“It might be bad news,” Jestine said.
I knew what she was thinking. A letter after all this time might mean Lyddie was afflicted in some way; perhaps she had died. It had been ten years since she had been stolen, time enough for anything to happen.
“You read it to me.” Jestine was shivering as she thrust the letter back into my hands.
I noticed there was a pelican nesting on the new roof, perhaps the one who had flown from my house during the Night of the Old Year fire. My luck, I was certain, was now Jestine’s. Such thoughts gave me the courage to open the letter and read, though at first my heart was in my throat.
I have often though of writing to you in the past, but will make this brief due to the circumstances. I thought you should know that your daughter had grown into a beautiful woman. On the trip to France I feared she might die from a fever. She fell into a deep sleep and when she woke, she remembered little, not even her own name.
Now, she is engaged to be married.
I raised my eyes to see Jestine weeping. She had cast away the dress she had been working on so that her tears wouldn’t ruin the fabric.
“Jestine,” I said. I put the letter down.
She shook her head. “They almost killed her with their love. Go on. Read it.”
I thought of Elise in our bathtub, her red hair streaming down her back, her pale skin scattered with freckles, cavorting in the water as if she was nothing more than a simple, mindless girl. Perhaps I learned that people were not always what they appeared to be from that time.
I beg you to be happy for the joy in her life, and not to despise me for giving her a better one than she might have had if she’d stayed on your island. I imagine you must curse me every day, but please know I have always loved her.
I’m writing you this news in the hope that it can bring you happiness as well.
We both had thought of Lyddie frozen at the age when she was taken. She was a six-year-old girl to us, not a young woman engaged to be wed.
Elise’s monogram was imprinted in the letter paper. “We should burn this,” I said.
On this day the sea was smooth and glassy. It seemed a person could walk all the way across it, on the backs of the turtles, until she reached the shoreline of France and the salt flats of the ancient city of La Rochelle. I wished it were so, just as I wished I could give my friend back her daughter. I would have even given her one of mine, but such things were impossible.
We went inside Jestine’s house and made a fongee pudding out of cornmeal for our dinner. We saved a bowl for Jacobo to have when his nap was through, but for now we left him to his dreams. This porridge had been Lyddie’s favorite meal when she was six, wrapped inside the life that should have been hers. We did not set a plate for her to help bring her back home, for people say such actions call to a person’s spirit, and we feared we would disrupt the happiness she had found with the man she was to marry. But we burned the letter after we had eaten. We saw that the smoke was blue, a sign that the writer did not have long to live. Surely that was why my cousin’s wife had written after all this time as an attempt to free herself of her sins. Yet there was no regret in her message, no apology, not even any gratitude. If it were me, I would have indeed cursed her. But Jestine simply poured water on the ashes, to make certain any flaming sparks were drowned. We threw what was left into the sea.
My son woke then, and he ran to us. But it was Jestine he threw his arms around, not me.
chapter seven
The Escape Artist
Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas
1841
JACOBO CAMILLE PIZZARRO
I wanted my freedom from the start. I did not wish to go to school and would have preferred to walk through the streets of the city, skirting the harbor, making my way to the shore so I could study waves, sand, birds, light. This was my library, the landscape around me, luminous and white-hot or starry and black. I liked to be with everyday people, watching them work, especially at the docks, where there was a riot of color, and a rush of great excitement every time a ship arrived, for that was the way the world came to us and woke us up with news and events and people. We had small lives here. Each group stayed to themselves, and people of our faith were very close-knit. My older brothers and sisters had all attended European schools, and several had left the island due to marriage. But we younger brothers did not attend the school at the synagogue, rebuilt from stone and brick after the fire that had burned it to the ground. Nor did we go to any of the schools that non-Jewish Europeans attended. We were outcasts, and as far as I was concerned this was good luck. So much the better.
But my mother insisted that all children must be taught to read and write, and she brought us to the school run by the Moravians, missionaries from Denmark. The Moravians on St. Thomas had been funded a hundred years earlier by the Danish princess Charlotta Amalia, the beloved wife of King Christian V, born in 1650, and it was her name that graced our capital city. My brothers and I were the only Europeans to attend this school, and at first the other students gawked and joked about us, but that didn’t last long. We had to work too hard for there to be time for ridicule. We were taught in English, Danish, and German. At home we spoke French, and I didn’t know a word of these languages at first, so I sat there in a dream state. I wondered if this was how our dog, called Souris—meaning mouse—felt when my sisters would chatter to him. Souris was a descendant of one of the dogs brought here by pirates from Madagascar, common on our island, a breed that was white and fluffy as cotton, but tough when it came to chasing after rats and lizards. My sisters, especially Delphine, liked to dress him up in a baby’s bonnet and have him sit on a chair for tea, and my father, who was easygoing, allowed this. My father loved peace and quiet; he was most interested in figures and ledgers. He was soft-spoken, though, and had a big heart. I think when my mother’s back was turned, he gave my sisters biscuits to share with Souris and laughed along with them at the dog’s antics. Delphine was his favorite; she was so pretty it was hard to say no to her. It seemed far easier to say no to me, for when I begged my father to let me escape from hours wasted at school, he told me every man should be educated. I knew he would not go against my mother. He never would.