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She sent the boy Camille a note asking if he would meet her in the park. It was nearly June, the time he would be leaving, a lucky thing, for the riots would grow worse until Napoleon III was elected later that year. He would remember France as it was when he first arrived, all color and light and beauty. Lydia waited on the bench as her children played with Ava watching over them. She now knew that the maid had two brothers, and that one would like to come to Paris and go to school, but there wasn’t money enough, and besides, there was the farm to care for. Lydia thought perhaps she would offer her help to Ava’s brother. It was the least she could do.

Camille was even taller now; he’d become more of a man in a matter of months.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Lydia said as lightly as she could. “After all these years you seem to have deserted me.”

“I thought you’d never want to see me again,” he admitted.

“Why would that be?”

Camille shrugged. “Perhaps you liked your life as it was.”

“It was a lie. How can anyone like that?”

He had a blue canvas bag. “I brought you something. A gift before I leave.”

It was a painting of this very park, and of her three children, and of the chestnut tree. The park benches looked glittery, as if a rain had fallen. The painted air was a strange blue color, as if the artist had managed to catch bits of mist and add them to his paints.

She thanked him and kissed his cheek. She was so grateful, but if he wished to give her a gift this wasn’t the one she wanted. She whispered what she most desired and he nodded, then jotted a note concerning the one she preferred. She then gave him the box of sixty letters. She had written in tiny print, which allowed her to tell the entire story of her life as it had been so far, the stolen years her mother knew nothing about.

Camille took the letters and said his good-byes. He had been following her for so long, it seemed odd that he would leave her in this park and not shadow her on her walk home. He knew her route, knew the way she ran a hand through her youngest daughter’s hair, and that she usually stopped to look in the branches of the chestnut tree in her yard to see if there were birds nesting there. Before he left, Lydia embraced him. He had become quite dear to her.

“Tell my mother I’m about to give birth to a boy,” she told him. “We’re naming him Leo. I was going to write that in today’s letter, but I’m telling you instead.”

Camille walked away, then turned back to her and waved before loping off. He left Paris soon after, packing up nearly six years of his life into two small suitcases and a leather trunk. He hated to return home, and could barely bring himself to think of what was waiting for him. His mother’s demands, a job at the store, his paints drying up in the heat of August, the girl he yearned for, Marianna, already married. He would give himself two years, and then, if it was as bad as he imagined it would be, he would find a way to leave. He had that in his blood, a history of men who knew when to stay and when to run away, men who could tell when it was time to find another life and another land.

Soon after he left, Lydia went to the Pizzarro house. Camille’s aunt welcomed her when the maid ushered her into the drawing room.

“This is unexpected. But a pleasure!”

They had not seen each other since Lydia’s initial visit. Tea was offered, but tea had not brought Lydia to this house, and so she said perhaps another time.

“You must miss your nephew,” Lydia said.

“Oh, we do,” Madame Pizzarro said warmly.

“As do I. We became very close. We both were born in St. Thomas, and so he granted me something to remind me of that place.”

Lydia took out the note Camille had left with her, written hastily in the park, a grin on his face as he complied with her wishes. He wrote to ask that the painting in his aunt and uncle’s parlor be given to Madame Cohen on the day she came calling. Madame Pizzarro frowned as she read it. She had grown accustomed to the painting and did not wish to part with it.

“I’d have to discuss this with my husband,” she said. “We had it framed at quite some expense.”

“I can pay you for that. I know you admire the painting, but it means so much to me. More than you can know.” Lydia had gone to stand in front of it. A woman carrying a basket of laundry, the sea behind her. Lydia knew what was inside the house on stilts and what was down the road where the donkeys ate tall grass and dodged toward you if you dared to pull their tails. The disease and shock that had left her without a memory was returning, bit by bit. She found she understood English, and she referred to foods with unfamiliar words, calling the porridge her daughters ate in the mornings fongee and making them laugh.

She was so overcome that she began to sob.

“My dear!” Madame Pizarro said. “Please don’t do that!”

“I’m so sorry,” Lydia said. “I’m so terribly sorry.” She could hardly get the words out in French. She thought of an odd phrase—
Jeg er ked af
—unsure of what it meant. “I truly don’t think I can live without it.”

“That’s very clear,” Madame Pizarro said, signaling to her maid to find some brown wrapping paper. “It’s yours, my dear.”

When she was given the painting, Lydia thanked her hostess and wished her well. She went into the corridor for her cloak and stood there for a few moments to collect herself. The heat inside her felt like the heat on this road leading down to the harbor on days when this woman held her hand.
Do not run too far from me,
she always said. At last, Lydia ventured into the street. It was nearly summer and the trees smelled sweet. The sound of birdsong echoed in the pale blue air, haint blue, the boy Camille had called this shade. He said it kept the ghosts away. It was the color of the sky in the painting she now had of her mother, whose name was Jestine, and who had been waiting for her daughter ever since she had been stolen, convinced that one day sixty letters would arrive in a box scented with lavender, the herb that always brings a person home.

CHAPTER NINE

The Ground That We Walk Upon

C
HARLOTTE
A
MALIE
, S
T
. T
HOMAS

1848

JACOBO CAMILLE PIZZARRO

H
e slept for eighteen hours straight after he got off the boat. When he woke it was as if he’d traveled not across the ocean but across time itself. Backward into the heat, listening to the goats’ bells in the hills and the fluttering of moths bumping against the shutters of his darkened chamber. He considered himself to be a man, but here he was still thought of as a boy. Half asleep and half dressed, he made his way to the kitchen, where Rosalie had the fongee porridge of his childhood waiting for him in a yellow bowl, the same bowl he had used when he was a boy who followed at his mother’s heels. He thanked Rosalie, announcing that her cookery tasted much better than anything he’d had in Paris. It was true, the porridge was more than mere sustenance; it brought back his childhood and everything it contained, like an enchantment. As he stood watching Rosalie at the stove, listening to her lilting French, it was as if he’d been charmed into remembering everything he had known on the island, the things he loved as well as the reasons he couldn’t wait to get away.

The major reason he had wanted to stay in France was evident as soon as he returned to his small bedchamber. There he found his mother unpacking his luggage, rooting around in the large trunk that had been battered from his voyage, the wood damaged by salt air and the rough treatment of its delivery.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted, forgetting in that moment all aspects of courtesy and respect. “Do I have no privacy whatsoever?”

He went to stand in front of the trunk in which he’d stored six years of his life, protective, guarding its contents, already embattled with the woman who’d given him his life. He loomed over his mother. Perhaps his expression was more fierce than he’d meant for it to be. For an instant she appeared to be afraid of him.

“Mother,” he said, backing down. “I am used to my privacy.”

“Do you have something to hide?” She’d recovered from the initial shock of his aggressive stance.

“My belongings are my business.” He was scowling, his anger now directed to himself for his rude behavior, which was indeed childish. In Paris his aunt had been too busy to know where he was half the time. He suspected she was involved with one of his uncle’s business partners, who called at odd hours. This hadn’t bothered him at all. His life had been his own, and his artistry had been appreciated by his teachers and his fellow students.

“It’s your father’s trunk,” his mother informed him, putting him in his place. “He paid for it, not you.”

“Then let him be the one to look through it.”

But Rachel had already spied the box packed alongside his clothing. Her expression darkened as she reached for it. She glared at him and held it in her hands. “Light as a feather, Jacobo.”

“It has nothing to do with you,” he replied. “And please do not refer to me that way.”

He no longer thought of himself as Jacobo, but as Camille, his French name. But perhaps it was Jacobo, the boy he used to be, who was trying his best not to be affected by his mother’s disapproval. He reached for the wooden box, a bit unsure of himself. People in Charlotte Amalie used to say that Rachel Pizzarro could turn herself into a snake or a witch. They said if you crossed her you’d likely never sleep again. Even he’d heard the rumors, whispers that her blood was made of molasses, which drew men to her even when they had no reason to desire her. Camille took a step away from his mother. She looked no older than when he’d left, although there was a white streak in her hair that hadn’t been there before.

“It’s for Jestine,” he admitted, and then was angry with himself for feeling the need to appease her.

When she heard this, Rachel’s countenance changed into something unreadable.

“And it’s such an important item that you are willing to disrespect your mother? Did you know it took three days for you to be born? Three days when I might have died.”

Camille’s face flushed with shame. She had told him this many times before. “Mother, I apologize. But you must understand I’m not a child.”

She was unfazed. “You are my child.”

There was no way to refute this.

“Though you have changed your name,” she added.

“My father calls himself by his third name.” He had a point in this, for his father was referred to as Frédéric rather than Abraham or Gabriel.

“True enough. Well, you will evidently do as you please, so by all means, go to Jestine,” she said, surprising him. “If I’m not mistaken, she’s been waiting all these years to hear from you.”

He took the opportunity to leave immediately, before his father requested he report to the office, a fate he dreaded as surely as if he’d had a prison sentence hanging over him.

He was unused to St. Thomas after his time away and was struck by the heat as if he’d never lived here. He broke into a sweat as he made his way to the harbor, his clothes drenched as the strong sunlight went through the fabric, through his skin it seemed. He felt as though he were a stranger, surrounded by the clatter of men at work at their fish pots in the harbor, the boats being readied for service, the crowds heading to the market. And then, all of a sudden, the enchantment came over him again, and he was home. A wind from Africa rose up, palm trees swayed, and a cloud of white birds took flight, a breathing, living cloud.
Like the breakfast he’d had, the landscape was a familiar part of him that surfaced in his dreams and in his art. Once his past had come back to him, he no longer had to think about where he was going. His feet knew the path, though some houses and shops had disappeared and new ones had appeared. He had come here so often with his mother, left to amuse himself while she and Jestine spoke of things he was not supposed to know about: gossip, tragedy, snippets of their daily lives.

JESTINE WAS HANGING UP
herbs to dry that she would later use in her dyes, but she stopped as soon as she saw him. She felt a sort of lightness enter her body, as if she were a younger woman. She had been waiting for his return and had half expected Lyddie would be beside him on this day, even though she’d read the thief’s letter and knew a return was impossible. Lyddie was a married woman now, and it was not so easy to leave one’s husband behind and come across the world to a mother she didn’t know.

As soon as her friend’s son came up the stairs, Jestine threw her arms around him. After returning her embrace, he backed away, grinning. He asked her to call him by his French name, Camille.

“I suppose Paris changed you,” Jestine said as she appraised him. “You’re certainly taller.”

“I’m the same in one way: I told you I would find her and I did.”

Jestine wrinkled her brow, not yet knowing what to believe. “You saw her with your own eyes?”

“Many times.”

“How many times?”

Camille laughed. “Too many to count. Trust me! She’s real and well and very much alive.”

“She has a husband?”

He nodded. “And three daughters.”

“Three?” Jestine felt her head swim as he recited their names. Amelia, Mirabelle, Leah. Had there ever been such beautiful names? Girls formed of her own blood and hope. When he’d left, Camille now told her, there’d also been another baby to come, one they planned to call Leo if it was a boy. He waited while Jestine took a moment for herself. She sat on the stair, keeping one hand upon the banister to steady herself. Despite her age, she was still beautiful. As always she wore the rope of pearls Camille remembered she favored even when she was in her work clothes, as she was today, a plain cotton dress with a black apron, to ensure that the dyes she used wouldn’t stain her good clothing. He could tell his news came as something of a shock. The details about her daughter were now spun into the thin thread of daily life.

Indeed, something inside Jestine made it difficult for her to breathe. It was as if there was a bubble rising up through her chest. It was clawing at her, everything she didn’t want to feel but felt anyway. A desire for revenge for all she’d lost. Not only a daughter had been stolen but an entire family.