The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon's Bird of Paradise Read online

  I realized that I was smiling, and forced my mouth into a solemn line. The overseer was pointing to a pile of wood over which a metal grate was being placed. On his orders the thief—a terrified young man, cringing and weeping—was lifted roughly and placed face-down on the metal grate. Lighted torches were brought and held close to the wood.

  A murmuring began in the crowd of slaves.

  “Yes, you all can tell what will happen to this thief,” Donovan was saying. “He will be burned alive. He will be roasted, until his skin peels from his body like the skin of a chicken is peeled from its flesh. From now on this is to be the punishment for theft: to be roasted alive.”

  The murmuring grew louder. It was a sound of protest.

  “And anyone who objects,” Donovan went on, “will be roasted alongside the thief.”

  “My God,” I heard my father mutter. “My God, this is too much.”

  I saw that the overseer was cruel. But that realization barely registered in my mind. I realized with shock that the horror of the present moment paled beside its promise—the promise that Donovan, the dark man, might be mine once again.

  The torches were held closer to the wood. Any second now the fire would blaze up and consume the shaking, sobbing boy. Once again I was dizzy and overwhelmed. I thought that I might faint.

  Donovan lifted his arm. The horror was upon us.

  Then, suddenly, he shouted. “Wait!”

  The pause seemed to last forever.

  “Wait,” Donovan said again. “I think this thief will live. The next thief to be caught will be roasted alive. This I swear. Who will be the next thief? You? Or you? Or you?” He stepped closer to the group of slaves and pointed an accusing finger at several of them in turn. Each one stepped back, lowered his head and said, “No, sir.”

  I heard my father chuckling. “He’s frightened them half to death.”

  Donovan ordered the thief to be whipped and sent him away. But the boy broke free of the two men who were holding him and knelt at the overseer’s feet. To my astonishment, the boy kissed the dusty toes of Donovan’s black boots.

  “Now, that’s the way to make them behave,” my father said. “Treat them like naughty children. Scare them. Then be lenient with them. The man’s a genius.”

  The slaves were sent away to return to their labors. Donovan moved off toward the stables. I watched him go, unable to take my eyes from his broad back and long legs. Just before he turned the corner of the mill he glanced back in my direction, his mouth turned slightly upward in the merest ghost of a smile.

  18

  WHEN WOULD WE MEET? When would I see him again? How should I behave when we were together? Questions whirled through my eager, worried mind. Was he married? Was there a woman in his life? A Selene, perhaps? What did he know of me? Of my years in France, and my difficulties and disappointments? Did he care?

  I slept that night, but Donovan’s face and lithe body wove themselves through my troubled dreams. And when the following day dawned I swore that I would seek him out. I would place myself in his path somehow, to give him the chance to approach me.

  But I did not see him that day, or the next. Protecting my complexion with a large umbrella, I strolled along the margins of the cane fields, watching for his tall figure amid the stalks of ripening cane. In the past he had been elusive, playful. We had been involved in an ongoing game of hide and seek. Now that we were adults, would that game continue? Or was I foolish to imagine that the pleasures of the past might go on?

  When three days had gone by and I had seen nothing of the dark man I asked my father about him.

  “I’ve sent Donovan to Les Plages. It’s a small estate on the slopes of Morne des Larmes. Your Uncle Robert bought it last year. He’ll be back in a week or two.”

  “Why has he gone there? What have you sent him to do?”

  My father sighed. “I may as well tell you, Rose, that we believe a slave insurrection is being planned. All the Grands Blancs are taking what measures we can to protect ourselves and our properties. The Grands Blancs are at war. Donovan is organizing a militia at Les Plages, and gathering firearms, and making certain everyone knows what to do and where to go when the emergency comes.”

  “Surely you mean if an emergency comes.”

  “Oh, it will come, Rose. And before long. But we can endure it, just as we endure the great wind storms and the terrible floods. We are Creoles. We are made of strong stuff.”

  One night my Uncle Robert and a number of other plantation owners came to Les Trois-Ilets and assembled in the largest room of the converted mill. Donovan was among them, as were several militia officers and the head of the police force in Fort-Royal. Rum and coffee were served, and there were plates full of sweet cakes and ripe fruit. But the food, I noticed, was barely tasted. The men were intent on the business at hand.

  “The Vengeur is due to arrive this week, from Brest,” my uncle told the others. “She brings another hundred muskets, plus powder and spare stocks.”

  “If only it were five hundred,” another man said. “Nothing but massive firepower will stop them, if they come in force.”

  An assessment was made of each militia on the island, how many men it had enrolled, how many weapons were in its cache.

  “All the women and children must share a single dormitory, heavily guarded at night, and the men must take turns at the watch, sleeping in shifts.”

  “When you hear your neighbor’s alarm bell ringing, ring your own at once.”

  “Listen for any change in the sound of the drums. We know the drums are a code. But it is constantly changing. Only the rebels can understand it.”

  “Why not just lock up all the slaves until the army can come from France and deal with them?” one plantation owner asked.

  “Because there are far too many of them,” came the curt reply. “For every Grand Blanc there are a hundred Africans. And France, as you may have noticed, is not overly concerned with the fate of her colonies.”

  “She will be concerned when no more cane is shipped. When no more taxes are paid.”

  The men wrangled and argued, and I sat listening, my presence largely overlooked except by Donovan, whose eyes sought my face and body several times.

  “There is one thing we must always keep in mind,” my Uncle Robert was saying. “This is no ordinary warfare we face. Potent African forces are being set loose. Orgulon, the mighty quimboiseur, is said to be prophesying a bloodbath.”

  Dismissive remarks greeted this pronouncement.

  “Scoff if you like, but he commands obedience from many of our own Africans. He has been holding meetings at the Sacred Crossroads on Morne Gantheaume. Our people go there to pay tribute. Unspeakable things go on there, I am told. Human sacrifices. Dead bodies reanimated. Orgies with spirits of the dead.”

  Yes, I wanted to say. Powerful things go on where Orgulon is. I have seen them. And he saved my life, when the fer-de-lance was about to strike.

  “Orgulon is coming down from Morne Gantheaume,” said Uncle Robert, “and we all had better watch for him. One word from him and our plantations will go up in smoke.”

  “We are not children,” Donovan said, standing as he spoke. “We do not fear the bogeyman. We know that this Orgulon is nothing more than flesh and blood, an old man with a weak old man’s body and a wily brain. What we must respect, I suggest, is the fear Orgulon creates in others.”

  Grunts of assent greeted this statement.

  “Orgulon has convinced his weak, foolish followers that he can kill a man with a glance, or stop the wind from blowing, or converse with the old gods of Africa through some pagan rituals. It is belief we must be concerned about. Belief in magic. Belief in the occult.”

  “Yes, that’s the real enemy. Pagan belief. False belief,” said another of the planters, and there were murmurs of assent.

  Or was the real enemy the force of change, I wondered. The power of an idea—the idea that the day of the Grands Blancs is over.

  The f
ollowing morning I went to the wind-house where my mother and Aunt Rosette spent their lonely days. I needed to tell them about the emergency plans being made, about the insurrection that was expected and the safety precautions they needed to take.

  “It would be best if you came back to the mill for awhile, maman,” I told my mother. “You and Aunt Rosette can be protected there.”

  “There is nothing for me in that place but humiliation,” she replied angrily. “Until that woman is gone, I will not set foot in the mill.”

  I soon saw that my mother had grown more stubborn. Living in her self-imposed exile had become the rock on which she built her pride, her self-respect. To leave the wind-house, I knew, would mean abandoning the most precious part of herself and acknowledging defeat.

  “He always used to keep his whores in Fort-Royal, you know,” she remarked after a time. “He kept them in their place.” Hearing my mother allude to my father’s perennial infidelity so casually was painful; she had never discussed it before in my presence. “I hated them all,” she went on, “but I couldn’t touch them there. So I let them have their town, and my husband, and I kept order here at Les Trois-Ilets.”

  She smoothed her skirt, running her thumbnail down a crease along one seam. She had never been a pretty woman, but there had always been an abundance of youthful color in her cheeks, and her eyes were an attractive shade of blue, lighter than my own. Now, however, she looked washed-out and pale, her hair a faded shade of grey, her skin ashen, her eyes ice-blue and ringed with dark circles. She would never admit her true age but I guessed that she was past forty-five.

  “I kept order here,” she repeated, “until six months ago. Then your father chose this girl to be his next mistress—this girl who had been our own house slave!—and began living with her, right alongside the rest of us. I tried to turn her out but he defended her.

  “‘I’m dying, old woman,’ he said to me. ‘Can’t you see I’m dying? Can’t you let me enjoy my last months?’“

  She made a scornful sound, and brushed her hand across her skirt as if to clear away an offending bug or bit of lint.

  “Of course he’s no more dying than I am, or you are, Yeyette. He’ll live for years, just to spite me.”

  “But you can’t go on staying out here in the wind-house, mother. It’s miles away from everything. You must come back to the mill, where you can be protected. What if you should get sick, or have an accident?”

  “I have Rosette, and three of the slave girls, and Jules-sans-nez who brings us food from the mill kitchen nearly every day.” Jules-sans-nez, or Noseless Jules, had been a cart driver at Les Trois-Ilets for many years. He was a mellow old African man with long grey hair worn in thin braids and a sunburned skull, always singing as he drove, his voice with an odd whistle to it because of his disfigurement. It was said his nose had been cut off when he was only a child, by a cruel overseer. I had known Jules all my life.

  My Aunt Rosette had been sitting in a corner of the cavelike room, eyes downcast, hands folded in her lap. I now saw that her cheeks were wet with tears. She looked over at me.

  “Can’t you see, Yeyette, that we cannot go back while Selene is there?”

  “I will not have that girl’s name spoken in my presence!” my mother barked.

  Aunt Rosette went on, unfazed by my mother’s reproach. “Moving here to the wind-house is the only protest we can make against what Joseph is doing. But you, Yeyette, you can make him get rid of Selene.”

  “Quiet, I say! Not that name again!” My mother glared at Rosette, trembling with rage.

  “Joseph respects you,” Rosette was saying. “You stood up to Alexandre. You had the strength to leave your marriage. He could never admit to you that he admired you for it, but I know he does. And he admires you for being able to make money, which he cannot. Make Joseph see reason and move that girl to Fort-Royal!”

  Seeing the two of them, my mother and aunt, there in the wind-house on the side of the hill filled me with sorrow and vexation. My mother’s pride, and Aunt Rosette’s loyalty to her, kept them in their isolation. But in their stubbornness they could not appreciate the danger they were in. Somehow they had to be made to realize, in the days ahead, that they must come home.

  19

  HE CAME FOR ME, as I sensed he would, on a warm, fragrant night when the air was full of the scent of jasmine blossoms. He knocked at my window, standing on the veranda, and when I went to the door to let him in he gently took my hand and pulled me outside. My feet were bare and I wore only a thin white linen nightgown. My hair was long and loose, tumbling down my back in dark waves.

  He led me to a bare room where newly cut cane was sometimes stored. The sugary scent of the cane was overpowering. He had piled blankets under an open window and together we sank down into their softness.

  As he began stroking my cheek I felt all the tightness in my chest and stomach unravel, and my worried mind let itself relax. I was safe, time was suspended and all was forgotten—all but the pleasure we took in one another.

  We lay together all night. Our passion rose and fell, rose and fell, its heights indescribable, its depths a seductive invitation to begin anew. I lost myself in him, my longing for him deepening even as our bodies merged. It was a longing beyond longing, a craving of the flesh, as urgent as hunger or thirst. He had been a beautiful boy, but his manly beauty was far greater and I responded to it with all my senses, opening up to him like a flower opening itself to the sun.

  He gave himself to me, fully and completely. And then, at dawn, he rose from the tumble of blankets, put on his clothes, leaned over to kiss me one last time—and was gone.

  He left me breathing in the pungent, lingering scent of him, and the strong scent of sugar, and the rich musky odor of our lovemaking, an odor that was ours alone. I had nothing else from him, beyond my memories, and my hope of our meeting again.

  But something had changed. In the past he had been the dark boy. Now he was my father’s overseer, a man among other men. And he had a name: Donovan de Gautier.

  20

  IT WAS IN THE FALL OF MY TWENTY-SIXTH YEAR, the year 1789, that the astounding news began to arrive from France. Every ship that docked at Fort-Royal brought fresh stories, word of surprising events.

  First we heard that the king had sent thousands of troops into Paris, frightening everyone. Then we heard that a huge armed crowd of unemployed workers and angry radicals had marched to the old fortress of the Bastille and broken in, killing the soldiers inside. And that all the Parisians were wild with joy over this and went to tear down the walls of the old place, as if it were a strong castle and not a forgotten and disused antique of no importance.

  For years there had been talk of reform. Now, it seemed, reform had arrived—and no one was in charge of it, to prevent it from going too far. We heard the remarkable news that all the nobles had given up their titles, and that Alexandre had been among the first to renounce his! I was no longer Vicomtesse de Beauharnais, but plain Rose Tascher, Citizeness Beauharnais. All male citizens were now equal in France. Throughout Paris the watchwords were “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

  It sounded fine and noble—until one thought about where such a philosophy might lead. Not everyone was highminded. Not everyone was altruistic. It did not surprise me when we learned that throughout

  France, thieves were ransacking the mansions of the rich, demanding equality of wealth.

  News of the sudden social changes in France made the existing conflict between slaves and masters on Martinique much worse. There were many freedmen in Fort-Royal, former slaves who had received their freedom, and from among their ranks orators now arose who spoke eloquently of the rights of all slaves to be equal with their masters. There should be no more servitude, they proclaimed. No more bondage. All men ought to be free.

  The immediate result was turmoil, on a scale never previously known in Martinique. (Or so Jules-sans-nez assured me, and he was said to be over ninety years old.) Field hands ran off
, house slaves refused to work. The cane stood uncut, ready for harvest, rotting where it stood. Fishing-boats were idle, market stalls empty. Cattle lowed in their pens, waiting in vain to be fed and watered.

  Slave riots broke out, we heard rumors of Grands Blancs being castrated and hanged, of their wives being raped and garroted. Runaway slaves were seen in the streets of Fort-Royal wearing necklaces made from the pale white ears of Grands Blancs. All across the island, slave drums could be heard, passing messages. And we had no doubt the messages meant us harm.

  Day after day, night after night the tension grew until on one moonlit night the savage pounding intensified to a new level of threat. Euphemia, frowning, went to the latticed window to listen.

  “They are coming,” I heard her mutter. She added more words in the Ibo tongue that I felt certain were prayers and incantations. Then she kissed the small statue of the Ibo Red Goddess that she wore around her neck and acted quickly. She picked up Hortense and, calling to me to follow, hurried with her down into the root cellar, a big, dim, cool room full of bins of sweet potatoes and tubers and casks of rum.

  A half-dozen others followed us, among them Jules-sans-nez and Selene, her eyes wide with fear, her grossly swollen belly making it hard for her to descend the stairs.

  “Stay down here,” Euphemia said to the rest of us, taking charge. “No matter what. Bolt the door when I go. I am going to warn the master.”

  Euphemia never used the name “father,” nor did our father call her “daughter.” The social gulf between them was too great, I supposed. Though I had heard it said that my father had loved Euphemia’s mother more than any of his other mistresses—until now, that is. Until Selene.

  Euphemia mounted the stairs and we bolted the door as she had told us to.

  We waited, as the sounds of drumming grew more insistent and with it, a clamor of voices. Men’s voices.

  Where was Donovan? I wondered. He was often away at Les Plages. Had he gone there tonight, to gather the militia?