Martinique (The Acolyte Book 1) Read Free Page B

perhaps he'd been too harsh, my friendship with the Ducasse boys, who ran wild as boars, would bring me nothing but disaster. My backside only hurt for a few days, but it burned for months, every time I remembered him towering over me, the evocative motion of his body as he administered his power on my prostrate form. My hand always burrowed between my legs under the sheets, as I sought to bring myself some relief, my imaginings of the other things he might have done vivid, but somehow formless. This made it more tortuous rather than less, for in many ways I didn't know what it was I yearned for, knew only that my body was stretched out on that rack, tormented by the ephemeral, indistinct longing.
    I do know that I found myself making mischief, deliberately, hoping for another session with him behind the closed door of his study. He was an intelligent man, as well as a passionate one, and looking back, I believe he realized the reason for my behavior, that I was "forcing his hand," pleading for his discipline, and so he began to deny it to me, finding other ways to punish me, in order to keep from overheating my blood.
    Yet I still believe the need would have remained formless, had it not been for something Nana let slip to me. She was only in her thirties, with a wisdom far beyond her years. A Catholic, she was still a woman of the islands, part African and part Carawak, the fierce natives who'd killed the first Carib inhabitants and taken the land for their own, before the whites came and did the same to them. A woman of wind and sea and the natural rhythms of life.
    I indulged in a cool bath before bed, and as I put on my night rail we gossiped of the planters, particularly Monsieur Fortier of Trois d'Ille.  They were, like the Ducasses, petits blancs , their plantation not a prosperous one. They were held in contempt by men like my father, for their feckless ways and lascivious behavior, and their count of bastards was impressive. Nana had told me there was a plant that grew in abundance on the island called rue that could be used to force Nature's hand and bring on a woman's courses, ensuring, if she'd been taken, that no child would come of it. This treatment being so effective, she had little patience for young women who "whelped bastards by the litter," as she put it, branding them slovenly and ignorant, with the contempt of the house slaves for the field workers I'd heard so often before.
    But that night she was especially scandalized, for she repeated to me the gossip flying over the island from Fort-Royal to Basse Pointe that Monsieur Fortier had taken the oldest of them, his own daughter, as his latest concubine, a girl of only fifteen.
    I froze, hoping my secret wasn't written across my face, as I asked, with all the insouciance I could manage, if she believed it was true. I felt my face redden when she replied off-handedly she had little doubt it was, for this was not an uncommon thing among the islanders, for a man to take his own daughter, though she'd expected better of the whites, who espoused their principles out of one face and demanded their darkest desires be satisfied from out the other.
    I attempted a suitable air of shock, while she defended her people, who sadly were only doing as their ancestors before them had done. And this I knew, since it was true as well for many of the ancients, the Egyptians and the Persians. For who better, they thought, to lovingly take a girl's maidenhead than her own father? Who better to take care she not suffer? Who better to learn the secret needs of his own seed, since he would be the one to choose the man she would wed? To me it seemed a logical beginning to womanhood, no matter the shock or outrage it engenders in our own society.
    I had been amongst the natives too long, and being motherless, was beginning to take their attitudes as my own. Hearing it spoken aloud, not as a vague fantasy but a thing occurring not ten miles from where I stood, I faced the truth at