Four years later, everything in the world changed. A new country formed after a decade of violence and blood, and the United States of America like a sapling tree began to spread its roots. On the other side of the Atlantic, an old country began to crumble in July when the people of France stormed into the Bastille prison. Changes also occurred on the duPres sugar plantation in Martinique; changes that for two young girls felt more important than revolutionary wars starting or ending.
Josette and Angelique grew taller and equal to the master in height. Monsieur duPres started calling the girls his prize fillies, which made Josette giggle, "Oh Papa!" Their hips gained a curve and their breasts sprouted into rose buds, as Andre duPres remarked to his wife. Madame Marguerite duPres commanded her servants to take away their childish frocks to be replaced with ladylike gowns. Josette, of course, had a stiff corset and petticoats beneath her Parisian fashions. Angelique wore plain cotton imitations. She treasured the lacey cap that Mamma had crocheted for her; it was the only possession that Madame duPres allowed her to keep.
The master's unmarried older sister Natalie la Comtesse duPres returned fresh from a trip to the heavenly court of King Louis XVI, bringing splendid presents and a constant litany of disdain for how "that American debacle" was doomed to fail. "An entire nation to be governed without a king? It will be chaos. It won't last five years." Countess duPres gave Josette lessons in penmanship, embroidery, and how to read sheet music on the harpsichord. Out of her summer villa in Pau, she brought a collection of leather-bound volumes with the plays of Moliere, whom she frequently boasted was superior to the English playwright Shakespeare. In the afternoons, over tea and croissants, Josette and the countess would recite the dialogue from L'École des Femmes and Tartuffe ou L'Imposteur, and they would laugh loudly at the wit of Moliere's satire.
Angelique had twice the chores to do, attending to both Josette's and the countess's material needs. She did her work without complaint as Mamma would have been proud to see her do. She laundered their lacy underclothes and dried them to white in the sun. She hung mosquito nets around their canopy beds. She wiped the mud off their dainty shoes. She polished their silver jewelry. She put away their feathered hats in the boxes lined with tissue paper. She refilled the crystal cruet of Josette's favorite perfume, and the strong odor of jasmine stuck to her own fingers for hours. Angelique often wondered, Mamma, where are you now? Are you happy with your new family, or do you miss me too? If only you could read and write, we could send each other letters.
#
On Christmas Eve, upon returning from midnight mass, Josette's mother fell suddenly ill. The carriage ride caused Madame duPres to vomit the communion bread and wine all over her lacy bodice. Servants flocked to catch her from collapsing in the foyer.
"Take her upstairs," the master commanded even as he turned away. A mood of grim urgency overtook him as if he were late for a business appointment. He kept on his hat and boots. He launched outside to the dark balmy night and slammed the front door behind himself. Where is he going, Angelique thought. At this hour? When his wife is falling ill?
Countess duPres tugged Josette by the hand. "Come with me."
Josette dug in her heels, resisting the pull to be drawn to her bedroom like a child. "But my mother needs me!"
"No Josette," the countess said firmly. "Don't worry about your mother. You'll see her in the morning."
As a mere servant, Angelique had the freedom to stay with the group who helped Madame duPres stagger upstairs. The dainty woman had broadened her girth in the last few months to almost double her size. At the same time Josette's feminine curves developed, her mother's statuesque beauty had degenerated quickly to resemble a stuffed goose. Lately she had abandoned a corset altogether and wore only loose-fitting layered gowns. Thick box pleats in the back fanned out from her shoulders to the dovetail of her trailing hem.
Madame clutched her swollen belly, crying out, "My child! My child!"
"Shall I go and fetch Josette?" Angelique volunteered.
"No," said Alexandre the head cook, a Gascon from the south of France who had been imported into the household with the Countess duPres. His black hair was as frizzy as a Cajun's and he tied it back into a thick puff at the nape of his neck. Even though his skin tanned to a shade of brown darker than a mulatto, the master still considered him a white man worthy of a free man's wages. Alexandre carried himself with a foolish pride, imagining that knowledge of pastry and meringue gave him wisdom in all things.
"Why not?" Angelique challenged him. "She is calling for her child."
"Don't you know, girl? A second child is coming. Josette's goin' to have a little brother or sister soon."
In wonderment, she followed them into the grand bedroom—a chapel of lace and flowers and gilded mirrors—but was too busy to admire the splendor of the place she had been forbidden to enter until now. She helped draw back the paisley quilts and blue sheets so that the suffering Madame could lie down. Servants removed the lady's brocade gown and loose-fitting smock dress, leaving her in only a cotton chemise. Angelique stared at her large, round belly and suddenly understood. She looked like one of the master's hunting dogs when it had been ready to whelp puppies.
"Too soon, too soon," the madame cried, weeping and feverish. Her chestnut hair spread over the pillow in a starfish pattern around her face.
Jean-Baptiste the butler arrived, dressed in his Christmas tailcoat as clean and fine as the master's suit. He was the oldest man in the house—twice as old as the master himself—with hair gone cotton white and a voice that sounded like a wood rasp. A native-born African, he came into service of the master's father at the age of seven, before the duPres family ever came to Martinique, when they had lived in the south of France in a villa of pink stone. Although he also had a secret name in the old language that was not Creole, he did not tell his name to anyone.
Jean-Baptiste gave his advice. "It's goin' wrong and bad. We must call the Obeah woman who lives on Mount Pelée. She will come down and do what needs to be done."
"None of that devil magic," said the Gascon cook with a sneer of contempt. "We must give her a holy medal of Saint Margaret to hold."
The master Andre duPres came to the threshold of the door. He viewed the scene within and would enter no farther. "I've sent for a doctor! There's one at the shipyards."
Angelique stayed at the bedside for all the long hours of the night and into the next day. Christmas bells rang from the little church on the hill, but no one of the duPres household went to mass. The servants rushed back and forth, to dab at the suffering woman's sweaty forehead, to hold her hand, to offer her rum that she refused to drink.
Josette sobbed and threw a teenaged tantrum in the hallway, but for once she did not get her way. No matter how loudly she screamed, or how violently she stomped her feet, she was not allowed into the gloom of her mother's bedchamber.
The shipyard doctor paced back and forth for hours. The candles flickered at his movements. He wore a long brown coat with a high collar that boxed his beard at the sides. He smoked a pipe with a long thin stem. Angelique watched him sternly, her large green eyes a-light with disapproval. Surely the Obeah woman on the mountain would be doing more for the laboring mother's agony. The shipyard doctor did not even lift the bed sheet to examine her.
"Well?" Andre duPres called from the threshold.
The doctor went to the doorway to speak to him. "Called me too soon, you did. Not much for me to do till the baby's coming."
"When will that be?"
"I don't know. These things take their own time."
Angelique saw the other servants in the hall, especially the old African Jean-Baptiste who was shaking his head in despair. She both admired his wisdom and despised his inaction. If given a choice between obedience to his master's orders and saving his master's wife, then one should have the courage to rebel. The meek shall inherit the earth, so the priests tell us, she thought. Does that say the meek allow everyone else to die before them?
Madame cried out in loud, huffing gasps. Too weary to scream, she was half crazed and half asleep. Her skin paled to candle wax. Her chestnut hair blackened with sweat. "It's coming. It's coming."
The doctor rushed back to the bedside. He reached underneath the bedsheets, ever mindful of the lady's modesty. He hesitated to probe between the Madame's knees and fumbled about blindly.
"Yes, yes, I feel it. Yes..."
The lady groaned once more. She curled her whole body forward in one supreme effort, and then collapsed back against the pillows. Slowly, the doctor pulled forth a slippery thing the size of a half-grown puppy.
Silence hushed through the room.
The doctor lifted the baby upside-down by the feet. He spanked the tiny buttocks. The infant was as gray as a squid and did not move.
"Oh my God!" Andre staggered backwards into the corridor. He slammed his shoulder against the far wall. "Oh my dear God! No, God, no!"
The doctor laid the tiny bundle onto the foot of the bed. "It can't be..." He pushed at its little stiff chest as he would for a half-drowned man.
Forgotten on the bed, the mother sagged sideways off the pillows. Her face turned gray. The stench of black blood filled the room. Angelique stood nearest to her, listening to her gargle on her exhaustion. It was only Angelique who heard the madame breathe out her last and fail to breathe in again. A cold wind rushed through the room—colder than any wind that she had ever felt. It snuffed out the candles. Everything went dark.
"I'm sorry to tell you, Monsieur duPres," said the shipyard doctor. "It would have been a boy."
#
Andre duPres shut himself in a guest bedroom. In one hand he carried a framed oil portrait of his wife. In the other fist, he gripped a bottle of Jamaican rum. The butler Jean-Baptiste urgently gave orders to all of the other servants, "Lock away the master's collection of pistols and flintlock muskets. Don't bring 'em out, even if he asks."
The priest came to the bedside to mumble prayers in Latin, and the master did not come out to greet him. It was the countess Natalie duPres who escorted the priest up and down the stairs; it was the countess who thanked him for his services; it was the countess who paid him a handful of silver coins. Angelique overhead the priest saying that because the baby had not received baptism before it died, its little soul was doomed to Hell. "But it's fortunate that Madame duPres made her confession at Christmas Mass. She died with her sins forgiven."
Josette heard the news from her Aunt Natalie and immediately broke down weeping. Angelique stayed with her all night. For the first time in many years, the two girls shared the same bed. Surrounded by lace curtains and the faint blue light of a crescent moon, she listened to Josette crying softly in her sleep. It was one of the rare times that Angelique felt sorry for her.
But when morning came, Josette awakened with a cheery smile. "I must go to Papa and tell him what I dreamed."
"What did you dream?" she asked.
"I dreamed the most beautiful dream. I can hardly describe it! I saw my mother in Heaven and all the saints reached out to her in welcome. The Blessed Virgin herself took my mother by the hand. They are sitting up there now on a golden throne in the clouds. Mother will never again be sick or unhappy. She's looking down on us, watching over us in the company of angels. She loves me and Papa very much."
Angelique gawked back at her, mystified. "Aren't you sad that your mother is dead?"
"No, of course not!" Josette laughed at her silliness. "I'm so happy that Mother is in such a beautiful place. Oh, I must go tell Papa right away!"
Josette ran off in only her nightgown, a fairy nymph of white and blue lace ruffles. Alone once more, the familiar fury twisted itself in Angelique's gut. Josette's own mother had become a discarded bit of rubbish like so many of her pretty things: the dresses that bored her, the shoes hardly worn, the ribbons of her hair, the flowers that fell off her hat. How often had Josette exclaimed, I love those earrings, only to drop them into her jewelry box a week later and never wear them again. Angelique wondered if the girl had loved her mother at all, or if she were capable of truly loving anyone.
#
Angelique attended the funeral along with the rest of the family. Monsieur duPres, his sister the countess, and his daughter all dressed in black crepe. Angelique wore gray because she did not own a black dress. The tropical landscape mocked them with its dazzling palette of colors. The family stood as lead statues in the warm rain that sprinkled out of a pure blue sky. Grass on the hills all around the church yard was a vivid emerald green. In the distance, the turquoise sea lapped gently at the white sand beaches.
The priest sang out in Latin his benedictions. When he finished, Andre duPres placed a single yellow lily on the casket. The pall bearers lowered it by ropes into the rectangular hole in the ground.
Countess duPres hugged Josette to her bosom, hiding the teenaged girl's view of the men starting to shovel in dirt. "Come, child, let's go home. There's nothing more to be done here."
"I'm not sad at all," Josette insisted. "Don't you understand? Mother is in Heaven with Jesus, and Mary, and all the saints. We should be happy for her."
"Of course," said her aunt, biting back on the tears that choked her.
The priest turned away without another word. On the back of his ivory chasuble was embroidered a simple cross in yellow thread—a shabby imitation of gold trim. He slouched and carried himself with an uneven gait, strolling up the path towards the rain-battered church on the hill.
Some of the servants left with the duPres family. A few of them stayed. Angelique remained at the grave site with the old butler Jean-Baptiste, his wife Claire the chambermaid, and the slender Haitian who tended the master's horses.
"You'd best go home, child," said Claire. She had no children of her own and usually showed no warm sentiment for the young. Today, though, she gazed at Angelique kindly and not as a servant would. Except for the flamboyant countess, Claire was the finest looking lady at the funeral. She had learned from Madame duPres that the only important things in life were the style of one's clothes, the novelty of one's bonnet, and the proper drape of a shawl across one's shoulders for each hour of the day. Now that her mistress was gone, Claire's own simple yet fashionable gown made her seem like a darker twin of the woman being laid in the ground.
"I want to stay with you," Angelique said, her eyes widening.
"No, child, there's nothing to be done. Prayers have been said." As the woman bent over, the layers of her taffeta overskirt separated into a pair of wings on the grass. She picked up a handful of dirt, no longer mindful of soiling her crocheted gloves. Whispering a few words in Creole, too quietly for Angelique to hear, she tossed the soil into the grave.
The diggers kept shoveling. More and more dirt slowly filled up the chasm.
One by one, the butler Jean-Baptiste and the Haitian followed Claire's example. They picked up handfuls of soft sod and, whispering a little prayer in their own words, threw the dirt into the hole.
"Is that enough?" Angelique asked.
Claire patted the girl on the lace doily that topped her blonde curls. "She'll rest in peace as long as no one disturbs her. Listen carefully, child, don't ever say her name out loud again. When you pray to the saints on behalf of her soul, say only, 'Josette's mama,' and never her name."
"Why should I not say her name?"
"Names have power, child."
The butler stepped in between them, separating Claire's gentle hand from the girl. "Enough of that talk, woman. Don't worry this child's head with such things."
#
Long after midnight, Angelique sneaked out of the house. Moonlight shined faintly from the crescent in the starry sky. The white sand of the path glowed like a carpet of silver.
She hoisted her skirts above her knees and ran, sprinting as fast as she could, dashing up the hill to the cemetery. Headstones softly shined like broken chunks of the moon fallen to earth.
Angelique knelt at the foot of the freshly dug grave. She admired the headstone's craftsmanship, the names carved with typeset precision, the image of a fleur-de-lis above a chevron banner. She quickly subtracted the two dates, calculating the Madame's age to twenty-nine. She was not much older than I am now, when she first married Monsieur. The countess surely must be twice that age. Is Natalie duPres any more deserving of a long life than Madame Marguerite?
As her fury built, so did the rain clouds overhead. Thunder rumbled. The sea's waves grew choppy. A warm wind ruffled the long blades of grass.
On her knees, Angelique pierced her fingers into the soft soil of the grave. "Josette doesn't want you anymore. She has tossed you away and forgotten you already. Tonight, after supper, she played the harpsichord and sang 'Au Clair de la Lune' to her father."
Coarse pebbles scratched her palms. A bit of her own blood leaked into the earth.
"If they don't want you anymore, I will welcome you." Angelique widened her eyes, not daring to blink as she stared at the soil and imagined the sound of Josette's mother gasping her last breath. "I call out to you, wherever you are. I invite you to return. Be my mother if no one else will have you. Come to me! Be my mother and no one else's, Marguerite Cecile Guiberteau duPres!"
The surface of the world tilted sideways. Ground lurched at a slant like the deck of a ship in a storm. All of it rolled upside-down. Sky opened as a vast black chasm beneath her. Angelique clung to the soil overhead. Her legs dangled into emptiness. She saw the infinity of the universe—a vast empty blackness where countless suns swirled together as glittering hurricanes—and the fragility of the world as a thin crust floating on a sea of emptiness. Laughter screamed out of her open mouth. The earth continued its rollover and came around to right itself.
Beneath the soil of the grave, something stirred. She heard the muffled cracking sounds of wood splitting. The dirt swelled.
Angelique's eyes widened, staring at the headstone, waiting for the shining ghost to appear. She imagined that, in death, the madame would be as beautiful as the statues of saints in church. Not like Josette had said, on a golden throne on a cloud, but here... Here among us, she would be a perfect spirit free of her flesh, free of pain, free of suffering, and eternal. She will be my mother forever.
A hand clawed up out of the dirt. Angelique screamed.
The hand continued to push upwards. Then a second hand and the arms emerged. Angelique recognized the soiled sleeves of the lace-and-silk gown that Madame had been buried in. The flesh of those arms was grayish blue—the color of a corpse—but active and strong, eager to dig out of the hole.
"No!" she cried. "This isn't what I wanted! Go away! Go back!"
More and more of it struggled to emerge: a head wrapped in a shroud, the dirt clinging to the soft cotton. White lace had turned brown. Pink silk seemed gray in the moonlight.
Angelique jumped to her feet. She ran away, sprinting downhill faster than she had gone up. All the while, she did not dare look behind her. Her own heartbeat thundered in her ears so she could not hear if a corpse's feet shuffled through the sands of the path. She could not hear anything but her own frantic breaths.
By the time she reached the kitchen door of the plantation house, she was in convulsions of terror. She pounded her fists on the closed door—in her madness, unable to do the simplest task such as turning the knob and going inside.
Jean-Baptiste opened the door. On this warm night, he wore cotton shirtsleeves that matched his white hair. The bleached fabric contrasted with the darkness of the rest of him.
"What is it, child?"
"She's coming!" Angelique threw herself into the man's embrace. Her cheek pressed to his strong shoulder. She listened to the steady thud-thud of his heart.
"Who's coming?"
"The madame..."
The butler gripped her shoulders and pulled her away. He frowned into her sobbing face. "What did you do?"
Angelique spun around in his grip to face the outside. Shivering all over, she stared past the door frame at the moonlight scene. Beyond the edge of the garden, through the fronds of the trees, she saw something move... something walking.
"You went to the cemetery, didn't you," he said in a calm but stern tone.
"Help me! She's coming!"
"Shouldna done that, fool child. We told you not to, and you went and did it anyway. You raised a zombie."
"A... zo-zombie?" Angelique's trembling mouth struggled to form around the unfamiliar word.
The figure in the garden stepped clearly into the open. It was indeed the Madame in her finest gown. The swathes of silky skirt tucked up at the sides like a curtain drawn away from the window. The underskirt with layers of lace ruffles showed underneath. Her dark hair was coiffed with great care but some of the pins had fallen out of her scalp. The swags of limp curls dangled over her face. And what a face! Purple bruises encircled her eyes. Brown slime drooled out of her yawning mouth.
"Jean-Baptiste, do something!" Angelique screamed.
"We are doin' something. Stay outta the way, child."
Angelique looked back at him in utter bewilderment. Then she realized that the kitchen fire was blazing and the room was full of light. At this hour, all the servants should have been asleep, but they gathered here. The chambermaid Claire was up and fully dressed in coral taffeta with lace cuffs like shredded lily petals sagging from her elbows. The Haitian and a couple of young men freshly stolen from Africa loitered by the hearth. They all held thick machetes from their work in the sugar cane fields.
Another person was in the kitchen—someone Angelique had never seen before.
Thin like a skeleton with the flesh painted on, the woman carried herself with a stiff posture of authority. She wore the bright aqua colors of the open sea, in large veils of cotton wrapped loosely around herself and belted with a cord at the waist. A scarf bundled around her skull concealed all of her hair. Large hoop earrings shined against her long neck. On the wrists of her bare arms, she wore bracelets of seashells. By the anklets of braided cord above her bare feet, Angelique realized who this had to be: the wise Obeah woman who dwelled on the slopes of Mount Pelée the sleeping volcano.
The butler explained, "We were planning to go up to the cemetery at dawn and do a good job of sealing her in her grave. We feared it would be Josette calling her back—missing her mama—but we never figured it would be you."
"I ju-just," she stammered. "I just wanted a mama of my own."
"Oh poor child," said Claire blinking at tears.
The Obeah woman at the fireplace lit a gourd cup full of incense powder. The smoke had the scent of dog hair and garlic flowers. The old woman made her way across the room in a sort of lopsided gait, working her shoulders and hips to pump her shuffling feet. She swayed like a turtle that had just lost its shell. She nudged past Angelique blocking the threshold. Unafraid, she stepped out into the night to face the zombie, as an old hunched crone almost like a zombie herself.
Angelique continued to shiver with terror even as her eyes widened to take in every detail. The Obeah woman waved the gourd full of incense, back and forth, creating a pale web of blue smoke. She chanted the Madame's whole name backwards, syllable by syllable, "Pres du teau ber gui cile ce rite gue ma."
The zombie stopped advancing and gazed vacantly toward the house. Neither did she retreat. Angelique's eyes widened, and for the first time, in the crescent moonlight, she saw everything that was unseen. She saw the loa spirits with glowing eyes that lurked in the trunks of trees, or that slithered through the grasses, or that perched upside-down clinging to the eaves of the house.
Take her back, Angelique silently pleaded to the spirits of everything that lived. Give her back the peace that I disturbed.
The loa swarmed out of the trees and up from the moist grasses. They swirled and fluttered around the Madame in a liquid spiderweb. The zombie's eyes drooped. She swayed as if in a carnival dance. She opened her arms to welcome an embrace. Her skirt floated off the ground. The zombie drifted backwards, swimming in the air, moving away on a current of the warm night breeze. The loa carried her off in the direction of the little church on the hill. Angelique watched them, a smaller and smaller twinkle fading away in the distance. At last, she felt the earth lurch, and rock, and sway sideways, and then set itself a-right.
Angelique collapsed, fainting into the butler's arms. She slept without dreams the rest of the night and into the morning.
##
While helping the Gascon make breakfast, everything felt sunny and bright and back to normal. Bread dough still rose, like any other day, and the baguette toasted to a rich golden brown on the bricks. Angelique gazed into the blazing fire. Plumes of bright flame slapped against the bottom of the soup kettle.
Between the gaps in the flames, she saw dark eyes looking back at her—darker than any eyes she had ever seen on a man or an animal. It was a new loa who had awakened last night and was, now, aware of her.
Serve me, the eyes in the flames invited her. The burning log made a hiss like an animal breathing. Serve me, and I will give you everything you want.
I do not wish to serve anyone but the duPres family, Angelique replied in her thoughts. There is nothing I want from you. I only wanted a mother, but now, I don't want one anymore.
Soon, you will want something else.
#