The Josephine B. Trilogy (5 page)
Sunday, October 19.
Mother and I took a potted ginger lily to town today to put on Catherine’s tomb. Then Mother told me to go sit in the wagon. When I looked back I saw her kneeling in the dirt. I ran to see if she was hurt. She had her fist in her mouth and her face was wet. It frightened me, seeing her thus. I didn’t know what to say or do.
“Is there a God?” she cried out. I could see rage in her eyes.
I was afraid to answer, afraid that something I said might condemn Catherine to eternal Hell. “We’d better go,” I said quickly, reaching out for her, fearful of what she might do in that holy place.
Once home I persuaded Mother to have a rum and syrup and got her to lie down. Her cry fills me still:
Is there a God?
My quill trembles and tiny blots of ink like a flurry of tears cover the page.
In which I suffer a bitter disappointment & hope is offered anew
January 3, 1778.
Uncle Tascher came from Fort-Royal today with a buggy-load of provisions: coarse cotton fabric for the slaves’ clothing, black crêpe for mourning clothes for us. Then he pulled a letter out of his vest pocket—a letter from Paris! From Aunt Désirée.
Father read the letter. He looked up at his brother. “It’s about Désirée’s godson—the Marquis’s boy.” He snorted. “
My.
”
“Are you not going to read it aloud, Father?” I sat down beside Mother on the sofa. Outside a gentle breeze stirred the palms. Our lovesick bull was bellowing in his pen.
Father began to read. In the letter Aunt Désirée informed Father that the Marquis’s son, Alexandre—“handsome and well educated”—was now seventeen. If he married, he would come into his mother’s inheritance, so Aunt Désirée has suggested he marry one of her nieces—one of
us.
At last! I thought. My prayers had been answered.
But then Father read out a part about Alexandre preferring Catherine.
Catherine?
“But…” I stuttered. It was only two months ago we buried Catherine.
Mother put down her mending. “Let him have her then,” she said. She is like that still—strange somehow.
Father paced the room. “The young chevalier will command an annual income of at least forty thousand livres.”
“Forty thousand?” Grandmother Sannois said, coming into the room. “Did he say forty thousand? Or four?”
Father stood by the window. “Maybe they would take Manette instead,” he said.
“My thinking exactly, Joseph,” Uncle Tascher said, rubbing his chin.
I didn’t understand. Why not
me?
“Manette’s too young,” Mother said.
“Four thousand would be an acceptable income,” Grandmother Sannois said.
“Manette’s
eleven,
” Father said. “By the time—”
“Only just,” Mother said.
“Eleven and a half. You’re not being reasonable!” Father raised his voice.
Uncle Tascher coughed and poured himself a rum. “Opportunities like this don’t come along every day,” he said.
“Why not
me?
” I said, standing.
Father looked uneasy. He sighed. “Rose—” He glanced at the letter again. Then he cleared his throat. “The chevalier has expressed a preference for a younger bride. You are too close to him in age—you wouldn’t look up to him the way a wife should.”
Mother snorted.
“That’s it exactly,” Father said. He stomped to the door. “God help me!” He slammed the door behind him.
“I won’t let you take my baby!” Mother cried.
I ran to my room. I started to throw things into an old haversack. I was going to run, I didn’t care where. Anywhere. Even the empty slave shack down by the shore would be better than this. Even a cave in the mountains, with the runaways.
That’s when I saw Manette, standing in the door sucking on a stick of sugarcane, her battered wood doll under one arm.
“I thought you were playing outside,” I said. I didn’t care about Manette, to tell the truth.
I heard sniffles. “I don’t want to go!”
“Oh…,” I said. “You heard all that.” I took her in my arms. “Poor little scarecrow,” calling her the name the slaves had given her.
Sunday night, January 4.
I woke to the sound of billiard balls knocking against each other, the sound of men laughing. Uncle Tascher and Father were in the game room, I thought. How late was it?
“Why one of
your
girls, Joseph?” I heard Uncle demand.
I went to the door, pressed my ear to the crack.
“Not that they aren’t lovely,” he went on, “and of baptismal innocence, both of them—but face it, a girl without a dowry? The lad must be desperate. And if he’s such a fine specimen, why must he go halfway around the world for a girl he’s never even seen? And a penniless one at that. If he’s all our sister says he is, it seems to me he would have his pick of any of the pedigreed strumpets in France.”
“Désirée’s no fool,” I heard my father answer. “How old is the Marquis now anyway? Sixty? Seventy? When he hangs up his fiddle, Désirée will be—” Father made a rude noise.
Then Uncle Robert said something, but I couldn’t make it out.
“If she can make this”—Father’s words became unclear for a moment—“she’ll be legally related. And it wouldn’t do, would it, for a
relative
to end her days in a charity hospital.”
I heard a chair scrape on the wood floor. “I can see the advantage to Désirée—but why would the
son
go along with it?” Uncle Tascher asked.
“Does the boy have a choice? Until he’s twenty-one, if his father tells him to jump in the Seine, he’s got to jump in the Seine. And if our sister tells the Marquis to make his son go jump in the Seine, I believe the old bastard would do it. The Devil knows what she does for him in return.” He laughed.
“So you think young Alexandre is being forced into this arrangement?”
“Not so much forced as bribed. Happiness is an unlimited income, if you ask me. The only way the young chevalier can get his hands on his fortune is to marry. And my guess is that his piss-proud father told him (at our beloved sister’s
suggestion,
God bless her): Look, if you want my permission to marry, it must be a Tascher girl.”
There was another burst of laughter and the talk turned to slave prices. I climbed back into bed. I felt a strange tingling in my belly. What did Father mean, that Aunt Désirée had
done
something to the Marquis—something that made him do her bidding?
January 5.
I told Mimi that Manette might be going to France to be married. “She’s scared,” I said.
“What’s to be scared of?” Mimi asked, mashing the plaintain with violent strokes.
I wasn’t really sure what it was Manette had to be afraid of, but I knew it was something—something to do with dogs climbing over each other, trembling in that pathetic way. “You know, marriage duty.”
“Is she in flowers yet?”
I shook my head. “What does that have to do with it?” All I know is that the cook isn’t allowed to cure pork when she’s in flowers.
*
“Child, don’t they tell you
anything!
” But Mimi didn’t tell me anything either.
March 17.
Now Manette is ill—she has a fever, just as Catherine had. Mother says it’s her fear of getting married that brought it on.
I crawl in under the covers beside her and try to cheer her. I tell her how grand it will be in France. I tell her about the wonderful dolls they have there, and how our beautiful Aunt Désirée will look after her. I tell her how handsome the chevalier is, how smart and how educated, how noble and how rich. I tell her how envious I am. (Oh, but I am!)
But in her fever she only cries. There are nights when I’m so afraid she will die, as Catherine did, in one big moment gone, just a limp body on a rumpled bed, no more or less than a rag doll.
June 23, 9:00
P.M.
Father came back from Sainte-Lucie yesterday. Right away he and Mother got into a quarrel.
“But Manette never did want to go!” I heard Mother say. “It was
you
put those words in her mouth.”
She started crying that he
couldn’t
take Manette from her, not so soon after losing Catherine. Father yelled, “You crazy créole women and your children!” I felt the walls shake as the door slammed shut.
June 24.
Father has relented. He wrote to Aunt Désirée, telling her he wouldn’t be able to bring Manette, she was too sick to go, but how about me? He explained that I wasn’t all
that
old, and already well developed.
“You know they may not like the idea, Rose,” he told me, sealing the letter with wax. “After all, you’re already fifteen.”
“When will you find out?”
“It will take a few months for my letter to get there and what with the war on—” He stopped to calculate. “Five months?”
I moaned. Five months! I want to know
now!
Sunday, July 19, 1778.
There is talk of a new family in town, a woman and her son. At church I saw them after mass. The boy—about sixteen, I guessed, and comely—was watching three village boys chase a scorpion that had slipped under a pew. He fiddled with the handle of his cutlass, his long dark bangs hiding his eyes. His linen frock and leather breeches were patched.
“Béké-goyave,” Mother said under her breath, pushing me outside, “vagabonds!”
July 25.
Mother allowed me to go with Mimi and Sylvester to market today. “So long as your chores are done,” she said. We set off for town in the back of the ox-cart.
It was busy in the village; I confess I was hoping to see the new boy, but there were only sailors who’d come over from Fort-Royal for the cock-fights. I kept my eyes to the ground, the way the nuns had taught.
At the dock we bought a bonito and three coral fish from a fisherman with light frizzy hair. He stared at me while we went through his catch. Then he said something to Sylvester and laughed in a way that made me blush.
We walked back up to the village square to buy pawpaws, guavas, avocado pears and tapioca. At a table displaying pictures of the saints, little mirrors and beads, a woman told us about the runaway slave who had turned into a dog and eaten a baby on the Desfieux plantation. Just at
the frightful part the new boy’s mother arrived, followed at some distance by the boy, laden with parcels.
His mother nodded at me, her eyes deep set. “I saw you at church,” she said. She talked like a nun, proper. Between sentences she pressed her lips together.
I nodded. She introduced herself as Madame Browder, a British name. The boy’s name is William.
“We’re at the foot of Morne Croc-Souris,” I told them.
Mimi spat onto the dirt.
“On the river?” Madame Browder asked, tucking a wisp of red hair under her plain white téte.
“Farther on, La Pagerie.” From across the bay, I could see a gommier making its way slowly to the shore. A swarm of gulls hovered above it like mosquitoes in rainy season.
“We’re closer in toward town,” Madame Browder said.
“The old Laignelot homestead,” Mimi said. She was scratching the ears of a mangy dog. “Neighbours, if you go by the river.”
I felt I should invite them for tea and cakes, but I dared not, remembering my mother’s harsh words: béké-goyave. I was saved by Sylvester pulling up in the wagon. Hurriedly I took my leave.
“Sweet eyes,” Mimi teased on the way home, jabbing me with her elbow. “I saw you making sweet eyes.”
Sunday, August 9.
William and his mother sat near the front of church this morning. Mother, Manette (who is better now) and I sat on a bench several rows behind. All through mass I watched him, my heart fluttering like a trapped baby bird.
August 10.
I sneaked down to the lower pond this afternoon for a swim. But when I got there I saw the new boy William Browder. He was fishing, his pantaloons rolled up to his knees. He startled when he saw me, as if he
shouldn’t be there. He pulled his line out of the water, a long length of white horsehair attached to a bamboo pole.
“Caught anything?” It was hot and I longed to go in, but I didn’t know if I should, now that he was there. Instead I sat down on the bank. I picked a long blade of razor grass and split it so I could whistle through it.
“How do you do that?” William Browder asked, rolling down his pantaloons.
I showed him and we sat whistling.
“Why did you move to Trois-Ilets?” I asked finally. Cul-de-sac à vaches—cow-field—that’s what we call it. “Not that it’s my business,” I added, in an attempt to show manners.
“It was hard for my mother in Saint-Pierre,” he said. He looked up at the sky. A hawk was circling. “It’s hard for her here, too.” He shrugged.
I’d heard that his mother used to be an actress, that she’d fallen in love with a sailor in the British navy during the Seven Years’ War. Imagine having a mother like that, I thought. An actress! The shame and the glory of it. An actress couldn’t be buried in a church graveyard, or even marry—the Church forbade it.
“You’re English? But you don’t have an accent.” I swatted at a red ant crawling up my arm.
“My father was from Scotland actually.”
I didn’t know where Scotland was, but I was relieved he wasn’t British. The British are not Christian—they eat children.
“I never knew him,” he went on. He stretched out on the grass, twirling a blade of grass between his fingers.
“Never?”
William looked at me. His eyes were the lightest blue I’d ever seen. “I remember his face, remember him smiling. But that’s all.”
“My father is rarely home, so I don’t suppose it’s that much different,” I told him.
“When I was young,” William said, “I liked to think that my mother and father had loved each other very much, and had parted tragically. I thought that better than some long drawn-out marriage where the husband and wife only grow bitter and cold.”
