Elisabeth’s stomach fell away.
‘You’re back,’ she said.
‘So many weeks gone and that is all the welcome I get?’
Elisabeth raised herself on tiptoes and, putting her arms around her husband’s neck, kissed him on the mouth. As he held her in a close embrace, she opened her eyes and looked over his shoulder. The savage girl stared at her without blinking. Her eyes were almost black, her brow high and strong. She was very still.
‘Welcome home,’ Elisabeth murmured and, tugging his hand, she pulled him into the house. Perhaps, she thought, if she slammed the door hard enough, when she opened it again the savage girl would have gone. ‘It was a profitable expedition?’
‘For Sieur de Bienville certainly.’ He flung himself into a hard chair, tipping backwards. ‘Again. Thirty able-bodied slaves and every
sou
they raise goes into his coffers.’
‘Not exactly his, surely?’
‘Then you do not know Sieur de Bienville.’
The door stood open. In the frame of it the girl stood like a wraith, her white dress bright as a candle-shade against the afternoon sun, the shape of her body dark and clear.
‘Jean-Claude?’ Elisabeth swallowed. He frowned, then turned to look.
‘Ah.’
He clicked his fingers at the girl, motioning at her to enter. As she walked, her body rippled inside the linen dress, slippery shadows that defied the demureness of her attitude. She stopped before Elisabeth. She smelled of bear oil and warm skin, a musky, carnal odour. Quickly Elisabeth covered her face with her hands, inhaling the familiar scent of her own fingers.
‘Did I say thirty slaves?’ he said blandly. ‘Better make that thirty-one.’
‘You bought a slave? But I thought–’
‘Who said anything about buying? She was – a gift.’
‘A gift?’
‘A little something for my trouble.’
‘But we agreed–’
‘No. You agreed. It is become absurd, Elisabeth, this caprice of yours. Every other household in the town, if they are not paupers, has some manner of slave.’
‘So? Since when did we give a fig for anyone else?’
‘I give a fig for affectation. And it is become an affectation, this nonsensical obstinacy of yours. She will do the heavy work, water, wood, cleaning. You will be free to teach your savage pupils whatever nonsense it is you teach them, and for whatever else you choose besides.’ He frowned at her impatiently. ‘What possible reason can you have for refusing her?’
The girl’s name was Okatomih. Though she was dressed in the costume of the Natchez, she was not a Natchez herself but of the Yasoux nation, whom the Natchez had raided some months before. Elisabeth knew nothing more of her than that. Okatomih knew no French and Elisabeth nothing of the savage tongues of the north. The few words she knew were either Pascagoula, picked up from the savage women who traded their wares at the market, or Alibamon, which was the commonest tongue among the slaves, but the girl only shrugged at her, her face blank. Elisabeth was obliged to instruct her in mime, pointing and performing the required actions. The slave observed Elisabeth’s efforts with her unblinking black eyes and said nothing. It filled Elisabeth with a fury at the same time murderous and hopelessly impotent. She longed for the girl to demonstrate her impudence, to fail in her duties, so that she might punish her.
In this, as in everything else, the slave confounded her. She wore her hair as Elisabeth instructed, in a tight braid, and her face in an expression that was not so much defiant as defiantly blank. She kept herself and the kitchen hut reasonably clean. She was always early to rise, folding her deerskin and placing it on a shelf beside the salt crock. She pounded the corn and washed the pots and household linens. She swept the floors. There was always flour in the flour barrel and wood in the wood store. Unlike Elisabeth, she was also an accomplished cook and even brewed a delicately flavoured savage liquor that resembled French beer. Elisabeth had only to serve the meal and afterwards set the dirty dishes outside the door. When the master was at home, the slave was forbidden from entering the cabin. On this last point Elisabeth was perfectly clear.
As for Jean-Claude, he appeared well satisfied with the arrangement. He showed not the slightest interest in the girl herself except on occasion to remark upon the flavour of a particular dish. It was the women of the settlement who concerned themselves with her diligence. In the weeks after Okatomih’s arrival, several of them called upon Elisabeth to inspect her and to advise upon the principles of slave management. Most of the settlement’s slaves were from the nation of the Chetimacha, with whom the French had long been enemies, and their shortcomings were only too well understood. The women studied the girl with narrowed eyes, unwilling to concede that Elisabeth might have made the better bargain.
‘Well, I suppose she looks strong,’ Renée Gilbert remarked. ‘The poor sort have an infuriating habit of wasting away.’
‘And the lively ones of making a run for it,’ Perrine Roussel warned, waggling a finger. ‘You will need to be vigilant. Whip her seldom but watch her like a hawk.’
In this, at least, Elisabeth was obedient. However resolutely she determined to disregard the slave, her gaze was drawn again and again to the high smooth brow, the slanting eyes, the pulled-back hair like a cap of black silk with its swinging tassel braid, the mesmerising pass of the broom back and forth across the floor, the press of her fresh, ripe flesh against the linen of her dress.
In all the years of their marriage, Jean-Claude had never been so present in the cabin as he was at those times. When the slave’s hands encircled a pot, her brown fingers splayed, when the tip of her tongue dampened the corners of her mouth, when the perspiration gleamed on her brow, he was there. He was the pot, the mouth, the brow, the broom that moved in her hands with breathless languor. The girl moved and he moved with her, darkening her shadow, thickening her hair, seasoning her breath with his favoured tobacco. When she bent and her heavy braid fell forward over her shoulder, it was his shadow hands that brushed it aside, his shadow lips that pressed themselves greedily against the stretch of her exposed neck. When she raised the spoon to her mouth, testing the flavour of the stew, it was his flesh she tasted, his juice she wiped from her chin. The lucidity of the images, and their unreasonableness, tormented Elisabeth.
She was short-tempered with the savage children, rebuking them sharply for slips of gender or of pronunciation. They grew wary of her. Then, one day, on the boys’ side of the cabin, there was a space in the line like a missing tooth. One of the older boys had not come. When she demanded of the others why he was not there, they did not answer. The smallest girl opened her mouth but the girl beside her elbowed her hard and she blinked and pressed her lips into a line. The lesson passed slowly. When it was over the children did not linger. They hurried from the cabin in silence. It was only when they reached the end of the lane that Elisabeth heard their voices, high and clear, singing the strange music of their own tongue.
Elisabeth sat on the stoop, watching the mosquitoes spread like mildew across the darkening sky. In the past when she had wished to hide from the excesses of her imagination, she had found solace in labour. She had toiled until she was exhausted, finding a kind of refuge in fatigue, in the immediacy of blisters and aching muscles. Now that was the slave’s work. Elisabeth was instead required to busy herself with the finer tasks, the making of soap, the sewing of clothes, the preserving of food. None of them required the skull-stunned grind to which she had cleaved so gratefully. None of them caused the sinews in her shoulders to shriek and the sweat to run into her eyes, so that she could no longer hear the voices or see the pictures that flapped like coloured bookplates in her head.
Books, the comfort for those who do not live.
Early the next morning, when it was hardly light, Elisabeth knelt by the bed and once more tugged the trunk from underneath it. The key would not turn in the lock. In the end she was required to break it open with the axe they kept in the wood store. When she lifted the lid, the smell of damp leather and paper stirred so powerful a nostalgia in her that for a moment she closed her eyes, besieged by the remembrances of a self she had thought long shed. The window with the curled iron latch that rattled when the wind blew. The slag of roofs and chimneys heaped up against the sky, crusted with lichen and streaked with bird droppings that gleamed white in the pink Parisian dusk. The battered writing desk with its too-frail legs piled with disordered towers of books and pamphlets and catalogues and papers. Yellow candlelight on the print-black page. The sentences cleaving themselves to the hidden parts of her, drawing her deeper and deeper into their private embrace until the whole world was a pool of light in which she swam, words swarming about her like fish.
She reached in, spreading the books out before her. Homer’s
Odyssey
. Racine.
The Thousand and One Nights. Essais Volume II
by Michel de Montaigne. She ran her fingers over the tooled cover. The leather was cool and slightly sticky, like the palm of a hand. Then, very carefully, she opened it. On the frontispiece, mould spread in flowers, their grey petals speckled with black. She ran a fingertip over the inked lettering. She had never written to Paris of her safe arrival in Louisiana nor had she received any letters from Paris. It had not been expected. In all those years, she had hardly given a thought to the shop in Saint-Denis, the silk of the polished wooden counter and the sharp edge of the brass measure, the heavy bolts of silk and cambric and fine wool, the rattling drawers of buttons and the reels of ribbons and trimmings and threads, Mme Deseluse in her brightly coloured gown sucking her teeth as she tutted over the mousseline held out for her inspection by her anxious and ingratiating aunt, and in her memory everything was precisely as it had been when she left it. Now, for the first time, she wondered if the shop were still there.
Later, when the girl came in from the kitchen hut, Elisabeth slammed the trunk shut and pushed it back into its place beneath the bed. The slave regarded her silently, the broom slack in her hand as Elisabeth took up the axe, clamping the book beneath her arm. Grains of rust sprinkled the floor like sugar.
‘To work,’ Elisabeth snapped, jabbing with her elbow towards the broom. Snatching down the knife from the shelf above the table, she marched across the sunlit yard towards the wood store.
The door stood open, as she had left it. She set the axe in its usual place, standing it on its handle so that the metal blade would not be dulled by damp. The stack of logs was high, readied for winter, and the air was sweet with resin. For a moment Elisabeth stood quite still, watching the sun-spangled dust turning idly in the doorway. She thought of the barrel behind the log pile, its lid pressed down by the weight of wood, and of the jar inside it, interned in its wrapping of rags. As the years passed, the tincture would thicken and dry up, the jar falling into pieces in its rags, a corpse in its winding sheet, she thought, and there was comfort in the ghoulishness, an easing of something at the back of her throat that had been knotted a long time.
The log pile had been stacked in steps so that they formed a kind of bench or settle. Elisabeth hesitated, the Montaigne heavy in her hands. She looked out into the yard. It was silent, low clouds muffling the sky, and the slave was nowhere to be seen. Though there was surely no need for stealth, she closed the door furtively, lifting it to ease the gritty drag of it against the dirt floor and leaving an opening just wide enough to cast a washed-out ribbon of daylight across her lap. When she stroked the worn green leather of the cover, something turned in her belly, a longing not so much for the book itself but for the unexpected stirrings within her of her childish self, whom she had thought long dead.
She sat there for some time, the book upon her lap. Then, very carefully, she inserted her knife between the sealed pages and cut.
She roused herself only when the light began to drain from the page and her eyes ached from squinting at the smudgy print. It was late and rain drummed on the roof of the wood store. It occurred to her that it had been raining some time. Her back and her neck ached, and her shoulders were clenched tight as fists, but there was a lightness inside her that caused her to catch her breath. She closed her eyes so that she might hold it tight inside her, but already it had begun to fade, the press of her own anxieties dark against the weaknesses in it.
Sighing, she stretched upward, turning her head to ease the stiffness in her shoulders. In the watered-down light the black words danced above her fingers:
I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself
. She thought of the Jesuit Rochon, whose ease and humour had so little of the Catholic Church about it. She thought of Renée, of the children who had come to her for lessons, of her husband who loved her for a fierceness that was all his and who feared nothing in the world but the throttle of her frailty. She thought of the books she had smuggled from France rotting in the trunk beneath the bed. She thought of Okatomih, who had been a prisoner and was now a slave.
A sudden white flash drew sharp black lines around the log pile. The rumble of thunder that followed it was long and violent. She could feel the force of it rattling in her throat. Rain hammered at the roof. She stood, the book hugged tight to her chest. There was another knife blade of lightning, the crack of thunder. The storm was close. For a moment she hesitated. Then, taking off her apron, she wrapped it several times around the book and placed it high on the log pile where it might not be seen. Then she opened the door.
Immediately the wind snatched at it, slamming it wide on its flimsy hinges so that she had to battle to secure it. The rain lashed her face and, at the boundary of the yard, the line of oaks bucked like ships. Wrapping her arms over her head, Elisabeth ran towards the cabin. Her hem dragged through the mud, setting curls of wood shavings floating in the puddles like pale feathers, and the wind tore at her hair and ripped roughly at the ragged cypress tiles of the roof, but the wildness of the storm filled Elisabeth with a kind of exhilaration and she tipped her head back, crying out to the tumultuous sky and kicking her heels out behind her as she ran. When the lightning came, the white force of it illuminated her like a lamp.