Eden Burning

BOOKS BY BELVA PLAIN
LOOKING BACK
AFTER THE FIRE
FORTUNE’S HAND
LEGACY OF SILENCE
HOMECOMING
SECRECY
PROMISES
THE CAROUSEL
DAYBREAK
WHISPERS
TREASURES
HARVEST
BLESSINGS
TAPESTRY
THE GOLDEN CUP
CRESCENT CITY
EDEN BURNING
RANDOM WINDS
EVERGREEN

There is, of course, no island of St. Felice in the Caribbean area. Yet, as a composite of all the lands in and around that lovely troubled sea, one might say that St. Felice does indeed exist. So, then, and notwithstanding that its characters are entirely fictional, the tale told here is a refraction, a reflection, of the truth.

On a winter afternoon in the year 1673, a fifteen-year-old indentured servant named Eleuthère François, of the family later to be known as Francis, saw the island of St. Felice rise up between clouds and sea. He was a waif from a peasant’s cold home in Brittany, and despite all the sailors’ yarns he had been hearing, had never imagined anything like this entrancing blue of water and sky, this warmth, this soft, unceasing wind. White sand lay spread like a silk robe, he thought, astonished at himself for having the thought; he was not in the habit of making comparisons, had indeed found little need in his life to do so. And stammered to himself as the island grew larger, It is a flower lying on a pond. Or the jewel in the bishop’s ring that Sunday? The dark green shining, the deep, dark shining …

He knew nothing about the island where he was to remain and found a great family; knew nothing most certainly, of that primordial heaving of the earth’s hot crust which had produced an arc of such islands between two continents. He had, very likely, no conception at all of a volcano, or of coral, or of the red-brown man who had preceded him there, the red-brown man with high cheekbones and black hair straight as a horse’s mane who had come across the land bridge from Asia some thousands of years before to wander eastward and southward, to scatter from what we now call Hudson Bay to what we now call Tierra del Fuego.

Eleuthère François thought of himself as a first-comer, although it had been a century since the first priests, armored soldiers, and buccaneers had arrived from Europe on their sailing ships. Under the tranquil leafage of these forests men
had already been crucified and roasted alive for gold. In the ramshackle taverns of Covetown sailors and their whores drank out of emerald-studded stolen cups, gambled and stabbed each other for the possession of gold. He could not have known as he waited at the rail, while the ship moved in toward the wharf, that even now another kind of wealth was beginning to outmatch the metal: human wealth this time, black, out of Africa. He could certainly not have imagined how this wealth, so brutally seized, would in time produce such refinements as a stately portrait under the ceiling fan in a governor’s mansion, or the tinkle of porcelain teacups on an English lawn, or a girl of his own blood dancing in white silk over a polished floor.

The anchor dropped. Men shouted. Gulls cried and swung about the rigging. Ignorant, hopeful, daring, and afraid, Eleuthère François stepped ashore.

Teresa Francis, called Tee, was six years old when first she learned that St. Felice was not the world—and fifteen when she fled from it in fear and shame, for reasons that the most flamboyant imagination could not have foretold.

“The world is enormous, child,” Père said. “It’s a great ball spinning around the sun, and St. Felice is only a fleck of dust on the ball.”

Père was her grandfather and her friend, more so than ever in that winter of 1928 when her father, he who was Père’s son, had died. She understood Père’s sadness, feeling it as a graver pain than Mama’s was, in spite of the black dress and the tears.

“Look carefully, there—those two dark curves like clouds, you see? Those are St. Lucia’s peaks. That way, there’s St. Vincent. And Dominica, and Grenada—”

The child had a sudden image of these islands, drawn out of who knew what remembered words, an image of green turtles, mottled and domed, like turtles dozing by the little river where black women were even now beating clothes clean on the rocks.

“And down there’s Covetown, follow my finger—you can see the careenage, and I think I can just make out a liner coming into the roadstead.”

A liner. A great ship with smoke twirling from the funnels and a lovely name like
Marina
or
Southern Star.
When the ships came they brought good things: bisque dolls with real hair, Mama’s beautiful hats and her kid gloves (“Unbearable in this climate,” Mama said, “but a lady can’t go very far without them, can she?”), and the glittery things in the Da
Cunha shop on Wharf Street, and Père’s books and Papa’s suits from England—only there would be no more of those; his suits had been given to the servants.

She stood there thinking about all that, stood in a silence of wondering and trance, in a remote and midday silence, until a woman far below at the river broke it with a whooping laugh and Père spoke again.

“‘Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made.’ Our first ancestor here became a pirate. He came as an indentured servant and ran away from a cruel master to join the buccaneers. Have I ever told you that, Tee?”

“Yes, but Mama said it wasn’t true.”

“Your mama doesn’t want to believe it. His name was Eleuthère François. When the English took the island the name was changed to Francis…. It was my great-grandfather who called this house Eleuthera, after a city in ancient Greece. He was an educated man, the first in our family to study at Cambridge…. I love this place. Your father loved it. It’s in our blood. Two hundred years of it and more.”

Père was tall. A child had to crane her head to see his prominent, thin nose. He carried a gold-knobbed cane, not to lean on, but to flourish. His name was Virgil Francis. He was master of the rising hills that mounted in tiers of jungle and cane toward the summit of Morne Bleue; master of all the looping fields that swept to the shore. Lands and houses miles away across the island were his also: Drummond Hall, Georgia’s Fancy, Hope Great House, and Florissant.

For all this ownership, Tee knew, he was respected. In later life she was to wonder how she, a child kept in an unworldly ignorance so profound that it nearly destroyed her, could have known that ownership commands the most respect of all.

“But why ever he chooses to stay in this shabby, far-off hill place,” Mama complained, “I will never understand.” Her earrings sparked. Now that she was in mourning she wore jet instead of pearls or gold, but still they sparked.
“Drummond Hall would be so much nicer, even though it’s run-down, too. A pity, he’s no manager.”

Tee defended him. “He speaks Latin and Greek.”

“Much good that does when it comes to running a sugar estate!”

But Mama would never have dared say that to Père. In all the pictures taken during those slow, long days it is he who sits in the fan chair on the veranda, Mama and the others who stand around him. Looking backward with these photographs (mounted in a black imitation-leather album with frayed corners), Tee, in another country where snow falls through gray afternoons, strains to recall the faces and the place which after so many years have grown unreal, yet which at moments can still be as painful and sensitive as fingertips.

Here she is herself in a dark skirt and a sailor blouse, the uniform of the convent school in Covetown.

“We are not Catholic, of course,” Mama said. “But the nuns have the best school here, and as long as you go to the Anglican church on Sundays, it doesn’t matter.”

The twelve-year-old face is earnest, timid, and plain. She has inherited Père’s proud peaked nose. Only her lavish hair is beautiful, lying dark on her shoulders. Later she will be told that this hair is aphrodisiac; certainly she would not have understood that then.

Here are the wedding pictures, the day Mama married again. Mama wore an enormous pink hat. There had been roast suckling pig and hearts of palm. A whole palm tree had been cut down to make the salads.

“A sin,” said Père, who would lay his hand on a tree as though it could speak to him.

Mama’s new husband was Mr. Tarbox—Uncle Herbert, Tee was to call him. He was a neat man who still spoke of England as home, although he had been living on St. Felice for twenty years. The servants said he was wealthy; he had been a commission merchant in Covetown, and now was to be a planter, which was a much more distinguished thing to
be. He had money to invest in the Francis estates and perhaps he would make them pay more richly; he was known to be smart. They hoped he would get along with old Mr. Francis. Miss Julia was, after all, not a daughter, only a daughter-in-law. Still, there was the girl Tee to hold them all together. So they spoke.

Mr. and Mrs. Tarbox were to live at Drummond Hall. In loving memory of his son and to provide a home for Tee, Virgil had given a grand house to his daughter-in-law. But it was too echoing, too lofty for Tee.

“I don’t want to leave Eleuthera,” she said stubbornly. “I won’t ever see you, Père.”

“Of course you will! But you belong with your mother. And don’t forget, Agnes will be going with you.”

Agnes Courzon had come years before from Martinique, to work for the family. She had coffee-colored skin; her hair was fastened sleek-flat; she had gold hoops in her ears and on Sundays wore a flowered turban and a necklace of large gold beads. Tee supposed she was handsome.

She liked fine things. “When I worked in Martinique at the Mauriers’—oh,
là!
What a gorgeous house! Such damask and silver you never saw! But for the eruption I would never have gone away. Destroyed, that wicked Mount Pelée destroyed it all. It hurts my heart to think of it. But wait,” she said, “wait and see what your mama and Mr. Tarbox will do with Drummond Hall. It won’t be like this old place, tumbling down—”