Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

  Later that day Renée Gilbert had come to see her.

  ‘You are possessed of a dry wit, Madame,’ the older woman said quietly. ‘But we would prefer if you would desist from such humour. Life in Mobile is hard enough without the bony fingers of saints poking us in the ribs, even in jest.’

  For two days Vincente had remained at home. She read her Bible. She knelt on the floor, her hands folded, and said her prayers. The splintery floor caught in the stuff of her skirt, tearing holes. She thought of the coarse rag rug she had insisted upon for her attic bedroom at the Place Royale and of the silk carpet with its delicate patterns that was too big for her mother’s parlour. On the third day, she rose and washed her face and went to join the women at the market.

  She did not know how she would have managed without the instruction of the women. They showed her how to make candlewicks from twisted milkweed silk, brushes and brooms from corn husks and tough-stemmed weeds, soft soap from a mixture of lye and buffalo grease. They taught her that a paste made from the pith of the sassafras wood worked wonders for redness and swelling of the eyes, and that inhaling the smoke from the burning leaves of jimson weed eased congestion in the chest. They instructed her in the best ways to prevent meat and slaves from spoiling. From them she learned that goods that were scarce or wanting might always be acquired for a price, and that the women of Mobile might endure upon a diet of cracked corn, but they would do whatever was necessary to acquire new sleeves or a collar from France when the ships came into port.

  Her own trousseau was stroked and sighed over, the lace-trimmed silk streaming like foamy water through the women’s fingers. Vincente, who in Paris had clamped her jaw and jutted her hips and refused to utter a word even as the dressmaker stuck her with pins, no longer despised the dresses so ardently. Sometimes, alone at night, she unfolded the mantuas and the chemises and the petticoats and the cloaks from the chest and laid them out upon the bed, their skirts spread and their sleeves outstretched. The heavy silks were lustrous and cool to the touch, and the approving murmurs of the women drifted from their folds, easing the knot in her belly.

  She had been married almost a month before she ventured with Germaine Vessaille to see the widow Freval, who let out the seams to their limits. Germaine, whose husband Jacques le Brun was a gunsmith, had a sweet smile and the harried abstraction of a mother overburdened with infants. Some days later, Vincente visited her at her own cabin and, amid the sticky-handed clamour, asked hesitantly if she would accept a lace fichu for which Vincente could find no use. Germaine said nothing but only gasped and pressed her hands over her mouth while a chap-mouthed child tugged unheeded at her threadbare skirts. The pleasure of it pinked Vincente’s cheeks.

  It was Anne Negrette, wife of the Canadian they called Le Grand, who was first to quiz Vincente about her husband. The hour was early and the women gathered before the baker’s ramshackle shop, waiting for him to raise his shutter.

  ‘So, tell us,’ Anne said, nudging Vincente with her basket. ‘What is he like?’

  Vincente flushed, startled at the impropriety of the question.

  ‘Why,’ she stumbled, ‘he is a decent enough man, I am sure.’

  ‘Decent? Come, Madame, you shall not satisfy us that way, shall she, ladies?’

  ‘I – I am sure you know him better than I,’ she said, unsettled by the women’s laughter. ‘We have spent hardly seven days together.’

  ‘And seven nights also!’ Yvonne Lereg interjected.

  The laughter grew louder.

  ‘I should grant you the advantage, all the same,’ Vincente muttered.

  ‘We hardly merit it,’ said Gabrielle Borret. ‘He is never here. His affairs are all with the savages.’

  ‘Peculiar, isn’t it? You’d think he’d want nothing to do with those brutes after what they did to him.’

  ‘If I were him, I would not have been able to look them in the eye.’

  ‘He did a great deal more than look,’ Yvonne Lereg said with a giggle. ‘Remember that slave of his?’

  There was an awkward silence.

  ‘What?’ Yvonne protested. ‘It is hardly a secret. The child’s parentage is there in the parish register for anyone to see!’

  Perrine Roussel cleared her throat.

  ‘Still, your husband was lucky,’ she said. ‘If the missioner had not arrived, those devils would surely have killed him.’

  ‘And he still has his arm.’

  ‘Thank the Lord. You remember it was Le Grand they asked to cut it off, when they thought it could not be saved?’ Anne Negrette smiled at Vincente. ‘If your husband was lucky, so was mine. He always said that he would have needed more eau-de-vie than Guichard, just to go through with it.’

  Gratefully, Vincente smiled back.

  ‘Those were terrible times,’ Gabrielle Borret agreed with a shudder. ‘Nothing to eat. The savages running wild. Everyone afraid they would be murdered in their beds.’

  ‘So many bad memories,’ Perrine Roussel agreed. ‘The sight of Elisabeth holding up that dead infant still haunts me, even now.’

  ‘No one could accuse Elisabeth Savaret of a want of grief,’ Anne Negrette added, and the two women exchanged a look. ‘She was a fool for that man, a perfect fool.’

  ‘She was a fine midwife,’ Anne Conaud protested.

  ‘She was a lunatic,’ Yvonne burst out, unable to support her sulk a second longer. ‘And not just because of you-know-what. Imagine marrying a virtual labourer without a sou to his name.’

  ‘Perhaps it was another of her great unions of love,’ Anne Negrette said drily.

  ‘It is Vincente who shall tell us, now that she is as good as her mistress.’

  ‘Well, so she is! Now, Vincente, I would counsel you to manage her most sternly. Pride and vanity make miserable helpmeets.’

  ‘Oh, yes, beat her often, do!’ Yvonne laughed, butting Vincente playfully with her basket.

  ‘Poor Vincente hasn’t the first notion what it is we are talking about!’

  ‘Elisabeth Savaret came over with Perrine on the Pélican,’ Gabrielle Borret explained.

  ‘And was trouble from the very first. It was Elisabeth whose first husband was murdered in mysterious circumstances.’

  ‘Anne Negrette, you are a scurrilous gossipmonger!’

  ‘She tried to murder herself in a surfeit of grief.’

  ‘She failed, of course. The child in her womb was not so fortunate.’

  ‘In France she would have been tried, imprisoned. Here she goes free!’

  ‘And now she is married to the foreman of your plantation. I wonder what you shall make of her?’

  ‘I fear no one in town was ever much fond of her.’

  ‘The Jesuit Rochon was kind to her,’ Anne Conaud protested. ‘And Perrine here could not have done more.’

  ‘She certainly had her admirers,’ Yvonne giggled. ‘Guichard used to trail after her like a lovestruck puppy dog!’

  The silence that followed was broken only by the bang of a fist against a jammed shutter.

  ‘At long last,’ Perrine Roussel announced brightly. ‘Ladies, form an orderly queue, if you will. The bakery is open.’

  AFTER THE JESUIT had gone, heat clogged the slow days, thickening the air to mud. Fuerst was gone at dawn and did not return until the first stars pierced holes in the indigo sky. When branches snapped or the shadows shifted in the trees, Elisabeth’s heart leaped. But still no one came. In their enclosure the cows hung their heads in the scanty solace of the shade, their sides moving in and out like bellows. She kept a full pitcher of water in the cabin, for messengers.

  It was not until after the full moon that a savage came from the village on the other side of the forest. His face was expressionless as he crossed the yard. Elisabeth watched as he gained upon her, and she pressed herself back against the rough wall of the cabin.

  ‘I bring word,’ he said unsmilingly in halting Mobilian.

  ‘The child,’ she said, and her mouth hurt with the sha
pe of it.

  ‘Yes.’

  Elisabeth bowed her head. She wanted to cover her ears, to reach up into the sluggish sky and rip out the burning sun by its roots, hurling it back towards morning.

  ‘Bad spirits gone.’

  Elisabeth exhaled so suddenly it was almost a laugh. Awkwardly, the savage mimed his message. The child was still weak, her improvement slow. She could not yet leave the village. But the fever had broken. The spirits of death had been thwarted.

  Elisabeth tipped back her head and the thankfulness in her was hot as the sun.

  ‘Praise God,’ she whispered. When she fetched the savage messenger water and something to eat, her hand shook, splashing water on the beaten earth floor.

  Inside her belly the child kicked.

  ‘Hush now,’ she murmured, pressing her hand flat upon the curve of her belly. ‘I have not forgotten you.’

  In the yard the savage squatted patiently in the shade. Elisabeth picked up the cup and then set it down again, looking about her. Aside from the table with its two benches and the chest set behind the door, the cabin was almost bare. There was no ornament, no rug on the floor nor plaited basket upon the table, not even a pretty curtain at the window. Nothing that might catch or snag on a splinter of memory. Nothing to hold fast to, when things were unsteady.

  On the wall behind the door, there was a single plank shelf. Elisabeth reached behind the old black-bellied kettle and a battered corn-husk brush and took down Marguerite’s slate. The pencil dangled on its leather thong, its tip worn blunt. Upon it in the child’s laborious rounded hand was written

  le beau fils

  la belle fille

  les beaux enfants

  The words were pale against the powdery ground. Elisabeth clasped the slate with both hands and thought of the tip of Marguerite’s tongue pink between her teeth as she shaped the unfamiliar letters, the knobs of her spine pushing up against the nape of her bent neck.

  The fever had broken. Marguerite would live.

  ‘Prepare yourself, Elisabeth. Do you truly believe his wife will permit them to stay?’

  Elisabeth shook herself like a dog, but the Jesuit’s words clung to her, insistent as burrs. It had been evening, Rochon’s last. The men had not yet returned from the fields, and in the yard the shadows stretched their long fingers across the dusty ground. The Jesuit had spoken gently, without emphasis, as though he only reminded her of something she already knew. The shock in her face had made his eyes soften with pity, and she had had to turn away.

  ‘It has been years,’ she had protested shakily. ‘Six years. How shall she even know?’

  ‘In Mobile?’

  She had been glad of the shadows then, glad of the men clattering up from the fields, the empty commotion that filled the yard. The next morning, as the guides readied the pirogues, Rochon and Elisabeth had walked out to the boundary of the indigo fields. They spoke little, neither wishing to acknowledge the necessity of parting.

  ‘It looks a fine crop,’ Rochon said, gazing over the sea of green.

  ‘You say that as though you know what a fine crop would look like.’

  Rochon smiled.

  ‘I shall be very sad to leave you,’ he murmured.

  ‘I am not worthy of your affection,’ she said, and she thought of the letter and the barrel behind the wood store and the poison in her blood and the urge to tell it rose suddenly up in her, like tears.

  ‘Nor I yours. But I am very glad of it.’

  ‘If you knew – oh, Father, I have done such wrongs.’

  The words were in her mouth. With her eyes on the ground and her feet moving, she might have allowed them to fall. But he stopped. He stopped and he extended his hands to her and he bid her look at him.

  ‘Is there something you wish to confess, child?’

  And she had looked at his wise, kind face and seen the lines that sketched the shape of a frown around his mouth and the space between his eyebrows, which in the soft, milky light of early morning were no more than faint pencil marks, and she had shaken her head.

  Later that morning Rochon had left.

  ‘Be strong, Elisabeth,’ he had said as he bid her farewell. ‘Think of your husband, of the child in your belly. Think of Marguerite.’

  Elisabeth stared at the slate. Then, snatching up the pencil, she drew a firm line through the first and the third line. At the bottom of the slate, in hasty capitals, she printed

  RENTRER VITE – LES LÉZARDS MANQUENT NOTRES COURS

  She set a slice of cold roasted pumpkin and some cornbread on a plate and took it with the water to the savage. The youth ate and drank slowly, squatting in the shade. When she gave him the slate, his fingers made dark circles on its dusty face.

  ‘Take this to the girl,’ Elisabeth said in her clumsy Mobilian and he nodded, eager to be off, the sinews in his thighs twitching like the haunches of a deer. He was halfway across the yard when Elisabeth called him back. She held a hairpin in her fingers. Taking the slate from him, she tied the pin to the leather thong that secured the pencil, testing the knot to make sure it held.

  ‘Go well,’ she murmured in French, and a curl of hair unspooled itself slowly from the smooth cap of her scalp.

  It was Rochon who had urged her to sell the slave. Her husband was buried, his remains committed to the earth and his soul to the mercy of God, and what was done was done. She had her unborn child to think of. The presence of Okatomih and the sin in her, swelling beneath her shift, would not ease her widow’s burden; it did no good to keep her. Besides, there was a buyer in the town who had made a good offer, to be paid in Spanish piastres.

  Elisabeth did not object. She signed her name clumsily, one arm held tight about the curve of her belly. Huddled inside her, the child had become a quiet thing. He seldom moved. They endured together, fists clenched, heads bowed, arms clutched tight around shins. Sometimes, in the dark hours of the night, something stirred inside her and she knew it was not a child that grew in her belly to rip between her thighs in a rush of blood and slime, but desolation.

  It was some weeks later that the women of Mobile observed to one another that the slave they called Okatomih was unquestionably with child.

  ‘They say her time is close,’ Perrine Roussel said to Elisabeth, her eyes round with rapt outrage. ‘Which means it happened under your roof, Elisabeth. Under your very nose. And after all you’d done for that boy. Still, I suppose we must give credit to the degenerate Guichard. In buying the slave he has honoured his obligations and has not tried to deny his part. I hear he wishes the infant properly baptised.’

  That afternoon, for the first time since she had buried her husband, Elisabeth went for a walk. The child sat heavily upon the base of her spine as she walked, so that the ache divided her in two. At Auguste’s house on the rue Condé she hesitated. Then she knocked.

  There was shock in his face when he came to the door, shock and sorrow and a kind of dread. Then his expression flattened and blanked, and she was looking at nothing.

  ‘Elisabeth,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  He waited.

  ‘I cannot – I must ask you something. I ask only that you answer truthfully.’

  Auguste looked at her and, though his ruined arm hung twisted at his side, his shoulders were square.

  ‘The child. The slave’s child–’

  She broke off, struggling to compose herself. Auguste took a step towards her.

  ‘No!’ She stepped away from him, her hands trembling. She clasped them together. ‘The child. It is his, isn’t it?

  Auguste regarded her, his grave grey eyes holding hers.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘No,’ he said very quietly. ‘The child is mine.’

  Elisabeth stared at him, disbelief unhooking her ribs. When she shook her head, the ground lurched beneath her feet.

  ‘No,’ she whispered, her mouth dry. ‘No. You are lying.’

  ‘The slave’s child is mine,’ he said aga
in and there was no evasion in his eyes, nothing but sorrow and defeat.

  She closed her eyes. She was hardly able to breathe.

  ‘Jean-Claude–’

  ‘–is innocent in this, whatever else he has done. I am sorry.’

  ‘No.’ Her eyes snapped open and she shook her head. She shook it again and again, the weight of her head jerking at her neck. ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why do you lie to me? It is his child. I know it is his.’ She was pleading with him now, the desperation wild in her voice.

  Auguste pressed his lips together and bowed his head.

  ‘Do what you must,’ he murmured. ‘There is no punishment in the world too harsh for my offences.’

  Taking up her skirts, Elisabeth stumbled blindly from the cabin, wrenching at the clumsy door and lurching up the street. At the corner the wife of the carpenter called out to her in sympathetic greeting, but Elisabeth barely heard it. Her breath came in jagged rasps that screeched like screams in her ears. What terrible thing had she done?

  She did not stop running until she reached the wood store.

  By the time she saw the slave’s child, saw in the infant face the unmistakable curve of his brow, his smile pressed into the corner of its mouth, by the time she knew for certain, there was no righting it.

  AFTER A BRIEF exchange of pleasantries, the meal passed in near silence. She had spread a cloth he had not seen before upon the table, a fine damask with a trim of lace. He ate carefully so that he might not splash it. A storm was coming. Auguste could feel the prickling of it in the soles of his feet. As the light faded, Vincente rose and lit the tallow lamps, setting the dusk to dancing in the darkening corners of the room. The storm was in her too, he could see it in the twitch of her shoulders, the restless fluttering of her hands. She had hardly touched her supper.