Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (9 page)

“Beg pardon?”

“On the beach this morning. I saw a child.”

“Oh,” said the librarian. “I thought we’d killed them all.”

“Them?” she said, rather faintly.

“You didn’t imagine your people were the first to be conquered, did you? Or that we could have built this fortress, which has been here for thousands of years?”

She hadn’t ever thought about it. “You really
are
like locusts,” she said and then winced. Merely because he did not treat her like a slave, did not mean she wasn’t one.

But the librarian just smiled, a slight, bitter quirk of the lips. “Your people named us well. We conquered this country, oh, six or seven years ago. I could still see. The defenders of this fortress resisted us long after the rest of the country had surrendered. They killed a great many soldiers, and angered the generals. You are lucky your people did not do the same.”

“Yes,” she said with bitterness of her own. “Lucky.” Lucky to have her husband butchered like a hog. Lucky to have her only child killed before her eyes. Lucky to be mocked, degraded, raped.

“Lucky to be alive,” the librarian said, as if he could hear her thoughts. “Except for this child you say you saw, not one inhabitant of this fortress survived. And they did not die quickly.” He turned away from her, as if he did not want her to be able to see his face.

She said with quick horror, “You won’t tell anyone? It’s only a child. A . . . more like a wild animal. Not a threat. Please.”

He said, still turned toward the window as if he could look out at the sea, “I am not the man I was then. And no one else will care. We are not a people who have much interest in the past, even our own.”

“And yet you are a librarian.”

“The world is different in darkness,” he said and then, harshly, briskly, asked her to get out the catalogue and start work.

Some days later, whether three or thirty, she asked shyly, “Does the library have any information on wild children?”

“We can look,” said the librarian. “There should at least be an entry or two in the encyclopedias.”

There were, and she read avidly—aloud, because the librarian asked her to—about children raised by wolves, children raised by bears. And when she was done, he said, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“No. Not really. I think he lives with the dog pack in the caves under the fortress, so it makes sense that he growls like a dog and runs like a dog. But it doesn’t tell me anything about . . . ”

“How to save him?”

“How to love him.”

She hadn’t meant to say it. The librarian listened too well.

“Do you think he wishes for your love?”

“No. But he keeps coming back. And . . . and I must love someone.”

“Must you?”

“What else do I have?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and they did not speak again that day.

She did not attempt to touch the child. He never came within ten feet of her anyway, the distance between them as impassible as the cold gray sea.

But he was always there, when she came down the stairs in the morning, and when she started coming down in the evenings as well, he came pattering out from wherever he spent his time to crouch on a rock and watch her, head cocked to one side, pale eyes bright, interested. Sometimes, one or two of the dogs he lived with would come as well: long-legged, heavy-chested dogs that she imagined had been hunting dogs before the fortress fell to the locusts. Her husband had had dogs like that.

The encyclopedias had told her that he would not know how to speak, and in any event she did not know what language the people of this country had spoken before their world ended, as hers had, in fire and death. The child was an apt mimic, though, and much quicker-minded than she had expected. They worked out a crude sign-language before many weeks had passed, simple things like
food
, for she brought him what she could, and
no
, which he used when he thought she might venture too close, and
I have to go now
—and it was ridiculous of her to imagine that he seemed saddened when she made that sign, and even more ridiculous of her to be pleased.

She worried that her visits might draw the fortress’s attention to him—for whatever the librarian said, she was not convinced the locusts would not kill the child simply because they could—but she asked him regularly if other people came down to the beach, and he always answered,
no
. She wasn’t sure if he understood what she was asking, and the question was really more of an apotropaic ritual; it gave her comfort, even though she suspected it was meaningless.

Until the day when he answered,
yes
.

The shock made her head swim, and she sat down, hard and not gracefully, on a lump of protruding rock. She had no way of asking him who had come, or what they had done, and in a hard, clear flash of bitterness, she thought how stupid of her it was to pretend this child could in any way replace her dead son.

But he was all she had, and he was watching her closely. His face never showed any emotion, except when he snarled with fear or anger, so she did not know what he felt—if anything at all. She asked,
All right?

Yes,
the child signed, but he was still watching her as if he wanted her to show him what he ought to do.

She signed,
All right,
more emphatically than she felt it, but he seemed to be satisfied, for he turned away and began playing a game of catch-me with the two dogs who had accompanied him that morning.

She sat and watched, trying to convince herself that this was not an auspice of doom, that other people in the fortress could come down to the beach without any purpose more sinister than taking a walk.

Except that they didn’t. The locusts were not a sea-faring people except in the necessity of finding new countries to conquer. They were not interested in the water and the wind and the harsh smell of salt. In all the time she had been in the fortress, she had never found any evidence that anyone except herself used the stairs to the beach. She was trying hard not to remember the day her husband had said, casually,
A messenger came from the lighthouse today. Says there’s strangers landing on the long beach.
Little things. Little things led up to disaster. She was afraid, and she climbed the stairs back to the fortress like a woman moving through a nightmare.

Her louring anxiety distracted her so much that she asked the librarian, forgetting that he was the last person in the fortress likely to know, “Who else goes down to the beach?”

The silence was just long enough for her to curse herself as an idiot before he said, “That was . . . I.”

“You?”

“Yes.”

“Why? What on earth possessed you?”

His head was turned toward the window again. He said, “You spend so much time there.”

At first she did not even understand what he was saying, could make no sense of it. She said, hastily, to fill the gap, “You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck.”

“I won’t do it again, if you don’t want.”

She couldn’t help laughing. “You forget which of us is the slave and which the master.”

“What makes you think I can forget that? Any more than I can forget that I will never see your face?”

“I . . . I don’t . . . ”

“I am sorry,” he said, his voice weary although his posture was as poker-straight as ever. “I won’t bother you about it again. I didn’t mean to tell you.”

She said, astonished, “I don’t mind,” and then they both, in unspoken, embarrassed agreement, plunged hastily into the minutiae of their work.

But that evening, as she sat on her rock beside the sea, she heard slow, careful footsteps descending the stairs behind her.

Come!
said the child from his rock eight feet away.

Friend,
she said, a word they’d had some trouble with, but she thought he understood, even if she suspected that what he meant by it was
pack-member
. And called out, “There’s room on my rock for two.”

Friend,
the child repeated, his hands moving slowly.

No hurt,
she said, and wondered if she meant that the librarian would not hurt the child, or that the child should not hurt the librarian.

Yes,
he said, and then eagerly,
Rock!

“What are you doing, this evening?” the librarian’s voice said behind her.

“Teaching him to skip stones.” She flung another one, strong snap of the wrist. Five skips and it sank. The child bounced in a way she thought meant happiness; he threw a stone, but he hadn’t gotten the wrist movement right, and it simply dropped into the water.
Again!
he said, imperious as the child of kings.

She threw another stone. Four skips. The librarian sat down beside her, carefully, slowly.

She said, “What is the sea like, in darkness?”

“Much more vast than I remember it being, when I had my sight. It would do the generals good to be blind.”

“Blindness won’t teach them anything—they have never wanted to see in the first place.”

“You think that’s what makes the difference?”

“We learn by wanting,” she said. “We learn by grieving.”

Shyly, the librarian’s hand found hers.

The child threw a stone.

It skipped seven times before it sank.

“You are importunate, m’sieur.”

In Nouvelle Orléans, the jewel of the Territoire Louisiane, the greatest American city of the Empire Français, to speak French with the hard drawl of an American could be a liability—or, if one carried it off well, a great asset. Annabel St. Clair worked hard to make her voice as much an asset as her hair or her skin or her brilliantly blue eyes.

“Mademoiselle St. Clair, please, I meant no insult.”

M. Charpentier lied, and they both knew it. But Annabel was not here tonight for her pleasure, or even for her personal business. She was here on the business of the Emperor of France and the Americas, Napoléon IV—little though that august gentleman himself might know it. “Then shall we call it mere gaucheness and an apology accepted?”

“As you please, mademoiselle.”

She liked seeing the flash of resentment in his eyes, the unspoken, unwilling acknowledgment that, although he was one of the wealthiest landowners in Louisiane and she a mere courtesan—what the Louisien nobility called an amante dorée—it was she who held the power this evening. To the child of threadbare, disapproving Boston respectability, that look was headier than wine. “You were inquiring, I believe, whether the gentleman who escorted me here intends also to escort me home?”

“Yes, mademoiselle.”

“Considering the fact that he
is
a gentleman, surely that question was unnecessary.”

“Mademoiselle St. Clair.” The growl of rising temper, and she abandoned her game.

“But, m’sieur, tomorrow evening I am entirely free. And I would be most enchanted to have dinner, perhaps, with your friend.” She did not look at the young man talking to Mme. Charpentier by the punch-bowl—the young man for whom M. Charpentier was but the grudging proxy—but she was keenly aware of him and had positioned herself carefully to give him her profile.

“You are most gracious,” said M. Charpentier with a slight, sardonic bow. “And I am sure my friend would be very pleased with such an arrangement. But I know also that it would delight him to make your acquaintance now, even if only for a moment.”

Is he so hungry, then? Good. That will make this business easier.
She turned, smiled sultry promise into the young man’s coffee-dark eyes, saw them kindle and flare in return. “That would be most acceptable, M’sieur Charpentier.”

It was long past midnight the next night when Louis Vasquez left Annabel St. Clair’s house, only slightly the worse for drink and wearing a sated smile that did not improve his looks.

Salomé came into Annabel’s boudoir carrying a cup of hot milk sweetened with vanilla and honey. “Shall I brush your hair, chérie?” Her French was perfect Parisian, crisp and fluid; it was her employer who spoke the muddy Français Louisien.

“Please,” Annabel said, accepting the milk.

“Was he very ennuyant?” Salomé asked as she began to separate Annabel’s hair into thick swatches, her voice light but her eyes, when Annabel met them in the mirror, concerned.

Annabel shrugged a little. “No more than they ever are.”

“Are you sore, chérie?”

“Nothing to signify. He was . . . eager.”

“Will it be worth it?” Salomé picked up the brush and began to draw it through Annabel’s long, heavy curls.

Annabel grinned. “It’s always worth it, darlin’,” she said, deliberately employing the American endearment to make Salomé wince. “But, yes, my talk with M’sieur Vasquez was most enlightening.”

“And will your Oncle Jules feel the same way?”

“I think so,” Annabel said, her smile now as sated and self-pleased as that of Louis Vasquez. “I think so indeed.”

It was not so much that the government of Napoléon IV cared for the Bourbon pretenders who came and went like mayflies, as that they wanted to be able to keep a weather eye on them. It was unlikely, seventy years after the death of the last Bourbon king of France, that any of the pretenders were either legitimate or capable of a serious bid for the throne, but they could be, and often were, nuisances, lodestones drawing trouble from Spain and England, especially when they announced themselves in one of the American principalities.

Louis Vasquez could have been trouble, despite his Spanish blood, for he was young, handsome—the Hapsburg chin not in evidence—well-spoken, and plausible, but although he had puffed up his consequence with hints of royal blood and dreadful persecution, he had seemed to have no imperial ambitions. His imagination had been fired by tracts he had read about the western reaches of the empire; he spoke animatedly of prospecting for gold, of exploring the wilderness, of meeting Sioux and Iroquois. She had asked if he did not wish to return to Europe, and he had laughed and said, “Maybe in five years, ten years, if I do not find a beautiful American wife, hein?” And had pinched her, maybe a little more viciously than necessary. She had not been sorry to see him go, and was not sorry to think that he would not require further cultivation.