by Clare Clark
Books, the comfort for those who do not live.
Early the next morning, when it was hardly light, Elisabeth knelt by the bed and once more tugged the trunk from underneath it. The key would not turn in the lock. In the end she was required to break it open with the axe they kept in the wood store. When she lifted the lid, the smell of damp leather and paper stirred so powerful a nostalgia in her that for a moment she closed her eyes, besieged by the remembrances of a self she had thought long shed. The window with the curled iron latch that rattled when the wind blew. The slag of roofs and chimneys heaped up against the sky, crusted with lichen and streaked with bird droppings that gleamed white in the pink Parisian dusk. The battered writing desk with its too-frail legs piled with disordered towers of books and pamphlets and catalogues and papers. Yellow candlelight on the print-black page. The sentences cleaving themselves to the hidden parts of her, drawing her deeper and deeper into their private embrace until the whole world was a pool of light in which she swam, words swarming about her like fish.
She reached in, spreading the books out before her. Homer’s Odyssey. Racine. The Thousand and One Nights. Essais Volume II by Michel de Montaigne. She ran her fingers over the tooled cover. The leather was cool and slightly sticky, like the palm of a hand. Then, very carefully, she opened it. On the frontispiece, mould spread in flowers, their grey petals speckled with black. She ran a fingertip over the inked lettering. She had never written to Paris of her safe arrival in Louisiana nor had she received any letters from Paris. It had not been expected. In all those years, she had hardly given a thought to the shop in Saint-Denis, the silk of the polished wooden counter and the sharp edge of the brass measure, the heavy bolts of silk and cambric and fine wool, the rattling drawers of buttons and the reels of ribbons and trimmings and threads, Mme Deseluse in her brightly coloured gown sucking her teeth as she tutted over the mousseline held out for her inspection by her anxious and ingratiating aunt, and in her memory everything was precisely as it had been when she left it. Now, for the first time, she wondered if the shop were still there.
Later, when the girl came in from the kitchen hut, Elisabeth slammed the trunk shut and pushed it back into its place beneath the bed. The slave regarded her silently, the broom slack in her hand as Elisabeth took up the axe, clamping the book beneath her arm. Grains of rust sprinkled the floor like sugar.
‘To work,’ Elisabeth snapped, jabbing with her elbow towards the broom. Snatching down the knife from the shelf above the table, she marched across the sunlit yard towards the wood store.
The door stood open, as she had left it. She set the axe in its usual place, standing it on its handle so that the metal blade would not be dulled by damp. The stack of logs was high, readied for winter, and the air was sweet with resin. For a moment Elisabeth stood quite still, watching the sun-spangled dust turning idly in the doorway. She thought of the barrel behind the log pile, its lid pressed down by the weight of wood, and of the jar inside it, interned in its wrapping of rags. As the years passed, the tincture would thicken and dry up, the jar falling into pieces in its rags, a corpse in its winding sheet, she thought, and there was comfort in the ghoulishness, an easing of something at the back of her throat that had been knotted a long time.
The log pile had been stacked in steps so that they formed a kind of bench or settle. Elisabeth hesitated, the Montaigne heavy in her hands. She looked out into the yard. It was silent, low clouds muffling the sky, and the slave was nowhere to be seen. Though there was surely no need for stealth, she closed the door furtively, lifting it to ease the gritty drag of it against the dirt floor and leaving an opening just wide enough to cast a washed-out ribbon of daylight across her lap. When she stroked the worn green leather of the cover, something turned in her belly, a longing not so much for the book itself but for the unexpected stirrings within her of her childish self, whom she had thought long dead.
She sat there for some time, the book upon her lap. Then, very carefully, she inserted her knife between the sealed pages and cut.
She roused herself only when the light began to drain from the page and her eyes ached from squinting at the smudgy print. It was late and rain drummed on the roof of the wood store. It occurred to her that it had been raining some time. Her back and her neck ached, and her shoulders were clenched tight as fists, but there was a lightness inside her that caused her to catch her breath. She closed her eyes so that she might hold it tight inside her, but already it had begun to fade, the press of her own anxieties dark against the weaknesses in it.
Sighing, she stretched upward, turning her head to ease the stiffness in her shoulders. In the watered-down light the black words danced above her fingers: I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself. She thought of the Jesuit Rochon, whose ease and humour had so little of the Catholic Church about it. She thought of Renée, of the children who had come to her for lessons, of her husband who loved her for a fierceness that was all his and who feared nothing in the world but the throttle of her frailty. She thought of the books she had smuggled from France rotting in the trunk beneath the bed. She thought of Okatomih, who had been a prisoner and was now a slave.
A sudden white flash drew sharp black lines around the log pile. The rumble of thunder that followed it was long and violent. She could feel the force of it rattling in her throat. Rain hammered at the roof. She stood, the book hugged tight to her chest. There was another knife blade of lightning, the crack of thunder. The storm was close. For a moment she hesitated. Then, taking off her apron, she wrapped it several times around the book and placed it high on the log pile where it might not be seen. Then she opened the door.
Immediately the wind snatched at it, slamming it wide on its flimsy hinges so that she had to battle to secure it. The rain lashed her face and, at the boundary of the yard, the line of oaks bucked like ships. Wrapping her arms over her head, Elisabeth ran towards the cabin. Her hem dragged through the mud, setting curls of wood shavings floating in the puddles like pale feathers, and the wind tore at her hair and ripped roughly at the ragged cypress tiles of the roof, but the wildness of the storm filled Elisabeth with a kind of exhilaration and she tipped her head back, crying out to the tumultuous sky and kicking her heels out behind her as she ran. When the lightning came, the white force of it illuminated her like a lamp.
At the porch she hesitated, watching the rain dance in frenzied patterns across the yard, and abruptly all the wildness in her was gone. It was late and she was cold and the day’s duties were undone. She shivered, squeezing the rain from her skirts and from her hair. Then she turned and went in to the cabin. It was only as she knelt before the grate in her sodden dress, coaxing the reluctant fire to unfold a second flame, that she felt once more the force of the lightning in her and the brilliance, a faint electricity that prickled in her hair and in the soles of her feet so that the next morning, when she awoke to a drizzly grey dawn, she did not think to inspect the damage done by the tempest. Instead she pulled a blanket from the bed and crossed the yard to the wood store, sidestepping the chaos of broken branches that littered her path. The rain tapped lightly on the roof above her as, curling up as comfortably as she was able, she unwrapped the Montaigne and once more began to read.
IT HAD BEEN, Babelon told Auguste, an act of Providence. Had it not been for the hurricane, which damaged the merchant’s pirogues and dragged his own downstream against his will, he would not have encountered the merchant as he did, on a turn of the river far from any native settlement, and shared with him a fire and some food. He would never have known that there were merchants who dealt not in furs and hides but in curiosities, marvels of the New World, both natural and man-made.
This merchant had once sold to a Prussian nobleman three dragon’s eggs and the feathers of a phoenix. In recent years, however, he had favoured the collection of more natural phenomena. There was, he had told Babelon, a growing fashion in Europe for grand gardens, which was no longer satisfied by the ordinar
y flowers and trees of such temperate regions. Discerning noblemen wished their gardens to inspire awe and incredulity, and they were willing to pay handsomely for unusual specimens. The merchant was not himself a horticulturist, but he understood vanity and he understood profit. In the company of two guides, he travelled between the savage nations, trading trinkets for persimmon and pitcher plants. The practice was protracted and often perilous but, after several months of such commerce, his two pirogues were laden with hundreds of carefully wrapped and boxed specimens.
It was no difficult matter, then, to show the merchant the notebook of Auguste’s sketches. The merchant had turned the pages eagerly. Several of the drawings showed plants for which there was considerable demand, several more species with which he was unfamiliar. When Babelon informed him that Auguste had a garden in which he cultivated many of Louisiana’s native plants for his own study, and that, moreover, Babelon himself could ensure their safe delivery to the merchant’s ships, the merchant closed the notebook and set his hands one on top of the other on its cover. The negotiations extended over the days that followed, but it was price they haggled over, not principle. By the time both men prepared to leave the village, an agreement had been reached.
Auguste’s uncertainty infuriated Babelon. He declared it absurd, unreasonable, childish. There was, after all, nothing in the least unlawful in the arrangement. The plants were entirely Auguste’s to do with as he wished. Private matters of business were permitted, even encouraged, in Louisiana so long as a man’s personal business in no way compromised his loyalty to the colony. France was at war and could spare no ships. Wages were three years in arrears. In such times, the commandant himself commended resourcefulness. A man could not live on an unpaid salary alone. There was nothing in the arrangement that Auguste could possibly object to.
Auguste admitted as much. And still he continued uneasy. He distrusted Babelon’s impatience, his airiness, the enthusiasm that was almost anger. He disliked the scorn with which Babelon teased him for his timidity and his youth as much as he disliked his own failure to divest himself of either. He detested the way that his friend, who had never before shown the slightest interest in his garden, now crouched close to the ground, running his hands over the leaves as though they were coins. Most of all he hated that his fate was to be sealed by an act of Providence. Auguste had always mistrusted Providence. She liked to watch you squirm.
He had grown accustomed to it, of course. And he had loved the work. It had never ceased to delight him: the clustered seeds in their boxes, the cuttings in their bracelets of damp earth, the flowers laid between paper leaves and pressed to gauzy translucence. The merchant had urged Babelon to consider no plant too ordinary, for virtually every native of Louisiana differed in some particular or other from its European cousin, and so everywhere he went, Auguste gathered flora of every manner and description. And so that he might know them more closely, for each plant that he collected he brought back another to his garden and set it to growing there, so that he might observe its seasons and its habits.
He observed too the habits of Le Caën’s daughter and the opossum, for the child brought the creature often to the cabin. On the first occasion she pushed the animal into his hands, ducking her head and walking away from him very fast. Auguste put his face against the creature’s soft fur and inhaled its musty smell.
The next time he shook his head.
‘See,’ he said as the creature squirmed in his arms. ‘She would rather have you.’
The girl bit her lip.
‘No,’ she said, but she reached out a hand all the same and touched the creature on its head.
‘She is more yours than mine now. I should like it if you would keep her.’
The child said nothing then but the gladness lit her face like a lamp.
The next time she came, she brought a plant.
‘For you,’ she said shyly and, though it was but a common iris that might be found anywhere thereabouts, he thanked her gravely and planted it where she might see it when she came. The girl herself grew as fast as a weed, her long limbs bent up around her as she squatted to inspect the plants. She seldom spoke, but when he told her their names she nodded, her brow creased and her dark eyes fierce with attention.
Babelon came to the cabin also. He brought money, Spanish piastres. One day, he joked, there would be something in Mobile to spend it on. It was years since Auguste had seen money of any kind, and he hid it in a bag in the rafters of his cabin. The beds of his garden grew crowded. The one Alibamon boy who tended the place when he was away became three. Before long, Auguste was obliged to dig out some of the more commonplace among his collection to make room for new arrivals. He took to adding careful sketches to the boxes of plants he sent with Babelon and, as he grew more courageous, suggested notes to Babelon, who scrawled them in the margins.
The merchant was well satisfied. Before long he was sending with Babelon crumpled lists of plants that he wished Auguste to seek out for him. When Babelon spread them out to read them, Auguste recognised the particulars of his friend’s spiky hand and he was glad. It made him feel closer to the unknown trader to know that he too was not a man of learning.
The merchant’s lists were vague and frequently incomprehensible – he asked for ‘the plant with the knife-shaped leaves that bears a crimson flower’ or ‘the low small tree whose white flower resembles a hedge honeysuckle’ – but Auguste was a paleface with a savage’s knowledge of the forest, and he made a fine detective. He had an instinct for the kinds of plants that might delight a Frenchman, however common they might be to Louisiana. As summer melted into autumn, he collected the seeds of the mulberry, the blueberry, the sassafras, of the walnut and the hickory, of the many diverse kinds of Louisiana rose and the lush sweet-shaded flower that the settlers called lion’s mouth, which in summer turned the plains of the Natchez pink. He gathered specimens of the flat-root, the rattlesnake-herb, the poison-arrow creeper, the maidenhair fern, the toothache tree and all the other favourite remedies of the savage medicine man, and had Babelon write out instructions for their manufacture.
His fascination was stronger than his uneasiness, and more persuasive. It entranced him to imagine the seeds of this land breaking open in the French earth, the cuttings he had taken so carefully stretching out their wild green arms towards the French sun. The King of France had a room in his palace made entirely of looking glasses and a garden filled with the plants of the New World. And one day a tulip tree would grow in the marketplace in La Rochelle, and the boys of the town who were now men would marvel at the heavy pink-lipped cups of its blooms and stare out to sea, the limits of their small lives pressed tight around their ribs.
Then winter came. The expeditions stopped and the plants blackened and shrivelled in his garden. Auguste went to Marie-Françoise, the schoolteacher, and asked awkwardly if she might teach him his letters. By spring he could write his name and simple words. By spring he was older and the resolute green in the muddy soil filled him with hope.
The rains were gentler that year. As the months passed and the bag of piastres in the roof grew heavier, Auguste was able to laugh a little at his callower, more mistrustful self. When he supped at the Babelon house he took fruits for Elisabeth from his garden, which she set in the palmetto basket in the centre of the table. The rim of the old basket had begun to unravel, slivers of sharp grass sharpening its edges. Elisabeth too was not as she had once been. Time and hardship had sapped her old poise. Instead there was a kind of tightly sprung agitation about her that put Auguste in mind of a hummingbird. Her eyes were never still but darted after her husband, shadowing his slightest shift. She was very thin.
In the winter, when Babelon had travelled to the nearby village of the Bayagoulas to buy corn, she had come to his house. It was late, the darkness chill against the windows. He had opened the door and she had been standing there, her head bowed, and at the sight of her his blood had leaped in his veins and he had taken a step backwards with t
he force of it, and she had come in.
He had not known what to say. That is, he had wanted to say a thousand things, all of them wrong, but she had spoken first and, rushing out the words as though she had rehearsed them, she had asked him to take her to a savage village so that she might consult with a medicine man. She had heard that there were things that the savages could do for women like her. To help them. Then she had hung her head.
‘Help me,’ she had whispered. ‘I do not know what else to do.’
They had never before been alone together. When he nodded his agreement, she reached out her hand and she touched him very lightly with the tips of her fingers on the back of his hand. Her fingers were icy. Thank you, she said, and she opened the door and, glancing quickly about her to make sure that she was not observed, she left.
The next day, he took money from his pouch in the roof and went to Burelle, who was known to keep a little gunpowder for customers who did not ask for credit. Two days later he walked to the village of the Pasagoulas a small distance from the settlement, where he spoke with the medicine man. When the tincture was ready he took it to Elisabeth, concealed beneath a basket of vegetables.
When he knocked at the door of the house on rue d’Iberville there was no answer. Auguste hesitated and turned away. On the other side of the street, the old wife of Burelle the taverner hailed him from a chair set out in the sun. She had a rug around her shoulders, another over her knees. He nodded at her, the basket held tight against his chest.
‘Leave them with me,’ the old woman rasped. ‘I’ll make sure they get ’em.’
Auguste shook his head, his arms cradling the basket.
‘Thank you but–’
‘You think I can’t be trusted with a few mouldy vegetables?’
Behind Auguste the door scraped open.