A day’s ride brought them to the perimeter of the Labiche plantation. Wearied with circling bayous, traversing swamps and anxious to come to a final rest, Patrick and Oxy nevertheless could not fail to halt and gaze in awe at the sight which now presented itself.
‘It is the Garden of Eden,’ Oxy proclaimed.
‘Pray God there are angels within!’ Patrick answered, unable to remove his eyes from the splendour before them.
‘Greek Revival …’ Stephen Joyce explained. ‘… the architectural style.’
This was Manoir Labiche, officially named Le Petit Versailles. Ahead of them lay a long avenue, on either side lined with moss-draped cypress trees. Thirty on one side. Thirty-one on the other. Strangely imbalanced.
‘It is a month of trees!’ Oxy said, working it out. ‘Thirty days hath September, April, June and November – on the left – and all else have thirty-one … save February, which one in four, has one day more.’ He paused, chin in hand, then pronounced, ‘I’ll guarantee you the house was completed in a leap year – in February. That’s it!’ Oxy proclaimed. ‘The house itself is February then, all the months are accounted for. How clever!’
‘And how clever of you Mr Moran to have worked out so quickly the conundrum of the cypress trees,’ Stephen Joyce added.
Patrick had often wondered how Stephen had entered such society as this. It was, he was sure, down to what his mother had always preached, ‘education’. Stephen moved easily at all levels, had many friends among the business classes and in political circles. Due, no doubt, to his earlier involvement with the struggle for Irish independence. Schooled in the classics, Stephen could as freely converse in French as in English. He had about him a confidence – an assured and convincing way of speaking that implied an equality, if not a superiority, with all. Almost bordering on arrogance, Patrick thought, but it got him places.
At the end of the trees the house awaited them. From it a duet of white, half-circular staircases, spiralled outwards to the vast lawns at the end of the cypress avenue. The staircases curved upwards, like welcoming arms, to a verandah supported by an army of Doric columns. The verandah itself, which ran the length of the house, stood out from the house itself by a span of fourteen feet.
‘Enough for two carriages to pass,’ Oxy said, his face awonder.
Scattered about the house, were its ‘dependencies’ – smaller houses, pigeonnaires and garçonières – the boys’ houses.
Stephen explained, ‘Here in the South they mature quickly. At seventeen, the boys are considered adults. The garçonières allow them to come and go as they please.’
‘And the girls?’ Patrick enquired.
‘A father would be worried if his daughter was not married off by sixteen – thirteen or fourteen is not uncommon. At twenty, if a young lady were still unmarried, all hope would be forlorn.’
The moment when Patrick first set eyes upon Emmeline Labiche, all hope was born.
‘She is as fair as a summer’s day,’ Oxy whispered to him as a regular congregation gathered to welcome them at what Patrick thought was the front of the house, but which Oxy delighted in telling him was the back.
‘This is the South!’ his friend said. ‘Everything opposite!’
Emmeline Labiche was fair – dark-haired and dark-eyed and blessed with an intoxicating reserve, and at no more than fifteen summers ripe for marrying. Of equal allure, her sister Cordelia was scarcely a twelve-month older.
Emeritus Labiche greeted them effusively in French. To which Stephen responded with equal affection, it seemed to Patrick.
The Creole planter was as sturdy of frame as of temperament. Sturdy, but not a large man, rather low-sized as the Creoles often were, Patrick placed him in his early forties. Eyes dark as his coal-black hair and as striking, he was given to expansive gestures when he spoke; throwing out his arms, patting down his large moustache, laughing. A man used to giving orders.
‘Cato, Plato!’ the robustly toned master of Le Petit Versailles shouted to two slaves. ‘Gather in the horses!’
Plates of freshly cut pineapple, succulent and cooling, magically materialised as Madame Labiche – a funereal lady with a decorous collar – welcomed them with similar though more muted expressions of hospitality. First en Français, then in English, for the young gentlemen’s benefit.
Later, accompanied by a whistling chorus from the slaves who ferried the fare from the outside kitchen, they were feted sumptuously. When Patrick enquired as to the whistling ‘tradition’, Emeritus Labiche pooh-poohed the question. ‘Tradition … pah!’ Maybe it will one day become one, but for now while I can hear the heathens whistling, I know they are not eating my food!’
And what food it was. Nut-flavoured hams, large as whole hogs, frilled with white paper, set in crusts of clove-dotted sugar and served with piled-high platters of ‘sweet Irish Taters’. Afterwards, a sugared mound of calf’s-foot jelly and a berg of vanilla ice cream served over beds of shimmering ice from the Great Lakes.
‘Were you aware, Mr Joyce, of a scheme the British once came up with in the Sugar Islands?’ Emeritus Labiche asked in a manner which displayed that he thought Mr Joyce was not. Their host paused perfunctorily, before himself supplying the answer. ‘It was both revolutionary and evolutionary – interbreeding the Irish with the Blacks!’
He stopped for the effect this remark would have on his guests.
‘They did it to improve the stock – of the nigger, of course! But all the British got for their trouble was an even more cussed bunch of niggers than they already had!’ He laughed loudly. Stephen Joyce did not.
‘Well, then, Emeritus,’ the Irishman replied, ‘you’d better win this little contretemps brewing with the North, else those British Yankees might make similar good use of former slaveholders!’
‘Mon Dieu, Stephen!’ their host exclaimed, ‘you are never found wanting. I am glad you will be for us, not against, if the invader comes. Save us from such a fate.’
Again he laughed and this time Stephen Joyce joined with him.
‘Whatever the Yankees might do to us men,’ Emeritus Labiche continued in more serious tone, ‘it is through our womenfolk that the civilisation of the South remains and will remain superior to that of the North.’ He inclined his head towards his wife and two daughters.
‘The North has erred in its dangerous tendencies. A woman trying to do a man’s business is the misfortune of the age. A challenge to marriage and the very hierarchies which sustain us.’
Silently, Patrick agreed. Lavelle had been too lenient with his mother, had given her too much leeway. And where had it landed them all?
It was Stephen who spoke next. ‘Come now, Emeritus, you cannot expect me to accept an understanding of the Southern lady that is so rigidly biological.’
‘Woman has but one right – and that is a sacred right – protection,’ his host responded. ‘And she has but one duty – undiluted allegiance to her protector. Then you have order.’
‘What says Madame Labiche?’ Stephen asked.
‘Oh, I concur with Monsieur Labiche. It is indelicate in the extreme for any woman to relinquish her private life and enter the public sphere,’ Lucretia Labiche replied, delicately fingering the rosette ribbon adorning the centre-point of her hair net. ‘A lady should always hold herself under scrutiny!’
Noiselessly, as the conversation grew, new courses appeared and disappeared before them. Now a French punch bowl, graved with a grape motif, symbol of abundance, was produced. Whilst the men were served rum, laced with sliced pear, the ladies were permitted to sample only the soaked slices of pear but not imbibe the rum itself. Conversation abated as two female house slaves, Lively and Promptly, and their male counterparts, Caesar and Cicero, served further groaning plates of Southern hospitality.
‘The Labiches have been here since before the Louisiana Purchase from the French in 1803,’ their host explained. ‘The Mississippi was their main street, as today it is ours; the concourse by which they commerced with the world.’
To hold the mighty river in check, he continued, Grandfather Labiche, had with the young Emeritus, built up the once four-, now fifteen-foot-high river embankment, using an army of black labour. It was Emeritus Labiche’s proudest boast – ‘The best levee in Louisiana.’
Now he stood up.
‘Father is going to the levee,’ Emmeline said, to no one in particular but nonetheless smiled at Patrick.
It was a tradition of the household that the patriarch of the family would, as a matter of duty after dinner each evening, check the levels of the Mississippi and the steadfastness of the manmade bulwark against the river’s might.
‘I’ll walk down with you, Emeritus,’ Stephen Joyce offered, but Madame Labiche was quick to intervene, to request that ‘in my husband’s absence we should seize the opportunity of encroaching on Mr Joyce’s good nature’, that he should ‘remain and entertain us ladies with stories of the revolutions in Ireland and your banishment to Van Diemen’s Land … and subsequent escape,’ she hastily added.
At this intervention Monsieur Labiche took his intended leave while Mr Joyce, in turn, deferred to Madame Labiche’s request and remained.
‘Without the high banks of the levee we should be washed away to America,’ Emmeline explained to Patrick as they retired to the withdrawing room. In tones that indicated the destination of that misfortune, to be altogether worse than the misfortune itself. Though it did strike Patrick that the Gulf of Mexico was a much more likely journey’s end to which fair Emmeline would be washed away rather than perfidious America.
Then, Mr Joyce regaled them with stories of his younger days, and his fight against the English coloniser.
‘It is precisely the same here, Mr Joyce,’ Lucretia Labiche professed. ‘The Northerners seek to control our cotton, our cane and our culture … but we shall not have it!’ she declared. ‘I trust we ladies can count on the protection of such gentlemen as are present, in the event of engagement with the enemy.’
Mr Joyce avowed that she could. Patrick and Oxy likewise pledged themselves to the protection of the younger Labiche ladies. The latter, to repay the compliment of such gallantry, would play some music for their guests. Lively, the female slave produced a duet of matching stools for the Warnum rosewood piano. A pleasant interlude of tunes and sweet-throated songs followed, until Emeritus Labiche returned and the ladies retired.
Patrick later had good reason to remember the piano manufacturer’s name. In his room he found tucked under a snuffbox a ‘property’ bill-of-sale, relating to the piano and other property bought at an auction in New Orleans.
Appolonia Creole negress of indeterminate age and having an ugliness of the eye – 700
Lively Creole mulatress – excellent seamstress – 1200
Rosewood piano Robert Warnum (needing tuning) – 600
Socrates a blacksmith negro of confidence – 1500
Jewel (15) Congo (first generation). Strong of back, needing occasional whipping – 800
Cupid (17) Creole (second generation) pleasing to the eye – 1000
A moderately-crippled female with no name good teeth, capable of breeding and non-field work – 300
Duet of rosewood piano stools – 300
Aphrodite a negro girl about nine years old – of potential – 600
Also for sale, one brute negro, a cow and her calf, some sheep and a pair of oxen.
Patrick read through the bill again. This time more slowly.
Two piano stools equalled a crippled slave. A piano needing tuning was of a price with a nine-year-old girl ‘of potential’. Creole slaves were worth more. These were second-generation, born in bondage so partly broken and less troublesome to train. Worth more as an investment, Patrick supposed. It was nothing special here – the buying and selling of people alongside sheep and a pair of oxen. Just a business transaction on a careless piece of paper.
He thought of the Labiche girls, white and beautiful – a protected species – delicately seated at the rosewood piano, with Lively the other ‘bought property’, fetching the stools for the ‘young misses’. The negroes themselves looked well-cared for. Happy almost, Patrick had to concede. Who was to say that this ‘peculiar little arrangement’, which worked so well here in the South, should be turned on its head by outsiders?
‘If the slaves were freed, it would upset everything, North and South,’ Oxy had said to him as they retired from the pleasures of their first day at Plantation Labiche. ‘The free slaves will swarm North, tumbling the price of labour and sending German, Pole and Paddy alike back to the disembarking ports.’
‘And here,’ Patrick added, ‘without servants, the ladies will no longer be ladies. Everything will be topsy-turvy!’
‘Would you fight, Patrick – if there’s a war?’ Oxy had asked him, his customary earnestness still present.
‘Of course,’ he had replied. ‘I have sworn it to fair Emmeline … and you, Oxy?’
‘Yes, but I would not fight to defend slavery, only for the honour of Southern ladies!’
‘Would you die for them, Oxy?’ Patrick had asked of his friend.
‘I would … but I’d rather not!’ Oxy Moran had squarely replied.