by Clare Clark
He was twelve years old and a boy no longer.
GENTLY, ELISABETH CRADLED her left hand in her right, stroking the ring’s smooth curve with her thumb. Again the fire caught, the flames licking her ribs with their hot tongues. The impossible absurdity of it stopped the breath in her chest and she hugged herself, her eyes squeezed shut, holding the dizzy tilt of it tight inside her. Had she not, of all of them, been the most distrustful, the only one indifferent to the insinuating drip of hope? Had she not despaired at the empty-headed idiocy of the lot of them, their wilful forgetfulness, the tenacious vigour with which they clung to their fantasies of prosperity and contentment? During those interminable lurching days, when it seemed that the world would be forever water and the ill-tempered priest La Vente limped the decks in search of sin, it was her contempt for her fellow passengers that had sustained her. Contempt and the certainty that, whatever the miseries of the voyage, the fate that awaited them at the end of it would surely be worse.
And yet, and yet. Raising her left hand she gazed at the ring on her finger and then swiftly touched it to her lips, closing her eyes to inhale the secret salty smell of her palm. It had been the order of the Ministry of the Marine that, excepting mealtimes, the girls be confined to their private quarters for the duration of the voyage, so that their virtue might not be corrupted by the coarseness of the ship’s crew and its cargo of young soldiers. When she remembered the darkness and the suffocating smell of them all together, the smell of hair and skin and stale powder and desperate, desiccating monotony, all crated up in damp salted wood, she had to swallow, so unaccustomedly sour was the taste of scorn upon her tongue. There had not been one among them with any book-learning, any scholarly curiosity, nor so much as an ounce of common sense. Closeted together they were as foolish as a coop of clucking chickens.
In the main the chickens had endured the voyage without protest. They had occupied themselves with sewing and tittle-tattle and to Elisabeth’s despair they had chafed against neither. Their tongues moved as deftly and as decoratively as their fingers. As their needles darted and flashed, Levasseur the infantry officer grew broader and braver than any man alive, René Boyer the gunsmith and Alexandre the master joiner more skilful and prosperous. The men’s blank faces were endowed with proud noses, firm chins, kindly blue eyes; their houses were furnished with comforts, their larders with meat and wine and exotic fruits.
At dinner, the chickens clustered around the trader La Sueur, who had been in Louisiana the previous winter, begging him for more details of their establishments and their future situations. The brash trader, long married and the father of five children, had amused himself by ranking the men of the colony according to their physical attributes, his sly allusions causing the chickens to flap and cackle. Elisabeth had observed his manipulations and had felt a flush of angry shame at their suggestibility. It had irked her then that La Sueur thought her no different.
Perhaps she was not so different after all. The thought began wryly, but the joy rose quickly in her and she could not keep it in. She had a sudden urge to laugh out loud, to spin wildly around the narrow room until she was dizzy. Instead she wrapped her arms over her chest, hugging herself tight, her fingertips finding the sharp wings of her shoulder blades, her lips together and her eyes closed, feeling herself swell with the bursting giddy miracle of it.
Was she truly the same person who, in exasperation, had thrown her book to the ground and demanded of the girls to know why, if their situation was so fine and the men of Louisiana so handsome and prosperous, was it that the King himself had been required to purchase them a wife? They had looked at her, then, and the bruised bewilderment in their eyes had made her want to scream.
Later that day Elisabeth had found herself accosted by Marie-Françoise de Boisrenaud, a girl a little older than the rest, who had quickly established herself as cock of the roost. The daughter of a squire from Chantilly, Marie-Françoise was a practical, pale-haired girl who had made it her business to become acquainted with the present situations of all of the bachelors of Louisiana. From an initial catalogue of fifty or sixty eligible men, and taking proper account of prosperity, position, age and health as well as congeniality and a pleasant appearance, she had proceeded to compile a list of the twenty-five she regarded as the colony’s best prospects. Among the chickens she had become known, not without gratitude, as the Governess.
‘We have been sent here to do God’s will,’ Marie-Françoise rebuked Elisabeth, and she raised her voice so that the other girls might be certain to hear her. ‘Do you dare to know better than Our Lord, to tell us what we should hope for?’
‘The Lord may tell you all He pleases,’ Elisabeth had answered, and she had glanced over at the chickens who dropped their eyes hastily and busied themselves with their sewing. ‘I know only that the only proper protection against disappointment is to expect nothing.’
Aside from causing Marie-Françoise’s mouth to pull tight as a stitch, Elisabeth’s words had not the slightest effect. As the weeks lengthened into months, the chickens traded the men like the cards in a game of bassette, snatching them up or frowning over them and fingering them before letting them drop. They mocked Elisabeth for her books and her gloominess, threatening her with the assistant clerk of the King’s storehouse, Grapalière, who was ancient and toothless and, as a result of an accident with a musket, had an iron hook for a right hand.
Elisabeth only shrugged. She did not care if they thought her proud. When at last the interminable voyage reached its end, they would be unloaded like barrels of salt pork and sold, if they were not deemed to have turned, to the highest bidder. If Elisabeth might in time contrive to accept her fate, she for one would not conspire in the preposterous pretence that it would all end happily.
She knew it now, of course, the lunacy of hopefulness, though she dared not submit to it. He possessed more than enough for them both, a sanguinity that was almost carelessness, and the simplicity of it in him took her breath away. It was like a lamp inside him, so that he was always brilliant with it. He dazzled her. That first night, that first perfect night when she was his and he hers, one before God, she had watched him as he slept and she had understood that this would be her part, that she would arch herself about him with her vigilance always, the glass around his flame so that he might burn the brighter. His face had been loose in sleep, like a child’s, his limbs sprawled and his hands curled open upon the sheet. Outside the night had hummed, alive with insects, and it had seemed to Elisabeth that she listened to the singing of her own heart.
Twenty-three girls and he had chosen her. He told her that he had never considered another but she knew it was not so. She remembered him. When they had at last arrived at Mobile, there had been a welcoming party of sorts but, though some of the chickens attempted cheer, the mood was subdued. Fever had struck the ship as it sailed from Havana; some twenty of the soldiers and crewmen on board the Pélican were dead. As Elisabeth trailed with the chickens onto the dock, all of them gaunt and several feverish, she noticed him, standing a little way off. The heat was overpowering, the windless air clinging to them like damp cobwebs, but he stood easily, as though he were quite comfortable. She watched as his eyes slid over them one after another, skimming across her and past her without snagging. Then she had only held her head a little higher, swaying on legs rendered unsteady by the shiftless solidity of the earth, and turned away to follow the ragged crocodile of girls to the commandant’s dwelling. These days she tried not to remember it. When the image came to her unbidden, something opened inside her and the depth of it made her dizzy.
She shook her head, swinging her legs to the bare floor. It was late. She should already be dressed. For the first time since she had come to Louisiana, there was a coolness in the air. She took the blanket from the bed and wrapped its weight around her shoulders, burying her face in its coarse weave. It smelled of leather and tobacco and, faintly, of stale wine. As she breathed it in, tasting its distillation in her mouth,
her belly tumbled and she clenched her hands into fists, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders until it held her close, its beard-rough lips pressed to the line of her jaw. She closed her eyes, one cold hand pressed tight against the throb of her neck, giving herself up to the lack of him.
A sudden brisk banging at the door caused her to startle. Curling herself into a ball, Elisabeth burrowed into the disordered bed, her nose pressed into the pillow. There was another flurry of knocking, causing the wooden latch to jump in its rest.
‘Elisabeth? Are you there? Elisabeth?’
It was Perrine Roussel, the wife of the carpenter. Elisabeth hugged her knees, her face hidden in the blanket, and waited for her to go away. Despite everything, the chickens still contrived to call round. They peered around her cabin and urged her to join with them in grumbling about the shameful conditions in which they were expected to live. They complained of the mosquitoes, of the inadequate housing, of their husbands and, most of all, of the dearth of proper white flour for bread.
The savages did not grow wheat. The planter Rivard had twice attempted to grow it at his concession at Bayou Saint-Jean but, though the first signs of growth had appeared promising, both times the grain had succumbed to rust in the final weeks of ripening and rotted on the stalk. Few others had followed Rivard’s example. Most of the settlers were soldiers or craftsmen from France’s cities. They possessed little knowledge of farming and less inclination to learn. Not one among them had journeyed halfway across the world to labour in the fields. Besides, the colony lacked tools and oxen. Some of the men raised small gardens behind their cabins as they had done in France, but for everything else they were dependent upon the savages, who had no cows or pigs and made their greasy yellow bread from ground corn. There was no bacon, no fresh pork or beef, only the tough, stringy meat of wild creatures hunted in the forest. As for white flour, that staple of every respectable French home, it was an expensive luxury, available only when the ships brought it three thousand miles across the sea.
The chickens deemed the situation intolerable. Just the day before, Anne Negrette and the others had told Elisabeth that they meant to take their objections to the commandant to protest the impossibility of surviving without it. They had urged her to come with them, had declared it imperative that they all stick together. Now they sent the carpenter’s wife, to ensure her attendance.
‘Elisabeth? Elisabeth Savaret, are you there?’
A grey shadow stained the stuff that covered the far window, the tip of a nose dark against the pale cloth. Then it was gone. That was yet another of the chickens’ objections, the lack of glass in the colony. The window frames in all the cabins were instead covered with stretched sheets of platille, a thin linen stuff that lent to the streakily limed interiors a kind of muted stillness, as though they were under water. Elisabeth loved it. Behind their blank white windows, soft in the filtered light, the two of them were perfectly alone, the neighbouring cabins forgotten. And, unlike glass, the platille let the breezes in while keeping out the harsh glare of the sun. Sometimes, in the searing heat of the summer, she had stepped inside the cottage and it had been almost cool.
Elisabeth squirmed down the bed, pulling the quilt over her head, burying herself beneath its comforting weight. Of all the things she had brought with her to Louisiana, he loved the sea-green quilt the best. He liked to tease her that he would have married her for the quilt alone and, when he took it in his arms and danced with it about the cabin, twirling its skirts in sea-green swoops, she laughed, swallowing the prickle of disquiet that caught in her throat.
She had laughed too when he told her she was beautiful, but behind her apron she had crossed her thumbs, pleading with the Fates that he might never see it was not so. For all her efforts, she could not rid herself of the fearfulness. When she signed the marriage contract that would formalise their betrothal, her hand had trembled so uncontrollably that she had pressed down too hard on the pen and split the nib, leaving a dark puddle of ink upon the paper. The curate had sighed and reached for the sand. He had only smiled. Taking her ink-stained hand in his free one, he had dipped the broken pen in the puddle of ink and signed his own name.
Jean-Claude Babelon. She murmured it under her breath, tasting the shape of it. Savaret was a brisk name, its syllables contained tightly within the private recesses of the mouth. Not so Babelon. Babelon was all in the lips. When she spoke his name, she could feel her mouth softening, her lips parting as though they readied for a kiss. Elisabeth had always disdained the English practice of a wife taking her husband’s name upon their marriage. Now she found herself envious of it. In England, each time she was introduced to a stranger, each time she signed a letter or wrote her name on the flyleaf of a book, each time someone called to her across the street, she would declare herself his. In England, she would shed her old name like a chrysalis and emerge newly made into the world. Elisabeth Babelon. But that was not the French way. In Louisiana, as in Paris, she would always be Elisabeth Savaret.
The quilt smelled of him. She inhaled and again her body stirred. The longing in her was pure and brilliant, like light in glass, and she wondered suddenly if this was the secret they shared, those empty-headed chickens, if somewhere deep in their down-stuffed hearts, they had understood what she had never even guessed at, for all her book-learning: the certainty that a man and a woman might share of themselves completely, their souls and spirits as indivisible as two wines poured together in a single bottle. These days she had to struggle to recall the girl she was before him, when her self was all in her head and her body was only trunk and arms and legs, its passing appetites satisfied by a warm cloak or an apricot tart.
She had not opened her books since she had arrived here. There was a shelf above the table, a plank set on makeshift brackets, bare but for a couple of dusty dishes and a knife with a broken handle, but she had not troubled to unpack them. As she reached into her trunk, she touched the worn covers lightly as an archaeologist might touch the relics of a bygone time, with a kind of respectful bafflement. On the tooled leather of Montaigne she paused, tracing the scrolled pattern very slowly with one finger, remembering the ache she had felt for it during the endless months in Rochefort. Then she had closed the trunk and pushed it under the bed.
She did not talk to him of poetry or philosophy, of science or astronomy. When they talked, they spoke of themselves. Sometimes, late in the liquid darkness, he told her of his dreams. For now he was merely an ensign, the lowest rank of commissioned infantry officers, but he meant to be rich. Sometimes she joined with him in imagining the pleasures of their future life. More often she lay with her head upon his chest and her hand flat upon his belly so that she might listen to him: the pulse of his blood, the quiver of his nerve-strings, the whisper of his lips against her skin.
As for the words, they still occupied her skull, their insect thrum never perfectly silent, but she cared nothing for them. With him, in this strange land, where the swamp whispered and the vast fruits swelled and rotted, she was flesh, all flesh. The weight of her, once densely crammed into her head, now tangled itself luxuriously about her ribs and tingled in her limbs. Her skin eased and opened. Her muscles melted. Even her bones softened, so that she moved with the indolence of a sun-drunk cat. He had breathed his warm life into her. And, when he touched her, his lips and fingers exquisitely unhurried, every freckle, every tiny hair was his, each one charged and spangled with the light of him. To look at him was like looking at the sun. When she forced herself to close her eyes, his face remained before her, branded scarlet on the underside of her lids.
Three days after their arrival, the commandant of the colony, a Canadian by the name of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, had given a party. By then most of the chickens had regained something of their strength and spirits. There had been food and a great deal of rather sour wine. Elisabeth had stood a little apart, observing the swallowed disappointment on both sides. Insofar as they were accustomed to gentlemen, the girls k
new only the citizens of Paris or of Rouen, soft-palmed men with powdered hair and scented handkerchiefs. The men of Louisiana, whether French or Acadian, were rough and awkward, their manners poor and their clothes worn and patched. They in their turn sought useful wives, the broad-hipped, spade-handed type of wives who might build houses and bear children in the same afternoon and still have supper on the table when they got home. Most of the girls gathered in Bienville’s parlour looked frail enough to be blown away by a sneeze. Only Marie-Françoise tipped up her chin and bared her teeth as she worked her path around the men, her smooth brow concealing a frenzy of calculation.
Sometime after the others he had come. From her corner she watched him pause on the threshold. He stood there for a long time, one hand flat against the jamb, observing the gathering, his uniform coat unbuttoned and his sword low on his hip. Once again Elisabeth found herself drawn by his indifference, the amused detachment that seemed to set him apart from the rest, and she named them vanity and pride. It hardly surprised her that when at last he entered the room, he crossed directly to Jeanne Deshays who, even diminished by sickness, remained the most beautiful among them.
The evening was almost over when the commandant brought him to her. He was taller than she had guessed and slighter, his hands narrow with long tapering fingers. His face was sunburned and, when he ceased to smile, the creases around his eyes drew pale streaks in the brown skin. The two men conversed together for a moment, something light-hearted about the Spanish garrison at Pensacola, before Bienville excused himself and turned away. He had regarded her thoughtfully, suppressing a smile, and in her confusion she had muttered something foolish about the weather. When he raised an eyebrow, she stared at the floor, insinuating herself into the gaps between the planks.