But what if his mother in Pointe à la Hache had not eaten too heavily one evening when she was pregnant, had not dreamed her monkey dream? What if Madame Mercier had been a different kind of woman, one who had taken to heart, perhaps, the great victory off Malta in 1798, when Horatio Nelson’s flagship had sunk with all hands? She would have been just a girl, impressionable and easily influenced, perhaps, by the celebrations in the streets. Later on, she might have been overjoyed to take into her home her brother’s children after the catastrophe. She might have loaded them with kindness. Stuck in a loveless marriage, she might have felt herself responding to the handsome young Lucien despite the difference in their ages. Generous, open hearted, and näve, perhaps she could not guard her nephew from the maniacal and sadistic Dr. Mercier, who would have driven the boy not just from the city but from the entire territory of New France—up the Mississippi and then east up the Ohio to the Kentucky wilderness. Several years later he might have sent his sister the following letter:
“Ma Chere Soeur, my heart bleeds when I think of you still in the grip of that madman—I do not speak of my aunt. But I must tell you what has happened in case the worst comes to the worst. I lie here wounded, close to death, shot down by Douglas Sharpe and my erstwhile companions …”
(In New Orleans, Amelie de Fontenelle might have wondered at the careful, feminine handwriting on the envelope. “Ah, is it true?” she might have thought.)
“Dear heart, it is true. And so I must leave a record of what has happened, for you to join together with your memory of our life together in Pointe à la Hache—ah, such times seem a paradise to me. In this way I might feel that my life has a pattern, however fitful and provisionary, however much it loops upon itself, as if I were a plaything for an arbitrary and erratic God. I also must inform you of what I most believe: that a war is coming, despite the wisdom of the emperor and his well-known sympathy for the rights of his native subjects, the appeal they have made to his own wild nature. The land is too empty on our side of the river. To the east the land fills up like water in a cup, and the time will come when it will burst its bounds.
“I have seen this at first hand, from the day I left the blessed shore of New France to assume my exile among these Americans. I suppose you must imagine me miserable, bedraggled, without funds, alone in an English-speaking land. Never mind how, but I found myself in a country called the Barrens, in the parish of Edmonson, along the banks of the Green River. This was a terrible desolation, as vast and lonely as the desolation in my heart, a sere expanse of hills and limestone knobs, with dark forests of blackjack trees in the crevices between them. Everywhere were fissures in the earth such as could swallow up a man on horseback—remnants of the earthquake that formed that country in the early days and whose instability can still be felt.
“In this dereliction, though, I found a refuge on a little farm, a few dozen acres and a log cabin chinked with mud, a few rooms to let to travelers. And you will understand what I mean when I suggest that the proprietress of this establishment reminded me of our dear aunt in her kindness toward an orphan far from home. Her name was Madame Mylecraine, but I did not think there was a monsieur, despite the presence of a dark-eyed and dark-skinned boy named Logan on the premises. You see I must describe these things as I first perceived them, not as I learned subsequently. She also had come a long way, because her father was a native of the Island of Man, and she spoke in the Manx language with a hired hand about the place. Oh, there is much for me to tell you. One thing at a time. I pray for strength to reach the end.
“She is small, formed like a woman and a child at the same time, although her hair already holds a silver frost—in this she also reminds me of our dear aunt. She has green eyes, I suppose. On my third night in that house, as I lay sobbing on my bed, she came into my room—these are spaces scarcely large enough to let the door open inward. She stood at the threshold carrying a stick, I thought—the light was behind her and I could not make it out. But I imagined the cudgel in my uncle’s hand, as he stood on the landing of the stairs (Oh, I pray that he is dead, and he torments you no longer!), until she moved. Then the light from the hurricane lantern touched her hair and the stick at the same time, revealing it to be a silver flute. She did not blow into it or touch its keys, but she showed it to me only, as if the fact of its existence could be a source of hope. It was outdoors that she played it, as well as a small flageolet or piccolo, a wild, ferocious sound! It was only later that I heard it, after I had revealed to her some news that agitated her in a way I did not understand. In my clumsy English I explained that I had taken employment. I thought she would be pleased! But I was to be a member of the party that would search out and apprehend a highway-man or bandit who preyed on travelers along the road; he always took refuge in one of the huge caves in that area, the largest one, in fact, which stretched many leagues under the earth from the great pit that was its entrance. A Captain Douglas Sharpe had undertaken to search him out.
“This was in the month of October. When I explained it to Madame Mylecraine, in the great room by the fire, I thought she would approve of me, if only because I would be able to pay my way—there were rumors, as always in such places, of buried treasure in the cave. Instead she was angry and distraught and asked me what I knew of this fellow, Leon Benbourgisse—an uncouth name! I answered what I had been told, that he was a mongrel or half-breed of prodigious strength who had robbed a number of rich gentlemen on horseback and murdered one of them, so that travelers now avoided the entire locality. I thought she would be grateful to dispose of such a one! Instead she said nothing and turned away from me. This was in the evening, when the lamps were lit. She put her kerchief over her head and went out.
“I waited for her to return. When she did not, I went in search of her. In time I followed not her foot-steps or the shadow of her passing but a sound at the limit of my hearing, a melody from the Celtic islands, or Brittany, or Acadia, as you and I have heard together from the players in the Place D’Armes. I found her in a seam of sunken rocks below a limestone cliff, a place of evil reputation in that country, if one can judge from the name of Devil’s Twist. It was a place where she went to be alone, and I followed the note of her piccolo, which in that amphitheater swelled among the rocks, even though she played quite softly, as I perceived. She had pulled away her kerchief, undone her long hair. When I kicked some stones to alert her to my presence, she turned suddenly, as if from a guilty secret. The music broke as if snapped off. When she saw who it was, she came to me. She took my hand and begged me to consider the extremities of fate that might drive a good man underground, the injustice that might force him to lash out against his tormenters. ‘I will not go,’ I said. ‘Not if you forbid it.’ But instead she asked me to continue the next morning to the muster at the gulf of Mammoth Cave so that I could be her eyes in that dark place. So small she was! Almost like a child. I reached to wipe away her tears, to comfort her like a child and a woman—you and I both know that is possible!
“The next morning I rendered myself at the top of the pit, at a distance from the farmhouse of two leagues or else some miles—I will give these measurements in the English fashion, as they were explained to me. We crossed over the stile of fence rails that blocked our way and continued down the ravine at a distance of a hundred feet below the surface of the plain. On each side of the dry streambed we found oak trees and chestnuts, as well as elms and maples and a proliferation of vines and brambles, in all a far greater variety than anything to be found up on the flat. When I remarked on this, my companions first explained to me one of the enduring mysteries of this place, which as we sank down appeared more and more dismal and terrible to me, darker and colder, though it was a bright, hot morning when I left Madame Mylecraine’s farm. There is a wind that issues back and forth out of the cave, as if from a bellows or the lips of a stone giant, a breath that is most healthful and bountiful. Consumptive patients, I was told, after all hope was abandoned, could take up residence in the mouth of the Vestibule and be cured in a matter of days. This was first reported in the days of the last war, because the floors of the first galleries are rich in nitre, which is used in the manufacture of gunpowder. Even now we could see the remnants of the abandoned works, while the guides told us stories of their uncles or fathers who had emerged from the pit with their backs straight and their eyes keen, their ponies glossy and well-tempered. I thought at first they were deceiving me.