Savage Lands (36 page)

‘
Mon Dieu
, Guichard, enough of this nonsense. You are not yet so much of a native you cannot address us in ordinary French. Now, it is time I went in search of sustenance and the elusive Mme de Boisrenaud. You will excuse us, I’m sure. Mlle le Vannes, would you accompany me to supper?’

Vincente hesitated. When Guichard said nothing, she took the physician’s proffered arm and allowed the little man to help her to her feet.

‘No,’ Guichard said abruptly. Startled, Vincente turned, and their eyes met. His were the grey-green of the Mobile River. She looked away. ‘You go on, Barrot. I shall escort Mlle le Vannes to the tables presently.’

‘Well, if the fair lady is content to wait a little. I must say, the spread looks very fine.’ Barrot licked his lips. His round eyes greedily followed the dishes of food as they were carried through the room, the aroma of roasted meat fattening the air. ‘Mam’selle?’

Vincente blinked.

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

‘Excellent. Good. Well, very good then.’

The physician sprang away from them as if released by a catch. Vincente shifted awkwardly. She could feel his gaze upon her. She did not know where to set her own.

‘So.’

‘So.’

There was laughter from the far end of the room and the clatter of forks. Vincente examined her wine glass.

‘You are hungry?’ Guichard asked.

The emptiness in her stomach curled tight as a walnut.

‘No. Thank you.’

There was a long pause.

‘You are not long arrived,’ he said.

‘I – I have been here twenty-three days.’

‘How do you find it?’

Vincente stared at him. She wanted to laugh, to scream, to beat him with her fists. She wanted to thrust the engraving under the nose of this impassive man and demand to know what lies there were that that devil Mr Law had not told. She wanted him to tell her how to endure such a place, the fear and the squalor and the grind of it, the heat and the swamps and the grim austerity, the snide disparagements and petty thefts of the schoolteacher, the spiders and the alligators and the snakes and the tormenting mosquitoes, the coarse, oily slabs that passed for bread and milk that cost fifty
sols
a jug, the whispers and the slid-away stares of the Salpétrière girls, the rough men and the whores and the half-naked savages and the soldiers so drunk that they fell against you in the street, the boils and the sores that would not heal, the cabin with its straw mattress that would hardly have sufficed for a shepherd, the sun that beat down so powerfully at midday that it could strike a man dead, the savages with their tattoos and their devilish magic and their taste for human flesh.

What kind of a deal had her mother done with the Devil, could he tell her that? To send her to a place where the church was no better than a byre for cattle and the chaplain, God’s agent on earth, a lascivious drunkard who had fled France to avoid punishment for his disorderly life and who, since arriving in Louisiana, had seduced a woman while hearing her confession and fathered a child? What was the enormity of her offence that she, who had endeavoured always to live an upright and pious life, must be discarded in such a place, from which even God averted His face?

And where was it, she wanted to plead with him, where had they hidden the magical land they talked of in Paris, where the savages read Latin and crowded the elegant churches, where the meat cast itself onto a man’s plate and the savage so venerated the Frenchman that he made of himself a willing slave? Where were the noble colonists, carving a paradise from the virgin soil? She had found only a midden, a foul dustheap where villains and rogues might be thrown to rot. Every day she had thought that she must die of it. They were dying everywhere, the coffins piled up like flour crates, except that there was no flour, only the vile pap of the savages, and no more coffins either, so that in the shallow, uncovered trenches, hands and feet poked mud-stained from the ill-wrapped winding sheets.

She swallowed.

‘It is not like Paris,’ she said.

‘I have never been to Paris.’

Vincente waited for him to say something more, but he only stood there. He made no attempt to set her at her ease. She wanted to seize him by the arm, to demand his attention. She wanted to run from the room.

Instead she stared at her feet. It defeated her, how it was possible to converse in the ordinary way with a man who had lived among savages, a man who had taken a savage woman in shameless concubinage and fathered a half-red bastard whom he had sold for profit. To Vincente’s disgust, the schoolteacher had reported his history as though it was hardly a scandal. Worse, she had rebuked Vincente for her repugnance. Auguste Guichard was a sober man, she had said sharply, able to support a wife in reasonable circumstances, and well regarded by the commandant. Vincente would be fortunate to make such a marriage and, without the schoolteacher’s considerable influence, would doubtless have fared much worse. Louisiana, if she had not noticed, was not Paris. In Louisiana an almost-widow was in no position to be particular.

The next day, and in the days that followed, the schoolteacher had been cold with her, speaking to her only when necessary, and declaring her spoiled and perverse. Vincente wept as she crouched in the kitchen hut at night. She would rather die than marry an unvirtuous man, she told herself, and her tears mingled with the handfuls of unknown, uncooked food that she crammed blindly into her mouth. It was to be another three days before she had finally relented. By then she had been in Louisiana long enough to learn that French goods, however badly broken or soiled, still exceeded the means of most settlers.

‘So,’ she said at last. ‘You seek a wife.’

‘Yes.’

‘Because of the plantation?’

If he was perturbed by her candour, he did not show it.

‘The plantation is a good one. But there is no want of good land in Louisiana.’

‘Merely a want of marriageable women.’

‘Indeed.’

There was another long silence. He studied her thoughtfully, without embarrassment. Vincente flushed and looked away, but the knot in her chest loosed a little. There was something about the gravity of him that settled her. He was not a man who would be made a fool of.

‘And you?’ he asked quietly. ‘You seek a husband?’

‘I seek to do God’s will.’

The words came out bunched up, like too-tight stitches. The flush in her neck deepened. He regarded her steadily and said nothing. She swallowed.

‘I – yes,’ she said. ‘I seek a husband.’

There was a long pause. Vincente watched as a boy carried a large milk jelly to the supper tables, its pale flesh quivering. She had always abhorred milk jelly.

‘I was born in La Rochelle to Auguste Guichard, docker,’ he said. ‘I am employed as a trader and emissary for the Mississippi Company, which pays me an annual subsidy of eighty
livres
. I am the owner of a single-storey house on the rue Dugué and an Indian slave of the Colapissas tribe. I am in good health. Might I call on you?’

Across the room a woman in a dark red dress raised a spoon and plunged it into the milk jelly. Cut low at the front to expose the woman’s ample breasts, the dress was trimmed with golden ribbon that had begun to unravel a little. Her mouth was wide with dark red paint, and she wore a yellow feather in her piled-up hair. The physician stood very close to her, paddling her plump arm with his fingers.

Vincente pressed her lips together.

‘In Paris I wanted to enter the convent.’

‘But you did not.’

‘My mother would not permit it.’

‘She wished to see you married?’

‘She wished to profit from the sale of a daughter into marriage. My mother was very fond of money.’

‘Your mother is dead?’

‘No.’

‘M. de Chesse is dead. Your mother’s arrangement is no longer binding.’

‘But I am here. The law says I am not permitted to leave.’

‘There shall be a convent here too. The commandant must have a hospital for his New Orleans, a school.’

‘How soon?’

‘Five years perhaps.’

‘Five years is too long.’

‘Then you must make the best of it.’

Vincente looked at him. He held her gaze. Then she looked away. The supper tables were strewn with half-eaten dishes, the hollowed-out carcasses of roasted birds. The craving was sudden and violent.

‘Very well,’ she said quickly. ‘You may call for me. Now please, I should like you to find me the schoolteacher. I have to go home.’

S
eventeen days later the priest du Mesnil married Vincente le Vannes and Auguste Guichard in a brief ceremony in the tiny unadorned church of the garrison. Vincente wore the mantua of dove-grey silk trimmed with silver lace chosen by her mother, and her old slippers. The dress was uncomfortably tight beneath her arms and the sole of her left slipper had come loose, so that the sharp point of a tack nudged her big toe. The governor, who had promised to attend, had been called away to Pensacola on urgent business and sent his apologies. In his place the schoolteacher and old Jean Alexandre, the master joiner, stood as witnesses. The priest was a wan old man, with brown wrinkles and a wisp of a beard on his tapered chin. He put Vincente in mind of a turnip. When he required her to speak her pledge, she felt the jab of her sister’s furtive elbow in her ribs and the fear of what was to come dried the spit in her mouth, so that the words came out gluey and stuck together.

Afterwards there was a brief celebration at the house of the schoolmistress, attended by a handful of guests. Vincente, who for the previous days had been kept under the close surveillance of the schoolmistress, recognised only one or two of them. They shook her hand, regarding her with ill-disguised curiosity. When they left she went with her new husband to her new home.

Auguste’s house was a low wooden building thatched with cypress that opened directly onto the rue Dugué, a narrow lane towards the rear of the settlement. Like all of the houses in the colony, it was dominated by a single simply furnished room with a fireplace but, unlike the schoolteacher’s cabin, this room was long and reasonably broad. It was adjoined by two smaller rooms, one leading into the next so that one was required to pass through one to reach the other. Though it was simple, it was not so ill-built as many of its neighbours. Its walls were whitewashed with an approximation of lime and the floor was laid with wooden planks. At the rear it boasted a wide porch that ran the length of the cabin and a sandy yard with a small vegetable patch staked around with canes.

Someone had brought her boxes from the schoolteacher’s house. The trunk containing her trousseau had been placed in the alcove of the smaller of the two bedchambers, its leather top soiled and greasy against the clean white wall. She did not open it. Instead she walked restlessly from room to room. There was nowhere of comfort to sit. In her head she placed her mother’s settle, with its needlepoint pattern of unicorns in a forest of emerald leaves, in front of the fireplace. As a child Vincente had crouched beside it, the silk of the stitches soft against her cheek, and pretended herself into its green depths, her legs astride a unicorn and her hair streaming out behind her like a flag. She had begged her father not to sell it when they were obliged to move the first time. Her mother had said it displayed a peasant’s taste to prefer the settle over the Gobelins cabriole chair, but the chair had only pink roses and ribbons on it. Pink roses and ribbons would not carry you anywhere.

That night Vincente went to bed alone. Some time later he came to her. She had known he would come. Still, when he slid into the bed beside her and lifted her skirt and she felt the graze of him against her flesh, she had to bite her lip to stop herself from screaming. She lay stiffly on her back, her arms at her sides and her eyes squeezed shut, as he rubbed and pressed her flesh with his hands. Its compliance disgusted her, the thick dough of it coating her bones. His mouth was wet and hot, and the flickering slime of his tongue unspeakable. He groaned and she turned her face from him, her mouth in a tight knot, waiting for it to end. When he entered her, it was the shock as much as the pain of it that caused her to cry out.

When she woke the next morning, there was dried blood on her thighs and upon her petticoats. She bent her head over her breakfast and could not look at him. When he asked if all was to her liking, the sound of his voice caused her skin to burn with mortification. She answered him in monosyllables. When at last he bid her goodbye, passing his hand lightly over her shoulder as he passed, she flinched at the touch of him, sickened with distaste and with shame.

That night, he came to her again. She wanted to weep, to scream, to take up the musket that stood propped and ready behind the door and thrust the barrel hard into his chest. Instead she closed her eyes, digging her nails hard into her clenched palms, and in the darkness all her disgust and disappointment, all of her wretchedness, hardened inside her until she could hardly breathe. At that moment she hated him so utterly, with such certainty and strength, that there was a kind of triumph in it.

Knees locked and head wrenched to one side, she stiffened herself against him, the soft, hidden parts all stone. She did not move as he pressed himself against the pliancy of her breasts, her belly. If he dared trespass upon her again, she would grind him like corn between her bones.

He covered her mouth with his. She clenched her jaw, locking her teeth against him. His mouth slid over the hard curve of her chin and found her neck. His breath was hot, his tongue urgent. His fingers closed around her breast. She ground herself down, down into the centre of herself, where the hatred was fiercest. She wanted him to die.

And then he thrust himself inside her. This time the pain was sharper. The force of it sprung a lock deep in her belly. Despite herself, she arched against him, her head thrown back, the cry caught in her throat. For that moment, adrift in the thick, hot darkness, she was free of him. The man who lay upon her was not M. Guichard, husband and employee of the Mississippi Company. He was not even a man. He was the darkness, the night made flesh, turning her own flesh inside out. In the astonishing pleasure of it, she forgot him. She strained only towards herself, towards the point of light that was release. When it came, she cried out and dug her fingers hard into his back.