by Clare Clark
‘You are quite certain?’ Auguste asked when darkness had fallen and the dancing was begun. ‘That we are to return to Mobile?’
‘And from there to the Mississippi. The Natchez expect me.’
‘But–’
‘Auguste, do not be naive. Can you not see that this is exactly what the English want? To distract us from the business of trading, of securing supplies for the settlement, until we are too weak to withstand their assault?’
Babelon’s face was shiny and in his eyes Auguste saw only the flames of the cane torches, leaping yellow in their curved glass shades.
‘The Choctaw would not betray us,’ Auguste said quietly. ‘They have pledged their allegiance most solemnly.’
‘Their solemnity is hardly at issue. Whether the Choctaw are in the pay of English masters or whether they are only their dupes, the end is the same. They send us to the Chickasaw and, in all likelihood, to a trap. We lose nothing by caution.’
Auguste was silent.
‘With the river in flow, it should take us no more than a matter of days to reach Mobile. Then, well, it is a question for the commandant. Let him decide.’
The current was swift and, as Babelon had predicted, they were returned to Mobile within the week. From the river they went directly to meet with the commandant. Auguste told Bienville what he knew, then, as instructed, he waited outside as the commandant conferred with Babelon. When the two men emerged, they informed Auguste that he was to return to the Choctaw village with a guide and require of the Choctaw chief that he attend the commandant in Mobile at his earliest convenience. As for Babelon, he would travel directly to the Mississippi so that the business interests of the settlement might not be compromised.
Auguste accepted the commandant’s orders. When they had been dismissed, the two men walked slowly back towards the dock. It was raining, a fine drizzle that clung to their coats.
‘A drink at Burelle’s?’ Babelon asked.
Auguste shook his head.
‘You must be impatient to see your wife.’
‘She will look even better after another drink. So will the woodrat, come to that.’
The thought of the opossum gave Auguste a tiny squeeze of pleasure. At the corner of rue Condé, he stopped and bid his friend farewell.
‘Godspeed,’ he said. ‘Go safely.’
‘And you, sir. And you.’
Auguste turned away.
‘Just one thing more,’ Babelon called after him. ‘Any chance of having that quire I loaned you? I may be required to keep a log of things. You know.’
Auguste fingered the familiar square of the book in his pocket. In the time that he had had it, the stuff of his coat had grown corners to accommodate it.
‘Of course,’ he said, and handed it reluctantly to Babelon, who slid it into his own pocket. ‘The drawings . . . I am sorry if I have used too many pages.’
‘On the contrary,’ Babelon protested. ‘With your pretty illustrations to enliven them, perhaps even business accounts may prove tolerable.’
When Babelon had gone Auguste lingered in the street, biting at his thumbnail. Then he turned and walked slowly towards the rue de Tonti. He tried to fix his thoughts upon anticipation, of the opossum who would scramble onto his shoulder and nip gently at his ear, of the tulip tree in his garden that would be just coming into flower, but they slid away from him and he thought instead of the commandant, who, before dismissing Auguste, had poured wine for the three of them and raised his glass.
‘To effective espionage,’ he had said, tossing back a gulp. He wore no neckcloth and his shirt was open, revealing the twined mass of serpents inked upon his chest. The wine had been sour. Later, when the bottle was empty, Bienville had shaken his head.
‘Surely the chief of the Chickasaw is not such a fool as the Choctaw would have us believe. Does he not know how the perfidious English whistle down his kind like turkeys from a tree? And for what? For a few muskets? More favourable terms of trading? Do not mistake me, I am only too familiar with the imperatives of commerce. But the English? The English worship profit as the savage worships the sun, not for the warmth of it on his back, but because without it day would never come. Treachery runs in their veins. There is nothing, I swear it, not kinsman nor country nor the kingdom of God Himself, that an Englishman would not sell at the right price.’
EVERY MONTH OF that dreary winter began with the faint fresh breath of hope and ended in cramps and clotted blood. Then it was spring again. Jean-Claude went north.
When the rains came, the river burst its banks anew and the houses in the lower part of town were once more flooded. The residents were obliged to rely on their pirogues to get about town and Elisabeth made room for the family of Renée Gilbert, whose home was several feet under water. Confined to the cabin the two women waited, the children peevish and fidgety about them. Elisabeth bitterly begrudged the violation of her solitude. She was irritated by Renée and exasperated by the children, whom she found both tedious and exhausting. When the smallest one overturned a pitcher of milk, she struck him. Renée’s affronted silence lasted for days.
The rains fell without ceasing. In its mud hole the fort rotted from the foundations up, its wooden bastions crumbling beneath the weight of its cannon. Bienville had brokered an uneasy alliance between the Choctaw and the Chickasaw in which both nations pledged their friendship to the French, and the chiefs of the two nations had both spent some part of the winter in Mobile. It did not prevent the English from stirring up trouble. If they succeeded in provoking the Chickasaw to attack, the town would have precious little hope of holding out against them.
Then, in a violent storm that lasted three days, the half-built church was flooded, the altar and makeshift pews smashed to sticks, and the single field of Indian corn that the commandant had prevailed upon the settlers to plant was destroyed. Worst of all, the warehouse was ravaged. There had been no ships from France since the Aigle, and even before the rains goods of every kind had been in perilously short supply. By the time the tempest blew itself out, there was almost nothing left.
Miserable, impoverished and fearful, the townspeople complained bitterly. The locksmith Le Caën, with several other tradesmen, led a delegation to the commandant to persuade him to move the town to the mouth of the river. There was, they declared angrily, no worse possible place for a settlement than this sodden swamp in the middle of the woods.
Bienville listened to their exhortations and sent them away.
The rains were still falling when Jean-Claude’s expedition returned with food and with slaves. There was not enough of either. The expedition remained in the town for three days while their cargo was recorded and stored in makeshift huts erected in the garrison high on the bluff, and the slaves were quickly sold to those settlers of the town who could afford them. Then, once again, Jean-Claude and his guides ventured north.
And still the rains did not cease. As the floods rose, tongues soured and rumours bobbed like logs on the surface of the scummy water. Renée declared bitterly that the commandant was a pig, too proud and too stubborn to admit the mistake made by his brother in situating the town in a swamp. Others went further. Some said that Bienville kept the settlement in Mobile solely because it was a good distance from the harbour at Massacre Island and the convoluted business of transporting cargo between the two made it easier for his agents to abscond with stolen goods; others claimed that he invented the threat of an English ambush simply to divert attention from his own incompetence. But though there were threats of reports to the Minister of the Marine and even of formal complaints to the King, nothing was done. No ships came and there was no paper for letters. For all the notice paid to them by the mother country, the drowned lands of Louisiana might have been sluiced from the surface of the earth.
It was almost June when the skies cleared and the waters slunk back to their summer positions on the margins of the settlement. Renée and her family returned to their home and made what repairs they could man
age. During the sweltering months of summer, a crew of twenty slick-skinned Apalache natives toiled against the white-hot sky, cutting and dressing timbers for a large stockade and rebuilding the bastions that supported the cannon. That summer six soldiers died from the fever.
The garrison for all of Louisiana now numbered fewer than sixty men.
For most of that summer, Jean-Claude was away from Mobile. In their two lines in the cabin on rue d’Iberville the savage children chanted French words, making music from everyday phrases. One day, when they were gone, Elisabeth pulled her trunk from its place under the bed. The leather was mildewed, the lock rusted shut. She ran her fingers over its rough mouth. Then she pushed it back out of sight. The commandant did not approve of teaching savages to read or write. He thought book learning among slaves not only unnecessary but hazardous. But when the children came for their lesson two days later, she waited as they chorused their greetings and then she held up her hand.
‘Today,’ she said, ‘I have a different lesson for you.’
The children waited. Elisabeth took a breath. Then she sat before them, her hands in her lap, and she began to tell them the tale of the Odyssey. She spoke of Telemachus, whose father was missing, and of his mother Penelope, surrounded by young men who endeavoured to persuade her to accept her husband’s disappearance and to marry one of them. The story came awkwardly at first, its details half forgotten, but as she continued Elisabeth found that Homer’s verses returned to settle on her tongue, their song familiar in her mouth. The children gazed at her, their eyes wide. She knew they did not understand her. When she was finished they were silent. Then, shyly, they filed away, leaving Elisabeth sitting alone in the cabin. She sat there for a long time as the darkness settled about her and the words hummed inside her like bees.
The next time she taught them words that would be useful in the fields: hoe, till, machete.
It was almost August when Jean-Claude returned. He was burned dark by the sun, the beard mossy on his chin. It was only when she hastened to embrace him that she saw the slave. Bare-headed, with long black hair that fell almost to her knees, she waited in the lane, her eyes set demurely upon the ground. She wore a long white linen dress of mulberry bark that skimmed her hips and her high, round breasts, and the skin on her face and arms was smooth and coppery-brown. She was very young.
Elisabeth’s stomach fell away.
‘You’re back,’ she said.
‘So many weeks gone and that is all the welcome I get?’
Elisabeth raised herself on tiptoes and, putting her arms around her husband’s neck, kissed him on the mouth. As he held her in a close embrace, she opened her eyes and looked over his shoulder. The savage girl stared at her without blinking. Her eyes were almost black, her brow high and strong. She was very still.
‘Welcome home,’ Elisabeth murmured and, tugging his hand, she pulled him into the house. Perhaps, she thought, if she slammed the door hard enough, when she opened it again the savage girl would have gone. ‘It was a profitable expedition?’
‘For Sieur de Bienville certainly.’ He flung himself into a hard chair, tipping backwards. ‘Again. Thirty able-bodied slaves and every sou they raise goes into his coffers.’
‘Not exactly his, surely?’
‘Then you do not know Sieur de Bienville.’
The door stood open. In the frame of it the girl stood like a wraith, her white dress bright as a candle-shade against the afternoon sun, the shape of her body dark and clear.
‘Jean-Claude?’ Elisabeth swallowed. He frowned, then turned to look.
‘Ah.’
He clicked his fingers at the girl, motioning at her to enter. As she walked, her body rippled inside the linen dress, slippery shadows that defied the demureness of her attitude. She stopped before Elisabeth. She smelled of bear oil and warm skin, a musky, carnal odour. Quickly Elisabeth covered her face with her hands, inhaling the familiar scent of her own fingers.
‘Did I say thirty slaves?’ he said blandly. ‘Better make that thirty-one.’
‘You bought a slave? But I thought–’
‘Who said anything about buying? She was – a gift.’
‘A gift?’
‘A little something for my trouble.’
‘But we agreed–’
‘No. You agreed. It is become absurd, Elisabeth, this caprice of yours. Every other household in the town, if they are not paupers, has some manner of slave.’
‘So? Since when did we give a fig for anyone else?’
‘I give a fig for affectation. And it is become an affectation, this nonsensical obstinacy of yours. She will do the heavy work, water, wood, cleaning. You will be free to teach your savage pupils whatever nonsense it is you teach them, and for whatever else you choose besides.’ He frowned at her impatiently. ‘What possible reason can you have for refusing her?’
The girl’s name was Okatomih. Though she was dressed in the costume of the Natchez, she was not a Natchez herself but of the Yasoux nation, whom the Natchez had raided some months before. Elisabeth knew nothing more of her than that. Okatomih knew no French and Elisabeth nothing of the savage tongues of the north. The few words she knew were either Pascagoula, picked up from the savage women who traded their wares at the market, or Alibamon, which was the commonest tongue among the slaves, but the girl only shrugged at her, her face blank. Elisabeth was obliged to instruct her in mime, pointing and performing the required actions. The slave observed Elisabeth’s efforts with her unblinking black eyes and said nothing. It filled Elisabeth with a fury at the same time murderous and hopelessly impotent. She longed for the girl to demonstrate her impudence, to fail in her duties, so that she might punish her.
In this, as in everything else, the slave confounded her. She wore her hair as Elisabeth instructed, in a tight braid, and her face in an expression that was not so much defiant as defiantly blank. She kept herself and the kitchen hut reasonably clean. She was always early to rise, folding her deerskin and placing it on a shelf beside the salt crock. She pounded the corn and washed the pots and household linens. She swept the floors. There was always flour in the flour barrel and wood in the wood store. Unlike Elisabeth, she was also an accomplished cook and even brewed a delicately flavoured savage liquor that resembled French beer. Elisabeth had only to serve the meal and afterwards set the dirty dishes outside the door. When the master was at home, the slave was forbidden from entering the cabin. On this last point Elisabeth was perfectly clear.
As for Jean-Claude, he appeared well satisfied with the arrangement. He showed not the slightest interest in the girl herself except on occasion to remark upon the flavour of a particular dish. It was the women of the settlement who concerned themselves with her diligence. In the weeks after Okatomih’s arrival, several of them called upon Elisabeth to inspect her and to advise upon the principles of slave management. Most of the settlement’s slaves were from the nation of the Chetimacha, with whom the French had long been enemies, and their shortcomings were only too well understood. The women studied the girl with narrowed eyes, unwilling to concede that Elisabeth might have made the better bargain.
‘Well, I suppose she looks strong,’ Renée Gilbert remarked. ‘The poor sort have an infuriating habit of wasting away.’
‘And the lively ones of making a run for it,’ Perrine Roussel warned, waggling a finger. ‘You will need to be vigilant. Whip her seldom but watch her like a hawk.’
In this, at least, Elisabeth was obedient. However resolutely she determined to disregard the slave, her gaze was drawn again and again to the high smooth brow, the slanting eyes, the pulled-back hair like a cap of black silk with its swinging tassel braid, the mesmerising pass of the broom back and forth across the floor, the press of her fresh, ripe flesh against the linen of her dress.
In all the years of their marriage, Jean-Claude had never been so present in the cabin as he was at those times. When the slave’s hands encircled a pot, her brown fingers splayed, when the tip of her tongue da
mpened the corners of her mouth, when the perspiration gleamed on her brow, he was there. He was the pot, the mouth, the brow, the broom that moved in her hands with breathless languor. The girl moved and he moved with her, darkening her shadow, thickening her hair, seasoning her breath with his favoured tobacco. When she bent and her heavy braid fell forward over her shoulder, it was his shadow hands that brushed it aside, his shadow lips that pressed themselves greedily against the stretch of her exposed neck. When she raised the spoon to her mouth, testing the flavour of the stew, it was his flesh she tasted, his juice she wiped from her chin. The lucidity of the images, and their unreasonableness, tormented Elisabeth.
She was short-tempered with the savage children, rebuking them sharply for slips of gender or of pronunciation. They grew wary of her. Then, one day, on the boys’ side of the cabin, there was a space in the line like a missing tooth. One of the older boys had not come. When she demanded of the others why he was not there, they did not answer. The smallest girl opened her mouth but the girl beside her elbowed her hard and she blinked and pressed her lips into a line. The lesson passed slowly. When it was over the children did not linger. They hurried from the cabin in silence. It was only when they reached the end of the lane that Elisabeth heard their voices, high and clear, singing the strange music of their own tongue.
Elisabeth sat on the stoop, watching the mosquitoes spread like mildew across the darkening sky. In the past when she had wished to hide from the excesses of her imagination, she had found solace in labour. She had toiled until she was exhausted, finding a kind of refuge in fatigue, in the immediacy of blisters and aching muscles. Now that was the slave’s work. Elisabeth was instead required to busy herself with the finer tasks, the making of soap, the sewing of clothes, the preserving of food. None of them required the skull-stunned grind to which she had cleaved so gratefully. None of them caused the sinews in her shoulders to shriek and the sweat to run into her eyes, so that she could no longer hear the voices or see the pictures that flapped like coloured bookplates in her head.
