Her head half turned, and for just a moment she gazed at her master. Then she nodded.
'I'll be outside’ Mulder said, and left the room behind his women.
'I am to lie with you, sir?' Her voice was soft, her French faultless.
'Does your master often give you to other men?' She nodded. 'It pleases him.' 'Aye. And you are not diseased?' 'No, sir.'
'But you are a mother?' 'No, sir.'
'You must have a secret all your own.' She did not reply. Her gaze was almost a physical presence, a veil, lying across his own body. 'I know your story.'
Was there a change of expression? He decided not. But the eyes had become watchful.
'So I had expected ...' he shrugged. 'I do not know what I expected. There are no marks upon your skin.'
'No, sir.'
'After four years as a slave? Does Meinheer Mulder never flog you?'
Almost she smiled. 'He will not destroy what he values, sir. He uses a cane. Sometimes.' 'Turn round.'
She obeyed and he bent to look at her flesh. And had to prevent himself touching the smoothly rounded buttocks. 'On my feet’ she said.
'By Christ’ Corbeau said. 'The bastinado. This pleases him?'
'Of course’ she said. 'As I am tied to his bed, the master can lie on me while I yet writhe with pain. This pleases him.'
Her voice remained soft, yet Corbeau could feel the hate, shrouding every word.
'And do you scream?'
'No, sir. I pray.'
'By Christ’ he said, and she almost smiled again. 'By Christ, to the Serpent, I'll wager.'
The smile disappeared, and her face was again closed. 'But you belonged to Hodge. And never tasted the whip?' 'But once, sir. Mistress Hodge preferred red pepper.'
'By Christ,' he said again. 'And you prayed?'
'No, sir,' she said. 'Then I screamed. I thought I was dying. My breasts were swollen to twice their normal size.'
'And none of these things have changed your face, changed your body. Yours is a powerful serpent.'
The very intensity of her stare was her answer. He touched her hair, stroking it across his fingers. He touched her shoulder. But she did not turn, or acknowledge him in any way. She could be no careless devotee. There was too much intelligence here, too much determination, and even, perhaps, a little humour. A mamaloi? By Christ, he thought, there is a risk. Yet why? He knew a great deal about voodoo; no one living in St. Domingue could help but know about the religion of the snake and the drum. It was an idle superstition, brought across from West Africa, but in it the blacks found some form of release from the intolerable harshness of their lives. And in it this girl had certainly found a mental refuge. So why should it be a risk? To be harmed by a voodoo spell one had to believe in it, and he had no time for superstition: he had little enough time for religion in any form. And if she was, indeed, a priestess, then might the future be even more crammed with alluring prospect.
'Do you hate your master?' There was no reply.
'There shall be no more bastinado, I promise you,' Corbeau said. 'I have come to buy you.'
Now her head did turn, and now he had penetrated the reserve. She frowned. 'Sir?'
'I told you, I heard your story, and I wished to see for myself, this girl who is so beautiful, and so tragic'
'You came, two thousand miles, to see a slave?'
Corbeau smiled; she was for the first time talking as a human being. Not even four years of slaver)', and perhaps as long of voodoo, could diminish her natural female curiosity. 'Life is a business, of doing, and seeing and experiencing, is it not, Gislane? Guyana is a place I have always wanted to visit. I will tell you my philosophy. In my public life, I am governed solely by honour. And I will kill any man who impugns that honour. But you will have no part of my public life. In my business life, I am governed solely by profit. And
I will sacrifice any man, or any woman, to attain the maximum profit. But you will have no part in my business life. And in my private life, I am governed solely by my wish to be amused. I think you will be able to amuse me, for the rest of my life, in one way or another. Will you be able to amuse me, Gislane?'
She hesitated. Another success. She was realizing for the first time that here was no brute of a man, like Hodge or Mulder, who could be conquered in turn merely by spreading her legs. She was understanding she would need her mind, for this new master.
'If you desire me, sir.'
'So tell me, do you hate your master?'
Once again the hesitation. 'I hate the master, yes, sir.'
'What of Hodge? And Mistress Hodge?'
This time there was no hesitation. 'I hate them, sir. Is that strange?'
'I am merely surprised you can say it so quietly. And what of Matthew Hilton?'
He had remained standing behind her, and she had never turned. But now her movement was almost vehement as she faced him. 'You know Matt Hilton?'
Corbeau shrugged. 'The Hiltons are great planters. So are the Corbeaux. Of course I know him.'
Her hand moved, as if she would have held his arm. Then it fell to her side again. 'Then where is he?' she asked. 'Please, Monsieur Corbeau.' Her upbringing, her education, came slicing through the humility of the slave, the remoteness of the mamaloi. 'Is he all right?'
'Oh, indeed,' Corbeau said. 'He lives on Plantation Green Grove, in Antigua.'
'Green Grove,' she whispered.
'With a young woman. His cousin. I believe they intend to get married, whenever she can secure a divorce from her husband.'
Slowly the interest, the eagerness, faded from her face.
'The story has it,' Corbeau said, quietly, 'that he wished to seek you, and then fell in love with this cousin, and so changed his mind.'
'The story,' she said. 'Who tells this story?'
Corbeau shrugged again. 'It is common talk.'
'And is this why you would possess me, sir? Because I am common talk?'
'I would possess you because you are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen,' Corbeau said, and wondered if he was not, perhaps, even telling the truth.
Certainly he had again penetrated that withdrawn mind. Her eyes searched his face. 'Monsieur does not speak like a slave-owner.'
'But as a man, I would hope. So tell me, do you still love Matt Hilton?'
She hesitated, then she shook her head. 'No, monsieur. Perhaps I do not hate him, either, as I hate the others. Perhaps he is no more than weak. I wish him to be happy, and he will be happier with a white woman, even if she is his cousin and another man's wife, than he could ever have been with me, as his name is Matthew Hilton. But I do not love him, any more. I do not love anyone, or anything, any more.'
Corbeau smiled. 'It will be my pleasure, mademoiselle, to teach you how to love again. Now get your clothes. Let us brush this mud from our feet.'
To love again. She supposed, incredibly, that that could almost happen. Given time to understand the utter incredibility of everything that was happening to her, that had happened to her, it seemed throughout her life.
She had known, from the day of Robert Hilton's visit to Hodges, the day she would not forget to her dying moment, that Matt would never come for her. She had understood this as the burning pepper had seemed to eat into her flesh, reaching through breast and bone to penetrate her very heart, seeped upward from her groin and cut her body in half, as she had screamed and twisted and spat, trying to make her feeble saliva reach Janet Hodge's grinning face. Then she had hated, in a manner which made her hatred of Runner and Penny, of the Unknown who had condemned her to this, of the Hodges themselves, previously, no more than a slight discontent.
And then too, she had known that she was damned, perhaps being punished for some long-dead ancestor's crimes, but certainly damned, and thus excluded forever from the courtesies and considerations due to a lady in the white man's world, and excluded too from the hopes and fears of the white man's religion, from the love it preached and no doubt, in some fortunate cases, practised. Her
refuge must be Damballah Oueddo, the Serpent, who taught patient hatred and physical gratification. And to that refuge she had devoted the last three years. Indeed, but for Damballah she would long have gone mad. She owed the invisible Serpent who was so omnipresent in her every sensation her very life, for he had taught her to accept the slobbering brutality of Mulder no less than the slobbering uncertainty of Hodge. But he had taught her more than that. In his eyes her removal from Nevis to the hell of Essequibo had been a necessary part of her education. He had been able to teach her that the ceremony she had attended on Hodges, when he had first appeared to her in the form of Charles the butler, had been no more than a polite gathering of devotees. The slaves of Nevis had lacked the desire, and even on Hodges they had lacked the necessary hatred, properly to communicate with the Serpent. In Essequibo, where the sun was too hot and the rain too heavy, where there was no refreshing sea breeze to calm the spirit, and no clear-green water in which to bathe, but only the piranha-filled brown rivers, Damballah was no god of pleasure to be enjoyed, but instead a god of wrath, to be feared, and to be used, as well, and the blood on her fingers these past two years had too often been human.
In those two years she had learned to exist in the bosom of the Serpent, to wait, with that patience which he demanded, for the day he would rise up amongst them and grant them that revenge which was all they lived for, to pray that she would remain alive for that moment, to ask nothing more of life.
So then, what was she to make of this last week? Whenever she thought this, she rolled on her back and stared at the deckbeams immediately above her, doubting that they were really there, and reached down to touch the soft cambric of the sheet beneath which she lay, of the nightgown in which she was enveloped, from neck to ankle. She had not worn a nightdress since the night before she had sought to elope.
But if these were there, waiting for her touch, if the creaking of the rigging and the soft swish of the water passing the hull, were at last real - and the first night the motion of the ship had kept her awake in a long nightmare - what was she to make of her situation? Of the gowns, richer than any she had ever known, which hung on the door and waited, as yet untouched, in the chest by the bed. What was she to make of the perfume which shrouded her body? Only on the perfume had he insisted. Odour was everything, he said.
So perhaps she was not dreaming, as she could inhale, and now that dawn had broken she could see the clothes. But surely she was dreaming, in that they had been at sea for nine days, slowly beating northward, and in all that time no man's hand had touched her body, save to assist her from her seat after dinner. But there again was a dream, that she should sit down to dinner in the great cabin, opposite her master, and have wine poured for her by an attentive Negro boy, and be engaged in conversation, of Paris and London, of politics and art, for all the world as if she were his bride, rather than a chattel he had purchased for an unreasonably large sum.
But there was the most fantastic dream of all. For had she been his bride, he would have been in here with her. The bunk was certainly large enough for two. But to lie here, in cleanliness and comfort, well fed and even a little dazed with wine, and to be alone ... almost it made her afraid. What did he intend? For what torture was he reserving her?
Or could Damballah himself be no more than an illusion, the past four years no more than a nightmare from which she would now awaken?
Oh no, because she was, most certainly, a slave. And the waiting, which grew more and more unbearable with every day, was surely at an end. She heard the deck creak, and a moment later the door opened. He had not entered here since he had shown it to her as her cabin, while they had still lain at anchor off Kyk-Over-Al in the mouth of the Essequibo.
'Awake?'
She sat up, the sheet drawn to her throat. How easy was it to regain the habits of a lifetime.
'Come,' he said. 'I would show you the most beautiful sight in the world.'
She hesitated. 'You wish me to dress?'
'It will not be necessary.' But he waited, and watched her throw back the sheet and step down from the berth. The cambric was sheer, and clung to her body. But why stare at her through gauze, when by a command he could snatch it from her? And now he held out a robe. She turned away from him and he touched her shoulders as he rested the heavy material. But only for a second, and his fingers were gone again. She could count the number of times he had touched her, from their very first meeting, on the fingers of her hand. So he had declared that his sole purpose in buying her had been to be amused. Then this must be his idea of amusement.
If only she did not feel, did not know, whenever she met his gaze, that there were depths behind those black eyes deeper even than the darkness she had plumbed. And she knew too well the boiling cauldron which lay in the recesses of her own mind.
Corbeau held the door for her, and she ducked her head to enter the great cabin, and mount the companion ladder, already deepening her breathing as the fresh sea air filled her lungs. She held the robe close as she gained the deck, and tossed hair from her eyes, and looked at the sparkling blue of the sea, and then ahead. Since leaving the brown waters of the Essequibo they had sighted no land as they had made their way directly across the centre of the Caribbean Sea. But now the horizon was suddenly filled with mountain peaks, and these were unlike any she had seen in her life before, reducing Dominica to a proper insignificance, towering across the skyline, rising and falling and disappearing into the blue haze beyond.
'It is a continent,' she whispered.
Corbeau smiled. 'No. But it is certainly the second largest island in the Caribbean. It yields only to Cuba.'
‘I had no idea we were so close,' she said. 'To Rio Blanco?' 'We are not close, to Rio Blanco,' he reminded her. 'My plantation is on the north coast, and that is still three days' sail away. I but wanted to show you your new home.'
'It is magnificent,' she said. 'They say there are high mountains in Guyana, but I have never seen them.'
'You will see these,' he promised her. 'They tower over Rio Blanco like the walls of a fortress.'
Once again he held the door for her, and she returned down the companion ladder, and hesitated. He stepped past her, and opened the cabin door. She entered, and waited yet again. His fingers touched her shoulders, and she hastily released the cord holding the robe, felt it being slipped from her body.
'You have had a week,' he remarked, 'to get to know me. To become used to me, perhaps.'
So then, it had only been a game after all. 'I am grateful, sir,' she said. ‘I have lived like a lady, for that week, and remembered how pleasant it was.'
'And do you now suppose you shall cease to be a lady?' he asked.
She sucked her lower lip beneath her teeth, and waited. She could not join in the game until she had learned the rules.
'Sit down,' he said.
She sat on the bunk, her hands clasped on her lap. 'Do you wish me to undress?'
‘I know what you look like,' he said, gently, and sat beside her. 'Any beautiful woman has the right to be a lady, if she chooses. Although sometimes the choice is a difficult one. But then, you are by far the most beautiful creature I have ever seen, and I completed my education in Paris and Vienna.'
'It pleases you to flatter me, sir.'
'I never flatter,' Corbeau said. 'It is not in my nature. But it is your future we should discuss. Are you totally unfamiliar with French law?'
She glanced at him, frowning. 'Should I be familiar with it, sir?'
He shrugged. 'I suppose not. French law in many ways is the most liberal in the world. For example, it states quite plainly that any human being with but a drop of white blood in his or her veins is free from the moment he or she sets foot on French soil.'
He paused, and she checked her head as it started to turn. For a moment she was not sure what she had heard.
'And St. Domingue, of course, counts as French soil,' Corbeau said, softly.
Now she did stare at him, and hated the hot flush w
hich filled her cheeks, even as she hated the way her mouth had drooped open. But it was a game. It had to be a game. He had told her this was her sole purpose in life, for him.
'And I have been informed, of course, that fifteen-sixteenths of your blood is white,' he said, still speaking very softly. 'So you see, you have but three days of slavery left to you, unless the wind entirely drops.'
She swallowed, and found it hard to lose the lump which had appeared in her throat, stretched down to her chest and belly. How strange, that she felt physically sick, now, where she had never known it before. A game. It had to be a game.
'Or unless, having shown me your island, you command your captain to alter course, and take me to an English or Dutch colony,' she said.
He smiled. ‘I have spent the better part of the past two years in Jamaica, as a prisoner of war,' he said. 'I have had my fill of the English. And I have never liked the Dutch. In three days, wind permitting, we shall disembark at Cap Francois, and you will be free.'
HF - 03 - Mistress of Darkness Page 34