“Let’s stop and get ourselves a meal,” Frédéric suggested. The fish soup looked especially delicious, and the scent of curry drifted toward them.
Mr. Enrique threw his companion a look. “There are some things you should know about this place.” He realized now how young and naïve his companion was. “Your people were granted full rights on this island, other than the fact that they cannot marry out of their race, but mine don’t have that benefit. There is no selling of human life since the first part of the century; the Danish government saw to that when they took the island. But those who came here as slaves, remain so. True, many people of color here are free, but that doesn’t mean you can publicly sit down for a meal with me.”
Frédéric shrugged. “We could take it with us.”
“I wouldn’t be served at this establishment. We’d have to go down the street, and there isn’t time.”
Frédéric laughed. “Because the widow is waiting. Snoring in a chair?”
He clearly had a vision of her, and Mr. Enrique gave him a hard look.
“You should know the widow isn’t old. She’s not what you expect. She understands the business and is bright.”
“And you know this because?”
“I was her father’s clerk, and then your uncle’s clerk, and now it appears I’ll be yours as well. That is, if she allows you into the office.”
“I am the heir to my uncle’s estate, which includes her father’s properties. I’m afraid she has no choice,” Frédéric informed his companion, his more serious side emerging.
“That may be, but she’d probably do better running the business than anyone, if it was not against the law for a woman to do so.”
They had reached the store, which was already bustling at this hour. Frédéric admired the stone and stucco façade. Enrique explained that above the commercial area were the rooms where the widow and her children lived. This was just as well. The estate wished to sell the house where his uncle Isaac had lived, and the house of his uncle’s mother-in-law, where Frédéric had spent the night. He thought of his dreams of rain and felt a chill. He had just turned twenty-two, and all at once he felt his youth, how little he knew about the lives of others: widows, children, dying men. He was about to enter into the daily life of people he didn’t know. He hesitated at the door. There was a hedge of those same pink flowers he’d seen in the stucco house, and the bees seemed to have followed him. He closed his eyes for a moment and listened to their buzzing, then suddenly felt he was being watched. He gazed upward, squinting, but all he saw were some lace curtains, made in France.
Once they were inside the main hall, Enrique directed him to the widow’s lodgings, before continuing on to the office at the rear of the store. Frédéric went through a side door and took the stairs to the modest living quarters. In France, this would have been considered the home of a person with little means. He had the key to the place and was legally the owner of everything, but felt too uncomfortable to use the key unannounced, so he knocked at the door. Frédéric heard people talking inside, the rise and fall of voices speaking French. He rapped on the wood again, and again there was no answer. He waited in the corridor for some time, long enough for him to realize no one would likely respond, and so he used one of the keys that had been sent to him.
There was a click, and then the door opened into the world he’d been sent to manage and guide. He hadn’t expected the scene before him, two boys who were nearly men gathering some books, so many children at the table he could not count them all, an African woman seeing to their breakfasts, admonishing them for being greedy and late, a little boy and some even younger girls, barefoot, their hair braided and pinned up. They were Emma and Delphine, so close in age they seemed to be twins. It barely mattered how many there were; he could not see any of them clearly as his attention was riveted on the woman who came out of a bedchamber, wearing a white shift, her masses of dark hair loose, a baby at her hip. He thought of a white rose, for there were some in his parents’ garden outside Paris, blooms which grew on thin, wavering branches covered by thorns. The woman appeared to have just come from her bed. Her clothes were loose and light enough for him to see her form. He found himself immobilized, there on the threshold of a home to which he hadn’t been invited or, it seemed, expected.
A little girl saw him first and pointed. “Qui est cet homme?” she asked in a singsong. It would take weeks before he could tell which one was Delphine and which was Emma. The rest of the children, who had been as noisy as birds, quieted, staring with suspicion. The black woman said, “What do you think you’re doing here?” in accented English. They were all speaking to him at once, except the dark-haired woman dressed in white, who merely raised her eyes to his. She gazed at him coldly, not wanting him to realize how handsome she found him. There was a soulful cast to his features, as if he revealed his innermost self. She saw that he was wearing gray leather boots and she knew he was from Paris, and at that instant Rachel Pomié Petit, who had the sharpest tongue on St. Thomas, found she could not speak.