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babies before they might be baptised and burned their bodies on the fires in their temples to appease their idols.
    His skin burned, but the boy thought of the alligator and dared not rinse his feet in the river. Instead he pulled up a handful of grass and scrubbed at his feet and ankles, pressing down hard to crush the ants that clung on. The sap in the grass stung his inflamed skin and streaked it green. He rubbed earth on the sorest patches. Then wearily, his too-small boots in his hand, he set off barefoot up the path towards the village.
    He was twelve years old and a boy no longer.

G ently, Elisabeth cradled her left hand in her right, stroking the ring’s smooth curve with her thumb. Again the fire caught, the flames licking her ribs with their hot tongues. The impossible absurdity of it stopped the breath in her chest and she hugged herself, her eyes squeezed shut, holding the dizzy tilt of it tight inside her. Had she not, of all of them, been the most distrustful, the only one indifferent to the insinuating drip of hope? Had she not despaired at the empty-headed idiocy of the lot of them, their wilful forgetfulness, the tenacious vigour with which they clung to their fantasies of prosperity and contentment? During those interminable lurching days, when it seemed that the world would be forever water and the ill-tempered priest La Vente limped the decks in search of sin, it was her contempt for her fellow passengers that had sustained her. Contempt and the certainty that, whatever the miseries of the voyage, the fate that awaited them at the end of it would surely be worse.
    And yet, and yet. Raising her left hand she gazed at the ring on her finger and then swiftly touched it to her lips, closing her eyes to inhale the secret salty smell of her palm. It had been the order of the Ministry of the Marine that, excepting mealtimes, the girls be confined to their private quarters for the duration of the voyage, so that their virtue might not be corrupted by the coarseness of the ship’s crew and its cargo of young soldiers. When she remembered the darkness and the suffocating smell of them all together, the smell of hair and skin and stale powder and desperate, desiccating monotony, all crated up in damp salted wood, she had to swallow, so unaccustomedly sour was the taste of scorn upon her tongue. There had not been one among them with any book-learning, any scholarly curiosity, nor so much as an ounce of common sense. Closeted together they were as foolish as a coop of clucking chickens.
    In the main the chickens had endured the voyage without protest. They had occupied themselves with sewing and tittle-tattle and to Elisabeth’s despair they had chafed against neither. Their tongues moved as deftly and as decoratively as their fingers. As their needles darted and flashed, Levasseur the infantry officer grew broader and braver than any man alive, René Boyer the gunsmith and Alexandre the master joiner more skilful and prosperous. The men’s blank faces were endowed with proud noses, firm chins, kindly blue eyes; their houses were furnished with comforts, their larders with meat and wine and exotic fruits.
    At dinner, the chickens clustered around the trader La Sueur, who had been in Louisiana the previous winter, begging him for more details of their establishments and their future situations. The brash trader, long married and the father of five children, had amused himself by ranking the men of the colony according to their physical attributes, his sly allusions causing the chickens to flap and cackle. Elisabeth had observed his manipulations and had felt a flush of angry shame at their suggestibility. It had irked her then that La Sueur thought her no different.
    Perhaps she was not so different after all. The thought began wryly, but the joy rose quickly in her and she could not keep it in. She had a sudden urge to laugh out loud, to spin wildly around the narrow room until she was dizzy. Instead she wrapped