The Vanishing Point (19 page)

Hannah worked beside him, as dedicated and unflinching as she had been in the old days with Father. They hung the sides of meat from a pole in the chimney to smoke. She boiled water and cleaned out the bear's intestines to make sausage. She ran the meat through the grinder with spices from the spice cupboard, dried herbs, salt, and cornmeal. While roasting a big chunk of bear meat, she salted down the rest of the meat in a barrel. Gabriel collected the fat in a special pot to make his bear grease. They worked long after sunset.

Gabriel caught her eye and grinned. "What a rude plenty we enjoy, Hannah."

***

Later, when they lay in bed, bellies full and bodies tired, Hannah bit gently into his flesh as though she were still hungry. Beside the bed, the candle still burned, allowing her to look into his eyes. Laughing, he put his finger in her mouth, then smoothed her red hair over her breasts. Out of nowhere, she found herself fighting the urge to cry. She wriggled away and pulled the bedclothes to her chest.

"What is it?" He touched her face.

"It seems strange to live with you in this house where once you lived with May, and yet you never speak of her."

He collapsed, flat on the bed, and was silent.

"You do not grieve for her as I do."

"What would you have me say, Hannah? I am not happy that she died. I mourned her passing, as I did my father's passing and the child's, but I cannot pretend that I cared for her the way I care for you."

Resting her head on his chest, she listened to his heart pound against her ear. "Was she untrue to you?" she asked in a small voice. "Is that why you will not speak of her?"

His body went rigid. "Would you have me speak ill of the dead, Hannah?"

"Back in our village." Her throat was so dry and tight, it hurt to get the words out. "She flew from one boy to the next. She was never true to anyone." Her voice broke. "I loved her well, but always pitied those boys."

"Is it true what you say? When I married her, I knew she was no maid, but I never suspected she had been so faithless to so many."

"She treated every boy the same. She could never love just one man." Hannah rolled away. "I have betrayed her."

He pulled her gently so that she faced him again. His eyes were moist, as though a terrible weight had been lifted off him. "Speaking the truth is no betrayal. You have done no wrong, my love. Before you told me this, I thought it was something in me that made her so capricious. My father used to say I wasn't man enough for her."

Her heart beat so fast that she was giddy. It lay revealed. Gabriel had never loved May. But he loved her.

"If I had been a good sister, I would never have lost my heart to you." She broke down in tears.

He embraced her. "Hannah, your sister and I did not choose each other. Never were two people more badly suited. Now you understand why I did not wish to talk about her. I know how you cherished her, and I did not want to say anything that would bring you sadness." His eyes, shining with love, fathomed hers.

She kissed him in wanton hunger, could not stop herself from tasting his flesh. He rolled on top of her, holding her in place.

"There is a pact I would make with you, Hannah." His face was so close that she could see herself reflected in his eyes. "Let us speak no more of her. It only brings pain to sully the memory of the dead."

Hannah nodded, a prickle of guilty relief running through her. Dwelling on May's past sins would benefit no one.

"Sweet girl." Gabriel kissed her until she pulled him fiercely inside her.
Just this one thing I want, now and forever.
How could May have squandered this on so many? He was right to make her swear the pact. Let her sister's name remain unspoken. Let her dead sister rest in peace.

B
ROOM IN HAND
, Adele Desvarieux stepped out on the porch and looked toward the river. Though trees blocked her view, she could hear the current, the promise of what the water would bring. Today Master Washbrook and his son were due back with the new English bride.

What, she wondered, would the new mistress be like? It was hard to imagine having a mistress instead of just the two masters. In the three years she had lived in this outpost, the only females she had laid eyes on were the Banham girls, the one time they had visited with their father. She hoped her new mistress wouldn't be haughty like those girls, but gentle and kind. Pretty, too. If she was a proper lady, she would call on Adele to brush her hair and lace her gowns, as Maman had done for her former mistress in Martinique. The mistress in Martinique had a face like a china doll, blue-marble eyes, and soft brown hair that Maman had curled with iron tongs.

All Adele knew from the letters Master Washbrook had read aloud to his son was that the new mistress's name was May, like the English month, and that she was healthy and twenty-two years old. Adele counted on her fingers. That made her four years older than Master Gabriel, seven years older than herself. Having a mistress here might finally put an end to her nightmares. Her hand moved inside the front of her smock to the small cloth bag that contained the white cockerel feather she wore for protection.

After sweeping the porch, Adele went back inside the house to make sure everything was ready for the mistress's arrival. This morning she had washed the window, scrubbed the floor, dusted the table, mantelpiece, dresser, and chest of drawers. But her hardest labor could not transform this shack into a proper home. The master and mistress in Martinique had owned a house built of stone with jasmine growing up the walls, a long veranda around it, glassed windows in each room. They had carpets, looking glasses, mahogany furniture, a spinet, and a parrot in a cage. Each Christmas the mistress had served roasted peacock. She tried to remember that place as she had loved it when she was a very young child—before she had learned to hate.

Yesterday, with no help from the lazy Irishmen, who sported and swam naked in the river when the master was away, Adele had stuck a small pig and butchered it. The bacon now hung in the chimney to smoke along with the sausages she had made. The loin she roasted in a pan with cider, apples, onions, and garden chard. Master Washbrook laughed at her cooking—he called it Frenchified and peculiar. The English like their meat the honest way, he had told her, boiled with turnips, not basted in cider and covered in fruit. Once he had given her a receipt book of proper English cookery, only to discover she couldn't make any sense of the words on the page. So it was either eat her Frenchified food or go hungry.

She missed the cooking she knew from her childhood—goat meat stewed in coconut milk, yams and mangoes, nutmeg and fresh pepper. Only dull food grew here. No wonder she had grown so thin. If Maman were with her, she would feed her guava fritters and sweet cakes until her hollow cheeks filled out. Although there was no looking glass in the Washbrook household, she had an idea how shabby she must look in her mud-colored homespun smock, her hair covered in a headcloth that had once been blue and was now a dull gray. She went barefoot, saving her shoes and stockings for winter's cold. Her skin wasn't coffee-dark as her mother's had been, but a lighter brown. She knew she was a half-caste, but didn't know anything more about her father. By the time she had been old enough to ask such questions, Maman was gone.

Adele went to the hearth to check the progress of the pork loin. When the mistress was finally here, she would fry corn-cakes on the griddle. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered cooking decent food for these people. Master Washbrook always prayed and read from the Bible before each meal. By the time he allowed them to eat, the food was overcooked.

She regarded the brand-new bedstead Master Washbrook had purchased from a ruined planter down the Bay. Previously young Gabriel had slept on a pallet, but now that he was to have an English bride, he must have a proper bed. Shyly she fingered the bed curtains and the linens she had washed in the creek. Bolder now, she sat on the edge of the feather mattress and bounced up and down. How inviting the bed was, how soft. How tempting just to curl up and doze until they arrived. But she sprang to her feet and smoothed the counterpane so no one would know she had tested the mattress.

Flowers,
she thought. A new bride must have flowers. Of course, nothing beautiful could bloom in these forsaken woods. Her former mistress in Martinique had a garden so exquisite, none of Master Washbrook's descriptions of the Garden of Eden in the Bible could match it. Orchids and frangipani had grown there, gardenia and hibiscus flowers as big as her fist. When she was a child, Maman used to scent her braids with vetiver. She could still recall the earthy sweetness of that scent, her mother's hands in her hair.

The only flowers she would be able to find in this place were the ones that grew wild—the tall spiky purple flowers that shot up in the forest, the gold flowers that grew among the rotting tree stumps. She didn't know the names of those flowers, and it was no good asking the Washbrooks—what did men know about such things? Although her mother had brought her up to speak proper French and not just slave patois, her English was patchy.

Adele stepped out the door. She tiptoed past Master Gabriel's dogs, sleeping in a heap near the porch steps. She couldn't get away from them fast enough. Dogs terrified her. When she was eight years old, they discovered Maman was a shadow catcher, an obeah woman. Not only that, she had cast a spell on Monsieur Desvarieux, their former master, who had given his slaves his surname. Maman had cast a spell to turn his eye, to stop him from hurting Madame Desvarieux, the mistress.

In Adele's mind, the pictures revolved—one of Maman brushing Madame's brown hair as they laughed together; another of Madame weeping, clad only in her chemise, a purple bruise blooming on her cheek, her bare white arms around Maman's neck.

Shivering, Adele touched the bag that held her cockerel feather and pressed it against her breastbone. No matter how hard she prayed, the pictures in her head never stopped tormenting her. Maman worked her magic to help Madame, then Monsieur Desvarieux caught her strewing rusty nails in his path. He lifted Maman's pallet and the loose floorboard underneath to discover more evidence of her sorcery—chicken feet, white feathers, broken eggshells, lizard bones, cat teeth, and a bottle of graveyard dust. Some of the other slaves betrayed her, saying they had seen her in the act of the old night worship. Clemence, the laundress, saw her pouring offerings of milk, chicken blood, and pilfered rum on the roots of the cotton silk tree.

Maman's punishment was a whipping with the cat-o'-ninetails, then twelve months of hard labor in the cane fields on the other side of the volcano. Clemence said Maman was lucky—other obeah women and men were hanged or burned alive. After they had taken Maman, Adele tried to find her. She ran away, cutting through the orange and lemon groves, the coffee plantation, and into the jungle that clad the steep volcano slope. Razor grass sliced her legs open and then dogs came out of nowhere, great mastiffs barking and growling, their teeth at her throat, paws on her chest, grinding her into the mud with the red and black ants until the master's men came and snapped iron manacles around her wrists and ankles. It didn't matter that she was a child; they whipped her until blood drenched her torn skirt. The welts still laced her back.

The whipping left her too weak for fieldwork, so they let her stay on as a house servant. She scoured chamber pots and polished Monsieur Desvarieux's shoes. With Maman gone, Madame fell ill, never leaving her bed. Eventually she died of the ague. When they buried her, the gravediggers raised and lowered her coffin three times so her ghost would rest gentle and leave the living in peace. Some said that her duppy would come back and haunt the master, punish him for his cruelty. Soon after Madame's death, the news came that Maman had perished in the cane fields, bitten by a snake.

Heart beating fast, Adele sat on a tree stump and smoothed her face with her hands, trying to draw herself back to the present. No one had died on the Washbrook Plantation yet. The place was free of ghosts. Maman had taught her that each person had two souls. After death, one soul went to heaven for judgment while the other lingered on earth as a duppy, taking up residence in the roots of a tree. A duppy could be good or evil; a shadow catcher like Maman could harness one to help or harm.

After Madame died, Monsieur Desvarieux could find no new wife. No white lady would have him. Instead he badgered the pretty young slaves, but sickened of them when they grew big with child. One night Adele woke to his weight crushing her into her pallet, his hands tearing open her shift. Eleven years old, she sank her teeth into his hand until she tasted blood. At the same time she scratched him like a wild cat, even managed to gouge his leg with her toenail. When he finally wrenched his torn hand from her mouth, she screamed and cursed, threatening to send his dead wife's duppy after him. She shrieked loudly enough to spook the horses in the stable. In the morning, he had her whipped, but he never dared to touch her again. People said that after that night, she had the eyes of a zombie.

Soon after, he sold her to an English sea captain, who spoke to her in a tongue she couldn't understand. She had to launder his clothes and wash the lice out of his bed linen before his ship set sail for the American colonies. The sea captain said the same words over and over until she understood. When he cornered her in his cabin and tried to lift her skirts, she kneed him in the pillocks. The following day she left a seagull's foot in his mug of beer and the rest of the dead gull on his pillow. After that, he left her alone, and soon sold her off so cheaply that Nathan Washbrook could afford her.

Adele stopped to pick the tall gold-flowering weeds that grew beside the harvested tobacco field. As she made her way down the path, she ran into Patrick, still dripping from his swim. Naked, he clutched his bundle of clothes over his groin.

Without wanting to, she jumped and let out a cry, dropping the flowers. Patrick laughed. "What are you looking at, Adele? Fancy a tumble?" Though the other Irishmen left her in peace, Patrick was cruel, always poking fun at how easily she startled.