Savage Lands (33 page)

The commissary slammed his hands down hard against the desk. Auguste observed the flush in his neck, the reddening of his large ears, and something loosened a little in his spine.

‘With respect, sir, the governor’s enemies here have sought repeatedly to slander the commandant with accusations of this kind. None has ever been proven.’

‘Not yet.’

‘There is no man in Louisiana who is more dedicated to the colony’s prosperity.’

‘There is no man in Louisiana who has done more to promote his own.’

Auguste was silent as the commissary picked up the sheaf of papers in front of him. He shuffled through them, extracting a sheet of onion-skin scrawled on in faded ink.

‘But I think you may be able to help me with that,’ the commissary said, and he struck the sheet of onion-skin with the back of his hand. ‘What, for example, do you know about an ensign by the name of Babelon?’

Auguste did not blink but set all his attention upon expressionlessness.

‘Babelon, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jean-Claude Babelon was a Canadian from Quebec, one of the first settlers here, I think. But he has been dead some years.’

‘I hear that he traded on the governor’s account. That you assisted him.’

Auguste shook his head.

‘No, sir. We traded with the savages in exchange for food. Without such trade, the people of Mobile would have starved.’

‘And what of the goods you took from the storehouses, the goods intended for the colonists?’

‘We have always been required to secure the friendship of the savages with presents, sir. Without those alliances we would not have contrived to hold the colony for one month, far less nearly twenty years.’

The commissary regarded Auguste. Then he looked back at the papers he held up in front of him.

‘This Babelon. He came to an unfortunate end, did he not?’

The commissary peered over the papers, his eyes narrowed. Auguste kept his gaze steady, but his neck prickled and the breath in his chest was as heavy as water. From where he stood, it was not possible to see the page that the commissary held in front of him, but in his mind Auguste saw it precisely: the crushed onion-skin browned with age, the ragged edge where it had been torn from the notebook, the words scrawled in his own clumsy hand.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘He was killed by savages.’

‘And what cause did they have to kill him?’

‘It was rumoured that they were perhaps encouraged by the English, though there was no proof of that. They robbed him. That may have been enough.’

‘You yourself were satisfied with that explanation, were you?’

‘During my time here, the savages of Louisiana have killed many white men. They have seldom troubled to explain themselves.’

The commissary pursed his lips. Then he looked down again at the papers in front of him. Auguste breathed carefully, inhaling the reek of rotting sweet potatoes.

‘When the death of Ensign Babelon was reported to the garrison, what was the response of Sieur de Bienville?’ the commissary asked.

‘He sent a raiding party to the Chickasaw to avenge him.’

‘Did he? And was any attempt made to discover which of the savages was in fact responsible for the ensign’s untimely demise?’

‘It seemed that one of them had boasted about Babelon to his fellows. When our soldiers reached the village, they killed him and several other warriors with him and brought several more savages to Mobile as prisoners.’

‘A bloody reprisal.’

‘The nation of the Chickasaw has ten times our strength. The commandant desired them to know the severity of their offence.’

The commissary pursed his lips, tapping at his papers with his fingers. Auguste thought of the savage warrior, set upon by three French soldiers, his head and all the recollection in it bludgeoned to pulp with a rock. With his death no proof remained, no trace of what had been, but for a letter on onion-skin paper torn from a notebook written in a man’s awkward hand.

Several minutes later, Auguste was dismissed. He walked slowly from the room, closing the door behind him. Whatever it was that the commissary had held in his stack of papers, it was surely not his letter to Elisabeth. Which meant that he had nothing. He could prove nothing. Or not yet.

That night he soothed himself with brandy, but still Auguste slept poorly, plagued by restless dreams whose images eluded him. Before dawn he rose. Uneasiness greased his stomach. Outside in the dying night, the air was almost cool, the black trees huddled together like cattle. Auguste drank more brandy and watched as the new day stretched and spread, insinuating itself among the trees, but still he could not blur them, the words on the onion-skin paper in his own unpractised hand.

T
he child inched away, her eyes upon a lizard of poisonous green. Elisabeth looked up. For a moment the lizard was no more than an inked outline on the page of a notebook hatched with shading and labelled in Auguste’s careful letters. She squeezed her eyes shut. There were days when, without warning, a part of her would sheer away, dropping like a stone into the past, and she had to stretch out over the chasm of herself to haul it back. Clasping tight to her elbows, she cleared her throat. The child’s slate lay abandoned on the dusty ground.

‘
Petchi
,’ she bid the girl, resorting to the child’s native language. ‘Sit down.’

The child hesitated and, reaching out her hand, tried to snatch up the lizard. With a flash of its green tail, it was gone. The girl stuck out her tongue.

‘
Le lézard vert vif
,’ Elisabeth said crisply, laying the stress on the article. ‘
La fille très désobéissante
.’

‘No disobedient,’ protested the girl in French. ‘The lizard–’ She hesitated, frowning. ‘The
bright green
lizard. He wished in the lesson.’

‘He wished
to be
in the lesson.’

‘There! You saw it also.’

The child was sharp as an arrow. Elisabeth’s head hummed. She tightened the grip upon her elbows.

‘Enough!
Caheuch
. Come here now.’

The child regarded Elisabeth with her dark eyes. There was neither insolence in her expression nor the slightest deference. Elisabeth held her gaze as the heat massed beneath her skin. The eyes were the girl’s own, but the mouth, the narrow fullness of it, the way the lip curved upward at the top so that it appeared to be outlined with a circle of paler flesh, the mouth was an anguish. The child puffed out her lips consideringly. Elisabeth did not blink. Then, without rising from her haunches, the child shuffled back to sit at Elisabeth’s feet and took up the abandoned slate.

She had been baptised at the same time as her mother, and given the name of Marguerite. Once, during a lesson, the child had asked Elisabeth what the meaning of her name was.

‘Pearl,’ Elisabeth had said. ‘It means pearl.’

‘What is pearl?’

‘It is a white jewel. In France rich ladies make necklaces of them and sew them to their dresses.’

‘Like a bead?’

‘Like a very precious bead.’

Elisabeth had thought she would be pleased. But the child had only frowned and pursed her unbearable mouth.

‘A bead is not a very interesting thing,’ she had said.

The clay pencil dangled on its leather thong as Marguerite licked her finger, drawing shiny black circles on the tablet’s dusty face. Elisabeth straightened a little. Her hands were clamped so tightly about her elbows that her knuckles ached. Slowly she brought them into her lap, cradling one inside the other. When they had first come to this place, the men had been obliged to travel abroad for days at a time, hunting meat and gathering wild indigo for cultivation. When the rains came, Jeanne had brought the child into the main cabin so that they could watch her while they worked. The child had stared up into the spidery roof and smiled her father’s secret smile. She had hardly ever cried.

‘A spelling test.’

Immediately Marguerite grew attentive, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth.

‘
L’homme
,’ said Elisabeth. ‘
La femme. Le garçon
.’

She waited, watching Marguerite’s bent head as she carefully formed the words.

‘
La fille
. Not so hard. You will break the pencil. Next.
Le fils
.’

Marguerite wrote, frowning with concentration. Then with her head on one side, she studied what she had written.

‘Please, Madame, excuse for asking but how can there be son without saying father?’

Elisabeth hesitated.

‘In my language, there is no such word,’ the child added.

‘And in French there is. Spell it.’

Obediently the child wrote. Elisabeth watched her, her stiff fingers laced tightly in her lap.
Le fils. F-I-L-S
. But it came all the same, the memory of Rochon on the porch of the house at rue d’Iberville on the day he left for the Chickasaw. He had told her then that in various of the Indian tongues there was no word for son but only for son-of-someone. The curiosity was that since the Indians traced their descent through the maternal line, someone was never the child’s natural father but rather his uncle, the eldest brother of his mother. While he might show indulgence towards his children, and his people would always be welcomed by the child’s tribe, a father wielded no authority. He had looked at her then, in that grave way he had that always seemed on the verge of laughter, and it had taken all her strength to bid him goodbye. He had walked away without turning. The seat of his worn-out coat had been rubbed to a darker sheen.

The child curved the
S
with a flourish and held out the slate, admiring her work.

‘So please, what is the word for the daughter-without-father?’

‘Just the same?’ The child looked disappointed. ‘But why?’

When she pouted, her brows twisted and her bottom lip protruded in a bow. The sight of it made Elisabeth light-headed. She frowned, looking away.

‘No more questions. Next.
L’infant
. Write it.
L’infant
.’

It was no good allowing oneself to remember things, Elisabeth knew that. Memories were like slaves. They had an instinct for weakness. You showed one a little latitude, permitted it some small privilege or attention, and before you knew it they were all there, hands outstretched and noses pressed against the palisades, half wild with the need for it.

At the plantation, Fuerst insisted upon locking the Negroes in their enclosure at night. He considered it vital for their safety. The Negroes of Guinea, raised from infancy to believe that the white man purchased them for no other purpose but to drink their blood, distrusted their master as a frog distrusts a snake, in the meat of its bones. He was a fair master, all the same. He believed that, like horses, slaves would only be ruined by violent and continual labours and should instead be set to work moderately and with adequate rest and nourishment. He gave them clothes and blankets and something on which to sleep, for he knew that it was a simple matter for men who want for every necessity to turn to thievery. He praised them when they worked well and whipped them only when they deserved it, and when the beating was done, he had the sore parts washed with a salve of vinegar mixed with salt and a pinch of gunpowder.

Fuerst treated his Negroes well, and they worked hard for him and did not make trouble. Yet he was careful to mistrust them as they mistrusted him and more careful still to conceal from them his dread of them, for he knew there was nothing so dangerous as an enemy who smelled your fear. He tried to conceal it from Elisabeth too. He wished to protect her. He did not see that she had learned the lesson long ago.

Meanwhile their neighbours the Chetimachas had grown bolder. The savage war parties no longer troubled to wait until nightfall. They carried English guns. Elisabeth knew she should be afraid. On plantations upriver cattle had been killed and taken, their bodies dragged away into the forest. On one occasion two of Fuerst’s men had spotted a band of savages in a canebrake only a few hundred feet from where they stood, and several blasts had been fired before the red men had been forced to retreat.

Fuerst was thankful that the Rhinelanders had proved poor shots, for savages were pitiless in revenge, but he knew also that matters could not continue as they were. If he could ill afford to lose his precious cows, he was in no position to lose any of his men.

‘I have no choice but to appeal to the commandant,’ he told Elisabeth that night. ‘He must make peace with those damned Chetimachas or we shall never be free of danger.’

She said nothing but placed her hand over the scorch mark on the table.

‘Do not be alarmed,’ he said, and he sucked on his pipe till the bowl gleamed red. ‘You are safe here. The savages are ferocious but they are cowardly. They would not come so close.’

She pressed down hard on her hand, spreading her fingers wide.

‘No one is ever safe,’ she said.

Fuerst hesitated. Then he leaned back against the wall and studied his pipe. The clay was stained dark around the rim of the bowl, and the stem bore the ghost prints of his lips.

‘I cannot go,’ he said at last. ‘Not now. Even if he is at New Orleans, there is too much to be done. And I shall not leave you here alone. A letter, that’s the thing. The river is busy this time of year, a trader will take it. Quick now, fetch me paper and ink.’

What little ink there was had all but dried in the bottle, and Elisabeth was required to add a few drops of water to get it to flow. In its damp box the paper had grown brown around the edges and, together with the ghostly pallor of the diluted ink, it gave the letter the air of something written long ago.