At last Auguste leaned forward and cleared his throat.
‘I have spoken to Fuerst. I go tomorrow to the Ouma. Harvest or no, we cannot permit the Chetimachas to trespass onto our lands, to kill our livestock.’
Vincente nodded.
‘What shall you do?’ she asked.
‘There are always Chetimacha at the Ouma village. I shall seek their help in brokering a peace.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that not dangerous?’
‘Perhaps a little.’
Vincente was silent.
‘I am sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I should not have permitted you to come.’
‘You did not. And yet I am here.’
‘Yes.’
The silence stretched out between them. As he looked down at his hands, Vincente scraped back her chair and gathered up the dishes. At the door she paused. He sat perfectly still, his head bent.
‘Be careful,’ she whispered, and she set down the dishes with a bang loud enough to scare off the Devil.
He left before dawn the next morning. It was still night when he rose from bed, and he fumbled for his clothing, stumbling a little as his foot caught in his breeches. Vincente lay in the darkness, listening, as he gathered his pack and took up his musket and tiptoed quietly from the room. She strained for the sound of his feet as he crossed the cabin, but they made no noise on the hard dirt floor. The door to the yard creaked open, its leather hinges protesting against the hour. In the dark hours of the night, he had held her and her skin had clung to his. On impulse, she threw back the covers and hurried across the bedchamber. He did not turn. She wanted to call out to him, but she did not. The door closed, its swollen hem drawing a fan in the dust.
She watched him go from the window. He walked briskly and did not turn round. The men walked behind him like dead men, their eyes half shut. They carried scythes in great baskets over their shoulders. The womenfolk followed them, dinners bundled in shawls. Then the whip cracked, sending up squalls of startled birds as the Negroes were hustled from their enclosure.
They were not the first Negroes Vincente had seen. In the days when they were rich, a cousin of her mother’s had owned a Negro boy. A round-faced cherub with skin the smooth brown of milky chocolate, he had been a favourite with the children. They had petted him, dressing him up in a suit of silk and, around his neck, an ornamental collar with a padlock picked out in gold. It had amused them to take him walking in the gardens on a leash of scarlet leather. Then he had grown and his round face had hardened into angles and he had gone, sold to a merchant in Rouen.
‘Like a bear,’ the cousin had observed sagely when asked her opinion of the matter. ‘Perfectly sweet when a cub and then frankly unsafe.’
The Negroes were not roped together. Led by one of their own and followed by two of the Rhinelanders, whips aloft, they padded in a ragged line across the yard, showing the pale soles of their feet. The palms of their hands were pale too, and the shiny scars that striped their unclothed backs. Otherwise they were quite black. The intensity of their blackness was a shock to which Vincente could not accustom herself.
Then they were gone, and in the sudden hush the forest edged a little closer and the fear rose up in her like heat from the strengthening sun. Fear of the savages, of the Negroes, of the bovine Rhinelander women who looked at her as though they might trample her if she came too close. Fear of the feverish heat and the alligators and the venomous snakes, fear of fever and exhaustion and loneliness and a clutching kind of terror at the prospect of the Rhinelander’s imminent labour. And all the time the persistent dread that Auguste would not come back and there would be nothing left to cling to, nothing at all between her and all the fear in the world.
She was mistress still. She had Fuerst give her the key to the kitchen hut, and when the men were gone she crammed food into the pockets of her apron and took it to the cabin, hiding it behind a big book on the shelf by the door. At night she took it down and ate, hurriedly, blindly, without lighting a lamp. She did not want to see her hands. Sometimes she closed her eyes, squeezing them tight as though even the backs of her eyeballs might push down hard against the emptiness and force it out of her.
There was no key to the windowless cabin where de Chesse had stored his effects. Fuerst was required to break the lock.
‘Most of it he took,’ he said, and he struck the door hard with an axe until it splintered.
Inside, the hut was dim and damp as a church. Apart from the cobwebs, it was mostly empty. But propped in the corner she found a silk carpet only a little eaten about its edges, and a few small items of furniture: a walnut table and a looking glass and a chaise upholstered in stained blue velvet. There were boxes too of linens, grown rather brown.
Vincente carried them into the cabin, setting the table and chair together in one corner, the flyblown looking glass against the wall. Light spilled from it like silver. Then, on her knees, she smoothed the carpet carefully across the hard dirt floor. The silk was cool and soft against the palm of her hand, the blown roses creamy and exquisite against the pale green ground. She lay down and set her cheek against it, and she imagined what the women of Mobile would say when they saw it and whether they would lie on it too, all of them in a row like beans in a pod, and the thought of it was a comfort to her and a torment.
She had not known that ordinary work could be so punishing. Auguste had assured her she would be required to do only as much as was necessary for the subsistence of the settlement, but the drudgery of it was unending. In her head she heard her mother’s appalled protestations at the impropriety of such low work, the disgrace that it brought upon the family, and she hunched her shoulders and wrapped her blistered hands and brought the paddle down upon the unground corn so hard that the kernels spilled from the shallow mortar and made yellow patterns in the dust. Then she cursed Elisabeth Savaret with all her heart, who had lured her here and abandoned her here and would have her die here, crushed by the gruelling toil that was rightfully hers.
At night, though, a ceaseless prickling twitched in her limbs and stung her into an exhausted wakefulness. She lay on the floor then and drew the wives about her for comfort, their faces soft with sympathy and admiration, but the creaks in the cabin walls startled her and she could not hold them steady. Fuerst too seemed possessed of a wariness that was almost agitation. At night he had the men take it in turns to sleep on a deerskin laid out beside the cattle pen. As for the foreman, he slept in the wood store that, set just behind the kitchen hut, was the cabin closest to the forest. He kept the door lashed open so that the pale moonlight fell on his face and drew a line of shadow beneath the musket he laid at his shoulder.
Vincente did not open her Bible. She lay upon the carpet, her eyes closed, flat against the carpet as though the stuffing of her was all leaked out, and she waited for the blind, black hours of night when her hands were no longer hers and could comfort her.
O
n the fifth day, in the sun-drugged hours of the early afternoon, Elisabeth Savaret came back. The men’s dogs slept in the shade of the live oak tree, their tongues hanging from their open mouths, and the cow drowsed in its pen, only occasionally bothering to twitch away the flies that clustered round its eyes. Somewhere Nellie slept too, for her baby had come down, its head hard and heavy between her thighs, and her time was near. The dazed hum of the heat was broken only by the dull clunk of metal against wood.
In the shade of the main cabin, a rag wound around her head, Vincente split watermelons with a field knife. The red juice stained her fingers and her apron was flecked with flat black seeds. Beside her on a great wooden platter, she piled the broken hunks of fruit. Inside the curls of green rind, the white flesh melted into scarlet like bloodstained snow.
She did not see Elisabeth at first, only a chit of a savage girl swinging from the bars of the cow’s pen, her hands reaching out towards the animal. Barely more than an infant, she was calling out to someone in her own tongue.
Vincente’s heart stopped.
‘Get away from those animals, do you hear me?’ she shouted in French, and she brandished her knife above her head. ‘Get away!’
The child turned round, her hand shielding her eyes. Then she climbed off the fence and ran back towards the forest. Vincente blinked dizzily, the knife loose in her hand. All was silent. A fat fly settled on the cut fruit.
Slowly, squinting against the glare, Vincente walked out into the stunned afternoon. She held the knife thrust out before her, the handle clasped in both hands. The heat pressed down on the crown of her head. Beneath the trees and between the mean cabins, the shadows swarmed with the bright heads of spears, the slick black points of poisoned arrows. Her skin was sticky with melon juice. Somewhere in the shade, swollen and stranded, Nellie waited for her baby to come.
The cow jerked up her head and skittered sideways, bumping against the bars. Vincente wheeled around. A savage stood before her, his glossy skin patterned with black marks. The savage child loitered beside him, her tongue caught between her teeth, and a little behind them both there was a white woman, her skin burned brown by the sun, dressed in a much-patched gown of sprigged cotton. Vincente let the knife drop. The woman was old. Her face was lined and her hair, which she wore pulled into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, was streaked with grey. She wore no cap, no stays. When she stepped forward, Vincente saw that she was pregnant.
‘Mme le Vannes,’ she said, and Vincente blinked and hid the field knife in the folds of her apron.
‘I – yes. You startled me.’
‘I am Elisabeth Savaret.’
Vincente said nothing but only stared at Elisabeth, unable to match the woman who stood before her with the Elisabeth Savaret of her imaginings. When she had asked Perrine and Anne and the others, they had sighed and agreed that Elisabeth was proud, that she was vain, that she was selfish. That she had always thought herself too good for the rest of them, that stuffed full with book learning, she knew everything and cared for nothing, nothing, that was, but herself and her ambitious husband. They said that, if it had pleased him, she would willingly have watched them starve. After that, whenever Vincente dreamed of Elisabeth Savaret, she always had a heart-shaped face, wax-smooth like a doll and with a doll’s round eyes and fixed expression. The face of her sister Blondine.
‘My husband is in the fields?’ Elisabeth asked.
‘It is harvest time,’ Vincente replied, a bewildered elation rising in her chest. This women, who was worn and old, her body misshapen with child, this woman was Elisabeth Savaret.
‘And yours? He is there also?’
Vincente stiffened and in the folds of her apron, her hand tightened around the handle of her knife.
‘Your master is away,’ she said sharply. ‘You chose a poor time to run out on us.’
‘Yes. Forgive me.’
‘You must ask the master for forgiveness. In the meantime there is work to be done. The harvest comes in and no one can be spared.’
That night Fuerst slept as usual in the wood store, the musket beneath his shoulder. Some time after midnight, Nellie’s waters broke. By dawn, when her husband came for Vincente, the contractions were coming regularly.
‘Come, please,’ he said in German. ‘It is her first. She is afraid.’
Vincente frowned at the Rhinelander in dismay.
‘Me? But I – surely one of the other women–’
‘They are ignorant. She asks for you.’
In the yard the whip cracked and the dogs set up a frenzy of barking. Vincente swallowed.
‘They will know what to do,’ she said. ‘I – I do not.’
When she turned away, the Rhinelander caught her by the sleeve. She looked at his fingers, at the broken nails. The creases in his skin were black with dirt.
‘Please,’ he stammered and his grip tightened, pinching her skin. ‘Please. I do not know what else to do.’
Nellie lay on a deerskin in the corner of her dark cabin, her eyes round with fright. The pains were coming regularly and she moaned, her head back and her swollen legs straining against the dirt floor. Her knees were parted. Vincente squeezed her eyes shut. She felt sick.
‘Help me,’ Nellie pleaded, gasping for breath. ‘Oh, God in Heaven, help me!’
‘I–’ Vincente pressed her fingers against her temples.
‘Oh, God–’
‘Mme Savaret,’ Vincente said desperately. ‘Mme Savaret shall know what to do.’
She backed away towards the door.
‘Don’t – don’t leave me. The baby – oh, God–’
‘It’s all right. Don’t be afraid,’ Vincente said shrilly, and she ran to the door and flung it open. ‘Everything is going to be all right. Elisabeth!’
She ran to the yard. The savage child stood in the doorway of the kitchen hut, a pile of dirty bowls in her arms.
‘Elisabeth!’
‘She is gone for water, Madame,’ the child said in French.
‘Then fetch her. Now!’
The girl clattered the bowls to the floor and set off across the yard.
‘Tell her Nellie’s baby comes,’ Vincente called after her. ‘Tell her to come quickly.’
Elisabeth did know what to do. She brought brandy and bear fat and bid Vincente have the child boil water and find clean rags. When she slid her hand between the Rhinelander’s thighs, Vincente had to turn away, but Elisabeth did not flinch. She gave Nellie instructions in a low, clear voice that seemed to calm her. Shaky with relief, Vincente clasped the labouring woman’s hand and wiped her brow with a cloth soaked in cool water and tried not to see the streaks of blood that striped the woman’s mottled legs.
It was a long labour but not a difficult one. That night, a little after the men had finished their supper, the child was born. Nellie had long since ceased her hollering and the cabin was hushed, the air hung about with tallow smoke and shadows. Vincente watched as Elisabeth deftly knotted and cut the cord and slapped the infant on the back. The scream was tiny and furious, raw with newness.