Savage Lands (2 page)

‘Elisabeth!’

Elisabeth set her palms flat on the desk. There was an ink stain on the longest finger of her right hand, a pattern of freckles on the back of her left like the five on a die. Her hands at least she might take with her. She closed her eyes. Then she lowered her head and set her cheek upon the desk, inhaling its faint smells of old varnish and ink powder. The King would buy her books from henceforth. The arrangements had been brokered by the bishop, whose diocese of Quebec had recently been extended to contain the new settlement in Louisiana. In addition to her trousseau, each girl would receive a small stipend from His Majesty’s Ministry of the Marine to support her until she was married, for a period not to exceed one year. Deseluse considered the bargain to be more than reasonable. There were perhaps one hundred unmarried men in Louisiana, many in a position to support a wife. The girls would have their pick of them.

Downstairs a door slammed.

‘For the love of peace, Niece, must I shout myself hoarse?’

Without opening her eyes, Elisabeth raised her head a little. Her nose brushed the desk as, very lightly, she pressed her lips against its waxy surface. Then, unsettled by her own foolishness, she rose and walked quickly across the room. She did not turn round as she closed the door behind her and descended the stairs towards her aunt.

Deseluse had been late. As her aunt hastened to greet him, her hands smoothing invisible creases from her skirts, Elisabeth watched the dark shape of his carriage beyond the swirled glass of the windows, heard the impatient jangle and slap of a horse shifting in its traces, the raised voice of a man objecting angrily to the obstruction. The afternoon had darkened, though it was hardly three o’clock, and the lamps were already lit, bright as coins in their buttery brass sconces. In their glow the long polished counter gleamed like a thoroughbred. Elisabeth leaned against the brass measure that ran the length of the counter, feeling its sharp edge press against her belly.

She had loved this shop when first she had come to live here. Accustomed to the frugal plainness of her father’s home, she had thought herself awoken in a jewel box. She had gazed in wonder as her aunt took down the heavy bolts of silk and velvet and gossamer mousseline, billowing them out so that her customers might appreciate their fineness, the grace of their fall. Along one wall of the shop were tiny drawers containing buttons of every shape and hue, buttons of shell and bone and polished metal and every shade of coloured glass that flashed like firecrackers when you held them in the light. She had not known there were so many colours in the world. Sometimes, when she was supposed to be working on her sewing, she had crept into the shop and hidden beneath the counter, aching to dip her hands into the rattling drawers of buttons and throw them into the air, to pull great spools of colour from the reels of ribbons and trimmings and threads so that she might fill the air with their brilliant patterns. She had not thought then that it was possible to be oppressed by the ceaseless cram of colour and stuff, that sometimes, when the day was ended, she would desire only to slip into the lane behind the shop and tip her head back, restored to herself by the grimy grey pallor of approaching dusk.

‘Elisabeth, my dear.’

Plomier Deseluse stepped into the shop, shaking the wet from his shoulders like a dog. His wig, bulky and horned in the old-fashioned style, glinted with rain. Elisabeth bobbed a curtsy, inclining her head.

‘Sir.’

‘Come out from behind there and let me kiss you. It is not every day that I despatch a ward of mine to be married.’

Elisabeth’s smile stiffened as, obediently, she stepped out into the shop and allowed her godfather to embrace her. He smelled of claret and wet wool.

‘Officially I suppose you are now a ward of the King or some such, but we should not let such formalities prevent a fond farewell.’ He took a large handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose loudly into it. ‘This is your box?’ Leaning out into the damp lane, he gestured at the coachman to load the trunk onto the back of the carriage. When the door clicked shut behind him he shivered. ‘Wretched miserable weather.’

‘Please, come warm yourself by the fire,’ Elisabeth’s aunt said hastily. ‘May I bring you some tea? A little port wine?’

Deseluse shook his head.

‘We should leave directly.’ He nodded at Elisabeth. ‘You are ready?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then let us be off. The roads are hardly safe in darkness.’ He bowed to Elisabeth’s aunt. ‘Good day, Madame. My wife wished me to tell you that she shall call on you tomorrow. It seems a woman can never have enough dresses.’

Elisabeth’s aunt bared her teeth in a smile. Her teeth were yellow, a slightly darker shade than her complexion.

‘I hope, sir, that you too shall come back and see us, though Elisabeth is gone. We should be most obliged.’

‘Yes, yes, well, I am sure,’ Deseluse said and he gave his shoulders another brisk shake. ‘Now, Elisabeth, you are ready?’

Elisabeth looked at the smooth gleam of the counter, at the bolts of cloth stacked on their deep shelves, and she thought of the long afternoons when she had thought she might die of the dullness of it. On the wall her shears hung from their blue ribbon, their blades slightly parted. Her fingers twined together, the tips hard against the points of her knuckles.

‘Come along, now,’ urged her aunt.

Slowly Elisabeth turned. The door was open and outside the rain flurried in petulant squalls. Pulling up the hood of her cape, she touched her lips to her aunt’s yellow cheek.

‘Godspeed, Niece, and may God bless you.’

‘Farewell, Aunt.’

‘Write and tell us how you find things. Your cousins shall be curious. Louisiana. Imagine.’

‘Imagine,’ Elisabeth echoed, and she rolled up her mind like a length of ribbon so that she might not.

Of the twenty-three girls, seventeen would be travelling from Paris. Some of the girls had connections to the convents and missions of Paris; others, like Elisabeth, had been proposed to the bishop by patrons of his acquaintance. Twenty-three girls between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, girls of high moral character, not all of them well-born, but all raised in virtue and in piety, fine stock from which to breed a new France in the New World.

Twenty-three girls who might otherwise never be wed.

She knew only that the men of Louisiana were mostly soldiers or civilian officials in the pay of the King. Some were Canadian, the rest French. One of these men would become her husband. She had signed a contract to make it so. For fifteen
sols
a day and a trunk of linen and lace, she had sold herself into exile, property of the King of France until, in a savage land on the other side of the world, a man she had never met might take her in marriage, a man of whom she knew nothing, not even his name.

If such a fate was preferable to the future that had beckoned her in Saint-Denis, married according to the arrangements of her aunt or confined to repeat forever the same dreary day behind the counter of the mercer’s shop, there was poor comfort in it. It was miserable to be a grown woman, more miserable still to be a grown woman with neither the funds nor the affections a grown woman must have at her disposal if she was to contrive her own future. As a child Elisabeth had liked to lie on her belly beneath the table in the kitchen, a book on the floor before her. It was warm in the kitchen and friendly. She had lain beneath the table and the words in the book and the hiss of the fire and the grunts and slaps above her as Madeleine kneaded the dough for bread had wrapped themselves around her like a blanket, muffling time. When it was dinner the old servant had been obliged to bend over, her breath coming in short puffs as she threatened to sweep Elisabeth from her hiding place with her sharp-bristled broom. Elisabeth had laughed then and tickled Madeleine behind her fat knees and thought how, when she was a woman, she would make her home under a table where the world was all stories and swollen ankles.

Then her father had died and Madeleine had gone and Elisabeth had been sent to live with her father’s sister in Saint-Denis. In her aunt’s house there were boys and wooden crates under the kitchen table where her aunt kept the china, wrapped carefully against breakage. Elisabeth was ten then and hardly a girl at all. Her aunt required her to work in the shop during the day, or to help with the house. Elisabeth read at night beneath a candle that guttered in the midnight draught from the window. Sometimes, when she lay down to sleep, the night sky had already begun to curl up at the edges, exposing the grey-pink linings of the day, and she could hear the heavy wheels of the vegetable wagons as they rumbled down the lane. Her aunt complained about the candles and rebuked Elisabeth for yawning in the shop, but the old woman was weary too and her heart was not in it.

A husband was another matter. When she was married, Elisabeth thought, even the nights would not be her own.

The box was large and flat, tied about with string. At his master’s instruction, the coachman set it on the table in the main parlour of the coaching inn. Though the taverner had informed them that several of the other girls were already arrived, the room was empty and ill-lit. The fire in the grate smoked and beneath the choke of it the inn smelled strongly of soup and spilled brandy.

‘Well, go on then,’ Deseluse said, his spirits somewhat restored by the arrival of a large glass of Madeira wine. ‘Open it.’

Elisabeth hesitated.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Proof if any was needed that no one ever learned wisdom from reading books,’ the merchant observed drily to the taverner, and he pressed a coin into the man’s palm. ‘Why don’t you open it, my dear, and see for yourself?’

Elisabeth did as she was told, lifting the lid from the wooden box. The silk inside was a milky green, the green of the tiny jade tiger that the bookseller kept on his desk in the shop behind the cathedral. The tiger had been brought from the Orient by the bookseller’s brother, against its will Elisabeth supposed, for its curiously human face was contorted into a furious scowl. She would never again enter that shop, she thought suddenly, never again hear the arthritic jangle of the bell over the door as it opened or breathe in the smell of dust and leather and patent medicines that caused her nose to wrinkle and her heart to lift, and she fumbled with the box, striking her wrist painfully against its sharp edge.

‘Take it out,’ her godfather urged, and he leaned into the box and scooped clouds of green into her arms. The quilt spilled from her embrace to sweep the floor, the cool silk heavy with feathers. The taverner whistled.

‘Goose,’ Deseluse said. ‘From the Périgord. The finest down in all of France.’

Elisabeth stroked the quilt and the heaviness of it was like the heaviness in her chest.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘A wedding present,’ he said. ‘With a good wife beside him and a good quilt on top of him, a man may sleep like a king.’

‘Better still the other way around,’ the taverner rejoined with a leer that, at the merchant’s frown, he quickly adjusted to deference. ‘May I fetch you another glass of that, sir?’

When the taverner was gone, Deseluse took the quilt from Elisabeth and laid it carefully across the back of a wooden settle.

‘There is something else in the box too. Something I was given that I thought might amuse you. Here, let me.’ He reached into the crate and drew out three heavy volumes bound in tooled leather. ‘Handsome bindings. Worth a few
livres
I shouldn’t wonder.’

Elisabeth’s hands reached out like a beggar’s.

‘For me?’

‘Well, they are not for that impudent taverner, that is certain!’ He turned the top volume on its side so that he could read the spine. ‘
Essais Volume I
by Michel de Montaigne. With two and three to follow, if you have appetite enough for them.’

Elisabeth gasped as, without ceremony, he hefted the three books into her arms. Montaigne’s
Attempts
. Her father had spoken to her of Montaigne, had called him one of the great sages of the modern world, and it had immediately intrigued her, that a man of eminence would label his life’s work so.

‘Attempts!’ Deseluse declared, shaking his head. ‘It would appear that Sieur de Montaigne had a thing or two to learn about salesmanship.’

But Elisabeth did not laugh.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered and her voice shook a little. ‘I – I don’t know what to say.’

‘Heavens, my dear, they are only books. Thank you will do very well.’

Much later, after supper when at last she was able to escape to her room, Elisabeth opened the first volume. The pages were uncut, the book folded in on itself like a secret. Elisabeth ran a finger over the inked lettering of the frontispiece and the urge to cut the pages was like a stitch in her side. But she did not. She thought of the other girls in the parlour and she twisted, constrained even in recollection by the sticky, stifling bounds of their obedient inconsequentiality, and she told herself – not yet.

All through the months of waiting in Rochefort, when the war with the English necessitated delay upon delay and she thought she might die of the other girls and their prattle, she had not succumbed. The volumes remained in her trunk uncut. Sometimes at night, for comfort, she took them onto her lap, stroking the leather bindings, running her finger over the fine gilded lettering. On the voyage, perhaps, if it was bad and she could not endure it, perhaps then she might permit herself the first chapters. A mouthful or two, just enough to sustain her.

She would keep the rest for Louisiana.

Now, the wind-fattened sails bulged contentedly as the ship traced a wide arc away from land. The dark stain of the sea widened and spread. Far off on the horizon, the port stretched narrow, no more than a ravelled thread hemming the sky before it pulled tight. Then it was gone.