by Clare Clark
The bed was damp and smelled of sweat and mouldy moss. Fuerst’s grunts scraped at the underside of her skull. She lay first on one side and then the other, but sleep did not come.
She thought of Marguerite, grey and glazed with fever, without whom she was hardly alive. And she thought of Auguste Guichard, who had loved her once and was now her master. The one man in the world she had trusted never to see again, the one man whose presence was unendurable. It was a mistake, she told herself. Rochon had misunderstood Auguste’s intentions. He would not come to Burnt-canes, he would never come, for she was here and was she not at least as intolerable to him as he was to her? He would not forgive her. She did not hope for that nor did she desire it. She wanted only the absence of him, so that she might set her gaze on her feet and go on, she might continue to go on.
He would not come. If he came, how might either of them pretend to forget? Elisabeth sat up in the darkness and the fear rose up in her like vomit. Was that why he came – because he wished to make her remember?
‘AND HOW IS the life of a married man?’
‘I hardly know.’
‘Never fear. With luck you shall have plenty of time to tire of it.’
‘I shall hold my thumbs.’
‘Luck seems to have favoured you this far.’ Bienville shook his head. ‘I only wish the Company would see fit to send us a few more Mme le Vannes. My Canadians can no more make wives of the whores they discard here than the garrison can make soldiers of murderers and thieves.’
Auguste said nothing. The governor himself had never married, though naturally there had been offers. Rumours persisted, many of them contradictory. Some years before there had been a scandal when the priest at Mobile had refused to allow the commandant to serve as godparent at a christening because of alleged improprieties with a French serving maid. She had been a pretty enough thing, Auguste remembered, with a swagger to her walk that presaged ruin. Although it had been the priest who had emerged from the incident the more damaged, it had done nothing to enhance Bienville’s already dubious reputation with the court at Versailles. Five years of deference under Cadillac’s ill-fated governorship had been a harsh punishment. Since he had finally been restored to authority, Bienville had either ceased in his adventuring or he had become more careful.
‘Of course I write to Paris, but I might as well talk to myself,’ Bienville went on. ‘The redoubtable Mr Law appears unable to grasp that I cannot turn roving coureurs-de-bois into sturdy colonists while they are running around after Indian girls in the woods.’
‘A wife cannot always prevent that.’
Bienville rubbed his palms on the thighs of his breeches. Then he stood.
‘So what do you think of our New Orleans?’ he asked. ‘Salt smugglers are cockroaches, but so far at least they have proved themselves capable of industry.’
Auguste looked about him. On the bluff that rose above the wide yellow crescent of the river, there were perhaps sixty men engaged in all manner of work, filling the air with shouts and the ringing of axes and hammers. Already a wide area of ground had been cleared and perhaps one hundred rectangular plots had been laid out around a central place, many of which already boasted cabins or the beginnings of them. At the rear were two large warehouses of wood and a long, low building thatched with palmetto that served as a barracks. Everywhere the signs of building were in evidence. Newly dug ditches were stubbled with a faint green beard of regrowth, the dirt matted with broken branches and fans of cut palmetto, and the splintered bones of trees jutted from the underbrush.
And still the forest pressed back against the attack, the ancient trees splay-footed and resolute, slung about with shadows and Spanish wig. Beyond the ravaged bluff, where the land sloped back to the river, swamps of cypress and tangled reeds choked the riverbanks and snagged in the low, heavy skies, drawing them downward. The air was thick and cumbersome, sticky with the reek of river water.
‘Shall it not flood?’ he asked.
‘Vierge, man, you are as blinkered as the dolts in Paris. Are embankments beyond the wit of man? You know there can be no ruling Louisiana without control of the Mississippi, and here there is a natural harbour, deep enough for the largest of vessels. When the wharf is properly completed, New Orleans shall challenge the finest ports in the world. It maddens me that they cannot see it. Instead they would have me travelling up and down from Mobile. We should have moved the capital here months ago.’
‘I am sure, sir, that you shall have plenty of time to tire of her.’
Bienville grinned.
‘If it is the possession of a wife that sharpens your wit so, perhaps I should be grateful that we suffer such a scarcity of them.’
The two men strolled together along the edge of the bluff. Below them the wide river slid unobserved, its yellow wavelets turned upward like pricked ears.
‘The King’s plantation shall be directly over there,’ Bienville said, gesturing towards the opposite bank.
‘A fine position.’
‘Fine indeed. And how goes yours?’
‘My wife’s.’
‘Then yours. How do you find it?’
‘I have yet to go there.’
‘But it is only a few days’ travel from here. Surely you–’
‘I will, sir.’
The two men stopped, looking out over the river.
‘You have my word,’ Auguste said.
Bienville sighed.
‘It is not over, you know,’ he said. ‘The commissary is to send another report.’
‘The commissary knows nothing.’
‘Perhaps not, but like any man unequal to his post, he abhors his superiors. He would stick a blade between my shoulders for the pure sport of it. Besides, the people of Mobile have long memories and short tempers.’
‘There is only rumour and insinuation.’
‘Since when was that not enough?’
Auguste did not reply. Bienville sighed.
‘The grant you were to have,’ he said. ‘It is to go to a cousin of the commissary.’
‘I heard.’
‘You have always served Louisiana faithfully, Guichard. It is not forgotten.’
‘Then perhaps it should be, for all of our sakes.’
The commandant rested his hand briefly on the younger man’s shoulder.
‘It is some solace, I hope, that the de Chesse plantation is worth the trouble of a wife,’ he said. ‘You are fortunate in the Rhinelander Fuerst. There are not many foremen who would work the land as he has without a master and his whip. Indigo was a prudent decision. And is he not married to–?’
‘Yes. Yes, he is.’
‘An irony, in the circumstances. Still, it will be a comfort to your wife, I imagine. An experienced woman to show her the ropes.’ Bienville jammed his hands in the pockets of his coat. ‘A new edict had been passed that prohibits royal governors from the possession of plantations, did you know that? Now that they have finally conceded me the title, it transpires that I must sell the concession that came with it. I am permitted to hold only sufficient land for a vegetable garden.’
‘That seems a little unjust, sir.’
‘A little? It is fortunate that I consider vegetables essential to a healthy constitution. Fifty-four acres should suffice, don’t you think?’
‘Shall that not provoke the commissary?’
‘Of course. Everything that I do provokes him. Do not give me that look, Guichard. I have come to regard the commissary much as I regard the mosquito. One must succumb to the harassment of neither if one is to make something of oneself here. This is my country, damn it. I have given my life to this place and at last it offers up something in return. I shall not let some bean-counting bureaucrat confound me.’
The next morning, Auguste sought passage on a Company boat preparing to depart for the coast. In his coat he carried in paper certificates the money pressed upon him by the governor and a number of letters to be delivered to the fort at Mobile.
Summer was ending. Alongside the sloop at the makeshift dock, several pirogues were being loaded with provisions. The roughly hewn canoes sat low in the water, squat and bundled about with rope-bound sailcloth, putting Auguste in mind of the cradle the Oumas had called ullosi afohka, or infant receptacle, a bent bark pod lined with Spanish wig from which the child peeped like a not-yet butterfly wrapped in the rolled brown leaf of its cocoon. For the whole first year of his life, a child resided in this cradle, either on his mother’s back or propped against the trunk of a tree so that he might see more clearly the world into which he had been brought.
Jeanne had not made a cradle for her child. Instead she had bound the infant to her body with a length of linen. Often too she had carried the child in her arms, the tiny skull cupped in her palm like a nut in its shell. He had understood then that, as a mother was a suckling’s whole world, so might a child be land and sky and village to its mother.
At last the sloop was loaded and ready for departure. There were shouted orders, the squeal of ropes through their wooden blocks, the crack and gasp of the sails straining to catch the faint breeze as the vessel pulled into the fast-flowing channel at the centre of the river, the yellow water tumbling in spirals around its prow. A Negro in a torn shirt pushed past Auguste, hauling at a rope coiled at his feet. Auguste did not move. He knew from long experience that wherever on the deck he chose to stand, he would find himself in the way of someone.
Instead he crossed his arms across his chest, watching as the chopped-out settlement disappeared from view and the forest reclaimed the land. On both sides of the river, the dense mass of trees hunched black against the sickly sky. The swamp waded waist-high into the water, reaching out towards the sloop while, trailing in its wake, whole tree trunks turned in the yellow churn, their shattered branches held aloft in silent appeal.
He had meant to go. He had sent a message with the Jesuit instructing Fuerst to expect him. He wrote that he wished to inspect the concession, to identify those supplies necessary for the further development of the land, including the construction of a house for himself and his bride. He had assured Fuerst that he had heard nothing but praise for his efforts at the plantation and that he looked forward to meeting him. In the meantime he asked that the Rhinelander pass on his sincere regards to his wife, Elisabeth, whom he hoped was in good health. He would be pleased to remake her acquaintance.
She had asked that they never meet again, and he had bowed his head and given her his word. It had been, agonisingly, a reprieve. She had not mentioned the letter. Perhaps he might have asked for its return or that she destroy it, but he did not. He wanted her to have it. The letter was hers, a sheathed blade that might be drawn when time had passed and the howling churn of anguish no longer drowned out anger or rendered it absurd. He knew it as a kind of justice, that she should hold in perpetuity the possibility of vengeance, and that he should continue forever in the shadow of it. She had lost her husband and her child. There was nothing else he had to set against the terrible vastness of her grief.
Now he would break his word. There was no help for it. He could not continue as he was, without knowing. And yet, when the day had come, he could not. Instead he had informed the men that they would travel directly to New Orleans and from there back to Mobile. The men had mocked his urgency and made crude observations about the appetites of newly-weds, but they were glad to be going south. In New Orleans, where the church remained no more than a square of earth marked out with timbers, the whores had already set up business and makeshift taverns pushed up from the newly turned earth like mushrooms.
‘So go on then, Guichard, tell us. What’s she like?’
Auguste stared at the soldier. See her there, he wanted to say, her head slightly averted and her dark hair looped beneath her cap? She is honest and bold and tender and fierce and quite without vanity. She is educated, worked fine with book-learning, and yet she is always curious. Intent upon a task, she presses the tip of her pink tongue between her teeth and a V forms between the twin arches of her eyebrows. She cries silently, her hands in fists. But when she looks up at you and her mouth curves upward and her cinnamon eyes soften, the world slips sideways and you have to hold tight to keep from falling.
Except that she cannot look at me. Her eyes are dead and all the soft, bold, curious parts of her are dead also. Because of me. Because I murdered her husband.
‘Will you look at him? The man’s gone all misty-eyed. And there was me thinking it was only those fancy plants of his that got him stiff.’
‘Spill it, Guichard. She must be something special to make you moon like that.’
‘In Louisiana? A smile and a pulse makes a girl special in Louisiana.’
‘There’s more to Guichard’s wife than a smile, I can tell you.’
‘Tits to make a Jesuit beg for mercy.’
‘So what’s the story, Guichard? Feel as good as they look?’
‘Ah, the man’s barely been married a minute. Give the bugger a break.’
‘Your bugger’s getting it for free, which is more than can be said for the rest of us. Since when did he deserve a break?’
The nearest man nudged Auguste hard in the ribs. Auguste stood and walked away from them.
‘You should not speak this way of my wife,’ he muttered.
‘If you ever spoke of her yourself perhaps we wouldn’t have to!’
The men laughed. Auguste stared out over the river. His wife. He strained to summon her likeness, to recall the shape of her face, the colour of her eyes, the feel of her flesh beneath his hands, but his head was dazed and disobliging.
Sharply he ordered the men to strike camp and load the boats. They would start south immediately. As the men worked, he forced himself to attend to the proper loading of provisions. Improperly stacked they would dampen and spoil.
‘In the first pirogue,’ he ordered the thickset man they called Le Fût. ‘Right up front, in the bow.’
Le Fût did as he was bid and straightened up, wiping his brow with his sleeve.
‘A married man, eh? Sweet Jesus. You’re a lucky bastard and no mistake.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Ungrateful bugger. You’d better watch out, you know. They need more than that, women, to keep ’em sweet.’
‘Do they?’
‘Mark my words. They all love you at the start but you wait. You just wait.’
‘For the love of God!’ Auguste cried, and he struck Le Fût in the soft part of his face with his fist. Around the camp the other men turned to stare as Le Fût staggered backwards, falling hard against the pirogue. Blood streamed from his nose.
For a moment Auguste stood there, his breath coming in jagged rips, his fists still raised. Then, dropping his hands, he turned and strode away into the forest.
IT WAS NOT possible to be a married woman in Mobile and to avoid company. Mr Law might have convinced the Paris newspapers that the port of Louisiana was a small city with more than two thousand residents, but the truth was that for more than a dozen years, it had numbered fewer than two hundred souls, even when the garrison was included in its count, and though it was grown five times as large, it could not shake the habits of familiarity. The people of Mobile were city folk, tradesmen and clerks and taverners. Inquisitiveness, which they called neighbourliness, was in their blood.
Once married and the mistress of her own house, Vincente le Vannes found herself taken up by what passed in Louisiana for the respectable women of the town. Just as Louisiana was nothing like Paris, nor were these coarse women with their rough hands and rougher humour like anyone Vincente had ever known. They were ignorant, shabby and shockingly godless. None knew so much as ten words from the Bible. But though she recoiled from them, she recoiled more from the prospect of isolation.
Vincente had never liked to be alone. The company of others was a looking glass she held up to her face, less for vanity than for reassurance. If they could see her, then she must be there. She was startled always by the sol
idity of others, their loud voices, their heavy footfalls, their strong smells. Even the nuns in their silent robes exhibited a containment and a certainty she could not imitate, for all her pains. Denied the proof of her reflection, she was filled with a dread that she had already begun to disappear.
The women of Mobile made poor looking glasses, but they were better than no glass at all. They spoke French and knew her troubles. She was consoled by their undisguised interest in her and by their blunt acknowledgement of her despondency. They had all of them despaired at the place, they told her, when first they came. She would grow accustomed to it as she would grow accustomed to marriage. It was a matter of arranging things to one’s advantage.
The wives were as eager to teach as Vincente was to learn. Under their tutelage, Vincente learned which of the families of the town were decent and upright, where she might find the least disreputable of the savage traders, and how to treat her linens so that they would not immediately mould. She learned that the taverner Burelle might always be depended upon to find a little white flour when the Company stores were empty and that while she might exchange nods with the Taensa woman who was the mother of the children of the merchant Charly, the Alabama wife of the carpenter should never be acknowledged. She learned that since the transportation of whores and felons from France, the town was no longer what it had been, obliging the rigorous observation of propriety.
‘You must attend Mass at least one Sunday in the month,’ Gabrielle Borret instructed her. ‘It sets an example to those debauchées who do not know a church from a lump of cheese.’
In Paris, Vincente thought, she would have assailed a speech of such impiety with every psalm and proverb in the Bible. Now she only nodded, her eyes sliding sideways to confirm that Perrine Roussel and the others did not mock her. It caused her ears to burn still, the recollection of the morning when, horror-struck by the depravities of a curé insensible to vice, she had begged the assistance of the wives in defeating the vast and terrible empire of the Devil in the New World. The women had not sighed gravely and clasped her hands, as she had hoped they would, nor had they been roused to righteous anger. Instead they had looked at each other, sucking in their cheeks as though the screws in their jaws had been tightened a half-turn. Then they had burst out laughing. The shame of it had caused her to flee.
