Savage Lands (28 page)

‘She is not unwell, I hope?’ Auguste asked, struggling to keep his voice steady.

‘No, no, though she shall make herself ill if she continues in this way. The Conaud woman has been labouring since Sunday, though, praise God, she was delivered this morning of a baby girl. When I passed Elisabeth on my way here, she was pale as milk and hardly able to speak for fatigue. The poor creature had not been home in two days.’

Auguste felt the bottom of his stomach drop away.

‘Two days.’

‘It does not sound much and yet it is always startling to me, how quickly sleeplessness disorders body and mind. King Perseus of Macedonia, of course, was murdered in Rome simply by being prevented from sleeping. Elisabeth was not so unfortunate, I grant you, but still she was almost insensible. I had to insist upon accompanying her home. Four times on the way there, she asked that I tell her husband she was come home and, though I told her as many times he was already departed, moments later she would ask again, as though I had not spoken.’ He shook his head. ‘Still, we must be glad that sleep restores reason at least as swiftly as its lack would steal it away. She will be recovered presently.’

Auguste said nothing.

‘Is he a decent man, her Babelon?’ Rochon asked after a while. ‘His disregard for men of the cloth might be construed with equal reason as brute ignorance or an unconscionable good sense.’

‘He – I–’ Auguste broke off, pressing his fingers into the sockets of his eyes. The questions swarmed across his skin, biting into his flesh. The torment of them was unbearable. ‘The potatoes. Did she get the potatoes?’

‘Potatoes?’ Rochon looked baffled.

‘I sent potatoes. Did she get the potatoes?’

‘Now that you mention it there was, I think, a basket of potatoes on the table. Or apples perhaps. Something sweet-smelling, certainly, and slightly rotten. You sent them? So you are no longer a secret?’

‘I – no. Not any more.’ Auguste was silent. Then he closed his eyes. ‘I wonder if you might come back another time? I am rather tired myself.’

Rochon smiled.

‘I would ill wish the fate of King Perseus of Macedonia upon you, my friend. Sleep soundly. I shall come again tomorrow.’

As soon as the Jesuit was gone, Auguste called the slave and, asking her loudly for tea, bid her in a whisper to help him dress. He did not have the strength for the girl’s fierce gaze. When at last he was in his breeches, the sweat stood out from his forehead and his head swam with silver.

‘Come with me,’ he said to the slave and, with painful slowness, they made their way through the mud-choked yard and out into the rue Pontchartrain. Each step required the summoning of all of his strength, the shock of the earth sending jagged spasms of pain like lightning down the side of his broken body. The lanes stretched away from him, tilting and swinging so that he lurched forward, losing his footing. Only the strong hands of the slave on his good arm stopped him from falling. On the rue d’Iberville, several passers-by stopped and called out to him, astonishment sharpening their greetings, but he hardly heard then. Fixing all his resolve upon the toes of his boots, he stumbled on.

When at last they reached the Babelon house, Auguste was a deathly grey, his breath coming in ragged snatches. Half leaning on the wall, his legs slackening beneath him, he closed his fist and banged on the door. The slave Okatomih opened it.

‘She sleeps,’ she said in Mobilian.

‘The potatoes,’ Auguste rasped in her own language. ‘Bring me the potatoes.’

Okatomih’s expression did not change. Turning, she went back into the house. Auguste closed his eyes, releasing himself into the embrace of the splintery wall. His legs no longer obeyed him. He was very cold and hollow too, so that the air roared through him, filling his skull with noise.

‘Monsieur?’

Auguste opened his eyes. The slave held out an earthenware pot. Inside it the peeled potatoes huddled together, like fledglings in a nest. He shook his head violently.

‘No!’ he cried and he seized the rim of the pot and shook it so that the potatoes rattled. ‘The basket, where is the basket–?’

Silently the slave reached inside the door.

There was nothing in the basket but some crumbs of mud and, on the rim, a hardening smear of rotten potato. ‘What about the letter?’ he demanded. ‘There was a letter here, in the basket. What did you do with the letter?’

The slave shrugged.

‘No letter.’

‘A fold of paper, here in the basket–’

Again the slave shrugged.

‘Maybe the mistress took?’ she said.

Auguste closed his eyes. The roaring rose up about him like water until he was cold as clay and the dead weight of him drew him down into the darkness until the roaring closed over his head.

I
t was some weeks later when the body of a French soldier was found by a Canadian
coureur
by the name of François Maurichon. Tangled in the thick reeds that fringed the wide plain of the Mississippi River, it bobbed gently, face down, outspread fingers stirring small circles in the yellow water. Maurichon was wary of alligators, and he cursed under his breath as he pushed through the waist-high water to retrieve the body.

It was no small matter to wrestle it through the undergrowth. Even before he had managed to pull it to shore, Maurichon could see that the dead man was much mutilated. There were deep cuts to his back and shoulders and above the slimy collar of his coat his fleshless skull gleamed pale. It was the savage way to pass a knife around the heads of their dead enemies, slicing around the ears and peeling back the skin of the scalp by the hair. Maurichon hauled the body onto the bank and turned it over. The dead man’s head fell back, his throat gaping like a toothless white mouth.

The
coureur
shuddered. Hacking a few fronds from a nearby palmetto bush, he hastily covered the body and retreated to the bluff to smoke and consider his options. A little later he made a search of the reeds. Tethered to a low tree, he found an abandoned pirogue and the man’s pack, sliced open like a belly. Maurichon was not afraid. His musket was oiled and loaded, though the savages would be long gone by now. He thought of the bloated body, the eyes eaten from the eye sockets by fish. It had plainly been in the water many days.

All the same there was no mistaking the dead man. There was not a man in Louisiana who did not know Ensign Jean-Claude Babelon.

1719

–
EXTRACT FROM A PAMPHLET DISTRIBUTED

AMONG INVESTORS IN PARIS,
c
.1719

A
s was customary, the ship docked first at Dauphin Island. As they eased slowly into the small harbour, the sun was low, slanting into their eyes. The sea was a dark green, the island no more than a humped black rock against the fading sky. By the time that the anchor was set and the sails brought down, night had fallen. They did not go ashore. In the previous months, as the trickle of colonists had become a stream, Dauphin Island was become something of a shanty town, a tumble of temporary cabins thrown up for the new arrivals. Some had waited months for boats that might take them to their concessions. In the morning a sloop would take them to Mobile. Until then, they would be safer to remain aboard the
Baleine
.

In her narrow bunk that night, as on so many nights, Vincente le Vannes reached into her bodice and drew out the folded square of paper. She opened it carefully. The paper was worn soft as muslin, the picture on it split in several places along the deep creases, but still the delicate watercolours glowed jewel-bright in the smoky light of the candle.

The sea was a vivid aquamarine and beneath the pale sky the purple mountains were marbled with pink gold. Above the spires and turrets of the elegant city, fresh breezes swelled the sails of a three-masted ship and tumbled the feathered branches of an exotic tree. A curious-looking creature scrambled up its trunk, its elongated cat-body crowned with the face of a wizened old man. In the foreground merchants and sailors in bright blue silk coats jostled with sturdy savages, naked but for loincloths and headdresses of brightly coloured feathers.

Louisiana. Vincente tasted the word as she traced a fingertip over the familiar silk of the painted ocean, the parapets of the fortified city. For months before she had left Paris, the talk had been all of Mr Law’s Louisiana where pearls might be fished in abundance and the streams rolled on sands of gold, where the savages worshipped the white men as gods, and silver was so common it was used to pave the public roads. Immense grants of this enchanted land had been sold to the wealthiest men in the kingdom, and every day the rest had scrambled with the stockjobbers in the rue Quincampoix to snatch for themselves a share in the Mississippi Company which would make nobles of them all. Some had grown so rich already that a new word had been minted to describe them:
millionaire
.

The engraving had been thrust into her hand by a man selling the
Nouveau Mercure
from a stall close by the entrance to the convent. He had not asked for payment and she had known it immediately as a sign, though what it signified exactly she could not have said. At the very left of the picture a missionary in clerical garb sat at a table, holding aloft a wooden cross. Before him a savage raised his eyes to Heaven in a transport of ecstasy, his crossed hands pressed against his heart. He stood in the shadows, his pale countenance creased with thick black lines, as though the weight of the small cross caused him excessive strain.

The abbess’s face had been soft and powdery, like a floured bun. Several times at the close of the day, when the twilight drifted in the cloisters and the novices were called to vespers, she had placed her hands upon Vincente’s head and blessed her.

‘Go home now, child,’ she had said, and her voice had been gentle and full of kindness. The thought of it caused Vincente’s eyes to prickle.

‘For many are called,’ Vincente murmured, ‘but few are chosen,’ and she ran her thumb over the missionary’s lined visage, stroking at first, then pressing hard into the page until the page crumpled.

The ship rocked gently, setting the light to dipping. Pushing the engraving aside, Vincente reached under her pillow and brought out her Bible, opening it at the Book of Proverbs, but, though she tried to fix herself upon its commands, she found none of her usual consolation in its numbered certainties. Instead she reached out and once again took up the engraving, smoothing it out across the Bible’s opened pages. Absently she ran a finger across the purple mountains, around the curve of elegant dwellings along the harbour wall. She wondered who lived there, whether her husband would own a house in the town, and she thought of the attic apartment in Paris, the cramped rooms with their mean windows, the ceilings that sloped low above the too-large furniture. The fireplaces were small, the light poor. In winter it was impossible to keep warm; in summer the sun baked the blue slates until the heat became insufferable. They might have found more comfortable accommodations elsewhere in the city, but her father was adamant. Whatever the treacheries of fortune, he insisted, they must remain in the Place Royale. It was the address that signified, he told them, the company a man kept that distinguished him and set him in his proper place. In the Place Royale a man, sooner or later, would find himself rich.

Then he had sold her. Her father knew people and he understood the value of the few assets he still possessed. When a nobleman who was cousin to someone high up in the Ministry of the Marine sent word from Louisiana that he had need of a wife of virtue and industry, M. le Vannes had professed himself only too willing to oblige, subject to certain terms. It had been Vincente’s mother who had informed her of the arrangements. Vincente had stared at her mother’s powdered face and remembered her sister Blandine’s furtive whispers, the jab of her nudging elbow as she described to the round-eyed Vincente the terrible things a man could demand of his wife when it was dark and the drapes around their bed shut tight.

‘What did he get for me?’ she had demanded. ‘Thirty pieces of silver?’

Mme le Vannes had only smiled.

‘Regrettably, child,’ she had said lightly, ‘you are not worth half that amount.’