by Clare Clark
‘It would have satisfied him, no?’ Perrine had reflected later. ‘That it was to him that you turned for protection, even in death.’
‘On the contrary, it would have angered him,’ Elisabeth had replied, and her eyes had shone hard and bright. ‘He always wished me more self-reliant.’
That night, when Perrine was asleep, she had opened her box. It had been Perrine who had insisted upon her sorting those possessions of his that she no longer needed so that they might be sold. Clothes remained in short supply, and even a much-mended pair of stockings might fetch six livres. When, after two days in the rue d’Iberville, she had contrived to fill only a small box with belongings of her own she wished to keep, Perrine had grown impatient and taken over the task herself.
Very slowly Elisabeth had lifted her everyday apron from the box. One by one she set the items out on the floor. His laced hat. His linen shirt with the frayed cuffs. His broadcloth coat. His good shoes, scabbed around their wooden heels with mud. All except the lace dress. She covered that with the apron and pushed the box away. Its corners left chalky scratches on the plank floor.
In Perrine’s house the clothes looked real. The hat was stained and the leather of the boots worn, their outside edges humped by the bulge of his feet. His feet had been small but broad, his toes tufted with hair. Once a month she had pared his toenails, his feet set between her thighs. Elisabeth touched one boot very lightly with the tip of her finger. She would clean them and oil the leather to preserve it. Perrine might sell whatever else she could, for Heaven knew Elisabeth needed the money, but she could not sell his boots. Good boots were impossible to find in Louisiana.
When he came back he would need his boots.
‘Madame? Are you well?’
The child’s hand was light upon her sleeve. Dazedly, Elisabeth looked up. The girl’s face was close to hers. She was frowning, her brows drawn together, her mouth, her impossible mouth–
He had never been hers. The fire in her had burned for him alone, a fierce and private flame lighting a single page, a single face. But the fire in him was like the fire that had consumed Old Mobile. There was no holding it. It leaped from one cabin to the next, hardly troubling to finish with one before starting on its fellow, and hurling itself against the sky as though it would out-blaze the stars themselves. By the time the Mobile fire was finally put out, eleven cabins had been destroyed.
Elisabeth closed her eyes and in the grainy red darkness his empty boots stood set together, side by side.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone.’
The child hesitated. Elisabeth snapped open her eyes.
‘Go away!’ she cried, and the child’s eyes opened round, and she held herself tightly with her thin arms and walked away.
Elisabeth peeled the stocking from her hand. Then, very carefully, she stood and walked into the cabin. Her entire body, her clothes, her hair, were ablaze with despair, her skin so scalded and blistered with it that the slightest touch would have been insufferable.
On the other side of the yard, the girl glared at her mother.
‘You should not have sent me,’ she said in her own language. ‘She was angry.’
Jeanne laid down her paddle.
‘Oh, little one,’ she said, smoothing her daughter’s forehead with her thumb. ‘The master shall be home soon. We must have supper ready.’
The child gazed up at her mother.
‘Why is the Madame always angry at me?’
‘She is angry with us all and with herself too.’
‘But why?’
‘It helps her forget her sadness.’
‘But she has another husband now. Surely she is not sad any more?’
‘But of course she is sad, little bear cub. Their tribe is not like ours. Even the most honoured of white men must go alone into the country of their spirits and leave those who would care for him behind. The Madame grieves for his loneliness.’
‘Was the Monsieur honoured?’
‘No. But he was loved.’
‘The he shall not be lonely for long.’
Jeanne smiled, her mouth twisting a little at the corner, and pressed her lips to her daughter’s head.
‘You see things clearly, child. It is the Madame who needs our comfort now.’
It was almost dusk when Artur Fuerst returned to the settlement. The men were tired and hungry, the mosquitoes already gathering in black clouds against the darkening sky, and they ate the meal that Jeanne had left for them rapidly and in silence, their forks sounding in dull knocks against the rough wooden plates.
In their own enclosure, despite the warmth of the evening, the Negroes squatted beside the fire that with its sour palmetto smoke did something to discourage the insects. They too ate greedily, each dipping into the big tin kettle with his own wooden spoon, scooping up the thick mess of peas and broken biscuits. When they had granted the nobleman his land, the Company had promised him three hundred Negroes to work it. So far Fuerst had received fourteen. The French surgeon who had examined them upon arrival had pronounced them all severely weakened by the privations of their passage. One of them, on account of a sickness he had succumbed to on the ship, was as good as blind. The balls of his eyes had a swirled look, like broken eggs. Fuerst despatched him daily to the bayou, to catch fish. There was little else that could be done with him.
The fire crackled and burst, sending flowers of sparks into the darkening sky. Summoning the Negro he had chosen as leader, Fuerst issued his orders for the following day, taking care to raise his voice so that the whole band might clearly hear him and not lose time in the morning coming to enquire about their duties. In the firelight their faces wore expressions at once assiduous and vacant, and their skin gleamed black-gold, their eyes ringed with yellow. Above the scent of the burning palmetto, he could smell the slaves’ animal odour. It made him afraid.
When he had locked the Negro enclosure, Fuerst hurried up the bluff, calling out goodnight to the men as he passed their cabins. He was weary. The raiding parties of the savages were taking their toll. It was not just a matter of the lost livestock, though that was bad enough. Slowed by the heat, the men were further hampered by the need to hold themselves with weapon in hand. They were falling behind.
He did not like it that the men went armed. The Rhinelanders were good workers and not given to complaining, but they were restive. He could not blame them. Back in the Rhineland, when the agents of the newly formed Mississippi Company had spoken to them so eloquently of the promise of the New World, each man had agreed to be bound to the Company for three years in exchange for a monthly stipend and, when the three years were up, the endowment of thirty arpents of his own land. It had seemed a straightforward enough agreement. The previous year the French Crown had granted the Mississippi Company a monopoly on all trade between France and its Eden of a colony for twenty-five years, the sole right to mine and farm the land. All that was wanting was industrious people: men to work the land and to share in its spoils. The Rhinelanders had come eagerly, impatient for this promised land of plenty where savages prostrated themselves before the white man, where deer offered themselves up for meat and settlers paid no taxes and the Company handed out not only rich and fertile land but also the seeds for its cultivation.
Now they knew better. For months the men’s stipend had gone unpaid. Trade between settlers had been outlawed and all commerce restricted to the Company’s stores, at the Company’s exorbitant prices. Nobody could leave the colony without the Company’s express permission. Fuerst had heard the men talk. They declared themselves little better than slaves, dragged from Europe as the Negroes were dragged from Africa, to serve a cruel and pitiless master. They meant the Company. But Fuerst was no longer certain that his authority outweighed their discontent.
He pushed open the cabin door, shouldering its reluctant canvas hinges. Elisabeth sat at the table, a single tallow candle alight before her. She did not look up as he entered. She stared at the wall, away from him,
her chin upon her elbows. The smoky flame painted shadows beneath her eyes.
Fuerst said nothing. Instead he sat on the low stool to pull off his boots and set them neatly in their place by the door. Then, pulling off his grimy shirt and hanging it upon its wooden peg, he crossed the room to wash. His body was thickset but not fat, compact bulges of power moving beneath his freckled skin. His face was burned by the sun, his wrists and hands too, red-brown gloves upon his pale bite-spotted arms. He leaned down, plunging his face into the earthenware dish of water left ready for him. Splashes of water gleamed on the dirt floor as he shook his head and rubbed his face and neck briskly with the coarse cloth. When he was finished, he spread it carefully out over the dish to dry. Then he took the clean shirt from the back of his chair and slipped it over his head.
‘A man came,’ he said. ‘From the de Catillon concession upriver. We may use their bull for stud.’
Elisabeth blinked at her husband, as though woken from sleep. She said nothing. Then she rose and, crossing to the plank table that served as a sideboard, she brought back several dishes, each covered with a cloth. She brought plates and spoons and cups, two of each. When she had set them on the table, she took the cloths from the dishes and folded them into neat squares before spooning the food onto her husband’s plate.
They ate in silence, Fuerst forking up neat, swift mouthfuls that he chewed with his mouth fastidiously closed. Elisabeth opened her mouth and set her fork inside it. She swallowed. The food caught in her throat. She swallowed again, harder. The nausea rolled through her. Then she dipped her fork once more into her food and raised it to her lips. She looked down at her plate. Food was scarce and others were not so fortunate. She seemed to have been eating for hours. The lumps of food had the air of the French words she practised with the girl, repeated so many times that they ceased to make sense. The thought of placing them in her mouth revolted her.
Fuerst swallowed his last mouthful and set his knife and fork together neatly upon his plate. Yawning, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his clay pipe.
‘That wasn’t half bad,’ he observed, as he always did, damping down the tobacco with his thumb.
Defeated, Elisabeth pushed away her plate, dropping her hands into her lap. In the thickening dusk, her upturned palms loomed pale, someone else’s hands. The ring on her left hand hung loose on her finger. He had brought it with him from the Rhineland. It had belonged to his mother. He had given Elisabeth her Bible too, with his mother’s name in careful ink on the flyleaf.
Fuerst held a lit spill to the bowl of his pipe and sucked on it until the tobacco pulsed red. Elisabeth breathed in the smoke, tasting it in the back of her throat. It occurred to her that this was something that she liked, the fragrant smell of his pipe smoke. She watched as he took the pipe from his mouth and studied it, his elbows on the table.
After a pause he raised his head and leaned forward a little, his lips parted and the pipe held aloft as though he were about to speak. Elisabeth waited, her back straight. Fuerst regarded the line of her neck, the whorl of her ear, the fine tendril of hair that escaped her simple lace cap, and he closed his mouth, setting his chin on the heel of his free hand. His jaw slackened and his shoulders too, so that he could feel the weight of his head in his forearm. Slowly he lifted the pipe to his lips and inhaled.
‘The indigo settles,’ he said. ‘If we can prevent the weeds from choking the new plants, next year we should have ourselves a very reasonable harvest. The seigneur will be pleased.’
Elisabeth murmured something.
‘Of course the seeds should have been set a foot apart, an instruction to which the Negroes showed themselves incapable of adhering, but most look set to prosper for all that. We will not have another year like this one. If we had only been able to secure twice as many slaves–’
‘You would have twice the number of mouths to feed.’
Fuerst frowned.
‘Well, yes, but with twice, three times the amount of land under cultivation–’
‘Are things not hard enough? Even Negroes do not eat indigo.’
The sleeping area was separated from the main room by a plank screen. They undressed in silence, their backs to each other. In the darkness he reached for her and dully she lifted her nightgown to accommodate him. His efforts were strenuous and brief and soon afterwards he slept. Elisabeth did not move. She lay on her back, her skirts around her waist and her legs still parted, staring upward into the ghostly folds of the linen she had hung from the roof as protection against the mosquitoes. The pale stuff clung to the darkness like smoke.
They had cut his throat while he slept. She closed her eyes tight, her fingers pressing down on the lids, but it came all the same, rolling through her like nausea: the sultry night sky pierced with white-hot stars, the baleful suck and hiss of the drowsing bayou, the whisper of feet, the pale gleam of linen as the flap of his baire lifted, his sleeping face, his arm thrown back above his head, his discarded boots, worn soles upward, the shimmer of oiled skin as the dark figure raised the blade – and then silence, a stillness like a gasp that stopped the night and silenced forever the ceaseless scream of the cicadas.
She wrenched herself over onto her side, her pulse hard in her neck. Beside her Artur snored, his mouth open, and her treachery tightened her throat and clenched her fists. She had not hoped to grow fond of her new husband, only that she might serve him uncomplainingly. She had accepted him in the certainty of loneliness, in the vague, bleak hope that in the isolation of the plantation and the drudgery of the work, she might find a kind of peace.
She had not reckoned on that hot fierce part of herself that refused to believe that he was gone, that it was over, but clung instead to the conviction that, one day, if she strained for it enough, she might be able, through the force of her own will, to force upon the story a different ending.
THE ROOM, PRESSED in upon by shelves and shelves of ledgers, was dominated by a large desk of dark wood. Its feet were cracked and splayed, pale green with mould. Behind it stood a tall man with a broad, imperious head and the large-boned fleshiness of a man who had once been muscular. Though he had been in the colony more than a year, his skin was pale, spotted with pale sand-coloured freckles. His abhorrence of the sun was well known. Whenever he walked in Mobile, he wore always a distinctive wide-brimmed hat of fine straw. His eyes, set deep into his skull, were cold and grey.
The man gestured at Auguste to close the door. Then, still standing, he extracted from the pile in front of him several pieces of correspondence and set them to one side. He did not invite Auguste to sit. He leaned upon his steepled fingers as he studied the papers, eyeglasses perched upon the end of his nose, a slight frown puckering his brow as though he calculated figures in his head.
‘You sent for me, Commissary?’ Auguste asked. His shoulder ached as it always did on damp days. In its sleeve his arm hung awkwardly, the palm twisted away.
‘You had a profitable expedition?’ the commissary asked.
‘Not entirely, sir. The English have been busy.’
‘But surely the Choctaw are our allies?’
‘It has been our habit to trade one deerskin for two-thirds of a pound of gunpowder. The English offer one pound.’
‘But that is outrageous. We cannot do business on such terms.’
‘Nor shall we. After long discussion, the Choctaw chief agreed to accept three-quarters of a pound. As for food, they will accept our goods and forgo trade with the English.’
‘That is the best you could manage?’
‘It is a fair arrangement, sir. The English goods are more plentiful than ours and of a higher quality.’
The commissary sighed. Then he nodded, gesturing at Auguste to sit.
Auguste hesitated.
‘If that is all, sir, I am needed at the storehouse. The manifest–’
‘The manifest can wait.’
He fixed Auguste with a look at once indifferent and intense. Auguste bowed his head,
but something in him stiffened.
‘Sit,’ the commissary ordered him.
Auguste sat. The commissary did not.
‘You find yourself in an awkward position, I think,’ the commissary said at last.
‘I am afraid I do not know what you mean.’
The commissary’s mouth tightened.
‘I would advise against disrespect. It will not favour you.’
‘I intend no disrespect, sir.’
The commissary frowned. Then he sat. He said nothing but lowered his gaze to the stack of papers on his desk, squaring the pile with the flats of his hands. Then, taking a folded handkerchief from his pocket, he removed the eyeglasses from his nose and set about polishing them. He worked meticulously to the perimeter of each lens, holding them up to the light to check that they were spotless before hooking them once more around his large ears.
‘Louisiana is the property of the Mississippi Company, M. Guichard. It does not and never has belonged to Sieur de Bienville, whatever he may think to the contrary.’
Auguste said nothing. It was no secret that the commissary had been a close confidant and ally of de l’Epinay who, during his short-lived tenure as governor of the colony, had quarrelled with all of his subordinates and Bienville in particular. Now de l’Epinay was returned to France and Bienville governor in his place.
‘Sir?’
‘I would counsel strongly against wasting my time. I am not a patient man.’
‘I do not know what it is that you want from me, sir.’
‘I want your cooperation. It is almost certainly too late for the governor. It is not too late for you.’ The commissary cleared his throat and took a paper from a pile upon his desk. ‘Perhaps you would begin by telling me why it was that you left Mobile. It coincided, I think, with the removal of Sieur de Bienville from the position of commandant?’
‘Not precisely, sir. In 1712, when the King granted the banker Crozat the lease on Louisiana, Crozat sent Sieur de Cadillac from France as governor, though Sieur de Bienville continued to serve as his lieutenant. It was some weeks after his arrival that the new governor sent me north to the Illinois as translator to one of his expeditions.’
