Savage Lands

by Clare Clark

  It was Anne Negrette who pushed the girl forward.

  ‘You have not yet met Mlle de Larme, have you?’ Anne Negrette said. ‘She came on the Charente. Her mother also.’

  The young woman ducked her head, glancing at Yvonne as though seeking reassurance that Vincente would not bite her. Vincente tightened her hands around her basket and wished her dead.

  ‘She is to marry the widower Martin,’ said Perrine Roussel.

  ‘Mlle de Larme, that is, not the mother,’ Yvonne Lereg added, slipping her arm through the young woman’s. ‘Martin was quite clear about that.’

  The women laughed, and the plummet of it was a stone in Vincente’s belly. She smiled and the smile stiffened on her face.

  ‘It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mlle de Larme.’

  ‘Yours too, Mme le Vannes.’

  Vincente watched as Yvonne Lereg leaned over to murmur in the young woman’s ear, and the hunger that had lain quietly in her turned over, opening its jaws.

  ‘You heard, I suppose, the sad news of Germaine Vessaille?’ Anne Conaud said, laying a quiet hand upon her sleeve. Vincente shook her head. ‘Her confinement . . . there were difficulties. She did not have the strength for it.’

  ‘Her eighth child,’ Anne Negrette sighed. ‘And all the others no trouble.’

  ‘The infant lives, thank the Lord.’

  ‘And thrives. A savage wet nurse has her.’

  ‘But a Tensaw? I would not leave my child with one of those.’

  ‘Beggars cannot be choosers.’

  ‘Nor drunks neither. The gunsmith is become a perfect souse.’

  ‘He will shoot his foot off one of these days.’

  ‘He will be lucky if it is only his foot.’

  As the women rattled on, Vincente let her spine soften. Her shoulders unhooked from her neck and her hands opened. She looked around the vigorous faces of the women as they talked, and she thought of Germaine Vessaille and her brood of children and the pleasure that had pinked her cheeks when Vincente had given her some trifle from her trousseau, and the fear tasted thin and foolish in her mouth. They were so few and so far away. The loss of any one of them was a hole in the fabric they made.

  She was kinder to Mlle de Larme after that, though she could not help but dislike the intimacy of the younger woman’s friendship with Yvonne Lereg, the way they whispered and smiled together as though they shared secrets that none of the others were permitted to share. All the same it was not until she stood with the other wives at the celebration of her marriage to old Martin that she understood that there was nothing to fear. The younger woman’s arrival had not pushed her out. It had pushed her in. To Mlle de Larme, Vincente was not the latest of the wives or the least. She was one of them, a stalk of palmetto woven into a basket of many stalks. It startled her to realise that her arrival had done precisely the same for Yvonne Lereg.

  They had been in Mobile some weeks when the summons came from the governor. Auguste had been expecting it. When the boy had gone, he went out onto the stoop, gazing out over the blank winter yard. He had never attempted to grow anything here and the neglected garden was overgrown, choked with half-dead grasses. There was no purpose in cutting them back. When spring came and Fuerst took up ownership of his own concession, they would return to Burnt-canes and Auguste would begin again. He had already drawn up plans for a garden of medicinals, the savage remedies of smutwheat, goldenrod, elderberry, catnip and jimson weed, as well as the imported simples such as ammoniac, antimony and rhubarb: remedies to ease pain, to reduce swelling, to deter corruption.

  ‘It is a fine idea,’ Vincente said when he told her. ‘What better place to trade medicines than New Orleans? There is more pestilence in the air than there are mosquitoes.’

  Auguste shook his head.

  ‘I do not mean to trade them. They are for us, for the plantation.’

  ‘But why, when there will be more than we can use? Why not profit from it?’

  ‘Because we shall have enough without it.’

  ‘And with it we shall have more.’

  Auguste squatted down close to the porch, his fingers feeling in the cold earth. The soil was sandy and loose, and he scooped it up, letting it fall in crumbs from his hand. Then he rose and went as he was bid to the commissary.

  Afterwards he returned to the house. Vincente knelt before the fire, struggling to light the mess of tinder. The curve of her back was soft, her arms plump. He did not know if she ate still secretly, at night. He thought perhaps she did, but less often than before. The swell of her belly in the darkness was round. Soon, perhaps, it would grow rounder. In the meantime, he waited and he hoped.

  She sighed, rolling back on her heels.

  ‘The wood is wet.’

  ‘Be glad you are not in New Orleans.’

  ‘Anne Negrette said that when the burial ground flooded in New Orleans, the soil gave up its dead.’ Vincente shuddered. ‘Spat them out, as though it could not wait to be rid of them. Imagine it. Scores of them, she said, just floating there.’

  ‘Those women say many things.’

  ‘She said that the pigs ate the bones.’

  They were silent, staring at the fire.

  ‘What did the governor want?’ Vincente asked at last.

  ‘Consolation.’

  Vincente gave him a curious look.

  ‘And you were able to oblige him?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Because there is none?’

  ‘Because there is no fixing past mistakes. There is only the making of new ones.’

  Auguste closed the door behind him, watching the governor as he paced the room. There was no trace of his habitual dry humour. When he seized the back of the chair, slamming it against the floor, his knuckles were white and the features on his face jerked as though they meant to escape him.

  ‘It is over,’ he said to Auguste, and his voice was high and thin. ‘Law’s bank is collapsed and the Mississippi Company with it. It is all over.’

  Auguste frowned at him.

  ‘You are quite certain?’

  ‘Mandeville arrived this morning on the Portefaix. He came here directly. All of Paris is in uproar. There are riots in the streets. Do you know what Law said to the Regent in his final audience before he fled for his life? He said that he had made mistakes but that his mistakes had proceeded always from the noblest of aims.’ Bienville exhaled a mirthless laugh. ‘As though that somehow set things right.’

  Auguste said nothing.

  ‘All of the paper money issued by his bank is worthless,’ the commandant said. ‘Law himself set bonfires of it and the stock certificates too. All of it, up in smoke.’

  ‘It is not new for us to have nothing.’

  ‘We can expect no more ships, not now. No more supplies or slaves. Once again the mother country will turn her back on us.’

  ‘Perhaps we are old enough now to fend for ourselves.’

  ‘And with what? I have for a garrison a miserable dustheap of thieves and deserters. Do you think that they will not mutiny now, when there is no pay?’

  ‘We have many allies among the savages.’

  ‘And how long do you think we may rely upon their friendship when the storehouse is empty?’

  The two men were silent.

  ‘The existence of this colony is no more than a prolonged agony,’ the governor said quietly. ‘The very principle of life is wanting in her.’

  ‘But still she lives.’

  ‘And for what? Mr Law has proven her not worth a straw.’

  ‘To the financiers of France, perhaps. But we are not in France.’

  ‘It was only months ago that those primped and perfumed nobles at Versailles were proclaiming Louisiana a perfect paradise,’ Bienville said. ‘Now they damn her as the charnel house of the Devil himself.’

  Auguste shrugged.

  ‘Louisiana made them rich. Now she beggars them.’

  ‘And not one of them has her soil upon t
heir shoes.’

  ‘Then we have something to be grateful for.’

  Bienville shook his head.

  ‘You are an optimist, Guichard. I should not have guessed it.’

  ‘Not an optimist. But I know that no place in the world is either as fine or as rotten as we would wish it. Nor any man either.’

  ‘Except the commissary.’

  Auguste inclined his head.

  ‘With the possible exception of the commissary.’

  ‘I am hoping his losses distract him from my persecution,’ said Bienville with a bleak smile.

  ‘Then you too, sir, are an optimist.’

  ‘I am governor of Louisiana. What other choice do I have?’

  When it was time for Auguste to take his leave, the commissary was waiting in the outer room. He too roamed restlessly around the small space, his hat twisted between his hands.

  ‘So I suppose you have heard the news?’ the commissary said.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘If you have any sense you shall get out. Return to France while there are still ships to sail on.’

  ‘Thank you, but I mean to take my chances here.’

  ‘Do not think you can depend this time upon the friendship of the governor.’ The commissary blew out his cheeks, shaking his head. ‘There is not enough meat left on this miserable carcass even for him.’

  Auguste regarded him steadily.

  ‘Then I shall depend on indigo.’

  ‘And doubtless you shall prosper. If you survive the famines. The English. The savages. Oh, and the hurricanes,’ the commissary said, counting them off on his fingers.

  ‘On indigo, then, and good fortune.’

  ‘A perilous stratagem.’

  ‘Are there any others?’

  There was nothing more to be said. The commissary held out his hand and Auguste shook it. It swung in his as if the bolts that attached it to the wrist had worked loose. Neither man smiled.

  Auguste was at the door when he paused, his hand upon the latch.

  ‘Did you hold stocks in the Mississippi Company, sir?’

  The commissary’s mouth tightened but he said nothing. Auguste settled his hat upon his head. Then, pushing open the door, he walked out into the sunlight of a spring afternoon.

  ELISABETH’S CHILD WAS born at dawn two days before the feast of Mardi Gras. It was an unseasonably cold morning, the damp air chill as wet clothes. Fuerst slaughtered the deer he had trapped and skinned it, skilfully slicing and stripping the hide from the animal’s purple flesh so that he might wrap the infant in its still-warm embrace. The deer was a large one and the hide handsomely marked. It would do very well.

  When it was time, he called the men together. The Rhinelanders’ wives had roasted the deer meat and they ate heartily and drank beer brewed from Indian corn. Nellie, who since the birth of her own child had come to occupy a position of authority among the women, raised her cup to toast Michel Fuerst. His father sat among them and smiled awkwardly, made bashful by his own joyfulness. On a battered hide spread close to the fire, Marguerite squeaked out a tune on a flute of cane, while beside her, like an upturned beetle, Nellie’s child rolled on his back, gurgling and kicking his fat legs in the air. The air was full of singing and smoke. Soon they would be separating, each man going to his own grant of land. The three-arpent lots were strung along the Mississippi north of New Orleans like beads on a string. It would be, they joked, a superior colony, a little piece of the Rhineland in the New World.

  Alone in the cabin, Elisabeth lay quiet among the mess of rugs, the infant asleep in her arms. The birth had been long and the pain terrible, as though the child would tear her in two. The raw force of it had startled her. She had thought her nerve-strings numb, but as she laboured in the throes of birth she was nothing but pain. She pushed her son out into the world with all her strength as though she would hurl him from her, desirous of nothing but to be rid of the anguish of him. And yet, when Nellie lifted him and placed him on her breast, she was split with a new anguish, and she held his slippery body against hers and wept.

  ‘It’s sore,’ Nellie said, her face split in a wide grin. ‘But you’ll heal.’

  Elisabeth’s need for the child was powerful and immediate. There were animals, it was said, who when their newborn offspring are endangered, attempt to eat them that they might be returned to the shelter of the mother’s womb. When Fuerst was permitted to enter the cabin, her arms locked around the infant and she would not let him go. The birth string was cut, the stump tied off, and already it grieved her, the drift of him away from her.

  Fuerst knelt beside the bed and put out a finger to touch the boy’s head.

  ‘He is Michel,’ she said, and Fuerst said nothing but only nodded, and she saw the softening in his work-scoured face and something in her softened too.

  ‘Take him,’ she said, and she watched as he lifted his sleeping son into his arms, and immediately the softness was gone and she pressed her fists into the mattress so that she might not snatch him back.

  That night the child cried. Elisabeth walked with him back and forth on the hard dirt floor and told him of his father, who said little and worked hard and who moved among the fields like the river, certain of his course. She told him of the farm on the Bayou Saint-Jean, which one day would be his if he wanted it, and the books in her trunk, which would be his also, whether he wanted them or not. And she told him of the Jesuit Rochon, who was as slow to judgement as he was quick to laughter and who would, one day, if he was willing, stand as the boy’s godfather.

  ‘You have another godfather also,’ she whispered over the child’s thin wails. ‘Though no one but you shall ever know it. His words shall guide and comfort you always.’

  When the infant did not quieten, she lifted the latch and took him outside into the yard where the stamped-out moon raised the sky and drew shadows sharp as ink on the beaten ground. It was cold and her breath made dandelion clocks as she walked towards the byre, singing to him softly as she settled him into the curve of her shoulder.

  When she pushed open the low door, the cow raised its broad head, pushing gently at her skirts. The child hiccupped, his cries no longer so certain, and his tiny fists uncurled a little. The cow had a white blaze that ran the length of her face and a tight whorl of curls upon her forehead that lent her an anxious look. Gently Elisabeth reached out and stroked her smooth neck. The cow snuffled, pressing her head against the woman’s shoulder, and Elisabeth leaned against her, inhaling her warm ripe smell.

  ‘Perhaps when you are older,’ she murmured, ‘Marguerite shall show you how to milk her.’

  But the child was asleep. His eyelids were lavender, etched with blue, and between the startled curves of his faint eyebrows, his skin was dry and flaky. Elisabeth tightened her arms around him, pressing him against the tingling in her breasts. Mon fils. A word like a kiss, with a kiss’s soft sibilance, lingering on the lips. His face twitched and his fists reached up to beat the air, but he did not wake.

  The fatigue came suddenly with a lurch of light-headedness. Cupping the child’s head with her hand, she lowered her bruised and battered body to the milking stool and closed her eyes, leaning her head against the mud-rough wall. The straw rustled as close by her the cow shifted and sighed. In the villages around Paris, the peasants brought their animals into their huts with them in winter. Elisabeth had always assumed the advantage all to the cattle. She thought now that perhaps there were a great number of things that she had not properly understood.

  She was almost asleep when the scraping of the door roused her. She blinked, her arms tightening reflexively about her sleeping child. Marguerite stood in the doorway. The moon caught silver in her hair and drew the narrow shape of her beneath the rough linen of her shift. She looked at Elisabeth and then at the floor, scraping a circle in the dirt with her toe.

  ‘I could not sleep,’ she said.

  ‘Nor I,’ Elisabeth said.

  ‘You were sleeping just then,’ the gir
l protested. ‘I saw you.’

  Elisabeth smiled, rubbing her eyes.

  ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Sit with me.’

  The child hesitated.

  ‘This is Michel. I have already promised him that when he is old enough you shall teach him how to milk the cow.’

  ‘Michel.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is it French?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  Elisabeth hesitated.

  ‘Does it mean bead?’ Marguerite demanded.

  Elisabeth smiled.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It has many meanings. But to me it means wise friend.’

  Tentatively Marguerite reached out and touched a grubby finger to the baby’s head.

  ‘Wise friend,’ she said. ‘He looks like a turtle.’

  Elisabeth looked down. The mottled deer hide curved over the baby’s head, leaving only his fists and the crown of his head emerging.

  ‘You are right,’ she said, and she smiled. ‘He does look like a turtle.’

  ‘Perhaps you should call him turtle instead.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I think his father would prefer Michel.’

  ‘In my language we say Olo. I think I shall call him Olo. He should have one of our names as well as his French one. Like my mother did. Like I do.’

  Elisabeth stared at her.

  ‘You have another name?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I did not know.’

  Marguerite shrugged a little.

  ‘He’s so small,’ she said, and the curve of her dirty hand fitted the infant’s head like a cap.

  The cramp was sudden and unexpected, and Elisabeth gasped as she folded over it, her face twisted in a knot. The child frowned.

  ‘Are you ill?’ she asked.

  ‘Not ill. Sore.’

  Elisabeth took a long breath as the cramp faded. Marguerite watched her warily.

  ‘Shall you die?’

  ‘Some day. But not yet.’

  Marguerite was silent. In the darkness the cow’s wet nose gleamed palely as she stretched out her neck to nudge the girl’s stomach. Marguerite put her thin arms around the beast’s neck, crooning to her in her savage tongue. The beast lowed softly, shuffling closer. When her hoof struck the milking stool, Elisabeth felt the shock of it in her belly.