Savage Lands

Table of Contents

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Published by Harvill Secker 2010

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Copyright © Clare Clark 2010

Clare Clark has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

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Detail from Guillaume de Lisle’s ‘Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississipi’ (Covens & Mortier, 1742) reproduced by kind permission of the David Rumsey Map Collection,
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The Great Stink

The Nature of Monsters

–
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

I
owe a significant debt to those writers, past and present, who have sought to cast light on this little-known period in American history. There are far too many to mention here, but I should like to express my particular gratitude to Jay Higginbotham for his extraordinary history of Mobile,
Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane 1702–1711
, without which I should never have been able to write this novel. I have leaned heavily on the definitive histories of Louisiana by Charles Gayarré and Marcel Giraud, as well as plundering George Oudard’s
Four Cents an Acre
and Peter J. Hamilton’s
Colonial Mobile
. The journal
Louisiana History
also proved an invaluable source of articles covering every aspect of the region’s colonial history.

A range of contemporary accounts provided crucial insight into the period, in particular
Fleur de Lys and Calumnet
, the journal of a carpenter in Louisiana, ably translated and edited by Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams, and
History of Louisiana
, the observations of Le Page Du Pratz, a Frenchman who arrived in Louisiana in 1717. The journals of Sauvole, the first governor of Louisiana, and of Pierre d’Iberville, the latter translated and edited by Carl A. Brasseaux, were also enormously useful. For access to these and other rare volumes, I would like to thank the staff of the Williams Research Center in New Orleans, where I was also able to draw upon a matchless collection of contemporary maps and prints.

For details of Native American life in the early eighteenth century, I am indebted to Jon Manchip White’s
Everyday Life of the North American Indian
, to Daniel H. Usner Jr’s
Indians, Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy,
and to Angie Debo, not only for her terrific
History of the Indians of the United States
but also for H. B. Cushman’s
History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians
, which she so capably edited and annotated. As for the story of John Law, it would be difficult to find a more erudite and enjoyable source than Janet Gleeson’s
The Moneymaker
.

My final acknowledgement, however, must go to Michel de Montaigne, whose
Essais
, more than five hundred years after his death, continue to rouse, inspire and delight all who read them. To him, and all the other scholars whose works I have plundered, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks. The weight of their scholarship underpins this novel, while any errors that may be contained within its pages are entirely my own.

1704

–
ANNOUNCEMENT TO THE CONGREGATION OF FORT LOUIS,

LOUISIANA, MARCH
1704

O
n the nineteenth day of April in the year of Our Lord 1704, the
Pélican
, a recently captured Dutch vessel of some six hundred tons, weighed anchor and headed for the open sea. Elisabeth stood on the main deck with several of the other girls, her hand raised to shade her eyes as the spires and towers of La Rochelle dwindled against the horizon. It was a fine day, unseasonably warm, the storms of the past weeks washed clean from the sky. Above her the men hauled on ropes or hung like spiders from the rigging, shouting to one another above the sharp slap and crack of the sails, but for once none of the girls spoke, though Marie-Françoise de Boisrenaud reached out and took the hand of little Renée Gilbert, who swayed a little, lettuce pale. Though exorbitantly overloaded, the heavy-hipped ship slid smoothly through the unruffled water, her company of twelve attending gunboats fanned out behind her, the creamy wake unfolding from her stern like a wedding veil.

It should have been over by now, her fate decided. With October barely a week old and a ship readied in Rochefort, the bishop had declared it probable that most of the girls would be settled by the new year. On the day that her godfather was to take her to Paris to meet the coach, she had stood in her attic bedroom, her hand on the iron latch of the window, gazing out through the rain-speckled glass at the crumpled clutter of roofs and chimneys heaped up against the smoke-grimed sky, and she had thought,
When the leaves return I shall be married
. Beyond the barricades of the weaving mills and the dyehouses, the bare trees ran through the sky like cracks in ice. The window frame was old and warped, the paint peeling in scabs. She ran her finger along the cold loop of the latch as the wind rattled the loose panes, and the draught made her shiver.

From the shop her aunt called her name, her voice wilting on the last syllable. Elisabeth turned away from the window, holding her arms tight across her chest for warmth, but she did not answer. It seemed to her that though she was not yet gone, the room had accustomed itself already to her absence. The bed in the corner of the room had been stripped of its sheets and rugs, its drapes knotted up so that the mattress might be aired. The door to the press hung open, its shelves and compartments empty but for a few yellowed sheets of the paper her aunt insisted upon to prevent the stained wood from spoiling the linens. The ewer and basin with their pattern of faded forget-me-nots had been rinsed and wrapped and put away in the kitchen, and there was no fire laid in the small grate. Even the old writing desk was bare, its curved legs buckling as though they might give way without the steadying disorder of books and pamphlets and catalogues and papers that habitually crowded its surface. Elisabeth stroked its scarred top, tracing the grain of the wood with her finger. Though elaborately carved at the feet, the desk was the work of an unskilled woodsmith, its table insufficiently deep for its breadth, its fragile legs ill-suited to so sturdy a piece. Beside them the squat legs of the ladder-backed kitchen chair straddled the floor with the stolidity of a taverner on market day.

Again Elisabeth heard her aunt calling for her and again she did not answer. Instead she pulled out the chair and sat down. The frayed rush seat had always been too high and it comforted her to feel the familiar press of the desk’s underside against her thighs. Sometimes, on those too few occasions when she contrived to sit here all day, she had undressed at night to find the shape of it printed in secret lines on her skin. The desk was shabby, ink-stained and scabbed with candle wax, its single splintery drawer split with age and clumsily nailed together, but she was filled with a sudden longing to take it. It was impossible, of course. Even if her aunt had agreed to such a notion, each of the twenty-three girls was permitted only a single trunk.

Elisabeth had packed the books herself, taking out some of the heavier linens her aunt had selected from the shop. She did not tell her aunt. Her aunt thought like most women and considered a tablecloth or a set of handkerchiefs of considerably greater value than the words of La Rochefoucauld or Racine. If it had not been for her godfather, she would never have managed to accumulate even her own modest library. A respected merchant, Plomier Deseluse was no bibliophile, considering books a pitiable proxy for the pleasures of company and of cards, but he was both prosperous and good-hearted. When Elisabeth’s uncle had died, he had settled upon her a small allowance from which she might purchase what he referred to as the necessary niceties. It would, he said, serve her until she was of an age to be wed.