The images slowed, fragments now, stretched and misshapen. The cold of the cabin floor. The convulsions. Blood spreading in a black pool. The cold spreading through her, and the pain emptying her, scouring her. The light fading, leaching out colour. The table, the chest, the basket vague and flat, like smudged charcoal sketches. Then darkness. Such darkness, filling eyes, ears, mouth, closing over her like a frozen sea. Down, down, into the abyss. Terror like the table in the darkness, there but not there, but for now a desperate, blessed numbness that was almost peace.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Sinners to everlasting damnation. The end.
Thanks be to God.
Then at the end of darkness a wash of grey light behind her eyelids like dirty water, and birdsong. A dog barking. The ordinariness of it, as though death were no different from what had gone before. Except for the fear. The fear spreading through her, and the cold. So cold. The convulsion of shivering that set the pain to screaming in her. The sickening flutter of her heart in her chest. The draught of sour breath in her mouth, the gluey stick of her throat as she swallowed. Through the fringed slit of her eyelids the familiar shapes of the table, the chest and the basket.
She lived. Oh, God, she still lived.
After that, only the fainting agony of movement and the meaty grey-blue string between her legs and at the end of it, of her, the tiny grey shape. Blood-blacked, empty, fingers stiffened into bird feet and bones hollow light, wrapped around with skin.
A girl.
Perhaps she screamed. The echo of it seemed to hang in the darkness as, wrenching herself from sleep, Elisabeth pulled her legs from the bed and sat up. She hunched over, stiff and very cold, waiting for the sobs to slow. Then, stumbling a little, she rose to her feet and crossed the cabin to the door. It was not yet dawn. The starless night pressed black against the porch, matted with shapes and shadows. She closed the door and leaned against it, rubbing her arms with her hands. On the other side of the cabin, swaddled in a twist of rugs, Fuerst sighed and turned over.
Afterwards, from pity or perhaps as punishment, Perrine had told her that they had found her in the street. She was half naked and covered in blood and in her arms she held the dead child, its birth string still uncut. She would not let it go. When they took it from her, she screamed as though the Devil himself was in her.
The delirium had persisted for days. Some of the women took it in turns to sit with her, but they could not quieten her. She tore at her sheets, clawed her body, bit her lips and fingers till they bled. She raved and screamed, pleading with Death not to abandon her. Childbed fever, they said, and they had sucked their teeth and waited for her to die.
She had not died. On the seventh day the fever broke. Anne Conaud called it a miracle from God. Most of the other wives shared the opinion of Renée Gilbert that there was strength in madness. But they could not abandon her. There were too few of them for that.
Around the edges of the night, the darkness was beginning to fade. In the grainy light of early morning, the ordinary outlines of the cabin gathered themselves together. The bench, the chest, the scrubbed wood table. There was something on the table, a dark, square shape. Slowly Elisabeth crossed the room. She did not pick the book up but she set her hands upon it. Then she placed them on her belly and closed her eyes.
Whether offering or blind error, the thrum of life had persisted in her. It was no longer hers alone. She carried in her womb a child whose father was a good man. Though it was six years since she had read them, the words returned to her then and the face of the man who spoke them, who was a good man also.
What a wonderful thing it is that drop of seed, from which we are produced, bears in itself the impressions, not only of the bodily shape, but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers!
Picking up the book as gently as if it were a child, Elisabeth closed her eyes, touching her lips gently to the greasy leather. Then, setting it carefully on the table, she knelt before the fire, readying herself for the new day.
F
rom the plantation they took the pirogue south as far as New Orleans, where they would find a pettyaugre to take them the rest of the way. When they reached the settlement, there were several small craft tied up at the muddy dock and, beyond the bluff heaped with the carcasses of cypress trees, the mud-slick hulk of a new embankment.
They walked up to the place together. At the rear of the square, a makeshift market had been set up where savages laid out deerskins to display their wares. Above them a faint breeze toyed with the flag of the House of Bourbon, three golden lilies on a white ground.
‘Business is good?’ Auguste asked one of the traders.
The savage shrugged. She had a dark streak pricked across her nose and another down the middle of her chin, and she wore several necklaces of kernel stones, so highly polished that they resembled porcelain.
‘White men come,’ she said. ‘Our village is moved to the shores of the lake so that they may have land to cultivate.’
When they had bought bread, they picked their way to the de Chesse cabin. The storms had come late this year, bringing down cabins and flooding all of the lower part of town. The ditches that surrounded the cabins, dug for drainage, were dark with stagnant water that gave off a powerful and noxious stink. Even the lanes were criss-crossed with planks to prevent the unwary walker from sinking to their knees in the mire. Where the cleared area ended, on rue de Conti, the marshy cypress groves pressed forward, shrubs and saplings like foot soldiers advancing across the narrow trenches. It was too wet, too densely wooded, for grazing. Instead, the settlement’s animals roamed the town, as aimless and excitable as the men who, late at night, staggered from the illegal drink shops that pushed up like weeds across the settlement, insinuating themselves into the cracks of sheds and stables.
Close to the de Chesse cabin, they were obliged to wait their turn while a large pig idled between the ramshackle dwellings, his chin bearded with mud.
‘And yet the town seems a little less wretched than I remember it,’ Vincente said, looking about her at the sloping cabins propped in their plots of slimy weeds.
Auguste smiled.
‘The savages say it is impossible to return to a place, even after a short absence, and find it quite unchanged,’ he said. ‘They say that time alters the shape of a man’s eyes.’
Later that day he went in search of news. The taverner, a red-faced man with unsteady hands and eyes like sucked bonbons, poured Auguste a pot of beer, and slopping it a little as he set it on the splintery counter, assured him that despite the season sloops continued to run between New Orleans and Mobile.
‘Bringing up the commandant’s favourites, aren’t they?’ he said sagely. ‘Not to mention materials. You should see the house he’s building himself here. Never saw nothing like it.’
‘The commandant is here often?’
‘Most always. Happened by him just yesterday, in fact. Though naturally I keeps my head down. Not what you might call a martinet, is he, the commandant, but all the same, best not to stick your neck out, if you knows what I mean.’
The next day Auguste arranged their passage on to Mobile. He was not fool enough to hope that his brief presence in New Orleans would pass unremarked but, like the taverner, he had no wish to summon attention to it. Besides, his wife was eager to return home. He watched her as she stood at the bow of the pettyaugre, straining forward over the yellow river like a horse in a harness, and it pleased him to oblige her.
A week later they were settled once more in the house on rue Dugué, their arrival so swiftly effected that no word of it preceded them. At the marketplace on the first day, Vincente saw them near the baker’s shop, their heads bent together as they awaited its opening, and the anticipation in her swelled like a bubble as she hastened towards them. She waited until she was almost upon them before calling out to them, and it was only when they turned, their mouths pulled wide with pleasure and astonishment, that she saw the stranger among them and the smile on her face and the swell of anticipation in her shrivelled, as though they had been sprinkled with salt.
The wives gathered round her, bombarding her with questions, and though Vincente did her best to answer, she could think only of the stranger in their midst. She was young, younger perhaps than Vincente, and her grey dress was faded and worn. As the women talked, her eyes flickered from one face to another, as though she would pull them to her with the force of her concentration. But when she looked at Vincente, her eyes were narrow, her mouth pinched.
It was Anne Negrette who pushed the girl forward.
‘You have not yet met Mlle de Larme, have you?’ Anne Negrette said. ‘She came on the
Charente
. Her mother also.’
The young woman ducked her head, glancing at Yvonne as though seeking reassurance that Vincente would not bite her. Vincente tightened her hands around her basket and wished her dead.
‘She is to marry the widower Martin,’ said Perrine Roussel.
‘Mlle de Larme, that is, not the mother,’ Yvonne Lereg added, slipping her arm through the young woman’s. ‘Martin was quite clear about that.’
The women laughed, and the plummet of it was a stone in Vincente’s belly. She smiled and the smile stiffened on her face.
‘It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mlle de Larme.’
‘Yours too, Mme le Vannes.’
Vincente watched as Yvonne Lereg leaned over to murmur in the young woman’s ear, and the hunger that had lain quietly in her turned over, opening its jaws.
‘You heard, I suppose, the sad news of Germaine Vessaille?’ Anne Conaud said, laying a quiet hand upon her sleeve. Vincente shook her head. ‘Her confinement . . . there were difficulties. She did not have the strength for it.’
‘Her eighth child,’ Anne Negrette sighed. ‘And all the others no trouble.’
‘The infant lives, thank the Lord.’
‘And thrives. A savage wet nurse has her.’
‘But a Tensaw? I would not leave my child with one of those.’
‘Beggars cannot be choosers.’
‘Nor drunks neither. The gunsmith is become a perfect souse.’
‘He will shoot his foot off one of these days.’
‘He will be lucky if it is only his foot.’
As the women rattled on, Vincente let her spine soften. Her shoulders unhooked from her neck and her hands opened. She looked around the vigorous faces of the women as they talked, and she thought of Germaine Vessaille and her brood of children and the pleasure that had pinked her cheeks when Vincente had given her some trifle from her trousseau, and the fear tasted thin and foolish in her mouth. They were so few and so far away. The loss of any one of them was a hole in the fabric they made.
She was kinder to Mlle de Larme after that, though she could not help but dislike the intimacy of the younger woman’s friendship with Yvonne Lereg, the way they whispered and smiled together as though they shared secrets that none of the others were permitted to share. All the same it was not until she stood with the other wives at the celebration of her marriage to old Martin that she understood that there was nothing to fear. The younger woman’s arrival had not pushed her out. It had pushed her in. To Mlle de Larme, Vincente was not the latest of the wives or the least. She was one of them, a stalk of palmetto woven into a basket of many stalks. It startled her to realise that her arrival had done precisely the same for Yvonne Lereg.
They had been in Mobile some weeks when the summons came from the governor. Auguste had been expecting it. When the boy had gone, he went out onto the stoop, gazing out over the blank winter yard. He had never attempted to grow anything here and the neglected garden was overgrown, choked with half-dead grasses. There was no purpose in cutting them back. When spring came and Fuerst took up ownership of his own concession, they would return to Burnt-canes and Auguste would begin again. He had already drawn up plans for a garden of medicinals, the savage remedies of smutwheat, goldenrod, elderberry, catnip and jimson weed, as well as the imported simples such as ammoniac, antimony and rhubarb: remedies to ease pain, to reduce swelling, to deter corruption.
‘It is a fine idea,’ Vincente said when he told her. ‘What better place to trade medicines than New Orleans? There is more pestilence in the air than there are mosquitoes.’
Auguste shook his head.
‘I do not mean to trade them. They are for us, for the plantation.’
‘But why, when there will be more than we can use? Why not profit from it?’
‘Because we shall have enough without it.’
‘And with it we shall have more.’
Auguste squatted down close to the porch, his fingers feeling in the cold earth. The soil was sandy and loose, and he scooped it up, letting it fall in crumbs from his hand. Then he rose and went as he was bid to the commissary.
Afterwards he returned to the house. Vincente knelt before the fire, struggling to light the mess of tinder. The curve of her back was soft, her arms plump. He did not know if she ate still secretly, at night. He thought perhaps she did, but less often than before. The swell of her belly in the darkness was round. Soon, perhaps, it would grow rounder. In the meantime, he waited and he hoped.
She sighed, rolling back on her heels.
‘The wood is wet.’
‘Be glad you are not in New Orleans.’
‘Anne Negrette said that when the burial ground flooded in New Orleans, the soil gave up its dead.’ Vincente shuddered. ‘Spat them out, as though it could not wait to be rid of them. Imagine it. Scores of them, she said, just floating there.’
‘Those women say many things.’
‘She said that the pigs ate the bones.’
They were silent, staring at the fire.
‘What did the governor want?’ Vincente asked at last.