She surrendered to his momentum. Through the back gallery and down the steps they raced, out into the night glaring orange and furious. They did not need the lantern. From the cane, knives of flame slashed at the sky. Black plumes of smoke surged all the way to the stars.
To the right, she was sure she heard the shrieking of their horses in the stable, and passing far above their heads, the angry hum of Matthieu’s bees. Behind them, she thought Gabriel yelled a question and his father answered. Then the snap and roar of the fire in the cane filled her ears as the ghastly light filled her vision.
Étienne pulled her closer and closer to the flames, to the heat, until at last he halted at the edge of the new latrine. Marguerite doubled over, but she could not catch her breath; she inhaled only burning air.
Her son set the lantern near the pit and tapped the top rung of the ladder. “You go first,Maman.”
She hesitated, still gasping, looking over her shoulder past the plumeria trees to the house. She heard a gunshot.
“We have to hurry,” Étienne urged, taking the pistol from her.
She had no choice. She descended cautiously, keenly aware that she was nearly naked, with nothing beneath her chemise but Étienne’s boots, without even a cap. At least the half-dug latrine was not as deep as she’d feared—not quite six feet. Inside, she could breathe more easily. Her son knelt at the edge and handed her back the pistol as well as the lantern. In the candlelight, she scanned the small floor of the pit for a flat spot. When she’d set down the lantern and the pistol, she looked up to find her son still above ground. He was pushing the ladder at an angle into the latrine, till its top sank below the surface of the earth.
“Étienne, what are you doing?”
He checked the flintlock mechanism of his rifle. “I have to help Papa.”
From the direction of the house, shouts now—and more shots.
Étienne turned toward them as well. “I have to help Gabriel and Narcisse.”
“No, Étienne!” She reached for his ankle, but he had only to step away from the pit, and in an instant he was lost to her. “Étienne!” She sucked in a terrified breath and tried to hoist herself above the earth. But the breath was all smoke; her lungs seized with coughing, and she collapsed into the latrine.
She did not know how much time passed before she recovered enough to move. Her eyes tearing, she groped for the ladder and dragged herself upwards into a ceiling of heat. She held her breath as best she could, but the stench of burning overwhelmed her and took on a new edge, harsher than the cane. She supposedshewas roasting now. She dared not open her eyes any farther, but?—
Her left foot slipped between the rungs, and she fell hard against the ladder. It wobbled sideways under her weight and dumped her back into the latrine. She coughed and moaned and extracted her leg, pulling it protectively against her. Bruised but not broken, she hoped. At least she could breathe again.
Still supine, she assessed her person. Her hands and forearms radiated heat, and the skin of her fingers was painfully stiff when she slid them into Étienne’s boot to check her ankle. Her hair—hernatural hair, cut close to the skull—was strangest of all:unnaturalnow. Clubbed. Brittle. Forlornly she stared upward through the rungs of the ladder. What could she do for Étienne that armed men could not do?
From this pit, she could see nothing but a few bright stars, and then smoke swallowed even those. There was no moon. She worried that the negroes might see the candlelight. Careful of her left ankle, she made herself sit up and crawl to the lantern. She grabbed the pistol, then blew out the flame. She heard no more gunshots, only cries that sounded like animals, or savages.
She retreated to a corner of the latrine, till something hard and bulbous jabbed her in the spine. Terror twisted her stomach. She scrambled away in a crouch, gritting her teeth at the sudden pain in her ankle and aiming the pistol wildly. She squinted hard but saw only shadows. She wished she had not extinguished the lantern. She had no way to relight it.
She backed away the few feet she could, under the ladder again. It must be Indian bones, she reasoned. She pulled her knees against her body, protected from the naked earth only by her son’s boots and the muslin of her chemise, nearly as thin as netting.
Was Delphine hiding somewhere like this? How many plantations would these negroes attack before they were crushed? Surely even savages would spare a woman eight months with child.
Marguerite clutched the pistol and stared up at the lurid firelight above the pit. She knew that if a black face appeared, she would have the strength to shoot.And then what?The explosion would only draw more of them.
Perhaps Matthieu had intended her to use the shot on herself. But suicide was sin, mortal sin, whatever the reason… Then again, she was already damned.
Not if she made an Act of Perfect Contrition. God might still forgive her, if she was truly sorry, if she repented not from fear of Hell but love of Him. She closed her aching eyes. Why hadn’t she remembered her rosary? If only the bones in this pit belonged to saints and not savages. She didn’t care what Étienne said, they wereall the same: red or black. How she wished he were here to argue with her…
New, precise pain seared into the flesh of her knee. Her eyes flew open to find an ember of cane perched on her chemise. She smacked at it and only burned her palm. She tossed aside the pistol and flipped the ember from her skirt, but the muslin had caught fire. She grabbed one fistful of dirt after another and threw them at her legs until the flames died.
Beside her, the ember pulsed dimmer and dimmer like an injured insect.“The Virgin’s chemise is full of fireflies.”Her lungs convulsed in a mad, noiseless laugh, that the Creole expression should come to her now. Marguerite had never understood it, but she knew it was some kind of blasphemy. Not even the Mother of God was sacred on Saint-Domingue. How could Marguerite expect her intercession? She doubted Saint Dominic would listen either; the colony was an insult and not an honor to him.
She recovered the pistol. She thought it was still at half-cock, but she wasn’t sure. Gabriel had given her that shooting lesson almost a year ago, after the mulatto uprising. The danger had been over; she’d nodded indulgently, but she hadn’t really?—
A sound speared through her, worse than her twisted ankle, worse than her burns. She knew who made the sound, though there was no way she could know. She had heard Matthieu howling with laughter; she had heard him bellowing with anger; she had heard him groaning with pleasure; but in their twenty-three years together, she had never heard him scream. Now, he would not stop.
She clenched her eyes shut and tried to cover her ears without letting go of the pistol. Her own whimpers became desperate whispers, a prayer to drown out those screams: “Pater noster, qui es in cælis…”
Perhaps the sweet stench of the cane would simply suffocate her. “Thy kingdom come.” She would welcome it, to be anywhere but this world where subjects imprisoned their King, where slaves raised their hands against their masters.
“Thy will be done…” The words choked her like the smoke. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those—who trespass…” She couldn’t say the rest, but in her head, she chanted:Deliver us from evil. Deliver us…
If the Lord turned His face from anywhere, she knew it would be from here.
