Cadoville (unfinished)

Chapter I

Spring 1792

Île de Domaine - French Caribbean, 1792

There were worse places to be exiled, I suppose.... Perhaps I should be grateful for the stretches of pearl-white beach and palm trees, not to mention water that dazzled like cut diamonds. After all, I had wanted for nothing growing up.... Imagine servants waiting on you hand and foot, skirts and dresses stitched by Paris' most reputable couturiers, cakes and viennoiseries made from Caribbean-cultivated sugar and molasses.... That was my life, and how things would always be – warm, comfortable, ritualistic, dull.... Don't envy me, I had longed to dip my toe into something different, less simple, maybe even a little scary... Be careful what you wish for....

The Île de Domaine was nothing but limbo - a crescent of earth between Guadeloupe and Martinique, a French colony littered with fishing villages and plantations, riddled with émigrés, resentment and the unwanted, like us.... We, that is to say, my parents, two elder brothers – Florian and Lucien – and yours truly, lived in a big house that belonged to my uncle Stefano, looming over a dark-skinned, fishing village called Les Moules - a rustic cluster of smoking chimney tops and a scattering of flickering amber orbs – a sweltering corner of Nowhere-sur-mer.

That sultry day in April, a migraine had kept me in bed until the sun had slipped away. The inescapable Caribbean heat and muggy air provided the perfect recipe for my bad heads - even the sea breeze had warmed up by the time it reached my windows.... My family were talking downstairs, but I wasn't up to holding a conversation yet, so I opened my shutters and listened, finishing the cold mint tea the maid had brought up some hours earlier, though I barely remember when.... My mother and uncle Stefano's voices resonated the most beneath my feet, my father and brothers keeping rather quiet, as was usually the way.... uncle Stefano traded tobacco and sugar, and had been living on the island for quite some time now.

"They're talking about war in Paris now...," I heard my uncle Say. "God only knows what that'll mean for us out here...."

"Who do they want to fight?" Replied my mother - uncle Stefano's sister and a rather ambitious Venetian socialite whose pride had been bruised by exile, perhaps irreparably.

She didn't sound at all surprised by what my uncle had said.

"Everyone, if I'm to believe what I read.... Danton said Only a madman would take us to war..., I remember reading that.... I'd consider leaving if I were you."

Plates chinked and chimed below - cake and tea fresh from the docks in Sainte-Marie. uncle Stefano's pipe smoke wafted up through my floorboards too, sweet and sickly.

"If you were me?" came an easily miss-able voice.... My father, finally. "We're staying here.... We've given up enough to come this far...."

My Father was a Swiss businessman, from Fribourg to be exact, and the latest of a line of wealthy entrepreneurs - quiet, soft-spoken, and frugality personified.

"I'm not suggesting you go far...."

"You're not hearing me, Stefano.... We waited three hours to board a ship in Bordeaux..., standing in the rain, alone, and a crowd of hundreds trying to leave the country...,death to traitors scrawled over the port gates.... All our staff had deserted us...."

That was another day etched into the walls of my memory..., also docking in Sainte-Marie six weeks later, hungry, exhausted and our clothes clinging to our skin. I never fully understood why we had to leave our home, why the new regime hated foreigners and wealthy people, or even really why they had attacked the Bastille. I just knew the tricolour flags I had seen billowing in Bordeaux, the one hanging off the back of the ship, and indeed the one rippling from the belfry in Les Moules were behind it all, and why we were now languishing on the other side of the world.