Savage Lands (40 page)

For a moment Auguste stood there, his breath coming in jagged rips, his fists still raised. Then, dropping his hands, he turned and strode away into the forest.

I
t was not possible to be a married woman in Mobile and to avoid company. Mr Law might have convinced the Paris newspapers that the port of Louisiana was a small city with more than two thousand residents, but the truth was that for more than a dozen years, it had numbered fewer than two hundred souls, even when the garrison was included in its count, and though it was grown five times as large, it could not shake the habits of familiarity. The people of Mobile were city folk, tradesmen and clerks and taverners. Inquisitiveness, which they called neighbourliness, was in their blood.

Once married and the mistress of her own house, Vincente le Vannes found herself taken up by what passed in Louisiana for the respectable women of the town. Just as Louisiana was nothing like Paris, nor were these coarse women with their rough hands and rougher humour like anyone Vincente had ever known. They were ignorant, shabby and shockingly godless. None knew so much as ten words from the Bible. But though she recoiled from them, she recoiled more from the prospect of isolation.

Vincente had never liked to be alone. The company of others was a looking glass she held up to her face, less for vanity than for reassurance. If they could see her, then she must be there. She was startled always by the solidity of others, their loud voices, their heavy footfalls, their strong smells. Even the nuns in their silent robes exhibited a containment and a certainty she could not imitate, for all her pains. Denied the proof of her reflection, she was filled with a dread that she had already begun to disappear.

The women of Mobile made poor looking glasses, but they were better than no glass at all. They spoke French and knew her troubles. She was consoled by their undisguised interest in her and by their blunt acknowledgement of her despondency. They had all of them despaired at the place, they told her, when first they came. She would grow accustomed to it as she would grow accustomed to marriage. It was a matter of arranging things to one’s advantage.

The wives were as eager to teach as Vincente was to learn. Under their tutelage, Vincente learned which of the families of the town were decent and upright, where she might find the least disreputable of the savage traders, and how to treat her linens so that they would not immediately mould. She learned that the taverner Burelle might always be depended upon to find a little white flour when the Company stores were empty and that while she might exchange nods with the Taensa woman who was the mother of the children of the merchant Charly, the Alabama wife of the carpenter should never be acknowledged. She learned that since the transportation of whores and felons from France, the town was no longer what it had been, obliging the rigorous observation of propriety.

‘You must attend Mass at least one Sunday in the month,’ Gabrielle Borret instructed her. ‘It sets an example to those
debauchées
who do not know a church from a lump of cheese.’

In Paris, Vincente thought, she would have assailed a speech of such impiety with every psalm and proverb in the Bible. Now she only nodded, her eyes sliding sideways to confirm that Perrine Roussel and the others did not mock her. It caused her ears to burn still, the recollection of the morning when, horror-struck by the depravities of a
curé
insensible to vice, she had begged the assistance of the wives in defeating the vast and terrible empire of the Devil in the New World. The women had not sighed gravely and clasped her hands, as she had hoped they would, nor had they been roused to righteous anger. Instead they had looked at each other, sucking in their cheeks as though the screws in their jaws had been tightened a half-turn. Then they had burst out laughing. The shame of it had caused her to flee.

Later that day Renée Gilbert had come to see her.

‘You are possessed of a dry wit, Madame,’ the older woman said quietly. ‘But we would prefer if you would desist from such humour. Life in Mobile is hard enough without the bony fingers of saints poking us in the ribs, even in jest.’

For two days Vincente had remained at home. She read her Bible. She knelt on the floor, her hands folded, and said her prayers. The splintery floor caught in the stuff of her skirt, tearing holes. She thought of the coarse rag rug she had insisted upon for her attic bedroom at the Place Royale and of the silk carpet with its delicate patterns that was too big for her mother’s parlour. On the third day, she rose and washed her face and went to join the women at the market.

She did not know how she would have managed without the instruction of the women. They showed her how to make candlewicks from twisted milkweed silk, brushes and brooms from corn husks and tough-stemmed weeds, soft soap from a mixture of lye and buffalo grease. They taught her that a paste made from the pith of the sassafras wood worked wonders for redness and swelling of the eyes, and that inhaling the smoke from the burning leaves of jimson weed eased congestion in the chest. They instructed her in the best ways to prevent meat and slaves from spoiling. From them she learned that goods that were scarce or wanting might always be acquired for a price, and that the women of Mobile might endure upon a diet of cracked corn, but they would do whatever was necessary to acquire new sleeves or a collar from France when the ships came into port.

Her own trousseau was stroked and sighed over, the lace-trimmed silk streaming like foamy water through the women’s fingers. Vincente, who in Paris had clamped her jaw and jutted her hips and refused to utter a word even as the dressmaker stuck her with pins, no longer despised the dresses so ardently. Sometimes, alone at night, she unfolded the mantuas and the chemises and the petticoats and the cloaks from the chest and laid them out upon the bed, their skirts spread and their sleeves outstretched. The heavy silks were lustrous and cool to the touch, and the approving murmurs of the women drifted from their folds, easing the knot in her belly.

She had been married almost a month before she ventured with Germaine Vessaille to see the widow Freval, who let out the seams to their limits. Germaine, whose husband Jacques le Brun was a gunsmith, had a sweet smile and the harried abstraction of a mother overburdened with infants. Some days later, Vincente visited her at her own cabin and, amid the sticky-handed clamour, asked hesitantly if she would accept a lace
fichu
for which Vincente could find no use. Germaine said nothing but only gasped and pressed her hands over her mouth while a chap-mouthed child tugged unheeded at her threadbare skirts. The pleasure of it pinked Vincente’s cheeks.

It was Anne Negrette, wife of the Canadian they called Le Grand, who was first to quiz Vincente about her husband. The hour was early and the women gathered before the baker’s ramshackle shop, waiting for him to raise his shutter.

‘So, tell us,’ Anne said, nudging Vincente with her basket. ‘What is he like?’

Vincente flushed, startled at the impropriety of the question.

‘Why,’ she stumbled, ‘he is a decent enough man, I am sure.’

‘Decent? Come, Madame, you shall not satisfy us that way, shall she, ladies?’

‘I – I am sure you know him better than I,’ she said, unsettled by the women’s laughter. ‘We have spent hardly seven days together.’

‘And seven nights also!’ Yvonne Lereg interjected.

The laughter grew louder.

‘I should grant you the advantage, all the same,’ Vincente muttered.

‘We hardly merit it,’ said Gabrielle Borret. ‘He is never here. His affairs are all with the savages.’

‘Peculiar, isn’t it? You’d think he’d want nothing to do with those brutes after what they did to him.’

‘If I were him, I would not have been able to look them in the eye.’

‘He did a great deal more than look,’ Yvonne Lereg said with a giggle. ‘Remember that slave of his?’

There was an awkward silence.

‘What?’ Yvonne protested. ‘It is hardly a secret. The child’s parentage is there in the parish register for anyone to see!’

Perrine Roussel cleared her throat.

‘Still, your husband was lucky,’ she said. ‘If the missioner had not arrived, those devils would surely have killed him.’

‘And he still has his arm.’

‘Thank the Lord. You remember it was Le Grand they asked to cut it off, when they thought it could not be saved?’ Anne Negrette smiled at Vincente. ‘If your husband was lucky, so was mine. He always said that he would have needed more
eau-de-vie
than Guichard, just to go through with it.’

Gratefully, Vincente smiled back.

‘Those were terrible times,’ Gabrielle Borret agreed with a shudder. ‘Nothing to eat. The savages running wild. Everyone afraid they would be murdered in their beds.’

‘So many bad memories,’ Perrine Roussel agreed. ‘The sight of Elisabeth holding up that dead infant still haunts me, even now.’

‘No one could accuse Elisabeth Savaret of a want of grief,’ Anne Negrette added, and the two women exchanged a look. ‘She was a fool for that man, a perfect fool.’

‘She was a fine midwife,’ Anne Conaud protested.

‘She was a lunatic,’ Yvonne burst out, unable to support her sulk a second longer. ‘And not just because of you-know-what. Imagine marrying a virtual labourer without a
sou
to his name.’

‘Perhaps it was another of her great unions of love,’ Anne Negrette said drily.

‘It is Vincente who shall tell us, now that she is as good as her mistress.’

‘Well, so she is! Now, Vincente, I would counsel you to manage her most sternly. Pride and vanity make miserable helpmeets.’

‘Oh, yes, beat her often, do!’ Yvonne laughed, butting Vincente playfully with her basket.

‘Poor Vincente hasn’t the first notion what it is we are talking about!’

‘Elisabeth Savaret came over with Perrine on the
Pélican
,’ Gabrielle Borret explained.

‘And was trouble from the very first. It was Elisabeth whose first husband was murdered in mysterious circumstances.’

‘Anne Negrette, you are a scurrilous gossipmonger!’

‘She tried to murder herself in a surfeit of grief.’

‘She failed, of course. The child in her womb was not so fortunate.’

‘In France she would have been tried, imprisoned. Here she goes free!’

‘And now she is married to the foreman of your plantation. I wonder what you shall make of her?’

‘I fear no one in town was ever much fond of her.’

‘The Jesuit Rochon was kind to her,’ Anne Conaud protested. ‘And Perrine here could not have done more.’

‘She certainly had her admirers,’ Yvonne giggled. ‘Guichard used to trail after her like a lovestruck puppy dog!’

The silence that followed was broken only by the bang of a fist against a jammed shutter.

‘At long last,’ Perrine Roussel announced brightly. ‘Ladies, form an orderly queue, if you will. The bakery is open.’

A
fter the Jesuit had gone, heat clogged the slow days, thickening the air to mud. Fuerst was gone at dawn and did not return until the first stars pierced holes in the indigo sky. When branches snapped or the shadows shifted in the trees, Elisabeth’s heart leaped. But still no one came. In their enclosure the cows hung their heads in the scanty solace of the shade, their sides moving in and out like bellows. She kept a full pitcher of water in the cabin, for messengers.

It was not until after the full moon that a savage came from the village on the other side of the forest. His face was expressionless as he crossed the yard. Elisabeth watched as he gained upon her, and she pressed herself back against the rough wall of the cabin.

‘I bring word,’ he said unsmilingly in halting Mobilian.

‘The child,’ she said, and her mouth hurt with the shape of it.

‘Yes.’

Elisabeth bowed her head. She wanted to cover her ears, to reach up into the sluggish sky and rip out the burning sun by its roots, hurling it back towards morning.

‘Bad spirits gone.’

Elisabeth exhaled so suddenly it was almost a laugh. Awkwardly, the savage mimed his message. The child was still weak, her improvement slow. She could not yet leave the village. But the fever had broken. The spirits of death had been thwarted.

Elisabeth tipped back her head and the thankfulness in her was hot as the sun.

‘Praise God,’ she whispered. When she fetched the savage messenger water and something to eat, her hand shook, splashing water on the beaten earth floor.

Inside her belly the child kicked.

‘Hush now,’ she murmured, pressing her hand flat upon the curve of her belly. ‘I have not forgotten you.’

In the yard the savage squatted patiently in the shade. Elisabeth picked up the cup and then set it down again, looking about her. Aside from the table with its two benches and the chest set behind the door, the cabin was almost bare. There was no ornament, no rug on the floor nor plaited basket upon the table, not even a pretty curtain at the window. Nothing that might catch or snag on a splinter of memory. Nothing to hold fast to, when things were unsteady.

On the wall behind the door, there was a single plank shelf. Elisabeth reached behind the old black-bellied kettle and a battered corn-husk brush and took down Marguerite’s slate. The pencil dangled on its leather thong, its tip worn blunt. Upon it in the child’s laborious rounded hand was written

The words were pale against the powdery ground. Elisabeth clasped the slate with both hands and thought of the tip of Marguerite’s tongue pink between her teeth as she shaped the unfamiliar letters, the knobs of her spine pushing up against the nape of her bent neck.

The fever had broken. Marguerite would live.

‘Prepare yourself, Elisabeth. Do you truly believe his wife will permit them to stay?’