• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1126 0

into the hands of the two women, which meant that it fell into Isabelle’s. Madame Fortier had judged Nanon correctly, at least to this extent. But Isabelle took up the ledgers where Madame Fortier had laid them down. In the older woman’s hand she found a meticulous record of all events on the plantation: the weather, positions of the stars and phases of the moon, progress of work in the coffee groves and drying sheds, a thorough record of illness, death and birth (not only among the people but for the animals too). Of the new child in the grand’case she had written this: “To the quarteronée woman, Nanon, was born, 6 January 1800, a male child, quarteroné, to be called François.”

There were no more excursions, no larks in the countryside. Not only because of the burden of management, but because Isabelle felt the weight of her pregnancy much more heavily now. In fact she was ill, and full of foreboding. That halcyon day by the waterfall seemed eons away from her now.

One morning at the breakfast table, she felt herself give way, but not till she saw Nanon’s startled face did she look down and see her skirts all stained with blood.

“Now let me die,” she said.

“Oh, what can you mean?” said Nanon, shocked. But she bypassed her own question and called a housemaid to help Isabelle to her bed.

The contractions, convulsions rather, came quickly, then subsided, then came again in viciously stabbing sets. So it went all through the morning, afternoon, into the night and the next day. The child was not descending properly. Isabelle felt that her own body would crush it to a lifeless pulp, and take her with it too. She held the name of the midwife to her like a secret weapon she would not draw. At last she passed from consciousness into fevered dream. It was night again when she awoke, enough to be aware of Nanon dabbing her temples and her lips with a cool cloth. In the light of a candle behind her head, Nanon whispered to her to hold on.

“No,” said Isabelle. “It is better I should die, and the child too.”

“You can’t mean that,” Nanon said to her.

“Oh yes,” said Isabelle. “If you knew the father.”

“No father could merit such a wish. No matter who.”

“It is Joseph Flaville.”

She felt Nanon draw back. For a moment she knew herself abandoned, utterly alone, and she wished she had not spoken. Then Nanon took one of her hands in both of hers, and pressed and rubbed it till Isabelle began to feel a thread of energy returning to her through this contact.

“Even so,” Nanon said. “Even so, we shall find some way.”

“There is no way,” said Isabelle. “From the day it happened I was ruined.”

“There is. You will live for your children already born, Robert and Héloïse.”

Isabelle felt the wetness of her tears against the pillow. “If I live,” she said, “I will ruin them too.”

“Do not say that!” Nanon hissed. “Listen to me. I will not let you go this way. When I was alone, and with child, and helpless, when the whites were killing women of my kind all through the streets of Le Cap, you took me in and saved my life and you saved Paul.”

“But . . .” Isabelle was thinking that she had not taken Nanon in with her whole heart, but had done it at the doctor’s insistence, and that at the time she had partly resented it. But there was no way for her to say such a thing, not now. So she did not, but let Nanon go on massaging her hand, until she began to feel that maybe Nanon was right about everything.

“Man Jouba,” she muttered at last.

“What?” Nanon’s breath was warm and sweet against her ear.

“Send for Man Jouba,” Isabelle said. Then she slipped backward, toppling into the delirium of her pain, and for a long time she knew nothing more.

When she came to herself again, it was night and she was alone. All the house was very quiet. She did not know if it were the same night, but thought it must be at least the next. Nothing in her memory was clear. There had been dreadful pain, which had now abated. The memory of pain was never perfect.

Outdoors, the wind shivered the leaves and branches, and a cool current swirled through her room. Somewhere