Voyage of Malice
Page 27
*
Jacob almost regretted watching Darlington—dressed in leathers, beaver hat firmly pulled over his head—mount his steed and canter off amid eddying leaves into the afternoon turned colder and blustery.
‘He has to go back to town anyway,’ said Marianne a few moments later, turning from the window, ‘to meet some French acquaintances whom he promised to introduce to a friend who can assist them with the purchase of land. The land we told you about.’
‘Oh, he’s always hopping on his horse,’ said Madame de Fontenay. ‘It is one of the disadvantages of living outside the city walls.’ Marianne shook her head in feigned exasperation.
Though far from what Marianne and her grandmother had been used to in her mother country, Jacob could see that the young woman had certainly settled into home life and had made a cosy abode. French dressers, silverware and glasses in a rack, quality furniture, and rugs on the waxed parquet gave the place a positively French appeal that allowed Jacob to feel quite at home.
He sat in an armchair by the fireplace, cracking walnuts. Madame de Fontenay was still seated opposite and still wrestling with another dropped stitch. ‘Over the strand and off the needle,’ she muttered. It was something she had decided to take up in order to while away the winter evenings, especially now since she had a little someone to knit for. She told Jacob of their voyage from Cow Island, where Delpech had been obliged to leave them with Darlington. ‘The last sea voyage I shall endure in this world—knitwise and slide across—and the next, God willing,’ she said between stitches, with a mirthful glow in her eyes.
Marianne, meanwhile, anxious to show her command of home management, proposed to Jacob to set her maid to heating water for the tub, there being no public baths in New York. Jacob, despite the risk of bathing in winter, accepted her offer, remembering the polite turn of her head when they had embraced on the porch, and recalling his wife’s heightened sense of smell during her pregnancies. Indeed, he admitted he must stink to high heaven, he said once the black servant girl had positioned the brass tub before the hearth.
‘Don’t worry, Martha is not a slave, Jacob,’ said Marianne, reading his thoughts. ‘She gets a wage, food, and a room next to Grandmother’s.’
‘As you can see, we have moved up in the world!’ added Madame de Fontenay with a drop of irony.
‘I would not, for a minute, imagine that you could become a supporter of slavery,’ said Jacob, flinging a handful of walnut shells into the fire. ‘But what about the plantation your husband spoke of?’
‘Oh, I will talk him out of it should the notion blossom in his mind, and he will listen to me, have no fear.’
‘And he certainly does that, all right,’ seconded Madame de Fontenay. ‘Why, he will do anything for her, just like my husband used to . . . in the early days. But slaves or no slaves, my dears, what is worrying is being so close to New France. It is bad enough living in the sticks with the wolves!’
‘We are not living amid the wolves, Grandmother, rather the squirrels.’
‘And the rats! And what if the French invade and capture Manhattan? What will happen to us?’
‘That is why those from La Rochelle have chosen the east side, Grandmother. You need not worry, Daniel already told you. And we shall have a splendid house, more land, and people with whom you can speak in French.’
‘Oh, I am past worrying about myself, my dear. The French and the Indians wouldn’t roast an old timer like me, far too nervy,’ said the old woman, as plucky as ever. ‘And I am not worried about a splendid house either. I’m quite all right with Martha next door; at least she doesn’t keep telling me how to knit properly! I was thinking about you two and the baby.’
‘Daniel says there will be a boat moored in the bay in case we need to escape to New York, or to Brooklyn. Besides, if the French attack, which they won’t, it would be from the west. They would come down the Hudson River from Albany.’
The old lady gave no answer. Instead, she placed a finger on her lips and nodded towards the opposite armchair.
Perhaps it was the coffee and nuts, or the warmth of the fire, or maybe something else, but Jacob at last had given in to an irrepressible urge to close his eyes. He had fallen into a snorting slumber, stirred only by the intermittent pouring of hot water from a ewer.
*
Half an hour later, he was transported back to his country estate in France, fields golden with wheat and orchards laden with fat fruit. He was standing in the reservoir he had devised for irrigation purposes, where his children and his farmhands sometimes bathed after a long summer day’s picking.
He suddenly found himself standing underwater with a crowd of babbling people, fully dressed and having fun, bounding from the shallow lake bed to the surface. He looked around and saw his son Paul kicking away from the stony bottom with a gleeful smile. But as the boy reached the end of his thrust, the water’s surface seemed to inch agonisingly further away.
‘I need to breathe now,’ Jacob heard the boy say calmly after landing back down on the lake bed, eyes beginning to bulge. Jacob seized him by the waist, thrust him upward, but again the boy only broke the surface with his outstretched hands. Jacob propelled the boy upward again with all his might. Again, only the boy’s hands reached out of the water.
But suddenly, as the lad began to sink back down, an anonymous hand plunged into the water, clasped the boy’s arm, and pulled him out of the lake.
The next instant, Jacob was standing on the grassy shore. Paul was standing, eyes reddened, lips violet with cold, but alive. There came a sudden loud pop, and Jacob, fearing musket fire, threw his arms around his son protectively as a company of dead Spanish cadets came walking, weapons in hands, from out of the black waters of the lake.
‘No!’ cried Jacob. ‘No! Go away!’
Jacob awoke to an insistent knocking at the lounge door.
‘Are you all right, Monsieur Delpech?’ called the voice of the old lady.
The fire crackled in the grate as he sat up in the bathtub in a cold sweat, burdened by thoughts of his wife stranded in London, burdened by the thought of the woman on the ship drowned in grief and debt.
‘All is well, just fell asleep in the tub, ha,’ he called out, surprised at the thickness of his voice.
*
The following morning, Jacob ached all over and could barely stand, let alone walk. The bone-chilling cold and muffled silence, the bleak light seeping through the window, and the echoey caw of the crow gave an atmosphere of stillness.
Half-frozen and trembling, he managed to slip his arms into his overcoat and stagger from the bedpost to the dresser near the second-floor window. His gaze fell upon a spectacular surprise. A glistening blanket of pure white snow lay over land, rooftops, and trees. He placed an eye to the cold brass telescope mounted on a tripod near the window box and pointed it towards the East River estuary. ‘Good God,’ he croaked to himself as a cold droplet dripped from his nose. ‘The river has frozen over!’
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A BLOOMTREE PRESS eBook.
First published in 2017 by BLOOMTREE PRESS.
Copyright © Paul C.R. Monk 2017
www.paulcrmonk.com
Formatting by Bloomtree Press.
Cover design by Sanja Gombar.
The moral right of Paul C.R. Monk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.