by Clare Clark
‘And the purpose of that expedition?’
‘The governor believed we should find mines there.’
‘Did he indeed?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But you did not?’
‘No, sir. Though we returned several times we found nothing.’
‘Unfortunate for Crozat.’
‘Unfortunate for Louisiana, sir.’
In the months after Cadillac’s arrival, there had been a brief flowering of optimism among the inhabitants of Mobile. After years of protest, they had finally succeeded in persuading Bienville to move the settlement south to the mouth of the river. While the sandy soil there was unfavourable for cultivation, it was less prone to flooding, and the settlers rebuilt their houses quickly, determined to put the years of hardship behind them.
Their hopefulness was short-lived. Embittered by his failure to find precious metals, inflamed by the abominable conditions in which he was required to exist, Cadillac had exacted his revenge upon the colonists. He prohibited all trade with the natives, including the lucrative trade in liquor, and instead established a single company store in Mobile where credit was refused and a pair of stockings cost forty livres. Any man unable to provide documentation in proof of his noble blood was forbidden to wear a sword under the penalty of imprisonment.
In penury and desperation, the settlers had staggered forward away from the past. Subsistence became an accomplishment. Elisabeth Savaret had married an indentured Rhinelander with nothing in his pocket but a contract promising a grant of land when his time was served. The women of the town had ground acorns for coffee and told each other that pride came before a fall. Months later, when the news of Elizabeth’s marriage reached the Illinois, Auguste toasted the bride with savage moonshine and wept into the hair of a girl who stroked his pale shoulder with her copper hand.
Cadillac was fired and de l’Epinay despatched to Louisiana in his place, but he lasted barely one year. In 1717, Crozat, faced with a massive tax bill from the Chamber of Justice, had remitted his privileges to the King. When Auguste’s expedition returned to Mobile, Le Caën’s daughter was grown up and married to a cannoneer, the white opossum Ponola was dead, and Louisiana was the possession of the newly minted Mississippi Company.
For a time it had seemed that the colony’s fortunes were finally to change. With the support of the Regent and the newly minted Banque Royale in Paris, John Law’s Mississippi Company would hoist Louisiana onto its broad shoulders and make it rich. The Company had been granted not only exclusive rights of trading but also the free possession of the coasts, ports and harbours of the colony, ownership of the forts, stores, houses, guns and ships in the colony belonging to the French Crown, the right to make war or truce with the native tribes, and the right to appoint all colony officials. In exchange, Law, the colony’s new merchant prince, had promised seeds, supplies and three thousand Negro slaves, as well as six thousand new colonists. Sieur de Bienville, restored to his position as the colony’s governor, was triumphant. A new era was begun.
In those months perhaps one hundred men sailed to Louisiana from France, agents of the noble concessionaires with orders to cultivate the land and return the profits, and a few wives too, widows with small children or bad debts, daughters too old or troublesome or impoverished to secure a husband. Respectable people, half stunned by the heat and the privations of the voyage, they made their way unsteadily to their grants while the settlers at Mobile squabbled over the contents of the newly stocked warehouses and waited for more ships to come.
And so they came. They brought flour and wine and inferior brandy and before long a different kind of colonist. For all his grand plans it seemed that Law could not persuade sufficient Frenchmen to travel of their own volition to the New World. So instead he scoured the orphanages. He emptied the prisons. He put bandoliers on the streets of Paris to round up throw-outs and cast-offs, any kind of human excrement that might be scraped together so that he might meet his commitment of human freight. It was said that Law’s Company paid a bounty for every vagabond arrested and put to sea. They paid nothing to those expected to receive them.
There is no man bitterer than he whose ambitions are exposed as a folly of his own invention. He must suffer his humiliation in the certainty that it has been from the very first an inevitability, with nothing to relieve the shame of his disgrace but the polishing of new curses and old grudges. The long-time habitants of Louisiana, who had suffered so much, responded with resentful garrulousness to the enquiries of the increasingly distrustful commissary. Of course the governor had always feathered his own nest. There was no smoke without fire. Personal commerce with the savages in goods granted for diplomatic purposes; the clandestine sale of stores intended for the garrison; use of the King’s boats for the transport of furs for his own profit; trade in savage slaves; favours to favourites. Like suspect coins, the old rumours were once more bitten on and rubbed up shiny.
The commissary cleared his throat.
‘I understand that the governor has granted you a concession. Why would he do that, do you think?’
Auguste thought of Bienville, his finger on a map, his shirt open to expose the time-softened tongues of serpents, his sleeves rolled up as though he meant to dig the triumphs of his future from the earth himself.
‘Yours,’ he had said, pointing at a square of land. ‘Make something of it.’
The years had aged the governor, stripping the flesh from his boyish face and pouching his eyes, but he had made no mention of the past. It was not in his nature.
Auguste regarded the commissary evenly.
‘So that there might be as much land as possible under cultivation,’ he replied. ‘It is important that the colony lessens its dependence upon the savages.’
‘I say he seeks to reward his friends. You are one of his friends, are you not?’
‘He was a just and tireless commandant. He will make a good governor.’
‘Don’t play the innocent with me, Guichard. We know full well that Bienville continues to deal with the Spanish at Pensacola on his own account in direct contravention of Company law. Just as we know that he and his cohorts trade in French goods intended as gifts for the savages. Damn it, man, the lot of you have been at it for years. Do you think me stupid?’
The commissary slammed his hands down hard against the desk. Auguste observed the flush in his neck, the reddening of his large ears, and something loosened a little in his spine.
‘With respect, sir, the governor’s enemies here have sought repeatedly to slander the commandant with accusations of this kind. None has ever been proven.’
‘Not yet.’
‘There is no man in Louisiana who is more dedicated to the colony’s prosperity.’
‘There is no man in Louisiana who has done more to promote his own.’
Auguste was silent as the commissary picked up the sheaf of papers in front of him. He shuffled through them, extracting a sheet of onion-skin scrawled on in faded ink.
‘But I think you may be able to help me with that,’ the commissary said, and he struck the sheet of onion-skin with the back of his hand. ‘What, for example, do you know about an ensign by the name of Babelon?’
Auguste did not blink but set all his attention upon expressionlessness.
‘Babelon, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jean-Claude Babelon was a Canadian from Quebec, one of the first settlers here, I think. But he has been dead some years.’
‘I hear that he traded on the governor’s account. That you assisted him.’
Auguste shook his head.
‘No, sir. We traded with the savages in exchange for food. Without such trade, the people of Mobile would have starved.’
‘And what of the goods you took from the storehouses, the goods intended for the colonists?’
‘We have always been required to secure the friendship of the savages with presents, sir. Without those alliances we would not have contrived to hold
the colony for one month, far less nearly twenty years.’
The commissary regarded Auguste. Then he looked back at the papers he held up in front of him.
‘This Babelon. He came to an unfortunate end, did he not?’
The commissary peered over the papers, his eyes narrowed. Auguste kept his gaze steady, but his neck prickled and the breath in his chest was as heavy as water. From where he stood, it was not possible to see the page that the commissary held in front of him, but in his mind Auguste saw it precisely: the crushed onion-skin browned with age, the ragged edge where it had been torn from the notebook, the words scrawled in his own clumsy hand.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘He was killed by savages.’
‘And what cause did they have to kill him?’
‘It was rumoured that they were perhaps encouraged by the English, though there was no proof of that. They robbed him. That may have been enough.’
‘You yourself were satisfied with that explanation, were you?’
‘During my time here, the savages of Louisiana have killed many white men. They have seldom troubled to explain themselves.’
The commissary pursed his lips. Then he looked down again at the papers in front of him. Auguste breathed carefully, inhaling the reek of rotting sweet potatoes.
‘When the death of Ensign Babelon was reported to the garrison, what was the response of Sieur de Bienville?’ the commissary asked.
‘He sent a raiding party to the Chickasaw to avenge him.’
‘Did he? And was any attempt made to discover which of the savages was in fact responsible for the ensign’s untimely demise?’
‘It seemed that one of them had boasted about Babelon to his fellows. When our soldiers reached the village, they killed him and several other warriors with him and brought several more savages to Mobile as prisoners.’
‘A bloody reprisal.’
‘The nation of the Chickasaw has ten times our strength. The commandant desired them to know the severity of their offence.’
The commissary pursed his lips, tapping at his papers with his fingers. Auguste thought of the savage warrior, set upon by three French soldiers, his head and all the recollection in it bludgeoned to pulp with a rock. With his death no proof remained, no trace of what had been, but for a letter on onion-skin paper torn from a notebook written in a man’s awkward hand.
Several minutes later, Auguste was dismissed. He walked slowly from the room, closing the door behind him. Whatever it was that the commissary had held in his stack of papers, it was surely not his letter to Elisabeth. Which meant that he had nothing. He could prove nothing. Or not yet.
That night he soothed himself with brandy, but still Auguste slept poorly, plagued by restless dreams whose images eluded him. Before dawn he rose. Uneasiness greased his stomach. Outside in the dying night, the air was almost cool, the black trees huddled together like cattle. Auguste drank more brandy and watched as the new day stretched and spread, insinuating itself among the trees, but still he could not blur them, the words on the onion-skin paper in his own unpractised hand.
It is decided. The trap is set. His death shall be an act of savagery to put fear in every white man’s breast.
Dear Elisabeth, if you love him, do not let him go.
THE CHILD INCHED away, her eyes upon a lizard of poisonous green. Elisabeth looked up. For a moment the lizard was no more than an inked outline on the page of a notebook hatched with shading and labelled in Auguste’s careful letters. She squeezed her eyes shut. There were days when, without warning, a part of her would sheer away, dropping like a stone into the past, and she had to stretch out over the chasm of herself to haul it back. Clasping tight to her elbows, she cleared her throat. The child’s slate lay abandoned on the dusty ground.
‘Petchi,’ she bid the girl, resorting to the child’s native language. ‘Sit down.’
The child hesitated and, reaching out her hand, tried to snatch up the lizard. With a flash of its green tail, it was gone. The girl stuck out her tongue.
‘Le lézard vert vif,’ Elisabeth said crisply, laying the stress on the article. ‘La fille très désobéissante.’
‘No disobedient,’ protested the girl in French. ‘The lizard–’ She hesitated, frowning. ‘The bright green lizard. He wished in the lesson.’
‘He wished to be in the lesson.’
‘There! You saw it also.’
The child was sharp as an arrow. Elisabeth’s head hummed. She tightened the grip upon her elbows.
‘Enough! Caheuch. Come here now.’
The child regarded Elisabeth with her dark eyes. There was neither insolence in her expression nor the slightest deference. Elisabeth held her gaze as the heat massed beneath her skin. The eyes were the girl’s own, but the mouth, the narrow fullness of it, the way the lip curved upward at the top so that it appeared to be outlined with a circle of paler flesh, the mouth was an anguish. The child puffed out her lips consideringly. Elisabeth did not blink. Then, without rising from her haunches, the child shuffled back to sit at Elisabeth’s feet and took up the abandoned slate.
She had been baptised at the same time as her mother, and given the name of Marguerite. Once, during a lesson, the child had asked Elisabeth what the meaning of her name was.
‘Pearl,’ Elisabeth had said. ‘It means pearl.’
‘What is pearl?’
‘It is a white jewel. In France rich ladies make necklaces of them and sew them to their dresses.’
‘Like a bead?’
‘Like a very precious bead.’
Elisabeth had thought she would be pleased. But the child had only frowned and pursed her unbearable mouth.
‘A bead is not a very interesting thing,’ she had said.
The clay pencil dangled on its leather thong as Marguerite licked her finger, drawing shiny black circles on the tablet’s dusty face. Elisabeth straightened a little. Her hands were clamped so tightly about her elbows that her knuckles ached. Slowly she brought them into her lap, cradling one inside the other. When they had first come to this place, the men had been obliged to travel abroad for days at a time, hunting meat and gathering wild indigo for cultivation. When the rains came, Jeanne had brought the child into the main cabin so that they could watch her while they worked. The child had stared up into the spidery roof and smiled her father’s secret smile. She had hardly ever cried.
‘A spelling test.’
Immediately Marguerite grew attentive, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth.
‘L’homme,’ said Elisabeth. ‘La femme. Le garçon.’
She waited, watching Marguerite’s bent head as she carefully formed the words.
‘La fille. Not so hard. You will break the pencil. Next. Le fils.’
Marguerite wrote, frowning with concentration. Then with her head on one side, she studied what she had written.
‘Please, Madame, excuse for asking but how can there be son without saying father?’
Elisabeth hesitated.
‘In my language, there is no such word,’ the child added.
‘And in French there is. Spell it.’
Obediently the child wrote. Elisabeth watched her, her stiff fingers laced tightly in her lap. Le fils. F-I-L-S. But it came all the same, the memory of Rochon on the porch of the house at rue d’Iberville on the day he left for the Chickasaw. He had told her then that in various of the Indian tongues there was no word for son but only for son-of-someone. The curiosity was that since the Indians traced their descent through the maternal line, someone was never the child’s natural father but rather his uncle, the eldest brother of his mother. While he might show indulgence towards his children, and his people would always be welcomed by the child’s tribe, a father wielded no authority. He had looked at her then, in that grave way he had that always seemed on the verge of laughter, and it had taken all her strength to bid him goodbye. He had walked away without turning. The seat of his worn-out coat had been rubbed to a darker sheen.
The child curved the S with a flourish and held out the slate, admiring her work.
‘So please, what is the word for the daughter-without-father?’
‘La fille.’
‘Just the same?’ The child looked disappointed. ‘But why?’
When she pouted, her brows twisted and her bottom lip protruded in a bow. The sight of it made Elisabeth light-headed. She frowned, looking away.
‘No more questions. Next. L’infant. Write it. L’infant.’
It was no good allowing oneself to remember things, Elisabeth knew that. Memories were like slaves. They had an instinct for weakness. You showed one a little latitude, permitted it some small privilege or attention, and before you knew it they were all there, hands outstretched and noses pressed against the palisades, half wild with the need for it.
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
At the plantation, Fuerst insisted upon locking the Negroes in their enclosure at night. He considered it vital for their safety. The Negroes of Guinea, raised from infancy to believe that the white man purchased them for no other purpose but to drink their blood, distrusted their master as a frog distrusts a snake, in the meat of its bones. He was a fair master, all the same. He believed that, like horses, slaves would only be ruined by violent and continual labours and should instead be set to work moderately and with adequate rest and nourishment. He gave them clothes and blankets and something on which to sleep, for he knew that it was a simple matter for men who want for every necessity to turn to thievery. He praised them when they worked well and whipped them only when they deserved it, and when the beating was done, he had the sore parts washed with a salve of vinegar mixed with salt and a pinch of gunpowder.
Fuerst treated his Negroes well, and they worked hard for him and did not make trouble. Yet he was careful to mistrust them as they mistrusted him and more careful still to conceal from them his dread of them, for he knew there was nothing so dangerous as an enemy who smelled your fear. He tried to conceal it from Elisabeth too. He wished to protect her. He did not see that she had learned the lesson long ago.
