Master of the Crossroads (28 page)

He moved, the door yielding inward before him, and the jalousies of Nanon’s window laid tiger stripes across his torso. Then darkness, as the door was shut. She heard a rustle, gasp, a muted hiss of complaint:
tu me fais mal.
Then silence. Elise cracked her door a little wider, listened harder. The gasps returned, more regular, rising to a different tone. With a secret smile she withdrew into her room and shut the door. She returned to her bed and covered the man with her hands and warm breath until he woke and rose to feed the appetite she felt so suddenly awakened.

Nanon had not been taken by surprise, not exactly; from the moment she had seen Choufleur standing between the mill and the newly engineered pool, she had grasped the nature of his errand well enough. Though they hardly spoke, the force of his intention bore down on her all through the evening, and increased when she retired to the room she normally shared with the doctor and Paul. There was no latch or interior fastener. She might have wedged a chair against the door, or balanced a cabinet that would topple when the door swung inward and perhaps make noise enough to wake the house. More than once in the recent past she had found herself barricaded in a room or a house with the doctor, who would use his pistols and rifle to defend the walls surrounding them. But the doctor was absent, and his weapons gone with him. Blocking the door would alarm Paul, who was tugging on her finger now, and pleading for a story. Nanon yielded to his desire, let him lie in her bed with her, and in the moonlight-spangled darkness she began the story of Tim Zwezo, crooning the songs in a low voice.

Tim Zwezo . . .
Zwezo nan nich-o . . . Zwezo nan bwa . . .
Tann-moin la . . .

Paul was asleep well before the story finished, and she carried him to his small cot in the corner. Returning to her bed, she glanced at the unlockable door once more, but she would not block it, for the same reason she would not scream or struggle. If he came. She could not have named her reason, but she felt its power.
Kon Dyé vlé,
she said to herself. As God wills. With the matter disconnected from her own wishes, she slept soundly enough, though as soon as the door ticked open, she came instantly and completely awake.

His belly was barred by moonlight and shadow, his face completely in the dark, and one hand spread against the door, behind him, pressing it shut. Nanon stood up, bare feet on the floor, and moved sideways, thinking suddenly that after all the room was not a cage; if she lured him from the door, she might slip out and evade him—go to Zabeth’s room in the rear? But Paul, she must not leave Paul alone with him . . . while she was distracted by that thought, Choufleur darted across the space between to catch her wrist, startling a gasp from her. She saw the rapacity of his expression when his face crossed the moonlight; the bones which pushed his features through the flesh were those of his father, and that frightened her more than the pain of her wrenched arm. His hand at the nape of her neck was hard and tight, fingertips digging bluntly into the tendons. She hissed a complaint,
you’re hurting me,
and then went limp, went numb all over, unresisting. She had been forced before, and with some regularity, though not for a long time now, not since the doctor or since she’d borne her child. But she remembered that yielding was the better way; she’d be hurt less, perhaps not hurt at all. Also, it was most important not to wake the child.

Nanon became absent from herself, feeling no more than a muffled discomfort at his weight and his intrusion. She returned to the sticky folds of the bed, her nightgown rucked up above her breasts, Choufleur sprawling half across her.
“Enfin,”
he murmured in a breaking voice. “At last, at last . . .”

Salt water gathered in the hollows of her collarbones. She realized that Choufleur was weeping. This surprised her very much.

“I knew this time would come at last,” Choufleur was saying. “I knew that we must come together. You have belonged to me, Nanon, from the beginning. Do you remember Vallière, the waterfall?”

Again, Nanon felt pricked with strangeness. She disengaged herself, but gently, sat up and pulled the sweaty wrinkles of the nightgown over her head. The breeze that ruffled the jalousies dried the sweat and tear stains on her bare skin. At Vallière, where they were children, there had been a falls, a small one, with a little grotto hollowed in the rock behind where the children played, and perhaps she did remember what Choufleur was now describing, how she stepped through the falling water from the cave into the light, revealing herself to him in her soaked chemise, her upturned face and waist-length hair sparkling with the water and the sunshine.
It was not that I first loved you then,
Choufleur was urgently whispering,
but then I first knew how I had always loved
you . . .

In spite of herself, Nanon was interested. She could indeed remember that green glade, the wet stone smell of the shallow cave behind the falls, the froth of the water falling through bright air. She had been, perhaps, thirteen; it was before the Sieur Maltrot had come to take her, to take her away, though probably not very long before. That younger self seemed to stand across a chasm from her now. Across the room, she saw that Paul slept calmly, undisturbed by anything that had happened so far. Choufleur’s moistened fingertip circled her breast, and she felt the nipple swell and stiffen. The tingle of sensation expanded till its ripples rocked the weird emotion she was feeling too. She relaxed against her pillow and turned toward him and found his root, molding it with her thumb and fingers, or lightly teasing it with the nails, until it became its larger self. Best not to use the full extent of her professional expertise, she thought, for that would offend him . . . but this time there would be pleasure, and she would be present for the act.

“Do you still have it?” Choufleur said as she swung astride. “Give it me.”

Nanon reached the silver snuffbox down from a bibelot shelf above the bed. Choufleur took it into his loose fingers, rocked and arched into her deeply.

“Ah . . .” he groaned. “I knew you’d know . . . I knew you’d keep it near . . .” He tightened his fist around the box, then dug his knuckles into the very small of her back. This was a seasoning of horror, Nanon knew, as a thread of nausea swirled into the vortex of sensation that sucked her deeper down, but it was very piquant, all the same.

Later, drifting in the afterglow, she revisited that other life across the chasm, and saw once more the girl she’d been at Vallière, before she’d been made a
fille de joie
at Cap Français. There was a trove of memories to match anything Choufleur had stored from those days, though it was a long time since she had opened the coffer where they were kept. She experienced them now almost as dreams: wistful, wishful, and finally distressing enough to keep her from real sleep. As she twisted and tossed for a resting place, her elbow knocked against the snuffbox, which reminded her that Choufleur, along with herself, had turned into something very much other than what they once might have been. He slept grimly beside her now, face down and unmoving, as if he were dead. But the moon had set, and the rising wind brought a damp breath of dawn. Nanon shook him by the shoulder, once, twice, until he grumbled.

“It’s nearly morning,” she hissed at him. “You must go.”

“Hanh?” Choufleur muttered. “Let them discover us . . . What does it matter if they know?” He turned onto his back and flung his arm across his eyes.

“Not
now.
” Nanon shook him again. “Not yet. Go now.”

Choufleur sat up abruptly, swinging his feet to the floor, giving his head a sharp shake, left and right. He swiveled toward her fluidly, wrapped his hands around the back of her neck and the base of her skull, and drew her half-falling across the bed, into a long, deep kiss. With the release, he spoke, rather curtly. “You’ll come with me. Tomorrow, to the north.”

Nanon said what she had planned to say. “I will not leave my child.”

His hesitation was informative. A moment of silence passed, then he stood up, paced to the door, turned back toward her.

“Then we will take him. Very well.”

Nanon said nothing. A little blue light filtered into the room, so that she made out his silhouette but not his face. She heard Paul breathing in his cot.

“And if you remain here with him, what?” Choufleur’s laugh was dry as ash. “He will live as the bastard son of a
blanc
.”

Nanon, sitting upright with her hips swathed in a tangle of sheet, put her palms over her breasts and lowered her head. She did not know how much of this posture he could discern in the dim light.

“Believe me,” Choufleur said, now with a pleading note, almost. “Come with me now, and we will wipe away everything that has been before.”

Still she would not look at him. “How am I to know what to believe?”

“Make ready,” Choufleur said, decidedly. “We leave tomorrow, before dawn.” He moved to the door. She felt a change of air as it opened and shut, but he made no sound at all in going out.

Elise arose at her usual hour, dressed, ordered coffee, and awaited developments. When she heard Paul’s voice, she put her head into the corridor and saw Nanon, groggy, her face puffed up with sleep, handing the boy over to Zabeth before falling back into her bedchamber.
Une
nuit de délices,
Elise imagined, feeling herself well satisfied. She breakfasted with Sophie and Paul. Tocquet and Choufleur had already gone out, Choufleur pausing to make her an ornate little speech whose general drift had been that, owing to his carriage’s need of some minor but time-consuming repair, he hoped to lay claim to her magnificent hospitality for one more night.

She passed the morning in the supervision of one household task or another, unable fully to fix her mind on any of these. Nanon did not appear till afternoon, floating dreamily onto the gallery as Tocquet and Elise were finishing a modest lunch of cold chicken and fruit. The day was still and suffocatingly hot, the sun swollen at the height of its arc. Pushing his plate away, Tocquet wiped his forehead and grimaced, then went to lie down till the heat should abate. Elise remained at the table, watching Nanon sip grapefruit juice. The colored woman did not seem to look at her, though perhaps she was spying, through her long black lashes.

“And how did you enjoy our Colonel Maltrot?” Elise said suddenly.

Carefully chosen, her words seemed effective. Nanon looked up involuntarily, her eyes widening for an instant before she regained her composure. Then her eyelids lowered, slowly. She did not speak.

“I find him interesting,” Elise went on. “It’s plain he is an educated man. Of talent, possibly, and certainly of strong will. Does he not look splendid in his uniform? One supposes also that he must be a man of means, judging from his manners, and the buttons on his coat.”

“I did not suspect that
you
could admire such a man as he,” Nanon said languidly.

Her emphasis was very slight, barely perceptible. That brown-syrup voice, her soft, brown, cow-like eyes . . . In a mad flash Elise wanted to rip the eyeballs from the other woman’s skull . . . and yet she did not dislike Nanon. On the contrary, they had got on very well, more than amiably sometimes, during the months they had lived in this house together. There were moments, even hours at a stretch, when Elise had forgotten herself enough to fall into an easy intimacy with the colored woman. Nanon was intelligent, and well, if erratically, schooled in the arts of love and ways of men; she was naturally suited for the role of
cocotte.
Had the situation not been so clearly untenable, Elise would have preferred to keep her in the household.

“Ma chère,”
she began. Repressing a glance over her shoulder, toward the blinded window of the room where Tocquet had retired, she leaned across the table and trapped Nanon’s hands in her own. “My dear, know that I think only of your welfare—of your future. Even if what I say seems cruel: with my brother you have none.”

Nanon flinched and pulled away, but Elise clung to her hands and followed her, leaning in so near she scented the tang of sweat on the other woman’s skin, and beneath it the faint perfume of sex.

“Of course, I don’t know what he may have told you. He might promise anything, in his heat.” Her voice was rising higher than she intended, and the lies came fully formed from her lips, without having ever entered her mind.
“Bon, sé youn cabrit li yé, konprann?
The man is a goat, my dear—imagine, such a one as he, a doctor and a brilliant scientist—why should he come out to this fire-blackened colony? Only that he had no choice, having left ruined girls and bastard offspring littered across half of France.”

Nanon’s hands went soft in Elise’s grip. Not the least tension could be felt in her fingers, palms or wrists. All her body looked passively, vacantly relaxed, limp as fresh-killed meat. On other occasions, Elise had noticed this capacity of Nanon’s to disappear within herself, and in an odd way she had envied it.

“As for the outcome of such relations in
this
country . . .” Elise gave the dead palms a little pressure. “
Ma chère.
I am sure you can bear witness much better than I.”

Then she let go of Nanon’s hands, and after studying her for a moment longer, adjusted herself against the chair back. Nanon’s knuckles still lay against the surface of the table, her palms cupped together, as if she were trying to hold water. Her body was partly twisted away, so that Elise saw only the fall of her unbound hair, the smooth curve of her cheek, the shield-like corner where her wide lips pressed together. A carpenter bee hummed over the bougainvillea vines, working in and out of the hole it had drilled in the gallery rail. Elise waited a moment more, but as Nanon did not speak or shift or blink, she got up and went on about the business of her day.

That evening the four of them dined together as before, though conversation flowed less easily, since the military and political topics had been exhausted the previous night. Nanon remained subdued and withdrawn (Elise thought she avoided Choufleur’s glances), and Tocquet had gone into one of his darkly silent moods, so he contributed little to the table talk. Choufleur, for his part, was more animated than when he’d first arrived, seeming exceptionally well pleased with himself and his visit to Habitation Thibodet. Elise rose to his repartee with all the vivacity she could muster. The effort left her weary, and on the verge of a headache.