Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [111]
She stopped that thought. Oh, but she did not wish at all to go to Santo Domingo City!—or anywhere else in that dull and primitive Spanish colony. Even in the capital, society was strait and prudish, and Elise had already a reputation there, from her first elopement with Tocquet. In Santo Domingo, she would have small use of her freedom indeed.
That word again. Oppressed, Elise pushed aside her cup and stood up, resting her hands on the railing. Vines of the purple-flowering bougainvillea twirled through the bannisters, briers grazing the heels of her palms. She looked at Nanon, who stood a little apart from the two boys, watching them. In Isabelle’s absence, she might have confided her trouble to Nanon, who was certainly discreet enough for that purpose. Yet something held her back from it.
Gabriel and François stood loosely embraced, like waltzing bears, uncertainly balanced on their hind legs. Then François lost his grip and plopped down on his bottom. This time he laughed, instead of wailing. At her remove, Nanon joined in the laughter. Gabriel, meanwhile, remained standing, rocking a little, his balance sure enough. His face was grave, his large head slightly lowered between his heavy shoulders. Already he had the build of a little man, and there was something familiar in that pose. Elise leaned further over the rail to peer more closely: the features of Joseph Flaville came rising to meet her, like the face of a drowned man surfacing from dark water.
Her stomach rolled; she clenched her jaw and forced herself to swallow. No, she would certainly keep this down. They had all kept it dark from her. Joseph Flaville, whom Isabelle would have married, in a differentworld. Perhaps Isabelle had been trying to tell her, in her way . . . and long enough after the fact. Well, no white woman had so much freedom as that to exercise. Elise raised her eyes, and Nanon met her gaze. Her melting look of patient resignation—in times gone by, Elise had wished to slap it off her face. She felt nothing of that now, though Nanon must have known from the beginning.
An infant’s cry sounded from within the house. Elise turned from the rail and hurried toward it. Her stomach rolled again with the sudden movement; again she swallowed the sour taste. In the nursery she found it was her own child, Mireille, who’d awakened wet and screaming, while Zabeth’s Bibiane lay, alert but silent, on her pallet on the floor. Elise took up Mireille and held her to her shoulder, crooning as she patted her back, but the child seemed difficult to calm, and when Zabeth came hurrying in, smelling of milk, Mireille stretched out her arms and cried for her.
Elise sat down, while Zabeth gave Mireille her breast. The nausea subsided, once she was still. Bibiane lay on her back, her brown eyes bright, reflective, watching patiently. Now it was calm. Elise had thought it one of Isabelle’s quirks, a whim, to accompany Nanon for her confinement to Vallière—a place so remote that there’d be no witness of any importance to what births might chance to happen there. Clearly it had been no whim at all. And what of her brother—he must have known too, afterward if not before. But he would simply have declined to see it, that was his way.
Mireille’s lips slackened from the nipple, and she rolled to her back in Zabeth’s cradling arm. Zabeth got up and made to change her.
“No, let me,” Elise said, rising. “Bibiane must have her share.” Zabeth smiled briefly, brilliantly. She stooped to the pallet, raised Bibiane and gave her suck. At such moments