well-tended by silk thread. “Perhaps I could interest you in a wager of a similar nature?”

  Damien returned her smile, understanding her meaning. He wasn’t interested in bedding the woman, for no other reason than that his experience had taught him that silvery blondes didn’t age well, but he wasn’t so stupid as to offend her. “Madame, I accept your wager.”

  He took up the dice, applying himself to the cavagnole diligently. When next he looked up, the enchanting vision he had beheld so fleetingly had vanished. Fortunately for him, the Comte de Polignac won the round.

  During the following days, Damien searched for the young woman incessantly, questioning those who had been in attendance at the entertainment that night. However, in a palace as vast as Versailles, with its apartments behind apartments and its secret corridors, one could go weeks without seeing the same face among its thousands of inhabitants.

  Her face.

  That single sighting had captivated him. Her worldly inexperience attracted his peasant’s lustiness, and her lack of coquetry appealed to his courtier’s jaded senses. He had become obsessed by her image and was beginning to think he had imagined her. He didn’t know her name and couldn’t even remember the color of her hair. Was she a brunette, a redhead, or a blonde?

  Could he be slightly mad, to have become so infatuated by a single glimpse of the young woman? At night, he lay in his attic room, which was little more than a hot and stifling closet, and tossed from one side of the narrow bed to the other, thrashing in a tangle of sweat-dampened linens. He fantasized about the mysterious young woman, then cursed his foolishness when he knew he could have a selection of women yet wanted none. He succumbed to fantasizing again until fatigue drew him into a restless sleep.

  Invariably, dinner at Versailles was served at one in the afternoon: a ceremonious affair normally au petit couvert, restricted to court attendance, though if open au grand public, the bourgeois would drive out from Paris for the spectacle.

  Louis sat alone at the table, seldom talking to those standing in attendance, while he appeased his enormous appetite with his fingers. In the king’s presence, only the Dauphin and his family and the princesses, but not the princes, of blood might sit—and then only on a tabouret, a three-legged stool. Everyone else stood. Things were different at the gaming table: any who could afford the stakes was allowed to sit.

  The pecking order was inviolable, from black-velveted gentlemen of the chamber pot to the last lucky courtier who held the candle lighting the royal performance of the couché, when the king went through the nightly ritual of undressing for bed before he took himself to another, more private bed.

  A day at court was worth a month’s income; to live at court could c
over a lifetime of debts, with fortunes spent on costumes alone. Damien’s meager, full-dress wardrobe of brocades and silks and velvets, lavishly trimmed or embroidered, was meticulously cleaned and mended by himself in order to make do as long as possible at court.

  Le Grand Louis had polished court etiquette as if it were a silver mirror in which daily life, so often dull, glittered like a medieval pageant. To be close to the king, to speak to and to be spoken to by him, to take precedence over others in closeness to him was an honor and ecstasy. The king was France incarnate.

  To experience this contrived drama of court routine, noblemen and their wives mortgaged estates and hastened to the village of Versailles, which was little more than a cluster of four hundred huts, a rude inn, and a crudely constructed twelfth-century church. They lived in the village while hoping and scheming to obtain even an attic room at the palace. Their debts made them more beholden to the king for his favors, so he encouraged their extravagances.

  If Damien was bored by the protocol and ritual of Louis XIV’s entourage, if life at court did not wholly satisfy him, at least it kept him from being easily satisfied by anything else.

  It was all a charade, of course, but for a courtier suddenly to declare it foolishness would be to declare his own worthlessness. Damien was certainly no fool.

  Or possibly he was, he thought. Across the Grand Salon, he caught sight again of the elusive young beauty, possessor of those laughing dark blue eyes, which had haunted him for two weeks. Studying her now, he realized her looks depended more on dazzle and expression than on bone structure, a trait rarely recorded successfully by portraitists. Then, that very moment, her eyes laughed for the moustached man in the full dress wig standing next to her.

  Stricken by acute jealousy, a condition not hitherto experienced by Damien, he glared at her companion, an imposing man of thirty or so who wore a black robe with an eight-pointed white cross stitched on its breast, signifying that he was a knight of the Maltese Order. That alone signified little—the Maltese Order abided by few principles pertaining to the godly; wealth and the acquisition of property were its major vows.

  Damien knew the man slightly. He was Claude Fabreville, whose dry wit had gathered about him a following of bored courtiers, as well as the patronage of Monsieur, the Duc d’Orléans and brother of the king. Monsieur was a flamboyant quasi-transvestite.

  Unobtrusively, Damien deserted his position near the fauteuil, the coveted armchair, and threaded his way toward the damsel. Though the dames of the court dressed in the bright colors of the peacock, she wore soft pink again, this time a dress of silk with Mechlin lace flouncing the sleeves and the low neckline.

  Although she didn’t look at him, he knew she was aware of him. Tall, with a warrior’s build and blessed with the dark coloring of the people of Anjou, Damien had had no trouble attracting women who were tired of the court’s prancing, painted dandies. Nor did he lack confidence.

  Without even the courtesy of a bow, he said with the bluntness of a soldier, “Mademoiselle, you have been ever in my thoughts.”

  At last she turned those fabulous eyes on him, their blue darkened further by the thick fringe of lashes and the influence of a black beauty mark placed beneath the corner of her left eye. Neither a blonde nor a brunette, he noted; her piled hair beneath the fontange was the shade of wet sand along the seashore. The ends of her budlike mouth twitched with amusement but otherwise didn’t concede any discomposure at his prosaic and abrupt approach. “How so, monsieur?”

  He forsook a courtier’s flattery for the obvious. “You are unwed?”

  Dimples appeared beneath the rather indistinctive cheekbones, but before she could reply, her companion intervened. Looking down his long, narrow nose, Fabreville asked languidly, “You have intentions toward my cousin, monsieur?”

  Somewhat relieved by the relationship, Damien replied, “Only the most honorable—marriage.” An absurd reply in a court where decadence was the norm, but Damien was caught up in the throes of first love. However, the second the statement left his tongue he was appalled. It was the last thing in the world he had intended to say, ever.

  Still, at that very moment, the idea took seed. His aimless life, which moved idly just ahead of him like his own shadow, suddenly had purpose.

  “Ah, then I must disappoint you,” the young woman said, her eyes twinkling, “for I intend to be a femme savante."

  “A waste of womanhood, Mademoiselle . . . ?”

  Claude’s nostrils flared, as if detecting an unpleasant odor, and the ends of his waxed, dark moustache followed the line of his disdainful smile as he said, “Monsieur of the Stables, the Marquis de Marchesseau would consider your suit sheer folly. Come, my dear.”

  Damien’s swarthy face blanched. All that street life had taught him about survival deserted him momentarily, especially the need to remain at ease in a situation where anger robbed one of self-control. His hand edged toward the haft of the broadsword at his left side, but such an act was one of even greater folly. To engage in a duel in the king’s presence was to risk banishment from the court, or possibly much, much more.

  A mordant smile pleated the sides of his mouth as he watched Claude draw the young woman away. Verily, he would have the girl as his own.

  So he began to lay siege to the young woman. He learned her name, Hélène—and that her father was a wealthy silk merchant of Blois. Of the noblesse campagnarde, the nobility of the countryside, her father was born high enough to climb higher and wealthy enough to purchase a title: Marquis de Marchesseau.

  Comtes, marquises, and barons had originally been part of a graduated hierarchy, as in the English peerage, but all trace of differentiation had vanished by the time Louis Quatorze ascended the throne, and not one of those titles yielded precedence to another. Only ducs, descendants of the Twelve Peers of Charlemagne, held higher rank. The titles were all territorial, attached to the land and not to the individual. When one of the titled estates was sold, the buyer acquired the title with the deed.

  Since Marchesseau wished a prestigious marriage for his daughter in order to further the family name and fortune, Claude, son of the marquis’s younger brother, had volunteered to sponsor his cousin at court.

  Damien forsook the king’s billiards salon, the gaming tables, and the tennis courts to attend the Royal Opera or performances of Moliere’s comedies, where he observed his quarry from afar. Always she was attended by her cousin. Once Damien found her at an appartement given at the salon of Les Divines, two femmes savantes who wished to attract the gifted and the wits of the court.

  Surrounded by would-be suitors, the object of his affections ignored him totally. She scintillated, and he eavesdropped in awe as she recklessly tossed names like Rembrandt, Rubens, and Racine into the conversation. Uneducated, Damien felt uncomfortable in the circle of philosophes who frequented the salon. He made no effort to approach her just yet. Often that evening he seemed occupied by whatever bejeweled lady claimed his momentary attention. Still, he was rewarded with an occasional covert flicker from Hélène’s bright eyes.

  This impasse was totally unknown to him. Usually, he simply took whatever and whomever he wanted. But Hélène was an intelligent young lady of quality, and he would be a man of patience, a warrior trained to win the ultimate battle.

  One rainy Sunday, he literally bumped into her as he descended a twisting back staircase from his third-floor garret. Behind her hovered her maidservant, a young, peasant girl who was broad of shoulder and hip.

  That part of Versailles was windowless, and for a moment neither Hélène nor Damien recognized one another as they both stooped to retrieve a book she had dropped. Their hands closed over the book simultaneously, and Hélène’s fingers jerked away. He rose and stared at the book’s title for a long moment as he put the letters into words. Slowly, a grin broadened his mouth.

  “La Princesse de Cleves,” he said, not bothering to hide the triumph in his voice. “The novel all Europe is talking about. A romantic
story, is it not, mademoiselle?”

  She reclaimed the book from his large, battle-scarred hands. Sudden embarrassment suffused her face with a rosy hue. “So you can read,” she managed to say.

  “Barely,” he acknowledged with a crooked smile. He kept talking to keep her there with him. Behind her, the maidservant eyed him coyly, but he heeded her not at all. “A comrade in arms— a Jesuit who forsook the tonsure for the helmet—taught me to write my name and read a little. But it comes hard for me.” He wanted to reach out and touch her lips, fresh, soft, and unkissed. So different from the bored noblewomen who schemed to entice him into their beds. “But I am a quick learner, mademoiselle. Now, if you were willing to teach me . . .”

  How could a young girl resist such determination in a suitor? There was something about him that proclaimed him an innocent, though court gossip whispered he was more than experienced in the art of seduction. That conundrum in itself was a challenge to her.

  “If you will teach me to ride,” she conceded with just a hint of feminine guile in her smile, “then I shall teach you to read.” She gathered up her panniers, saying, “Now, if you will excuse me, monsieur.”

  As if the deities had blessed Damien’s plan, the following day dawned fair and golden. Damien had a gentle palfrey for Hélène waiting at the Baths of Apollo. As grand equerry, he had his selection of mounts.

  When the appointed hour came and went, he despaired. He stroked his restive Arabian gelding, silently berating himself as an oaf to take her careless words literally. Then he saw Hélène hurrying toward him along the allée of live oaks.

  “La!” She laughed when she reached his side. “I had to rid myself of both my maidservant and my hawk-eyed cousin, a task, I assure you.”

  Was ever a woman so exciting, so alive, so précieuse? He delighted in watching her as she chattered about court gossip and Moliere’s play. “A boring one,” she declared with mock solemnity, “titled The Bores."