Savage Lands

A Novel

Clare Clark

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780547488691
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The author of In the Full Light of the Sun "treats the founding of French Louisiana with her signature dark realism and beautiful handling of character" ( Library Journal).
Praised by Hilary Mantel, Amanda Foreman, and the  New York Times Book Review for her "verve and intelligence . . . [and] the originality of her imagination," Clare Clark has become a rising star in historical fiction. Elisabeth is among twenty-three girls who set sail from France for the new colony of Louisiana to be married to strangers. Although she has little hope for happiness in her new life, she finds herself passionately in love with her new husband, Jean-Claude, a charismatic and ruthlessly ambitious soldier. But betrayal is as much a part of the new world as the old, and when Elisabeth finds herself deceived by her husband she also finds herself bound to a poor cabin boy in a way she never anticipated. Clark creates a world that is both incredibly real and incredibly dazzling. And with the same compelling prose and vividly realized characters that won her widespread acclaim for  The Great Stink and  The Nature of Monsters, she takes us deep into the heart of colonial French Louisiana.
"It is well told and well paced, with an easy narrative flow. The story offers strong personalities and a complicated, interesting plot, stretching over a couple of decades, set in an unfamiliar, truly exotic place and era." — The Guardian
"Clark's vast store of historical and geographical detail enriches the portraits of her three vibrant characters, whose destinies are inextricably, and memorably, bound." — Booklist

1719

After

The Kingdom of Louisiana is larger than the one of France. The climate is very mild and temperate. One inhales good air and can enjoy a perpetual spring, which contributes to the fertility of the soil of this country which abounds in everything.

In the upper part of the Mississippi one can see mountains filled with gold, silver, copper, lead and mercury which facilitate commerce. The savages have been domesticated by the French settlers, and they treat in good faith and without restraint, having nothing to fear from one another. As gold and silver are very common, and as the savages do not know their value, they exchange pieces of gold or silver for the European merchandise such as a knife made of steel, a steel axe to cut wood, often for a small mirror, a little dash of brandy or other things similar to their tastes.

Plans have been made for a new city which will be the capital of Louisiana. They call it New Orleans. There are already more than 600 houses which are practical for those that inhabit them. Its port is magnificent, of such great length and proportion that it will conveniently enclose vessels which come from all parts of the world.

The Catholic religion is making great progress through the tireless zeal of the missionaries. The frequent instruction given to the catechumens in addition to the good example of the recent converts, attracts the idolatrous Indians (and unbelievers) to the joys of Jesus Christ and they ask in earnest to receive baptism.

Great care is given to the education of children, and good order reigns everywhere due to the attention and care of the principal officers of the Company.

—Extract from a pamphlet distributed among investors in Paris, c. 1719

As was customary, the ship docked first at Dauphin Island. As they eased slowly into the small harbor, the sun was low, slanting into their eyes. The sea was a dark green, the island no more than a humped black rock against the fading sky. By the time that the anchor was set and the sails brought down, night had fallen. They did not go ashore. In the previous months, as the trickle of colonists had become a stream, Dauphin Island was become something of a shanty town, a tumble of temporary cabins thrown up for the new arrivals. Some had waited months for boats that might take them to their concessions. In the morning a sloop would take them to Mobile. Until then, they would be safer to remain aboard the BALEINE.

In her narrow bunk that night, as on so many nights, Vincente le Vannes reached into her bodice and drew out the folded square of paper. She opened it carefully. The paper was worn soft as muslin, the picture on it split in several places along the deep creases, but still the delicate watercolors glowed jewel-bright in the smoky light of the candle. The sea was a vivid aquamarine, and beneath the pale sky the purple mountains were marbled with pink gold. Above the spires and turrets of the elegant city, fresh breezes swelled the sails of a three-masted ship and tumbled the feathered branches of an exotic tree. A curious-looking creature scrambled up its trunk, its elongated cat-body crowned with the face of a wizened old man. In the foreground merchants and sailors in bright blue silk coats jostled with sturdy savages, naked but for loincloths and headdresses of brightly colored feathers.

Louisiana. Vincente tasted the word as she traced a fingertip over the familiar silk of the painted ocean, the parapets of the fortified city. For months before she had left Paris, the talk had been all of Mr. Law’s Louisiana, where pearls might be fished in abundance and the streams rolled on sands of gold, where the savages worshipped the white men as gods, and silver was so common it was used to pave the public roads. Immense grants of this enchanted land had been sold to the wealthiest men in the kingdom, and every day the rest had scrambled with the stockjobbers in the rue Quincampoix to snatch for themselves a share in the Mississippi Company which would make nobles of them all. Some had grown so rich already that a new word had been minted to describe them: millionaire.

The engraving had been thrust into her hand by a man selling the Nouveau Mercure from a stall close by the entrance to the convent. He had not asked for payment and she had known it immediately as a sign, though what it signified exactly she could not have said. At the very left of the picture a missionary in clerical garb sat at a table, holding aloft a wooden cross. Before him a savage raised his eyes to Heaven in a transport of ecstasy, his crossed hands pressed against his heart. He stood in the shadows, his pale countenance creased with thick black lines, as though the weight of the small cross caused him excessive strain.

The abbess’s face had been soft and powdery, like a floured bun. Several times at the close of the day, when the twilight drifted in the cloisters and the novices were called to vespers, she had placed her hands upon Vincente’s head and blessed her.

“Go home now, child,” she had said, and her voice had been gentle and full of kindness. The thought of it caused Vincente’s eyes to prickle.

“For many are called,” Vincente murmured, “but few are chosen,” and she ran her thumb over the missionary’s lined visage, stroking at first, then pressing hard into the page until the page crumpled.

The ship rocked gently, setting the light to dipping. Pushing the engraving aside, Vincente reached under her pillow and brought out her Bible, opening it at the book of Proverbs, but, though she tried to fix herself upon its commands, she found none of her usual consolation in its numbered certainties. Instead she reached out and once again took up the engraving, smoothing it out across the Bible’s opened pages. Absently she ran a finger across the purple mountains, around the curve of elegant dwellings along the harbor wall. She wondered who lived there, whether her husband would own a house in the town, and she thought of the attic apartment in Paris, the cramped rooms with their mean windows, the ceilings that sloped low above the too-large furniture. The fireplaces were small, the light poor. In winter it was impossible to keep warm; in summer the sun baked the blue slates until the heat became insufferable. They might have found more comfortable accommodations elsewhere in the city, but her father was adamant. Whatever the treacheries of fortune, he insisted, they must remain in the Place Royale. It was the address that signified, he told them, the company a man kept that distinguished him and set him in his proper place. In the Place Royale, a man, sooner or later, would find himself rich.

Then he had sold her. Her father knew people and he understood the value of the few assets he still possessed. When a nobleman who was cousin to someone high up in the Ministry of the Marine sent word from Louisiana that he had need of a wife of virtue and industry, M. le Vannes had professed himself only too willing to oblige, subject to certain terms. It had been Vincente’s mother who had informed her of the arrangements. Vincente had stared at her mother’s powdered face and remembered her sister Blandine’s furtive whispers, the jab of her nudging elbow as she described to the round-eyed Vincente the terrible things a man could demand of his wife when it was dark and the drapes around their bed shut tight.

“What did he get for me?” she had demanded. “Thirty pieces of silver?”

Mme. le Vannes had only smiled.

“Regrettably, child,” she had said lightly, “you are not worth half that amount.”

Still, he had sold her. A daughter in exchange for shares in the Mississippi Company and a grant of two hundred livres for the purchase of a trousseau. By the time Vincente knew of it, the papers had been signed, the details confirmed. At supper that night her father had patted her shoulder and declared it a great triumph, for stock in Law’s Mississippi was rarer than hen’s teeth. Her mother had contemplated her in exasperation.

“If you insist on regarding as a misfortune marriage to a man whose estates yield harvests of gold, you are more suited to a madhouse than that damned nunnery,” she had declared. “It is I who must find a seamstress skilled enough to make a bride from skin, bones, and sackcloth.”

Later she had overheard her mother talking with her father in the parlor.

“I suppose we should be grateful Louisiana is so far away,” her mother had said. “At least the Comte cannot consider the bargain of his purchase before it is paid for.”

Her father’s laugh had seemed to Vincente the bitterest betrayal of them all.

The light spat, belching smoke. It was almost all burned out. Vincente rubbed her eyes and abruptly the hole inside her opened, pushing against the constraints of her bodice. She swallowed, pushing it down, but it pushed back, stretching into the sockets of her arms, the base of her throat. Vincente hesitated. Then from the pocket of her skirts she took the bread and cheese that she had smuggled from the dining room in a napkin. She had promised herself she would keep it till morning.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” she whispered as she tore frantically at the clumsy knot that secured it. “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

Tearing open the bundle, she snatched up handfuls of food and crammed it into her mouth, pressing and swallowing, squeezing up her face as the lumps of ill-chewed bread traveled awkwardly down her throat and pressed themselves against the underside of her breastbone. When the food was all gone and her hands lay slack in the grease-stained napkin, she lay down, her knees tight against her chest and her pulse hard, and the tears slid quietly from beneath her closed eyelids.

It was barely morning when the sloop cast off from the hull of the Baleine and made its slow voyage across the dun water toward Mobile. The mists had yet to clear and, in the cobweb dawn, Vincente stood upon the deck, straining for the first smudged sight of land. As the sun rose, rolled tight in the white pastry of the sky, and ropes and sails and shouts snapped around her, she gazed across the harbor, disbelief springing into her mouth like saliva.

The prospect before her bore no more resemblance to the Parisian illustration than it did to the filthy sprawl of Paris herself. Beneath the dough of the sky, the town of Mobile rose like a dismal act of defiance from the chaos of swamps that encircled it. The water was a muddy yellow soup, choked as far as the eye could reach with thick reeds, and the wooden cabins and warehouses circling the harbor were hardly better than cattle byres. There were no palms, no elegant spires. Instead there rose from the water great dark trees with leprotic bark that rotted in hanks from their trunks. Behind them, on higher ground, squatted a hunchbacked fort built of wood, with four bastions and a flagpole from which the faded flag sagged defeated, like a pauper’s washing.

When at last the passengers were permitted to disembark, there were no gleaming savages, no men in fine silk coats. The motley crowd was poorly dressed. Several of the soldiers wore no shoes. Behind her several undernourished Negroes loaded luggage into a rough-looking flat boat of the kind peasants used for the transport of vegetables on the Seine. By the time she had departed Paris, she had convinced herself she left it gladly. She had declared herself disgusted with the city’s ingrained dirt and covetousness, its clamor for money and courtly favor, the contaminated monotony of its society, the stink of its alleys and the shrieks of the hags selling herb teas and old hats. Throughout the long and comfortless voyage, it had consoled Vincente to consider how enraged Paris must be by the sweet youth of the New World, a land barely older than Vincente, its beauty freshly minted, its warm breezes soft as a kiss upon a lover’s cheek. Beside the bloom of Louisiana, old Paris was no more than a toothless harlot, her peeling mask of paint and patches powerless to disguise the sag of her pockmarked flesh, the coarseness of her cynicism.

Vincente descended the gangplank in a daze of heat and stunned dismay. I am here, she thought. I have reached the promised land. When she had left it, Paris had been giddy, convulsed by speculation fever, the talk only of the Mississippi Company and of the magical country they called Louisiana. Every man in Paris had wanted a share in it. At the rue Quincampoix where stocks were traded, bishops and priests had jostled with courtesans, magistrates with prostitutes, aristocrats with their footmen and maids, and her father with anyone he could find. Fights had broken out; a man had been crushed to death in the stampede. For this.

“Mlle. le Vannes, my name is Mme. de Boisrenaud. I am only sorry that we meet in such circumstances. Why, they brought you the news in Havana, did they not? I do hope that I am not the one to whom the burden falls—you know, do you not, that M. de Chesse, to whom you were betrothed, is dead?”

Dizzy with the airless clamor of the dock, Vincente could only blink loose-jawed at the pinch-faced crone who stood before her. Though her expression was mournful and her skin slack with age, the old woman’s eyes were round, almost eager, and she strained forward, nostrils wide, as though she meant to inhale the aroma of Vincente’s distress.

“Last September, it was,” she lamented, shaking her head. “Every summer it comes, the fever, like a plague on us. Always some lost, though we have none to spare.”

The sourness of the old woman’s breath caused Vincente to cover her nose with her fingers. It seemed that though M. de Chesse had been renowned for the robustness of his constitution and had resisted the illness for some weeks, the affliction had at...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• A Map of Louisiana and of the River Mississippi
• 1704
• 1719
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH