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Chapter Fifteen

As the sky began to clear, Viv hooked her umbrella over her arm. Puddles glinted everywhere in shafts of sunlight, reflecting back the fleeing clouds. The breeze tossed bare tree limbs and scattered bright drops. Viv made three circuits of the neighborhood, noting possible bachelor’s quarters, before the tall woman with the flowers appeared.

This time she carried yellow flowers, and wore a green gown. Like Viv, she had an umbrella over her arm, but also a sturdy traveler’s case. Viv waited for the woman to put down her burdens and replace the spray of flowers on the railing. When the new flowers were in place, and the woman had said her prayer, Viv approached.

“You again. I suppose you want that story now. Miss Bradish, is it?” With smiling eyes in her heart-shaped face the woman bent to retrieve her bag and umbrella.

“I do, ma’am. If I may have it.”

“Your friend, Mr. Larkin, tells me I may trust you.”

Viv kept her smile in place. There was the proof, if she needed it, that Lark lived in the neighborhood. “He’s a good neighbor then?”

“He is.” The woman’s eyebrows went up. She pointed. “He’s just there with the bachelors.”

Viv made a mental note of the number.

“Walk with me, Miss Bradish. And I’ll tell you my story.”

“May I know your name?”

“I was born Adele St. Clair in Cap Francois, like the queen.” It was a simple beginning, but at once Viv had a thousand questions.

“Did you know her in Haiti?”

“No. I came to London as a girl before Marie Christophe became queen. My father sent me when I was twelve because there was great violence against our people then, and everyone said the land was a powder keg.” Adele had a faraway look in her eyes.

Viv fell into step beside the older woman. “How did you come to know the queen in London?”

“My husband is a customs clerk. He heard of her arrival as I was beginning my business, and he encouraged me to seek her favor.” Something in the memory made Adele smile.

“You smile, ma’am. Tell me more.”

“I was not sure I should put myself forward, she, a queen, and I, a seamstress, but my husband said, ‘Who else should sew for her but her own countrywoman?’ And he had an idea of how I could win her favor.”

They came to the park’s York Gate and turned west along the road, passing a row of new terraced houses. Through the park’s iron fence, the little lake sparkled and the trees made a lacy open canopy of branches about to blossom. Viv admired the storyteller’s craft with which Adele had stopped the narrative short leaving her listener with an unanswered question.

Beyond the row of terraced houses was an island in the road with shrubs around a bench. To Viv’s surprise Adele produced a small rug from her bag to lay over the damp surface. “Sit, girl,” she said.

When Viv complied and Adele joined her on the bench, she asked, “Are you particular about your coffee, Miss Bradish?”

Viv nodded, momentarily confused by the aside from the main story. “I prefer a cup prepared the Turkish way.”

Adele nodded. “In Haiti, the coffee cherries are as red as your English holly berries, and the roasted beans, as black as my hands. You use a pilon, a large mortar to turn the roasted beans to powder.” Adele made a gesture with her hands. “So, at my husband’s suggestion, I brought the queen beans from home and a pilon and offered to sew for her and for her daughters, Améthyste and Athénais.”

Viv could see the cleverness of the appeal to a shared experience, and the intimacy of such a connection. A woman’s seamstress knew her tastes, her figure, her very attitude toward her appearance. Viv itched to pull out the notebook from her reticule, but there would be a time for that. First, she must simply listen.

“That’s how we came to be friends. Over coffee. When I came to bring cloth or designs or to measure and fit, we always had our coffee and our talk. So much talk. I cannot begin to tell it all.”

“Please, can you tell me about her? The queen?”

For a time, it seemed to Viv that Adele St. Clair was lost in memories, then she smiled again. “She was Marie-Louise, as she grew up in her father’s hotel. Cap Francois was like another Paris then. She told me of all the people she met there as she came up. It was her father who first thought she would make a queen. In some ways her father was like mine, believing his daughter could learn anything, be anything. But they did not always see eye-to-eye. Especially about her husband who worked in the hotel’s stables, until Marie taught him, and helped him buy his freedom and become a soldier.”

Adele paused looking out over the park. “The great struggle with the French came and afterward with the factions. The queen lived underground for nearly three years with her children. Her time as queen was brief, but she had dignity and grace.”

Viv did not know the story of the distant island and the struggles of its people. “And then?” she asked.

Adele sighed, but her voice took on a powerful quality. “Her husband died, and their home was to be destroyed. She saved his body from harm. Her sons were killed, and she fled with her daughters. All they had known was lost.”