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“Perhaps we can help find you a suitable match,” Madame Halevy added.

The children, quiet and well behaved, were listening in. Isaac was quiet in his mother’s arms, his eyes wide.

“Thank you for your consideration.” Rachel’s face was burning. She was certain they had a list of old men who would just as soon have a maid as a wife. She swallowed the words she wished to say, having practiced trying to tame her arrogance in every conversation she had ever had with her mother. “At the moment I’m quite busy with my children.”

“We would hate to see you make a mistake,” the women who were not her friends told her.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Rachel said.

“Not like this,” she was told by Madame Halevy. She pulled Rachel aside. “I spoke with Frédéric,” she said. “But it is clear he is under some sort of spell.”

“You spoke with him?” Rachel was furious. “Who are you to say anything?”

“I was your mother’s friend, therefore I am trying to do as she would have if she were still alive. Your feelings about this man may seem earth-shattering now, but what is love if not an enchantment. Is it worth it to destroy the lives of your children? If you choose to be an outcast, so be it, but it will be their fate as well.”

“What do you know about love?”

“It’s ruin I know about,” Madame Halevy told her. “Be as smart as you think you are. Put your heart away and listen to me.”

Rachel took the children home and left them in Rosalie’s care. She needed time to think things through. She walked along the beach where the turtles nested, where she and Frédéric had lain together in the sand watching a miracle. She considered what Rosalie said could happen if you loved someone too much. She remembered everything Jestine had lost in the name of love. Her thoughts were scattered and she could not gather them together. And then she realized she could not act on thoughts alone.

At night she lay beside Frédéric in his small bed. She went there after the children were asleep, moving so quietly through the corridors that she might well have been a ghost herself. Sometimes she could hear the rain when they fell asleep together. He would say how wrong it was, how he was betraying his uncle and, most important, defiling her. It was at these times she remembered how young he was. He had no idea she didn’t care about any of that. And anyway, such regret did not stop him. He often pushed a chair against the door so none of the children could wander in accidentally. He kept a hand over her mouth so she would not cry out, but there was a time when neither could control themselves. Emma came to the door, frightened, asking if there were ghosts in the house for she had heard their moaning. Rachel slipped on her nightgown and opened the door; she scooped her daughter up to put her back to bed. “There are no such things,” she whispered. But Emma had seen a ghost in her mother’s bed. He had taken on the form of their beloved Freddy. In the morning Emma left a circle of salt around the chair where her uncle usually sat, for Rosalie had said that spirits feared not only the color blue but the sting of salt as well.

That same night Frédéric asked to marry her. He did it in the French manner, formally. He had planned the evening, asking Rosalie to take the children out, going to the finest jewelers, where he bought a slim gold band that was exquisite, with hallmarks from France. He took pink flowers from the garden for their table, but was stung while doing so. When he came inside with the bougainvillea, Rachel saw that he’d been hurt. She paid no attention to the flowers, but instead took his fingers into her mouth. The old women in town said a bee sting could be soothed in this manner, but Frédéric was inflamed. He took her to bed right then and wouldn’t let her leave, even when Rosalie called for her that supper needed to be started. He kept one hand over her mouth so she couldn’t answer, and she bit him as she had in his dream, and he laughed to think there was so little room between the everyday world and his dreams.

At last, Rachel moved away and slipped on her dress. While her back was turned, Frédéric went onto one knee, without a stitch of clothing on, and asked her to be his wife. Rachel laughed so hard she collapsed beside him on the floor.

Frédéric shook his head, hurt. “You’re laughing at me.”

“I’m not,” she insisted. “It’s simply that we can’t.”

“Of course we can.” He stood and turned away from her as he began to dress.

Rachel went to embrace him, resting her head against his back. She felt everything inside of him, including the hurt she had just caused him. She loved him twice as much as she had only a moment ago.

“Are you certain you want to face Madame Halevy?” she asked.

Now it was his turn to laugh. “I thought you had no fear of that witch. I know that I don’t. This is our business, not hers or anyone else’s. In the end they’ll be won over.”

“You don’t know these people. They have lived a hundred lives of suffering, all for their freedom. There’s a reason for their rules and a reason they can’t abide people like me. They will turn against us.”

“No,” Frédéric insisted. “They’ll have no choice but to accept us.”

He kissed her without stopping, and she knew what Madame Halevy had said was true, and that she would bring ruin on them if it was her fate to do so.

She said yes to his proposal, but refused to wear his ring until they were wed. She walked along the beach in the evenings, wondering if she should reconsider. She was the older, more experienced person. She should have known better and called a halt to their love affair. She could have written to his family and insisted they bring him home and send someone in his place, an old uncle, a married couple, the nastiest man in the family.

She had tried her best to keep Frédéric away. After Isaac’s death she had written a letter to his nephew, suggesting he stay in France.
Thank you for your kindness, but don’t feel you must come to our Island, for I am fine on my own.
He’d written back,
Of course I will come to assist you.
She had cursed him, but in the morning after she’d read his response she’d woken to rainfall though it was the dry season. Now she reread his letter and noticed a line scrawled beneath his name she’d overlooked before.

I will think of nothing but you.

Every night she walked farther, until there came an evening when she was so deep in thought she paid no attention to her whereabouts. Before she knew it she was lost, even though she’d spent her childhood in these hills. She found herself on a path that led into the mountains. She heard running water. The waterfall. It sounded like a heartbeat. She thought about love and what a mystery it was, how when it came it seemed to be inevitable.

She had stumbled upon the herbalist’s house. She had no idea how she had discovered this place, which was so hidden even Jestine had had trouble remembering where it was. Perhaps everything that had happened was meant to be, for this was where her love had led her. The herb man came outside as if he’d been expecting her. She owed him something, it was true. “Thank you for giving me my life,” she said. She kissed him then, and although he neither thanked her nor stopped her, he accepted her gratitude.

THEY WENT TO THE
synagogue to ask to be married. They wore their best clothes when they went. Both were rattled, filled with nerves. But they needn’t have dressed in their finery for the occasion, as they were not allowed into the Reverend’s office. His secretary said he was too busy, and when they’d sat there for more than four hours, with people going in and out to meet with the Reverend, Frédéric rapped on the door. Now his secretary told Frédéric the good man had gone home to dinner. They went back the next day, and again they were denied. They did this for a week, wearing the same clothes. Each day they were told the Reverend could not see them and each day they waited on a carved wooden bench. At last the Reverend sent them a written message that his assistant brought into the corridor where they were waiting. Frédéric read it, then crumpled it, dropping it on the floor before he stalked away. Alone in the corridor, Rachel bent to retrieve the missive directed to Frédéric.

It is a sin and an abomination to lay with a member of your own family, as well as a criminal act. We suggest you return to Paris.

Frédéric was waiting for her on the street. Rachel had brought along her mother’s wedding veil. She gave it to the first woman who passed by, a young African woman who thanked her for the gift, for it was beautiful French lace.

“I never cared for it,” Rachel told Frédéric.

He laughed, which was a relief. He had seemed so hurt and confused to have been turned away and told he was a criminal.

“I never care for anyone’s opinion of me either,” Rachel said.

“I’ve heard that about you.” He grinned at her. “I’ve heard many things about you.”

“It’s all true.” Rachel might have felt herself to be a fool, wearing her best clothing and standing in the street, but she did not. They walked back the way they had come. Some who spied on them said they were hand in hand, though they were so close to one another it was difficult to tell.

IT WAS A SURPRISE
to some and not to others when, two years after her husband died, and less than a year after his nephew had arrived on the island, Rachel Pomié Petit appeared to be expecting a child. She acted as if no one noticed, but in fact she was all anyone could talk about. In every household the scandal was discussed at breakfast and then again at the dinner table. Those who so blatantly broke rules usually had the decency to disappear; they withdrew from the congregation and went to the Carolinas or South America rather than bring shame upon their people. But not Rachel Pomié Petit. If anything, she grew more defiant with each passing day. Some people said that a pelican flew above her when she brought her children to the synagogue’s school, perhaps to prevent taunts from the other children. As it was, no one said a word about her condition. Not the children or their parents or the women of Blessings and Peace and Loving Kindness. They were all waiting to see what would happen next.

That handsome man, Frédéric Pizzarro, still came to the synagogue to pray in the morning and at sundown, even though no one spoke to him and no man would sit next to him. He didn’t seem to mind. He had been something of a loner since he’d first arrived. When Rachel Pomié Petit was too huge for anyone to ignore her circumstances, she stayed at home, where it was said that Frédéric Pizzarro had moved into her room without the benefit of a marriage contract.

The family in Bordeaux, business partners worried for their financial future, heard the gossip and immediately denounced the relationship. The couple didn’t seem to notice their disapproval, or if they did, they didn’t care. Frédéric did not answer the frantic letters from his relatives, but merely continued to send a monthly business report. When the baby’s time came, on a bright February day, Rachel called for Jestine, who helped to deliver her. After only a few weeks Madame Petit could be seen carrying the baby through town as if she were a married woman, as if the father of her child was not the nephew of her husband, as if sin was the last thing on her mind.

I
. The name was traditionally Pizzarro, until Camille Pissarro changed it to the French spelling in the 1880s.

CHAPTER SIX

The Night of the Old Year

C
HARLOTTE
A
MALIE
, S
T
. T
HOMAS

1826

RACHEL POMIÉ PETIT PIZZARRO

I
f I had locked myself away to wear mourning clothes for the rest of my life the members of the congregation would have certainly approved. Many would have preferred I give my baby to a family who couldn’t have a child of their own. Every door shut. When I walked through the marketplace the other women passed by, ignoring me. I was a cautionary tale, and young girls especially fled from me. I came to understand why the pirates’ wives had lived alone in the caves, not wanting even one another’s company. It was easier not to face judgment, especially from your own kind.

We named our son Joseph Félix, a second son named after my predecessor’s child to bring good fortune. But he was a pale, quiet child who never fussed, too quiet, I believed. I wondered if he’d been cursed as I carried him, if the whispers about me had seeped inside and harmed him in some way, for he was listless and seemed to lack spirit. I kept him close, and at night I often took him into bed with us, so that our bodies might warm him and keep him safe despite the cold reception of our own people. For months after the birth, Frédéric had gone to the elders of our community, begging them to let us marry, but each time he was refused. The Reverend would not see him, and when Frédéric insisted on intruding on the council, the elders who made decisions for all, they disrespected him, suggesting that he find his own lodgings and look for a suitable wife.

Frédéric told me that Monsieur DeLeon had taken him aside. He cared for me and had known me since I was a child. “I’ve done all I can on your behalf,” he told Frédéric, “and will continue to do so, but this has always been the rule here. No marriage inside of a family.”

“I’m not her family,” Frédéric insisted.

“Do you run her father’s business? Are you her husband’s nephew?” The men exchanged a look. “On this island, that’s family,” Monsieur DeLeon informed him.

The council’s advice was that Frédéric return to France with haste, before the Danish authorities became interested in what was a personal matter between Jews. Frédéric came home from this meeting exhausted and sick at heart. He had always been the good son, the reliable brother and cousin, the young man who could be called upon and trusted. The judgments of others weighed upon him. Rosalie told me that in the market, people said I was a witch and had cast a spell upon him, and perhaps that was true. Indeed I wanted him to defy everyone, even God if necessary, not that I believed God would be against a love like ours. We had nothing to repent for and nothing to feel guilty about.