by Clare Clark
‘I suppose we must after them, harvest or no?’
Auguste shook his head.
‘Not directly. Let them think themselves safe.’
The men went to the fields, muskets slung across their backs. Auguste went with them. In the silent yard Vincente pressed her brow against the cow’s flank, her hands tugging at the udders in the way that the German woman had shown her. The milk did not come. The cow twisted against its rope, jarring her neck. Vincente straightened up a little, pulling the stool closer, and began again. The udders slipped in her hands. The cow stamped its protest, barking her shin with its hoof, and almost kicking over the bucket.
Hot tears sprang into her eyes.
‘Stop it, you stupid animal,’ she hissed at the cow, and she jabbed her shoulder hard against its belly, crushing the teats in her clenched fists. Fuerst’s wife always did the milking, that’s what the Rhinelander woman had told her as she balanced her bulk precariously on the milking stool. The woman was big with child and the effort of reaching for the teats had turned her face brick red. Her name was Nellie. Fuerst’s wife had had a knack with the cows, Nellie had said. No one else could get milk from them like she could.
It was at that moment that Vincente had determined to master the knack of it. It was not so simple as it looked. Vincente tugged again, her brow creased with vexation.
‘The child mistakes ferocity for feeling, and as for melody!’ she heard her mother murmur, with her tinkling laugh. ‘She wields that harpsichord as though it were an axe.’
Vincente’s stomach was empty. It moaned a little, stretching up beneath her ribs, and her head swam. When she closed her eyes, tiny silverfishes darted through the darkness. She thought of her mother then and of the shrinking disgust that would compress her mouth if she were to see her daughter, a le Vannes who could trace her lineage through marriage to the noble families of France, in a place like this, milking a cow like a peasant girl. The cow had the warm, frowsy smell of a slept-in bed. She rested her forehead against its flank, and the gurgle of its stomach made echoes in her skull.
The food she had brought with her from Mobile was almost all gone. The previous night, while Auguste slept, she had crept to the kitchen hut, but the door was locked, and though she set all her weight against it, she could not open it. Instead she had slid to the ground, the need in her belly straining the fibres of her, stretching her fingers from her palms, splaying her toes, every nerve strung shrill. To steady herself she had pressed down with her hands into the dirt, closing her fists around handfuls of dust and pebbles and tendrils of dried grass and, for a moment, she had been seized by a violent impulse to cram her mouth with earth.
Instead she had opened her hands and the dirt had run out between her fingers. She had put her head back against the door, the splintery wood snagging her scalp, and she had stretched up her neck as though she would fill her mouth with darkness. The sky was vast above her, so crowded with stars that in places they swirled in a milky soup, blotting out the night.
The kitchen hut was a few strides from the gate to the cow pen. If the savages had come then, if they had found her there, crouched like a criminal by the kitchen hut, they might have taken her instead. They might have cut her throat with their flat knives and carried her away, wrists and ankles bound tight together over their hunting pole so that as they walked, she swung a little from side to side like the deer when they brought them out of the forest. Her blood in a spreading pool in the dirt, her life leaking from her to fall in dark petals into the dust of a savage land.
They would have hardly noticed she was gone. Auguste and the Rhinelander left always before dawn, leading their trail of almost-men behind them and the women too. It was nearly harvest, Fuerst said. No one could be spared. Vincente was left alone all day with Nellie, who wheezed through her mouth like a mule and spoke only to protest at her discomfort. The list of her complaints was inexhaustible. Vincente tried to ask her about Elisabeth Savaret, about the slave, but the Rhinelander woman only shrugged and muttered about the ache in her back. Alone in the heat of the afternoon, Vincente swallowed mouthful after mouthful of rough yellow bread, but though she could seize her flesh in both hands she felt as though she were disappearing. She knew that in Mobile the wives would have already begun to forget her.
Dumbly, Vincente pressed her brow into the cow’s warm flank. The heaviness in her chest caused her back to bow. Carelessly, like a child playing at pretend, she moved her hands on the udders. The cow shifted a little and made quiet chuntering noises in its throat. Slowly at first, and then faster, the milk hissed into the bucket.
That evening a hunting party came to the plantation. When the Rhinelanders saw the savages, they ceased in the eating of their dinner and made to stand up, several of them bunching their fists and calling out to one another excitably. The clamour raised Auguste, who had gone with Fuerst to the upper settlement. Quickly he snatched up his gun, cocking it ready.
‘Stay here,’ he said to Vincente, who hesitated and then followed him, clutching her apron about her. It would be worse to be left alone.
When he saw the savages, Auguste let the gun fall.
‘These men are not of the Chetimacha tribe,’ he said impatiently. ‘They are Bayagoulas. Our allies.’
He listened gravely. When they were finished he turned to Vincente.
‘Tell Fuerst that they bring word from the village they call Strayed Pigeon,’ he said. ‘His wife is safe there and the slave girl too.’
Vincente did as he bid. When she followed Fuerst from the cabin, she saw Auguste point towards the fire in the men’s camp. Later, when food had been brought for the savages and a camp struck, she saw the men talking again with Auguste. He carried a bundle in his arms, which he gave to them.
‘What did you give them?’ she asked when at last he came in to supper.
‘Not much.’
‘What manner of not much?’
Auguste paused in the pulling off of his boots and looked up at her. Her ears pinked a little. It disturbed her, the way he had of finding the meaning of things under the words, but, like a blush, the sensation was not entirely disagreeable. She smoothed her skirts, jutting out her chin.
‘Gabrielle Borret says that the French have always given too much to the savages. She says it is the reason they grow greedy.’
Auguste regarded her.
‘It is their custom to give and receive gifts.’
‘So what did you give them?’
‘Not much,’ he answered, and dropped his boots on the floor. ‘A few trinkets, beads and the like. A little gunpowder and shot. Some brandy.’
‘They say the savage will do anything for brandy.’
‘And so we bring God’s light to the Devil’s empire.’
He intended to provoke her. Angrily Vincente clattered his plate before him.
‘So Fuerst’s wife condescends to come back, does she? How much longer must we wait?’
‘A few days, perhaps. Until her business is complete.’
Vincente pushed her own food around her plate. She could not eat, not while he watched her.
‘Who in the Devil’s name does she think she is, this woman?’ she demanded. ‘Conducting business with the savages?’
Auguste was silent. Then he shook his head.
‘I do not think I know,’ he said.
‘I have heard no good of her, I cannot deny it. Anne Negrette, Perrine Roussel, they . . .’
She trailed off, the words shrivelling under the light of his unblinking stare. In the silence that followed, he lowered his gaze, straightened the spoon beside his bowl. Then he picked it up and began to eat. He chewed and swallowed, then raised his spoon again. Neither of them spoke. He finished eating and pushed his bowl away. The grease on the bowls hardened and turned white. Somewhere a dog howled, dragging its cry down the slate-dark sky.
At last Auguste leaned forward and cleared his throat.
‘I have spoken to Fuerst. I go tomorrow to the Ouma.
Harvest or no, we cannot permit the Chetimachas to trespass onto our lands, to kill our livestock.’
Vincente nodded.
‘What shall you do?’ she asked.
‘There are always Chetimacha at the Ouma village. I shall seek their help in brokering a peace.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that not dangerous?’
‘Perhaps a little.’
Vincente was silent.
‘I am sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I should not have permitted you to come.’
‘You did not. And yet I am here.’
‘Yes.’
The silence stretched out between them. As he looked down at his hands, Vincente scraped back her chair and gathered up the dishes. At the door she paused. He sat perfectly still, his head bent.
‘Be careful,’ she whispered, and she set down the dishes with a bang loud enough to scare off the Devil.
He left before dawn the next morning. It was still night when he rose from bed, and he fumbled for his clothing, stumbling a little as his foot caught in his breeches. Vincente lay in the darkness, listening, as he gathered his pack and took up his musket and tiptoed quietly from the room. She strained for the sound of his feet as he crossed the cabin, but they made no noise on the hard dirt floor. The door to the yard creaked open, its leather hinges protesting against the hour. In the dark hours of the night, he had held her and her skin had clung to his. On impulse, she threw back the covers and hurried across the bedchamber. He did not turn. She wanted to call out to him, but she did not. The door closed, its swollen hem drawing a fan in the dust.
She watched him go from the window. He walked briskly and did not turn round. The men walked behind him like dead men, their eyes half shut. They carried scythes in great baskets over their shoulders. The womenfolk followed them, dinners bundled in shawls. Then the whip cracked, sending up squalls of startled birds as the Negroes were hustled from their enclosure.
They were not the first Negroes Vincente had seen. In the days when they were rich, a cousin of her mother’s had owned a Negro boy. A round-faced cherub with skin the smooth brown of milky chocolate, he had been a favourite with the children. They had petted him, dressing him up in a suit of silk and, around his neck, an ornamental collar with a padlock picked out in gold. It had amused them to take him walking in the gardens on a leash of scarlet leather. Then he had grown and his round face had hardened into angles and he had gone, sold to a merchant in Rouen.
‘Like a bear,’ the cousin had observed sagely when asked her opinion of the matter. ‘Perfectly sweet when a cub and then frankly unsafe.’
The Negroes were not roped together. Led by one of their own and followed by two of the Rhinelanders, whips aloft, they padded in a ragged line across the yard, showing the pale soles of their feet. The palms of their hands were pale too, and the shiny scars that striped their unclothed backs. Otherwise they were quite black. The intensity of their blackness was a shock to which Vincente could not accustom herself.
Then they were gone, and in the sudden hush the forest edged a little closer and the fear rose up in her like heat from the strengthening sun. Fear of the savages, of the Negroes, of the bovine Rhinelander women who looked at her as though they might trample her if she came too close. Fear of the feverish heat and the alligators and the venomous snakes, fear of fever and exhaustion and loneliness and a clutching kind of terror at the prospect of the Rhinelander’s imminent labour. And all the time the persistent dread that Auguste would not come back and there would be nothing left to cling to, nothing at all between her and all the fear in the world.
She was mistress still. She had Fuerst give her the key to the kitchen hut, and when the men were gone she crammed food into the pockets of her apron and took it to the cabin, hiding it behind a big book on the shelf by the door. At night she took it down and ate, hurriedly, blindly, without lighting a lamp. She did not want to see her hands. Sometimes she closed her eyes, squeezing them tight as though even the backs of her eyeballs might push down hard against the emptiness and force it out of her.
There was no key to the windowless cabin where de Chesse had stored his effects. Fuerst was required to break the lock.
‘Most of it he took,’ he said, and he struck the door hard with an axe until it splintered.
Inside, the hut was dim and damp as a church. Apart from the cobwebs, it was mostly empty. But propped in the corner she found a silk carpet only a little eaten about its edges, and a few small items of furniture: a walnut table and a looking glass and a chaise upholstered in stained blue velvet. There were boxes too of linens, grown rather brown.
Vincente carried them into the cabin, setting the table and chair together in one corner, the flyblown looking glass against the wall. Light spilled from it like silver. Then, on her knees, she smoothed the carpet carefully across the hard dirt floor. The silk was cool and soft against the palm of her hand, the blown roses creamy and exquisite against the pale green ground. She lay down and set her cheek against it, and she imagined what the women of Mobile would say when they saw it and whether they would lie on it too, all of them in a row like beans in a pod, and the thought of it was a comfort to her and a torment.
She had not known that ordinary work could be so punishing. Auguste had assured her she would be required to do only as much as was necessary for the subsistence of the settlement, but the drudgery of it was unending. In her head she heard her mother’s appalled protestations at the impropriety of such low work, the disgrace that it brought upon the family, and she hunched her shoulders and wrapped her blistered hands and brought the paddle down upon the unground corn so hard that the kernels spilled from the shallow mortar and made yellow patterns in the dust. Then she cursed Elisabeth Savaret with all her heart, who had lured her here and abandoned her here and would have her die here, crushed by the gruelling toil that was rightfully hers.
At night, though, a ceaseless prickling twitched in her limbs and stung her into an exhausted wakefulness. She lay on the floor then and drew the wives about her for comfort, their faces soft with sympathy and admiration, but the creaks in the cabin walls startled her and she could not hold them steady. Fuerst too seemed possessed of a wariness that was almost agitation. At night he had the men take it in turns to sleep on a deerskin laid out beside the cattle pen. As for the foreman, he slept in the wood store that, set just behind the kitchen hut, was the cabin closest to the forest. He kept the door lashed open so that the pale moonlight fell on his face and drew a line of shadow beneath the musket he laid at his shoulder.
Vincente did not open her Bible. She lay upon the carpet, her eyes closed, flat against the carpet as though the stuffing of her was all leaked out, and she waited for the blind, black hours of night when her hands were no longer hers and could comfort her.
ON THE FIFTH day, in the sun-drugged hours of the early afternoon, Elisabeth Savaret came back. The men’s dogs slept in the shade of the live oak tree, their tongues hanging from their open mouths, and the cow drowsed in its pen, only occasionally bothering to twitch away the flies that clustered round its eyes. Somewhere Nellie slept too, for her baby had come down, its head hard and heavy between her thighs, and her time was near. The dazed hum of the heat was broken only by the dull clunk of metal against wood.
In the shade of the main cabin, a rag wound around her head, Vincente split watermelons with a field knife. The red juice stained her fingers and her apron was flecked with flat black seeds. Beside her on a great wooden platter, she piled the broken hunks of fruit. Inside the curls of green rind, the white flesh melted into scarlet like bloodstained snow.
She did not see Elisabeth at first, only a chit of a savage girl swinging from the bars of the cow’s pen, her hands reaching out towards the animal. Barely more than an infant, she was calling out to someone in her own tongue.
Vincente’s heart stopped.
‘Get away from those animals, do you hear me?’ she shouted in French, and she brandished
her knife above her head. ‘Get away!’
The child turned round, her hand shielding her eyes. Then she climbed off the fence and ran back towards the forest. Vincente blinked dizzily, the knife loose in her hand. All was silent. A fat fly settled on the cut fruit.
Slowly, squinting against the glare, Vincente walked out into the stunned afternoon. She held the knife thrust out before her, the handle clasped in both hands. The heat pressed down on the crown of her head. Beneath the trees and between the mean cabins, the shadows swarmed with the bright heads of spears, the slick black points of poisoned arrows. Her skin was sticky with melon juice. Somewhere in the shade, swollen and stranded, Nellie waited for her baby to come.
The cow jerked up her head and skittered sideways, bumping against the bars. Vincente wheeled around. A savage stood before her, his glossy skin patterned with black marks. The savage child loitered beside him, her tongue caught between her teeth, and a little behind them both there was a white woman, her skin burned brown by the sun, dressed in a much-patched gown of sprigged cotton. Vincente let the knife drop. The woman was old. Her face was lined and her hair, which she wore pulled into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, was streaked with grey. She wore no cap, no stays. When she stepped forward, Vincente saw that she was pregnant.
‘Mme le Vannes,’ she said, and Vincente blinked and hid the field knife in the folds of her apron.
‘I – yes. You startled me.’
‘I am Elisabeth Savaret.’
Vincente said nothing but only stared at Elisabeth, unable to match the woman who stood before her with the Elisabeth Savaret of her imaginings. When she had asked Perrine and Anne and the others, they had sighed and agreed that Elisabeth was proud, that she was vain, that she was selfish. That she had always thought herself too good for the rest of them, that stuffed full with book learning, she knew everything and cared for nothing, nothing, that was, but herself and her ambitious husband. They said that, if it had pleased him, she would willingly have watched them starve. After that, whenever Vincente dreamed of Elisabeth Savaret, she always had a heart-shaped face, wax-smooth like a doll and with a doll’s round eyes and fixed expression. The face of her sister Blondine.