Wishing to repay her compliments in some way, Georgina remarked: "I should be interested to hear where you learned French, Madame, as you speak it when you wish with hardly a trace of the Creole accent, and most fluently."
Lucette's white teeth flashed between her full red lips. "Madame la Comtesse is most gracious; but French comes naturally to me, for I am a member of a noble French family. I am a Tascher de la Pagerie."
Georgina, taking this to be a bare-faced lie, quickly lowered her eyes to conceal her disbelief at such a pretension; but Roger thought it quite probable that Lucette was speaking the truth.
For well over two hundred years colonies administered by French aristocrats had been established in Saint-Domingue—the western third of the otherwise Spanish-owned island off which they were cruising—Martinique, Guadeloupe and several other islands. By the reign of Louis XV many of them owned vast estates, and on visits to Versailles had outshone their relatives who lived in France, owing to the immense wealth drawn from their plantations. Unlike the British they paid small regard to the colour bar, with the result that a high percentage of this Creole aristocracy now had a good dash of black blood. The Comte de Caylus, whom Roger had fought and killed seven years before, had been a product of just such a family history, for he had owned estates in Martinique as well as Brittany and had himself been a mulatto. Yet, while there seemed to Roger no particular reason to doubt Lucette's claim, it did strike him as strange that the daughter of a French nobleman should, even if captured or kidnapped in the first instance, have willingly adopted the sort of life she was leading. So he asked her:
"How comes it, then, that we find you in your present situation?"
She replied without hesitation, and this time none of them felt doubt of her honesty. "For having aided my young mistress in an intrigue I was punished by being sent to work in the cane fields, so I ran away."
"Pardon my curiosity, Madame," remarked Clarissa, "but what you have just told us is difficult to reconcile with your being the daughter of a nobleman."
"I did not say that I was," Lucette retorted, quite unruffled. "My white blood comes from the present M. de Tascher's grandfather. But I will tell you my story if you wish."
A murmur of encouragement having greeted her offer, she went on: 'I was born on the de la Pagerie estate in Martinique, and as my mother was a slave, I, too, was technically a slave. But, as you must know, there are varying degrees of slavery. My mother was a much beloved servant in the house, and it so happened that she gave birth to me in the same week as Madame de Tascher was delivered of her second daughter, Marie Rose Josephine. In consequence my mother was given Josephine to suckle as well as myself, so we became foster sisters.
"It is the custom on such estates for white children to be given coloured children of their own age as playmates from earliest infancy, on the principle that such a bond will lead to the slave child becoming a most devoted personal servant to the other later in life. For Josephine, I was the natural choice to fill this role, so we were brought up together, and treated in every way as though we were sisters by blood.
"Josephine had no brothers and only one elder sister, named Manette; but she was an insipid creature much given to introspection; so Josephine was much more drawn to myself. She was very pretty and of a very frolicsome disposition. Both of us loved to dance and sing, and as we grew older we encouraged one another in naughty escapades. Out here in the Caribbean white girls as well as coloured began to feel the urges of sex very young, and from the time Josephine and I entered our teens both our minds were filled with the thoughts natural to fully grown women. I let myself be seduced by the overseer's son; while she developed a passion for the son of one of our neighbours, who fell equally passionately in love with her.
"The name of her beau was William de Kay, and his family, had been settled in Martinique only for some twenty-five years. Originally, I think, their name was MacKay, for they were of noble Scottish descent and related to many great lords in their own country; but they had been deprived of their estates and exiled for having taken up arms in the cause of the Stuart pretender during his attempt to gain the throne of England in 1745.
"Madame de Tascher and Madame de Kay had long been close friends, so from childhood little William was always in and out of the house, or we at his, and was our most cherished playmate. As he and Josephine grew older the two mothers smiled at the devotion they showed to one another, for at that time the parents of both children favoured the idea of a match between them. But later, on both sides, events occurred to alter their plans.
"I never fully understood the complications of the inheritance that devolved on William, but it seems that his father was heir to a Lord Lovell and that his own succession to the estates was dependent on his marrying this old nobleman's niece. Whatever the rights of the matter, news arrived that Lord Lovell had died; it thus became necessary for Monsieur de Kay to present himself as the heir in London, and he decided to take William with him in order that the young man might complete his studies at the University of Oxford.
"At that time William was not aware that he would be called on to marry his cousin, and he considered himself irrevocably pledged to Josephine. Naturally, at the idea of a separation which might last for several years the two young lovers were distraught. Their parents had, some months before, consented to their regarding themselves 4 as unofficially betrothed, but that no longer satisfied them. They craved some means of entering into a more indissoluble bond before a cruel fate tore them from each other's arms.
"Since both were of such tender years, no French priest would have married them without the consent of their parents; but, then being greatly devoted to my young mistress, I took it on myself to secure for them an opportunity to exchange the vows by which they set so much store.
"As you may know, there is nothing incompatible about being a Roman Catholic and a practitioner of Voodoo. In fact, all the best known Christian Saints are also gods and goddesses in the Voodoo pantheon; and a part of the training of the Houngans, as the Voodoo priests are called, is to fully familiarize themselves with all the rituals of the Roman Church. For some time past a local Houngan, who had recently graduated from the Roman Catholic Seminary for coloured men, had been casting eyes of desire upon me, so I had no great difficulty in persuading him to do as I wished. I then told the two lovers that I had found a priest who would marry them in secret, and two nights later the ceremony was duly performed beneath a giant cedar tree that grew not far from la Pagerie mansion.
"Some months after William arrived in England M. de Tascher learned from M. de Kay the conditions of the inheritance, but he was not particularly put out by these rendering a union between their families no longer practical, as by that time he had other plans for Josephine.
"His sister, a Madame Renaudin, who resided in France, was a rich and influential woman. Being a good aunt she was strongly set upon arranging an advantageous marriage for her eldest niece, and it had already been agreed that Manette should cross the ocean to live with her. But, just then, Manette was taken with a fever, and within a week she was dead.
"Monsieur and Madame Tascher decided that Josephine should take her place, but they did not tell her so at once, because she did nothing but dream and talk of William, and they feared to disturb the balance of her mind. Instead, they suppressed his letters to her and hers to him, hoping that both would believe each had lost interest in the other.