Elisabeth shook herself like a dog, but the Jesuit’s words clung to her, insistent as burrs. It had been evening, Rochon’s last. The men had not yet returned from the fields, and in the yard the shadows stretched their long fingers across the dusty ground. The Jesuit had spoken gently, without emphasis, as though he only reminded her of something she already knew. The shock in her face had made his eyes soften with pity, and she had had to turn away.
‘It has been years,’ she had protested shakily. ‘Six years. How shall she even know?’
‘In Mobile?’
She had been glad of the shadows then, glad of the men clattering up from the fields, the empty commotion that filled the yard. The next morning, as the guides readied the pirogues, Rochon and Elisabeth had walked out to the boundary of the indigo fields. They spoke little, neither wishing to acknowledge the necessity of parting.
‘It looks a fine crop,’ Rochon said, gazing over the sea of green.
‘You say that as though you know what a fine crop would look like.’
Rochon smiled.
‘I shall be very sad to leave you,’ he murmured.
‘I am not worthy of your affection,’ she said, and she thought of the letter and the barrel behind the wood store and the poison in her blood and the urge to tell it rose suddenly up in her, like tears.
‘Nor I yours. But I am very glad of it.’
‘If you knew – oh, Father, I have done such wrongs.’
The words were in her mouth. With her eyes on the ground and her feet moving, she might have allowed them to fall. But he stopped. He stopped and he extended his hands to her and he bid her look at him.
‘Is there something you wish to confess, child?’
And she had looked at his wise, kind face and seen the lines that sketched the shape of a frown around his mouth and the space between his eyebrows, which in the soft, milky light of early morning were no more than faint pencil marks, and she had shaken her head.
Later that morning Rochon had left.
‘Be strong, Elisabeth,’ he had said as he bid her farewell. ‘Think of your husband, of the child in your belly. Think of Marguerite.’
Elisabeth stared at the slate. Then, snatching up the pencil, she drew a firm line through the first and the third line. At the bottom of the slate, in hasty capitals, she printed
RENTRER VITE – LES LÉZARDS MANQUENT NOTRES COURS
She set a slice of cold roasted pumpkin and some cornbread on a plate and took it with the water to the savage. The youth ate and drank slowly, squatting in the shade. When she gave him the slate, his fingers made dark circles on its dusty face.
‘Take this to the girl,’ Elisabeth said in her clumsy Mobilian and he nodded, eager to be off, the sinews in his thighs twitching like the haunches of a deer. He was halfway across the yard when Elisabeth called him back. She held a hairpin in her fingers. Taking the slate from him, she tied the pin to the leather thong that secured the pencil, testing the knot to make sure it held.
‘Go well,’ she murmured in French, and a curl of hair unspooled itself slowly from the smooth cap of her scalp.
It was Rochon who had urged her to sell the slave. Her husband was buried, his remains committed to the earth and his soul to the mercy of God, and what was done was done. She had her unborn child to think of. The presence of Okatomih and the sin in her, swelling beneath her shift, would not ease her widow’s burden; it did no good to keep her. Besides, there was a buyer in the town who had made a good offer, to be paid in Spanish
piastres
.
Elisabeth did not object. She signed her name clumsily, one arm held tight about the curve of her belly. Huddled inside her, the child had become a quiet thing. He seldom moved. They endured together, fists clenched, heads bowed, arms clutched tight around shins. Sometimes, in the dark hours of the night, something stirred inside her and she knew it was not a child that grew in her belly to rip between her thighs in a rush of blood and slime, but desolation.
It was some weeks later that the women of Mobile observed to one another that the slave they called Okatomih was unquestionably with child.
‘They say her time is close,’ Perrine Roussel said to Elisabeth, her eyes round with rapt outrage. ‘Which means it happened under your roof, Elisabeth. Under your very nose. And after all you’d done for that boy. Still, I suppose we must give credit to the degenerate Guichard. In buying the slave he has honoured his obligations and has not tried to deny his part. I hear he wishes the infant properly baptised.’
That afternoon, for the first time since she had buried her husband, Elisabeth went for a walk. The child sat heavily upon the base of her spine as she walked, so that the ache divided her in two. At Auguste’s house on the rue Condé she hesitated. Then she knocked.
There was shock in his face when he came to the door, shock and sorrow and a kind of dread. Then his expression flattened and blanked, and she was looking at nothing.
‘Elisabeth,’ he said.
‘Don’t,’ she said.
He waited.
‘I cannot – I must ask you something. I ask only that you answer truthfully.’
Auguste looked at her and, though his ruined arm hung twisted at his side, his shoulders were square.
‘The child. The slave’s child–’
She broke off, struggling to compose herself. Auguste took a step towards her.
‘No!’ She stepped away from him, her hands trembling. She clasped them together. ‘The child. It is his, isn’t it?
Auguste regarded her, his grave grey eyes holding hers.
‘Well?’
‘No,’ he said very quietly. ‘The child is mine.’
Elisabeth stared at him, disbelief unhooking her ribs. When she shook her head, the ground lurched beneath her feet.
‘No,’ she whispered, her mouth dry. ‘No. You are lying.’
‘The slave’s child is mine,’ he said again and there was no evasion in his eyes, nothing but sorrow and defeat.
She closed her eyes. She was hardly able to breathe.
‘Jean-Claude–’
‘–is innocent in this, whatever else he has done. I am sorry.’
‘No.’ Her eyes snapped open and she shook her head. She shook it again and again, the weight of her head jerking at her neck. ‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do you lie to me? It is his child. I know it is his.’ She was pleading with him now, the desperation wild in her voice.
Auguste pressed his lips together and bowed his head.
‘Do what you must,’ he murmured. ‘There is no punishment in the world too harsh for my offences.’
Taking up her skirts, Elisabeth stumbled blindly from the cabin, wrenching at the clumsy door and lurching up the street. At the corner the wife of the carpenter called out to her in sympathetic greeting, but Elisabeth barely heard it. Her breath came in jagged rasps that screeched like screams in her ears. What terrible thing had she done?
She did not stop running until she reached the wood store.
By the time she saw the slave’s child, saw in the infant face the unmistakable curve of his brow, his smile pressed into the corner of its mouth, by the time she knew for certain, there was no righting it.
A
fter a brief exchange of pleasantries, the meal passed in near silence. She had spread a cloth he had not seen before upon the table, a fine damask with a trim of lace. He ate carefully so that he might not splash it. A storm was coming. Auguste could feel the prickling of it in the soles of his feet. As the light faded, Vincente rose and lit the tallow lamps, setting the dusk to dancing in the darkening corners of the room. The storm was in her too, he could see it in the twitch of her shoulders, the restless fluttering of her hands. She had hardly touched her supper.
He watched as she smoothed the wrinkled cloth, straightened a plate upon the dresser.
‘Come,’ he said gently. ‘Sit with me.’
She sat. Auguste swallowed his last mouthful and, pushing his plate away, smiled up at her. She blinked at him and looked away. Her neck was very white. In the blind dream-warped burrow of the night, she pressed her soft heat against him, her nightdress already raised above her waist, her hands and mouth eager for his. Now those hands lay locked together in her lap and the points of her teeth pressed into the plump spill of her bottom lip. Her back was straight as a cypress. She wore a lace cap, also very white. Only a tendril of hair, escaping its pins to cling to the damp nape of her neck, whispered faintly of abandon.
‘There will be a storm,’ he said.
‘Yes. They said that, at the market.’
The ocean roar of the cicadas swelled in the silence. They were always shrillest before a storm. Auguste listened, straining to pick out the calls of the nightbirds above the clamour of them. At the rue d’Iberville, he had never heard the cicadas. The evenings there had been filled to the brim with words, so many that they tumbled over one another in the effort to be spoken. Auguste had thought that the measure of happiness, the number of words you could share out between you and still not come to the end.
He thought now that he had been mistaken. Several times he had observed Vincente in the marketplace, surrounded by the women of the town, and he had thought of the chief of the Ouma who had asked him once how it was that the French understood one another when, like angry bustards, they squawked all at the same time. It had grieved the chief that the white man wasted words just as he wasted the carefully husbanded resources of the land, neither planting nor tending but only eating and drinking and smoking tobacco as though the earth was not his mother but his slave, his property to do with as he desired. His ships crushed the rivers, his stinks stifled the skies. And yet when the floods came, and the famines, he was angry.
‘A bishop,’ Auguste said suddenly. ‘Do you hear it?’
Vincente looked up, her face creased into the fierce frown of a child. The vehemence of it surprised and stirred him. He smiled again, this time almost tenderly, and immediately her frown deepened, as though their faces tugged at each other with invisible threads. So this is marriage, he thought, and, though the thought startled him, the sensation of it was not entirely unpleasant.
‘A bird,’ he said. ‘Not a cleric. Listen.’
The bird’s song spilled like mercury into the smoky room. He watched her frown falter a little, easing the twin notches between her eyebrows. There was the faintest of hesitations. Then she leaned forward and the notches returned, more deeply etched than before.
‘I want to come with you,’ she said. ‘To the plantation.’
Of course the women would have told her. He thought of them crowding about her at the market, hissing and chattering and choking the earth with their dung.
‘To the plantation,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I do not advise it.’
‘Really? And why is that exactly?’
‘The situation is perilous.’
‘The Lord is with us whithersoever we goest.’
‘The bishops I am familiar with have feathers.’
Vincente flushed.
‘Do not laugh at me. I am not afraid.’
‘Perhaps you should be,’ Auguste said gently. ‘The Chetimachas attack our expeditions and ambush the plantations. You would be safer here.’
‘What about you?’
‘I would be safer here also.’
Vincente hesitated.
‘So you shall stay?’
‘No.’
‘Then you must let me come with you.’
‘I shall not be gone long.’
‘Then I shall be quickly returned to safety.’
Auguste considered his wife, the tips of his forefingers against his lips. There were smudged thumbprints of pink in her habitually pale cheeks.
‘You are determined,’ he said at last. ‘Why is it that you are determined, when there is no sense in it?’
Vincente looked away.
‘There is every sense in it,’ she said. ‘It is my plantation, is it not?’
‘It is.’
‘It belongs to me by law.’
‘That is true.’
‘And we are to live there, are we not?’
Auguste’s mouth twisted a little and his fingers pressed together.
‘Yes.’
‘Then I must come with you. Arrangements must be made. Now, forgive me but it grows late. I am to bed. Goodnight, husband.’
Tipping her chin into the air, Vincente seized the candle in one hand and her skirts in the other and swept away from him towards their chamber. Though it was clear that she intended a display of victory, there was something about the slip of her shoulders that lent her the air of a child dressing up in her mother’s clothes. Again somewhere in the soft parts of him, Auguste felt the bruised press of tenderness.
‘Goodnight, wife.’
He was not sure if he had spoken the words aloud. The curtain to the bedchamber swung loose, obscuring the doorway and setting the lamp on the dresser to shivering. Auguste unfolded his hands. Never before had they spoken to each other so freely and at such length. The flame bent and straightened, exhaling a kinked smear of black smoke as the silence sighed, settling itself once more over the room.
From behind the curtain he could hear the small noises as she readied herself for bed, but he did not go to her. He thought of the darkened bedchamber, the unspoken world beneath the rugs where there were no words, and he knew that for tonight at least that place was lost to him. The words had torn it open, letting in the light. The light was impossible.
A long, low growl of thunder set the heavy air to trembling. Auguste pressed his fingers into the sockets of his eyes. Then, pushing back his chair, he walked slowly across the room to the dresser. Low in its dish, the tallow candle hissed and spat, smearing soot over the rough saucer and painting a second shadow on the wall. Auguste blew it out, then pinched his dampened fingers over the red eye of the wick.
Out in the yard he paused beneath the shelter of the porch, his back against the lintel as the thunder snarled again. Though a faint and twisting draught stirred the very tops of the trees, there was no freshness to the night. It clung to his face, greasy with slime and rot. There was a sudden slash of white light that slit the darkness and then thunder again, no longer a warning but a war cry as the rain hurled itself in great gobbets to the ground.