Bienville had thought the fort at Mobile better protected, surrounded as it was by small nations friendly to the French, but he was no longer so sure. It was not only the proximity of Pensacola to Louisiana that concerned him. Today he had received word that the Alabama, with whom he had thought to have made peace, had ambushed the nearby nation of the Mobilians, the French’s closest allies. The Alabama had attacked unexpectedly and at night, slaughtering fourteen and making off with women and children.
‘The same story,’ the commandant said grimly. ‘English guns. English gunpowder. If we are to safeguard our savage alliances, we must retaliate immediately.’
By nightfall a force of French and Mobilian soldiers had been mustered. They would depart for the Alabama the next day. In the meantime Bienville summoned an emergency meeting of the chiefs of the neighbouring nations, so that they might once more pledge kinship and join together in the protection of the French lands against enemy attack. When that was done, he himself would travel north to the great nations of the Choctaw and the Chickasaw. If the English were intent upon trouble, then the French could afford to lose the friendship of neither.
That night Auguste did not take supper at the rue d’Iberville. Instead he sat upon his own stoop, chewing on a piece of cornbread and slapping away the mosquitoes as the liquid darkness thickened, submerging the familiar contours of the garden. He would be gone for many weeks. When he returned it would be summer. He would not see the tulip tree flower. The thought of it filled him with a melancholy that was almost grief.
It was late when Babelon came. Auguste half rose.
‘What news? Is something happened?’ he demanded.
Babelon shook his head.
‘I was restless. I needed a walk.’ Reaching into his pocket he pulled out his flask. ‘A walk and a drink.’
He sat down beside Auguste and uncorked the flask with his teeth, upending it into his mouth before handing it to Auguste. The brandy was fine, strong but mellow, without the customary firewater burn.
‘Good, huh?’ Babelon said. ‘You can keep a man in a sewer but you can’t make him drink piss.’
Babelon was drunk. As he set clumsily about filling his pipe, Auguste thought of Elisabeth alone in the Babelon house. He pictured her sitting at the table in the light of a single tallow lamp, one hand pressed over the burned black mark on the tabletop, the other tracing with one finger the zigzag weave of a palmetto basket filled with fruit, as her ashy shadow flickered restlessly behind her on the wall.
‘Your slave,’ he said abruptly, startling himself.
Babelon stretched out a hand, plucking the flask from Auguste’s fingers. Tipping his head back, he took a long gulp of brandy.
‘God, that’s good.’ He sighed happily, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘My slave? She’s clean, quiet. She works hard. In the main I’m satisfied.’
‘So I see.’
‘“So I see”?’ mocked Babelon. ‘Ah. I see you attempt the
double entendre
. Very clever.’
Auguste did not reply.
‘Satisfied, I get it. You imply – but what is it exactly that you imply, Auguste?’
Still Auguste was silent.
‘Can it be that you consider my private affairs your concern? Perhaps you seek to instruct me in how to manage my finances? Or how to fuck my wife? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To fuck my wife?’
Auguste stared at his knees as the shriek of the cicadas scraped like a slate down his spine. He had never felt so young or so foolish.
‘No?’ Babelon stretched his face in a parody of astonishment. ‘The woman you follow about like a dog with his tongue out? Don’t tell me you are a man of principle? But of course you are. You were raised by savages.’
‘Go home, Babelon,’ Auguste said softly.
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m going. But let me tell you something before I go, since those bastard savages don’t seem to have taught you the first thing about civilised behaviour. Here, among white men, there are rules, and the first rule? Keep your fucking nose out of other men’s business.’
Auguste did not know how long he remained there on the porch once Babelon was gone. He knew only that he missed the soft, warm weight of the opossum in his lap and that against the black of the sky, two owls swooped and cried, faint gleams of warning in the moonless dark.
I
s not man wretched creature? Because of his natural attributes he is hardly able to taste one single pleasure pure and entire: he is not wretched enough until he has increased his wretchedness by art and assiduity.
She did not know what exactly it was in Montaigne that stirred her. He wrote of war and religion, of marriage and friendship, of fear and the power of the imagination, of drunkenness and lying, of the sweet gratification of scratching an itch and the pleasure of playing with his cat. His book had no form and reached no conclusion. Frequently its reasoning wandered from the point, drifting off into reverie before circling back to its origin and then stopping abruptly, without apology.
It was not so much a book as a discourse, interrupting itself, scolding itself and frequently laughing at its own jokes, but she devoured it as a boy consumes sweetmeats, peeling apart the paragraphs so that she might know precisely the taste of every part of it. Some days, when his words pierced her with the precision of his understanding, she stood before him as though naked, and his compassion was a balm that soothed the raw and ragged scars of her. Other days, provoked to protest by his rueful assertions, she argued out loud, gesturing at the page as though he might see her and declaring herself determined to prove him wrong. Always he awoke something in her, something that she had forgotten in herself or something she had never known. Whether they touched her or provoked her or caused her to hoot with amusement, his words splashed in her like sunlight, setting long-buried seeds once more to germination.
It entranced and troubled her, that it was possible to know another person in the world so absolutely as she knew this man. She knew her husband’s flesh better than her own, the landscape of its dips and knots, but he had never shared himself with her as Montaigne shared himself, without limits, his erudition always tempered by his unflinching honesty and his generous heart. Would Jean-Claude have admitted to her that his memory was rotten, that he struggled with basic mathematics and had never mastered chess, that, until recently, he had not known that yeast was used to make bread? Would he have confessed to her that sometimes, to his delight, the smell of a kiss lingered a whole day upon his moustache? Once, perhaps, in the beginning. Would he examine himself as Montaigne examined himself, clearly and without sentiment, never flinching from the truth?
Montaigne thought friendship a more precious gift than the sexual ardour between a man and a woman. Though he acknowledged that the fires of passion burned more brightly, he declared them rash and fickle, subject to attacks and relapses. Since passion was a matter of the body, he declared, and not of the mind, it was subject to satiety. It comforted Elisabeth to pity him. On the matter of love, she told him, tapping the woodcut on the frontispiece, he was simply wrong.
Once, only once, Jean-Claude surprised her with her head bent over the book.
‘What’s that?’ he had asked without curiosity, and she was startled to find herself flushing.
‘Nothing,’ she muttered, and she tried to push it down into the chair out of sight but something in her awkwardness aroused his curiosity and he bent down and took the volume from her, letting it fall open in his hands.
‘
Desires are either natural and necessary, like eating and drinking; natural and not necessary, such as mating with a female; or else neither natural nor necessary, like virtually all human ones, which are entirely superfluous and artificial
. What the devil kind of nonsense is this?’
‘It’s just a book. My godfather gave it to me when I left Paris.’
‘Why?’
‘He thought I should like it.’
‘He could not think of something more useful?’
‘He gave me the quilt also.’
She smiled up at him hopefully, but Jean-Claude appeared not to hear her.
‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘
Baboons falling madly in love with women are an everyday occurrence
.’ He turned the book over. ‘Who is this lunatic?’
‘He’s not a lunatic. He’s a Frenchman. From Bordeaux. Do not be misled by the baboons. He writes of every subject under the sun.’
‘Baboons included? Although I think of our garrison and I am obliged to concede that the man may have a point.’
Snapping the book shut, he handed it back to her. Elisabeth felt the weight of it in her lap. Then she held it out to him.
‘Why don’t you take it?’ she said. ‘For the expedition. You will like it, I know you will.’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps when you return we might talk about it.’
‘You are attempting to educate me, is that it?’
‘It is a book for real people, not scholars. What I mean is, it is written not to make one feel stupid, as so many books are, but to make one understand things. The important things.’
‘And what are they, pray?’
‘To know ourselves. Entirely and truthfully, without evasion.’
Jean-Claude snorted derisively, snatching the book from her hands.
‘Elisabeth, I swear to God – this town may soon be besieged by the English and yet you sit here with your head in a book when the other women are laying in food? Since when did this important business of knowing ourselves keep anyone from starvation?’
‘Things are not yet so bad,’ Elisabeth murmured.
But he was already halfway to the cabin. She found the book when at last she followed him in, abandoned face down on the table, its pages crushed awkwardly within its covers. She wrapped it carefully and hid it behind a muddle of corn-brush heads and broken dishes on the high shelf over the table. She no longer kept it in the wood store. Several times since his return, Jean-Claude had brought bundles to the house and hidden them behind the woodpile. He did not tell her what was in them and she knew better than to ask.
‘Keep the place locked,’ he told her. ‘In this town you can’t trust anyone.’
It was Montaigne who urged her not to be afraid, to untangle need from desire, conviction from zeal, learning from good sense. He counselled her to look about her, to accept not the judgements of others, however highly she held them in esteem, but to judge for herself. And always he gazed into the depths of his imperfect self and set down what he saw there, obfuscating nothing.
Rare is the life which remains ordinate even in privacy. Anyone can take part in a farce and act the honest man on the trestles: but to be right-ruled within, in your bosom, where anything is licit, where everything is hidden – that’s what matters.
She went to Guillemette le Bras and begged her pardon.
‘I should like to assist you again,’ Elisabeth said. ‘If you ever have need of me.’
The midwife regarded her coolly, her red knuckles clamped beneath her sharp chin.
‘Marie Nevette is my assistant now,’ she said. ‘The commandant will pay for only one.’
‘I – it would not matter. I don’t care about the money.’
‘Oh?’ Guillemette raised a thin eyebrow.
Elisabeth hesitated.
‘The night that François-Xavier was born,’ she said quietly. ‘I shall remember it always.’
‘It was an easy labour.’
‘I know. I know there will be others that are not. But I should like to help you. This place, the rains and the heat and the mosquitoes, the hunger, it is as though it wants only to break us, to make thieves of us and beggars, to drag us down into its own godless mud. I cannot change Louisiana, but I can examine my own conscience. I can try to be good.’
‘There is no halo for a midwife’s assistant. Only blisters and broken nights.’
‘Then I shall make do with those.’
‘And no pay?’
‘For now. If I am useful to you perhaps the commandant will change his mind.’
‘I admire your optimism. Let me think about it.’
Several days later Guillemette came to the cabin. It was afternoon and she waited on the stoop as the savage children filed out. Then she reached down and picked up a basket, covered with a sheet of nettle-linen that she placed in Elisabeth’s arms.
‘Here. You will take your instructions from Marie Nevette.’
‘Of course,’ Elisabeth said, and she hugged the basket to her chest.
‘Check the basket and make sure all is in order. Anne Negrette is expecting, but not due for several months. We shall hope for more.’
‘Yes. And thank you.’
Guillemette inclined her head, a slight smile softening her sharp features.
‘I do not know who or what changed your mind. But I am glad of it.’
Spring came and Jean-Claude went north. Each day, when the work was done, Elisabeth curled up with Montaigne. As the weeks passed, she got into the habit of opening the book at random so that she might enter his thoughts as if she entered a room and disturbed him there. Sometimes she did not read but only looked at the woodcut of the author pasted into the frontispiece, holding his wise and weary gaze and touching her fingertips to the creases that lined his face. She came to know his opinions on sleep, on names, on prayer and on the affection of fathers for their children, and all the time his words worked upon her like fingers gently loosening her bonds. He examined her, as he had examined himself, with tender exasperation, and he knew her too.
When her monthlies ceased, then, and her breasts began once more to tingle and swell, it was perhaps not so surprising that to Elisabeth the child in her belly was a part of this awakening, a creature brought to life not only through the simple bodily act of a man lying with a woman but also by the bringing to life of those hidden parts of her that for so long had been but insensible flesh. She was not sick as she had been with the others. Indeed she glowed with new vigour. She had been unwell for so long she had forgotten the sheer pleasure of strength, of eagerness. Every day she told herself that she was mistaken, that the pain and the bleeding would come, but the strength in her grew daily and she did not believe it. Not this time. She was filled with a new certainty that rendered everything about her sharp and clear, as though it were outlined in black ink. Though she was afraid, the elation was stronger. It rose in her throat in reckless bubbles.