The leave-taking ceremony was concluded, the preparations almost complete. The chief had repaired to the temple to exhort the savage gods to look favourably upon the expedition and grant it safe passage. A procession of savages accompanied the white men down the hill to the river, stamping their feet and beating drums. It was still early, but the day was already oppressively warm. By the bayou the close-set copse of trees offered no respite but, like a huddle of perspiring men, gave out its own sour-smelling heat.
The boy waited by the copse, half hidden by a brake of cane, watching as the men loaded the last of their supplies. Their faces were scarlet and shiny with sweat and they slapped in vain at the veils of biting insects that hung about their necks. In the muddy shallows the pirogues rocked gently. They were heavily laden, the savages’ deerskins mounded in the bow; inside the crates the chickens squawked, scratching and banging their wings against the wooden sides. The boxes of lead and powder were set with care upon a folded pad of sailcloth so that they might remain dry.
It was time for the party to depart. The commandant called the boy’s name. He did not answer. Instead he watched as an alligator cruised the far side of the river, only its nostrils and its hooded eyes visible above the yellow crust of the water. One of the men had told the boy that to snare human prey, alligators had been known to call out to passers-by in the voice of a child.
The boy did not know whether to believe this or not. On his first day at the garrison at Mobile, he had seen the dog belonging to the commissary bitten by a rattlesnake. The beast did not even live a quarter of an hour, but swelled up so much that it was unable to move and died with a ghastly choking, as if it had swallowed its own tongue. Astounded by the speed of its demise, the boy had regarded its passing less with sympathy than a kind of grisly enthralment, but now, as the men uncoiled the ropes securing the pirogues and with a great deal of shouting and splashing pushed out into the wide stream, he felt a sharp pang of grief for the poor dead creature and his nose prickled. He rubbed it roughly with the back of his hand.
Raising his gun the commandant saluted the village with two volleys of musketry.
Upstream against the current, the pirogues made slow progress. It was several minutes before they reached the bend in the creek and passed out of sight. Behind the boy, high on the hill, dark smoke rose from behind the palisades and smudged the blank sheet of the sky. Calling out to one another in their garbled tongue, the last of the natives turned away from the river and began to climb the path back to the village.
The boy leaned against a thick staff of cane, his fingers seeking out the swollen ridges of its joints. He felt hollow, as though the soft parts of him had been carried away upstream, bundled up with the deerskins and the squawking fowls. On the other side of the creek, the alligator rose again, paused and sank out of sight. The stream smoothed and steadied and continued on its way.
They were gone.
He was all alone, cast adrift among the savages. He spoke not a word of their language. He knew none of their names or whether indeed they possessed any. He knew nothing of where he was, except that the French garrison was eight days’ travel away, through forests and swamps swarming with every kind of terror. He had not the faintest notion when he might see one of his countrymen again.
As he stepped out from the cane brake, the boy trod in a hillock of soft earth and a swarm of red ants spread like a rash across his boots and up over his bare ankles, setting his skin on fire. There were ants inside his boots. As he tugged them off, the boy once again felt the prickle of tears behind his eyes. The missioners claimed that there were savages who strangled their babies before they might be baptised and burned their bodies on the fires in their temples to appease their idols.
His skin burned, but the boy thought of the alligator and dared not rinse his feet in the river. Instead he pulled up a handful of grass and scrubbed at his feet and ankles, pressing down hard to crush the ants that clung on. The sap in the grass stung his inflamed skin and streaked it green. He rubbed earth on the sorest patches. Then wearily, his too-small boots in his hand, he set off barefoot up the path towards the village.
He was twelve years old and a boy no longer.
G
ently, Elisabeth cradled her left hand in her right, stroking the ring’s smooth curve with her thumb. Again the fire caught, the flames licking her ribs with their hot tongues. The impossible absurdity of it stopped the breath in her chest and she hugged herself, her eyes squeezed shut, holding the dizzy tilt of it tight inside her. Had she not, of all of them, been the most distrustful, the only one indifferent to the insinuating drip of hope? Had she not despaired at the empty-headed idiocy of the lot of them, their wilful forgetfulness, the tenacious vigour with which they clung to their fantasies of prosperity and contentment? During those interminable lurching days, when it seemed that the world would be forever water and the ill-tempered priest La Vente limped the decks in search of sin, it was her contempt for her fellow passengers that had sustained her. Contempt and the certainty that, whatever the miseries of the voyage, the fate that awaited them at the end of it would surely be worse.
And yet, and yet. Raising her left hand she gazed at the ring on her finger and then swiftly touched it to her lips, closing her eyes to inhale the secret salty smell of her palm. It had been the order of the Ministry of the Marine that, excepting mealtimes, the girls be confined to their private quarters for the duration of the voyage, so that their virtue might not be corrupted by the coarseness of the ship’s crew and its cargo of young soldiers. When she remembered the darkness and the suffocating smell of them all together, the smell of hair and skin and stale powder and desperate, desiccating monotony, all crated up in damp salted wood, she had to swallow, so unaccustomedly sour was the taste of scorn upon her tongue. There had not been one among them with any book-learning, any scholarly curiosity, nor so much as an ounce of common sense. Closeted together they were as foolish as a coop of clucking chickens.
In the main the chickens had endured the voyage without protest. They had occupied themselves with sewing and tittle-tattle and to Elisabeth’s despair they had chafed against neither. Their tongues moved as deftly and as decoratively as their fingers. As their needles darted and flashed, Levasseur the infantry officer grew broader and braver than any man alive, René Boyer the gunsmith and Alexandre the master joiner more skilful and prosperous. The men’s blank faces were endowed with proud noses, firm chins, kindly blue eyes; their houses were furnished with comforts, their larders with meat and wine and exotic fruits.
At dinner, the chickens clustered around the trader La Sueur, who had been in Louisiana the previous winter, begging him for more details of their establishments and their future situations. The brash trader, long married and the father of five children, had amused himself by ranking the men of the colony according to their physical attributes, his sly allusions causing the chickens to flap and cackle. Elisabeth had observed his manipulations and had felt a flush of angry shame at their suggestibility. It had irked her then that La Sueur thought her no different.
Perhaps she was not so different after all. The thought began wryly, but the joy rose quickly in her and she could not keep it in. She had a sudden urge to laugh out loud, to spin wildly around the narrow room until she was dizzy. Instead she wrapped her arms over her chest, hugging herself tight, her fingertips finding the sharp wings of her shoulder blades, her lips together and her eyes closed, feeling herself swell with the bursting giddy miracle of it.
Was she truly the same person who, in exasperation, had thrown her book to the ground and demanded of the girls to know why, if their situation was so fine and the men of Louisiana so handsome and prosperous, was it that the King himself had been required to purchase them a wife? They had looked at her, then, and the bruised bewilderment in their eyes had made her want to scream.
Later that day Elisabeth had found herself accosted by Marie-Françoise de Boisrenaud, a girl a little older than the rest, who had quickly established herself as cock of the roost. The daughter of a squire from Chantilly, Marie-Françoise was a practical, pale-haired girl who had made it her business to become acquainted with the present situations of all of the bachelors of Louisiana. From an initial catalogue of fifty or sixty eligible men, and taking proper account of prosperity, position, age and health as well as congeniality and a pleasant appearance, she had proceeded to compile a list of the twenty-five she regarded as the colony’s best prospects. Among the chickens she had become known, not without gratitude, as the Governess.
‘We have been sent here to do God’s will,’ Marie-Françoise rebuked Elisabeth, and she raised her voice so that the other girls might be certain to hear her. ‘Do you dare to know better than Our Lord, to tell us what we should hope for?’
‘The Lord may tell you all He pleases,’ Elisabeth had answered, and she had glanced over at the chickens who dropped their eyes hastily and busied themselves with their sewing. ‘I know only that the only proper protection against disappointment is to expect nothing.’
Aside from causing Marie-Françoise’s mouth to pull tight as a stitch, Elisabeth’s words had not the slightest effect. As the weeks lengthened into months, the chickens traded the men like the cards in a game of bassette, snatching them up or frowning over them and fingering them before letting them drop. They mocked Elisabeth for her books and her gloominess, threatening her with the assistant clerk of the King’s storehouse, Grapalière, who was ancient and toothless and, as a result of an accident with a musket, had an iron hook for a right hand.
Elisabeth only shrugged. She did not care if they thought her proud. When at last the interminable voyage reached its end, they would be unloaded like barrels of salt pork and sold, if they were not deemed to have turned, to the highest bidder. If Elisabeth might in time contrive to accept her fate, she for one would not conspire in the preposterous pretence that it would all end happily.
She knew it now, of course, the lunacy of hopefulness, though she dared not submit to it. He possessed more than enough for them both, a sanguinity that was almost carelessness, and the simplicity of it in him took her breath away. It was like a lamp inside him, so that he was always brilliant with it. He dazzled her. That first night, that first perfect night when she was his and he hers, one before God, she had watched him as he slept and she had understood that this would be her part, that she would arch herself about him with her vigilance always, the glass around his flame so that he might burn the brighter. His face had been loose in sleep, like a child’s, his limbs sprawled and his hands curled open upon the sheet. Outside the night had hummed, alive with insects, and it had seemed to Elisabeth that she listened to the singing of her own heart.
Twenty-three girls and he had chosen her. He told her that he had never considered another but she knew it was not so. She remembered him. When they had at last arrived at Mobile, there had been a welcoming party of sorts but, though some of the chickens attempted cheer, the mood was subdued. Fever had struck the ship as it sailed from Havana; some twenty of the soldiers and crewmen on board the
Pélican
were dead. As Elisabeth trailed with the chickens onto the dock, all of them gaunt and several feverish, she noticed him, standing a little way off. The heat was overpowering, the windless air clinging to them like damp cobwebs, but he stood easily, as though he were quite comfortable. She watched as his eyes slid over them one after another, skimming across her and past her without snagging. Then she had only held her head a little higher, swaying on legs rendered unsteady by the shiftless solidity of the earth, and turned away to follow the ragged crocodile of girls to the commandant’s dwelling. These days she tried not to remember it. When the image came to her unbidden, something opened inside her and the depth of it made her dizzy.
She shook her head, swinging her legs to the bare floor. It was late. She should already be dressed. For the first time since she had come to Louisiana, there was a coolness in the air. She took the blanket from the bed and wrapped its weight around her shoulders, burying her face in its coarse weave. It smelled of leather and tobacco and, faintly, of stale wine. As she breathed it in, tasting its distillation in her mouth, her belly tumbled and she clenched her hands into fists, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders until it held her close, its beard-rough lips pressed to the line of her jaw. She closed her eyes, one cold hand pressed tight against the throb of her neck, giving herself up to the lack of him.
A sudden brisk banging at the door caused her to startle. Curling herself into a ball, Elisabeth burrowed into the disordered bed, her nose pressed into the pillow. There was another flurry of knocking, causing the wooden latch to jump in its rest.
‘Elisabeth? Are you there? Elisabeth?’
It was Perrine Roussel, the wife of the carpenter. Elisabeth hugged her knees, her face hidden in the blanket, and waited for her to go away. Despite everything, the chickens still contrived to call round. They peered around her cabin and urged her to join with them in grumbling about the shameful conditions in which they were expected to live. They complained of the mosquitoes, of the inadequate housing, of their husbands and, most of all, of the dearth of proper white flour for bread.
The savages did not grow wheat. The planter Rivard had twice attempted to grow it at his concession at Bayou Saint-Jean but, though the first signs of growth had appeared promising, both times the grain had succumbed to rust in the final weeks of ripening and rotted on the stalk. Few others had followed Rivard’s example. Most of the settlers were soldiers or craftsmen from France’s cities. They possessed little knowledge of farming and less inclination to learn. Not one among them had journeyed halfway across the world to labour in the fields. Besides, the colony lacked tools and oxen. Some of the men raised small gardens behind their cabins as they had done in France, but for everything else they were dependent upon the savages, who had no cows or pigs and made their greasy yellow bread from ground corn. There was no bacon, no fresh pork or beef, only the tough, stringy meat of wild creatures hunted in the forest. As for white flour, that staple of every respectable French home, it was an expensive luxury, available only when the ships brought it three thousand miles across the sea.