In any case, rather than whip his own wife in the town square or sell her to pirates or brand her or disfigure her or abide by any of the other more salacious public entertainments suggested by less-sympathetic tongues, Master D’Alendria sent his wife away in the dead of night, on a ship reputedly headed for the northern coasts. I heard it whispered that Mistress D’Alendria, or “Giselle,” as she was to be again, had family up there, variously said to be in Virginia or the more flamboyant and exciting French town of New Orleans.
Like I said, the development gave me much relief, for I wished no harm upon Miss Giselle, regardless of the color of her skin.
Any fears I or others might have had around Master D’Alendria’s indifference to the crime itself were quickly put to rest, however.
In his wife’s absence, the master seemed even more determined to know the source of the abomination his wife had borne, regardless of whether she had been willing to that crime or not.
The child itself had disappeared too, of course, by that time.
I wondered, had they drowned it?
The thought brought some feelings of squeamishness on my part, although I couldn’t say the action would have surprised me. The whites may not have bothered in drowning it, of course...it might have been sold, or given away at auction along with the same wet nurse who had been handed the creature in the afternoon of its birth. Like someone had done with me once upon a time, the boy would disappear into the markets, carried by a female slave young enough and with skin dark enough to provide a believable surrogate.
None of this would help Choate, of course.
Nor would it help any of us, really.
***
They came for Chaote in the night.
We heard the screams.
Not his screams, of course, but Lara’s.
The walls of the quarters are thin, made of planks too poor in quality to be used in any of the structures built for the whites. Some of the newer additions to the quarters were made of mud brick, baked in the sun, but generally the climate remained too wet here for such materials to last more than a full season. The boards would warp and weave in the summer rains, but in the end, they were easier to tear out and replace than the bricks that crumbled into paste when the heaviest of storms came, usually in the peak of the summer months.
We slaves had been housed in caves before, too, when the last of the great storms came, wiping out all but the furthest inland and strongest-built of the white men’s homes. Even the township’s church went down that year, such that only the bell tower survived, and the giant bell itself, which weathered the storm without so much as a crack in the thick metal.
I winced at Lara’s heart-rending scream that shattered that night.
I winced as she pleaded with Master D’Alendria and the townsfolk, begged them not to take Chaote from her. I heard not a word from her husband himself. At the time, I did not know if they had knocked him unconscious by then, but I doubted it.
They would want Chaote awake for all they had planned.
The rest of us awoke in seconds, but knew better than to venture outside our thin-walled shacks. Our eyes pressed to the cracks in those walls instead, peering into the flickering torchlight of the clearing out front of our section of quarters, which were older and made solely of wood and piled stones.
I pressed my eyes to those cracks as quickly as the rest, and immediately saw human forms. Faces remained elusive for a time, lost within angry shouts and long fingers of shadow from the waving fronds of palm trees and the broader leaves of the calabash where they shifted in the wind. Closest to the quarters stood a number of those branches filled with white flowers, those the white men called “magnolia,” half of them strangled by banyon vines that looked like twisting snakes in the smoke and guttering torches.
I felt my breath stop somewhere in my chest when they dragged Lara outside.
She wore only half a slip of a dress, shorter than what she wore in the daytime and nearly see-through where it fell down to the tops of her muscular thighs, even with only torchlight to illuminate her. Despite the fear that rose immediately to my throat, choking off my air, a blush started somewhere in my neck and ears as I realized I could see most of her outlined body in those flames.
“Lara,” I whispered.
I couldn’t get the word to come out any louder. Even so, hands touched me and grasped me from either side, warning me to be still.
They brought Chaote out, seconds later.
I saw a conference under way among the white men standing there. One had blood on his face, which caused me to look back at Lara, trying to reassure myself that her own blood wasn’t the source. Then the white man touched the cut there and cursed, muttering about ‘the little demon who bit him.’
One of the other whites smiled at his words, leering at Lara in her short shift.
The other men had eyes only for Choate.
I saw Master D’Alendria hanging back, somewhat apart from those who held the two slaves. His wig stood strangely on his head, looking as incongruous on him as it always did, compared to others of his kind. He wore a plain-spun top, undyed even to make it more white, and black pants shoved into work boots coated in island mud and plant matter.
His expression lacked the triumph and excitement I could see in the faces of the other white townsfolk and plantation men.
If anything, what I saw there resembled something closer to pity, as if, in looking at Choate, he knew he hadn’t been the one to defile his wife all those months ago, but felt helpless to stop the cascading events.
Master D’Alendria’s sympathy for Chaote took me aback, although I couldn’t say how it hit at my own heart precisely.
I saw the magic man then, standing close to our master, who still witnessed this judging with more than a little pallor.
“Is it him, magic man?” Master D’Alendria demanded, his voice deep, but still holding that darker thread of grief. “Do your bones tell you the truth of this thing, so we can be shut of it, once and for all?”
Somehow, it occurred to me only then that our master had lost a wife in all of this. A wife that—rumor had it, and one verified by my own observations prior to the nightmare of the past weeks—our master had loved dearly, and perhaps held in a higher regard than he did his own person.
Giselle D’Alendria was dead to him now, forever gone from his bed and his home.
The magic man frowned at our master’s words.
I saw his eyes look at Chaote, then past him, until he seemed to be looking at the very wall where I crouched, at me and my own eyes, where they peered through the cracks in the quarter’s walls.
I held my breath until those light-brown eyes shifted away. The magic man answered Master D’Alendria somberly, once more regarding Chaote, who stood, bare-chested, his eyes on his wife alone, in the center of the clearing.
“There is a danger in either path,” the magic man said only.
Master D’Alendria gave him an angry look.
“Do not plague me with your riddles!” he snapped. “Answer me with a single word, did he do this thing, or not?”
“You know the truth of his involvement in this matter already, sir,” the magic man said. “You need no chicken bones to answer that riddle. Yet fate has its own ideas as to what will finally occur in our lives...”
I saw our master’s lip curl in fury at the magic man’s words, even as he seemed to restrain himself from shouting at the old man again. Nodding instead, Master D’Alendria folded his muscular arms—the master himself couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, and wasn’t immune to the charms of physical exertion, unlike some of his countrymen—and stared back at where Chaote continued to look at Lara, his dark eyes holding an overt fear.
“Let the girl go,” Master D’Alendria said, his voice brooking no argument. “Even animals have loyalty to their mates. I will not have her killed for such a thing, not when there’s a good forty years of labor left on her. Tie her to her bed, if you must, but leave her here...I shan’t lose two slaves on this night.”
The look of relief that came to Chaote’s eyes was so palpable that I felt my throat close...although if it was in anger or surprise, I could not have with certainty said. I felt a twinge of something, a grief greater for him than I would have thought possible in the months since he’d been named Lara’s mate.
In that same instant, Lara herself burst out with another scream.
“NO!” She threw herself against the white men holding her, who regarded her with their own varying levels of disappointment, even as they stared at Lara’s body through the thin shift. “NO! NO...PLEASE! DO NOT HURT HIM!”
The larger and more muscular of the white men, most of them overseers and other tradesmen rather than plantation owners or their sons, gripped Chaote and began to walk him into the darkness beyond the clearing.
I could only watch, lost again in meaning and silence, as they dragged Lara writhing and screaming back towards the slave’s quarters. The white men handed her off to the older slave women and their husbands when they finally reached the darkened door. Lara continued to fight the slaves, too, but too many hands held her now and would not let go, and eventually I saw her collapse in a kind of despair into the nearest of the old women’s arms.
Lara’s sobs continued on into the night, long after the last of the torches went with Chaote and the white men into the jungle towards the ocean.
Lara’s sobs did not cease even when the sun came up over the mountains on the eastern edge of the island.
None of us in the quarters closed our eyes that night.
In all of that time, that sickness in my belly did not dissipate either.
It remained there, unsated, even after I knew that Chaote had finally drawn his last breath.
***
The death of Chaote did not satisfy the whites.
Chaote’s body hung naked from an old magnolia tree that stood not far from the ocean, on a small, grass-covered hill that gave a view of both the cane crops and the distant blue of the clear sea. It stood as probably the largest of the magnolias on the master’s land, and I could not help thinking it was a good place for Chaote, as he had stared out so often upon a similar view in his rare moments of leisure, even after Lara had been given to him as a wife.
The whites did not take the body down.
Instead, they let it rot there, perhaps as a message to us (one, it must be said, we did not need), or perhaps as a message to the other white women in town, most of whom did not need that lesson, either.
In any case, they let Chaote’s muscular body rot without interference, which it did quickly and efficiently, as all things do in the wet air of the islands. The magic man conducted rituals over it, but only in the dead of night, and only after all of the white people had left.
Even so, the white people heard of this, and the whispers began anew.
All of those townsfolk present had heard the magic man’s unwillingness to name Chaote in the late hours of that night. More than I had wondered whether guilt had driven the magic man to hesitate to accuse the young slave, especially with the man’s wife crying uncontrollably by his side—a wife that the magic man himself had given to Chaote.
Rumors that the magic man allied with the Maroons in the hills arose from that same collection of whispering tongues. It began to be said, by whites and blacks alike, that the magic man used his magic to break down the mind of our young master, and deprive him of his fair young mistress. Some thought the magic man had seen a weakness in Master D’Alendria, in the wife he so adored, and sought to create a fear in him of his own slaves. They said that the magic man had given the master’s wife a mystical birth, one that produced a devil meant to undermine the very foundations of the plantation’s home.
On other islands, magic had been used against the whites in such a way.
These stories were well known not only to the whites, but to us, too, and fortified by the sale of blacks between the various plantations among the islands.
Our magic man had always been seen as above reproach in such things by Master D’Alendria, who consulted him whenever such doubts arose as to the character of others of his household. Now those whispers took on an ugly, frightened cast, a wondering as to whether the magic man had hidden his true disposition from the whites all this time.
Further, our master grieved her, I knew.
He grieved his young wife, Giselle, just as Lara grieved Chaote.
I shut my mind to both things, for to dwell on either would only take me to dangerous places in my own mind. Grief is not an emotion I enjoy, whether it is mine or another’s.
Still, Lara’s continued pain stung, perhaps more than it should have done, given that Chaote was, after all, her husband.
Given that the magic man was seen as unusually gifted—not only in spells and medicines, but with his own brand of uncanny cleverness—that seed, once it found its way to fertile ground, dug only deeper into those dark soils, taking root and worming further into the minds of every white in the township, until many were quite overcome with fear of him.
I do not know when or how they finally reached Master D’Alendria’s ears, these whispers and suppositions and rumors of black magic and mystically-created demon babies and other Maroon-like ill-doing, but it was not long before an alternate theory of how Mistress D’Alendria had been impregnated had reached the insides of the planter’s mansion.