The Vanishing Point

Home > Other > The Vanishing Point > Page 15
The Vanishing Point Page 15

by Mary Sharratt


  What, she wondered, would the new mistress be like? It was hard to imagine having a mistress instead of just the two masters. In the three years she had lived in this outpost, the only females she had laid eyes on were the Banham girls, the one time they had visited with their father. She hoped her new mistress wouldn't be haughty like those girls, but gentle and kind. Pretty, too. If she was a proper lady, she would call on Adele to brush her hair and lace her gowns, as Maman had done for her former mistress in Martinique. The mistress in Martinique had a face like a china doll, blue-marble eyes, and soft brown hair that Maman had curled with iron tongs.

  All Adele knew from the letters Master Washbrook had read aloud to his son was that the new mistress's name was May, like the English month, and that she was healthy and twenty-two years old. Adele counted on her fingers. That made her four years older than Master Gabriel, seven years older than herself. Having a mistress here might finally put an end to her nightmares. Her hand moved inside the front of her smock to the small cloth bag that contained the white cockerel feather she wore for protection.

  After sweeping the porch, Adele went back inside the house to make sure everything was ready for the mistress's arrival. This morning she had washed the window, scrubbed the floor, dusted the table, mantelpiece, dresser, and chest of drawers. But her hardest labor could not transform this shack into a proper home. The master and mistress in Martinique had owned a house built of stone with jasmine growing up the walls, a long veranda around it, glassed windows in each room. They had carpets, looking glasses, mahogany furniture, a spinet, and a parrot in a cage. Each Christmas the mistress had served roasted peacock. She tried to remember that place as she had loved it when she was a very young child—before she had learned to hate.

  Yesterday, with no help from the lazy Irishmen, who sported and swam naked in the river when the master was away, Adele had stuck a small pig and butchered it. The bacon now hung in the chimney to smoke along with the sausages she had made. The loin she roasted in a pan with cider, apples, onions, and garden chard. Master Washbrook laughed at her cooking—he called it Frenchified and peculiar. The English like their meat the honest way, he had told her, boiled with turnips, not basted in cider and covered in fruit. Once he had given her a receipt book of proper English cookery, only to discover she couldn't make any sense of the words on the page. So it was either eat her Frenchified food or go hungry.

  She missed the cooking she knew from her childhood—goat meat stewed in coconut milk, yams and mangoes, nutmeg and fresh pepper. Only dull food grew here. No wonder she had grown so thin. If Maman were with her, she would feed her guava fritters and sweet cakes until her hollow cheeks filled out. Although there was no looking glass in the Washbrook household, she had an idea how shabby she must look in her mud-colored homespun smock, her hair covered in a headcloth that had once been blue and was now a dull gray. She went barefoot, saving her shoes and stockings for winter's cold. Her skin wasn't coffee-dark as her mother's had been, but a lighter brown. She knew she was a half-caste, but didn't know anything more about her father. By the time she had been old enough to ask such questions, Maman was gone.

  Adele went to the hearth to check the progress of the pork loin. When the mistress was finally here, she would fry corn-cakes on the griddle. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered cooking decent food for these people. Master Washbrook always prayed and read from the Bible before each meal. By the time he allowed them to eat, the food was overcooked.

  She regarded the brand-new bedstead Master Washbrook had purchased from a ruined planter down the Bay. Previously young Gabriel had slept on a pallet, but now that he was to have an English bride, he must have a proper bed. Shyly she fingered the bed curtains and the linens she had washed in the creek. Bolder now, she sat on the edge of the feather mattress and bounced up and down. How inviting the bed was, how soft. How tempting just to curl up and doze until they arrived. But she sprang to her feet and smoothed the counterpane so no one would know she had tested the mattress.

  Flowers, she thought. A new bride must have flowers. Of course, nothing beautiful could bloom in these forsaken woods. Her former mistress in Martinique had a garden so exquisite, none of Master Washbrook's descriptions of the Garden of Eden in the Bible could match it. Orchids and frangipani had grown there, gardenia and hibiscus flowers as big as her fist. When she was a child, Maman used to scent her braids with vetiver. She could still recall the earthy sweetness of that scent, her mother's hands in her hair.

  The only flowers she would be able to find in this place were the ones that grew wild—the tall spiky purple flowers that shot up in the forest, the gold flowers that grew among the rotting tree stumps. She didn't know the names of those flowers, and it was no good asking the Washbrooks—what did men know about such things? Although her mother had brought her up to speak proper French and not just slave patois, her English was patchy.

  Adele stepped out the door. She tiptoed past Master Gabriel's dogs, sleeping in a heap near the porch steps. She couldn't get away from them fast enough. Dogs terrified her. When she was eight years old, they discovered Maman was a shadow catcher, an obeah woman. Not only that, she had cast a spell on Monsieur Desvarieux, their former master, who had given his slaves his surname. Maman had cast a spell to turn his eye, to stop him from hurting Madame Desvarieux, the mistress.

  In Adele's mind, the pictures revolved—one of Maman brushing Madame's brown hair as they laughed together; another of Madame weeping, clad only in her chemise, a purple bruise blooming on her cheek, her bare white arms around Maman's neck.

  Shivering, Adele touched the bag that held her cockerel feather and pressed it against her breastbone. No matter how hard she prayed, the pictures in her head never stopped tormenting her. Maman worked her magic to help Madame, then Monsieur Desvarieux caught her strewing rusty nails in his path. He lifted Maman's pallet and the loose floorboard underneath to discover more evidence of her sorcery—chicken feet, white feathers, broken eggshells, lizard bones, cat teeth, and a bottle of graveyard dust. Some of the other slaves betrayed her, saying they had seen her in the act of the old night worship. Clemence, the laundress, saw her pouring offerings of milk, chicken blood, and pilfered rum on the roots of the cotton silk tree.

  Maman's punishment was a whipping with the cat-o'-ninetails, then twelve months of hard labor in the cane fields on the other side of the volcano. Clemence said Maman was lucky—other obeah women and men were hanged or burned alive. After they had taken Maman, Adele tried to find her. She ran away, cutting through the orange and lemon groves, the coffee plantation, and into the jungle that clad the steep volcano slope. Razor grass sliced her legs open and then dogs came out of nowhere, great mastiffs barking and growling, their teeth at her throat, paws on her chest, grinding her into the mud with the red and black ants until the master's men came and snapped iron manacles around her wrists and ankles. It didn't matter that she was a child; they whipped her until blood drenched her torn skirt. The welts still laced her back.

  The whipping left her too weak for fieldwork, so they let her stay on as a house servant. She scoured chamber pots and polished Monsieur Desvarieux's shoes. With Maman gone, Madame fell ill, never leaving her bed. Eventually she died of the ague. When they buried her, the gravediggers raised and lowered her coffin three times so her ghost would rest gentle and leave the living in peace. Some said that her duppy would come back and haunt the master, punish him for his cruelty. Soon after Madame's death, the news came that Maman had perished in the cane fields, bitten by a snake.

  Heart beating fast, Adele sat on a tree stump and smoothed her face with her hands, trying to draw herself back to the present. No one had died on the Washbrook Plantation yet. The place was free of ghosts. Maman had taught her that each person had two souls. After death, one soul went to heaven for judgment while the other lingered on earth as a duppy, taking up residence in the roots of a tree. A duppy could be good or evil; a shadow catcher like Maman could harness one to help o
r harm.

  After Madame died, Monsieur Desvarieux could find no new wife. No white lady would have him. Instead he badgered the pretty young slaves, but sickened of them when they grew big with child. One night Adele woke to his weight crushing her into her pallet, his hands tearing open her shift. Eleven years old, she sank her teeth into his hand until she tasted blood. At the same time she scratched him like a wild cat, even managed to gouge his leg with her toenail. When he finally wrenched his torn hand from her mouth, she screamed and cursed, threatening to send his dead wife's duppy after him. She shrieked loudly enough to spook the horses in the stable. In the morning, he had her whipped, but he never dared to touch her again. People said that after that night, she had the eyes of a zombie.

  Soon after, he sold her to an English sea captain, who spoke to her in a tongue she couldn't understand. She had to launder his clothes and wash the lice out of his bed linen before his ship set sail for the American colonies. The sea captain said the same words over and over until she understood. When he cornered her in his cabin and tried to lift her skirts, she kneed him in the pillocks. The following day she left a seagull's foot in his mug of beer and the rest of the dead gull on his pillow. After that, he left her alone, and soon sold her off so cheaply that Nathan Washbrook could afford her.

  Adele stopped to pick the tall gold-flowering weeds that grew beside the harvested tobacco field. As she made her way down the path, she ran into Patrick, still dripping from his swim. Naked, he clutched his bundle of clothes over his groin.

  Without wanting to, she jumped and let out a cry, dropping the flowers. Patrick laughed. "What are you looking at, Adele? Fancy a tumble?" Though the other Irishmen left her in peace, Patrick was cruel, always poking fun at how easily she startled.

  Arranging her face in a scowl, Adele stared with a ferocity that made the little bit of color vanish from his pasty skin. "I will put the chicken foot in your pottage this night," she muttered. "I will put bones in your bed." Though she only pretended, the men on the Washbrook Plantation, even Master Washbrook himself, feared deep down that she possessed dark powers. It had been Maman's gift, not hers, but she did nothing to correct their assumption. Let them be afraid of her.

  Muttering Jesus under his breath, Patrick scuttled away, allowing her to catch a glimpse of his goose-pimpled white ass. She spat in his direction, then picked up the gold flowers and headed toward the creek. Despite her fierce face, her heart pounded and her hands shook. Would the fear and hate of men ever leave her? Maybe when the new mistress came and she wasn't the only female. But what if the mistress was cruel? She had heard that Mrs. Banham whipped her servants at will, even if they did nothing to provoke her. They said she was driven to madness, wed to such a libertine, that she took it out on her maids and garden boys.

  A crow flying overhead touched her with its shadow. Shivering, she crossed herself. The purple flowers, she thought. She still had to pick the tall spiky blooms at the edge of the woods. When she reached the creek, she knelt on the bank and cupped her hands to drink. Then she lifted her face toward the towering trees that grew on the other side. If she weren't afraid of Master Gabriel's traps, she often thought she would run deep into the forest and never return. If she squinted and prayed, she could see her mother dancing beneath the oaks. Tall and graceful with her too proud eyes. If Maman were here, she would take Adele's hands, raise her to her feet, tell her to be strong. Never forget you are a shadow catcher's daughter. When Adele was six years old, Madame had given her a silver bangle with Adele Desvarieux engraved on the inside, so she would grow up knowing how to write her name. The bangle was too small for her now. She hid it in her pallet.

  Leaping across the creek to the lush bank opposite, she picked the tall purple flowers until her arms were too full to hold any more. Then she headed back toward the house. On her way, she passed Finn. He was her age, a quiet boy. If she had no fear in her heart, she sometimes thought they might have become friends. He wasn't cruel like Patrick.

  "Adele." He nodded to her in greeting. "Did you pick those flowers for the new mistress?"

  Even with Finn, the old panic wouldn't let her go. Ducking her head, she just nodded and hurried up the path. He stepped aside to let her pass.

  Once she had heard Master Washbrook telling the Irishmen to leave her alone, stay out of her way, for she was touched by God. Touched by God. She imagined a golden hand emanating from Master Washbrook's huge English Bible and resting on her, marking her as different. Please, God, let the new mistress be kind. Let there be one person here she could look at without the dread rising inside her. Perhaps the mistress would have the power to still her hate, take away her fear.

  Before reaching the porch, she slowed her gait to avoid awakening the dogs. Stealing inside, she found a jug for the flowers. There was enough water in the bucket to spare her another trip to the creek. As she arranged the purple and gold blooms, she decided that even though they were weeds, they were pretty in their way, brightening the gloomy house. Maybe when the mistress saw them, she would smile, knowing someone had thought to pick her flowers. Plucking one of the purple spiky flowers from the bouquet, Adele laid it like an offering in the center of the brand-new bed.

  She jumped and swallowed a scream when the dogs started barking. Edging to the window, she saw them leaping down the path to the river. Her heartbeat quickened. That meant Master Washbrook and his son had returned with the English lady. She took a deep breath, decided this was the moment to be bold. In truth, she couldn't stop herself from rushing out the door and creeping toward the river. She held back, peering from behind bushes. Through the autumn leaves, she caught glimpses of the Irishmen walking to the dock. Finn held his straw hat in his hands. Patrick was clothed again, but his wet hair gave him the look of a water rat.

  She saw James helping the young woman out of the boat. When he stepped away, providing Adele with a clear view of her, she forgot to breathe. The lady wore a green gown embroidered with flowers. Though it was October, she came dressed like spring, as beautiful as her name. The sun shone on her hair, which was the same color as Madame Desvarieux's mahogany dressing table. She was so lovely, she seemed to give off light, like the fireflies Maman had called les belles. As the Irishmen gathered at the dock, the lady smiled at them, hands outstretched like the Madonna. Adele could find no arrogance in her face, only curiosity. Something caught in Adele's throat. Forgetting her fear, she walked forward to greet her new mistress.

  18. A Woman's Fate

  Hannah

  1693

  THE DAYS SLID PAST in a happy blur. The pile of skins in the attic grew so high, it touched the ceiling. Gabriel stitched her a cloak of fox fur that kept her warm even in bitter weather, when the wind blew straight in from the Atlantic and she had to break the ice on the creek with a hatchet to get water. With snowflakes nestled in her hair and fur cloak, she looked like the Snow Queen, or so Gabriel said when he teased her. Sometimes they danced across the bare wooden floor, even though they had no music except the wind howling down the chimney.

  "How do you keep track of the days?" she asked him one morning when they walked hand in hand down the riverbank. "I don't know if it is already the New Year or still the old."

  "The Indians mark the time by counting the full moons, the summers and winters," he said. "Time passes differently here."

  "I feel it too." Their youth could stretch on forever, she decided, if they stopped counting the years. This was probably the closest a mere mortal could come to touching eternity. She squeezed his mittened hand. "Now I know why you don't want to go back there." She looked down the river. "Back to that world." The world of calendars, planters, tobacco, and money counters.

  He kissed her. "What need have we to go back there? We want for nothing. Do we, Hannah?"

  The only two things left to desire were a ring on her finger and a minister to sanctify their union. In the eyes of the world, they were living in sin. But she didn't tell him this—she couldn't. What power did the word
sin have on this dazzling white morning when the snow glittered like a crop of diamonds?

  "No," she told him softly. "We lack nothing." She could walk the forest in a fur cloak like some highborn lady. Meat on her table every night, the love of an adoring man. She wouldn't trade places with any woman alive. Banham's daughters would be married off to planters of their father's choosing. Mrs. Gardiner would continue bedding her husband's friends until her beauty was gone. But you, Hannah Powers, are a free woman, your own mistress.

  ***

  The days grew longer and the snow melted, leaving the earth springy and damp. Tiny white and yellow flowers carpeted the forest floor. The land claimed her and left its mark on her, as it had done with Gabriel. Soon all vestiges of her old life would be worn away. One morning she opened her trunk to take out her old Sunday dress of mustard-colored wool with the forest-green stomacher. Gabriel had never seen her in her good dress. But it was laced with moth holes. In a fit of disgust, she threw it in the midden heap. Soon she would have to dress in buckskin, as the Indian women did. An Englishwoman no longer, she would clothe herself in deerhide and let the sun burn her skin. When the weather grew warmer, she would go barefoot. Her foot soles would toughen into leather.

  ***

  Hannah spread goat manure in the garden and hoed it into the soil. She planted the seeds Gabriel had saved in autumn. In a ring around the garden, pear and apple trees bloomed. Cherry trees blossomed in a pink cloud. Soon they were eating salads of dandelion and violet leaves. Not long after, the strawberries ripened. Hannah picked the first lettuce and tender peapods. The river filled with trout, which she fried in fresh butter.

  "This feast never ends," she told Gabriel, thinking sadly of the plantation folk, who spent these lovely days working from dawn to sunset just to keep the tobacco alive. Gabriel had told her what a labor it had been. Each day during the growing season they had to strip off the beetles that could destroy the entire plant.

 

‹ Prev