Savage Lands (42 page)

Auguste extended his hand, feeling the slap-sting of water against his palm. He wondered if Vincente slept, her face pressed against the pillow, the sticky click of her breathing catching in her throat. The rain hammered on the earth, and when the lightning came, it froze the night into shattered sheets of glass. Did it rain one hundred leagues north, on a bluff above the Mississippi River? Did she lie in the arms of her Rhinelander as the yellow waters rose, washed clean of anger and of grief? Or did she run the tips of her fingers over the stumps and loops of his clumsy script and think –
today
?

The rain was easing, the storm rolling out to sea. Above the trees a few stars shivered dew-like in the clearing sky. She was his wife, this stranger whom he reached out to in the other-world of the night. He would take her with him. It would alter things, it would surely alter things, but it would keep him steady. If the worst was to come, she would have to know it also. They would know it together.

He turned and went back into the cabin. In the darkness the hulk of the table was heavy and unfamiliar. He had grown almost accustomed to it, the small changes to the place that presented themselves when he opened the door. A shawl of soft green wool across the back of the hewn-pine bench. A linen towel by the washstand. A woven spread across the bed, trimmed with silk ribbon. Her chest was a kind of magic box, ever-yielding up new treasures of a kind he had never seen before. The day before he had found beside the bed a small stool with curved mahogany legs. On its seat, picked out in needlepoint, was a posy of spring flowers, tied with a silk ribbon.

In the bedchamber he peeled off his wet clothes and stood shivering beside the bed. She lay curled like a crayfish, the rugs thrown off and one pale foot thrust out, suspended in the darkness. Gently he eased it back. She murmured in her sleep, throwing out an arm towards him. He sat, absently brushing away the scattered crumbs that clung to the soles of his bare feet, and slid into bed beside her, cupping her warm hand between his cool ones.

In the darkness it was simple.

T
he port at Mobile was clamorous, a jostle of noise and activity. A sloop had just docked and men shouted to one another as the sails were brought down and ropes properly secured. Men crowded together on the narrow deck, sun-blistered and unkempt, their heads low. There were women too and children, thin faces half hidden by the confusion of crates and ropes and ragged clothing heaped up around them.

Standing alongside the Company vessel that would take them as far as New Orleans, Vincente watched as her husband made the final arrangements for the safe embarkation of their boxes. They were not the only passengers bound for New Orleans. A gentleman come from Picardy by the name of M. de la Houssaye was to join them, along with several men he had brought from France, and, under the close supervision of a red-faced foreman, several rough-looking labourers. She had heard that they were to be taken to the de Catillon concession, situated only a day’s travel beyond their own. Even she had heard of the de Catillon brothers, probably the wealthiest financiers in Paris.

‘My daughter’s neighbours,’ she heard her mother say with satisfaction, and she shook herself hard, like a wet dog.

There appeared to be some confusion about the manner in which the luggage might be stowed aboard. Auguste was irked, she could see it in the twist of his bad shoulder. But he did not raise his voice to the savage as the other men did, hardening the consonants until the words bristled and the spittle flew from their mouths. He did not gesticulate with his fists, rolling his eyes heavenward. He spoke slowly, his mouth rolling easily over the awkward syllables of their strange tongue. When they spoke, he was silent, attentive, as though he conversed with equals.

It was a mortification to her, the differences in him.

‘All of our husbands,’ the wives of Mobile often said. ‘Except for yours.’

‘I know!’ she declared then, rolling her eyes in mock despair, but still the breach opened up between them, cutting her adrift. Their husbands did not speak the savage languages. They were carpenters and gunsmiths and taverners. Even as she recoiled against their coarseness, Vincente frowned at her own husband, wishing him more like them. Meanwhile, the women called him the white savage and made jokes about warpaint and about the bones of his deceased ancestors, which Yvonne Lereg liked to imagine he kept in a pot in the kitchen hut.

‘Make sure it is truly deer bones that slave of yours puts in the soup,’ she giggled, and Vincente laughed with the others and wrapped her arms around her belly and did not know which she wished more, that Yvonne Lereg loved her or that Yvonne Lereg was dead.

‘A fine specimen.’

Vincente turned. The physician Barrot stood beside her, gesturing at the sloop where a boy was trying to coax a large bay horse down the narrow gangplank. The animal’s flanks were scummed with foam, its eyes wild as it thrashed and danced, twisting away from the rope.

‘You would think it glad of dry land,’ Vincente said.

‘Dry land? In Louisiana?’ The physician chuckled, his jowls shuddering above his neckcloth. ‘I admire your optimism.’

On the gangplank the horse stretched its throat and neighed, trumpeting its distress. There was a clattering and shouts of warning as, its front legs pawing at the air, it pulled free of the boy and skittered wildly onto the dock. Men ran to grab it, clustering about the creature and reaching up to restrain it. It neighed again, its eyes rolling in its head. On the deck the men and women waited, huddled in uncertain clumps as the boat hands pushed among them, hoisting boxes and barrels onto shore.

‘So I hear you are to go and live among the savages,’ Barrot said. ‘Husband taking you back to meet the family, is he?’

‘We are to go to our plantation.’

‘Oh, come now, do not glare at me so fiercely. It was just an old man’s little joke. We all know how Guichard loves those damned savages.’

‘There is hardly a need for curses,’ Vincente said stiffly. ‘The savages are as much a part of God’s creation as we are ourselves.’

‘Indeed. Just like the snakes and the venomous spiders and the alligators who would snap off your leg as soon as look at you.’ Barrot stared balefully across the dock towards the pettyaugre. Beneath his wig his brow was shiny with sweat. ‘Louisiana is certainly the sewer for the Almighty’s least successful experiments. Madame, I shall see you on board.’

Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to mop his brow, the doctor bowed and bustled away. Across the dock Auguste turned his head and nodded at her and she nodded back, her arms tight across her chest. She did not know why she had defended the savages to Barrot when her abhorrence for them was like sickness in her throat.

When she had told the wives of her plan to travel to the plantation, their voices had shrilled with pleasurable disgust.

‘Among the savages?’

‘How could you?’

‘They scalp their prisoners alive!’

‘They throw babies, live babies, onto the fire to appease their gods!’

‘They feast on human flesh!’

Unnoticed, the slave Thérèse spread wet linens across the nearby shrubs to dry. Vincente’s stomach turned over.

‘But I promised I would go with him,’ she had confessed unhappily. If the wives judged her decision imprudent, she comforted herself, she would heed their counsel. It would not be so awkward a matter to change her mind.

‘Are you sure you should?’ Anne Negrette said. ‘I mean, it is hardly safe for the men.’

‘It is hardly safe here,’ Renée Gilbert said. ‘Now that we are at war. Trégon says that if the Spanish are prepared to besiege Dauphin Island, there is no telling what else they will try.’

‘Unlike the savages, the Spanish stop short of murdering you in your bed.’

‘
I
should not go,’ said Germaine Vessaille. ‘I should be too afraid.’

Anne Conaud shook her head and patted Vincente reassuringly on the arm.

‘Do not listen to her,’ she said. ‘M. de Bonne, the attorney general, has taken his wife and children to his plantation. And M. Dubuisson took his sisters to the de Catillon place. It cannot be so very dangerous.’

‘I only know that I should not wish to be a farmer’s wife,’ Anne Negrette said. ‘Life is hard enough in the town.’

‘The food will surely be more plentiful,’ Anne Conaud countered.

‘And the poisoned arrows too.’

‘I think Vincente does not trust her husband to go alone,’ said Yvonne Lereg slyly. ‘Oh, come, do not give me that look. I can hardly blame you. I would not trust my husband either.’

‘Auguste asked me to go with him,’ Vincente said in a choked voice.

‘I should want to go,’ Anne Conaud. ‘After all, the effects of the estate are hers.’

‘If there are any.’

‘But of course there will be,’ said Gabrielle Borret. ‘De Chesse brought crates with him when he came, do you remember? The place is likely full of treasures.’

The women’s eyes opened wide.

‘De Bonne brought a carriage,’ said Germaine Vessaille. ‘Did de Chesse bring a carriage?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘But there will be furniture. Proper French furniture and French linens. Perhaps even carpets. Imagine carpets!’

‘How unjust it is, that it is to those that have that more is given,’ Yvonne Lereg pouted.

‘Fortune favours the brave,’ Anne Conaud said with a smile.

‘And those betrothed to dead noblemen.’

‘Yvonne Lereg, you are sour as a lemon,’ Anne Negrette said. ‘Pay her no heed, Vincente. You shall be returned before you know it.’

‘Of course you must promise to bring something back for us,’ said Renée Gilbert. ‘A token of your affection.’

‘A handkerchief perhaps.’

‘A piece of lace.’

‘A carriage!’

‘Yes, promise!’

The women laughed and nudged her, and Vincente laughed too because there was nothing else to do. After that it appeared that the matter was decided. The wives helped her collect provisions for the voyage, advised her upon suitable clothing, the proper oil to rub upon her skin to repel the mosquitoes, and the tide of the arrangements bore Vincente onward despite herself.

Alone in the cabin, she watched the slave Thérèse as she worked and wondered with a shiver at the nature of the devilish imaginings that filled the slave’s shuttered skull, the wild superstitions that fermented in her fleshless chest. She told herself that God was in His heaven, even in Louisiana, that however barbarous the savages’ habits, their spirits were nothing but false idols, the imaginings of the ignorant and the credulous, signifying nothing. And yet, at night, when the pull in her belly was too much for her and she crouched in her bare feet in the porch, cramming her mouth with the cold sagamity left over from supper, when the bats beat the darkness with their leathery wings and the owls howled like souls in purgatory, she knew that it was not God who presided over the night but the malignant animal spirits of the savages, snaking between the cabins like vines to claim back the tiny scratched-out patch of civilisation that clung precariously to the hem of a lost and lawless land.

At night she drew the body of her husband on top of her and the weight of it kept her from scattering in the darkness.

Vincente watched as Auguste pushed his way through the jostle. Not for the first time, she felt a tug in her belly, a stretching sense that, the closer he came, the less clearly she could see him. When he reached her, she gave him a polite smile and looked away.

‘Is everything arranged?’ she asked.

‘Yes. We are to take pirogues from New Orleans. I am afraid you shall find it uncomfortable.’

‘Yes.’

There was a pause. Though Vincente had grown accustomed to them, the still and silent spaces when it seemed that her husband slipped out of his skin, they still disquieted her. Her mother’s disparaging voice echoed in her head, deriding his poor breeding and the unnaturalness of his conduct. Anyone, she sneered, would think he was not French at all. Vincente sighed, smiling up at him.

‘Shall we board?’ she suggested.

Clasping her arm with his good hand, he steadied her as she stepped aboard. His grip was firm and, when he released her, the impression of it lingered on the fine stuff of her sleeve. She followed him towards the stern of the pettyaugre, noticing the way that his coat puckered over the warp of his maimed shoulder. She could not look at it, not in the light, but her fingers knew the jutting lumps where the bones had healed awkwardly, the waxy smoothness of his scars.

‘Are you truly not afraid?’ Gabrielle Borret had whispered the day before, when the wives came together to bid Vincente farewell. ‘So far from the town and the safety of the garrison, shall you not be terrified out of your wits?’

The other women had hushed her then and talked of the ordinary business of the town, the rebuilding of the church and the seventh confinement of Germaine Vessaille. It was only as they came to leave that Vincente confessed to them that she was indeed afraid. They were kind to her then. They held her hands and patted her arm and told her that she was fortunate. Her husband spoke the savage tongues, knew the strangeness of their ways. He was a friend to them, as much one of them as it was possible for a white man to be. She would surely be safe with him.

Vincente was grateful. She wept a little and clung to them and allowed herself to be comforted. It was only after they had gone that she remembered their reassurances and wept again. In the town her husband passed for a Frenchman. He ate like a Frenchman and dressed like a Frenchman and kept company with Frenchmen with as good a grace as he could muster. In the town she was a wife and he a husband, a white-skinned man who, for all his peculiarities, was not so very different from all the others. But among the savages? Who knew what kind of a savage he himself might become among the savages?