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In the tax records Mr. Enrique was said to belong to Moses Pomié, but he’d been granted his freedom on the dock in Saint-Domingue, where they traded a life for a life. My father told us that our people had been slaves in the desert and because God had seen fit to set us free, none among us should ever own another man. It had been written that every man belonged to God and no one else. But did women belong to God or to the men of their family? They could not own property or businesses; only their husbands could have that honor. They must lower their eyes, behave, follow their appointed destinies. My father now told me I must trust in him and do as I was told.

“Marriage is not unlike business, and business is something you’re good at, my dear.”

He had finally arranged a marriage, as was the custom among our people. But I had never believed he would find a match for me. As soon as I heard that he had, a chill ran through me, even though he assured me he had chosen a good man, one who would treat me kindly. I must have paled, but before I could begin to mount my argument against the marriage, my father shook his head and took my hand in his.

“Understand,” he said, gently, sadly. “It has already been agreed upon.”

I knew once he gave his promise there was no breaking his word. I could feel my pulse at the base of my throat. I heard the hummingbird outside the window, the whir and beat of its wings. The man my father had chosen was wise in the ways of business but had recently had some bad turns of fortune with his ships. He had several decent ships left, and so he had come to my father, who had goods to sell but no ships on which he could transport rum and molasses to Charleston and New York. Together, they would join forces, and in this way they would both prosper. It was a partnership that would include the entire family, on this island and in Europe, as both businesses were co-owned by European relatives who had lent us money. A marriage would be a bridge between the two families, our wedding vows more binding than a legal contract.

“It’s
a combining of strengths,” my father told me.

I said nothing, but I knew it was more. It was a combining of destinies.

Our congregation was so small there were only a few young men left unmarried. I assumed I would know the groom-to-be. But he was not one of the boys I had grown up with. When my father told me the name of my betrothed, I felt the way prisoners must when the cage that holds them is slammed shut and the key in the lock is turned. My husband-to-be was Isaac Petit, a man nearly thirty years my senior, the father of three children, the last a girl not yet a year old. It was the birth of this baby that had caused his wife to pass from our world. We had all gone to her funeral. I could not see Monsieur Petit from where I sat, but I had heard his children crying.

The losses to the Petit family seemed beyond what humankind could bear. Several children had died: a daughter, one son and then another, two twin girls who passed from this world before they could be named, and finally a beloved son named Joseph. Only two sons had survived, David and Samuel, and then, twelve days after the last baby girl was born, Madame Esther Petit, who had been suffering from childbed fever, passed away. I had seen her many times in the market square, a slim, pretty woman who had prized the red flower of the flamboyant tree. For days after her passing people left vases of them outside her husband’s house.

They were all faded now, swept away.

There was a lump in my throat when I heard my fate. I thought of the map of Paris that I had memorized and my childish book of stories hidden beneath my mattress. I imagined a man I didn’t even know coming into my bed. I would rather be at the bottom of the sea, but I knew I must go forward. Perhaps someone else would have begged to be released from her father’s promise. But I had seen the ledgers, and I knew that there would be no house, no garden, no comfortable life as we knew it if the business stayed the same. This was why Adelle had seen an unexpected fate for me. I would be a mother before I ever was with a man or had given birth. My future was already waiting for me: the house of the red flowers, the motherless children who wept, the sorrowful man who had paid so little attention to his business after his wife died that he’d nearly been ruined.

On the night when moths twice as large as any in Paris struck against the wooden shutters, I knew this was not a dream that would be broken by morning light. I wanted nothing more than to leave St. Thomas and be sent off to Europe, even if it meant I must care for some aging relative or clean other people’s homes. All the same, my father looked like an old man, beaten by fate. He was concerned for the future, but it was my future as well.

“First I will have a discussion with Monsieur Petit,” I told my father.

He sighed. He knew I was stubborn and had my reasons. “Must you?”

“Must you breathe to live?” Wishing to save the business didn’t make me a fool. “I won’t deny you what you ask, but in return, don’t deny me. Send him to me.”

MONSIEUR PETIT CAME A
few evenings later, after his children were asleep under the watchful eye of a maid. It was late enough for the mosquitoes that swarm at dusk to have disappeared into the damp night. The bats had settled in the trees, their shadows like leaves. I could hear them breathing as they hung upside-down in the branches. I’d asked for the meeting to be informal, outside. All the same, my father introduced us formally, though surely we’d met before, although on what occasion neither of us could remember, for Monsieur Petit had been a grown man and I nothing more than a girl.

“Enchanté,” Monsieur Petit said to me.

I’d been told that he’d come directly to St. Thomas from Paris, which interested me. I wished I might question him about his past there, but my father threw me a look, so I merely greeted our guest politely. The men had glasses of sherry. I had a tea of vervain, though I would have preferred rum. My mother insisted I wear one of her dresses so that I would look sophisticated, a bit older than my age. It was a gray silk frock from France, with an underskirt of crinoline that pricked at my legs, as if ants were climbing past my ankles. My hair was pulled back with combs fashioned of tortoiseshell and abalone. I knew I wasn’t beautiful, but I was young, and perhaps that was enough.

My father spoke about the weather, always a topic on an island prey to storms, and then they discussed business matters, nothing too urgent. What was central to the arrangement had already been addressed before the proposal of marriage was made, in private. I asked Adelle to find out as much as she could about Monsieur Petit from the maid who cared for his children. Because of this I knew he was forty-four years of age.

Older than my father.

More than double my own age.

Earlier in the day, Jestine had come into my room. She knew what was to be, and didn’t approve of arranged marriages. She gazed at the silk dress my mother had given me, then rubbed the heavy gray fabric between her fingers.

“You shouldn’t wear this,” she advised. The weather was sweltering, and drops of water fell into the garden even though there was no rain. “This is why French women faint.”

“He’s proposing tonight.” I was gazing at myself in the mirror, and I didn’t like what I saw. I thought I resembled my mother.

“You don’t even know him. How can you marry him?” Jestine asked.

“Marriage is no different from business,” I told her. I was parroting my father, but I also believed I had a duty to him.

“It should be a business of the heart and soul.” Jestine lowered her voice. “We can run away and be gone before anyone notices we are missing. Let them find him another wife. We’ll go to Paris.”

We had always planned to journey there together, but now I shook my head. I couldn’t allow my family to be financially ruined. It was the night when the turtles came to shore, but Jestine went alone to the beach while I sat in the courtyard with the man I was to marry.

“SHALL WE SPEAK TO
one another plainly?” I asked Monsieur Petit when there was a lull in his conversation with my father. Adelle had always told me that a woman who acts as if she knows what she’s doing gets what she wants. “And perhaps alone?”

Monsieur Petit glanced up, startled by my request. He was tall, with distinctive features. His hair was marked with gray. I’m sure a woman of his age would have found him attractive. I smiled at him with whatever small charm I might have. “Surely my father can trust you to be alone with me.”

Monsieur Petit nodded. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he said to my father. He still had not addressed me directly.

“You’re the one who might mind. She doesn’t hold back her remarks.” My father glanced at me with an implicit warning.

Once Monsieur Petit and I were left alone in the garden, the seriousness of the situation settled between us, a heavy weight. We were to marry, yet knew nothing of one another. We both gazed into the hedge of jasmine, embarrassed and ill at ease. The heat enveloped us. Jestine had been right. The gray silk dress was much too heavy for the season. I wished I could tear it off and toss it into the shrubbery, then sit across from my fiancé in my white cotton chemise and petticoat so I might be more at ease. My mother had forced me to wear black stockings and calfskin boots with pearl buttons when I would have much preferred to be barefoot. I laughed to think of what Monsieur Petit’s reaction might be were he faced by an unruly girl who’d slipped out of her dress. When I laughed at my imagined state, he glanced at me, confused, then studied the dark garden, as if there was something to see in the hedges.

The scent of jasmine and frangipani was dizzying, but I was used to it and kept my head. I grew braver and turned my attention to Monsieur Petit, searching his face for clues to his disposition, pleased when he looked up, then quickly looked away. My direct gaze had made him nervous. I took that to mean he would not bully me or tell me what to think. He turned to his glass of sherry as if it was the most compelling thing on earth. That was when I thought I might have the upper hand in the situation.

Monsieur Petit politely asked about my interests. Another man wouldn’t have cared.

“I believe you’re my interest now,” I told him.

“Do you wish to know me more thoroughly before you make your decision?” he asked. “I wouldn’t wish for you to be unhappy with the arrangement.”

It was then I realized this was as much a business affair for Monsieur Petit as it was for me. In that instant I understood he still loved his wife.

“My father speaks well of you. I don’t need to know more. But if I’m to be a mother, I wish to meet the children.”

“The children are very well behaved,” Monsieur Petit assured me.

I was cordial, but I made my point. “That’s not the issue. If we are to be married, you need to trust my opinion, and that is, I must meet the children.”

His expression was puzzled, but he nodded. He had dark eyes and tanned skin. He’d spent a good deal of time on ships before he married and had children. “Of course.”

“There,” I said. I could tell what happened between us would be up to me. “We’ve had our first fight, and are none the worse for it.”

He seemed amused, and perhaps would have enjoyed further conversation, but I stood and shook his hand and told him good night. I did not wish for him to consider our meeting anything more than it was. He had a nice handshake. He did not try to overpower me, as some men might have, nor did he shrink from me. Most important, he didn’t press me to account for my reasoning.

In truth, I wasn’t worried that something was wrong with the children. Rather I feared that I might not be able to experience the emotion a mother should possess, due to my own fraught relationship with my mother. I knew from fairy tales about the evil deeds stepmothers might do, how black their hearts might turn. I had no idea what reaction I might have to another woman’s children, especially the daughter who had caused her death. When the Petits’ maid spoke with Adelle, she had divulged that even on her mistress’s deathbed the ailing woman could think only of her newborn daughter. Madame was desperate to live long enough for the naming ceremony, eight days after the birth. If a baby died without a name, the spirit of Lilith, she who preceded Eve, could come for that child’s spirit and claim it as her own. Madame Petit chose the name Hannah, which meant grace.

On the day after the naming, Madame was too weak to take a sip of water. She lasted four more days, but on the twelfth day she began to succumb to childbed illness. “If you don’t watch over her, I’ll haunt you,” she had whispered to her maid, frightening the woman so deeply she rarely let go of the child even now, all these months later. She held the baby close all night, watching over her until morning, afraid not of Lilith but of Madame Petit’s ghost.

The one thing that could make me walk away from this marriage bargain was if I felt nothing upon seeing the boys and the baby girl. To take care of a ghost’s children, one could not feign love.

ON THE DAY I
went to the Petit house, I wore what I would have to wander through the hills with Jestine. We favored plain cotton skirts that made it easy to run, in case we came upon some of the wild donkeys with nasty dispositions that might give chase, braying as they nipped at our legs. Jestine came in while I was dressing.

“If you join that family you will know only tragedy,” she told me.

She had seen the boys in the market, and they looked ragged, like little criminals, even though their housemaid treated them with special kindness.

“All boys look like criminals until you wash their faces,” I said. “No one could have looked more like a little thief than Aaron, and you certainly opened your heart to him.”

My cousin could be selfish and stubborn, but with Jestine he was tender, a different person completely. I believe he had fallen in love with her on those nights when we were the only people in the world. She returned his love, even though she knew no one of our faith could marry a woman of African heritage. Jestine, although free, would never be recognized as one of our people. Still, Aaron was sullen if she went out with anyone else, whether it be with her mother or her cousins or, lately, even me. When men looked at her, as they always did, he was outraged. He’d gained a reputation as a hothead, someone to avoid. But while Jestine had sleepless nights, Aaron slept quite well. I knew this because when I knocked on his door to tell him his breakfast was waiting, he didn’t even bother to reply. I went in anyway and sat on the edge of the bed.