CHAPTER 14
I felt like my life was ending when I was sent away to the convent far across the sea in France. I never wanted to leave Martinique, it was my home and I loved it, and I had never known, or wanted to know, anything else. I was never one of those little girls who dreamed of going to France and being a lady-in-waiting to the Queen or marrying a prince amidst the gilded splendor of Versailles. But I was only nine years old, too young to know what was truly best for me, or to have earned a say in my future.
The day before my ship sailed was a Sunday. I sat on Papa’s knee, the full skirts of the white satin and lace dress I had worn to Mass overflowing his lap, and Mama caressed my golden hair as I wept. They reminded me that I was their “precious girl” and they had given me my name—Aimee—because it described me best, I was their “dearly loved” daughter. I had come to them late in life, when their hair was already turning gray, and though God had seen fit to send me a little sister three years later, that did not mitigate the miraculous blessing my birth had been in any way.
“You are our precious pearl,” Papa said as Mama fastened a delicate cross of white pearls set in gold filigree about my throat, “and we only want the best for you, even if it means you must leave us.”
No one sets such a jewel in base metal or trusts it to the hands of an untried or inferior craftsman, Papa explained, so I must go to Paris for the finishing touch, to the Convent of the Dames de la Visitation.
Papa was known as “a man of iron with a heart of gold,” and there was no saying no to him. So I stopped wasting precious time weeping and went out to say good-bye to my island home.
I drew the sugar that infused the very air deep into my lungs, trying to hold on to it, determined to carry it away with me, to Paris. My fingers lovingly caressed the bright pink, orange, and yellow hibiscus blossoms and the peculiar orchids that were at once purple and pink, which I had often heard people say had “a lascivious shape,” whatever that meant. My hands lingered long over the dear familiar palm fronds that had provided me with shade my whole life long. Marianne, my da, as we called our Negro nurses, had taught me to weave fans from dried palms when I was three years old. I had heard the only palm trees they had in Paris grew in silver tubs and were kept in hothouses until they were required to decorate a ballroom. And what of breadfruit, bananas, mangoes, frangipani, passion fruits, papayas, and pineapple? Would I ever taste the fruits of my childhood again?
A noisy flock of red, blue, green, and gold parrots exploded like fireworks from the trees. As I watched them fly away tears ran down my face and I turned and gazed back at my home, La Trinité, the three-story plantation house so glaring white in the tropical sun it hurt my eyes just to look at it. I was certain its image would be seared upon my eyes forever, a memory I would always carry with me wherever I went.
My grandfather Pierre Dubucq de Rivery was a hotheaded young man exiled from France after he killed a nobleman, the Chevalier de Piancourt, in a duel over a fickle and faithless mistress who could not decide between the two of them. With the King’s men hot on Pierre’s heels and his horse layered in sweat and foaming at the mouth, close to falling down dead beneath him, he made a mad dash for the harbor. A ship was just pulling away, the gap between dock and deck ever widening. He had no idea where it was going, but he urged his mount to make one last valiant effort and leap across the dark water onto that deck. A purse of gold persuaded the Captain to look the other way.
The ship was bound for Martinique. Since it was prison or the West Indies for Pierre Dubucq de Rivery he wisely chose the latter. He built a grand white plantation house, La Trinité, overlooking the turquoise waters of the Harbor Robert and erected the first sugar mill. White gold—sugar—made him a very wealthy man. But not content with one fortune, he soon made another by cultivating cocoa from the trees that grew wild upon the island. It was made into a popular drink called “chocolate” that first the French, then the whole world, fell in love with.
I never knew my grandfather, he died long before I was born, but he left a message for me. “Tell your daughter,” he used to say to Papa, “that every time someone drinks a cup of chocolate they are adding a coin to her dower chest.”
I was known as “the black and white heiress”; chocolate and sugar would ensure my future. “Good times or bad,” Papa said, “people always crave sweets.”
* * *
As I prepared for bed that night, I lingered by my window for a long time gazing out at the papayas and purple bougainvillea, breathing in the jasmine, roses, and honeysuckle. I had the most terrible, frightening feeling that I would never see this place again.
Mama came in and waved aside my da, to braid my hair herself for what might be the last time. It would be years before I returned to Martinique and she was no longer a young woman; neither disease nor accidents respect youth or age, so it was quite possible we might never meet in this world again. I was to stay at the convent until I was eighteen, though privately I couldn’t imagine what the nuns had to teach me that would take me nine years to learn. Surely the social graces were not so complex? I was to be given a lady’s education, not a soldier’s or a statesman’s; philosophy and mathematics would occupy little, if any, of my time.
Mama tried to comfort me by talking of Rose. She was married now, in Paris, the wife of the Vicomte de Beauharnais, a man so handsome he was rumored to have inspired the hero of a scandalous novel that I was far too young to read, which made me want to read it all the more. Les Liaisons Dangereuses—the title alone sounded fascinating!
I had wept and clung fiercely to Rose when she came to say good-bye, but she had promised that she would come to visit me at the convent every chance she could. We would have lots of fun, she said, and being a married lady, a vicomtesse no less, and my kin, she could command the Mother Superior to let me out for the day. Rose and I would go shopping, she would help me out of my dreary convent habiliment, dress me up in elegant clothes, and we would ride around Paris in a fine carriage. We would sit and sip cups of chocolate at a sidewalk café and watch the fashionable world pass by, and gentlemen would stop to bow to us and admire our pretty hats and say that we had roses in our cheeks. She would have me to stay with her every Christmas and, when I was old enough, she would take me to balls and the theater. I might even find a beau, a man of fortune and fine figure and features, amongst her husband’s friends.
Mama reminded me of all this, urging me to see that I had so much to look forward to instead of mourning what I was leaving behind in Martinique.
That night I dreamed I saw Euphemia David standing over my bed in her scarlet tignon and gown of madras handkerchiefs with big gold hoops in her ears and her snake draped and slithering about her shoulders. She bent to kiss my cheek and whispered in my ear: “In my end is my beginning.” When I awakened I found a charm, a gilded serpent with ruby glass eyes swallowing its own tail, lying upon my pillow.
I still wasn’t sure that the Queen of the Voodoos wasn’t just a clever charlatan, adept at reading people and probabilities, more physician and mathematician than prophetess, but something made me thread a cord through the golden O of the snake’s body and wear it around my neck alongside the pearl cross my parents had given me.
* * *
I never dreamed an ocean voyage could be so dreary. When our ship, the Godspeed, rocked it was more like a cradle lulling a baby to sleep than Neptune’s fury. The waters were so calm and the winds so well behaved that we stayed on course and made the voyage in a swift seven weeks instead of the usual two months or a baneful storm-tossed three. I stood on the deck for hours each day, staring at the placid blue sea, hoping to spy something of interest like a shark’s fin or a school of dolphins cavorting. Sometimes the sailors sought to relieve my boredom with wondrous tales of mermaids and sea serpents and exotic lands they had visited, but when one tried to scare me with stories of pirates and what they would do to a pretty little golden-haired girl like me, Marianne, like a fierce chocolate-skinned giantess, seized him by the throat and threatened to throw him overboard if he ever came near me again.
I had thought my boredom would surely end when my feet touched French soil at last, but I was woefully mistaken. I soon found there was something else that could be even more tedious and dull than seven maddeningly tranquil weeks spent at sea—nine years in a convent school.
The Mother Superior had sent the mustachioed Sister Claude to act as my jailer and convey me to prison. She had such a deep, gruff voice and broad shoulders I wondered if it wasn’t really a man hiding beneath that wimple, black veil, and shapeless chin-to-toes black robe. I saw nothing of Paris since Sister Claude insisted that the leather blinds be put down and stay down before the wheels of the carriage even started to turn; the one time she caught me trying to peep she gave my knee such a vicious thump with her fingers it raised a livid bruise that would be aching for weeks afterward.
I passed the time inventing all sorts of lurid tales about Sister Claude and her mustache. My favorite was that she was a convict who had escaped from prison and met a kindly nun along the road, robbed the Good Samaritan of her habit, and then sought sanctuary in the nearest convent to elude capture. But his greatest vanity was his fine black mustache, so he refused to shave it off; luckily the Mother Superior was so shortsighted she thought it was a rather unfortunately placed birthmark.
Mother Angélique was nothing like an angel. If I had been charged with naming her I would have chosen something more fitting like Diabolique. I was certain she had a pair of devil horns on the bald head hidden underneath her wimple and veil. We butted heads at once like two goats who couldn’t peacefully occupy the same pen or pasture.
Her rules were stifling and nonsensical. Whoever heard of taking a bath with your clothes on? And by the light of a single candle positioned far on the opposite side of the room! If God made our bodies why was it a sin to touch or look upon them in the pursuit of cleanliness and good health? Besides, my eyes were no strangers to the human form. In Martinique, the slaves wore very little when they labored in the cane fields and even less when they danced in their voodoo ceremonies and I, and other white plantation children, often swam naked, or nearly so, in the sea. But Mother Angélique said we must mortify, never glorify, the flesh, and I must cleanse my soul of sin.
I felt like a fool stepping into the tub in the long unbleached linen bathing robe that had been given to me. It tied at my throat and had long, wide sleeves so I could reach in to wash my arms, and ties all down the front that I might open, but only one at a time, to reach in and swiftly bathe the flesh within reach. If we took too long, we were accused of sinful explorations. The nun who sat sentry beside the single candle minded the time we spent over our ablutions and reported any dawdlers to the Mother Superior. These absurd rituals and expectations removed all trace of relaxation from bathing and turned it into a race, to be done as soon as we could to avoid unjust punishment. When the time came to quit the tub, the robe was so weighed down with water I was afraid it would pull me back down to drown, since lifting it to wring it out was also not permitted as that would expose the limbs.
My classmates were quick to tell me that the Queen of France always bathed in such a garment. But I was not impressed. The Queen was also known to sail through ballrooms with a model of a fully manned battleship on top of her powdered hair straining at its roots to stand three feet off her scalp and to wear skirts with panniers so wide she could not walk through a door without turning sideways. During my time in France I heard Marie Antoinette called many things, but never the quintessence of common sense.
If one of us fell ill and the doctor was summoned we were not even permitted to disrobe for him. And when we slept we must keep our hands above the covers at all times. One of the sisters sat and watched us in the dormitory all night, and those who disobeyed risked having their wrists bound and spending a sleepless night being prayed over. A natural urge to scratch an itchy calf or thigh was instantly suspect. That was how strict Mother Angélique was about safeguarding our sinful skin.
I was already beginning to wonder why nuns, who so vigorously despised the body and its natural functions, were chosen to mold young girls into perfect wives. To my mind, it was like hiring a man blind from birth to paint your house both inside and out and giving him free choice of color. I once asked Mother Angélique what we were to do when we became wives, subject to our husbands’ amorous demands and the expectation of procreation. She said we should shut our eyes and pray throughout the ordeal, or think of the blessed fruit that might come of our union nine months later if God willed it. I then asked her what of the midwife. Surely it would be necessary to expose ourselves to her gaze. I doubted whether a baby could be safely delivered in pitch-dark or by the light of a single candle set far across the room. I had my palm split open with a cane and was sent to spend the night in chapel fasting and praying for that impertinence. Mother Angélique said I dwelled overmuch on sinful, and bodily, things and should look to my soul more. But when Marie Antoinette defied convention and scorned a midwife and had a male accoucheur attend her in childbed, the brother of her own chaplain no less, Mother Angélique was scandalized. Her face turned red as flames and she momentarily lost the power of speech. I laughed until I cried. It left me with a new respect for Marie Antoinette; apparently she was not as cowed by etiquette as I at first thought. A fashion-mad flibbertigibbet she might be, but she was also a rule breaker just like me.
Our daily lessons were such that I feared my mind would be both numb and dumb by the time nine years had passed. We had to learn to curtsy perfectly to personages of various ranks. And to glide as gracefully as an angel across a sea of smooth glass with her head held high while wearing wide, jutting whalebone panniers sticking from our hips on either side, our torsos laced to near rib-cracking tightness in corsets, with a heavy court train trailing six feet behind us, and our hair piled and pinned as high as it could be stretched off our heads.
Even dancing lessons, which I expected to bring at least a small degree of fun to our otherwise dreary days, were just as trying. Sometimes we spent an entire hour learning to point our toes just so without causing a single ripple in our satin skirts; the fabric must stay as straight and smooth as if it had just been ironed. It was a pointless exercise in futility, I thought. Why should anyone care? Why shouldn’t our clothes move with us as we danced?
Our poor brains were constantly bombarded with such thorny quandaries as: If the Pope and all the ruling families of France, England, Russia, Germany, and Italy did us the honor of dining at our table on the same night how should they be seated so as to avoid giving offense to any of our august guests? When I asked Mother Angélique why she did not also include the Emperor of China and the Sultan of Turkey, she said they were heathens and not deserving of a seat at a Christian table, and I was exiled to chapel with a smarting palm to reflect upon, and, it was hoped, repent, my impertinence again. The same question was endlessly reshuffled with various dukes and duchesses, comtes and comtesses, princes and princesses, vicomtes and vicomtesses, marquis and marquises, and visiting ambassadors and assorted dignitaries and churchmen thrown into the mix. Another variation ran: If the princess of such and such was about to hand Her Majesty her gloves and the princess of so and so walked in should the first princess step aside in favor of the second?
I honestly could not have cared less. I just wanted to go home and forget all the ceremonial garnish and pointless fussiness that attended life in France. It was not to my liking; I preferred a more commonsensical approach to living. When I thought of my future, I saw myself as a happy and contented plantation wife, concerned only with my husband, our children, and running my household, socializing with our neighbors and relatives, not handing the Queen of France her gloves or the Pope a finger bowl filled with rosewater. In Martinique we took our clothes off when we bathed, and when we danced it was for fun, and a wrinkle in her satin skirt as she pointed her toe was the last thing on a woman’s mind.
* * *
Honesty behooves me to admit there were some lessons I enjoyed, like the intricate embroidery and practical sewing that allowed me to create beautiful things with my own hands. To ease as well as express my homesickness, I embroidered the flora and fauna of my homeland: bunches of yellow bananas and gilt-thread pineapples on an apple-green skirt; flocks of tropical birds spreading their wings and flying across a turquoise gown; vines of honeysuckle twisting and twining all over a dress of virgin’s-blush pink. I even embroidered the dreaded fer-de-lance coiled around the hem of a nutbrown gown. I enjoyed music as well; I learned to play the harpsichord and to sing. And I liked to read, though I preferred to choose my own books rather than the endless tomes of etiquette and saints’ lives and bland but pretty poetry that the nuns assigned. I liked to lose myself in tales of romance, adventure, history, and fabulous journeys to far-off, exotic lands.
I thought often of Rose and looked forward to her letters even though they were full of excuses about why she could not come to see me and grew fewer and briefer as the years passed until they stopped altogether. I longed to see her, but I was not one to beg, and I feared an outright request, or a forthright reminder of all the promises she had made, would stop her letters completely.
Girls who had family to go home to on holidays, or for special occasions, told me that the true story of the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Beauharnais was far from the happy romance Rose recounted in her letters. Their union was sorely troubled, Alexandre was certainly untrue, and perhaps Rose was too. They eventually separated and rumors of immorality continued to dog Rose. Some of the bolder girls said she had become a courtesan, selling her favors to any man who was willing to support her.
It made me very sad. I remembered with what happiness and high hopes Rose had set sail for France. She had been so eager and excited and had left Martinique with the spirit of a conqueror, determined that within a year she would be the toast of Paris. Now it seemed, if gossip could be believed, that all her dreams had turned to ashes. I prayed that she would rise, like a phoenix, from them. I didn’t like to think of Rose defeated, knocked and beaten down by life and her own perfidious husband.
I wish she hadn’t stopped writing, and even more that she had come to see me and let me be her friend again. Though I had often tried to fetter it with common sense, she had the freest spirit I had ever known, and a part of me always secretly admired her and wished I could be more like her. Perhaps she felt the seven years between us more in sophisticated Paris than she did in Martinique? And if we met it would be awkward, she would be a grown woman with children, and I a little girl still, and we would have nothing to say to each other. But in my heart I think Rose feared most that I would judge her, or the image of herself she would see reflected back at her when she looked in my eyes.
Whatever you have become, whatever you have done, I still love you and remember you fondly, I wanted to write to her. It is one of the great regrets of my life that I never did. But with only gossip to guide me, and no actual knowledge, I feared my words would seem like a presumption of her guilt. I didn’t want to make Rose cry, I loved her too much, so I let the silence between us remain unbroken.