Savage Lands (9 page)

Raising his head, he parted her lips with his tongue and kissed her. She closed her eyes, melting against the warmth of him. When the kiss was over, he raised himself on his elbow to look at her, one hand upon her belly. She smiled up at him dazedly, memorising all over again the flecks of gold in his grey-green eyes. He touched his mouth lightly to her forehead. Then, abruptly, he sat and swung his legs round to the side of the bed. The air was chill against her bare skin as he reached for his breeches, the first smoky breath of winter visible as he sighed and stood.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘Now? But you are only just come home.’

He shrugged, his back to her as he pulled his shirt over his head.

‘I have business at the tavern.’

‘Tonight?’ She tried to laugh. ‘They shall surely not expect you tonight?’

‘On the contrary, I was supposed to have gone there directly. Now where are my boots?’ Still fumbling with the buttons of his breeches, he leaned over to kiss her briefly on the mouth. ‘Do not wait supper for me. I shall eat there.’

‘But I have meat for you. And whortleberries.’

‘They’ll keep.’

‘Don’t go,’ she pleaded, no longer troubling to conceal her dismay, and she reached up to caress his neck. She felt the twitch of his muscles beneath her fingers as he leaned past her to retrieve his discarded neckcloth. ‘Please. Not tonight.’

‘Come now,’ he said, with a wry smile, pulling away from her embrace as he straightened up to arrange the cloth around his neck. ‘For weeks you have been spared the affliction of a stinking husband clogging up the place. You expect me to believe you are not a little bit glum that I am come home?’

Her eyes flew open.

‘How can you be so cruel? I have done nothing but long for your return. Without you I am – I am nothing.’

His fingers stilled. He looked at her and his smile contracted to a twist that caused her skin to shrivel.

‘I am going to the tavern, Elisabeth,’ he said coldly. ‘Not New France.’

‘I – forgive me.’ She attempted a smile. ‘I have spent too much time with the other wives. I have learned to be a scold.’

Jean-Claude shook his head at her, rolling his eyes. Her heart unclenched.

‘Then unlearn it forthwith or, God help me, I shall go back up the St Louis this very night and take refuge with the savages.’ He laughed softly through his nose, touching his lips to her forehead. ‘Believe me, a man can suffer no greater misery than a shrewish wife.’

T
he first days of November blew in on a flurry of wind and spitting rain. Elisabeth was entirely happy. In the winter the upper reaches of the river froze and the men no longer made their long expeditions north. The winter months were devoted instead to repairs around the settlement, to planning and preparing, to waiting for spring. The cabin was full of him, the scatter of his discarded coat and boots, the greasy smears of breakfast on an abandoned wooden plate, the dent of his head in the moss pillow on their disordered bed. It astounded her, the delight she took in caring for him.

It was not just Elisabeth who was grateful for winter. The brisker air lifted spirits dulled by months of stifling heat and humidity and brought an end at last to the cursed mosquitoes. The warehouses were adequately stocked and the forest a fine source of firewood. It was generally agreed among the settlers that a little French weather was by no means unwelcome.

Their sanguinity was short-lived. That winter, the winter that heralded the year of 1709, was the bleakest anyone could remember. Elisabeth’s crowded shelves grew empty. The supplies in the warehouses dwindled. By February they had run out. The commandant despatched an emergency expedition to nearby savage villages but the savages had little to spare and the men returned with less than a quarter of the anticipated rations.

There was hardly any meat. Rabbits were scarce, deer scarcer. The men shot scrawny squirrels and scoured the shreds of flesh from the bones with their teeth, while the women foraged in the swamps and forests around the town for acorns and edible roots. The garrison was sealed and the unmarried soldiers once more billeted upon the natives. Only the taverner Burelle scraped up an income of sorts. The maize beer brewed by the savages was neither as strong nor as flavoursome as French wine, but it served at least to blunt the rodent gnaw of hunger. In Burelle’s modest dwelling, the oak chest by the fireplace was crammed with darned stockings and lengths of faded silk ribbon.

In so small a settlement it was hard to keep secrets. Hunger soured the breath and sharpened eyes and tongues. Marie-Françoise de Boisrenaud accused Renée Gilbert of entering her storehouse on the pretence of returning a dish and stealing a handful of chestnuts. Perrine Roussel came close to blows with the wife of the ferret-faced carpenter over the just apportionment of a small crop of the tasteless mushrooms that grew among the roots of the walnut tree at the edge of the forest. Jean-Claude had Elisabeth salt the meat he brought to her when it was dark and store it in a barrel he had concealed behind the woodpiles in the outhouse.

‘How on earth did you manage it?’ she asked him the first time, her eyes round as he unwrapped the bloody haunch of venison from his pack. ‘I thought there were no deer.’

‘There are always deer for the hunter who knows in which direction to point his musket.’

‘But so much of it! What about the others?’

‘If the others lack meat, then they must devise their own ways of getting it. The wise man makes sure to hunt alone. Tonight it is just you and me and a feast fit for a king. What else could possibly matter?’

She touched her fingers to the meat, thinking of the wives and their hungry eyes, their snatching fingers. Let
their
husbands bring them meat, she told herself, if they care enough to do so, and she took his face in her hands and kissed him. He tasted of tobacco and the medicinal sting of
eau-de-vie
.

‘Meat,’ she murmured. ‘You work miracles.’

She was frugal with the meat and it lasted a good while. The sacks of Indian corn they pushed beneath the bed, wrapping them in deer-skins to protect them from the mice. She did not ask where they had come from but measured out the grains carefully, half-cup by half-cup, and afterwards going on her hands and knees to pick up any that might have spilled. Once she heard footsteps in the lane outside and she froze, her fists closing over the gold kernels like contraband.

They ate in darkness, stealthily, an old blanket over the
platille
window and the lamps blown out, spooning up thick gravy in the dying light of the fire. The river was frozen above the red-painted post that marked the border between the Ouma and their northern neighbours, the Bayagoulas. There could be no venturing north. There were rumours that the Chickasaw, stirred up by the English and in league with several of the smaller savage nations, planned an attack on the depleted garrison. The attack did not come. Shrivelled with cold and famine, the town closed in upon itself, hunched against the blasts of the north wind as the desolate seabirds shrieked in the ice-grey sky.

The sacks of corn grew lean. In the bitter early mornings, when fingers fumbled buttons and the damp chill cut through bone, Elisabeth watched the pinched grey faces of her neighbours as they toiled with wood and with water. Two or three of them were big with child. She covered her head with her patched scarf and did not meet their eyes, muttering the required pleasantries with lips that were clumsy with shame and a choked-up sort of anger at the weight of their wretchedness.

Sometimes she went with them to the forest in search of food. They spoke little, their eyes blunt with hunger and fatigue. When she discovered a fistful of sour late mulberries or a straggly half-dead patch of wild onions, she took only a few and thrust the rest at the others, refusing their gratitude. Afterwards, alone in the cottage, she pulled the sack from its hiding place beneath the bed and ran what was left of the corn through her fingers, inhaling its old-barn smell before putting it back, pulling the deerskin tight over it as though she was tucking an infant into bed.

One night in March, Jean-Claude brought wine. They drank it in bed directly from the bottle, wiping their mouths on the backs of their hands. The wine was Spanish, thick with sunshine and the turned-earth sweetness of blackberries. The embers of the fire caught in the bottle and spilled jewels of dark red light on the sea-green silk of the feather quilt as he protested bitterly against the stifling confines of the settlement, the dull and narrow preoccupations of his fellows. He declared himself bored beyond the limits of reason by the political manoeuvrings of the garrison officers, their petty jostlings, their fixation with favour and with hierarchy.

‘They rot here with their seals and their promises, scouring the horizon for boats that might bring them a word of praise from the minister-in-waiting for this or the third undersecretary to the commissary of that. They are truly a pitiable lot, these Frenchmen of yours. The colony of Louisiana covers almost two thousand miles of bountiful St Louis River and they cluster here like timid children clutching at their mother’s skirts, waiting to lick the leftover smears from her baking bowl? No wonder their wives starve and their mewling infants too.’

‘The river is frozen solid,’ Elisabeth protested gently. ‘Even the hardiest of you hairy Québecois cannot travel when the river is impassable.’

‘Do you know what they do, these countrymen of yours?’ Jean-Claude frowned and took another gulp of wine. ‘They write angry letters to the Minister of the Marine accusing Sieur de Bienville of selling fifty barrels of the colony’s best gunpowder to the Spanish in exchange for gold. Perhaps he did so. Perhaps he did not. But the colony endures, though the same minister in his elegant house in Paris would not risk a fingernail to save it. The whole army of Louisiana numbers hardly more than one hundred, of which one quarter are not fit to fight, but somehow the commandant sees that we hold our position here against all the odds. In the Mediterranean we are at war with the Spanish, but the commandant maintains his own private peace with Pensacola. He has made us safe. Why should it concern me that the esteemed Bienville may or may not grow rich on the proceeds of gunpowder he has contrived, through a miracle, not to require?’

Elisabeth smiled. ‘You cannot expect the commissary to think as you do. I am as much an admirer of the commandant as you are but, whatever his abilities, the gunpowder is not his to sell.’

‘There, you see, you are as French as the rest of them. You all believe that you can bring the rules of Paris here. But this is not Paris. Look at your Frenchmen stamping their feet and dashing off their furious letters on the King’s paper. How will those letters reach France when there are no ships to take them?’

‘They are idiots, it is true.’

‘They would be better to sell the paper and the ink and be done with it. At least there would be profit in it.’

‘Your cynical posturing does not convince me. You are not half so much a Diogenes as you pretend.’

Elisabeth uncurled herself lazily, stretching her arms high above her head. Reaching out, Jean-Claude caught her wrists in one hand and pulled her towards him, his other hand seeking the hidden warmth beneath her skirts. Elisabeth sighed and leaned in to him.

‘You Parisians are all the same,’ he murmured. ‘I might defend myself against your accusations if I had the first idea what it was you were talking about.’

Elisabeth laughed and took his head between her hands, tipping his face up towards hers. He smiled at her and the miracle of him squeezed her heart like a fist.

‘My love,’ she whispered. ‘You shall never have to defend yourself to me. Not if you live to be a hundred.’

I
t was several months before spring came and men of his kind returned to the village. From their place in the canebrake, Auguste and the dog watched them as they mounted the bluff, two of them, tall and short, accompanied by a native servant. He did not know them. They were not soldiers. The tall one was a gaunt man in the white collar of a religious. His right arm was in a rough sling and he walked jerkily, shrugging off the solicitudes of his stocky sandy-haired companion. Behind them walked the servant, all slung about with bags and pouches and carrying a small wooden box upon his head.

Before the men reached the village palisades, they were greeted by several of the elders bearing the
calumet
. Auguste watched as the sandy-haired man spoke to them urgently, chopping at the air with his hands. Then he slipped away, the dog silent at his heels. At the edge of the forest, where the savages cut the trees for daily use, he unbelted the hatchet at his waist, testing the sharpness of the blade against his thumb. He paid no heed to the
rat-a-tat-tat
of the red-capped woodpecker nor to the paint-bright hummingbird that darted between the white bells of the convolvulus. He chopped wood until the buttery sun melted in the sky and the nerve-strings in his neck and shoulders sang in protest.

It was dark when he returned to the village. As he gathered with the others to eat, he learned that the visitor was a pastor with a mission upriver, many days’ travel away. He had come to the village once before and talked to the villagers of the white man’s Great Nanboulou, who had no body and in whose fire the wicked must burn for many, many moons. He had claimed himself the Nanboulou’s chosen instrument on earth. Now it seemed that he was powerless to call down that god’s powers to expel the evil spirits that plagued him. Weak with sickness, he travelled to Mobile in search of the pale-faced medicine man whose powers might prove stronger than his own.

As was customary, the chief of the village made accommodation for the priest and his companion in his own hut. When the pastor learned that there was a French boy living among the savages at the village, he asked that the boy be sent to him there so that he might report upon his progress to the commandant at Mobile.