The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr

by Susan Holloway Scott

  She turned in her chair so the back of her head now faced us, pointedly expecting us to finish dressing her hair. Estelle gulped, and scrambled to her feet, and together we completed the task that was expected of us, as if nothing else was any different.

  It wasn’t. Unlike Estelle, who seemed genuinely pleased to be accompanying Madame, I didn’t know whether I, too, should rejoice, or be fearful, or something else entirely. I had longed to leave this house, and now I was.

  I didn’t care that Estelle had been spared, but I was grateful that Orianne would also be coming to Saint-Domingue. Yet when I remembered the last time I’d seen her with Marc by the staircase, I doubted very much that she would likewise be happy this day. While I was still too young to understand the powerful bonds that love created between men and women, I knew the cruel finality of what had happened today, and how Marc had been among those sold to slave traders while Orianne remained.

  I went with Madame to make her final calls, and continued with her and Monsieur to a dinner in their honor. I watched, and listened, and thought of how much more fortunate Madame was to be able to bid such tender farewells to her friends than the slaves she had sold away earlier this same day. Some of those people had been in her household since she’d first come to India thirty years before, and yet she’d discarded them with as little emotion as if they’d been a broken bowl or teacup, with no further use or purpose to her.

  It was long past nightfall when we returned to the house for the last time, and I was acutely aware of how silent the house was now without the others. It was not as if the footmen and housemaids and cooks-maids and laundresses and grooms and coachmen and all the rest had made so much noise as they’d followed the orders of Madame and Monsieur. But their presence had given life to the rooms and halls, and now that they were gone the house was like an empty tomb, bereft of warmth and heart.

  While we had been out, the remainder of Madame’s furnishings had been taken away to the ship, including her great heavy bed of mahogany. For this last night she was forced to make do with a plump mattress and pillows spread upon the floor.

  “How I shall sleep on such a mean little pallet I do not know,” she said peevishly as Estelle and I tried to arrange her comfortably. “I’ll be covered with a thousand bruises by dawn, and by all the saints it will be a holy miracle if I’m not completely crippled.”

  I thought of how much more comfortable her well-stuffed mattress was than the mat that had been my bed for the past three years. I kept those thoughts to myself as I plumped yet another pillow to place behind her head.

  “You know I must trust you tonight, Eugénie,” Madame said, her face nearly as pale as the pillow she lay upon. “With my bed gone, there is no place for me to chain your collar. Instead I must trust you not to run away, but to remain here with me. Do you understand what trust means, Eugénie?”

  “Yes, Madame,” I murmured. She could speak all she wished of trust, but I’d already seen how every door and window and gate to the house had been closed and locked, on account of there no longer being any male slaves to guard us. The house would be as adept at keeping me locked inside as it was at keeping villains and thieves without.

  But no matter how much Madame fussed, she had drunk enough wine at dinner that she was soon fast asleep. When I was sure, I left her, and hurried downstairs and across the courtyard to the kitchen to look for Orianne.

  I thought at first she wasn’t there. Usually a place full of voices and activity and temptations, the kitchen was now dark and silent. The shelves and cupboards and baskets that once had held such bounty were empty, the tables scrubbed bare. Only a few coals glowed in the hearth, kept alive to heat Madame’s morning tea one last time.

  “Orianne?” I called into the shadows. I heard a shuffling sound and what might have been a groan, and stepped closer. “Are you here, Orianne?”

  “What do you want of me, Eugénie?” She startled me, a shadow huddled on the floor to one side of the fireplace. Her voice was rough and ragged, and I guessed she’d been weeping. “How does Madame wish to torment me now?”

  “She didn’t send me,” I said. “She’s asleep. I’ve come on my own.”

  Orianne didn’t answer. The silence stretched longer and longer between us. I’d intended to offer comfort to her as she’d often done to me, but now that I was here, I’d no notion of what to say.

  Finally I dared to step closer. “I wanted to see if you were—if you were well.”

  “Haven’t you learned anything?” she demanded abruptly, and with a ferocity I hadn’t expected. “What you want, what I want—none of that matters before what they want, and what they will have.”

  “I know that,” I said defensively.

  “Do you?” she asked. “What else do you know? Why did they decide to keep you today, and not sell you away like the others?”

  Again I’d no idea how to reply, and I longed to see her face to be able to answer her in the way that would please her most.

  “I’m sorry your—your friends were taken today,” I said in a small voice. “I’m sorry it wasn’t me instead.”

  She groaned, and pressed her hands to her forehead. “That’s nothing for you to be sorry for, little one. They did it and now it cannot be undone, no matter how much I cry tears that are torn from my heart.”

  I didn’t answer. There wasn’t more that needed saying. I sat on the floor across from her in the dark kitchen until the first dawn began to show through the windows, and then I crept back to my mat beside Madame, and was there when she woke.

  The rest of the morning passed in the rush of our departure, with both Madame and Monsieur in disagreeable humor and short temper, and quick as always to fault others for it. But finally we were aboard the vessel that would carry us to Saint-Domingue, and sailing with the evening tide as the captain had wished.

  Our ship was called the Céleste. To me who had never before been in a vessel of any kind, she seemed at once both very large and fine, and yet very small when placed against the enormity of the sea. I hadn’t expected the ship to move so much beneath my feet, as if the waves had given it life. I felt clumsy and unsure, and watched with envy as the sailors skipped with ease across the slanting deck and through the rigging overhead.

  As the sun set, I stood on the deck in my usual place at Madame’s side while she and Monsieur bid their farewells to Pondicherry. For the sake of impressing the captain, Madame made a great show of pretending to cry while waving her lace-edged handkerchief, as if she weren’t overjoyed to be leaving this place that she claimed to despise. Monsieur paid her no attention, and instead peered through a small spyglass that he’d purchased especially for the journey.

  As for me, I gazed out at the city where I’d been born, turned golden by the setting sun. At a distance like this, it was little more than a jumble of buildings scattered around the old fort. Somewhere in the middle of those buildings my family must still live and work, bicker and laugh, and love one another as they hadn’t loved me.

  I thought of the crack, jagged like lightning, that had always marked the wall of our small quarters, and how my cousins and I would lie rolled in our blankets beneath it, whispering together when we were supposed to be asleep.

  I remembered how Ammatti would take me with her to the market at the end of our street, and how proud I’d been when I was old enough to carry her purchases for her. She’d smiled so widely with approval that her eyes had nearly disappeared, and she’d called me her fine little pigeon as she’d slowly walked with one hand on my shoulder to steady herself. I would have done anything to make her happy, and I believe she would have done the same for me.

  “This sea air chills me to the bone,” Madame was saying, supported on one side by Estelle, and the other by Gabriel. “I don’t know how I shall bear it. Where is my shawl, Eugénie? Why don’t you have it when I am clearly chilled and suffering so? At once, Eugénie, don’t dawdle!”

  Reluctantly I turned away from the rail, and from Pondicherry, a
nd all that it had meant to me.

  I pulled my dupatta more closely over my head and shoulders against the wind, and followed Madame to her cabin.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Indian Ocean

  1771

  As could only be expected, neither the sea nor the voyage agreed with Madame, nor did she agree with them. No one could discover ill-usage like Madame. With Pondicherry scarcely from our sight, she had begun to howl at the meanness of her accommodations, and the disrespect she believed was being shown by the ship’s company toward her.

  It is true that for a French lady such as Madame, accustomed only to the luxury of a fine home, the cabins—tiny compartments scarcely bigger than closets—given to her and Monsieur on board the Céleste must have seemed disagreeable. Behind a louvered door for privacy, each cabin contained a narrow shelflike bed built into the bulkhead, a pewter bowl for washing and a looking glass pinned to a beam, and only space for a single chest of belongings.

  Two of these cabins belonged to Madame and Monsieur, while a third was occupied by an elderly French cleric, Révérend Père Noyer, a long-faced holy man in black who kept to himself and his prayers. The fourth cabin had been converted to storage of the belongings of Madame and Monsieur.

  No quarters were provided for Orianne, Estelle, Gabriel, or me. This, too, was cause for Madame to complain to the captain: not because of the slight to us, but because of the inconvenience to her, accustomed as she was to having us all nearby. It was decided that Estelle would sleep on a pallet on the floor—that is, the deck—of Madame’s cabin, while Gabriel would stay near Monsieur. Orianne and I were likewise given pallets, and told by the first mate, Roussel, to sleep on the deck in the common area outside the cabins.

  “But that will not do, Roussel, not at all,” Madame protested. “It’s far too much liberty for Eugénie. You see the collar I’ve had put round her neck. It’s my custom each night to clip a chain to it, and then to a post of my bed, to make certain she does not run from me while I sleep.”

  “And I ask you, ma’am: where would your little creature dare run?” Roussel was broad-shouldered and brutish in the way of many Frenchmen, and he spoke so loudly that his words echoed between the decks. “Recall that we are at sea, ma’am. I’ve yet to see a Negress who won’t shudder and quake at the very sight of so much water. They haven’t the sense to swim, you know, but sink like black stones into the deep.”

  He laughed, and Madame laughed with him.

  “How reassuring you are, Roussel.” Madame placed her hand familiarly on the mate’s sleeve, a gesture she would not have dared make if Monsieur had been in sight. “I should hate to lose my little Eugénie.”

  “I shall take every effort to keep your property safe, ma’am.” Roussel bent over me and spoke foolishly loud and slow, as if I were deaf or half-witted. “Do as you’re ordered, you little monkey. Don’t vex your mistress.”

  He raised his fist as if to strike me. I couldn’t tell if this was simply more of his bluster or if he did intend to strike me, but by instinct I stepped back away from him. I’d long ago learned to judge the exact distance necessary to preserve myself from a blow from Madame, yet remain near enough that she believed it still were possible, if only she bothered to exert herself. So it was now with Roussel; he glared at me in warning, then dropped his hand and turned back toward Madame, waiting to preen and fuss further over him.

  “I saw what you did, little one,” Orianne murmured beside me as they left us to arranging Madame’s belongings. “You put yourself in danger with tricks like that.”

  I shrugged with the unconcern of my age. “It spared me from harm.”

  “You’ve only been struck by an old woman,” Orianne said. “A blow or a whipping from a grown man is different.”

  I shrugged again. “My uncle punished me if I was slow to obey him.”

  Orianne frowned. “Your uncle was your kin,” she said. “He wouldn’t kill you. But that man Roussel is different. If you make him look like a fool again, his pride will see that you pay with your blood.”

  I didn’t answer. I suspected that she was right, though I was too stubborn to admit it to her. I’d already sensed that about Roussel, and how I’d be wise to avoid him as best I could during the voyage. What mattered more to me was that I was at last free of the chain to the back of my collar that had linked me each evening to Madame. Yet that first night aboard the ship, I slept on my side as if the heavy chain bound me still, a ghostly presence I could not shake.

  I awoke to feel the ship pitching and rocking beneath me. The lanterns that hung from the beams overhead swung wildly and cast shadows that danced like demons across the bulkheads. I squeezed my eyes shut and clutched at my mattress, certain we all would soon be cast into the sea to drown.

  “Wake, Eugénie, and be of some use!”

  I opened my eyes to see Estelle crouching beside me. She had a shawl wrapped over her nightgown and her usually neat single braid was frayed over her shoulder. By the lantern’s light, her face was greenish pale, with dark patches of distress beneath her eyes.

  “Madame has been ill,” she said. “Go above, and empty this.”

  She shoved the pewter washbowl from Madame’s cabin across the deck toward me. The bowl was nearly filled with vomit and bile, and I covered my nose and face to keep from gagging myself at the stench.

  “Hurry,” Estelle said sharply. “Madame may require it again.”

  I rolled from the mattress, struggling to find my footing on the rocking deck. I braced myself against the bulkheads, moving from one handhold to the next as I held the reeking bowl in the crook of my elbow. My heart was pounding as I slowly climbed the steps of the companionway, and I dreaded what manner of nightmarish scene would await me.

  But instead of the storm that I was certain must be raging, all I saw was the first light of day, and the pink of dawn along the horizon. Overhead the canvas sails snapped and cracked with the wind, a wind that tore at my hair and clothes like a wild beast. I clung to the rail, terrified of being blown from the slanting deck over the side, and into the white-tipped waves.

  “What are you about?” shouted one of the sailors into the wind, coming toward me across the lurching deck as easily as if it were his parlor at home. “Come to toss that bilge overboard, eh?”

  I looked down at the bowl in my hand, unsure of how I was to dispose of the unsavory contents. I was afraid to venture any closer to the rail, yet it seemed I had no choice. Slowly I began across the deck, gripping every handhold I could find.

  “Not that side, damn you,” the sailor said. “You’ll foul the deck with your filth if you try to throw it into the wind.”

  With an oath, he grabbed the bowl from me and emptied it over the railing, then swiped it through a half hogshead of seawater that sat on the deck.

  “There,” he said as he handed it back to me. “Take care you don’t come empty your puke when the captain’s on deck, else he’ll have you tossed over, too.”

  Beside the door to Madame’s cabin, Estelle was squatting on the deck, her back braced against the bulkhead and a white cloth pressed to her mouth. Beside her was a small bucket, and I saw that she, too, had been ill.

  “Where have you been?” she croaked at me. “You’ve kept Madame—Ah, my God!”

  Abruptly she leaned over the bucket beside her and retched again. At the same time, I heard Madame call for me from within her cabin, and the sound of her, too, gagging.

  So it would be for the next week, or perhaps it was a fortnight. One day seemed much like the next, and I cannot be certain. I ate only dried sea biscuits broken into watery cold tea, for no one offered me anything else. Of our entire party, I was the only one unafflicted. The ship’s cook, who also served as the surgeon, came to peer at them each in turn, diagnosed it as no more than common seasickness, offered cinnamon bark to chew, and abandoned them to their misery. I tended to them all as best I could. Even Orianne was poorly, and lay curled in groaning misery on her pallet to one sid
e of the deck.

  I became adept at scrambling to the deck with full buckets and bowls. I learned to keep my knees bent and to walk with the roll of the deck rather than against it, and how to use the ship’s movements to help carry me up the ladders and through the hatch. I’d found my sea legs, as the sailors called it, and it soon became second nature to me.

  Madame gradually improved, and though she continued to keep to her bunk and play the invalid, Estelle could now tend to her demands well enough. When Monsieur recovered, he began taking his dinner with Captain Gagnon and Père Noyer in the captain’s cabin, and seemed content to spend as little time as he could in his wife’s company. Although Monsieur was the captain’s guest at these dinners, he expected Orianne to prepare her customary curries for him; like most Frenchmen, he called all the wide range of Indian food by that single name. This she did in the ship’s galley, and I nearly wept with longing as the familiar spicy aromas of Pondicherry wafted between the decks.

  But Orianne and I were also given other tasks to perform, including scrubbing away with rough square blocks called holystones at the passageway decks between the cabins and where Orianne and I slept. Roussel himself had ordered us to do this every day, to keep the weather deck from smelling not from seasickness, but from our own persons. The Céleste was not a slaver, he declared, and he wouldn’t have his vessel stinking like one on account of us.

  “I was not brought from Pondicherry for this,” Orianne muttered beside me as we scrubbed the deck on our hands and knees. “I am a cook, a keeper of the house for my master and mistress.”

  I nodded in agreement, wincing as I plunged my holystone once again into the bucket of chilly water. My hands were chapped from the seawater, the salt stinging and burning my fingers and my knees, and I’d no doubt Orianne’s were, too. I’d worked harder in these last weeks on board the Céleste than I had in all the years combined that I’d belonged to Madame, yet Orianne would not dare complain to anyone but me. We’d both seen Roussel take a knotted rope to his own sailors, white-skinned Frenchmen, if they didn’t obey orders as swiftly as he believed they should, his thick arm flailing the rope against their backs and buttocks until they jumped and swore with pain. I was sure he’d do much worse to us if we gave him reason.