Property (Vintage Contemporaries) by Martin Valerie

Author:Martin, Valerie [Martin, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T23:00:00+00:00

WHAT DID WE eat that night? It seems a place to start. There was a gumbo, but what kind? It was the last pleasurable moment; Sarah lifting the lid of the tureen, and the delicious aroma filling the room. My aunt’s cook, Ines, had served it often enough in the town, but in my opinion, no one made it better than Delphine. Was it chicken? After that there was another course and another, but what?

My husband droned on about the crop, as he thought it unwise to discuss the threat of a revolt before the servants, though there was only Sarah. He must have pictured Sarah telling Delphine or Rose, who would tell some passing hand, and thus it would make its way to the quarter, as if every negro in fifty miles didn’t already know all about it.

I drank a good deal of wine. Sarah lit the lamps and served the coffee. The room seemed smoky to me, airless. When Sarah went out, my husband got up and bolted the shutters on the casements, which made it seem like a prison. “I’d like a glass of port,” I said. My husband suggested that he had a good bottle in his office. I followed him there.

“Will you be joining the patrol?” I asked as he poured out a tablespoon of port.

“Not at first,” he said. “They’ll be starting near the Pass and pushing down this way.” He held the glass out to me.

“I’d like a little more than that, if you don’t mind,” I said.

He looked puzzled, then took my meaning. “I know these conspiracies must be torture to your nerves,” he said, filling the glass.

“On the contrary,” I said. “It gives me something to think about besides my sewing.”

He ignored this remark. “In truth, I’m reluctant to leave the house. I can’t trust anyone to stand guard. If the informant told the truth, this plot has infiltrated every quarter from Pointe Coupée to the city on both sides of the river.” He opened his cabinet and took down two pistols.

“With the militia called out, they can have no chance of success,” I observed. “What do they possibly hope to accomplish?”

“They just want to murder as many of us as they can,” he said. “They don’t think further than that.”

I sipped my port, thinking of them gathered around their fires of an evening, their rude passions inflamed by the wild talk of some preacher, planning how best to kill us all. And it wasn’t just the field hands. In New Orleans, I had heard of an American lady who discovered her maid attempting to poison the entire household by lacing the sugar with arsenic. What benefit would her mistress’s demise be to her, since she would only be sold again, perhaps to a more severe mistress? It puzzled me. “I suppose it is just the numbers,” I said.

My husband cast me a questioning look, distracted by the business of tamping powder into one of his pistols.

“It is because they outnumber us so,” I explained.

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