Savage Lands by Clare Clark Read Free Book Online Page A

against the pale cloth. Then it was gone. That was yet another of the chickens’ objections, the lack of glass in the colony. The window frames in all the cabins were instead covered with stretched sheets of platille , a thin linen stuff that lent to the streakily limed interiors a kind of muted stillness, as though they were under water. Elisabeth loved it. Behind their blank white windows, soft in the filtered light, the two of them were perfectly alone, the neighbouring cabins forgotten. And, unlike glass, the platille let the breezes in while keeping out the harsh glare of the sun. Sometimes, in the searing heat of the summer, she had stepped inside the cottage and it had been almost cool.
    Elisabeth squirmed down the bed, pulling the quilt over her head, burying herself beneath its comforting weight. Of all the things she had brought with her to Louisiana, he loved the sea-green quilt the best. He liked to tease her that he would have married her for the quilt alone and, when he took it in his arms and danced with it about the cabin, twirling its skirts in sea-green swoops, she laughed, swallowing the prickle of disquiet that caught in her throat.
    She had laughed too when he told her she was beautiful, but behind her apron she had crossed her thumbs, pleading with the Fates that he might never see it was not so. For all her efforts, she could not rid herself of the fearfulness. When she signed the marriage contract that would formalise their betrothal, her hand had trembled so uncontrollably that she had pressed down too hard on the pen and split the nib, leaving a dark puddle of ink upon the paper. The curate had sighed and reached for the sand. He had only smiled. Taking her ink-stained hand in his free one, he had dipped the broken pen in the puddle of ink and signed his own name.
    Jean-Claude Babelon. She murmured it under her breath, tasting the shape of it. Savaret was a brisk name, its syllables contained tightly within the private recesses of the mouth. Not so Babelon. Babelon was all in the lips. When she spoke his name, she could feel her mouth softening, her lips parting as though they readied for a kiss. Elisabeth had always disdained the English practice of a wife taking her husband’s name upon their marriage. Now she found herself envious of it. In England, each time she was introduced to a stranger, each time she signed a letter or wrote her name on the flyleaf of a book, each time someone called to her across the street, she would declare herself his. In England, she would shed her old name like a chrysalis and emerge newly made into the world. Elisabeth Babelon. But that was not the French way. In Louisiana, as in Paris, she would always be Elisabeth Savaret.
    The quilt smelled of him. She inhaled and again her body stirred. The longing in her was pure and brilliant, like light in glass, and she wondered suddenly if this was the secret they shared, those empty-headed chickens, if somewhere deep in their down-stuffed hearts, they had understood what she had never even guessed at, for all her book-learning: the certainty that a man and a woman might share of themselves completely, their souls and spirits as indivisible as two wines poured together in a single bottle. These days she had to struggle to recall the girl she was before him, when her self was all in her head and her body was only trunk and arms and legs, its passing appetites satisfied by a warm cloak or an apricot tart.
    She had not opened her books since she had arrived here. There was a shelf above the table, a plank set on makeshift brackets, bare but for a couple of dusty dishes and a knife with a broken handle, but she had not troubled to unpack them. As she reached into her trunk, she touched the worn covers lightly as an archaeologist might touch the relics of a bygone time, with a kind of respectful bafflement. On the tooled leather of Montaigne she paused, tracing the scrolled pattern very slowly with one finger, remembering the