‘For God’s sake, nobody mention we have botanists on board,’ the General said to his lieutenants as they climbed into the boat. But he winked at her as they drew away.
Girardin longed to know what the General intended to do now. Would they continue the search for La Pérouse? He was yet to reveal their next destination. Whenever she asked about their route, all he would say was: ‘To Amboyna. There we will find all the supplies we need.’ But for what? she had wondered. For a journey home?
When the General returned to the ship, he was smiling. ‘Children, you are going ashore!’ he announced, spreading his arms wide.
The crew cheered. Someone cried out, ‘We will behave like little angels!’ She doubted it, most strongly.
Within a week almost all the officers had taken rooms in the town. Girardin watched the naturalists load up their cages and presses onto the back of a truculent donkey. They made a fine nativity scene, she thought, the chaplain hauling on the donkey’s lead, Labillardière striding ahead, his tall hat visible above the crowd on the bustling street, and Félix struggling behind beneath the weight of his pack. Ventenat pulled the lead with all his might while the donkey’s neck stretched out straight, its toes digging into the dirt street. She smiled to see its stubborness. Félix put down his pack and shouldered the rump of the donkey. It charged, the rope went slack, and Ventenat toppled onto his back. She sniggered as the donkey cantered up the street. But when the naturalists finally disappeared from sight, her smile faded and she felt an unexpected pang of loss at being left behind. This time they had not asked her to join them in their researches.
Girardin was to stay on board to supervise the loading of supplies and to help Besnard prepare dinner for the crew. By day the sailors scurried into the brothels and alehouses, but at night they returned to the ship, like rats to their nests, ordered by Joannet to avoid the worst excesses of debauchery. As the days passed, she grew impatient. The climate was hot and muggy and every afternoon the rain fell like ropes. She itched to leave the ship and explore the town, but the constant arrival of flour and biscuit and meat kept her days filled. Besnard ignored her.
No longer able to speak with the General now that he had lodgings ashore, she felt isolated and uncertain. She wrote letters to Olympe in her journal, for comfort. She wrote to her son, asking him to forgive her. She felt the urgency stronger than she had before, a dread that the longer they delayed the harder it would be to find her boy. The false reports of La Pérouse in the Admiralties had been a diversion from the King’s instructions. What would the General decide to do?
Other doubts plagued her moments alone. When would Raoul speak out? He knew her name, knew she was a woman. A sly word in Besnard’s ear would be all it took to reveal her secret. Why did he keep silent? Or did he mean to seek his own revenge? She knew he would not forget her shaming him on the beach in Van Diemen’s Land. Girardin removed her wages from their hiding place in her cabin and sewed the coins into the hem of her tunic. If he came for her, she would be ready to run.
Today, Besnard had leave to take his turn at the alehouses ashore, and she was alone in the galley. The ship was unusually quiet.
A cough behind her made her swing about.
Captain Kermadec smiled at her. His hands were clasped behind his back.
‘You startled me,’ she said, heart pounding.
‘I would like your opinion on something.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘But you must close your eyes.’
‘Why?’
‘Trust me.’
She stared at him for a moment, then let her eyelids fall closed.
It was disorientating to be plunged into sudden darkness in the cramped galley. Sounds grew louder. She heard the animals chewing in their stalls, their teeth grinding the fresh hay. She smelled the musky lanolin of the sheep’s wool. In the distance, strange booms and thumps echoed from the loading docks. The ship swayed gently on its mooring.
‘Now hold out your hands.’
She wanted to trust him, but she hesitated. Even in the darkness, she was aware of the shape of him, standing just an arm’s length away. She stretched out her hands.
The weight of the fruit surprised her. Spines pricked her palms, sending curious tingles across her skin. The rough surface was too hard for her nails to puncture. As she circled her hands up towards the neck, her finger struck a thorn.
‘Ouch!’ She opened her eyes.
She snorted. The pineapple was a ridiculous fruit. It wore a top knot of barbed fronds curling outwards like a jester’s cap and its skin was puckered into circles of green and gold, like a turtle’s shell.
‘Smell it,’ he urged her.
She pressed the fruit to her nose. The scent was indescribable, completely unfamiliar, an absolute novelty. When he took it from her, the scent lingered in her nostrils.
He cut through the length of it. When it fell open the fruit was creamy golden, a shade of yellow that reminded her of buttercups. He quartered it, trimmed out the heart, and offered her a golden wedge.
She touched the fruit to her lips and that alone was a burst of sweetness. Juice exploded in her mouth. She tugged on the fibres of the flesh with her teeth.
‘This is so good,’ she said, her voice husky.
Kermadec laughed. He looked thrilled as she took another bite. The juice dripped from her chin and she had to use her forearms to clean her face. Kermadec fell about with laughter.
For the first time in such a long time, she laughed freely. She didn’t care that she looked foolish. She took another piece, then another, letting the juice spill down her shirt.
When it was finished, her lips were stinging and her tongue felt raw. Fibres of the fruit were caught in her teeth. She wiped the juice from her mouth with the back of her hand. They stood facing one another, all laughter gone.
‘Steward!’ a voice called from above.
Their eyes widened. They both felt it, she was sure, this guilt at being found together. They had crossed some boundary into suspicion.
‘Steward!’ The voice belonged to Joannet. They heard his footsteps heavy on the stairs.
There was no need to be ashamed. They had done nothing but eat fruit together. ‘Quick,’ she whispered, pushing Kermadec behind the oven. She hid beside him, her body pressed against him hip to hip.
‘Monsieur Girardin!’ Joannet called as he entered the galley. He tutted and tsked at the remains of the dripping pineapple. ‘Too much fruit will bring on illness.’
She shared a look with Kermadec. ‘Go,’ she mouthed to him. He winked in return.
Girardin stepped out, wiping her hands on her tunic. ‘Joannet, how can I help you?’ She watched Kermadec sidle around the back of the oven, away from the surgeon, and make his silent escape.
‘Ah, there you are!’ Joannet frowned at her from beneath his heavy eyebrows. ‘You are requested to go ashore,’ he said. ‘One of the naturalists has fallen gravely ill.’
Chapter 33
GIRARDIN HURRIED BEHIND JOANNET THROUGH THE SPICE-SCENTED streets. The smell of nutmeg invaded her nostrils, making her sneeze. She passed garden plots and spreading trees heavy with fragrant flowers. Green vegetables were growing in the alleyways and on rooftops and even the cracks in the walls seem to sprout some fruiting or flowering plant. But she took no joy in this garden paradise, this prodigious display of life.
‘Who is ill?’ she asked the chief surgeon.
Joannet shrugged. ‘The messenger did not say.’
The sun beat down on the crown of her head. She had forgotten her hat in her haste, taking time only to remove her journal from the ship, wanting to keep it close beside her. Here the Malay people wore woven conical hats to shade themselves or scarves across their heads. They crowded the streets, standing, walking and sitting cross-legged with items of trade displayed on mats in front of them. A group of Dutch women wearing long black dresses and white bonnets to protect the whiteness of their skin, clustered together like nuns. Ins
tinctively, Girardin crossed the street to avoid their scrutiny.
Sweat made her skin clammy and dripped between her breasts. She could still smell pineapple juice. It had soaked through her shirt, her bindings, perhaps even her skin. She had let her guard down with Kermadec and her cheeks flushed at the memory. She had forgotten what it was like to lose yourself in laughter, to be as giddy as a foal, and now her chest ached at the reminder.
‘How much further?’ she asked
‘Not far.’ Joannet sidestepped a pile of manure.
Girardin thought of Félix’s kindness to her from the first moment they met. She thought of Labillardière, his brusque arrogance, but his tender fingers mending the gash on her arm in Van Diemen’s Land. And clumsy Ventenat, with his secret passion for colourful beetles and his faith that God would look after them all. Their friendship had sustained her on the long sea voyages and given her a measure of safety, and yet she had abandoned them to keep in the General’s good graces, to please the royalist officers. She saw the wounded expression on Félix’s face and was disgusted with herself.
Joannet stopped outside a house built in a medieval style with lime plaster and dark wood. The upper storey jutted out above the street and she felt the oppressive weight of it as she stood beneath.
‘The General leased the house from a Dutch family who have gone to replant the nutmeg plantations of Banda Island after a hurricane.’ Joannet gave a gleeful chuckle as he rapped on the door. ‘The Dutch ripped the spice plants out of every other island in the East Indies to keep their stranglehold on trade. I bet they regret that now!’
‘The General?’ she said. ‘The General is here with the naturalists?’
‘And Captain Kermadec.’
She stilled, listening to the thump of her heart. Smelling pineapple.
‘D’Auribeau played a prank on the naturalists. He pretended to be Labillardière and took over their arranged lodgings. I found it very amusing.’ He rapped again on the door. ‘The General took pity on them.’
This time the door swung back and the strangest man Girardin had ever seen stood before them. He wore a footman’s uniform and his woolly hair was dusty white, but it was not a powdered wig. His nose was broad and his lips full, like the slaves she had seen in Cape Town, but his skin was a sickly, almostly chalky white. She found she wanted to reach out and scratch his face, as though he had merely covered himself in powder.
‘An albino Negro!’ Joannet cried with delight. ‘Well, I never. The things you see.’
He was still shaking his head as Girardin followed him into the dark house.
Two more servants materialised in the gloom. These were Malay men with short flat hair that shone like raven’s feathers. One took her by the hand and led her up the stairs.
The fetid stench of the invalid’s room hit her with force. The window shutters were drawn and the room barely lit by yellow candlelight. A figure vomited noisily into a wooden pail as she entered. She couldn’t see who it was. Girardin stepped closer to the bed. The invalid collapsed back and stared upwards, mouth falling open. Some of his teeth were missing. Ventenat. She remembered his fall into the ants’ nest in Van Diemen’s Land. Girardin felt a stab of relief, and was instantly ashamed.
Labillardière came around the bed to meet her. ‘His symptoms are alarming and he is in great pain,’ he said in a low voice. ‘We fear to leave him alone.’
Félix stepped out from a dark corner of the room. ‘Will you help us?’ he asked. She met his eye, relieved to see him, but fearing he must think her a coward. ‘There is no one else we can ask.’
‘Get some air in here,’ Joannet ordered. But the piercing shard of light when the shutters were opened caused Ventenat to cry out in pain. Girardin jumped back in shock when an attack of hiccups convulsed the sick man’s body.
‘Too much fruit,’ declared Joannet. He turned to her with a self-righteous eye. She licked the taste of pineapple from her lips as though it could betray her. ‘And imbibing the crude spirits and fermented liquors,’ he continued. ‘That’s the cause of dysentery.’
Girardin ground her teeth. How dare he suggest the chaplain was a debauched drunkard? She took a seat by Ventenat’s bedside, noticing his face had become waxy, almost corpse-like.
‘These putrid fevers are highly contagious,’ Joannet said in his booming voice. ‘We must cut off as much communication with others as possible, as one would separate a mangy dog from the pack.’
Girardin could only hope that Ventenat was protected by his delirium. She dunked a cloth in a pail of juniper water and wrung it hard.
‘And in the case of a mortal outcome—’ Joannet dropped his voice to a loud whisper ‘—everything this man has touched should be burned.’
Félix burst forward, his lips set in thin white lines, and pushed the surgeon from the room.
‘Vinegar,’ Joannet yelled as the door closed behind him. ‘Fumigate the room with vinegar.’
Félix turned to her, while Ventenat groaned on the bed.
‘Will you stay?’ Félix asked. ‘Will you help us care for him?’
She blinked tears from her eyes, relieved he still trusted her enough to ask. ‘Of course,’ she said.
Girardin held a bucket as the chaplain leaned over the side of the bed to vomit up the broth she had made him. She helped him crouch over the pail when the spasms clenched his bowels. Each evacuation left him more disorientated and feeble. He called out for his brother. Girardin squeezed his hand and sang to him, trying not to think of her first son, Jojo, and the night when the fevers came to take him from her.
Labillardière relieved her at midnight. One of the servants, the albino Negro, gestured that she should take his own bed for the night. Girardin declined his offer, assuring him she could sleep in a chair, but he became insistent. Labillardière shrugged. ‘The man has offered you something of his own free will. How often does he get to exercise that which we take for granted?’
‘What do you mean?’ She was too tired to puzzle over Labillardière’s words.
‘The servants are slaves,’ he said with disgust. ‘Leased to us along with the house.’
Slaves. A commodity that could be bought and sold, traded away from their friends and family as readily as the crates of cloves and nutmeg. She felt sick. She stared at the man’s wrists. She could not imagine him as one of those shackled men on the dock at Cape Town. She wondered if he had children he would never see again.
He tugged her sleeve. His insistence only increased her sense of guilt. Now it seemed churlish to resist and Girardin accepted the man’s generosity with profuse thanks. She followed him to his cupboard-sized room and stretched out on the thin mattress, laying her head on her journal. All those words that nestled inside the pages were messages of love to her son that she could not bear to be without.
The straw mattress was lumpy and crawled with biting insects that niggled their way through her clothes to her skin. But she was safe inside a house, on solid land. And somewhere inside these same walls, she thought, Captain Kermadec was also spending the night.
Chapter 34
VENTENAT’S CONDITION REMAINED UNCHANGED THROUGH THE next day. By nightfall, a room had been prepared for her. Its floors had been swept and mopped, the rugs beaten and all the surfaces wiped, but its musty smell caught at the back of her throat. This room had not been opened for many years.
In the centre of the room was a magnificent bed. The coverlet was silk and intricately stitched in gold, green and blue. Girardin longed to stretch out flat on the mattress, to feel its solid weight beneath her. The walls were whitewashed and empty of any paintings. Dark mahogany furniture of both Dutch and Oriental style decorated the room. Beneath the window stood a small writing table, each carved leg ending in the shape of a human hand balancing upon a globe. She would write to Olympe, she decided, thinking of the letters she had written in her journal, telling her about the power of the ocean waves and the beauty of the snow-white albatross. Let her know that she was
safe. From this port there must be a ship that could take a letter home.
Girardin took a seat in front of the washstand and mirror where the servants had left a basin of tepid water for her to wash and a knife for her to shave. She looked long at her reflection. It was the first time she had seen herself in nearly a year. Pulling back her lips, she bared her teeth and gently probed at her gums; they felt swollen and tender. She took one of her front teeth between her fingers and felt it move forwards and backwards, wondering briefly what price her teeth might have fetched in the Paris slums. She grew afraid to wiggle it further lest it fall to the basin in front of her.
Her hair had grown and it curled around her ears in an alarmingly feminine manner. She picked up the razor beside the basin and drew its blade along her scalp, scraping from the crown of her head towards the fringe. The greasy clumps came away in her hands as though her hair were falling out at the roots. When she was done, she took stock of her reflection once more. The near bald head and plain face that confronted her was no more masculine than before. She looked like a street girl who had sold her hair to eat. And something about the smallness of her head, the curve at the back of her neck, reminded her of a vulnerable child. A baby.
She wept.
She wept until her shoulders were weak and her head was heavy on her arms. When her tears had dried, she dipped a rag into the tepid water of the basin and wiped it across her cheeks. Tears would not help her. She wiped around the base of her neck. She knew she stank. How long had it been since she had dabbed perfume on her skin?
Dragging a chair across the floor, Girardin wedged its back underneath the doorknob. Sure that no one could disturb her, and with the windows shuttered, she began to strip off her clothes. Loosening the drawstring, she let her trousers fall to the floor. Even in the dim candlelight, the black rash on her lower legs repulsed her. She pulled her tunic over her head and slowly unbound the grey bandage from her breasts. Not daring to look she closed her eyes and felt the pulpy, clammy skin. It was tender beneath her fingertips. Girardin washed quickly. She dosed the water with vinegar and dragged a wet rag underneath her armpits, around her breasts and between her legs. She pulled a starched nightgown over her head and it fell stiffly to her ankles, covering her completely.
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