Free Elianne by Judy Nunn

proud that his friends lusted after his daughter.
    Elianne detested everything about her father, whom she considered the vilest of ingrates. The reason André Desmarais’s copra plantation had thrived in previous years had been due to the financial acumen of his astute English wife and the expertise of his hard-working French overseer, both of whose efforts had been not only unappreciated, but barely even recognised. And now, since Beatrice’s death, the ever-loyal Michel Salet was faced with an ongoing battle to prevent his employer, whom he also considered his friend, gambling away the last of the company’s profits. Elianne knew her father to be a liar, a hypocrite and a thief, and much as she would miss her friends on the plantation and in the small township of Port Vila, James Durham and Australia offered a welcome escape.
    ‘It is you who will suffer the humiliation of having married your daughter off to a blackbirder, Papa,’ she continued, ‘and you know the contempt with which such men are held in society these days, not only in Vila, but –’
    ‘James Durham is hardly a blackbirder,’ André interrupted testily, offended by the term, as she’d intended he should be. ‘James Durham is a wealthy plantation owner who has recently built his own sugar mill! Good God, child, a man in his position does not kidnap and enslave island workers! He employs indentured labour through government-appointed agents as the law dictates.’
    ‘But he
was
a blackbirder, wasn’t he, Papa?’ Determined to have the last word, Elianne continued to needle her father, experiencing a perverse form of pleasure in his annoyance. ‘I believe that’s how he came by his fortune, is it not? Some years ago as a young man –?’
    ‘He would need to have been a very young man indeed, Elianne.’ Once again André interrupted his daughter, but this time in a patronising fashion. ‘Considering he is not yet thirty years of age. His wealth, as you very well know, comes directly from his moneyed English family, who financed his interests in the colonies.’
    ‘Yes, so he has told me,’ she replied sceptically, ‘but I have heard other stories. Pavi Salet says that not so very many years ago the islanders feared James Durham. Many accept employment from him now, I know, but he was not always respectable, Papa, as I’m sure you’re aware. I’ve heard that as a very young man he was ruthless and brutal and that the islanders lived in fear of him. They called him “Big Jim”.’
    ‘Well of course they called him Big Jim, you stupid child,’ André exploded. Her needling was successfully pushing him towards the limits of his patience. ‘He’s a big man and they’re simple-minded blacks, what else would you expect them to call him?!’
    ‘Pavi was twelve years old when his uncle and others of his family were taken from Ambrym,’ Elianne continued, unfazed by her father’s outburst. ‘Pavi himself was here at the plantation when it happened, but he told me that upon a trip home with his mother, his aunties had sworn it was Big Jim who led the raid on the village.’
    ‘That’s enough, Elianne!’ The angry light in her father’s eyes warned her she’d gone too far. ‘You’re speaking of the man you’re about to marry. I will not have you quote to me the lies you’ve heard from an ignorant savage.’
    But André had in turn angered his daughter.
    ‘That ignorant savage, as you call him, Papa, happens to be the son of your good friend, Michel Salet, who –’
    ‘Who married a savage,’ André snarled, ‘which makes him a black-lover, and his son a savage just like his mother.’
    For the first time in their exchange, Elianne found herself at a loss for words. Her father and his friends often spoke in a derogatory manner of the islanders, which she found offensive, for there were many loyal, hard-working natives employed at the plantation. Over the years, though, she had become inured to the bigotry that surrounded