Savage Lands (31 page)

With a concerted effort, Elisabeth leaned down and took a stocking from the basket at her feet. Across the yard the child looked up at her mother. The savage woman nodded. With great deliberation, as though she balanced on a tree branch, the child walked over to Elisabeth.

She eyed the gun.

‘Beg pardon, Madame,’ she said, her hands curled behind her back. Her accent was already better than her mother’s. ‘You like me make study?’

Elisabeth slid her hand inside the stocking, stretching out the foot. The girl’s eyes were almond-shaped, their heavy lids and thick brows giving her a solemn, sleepy look. Her mother rubbed her with bear oil, in the manner of native children, so that she might be protected from the sun, but she was not yet burned brown. Her skin was tawny, like fruit, and on her nose the skin had peeled a little, leaving a faint trace of freckles smeared with dirt.

Elisabeth wanted to take her in her arms, to crush the child’s narrow body against her own. She wanted to bury her face in her neck, to twist her hands in her hair, to kiss her until her lips split with the force of it. Instead she examined the hole in the stocking’s heel. It had been darned several times before. Its edges gaped with stitches like broken teeth.

The girl shifted, glancing behind her towards her mother. Jeanne’s arms rose and fell as she pounded the corn, the muscles twisting like vines beneath the skin. The child hesitated, coiling her hair around her finger and pulling it into her mouth.

‘Madame?’ she tried again.

Elisabeth stared at the hole in the stocking. Then she looked up. Behind the child’s head, the sun tangled in the trees, its sticky light stretched in strings of burned sugar. There was a dimple in the child’s cheek the size of a fingertip. Elisabeth smiled, her lips clumsy, and shook her head. Then she returned her attention to the stocking.

‘Not today,’ she said, and she spread her fingers inside the stocking until the hole gaped. Still the child did not go. Her toe traced a circle in the dust.

‘I like study with you,’ the child said.

‘Tomorrow perhaps. If there is time.’

Elisabeth could feel it starting, the tightness that closed around her like an iron bodice, the nausea, the fierce urgency for which she could find no object.

‘But my mama said–’

‘I said no, didn’t I?’ she snapped, and halfway through its circle the child’s toe stopped. Elisabeth hunched her shoulders, her gaze fixed upon the stocking. He was buried in the wretched stretch of swamp that Bienville had chosen for his new capital, though there had been no town then. At her insistence they had taken her to what passed for the grave. Perrine Roussel, who had immediately appointed herself Elisabeth’s guardian, protested that it was foolish, dangerous, that she was not yet strong enough to leave Perrine’s cabin, but she had to do something. It took three days to reach the place. The ground was sodden, slippery with mud that clung like lead to the hem of her skirt. Parts of the ground had been cleared and pale tangles of roots reached like fingers from the churned earth. She did not remember anything else except that they had half carried her to the pirogue. They told her afterwards that, as she struggled, she had cried out to him by name, beseeching him to help her.

‘It would have satisfied him, no?’ Perrine had reflected later. ‘That it was to him that you turned for protection, even in death.’

‘On the contrary, it would have angered him,’ Elisabeth had replied, and her eyes had shone hard and bright. ‘He always wished me more self-reliant.’

That night, when Perrine was asleep, she had opened her box. It had been Perrine who had insisted upon her sorting those possessions of his that she no longer needed so that they might be sold. Clothes remained in short supply, and even a much-mended pair of stockings might fetch six
livres
. When, after two days in the rue d’Iberville, she had contrived to fill only a small box with belongings of her own she wished to keep, Perrine had grown impatient and taken over the task herself.

Very slowly Elisabeth had lifted her everyday apron from the box. One by one she set the items out on the floor. His laced hat. His linen shirt with the frayed cuffs. His broadcloth coat. His good shoes, scabbed around their wooden heels with mud. All except the lace dress. She covered that with the apron and pushed the box away. Its corners left chalky scratches on the plank floor.

In Perrine’s house the clothes looked real. The hat was stained and the leather of the boots worn, their outside edges humped by the bulge of his feet. His feet had been small but broad, his toes tufted with hair. Once a month she had pared his toenails, his feet set between her thighs. Elisabeth touched one boot very lightly with the tip of her finger. She would clean them and oil the leather to preserve it. Perrine might sell whatever else she could, for Heaven knew Elisabeth needed the money, but she could not sell his boots. Good boots were impossible to find in Louisiana.

When he came back he would need his boots.

‘Madame? Are you well?’

The child’s hand was light upon her sleeve. Dazedly, Elisabeth looked up. The girl’s face was close to hers. She was frowning, her brows drawn together, her mouth, her impossible mouth–

He had never been hers. The fire in her had burned for him alone, a fierce and private flame lighting a single page, a single face. But the fire in him was like the fire that had consumed Old Mobile. There was no holding it. It leaped from one cabin to the next, hardly troubling to finish with one before starting on its fellow, and hurling itself against the sky as though it would out-blaze the stars themselves. By the time the Mobile fire was finally put out, eleven cabins had been destroyed.

Elisabeth closed her eyes and in the grainy red darkness his empty boots stood set together, side by side.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone.’

The child hesitated. Elisabeth snapped open her eyes.

‘Go away!’ she cried, and the child’s eyes opened round, and she held herself tightly with her thin arms and walked away.

Elisabeth peeled the stocking from her hand. Then, very carefully, she stood and walked into the cabin. Her entire body, her clothes, her hair, were ablaze with despair, her skin so scalded and blistered with it that the slightest touch would have been insufferable.

On the other side of the yard, the girl glared at her mother.

‘You should not have sent me,’ she said in her own language. ‘She was angry.’

Jeanne laid down her paddle.

‘Oh, little one,’ she said, smoothing her daughter’s forehead with her thumb. ‘The master shall be home soon. We must have supper ready.’

The child gazed up at her mother.

‘Why is the Madame always angry at me?’

‘She is angry with us all and with herself too.’

‘But why?’

‘It helps her forget her sadness.’

‘But she has another husband now. Surely she is not sad any more?’

‘But of course she is sad, little bear cub. Their tribe is not like ours. Even the most honoured of white men must go alone into the country of their spirits and leave those who would care for him behind. The Madame grieves for his loneliness.’

‘Was the Monsieur honoured?’

‘No. But he was loved.’

‘The he shall not be lonely for long.’

Jeanne smiled, her mouth twisting a little at the corner, and pressed her lips to her daughter’s head.

‘You see things clearly, child. It is the Madame who needs our comfort now.’

It was almost dusk when Artur Fuerst returned to the settlement. The men were tired and hungry, the mosquitoes already gathering in black clouds against the darkening sky, and they ate the meal that Jeanne had left for them rapidly and in silence, their forks sounding in dull knocks against the rough wooden plates.

In their own enclosure, despite the warmth of the evening, the Negroes squatted beside the fire that with its sour palmetto smoke did something to discourage the insects. They too ate greedily, each dipping into the big tin kettle with his own wooden spoon, scooping up the thick mess of peas and broken biscuits. When they had granted the nobleman his land, the Company had promised him three hundred Negroes to work it. So far Fuerst had received fourteen. The French surgeon who had examined them upon arrival had pronounced them all severely weakened by the privations of their passage. One of them, on account of a sickness he had succumbed to on the ship, was as good as blind. The balls of his eyes had a swirled look, like broken eggs. Fuerst despatched him daily to the bayou, to catch fish. There was little else that could be done with him.

The fire crackled and burst, sending flowers of sparks into the darkening sky. Summoning the Negro he had chosen as leader, Fuerst issued his orders for the following day, taking care to raise his voice so that the whole band might clearly hear him and not lose time in the morning coming to enquire about their duties. In the firelight their faces wore expressions at once assiduous and vacant, and their skin gleamed black-gold, their eyes ringed with yellow. Above the scent of the burning palmetto, he could smell the slaves’ animal odour. It made him afraid.

When he had locked the Negro enclosure, Fuerst hurried up the bluff, calling out goodnight to the men as he passed their cabins. He was weary. The raiding parties of the savages were taking their toll. It was not just a matter of the lost livestock, though that was bad enough. Slowed by the heat, the men were further hampered by the need to hold themselves with weapon in hand. They were falling behind.

He did not like it that the men went armed. The Rhinelanders were good workers and not given to complaining, but they were restive. He could not blame them. Back in the Rhineland, when the agents of the newly formed Mississippi Company had spoken to them so eloquently of the promise of the New World, each man had agreed to be bound to the Company for three years in exchange for a monthly stipend and, when the three years were up, the endowment of thirty
arpents
of his own land. It had seemed a straightforward enough agreement. The previous year the French Crown had granted the Mississippi Company a monopoly on all trade between France and its Eden of a colony for twenty-five years, the sole right to mine and farm the land. All that was wanting was industrious people: men to work the land and to share in its spoils. The Rhinelanders had come eagerly, impatient for this promised land of plenty where savages prostrated themselves before the white man, where deer offered themselves up for meat and settlers paid no taxes and the Company handed out not only rich and fertile land but also the seeds for its cultivation.

Now they knew better. For months the men’s stipend had gone unpaid. Trade between settlers had been outlawed and all commerce restricted to the Company’s stores, at the Company’s exorbitant prices. Nobody could leave the colony without the Company’s express permission. Fuerst had heard the men talk. They declared themselves little better than slaves, dragged from Europe as the Negroes were dragged from Africa, to serve a cruel and pitiless master. They meant the Company. But Fuerst was no longer certain that his authority outweighed their discontent.

He pushed open the cabin door, shouldering its reluctant canvas hinges. Elisabeth sat at the table, a single tallow candle alight before her. She did not look up as he entered. She stared at the wall, away from him, her chin upon her elbows. The smoky flame painted shadows beneath her eyes.

Fuerst said nothing. Instead he sat on the low stool to pull off his boots and set them neatly in their place by the door. Then, pulling off his grimy shirt and hanging it upon its wooden peg, he crossed the room to wash. His body was thickset but not fat, compact bulges of power moving beneath his freckled skin. His face was burned by the sun, his wrists and hands too, red-brown gloves upon his pale bite-spotted arms. He leaned down, plunging his face into the earthenware dish of water left ready for him. Splashes of water gleamed on the dirt floor as he shook his head and rubbed his face and neck briskly with the coarse cloth. When he was finished, he spread it carefully out over the dish to dry. Then he took the clean shirt from the back of his chair and slipped it over his head.

‘A man came,’ he said. ‘From the de Catillon concession upriver. We may use their bull for stud.’

Elisabeth blinked at her husband, as though woken from sleep. She said nothing. Then she rose and, crossing to the plank table that served as a sideboard, she brought back several dishes, each covered with a cloth. She brought plates and spoons and cups, two of each. When she had set them on the table, she took the cloths from the dishes and folded them into neat squares before spooning the food onto her husband’s plate.

They ate in silence, Fuerst forking up neat, swift mouthfuls that he chewed with his mouth fastidiously closed. Elisabeth opened her mouth and set her fork inside it. She swallowed. The food caught in her throat. She swallowed again, harder. The nausea rolled through her. Then she dipped her fork once more into her food and raised it to her lips. She looked down at her plate. Food was scarce and others were not so fortunate. She seemed to have been eating for hours. The lumps of food had the air of the French words she practised with the girl, repeated so many times that they ceased to make sense. The thought of placing them in her mouth revolted her.

Fuerst swallowed his last mouthful and set his knife and fork together neatly upon his plate. Yawning, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his clay pipe.

‘That wasn’t half bad,’ he observed, as he always did, damping down the tobacco with his thumb.

Defeated, Elisabeth pushed away her plate, dropping her hands into her lap. In the thickening dusk, her upturned palms loomed pale, someone else’s hands. The ring on her left hand hung loose on her finger. He had brought it with him from the Rhineland. It had belonged to his mother. He had given Elisabeth her Bible too, with his mother’s name in careful ink on the flyleaf.