Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [257]
“But, Maman,” the boy said, his ivory face disconsolate. “Is it not useless to write now? How shall we send it?”
A fair question, Elise thought. She would have been lost for an answer herself. She watched Paul fidget with his cup; half-finished café au lait gone scummy. Nanon should make him drink up that milk; it would be hard to come by at Le Cap, no doubt. Along with other privations and discomforts they could certainly expect. It made her queasier to look at that cup. But Paul was not resisting the letter out of sheer sloth, she imagined; it must certainly distress him to think of his absent father.
“Maybe we will give it to a bird,” Nanon said, with a faint curve of her full lips. Her hands were folded demurely on the table’s edge, and her head slightly bowed, so that she seemed to be looking at the point of Paul’s chin. It was her habit, Elise knew, to avoid, almost imperceptibly, the eyes of white people.
“The malfini will find your father when he looks down from the top of the sky,” Nanon said. “Or maybe we will give this letter to one of these little brown doves, who are so careful.”
“But really, Maman,” Paul said sulkily. “There is no bird who will carry a letter.”
“Kouté,” Nanon said, listen. Her voice was still gentle, but she raised it enough to look her son full in the face. “To write to your father will put you in the same spirit with him, and even if we cannot send the paper, it may be that your thought will reach him still.”
Paul glanced at Elise, though not so petulantly.
“Your mother is right,” Elise said. She placed her fingers over her mouth for the moment it took her to swallow the sour bubble forming in her gullet. “Do as she says.”
Paul nodded and picked up his pen. There was merit in Nanon’s way of thinking of the thing, Elise considered. Between herself and Sans-Souci there’d been no letters, no exchange of tokens. There, the name had slipped out of its oubliette in the depths of her brain. Was he still alive at Grande Rivière? And if he were, what difference? No news, no word, no bird to carry messages. Quite likely she did not even wish that there were. She pushed the name back down where it had come from. Paul’s quill scratched upon the paper. Someone was watching her, she felt, from beyond the pool below the gallery—from the lemon hedge that bounded the yard. But before she could make out who it was, Merbillay came striding onto the gallery, carrying the coffee tray, her head held high and her height exaggerated by the long striped kerchiefs that swept her hair up into a cone.
Queen of the kitchen that she was, Merbillay almost never served at table; her manner was a little too imperious for that. Merbillay had spent too much of her youth as a maroon ever to acquire the submissiveness one wanted in a house servant. Where was Zabeth? She must be readying the infants for this day of travel. In fact, Elise had set her to that task. Elise had not ordered any more coffee, and wanted none. Her first cup had seemed to disagree with her. But Merbillay tilted the hot black stream from the silver spout, bracing her free hand on the table. The edge of her palm pressed warmly, insistently, against Elise’s hand.
Then somehow Merbillay’s hand had completely covered Elise’s with its warmth, but between their palms, there was some object: a folded paper. Elise looked up, meeting Merbillay’s eyes, calm and inscrutable beneath the embroidered hem of her kerchief, and as their contact sundered she slipped the paper to her knee, beneath the table’s edge. The letter was twice folded, but unsealed. At a rapid glance she could just make out the backward