Chapter Twenty
NOVEMBER WIND SWEPT A THIN ragged rain cloud over the streets of Le Cap. Most passersby scurried for shelter in the doorways, but Monsieur Cigny, determining from a glance at the sky that the shower was unlikely to last long, kept striding down the middle of the way, a few raindrops collecting on his thick black hair, glistening in the curls of his beard. He was returning from the government house to his offices on the quay, but he had it in mind that he might in passing make one of his rare appearances at his wife’s salon.
The cloud passed over; it had rained scarcely enough to settle the dust. The sun shed a weak radiance through the haze. The wind had died, replaced by a damp calm settling. Monsieur Cigny crushed a mosquito against his cheek. He entered his house and mounted the steps, absently crumpling the insect’s legs between his fingers.
He came into the parlor unannounced; there was a stir on the sofa cushions as his weighty steps crossed the threshold. It was Pascal, that frail and foppish youth his wife kept dangling from one of her several spider’s threads, straightening hastily from where he’d been lolling on the sofa, his head in her lap perhaps? Isabelle twisted to smile at him across the sofa’s back.
“An unexpected pleasure,” said Madame Cigny. Her husband studied her, wondering if her flush had a source other than the humid heat. But surely it was unlikely that she would carry on her dalliance in the presence of her son, not to mention that mulatto courtesan she’d been, inexplicably, sheltering here these last few months. Nanon was sitting in the corner, amusing Robert with cat’s cradles.
“Monsieur.” Pascal jumped to his feet and bowed.
“Asseyez-vous.” Monsieur Cigny circled the sofa and walked into the center of the room. Robert ran to him; he swung the boy up into his arms. Pascal shifted a silver flute from a cushion before he reseated himself. Monsieur Cigny noticed a sheaf of music on the low table there; perhaps it was this that had brought Pascal and his wife tête-à-tête.
“Well, I have seen our new commissioners,” he announced. “Messieurs Mirbeck, Roume, et Saint-Léger…”
“Do you approve them?” Isabelle’s dark eyes narrowed as she spoke. Monsieur Cigny smiled down at her, quite naturally. He recognized her good political sense, and could make use of it even when other departments of their marriage were in utter disarray.
“One must distinguish the men from their mission, I believe,” he said. “Of course they are radicals, though not of the worst kind.” He paused to ruminate.
The three commissioners, sent out to do what they might to resolve the disturbances in the colony, had been selected by the French National Assembly at the time of the decree of May fifteenth, which granted political rights to mulattoes, but, between their appointment and their actual departure from the metropole, there had intervened a new decree, which restored authority over all such matters to the internal governing bodies of the colony itself.
“But they are bound to support the decree of September twenty-fourth,” said Isabelle, anticipating him.
“Indeed, and I believe they will not fail to do so,” Monsieur Cigny said. “But they bring better news than that.” Robert was tugging at his beard; wincing a little, the father disengaged the child’s plump fingers and set him on the floor.
“There are troops coming,” he declared. “Or so they say.”
“A good number?” asked Isabelle.
“Sufficient. As many as ten thousand I have heard. Enough to put down this slave revolt once and for all.” He watched Robert, who had returned to Nanon’s knees.
The woman took up her loop and twirled it dexterously among her fingers. Two dancing figures made of string approached each other, suspended in the cat’s cradle. Monsieur Cigny felt a returning twinge of the irritation that had pricked him when he first came into the parlor. Nanon had rebuffed him the couple of times he’d visited her room at night—this in spite of the obvious pregnancy that proved she could not be so nunnish as she affected to behave with him.
“I thought you’d want to hear the news,” he muttered.
“Oh yes,” said Isabelle, “I am very glad of it.”
“Well then.” He stared at Pascal. To be cuckolded by such a creature, whom he could have broken like a stick across his knee. And would have, if he knew for sure…“I must improve the hour, I suppose.” He nodded, a stiff jerk of his neck, and went out.
On the street his confusion dissipated and again he felt quite cheerful. That the revolt should be suppressed at last—their property on the plain would finally be recovered. He smiled to himself a little as he walked. A freckled mulatto in fancy dress was coming toward him in the opposite direction, swinging a slim, gold pommeled cane. Cigny knew him to be some grand blanc’s bastard, though for the moment he did not recall just whose. The decree of September 24 not withstanding, the mulatto did not seem disposed to make way for him. But Monsieur Cigny was as emboldened by the thought of ten thousand French dragoons as if they were already at his back. Coming abreast of the mulatto he swung his shoulder forcefully into his chest, unbalancing the slighter man so that he stumbled into the gutter, with a hissing exhalation of breath. After several more paces, Cigny could not resist looking back. The mulatto was staring after him, twisting his spotted hands on the pommel of the cane in a spasm of impotent fury. Monsieur Cigny smiled at him ironically and continued his way, well pleased.
IN THE PARLOR, Pascal had taken up his flute again. He held it cross-wise to his lips and blew across the sounding hole, with a noise like the wind in a bottleneck, short of a true note. Isabelle crossed the room to the window and stood pensively looking down at the street below, then she turned to face the room again. Pascal lowered his instrument.
“The news is good,” he said hesitantly. “The troops?”
“Oh the troops,” Isabelle said, in her jingling tone. “I will believe in them when they debark—if then.”
“What do you mean, ‘if then’?”
“An English general sailed later with eighteen thousand men to conquer Cuba,” said Madame Cigny. “Two months later, he had eighteen hundred left to him.”
“I’ve heard that story.”
“Yes, it’s well known.” Madame Cigny wrapped her arms about herself and shuddered. “I’m chilled,” she said, though in fact there was a light sheen of perspiration overlying the pallor of her face. She clapped her hands and sent the footman for wine.
In the corner, Nanon was showing Robert how to arrange the cat’s cradle string on his own fingers, but the boy soon lost patience and began shrieking and yanking furiously at the loop. Isabelle, who’d been pouring the wine, replaced the decanter on the tray and went to pick him up. Robert kicked and twisted in her arms, his face empurpling. Disgusted, she set him down and he slid belly-down to the carpet, crying and writhing. Nanon watched him with her large liquid eyes. In her hands another cat’s cradle spun itself, as if unconsciously.
The footman entered and announced the name “Maltrot.” Isabelle, wineglass in hand, beckoned for the caller to be admitted. Choufleur walked into the room holding the slender cane with two hands across his groin, smiling into the corners of the room, a strangely fixed expression on his face, like a petrified cat.
“Ah,” he said. “Good afternoon.”
He looked around, his eyes passing over Nanon with no particular sign of interest. Robert’s tantrum had wound down. He still lay on the floor, with his feet cocked up and crossed behind him, raised on his elbows to watch her cat’s cradles through his drying tears.
No one answered Choufleur’s greeting. Pascal’s hands were trembling slightly, rustling the sheets of music he’d picked up. Madame Cigny’s skin stretched over the sharp bones of her face as if it were tacked to season on a tannery wall.
Choufleur propped the cane on the arm of the sofa. He stooped over the tray for the decanter, poured himself a glass of wine. The glass was egg-sized, leafed with gold, supported by a garnet-colored stem. Choufleur raised it as if in a toast.
“Santé,” he said, and drank half the glass. “And thank you.”
“I regret that I cannot make you welcome,” Madame Cigny said brittlely.
“Is it so?” Choufleur said. “As it happens, I’ve come to call not on you but on this lady.” He looked at Nanon, who averted her eyes. Robert had climbed up from the floor and stood beside her knees; one of her hands went carelessly combing through his curls.
Choufleur looked at Pascal and Madame Cigny as if he expected them to clear the room to afford him greater privacy for his interview with Nanon. He drained his wineglass and replaced it on the tray, then picked up his cane. The silence that followed the tap of the glass on the tray was so heavy that they could all hear one another breathing.
Nanon stood up. She wore a long loose shift of white cotton, and when she rose it hung to the floor uninterrupted from her breasts, so that her pregnancy disappeared behind the straight, clean fall of it. She left the room at the measured pace of a sleepwalker, looking neither left nor right. Choufleur favored the others again with his catlike smile and followed her.
“The audacity—” Pascal began, but Isabelle signaled him to be silent. Robert, looking at the knotted loop of string abandoned on the cushion of Nanon’s seat, looked as if he might weep again. Madame Cigny sent him out with the footman, off to find his nurse.
“The effrontery of that creature, to come here!” Pascal said. “To impose himself upon you—with that name.”
“Oh don’t be tiresome.” Madame Cigny looked across at him with unmasked contempt. She picked up the glass Choufleur had used and rolled the bowl of it across the palm of her left hand.
“If my husband had still been here…” she mused.
“Ah, madame, your husband…” Pascal said.
With a quick spasmodic clench she crushed the glass in her left hand; it made a muffled sound like a wet stick breaking. She let the stem fall to the floor and opened her hands to dust the bloodstained shards down onto the carpet. Pascal gasped.
“You’ve hurt yourself.”
“It’s nothing.” Madame Cigny covered her palm with a handkerchief. “Now leave me, please.”
When he had gone, she stood at the window again, alone, squeezing the ball of her handkerchief in her left hand. After a few minutes, she inspected her palm: the pale crisscross of fine cuts there—mere scratches, really.
NANON’S ROOM WAS A WHITEWASHED CUBBYHOLE underneath the eaves. There was a single small window, circular like a porthole on a ship, overlooking an alley beside the house. Its light passed through the fabric of her dress and outlined the rondure of her pregnancy again.
“This room is better made for lying than standing,” said Choufleur, who had to stoop under the slanting eaves.
“Do you think so?” Nanon motioned him toward the single straight-backed chair. There was a white-sheeted pallet and a small table near it, but no other furniture. Choufleur sat down, balancing the cane across his knees.
“It makes a change for you,” he said. “I would not have looked for you in such a spartan setting.”
“I am well enough here,” said Nanon, who remained standing near the window. “Or I was, until today.”
“Yes, I see that.” Choufleur pointed the cane’s tip at her midsection. “Is it his?”
“Whose?”
“You know very well what I mean.” Choufleur’s lips twisted unpleasantly around the words. “Am I to expect a bastard brother?”
“You have nothing to expect from me,” Nanon said.
Choufleur did not speak for a moment. He sat, rolling the cane on his knees. A mosquito dropped from the ceiling and whined elliptically to settle on the back of Nanon’s neck. Inattentively, she pinched it away.
“You’ve taken on his manner,” she said. “Along with his name…and his stick. It doesn’t suit you.”
“The cane, you mean?” Choufleur released the catch and exposed two inches of the sword stick blade, then shot it back into its wooden sheath. Nanon smiled, in spite of herself.
“No, the sword stick agrees with you very well,” she said. “I meant the manner. And what would he say to hear you use his name?”
“The name is mine,” said Choufleur. “I’ll be his heir. In name, in property, and all the rest.”
“Impossible.”
“I claim it,” Choufleur said. “It is my birthright. Besides, he’ll have no other. I will make this be.” He stood up, round-shouldered under the eaves, and reached to touch her face. She broke from him, turning to the window.
“You prefer white men,” Choufleur said. “To live in a white household…as a ménagère or what you will. To bear white bastard children.”
“When have you offered me your protection?” Nanon said. “You were away—you didn’t see what it’s been like. If they had not taken me in here, I’d have been killed in the streets, or worse.”
“There is no worse,” Choufleur said.
“You don’t believe that.”
“No, I don’t,” he said, with a half smile. “You understand me very well.”
Nanon didn’t respond to him. She stared down at an angle through the porthole. A bare-chested slave was walking down the alley, some loaves of bread bundled under one arm and a basket of fruit balanced on his head. A green parrot perched on his left shoulder, and this somehow reminded her of the afternoon she’d encountered Doctor Hébert in the Place de Clugny.
“I brought you something,” Choufleur said softly.
Nanon looked around. In the palm of his hand was the silver snuffbox embossed with the fleur-de-lis. She laughed at it.
“Do you take me for Maman Maig’?” she said. “It’s pretty, but I don’t use snuff.”
“Open it,” Choufleur said.
Cupped in his palm, the heavy silver caught the light and seemed to glow. When she reached for the box, it was warm to her touch. With her thumb she flipped back the lid and looked. Inside the box was a shriveled brownish thing with a head like a mushroom; at first she thought it was a mushroom but its texture was parchment dry, like a mummy’s skin.
“It was his once,” Choufleur said. “Oh, it was most intimately rooted to him. I think he would have wanted you to have it. But I wonder, did it give you pleasure?”
Nanon blanched. “Never,” she said. “Never in my life, not once.”
Choufleur smiled. “I hope that it will please you better now.”
Nanon snapped the box shut and pushed it toward him.
“You must keep it,” Choufleur said. “Or do what you will with it, n’importe quoi. A token of my intentions, let us call it. You see that they are very serious indeed.” He picked up his cane and went out without waiting for any reply.
Nanon put the snuffbox on the rickety table, beside her clay candlestick there. She backed away from it, then moved forward to pick it up again. She opened it and looked at the petrified member curled inside. It was close in the little room, quite airless, and very hot below the lowering roof. A pulse was beating in her throat like a door slamming in the wind. She closed the box and put it on the table.
The door latch clicked and Isabelle Cigny came into the room, her face drawn with anger. She saw the snuffbox first of all, there being no other ornament or bibelot in the whole room, and crossed to take it up.
“Did he bring this?”
“Yes,” Nanon said, indifferently.
“A lover’s gift, je vois bien.” She made as if to open it but the handkerchief wadded in her left hand hampered her and she set the box down on the table, still shut.
“You are not to receive your half-breed lovers here.” Madame Cigny slapped Nanon’s face with her right hand. The blow was limp-wristed, without heat, meant to insult rather than to sting. Nanon dropped into the chair Choufleur had occupied and sat with her head lowered meekly over her folded hands.
“I will not have them come here,” Madame Cigny said. “Your…whatever you may call them. My house is not a bordello, do you understand?”
“I understand,” Nanon said tonelessly. Madame Cigny put her hands on her hips and glared at her.
“Yes, and I know that my husband has come scratching at your door at night,” she snapped. “Tell me, why did you turn him away?”
“I have a respect for you,” Nanon murmured, still looking down at the floor.
“I could turn you out at once,” Isabelle said. “I don’t know why I haven’t done it.”
“You are of a stronger character than the people who surround you,” Nanon said.
Isabelle snorted. “Do you think you can flatter me?”
“No,” Nanon said. “I don’t think that.”