In the parlour beyond the door, a woman laughed, a shrill screech like a crow’s cawing. Auguste pressed his knuckles to his lips, and in the glass the man in the wig did the same. He knew nothing of her, only that she had come from Paris and that, when Bienville proposed it, there was immediately a certainty in him, as though he had known she was coming. That afternoon he had dressed with great care. He had donned a clean shirt and sponged his breeches until they were spotless. Then, very carefully, he had slid his arms into the sleeves of his new coat.
The coat was the finest thing he had ever owned, and the most expensive. In the guttering candlelight, the silk brocade shimmered like water, causing the double row of close-set crystal buttons that ran the length of its front to glitter and dance upon its surface. Delicate and easily broken, the buttons served only as embellishment and could not be fastened. The buttonholes that would never receive them were trimmed with sleek bindings of scarlet kid, like ranks of little red mouths. The pockets were trimmed with silver braid. Auguste slid his fingers into the slit of one, feeling the smooth silk of the lining and, deeper, the sharp corners of a folded-up piece of paper. A bill in brown ink acknowledging the receipt of payment in full. But he had not paid for it. The coat had been a gift from the governor.
‘Consider it a wedding present,’ Bienville had said with a grin. ‘From Louisiana’s own Mr John Law. It is the very least he can do, in the circumstances.’
Auguste had not taken the slave into his bed. The smell of the dead man had been too strong on her, the shape of her the shape of treachery, of madness. He had dreamed of her though, and when in the dark hours he reached down to comfort himself, it was her mouth that encircled him, her high breasts that he spattered with his seed. In the mornings when she brought his breakfast, he could not meet her eye. He was ashamed but he was grateful too. He could not have borne to have dreamed of Elisabeth.
Later, when the child was born, Auguste had insisted that both mother and baby be baptised with French names. The beginning of a new life in the sight of God, the Jesuit had called it. The slave had held the child in her arms, her head bowed, and as the Jesuit made the sign of the cross over their heads and spoke her new name, and of the name of her child, she closed her eyes and the savage song she sang over the child’s sleeping head flowed from her like a stream of water.
It was in the first days of the governorship of Sieur de Cadillac that he had received word from the Jesuit that Elisabeth wished to buy back the slave. The priest, who was a good man, had begged him to deny her. Her body was still weak from the ravages of the poison, he said, and the Devil worked in her, disturbing the order of her mind. After all that had happened, the presence of the slave, and of her child, in Elisabeth’s house would only undo her further. The weight of her mortal sin bore down upon her. He had said very quietly that penance was a matter for God.
Auguste had listened courteously to the priest. The next day he had made arrangements for the sale as Elisabeth had asked. They met only to set their signatures upon the papers. She had been gaunt and pitifully frail, her skin wax-grey, her eyes dark holes punched in her white face. By then it had been agreed that she would not be called to trial. The governor spoke of clemency but it was plain that pragmatism, not mercy, had prevailed. Among the frantic problems of the colony a failed self-murder was hardly of pressing concern. Her exoneration had not prevented the other wives from branding her a criminal, a lunatic, but he had seen then that there was no madness in her, only the indifference of someone with nothing left to lose. She asked him to promise that they would never meet again. He had given her his word.
And he had kept it. Some time later she had left Mobile. Recently there had been rumours that the husband held her captive, that he meant to take her to the Rhineland. The Company had forbidden all departures, but the ships were frequent these days and the chaos at Dauphin Island beyond imagining. There were plenty of sea captains hungry for specie and for France. Perhaps she was already gone.
Auguste straightened up, staring at himself in the glass. He looked, he thought with a sudden rush of shame, like a peasant dressed up in his master’s clothes. The sudden impulse to flee overcame him. He did not know what it was he thought he was doing here. The past was not the past. A man could not shed his skin like a snake. He was not ready.
From the house there came the clatter of approaching heels and, distinct from the frog chorus, a man’s voice, prickly with impatience. Hastily Auguste turned, smoothing the creases from the skirts of his coat.
‘Governor,’ he said, and bowed.
Bienville stopped in the doorway, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the vestibule. Behind him stood le Pinteux, junior clerk to the governor’s office since Auguste was a boy. The clerk’s wig was crooked and his sparse eyebrows twitched restlessly upon the sun-reddened dome of his forehead.
‘Guichard? What the devil are you doing lurking out here?’
‘I am just arrived, sir.’
‘Then you are late. Look at you, though. Sieur de Guichard makes quite the popinjay, wouldn’t you agree, le Pinteux?’
The clerk scowled, a droplet of water quivering on the end of his peeling nose.
‘Of course you cannot expect easily to impress a man of mode like M. le Pinteux,’ Bienville sighed. ‘If only we could all boast his natural Parisian style and ease of manner. Look here, I have business with the commissary but I shall be back directly. Go on in. You are reasonably safe, I think. Barrot accompanies her, and that shrivelled old prune of a schoolteacher. Between them they should keep you from harm.’
‘I am comforted.’
Bienville grinned.
‘I shall need to see you tomorrow. There is trouble again between the Choctaw and their Chickasaw neighbours. Have you word of it?’
Auguste shook his head.
‘With the ship come it will not be long before the chiefs start sniffing around,’ Bienville said. ‘Both nations are sure to send deputations. We must be prepared.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Till tomorrow then. And do not think you can slip away the moment my back is turned. I shall return.’
‘Do not hurry on my account.’
‘Trust me, I would take a party any day over an hour pettifogging over specks of flour with the commissary. Hell, I should take a wife.’
‘Come now.’
‘Truly. Any one of them. Even the old schoolteacher, I swear it.’
‘But not Mlle le Vannes?’
Again Bienville grinned.
‘Guichard, you have a disturbingly distrustful nature. You shall find the Mademoiselle as charming an almost-widow as you could hope for. Blue-eyed, plump as a peach and legal owner of a fine indigo plantation. Truly, my friend, I am green with envy. Now, if you will excuse me–’
Auguste bowed again as the commandant hastened from the house, the pink-nosed clerk scurrying behind him. The candles dipped, gold-tipped brushes painting flourishes of gold on the darkness. Then, clamping his hat more tightly beneath his arm, he walked towards the light.
‘
M
lle le Vannes, I would like to introduce you to M. Guichard. M. Guichard is one of the longest-serving of our colonists, is that not right, old boy?’
‘Perhaps.’
There was a silence. Guichard held her fingertips awkwardly, away from his body, and looked about him as though seeking a place to put them down. His tentativeness dismayed her. She wanted him to seize her hand and crush it in his own, to address her vigorously, without hesitation or ambiguity. She wanted him to demand that she raise her head so that he might get a proper look at her. She wanted to disappoint him. Instead she waited, her hand wilting on its wrist, and stared at the crystal buttons that edged his coat. They were fine and bright, like chips of ice. She imagined taking one in her mouth.
‘So. Please.’ The physician, whose name she had already forgotten, cleared his throat purposefully. ‘Mlle le Vannes, sit down.’
‘Thank you.’
Awkwardly she pulled her hand away and sat down, busying herself with her skirts. When Guichard turned away to set his hat upon the table, Vincente observed that the bow securing his queue was lopsided, foolish, one loop of ribbon much larger than the other. He did not turn back. He doesn’t like me, Vincente thought suddenly, and she swallowed. His neck was narrow, burned brown, and his shoulders were sharp beneath the expensive coat, his damaged arm pulling awkwardly at the seam. It was an ugly coat, she thought, absurd in its courtly pretension. It did not even fit him. The cuffs fell over his hands like a child playing at dressing up.
‘M. Guichard knows everything there is to know about Louisiana,’ the physician announced. ‘A proper authority on plants and animals and so forth, if you have an interest in such matters. Used to have an extraordinary garden, full of herbs and whatnot, though that was years ago, of course, in Old Mobile. Do not listen to him, however, when he tries to tell you that the savages know more about medicine than French physicians. I have no desire to be called to your bedside to undo the damage.’
Though Vincente forced something of a smile, Guichard gave no impression of having heard the physician at all. He stood quite still, his hands cupping his hat and his head tilted, as though he listened to something very far away. It was hard to see beneath the coat the extent of his affliction. His fingers looked quite ordinary.
He turned to look at her before she could look away. Flustered, she dropped her head. The tips of her slippers protruded from beneath her skirts. They were the old ones that her mother had threatened to throw away in Paris, but Vincente had wrapped them in paper and hidden them in the bottom of her trunk. She had worn them so often that she could see the shape of her toes in them even when they were empty. The floor of the commandant’s house was of wooden planks, not splintery like the schoolteacher’s, but rubbed to a smooth sheen. The physician’s shoes were shiny too, with bright silver buckles. Guichard’s shoes, by contrast, were almost as worn as hers.
The physician tried again.
‘Of course he’s been here an eternity, haven’t you, old boy? Almost raised by the nation of savages known as the Natchez, though luckily for you, Mam’selle, he lived to tell the tale. People like to claim that the Natchez are the most civilised of the lot because they dress respectably but, my dear, do not be deceived. Last year, when the wife of their chief died of a fever, every one of her retinue was strangled, hung from scaffolds and strangled, so that they might accompany her to the next world. Infants too, a score of ’em, strangled by their own fathers and then trampled underfoot by the coffin-bearers until they were in pieces. Pieces, I tell you.’
‘But that’s horrible.’
‘That’s savages,’ the physician said firmly.
‘The Ouma.’
‘What’s that, old chap?’
‘It was the Ouma with whom I lodged as a boy. Not the Natchez.’
His French had a guttural rasp, as though the words formed not upon his tongue but bubbled up from the back of his throat.
The physician blinked.
‘Is that so? Ah, well, it is all the same to Mlle le Vannes, I imagine. One red man much like another and all that. Ah, excellent, excellent. Drinks. We haven’t seen a vintage this fine in the garrison in months. Mlle le Vannes, will you raise a glass? A toast to new arrivals, then. And Godspeed the ships that bring to us parched colonists the sweet, sweet blessings of French women and French wine.’
The physician laughed and drained his glass, seizing another from the tray before the boy had time to move away. Vincente murmured and set the glass to her lips. Over the rim she saw that, though he stood quite still, against his sides his fingertips tapped restlessly, each one lightly touching the pad of his thumb in sequence as though he counted them.
‘It falls to M. Guichard to make sure that we live in peace with our red neighbours, as far as such a thing is possible,’ the physician declared. ‘Which means he does his damnedest to keep them fighting with one another so that they have neither the men nor the appetite to fight with us! Isn’t that so, M. Guichard?’
‘Something of that kind.’
‘As you can see, Mlle le Vannes, M. Guichard is a man of few words. It is fortunate for him, perhaps, that he has at his disposal so great a host of outlandish languages in which to speak them. Now where has Mme de Boisrenaud got to? She assured me she would be gone only for a moment.’
The physician raised himself up on his tiptoes and strained his fat neck. Vincente was reminded of a dachshund which she had often seen in the Tuileries as a little girl, whose extravagant ambitions with dogs several times its own size caused her nursemaid to snigger and press her red hand over Vincente’s eyes.
‘Can you see the boy? Ah, here he is. I’ll take that, I think. More for you, Guichard? No? You should drink it while you can, old boy. Anything of a decent vintage is gone in the blink of an eye. I’m only glad your savages prefer the hard stuff.’
‘Yours too, of course.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Guichard said nothing but only looked stonily at the physician, who began to splutter.
‘If you accuse my slave of drunkenness, it is a baseless slander. I’d beat her from here to Pensacola for so much as sniffing a cork.’
‘A prudent master.’
‘So which savages
do
you refer to then?’ the physician demanded, gesturing at him with the wine bottle. ‘Come on, man. Spit it out.’
‘It is of no consequence.’
‘On the contrary, if you troubled to say it, I should say it was. Well?’
Guichard was silent. Then he shrugged.
‘I referred to the savages at the garrison,’ he said quietly.
‘The garrison? But there are no red men at the garrison.’
The physician frowned, baffled. Then he tossed back the last traces in his glass and emptied the rest of the bottle into it.