Landfalls (9 page)

Five or six servants of uncertain racial extraction came forward, and Sabatero explained that dinner was not for another hour, and that his guests were welcome to make use of the spare bedrooms in the house to rest or tidy up. “My steward, Jos
é
, will show the two captains to their room,” he said, introducing a short, olive-skinned man to Lap
é
rouse and Langle.

The steward bowed, unsmiling, and led Lap
é
rouse, Langle, and their servants, Pierre and Fran
ç
ois, down the corridor. They passed several rough-hewn arched doorways, rounded one corner, passed more doorways, then turned again, finally stopping at an open door at which Jos
é
waved them in. It was an immaculate room bright with sunshine and equipped with two of everything—chairs, beds, mirrors, washstands, wash basins, linens. As soon as Jos
é
shut the door behind them, Lap
é
rouse threw off his jacket and wig and boots, rebuffing Pierre's attempts to help him. He lowered himself onto the nearest bed with a groan, feeling at once relieved and repelled by the sensation of cooler air on damp armpits, head, and feet.

“Are you all right, sir?” Langle asked. He was removing his outer clothing, neatly folding each item and handing it to his servant, Fran
ç
ois.

“I am no longer accustomed to bumping about in a carriage,” Lap
é
rouse replied.

He sat on the bed and watched idly as Pierre and Fran
ç
ois fussed with their masters' wigs. Pierre was twenty-one and already a skilled captain's servant, while Fran
ç
ois was just a boy, and an awkward one at that. But one would never guess who was more experienced from the wigs they handled. Lap
é
rouse's wig was in terrible shape, subject as it was to constant ill-treatment by its owner. Fran
ç
ois scarcely knew what to do with his hands, but it did not matter, as his master's wig—no doubt one of several Langle had brought with him—looked new. “That'll do,” Lap
é
rouse finally said, rescuing his wig before Pierre attacked it with another round of expensive powder.

He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and ask to be wakened for dinner. But here was Langle, sleeves rolled up, bending over a wash basin to rinse his face. It would not do for the commander of the expedition to arrive for dinner unkempt and bleary-eyed. And it would not do at all for Langle, with his patrician bearing and manners and height, to be mistaken for the commander. Lap
é
rouse heaved himself off the bed with a second groan and made his way to the other washstand.

An hour later, Jos
é
announced them into the dining room: “Jean-Fran
ç
ois de Galaup, Count de Lap
é
rouse, commander of the French expedition and captain of His Majesty's ship the
Boussole
, and Paul-Antoine-Marie Fleuriot, Viscount de Langle, captain of His Majesty's ship the
Astrolabe
.” Or that was what he was supposed to say. He had obviously been taught the French names and phrases by rote that afternoon. Unfortunately, he had not first been taught any French.

Lap
é
rouse looked over at Langle. “Did he just call me ‘count'?”

Langle smiled. “It suits you.”

Lap
é
rouse shrugged. In truth, he was likely to be awarded the appellation when he completed the voyage, but officially he had no such title. He could hardly correct his hosts, however. Perhaps the Spaniards, unable to imagine a man in command over a viscount unless he was himself of higher rank, had supplied the title to preserve their own sense of social order.

The only lady present was a woman so much younger than Sabatero and coiffed so outlandishly that Lap
é
rouse assumed Sabatero was widowed and the woman an unmarried daughter whose sartorial excess there was no mother to check. “My wife, Eleonora,” Sabatero said, and Lap
é
rouse had to stifle his surprise, not only at his mistake, but because of the resemblance to his own wife's name,
É
l
é
onore. The young woman curtsied, then sat at the opposite end of the long pine table, flanked by—how had this happened?—the least charming of the Frenchmen present: Lamanon and Fr
é
d
é
ric on one side, and a glum naturalist from the
Astrolabe
called Dufresne on the other. Poor woman: accosted by excess of learning and false gallantry to her right, and an aggravated sense of personal suffering on the left. The more amiable Frenchmen present were all seated in a convivial group in the middle of the table. During the meal Lap
é
rouse caught occasional bits of speech from the far end, all of it hyperbole—Dufresne exaggerating the discomforts of the journey, Fr
é
d
é
ric exaggerating its dangers and his bravery in the face of them, and Lamanon declaiming—of course—on the splendidness of savages. Lap
é
rouse wondered if Do
ñ
a Eleonora understood a word of it. He rather hoped she did not.

At his end, Lap
é
rouse sat between his host and Quexada and across from Langle, and enjoyed platefuls of seafood delicacies and glass after glass of surprisingly good local wine. He nodded politely through Sabatero's own version of the 1751 disaster and apologies for O'Higgins. “But it is your voyage we wish to know about,” Sabatero said, so Lap
é
rouse obliged him. The expedition just begun, of course, but a great success thus far: happy ships, the finest officers, the ablest crew, the savants both brilliant and personable; the passage out uneventful; rounding Cape Horn not nearly the navigational horror he had been led to believe; his men healthier now than when they left Brest, not one man sick. “We are truly the most fortunate of navigators,” Lap
é
rouse concluded. Langle raised his glass in concurrence.

“Not
one man
sick after so long?” Sabatero asked in surprise.

“Not one,” Lap
é
rouse repeated.

“Then you are indeed fortunate,” Quexada said, raising his own glass.

Lap
é
rouse nodded. It was true—everything he said—and yet he had a misgiving that he was not being sincere, as if he were reciting a prepared statement, or rehearsing a missive for the minister of marine.

After dinner, Sabatero invited his guests to enjoy more wine and refreshment in the courtyard while the dining room was cleared for the ball. “Count,” he said—that title again!—“you will allow my wife to show you out?”

Up close, Do
ñ
a Eleonora looked even younger than she had from the other end of the table. Her clothes and hair both seemed designed to distract the viewer from the real woman underneath. Tight black plaits of hair coiled around her head, giving her height she did not have; the striped silk mantle added width to her shoulders and the billowy skirt to her hips. But the hand she placed in the crook of his arm was tiny and soft, the stockinged calves that peeked out from under the skirt were the thin legs of a girl, and the serious face she turned up to him was round and pink with youth, though not, he observed, happiness. She was not yet twenty, perhaps not even seventeen. Young enough to be his own daughter. She smiled at him, then tipped a Chinese fan she was holding toward a set of open doors.

“A wonderful meal, Do
ñ
a Eleonora,” he said. Now he would learn if she spoke French.

“Thank you.”

Anyone could say “thank you,” of course. They stepped into a courtyard that looked like a stage, with its carefully placed plants and even more carefully placed servants. The lurid sunset sky looked unreal, as if painted in orange and red for the occasion. “I hope Monsieur de Lamanon didn't overwhelm you with his erudition,” he ventured.

“Not at all. I found him very interesting.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Lap
é
rouse said. “And I hope Monsieur Dufresne did not oppress your spirits—he can be gloomy sometimes.”

She nodded. “Some men are not so suited to life at sea,” she said.

Excellent French. There was just a hint of those irrepressible Spanish
r
's. She stopped a servant carrying a tray of wineglasses and handed one to Lap
é
rouse. He had had several glasses already, but how to refuse this oddly poised girl, his hostess for the evening? The rest of the guests filled the courtyard, settling into jovial clusters, wineglasses in hand. He hoped none of his men would become foolishly drunk. During their time at sea, they had grown used to meting out their drink in sensible, barrel-conserving doses.

“I understand that I have the same name as Madame de Lap
é
rouse,” Eleonora said.

His face warmed at the mention of
É
l
é
onore. “Monsieur Broudou must have told you,” he said. “He is my wife's brother.”

“Do you have any children?”

Her directness took him by surprise, and he had no defense except to return candor for candor. “No—that is, not when I left France.”

Her face opened into an artless smile. “You may be greeted by a child on your return?”

He laughed, flustered. “Perhaps.” A letter had reached him in Brest right before they set sail.
It has been more than two months this time
,
É
l
é
onore had written. He knew not to count on it. But how to check hope? If she had been pregnant when he left, and all went well, the baby might have arrived already. He would not learn any news till much later, of course, when they reached another outpost of civilization—Macao, perhaps, or Petropavlovsk, or Manila—and crossed paths with another ship bearing letters from France. As for going home, that would be still later—sometime in 1789, most likely. Again, if all went well. In that time a child could be born, could cut its teeth, learn to walk, to babble prayers for an absent father. A child could also be carried off by fever, by measles, by accident. It had happened to seven of his own siblings.

He looked down to find Eleonora staring up at him with an expression that mixed curiosity with evaluation. “Do
ñ
a Eleonora,” he said, “you and Major Sabatero, are you blessed with—?”

“I have no children,” she said. Her eyes strayed across the courtyard and toward the dining room, where servants rushed about rearranging furniture while musicians tuned their instruments. Sabatero stood at one of the open doorways, wiping his brow with a kerchief as he conferred with Jos
é
. He waved when he saw them, gesturing that they were nearly ready to begin. Lap
é
rouse nodded, delivered his empty wineglass to a passing tray, and offered his arm once more to Eleonora.

“You're young. You have time,” he said.

For a moment her hand tightened around his upper arm; he could feel her fingers through the wool of his dress jacket. “That is what everyone says.”

He led her back toward Sabatero and the warm light of the transformed dining room, relieved to deliver her back to her husband. There was something a bit overwrought about her. Perhaps it was just youth. He rubbed at the place above his elbow where she had gripped him. It did not hurt, but felt marked somehow, as if he would be aware of the spot all evening.

*   *   *

The distinguished citizens of Concepci
ó
n began to arrive—retired military officers, members of the local council, magistrates, merchants; wives, many of them much younger than their husbands; some daughters and sisters; and priests, many priests. Lap
é
rouse had never seen so many priests at a ball; it was possible he had never seen so many priests together in his life. He was aware of some hierarchy at work in the ordering of introductions, some complicated calculus of title, racial purity, and wealth, with the early introductions being generally for older, fairer-skinned, wealthier-looking individuals than the later ones. It was by no means straightforward, however. One of the first couples he met was a pompous old Spaniard weighed down by military medals whose wife looked for all the world like an Indian princess except for her startling blue eyes.

Seen now among her countrywomen, Eleonora looked less outlandish than Lap
é
rouse had first found her. Nearly all of them wore the same pleated, bell-shaped skirts that ended just below the knee, displaying calves, shapely under striped stockings, and feet, some dainty, some not, in heavy, beribboned shoes. Like Eleonora, their upper bodies were draped with colorful mantillas, as if to compensate for the generous exposure of their lower extremities, and their hair was unpowdered and pulled back from the brow, arranged in those tight plaits, some coiled over the ears, some left to cascade down the back. It was a coiffure that worked better with some heads than others, but made all the women look like sisters. Then there were the headdresses, exotic and varied—hats, feathers, turbans, and flowers both real and artificial. Eleonora's head, adorned only by her plaited hair, seemed downright sober by comparison.

Most of the women fell silent as they entered the room and found themselves appraised by so many strangers. On being introduced, each woman shyly spoke a few words in French or Spanish, then retreated to the orbit of whichever man in the room she belonged to—husband, father, brother. It was an odd effect, the combination of apparel so gaudy and behavior so modest.

Langle leaned over. “You remember what Buffon said about New World birds?”

“You know I've never read Buffon,” Lap
é
rouse said.

“He said they were brilliantly feathered and largely mute.”

“Perhaps he'd been here.”