‘We are lucky,’ whispered her mother, ‘that we survived it.’
But her mother did not survive France. Victoire never learned how her mother, a free-born woman, was sent from Suffolk to work in the household of a retired Parisian academic, Professor Emile Desjardins. She does not know what promises her mother’s friends made her, whether or not money changed hands. She knows only that in Paris, at the Desjardins estate, they were not allowed to leave – for here, forms of slavery still existed, as they did all over the world; a twilight condition, the rules unwritten but implied. And when her mother fell ill, the Desjardinses did not send for a doctor. They merely closed the door to her sickroom and waited outside until a maid went in, felt for her breath and pulse, and announced she had expired.
Then they locked Victoire in a cupboard and did not let her out, for fear the illness would catch. But the contagion took the rest of the household regardless, and once again the doctors were powerless to do anything but watch it run its course.
Victoire survived. Professor Desjardins’s wife survived. His daughters survived. The professor himself died, and with him, Victoire’s only connection to the people who purported to love her mother, and had yet somehow sold her away.
The house fell into disrepair. Madame Desjardins, a tight-faced blonde woman, kept bad accounts and spent prodigiously. Money was tight. They fired the maid – why keep one, they argued, when they had Victoire? Overnight Victoire became responsible for dozens of tasks: keeping the fire, polishing the silver, dusting the rooms, serving the tea. But these were not tasks she’d been trained to fulfil. She’d been raised to read and compose and interpret, not manage a household, and for this they scolded and beat her.
She found no comfort from Madame Desjardins’s two little daughters, who took great delight in announcing to houseguests that Victoire was an orphan they’d rescued from Africa. ‘From Zanzibar,’ they would sing in unison. ‘Zaaanzibar!’
But it was not so bad.
It was not so bad, they told her, compared with her native Haiti, which was overrun with crime, which was being driven to poverty and anarchy by an incompetent and illegitimate regime. You are lucky, they said, to be here with us, where things are safe, and civilized.
This she believed. She had no way of knowing anything else.
She might have run away, but Professor and Madame Desjardins had kept her so sheltered, so isolated from the world outside that she had no idea she had the legal right to be free. Victoire had grown up in the great contradiction of France, whose citizens in 1789 had issued a declaration of the rights of man but had not abolished slavery, and had preserved the right to property including chattel.
Liberation was a string of coincidences, of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and luck. Victoire went through Professor Desjardins’s letters, looking for a deed, some proof that he did own her and her mother. She never found it. But she did learn about a place named the Royal Institute of Translation, a place he’d trained at in his youth, a place he’d written to about her, in fact. He’d told them about the brilliant little girl in his household, about her prodigious memory and talent for Greek and Latin. He’d intended to show her around Europe on tour. Perhaps they might be interested in an interview?
And so she created the conditions of her own freedom. When Professor Desjardins’s friends at Oxford finally wrote back, expressing that they would be very happy to have the talented Miss Desgraves at the Institute, and that they would pay the way, it felt like such an escape.
But the true liberation of Victoire Desgraves did not happen until she met Anthony Ribben. It was not until her induction to the Hermes Society that she learned to call herself Haitian at all. She learned to take pride in her Kreyòl, patchy, half-remembered, barely distinguishable from her French. (Madame Desjardins used to slap her whenever she spoke in Kreyòl. ‘Shut up,’ she would say, ‘I told you, you must speak French, the Frenchman’s French.’) She also learned that to much of the rest of the world, the Haitian Revolution was not a failed experiment but a beacon of hope.
She learned revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential. The colonizers have no idea what is coming, and that makes them panic. It terrifies them.
Good. It should.
She’s not sure where she’s headed now. She has some envelopes in her coat pocket: parting words of advice from Anthony and the code names of several contacts. Friends in Mauritius, in the Seychelles, and in Paris. Perhaps one day she’ll head back to France, but she’s not quite ready yet. She knows there’s a base in Ireland, though at the moment she’d quite like just to be off the continent. Perhaps one day she’ll go home and see, with her own eyes, the historical impossibility of free Haiti. Right now she’s boarding a ship to America, where people like her are still not free, because it was the first vessel that she could book passage on, and because she needed to get out of England as quickly as she could.
She has the letter from Griffin that Robin never opened. Meanwhile she’s read it so many times she’s memorized it. She knows three names – Martlet, Oriel, and Rook. She can see in her mind’s eye the final sentence, scrawled before the signatures like an afterthought: We’re not the only ones.
She doesn’t know who these three are. She doesn’t know what this sentence means. She’ll find out, one day, and the truth will dazzle and horrify her. But for now they are only lovely syllables that signify all sorts of possibilities, and possibilities – hope – are the only things she can cling to now.
She has silver lining her pockets, silver in the inseams of her dress, so much silver on her person that she feels stiff and heavy when she moves. Her eyes are swollen from tears, her throat sore with stifled sobs. She has the faces of her dead friends engraved in her memory. She keeps imagining their last moments: their terror, their pain as the walls came crumbling down around them.
She does not, will not let herself think of her friends as they were, alive and happy. Not Ramy, torn down in his prime; not Robin, who brought down a tower upon himself because he couldn’t think of a way to keep on living. Not even Letty, who remains alive; who, if she knows Victoire lives too, will hunt her to the ends of the earth.
Letty, she knows, cannot allow her to roam free. Even the idea of Victoire is a threat. It threatens the core of her very being. It is proof that she is, and always was, wrong.
She won’t let herself grieve that friendship, as true and terrible and abusive as it was. There will come a time for grief. There will come many nights on the voyage when the sadness is so great it threatens to tear her apart; when she regrets her decision to live; when she curses Robin for placing this burden on her, because he was right: he was not being brave, he was not choosing sacrifice. Death is seductive. Victoire resists.
She cannot weep now. She must keep moving. She must run, as fast as she can, without knowing what is on the other side.
She has no illusions about what she will encounter. She knows she will face immeasurable cruelty. She knows her greatest obstacle will be cold indifference, born of a bone-deep investment in an economic system that privileges some and crushes others.
But she might find allies. She might find a way forward.
Anthony called victory an inevitability. Anthony believed the material contradictions of England would tear it apart, that their movement would succeed because the revels of the Empire were simply unsustainable. This, he argued, was why they had a chance.