Savage Lands (32 page)

Fuerst held a lit spill to the bowl of his pipe and sucked on it until the tobacco pulsed red. Elisabeth breathed in the smoke, tasting it in the back of her throat. It occurred to her that this was something that she liked, the fragrant smell of his pipe smoke. She watched as he took the pipe from his mouth and studied it, his elbows on the table.

After a pause he raised his head and leaned forward a little, his lips parted and the pipe held aloft as though he were about to speak. Elisabeth waited, her back straight. Fuerst regarded the line of her neck, the whorl of her ear, the fine tendril of hair that escaped her simple lace cap, and he closed his mouth, setting his chin on the heel of his free hand. His jaw slackened and his shoulders too, so that he could feel the weight of his head in his forearm. Slowly he lifted the pipe to his lips and inhaled.

‘The indigo settles,’ he said. ‘If we can prevent the weeds from choking the new plants, next year we should have ourselves a very reasonable harvest. The seigneur will be pleased.’

Elisabeth murmured something.

‘Of course the seeds should have been set a foot apart, an instruction to which the Negroes showed themselves incapable of adhering, but most look set to prosper for all that. We will not have another year like this one. If we had only been able to secure twice as many slaves–’

‘You would have twice the number of mouths to feed.’

Fuerst frowned.

‘Well, yes, but with twice, three times the amount of land under cultivation–’

‘Are things not hard enough? Even Negroes do not eat indigo.’

The sleeping area was separated from the main room by a plank screen. They undressed in silence, their backs to each other. In the darkness he reached for her and dully she lifted her nightgown to accommodate him. His efforts were strenuous and brief and soon afterwards he slept. Elisabeth did not move. She lay on her back, her skirts around her waist and her legs still parted, staring upward into the ghostly folds of the linen she had hung from the roof as protection against the mosquitoes. The pale stuff clung to the darkness like smoke.

They had cut his throat while he slept. She closed her eyes tight, her fingers pressing down on the lids, but it came all the same, rolling through her like nausea: the sultry night sky pierced with white-hot stars, the baleful suck and hiss of the drowsing bayou, the whisper of feet, the pale gleam of linen as the flap of his
baire
lifted, his sleeping face, his arm thrown back above his head, his discarded boots, worn soles upward, the shimmer of oiled skin as the dark figure raised the blade – and then silence, a stillness like a gasp that stopped the night and silenced forever the ceaseless scream of the cicadas.

She wrenched herself over onto her side, her pulse hard in her neck. Beside her Artur snored, his mouth open, and her treachery tightened her throat and clenched her fists. She had not hoped to grow fond of her new husband, only that she might serve him uncomplainingly. She had accepted him in the certainty of loneliness, in the vague, bleak hope that in the isolation of the plantation and the drudgery of the work, she might find a kind of peace.

She had not reckoned on that hot fierce part of herself that refused to believe that he was gone, that it was over, but clung instead to the conviction that, one day, if she strained for it enough, she might be able, through the force of her own will, to force upon the story a different ending.

T
he room, pressed in upon by shelves and shelves of ledgers, was dominated by a large desk of dark wood. Its feet were cracked and splayed, pale green with mould. Behind it stood a tall man with a broad, imperious head and the large-boned fleshiness of a man who had once been muscular. Though he had been in the colony more than a year, his skin was pale, spotted with pale sand-coloured freckles. His abhorrence of the sun was well known. Whenever he walked in Mobile, he wore always a distinctive wide-brimmed hat of fine straw. His eyes, set deep into his skull, were cold and grey.

The man gestured at Auguste to close the door. Then, still standing, he extracted from the pile in front of him several pieces of correspondence and set them to one side. He did not invite Auguste to sit. He leaned upon his steepled fingers as he studied the papers, eyeglasses perched upon the end of his nose, a slight frown puckering his brow as though he calculated figures in his head.

‘You sent for me, Commissary?’ Auguste asked. His shoulder ached as it always did on damp days. In its sleeve his arm hung awkwardly, the palm twisted away.

‘You had a profitable expedition?’ the commissary asked.

‘Not entirely, sir. The English have been busy.’

‘But surely the Choctaw are our allies?’

‘It has been our habit to trade one deerskin for two-thirds of a pound of gunpowder. The English offer one pound.’

‘But that is outrageous. We cannot do business on such terms.’

‘Nor shall we. After long discussion, the Choctaw chief agreed to accept three-quarters of a pound. As for food, they will accept our goods and forgo trade with the English.’

‘That is the best you could manage?’

‘It is a fair arrangement, sir. The English goods are more plentiful than ours and of a higher quality.’

The commissary sighed. Then he nodded, gesturing at Auguste to sit.

Auguste hesitated.

‘If that is all, sir, I am needed at the storehouse. The manifest–’

‘The manifest can wait.’

He fixed Auguste with a look at once indifferent and intense. Auguste bowed his head, but something in him stiffened.

‘Sit,’ the commissary ordered him.

Auguste sat. The commissary did not.

‘You find yourself in an awkward position, I think,’ the commissary said at last.

‘I am afraid I do not know what you mean.’

The commissary’s mouth tightened.

‘I would advise against disrespect. It will not favour you.’

‘I intend no disrespect, sir.’

The commissary frowned. Then he sat. He said nothing but lowered his gaze to the stack of papers on his desk, squaring the pile with the flats of his hands. Then, taking a folded handkerchief from his pocket, he removed the eyeglasses from his nose and set about polishing them. He worked meticulously to the perimeter of each lens, holding them up to the light to check that they were spotless before hooking them once more around his large ears.

‘Louisiana is the property of the Mississippi Company, M. Guichard. It does not and never has belonged to Sieur de Bienville, whatever he may think to the contrary.’

Auguste said nothing. It was no secret that the commissary had been a close confidant and ally of de l’Epinay who, during his short-lived tenure as governor of the colony, had quarrelled with all of his subordinates and Bienville in particular. Now de l’Epinay was returned to France and Bienville governor in his place.

‘Sir?’

‘I would counsel strongly against wasting my time. I am not a patient man.’

‘I do not know what it is that you want from me, sir.’

‘I want your cooperation. It is almost certainly too late for the governor. It is not too late for you.’ The commissary cleared his throat and took a paper from a pile upon his desk. ‘Perhaps you would begin by telling me why it was that you left Mobile. It coincided, I think, with the removal of Sieur de Bienville from the position of commandant?’

‘Not precisely, sir. In 1712, when the King granted the banker Crozat the lease on Louisiana, Crozat sent Sieur de Cadillac from France as governor, though Sieur de Bienville continued to serve as his lieutenant. It was some weeks after his arrival that the new governor sent me north to the Illinois as translator to one of his expeditions.’

‘And the purpose of that expedition?’

‘The governor believed we should find mines there.’

‘Did he indeed?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But you did not?’

‘No, sir. Though we returned several times we found nothing.’

‘Unfortunate for Crozat.’

‘Unfortunate for Louisiana, sir.’

In the months after Cadillac’s arrival, there had been a brief flowering of optimism among the inhabitants of Mobile. After years of protest, they had finally succeeded in persuading Bienville to move the settlement south to the mouth of the river. While the sandy soil there was unfavourable for cultivation, it was less prone to flooding, and the settlers rebuilt their houses quickly, determined to put the years of hardship behind them.

Their hopefulness was short-lived. Embittered by his failure to find precious metals, inflamed by the abominable conditions in which he was required to exist, Cadillac had exacted his revenge upon the colonists. He prohibited all trade with the natives, including the lucrative trade in liquor, and instead established a single company store in Mobile where credit was refused and a pair of stockings cost forty
livres
. Any man unable to provide documentation in proof of his noble blood was forbidden to wear a sword under the penalty of imprisonment.

In penury and desperation, the settlers had staggered forward away from the past. Subsistence became an accomplishment. Elisabeth Savaret had married an indentured Rhinelander with nothing in his pocket but a contract promising a grant of land when his time was served. The women of the town had ground acorns for coffee and told each other that pride came before a fall. Months later, when the news of Elizabeth’s marriage reached the Illinois, Auguste toasted the bride with savage moonshine and wept into the hair of a girl who stroked his pale shoulder with her copper hand.

Cadillac was fired and de l’Epinay despatched to Louisiana in his place, but he lasted barely one year. In 1717, Crozat, faced with a massive tax bill from the Chamber of Justice, had remitted his privileges to the King. When Auguste’s expedition returned to Mobile, Le Caën’s daughter was grown up and married to a cannoneer, the white opossum Ponola was dead, and Louisiana was the possession of the newly minted Mississippi Company.

For a time it had seemed that the colony’s fortunes were finally to change. With the support of the Regent and the newly minted Banque Royale in Paris, John Law’s Mississippi Company would hoist Louisiana onto its broad shoulders and make it rich. The Company had been granted not only exclusive rights of trading but also the free possession of the coasts, ports and harbours of the colony, ownership of the forts, stores, houses, guns and ships in the colony belonging to the French Crown, the right to make war or truce with the native tribes, and the right to appoint all colony officials. In exchange, Law, the colony’s new merchant prince, had promised seeds, supplies and three thousand Negro slaves, as well as six thousand new colonists. Sieur de Bienville, restored to his position as the colony’s governor, was triumphant. A new era was begun.

In those months perhaps one hundred men sailed to Louisiana from France, agents of the noble
concessionaires
with orders to cultivate the land and return the profits, and a few wives too, widows with small children or bad debts, daughters too old or troublesome or impoverished to secure a husband. Respectable people, half stunned by the heat and the privations of the voyage, they made their way unsteadily to their grants while the settlers at Mobile squabbled over the contents of the newly stocked warehouses and waited for more ships to come.

And so they came. They brought flour and wine and inferior brandy and before long a different kind of colonist. For all his grand plans it seemed that Law could not persuade sufficient Frenchmen to travel of their own volition to the New World. So instead he scoured the orphanages. He emptied the prisons. He put bandoliers on the streets of Paris to round up throw-outs and cast-offs, any kind of human excrement that might be scraped together so that he might meet his commitment of human freight. It was said that Law’s Company paid a bounty for every vagabond arrested and put to sea. They paid nothing to those expected to receive them.

There is no man bitterer than he whose ambitions are exposed as a folly of his own invention. He must suffer his humiliation in the certainty that it has been from the very first an inevitability, with nothing to relieve the shame of his disgrace but the polishing of new curses and old grudges. The long-time habitants of Louisiana, who had suffered so much, responded with resentful garrulousness to the enquiries of the increasingly distrustful commissary. Of course the governor had always feathered his own nest. There was no smoke without fire. Personal commerce with the savages in goods granted for diplomatic purposes; the clandestine sale of stores intended for the garrison; use of the King’s boats for the transport of furs for his own profit; trade in savage slaves; favours to favourites. Like suspect coins, the old rumours were once more bitten on and rubbed up shiny.

The commissary cleared his throat.

‘I understand that the governor has granted you a concession. Why would he do that, do you think?’

Auguste thought of Bienville, his finger on a map, his shirt open to expose the time-softened tongues of serpents, his sleeves rolled up as though he meant to dig the triumphs of his future from the earth himself.

‘Yours,’ he had said, pointing at a square of land. ‘Make something of it.’

The years had aged the governor, stripping the flesh from his boyish face and pouching his eyes, but he had made no mention of the past. It was not in his nature.

Auguste regarded the commissary evenly.

‘So that there might be as much land as possible under cultivation,’ he replied. ‘It is important that the colony lessens its dependence upon the savages.’

‘I say he seeks to reward his friends. You are one of his friends, are you not?’

‘He was a just and tireless commandant. He will make a good governor.’

‘Don’t play the innocent with me, Guichard. We know full well that Bienville continues to deal with the Spanish at Pensacola on his own account in direct contravention of Company law. Just as we know that he and his cohorts trade in French goods intended as gifts for the savages. Damn it, man, the lot of you have been at it for years. Do you think me stupid?’