“Yes,” said the doctor, thinking that this was another sight he had stayed to behold. “I believe it was.” As he spoke, the arsenal of the caserne blew up, and another deep moan passed through the crowd like wind.
10
During those two days when Leclerc’s portion of the fleet lay waiting outside the harbor of Le Cap, rumor of Christophe’s defiance glided from one vessel to another in the manner of the wandering gulls. On La Vertu it was received with hope. The leaders of the mulatto rebellion against Toussaint walked the deck and sniffed the air, as if to test the limits of their prospects. The pink-roofed town was tranquil in the pocket of the bay. Rigaud, Villatte, Boyer, Pétion—these colored gentlemen who’d been defeated and driven into exile by the armies of Toussaint had all got wind of the semi-secret order which Leclerc bore from the First Consul. They knew that if Toussaint resisted, their knowledge of the land and its people would be recognized as of inestimable value—they would certainly be sent into the field and with luck might receive commands of their own. They also had a good idea that if Toussaint were to receive the French fleet peaceably, their presence here would be judged a liability.
Aboard the Jean-Jacques the mood was much the opposite. Isaac had no direct memory of Le Cap, since he was too young when he had left it. And neither boy had ever spent much time there before they’d been sent to the Collège de la Marche in France. But Placide remembered enough that he could point out the salient features to Monsieur Coisnon: Fort Picolet, the Batterie Circulaire, the Fontaine d’Estaing, the roof of Government House, and the elevation of the church. And even Isaac had ideas of the town transmitted to him by his elder brother and by other colonial students at the Collège, some vivid enough they’d merged with his own fund of memories. Both boys and their tutor were looking forward to seeing the town at closer range.
During those same two days, Captains Cyprien and Daspir found themselves billeted to the general staff aboard L’Océan—which meant, as it turned out, dancing attendance on Madame Pauline Leclerc, to stoop or run to recover her dropped kerchiefs and windblown scarves, and be rewarded with glimpses of her famous alabaster skin. There’d been worse duty in the world, as Cyprien remarked. Their position also put them in the way of news more reliable than the common run of rumor.
Possessed of all the patience of a butterfly, Pauline soon grew petulant at their delay in landing in the town. “But what is this impertinence—to burn the place and fight us on the ashes?” she exclaimed. “The General my husband has only to act swiftly to prevent such a disaster. I do not understand why he is dilatory. After so many weeks penned up on this chip of a boat, I am sure we should all be glad of a chance to stretch our legs on shore.” So saying, she extended her own slender leg, which the attending officers could admire through its gossamer skirting as they murmured their assent to her opinion. As for Leclerc himself, Captain Daspir noticed with some interest, he seemed to steer clear of Pauline’s daylong levées on deck. Indeed, he gave her a wide berth altogether, except of course at night when the couple retired together into the elaborate boudoir fitted out for them below. Not the most spartan exercise of martial virtue, Cyprien quipped, to which Daspir replied that a good general was duty-bound to do his best to prevail and conquer in whatever field he might find laid before him . . . But the sounds that filtered past the bulkheads suggested bickering more often than bliss.
For roughly thirty-six hours Leclerc, no matter Pauline’s impatience, seemed willing to temporize with Christophe and await developments, but by February 4 he was persuaded that Christophe meant only to delay, to make time for the resistance to be organized on shore—and organized, perhaps, by his superior in command, for the envoy Lebrun had been sensitive to the half-open door of the inner sanctum, during his interview with Christophe at Government House. Once Leclerc had been so persuaded, he was quick enough to order action. Leaving L’Océan with his bride at its mooring, he transferred his command to another vessel, which would sail round the point for a landing at the Baie d’Acul. That area had been reconnoitered early, and was well out of view of the guns of Picolet.
Now Daspir was reassigned to the staff of General Hardy, embarked in the same squadron as Leclerc. “Hard luck,” he called to Cyprien, though his stomach fluttered as he climbed down into the boat.
“What do you mean?” Cyprien’s face hung moon-like over the rail above.
“Why,” said Daspir, “you stand to miss this action.”
“There may be action enough here as well.” Cyprien smirked. “And I will keep our lady safe, till we are reunited.”
“See that you do,” Daspir shouted, as the oarsmen pulled his boat away. “And don’t forget our wager—we’ll bring the raghead in.” But Cyprien did not reply to this; perhaps the wind had blown his words away.
It was no great distance that their squadron had to sail, but contrary winds delayed them. Slowly the ships tacked out past the end of the promontory that stretched into the Atlantic beyond Fort Picolet. Curled like a beckoning finger, that last spit of land sheltered an inviting strip of sandy beach inside its curve.
The wind blew full in Daspir’s face from the open ocean, and the gulls whirled above them, crying. He stared at the densely jungled shoreline and thought of Pauline’s careless words. He was eager enough to set his foot on shore, and readier still for the fresh provender that might be found once they landed. The idea of confronting savage Negro armies gave him a more ambiguous feeling. Perhaps before the end of this day he would be facing enemy fire for the first time. Somehow it did not seem so light a matter now as it had when he and the others had toasted their compact with the excellent brandy he had brought out on this voyage from his father’s cellar in France. All gone now, that brandy, squandered, except for half of the very last bottle, wrapped in a shirt in Daspir’s pack. But wonderful things were said of Saint Dominican rum . . . If his mind could dwell on such a prospect, Daspir thought, then he must not be afraid—the wobbly sensation in his belly must be no more than excitement. Still, he wished the other three were with him, or even just one of them, whether Guizot, with whom he might have shared his innocence of combat, or one of the other two, who were at least somewhat familiar with this country.
The molten coin of the sun was boring through the flat plane of the ocean by the time the squadron had reached the mouth of the Baie d’Acul. The word went round the ships that they would wait till the next day to effect their landing. Daspir ate his evening ration without much tasting it. He thought wistfully of a dram of brandy, but decided to conserve it for some time of greater need—and he had no acquaintances on this ship he cared to drink with anyway. He found his hammock and lay rocking from the cross timbers of the lower deck, breathing the fetid air as shallowly as he could. There was a throbbing of drums on shore and he wondered if it had a meaning, if perhaps those drums were signals. The next thing he knew, someone was shaking him awake with a hard clasp on his bare ankle and he came bolting up from a host of dreams he could scarcely remember.
He pulled his boots on, collected his arms, and clambered to the upper deck, yawning behind one hand and scratching mosquito bites with the other. The staff officers were clustered around General Hardy, who was studying a map by lamplight, as it was not quite dawn. Daspir joined the edge of this group, just as Hardy raised one hand to point at the surface of the bay, which lay calm and silvery with starlight.
“There,” he said, comparing with the legend of his map, “it was just there that Columbus sank one of his first ships, the Santa María, and on that shore where he raised the first settlement in this land.”
Daspir shivered in the morning chill. The thought of the ancient beams of the Santa María dissolving in the silt somewhere below their own vessel rang ominously against something in his unremembered dream. And he had heard how Columbus’s first settlement here had been sacked and destroyed by Indians, when the great explorer was voyaging somewhere else . . . But Hardy’s forefinger had settled on the map again. Daspir leane
d in to peer more closely. A road was marked out from the lower end of the Baie d’Acul, back across the peninsula they’d sailed around the previous day.
“Here there is something of an ascent,” Hardy said, tapping the parchment. “Once we have achieved the height, we descend thus—and from that point the road should be open, through Morne Rouge and Haut du Cap to Le Cap itself and the harbor there. Or if it is not, we shall open it.”
At first light the boats were plying between the ships and shore, as a cool mist drifted up from the water of the bay. There was the usual splashing of paddles, creaking of oarlocks, grunting and cursing of soldiers and sailors. The troops had formed on shore before the sun had cleared the top of the hills above them. There’d been no opposition to their landing in this place. In fact the whole area was quite eerily empty of any human sign at all—not so much as a fisherman’s canoe here on the bay. But when they began to march up the steep road Hardy had indicated, a dry rattle of drumming started off to their left, hidden somewhere in the jungle.
The first rays of sun slanting in through the treetops gave a hint of the blazing heat that would follow. Daspir was sweating in his wool uniform, though as a staff officer he’d been given a horse. Sweat-soaked in half an hour’s time, the laboring infantry smelled rather like wet sheep. They went double time up the steep zigzag ascent, which was more of a goat path than the road Hardy’s map had suggested. Daspir pressed up on his stirrups, lifting his seat from the saddle and leaning forward to ease the burden on his mount. The men pressed on, wooden faced, their pigtails hanging limp behind them in the moist heat. The air of the woods surrounding the trail had a thick scent of ripeness and rot. Daspir’s nose wrinkled. They had reached such a height now that the open stretches of the trail gave them a splendid wide view of the bay where the ships were moored and the ocean bending away beyond.
The drum sound thickened in the jungle, picked up speed. Then from the crook of the trail ahead came the sudden roar of cannon. Daspir was in the van with General Hardy; at the noise his horse spooked and slipped from the trail. The struggle of mastering the panicked animal and bringing it back to level ground helped him control his own impulse to jump down from the saddle and cower on the ground. Another horse had fallen with a shattered leg, pinning the rider half under it. After a moment Daspir dismounted and helped the other man free. The action calmed him. Their forward movement had scarcely been checked. Daspir swung back into the saddle. Someone shot the wounded horse and it lay still. Daspir’s mount trembled between his knees but was willing to go on, and Hardy was urging the troops forward with his sword. The cannon fired again and then were silent. Daspir moved up, dimly noticing the bodies of a couple of grenadiers spilled to the side of the trail, passing a wrecked gun carriage flung off the next bend. Then they had burst into a cluster of small clay-daubed houses, just over the crest of the height they’d been climbing. Cannon fired again, from the road below, and women and children and livestock ran scattering in all directions, throwing themselves down the defiles, plunging into cover of the jungle where the hidden drums kept grumbling. The women shrieked in a language that sounded exactly like French, yet Daspir could not find a single intelligible word in it.
At that he stopped short and groped at the back of his head, wondering if he’d taken some unfelt hurt that had knocked the comprehension right out of his brain. But then he realized he still understood Hardy’s shouted orders well enough. He choked, coughed, and saw that the roofs of all the little houses had been set afire. No wonder the women were all screaming. He squeezed his horse forward down the slope, behind the front line of infantry. The horse was cooperating with him better now—it was not such a poor horse as he’d at first thought. A row of black soldiers appeared across the road, and Daspir felt his hat go crooked; only as he set it straight did he hear the volley of musketry. The French soldiers moved on unperturbed except for those who had fallen. Enemy cannons spat out fire, and there was another ring of female screeching. Among the black soldiers Daspir picked out a huge white horse with a small black rider, swirling a sword as long as himself through clouds of smoke above his kerchiefed head. Daspir, who prided himself on his own horsemanship, had not seen such a stallion in his whole life. He swallowed and instinctively spurred out ahead of the infantry line.
Alé! Meté feu partout!
Hardy’s infantrymen were charging with the bayonet. Now they had the advantage of the downhill grade to add to their momentum. A shock, and the enemy line was dispersed. White horse and dark rider had vanished. The black soldiers were scattering into the trees. Hardy’s infantry re-formed and continued marching down the slope. Of a sudden their column was raked by musket fire—not an organized volley, but a series of isolated shots from the cover of the jungle on either side. A few men fell. Daspir picked at his mosquito bites absently as he rode down; the bites were turning to sores where they chafed against his coat collar. He twisted in the saddle and looked back. The blue coats of the infantry flowed down the hill in a steady stream out of the burning village, the white knees of their breeches flashing like scissor blades in the sun.
He felt a flash of exhilaration, without reason, beyond it. Then a tight outward bend of the trail brought him clear of the cover of the trees, and all at once he could see the whole expanse of the great Northern Plain. The land was on fire like a checkerboard: some plantations were ablaze while others remained green and somnolent. Columns of men moved through the fuming landscape like lines of worker ants. At this distance Daspir could not discern what men they were. The humid air was heavy with the smell of scorching sugar.
“Forward!” Hardy ordered. For a moment, the general himself had been staggered by the panorama of the burning plain. But now his men were coming down onto flat and open terrain, with the black soldiers falling back before them. Hardy massed his infantry, signaled a charge— but the blacks would not stand to receive them. They were retreating, in reasonable order, dragging their cannon across a wooden bridge.
Daspir rode up. Without realizing it, he had passed the front line of his own troops to reach the bank of a swift-running brown river. Oxen were laboring on the shoals of the stream bed, hauling on ropes attached to the posts beneath the bridge. There was that small rider on the big white horse, shouting commands to the ox drivers. With a great heave and a groan of ripping wood, the posts gave way, the bridge buckled and collapsed into the water. Scraps of plank and broken joist came eddying out into the spiraling currents of the stream. Daspir watched as the white horse scrambled up the opposite bank; once on level ground, it broke into a canter. A magnificent animal—and the old rag-headed Negro certainly rode with a consummate skill. He moved as fluidly with the horse as if the two were one. By instinct Daspir rode down the bank and scouted the water’s edge, but it looked too deep to cross without swimming. When he looked up he saw that the black riding the big stallion had paused in his movement to study him, and felt a thrill at that recognition.
“What are you doing there, Captain—come back!” It was Hardy’s voice; the general had just appeared on the bank above. Daspir leaned forward and pushed his horse up to join him; Hardy watched his riding with a grudging respect.
“Look you well,” the general said, when Daspir had swung his horse in beside him. “We have the honor to bring the battle to Toussaint Louverture.”
Across the river the little man had slipped down from the warhorse and was moving among the gun carriages, nudging, gesturing. Daspir stared at him, only half believing. But it must be. Something whined between him and Hardy. Daspir reached automatically for his mosquito bites, then realized it must have been a musket ball.
“Get out of this,” Hardy told him. “Ride to the Captain-General and let him know the bridge is down.”
Daspir snapped his fingers to his hat brim and turned his horse to the rear. There was a volley of cannon as he spurred up, and cries as the front rank of Hardy’s infantry was torn by grapeshot on the riverbank. Daspir did not look back. The drums from the j
ungle had gone silent, yet their absence seemed to hum in his head.
“Then we must hurry to find a ford,” Leclerc said, when he’d received the message. “I want to enter Le Cap before dark.” He stroked his silky blond sidewhiskers absently down toward his chin, and narrowed his eyes at Daspir. “But are you not wounded?”
“No,” Daspir said, confused. “I do not think so.” Leclerc seemed to be peering at his hat brim. Daspir pulled off the hat and looked at it. Halfway up the crown was a hole big enough to admit his thumb.
“A fine souvenir that will make of this day,” Leclerc said with a brilliant smile. “And a fortunate first day of battle for you, Captain.”
Daspir flushed with pleasure at the compliment. He saluted Leclerc and rode back toward the riverbank. The cannon barrage Toussaint had organized had now stopped, and the men swarming on the opposite bank were different now. One of Rochambeau’s flying columns had appeared to join them and driven the black soldiers out of their position.
Suddenly weary, Daspir slipped down from his horse. His legs went rubbery when they struck the ground and he caught a stirrup leather for support. Unbelievingly, he squinted at the declining angle of the sun. Almost the whole day had passed in this skirmishing, though to him it had seemed no more than an hour.
Leclerc would never reach Le Cap by nightfall, Daspir realized now. He took off his hat, rubbed the felt, and traced the edge of the bullet hole with one finger. The reddening sun was dropping toward the ridge of Morne du Cap, and east of the mountain the smoke that came boiling up from where the town itself must have been was thick and black as tar.
On the deck of La Vertu the mulatto leaders pressed against the rail, listening to the cannonade that had begun as soon as L’Aiguille was fired on from Fort Picolet. In the space of an hour or even less, all response from the fort had ceased. Rigaud looked to see any sign of a movement of retreat from Picolet, but darkness had settled in to cover everything. An ominous orange glow increased beyond the headland.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 21
