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“You know what this means,” she said.

All at once I did. I thought of the nights in bed with my husband, and of the first Madame Petit, who had died of childbed fever. I thought of my cousin, who had never even looked at a map of Paris and would soon be living there, staring out his window at the rain.

“They say if you’re sick in the morning you’ll have a daughter, and if it’s in the night, you should expect a son,” Rosalie announced. “It will be a boy for certain.”

“I don’t wish anyone to know until I’m sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, I’m not.”

I was thankful that my mother hadn’t needed Jestine to serve dinner, so she was saved the dreadful news about my cousin. I went around to the patio kitchen, searching for Adelle, who I’d assumed had cooked our meal. Often she sat beside the rose tree my father had ordered from France. My mother despised and ignored the tree, she thought it too showy, but I knew that Adelle secretly watered it, perhaps to spite my mother. When I searched for her now, I found she hadn’t appeared that evening. Another hired woman had helped with the dinner, one I didn’t know.

“Is Adelle ill?” I asked. “Will she be back tomorrow?”

The cook threw up her hands. “I only work here!”

I went then to the bedroom where the children were sleeping and lay down beside them. I found some peace when I closed my eyes and listened to them breathing, but too soon it was time to go home. Rosalie came for us, and I carried Hannah as I followed Rosalie down the corridor. The boys clung to her as they ambled after her, sleepy and thickheaded with the heat.

When I said good night to my mother, I asked where Adelle was.

“Not here.” My mother shrugged. “That’s all I know.”

THERE WAS A SERIES
of squalls after that, with the appearance of the raging wind and rain that often comes in September. It was a terrible month, which ended with a hurricane of enormous proportions. My husband spent his nights at the office, worried over our ships at sea. Perhaps it was best for us to be apart; certainly, I had not forgiven him for taking up my father’s argument against me. While he was gone, I made the best of the situation for the children. We played games, hiding under beds and in wardrobes, making birds out of paper and flying them across the rooms. We had some of the long pods from the flamboyant tree that we had set out to dry in the sun, and we used the husks the children called
shack-shacks
to make music. It was a delight to feel like a child again, but it was impossible to stay in that frame of mind for very long. The wind was screaming, and the shutters at every window needed to be nailed closed. Later I took out my notebook of stories and added a storm in which goats and sheep were lifted out of a pasture and deposited on the other side of the island, still chewing their cud. I wrote about a woman who was left behind and did her best to return to the moon, even though every storm could take her no higher than the treetops. When the center of the storm was above us, there was an odd quiet that was even more frightening than the howling of the wind. I wondered if God was above us, and if he could see our love and our fear. We all got into bed together, and Rosalie joined us. We said our prayers and she said hers as we held hands.

When the worst of the storm had passed, a stray little donkey came into the garden, drenched and bawling for its mother.

“Look who came calling!” Rosalie laughed when she looked out the back door.

The rain was still falling, and the puddles were huge, some as deep as ponds. When such things happened, fish would appear, as if brought about by magic. Samuel was terrified of the donkey at first, and hid behind my skirts. I told him it was a baby, nothing to fear.

“Let’s help him,” I said to Rosalie.

While I held Hannah and Samuel clung to my skirt, Rosalie and David caught the donkey with a rope, then brought it into the yard, where we offered it soft bread and milk from a tin pan. It was shy at first, but starvation got the best of it and it ate with such abandon we all laughed. Samuel soon lost his fear of the donkey. He asked if he might keep it as a pet. He had already named him Jean-François, and indeed the creature trotted over when called so. I shook my head and told Samuel no. This was a wild donkey, meant to be with its mother.

“Why does he have to be wild? Can’t he be like Gus?”

Gus was a goat who lived nearby and who escaped from his pasture every once in a while to terrorize the local dogs.

“No,” I told Samuel. “Some creatures are not meant to be pets.”

When the sky brightened, and the donkey was well fed, we set it free. Samuel cried for so long that David teased him and called him a baby, which made him cry even harder. That night when I was putting Samuel to bed I lied and swore that I had seen the little donkey on the road with its mother, and that the day had turned out for the best. He slept easier then, his hand clutching mine. I curled up beside him rather than go into my marriage bed. But the wind arose again, hammering at the roof, and I couldn’t sleep. I felt I had become a different person since moving into this house. Before I’d had no trouble killing chickens for Friday dinner, but now I wept over a wild donkey as I thought of him wandering alone. My dream for my life was slipping away from me, and perhaps that made me more tenderhearted toward this motherless creature.

I needn’t have worried. In the morning the donkey was in the kitchen. He had let himself in through a door that had been blown open. Maybe it was true what they said, that donkeys and mules would not cross over a shadow, and this one had turned back when he reached the end of the property. The boys begged and begged, and even Hannah wailed and cried, reaching her hands out to the beast everyone now referred to as Jean-François. I relented. When Isaac came home at dinnertime, he found that I’d made his favorite dish, wild mushrooms and rice. I poured him a glass of rum with limewater. I said there was no reason to let our disagreement fester and interfere with our daily lives. Then I told him that the children had a pet they had named Jean-François.

“Pets are a foolish expense” was his initial comment.

“Sometimes being foolish is the right thing to do. Look at us.”

“You’re never foolish. I know that much.”

“Not even when it comes to Paris?”

“The business cannot be run from Paris, Rachel, though I wish that it could be. Do you think I haven’t thought a thousand times of leaving this place behind? I have terrible memories here. But I have to think of the children, and children expect to be fed and clothed.”

“And you would be leaving Esther if you went back to Paris.”

Whereas other men went to taverns in the evenings, I knew my husband went to the cemetery. Rosalie and I could both tell because there would be red mud on his shoes and red flowers in the pockets of his jacket.

“I couldn’t leave,” he admitted.

I went to sit on his lap. He was a kind man, and although I couldn’t change his mind about Paris, when it came to the household I knew how to get what I wanted. “Be ready to be surprised.”

“You always surprise me.”

Because Isaac disliked dogs, he was somewhat relieved when I took him out to the barn.

“Voilà,” I said. “Jean-François.”

Isaac laughed, despite how tired he was. “Let me guess—he’s a French donkey.”

“Exactly. So we had no choice but to take him in.”

Isaac stroked my hair. He was grateful that I was good to his children and humored them. “The boys talked you into this.”

“Would Esther have let them keep him?”

“Esther would have been terrified of him. But she would have been glad you kept him.”

I DID NOT HEAR
my husband laugh again for some time. The storm was terrible for everyone, and nearly ruined us. Every workingman on our island found himself thwarted. Desolation was everywhere: roofs collapsed, houses were washed away, mudslides ruined roads and streets. The island was ravaged by destruction, and we suffered the fate of those who depended on the sea. Trading ships carrying merchandise to Charleston, including those belonging to our family, had sunk. It was a financial disaster, and Isaac spent weeks in the office, sleeping there and taking his meals at his desk, doing his best to salvage the business. Three months had passed since I’d been ill in the garden, but our bad fortune kept me from telling my husband of my condition. He didn’t need more worry.

At least we still had a home. Other people were not as fortunate. Roads were impassable, and part of the shoreline had disappeared. Boats could be found on hillsides, swept there by the rising tide, broken apart so that their wooden hulls whitened and became skeletons left in among the vines. There were bodies of creatures, dogs and rats and iguanas, along the streets. Parrots in the trees drowned from turning their faces toward the sky; when they fell their feathers scattered in the mud.

I worried for Adelle’s house, so close to the harbor. Neither Adelle nor Jestine now worked in my parents’ home. They avoided me as well. As soon as crews had chopped up fallen trees and hauled them away, I left the children with Rosalie and made my way to their house with a satchel of food and clothes. There was a huge flood between the town and the docks, impassable. I paid a man to take me across in his canoe. Clouds reflected in the water. Everything was calm now, and the sky was an indigo color. When people in Paris thought of paradise, surely they imagined this.

The boatman dropped me off. I waded through knee-deep water until I reached Adelle’s cottage. There was a starfish on the road. It was a good thing the house had been built on stilts, and that the stilts were pounded into rock, otherwise the house would have likely floated away to the other side of the world.

Adelle came onto the porch. She took the necessities I’d brought her, then hugged me close. “I’m grateful, but you shouldn’t have come here,” she said. The roads were dangerous, not only because of the flooding. There were looters and bands of wild dogs, all of them hungry. Adelle said that Jestine had been unwell and had taken to her bed. During the storm they had both said their last prayers as seawater rushed in through the windows. At the worst of the flooding they’d tied themselves to the cast-iron stove in the kitchen, which was the heaviest thing in the house. There was still sand on the floor, and the blue paint was pale with salt. Adelle swore that a flatfish had swum through the window, right into a cooking pot, which was God’s way of seeing that they had enough to eat through the storm. They were Christians and believed in a merciful maker who would watch over them.

I told Adelle I’d come despite the floods because I missed them both. And because I had a secret. I wanted Adelle and Jestine to be the first to know.

“It’s no secret, Rachel. I told you your fate before you got married. I saw that man and his children and all the other children that you’d have. Now you tell me my fate in return. Is your mother going to have me come back to her house?”

I suppose my mother had bad-mouthed Adelle and she could not get other work. I didn’t mention that a hired woman was now serving dinner there. I was still confused over the matter. I asked Adelle what had happened between her and Madame Pomié, and she simply said, “We had words.”

“What kind of words?”

“What kind do you think? Would your mother say anything nice to me? She didn’t want me or Jestine in the house.”

Just that morning my mother had ordered one of the hired men who worked in the yard to cut down the rose tree Adelle favored, but fortunately Mr. Enrique had taken it to his house before any damage was done.

“I’ll speak to my mother,” I promised. “You’ll see. You’ll be back and nothing will change.”

But Adelle didn’t agree. “Everything changes. Look at you. Look at Jestine.”

I went into the bedroom and saw Jestine in her bed. She wore a white nightdress, and her arms were bare. It was afternoon and hot and murky, the way it is after a storm, with air that smelled like the tide. I lay down beside her, and she opened her eyes. As girls we had done everything together. At least that hadn’t changed. What had happened to me had happened to her as well. I could tell from the sleepy look in her eyes, the rise in her belly. I was happy about it. Our children would be friends, although they couldn’t be the cousins that they truly were. This child to come was the reason Aaron was being sent to Paris.

“We should have run away when we had the chance,” Jestine said. “If you hadn’t gotten married we could have gone and been there waiting for Aaron, but you had to go and fall in love with those children. I could tell after your first visit to his house that we would never get out of here.”

I felt stung by her remarks. I promised that nothing would be different. I swore it on my blood. I bit my own arm and let it bleed onto the sheet. We watched as the blood formed the shape of a bird. We would still go to France, I insisted. We would leave after the children were born, despite the fact that I was a married woman. I’d lately been reading about the history of Paris, and now I told these stories to Jestine, how the streets were built over tunnels that were a thousand years old, how the Île de la Cité had been shored up by ancient ramparts to ensure that the island would never float away, no matter what floods might come. I told her Perrault’s story of a girl who was in love with a beast and knew he had a true heart.

“Not that one,” Jestine said.

I also recited from an old French recipe book on Esther Petit’s bookshelf that I read as if it were a storybook. I’d memorized the instructions for making chestnut pastries. I recited the recipe to Jestine now, even though neither one of us had ever seen chestnuts or tasted them.

That night when I told my husband we were to have a child, he was so grateful he gave thanks to God, but in my prayers I gave thanks that there would always be ships in the harbor, there to carry us away. That night I made the pastry in the first Madame Petit’s cookbook, even though I had neither chestnuts nor almond paste. I used what I had in the kitchen, molasses and papaya, and though it was not what the recipe called for, the results were delicious all the same.