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move to Trois-Ilets?” I asked finally. Cul-de-sac à vaches—cow-field—that’s what we call it. “Not that it’s my business,” I added, in an attempt to show manners.
    “It was hard for my mother in Saint-Pierre,” he said. He looked up at the sky. A hawk was circling. “It’s hard for her here, too.” He shrugged.
    I’d heard that his mother used to be an actress, that she’d fallen in love with a sailor in the British navy during the Seven Years’ War. Imagine having a mother like that, I thought. An actress! The shame and the glory of it. An actress couldn’t be buried in a church graveyard, or even marry—the Church forbade it.
    “You’re English? But you don’t have an accent.” I swatted at a red ant crawling up my arm.
    “My father was from Scotland actually.”
    I didn’t know where Scotland was, but I was relieved he wasn’t British. The British are not Christian—they eat children.
    “I never knew him,” he went on. He stretched out on the grass, twirling a blade of grass between his fingers.
    “Never?”
    William looked at me. His eyes were the lightest blue I’d ever seen. “I remember his face, remember him smiling. But that’s all.”
    “My father is rarely home, so I don’t suppose it’s that much different,” I told him.
    “When I was young,” William said, “I liked to think that my mother and father had loved each other very much, and had parted tragically. I thought that better than some long drawn-out marriage where the husband and wife only grow bitter and cold.”
    A fish jumped from the water, making rings over the glassy surface of thepond. I thought of my own mother and father, of the bitterness between them. Had there ever been love?
    William pushed his hair away from his eyes. “I’m a romantic, I guess.” He smiled. “Like my hero, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
    I got to my feet, uneasy. No one, most especially a boy, had ever talked to me about such things. I feared it was improper and didn’t know how to respond. “I must go,” I said.
    “Yes,” William said, also rising. He stood before me, awkward and hesitant, no longer a mysterious young man, the son of an actress who had been tragically loved, but instead only William, a béké-goyave in patched clothes.
    I hurried up the trace. At the stone bridge I glanced back. William was watching me.
    “Tomorrow?” he called out.
    I ran up the hill, my face burning.
    Wednesday, August 12.
    All morning I told myself: I’m not going to go, I’m not going to go. And then, after chores, there I was, heading for the swimming pond…
    William grinned when he saw me coming down the trace. I pretended to be surprised to see him there. I didn’t know what to say so I sat on the bank and threw pebbles in the water. Then I ran home singing.
    If anyone ever found out, I hate to think what might become of me.
    I will never go again.
    September 2.
    Whenever I can I go to the fishing pond. William is often there. Mostly we sit and talk. I tell him how I long to go to France, to Paris, how I feel there is so much to experience and see, how exciting it is to be young and looking forward to it all, how hard to be told your dreams are impossible.
    William is the same. He longs to see the world. He reads the journals that come over on the boats. He tells me all about the things that are going on in the American colonies. He talks of “freedom” and “equality.”He asks me what I think about it all, but I tell him I don’t read, so how do I know?
    “You don’t have to read to know how you feel about something like freedom. It’s in your heart,” he says, “not in words on a page.”
    This afternoon he read a passage from a book: Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains. * “ Born free,” he said. “Imagine that.”
    “Everyone?”
    “Free and equal.”
    “Slaves, too?”
    “A master and his slaves.” He paused. “A king and his subjects.”
    “Is that what’s written in that book?” I regarded it