Savage Lands (24 page)

He nodded, pulling away a little.

‘And you?’ he asked without looking at her.

‘As you see.’

‘How far along?’

‘Five months, maybe six.’ She smiled despite herself. ‘See how well it goes?’

‘You do look well.’

‘It is a boy, I’m sure of it. He kicks like a cavalryman.’

‘Does he now?’

‘A son,’ she breathed. ‘Oh, my love, imagine it. Our own son.’

Jean-Claude sighed. Then he turned away.

‘Just remember how it has always gone before,’ he said. ‘And spare us that.’

Some nights later she woke. He was not there. Throwing back the rugs, she rose from her bed. In her belly the infant shifted sleepily. She put her hands on the swell of him, feeling the insistence of his knees beneath her skin.

‘Go back to sleep,’ she whispered.

The yard was quite still. Above the dark lace of the trees the moon was nearly full, its white gleam smeared with grey like dirty fingerprints. It cast sharp shadows on the hard earth and frosted the shingled roof of the kitchen hut. Elisabeth leaned against the splintery jamb of the doorway, rubbing the chill from her arms. Somewhere an owl hooted.

He had been restive ever since his return. She had expected it. Every winter he chafed against the fetters of convention and routine, of boredom and idleness. The petty hierarchies and trifling pre-occupations of the town’s inhabitants provoked him to exasperation. Even the companionship of Auguste had proved small consolation for the miseries of the winter months. Without him, Jean-Claude’s imprisonment would weigh upon him unbearably.

All the same it startled her, the turbulence of his repressed vigour, the intensity of his distraction. It crackled in the air around him until he burned like a lamp. No part of him was still. He paced figures of eight in the cabin until she thought she would go mad with it. Even when she begged him to sit, his feet tapped and his fingers drummed the table so forcefully she felt the rattle of it in her teeth. And yet he was not ill-tempered. Sometimes, as she worked, he would steal up behind her and seize her by the waist, laughing as he spun her in a giddy gavotte. When, laughing too, she pulled away from him, he pressed his mouth on hers, his appetite for her as abrupt and immediate as it had been when they first were married.

Elisabeth was grateful. She remembered how he had been before, how he had recoiled from the swell of her, and she was glad of it. But she feared for the child. When he thrust himself inside her she was sure that he would damage the infant, dislodge him. She begged Jean-Claude to be gentle, but the fever was on him and he did not hear her. Afterwards she reached out for him so that she might soothe them both, but he twisted from her embrace, one leg already in his breeches.

He could not be still. And yet he sought no society. He did not go to the tavern. He drank brandy on the yard steps, staring out into the overgrown garden, his boots tapping out a ceaseless rhythm against the rickety boards. The liquor eased the frenzy in him. It helped him sleep.

A breeze stirred the trees, lifting the strings of Elisabeth’s undress. She shivered. Then she turned and went back into the house. The next morning, as she lit the fire for breakfast, he pushed open the door. His face was tight with triumph.

‘Is breakfast ready?’ he asked. ‘I am ravenous.’

Elisabeth set the pot of sagamity on the fire.

‘Soon,’ she said, and she did not look at him.

When he put his arms around her, he smelled of brandy and the brackish salt of the sea. She could feel the energy coming off him like heat. He wrenched at the strings that fastened her bodice, forcing his hand inside to close around her breast. She murmured protestingly, pulled away. When he caught her again, his arms were tighter, his fingers more insistent as he pressed his lips against the nape of her neck, his teeth, crushing her to him. She could feel the hardness of him against her buttocks.

Inside her belly the baby kicked.

‘Not now,’ she muttered, twisting from his embrace.

He held her tighter, his tongue insistent against her ear.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘The porridge will burn.’

His fingers closing like a vice around her jaw, he twisted her face to meet his, his mouth closing over hers, biting at her lips, her tongue. She could hardly breathe. The child turned inside her.

‘Please,’ she whimpered.

He let go of her jaw, moving fractionally away from her. She tried to put her hands to her face but his arm still held her, clamping her arms to her sides. With his free hand he ripped open his breeches, bundled up the loose skirt of her undress. Then, with his arms clasped tight around her ribcage, he drove himself hard inside her, twice, three times, a final juddering thrust. Then he let her go. She staggered forward, clutching at her skirts, at the swell of her belly.

‘There,’ he said. ‘The porridge is hardly yet hot.’

That night and the next she went early to bed, her knees drawn up, the curve of her belly safe inside them. The second night she woke and he was not there. As she had before, she rose and went again to the door. She did not know what drew her, only that she needed to see it, the unruffled still of the night, the silent kitchen hut.

She could not have sworn it was him, not with complete certainty. It was dark, the new moon a lightless bubble rimed with silver. There were other men of his build, his height. It might have been anyone.

She told herself to go back to bed. But she could not move, could not look away. Beside the kitchen hut the figures moved. Then they were still. The night was warm. It vibrated with the songs of the frogs and cicadas, histrionic as a Greek chorus. The figures divided, resolving themselves into two. Then they were gone.

Elisabeth remained there for a long time, staring out into the dark yard. When she breathed in and out, her breathing was almost steady, but there was a hole inside her that she could not fill with breath. She felt as though a part of her had been cut off. Her mind was gone, her heart too. There was no pain, only nothingness. The pain would come, she knew that. Till then, she could only stare into the darkness. She had no notion of what came next.

Time passed. He did not return. The moon was a blur of tarnished silver behind the clouds, the wood store a dark shape like a threat. Something in her chest stretched, tender as an old bruise. Elisabeth straightened up, setting her spine stiff as a broom handle. When she took down a rush light and lit it, her hands were steady. She cupped the flame with her hand, so that the draught would not extinguish it. Then she walked across the yard to the kitchen hut.

The door stuck. Elisabeth had to kick it hard to open it. As greasy yellow light splashed around the hut, Okatomih scrambled groggily to her feet, the deerskin clutched about her. Her face was smudged with sleep. Elisabeth bent down so that the light flared in the hidden area beneath the cooking ledge. The pots were stacked as they always were, covered with a weighted cloth against snakes and venomous spiders. The space was not large enough to serve as a hiding place.

She turned round. The girl watched her. She said nothing. Elisabeth stepped close to her, holding the light up to the girl’s face so that she blinked against the smoke of it. She did not step back. For one wild moment Elisabeth imagined what it might be like to dash the dish of burning oil into that imperious face, the hair shrivelling back from the high brow, filling the air with its acrid stink, the flesh sliding from the blades of her cheekbones. She held the lamp higher. The girl blinked again but did not move. Elisabeth stared into the flame. A plume of black smoke twisted from its frayed yellow tip. She breathed in the meaty smell of the molten fat, the heat of it sharp upon her skin. Then she blew out the light.

Hardly knowing what she was doing, she reached out and closed one hand around the girl’s throat. The slave did not struggle, though her pulse beat like a bird against Elisabeth’s palm. Elisabeth squeezed her fingers, watching the twist in the girl’s face, the bulge of her eyes. A far-off part of her mind wondered if she might be going mad.

‘If you ever so much as look at my husband again, I’ll kill you,’ she said. ‘Do you understand me?’

The girl did not reply. Elisabeth pushed her backwards. The itch in her fingers was overwhelmingly strong. She bit down on her lip, her fingertips pressing down into the pliant muscle, and the stirring in her belly was a kind of lust. A stripe of moonlight lit the slave’s face, her wide-open eyes. There was no fear in them, only a dull resignation. They were the eyes of someone already dead.

‘What am I doing?’ Elisabeth said, and the burst of laughter that broke from her was shrill and sharp. ‘You don’t understand, do you, whore? Not a single fucking word!’

With a disgusted thrust she pushed the girl away. The slave stumbled backwards, striking her head hard against the wall of the hut. Elisabeth snatched up a pot, holding it like a weapon before her, but the slave did not rouse herself in attack. Half crumpled against the wall, she closed her eyes and waited, her only defence one brown hand held up against her bruised neck and one brown forearm like a strap over the curve of her belly.

When at last he came to bed, Elisabeth pretended she was sleeping. He was clumsy from drink, dropping his boots and stumbling over them on his way to bed. When he climbed in beside her, he smelled of liquor and tobacco, of men. He slept heavily, sprawled on his back with his mouth open, one arm thrown wide.

Elisabeth did not sleep.

Later, in that dislocated stretched-out hour when night unhitches itself from time and day is unimaginable, she reached out with her left hand and set it upon his neck. The skin was looser on the muscle than the girl’s, and harsh with stubble. She closed her hand, pressing her fingers into each side of his neck. He did not stir. Her fingers tightened. She could feel the tendons as they shifted and slipped. Then she let go.

It grew light eventually, the first fingers of dawn powdering the darkness a dusty grey. Murmuring in his sleep, he turned towards her. His cheek was crumpled, marked with creases by the tumbled rugs. He looked both very old and very young, like a turtle turned out of its shell. Tears pricked her throat.

Setting her head beside his, she matched the tip of her nose to his, the backs of her fingers light upon his lined cheek. She could hardly bear for him to wake. She might have done it. A little more pressure, just a little more, and she could have held things steady. She could have rewound time. She could have forced back the hands. She might have arranged it right, so that the clock showed always a day in November a little before dawn, when she was his and he was hers, for all eternity.

N
o one thought Auguste would survive the journey. He was feverish, his wounds corrupted and the bone badly broken. He cried out when they lifted him and laid him in the bottom of a pirogue upon a bed of skins and Spanish beard. As they made their way south towards Mobile, the Jesuit, who had learned something of native medicine during his time among the Nassitoches, applied a poultice of the root of the cotton tree to his damaged shoulder and had his boy dribble a hot decoction of china root between his lips to promote sweating.

It had taken all Rochon’s guile and persuasiveness to convince the high
minko
to release the injured man into his care. He had been obliged to remind him several times of the brutal reprisals that had followed the murder of the French missionary Saint-Cosmé by the Chitimacha ten years before, and the perpetual state of war that had since blighted that once-great savage nation. As for the ambush, he pledged an oath in God that the French commandant would not rest until the agitators were uncovered and turned over to the Chickasaw for punishment. Thus would the two nations be reconciled, drawing their alliance afresh in the blood of a common foe.

The priests at the seminary in Quebec, who some fifteen years before had struggled vainly to contain their pupil’s merriness, would surely have been startled to observe him possessed of such sombre authority as he displayed before the elders of the Chickasaw, but then a man may find himself possessed of considerable gravity when he holds the life of another in his hands. The high
minko
, mistrustful of the Jesuit but more fearful of plunging the Chickasaw once more into a bloody war with France and all her savage allies, reluctantly concurred. He promised a pitiless revenge if the white man failed him.

Their course to the settlement was a straightforward one, for the upper reaches of the Mobile River would bear them directly to the coast. Still, it was a perilous journey. The winter had been wet and the river was unruly, roaring into unexpected rapids and rolling with rotted trees. They could not be certain that the Chickasaw did not double-cross them. They dared not hunt, or light a fire, or make camp in the open spaces by the river. Nor did they consider it prudent to take refuge with the Choctaw. Instead they travelled at night, risking the treacheries of the stream so that they might evade discovery, and when daylight came they set their
baires
in the tangled confusion of deep forest, always posting one of their number as a sentry to keep watch.

As the days passed, Auguste grew hectic with delirium. His dreams pitched and plunged on the black water and in the heat of fever they were thick with the bodies of the dead and dying, their skulls striking dully against the hull of the pirogue, their nails scoring its bark. He saw pale fingers that reached up from the depths to pluck at him and woke screaming to the ministrations of the boy, who closed his hand over Auguste’s mouth and hissed at him to hold his tongue.

It took thirteen nights to gain the boundary of the settlement. By then Auguste’s fever was broken and he was quiet, his breathing weak but steady. As soon he was able, Rochon sent word to the commandant only to discover that the Sieur had been summoned to the Spanish fort at Pensacola on a matter of urgency and was not expected back for some days. The Jesuit had been away from the settlement for some years, but he had not forgotten the town’s aptitude for intrigue and alarmism. Informing the commissary only that he had arrived as instructed, he returned his patient under cover of darkness to his own house on the rue Condé, taking care to promise Auguste’s slave recompense if she kept her master’s presence there a secret.