Chapter 1 #2
Instead, Gabriel spoke. “It was as if she bewitched us.”
Suddenly, Marguerite couldn’t breathe.
After a moment, étienne leaned closer to her. “Does…this mean I am going to be an uncle?”
She gaped at Matthieu. “You knew of this?”
He only shrugged. “It was bound to happen eventually.”
“How can you—” Marguerite sputtered. “After what she has done!”
Matthieu took her elbow to direct her away from the boys and lowered his voice. “I don’t think ève is the one to blame here.”
Marguerite threw off his arm and planted her feet. “She seduced our children, Matthieu!”
He kept walking, up the glacis toward the east garden.
She was obliged to follow or lose his ear. “We should burn her at a stake!”
Matthieu glanced over his shoulder, frowning. “She is carrying our first grandchild.”
Marguerite clenched her fists. “That baby is an abomination!” God’s blood, would the thing have two heads? “I never want to set eyes on it!”
“You know what’s expected, Marguerite. We owe that child its freedom.”
“That is custom, Matthieu, not law!” She pursued him through the shade of the flamboyants. “Don’t you dare give that little bitch—”
Marguerite heard a squeal. Their daughter Delphine sprang up from behind one of the rose bushes, giggling, her face the color of its petals.
Matthieu chuckled in return. “Bon matin, Guillaume.”
“Good morning, sir.” Their daughter’s suitor stood up from the garden bench next, buttoning his waistcoat and not even attempting to conceal his grin.
Marguerite buried her face in her hands and groaned.
This island was ruining her children. When she peeked between her fingers, Delphine was wearing one of those gauzy white chemises she called gowns, whose inadequate ruffles left no part of her to the imagination.
Her unpowdered hair was bound up in a garish turban, as if she were a negress.
“This is how all my friends dress!” she would argue.
Matthieu, meanwhile, chatted amiably with their daughter’s corrupter. “I see you’ve returned from your Grand Tour.”
“Last night.” Guillaume glanced at Marguerite and added: “I do not mean I spent the night. I have been here not more than a quarter of an hour.” And what a welcome Delphine had given him.
“Look what he brought me, Maman!” Her daughter bounded toward her, those unmistakably aroused nineteen-year-old breasts jouncing behind the sheer muslin.
She thrust forward a dull grey pendant, a cameo of a nude Cupid playing a flute.
“It’s carved from lava,” Delphine declared.
“From Mount Vesuvius! And Guillaume got to watch it erupt! Can you imagine?”
“It wasn’t like the eruption that buried Pompeii,” the lecher shrugged, “only puffs of smoke.”
What a pity, thought Marguerite. We might have been rid of you.
“But it’s an active volcano, just waiting…”
Guillaume could have brought Delphine a rosary blessed by the Holy Father himself. Instead, their daughter’s suitor had brought her a piece of God’s wrath, His judgment on all those hedonist Romans.
Marguerite sank to one of the iron benches and let her eyes drift from her daughter’s lack of clothing, across the road, beyond Guillaume’s banana fields, to the clouds looming beneath the dark peaks in the distance.
Twenty years before, those emerald mountains had been her first sight of the island.
After three months at sea, she’d clung to Matthieu and exulted as they inhaled the fragrance of the tropical blooms that carried all the way to the ship.
Nestled between the mountains and the sea, the grand buildings and parks of Le Cap appeared like a heavenly city. She thought they’d found Paradise.
Saint-Domingue: the Pearl of the Antilles, the richest colony in the world, it promised them a new beginning, a shedding of their old lives. They wouldn’t need to work or dress or build anything more than a hut; fruit would drop from the trees and the weather would always be perfect…
Then they’d stepped onto this American soil and seen, thick as locusts, twelve black faces for every white one. Their neighbors were the refuse of France. Even the Priests kept colored concubines.
The wrath of God took every form but volcanoes.
Less than a year ago, a hurricane had decimated Port-au-Prince, when the city had barely recovered from its last earthquake; two years before that, not a single drop of rain had fallen on this Northern Plain.
And in the jungles on those emerald mountains, bands of runaway negroes worshipped snakes, drank hogs’ blood, and plotted how to murder them all.
Delphine and Guillaume’s murmurings grew more distant. Marguerite supposed Matthieu had sent them away. She watched the pair go: swaying closer together as they walked, the shape of her daughter’s posteriors clearly visible through the chemise.
“I know what my mother would say,” Marguerite muttered. “‘What else did you expect, from children conceived in sin? God is punishing you for your lust.’ And I suppose she would be right. But it isn’t only us, Matthieu. This island is cursed. It ruins everyone it touches.”
His bee hood still tucked under one arm, Matthieu glanced quizzically at their retreating daughter. “How has living here harmed Delphine?”
Once, she had thought him intelligent. “Look what she’s wearing!”
“La chemise à la Reine? What our Queen and her ladies are wearing?”
“Who introduced the fashion to that Austrian bitch? Creoles from this island.”
“I imagine it’s comfortable.” Matthieu tugged at his own shirt, plastered to his skin with sweat.
“Look who she’s ruining herself with!”
“They intend to marry, Marguerite. After all these years apart, that hasn’t changed. Delphine might have wed a dozen other men while Guillaume was at university and travelling.”
Precisely. Not that anyone on Saint-Domingue deserved her. Marguerite narrowed her eyes as her daughter tilted up her face for a kiss. “I had hoped the old proverb would prove true.”
“‘Far from the eyes, far from the heart’?” Matthieu offered with a smile.
Marguerite nodded gloomily.
“I prefer: ‘Absence is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes little ones and feeds great ones.’”
Marguerite could only sigh in defeat as the lovers vanished around the corner of the house.
“Why is Guillaume so objectionable to you?”
“He’s a Creole.”
“Our children are Creoles too.”
Yes, they had been born here—but Guillaume’s family had been wallowing on this island for more than a century. “He is descended from pirates and whores.”
“And I am the son of a barber! If it were not for those ‘pirates and whores,’ France would never have gained a foothold on Saint-Domingue. We owe them a great deal.”
“Do we?” She forced her eyes to the four rose bushes surrounding them. White, pink, red, and variegated—a rose for each child they had lost. Marguerite remembered their birthdays, their death days, and every day in-between. Félicité would have been two years old today, if she had lived.
Soon they would be unable to visit any of their children’s graves.
So cramped was the cemetery in Le Cap, every three years, negroes turned over the soil to make room for more corpses.
This was not the New World Matthieu had promised her.
No one had warned them about the fevers, that they would “pay the clime’s tribute” with half of their children.
Matthieu sat beside her on the bench. “We might have lost just as many in France.”
That was no comfort. She knew it wasn’t a child stopping her menses now. She was forty-six: she had reached the critical age. If Matthieu ignored her much longer, she would never have another child to love or to lose. She wasn’t sure whether to lament or give thanks.
The mulatresse came outside with a jar on her head and sauntered toward the well. Marguerite clenched her teeth.
“Do you really think any of it would have been different in France?” Matthieu asked. “It is hardly a bastion of morality, and there are servants there too.”
This was different. Just look at her.
“If ève bothers you so much, she will be gone by nightfall.” Matthieu set the bee hood on the ground next to them. At the back of the house, they heard gunshots and whooping again. “I made certain Gabriel and Narcisse confessed before Holy Week. They are far from ruined. Remember Saint Augustine?”
Marguerite remained silent. She was waiting for the little whore to disappear.
“You cannot say the island has ruined étienne.”
“Not yet.”
Matthieu took her hand, but she left it limp. “Are you ready to write to Denis?”
Marguerite closed her eyes. In his letters, her brother had mentioned the fine school in his parish.
Even if the boys began their educations on Saint-Domingue, the island would never have a university—such a thing encouraged independence, as the British colonies had proved.
She knew it would be best to surrender her sons to Denis’s keeping, that they should have sent Gabriel and Narcisse to France years ago; but to lose them, too…
“Can’t we go back with them, Matthieu?” She squeezed his hand in supplication. But when she opened her eyes, he was shaking his head. “Surely no one would recognize us now.”
“You have only a convent to fear; I have a noose.” His voice became strident. “I won’t risk it—not while your husband is still alive.”
“Matthieu! The children might hear you!” Her gaze leapt toward the sounds of their laughter.
Matthieu stood at once and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Gabriel! Narcisse! étienne! Delphine!”
He’d always wanted to tell them—the lies were hers. Panic strangled Marguerite, and suddenly her limbs were useless—she couldn’t stop him.