There could be no doubt now: the girl was pregnant. This was not the first morning she’d run for the chamber pot. Marguerite had felt a difference when the girl brushed against her to retrieve her wig or a hatpin, but for too long, she’d told herself the girl was simply developing—she was what, fourteen?
“Well?” Marguerite inquired. “Who is the father?”
The mulâtresse wiped her face with her apron, still looking green in spite of her dark skin. Not as dark as the pure Africans—a sort of chestnut. “I do not know, Madâme.”
“What do you mean, you do not—” When the truth hit her, Marguerite almost laughed. “You mean there is more than one possibility?”
“Yes, Madâme.”
The expression was true: “The mulatto’s only master is pleasure.”
The girl wobbled to her feet, bringing the chamber pot with her. She carried the noxious basin to the other end of the belvedere.
Marguerite turned her attention to her powder box and plucked off its silver lid. “I want their names,” she called, twirling the swan’s-down puff in the powder. “You do know their names?”
“Of course, Madâme.” Her words grew louder as she returned. “Their names are Gabriel and Narcisse.”
Marguerite dropped the puff. Powder bloomed like a burst mushroom. She whirled around on the stool, as fast as she could fully dressed, and gaped at the girl; but such impertinence stole her voice as surely as a voodoo curse. The idea that Marguerite’s sons would fancy this little brown bitch…
The girl smirked.
Marguerite struck her hard enough to leave her palm on fire, as if she’d been stung by one of Matthieu’s bees. Marguerite flung open the window and shouted his name. If the girl did not respect her mistress, she would respect her master. But everyone else had risen hours ago; the hot flashes had robbed Marguerite of sleep.
Over the shingled roof of the gallery, past the plumeria trees, Marguerite saw blue parasols, and below them, male legs. “Matthieu!”
No one answered.
Marguerite didn’t have the strength to drag the girl with her bodily, so she hurried alone through the children’s bedchambers to the other end of the belvedere—and nearly tripped over the chamber pot. The clinging billows of her peignoir slowed her pace down the stairs, so she tore it off. The motion pooled perspiration at the small of her back, reminding her to snatch a straw hat from the rack. She reached the back gallery—empty, though she heard voices through the jalousies.
Without pausing to peer between the slats, she hurried down the steps into the cloying fragrance of the plumeria. Gabriel and Narcisse stood with their backs to her in the scant shade of the parasols held aloft by their valets. From this distance, her sons looked like half-grown cherubs, their golden curls tapering into queues.
Under her breath, Marguerite cursed the little whore, for making her come out here like this, for interrupting her toilette. Her face was utterly naked, and in her slippers she felt as if she were wading through the thick grass. She tied the hat’s ribbon awkwardly. The girl’s accusation was so ridiculous, Marguerite refused to sully her sons by addressing it; but she damn well intended to tell Matthieu and ensure a just punishment.
Another slave approached her sons and their valets, a woman past her prime with skin as black as pitch. The negress carried a basketful of lemons in her only hand. Her right sleeve was pinned and empty. The boys seemed to be waiting for her: as she neared, Gabriel called an order in Creole and pointed west.
Narcisse’s valet noticed Marguerite and shifted his parasol. Narcisse glared at the man, saw her, and laughed. “You’re redder than cochineal, Maman.”
She would address his manners later. “Where is your father?”
Gabriel glanced toward the citrus hedge. “I think he took Étienne to the apiary.”
How many times had Marguerite told Matthieu she did not want their sons anywhere near his bees! Especially an eleven-year-old! She picked up her skirts, consigned her slippers to ruin, and plowed toward the hives. What need did they have for honey, amidst a hundred acres of sugarcane? Why couldn’t Matthieu keep birds like their neighbor? Marguerite would not lie awake at night fearing parakeets might turn on their master.
Ahead, she heard Matthieu whistling. He thought it calmed his little monsters. He’d read that continence calmed them too, as if the bees could smell her on him. He’d slept on the gallery for months now. He preferred insects to her. Was she one of his experiments? Was he testing how long it would take before he drove her mad?
Behind her, Narcisse yelled: “Farther!”
She knew perfectly well where the apiary was! Marguerite did not stop but glowered over her shoulder.
She realized her son was shouting at the one-armed negress. With her basket of lemons, the slave trudged closer to the cane nearly three times her height. “She must think we are terrible shots,” Narcisse complained to Gabriel, who peered into a wooden case another slave had brought them.
Marguerite gritted her teeth and kept striding toward Matthieu’s whistle. Fifteen was too young to be playing with pistols. Seventeen, too—but she had lost that debate months ago. At least her sons had found a use for the cripple.
That negress must be the latest mill worker to fall asleep feeding cane into the machine. The cast iron grinders had crushed most of her arm along with the stalks, ruining the entire batch of juice. Dr. Arthaud had been their guest that night. Matthieu had urged his friend to return to his bed and not to bother with the woman—they’d just buy another—but Arthaud had revelled in the opportunity.
Marguerite halted well away from the citrus hedge, where dark bees assaulted white blossoms to Matthieu’s whistled tune. No matter how he went on about queens and workers or the pastry scent of the hives, she would not venture any closer to that dangerous mass of life. Did he think fire wouldn’t burn? “Matthieu Lazare!”
The whistling stopped at once. For a moment, only that unearthly buzzing filled her ears. Then Étienne giggled. Matthieu called from the other side of the foliage: “Coming, my queen!”
Apian humor. It made a mockery of her. If Marguerite were truly in charge of this household…
The report of a pistol made her start, twice when it echoed against the mountains. A whoop of pride drew her attention back to her eldest sons. White smoke hung over Gabriel, who held his gun aloft and beamed in victory. At a distance, the crippled negress stood with her eyes squeezed shut and her face turned away from her single extended palm. It was empty, the remains of a lemon presumably propelled somewhere behind her into the tall green sea of cane, where anything might hide.
They should all be in Le Cap right now. No fountain, convent, or theatre could make it Paris, but the city was more tolerable than this plantation, surrounded by wild animals and negroes. In Le Cap, Marguerite could take the children to the wax museum (how the proprietors kept the figures from melting, she’d never know) and pretend that she was back at court in the most civilized country in the world.
Finally, the beekeepers emerged from the citrus hedge, the first looking like an executioner and the second like a mourner: Matthieu in his masked hood and Étienne with his straw hat draped in black crape. Neither of them wore gloves. Marguerite rushed toward her son, who tucked his swollen thumb behind his back.
“I am all right, Maman!” Étienne kept on his path toward the house. “Papa got out the stinger. It was a warning; that’s all. They don’t attack unless you’ve done something wrong.”
Marguerite cradled the boy’s hand as they walked; and she remembered what waited for them back in that house. She narrowed her eyes at Matthieu. “I told you that girl would be trouble!”
“Pardon?” He doffed his hood to reveal a shaved head gleaming with sweat.
“That little”—Marguerite thought of Étienne and restrained herself—“mulâtresse has gotten herself with child, and she had the audacity to accuse our sons!”
Ahead of them, another gunshot cracked. Marguerite’s attention jumped from the negres
s, who stood quivering with an undamaged lemon on her head, to Narcisse in his cloud of smoke. Pistol arm limp, her son scowled at the ground and muttered, “Merde.”
Marguerite stamped her foot. “You know how I feel about cursing, Narcisse!”
Looking remarkably contrite for once, he mumbled, “I couldn’t help it, Maman.”
Before Marguerite could argue, Matthieu cleared his throat as though he were about to speak; but in the end, he only stood there with the bee hood under his arm.
Instead, Gabriel spoke. “It was as if she bewitched us.”
Suddenly, Marguerite couldn’t breathe.
After a moment, Étienne leaned closer to her. “Does…this mean I am going to be an uncle?”
She gaped at Matthieu. “You knew of this?”
He only shrugged. “It was bound to happen eventually.”
“How can you—” Marguerite sputtered. “After what she has done!”
Matthieu took her elbow to direct her away from the boys and lowered his voice. “I don’t think Ève is the one to blame here.”
Marguerite threw off his arm and planted her feet. “She seduced our children, Matthieu!”
He kept walking, up the glacis toward the east garden.
She was obliged to follow or lose his ear. “We should burn her at a stake!”
Matthieu glanced over his shoulder, frowning. “She is carrying our first grandchild.”
Marguerite clenched her fists. “That baby is an abomination!” God’s blood, would the thing have two heads? “I never want to set eyes on it!”
“You know what’s expected, Marguerite. We owe that child its freedom.”
“That is custom, Matthieu, not law!” She pursued him through the shade of the flamboyants. “Don’t you dare give that little bitch—”
Marguerite heard a squeal. Their daughter Delphine sprang up from behind one of the rose bushes, giggling, her face the color of its petals.
Matthieu chuckled in return. “Bon matin, Guillaume.”
“Good morning, sir.” Their daughter’s suitor stood up from the garden bench next, buttoning his waistcoat and not even attempting to conceal his grin.
Marguerite buried her face in her hands and groaned. This island was ruining her children. When she peeked between her fingers, Delphine was wearing one of those gauzy white chemises she called gowns, whose inadequate ruffles left no part of her to the imagination. Her unpowdered hair was bound up in a garish turban, as if she were a negress. “This is how all my friends dress!” she would argue.
Matthieu, meanwhile, chatted amiably with their daughter’s corrupter. “I see you’ve returned from your Grand Tour.”
“Last night.” Guillaume glanced at Marguerite and added: “I do not mean I spent the night. I have been here not more than a quarter of an hour.” And what a welcome Delphine had given him.
“Look what he brought me, Maman!” Her daughter bounded toward her, those unmistakably aroused nineteen-year-old breasts jouncing behind the sheer muslin. She thrust forward a dull grey pendant, a cameo of a nude Cupid playing a flute. “It’s carved from lava,” Delphine declared. “From Mount Vesuvius! And Guillaume got to watch it erupt! Can you imagine?”
“It wasn’t like the eruption that buried Pompeii,” the lecher shrugged, “only puffs of smoke.”
What a pity, thought Marguerite. We might have been rid of you.
“But it’s an active volcano, just waiting…”
Guillaume could have brought Delphine a rosary blessed by the Holy Father himself. Instead, their daughter’s suitor had brought her a piece of God’s wrath, His judgment on all those hedonist Romans.
Marguerite sank to one of the iron benches and let her eyes drift from her daughter’s lack of clothing, across the road, beyond Guillaume’s banana fields, to the clouds looming beneath the dark peaks in the distance.
Twenty years before, those emerald mountains had been her first sight of the island. After three months at sea, she’d clung to Matthieu and exulted as they inhaled the fragrance of the tropical blooms that carried all the way to the ship. Nestled between the mountains and the sea, the grand buildings and parks of Le Cap appeared like a heavenly city. She thought they’d found Paradise.
Saint-Domingue: the Pearl of the Antilles, the richest colony in the world, it promised them a new beginning, a shedding of their old lives. They wouldn’t need to work or dress or build anything more than a hut; fruit would drop from the trees and the weather would always be perfect…
Then they’d stepped onto this American soil and seen, thick as locusts, twelve black faces for every white one. Their neighbors were the refuse of France. Even the Priests kept colored concubines.
The wrath of God took every form but volcanoes. Less than a year ago, a hurricane had decimated Port-au-Prince, when the city had barely recovered from its last earthquake; two years before that, not a single drop of rain had fallen on this Northern Plain. And in the jungles on those emerald mountains, bands of runaway negroes worshipped snakes, drank hogs’ blood, and plotted how to murder them all.
Delphine and Guillaume’s murmurings grew more distant. Marguerite supposed Matthieu had sent them away. She watched the pair go: swaying closer together as they walked, the shape of her daughter’s posteriors clearly visible through the chemise.
“I know what my mother would say,” Marguerite muttered. “‘What else did you expect, from children conceived in sin? God is punishing you for your lust.’ And I suppose she would be right. But it isn’t only us, Matthieu. This island is cursed. It ruins everyone it touches.”
His bee hood still tucked under one arm, Matthieu glanced quizzically at their retreating daughter. “How has living here harmed Delphine?”
Once, she had thought him intelligent. “Look what she’s wearing!”
“La chemise à la Reine? What our Queen and her ladies are wearing?”
“Who introduced the fashion to that Austrian bitch? Creoles from this island.”
“I imagine it’s comfortable.” Matthieu tugged at his own shirt, plastered to his skin with sweat.
“Look who she’s ruining herself with!”
“They intend to marry, Marguerite. After all these years apart, that hasn’t changed. Delphine might have wed a dozen other men while Guillaume was at university and travelling.”
Precisely. Not that anyone on Saint-Domingue deserved her. Marguerite narrowed her eyes as her daughter tilted up her face for a kiss. “I had hoped the old proverb would prove true.”
“‘Far from the eyes, far from the heart’?” Matthieu offered with a smile.
Marguerite nodded gloomily.
“I prefer: ‘Absence is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes little ones and feeds great ones.’”
Marguerite could only sigh in defeat as the lovers vanished around the corner of the house.
“Why is Guillaume so objectionable to you?”
“He’s a Creole.”
“Our children are Creoles too.”
Yes, they had been born here—but Guillaume’s family had been wallowing on this island for more than a century. “He is descended from pirates and whores.”
“And I am the son of a barber! If it were not for those ‘pirates and whores,’ France would never have gained a foothold on Saint-Domingue. We owe them a great deal.”
“Do we?” She forced her eyes to the four rose bushes surrounding them. White, pink, red, and variegated—a rose for each child they had lost. Marguerite remembered their birthdays, their death days, and every day in-between. Félicité would have been two years old today, if she had lived.
Soon they would be unable to visit any of their children’s graves. So cramped was the cemetery in Le Cap, every three years, negroes turned over the soil to make room for more corpses. This was not the New World Matthieu had promised her. No one had warned them about the fevers, that they would “pay the clime’s tribute” with half of their children.
Matthieu sat beside her on the bench. “W
e might have lost just as many in France.”
That was no comfort. She knew it wasn’t a child stopping her menses now. She was forty-six: she had reached the critical age. If Matthieu ignored her much longer, she would never have another child to love or to lose. She wasn’t sure whether to lament or give thanks.
The mulâtresse came outside with a jar on her head and sauntered toward the well. Marguerite clenched her teeth.
“Do you really think any of it would have been different in France?” Matthieu asked. “It is hardly a bastion of morality, and there are servants there too.”
This was different. Just look at her.
“If Ève bothers you so much, she will be gone by nightfall.” Matthieu set the bee hood on the ground next to them. At the back of the house, they heard gunshots and whooping again. “I made certain Gabriel and Narcisse confessed before Holy Week. They are far from ruined. Remember Saint Augustine?”
Marguerite remained silent. She was waiting for the little whore to disappear.
“You cannot say the island has ruined Étienne.”
“Not yet.”
Matthieu took her hand, but she left it limp. “Are you ready to write to Denis?”
Marguerite closed her eyes. In his letters, her brother had mentioned the fine school in his parish. Even if the boys began their educations on Saint-Domingue, the island would never have a university—such a thing encouraged independence, as the British colonies had proved. She knew it would be best to surrender her sons to Denis’s keeping, that they should have sent Gabriel and Narcisse to France years ago; but to lose them, too…
“Can’t we go back with them, Matthieu?” She squeezed his hand in supplication. But when she opened her eyes, he was shaking his head. “Surely no one would recognize us now.”
“You have only a convent to fear; I have a noose.” His voice became strident. “I won’t risk it—not while your husband is still alive.”
“Matthieu! The children might hear you!” Her gaze leapt toward the sounds of their laughter.
Matthieu stood at once and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Gabriel! Narcisse! Étienne! Delphine!”
Necessary Sins Page 2
