A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  And yet there had been something impossibly peaceful about that summer too. The days were long and hot, and the nights were dim and soft. Toussaint’s estate was large enough that the bristling weaponry of the rest of the country never touched it. The militiamen who patrolled the edges seemed to be keeping the world out as well as the war.

  Against her will, she had found herself lulled into security. She helped the workers in the field sometimes; at other times, she would drift into the library that Toussaint had grown over the years and explore with her fingertips the spines of the worn leather tomes and yellowed pamphlets. One day, she told herself, she would have time and leisure to learn to write. It would be a different way of reaching other people’s minds, without magic or terror, harder but more powerful. In the meantime, she had taken the books from the shelves and traced the symbols, enjoying the thrill when one of the words Toussaint’s scribes had taught her over the years peeked out from the muddle. The room smelled like dust and secrets.

  Fina was more than forty now—most enslaved men and women she knew had not lived so long. She had been fighting since she was six years old, and she was so very tired. It had been a very seductive thought that there was nothing she could do but wait, and rest, and be in her own body for once. She regretted it now, bitterly. The dead had not been recalled, even as rumors of renewed conflict overseas grew louder and Saint-Domingue grew even quieter. And the enemy they were fighting didn’t rest.

  “It’s a trap,” she said again, because Toussaint still hadn’t replied. He just went on saddling his horse beneath the clear blue sky, as though nobody else was about them for miles.

  “You know this for certain?” he asked—mildly curious, as though she had imparted news about someone they both vaguely knew.

  “Yes.” Her face was back under control. Her feelings were not so easy. Something was very wrong here, not only in the news itself, but in Toussaint’s acceptance of it. “I saw it. I didn’t mean to— I fell asleep, out in the fields. But there’s a ship waiting in the harbor at Le Cap. I saw the cage prepared for you.”

  “A cage. That’s hopeful, at least. I feared they might just shoot me where I stood. If they plan to take me back, perhaps Bonaparte means to be merciful. Perhaps, after all, he and I will talk face-to-face. I could do something then. He seems a pragmatic man; at the very least, perhaps I could cause a rift between him and the stranger. There are always possibilities.”

  She stared at him. Her heart had slowed now, and something cold was creeping over it. “You already knew.”

  “It was one of Leclerc’s generals who sent for me.” He seemed completely at ease. Perhaps there was something darker than usual in his eyes. “He invited me to his headquarters to discuss troop movements in the area. My sons say he befriended them in France.”

  “It’s a trap.”

  “Yes. It’s a trap.”

  Fina folded her arms, tightly, as though against the cold. “What idiotic thing are you planning now?”

  He had never let her talk to him like that before. The fact he did now troubled her. Something was very, very wrong.

  “It’s their plan this time, Fina,” he said. “You saw it. I’m only allowing it to succeed.”

  “Stop it. Stop playing games with me and tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I suspect you already know.” The last buckle was in place now. He gave his horse a final pat and turned to face her in full. “Our plan was always to wait out the season so that the French troops will be weakened by disease. Agreed?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “But you said it yourself: the dead won’t be weakened. We need them to leave. I hoped they would do so by now, but they haven’t. They’re waiting for something.”

  “Bonaparte is waiting for Saint-Domingue to be under his control.”

  “No. He has that now—or he thinks he does. As far as Bonaparte is concerned, the army of the dead could have been withdrawn already. He has a war in Europe to fight. I suspect, from everything you’ve told me, that the stranger won’t let him. You were right. He wants me dead.”

  “Of course he does! That’s exactly why you can’t go.” She had been asleep a moment ago. She had been dozing in the sun looking over the fields, and the sky had been hot and clear and open. There was still a stalk of grass in her hair. “Toussaint, I saw that ship and what waits inside it. The only way I could have seen that ship is if the stranger was visiting it at that moment, the way he does in Jamaica. It’s his trap. If you step into it, he’s won.”

  “That’s exactly what the stranger thinks.” There was a note in his voice almost like triumph. “And he’s wrong. You told me yourself, Fina. The stranger thinks war is between great men, and great magicians. He thinks I am his rival, and if he removes me, there will be nobody to stand against him and his plans. It isn’t true.”

  He had been planning this for a very long time. She realized that now, far too late. All that long summer, when she had hoped they needed only to wait, she should have known he had been planning something. Toussaint always had plans.

  It was her fault. She had told Toussaint everything she had seen pass between the stranger and Bonaparte: their arguments over Saint-Domingue, their tensions over how the war should be fought. She had told him that their meetings had been more and more frequent, that Bonaparte wanted the dead back in Europe, that the stranger’s control over him was weakening. She had never thought it would lead to this.

  “We can fight the dead when the rains come, alongside the living troops,” she said. It was all she could think to say, even though she knew it wasn’t true. “You don’t have to do this. You said you weren’t afraid of them.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “And I’m not afraid of this. I knew when I made that deal with the stranger that I would pay for it one day. My only plan was that he paid as well, and that it cost him this country. I think I held it long enough that he won’t be able to take it back now.” His voice was still calm, but his fists were clenched. It truly wasn’t fear. It was anger. “We could have worked together, you know, he and I. When we stood face-to-face, all those years ago, and made our deal, I was willing to honor it. I was willing to keep the island under French command and to make the plantations as profitable for France as they ever were under slavery. It didn’t have to be this way.”

  “He would never have worked with you,” Fina said. She had felt the stranger’s contempt every night. She had felt what he was doing in Jamaica. Not only would he never have worked with Toussaint, but she knew that Toussaint would never really have worked with him either.

  Toussaint didn’t answer. There was no time, but perhaps he would not have anyway.

  “They’ll be here soon,” he said instead. “You need to get as far away as you can. The stranger knows you exist, but he doesn’t know who you are. Go to Dessalines. This will be his fight now, unless I’m very much mistaken. If anyone can take this island back, he can.”

  “He’s helping the French,” she said numbly. It was an understatement. He was murdering for the French, without remorse and without mercy.

  “I helped the French myself, for a time. He won’t be for long.”

  “He doesn’t like me. He never has. He knows I’m loyal to you, not to him.”

  “You’ll have to be careful. That’s something at which you’re very practiced. But he will work with you. He’ll be eager for your support, after this winter—he knows your value now. And if I’m not mistaken, he’ll agree to help take the fight to Jamaica at the first opportunity in exchange for your help. It might be a bloodier revolt than the one we planned together—Dessalines, as you said so astutely once, isn’t kind. But it will work.”

  Of course it would. That was why she had been kept at arm’s length from Toussaint all winter, why she had been sent to fight at Dessalines’s side during their war with Leclerc’s troops, and earn his respect if not his trust. Toussaint had planned all that too.

  She struggled to keep the anger in her voice
from turning to desperate grief. Once it did, she would never get it back. “I came here to find help, all those years ago. I found you. I came here so you could help us.”

  “I know. And I never helped your people, in the end. I left it for you. I hope you can forgive that, and make it right.”

  “Toussaint—”

  He cut her off. “We don’t have time. They’ll come to this house after they have me, and you must not be here when they do. You need to leave.”

  “What about Suzanne? And your sons?”

  “They want to stay at my side. Fina. If you get taken with us, then there truly will be nobody left to stop the stranger from doing anything he wants. Go.”

  She wanted to stay at his side too. It was an impulse so immediate, so right, that she almost told him so. He was the only person whose head was closed to her, by promise and by trust, and because of that and so much else she belonged at his side now. Once she left it, she would never see him again.

  But he was right. She still had an enemy to defeat.

  “Go,” Toussaint said again. He said it gently this time, and that of all things was what broke her. If he’d pushed her, she could have pushed back. But gentleness couldn’t be fought. It could only be ignored or accepted, and whatever Toussaint had done, she had never been able to ignore him.

  “This won’t be the last time we speak to each other,” she said. She knew she was echoing the promise she had made to Jacob and the others in Jamaica, so many years ago, but what did that matter? She intended to keep that promise as well. “This isn’t the end.”

  “No,” he agreed. He took her hands, just for a moment. It was the first time he had done so in a very long time—she couldn’t remember how long. Perhaps since the day he had betrayed her. His hands were warm and firm and calloused around her own. “It isn’t the end.”

  That evening, Toussaint rode to the headquarters of General Jean Baptiste Brunet. He dismounted and went inside. The two of them talked, cordial and reserved, and then Brunet retired from the room and a party of grenadiers entered. They were magicians, but in the end magic wasn’t needed. Toussaint’s men put up very little resistance, and he put up none at all. They came for his family soon after.

  Toussaint was taken to Le Cap and transferred at last to the ship that would take him to France. The last of the army of the dead, as he had predicted, were being recalled as the ship readied itself for departure. There was an edge of superstitious fear among the crew, as though they had a wild shadow on board.

  “You cannot hold Toussaint far enough from the ocean or put him in a prison that is too strong,” Leclerc wrote to Napoléon. It was widely accepted that Toussaint had no magic now, that whatever powers had allowed him to bring storms against the British fleet and rally the island itself against them had deserted him. And yet nobody quite believed that he was only human either.

  Toussaint was the only calm one on deck. He greeted the captain coolly, but politely.

  “In overthrowing me,” he said, just before they took him below, “you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will grow back from the roots, because they are deep and numerous.”

  The insurrection did not come quickly after that. It should have, Fina thought. Toussaint being removed from the island should have torn it apart; the sky should have split in a scream of outrage; the dead should have risen from the ground to avenge him. But Dessalines was there, along with many of Toussaint’s other generals, and they were still with the French. Without the army of the dead, Leclerc relied more and more on Dessalines and Christophe to enforce the peace, and they obliged with brutal efficiency. Any fledgling uprisings were crushed. Dessalines slew his fellow revolutionaries without hesitation; his paralyzing magic stopped revolts in their tracks, and the retribution was made so terrible that it seemed they would never recur. The French forces called him “the butcher of the Blacks.”

  Fina knew what he was doing. The French forces were dwindling every day, and the more they built their power on Dessalines’s strength, the swifter it would crumble when he turned it against them. But it didn’t make it easy to hear of the atrocities being wrought by the French forces up and down the country. She also couldn’t help but suspect that, in destroying so many of the potential revolutions, Dessalines was also clearing the path of potential rivals.

  And yet the groups kept rising, and they began to grow.

  Leclerc was beginning to panic. He had, as he wrote to Bonaparte, no true authority in the colony; all he had, as Robespierre had found so many years ago, was terror. The French troops drowned and burned. He hung sixty men in Le Cap in one day. Amid all the cruelties, Leclerc promised freedom to any who would fight for his army. It was then that the Black population of Saint-Domingue knew for certain what Bonaparte had, from the first, meant to do. There was no point in promising freedom to a nation already free, unless that freedom was soon to be taken from them.

  Fina had been waiting too. She hadn’t spoken to Dessalines since Toussaint’s arrest, but she had made certain he knew where she was. She watched him often. She watched, too, as the days grew cooler, the rains began to speckle the sunbaked coast, and more and more of the French began to sicken and then to die choking on yellow bile. She watched as the tide turned.

  On the day Dessalines at last turned on the French, she was ready. She rode through the war-torn roads to find him at Gonaïves, sitting in the mansion recently vacated by the French commander. Perhaps he had been watching her too, by magical means or otherwise, because he seemed unsurprised to see her.

  “Toussaint’s magician.” He said it cautiously, not without respect. “What brings you here?”

  “I’ve come to join you.” Her heart was hammering, but it was a slow, steady hammer. For now, she was safe. If he hadn’t recognized her value, he would have killed her already. “You know what I have to offer.”

  “I do. And what do I have to offer you?” He stood before she could answer. She had watched him so long in his own head she had forgotten how he was in person. He was everything Toussaint wasn’t: young, powerful, dangerous, with a tiger’s coiled strength and animosity. “I’ve never understood what lay between you and Toussaint, you know. You never wanted power, as far as I could tell. Your power lay in your magic, and nobody could give or take that. Was it only a matter of protection?”

  “We weren’t lovers, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Oh, I believe that.” His dark eyes looked her up and down. “You weren’t his kind of woman—you’re barely a woman at all, are you? I would give money you didn’t even cry when they took him. You’re a soldier through and through.”

  “I’m a magician,” she said.

  He nodded as if conceding her point. “So what do you want?”

  “What I’ve always wanted.” She had already determined not to mention the stranger. It wasn’t needed, and she didn’t trust him. “I want freedom for Jamaica. I want the spellbinding broken and revolution brought to its plantations. Toussaint promised me he would do this. We were on the brink of it when the French arrived.”

  “Were you?” He sounded pleased. “I thought he was still interested in appeasing the English. It was always difficult to tell with him. I wish I’d known.”

  “Would it have made you hesitate to betray him?”

  “I didn’t betray him,” he said without offense. “We both signed our own agreements with the French.”

  “He wanted you to lead the rebellion on Jamaica, when it came.”

  “And now you want me to lead it for you. Is that right?”

  “I came here to free the plantation I ran away from,” she said. “I stayed to help free Saint-Domingue. If you can promise me both these things, Dessalines, I’m yours.”

  “I can promise you both those things,” he said.

  It wasn’t a blaze of fire, as rebellions on Saint-Domingue so often were. It was the slow, steady drip of a mountain stream, building in whispers, growing in momentum, until final
ly the dam was broken and the tide rushed out.

  The insurrection did not come quickly, but it came.

  London/Saint-Domingue

  April 1803

  The dead had returned to Europe.

  Throughout the winter, they had stayed confined to France, a source of unease but not yet of fear. The British government assured its people that Bonaparte intended them only to keep order within his own borders, as he had done in Saint-Domingue. As the weather warmed, however, things began to shift. Regiments of the dead were seen in the Low Countries, in Italy, on the Spanish coast. Addington’s warnings to Bonaparte went unanswered, and largely unheeded. Rumors of renewed war began to sweep Europe. Wilberforce’s eldest son, not yet five, woke in the night crying about skeletons coming for him and could not be soothed back to sleep until nearly dawn.

  “Addington should have insisted the army of the dead be destroyed before peace be made,” Wilberforce said the next day. His head throbbed with exhaustion. “Everybody told him so.”

  “He didn’t have the power to enforce that,” Pitt said. “There would have been no treaty at all. Which should have told him, of course, that the treaty was never intended to last.”

  “It’s more than that. I could have forgiven that. He allowed the army of the dead to exist because he wanted Bonaparte to use them to put down the revolt in Saint-Domingue before it spread to English territories in the West Indies. Our own ships helped to carry them there. Well, that hasn’t happened, thank God, and it serves him right.”

  Pitt tried and failed to hold back a smile. “I’m sorry. I just never quite get tired of hearing transatlantic politics couched in terms of a morality lesson for world leaders.”

  Wilberforce smiled himself, but barely. “Well, if they are, they’re far too costly. And now there’s every indication that the dead are once again moving toward English territories.”