Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [204]
And yet her first weeks here had been deep delight. Here was her home, her own true country; she had not known how much she cared for it till her return. She had never thought to return to Vallière, but now she was here—and free. Then too, there were the pleasures of love. The release of Choufleur’s long-bottled passions excited her; he had convinced her with his body that they had truly been waiting all their lives to be joined. He was a fiercer lover than the doctor, and if he sometimes frightened her a little, the fear was no more than the shivering edge of the thrill. The doctor had been tentative at first, seemed inexperienced; she had had to teach him a great many things, though she had enjoyed the project. He was a willing student too, and in the end he had learned to please her very well. It was also true that his was the first man’s touch that she had come to enjoy. She did not think of the doctor when she was with Choufleur, but Choufleur had been away for some weeks now, and so sometimes she remembered the doctor’s gentleness with her, though she did not miss him as much as she did her son.
She watched the little birds flickering from tree to tree among the heavy leaves, and thought of Paul, pressing her fingers against the hollow of her throat. In their first days here she had taken the boy to the places where she had played herself as a little girl; it gave her joy to teach him her childhood games. And Paul was happy, happy enough, though at first he cried for Zabeth and Sophie, and he asked many questions about the doctor, whom he had called Papi. Nanon twisted her head restively, pressing the join of her collarbones. She pictured the doctor holding Paul by both hands and joggling him on his raised instep, both of them grinning and laughing wildly at each other. But Paul was so young; he could forget.
There was nothing in this image, nor in any image she had of the doctor, which agreed with the story Elise had told of him. Nanon had returned to this inconsistency many times since she had come to Vallière, and all the more in Choufleur’s absence, which left her too much to her thoughts. Particularly, the doctor’s first ineptitude as a lover did not fit with Elise’s proposition that he was a careless and callous seducer. Well, perhaps a man might falsely play the ingenue the same as a girl (though in her considerable experience Nanon had never encountered such a thing). But the doctor’s affection for Paul had seemed so genuine! Yes, but with a child so young, she told herself, there was no difficulty. Love of the bastard infant diminished as the child grew taller and began to occupy a larger space in the world. Nanon had seen it many times. Her own father was a white man, and she had a few bright, furry memories of him dandling and petting her when she was very small, giving her special chocolates from Europe whose remembered scent and taste still made her salivate. But after she was three or four years old, she did not see him anymore.
A tiny spider climbed the juice glass, no more than a moving crimson dot. She watched it cross over the rim and fall into the liquid it contained. The spider was too light to sink. Nanon imagined its struggles, which she could not see because the spider’s legs were too small for her to discern. She went indoors and dressed and walked barefoot down from the gallery through the garden to the gateposts. Hinges had been set in the masonry, but the metal gates had never been delivered or hung. All such enterprises had been suspended when the Sieur de Maltrot had disappeared into the mountains of Grande Rivière five years before.
Nanon worked her toes in the fine dust which lay between the posts. Choufleur did not like her to go barefoot—it made her feet hard and horny, and he claimed that it would also make them splay out like the flat, ugly feet of some market woman. But he was not here to prevent her,