Dark Shadows: Angelique's Descent

by Lara Parker

  Nine

  Thais tried but could not console the grieving Angelique, who sat clinging to her window. Her tears fell freely, while she stared at the forsaken well, as though she could draw Chloe, like water, back from the dead. She was numb with anger and despair, and her only thoughts were of her mother, how she must see her again, that hers was the only embrace which would lift this crushing pain.

  It was late afternoon when a cart came through the gate and stopped by the well. A muscular man in leather descended from the cart with a young slave boy at his side. After looking into the well, and after much muttering and considering between themselves, the man pulled a long rope from the cart and tied it around the boy’s waist. The boy then climbed onto the bucket and crouched there, his bare feet curled around the edge, and the man proceeded to lower him, inch by inch, down into the chasm.

  A feeble, misguided hope fluttered near Angelique’s heart, but as the man waited, the horse only clipped the pavement and the sun sank in the sky. There was no sound or movement from the dark hole. After a long while the chain finally gave a rattle, and the man leaned in and tugged on the rope, hauling the boy up to the top of the well wall. He was dripping wet and clinging to the rope as he climbed out and jumped to the ground. Then the two looked into the bucket as the man raised it, the chain rumbling and the pulley creaking as it turned.

  When the bucket broke the air, it bore Chloe’s limp form draped across the rim like a clump of brown seaweed caught on an old anchor. The man swung her off and tossed her to the earth as though she were a sack of feed. Angelique turned to Thais.

  “Please, Thais, let me go down,” she said softly. “I need to see her. To tell her good-bye.” But shaking her head, Thais rose, took up a coverlet from her bench, and moved for the door.

  “No, missy, you stay here. Like you shoulda done all along,” Thais said. Then she left the room to help Suzette prepare the body.

  Angelique turned back to the window. Chloe lay on the stones she had washed so many times, her face hidden under her arm, the ragged dress clinging to her delicate form and her perfect limbs modeled like clay from the gray earth. Angelique remembered Suzette, who had fallen on the same spot, beaten, but alive. She watched as Thais and Suzette silently wrapped the body and carried it into the kitchen. The man spoke to them, telling them to fetch him something, and Thais nodded.

  Suddenly it occurred to Angelique that the man was not a servant and did not live on the plantation. His leather jerkin and boots marked him as a journeyman who had been called upon to save the well, someone who would have such knowledge, someone, perhaps, from Saint-Pierre.

  The man turned and followed the slave women into the kitchen. Without thinking, Angelique dashed for the door, which Thais had forgotten to lock, and ran down the stairway into the courtyard, ignoring the slave boy, who stared at her in astonishment when she appeared. He made no sound and no move to stop her as she raced to the cart, scurried up the wheel like a rat, and dropped into the back.

  She saw in a flash that it was a sailmaker’s wagon, for canvas and ropes lay about in piles, sewn with grommets and loops of twine. The odor of the sea was strong, and the sails heavy, but she burrowed under them, tucking herself into a corner under the debris.

  She heard the man shout to the boy, “Here! Here’s soda and cornstarch. Pour these in the well!”

  She waited, afraid to breathe for long agonizing minutes, certain her absence would be discovered, until, finally she felt the cart shake, then lurch, and the whip crack.

  Slowly the wheels began to turn. The iron gate screeched and the bolt clanged, and at last, from the even rolling, she knew they were on the road.

  The horse was spirited and took off at a good clip, to where she did not know or care, as long as she was free of the plantation. Her heart quickened at the thought of what might lie ahead: the longed-for reunion with her mother, the safety and love of her childhood, and the sea. She could not wait to be in the arms of the sea once more.

  The pain of Chloe’s death, her sleepless night, and the exhilaration of her escape all gathered around her, like phantoms, as she curled beneath the sailcloth, numbed into a stupor, clinging to one thought—her mother’s warm embrace. She pressed her fingers into the ouanga still at her neck, her mother’s charm, and, remembering the cart that had carried her to the plantation, fought sleep as if she could hold back the tide with her outstretched hands. But she finally succumbed and fell into a dark well, clawing at the cold walls as she slid into unconsciousness.

  She dreamed of Barnabas. The curtain opened, the light poured in, and he was there, dripping wet, laughing, climbing in beside her, jostling her, pushing her to the corner of her carrier. He spilled the jewels into her lap and took them up again, his hand grazing her thighs, and his fingers carelessly brushing between her legs as he gathered the baubles from the folds of her dress. It took forever to expose them all, for some had hidden their bright colors in the creases, and each time he found one his feather touch comforted her. Then he kissed her on the neck and the lips, and he was so close that she felt the beating of both their hearts. He whispered to her, “Goddess,” and his hand reached under her skirt and stroked her, and his fingers found places that quivered to life with his touch.

  Angelique woke in the dead of night. Someone was shaking her, and she sat up with a start. The cart was still, parked in an empty shed, and the slave boy stood over her, peering down.

  “What you want, girl?” he whispered, his warm breath close to her cheek.

  “Where are we?” she said, sitting up and looking around.

  “We’s home. The Massa’s goin’ in the house, and he leave me here to coil them ropes.”

  “Home … where is that?”

  “Why, gal, we is at the dock. In Saint-Pierre! We brung you the whole way. What you goin’ to do, now?”

  “Did anyone see me?”

  “I din’t tell nobody you was there. I din’t say a word to nobody. I knew you was tryin’ to escape!”

  “Are we really in Saint-Pierre?” she asked, not daring to believe.

  “Thas’ right…”

  “Oh! I have to go,” she said, climbing out of the cart. “I’m going to find my mother. I know the way from here.”

  “You goin’ alone?” he asked, surprised.

  “Of course. It’s the harbor road, only a furlong beyond the caves. The house is on the cove,” Angelique replied confidently.

  “You ain’t scared to go alone?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “I dunno. I guess nothin’ would scare you. The way you jump in that wagon! You din’t run like a dog. You run like a pig! You run for your life! But there be bad things on the road. Robbers and run’way slaves. An’ buccaroons! I’ll jus’ put these ropes away and come with you for a bit,” the boy offered.

  “I don’t want to wait for you,” she said. “There’s no moon, and no one will see me.” With that she scampered toward the dock. But the boy was fast on her heels.

  “Trouble is,” he said breathlessly, “they sees a white gal with a black boy, and I be in big trouble. So’s I jes’ hang back a bit behind. You go ahead, but you no worry. I be followin’ right after.”

  The boy spoke not another word for over half an hour as they trudged along the road in the darkness. Several times she cried, “Go away!” and tried to run ahead and lose him, but he seemed glued to her and increased his speed whenever she did. Finally, she let him be.

  The night was warm, and billions of stars hung suspended in the black sky, some high in the dome of heaven and some hovering just over the sea. The music of the easy-rolling surf was a siren’s song, and the longer Angelique walked the shore, the more she ached for the water’s sweet caress. Finally, she ran to the edge of the foam. When she saw the stars themselves swimming in the inky waves, she could bear it no longer.

  “What you doin’?” the boy called.

  She ignored him and plunged into the first breaker that rose up to meet her. The
warm surge sucked her under, and she tucked and tumbled in the roll of it, curling into a tight ball, then thrusting like a supple seal under the next wave. She floated, at home now, more so than she would have been at her mother’s side, for the sea was her soul’s birthplace.

  When she crawled out on the sand, breathless and exhilarated, the boy was sitting there, waiting for her.

  “You swim like a porpoise,” was all he said.

  “Do you have a name?” she asked curtly as she sat down near him.

  “Cesaire,” came the reply.

  “And I suppose you are the sailmaker’s slave.”

  “No, miss, I ain’t no slave. I gots my papers.”

  “You’re free?” She felt an odd pang of envy when she said the word.

  “Yes, miss, Massa give me my freedom, or at least, I earned it, sewin’ sail. I been bustin’ my fingers for ten year, made a hundred sail, an’ I have all o’ them strainin’ in the wind right ’bout now.”

  “Then you still are indentured,” she said smugly. “Just as I thought. You are certainly not free.”

  “Well, that show what you don’ know. I been to sea already, as a sailmaker’s mate. An’ someday I be like you—travelin’ home—to Africa,” Cesaire said proudly.

  “Africa! What fine dreams you have!”

  “I come over when I was a baby, down in the black hole. But I be goin’ back befo’ the mast, you wait an’ see. That was a top royal mizzen you was hidin’ under. An’ I made that sail. It go to a ship in the harbor on the morrow, a schooner from America.”

  “America?” cried Angelique. “Is the ship from Maine, do you think?”

  “Well, I don’t rightly know, but it’s an interloper, come every season to trade tobacco for rum an’ guns. An’ it take on illegal slaves.”

  “I don’t believe you made a sail for that schooner,” she said, “or you would know whether it came from Maine. Everything you said just now was probably a lie!”

  She rose and began walking again, following the path around the lagoon. As it was after midnight, and there was no one about, Cesaire had given up hanging behind and now walked beside her. All they could see was the sea’s glimmering foam, the long pale road, and the dunes rising to the jungle; all they heard was the sucking of the tide and the thousands of frogs singing, “Coqui! Coqui!” from the bush.

  “What make you so bitter?” Cesaire asked.

  “That’s none of your affair,” she said hotly. “Why are you watching over me?”

  “Why, I thought you might destroy yourself. You was runnin’ away, ain’t that right?”

  “Yes … so?”

  “What from?”

  She thought to tell him but couldn’t answer. The harsh lesson of secrecy was driven too deep.

  “Why was you there at that castle?” he persisted.

  “It belongs to my father, Theodore Bouchard.”

  “Did you know the l’il girl who drowned?”

  “Yes. I did,” she said, and after a pause, added, “She was my friend.”

  “Why for she do that?” he asked, surprised.

  “Do what?”

  “T’row herself in the well?”

  “But, she didn’t—”

  “That Monsieur Bouchard say she was horse to the goddess Erzulie, who mounted her and drove her to do it. Tha’ she was driven’ mad by the loa, and she t’rowd herself in the well.”

  “No, that’s not how it was at all! That shows how stupid you are to believe such a thing be—” Angelique began, when suddenly she caught her breath in mid-word and her heart skipped a beat.

  Far back down the road, a horse was coming at full gallop. She looked around wildly but Cesaire grabbed her arm and pulled her into a ditch beside the path, then crawled in beside her, under the tall grass.

  There they lay, breathing in the dark, waiting as the hoofbeats drew nearer and thundered by their heads only a few feet away, before clattering away into the distance. Angelique was so terrified that she was afraid to move and lay burrowed under the sharp reeds, close enough to Cesaire to hear both their hearts beating like hammers. Finally, he spoke in a whisper that made her jump.

  “He gone now. He din’t see nothin’. We’s like rocks in the stream, me an’ you, me black and you silver, and both of us, hidden deep under the water.”

  She sighed and let the fear flow out of her.

  “How much more to your home?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “It can’t be far now, but I can’t tell in the dark.”

  “Mebbe you should wait ’til mornin’. Then there be people on the road, comin’ an’ goin’, an’ you won’t be so suspicious-lookin’. I could sleep a bit, could you?”

  “I’m not tired,” she said dreamily. There was a long pause.

  “Has you bin with a boy yet?” he asked softly.

  “What do you mean, ‘been with’?”

  “I means … alone…”

  She was about to say, “Like this?” But her pride stopped her, and she remembered the night Barnabas had climbed into her covered chaise.

  “Yes … once,” she said.

  “Only once?”

  “Yes…”

  “Well, tha’s how it be with me, too. Once. She live in Saint-Pierre, and her name Tippi. Tippi, the jewel o’ the night.”

  They lay in the grasses and looked up at the stars glimmering in gossamer curtains.

  “Thank you, Cesaire, for not giving me up,” said Angelique.

  “I think you is a brave girl,” answered the boy.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I see you. You’s got the heart to take what you think is yours. An’ that be the bes’ thing there is. You sees your chance, and you grabs it. Is your mama learn you that?”

  “I don’t know.…” She sighed.

  “Well, that brave heart, it’ll give you fortune and give you pain,” he stated knowingly. “You know that?”

  “No…”

  “A lotta things come to you, an’ a lotta things be lost to you. Once you choose a brave heart you gots to keep yer courage up, ’cause it be a hard load to carry. Hurricane take the frigate bird’s roost and the crow kill his babies, but he be flyin’ still.”

  Angelique heard these words as she drifted off to sleep, and with Cesaire there with her, she felt safe for the first time in a long while.

  Suddenly the boy was shaking her, and saying, “I gots to go now. I gots to go back before I’s found out. Can you find the way?”

  She sat up. Dawn streaked the sky, and the sea rolled in on the golden sand, soft and blue, with foam cleaner than milk.

  “I see the cottage!” she cried, scrambling to her feet. “It’s there across the lagoon.”

  “That l’il box … way over yonder?”

  “Yes that’s it! That’s my house! Oh, thank you, Cesaire!” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “You’ve brought me home!”

  He stared down at her, and she up at him, and they saw one another clearly for the first time in the morning light. He was coal black, and his eyes were ebony, and he spoke in a shaking voice.

  “Tell me your name. I want to think of you. When I’s gone to sea.”

  “It’s … Angelique…”

  “Well, good-bye, Angelique,” he said, “and good luck.” He turned and started back up the road toward Saint-Pierre.

  She worried about the late-night rider. Could it have been her father? But the little house sat alone on the sand, and as she came around the curve of the beach, she saw no horse. Her heart began beating with exultation, as she imagined her mother’s face, hearing her cry of happiness, feeling her mother’s soft bosom against her cheek. Never, never, would she leave her again.

  But as she drew closer, she felt a stab of dismay. The lustrous banana trees were hanging limp and torn, and the garden that had been so fresh and green was dried to bare earth. The once-coral house was now pale as the sand it stood upon, and the lavender shutters were fallen away,
except for one, which dangled from a single hinge. The thatch of the roof was flattened and gray over the leaning porch, and the door stood open to a deserted room.

  She drew nearer and walked up on the stoop. The house was empty of life, as if no one had ever lived there. She wandered inside and stood a moment in the room that seemed so small now, dusty and abandoned. A breeze stirred at the door and swept a cloud of sand across the floor.

  “Mama?” she cried, unable to comprehend this nothingness. “Mama!” she screamed. “Mama!”

  She walked to the back door and slowly pushed it open. A horse snorted, and she heard the thud of a hoof in the dirt. The animal was tethered to a broken banana frond, his tail switching flies, and he was rubbing his muzzle vigorously against his leg. When he saw her, he lifted his head, and looked at her, blinking. Beyond the house, fan palms dipped feathery fronds, like giant wings obscuring the brush, which quivered now, then was still. She froze as her father staggered out of the trees, fastening his trousers. He jerked his head toward her and scowled, and when she saw his murderous visage, the blood rushed to her face.

  There was an eel that lived in the second reef beyond the caves that triggered a fear so primordial that she shuddered whenever she saw it. She felt the same repulsion now as she stared at her father, who was red-eyed and swaying. She knew the eel’s crevice and always kept a distance, sometimes glimpsing its fat snout and stark eye when sunlight streamed through on its hole. Her mother said that eels were lazy and would never chase her, but she felt certain this one would bite, for it had rows of sharp teeth and an evil practice of rhythmically gnawing at the water, an action so sickening, it spiked a prickly buzz under her arms and pulsed a painful throb between her legs.

  These same sensations jolted her now as her father took an awkward step in her direction.

  Once, late in the afternoon, when she was floating over the huge brain coral behind which the eel kept his cave, she saw the creature emerge to forage for food. First the head, then the long rubbery form—ten, twelve feet in length—eased out and slithered through the bright coral, scattering a group of angelfish and darting quicker than a snake through the sand. She had stared down, afraid to breathe or to kick, as she was now, staring across at her father, paralyzed with a fear she did not comprehend.