Chapter 3: Not a Lady

[Undated entry]
Somewhere in the Caribbean

“I WIN!”

Amélie sat on the small native boy, not any larger than she was. It was hard to tell which one was white and which one was black. The mud from the tidal flat was dark and sticky and covered them from top to bottom.

The boy smiled, his teeth white in the middle of black.

“Yes, Emmie!”

Neither one was five years old, but at that age it didn’t matter. When they were old enough for school, which for Amélie meant old enough to sit in a small drawing room with a series of tutors brought at great expense from England, they would go their separate ways. For the boy, it meant work in his family’s garden plot.

“Amélie, we must talk about manners.”

Amélie sighed, but she was careful not to do so aloud. Father was going to give her another lecture. Rather, he was going to let Grace give the lecture while he read the two-month-old newspaper from London.

“Yes, Aunt Grace.”

“Young ladies do not fight. Especially not with natives.”

“But I didn’t hurt him, Aunt Grace.”

“It does not matter, Amélie. It is not done. You must understand this.”

“Yes, Aunt Grace.”

Amélie figured it would be easier to agree for now and worry about getting caught the next time. If there was a next time. As it turned out, her next fights were wrestling matches with Gérard. Until they entered adolescence they’d been pretty evenly matched, and for a year or two Amélie was taller than Gérard and usually had the upper hand. It was only temporary. Gérard, who had been swimming since he was a baby, soon began to put on muscle and weight and by the time Amélie began to sprout curves and to learn about all of the marvelous things her body was capable of, Gérard won every time.

It was common among their contemporaries to marry as early as age fifteen. Father insisted Gérard wait until his education was complete and he returned from England. As for Amélie, she refused the few suitors their small community offered. Father and Grace showed their displeasure but Amélie was immovable. She didn’t know what she wanted, but she knew she did not want to be the bride of one of the local cloddish sons of another plantation owner.

Thus it transpired that Gérard and Amélie celebrated their majority still unmarried and still resident in Father’s house. The following year Gérard would sail for England and the famous Oxford University. Father had enrolled him in B— College as soon as he had come to live with Amélie and her family. Undecided herself about her own future but certain it did not lie on the island, Amélie was growing desperate to find a way to accompany him.

In the meantime, with the added freedom that came with her eighteenth birthday, Amélie applied some of the lessons she’d learned from Anne-Marie. She didn’t understand the connection, the why of it, that is, but she understood and loved the feeling when it came. The struggle, the physical struggle, metamorphosed for her from fighting to arousal, to the avalanche of emotions and physical side effects of sexual longing.

Amélie surprised Gérard the first time this happened. They had been wrestling, hidden away in an unused bedroom on the far end of the guest wing of the plantation because Father and Grace had told them it was unseemly for them to wrestle together any more.

The guest wing had been built when the house was expanded, shortly after Father had purchased it, when prices for sugar cane were exceptionally high. The demand from England and the rest of the European continent seemed to be unlimited, and so Father and the other planters on the island had increased production to the point where there was hardly a single square yard of cultivatable land on the island without its quota of cane.

Expecting visits from his own and his late wife’s family from England, Father added the wing when he purchased the house. For reasons best left to them to explain, the relatives found the trip too daunting to attempt more than once, even if they stayed at least three months. The heat, the humidity, the press of humanity, mostly black, had frightened them and made them uncomfortable, and made them conclude life was better in England.

After the death of Amélie’s mother from fever, Father’s sister, Grace, was the only visitor in residence at the house. Amélie discovered Grace rarely slept in her room in the guest wing. As a result, she and Gérard were confident they would not be disturbed in their play in that part of the house. Which was a good thing because in the months following their early morning encounter in the garden, where they watched Father and Grace on the balcony, they had moved easily from wrestling to lovemaking. It had been a process, a step-by-step learning for both of them, but they knew each other so well and for so long that once it had happened the first time in the course of later experimenting they could almost predict the moment when they would move from one to the other. More than once Anne-Marie joined them.

The three often rode out together, usually in the cool of the morning when the fields and forest were still wet from dew and the heat had not yet descended. Too, the rains most often happened in the late afternoon, and on most rides they could count on being out for at least two or three hours. They would be back in time for morning tea with Father and Grace.