I met her glance with equanimity. She poured out a cup of tea and handed it to me, then said, “Do you think Jean-François could still be alive?”
Well, this was unexpected. He’d been gone—eighteen years. The expedition had been declared lost for thirteen. I stared at my sister-in-law, quite unable to formulate a reply.
“Over the years I’ve met some of the other wives,” Éléonore went on. “Many of them said they knew their husbands were still alive.”
“Hope fed by desperation,” I said.
“A few of them seemed equally sure that their men were dead.”
“The less happily married ones,” I suggested.
Eléonore laughed at this, a small trilling laugh that reminded me of her cheerfulness when she’d first come to Albi as Jean-François’s bride, a cheerfulness that seemed immune to our collective disapproval. But now the laugh turned into a dry, papery cough. When it subsided, she said, her voice quieter: “Do you think there can be such bonds between people? Bonds so strong they can communicate over vast distances?”
“It seems a question for a philosopher,” I said.
“I’ve never had any sense of Jean-François’s fate,” she said. “I thought that you—” She pressed her lips together before going on. “You may remember that I also lost a brother in the expedition.”
I clinked the spoon against the side of my teacup. I’d forgotten about her brother and was not pleased by the reminder. He’d been arrested for assaulting their sister, then given a choice between going to prison or accompanying Jean-François as a volunteer. He should have chosen prison, I thought. He could have spent the ensuing decade happily assaulting aristocrats. “I’m sorry, Éléonore,” I said, then thought about why she’d mentioned him. “Are you saying you know what befell your brother?”
She looked away, embarrassed. “I don’t know, of course,” she said. “But I do have an inkling—or I did, early on—that Frédéric might still be alive. Now, of course, it’s been so long…” Her voice trailed off, then she looked directly at me. “You are Jean-François’s sister and knew him the longest,” she said. “If he were able to convey his fate to anyone, it would be you.”
I shook my head and said nothing. Her unjealous, clear-eyed sadness was more painful to me than an undisciplined episode of tears would have been. I kept my lips shut tight, fearful of revealing the raw anguish I felt welling up inside. As soon as I could manage, I made my excuses and got up.
“Madame Dalmas,” Éléonore said, also rising. “I would be very happy, and honored, if your family were to adopt the name Lapérouse. It would be an enormous comfort to me, in fact.”
I left the room. My niece was married the next day. Éléonore returned to Paris, where, I learned later, she successfully petitioned Napoleon for a small pension. I never saw her again.
* * *
You were his sister and knew him the longest.
And what was it that I knew? That Jean-François was a man maddeningly indifferent to society and his status in it. That he would have found my adoption of his name amusing and my distress over its misspelling incomprehensible. That he would have delighted in the noisiness of children. That the fading and early death of Éléonore would have broken his heart.
I also knew that he had never communicated his fate to me—or if he had, I had been too insensible to hear him. Every year it grows more certain, not only that he will not return, but that I will go to my grave not knowing what happened to him or to the expedition that bears his name. His name is all I have left of him. An old woman may be forgiven, I think, for hoarding a few things over which she may still exercise some sway.
I turn at the sound of a footstep—not Armand’s. It’s my husband, hat and cane in hand, standing just outside the side-chapel and regarding me with a look of patient indulgence. What are you doing here? I want to cry. But that hardly seems an appropriate utterance in church, even if the church is a private chapel one used to own. Anyway, it’s entirely obvious Antoine has come to take me home.
“Monsieur Dalmas de Lapérouse,” I say.
His face opens into an expression I have not seen in a long time, an expression of pleased surprise and gratitude. I’m reminded of him as a younger man and younger husband, and the heat rises to my face as I realize: he’s been waiting two days to hear me call him “Monsieur Dalmas de Lapérouse.” It would be so easy—it’s so tempting—to quash his pleasure, to say, How considerate of Jean-François to disappear so you could improve your name. But—well, we’re still in church, so I let him help me up, and I wave my farewell to Père Armand as my husband escorts me outside.
Helping me down the steps, Antoine says, “Victor and François and I have written to Paris about the name, Jacquette. And we’ve written to Léon to get his help. With his connections, he may be able to see it through better than we can.” Léon, Martiane and Émile’s father, is a naval commissary in Vannes.
When I say nothing, he adds: “We may not live to see it fixed, Jacquette. But our children will. And I predict that within a generation or two, they will drop the ‘Dalmas’ and call themselves only ‘Lapérouse.’”
I pause at the bottom of the steps and look up into the face of the man who has been my husband for fifty-one years. “Won’t that bother you?”
“Only a little.”
At the carriage, I’m startled by Pierre’s impish face grinning at me from the window.
“Oh, what did you bring him for?” I ask.
“Because he’s your favorite.”
“He most certainly is not.”
“Then you may believe I’ve brought him to punish you for the trouble of having to collect you,” he says, helping me in.
“Grandmother!” Pierre cries when I seat myself opposite him. Quite heedless of my frown, he leaves his seat and sits next to me, then takes my hand. I’ve never liked holding hands. And his fingers are damp and sticky—no doubt he’s eaten something sweet and not washed afterward. But as I said earlier, his hands are stronger than mine, so I let him.
FOURTEEN
RELICS
Hôtel de La Marine, Paris, March 1829
Spoon & Fork
Barthélemy de Lesseps picked up the spoon and fork, one in each hand, and held them flat against his palms as if weighing them. Peter Dillon watched the Frenchman with a mixture of admiration and anxiety. “The islanders had lots of silver,” he found himself explaining. “But most of it they’d beat into wires for rings and bracelets and the like. These few we found intact in their original forms.”
He knew Lesseps was sixty-three, but the man looked younger, too young to have been a grown man forty years earlier. Perhaps it was his clothes: fashionable blue coat worn over white waistcoat, cambric shirt, neat gray breeches. He was also thin and agile, with a full head of barely graying hair and clear blue eyes. He’d been introduced to Dillon as “Monsieur de Lesseps, our consul general in Portugal,” but Dillon wondered if he could get away with calling him Viscount de Lesseps in his book. This aristocratic gentleman was the perfect figure for the narrative’s triumphant conclusion in Paris.
But those clear blue eyes were now examining, with an expression of careful detachment, the utensils Dillon had brought back from the island of Vanikoro in the South Pacific. The well-fed and medal-bedecked Baron Hyde de Neuville, minister of the Navy and the man who’d arranged this meeting, stood by watching his countryman with a kind of pompous intensity. Dillon had thought of this meeting with Lesseps, taking place in the most ornate room he’d ever set foot in, as simply the crowning formality to cap his achievements. But he realized now that that wasn’t how the two Frenchmen saw it. For them, it wasn’t a meeting so much as a test. A test he could fail. Even though his discoveries had been touted in newspapers in Sydney, Calcutta, and London. Despite his audience with His Majesty King Charles X. Notwithstanding the Légion d’honneur he’d been promised, or the monetary reward for information on the missing frigates, or the annuity of four thousand francs. None
of that mattered—all of it could be rescinded, in fact—if this man, the only known survivor of the Lapérouse expedition, missing these forty years, declined to confirm his findings.
* * *
For his part, Barthélemy de Lesseps wished the tall, red-headed Irishman would not stand so very close. The man’s recently re-dyed coat and resoled shoes fairly exuded, not just the smell of dye and glue, but an anxious wish to please and be liked. Lesseps had heard rumors about Dillon—that he was a fearless and skilled ship captain, a savvy trader in sandalwood and native artifacts, a man well-versed in the cultures and languages of the South Seas. But he was also known as a brute who dragged his wife along on his travels, beat her when he got drunk, and carried on liaisons with island women at every port of call. The missionaries hated him, as did many of his former associates, who tended to regard him, not as fearless and skilled, but as foolhardy and very, very lucky. Odd how meek the man seemed now, Lesseps thought. He’d met such men before: tyrannical in their own spheres but timid, even obsequious, before men they believed to be their social betters.
He looked at the silver utensils in his hand and sighed. When the minister’s letter came, asking him back to France to examine objects recovered from the South Pacific, objects suggesting that the final resting place of the Boussole and the Astrolabe had at last been discovered, he’d departed on the first ship out of Lisbon and hired the fastest postilions out of Marseilles to convey him to Paris. For wasn’t it this for which he’d been granted long life through such dangerous times? He’d sat forward in the carriage seat, willing the horses to go faster, impelled by a sense of destiny.
But now he couldn’t help it: he wished someone else—someone with more dignity, someone more, well, French—had solved the mystery, not this gruff Irishman of uncertain parentage and little education. What could a scarred spoon or tarnished fork prove, anyway? They looked like items one might find anywhere.
“It is hard to say,” he said at last, diffident about his English but aware that both Dillon and the minister were waiting for him to speak. He turned the spoon over, then moved to one of the room’s tall, recessed windows to examine it more closely. At the base of the bowl he could just make out a worn design—a seashell, perhaps—and experienced a frisson of familiarity, a memory of elegant officers’ dinners aboard the Astrolabe, wineglasses glinting in candlelight, meals served on china and eaten with polished utensils. The back of the fork seemed to have a similar design. He ran his thumb over the ribbed silver, then turned to Dillon: “We did have forks and spoons like these.”
Dillon exhaled noisily and Lesseps stepped back, put off by an unpleasant mix of fish and tobacco that wafted his way. “Though I suppose such spoons are common enough,” he added, setting the items down. He heard Dillon inhale sharply and wondered if he might control the man’s respiration by alternating encouraging comments with dismissive ones.
Fleur-de-Lis
Unnerved, Dillon led the way to the next item—a decayed fir plank that one of his men had found in the threshold of a hut in Vanikoro. The hut’s owner had not been home at the time, but an elderly man who claimed to be the village chief had been pleased to receive one of Dillon’s hatchets in exchange for the post. It had been their most successful day on the island: a village full of objects related to the wrecks, most of the villagers away on a fishing expedition, and the “chief” only too happy to enrich himself at his neighbors’ expense. Afterward Dillon had amused himself imagining the villagers’ reactions when they returned home to discover most of their prized possessions gone.
But Monsieur de Lesseps was regarding the board skeptically, tilting his elegant head, first to one side, then the other. Dillon rushed forward. “See?” he said, pointing to one end of the plank. “Right here.”
Lesseps leaned in and squinted, then suddenly widened his eyes. “A fleur-de-lis?”
“Still visible after all this time,” the minister said helpfully. He spoke English with an American accent, a particular quite at odds with his aristocratic dress and demeanor.
Lesseps replied in French. His neutral expression made it impossible for Dillon to guess what he was saying. Perhaps he suspected the item was fake—a weathered board on which someone had painted the outline of a fleur-de-lis. Dillon wanted to interject, to tell Lesseps about Monsieur Chaigneau, the French attaché who’d accompanied the expedition and witnessed the retrieval and inventory of every item. The minister knew about Chaigneau; surely he would defend Dillon’s methods and the authenticity of the post.
“We wondered the same thing, Monsieur de Lesseps,” the minister said in English. “But we know of no other French voyage lost in that part of the world.”
So that was Lesseps’s question. An intelligent question. Dillon was relieved he hadn’t interjected.
* * *
Lesseps nodded, then switched back to English himself: “There were many fleurs-de-lis on both vessels, of course. But this—” He reached out and ran a finger along the rough surface. “It might have been a—how do you say?—ornamentation on the Boussole’s stern.”
Not that he’d had such intimate knowledge of the ships’ architecture, especially the Boussole, which he’d been on board only twice in his two years with the expedition. The truth was he’d spent most of his time on the voyage on the Astrolabe, playing cards with anyone off duty, reading other men’s books, drinking other men’s wine. As the expedition’s Russian interpreter, he’d had nothing official to do till they reached Petropavlovsk. The first year of the voyage he’d befriended the two La Borde brothers, the younger of whom was a cabinmate. The brothers had begun teaching him navigation. “We’re going to make you useful yet, Lesseps,” they said. But a violent tidal current one unforeseen summer morning in Alaska had taken the brothers and ended Lesseps’s career as a navigator. It had been his first lesson in the cruel unpredictability of life. No loss since then—not even the deaths of two of his own children—had shocked him in the same way. The memory of the La Borde brothers still stung, as if the losses sustained in his youth, before he’d learned to protect himself from attachment, would never quite heal.
“Monsieur de Lesseps?” the minister called from behind. “May I interest you in some cannons?”
Presumably the minister insisted on speaking in English for Dillon’s sake. Lesseps found it incredibly irritating. “Are they for sale?” he asked in French.
Brass Guns
The cannons, four quite large and three smaller, had been placed on wooden pallets to protect the room’s marble floors. Of all the items the minister had chosen to show Lesseps, these guns, it seemed to Dillon, were the most generic and therefore least likely to create a clear association with the expedition. He thought of other items he’d salvaged—an ornate silver candelabra, tarnished and bent but very distinctive, came immediately to mind—that might have compelled the inscrutable Monsieur de Lesseps to say, “Why, yes! This is the very one Monsieur de Lapérouse had in his quarters…”
But he hadn’t been consulted about which items would be displayed—an oversight that, it now occurred to Dillon, suggested the minister considered him a mere transporter of stuff rather than the knowledgeable explorer who’d recognized the items’ importance and successfully negotiated the myriad difficulties involved in effecting their recovery. It was a sour realization, one of many that had steadily eroded the elation of the initial discovery three years before. He reflected, not for the first time, that Fortune was indeed a bitch. A man could fulfill his most cherished dreams—and hadn’t he plied the waters of the South Pacific for decades hoping to discover the traces of Lapérouse and his frigates?—yet find himself still subject to petty indignities from men of “superior” birth.
Lesseps approached the pallet, reached out to touch the worn and oxidized surface of one of the larger guns, and said with a boyish grin, “I never dared touch any of the cannons, but I always wanted to.”
The man’s good cheer intensified Dillon’s annoyance. Surely the ident
ification of items from a lost expedition—an expedition whose loss you’d been mercifully spared—deserved some gravity? “Touch them all you like now, Monsieur de Lesseps,” Dillon couldn’t stop himself from barking. “There’s no one to say aught.”
* * *
Lesseps turned to look at Dillon. Had he offended somehow? Might they now be treated to a display of the Irishman’s famous temper? He had a sudden urge to climb onto the pallet and straddle one of the cannons—see how that deflated the man’s self-importance. But of course he’d never do such a thing—not in front of Baron Hyde de Neuville, whose good graces still mattered. And not even in front of this humorless Irish trader, who was probably writing a book about his adventures. It wouldn’t do to appear in such an account as an antic fool.
He drew himself up and spoke with as much formality as he could muster. “We had cannons like these on both ships,” he said, indicating the larger ones. “They were never fired—not in anger, that is,” he said, remembering a salvo before the launch of a hot-air balloon in Concepción and formal gun salutes on entering the harbors in Monterey and Macao and Petropavlovsk. “Not while I was with them,” he added, remembering what happened in the Navigators. Not that he remembered—the massacre happened after he left the expedition. But he remembered getting the terrible news, and he wondered again how it could have happened, for—pointing to the smaller cannons—“We had guns just like this mounted to the bows of each of our landing boats.” He heard Dillon exhale again with relief, but he was no longer inclined to make fun of the man. For really—how was it that four boats, so equipped, and manned, moreover, by armed officers and marines, could not overpower islanders with rocks? Captain de Langle had died in the battle, as had eleven other men, including Monsieur de Lamanon, whose sardonic pomposity Lesseps had always found more amusing than annoying, and a fusilier named Louis David who’d made a small fortune at cards.
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