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 iscustom, Matthieu, not law!” She pursued him throughthe shade of the flamboyants. “Don’t youdaregive 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 Ispentthe night. I have beenherenot 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 fromlava,” 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 driftfrom 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.
