Into the World

by Stephanie Parkyn

  ‘And what of duty, Monsieur?’ Captain d’Auribeau said coldly. ‘You speak of your rights but not your responsibilities. We are the children of the monarchy. Would you speak as disrespectfully to your own father, insist that you know best how to run his household and push an old man out on the street? What hope does a society have if those are its principles?’

  ‘What hope does a society have if it accepts governance purely by an accident of birth? We are children no longer, Citizen. The Enlightenment has taught us to think for ourselves. We can use our intellect and reason. We can reject tyranny!’

  ‘When we return to France, our King will be reunited with his throne and your revolutionary friends tied to the palace gates by their entrails!’ With a clatter of dishes, both Labillardière and d’Auribeau stood, stiff-backed and bristling.

  ‘When we return to France the King will be dead!’

  Girardin gasped. A shocked silence stilled the table. Then Kermadec shot to his feet, challenging Labillardière to recant his words. She had never seen him look so furious. She pressed herself back against the wall.

  ‘Gentlemen! Please sit!’ the General commanded sternly above the din.

  Labillardière’s nostrils flared, but he took his seat with exaggerated annoyance. The officers followed suit, eyeing him as though he were a wild animal they needed to tame.

  ‘Monsieur Labillardière, you forget you are on a mission in the name of our King,’ said the General.

  Labillardière snorted. ‘In name only. The monarchy is no more. The people are the true rulers of France.’

  ‘You would not be here on this voyage if it were not for the passion of our King. We are his servants. Our search for La Pérouse, our discoveries of geography and natural history, are all for his glory, not your own. You had better hope that your premonition is not correct, Monsieur. For if the King falls, then I predict your precious National Assembly will tear themselves apart to seize power from one another and our beloved country with it!’

  ‘I have greater hope that reason will prevail.’

  ‘No doubt you do. But I have greater experience in the virtues and vices of man.’

  Girardin was trembling. The officers were lined along one side of the table, the naturalists on the other. She looked at Kermadec, whose face had flushed bright red above his white cravat. Even the General was breathing hard. She knew now that if these men ever discovered what she had done for the revolution, all was lost.

  Chapter 36

  GIRARDIN STRETCHED OUT ON HER BED IN THE AFTERNOON HEAT, listening to the shrill pulse of insects outside the windows. Her journal lay on the pillow beside her. She had been writing to Olympe, pouring her anxiety into the ink until it eased her heart. She would have to burn those pages. The letter she would send to Olympe was a simple note. She had sealed it, hoping to place it with a Dutch ship, not knowing if it would ever reach her friend’s hand. She closed her eyes. Tomorrow, she would return to the Recherche. Tomorrow she would be gone from this house and all its reminders of revolution.

  When she met Jacques Hébert again, months after his argument with Olympe, it was at a ball. He singled her out. She recognised him as the writer, the Jacobin pamphleteer who had shown such naked interest in her that night at the salon. At the ball, he wore a wig of tight curls pushed too far back on his head and it aged him. His nose was too long and his face too narrow for her taste. But when he asked her to dance, she found she could not refuse.

  ‘You appear to be a most curious woman,’ he whispered in her ear as he passed her in the contredanse.

  She had felt a blush spread across her chest.

  ‘You are perfect,’ he said to her on the next turn, ‘for what I have in mind.’

  The intensity of his gaze excited her.

  ‘I see you are brave. You are strong. You are enlightened.’

  With each circuit of the dance, she walked taller and with more grace. She thought her partner grew in charm in the different light. When he smiled at her his face was transformed. When Olympe flicked her fan and frowned from the corner of the room, Marie-Louise ignored her. She felt the fierce thrill of being chosen.

  When they left the floor, Hébert steered her away from Olympe. He took her outside, into the cool night air.

  ‘A spy!’ she exclaimed when he told her what he wanted of her.

  ‘An informant,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘To be my eyes and ears in the palace of Versailles, to watch the pigs at their trough.’

  Her eyes grew wide. He was offering her the chance to act. To be someone of significance. Someone who made a difference.

  ‘Knowledge is power,’ he said, clenching his fists.

  ‘My father would never allow it.’

  ‘Leave your father to me. We will tell him you have been chosen as a companion to a noblewoman from a family of influence.’ He grinned and she saw that he had the measure of her father perfectly.

  She pictured the walls of her father’s house, the enclosed courtyard with cracks in the plaster like ropes she could not climb. Her breath quickened. She had found a way out.

  ‘Tell no one what I have said. None of your friends, not even Olympe de Gouges. What I ask of you requires the utmost secrecy. Can I trust you?’

  She had smiled up at him, eager as a pup. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  A knock at Girardin’s door startled her to her feet.

  Huon de Kermadec pushed the door wide. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I saw your door ajar.’

  She forgot she had cracked it open for the breeze. She glanced back at her bed as though she had left Marie-Louise lying there in her ball gown, trembling, at the moment her life was changed forever.

  He followed the direction of her gaze, and she felt her cheeks warm. Kermadec wore his white shirt loosely tucked, the weather too hot for jacket and cravat. Golden hairs curled on his damp chest. The sight was so intimate she quickly looked away.

  ‘Your hair,’ he said. ‘I almost did not recognise you at the General’s table.’

  She reached up. It had grown back fine and clean, fuzzing her head like flocked velvet.

  ‘I have news to share with you,’ he said.

  ‘The General’s decision?’ Her heart thumped.

  He nodded, his face sad. ‘We will chart the unknown coast of New Holland. I am sorry.’

  She spun away from him. It was as she had expected, but the realisation of the extra months, perhaps years, at sea sent her spirits plummeting. She should never have come on this journey.

  Crossing the room, she pushed her window shutters open, but now the heavy scent of spice was too sickly for her. The town stretched out below her, with its uneasy mix of Oriental and European houses. A knot of Dutch women in their black dresses and white caps stared up at her from the street, pinch-faced. She gulped the wet air.

  He followed her to the window and she could sense him standing close behind her.

  ‘We will find La Pérouse,’ Kermadec said, his voice full of certainty. ‘It will just take a little longer.’

  She worried her thumb under the cuff of her sleeve, searching for the familiar raised skin of her burn. She felt nothing. Startled, she pulled her sleeve back, terrified that the mark might have worn away to nothing. The scar was now a smooth red weal on her pale arm.

  ‘We will find him,’ he murmured, his breath a whisper against the nape of her neck. Were all men full of false promises? She slid sideways, putting a writing desk between them.

  ‘Did you know about the purchase of the slaves?’ she said, her voice sharp, wanting to wound.

  ‘They are volunteers,’ he said, guarded. ‘They seek escape from this place.’

  The irony was not lost on her. Had she not used the expedition herself to run away? Her fingers tapped the surface of the writing desk where the servants had polished the lacquer so well that she could see herself reflected. ‘We should pay them for their service,’ she snapped.

  ‘We will,’ he said, moving close to her. ‘And when
they leave us they will be free men.’

  He was standing directly in front of her. He smelled of warm cologne and fresh sweat. She stared at the rise and fall of his chest. He reached out and caught her hands in his and pulled her gently towards him. She resisted, afraid to let herself soften.

  ‘Louis!’ a voice called from the stair. ‘Louis Girardin!’

  Girardin jumped back as Félix burst through the doorway. His eyes followed her sudden movement.

  ‘We brought you a present,’ he said, dangling a green lizard by its long tail. ‘Like a chameleon,’ he added lamely, ‘it changes colours.’ He lifted it up in his hands.

  The lizard stared at her with an all-knowing eye.

  Chapter 37

  HER RETURN TO THE SHIP WAS DIZZYING. GIRARDIN EDGED between mounds of potatoes, yams and different kinds of melons, carrying her lizard in a bamboo cage. The ship was overflowing with food and livestock. Great quantities of banana leaves adorned the stern. She saw the old sailor, Armand, smuggle a piglet beneath his shirt and disappear below deck. She struggled past makeshift corrals crammed with goats and hogs. A stag stomped his foot, nostrils flaring. She caught the defiant look in his eye as he tossed his wide, impressive antlers. Beside him, a doe quivered in her stall. The stag and its breeding mate were to be released on New Holland, intended to supply future mariners with fresh meat.

  Besnard confronted her. ‘’Bout time you showed your face.’

  ‘What is that?’ she said, pointing to the gaily-coloured bird perched on his shoulder. She felt queasy watching the parrot kiss his lips, searching for the seed the chef held between his teeth. Looking around, she saw that almost every sailor aboard had adopted the fashion. The air was filled with the piercing shrieks of their birds.

  ‘And that?’ He jabbed a finger at her lizard in its bamboo cage. She ignored him, lifting the cage high as she sidled past.

  After weeks of space and solitude, this shambolic frenzy squeezed the breath from her. She fought her way through the press of men and beasts, anxious to reach her cabin.

  The vapours below deck reminded her that she faced another long sea voyage. Another year at least before they turned for home. Think of your wages, she consoled herself. She had survived the southern ocean once before and she had no choice but to endure it now.

  When she reached her cabin, Girardin locked herself in. She hung the cage from a hook and pulled apart a piece of ship’s biscuit to feed the grubs to the lizard. Its eyes darted around the cabin. ‘Your new home,’ she said. The familiar boundaries both comforted and oppressed her. She lit a candle.

  She was pleased to be leaving Amboyna, and yet she was not. She was pleased to be far from Captain Kermadec, and yet she was not. She could not settle, remembering how easy it would have been to let herself fall.

  An eerie wailing, like a woman’s haunted cry, drew her back on deck. It serenaded the ships as they departed from the Dutch East Indies. The soulful voice travelled across the water and sent shivers down her arms. The sailors grew quiet. She saw Armand cross himself. ‘It’s an omen.’

  ‘It’s the bamboo.’ Labillardière appeared at her elbow. He pointed to a river mouth where tall stakes of bamboo had been driven into the ground. ‘The natives drill a hole through each segment and the wind whistles a tune. We came across it on our travels.’

  ‘Sounds like the devil’s work to me,’ the old sailor said with a contemptuous sniff.

  Labillardière ignored him. ‘I hear we are to abandon La Pérouse and travel to the southern ocean once again.’

  Girardin refused to be baited. ‘The General must have good reason. He follows the King’s orders.’

  ‘The General thinks of his legacy. He wishes to be remembered on the charts of history,’ scoffed Labillardière.

  ‘And are you so different?’ she asked. ‘Do you not wish to be remembered long after your death in the names of the plants you have discovered?’

  Labillardière thumped his fist against the rail. ‘Look around you. Look at the oak boards beneath our feet, the fibres of these ropes, the cotton of your shirt. Where would we be without plants and the discovery of their uses? Look here—’ he scrabbled around in his knapsack and held up a candle ‘—the gum of the tree Dammara alba. The natives roll it into candles wrapped with sago leaves. It burns with no wick and no smoke for three hours! This is the sort of discovery we should be taking back to France. But instead the efforts of the naturalists are pushed aside in favour of the stargazers and the mariners. I cannot reason with him. We have all seen what lucrative trade the spices make. But he cannot see that our researches should be of equal, if not greater, import than mere cartography!’

  ‘But there will be opportunities, surely, when we stop for water?’ She thought of Kermadec without meaning to. The next time she would see him would be on Timor, when the ships were to resupply with water.

  ‘Mark my words, the needs of the savants will be the lowest priority.’

  In the following days, her lizard dined on the explosion of cockroaches that had stowed away with the wood. It roamed about Girardin’s cabin, crunching their shiny bodies into its mouth. The cockroaches could not be contained and they made their way through linen, books and papers, even draining the ink from inkwells. Her lizard and its appetite was in great demand and welcome in every cabin. ‘Lacerta amboinensis,’ Labillardière declared it to be, ‘sailfin lizard. The female of the species.’ He had snapped his book closed. But Girardin named her Passepartout after the master key that passes everywhere.

  While her lizard thrived, the sailors’ parrots succumbed to convulsions and died within days of leaving Amboyna. Secretly, Girardin was thankful for the respite from their fierce shrieks. Besnard was distraught.

  The goats were next to perish for want of better food.

  The scheduled visit to Timor for water was abandoned. Light and fickle breezes forced the ships to veer out deeper into the ocean in search of stronger winds. Labillardière was proved right. He was denied his chance to explore and Girardin now realised she would not see Captain Kermadec for many more months.

  As the weeks passed she replayed all the moments she had spent alone with Huon de Kermadec, the feel of his hand on the small of her back, the strength of his arms as he pulled her to her feet, the shock of his hands drawing her in to him. Had she remembered their connection to be more than it was? Had he only meant to give her comfort?

  At night, Girardin tried to banish him from her thoughts, but the fantasies remained. She imagined Kermadec with his arm resting across her shoulders, smiling at her. They were standing in a field and her son was running through the long grass towards her. There were flowers in the field, and a goat. Her son was now a small boy. He had a shock of white-blond hair.

  With Kermadec, she could raise her boy. With Kermadec they could be a family. The thought was there, like a dormant seed, waiting for water.

  What was she doing? How could she allow herself to feel this way? God punishes you whenever you dare to hope for something better, she reminded herself.

  To make matters worse her body began to burn and ache for touch. Each night a throb settled between her legs. She denied herself in punishment, knowing the feelings would pass. But she dreamed of the weight of a man lying on her, his hardness. She felt his wet lips on hers and the sudden suck of her lower lip into his mouth, and her loins kicked in response. She woke to the pulsing sensation and felt shame and anger—anger that her body had betrayed her yet again.

  During the day, she paced the deck. The tightness of the ship pressed on her spirits. Now that they had lost sight of land, there was nothing but the distant shape of the Espérance to fix her eyes on. Beside her, the stag shook his head and snorted in his corral. He lunged from left to right. She saw holes in the planks where his hooves had turned for days on end.

  It was time to forget this foolishness. Kermadec meant nothing by his attentions. Did she honestly believe that he would want her? A captain of a ship, no less! But she took
out his gift to her, the telescope, and found the Espérance through its eyepiece.

  She turned at the crack of splintering wood.

  The stag had burst from his pen. His hooves slipped on the deck, striking buckets and coils of rope. She watched as the magnificent animal twisted away from the hands that reached for him. The doe, still confined in her corral, whirled around. Sailors scattered as the stag lowered his head and charged towards the stern. His leap was weightless, he hovered in mid-air with the ship moving out from beneath him, and then he was swimming, strong and hard, nostrils flared above the water. The cry of the doe tore her ears and Girardin turned to see the deer staring back at her, wide-eyed and trembling.

  The stag held his antlers valiantly above the waves. Could he smell land? she wondered. They had sailed for days without sight of it. How long could he swim? He did not hesitate nor waver in his direction. What of the sharks?

  He would rather take his chance of freedom, Girardin realised, than stay constrained a moment longer.

  Chapter 38

  Cape Leeuwin, New Holland, 5 December 1792

  THIRST.

  A kind of madness, an obsessive need, gripped her. She fought it. She understood why men had been caught drinking from the stagnant rain gauges. She must drink! She took a small mouthful of mud-tasting brine and let it trickle down her throat. The water from Amboyna had turned putrid and the rations had been cut to one small bottle a day.

  She began to dream of the fountains of Versailles. Of falling into the pools, of splashing at the feet of Apollo’s horses, of drinking from his spouting horns. She remembered the wet juice of an orange. The boy had plucked one from the tree, casually dropping the peel to the ground. She had been shocked. ‘The oranges are to be looked at, not eaten,’ her father had told her. ‘The King will know if we take one.’ All the gardeners knew the consequences if they were caught with stolen fruit. The boy held out a piece of orange to her and she took it. An explosion of juice filled her mouth, sweet and tart. Now she thought of the taste of pineapple.