Vincente let the old woman run on. The hole in her was a living thing, dense and muscular. As they made their way along rutted lanes bordered by dilapidated cabins, their windows sealed with rough linen, their roofs askew, it turned inside her, crushing the breath from her lungs. She stumbled, fixing her eyes on the tips of her boots. The thick dust of the path turned them the dull white of old bones.
‘This is the Place Royale,’ the old woman said as they crossed in front of the fort. Close up the sagging structure had a drunken air, its splintered walls askew. The wood pilings were green and swollen with damp. Vincente thought of the lofty red-brick mansions in Paris rising from the arches of the vaulted arcades, their great windows framed with pale stone quoins, and she was flooded with a despair so fierce that it was almost laughter.
‘The Place Royale,’ she echoed.
‘Across there is the commandant’s house and, next to that, the residence where your orphan girls shall be lodged until they are safely wed,’ the old woman continued. ‘It shall not take long. We suffer from a dearth of every kind of merchandise here. The ladies of Mobile pine for white flour and stockings, the gentlemen for French wine and fresh beef, and the soldiers of the garrison for cheap
eau-de-vie
and vigorous wives. They have set a sentinel at the door, you know, to contain their excesses.’
‘The men or the girls?’
The old woman stopped. Then, with her cheeks sucked in, she expelled a snuffling snort of a laugh, her waggling finger aloft.
‘Come now, Mam’selle, I am sure that the Sisters will confirm that the girls’ conduct thus far has been above reproach.’ She leaned in towards Vincente, her eyes beady. ‘Or do you know better?’
Vincente thought of the long, starless nights of the tropics, when the thick black ink of the ocean bled ceaselessly into the black drapes of the sky and there was no end to it. Felled by sun-stunned sleep in the hot afternoons, she spent her wakeful nights crouched out of sight at the stern of the ship, watching the white wake unrolling like lace towards Havana. She paid no heed to the muted thumps, the stifled gasps, the sudden bursts of skittering bare feet. They were past White Island by then and she long past caring, adrift in her solitude and the yawning maw of her hunger. In Paris she had eaten little. Her fast was her offering to God, the emptiness in her belly a kind of righteousness. When the Devil came and she could not resist him, she thrust her fingers down her throat to expel the wickedness from her body. Uncorrupted by the grossness of appetite, contained within the strict confines of her fleshless body, she had willed herself pure in His sight, the desires of her heart clear and sweet. Besides, it had infuriated her mother.
She had grown accustomed to hunger. But aboard the
Baleine
it grew into a craving so violent that she was powerless to withstand it. At Havana they had taken on a milk cow, and every day there was milk and cheese and sweet, fresh butter, fat and cool against her ravenous tongue. She swallowed and her fingers stayed in her lap. The weight of the food in her belly kept her steady. As for the orphan girls, what did she care for their reputations? It fell to Sister Marie to keep them from ruin. Their undoing would be the nun’s too.
‘Come now,’ Mme de Boisrenaud coaxed. ‘You can tell me.’ Vincente looked at the old woman’s greedy eyes, her parted lips, and she hated her and the orphan girls and Sister Marie and Louisiana, and most of all she hated the hole that stretched inside her and would not let her go.
‘I am no scandalmonger, Madame,’ she spat. ‘The shepherd who speaks ill of his flock speaks ill of himself. Now, I beg you, I must eat.’
The old woman’s face pinched.
‘You do me great disservice, Mlle le Vannes. I seek only to ensure that the honourable men of this colony receive wives of equal virtue, but it seems that your Mr Law is satisfied with sending them the very dregs.’
Stiffly Mme de Boisrenaud stalked away. She had no intention of being preached at by a child. She thought of M. de Chesse, whose desperate appeals to physicians both French and native had brought no cure for his disease, and her lips curled sourly. Wherever it was that his godless soul wandered, he was surely congratulating himself upon a fortuitous escape.
O
n the bluff above the wide yellow river, a handful of plank cabins huddled together, their mud-plastered walls capped with roofs of bedraggled palmetto. Behind them the roughly cleared ground sloped downward towards a cow pen and, further down, another group of shacks, strung about with laundry and built around a circle of smoke-blackened rocks that served as a fireplace. A little downriver, a high fence of logs encircled an encampment of Negroes; upstream a crooked palisade stood sentry against the moss-slung shadows of the forest.
The place was known among the settlers as Burned-canes, for the canebrakes that had been burned to clear the land for occupation. It had exasperated Elisabeth once, the pitiful lack of poetry in the names chosen by the exploratory parties. The colony was pristine, as blank as a fresh sheet of paper, and yet, in drawing up their maps, the men had contrived no more than a list for the butcher: Fish-river, Cat-island, Grass-point, Red-post. When Elisabeth discovered that one curve of the St Louis River had been dubbed Plate-point because the commandant’s brother had lost a plate there, she had declared it an outrage and had threatened to take the matter up with the commandant himself. She had not done so then. She would not now.
It was of no consequence. The plantation at Burned-canes was not theirs. It belonged to a French nobleman whose family name was eminent enough to carry weight among the financiers of Paris. It mattered not at all that the nobleman was a dissolute with a powerful dislike for matters of agriculture. The newly established Mississippi Company, who had pressed the land upon him as a gift, had assured him that he would need to mine only one-tenth of his property to bring up enough gold for several lifetimes. The nobleman, bruised by a series of unhappy speculations, had not hesitated. Mustering sixty sturdy labourers and their wives from the Rhineland, he had set sail from Lorient to claim his spoils.
In Havana the ship had been struck with fever. More than half of the Rhinelanders had died. While he waited to weigh anchor, the nobleman purchased two skinny cows and a handful of Negroes, and closed to his ears to the tiresome band of naysayers who shook their heads and declared his schemes fantastical. It took several more weeks to reach Mobile and another month to raise the ships necessary to transport himself and what remained of his men to the plantation. By then he had almost nothing left. Enraged and embittered, he had ordered his foreman to grow something and sought refuge in the newly established settlement of New Orleans, a hardly town of a few shacks, where he consoled himself with brandy and a rash of whores fresh from the prisons of Paris.
It was the foreman’s idea to try indigo, which grew wild in those parts. The indigo flourished. His men did not. They were good men for the most part, large in build and uncomplaining in nature, but the climate plagued them, the teeming compost of the air rotting their lungs. Several more fell ill. Even those who resisted the sickness found themselves stupefied by the heat, their skin purpled with fierce rashes. Their feet bloated and decayed in their leather boots and their bowels turned to water. The incessant bites and stings of the insects burst into boils.
A handful of the Rhinelanders had brought wives. The women were broad-faced and large-boned and huddled around the cabins, their flanks pressed together like cattle. There were no children. It was whispered among the cattle-women that the water in Louisiana made you barren. It was whispered too, and very cautiously, that the foreman’s wife was a witch.
The foreman, whose name was Fuerst, had acquired his wife at Mobile. It had been Burelle, the taverner, who had brought the widow to his attention. She was not young nor was she lively, Burelle confessed, but she kept a spotless house and she had a slave. Not being one for company, she would not miss the town. Besides, her husband’s death had left her in precarious circumstances. Fuerst had sought the widow out that same day. His French was poor, but he knew enough to make himself understood.
Four days later, he and Elisabeth Savaret were married.
Elisabeth sat on a makeshift bench set against the wall of the largest cabin. The palmetto roof cast a little shadow, but still she squinted against the fierce afternoon sun as she bent her head over the torn shirt in her lap. The shirt was made of nettle-bark linen and the rough fabric frayed easily under the coarse needle. Elisabeth folded the seam and stabbed the needle into the thick layer of stuff, pulling the thread tight.
Over by the cooking hut, the savage woman was pounding corn for bread. The steady
thump-thump
of the paddle throbbed in the blood-thick afternoon. Beside her mother the child squatted in the dirt, drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. Her hair fell across her face and her dirty knees were sharp as elbows. It still startled Elisabeth to observe the child’s hard, narrow body, her coltish grace, the sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. None of the other savages had freckles. Elisabeth thought of the day she had first seen her swaddled in her sling of linen, the plump and dimpled infant with her wide dark eyes and her shock of dark hair and her mouth like a bud beginning to open, and she closed her eyes tight, twisting her head as if from a blow, jabbing the needle hard into the shirt’s hem.
Wincing, she put her thumb in her mouth. A spot of red blood bloomed in the rough fibres of the shirt’s hem. Elisabeth spat on it and rubbed it with her good thumb but it did not come out. She sighed, pressing her fingers into the sockets of her eyes. She knew it was within the means of any woman to be neat in her work, just as it was quite possible for any woman to husband her household’s resources, however meagre. It required only precision and vigilance, both of which might easily be learned. Precision and vigilance and a mind wedged shut against the slippages of memory.
She took up her needle once again, but her fingers were clumsy. The stitches came out irregularly, pulled too tight, so that the seam bunched and refused to lie flat. On the bench beside her, a butterfly settled, its wings trembling together like hands. Then, very slowly, it spread them wide. Elisabeth saw that they were a velvety burnt orange, traced all over with a delicate fretwork of black and white, each one as wide as her palm. For a moment it was still, its feelers quivering faintly in the heat, as fragile as a flower pressed between the pages of a book. Then with a flash of orange it was gone.
Some days were just more difficult than others. They required a greater exercise of will. Pressing her lips together, Elisabeth bent her head over her seam, stretching it and pressing down hard with her thumbs. Carefully she pulled the needle through, but the thread caught. It was knotted, looped around itself. She tugged at it to free it. The knot did not give. She pulled harder. The thread snapped.
The cry was out of her before she could stop it. Across the yard the savage woman looked up. Elisabeth frowned, squinting at the needle as she tried to rethread it. The thread was frayed, her hands unsteady. After three attempts she let them drop into her lap and closed her eyes. The afternoon seemed to tip away from her, dizzying in its heat and silence. It was a few moments before she realised that the regular
thump-thump
of the flour paddle had ceased. She breathed in, steadying herself, sliding her precious needle into her collar for safe keeping before folding her husband’s shirt and reaching down to place it in the basket at her feet. When she looked up, the slave was kneeling by the cooking hut, the front of her dress unfastened. The savage woman swayed a little, her eyes half closed, her fingers loose in her child’s tangled hair as the girl pressed her face against her mother’s chest.
‘For the love of–!’ Elisabeth cried out.
As she strode across the yard, the child ducked her head, wiping her mouth with the back of her small hand, and pressed herself against her mother’s side. The nipple of the exposed breast was puckered tight, its brown centre thrusting out like a stalk, pale traces of milk pearling its crumpled folds. There was a dent in the flesh left by the child’s nose. The savage woman’s hands tightened on her daughter’s shoulders. Then she reached up and retied the strings of her dress.
‘Have I not made myself clear on this matter?’ Elisabeth demanded. ‘The child is five years old, not a babe in arms. If she is hungry, there is sagamity enough in the kettle.’
‘Yes, Madame.’
The savage woman’s voice was gentle. The child looked up at her mother, her lip caught between her teeth. Elisabeth observed the slope of the girl’s cheek, the way that the syrupy sunlight caught in the pale down beneath her ear, and she was overcome by an abrupt and unbearable fatigue.
‘Now get back to work,’ she said wearily. ‘There is a great deal to be done.’
Slowly, stiff-legged, Elisabeth walked back to her bench. She sat upright, her back straight, not touching the rough mud plaster of the wall. Once the planks had exhaled the sharp curative tang of cypress and she had not been able to sit outside, for the smell of them had split her open like a chisel. Now the cypress smell was gone. The dried-mud mortar smelled only of stones, of dust. It was a dead smell.
Her hands were quiet now, her pulse heavy and slow. Beside her the gun gleamed dark and sleek in the slanting afternoon silent. Fuerst had shown her how to fire it. She thought of the weight of it, the resistance of the trigger against her finger, the kick in her shoulder as it went off. The birds had startled from the woods in a confusion of wings and cawing.
‘I pray you shall never have need of it,’ he had said to her. ‘But I cannot always be here. You must be able to kill if you have to.’
Once again Jeanne’s flour paddle resumed its steady thump. Jeanne. A French name and yet for so long it had tasted foreign in Elisabeth’s mouth. She had become accustomed to it though. The slave had grown into the name and the name into her, so that it was no longer possible to see where one ended and the other began. Jeanne was no longer Okatomih and yet she held her old self inside her, like the stone in a plum.