by Clare Clark
In her narrow bunk that night, as on so many nights, Vincente le Vannes reached into her bodice and drew out the folded square of paper. She opened it carefully. The paper was worn soft as muslin, the picture on it split in several places along the deep creases, but still the delicate watercolours glowed jewel-bright in the smoky light of the candle.
The sea was a vivid aquamarine and beneath the pale sky the purple mountains were marbled with pink gold. Above the spires and turrets of the elegant city, fresh breezes swelled the sails of a three-masted ship and tumbled the feathered branches of an exotic tree. A curious-looking creature scrambled up its trunk, its elongated cat-body crowned with the face of a wizened old man. In the foreground merchants and sailors in bright blue silk coats jostled with sturdy savages, naked but for loincloths and headdresses of brightly coloured feathers.
Louisiana. Vincente tasted the word as she traced a fingertip over the familiar silk of the painted ocean, the parapets of the fortified city. For months before she had left Paris, the talk had been all of Mr Law’s Louisiana where pearls might be fished in abundance and the streams rolled on sands of gold, where the savages worshipped the white men as gods, and silver was so common it was used to pave the public roads. Immense grants of this enchanted land had been sold to the wealthiest men in the kingdom, and every day the rest had scrambled with the stockjobbers in the rue Quincampoix to snatch for themselves a share in the Mississippi Company which would make nobles of them all. Some had grown so rich already that a new word had been minted to describe them: millionaire.
The engraving had been thrust into her hand by a man selling the Nouveau Mercure from a stall close by the entrance to the convent. He had not asked for payment and she had known it immediately as a sign, though what it signified exactly she could not have said. At the very left of the picture a missionary in clerical garb sat at a table, holding aloft a wooden cross. Before him a savage raised his eyes to Heaven in a transport of ecstasy, his crossed hands pressed against his heart. He stood in the shadows, his pale countenance creased with thick black lines, as though the weight of the small cross caused him excessive strain.
The abbess’s face had been soft and powdery, like a floured bun. Several times at the close of the day, when the twilight drifted in the cloisters and the novices were called to vespers, she had placed her hands upon Vincente’s head and blessed her.
‘Go home now, child,’ she had said, and her voice had been gentle and full of kindness. The thought of it caused Vincente’s eyes to prickle.
‘For many are called,’ Vincente murmured, ‘but few are chosen,’ and she ran her thumb over the missionary’s lined visage, stroking at first, then pressing hard into the page until the page crumpled.
The ship rocked gently, setting the light to dipping. Pushing the engraving aside, Vincente reached under her pillow and brought out her Bible, opening it at the Book of Proverbs, but, though she tried to fix herself upon its commands, she found none of her usual consolation in its numbered certainties. Instead she reached out and once again took up the engraving, smoothing it out across the Bible’s opened pages. Absently she ran a finger across the purple mountains, around the curve of elegant dwellings along the harbour wall. She wondered who lived there, whether her husband would own a house in the town, and she thought of the attic apartment in Paris, the cramped rooms with their mean windows, the ceilings that sloped low above the too-large furniture. The fireplaces were small, the light poor. In winter it was impossible to keep warm; in summer the sun baked the blue slates until the heat became insufferable. They might have found more comfortable accommodations elsewhere in the city, but her father was adamant. Whatever the treacheries of fortune, he insisted, they must remain in the Place Royale. It was the address that signified, he told them, the company a man kept that distinguished him and set him in his proper place. In the Place Royale a man, sooner or later, would find himself rich.
Then he had sold her. Her father knew people and he understood the value of the few assets he still possessed. When a nobleman who was cousin to someone high up in the Ministry of the Marine sent word from Louisiana that he had need of a wife of virtue and industry, M. le Vannes had professed himself only too willing to oblige, subject to certain terms. It had been Vincente’s mother who had informed her of the arrangements. Vincente had stared at her mother’s powdered face and remembered her sister Blandine’s furtive whispers, the jab of her nudging elbow as she described to the round-eyed Vincente the terrible things a man could demand of his wife when it was dark and the drapes around their bed shut tight.
‘What did he get for me?’ she had demanded. ‘Thirty pieces of silver?’
Mme le Vannes had only smiled.
‘Regrettably, child,’ she had said lightly, ‘you are not worth half that amount.’
Still, he had sold her. A daughter in exchange for shares in the Mississippi Company and a grant of two hundred livres for the purchase of a trousseau. By the time Vincente knew of it the papers had been signed, the details confirmed. At supper that night her father had patted her shoulder and declared it a great triumph, for stock in Law’s Mississippi was rarer than hen’s teeth. Her mother had contemplated her in exasperation.
‘If you insist on regarding as a misfortune marriage to a man whose estates yield harvests of gold, you are more suited to a madhouse than that damned nunnery,’ she had declared. ‘It is I who must find a seamstress skilled enough to make a bride from skin, bones and sackcloth.’
Later she had overheard her mother talking with her father in the parlour.
‘I suppose we should be grateful Louisiana is so far away,’ her mother had said. ‘At least the Comte cannot consider the bargain of his purchase before it is paid for.’
Her father’s laugh had seemed to Vincente the bitterest betrayal of them all.
The light spat, belching smoke. It was almost all burned out. Vincente rubbed her eyes and abruptly the hole inside her opened, pushing against the constraints of her bodice. She swallowed, pushing it down, but it pushed back, stretching into the sockets of her arms, the base of her throat. Vincente hesitated. Then from the pocket of her skirts she took the bread and cheese that she had smuggled from the dining room in a napkin. She had promised herself she would keep it till morning.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ she whispered as she tore frantically at the clumsy knot that secured it. ‘Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.’
Tearing open the bundle, she snatched up handfuls of food and crammed it into her mouth, pressing and swallowing, squeezing up her face as the lumps of ill-chewed bread travelled awkwardly down her throat and pressed themselves against the underside of her breastbone. When the food was all gone and her hands lay slack in the grease-stained napkin, she lay down, her knees tight against her chest and her pulse hard, and the tears slid quietly from beneath her closed eyelids.
It was barely morning when the sloop cast off from the hull of the Baleine and made its slow voyage across the dun water towards Mobile. The mists had yet to clear and, in the cobweb dawn, Vincente stood upon the deck, straining for the first smudged sight of land. As the sun rose, rolled tight in the white pastry of the sky, and ropes and sails and shouts snapped around her, she gazed across the harbour, disbelief springing into her mouth like saliva.
The prospect before her bore no more resemblance to the Parisian illustration than it did to the filthy sprawl of Paris herself. Beneath the dough of the sky, the town of Mobile rose like a dismal act of defiance from the chaos of swamps that encircled it. The water was a muddy yellow soup, choked as far as the eye could reach with thick reeds, and the wooden cabins and warehouses circling the harbour were hardly better than cattle byres. There were no palms, no elegant spires. Instead there rose from the water great dark trees with leprotic bark that rotted in hanks from their trunks. Behind them, on higher ground, squatted a hunchbacked fort built of wood, with four bastions and a flagpole from which the faded flag sagged defeated, like a pau
per’s washing.
When at last the passengers were permitted to disembark, there were no gleaming savages, no men in fine silk coats. The motley crowd was poorly dressed. Several of the soldiers wore no shoes. Behind her several undernourished Negroes loaded luggage into a rough-looking flatboat of the kind peasants used for the transport of vegetables on the Seine. By the time she had departed Paris, she had convinced herself she left it gladly. She had declared herself disgusted with the city’s ingrained dirt and covetousness, its clamour for money and courtly favour, the contaminated monotony of its society, the stink of its alleys and the shrieks of the hags selling herb teas and old hats. Throughout the long and comfortless voyage, it had consoled Vincente to consider how enraged Paris must be by the sweet youth of the New World, a land barely older than Vincente, its beauty freshly minted, its warm breezes soft as a kiss upon a lover’s cheek. Beside the bloom of Louisiana, old Paris was no more than a toothless harlot, her peeling mask of paint and patches powerless to disguise the sag of her pockmarked flesh, the coarseness of her cynicism.
Vincente descended the gangplank in a daze of heat and stunned dismay. I am here, she thought. I have reached the promised land. When she had left it, Paris had been giddy, convulsed by speculation fever, the talk only of the Mississippi Company and of the magical country they called Louisiana. Every man in Paris had wanted a share in it. At the rue Quincampoix where stocks were traded, bishops and priests had jostled with courtesans, magistrates with prostitutes, aristocrats with their footmen and maids, and her father with anyone he could find. Fights had broken out; a man had been crushed to death in the stampede. For this.
‘Mlle le Vannes, my name is Mme de Boisrenaud. I am only sorry that we meet in such circumstances. Why, they brought you the news in Havana, did they not? I do hope that I am not the one to whom the burden falls – you know, do you not, that M. de Chesse, to whom you were betrothed, is dead?’
Dizzy with the airless clamour of the dock, Vincente could only blink loose-jawed at the pinch-faced crone who stood before her. Though her expression was mournful and her skin slack with age, the old woman’s eyes were round, almost eager, and she strained forward, nostrils wide, as though she meant to inhale the aroma of Vincente’s distress.
‘Last September, it was,’ she lamented, shaking her head. ‘Every summer it comes, the fever, like a plague on us. Always some lost, though we have none to spare.’
The sourness of the old woman’s breath caused Vincente to cover her nose with her fingers. It seemed that though M. de Chesse had been renowned for the robustness of his constitution and had resisted the illness for some weeks, the affliction had at last proved too formidable an opponent, even for him. It had been providential, the old woman said piously, that the gentleman had been resident at the time in the settlement of New Orleans and not at his concession upcountry. It had been possible to summon a priest to him in his final hours. Perhaps it would comfort the Mademoiselle to know that the last rites had been properly given.
Last September. The ship that had brought her here had finally put out from Rochefort two weeks before Christmas. When the old woman patted her sleeve, Vincente could only gape, seized by a bewilderment that was almost outrage. She could not shake the sense that someone, somewhere, was playing a vast and terrible joke upon her.
‘Perhaps if your passage had been swifter?’ the old woman commiserated, absently testing the silk between finger and thumb. ‘We expected you months ago, of course. It really is most unfortunate. You can hardly have the most favourable first impression of our little colony.’
The old woman shook her head, her brow furrowed and a sad smile upon her lips.
‘Hardly the welcome you might have hoped for, is it?’
The urge to strike the old crone was sudden and powerful. Vincente pressed her fists against her cheeks, pinching the flesh with her thumbs.
Her intended husband was dead.
The blow could not match the treachery of the place itself, but the shock of it still startled her. In the first blaze of her resistance, and then, later, dulled by seasickness and the heavy drag of inevitability, she had somehow failed to notice how accustomed she had grown to the fact of her marriage. Though a second box containing small household gifts had been stored in the hold, the chest containing her trousseau had, at her mother’s insistence, been placed in her cabin, for she had not, her mother had declared, gone to all that trouble to lose the contents to thieves and damp. It had occupied nearly all the available space, and Vincente had been obliged to press its leather lid into use as table and writing desk. The grease stains and ink spots that had begun as a kind of defiance had persisted as symbol of her defeat, their unchanging forms testimony to her surrender. Once or twice she even discovered herself kneeling before the open lid, trailing her fingers in the pale foam of lace and silk. There was something grimly gratifying in the pain, like probing a bad tooth with the tip of one’s tongue.
Vincente swayed, the ground shifting beneath her feet as though she were still aboard ship.
‘Do you think – I feel rather unwell. Perhaps it would be possible to take a little water?’
The crone peered at her, examining first her face and then the pearl brooch at her bosom before tilting her head, her mouth busy with sympathy.
‘I pity you. I too was betrothed to a man who passed away before we could be married. He was a prominent man, perhaps the most prominent in all the colony, aside from the commandant himself. The influenza, they said. Five days before the wedding ceremony. Five days!’
‘May he rest in peace.’
‘Indeed. Though there has been precious little rest for those he left behind. Unlike you, I was not protected by the security of a marriage contract.’
Across the dock, half hidden by a heap of barrels and boxes, Sister Marie urged her flock through the jostling crowd. The daughters of beggars and felons, the sixty girls had been plucked from Paris’s Salpétrière penitentiary so that they might be brought to America as wives for the rougher sort of settlers. A patched ragbag of a seraglio even in the inns of Lorient, they were worn thin and grey by the voyage. A number of the sorrier specimens had wept without ceasing for the entirety of the passage, prompting one waggish sailor to remark that this was the first seaworthy ship he’d had the pleasure of that carried more salt water inside the hull than out.
During the rough weather, when many feared themselves lost forever, Vincente had discovered one of them crouched on the deck, her arms about her knees, and had bid her there and then to put her hands together and pray for the ship’s safe deliverance. The girl, a scrawny creature with a chapped mouth and hair the colour of dust, had gaped at her with slack, pink eyes. Then she had vanished. The Salpétrière girls had a way of disappearing that was almost sinister, slipping through closed doors and the cracks in floorboards like curls of smoke.
Sister Marie looked up, meeting Vincente’s eyes. Murmuring something to the girl at the head of the group, she swung round and hustled the girls away.
‘It is not for us to question the will of the Lord,’ Vincente said tightly. ‘Those that trust in Him shall be brought from darkness into His eternal light.’
The crone blinked. Then she inclined her head.
‘Your piety becomes you,’ she said. ‘The orphan girls are to be accommodated with the nuns in the centre of town, but you are to lodge at my house. The commandant considered it the most suitable arrangement, at least for the present. I shall do what I can to ensure your comfort.’
Vincente shrugged.
‘I must go where the Lord intends me.’
The old woman’s mouth tightened.
‘You are fortunate, in that case, that He did not abandon you on Massacre Island,’ she rejoined tartly. ‘You would be lucky there of a shack fit for a pig.’
Vincente watched as a savage woman made her way through the crowd with a basket of food balanced on her head. The smell of fried batter insinuated itself between the salt and rot reeks of the
quayside, flooding Vincente’s mouth with a rush of saliva. The hole inside her stretched.
‘Madame–’
‘Now, now, a little jest, that is all. Did the Lord not command us to remain cheerful in the face of adversity, to bear our troubles without complaint? Of course they call it Dauphin Island these days, though most of us consider the old name more appropriate. Thank the Heavens that there are not enough boats to bring over all the human refuse that lands there. The place is full to bursting with felons, convicted felons if you don’t mind, murderers and thieves and the good Lord only knows what dregs of humankind, packed off to save your precious Mr Law the trouble of finding decent folk to settle here. And at whose expense, I ask you?’
‘Perhaps I might–’
‘Everyone here is in a perfect ferment about it, make no mistake. We are grateful only that the commandant keeps them there and not here on the mainland, at least for the present. We have not suffered here this long to be slaughtered in our beds. Of course the savages are a different story. The ones around here are mostly docile. It is the money, you see. They wish to trade with us and know we shall not tolerate their excesses for all their corn and pumpkins. Some can even be prevailed upon to baptise their children, though their practice of the faith would hardly impress Rome, but upcountry, why, it is said that the tribes are become so wild–’
Steadying her basket with one hand, the savage woman disappeared into the crowd. Vincente whimpered.
‘Mme de Boisrenaud, I beseech you, if I might only rest a little, perhaps take some refreshment–’
The old woman’s face snapped shut.
