The chickens deemed the situation intolerable. Just the day before, Anne Negrette and the others had told Elisabeth that they meant to take their objections to the commandant to protest the impossibility of surviving without it. They had urged her to come with them, had declared it imperative that they all stick together. Now they sent the carpenter’s wife, to ensure her attendance.
‘Elisabeth? Elisabeth Savaret, are you there?’
A grey shadow stained the stuff that covered the far window, the tip of a nose dark against the pale cloth. Then it was gone. That was yet another of the chickens’ objections, the lack of glass in the colony. The window frames in all the cabins were instead covered with stretched sheets of
platille
, a thin linen stuff that lent to the streakily limed interiors a kind of muted stillness, as though they were under water. Elisabeth loved it. Behind their blank white windows, soft in the filtered light, the two of them were perfectly alone, the neighbouring cabins forgotten. And, unlike glass, the
platille
let the breezes in while keeping out the harsh glare of the sun. Sometimes, in the searing heat of the summer, she had stepped inside the cottage and it had been almost cool.
Elisabeth squirmed down the bed, pulling the quilt over her head, burying herself beneath its comforting weight. Of all the things she had brought with her to Louisiana, he loved the sea-green quilt the best. He liked to tease her that he would have married her for the quilt alone and, when he took it in his arms and danced with it about the cabin, twirling its skirts in sea-green swoops, she laughed, swallowing the prickle of disquiet that caught in her throat.
She had laughed too when he told her she was beautiful, but behind her apron she had crossed her thumbs, pleading with the Fates that he might never see it was not so. For all her efforts, she could not rid herself of the fearfulness. When she signed the marriage contract that would formalise their betrothal, her hand had trembled so uncontrollably that she had pressed down too hard on the pen and split the nib, leaving a dark puddle of ink upon the paper. The curate had sighed and reached for the sand. He had only smiled. Taking her ink-stained hand in his free one, he had dipped the broken pen in the puddle of ink and signed his own name.
Jean-Claude Babelon. She murmured it under her breath, tasting the shape of it. Savaret was a brisk name, its syllables contained tightly within the private recesses of the mouth. Not so Babelon. Babelon was all in the lips. When she spoke his name, she could feel her mouth softening, her lips parting as though they readied for a kiss. Elisabeth had always disdained the English practice of a wife taking her husband’s name upon their marriage. Now she found herself envious of it. In England, each time she was introduced to a stranger, each time she signed a letter or wrote her name on the flyleaf of a book, each time someone called to her across the street, she would declare herself his. In England, she would shed her old name like a chrysalis and emerge newly made into the world. Elisabeth Babelon. But that was not the French way. In Louisiana, as in Paris, she would always be Elisabeth Savaret.
The quilt smelled of him. She inhaled and again her body stirred. The longing in her was pure and brilliant, like light in glass, and she wondered suddenly if this was the secret they shared, those empty-headed chickens, if somewhere deep in their down-stuffed hearts, they had understood what she had never even guessed at, for all her book-learning: the certainty that a man and a woman might share of themselves completely, their souls and spirits as indivisible as two wines poured together in a single bottle. These days she had to struggle to recall the girl she was before him, when her self was all in her head and her body was only trunk and arms and legs, its passing appetites satisfied by a warm cloak or an apricot tart.
She had not opened her books since she had arrived here. There was a shelf above the table, a plank set on makeshift brackets, bare but for a couple of dusty dishes and a knife with a broken handle, but she had not troubled to unpack them. As she reached into her trunk, she touched the worn covers lightly as an archaeologist might touch the relics of a bygone time, with a kind of respectful bafflement. On the tooled leather of Montaigne she paused, tracing the scrolled pattern very slowly with one finger, remembering the ache she had felt for it during the endless months in Rochefort. Then she had closed the trunk and pushed it under the bed.
She did not talk to him of poetry or philosophy, of science or astronomy. When they talked, they spoke of themselves. Sometimes, late in the liquid darkness, he told her of his dreams. For now he was merely an ensign, the lowest rank of commissioned infantry officers, but he meant to be rich. Sometimes she joined with him in imagining the pleasures of their future life. More often she lay with her head upon his chest and her hand flat upon his belly so that she might listen to him: the pulse of his blood, the quiver of his nerve-strings, the whisper of his lips against her skin.
As for the words, they still occupied her skull, their insect thrum never perfectly silent, but she cared nothing for them. With him, in this strange land, where the swamp whispered and the vast fruits swelled and rotted, she was flesh, all flesh. The weight of her, once densely crammed into her head, now tangled itself luxuriously about her ribs and tingled in her limbs. Her skin eased and opened. Her muscles melted. Even her bones softened, so that she moved with the indolence of a sun-drunk cat. He had breathed his warm life into her. And, when he touched her, his lips and fingers exquisitely unhurried, every freckle, every tiny hair was his, each one charged and spangled with the light of him. To look at him was like looking at the sun. When she forced herself to close her eyes, his face remained before her, branded scarlet on the underside of her lids.
Three days after their arrival, the commandant of the colony, a Canadian by the name of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, had given a party. By then most of the chickens had regained something of their strength and spirits. There had been food and a great deal of rather sour wine. Elisabeth had stood a little apart, observing the swallowed disappointment on both sides. Insofar as they were accustomed to gentlemen, the girls knew only the citizens of Paris or of Rouen, soft-palmed men with powdered hair and scented handkerchiefs. The men of Louisiana, whether French or Acadian, were rough and awkward, their manners poor and their clothes worn and patched. They in their turn sought useful wives, the broad-hipped, spade-handed type of wives who might build houses and bear children in the same afternoon and still have supper on the table when they got home. Most of the girls gathered in Bienville’s parlour looked frail enough to be blown away by a sneeze. Only Marie-Françoise tipped up her chin and bared her teeth as she worked her path around the men, her smooth brow concealing a frenzy of calculation.
Sometime after the others he had come. From her corner she watched him pause on the threshold. He stood there for a long time, one hand flat against the jamb, observing the gathering, his uniform coat unbuttoned and his sword low on his hip. Once again Elisabeth found herself drawn by his indifference, the amused detachment that seemed to set him apart from the rest, and she named them vanity and pride. It hardly surprised her that when at last he entered the room, he crossed directly to Jeanne Deshays who, even diminished by sickness, remained the most beautiful among them.
The evening was almost over when the commandant brought him to her. He was taller than she had guessed and slighter, his hands narrow with long tapering fingers. His face was sunburned and, when he ceased to smile, the creases around his eyes drew pale streaks in the brown skin. The two men conversed together for a moment, something light-hearted about the Spanish garrison at Pensacola, before Bienville excused himself and turned away. He had regarded her thoughtfully, suppressing a smile, and in her confusion she had muttered something foolish about the weather. When he raised an eyebrow, she stared at the floor, insinuating herself into the gaps between the planks.
‘Elisabeth Savaret,’ he said as though the words amused him.
She nodded, almost a shrug, and did not look up.
Gently he placed his fingers beneath her chin and brought her face up to his. To think of it still caused her skin around her jawbone to thrill.
‘Elisabeth Savaret,’ he said again, and the smile tugged at his lips. ‘I have a question for you. Will you answer it?’
‘Perhaps.’ Her voice was hoarse.
‘Perhaps?’
‘It depends upon the question.’
‘A reasonable condition.’ His face was so close that she could see the flecks of gold in his grey-green eyes. ‘Very well then, this is my question. What in the world is it that vexes you so?’
The next day, the day that Louise-Françoise Léfevre died, he called for her. Afterwards he said laughingly that it was her ill temper that drew him to her, that alone among the straining, sickly girls for sale, she had flint and fire. He was a Québecois, he said, born to snow and ice. He was powerless to resist fire. She kissed him then and did not tell him that the fire was all his, that, before him, the rage in her was all ash and the thin sour smoke of disenchantment. In the brightness of his own flames he forged her, dissolving her chill metal to a stream of liquid red.
He had gone on an exploratory voyage, something to do with minerals and mines. It was a hazardous journey, for the mines were situated in the territory of the Nassitoches tribe, requiring him to travel through nations who were enemies to the French, but he assured her that he would be in no danger. He knew the country well. The previous winter, when there had been no ships and barely enough food, and the commandant had feared the men of the garrison would starve, he had billeted them among the natives, who had taken them in and fed them. On board the
Pélican
La Sueur had cocked an eyebrow as he described these billets and the willingness of the savages to satisfy every one of the Frenchmen’s particular needs.
‘Do you see now why the colony needs you so?’ he declared. ‘A man without French wine must slake his thirst with Indian beer.’
The trader’s chivalry was always blade-bright, calculated to cut cleanly. Aboard ship she had thought her own hide too thick for it. Now, as she huddled beneath the quilt, crushing the skirts of her dress, she was glad that La Sueur had taken ill in Havana and was not yet come.
She tried to summon the trader’s face, pallid and sweaty with fever, but instead it was the bodies of the savage women that came, their glistening breasts and their supple bellies and the languid roll of their smooth coppery limbs. They gathered in the shade of the canebrake behind the garrison, their deft fingers twisting the dried leaves of the palmetto into baskets. Their bodies were perfectly smooth, like brown fish, for they stripped the hair from their skin with a paste of shell ash and hot water.
They were not like the slack-mouthed whores of Paris. Their faces proffered no invitation. Their unclothed bodies were a fact, their polished skin declaring their sex with neither pride nor shame, like animals. They knew nothing of modesty or restraint. The thought of him in the embrace of one of those women, his skin against hers, his fingers tangled in her black hair, his lips upon her lips–
Elisabeth buried her face in the blanket, forcing the image away before it could bring ill luck. As she inhaled, filling herself with the smell of him, the dread gave way to shame. What kind of wife doubted her husband so, when he had given her no cause to doubt him? He had promised himself to her before God, his voice clear and unfaltering, the secret smile pressed into the side of his mouth. He was hers as entirely as she was his, her lawful wedded husband to have and to hold and to hold and to hold, till death do us part.
Except that she must not think of death, nor of fear, not yet, not while he was gone. Soon he would be home, perhaps even today. Until then, her faith in his safety was all she could give him, a fiery circle of devotion inside of which, if she held steady, she might protect him from harm.
They were nearly all of them married now. The fever had forced a number of postponements but still, throughout August, there was a steady stream of marriages at the small, unadorned chapel inside Fort Louis. Aboard ship, Marie-Françoise had urged her intimates to coyness. By holding themselves aloof, the well-made girls would demonstrate to the cream of the colony’s bachelors that they were worthy of their consideration. It was only the least desirable of the girls who had any reason to hurry.
The girls had nodded solemnly then, but none had heeded her advice. Even the beautiful Jeanne Deshays had succumbed to courtship within a matter of weeks. Her husband was judged something of a catch, a high-ranking officer with a meaty face and considerable influence. Elisabeth, herself three days wed, had attended her marriage. Jeanne, still weak from her illness, had recited her vows like a shopping list.
Once the formalities were complete, there had been celebrations at the house of Jean Alexandre, the master joiner. Most of the men of the garrison attended, and he had promised he would come. For more than two hours she watched the door, light-headed with the lack of him and the boom and crack of the evening storm. When at last he entered the cabin, wet with rain and already engaged in conversation with several of his fellow officers, her heart flew from her chest.
‘Do you mean the short one with the squint? I hear her pots last the longest,’ Anne Negrette asked her then, but she did not answer. Her breath came quickly and her spit tasted strange in her mouth. He did not cross the room towards her. With the others he paid his respects to the newly-weds, clapping the groom on the shoulder and saying something that made him laugh. The savagery of her jealousy then caused her ears to sing. For a shameful moment she hated them all, the bride and groom, the men with their faces foolish with drink, the shirt that lay against his chest, the finger and thumb that cupped his jaw, the sheen of rain upon his forehead. She looked away, then, and her apprehension caught like a bone in her throat. He was so substantial in his separateness, so complete. He looked exactly as he had before they were married.