Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

  Meanwhile their neighbours the Chetimachas had grown bolder. The savage war parties no longer troubled to wait until nightfall. They carried English guns. Elisabeth knew she should be afraid. On plantations upriver cattle had been killed and taken, their bodies dragged away into the forest. On one occasion two of Fuerst’s men had spotted a band of savages in a canebrake only a few hundred feet from where they stood, and several blasts had been fired before the red men had been forced to retreat.

  Fuerst was thankful that the Rhinelanders had proved poor shots, for savages were pitiless in revenge, but he knew also that matters could not continue as they were. If he could ill afford to lose his precious cows, he was in no position to lose any of his men.

  ‘I have no choice but to appeal to the commandant,’ he told Elisabeth that night. ‘He must make peace with those damned Chetimachas or we shall never be free of danger.’

  She said nothing but placed her hand over the scorch mark on the table.

  ‘Do not be alarmed,’ he said, and he sucked on his pipe till the bowl gleamed red. ‘You are safe here. The savages are ferocious but they are cowardly. They would not come so close.’

  She pressed down hard on her hand, spreading her fingers wide.

  ‘No one is ever safe,’ she said.

  Fuerst hesitated. Then he leaned back against the wall and studied his pipe. The clay was stained dark around the rim of the bowl, and the stem bore the ghost prints of his lips.

  ‘I cannot go,’ he said at last. ‘Not now. Even if he is at New Orleans, there is too much to be done. And I shall not leave you here alone. A letter, that’s the thing. The river is busy this time of year, a trader will take it. Quick now, fetch me paper and ink.’

  What little ink there was had all but dried in the bottle, and Elisabeth was required to add a few drops of water to get it to flow. In its damp box the paper had grown brown around the edges and, together with the ghostly pallor of the diluted ink, it gave the letter the air of something written long ago.

  Elisabeth put her face close to the page, inhaling its smell. Her handwriting was small and cramped, long accustomed to the scarcity of paper. She thought of Auguste’s spiky hand, of the paper fine as onion-skin, so that the ink showed through. It had been torn from a book so that while one side of the paper was jagged, the other was smooth, with a trace of gold along its edge.

  Dear Elisabeth, do not let him go.

  ‘Are you listening, Elisabeth?’ Fuerst asked, frowning, gesturing at her with his pipe.

  Elisabeth turned away from him.

  ‘Why must you smoke that thing in here? It makes my eyes sting.’

  ‘Then pay attention and we shall be done the sooner. If my men go out ever so little, they are daily in danger of seizure or death–’

  Elisabeth forced her attention back to the words on the page, taking care to form each letter with the precision her brother’s tutor had required of her and which she in her turn demanded from the child. When she scratched the paper with the nib, she thought of the girl and the squeal of pencil on slate. The hairs on her arm pricked.

  ‘Your faithful servant &c &c. Very well, we are done.’

  The paper was coarse and the pale ink already dry. His pipe clamped between his teeth, Fuerst read the letter through slowly, his eyes narrowed against the smoke. Then he set it down on the table and, taking the pen from Elisabeth, signed his name at the bottom.

  ‘Do we have sealing wax?’ he asked. ‘Or must we make do with tallow?’

  She reached into the wooden box and brought out a flat-sided pebble and a lump of wax the size of an acorn. Careful not to burn her fingers, she held it to the light, letting the molten wax fall upon the folded paper. She waited a moment for it to cool and pressed down upon it with the pebble. His seal had been an elaborate J-C entwined with vines. He had had the matrix carved for him by a savage from a piece of moss oak.

  The pebble was smooth and warm in the palm of her hand.

  ‘Husband?’ she said quietly.

  ‘Let me see.’

  He picked up the letter and examined the seal.

  ‘I am expecting.’

  Fuerst blinked at her. His pipe ducked in his mouth and he snatched it out, crushing a corner of the letter.

  ‘A child? You are certain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jeanne knows, she wanted to add. We have never spoken of it but I see how Jeanne takes the heavier of the burdens, thickens the stew with squash fried in bear grease so that the infant might grow fat. I see the squash she leaves on a dish among the trees at the boundary of the plantation so that the bad spirits might fatten too and forget their spite.

  ‘It may not hold,’ she said instead. ‘I am old and I have not been lucky.’

  ‘No. But a child? A child! Come, this is excellent news.’

  There was no concealing his pleasure. It creased his farmer’s face and flexed his blunt farmer’s fingers, setting them to twitching against the stem of his pipe.

  ‘So when? When do you think?’

  Elisabeth shook her head. She did not expect to feel things any more, not in the ordinary way, but still it surprised her a little, the numbness of it.

  ‘December, perhaps sooner. I cannot be sure.’

  ‘A child.’ Fuerst shook his head, his smile widening. ‘Perhaps it is a boy.’

  It came upon her suddenly, the pendulum creak of the rocking chair at the rue d’Iberville, the stiff clay-skinned creature with the cap of dark hair and the pelt of curdled blood, and she had to close her eyes to hold herself steady.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Or a girl. No matter.’ He grinned at his wife. ‘Karl-zu-klein’s wife and now you. It shall give faith to the others.’

  ‘Shall it?’

  They had never told her where they buried her child. She had lain in Perrine Roussel’s cabin, her eyes fixed upon the brown stain shaped like France that spread beneath the window and her arms around her shins, curled tight against the ebb of poison from her body that abandoned her to life. Waking was a torment, the stretch and lift of her chest, the breath in her mouth and the flicker of her fingers on the sheet. The sun had moved through the room and then the moonlight, marking out in slices of shadow days that were not hers. The baby had not lived long enough to be baptised and Elisabeth had never named her, not even in her dreams. A name was a hand held out to a stranger, permission to touch. Elisabeth would not let anyone touch.

  Fuerst frowned.

  ‘You should not do the heavy work. If we were to sell the girl–’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Elisabeth, consider your duty. This infant–’

  Elisabeth’s eyes snapped open.

  ‘Consider my duty? I am here, am I not?’

  Fuerst blinked.

  ‘You are my wife,’ he said evenly.

  ‘And she is my slave. Mine. You know the law.’

  ‘You would threaten me with the law?’

  ‘She is only a child! She would fetch nothing.’

  ‘Enough to–’

  ‘I will not sell her, do you hear me?’

  Fuerst’s mouth tightened. He turned away.

  ‘Why do you oppose me? You are my wife.’

  ‘Yes,’ Elisabeth said more gently. ‘And I shall not let you act recklessly. Wait until she is older, until she is worth something. We can manage as we are.’

  He did not turn round. But very slowly his back softened.

  ‘A child,’ he murmured. ‘It is fine news.’

  ‘If it holds.’

  ‘If it holds.’

  He turned round. Taking the chair from its place on the other side of the table, he set it next to hers and slung his leg across it.

  ‘It is fine news,’ he said again, and he nodded to himself, reaching over to pat her awkwardly on the arm. ‘Think of it. A son. Uberto for my father.’

  She shifted in her seat, moving her arm out of reach.

  ‘No German names,’ she said.

  ‘The child shall h
ave a German name. A child of mine will always be German, wherever he is born.’

  ‘No. He shall be of this place. The Islands of the New World.’

  ‘And the blood of generations of Rhinelanders will flow in his veins. He shall have a name to honour his forefathers. He shall not deny his history.’

  ‘Then he shall be as much of a fool as you are. Our histories are nothing but ropes around our necks.’

  There was a silence. Then Fuerst rose, slamming the back of his chair hard against the table. Elisabeth did not look up. She hunched over in her chair, staring at the wall. Near the floor a moth clung to the rough plaster, its dust-brown wings shut tight. Perhaps it was dead. The door wrenched open, banged shut. The moth trembled in the echoed silence but it did not fall.

  It was much later when he came in. Elisabeth lay on her side, her face turned away from him, deepening her breathing so that he might think her asleep. At nightfall Jeanne had come to tell her that the child was sick. There had been no sign of it. She had done her chores as usual and a little before dusk had swum as she always did in the river, beating the water with her habitual excited ferocity to frighten away the alligators.

  But with the darkness had come a violent fever. When Elisabeth went out to the hut with Jeanne, the child on her sleeping mat was hot as a sun-baked stone. Jeanne sat down cross-legged, sliding her arms under her daughter, taking her into her lap. Marguerite whimpered and shivered and arched her back into a bow, pressing her burning face against her mother’s belly. The rough violence of her coughs shook her small body until it rattled.

  Elisabeth had brought a tisane of red willow. Jeanne lifted the child a little and Elisabeth knelt before her, spooning the medicine between her lips. When it was drunk, she sat back on her heels. She wanted to reach out, to touch Jeanne upon the shoulder, but she did not. The slave did not look at her, and she said nothing. They waited together in silence as the child sank back into a fitful sleep. They watched as the fever coursed through her, causing her limbs to jump, her eyes to flutter. Elisabeth gazed at the floor so that she might not see the stricken look upon the slave’s face, who endured her own trials with a distant and ancient composure, the way her fingers clenched in a knot so tight it had seemed to Elisabeth that the bones must poke through the skin.

  Once, when Marguerite was a baby and would not settle, Jeanne had whispered to her of the terrible sickness that had come to her village when she herself was a girl. The sickness had filled the mouths of the sick with sores and covered their skin with scarlet lumps fat with slime. Though the medicine man pleaded with the spirits to yield up a remedy for their afflictions, his appeals were not answered. A great number of her people died. When at last the sickness was exhausted, the village was too big for those who were left. Several of Jeanne’s sisters had been taken to another village a long way away where they might find husbands. In their own village there were no longer enough men to go around. From her corner of the cabin, Elisabeth had listened, rocking herself for comfort, and she had known that this was the nature of lullabies among her people too, that they should stand not as a kind of solace but as a warning.

  When the child at last was still and the heat in her a little diminished, Elisabeth bid the slave goodnight and returned quietly to her own cabin. Alone in her bed her fears were stronger. She told herself that the child was strong, that she would soon be well, but when she closed her eyes she saw only Jeanne’s clenched hands, her wide, frightened eyes. It frightened Elisabeth that Jeanne too could be frightened. She had grown accustomed to the strength of her, the quiet succour that she carried in the air around her.

  It was Auguste who had chosen her name, Auguste who arranged for her and the child to be baptised. By then they were his, to do with as he pleased. He had told Okatomih that in the Grand Village of the white men, Jeanne meant ‘mother to the first of the Great Suns’. He had not told her it was also the name of Jean-Claude’s mother, who was dead. Perhaps he had not known.

  Rochon had pleaded with her not to do it. He would find her another slave, he promised her, an obedient girl unhampered by the demands of an infant, but she would not hear him. She could no longer bear the confines of Perrine’s house, was recovered enough to return to the cabin on rue d’Iberville. The clemency of numbness, so long a refuge, had grown to be a gaol.

  She had them sleep not in the kitchen hut but in the house, where every cup and fork recalled the touch of his lips and the back of the door was stained with the greasy shadow of his hat. The cabin had been shut up for many weeks. She and Jeanne took down the mouldy platille from the windows for washing. They swept the cobwebs from the ceiling and scrubbed the floor with sand. As they worked they breathed life into the dead air, setting the ceaseless shadow of him dancing in its dark corners. The pain of it had stunned her. Elisabeth burned Okatomih’s old white dress and in a tunic of deerskin the slave was no more than a dull and constant ache.

  To look upon the child was an agony.

  The bed shifted as Fuerst sat heavily and pulled off his boots. Elisabeth waited, one hand gripping the edge of the moss-filled mattress, the other upon her belly. The boots fell, two dull thuds, before he rolled over to lie beside her. He smelled of pipe tobacco and, faintly, of cypress. He placed his hand upon her hip and she stiffened, waiting for him to raise her nightshift. Instead he rubbed at her hip bone in little circles as though it were a blade requiring cleaning.

  ‘A child,’ he said.

  Suddenly Elisabeth was filled with fear. She curled herself into a tight ball, squeezing her eyes tight shut.

  ‘If it holds,’ she whispered.

  ‘It will hold. You’ll see.’

  AUGUSTE WAS LATE. The braid of his new wig rustled between his shoulder blades as he hurried along the dusty lane, the silk ribbon whispering to the brocade of his heavy coat. Auguste insinuated a finger beneath the unfamiliar weight of horsehair and scratched at his freshly shaved scalp. His skin prickled with the heat and the awkward vanity of the unaccustomed dandy.

  As he mounted the steps and went in through the open door, he could hear the clink of glasses, the gurgle and creak of voices taking up the night-time chorus of the frogs. The commandant’s house had been rebuilt and was entered now through a vestibule. It was a fine residence. Though there was still no glass in the colony for windows, the governor had hung a small gilt-framed looking glass on the plastered wall, and set wax candles in an eight-armed candelabrum. Auguste held his hand up, spreading his fingers so that the flames seemed to leap from the ends of them. He had not seen candles for many years. He had forgotten that lights could smell so sweet.

  He had ceded his grant. After his interview with the commissary, he had gone to Bienville and told him that he would not be taking it. He said that he did not wish to be a farmer. The governor had tried to persuade him to reconsider.

  ‘The commissary can do nothing,’ he had said. ‘The past is past.’

  Auguste had only shaken his head. He had never comprehended why the white man resolved to think of time as a straight line and life a course set always ahead. Like the Ouma, he knew that time was a series of loops like knitting, so that the then knotted itself about the now until each was as much one as the other.

  ‘It shall serve neither of us,’ he had said firmly and, placing the papers on the governor’s desk, he had turned to leave.

  ‘Wait,’ Bienville had said. ‘There is perhaps another way.’

  Auguste breathed in the sweet syrup smell of the melting wax. In the glass his face gazed back at him unsmilingly. His skin was dark against the powdered grey of his wig, burned brown by the sun. He tried to imagine a white woman’s pale fingers against his cheek, the rise of her pale neck and slope of her pale bosom, but instead he thought of the slave girl Okatomih. The moon had been full that night. It had lit the white dress that she wore like the shade of a lamp, imprinting on it the dark curves of her body. She had pulled at the ties that fastened it and it had fallen away, a pale puddle at her feet. Beneath
her bowed head, the smooth, swollen curves of her had shone like polished wood, a dark grain running from the stub of her protruding belly button to the shadowed tangle between her thighs, dividing her in two. She had said nothing. She had only knelt by the bed and reached under the rugs, her fingers cool against the flush of his skin. He had smelled the musky oil in her hair, felt himself harden. When he had asked of her what it was she thought she was doing, she had replied simply, ‘You are master now.’

  In the parlour beyond the door, a woman laughed, a shrill screech like a crow’s cawing. Auguste pressed his knuckles to his lips, and in the glass the man in the wig did the same. He knew nothing of her, only that she had come from Paris and that, when Bienville proposed it, there was immediately a certainty in him, as though he had known she was coming. That afternoon he had dressed with great care. He had donned a clean shirt and sponged his breeches until they were spotless. Then, very carefully, he had slid his arms into the sleeves of his new coat.

  The coat was the finest thing he had ever owned, and the most expensive. In the guttering candlelight, the silk brocade shimmered like water, causing the double row of close-set crystal buttons that ran the length of its front to glitter and dance upon its surface. Delicate and easily broken, the buttons served only as embellishment and could not be fastened. The buttonholes that would never receive them were trimmed with sleek bindings of scarlet kid, like ranks of little red mouths. The pockets were trimmed with silver braid. Auguste slid his fingers into the slit of one, feeling the smooth silk of the lining and, deeper, the sharp corners of a folded-up piece of paper. A bill in brown ink acknowledging the receipt of payment in full. But he had not paid for it. The coat had been a gift from the governor.

  ‘Consider it a wedding present,’ Bienville had said with a grin. ‘From Louisiana’s own Mr John Law. It is the very least he can do, in the circumstances.’

  Auguste had not taken the slave into his bed. The smell of the dead man had been too strong on her, the shape of her the shape of treachery, of madness. He had dreamed of her though, and when in the dark hours he reached down to comfort himself, it was her mouth that encircled him, her high breasts that he spattered with his seed. In the mornings when she brought his breakfast, he could not meet her eye. He was ashamed but he was grateful too. He could not have borne to have dreamed of Elisabeth.