Master of the Crossroads (82 page)

For a month, six weeks, it did go badly with Isabelle. She could scarcely eat, so she lost her strength and grew spectrally thin, with the bones standing out on her face, as if the flesh were no more than a veil for her skull. She began to avoid the mirrors of the house for that reason—it was no aspect for a pregnant woman, though maybe not so inappropriate for her case. Maybe the child would starve in the womb, come rattling out like a dry, shriveled pea. But she could not quite bring herself to wish for that. Even the bitter remark she’d made from the saddle to Captain Maillart had only been half-intended. She could feel the child’s life fully wrapped around her own, and she still clung to life herself, in spite of everything.

Then the period of illness passed, and she could eat again, and she did eat—like a tiger, to the frank amazement of Nanon and Madame Fortier. Even Monsieur Fortier, usually so inexpressive, would study her with interest at the table, stroking his beard with his long, graceful hand and humming to himself, as Isabelle demolished entire platters of food.

Her color came back, and so did her strength. Useless, for she had no future. The outcome of her situation was something which her thought rejected. Fortunately, this middle phase of pregnancy always made her stupid. She could feel, but could not think, and she embraced her feeling.

Nanon began to take her around the countryside. They might do whatever they liked all day, as the Fortiers required nothing of them at all, but indulged them like two spoiled children. For some few blissful weeks, Isabelle felt herself carried back to her own childhood, a time when no could gainsay her—her mother had died soon after her birth and her father had no will to oppose her. She had been the princess of Habitation Reynaud, admired and obeyed by all her father’s six hundred slaves. The slaves had mostly been fond of her, for, though capricious, she had not been cruel. Now, as she went rambling with Nanon, she remembered with a strange emotion certain kindnesses they’d shown her, which she had not recalled for many years.

She and Nanon got the use of two little donkeys, and rode them all around the country in the style of two market women—sidesaddle but without stirrups, the forward knee hooked up over the animal’s shoulder. Nanon showed her the tombs of the
caciques,
and the places where one could gather wild orchids or, better yet, wild mushrooms. She took Isabelle to a cavern full of Indian relics, now inhabited only by bats—which were reputed to smoke pipes of tobaccos, like ghosts of the old
caciques.
The two women giggled like girls over this tale, but afterwards were perhaps a little frightened by it.

Then one bright morning Nanon brought Isabelle to a new place. Isabelle had felt, from the moment they set out, that her friend had some particular plan. Nanon had packed an elaborate lunch in one of her donkey’s panniers, and had put two blankets in the other. They rode an unfamiliar path, and soon Isabelle began to hear the sound of rushing water. They came out into a green glade in the center of which was a deep, foaming pool, fed by a twenty-foot waterfall.

“Oh,” Isabelle said. “Oh . . .” She could say nothing more at all, the place was so very special, like a gift.

Nanon was tying up the donkeys, on long tethers so that they had space to graze. She spread one of the blankets over the grass, and set the basket of food and the other folded blanket on top of it. Then she took Isabelle by the hand.

“Come,” she said, and Isabelle let herself be led. They climbed alongside the waterfall to about half its height, with the help of hands and footholds worn in the stone by long years of use. Ten feet up, they balanced on a ledge, and Nanon thrust her free arm to the elbow into the curtain of falling water.

“Come,” she said, and she drew Isabelle forward into the current, before she could think of resisting. The cold drenched her, shocked her to the bone. Then she was through. She and Nanon stood in a little grotto behind the fall, hugging each other for warmth and laughing from excitement.

The sun, filtered through the falling water, covered them with a strange liquid light. Nanon pulled her dress over her head and balled it up and hurled it through the barrier. She turned to Isabelle and kissed her on the corner of the mouth.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. Then she stepped through the veil, as she were herself translated into water, and disappeared into the tumbling light.

Isabelle stood poised a moment, with her finger laid on her open mouth where she had been touched. The waterfall made a weird window, through which everything appeared magnified, distorted, rearranged by the ropes of crystal fluid. She could not really see what lay beyond it.

She took off her own dress and jumped through the waterfall, holding the garment stretched out at arm’s length like a flag. As she launched into the bright air, she shouted out a mixture of joy and fear and surprise at the chill water washing over her again. The water of the pool was warmer than she had expected when she went under, though it was very deep. She came up spluttering. Nanon reached out her hand to pull her up over the bank into the glow of the sunshine.

For a moment they stood side by side, studying each other’s bodies, each pear-shaped from pregnancy. Nanon set her arm against Isabelle’s; they were now almost the same honey shade, for in these last weeks Isabelle had abandoned all her usual precautions against the sun. Only her breasts and belly were still pallid, of course, and the parts of her limbs which were usually covered, and soon they were both giggling at the effect of this. Then they turned and stood side by side, looking into the pool, where their dresses floated like two great crumpled water lilies.

“The water is not so cold as I thought,” Isabelle said. “And it seems to get warmer the deeper you go.”

“A warm spring feeds it from below,” Nanon said. She wrinkled her nose, and Isabelle thought she caught a hint of sulfur in the air.

“But come,” Nanon said, “you will burn.”

She led Isabelle to the spread blanket and covered her with the folded one. They stretched out on their backs, side by side, with their fingers lightly laced and the sun red against their eyelids.

Later, when they roused from their doze, they were both very hungry. Isabelle busied herself laying out the cold chicken, bread and fruit, while Nanon hooked their dresses from the pool with a long stick and spread them on the grass to dry. Then she climbed again to the grotto behind the waterfall. When she came out this time, she was brandishing a bottle of white wine.

“Miracle,”
Isabelle said, when she had tasted it. “But this is very good, it is certainly French. How is it possible?”

Nanon gave her only a sly smile. For a time they went on eating and drinking and silence.

“But it must be witchcraft,” Isabelle said finally, as she drained her glass.

“No,” said Nanon, a little sadly, it seemed. “No witchcraft. Choufleur kept his wine here, so it would not sour in the heat. Now I am the only one that knows.” She smiled distantly. “There are still a great many bottles hidden there. I think I shall not tell the Fortiers.”

“All this place must be your secret, then.”

“It was one of the first secrets I shared with him. Later, after he had changed, it was all destroyed for me.” Nanon turned to Isabelle, her heavy red lips curving. “But now I can love it again, because of you.”

“Why, you touch my heart,” Isabelle said. As she spoke, she felt a shadow pass over her. She leaned back on her elbows. A hawk was circling the crown of the sky, but the hawk could not have cast such a shadow.

“No,” said Nanon, as if to answer the unspoken question. “I would rather remember him as he was then.”

“You speak of him as if he were dead.”

“Yes,” Nanon said slowly. “I suppose I do.” She stood up and walked over to her dress, which had dried by then, and slowly stooped to lift it, like a burden she was reluctant to resume.

When Nanon’s child was born, Isabelle assisted her as she had promised. The birth was uncomplicated, and Madame Fortier, though older and more experienced in midwifery, stepped back at the last moment, so it was Isabelle who received the bloody infant into her own hands. A boy. She slapped his back to start him crying, as she’d seen others do, then cleaned and dried him all over and swaddled him carefully in soft white cloth. Nanon was insensible; Isabelle passed the baby to Madame Fortier for a moment while she dried her own hands. When she looked again, the older woman seemed to be in the grip of some interior struggle, her hands trembling, her face tightly drawn, so that Isabelle took the infant back at once, and so quickly that she almost snatched him away.

During the next three days, the newborn began to take on the face he would wear through life. His features were very much those of his father’s, and it was plain enough to Isabelle that this father must be Choufleur, rather than Antoine Hébert, though no one spoke openly of the matter. Madame Fortier had none of the affection one might have expected for a grandson. She handled the baby seldom, and whenever she did pick him up, Isabelle had the disturbing impression that Madame Fortier could barely restrain herself from dashing his brains out on the floor.

At the end of three days, Nanon was on her feet again, and Madame Fortier announced her own departure. She and her husband must go, she said, to see to their holdings near Dondon. Here at Vallière, all was now in satisfactorily good order. Salomon had the field workers well in hand and (Madame Fortier implied) the two younger women would know well enough how to manage him.

At this announcement, Nanon merely lowered her head with her usual self-obscuring modesty, but Isabelle found a moment alone with Madame Fortier, just before they left.

“It is only a child,” she said carefully, having chosen her words in advance. “Only a baby—and given to us to make the best we can of him.”

“Is it so?” said Madame Fortier, drawing herself up to such a sharpness that Isabelle quailed, believing for an instant that the other woman had penetrated her own secret.

“A mother may fully give her love,” Madame Fortier said, in a terrible voice. “But there is blood too, and nothing—nothing!—will wash blood away.”

Then she softened ever so lightly. “But perhaps you are right,” she said more quietly. “In any case, I admire your sentiment, though what this child will do for a father, I do not know. I do not say I am leaving forever, though it’s best that I leave now, for a time.”

She stood up, and with her usual stately grace went down from the gallery into the garden. Beyond the open gateway, Fortier was already waiting on the wagon seat. But Madame Fortier paused at the foot of the stairs, and beckoned Isabelle to come down within earshot of her whisper.

“For your sake too, it may be better that I leave now, young woman.”

Inwardly, Isabelle wilted again, though she thought she kept her expression calm.

“You may find that Nanon has small enough experience in certain practical matters,” Madame Fortier said, with a dubious smile. “If you are in trouble, when your time comes, you must send for a woman called Man Jouba.”

“But where?” said Isabelle, who’d grasped her meaning well enough.

“Only say her name. They will bring her, out of the mountains.” Without saying anything more, Madame Fortier glided across the garden, her back faultlessly erect, like a soldier’s, as she stepped up into the wagon.

The management of the plantation now fell into the hands of the two women, which meant that it fell into Isabelle’s. Madame Fortier had judged Nanon correctly, at least to this extent. But Isabelle took up the ledgers where Madame Fortier had laid them down. In the older woman’s hand she found a meticulous record of all events on the plantation: the weather, positions of the stars and phases of the moon, progress of work in the coffee groves and drying sheds, a thorough record of illness, death and birth (not only among the people but for the animals too). Of the new child in the
grand’case
she had written this: “To the
quarteronée
woman, Nanon, was born, 6 January 1800, a male child,
quarteroné,
to be called François.”

There were no more excursions, no larks in the countryside. Not only because of the burden of management, but because Isabelle felt the weight of her pregnancy much more heavily now. In fact she was ill, and full of foreboding. That halcyon day by the waterfall seemed eons away from her now.

One morning at the breakfast table, she felt herself give way, but not till she saw Nanon’s startled face did she look down and see her skirts all stained with blood.

“Now let me die,” she said.

“Oh, what can you mean?” said Nanon, shocked. But she bypassed her own question and called a housemaid to help Isabelle to her bed.

The contractions, convulsions rather, came quickly, then subsided, then came again in viciously stabbing sets. So it went all through the morning, afternoon, into the night and the next day. The child was not descending properly. Isabelle felt that her own body would crush it to a lifeless pulp, and take her with it too. She held the name of the midwife to her like a secret weapon she would not draw. At last she passed from consciousness into fevered dream. It was night again when she awoke, enough to be aware of Nanon dabbing her temples and her lips with a cool cloth. In the light of a candle behind her head, Nanon whispered to her to hold on.

“No,” said Isabelle. “It is better I should die, and the child too.”

“You can’t mean that,” Nanon said to her.

“Oh yes,” said Isabelle. “If you knew the father.”

“No father could merit such a wish. No matter who.”

“It is Joseph Flaville.”

She felt Nanon draw back. For a moment she knew herself abandoned, utterly alone, and she wished she had not spoken. Then Nanon took one of her hands in both of hers, and pressed and rubbed it till Isabelle began to feel a thread of energy returning to her through this contact.

“Even so,” Nanon said. “Even so, we shall find some way.”

“There is no way,” said Isabelle. “From the day it happened I was ruined.”

“There is. You will live for your children already born, Robert and Héloïse.”