Casket Girls
She was one of the many, les
filles à les caissettes, named for the little sea chests they had been
allowed for their voyage. Casquettes, as some on the river later
mispronounced it, as if they had all worn little caps -- although some of them
did. Some of them were orphans and could afford no more, but many had come from
better families, good, respectable Catholic girls. Often from convents. Just what would be
needed to tame a frontier.
Or so, at least, King Louis XV
thought, or was it the idea of his Polish wife? Or more likely the cardinal,
André de Fleury, his minister of state. It didn't matter.
It was later to become a point of
pride for New Orleanian families to claim their descent from the "casket
girls." Which did not matter either.
Aimée had her own reasons for
leaving France. As for the means -- well, let the king, or the cardinal, or
both take credit for her transportation. Aimée was nothing if not always
willing to credit others where credit was due. Her own reasons, however, had
been more immediate, France had become too hot, family members of hers had been
found out. Some of them slaughtered.
It was a hard thing, this, to be
persecuted. She felt sorry for the girl she had left in the harbor behind her,
no doubt a good girl who deserved better treatment. But one must be always
looking ahead, yes?
Her home and her friends she had
left behind too.
She suffered the voyage, the ship
cramped and smelly, crammed in the hold with young women around her, pressed
body to body. She, whose tastes were catholic in many ways, but resisting
temptation.
She, with her large, sparkling eyes
and tight-curled black hair, affecting a perpetual look of wonder -- waif-like
and longing -- it was not her nature to fight her urges. But fight them she
did.
By the time their ship had reached
the great river, Aimée gazing now beneath the deck-awning at strange swampy
shores, she had become almost like a big sister to the other women, despite
looking as young or younger than most. It was she who led them, finally, down
the broad gangplank, there to be met by the Ursuline nuns who would be their
protectors.
From there they were walked the
short way from the river, their "casquettes" heaped on a cart behind
them, to Rue Chartres and the Ursuline convent where they were given the entire
third floor, above the nuns' quarters. It was only later, however, when more and
more of the girls complained about the brightness of the sun, so much more so
than in France, and how it hurt their eyes when they had to be up in the
daytime, that carpenters installed the "hurricane shutters" that
remain today. Aimée watched as they did this, admiring the carpenters' muscular
arms and their ruddy complexions, but waited until dark, the nuns fast asleep
in their beds on the floor below, before she would sneak out to sample the
town. And despite the fact that one workman had died, later, from a strange
sickness, a kind of anemia. These men were not for them, these laboring men,
but rather they were to be groomed to marry the owners of land, of shops in the
city or else the plantations that dotted the sides of the Mississippi.
As time went on she often took some
of the others out with her on these nighttime forays -- shuttered windows or
not -- having already made one or two of them special companions back aboard
the ship. A playful nip on a wrist here and there, but always discreetly, where
there would not be wounds to be noticed. But here in their attic with its bends
and crannies, Aimée had found secret places aplenty to introduce her fellow filles
à les casquettes to love and more.
By day, some of them who had been
orphans before sleepily helped in the orphanage the nuns themselves ran on the
convent's first floor. All also took lessons in skills they would need when
they became wives, of directing servants, of selecting produce in the French
Market for the kitchen staff to prepare. They went out by day in the care of
the convent priest, their modesty well protected by parasols and veils -- by
night with Aimée, they wore perhaps less clothing. Mornings they did chores, repairing their
work dresses, their better clothes still packed in their sea chests for when
they were married or, if before, being introduced to those men they might marry.
The nuns did their work well. There
were women enough of the lesser sort on the streets of New Orleans, women
cleaned out from the prisons of France, transportees and worse. But the "casket girls" were bred to
be ladies, and never mind the rumors that began to be whispered about them. The
nuns countered these -- so what if they all had such pale complexions? That is
what veils were for. And if some still
looked gaunt, consider their arduous voyage from France, across the whole
ocean, already frail enough at the outset because they were ladies.
And ladies they were. They were
their own society, married to men of the highest station, eventually, becoming
the hostesses to kings and generals should such come to visit. Ruling their
households. And Aimée had wed the wealthiest of them all, a doctor and
scientist by reputation, though forced to leave New Orleans eventually. Aimée
herself, rumor had it, had shown up again in France many years after, but still
with the look of youth. Still with the spirit that she had shown the
others.
And never mind the rumors, those
early years, of corpses found along the river.
The blood drained out from them. Those were still the years when New
Orleans was rough, its streets teeming with criminals. What business would
convent girls have to do with such things?
Yes, these were the ones called les
filles à les casquettes, the "casket girls," for the small chests
they brought with them with their things in them, and it is not true what
people say now. That within these trunks
there had been concealed vampires. Nor is it true either that with them had
come some new kind of disease.
No, it was enough that with them had
come the one named Aimée.
Indiana
(USA) writer James Dorr’s THE TEARS OF ISIS was a 2014 Bram Stoker Award®
nominee for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. Other books include STRANGE MISTRESSES: TALES
OF WONDER AND ROMANCE, DARKER LOVES: TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET, and his
all-poetry VAMPS (A RETROSPECTIVE). His
latest, out in June 2017 from Elder Signs Press, is a novel-in-stories, TOMBS: A
CHRONICLE OF LATTER-DAY TIMES OF EARTH. An
Active Member of HWA and SFWA with more than 500 individual appearances from
ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE to XENOPHILIA, Dorr invites readers to
visit his blog at http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com.
Tags:
Short Fiction