by Clare Clark
‘I am so sorry, dearest,’ she whispered. ‘The child. I should never – it was my fault.’
He shook his head, then, and he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Don’t say that.’ His voice was sharp with anger. ‘Don’t – you are strong. Damn the child, do you hear me? Damn the child.’
His voice thickened as he knelt beside her, bringing his fist down upon the lumpy mattress. When she held him against her torn, tender body he did not resist her. Through her numbness she felt his dependence upon her and there was comfort in it.
She was not left alone. Rochon came. The women, mollified a little by Elisabeth’s continued misfortune, came too, but unlike the Jesuit, they were not content to sit with her in silence. It was among the most certain of their certain principles that company was meat to the convalescent and scandal her strongest physic. They came in pairs, bringing vittles and juicy morsels of town gossip, and set about sweeping and scrubbing and straightening around her, thickening the air with dust and chatter.
They discussed the price of a head of bear oil and the prettiness of Jeanne Deshays’ daughter and the sudden and unexpected demise from the fever of Gabrielle Borret’s seven-year-old Mobilian slave, because naturally it was never the troublesome ones that were taken. They talked of Angélique Brouyn’s milk cow that was grown dry and of rumours that natives in the pay of the English attacked the Spanish fort at Pensacola and of the best way to cook buffalo meat. The subject of greatest interest, however, was the scandal of Pierre Charly, the merchant, whose savage housekeeper had just borne him a son.
Though such infants were hardly unknown, this particular case had caused something of a stir, and the previous Sunday La Vente had taken to the pulpit to argue for the legitimisation of marriage between white man and savage, claiming that otherwise there would be no end to debauchery and the disgrace of illegitimate offspring. His remarks had infuriated the commandant and, though the wives had not yet forgiven Sieur de Bienville for the lack of white flour, in this regard they were all firmly on his side. La Vente was not well liked. His manner was abrasive and his purple-faced piety tyrannical. Worse than either, he ran the most expensive shop in all of Mobile, selling his allowance of flour at ten times the usual rate and a barrel of wine for the shocking sum of two hundred and fifty French livres. It was Perrine Roussel who observed that for all his denouncements from the pulpit, the good priest was less a Catholic than he was a Jew.
As the chickens cackled, Elisabeth fixed her gaze upon the peeling lime and said nothing. There was a weight upon her chest like two hands pushing down that made it hard to breathe. Her eyes and her throat ached. She ate when someone set a dish in front of her, but she was hardly aware of the food in her mouth. Sometimes she blinked, startled by a noise or the abrupt awareness that the room had grown dark without her noticing, to find that the food was cold and the spoon lost among the bed rugs.
Inside her belly her womb cramped, wringing itself out like a wet cloth. The emptiness cramped too, shrinking and hardening into something frozen that pressed its sharp edges into the soft parts of her. When she thought of the lost infant, it was with a kind of heavy detachment. Her grief was all for her husband.
One day, when Guillemette, the midwife, came to see Elisabeth, she was accompanied by Marie-Françoise de Boisrenaud. A spinster still, the Governess occupied her days with schooling the colony’s children and superintending the conduct of their mothers.
‘Do you still bleed?’ Guillemette asked Elisabeth.
When Elisabeth nodded, Guillemette clicked her fingers and reluctantly Elisabeth parted her knees. The midwife unwrapped the rag she had knotted about her hips, placing it in a bucket at her feet.
‘I had not expected it to continue so,’ Guillemette said. ‘Of course the afterbirth did not come out cleanly. It is possible that fragments of it remain. Still, you are otherwise well healed.’
‘Did you hear that, Elisabeth?’ Marie-Françoise admonished. ‘Otherwise well healed. You should be satisfied.’
‘I am going to give you a tisane of ground pine,’ the midwife said as she set a fresh rag between Elisabeth’s thighs. ‘The treatment is unpleasant. You will bleed very heavily and there will be considerable pain. But it must be endured. The flow will cleanse your womb and you will mend. Take heart. There will be more children.’
The spasm that cramped Elisabeth’s abdomen then caused her to whimper. Guillemette regarded her coolly, her knobby hands set upon her hips.
‘Belladonna is a poison, of course,’ she said calmly. ‘An excess of it will kill. Taken as instructed, however, it effects only enough harm to the body to provoke it to heal itself.’
‘Moderate harm?’ muttered Marie-Françoise, rolling her eyes. ‘Then I wish you all good fortune. Elisabeth Savaret is not well known for her love of moderation.’
‘Nor is she a fool,’ Guillemette countered briskly. ‘She will do as she is told. With physic of this kind, the perils of intemperance are grave.’
‘Intemperance is a sin of pride, Guillemette,’ Marie-Françoise replied. ‘Its perils are always considerable. Elisabeth would do well to remember that. Our miseries on earth, like our joys, are a matter of divine Providence. Like the farmer in the parable, we reap what we sow.’
A surge of fury split the crust of Elisabeth’s exhaustion.
‘Since when did a shrivelled-up spinster governess know anything about how to live?’ she hissed.
Marie-Françoise’s face twisted into a knot.
‘You are not the first in the colony to have suffered loss, Elisabeth Savaret,’ she spat. ‘Nor shall you be the last. You may consider yourself better than the rest of us but, believe me, you are quite mistaken. It would become you to show a little humility.’
The next day Elisabeth swallowed a draught of the midwife’s tincture, measuring it out carefully as she had been told. Then she lay upon her bed. Within minutes her stomach began to scream and her mouth to desiccate. Her tongue cracked and, as the tincture took hold of her, every part of her body shook and sweated, convulsed with fever. When the blood came, it was dark and clotted, soaking through the rags to spread in a black bruise on the palliasse beneath her.
On the third day, when she managed to rise from her bed, Guillemette le Bras declared herself satisfied. It was, the midwife admitted, the first time she had attempted such a cure, which she had learned from a book that one of the sea captains had brought from France. The remedy called for mercury but, unable to secure it, she had instead used belladonna, which grew in abundance in the forests close to the settlement. The substitution of one poison for another had proved a matter of good sense. If it was true, the midwife said briskly, that the effects of physic could never be relied upon, the practice of it was not half the mystery that physicians liked to make of it.
When Jean-Claude returned, they did not speak of the infant. He did not ask after his wife’s health, only observing approvingly that she had regained her figure. Somehow he had acquired for her a new petticoat and a dress of dove-grey silk, trimmed with velvet ribbon. The dress became her. She did not think to ask how he had obtained it. He had always been clever at such things. At night, in the darkness, he set his hands upon her, folding back time. Afterwards she lay beside him as he slept, pulling his arms around her shoulders like a cape.
On a dull, airless day in April, Marie-Françoise de Boisrenaud came to the cottage with a parcel that she dropped without ceremony upon Elisabeth’s table.
‘It would seem that even our old enemies the Spanish take pity upon us. The commandant returned from his visit there with a chest of items sent to them by the charitable ladies of Havana. The commissary has charged me with the fair disposal of its contents.’
Elisabeth took the parcel, turning it over in her hands.
‘Have you heard? The Jesuit Rochon is to take a mission among the savages on the Red River. Doubtless their godless ways shall suit him very well.’ Marie-Françoise wrinkled her
brow. ‘La Vente shall not regret his departure, of course, but perhaps you shall? I understand that he was quite the companion to you while your husband was away. Well, go on then, open it.’
Her jaw hard, Elisabeth set the parcel down on the table and picked at the knots. She had known about the mission, of course. Rochon had told her the news himself. He had laughed at her apprehension, unable to contain his excitement.
‘I shall come to no harm,’ he had assured her.
‘And if you do?’
‘Then the last will of Rabelais shall serve as well for me: “I have nothing, I owe a great deal, and the rest I leave to the poor.”’
The knots were tight and her fingers were clumsy. When at last they came loose, she coiled the string carefully around her hand, pulling it tight. The tips of her fingers whitened.
‘We saw it and thought immediately of you,’ Marie-Françoise said, her voice sticky with virtue. ‘We pray that you shall soon have the need of it.’
Elisabeth pulled open the paper. Inside was a baby’s dress of lawn and lace, white, a little worn. Beneath one sleeve there was a neat darn where the seam had torn. Elisabeth stared at it and her jaw clamped tight.
‘For me?’ she said. ‘How very considerate you are. You are quite certain, I suppose, that you shall have no want of it yourself?’
When Marie-Françoise was gone, she dragged the chest out from beneath the bed. The corners of the trunk left pale lines in the hard dirt floor. Lifting the lid a slit, she bundled the dress into it and pushed it once more out of sight. She went to the garrison then, to ask after the Jesuit. The dress remained there for five years, quite forgotten, the lawn browning at the edges and the fine lace working into holes. It was only long afterwards, in the dark days when there was no sense or shape to any of it, that she took it out and wept for each one of them and all that they had lost.
FROM THE FIRST moment that he saw him, Auguste knew that the Canadian was not like the others.
Most of the white men who came from time to time to the village were coureurs-de-bois, coarse hunter-traders from the north desirous of satisfying their simple appetites for trade and women. They reminded Auguste of the boys of La Rochelle before they were sent to sea. Hairy-chinned and coarse-mannered, the coureurs prided themselves upon their bluntness, their lawlessness and their lack of restraint. They derided the petty curbs set upon their liberty by the officials and priests of the towns, by the chiefs and missionaries in the villages. They drank heavily and gambled whatever they had. The savages were wary of them, for they had guns and they were known to raid the villages for slave concubines, but they did not fear them as they feared their enemies among the savages. The coureurs possessed neither the subtlety of the native nor his stark brutality. Their deceptions were as clumsy as their sentiments.
The Canadian ensign was another matter. Like the coureurs he travelled alone, with only three Mobilian warriors as guides. Like them he greeted the savages with bonhomie, distributing presents with a reckless generosity, but beneath the affability there was a refinement about him, a watchfulness that Auguste recognised as calculation. His hands were elegant, with tapered fingers. His nails were almost clean. The men of the Ouma were tall but he was taller, more than six feet, with long legs and the languorous manner of someone accustomed to admiration. The crown of Auguste’s head barely grazed his chin. When the ensign clapped him on the shoulder, Auguste stiffened at the condescension. He would not be made to feel like a child.
More than any of this, though, it was the consideration that the ensign gave him that made Auguste uneasy. The coureurs had never bothered with him much. They noticed him of course, for a boy sent to live among savages was an object of curiosity. Sometimes after supper they liked him to sit with them so that they might lecture him in words smudgy with brandy upon the idleness of savage men and the licentiousness of savage women and the weakness of both for strong liquor.
Occasionally one might nudge him for titbits of information about the tribe, pretending a white man’s fellow feeling in the hope of learning something that might advantage their negotiations, but that was rare. Certainly none had ever sought him out, as the tall Canadian sought him out, to converse with him. The first time, he sat with his long legs folded up on each side of him like a cricket as Auguste whittled at a piece of wood with his knife. Curls of pale wood drifted about his knees and settled on the fur of the yellow dog that slept beside him.
‘What are you making?’ the ensign asked idly, twisting one of the curls of wood around his finger.
Auguste shrugged.
‘Nothing much.’
There was a silence. The ensign smoked a pipe. Auguste bent over his work, gouging the flesh of the wood with the point of his knife. Then the ensign rose and walked over to the cabin, pulling several strands of palmetto from its fringed roof and swiftly twisting them together.
‘There,’ he said.
On the palm of his hand was a small dog, its ears and tail cocked, a tiny palmetto tongue protruding from its muzzle.
‘Here, take it. It’s for you.’
Auguste shook his head, hunching over his knife.
‘It’s all right,’ he said.
‘Come on. It’s the only trick I know. I have no choice but to oblige you to appreciate it. The savage who taught me despaired of me. I was so poor a pupil it took me a six-week expedition to master the one animal.’
Auguste hesitated. Then he reached out and took the palmetto dog, touching it gently on the head with one finger.
‘Does he have a name, your dog?’ the ensign asked.
‘No.’
‘Not even in your head? I mean, you must call him something, mustn’t you, when you think of him, even if it is just Dog or Him?’
Auguste eyed him suspiciously, but he did not smirk. He looked at Auguste, his brow creased, as if the question itself was a puzzle to him. Auguste was silent, gazing at the palmetto dog in his hand.
‘No,’ he said at last. ‘Not a word. A picture.’
‘A picture.’
‘Yes.’
‘A particular picture?’
Auguste thought of the yellow dog and in his head it sat, its bottom barely grazing the earth, its muzzle stuck carelessly into the air as if it were about to whistle.
‘Yes.’
‘But no name?’
‘No name.’
The ensign laughed softly and shook his head.
‘French, Mobilian, Choctaw, and still you think in pictures? You are a most unusual man, Monsieur whatever-your-name-is. A most unusually interesting man.’
The ensign’s name was Babelon. He remained at the settlement for several days. Auguste grew almost accustomed to the strange questions and the way the ensign cocked his head to listen to his answers, as though the words were a liquid that must be poured into his ear without spilling a drop. To his astonishment he found himself telling the ensign of his life in La Rochelle, of things and people he told himself he no longer remembered, the stone house by the harbour, his sisters with their wide grins and wider-legged gaits, the siren suck and spit of the stone-grey sea. He scratched them into the dust with a stick as he spoke, drawing them out of his head, but still the images jostled forward, noisier than market day, and first among them, as he always had been, was Jean.
‘Your cousin sounds like my brother,’ Babelon said with a rueful grin. ‘My brother was big, taller by far than me and broad as a wall, and he could get the rest of us to do whatever he wanted. It did not matter how vilely he behaved towards us, we followed him like sheep wherever he went. My mother used to say she hoped we were fastened to his boots with invisible threads for she could think of no other explanation that might excuse our pitiful devotion. My mother was not an admirer of devotion.’
Auguste thought of his own mother, the drag of her shoulders, the droop of her mouth, the way she had of slumping at the table at dawn as though the day had already defeated her. The prickle of it discomfited him and he made to scramble to his
feet, clicking his fingers at the dog.
‘It’s late,’ he mumbled.
‘Ah, not so late. Take pity on me, I beg you. Agreeable company is a rare and precious pleasure in Louisiana.’
He smiled. Auguste smiled too, awkwardly, then swallowed and stared down at the ground. The dog sighed and thrust its nose once more beneath its haunch. There was something about the ensign’s gaze, the warmth and the intensity of it, that seemed to shrink the world to the space between the two of them. Auguste was not accustomed to being looked at in such a way.
‘You want a woman?’ he blurted. ‘I can, you know. Arrange it for you. If you want.’
‘That I can manage for myself. If I have learned anything in this life, it is that it is a great deal easier to find consolation for the body than for the spirit.’
There were men of the Ouma who lay with men. Of course there had been men like that on the ship to Louisiana too, but it had been different then, furtive and dirty, something for the boys to snigger at. Among the savages such men were accommodated and permitted to practise their perversions openly. They wore the woman’s apron to mark them out. Auguste glanced up at the ensign. Babelon smiled, a dry smile tucked into the corner of his mouth, and Auguste’s neck flushed. He was sure that the older man knew exactly what it was he was thinking. He reached out and set his hand on the dog’s neck, feeling the comforting coarseness of its coat beneath his hand. The dog shifted a little but did not wake.
‘I have a wife in Mobile,’ the soldier said, his mouth twitching. ‘To whom, for all of my mother’s admonitions, I am devoted.’
Auguste’s blush deepened.
‘You have children?’ he muttered.
‘Probably. But none that I know of.’
Auguste ducked his head, a snort of laughter escaping his nose.
‘Your Ouma girls are fine-looking,’ the Canadian observed.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I think we can dispense with the sir this far from the garrison. You have a girl?’