Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

  If he was perturbed by her candour, he did not show it.

  ‘The plantation is a good one. But there is no want of good land in Louisiana.’

  ‘Merely a want of marriageable women.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  There was another long silence. He studied her thoughtfully, without embarrassment. Vincente flushed and looked away, but the knot in her chest loosed a little. There was something about the gravity of him that settled her. He was not a man who would be made a fool of.

  ‘And you?’ he asked quietly. ‘You seek a husband?’

  ‘I seek to do God’s will.’

  The words came out bunched up, like too-tight stitches. The flush in her neck deepened. He regarded her steadily and said nothing. She swallowed.

  ‘I – yes,’ she said. ‘I seek a husband.’

  There was a long pause. Vincente watched as a boy carried a large milk jelly to the supper tables, its pale flesh quivering. She had always abhorred milk jelly.

  ‘I was born in La Rochelle to Auguste Guichard, docker,’ he said. ‘I am employed as a trader and emissary for the Mississippi Company, which pays me an annual subsidy of eighty livres. I am the owner of a single-storey house on the rue Dugué and an Indian slave of the Colapissas tribe. I am in good health. Might I call on you?’

  Across the room a woman in a dark red dress raised a spoon and plunged it into the milk jelly. Cut low at the front to expose the woman’s ample breasts, the dress was trimmed with golden ribbon that had begun to unravel a little. Her mouth was wide with dark red paint, and she wore a yellow feather in her piled-up hair. The physician stood very close to her, paddling her plump arm with his fingers.

  Vincente pressed her lips together.

  ‘In Paris I wanted to enter the convent.’

  ‘But you did not.’

  ‘My mother would not permit it.’

  ‘She wished to see you married?’

  ‘She wished to profit from the sale of a daughter into marriage. My mother was very fond of money.’

  ‘Your mother is dead?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘M. de Chesse is dead. Your mother’s arrangement is no longer binding.’

  ‘But I am here. The law says I am not permitted to leave.’

  ‘There shall be a convent here too. The commandant must have a hospital for his New Orleans, a school.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Five years perhaps.’

  ‘Five years is too long.’

  ‘Then you must make the best of it.’

  Vincente looked at him. He held her gaze. Then she looked away. The supper tables were strewn with half-eaten dishes, the hollowed-out carcasses of roasted birds. The craving was sudden and violent.

  ‘Very well,’ she said quickly. ‘You may call for me. Now please, I should like you to find me the schoolteacher. I have to go home.’

  SEVENTEEN DAYS LATER the priest du Mesnil married Vincente le Vannes and Auguste Guichard in a brief ceremony in the tiny unadorned church of the garrison. Vincente wore the mantua of dove-grey silk trimmed with silver lace chosen by her mother, and her old slippers. The dress was uncomfortably tight beneath her arms and the sole of her left slipper had come loose, so that the sharp point of a tack nudged her big toe. The governor, who had promised to attend, had been called away to Pensacola on urgent business and sent his apologies. In his place the schoolteacher and old Jean Alexandre, the master joiner, stood as witnesses. The priest was a wan old man, with brown wrinkles and a wisp of a beard on his tapered chin. He put Vincente in mind of a turnip. When he required her to speak her pledge, she felt the jab of her sister’s furtive elbow in her ribs and the fear of what was to come dried the spit in her mouth, so that the words came out gluey and stuck together.

  Afterwards there was a brief celebration at the house of the schoolmistress, attended by a handful of guests. Vincente, who for the previous days had been kept under the close surveillance of the schoolmistress, recognised only one or two of them. They shook her hand, regarding her with ill-disguised curiosity. When they left she went with her new husband to her new home.

  Auguste’s house was a low wooden building thatched with cypress that opened directly onto the rue Dugué, a narrow lane towards the rear of the settlement. Like all of the houses in the colony, it was dominated by a single simply furnished room with a fireplace but, unlike the schoolteacher’s cabin, this room was long and reasonably broad. It was adjoined by two smaller rooms, one leading into the next so that one was required to pass through one to reach the other. Though it was simple, it was not so ill-built as many of its neighbours. Its walls were whitewashed with an approximation of lime and the floor was laid with wooden planks. At the rear it boasted a wide porch that ran the length of the cabin and a sandy yard with a small vegetable patch staked around with canes.

  Someone had brought her boxes from the schoolteacher’s house. The trunk containing her trousseau had been placed in the alcove of the smaller of the two bedchambers, its leather top soiled and greasy against the clean white wall. She did not open it. Instead she walked restlessly from room to room. There was nowhere of comfort to sit. In her head she placed her mother’s settle, with its needlepoint pattern of unicorns in a forest of emerald leaves, in front of the fireplace. As a child Vincente had crouched beside it, the silk of the stitches soft against her cheek, and pretended herself into its green depths, her legs astride a unicorn and her hair streaming out behind her like a flag. She had begged her father not to sell it when they were obliged to move the first time. Her mother had said it displayed a peasant’s taste to prefer the settle over the Gobelins cabriole chair, but the chair had only pink roses and ribbons on it. Pink roses and ribbons would not carry you anywhere.

  That night Vincente went to bed alone. Some time later he came to her. She had known he would come. Still, when he slid into the bed beside her and lifted her skirt and she felt the graze of him against her flesh, she had to bite her lip to stop herself from screaming. She lay stiffly on her back, her arms at her sides and her eyes squeezed shut, as he rubbed and pressed her flesh with his hands. Its compliance disgusted her, the thick dough of it coating her bones. His mouth was wet and hot, and the flickering slime of his tongue unspeakable. He groaned and she turned her face from him, her mouth in a tight knot, waiting for it to end. When he entered her, it was the shock as much as the pain of it that caused her to cry out.

  When she woke the next morning, there was dried blood on her thighs and upon her petticoats. She bent her head over her breakfast and could not look at him. When he asked if all was to her liking, the sound of his voice caused her skin to burn with mortification. She answered him in monosyllables. When at last he bid her goodbye, passing his hand lightly over her shoulder as he passed, she flinched at the touch of him, sickened with distaste and with shame.

  That night, he came to her again. She wanted to weep, to scream, to take up the musket that stood propped and ready behind the door and thrust the barrel hard into his chest. Instead she closed her eyes, digging her nails hard into her clenched palms, and in the darkness all her disgust and disappointment, all of her wretchedness, hardened inside her until she could hardly breathe. At that moment she hated him so utterly, with such certainty and strength, that there was a kind of triumph in it.

  Knees locked and head wrenched to one side, she stiffened herself against him, the soft, hidden parts all stone. She did not move as he pressed himself against the pliancy of her breasts, her belly. If he dared trespass upon her again, she would grind him like corn between her bones.

  He covered her mouth with his. She clenched her jaw, locking her teeth against him. His mouth slid over the hard curve of her chin and found her neck. His breath was hot, his tongue urgent. His fingers closed around her breast. She ground herself down, down into the centre of herself, where the hatred was fiercest. She wanted him to die.

  And then he thrust himself inside her. This time the pain was sharper. The force of it sprung a lock de
ep in her belly. Despite herself, she arched against him, her head thrown back, the cry caught in her throat. For that moment, adrift in the thick, hot darkness, she was free of him. The man who lay upon her was not M. Guichard, husband and employee of the Mississippi Company. He was not even a man. He was the darkness, the night made flesh, turning her own flesh inside out. In the astonishing pleasure of it, she forgot him. She strained only towards herself, towards the point of light that was release. When it came, she cried out and dug her fingers hard into his back.

  In the morning she was no more than herself and he was a man again, an ordinary stranger with a twisted arm and an unfamiliar face. The distaste was the same and the shame greater. The ordinary exchanges of the morning caused her to redden. As they had the previous day, they ate their breakfast in silence.

  That night and the next night, he came to her again but it was not the same. Whatever enchantment he had placed on her had lifted, leaving only a faint impression of intoxication, like the memory of a dream. Two days later he left Mobile, despatched on a Company matter to a savage village several days’ journey from the town. Vincente listened to him as he explained the expedition and longed for him to be gone. And yet, when he had rounded the corner, she stood for a long time in the lane, looking after him, her hand sheltering her eyes from the slanting morning sun. It was only when Mme Driard threw her slops into the lane that she slowly let her hand fall to her side. She watched the water run through the dust, the stream narrowing to rivulets that spread across the lane like roots. Then, smoothing her hair from her brow, she went inside.

  She was quite alone. The slave was in the kitchen hut and in the garden the boy worked, his back bent over. Outside the birds shrieked, their calls shrill and contemptuous, but in the cabin all was still. She thought of Blandine and Marie-Hélène whispering and giggling with their mother, the way they stopped when she entered a room, their lips pressed together and their eyes round, and the explosion of laughter when she blinked at them and turned away, and she felt a pang of something that was almost grief.

  Hurriedly Vincente picked up her Bible, turning the fragile pages in search of a favourite passage, but the words blurred before her eyes. During the weeks at the schoolteacher’s cabin, she had gone half mad with the need for solitude. All day long the cabin clattered with a mismatch of ill-clad youngsters, both red and white, and several of them visibly a mixture of the two, to whom Mme de Boisrenaud gave elementary instruction. Vincente had been obliged to assist her. Afterwards, when the yearning for silence rose up in her like a scream, she was assigned her share of the household duties, during which the schoolteacher kept up an unceasing stream of complaints about her innumerable infirm ities, to which she was devoted. At night they slept in the cabin’s only bedchamber in a pair of curtainless cots no more than an outstretched arm from one another. The rasp of the old woman’s snores rattled up and down Vincente’s spine and set her teeth to throbbing in her gums. It required considerable will not to throttle her but to lie quietly until she was certain she was quite asleep. Only her night-time forays to the kitchen hut had kept her steady. Sometimes, as she knelt upon the dirt floor, her mouth and her fists frantic with food, she had thought she might weep with gratitude and relief.

  In the cabin on the rue Dugué, there was nothing but silence, broken only by the ominous shrieks of the forest that pressed up against the town as though it meant to snatch back the land. Silences were all different, Vincente knew that well enough. In the Place Royale the silence had been all muffled rage and clamped-down expectation, while in the convent the cloistered stillness had gleamed like an undisturbed lake. In the convent the veils and loose grey habits obscured the awkward angularities of form and disposition and made everyone right. No one in the convent had ever raised their voice to her. They had not declared her tiresome or ugly or dull. Though she had visited almost daily, no one had ever ordered her away. When the abbess had taken Vincente’s bony hands in hers and counselled against the too-bright flame that burns itself out, she had done so gently and with a tender pity in her soft face, so that Vincente had thrown her arms around the old woman’s neck and clung to her, her face pressed against the old nun’s shoulder, inhaling her comforting dusty smell. The abbess had patted her back and blessed her, calling her my child.

  ‘I am your child,’ Vincente had whispered. ‘I am.’

  ‘Do you love me?’ she had asked later. ‘Do you think me good?’

  ‘The Lord loves all His children,’ the abbess had replied, and she had detached the girl’s arms from around her neck. ‘And you shall be a good girl if you say your confession and live according to His holy commandments.’

  Vincente had announced her determination to take orders during a fierce quarrel with her mother. Mme le Vannes had struck the table with her fist and declaimed her as the most insufferable of daughters, and Vincente had been flooded with a fierce and bitter-tasting exultation. Her Father in Heaven had chosen her, Vincente le Vannes, for His handmaid and she would give herself to Him entirely, surrendering all that she was and all that she would ever be to a life of silent prayer and contemplation.

  Two months later they had sold her into marriage. Distraught, Vincente had gone to the abbess to beg her intercession, but the old nun had only shaken her head and advised her to accept the will of God. Vincente had not given up. Aboard the Baleine she had tried again, declaring her vocation to Sister Marie and pleading with her to accept her as a postulant. Sister Marie’s refusal had been quick and contemptuous. If Vincente cared to demonstrate her piety, she had said sharply, she could begin by teaching the godless Salpétrière girls their catechism. Vincente had managed just two awkward hours of lessons before the seasickness came, rolling through her in a terrible, unstoppable wave. When at last the sea calmed and the ship reached Havana, her dress hung loose from the knobs of her shoulders.

  ‘I was not sick,’ Sister Marie declared with satisfaction as Vincente stumbled onto dry land. ‘And the girls have their catechism despite you. The Lord is merciful.’

  Past Havana there was no wind and the sea glared flat and smooth. During those long drifting weeks, Vincente spoke to no one. She had consoled herself with her Bible, which proved poor comfort, and with a great deal of milk and cheese and butter, which did not. Once or twice, half-heartedly, she put her fingers down her throat but, weary of its old convulsions, her body refused her.

  Now she was plump. Her face was full, her breasts also. Her thighs nudged each other beneath her skirts, and she grew breathless when she walked. She hardly cared. She wore the supplementary flesh like an under garment, without thinking it a part of her. She had never imagined it might hide pleasure in its yielding plush, such pure intensity of sensation that the sight of the tumbled bed was enough to sharpen her skin to gooseflesh.

  The thought shamed her, and she shook herself briskly and went to her trunk, thinking to cheer the house a little with the linens she had brought from Paris. In the alcove, above the trunk, her husband’s clothes hung from crude wooden pegs, his expensive silk coat beside the brown tangle of garments sewn from deerskin and nettle-bark linen. The smell of the old clothes made her shudder. Carefully she lifted the silk coat off its peg, smoothing out its gleaming folds, and threads of remembered pleasure glittered like silver between her thighs.

  ‘And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite,’ she whispered, but there was no heat in it. Perhaps the abbess had been right. Perhaps the flame had indeed burned itself out, all the psalms and proverbs in her descending, with the last scraps of nourishment in her belly, to the bottom of the great wide ocean.

  The day stretched ahead of her, empty and endless. For the sake of something to do, she turned and walked out into the yard. Smoke came from the chimney of the kitchen hut. Above the chattering of the birds, she could hear the slave pounding maize for bread. The slave’s name was Thérèse. Vincente leaned in the frame of the open door, watching her. The slave did not look up but continued to pound
in slow thuds, the sinews straining in roped stripes along the bones of her forearms. Vincente knew that she should return to the house and the pile of mending that awaited her, but she remained where she was, watching the sliding movement as the tight, round fist of muscle at the top of the slave’s arm moved slick beneath her skin. Rough yellow cakes of cornbread cooled on the bench and something bubbled in the large iron pot on the fire. The bread of Louisiana tasted to Vincente like it was baked from greasy sawdust, but the soup smelled good, thick and meaty. Vincente felt the pull of saliva drawing up into her mouth.

  ‘It smells good,’ she said.

  The slave glanced up and did not cease in her pounding. She did not smile. Vincente was not certain if she understood her. Auguste had told her that the slave was from the nation of the Colapissas and that though she had a French name, she knew only a few words of the French tongue.

  ‘The soup,’ Vincente persisted, pointing at the pot and rubbing her stomach with the flat of her hand. ‘Delicious.’

  The slave Thérèse stopped pounding and wiped her hands on the broad apron she wore around her waist. Her brow was oily with perspiration. Reaching up to a shelf above her head, she took down a cloth and laid it over the pounded grain. Her head hung forward, too heavy for her thin stalk of a neck. Then slowly she turned towards the fire and squatted before it on her haunches, her apron falling between her thighs. Her upturned knees were as sharp as teeth. Taking up a ladle, she dipped it into the iron pot and brought it to her face, her nostrils wide as she inhaled. The smoke curled upward, spangling her eyebrows. Something about her stillness made Vincente think of Auguste. She wanted to ask if she might taste the soup.

  Instead she watched as the slave returned the ladle to its place and took up a long spoon. Her plait fell over her shoulder as she stirred, and the ridged jut of her spine pushed pale against the curve of her brown neck. Beside her on its hook, the iron ladle glistened, its bowl speckled with flecks of meat. A bead of gravy slid unhurriedly from its rim and fell silently to the floor. Round and round, the slave stirred with her long spoon, pushing the fragrant smoke up into the air. She did not look up as Vincente jerked herself away from the door jamb, snatched up a cake of the still-hot cornbread and, tearing it into wads that burned her crammed mouth, walked back across the yard to the empty cabin.