Bouchard's Widow

Chapter 1: The Fever

The bells of Saint Augustine's had not yet stopped ringing when the gravediggers began their work. They moved quickly in the October heat, turning the red clay of the Bouchard family plot with shovels that caught the late afternoon light. Lucie Perrault Bouchard stood at the edge of the hole and watched her husband descend into the earth.

She did not weep. She had wept for three days already—through the delirium, through the terrible yellow tinge that crept across Tomas's skin like a stain spreading through linen, through the final rattling hours when his body seemed to argue with death itself before surrendering. Now she was emptied out. She stood in her black bombazine dress, her face veiled, her gloved hands folded before her, and she felt nothing but the sun on her shoulders and the faint nausea that had lived in her stomach since the fever first touched their house.

Father Joachim read from his book. His Latin was poor, his accent thick with the Alsatian French of his childhood, and Lucie caught perhaps one word in three. It did not matter. Tomas had not been a churchgoing man. He had attended Mass on Easter and Christmas, had donated generously to the parish building fund, and had otherwise kept his Sundays for ledgers and correspondence. That he was buried with full rites owed more to his money than to his faith.

The mourners numbered perhaps two dozen. Free people of color from the surrounding parishes, mostly—planters and tradesmen and their wives, people who had done business with Tomas or owed him favors or simply understood that a Bouchard funeral was an occasion one attended. A few white faces hovered at the margins: the notary Gaspard Thibault, who had drawn up the will; old Madame Arnoux, who had been a friend of Tomas's mother decades ago and who attended every funeral within twenty miles as though collecting them. And standing apart from everyone, beneath the live oak at the cemetery's edge, Renard Cyprien.

Lucie saw him and looked away. She knew why he was there. Everyone knew why he was there.

The gravediggers finished their work. The mourners began to drift toward the road, where carriages and carts waited in the shade. Lucie's mother, Célestine Perrault, took her daughter's arm and guided her toward their own carriage—Tomas's carriage, Lucie corrected herself, though it was hers now. Everything was hers now.

"You will come home with me tonight," Célestine said. It was not a question.

"I cannot, Maman. There is too much to see to at the house."

"The house will keep. You need rest."

"I need to understand what Tomas has left me."

Célestine's lips pressed together. She was a small woman, fine-boned and precise, who had spent forty years as a seamstress in Natchitoches before Lucie's marriage had drawn her south to Iberville Parish. She understood fabric and thread and the geometry of a well-cut bodice. She did not understand sugar, or land, or the particular mathematics of plantation life.

"Then at least eat something," she said. "You have had nothing but coffee for two days."

Lucie promised she would eat. She helped her mother into the carriage, then turned to receive the last of the condolences. Hands were pressed. Murmured sympathies were offered. Tomas had been respected, if not universally loved. He had been a careful man, a shrewd man, a man who understood the value of everything and showed sentiment toward nothing. He had married Lucie when she was nineteen and he was forty-one, and in the seven years of their marriage, she had come to know him the way one knows a well-furnished room—she could navigate it in the dark, but she had never chosen any of the furniture.

She was turning back toward the carriage when Renard Cyprien appeared at her elbow.

"Madame Bouchard." He removed his hat. He was a tall man, rawboned and sun-darkened, with a thin mouth that seemed designed for the delivery of unpleasant truths. His plantation, Beau Rivage, bordered the Bouchard land to the north, and for years he had made no secret of his desire to absorb it. "My deepest sympathies."

"Thank you, Monsieur Cyprien."

"If there is anything I can do—anything at all—you must not hesitate."

"You are kind."

He replaced his hat. "I wonder if I might call on you in a few days. There are matters of a practical nature that—"

"Not today, monsieur."

"Of course. Of course not today." He smiled. It was the smile of a man who had already calculated every number and was simply waiting for the other party to arrive at the same sum. "When you are ready."

He walked away. Lucie watched him go, then climbed into the carriage beside her mother.

The road from Saint Augustine's to the Bouchard plantation ran along the river for three miles before turning inland through a corridor of pecan trees. The land here was flat and impossibly green, the cane fields stretching away on both sides in rows so uniform they seemed drawn with a ruler. This was the richest soil in Louisiana—alluvial earth deposited by centuries of flooding, black and deep and capable of producing sugar in quantities that made men wealthy and kept them awake at night with the fear of losing it.

Tomas had owned six hundred and forty acres. Not the largest holding in the parish, but substantial. The house sat on a slight rise above the river road—a two-story Creole cottage with wide galleries and a hipped roof, painted white, surrounded by crepe myrtles that Tomas's mother had planted forty years ago. Behind it, in descending order of importance, stood the kitchen building, the sugar house, the overseer's cottage, the stables, the cooperage, and finally, at the far end of a dirt path that ran through a stand of chinaberry trees, the slave quarters: two rows of cypress-plank cabins facing each other across a packed-earth yard.

Lucie had lived in this house for seven years, but she had spent most of that time in its front rooms—the parlor, the dining room, the bedroom she shared with Tomas. The plantation's operations had been Tomas's domain. She had managed the household: the menus, the linens, the social calendar, the correspondence. She had done it well. She had been, by every measure that mattered to the world she inhabited, an excellent wife.

Now she was a widow, and the world she inhabited had shifted beneath her feet.

The carriage pulled up to the front gallery. Jean-Pierre, the elderly coachman, helped the women down and led the horses away. Inside, the house smelled of beeswax and camphor—the smell of sickroom and funeral, layered over the ordinary smells of a working household. Lucie removed her veil and gloves and handed them to the young girl who waited in the hallway.

"Where is Hettie?" Lucie asked.

"In the kitchen house, madame."

"Tell her I will take supper in the study."

Célestine frowned. "The study?"

"I need to look at Tomas's papers."

"Tonight? Lucie—"

"Maman. Please."

Célestine studied her daughter's face, then sighed and went upstairs to the guest room she had occupied for the past week. Lucie stood alone in the hallway for a moment, listening to the house settle around her. Somewhere in the back, a door closed. Outside, the evening insects had begun their chorus. The house felt enormous and strange, as though it had been rearranged while she was at the cemetery.

She walked to the study.

Tomas's study was a small room at the back of the house, its single window overlooking the kitchen garden. A desk of dark walnut dominated the space, flanked by shelves that held ledgers, correspondence files, and a few books—agricultural treatises, mostly, and a French Bible that had belonged to his father. The desk was orderly, as Tomas had been orderly in all things. His pen still sat in its holder. His inkwell was still half full.

Lucie sat down in his chair. It was too large for her. She opened the center drawer and found the will—a copy; the original was with Gaspard Thibault—and read it again, though she already knew its contents. Tomas Bouchard, being of sound mind, left the entirety of his estate to his wife, Lucie Perrault Bouchard. There were no children. There were no other heirs.

The entirety of his estate.

She opened the first ledger.

The numbers told a story she had not expected. Tomas had been wealthy, yes, but wealth on a sugar plantation was a particular kind of illusion. The land was valuable. The equipment was valuable. The enslaved people were, in the language of the law and the ledger, valuable. But the debts were also substantial. Tomas had borrowed heavily to rebuild the sugar house two years ago after a fire. He had taken additional loans to purchase new equipment—a vacuum pan, a centrifuge—that promised greater efficiency. The interest payments were considerable. The sugar crop, which would not be harvested for another six weeks, was already pledged against these debts.

Lucie turned pages. She found the household accounts, meticulously kept. She found the correspondence with factors in New Orleans—the middlemen who sold the sugar and took their commission. She found letters from creditors, politely worded but unmistakable in their intent.

And then she found the other ledger.

It was smaller than the rest, bound in brown leather, and it had been kept in the bottom drawer beneath a stack of old newspapers. Lucie opened it and recognized her husband's handwriting—the same precise, forward-slanting script that filled the financial ledgers—but the entries here were different.

They were records of discipline.

The entries were dated and detailed. Names, offenses, punishments. She read them with a growing coldness in her chest.

*March 14, 1842. Solomon. Insolence. Ten lashes.*

*April 2, 1842. Patience. Slow work. Reduced rations, three days.*

*June 19, 1842. Big Henry. Fighting. Twenty lashes. Confined to cabin, one week.*

*August 3, 1842. Rose. Broke a cane knife through carelessness. Five lashes.*

The entries went on for pages. Years of them. Tomas's handwriting never wavered, never showed hesitation or remorse. The punishments were recorded with the same precision he applied to bushels of sugar and barrels of molasses. They were, to him, operational matters.

Lucie closed the ledger. She sat in the too-large chair and stared at the wall.

She had known. Of course she had known. She had lived on a sugar plantation for seven years. She had seen the field hands moving through the cane in the brutal heat. She had heard sounds that she had trained herself not to identify. She had understood, in the abstract way that one understands a war being fought in another country, that the wealth that furnished her parlor and dressed her in silk was extracted from human bodies through force.

But she had not read the ledger. She had not seen it written in her husband's hand, in his careful script, with the same pen he used to write her birthday greetings.

A knock at the door. Hettie Gaudet entered without waiting for an answer, carrying a tray.

Hettie was perhaps fifty—she did not know her own age with certainty—and she moved through the Bouchard house with the authority of someone who had been there longer than anyone else and intended to be there after everyone else was gone. She was a tall woman, broad-shouldered, with skin the color of dark honey and hands that were always in motion—stirring, chopping, arranging, correcting. She had been the head cook and de facto household manager for twenty years, first under Tomas's mother and then under Tomas himself. She had regarded Lucie, from the first day of the marriage, with a politeness that stopped well short of warmth.

"Your supper," Hettie said, setting the tray on the corner of the desk. Rice, gravy, a piece of roasted chicken, a glass of claret. "Your mother said you haven't eaten."

"Thank you, Hettie."

Hettie's eyes moved to the open ledgers on the desk. Her expression did not change, but something shifted behind her eyes—a flicker of something that might have been recognition, or assessment, or simply the acknowledgment that a new chapter had begun.

"Will you be needing anything else tonight?"

"No. Thank you."

Hettie turned to go, then paused. "The people are asking what's to happen."

Lucie looked up. "The people?"

"The people in the quarters. They want to know if you're selling. If someone new is coming."

"No one is selling anything."

"They'll want to hear that from you."

Lucie met Hettie's gaze. There was no deference in it, no submission. Hettie looked at her the way one adult looks at another who has just been handed a task far beyond their competence.

"I'll speak to them tomorrow," Lucie said.

"Tomorrow, then."

Hettie left. Lucie ate a few bites of chicken, drank the claret, and returned to the ledgers. She read until the candle guttered and the numbers blurred before her eyes, and when she finally climbed the stairs to the bedroom she had shared with Tomas, she lay in the dark and listened to the sounds of the plantation settling into night—the distant lowing of cattle, the creak of the house in the river breeze, and somewhere far off, so faint she might have imagined it, the sound of singing from the quarters.