Savage Lands (20 page)

At the porch she hesitated, watching the rain dance in frenzied patterns across the yard, and abruptly all the wildness in her was gone. It was late and she was cold and the day’s duties were undone. She shivered, squeezing the rain from her skirts and from her hair. Then she turned and went in to the cabin. It was only as she knelt before the grate in her sodden dress, coaxing the reluctant fire to unfold a second flame, that she felt once more the force of the lightning in her and the brilliance, a faint electricity that prickled in her hair and in the soles of her feet so that the next morning, when she awoke to a drizzly grey dawn, she did not think to inspect the damage done by the tempest. Instead she pulled a blanket from the bed and crossed the yard to the wood store, sidestepping the chaos of broken branches that littered her path. The rain tapped lightly on the roof above her as, curling up as comfortably as she was able, she unwrapped the Montaigne and once more began to read.

I
t had been, Babelon told Auguste, an act of Providence. Had it not been for the hurricane, which damaged the merchant’s pirogues and dragged his own downstream against his will, he would not have encountered the merchant as he did, on a turn of the river far from any native settlement, and shared with him a fire and some food. He would never have known that there were merchants who dealt not in furs and hides but in curiosities, marvels of the New World, both natural and man-made.

This merchant had once sold to a Prussian nobleman three dragon’s eggs and the feathers of a phoenix. In recent years, however, he had favoured the collection of more natural phenomena. There was, he had told Babelon, a growing fashion in Europe for grand gardens, which was no longer satisfied by the ordinary flowers and trees of such temperate regions. Discerning noblemen wished their gardens to inspire awe and incredulity, and they were willing to pay handsomely for unusual specimens. The merchant was not himself a horticulturist, but he understood vanity and he understood profit. In the company of two guides, he travelled between the savage nations, trading trinkets for persimmon and pitcher plants. The practice was protracted and often perilous but, after several months of such commerce, his two pirogues were laden with hundreds of carefully wrapped and boxed specimens.

It was no difficult matter, then, to show the merchant the notebook of Auguste’s sketches. The merchant had turned the pages eagerly. Several of the drawings showed plants for which there was considerable demand, several more species with which he was unfamiliar. When Babelon informed him that Auguste had a garden in which he cultivated many of Louisiana’s native plants for his own study, and that, moreover, Babelon himself could ensure their safe delivery to the merchant’s ships, the merchant closed the notebook and set his hands one on top of the other on its cover. The negotiations extended over the days that followed, but it was price they haggled over, not principle. By the time both men prepared to leave the village, an agreement had been reached.

Auguste’s uncertainty infuriated Babelon. He declared it absurd, unreasonable, childish. There was, after all, nothing in the least unlawful in the arrangement. The plants were entirely Auguste’s to do with as he wished. Private matters of business were permitted, even encouraged, in Louisiana so long as a man’s personal business in no way compromised his loyalty to the colony. France was at war and could spare no ships. Wages were three years in arrears. In such times, the commandant himself commended resourcefulness. A man could not live on an unpaid salary alone. There was nothing in the arrangement that Auguste could possibly object to.

Auguste admitted as much. And still he continued uneasy. He distrusted Babelon’s impatience, his airiness, the enthusiasm that was almost anger. He disliked the scorn with which Babelon teased him for his timidity and his youth as much as he disliked his own failure to divest himself of either. He detested the way that his friend, who had never before shown the slightest interest in his garden, now crouched close to the ground, running his hands over the leaves as though they were coins. Most of all he hated that his fate was to be sealed by an act of Providence. Auguste had always mistrusted Providence. She liked to watch you squirm.

He had grown accustomed to it, of course. And he had loved the work. It had never ceased to delight him: the clustered seeds in their boxes, the cuttings in their bracelets of damp earth, the flowers laid between paper leaves and pressed to gauzy translucence. The merchant had urged Babelon to consider no plant too ordinary, for virtually every native of Louisiana differed in some particular or other from its European cousin, and so everywhere he went, Auguste gathered flora of every manner and description. And so that he might know them more closely, for each plant that he collected he brought back another to his garden and set it to growing there, so that he might observe its seasons and its habits.

He observed too the habits of Le Caën’s daughter and the opossum, for the child brought the creature often to the cabin. On the first occasion she pushed the animal into his hands, ducking her head and walking away from him very fast. Auguste put his face against the creature’s soft fur and inhaled its musty smell.

The next time he shook his head.

‘See,’ he said as the creature squirmed in his arms. ‘She would rather have you.’

The girl bit her lip.

‘No,’ she said, but she reached out a hand all the same and touched the creature on its head.

‘She is more yours than mine now. I should like it if you would keep her.’

The child said nothing then but the gladness lit her face like a lamp.

The next time she came, she brought a plant.

‘For you,’ she said shyly and, though it was but a common iris that might be found anywhere thereabouts, he thanked her gravely and planted it where she might see it when she came. The girl herself grew as fast as a weed, her long limbs bent up around her as she squatted to inspect the plants. She seldom spoke, but when he told her their names she nodded, her brow creased and her dark eyes fierce with attention.

Babelon came to the cabin also. He brought money, Spanish
piastres
. One day, he joked, there would be something in Mobile to spend it on. It was years since Auguste had seen money of any kind, and he hid it in a bag in the rafters of his cabin. The beds of his garden grew crowded. The one Alibamon boy who tended the place when he was away became three. Before long, Auguste was obliged to dig out some of the more commonplace among his collection to make room for new arrivals. He took to adding careful sketches to the boxes of plants he sent with Babelon and, as he grew more courageous, suggested notes to Babelon, who scrawled them in the margins.

The merchant was well satisfied. Before long he was sending with Babelon crumpled lists of plants that he wished Auguste to seek out for him. When Babelon spread them out to read them, Auguste recognised the particulars of his friend’s spiky hand and he was glad. It made him feel closer to the unknown trader to know that he too was not a man of learning.

The merchant’s lists were vague and frequently incomprehensible – he asked for ‘the plant with the knife-shaped leaves that bears a crimson flower’ or ‘the low small tree whose white flower resembles a hedge honeysuckle’ – but Auguste was a paleface with a savage’s knowledge of the forest, and he made a fine detective. He had an instinct for the kinds of plants that might delight a Frenchman, however common they might be to Louisiana. As summer melted into autumn, he collected the seeds of the mulberry, the blueberry, the sassafras, of the walnut and the hickory, of the many diverse kinds of Louisiana rose and the lush sweet-shaded flower that the settlers called lion’s mouth, which in summer turned the plains of the Natchez pink. He gathered specimens of the flat-root, the rattlesnake-herb, the poison-arrow creeper, the maidenhair fern, the toothache tree and all the other favourite remedies of the savage medicine man, and had Babelon write out instructions for their manufacture.

His fascination was stronger than his uneasiness, and more persuasive. It entranced him to imagine the seeds of this land breaking open in the French earth, the cuttings he had taken so carefully stretching out their wild green arms towards the French sun. The King of France had a room in his palace made entirely of looking glasses and a garden filled with the plants of the New World. And one day a tulip tree would grow in the marketplace in La Rochelle, and the boys of the town who were now men would marvel at the heavy pink-lipped cups of its blooms and stare out to sea, the limits of their small lives pressed tight around their ribs.

Then winter came. The expeditions stopped and the plants blackened and shrivelled in his garden. Auguste went to Marie-Françoise, the schoolteacher, and asked awkwardly if she might teach him his letters. By spring he could write his name and simple words. By spring he was older and the resolute green in the muddy soil filled him with hope.

The rains were gentler that year. As the months passed and the bag of
piastres
in the roof grew heavier, Auguste was able to laugh a little at his callower, more mistrustful self. When he supped at the Babelon house he took fruits for Elisabeth from his garden, which she set in the palmetto basket in the centre of the table. The rim of the old basket had begun to unravel, slivers of sharp grass sharpening its edges. Elisabeth too was not as she had once been. Time and hardship had sapped her old poise. Instead there was a kind of tightly sprung agitation about her that put Auguste in mind of a hummingbird. Her eyes were never still but darted after her husband, shadowing his slightest shift. She was very thin.

In the winter, when Babelon had travelled to the nearby village of the Bayagoulas to buy corn, she had come to his house. It was late, the darkness chill against the windows. He had opened the door and she had been standing there, her head bowed, and at the sight of her his blood had leaped in his veins and he had taken a step backwards with the force of it, and she had come in.

He had not known what to say. That is, he had wanted to say a thousand things, all of them wrong, but she had spoken first and, rushing out the words as though she had rehearsed them, she had asked him to take her to a savage village so that she might consult with a medicine man. She had heard that there were things that the savages could do for women like her. To help them. Then she had hung her head.

‘Help me,’ she had whispered. ‘I do not know what else to do.’

They had never before been alone together. When he nodded his agreement, she reached out her hand and she touched him very lightly with the tips of her fingers on the back of his hand. Her fingers were icy. Thank you, she said, and she opened the door and, glancing quickly about her to make sure that she was not observed, she left.

The next day, he took money from his pouch in the roof and went to Burelle, who was known to keep a little gunpowder for customers who did not ask for credit. Two days later he walked to the village of the Pasagoulas a small distance from the settlement, where he spoke with the medicine man. When the tincture was ready he took it to Elisabeth, concealed beneath a basket of vegetables.

When he knocked at the door of the house on rue d’Iberville there was no answer. Auguste hesitated and turned away. On the other side of the street, the old wife of Burelle the taverner hailed him from a chair set out in the sun. She had a rug around her shoulders, another over her knees. He nodded at her, the basket held tight against his chest.

‘Leave them with me,’ the old woman rasped. ‘I’ll make sure they get ’em.’

Auguste shook his head, his arms cradling the basket.

‘Thank you but–’

‘You think I can’t be trusted with a few mouldy vegetables?’

Behind Auguste the door scraped open.

‘Madame,’ he said, turning with relief towards Elisabeth. But instead of Elisabeth, it was the slave who stared back at him. Auguste was surprised. He had never before seen her in the house, had only ever observed her as a shadowy presence as she worked in the garden or brought platters of food to the cabin door, the whisper of her feet on the rough planks causing Elisabeth’s back to stiffen.

She was young and very beautiful. When she held out her hands for the basket, he held it tightly against his chest. Across the street old Burelle’s wife strained forward, her wrinkled neck extending from the shell of her blankets.

‘Where is your mistress?’ he asked.

The slave did not answer. Above the tilt of her cheekbones her dark eyes were fixed upon his but he could see no coldness in them, no anger or hidden grief. He could see nothing at all. Then abruptly she turned and, leaving the door open behind her, she walked back into the cottage. He followed her, setting the basket of vegetables on the table. She did not turn. As she walked the roll of her haunches pulled the linen of her dress tight over her buttocks and the braid of her hair swung, revealing two dark bruises on the back of her neck.

On the other side of the room she pushed open the yard door, jerking her head towards the wood store. The flare of pale sun caught in the linen of her dress, sketching the shape of her darkness against its bright whiteness as she walked slowly across the yard towards the cooking hut.

Auguste stared at the wood store. The rickety door stood a little ajar. He hesitated. Then, the old woman craning after him, he hurried away.

It was some days later that Babelon returned from the Bayagoulas. Almost immediately they were summoned by the commandant. There were alarming reports from the Spanish fort at Pensacola. Savages in the area surrounding the fort had been armed by the English, who were determined to force the Spanish to cede the stronghold. For almost a month these savages had posted themselves at the gates of the garrison, holding the soldiers there as virtual prisoners. Those men who had ventured too far from safety were brutally attacked. None had yet been killed, but several were badly wounded. The fort was not sure how long it could survive the siege.