“Yes,” said the doctor.
“What—he can’t have told you he meant to leave us.”
“No,” said the doctor. “But he has brought us far enough. We won’t have any trouble on the plain today.” He polished his glasses and settled them on his nose. “Probably Riau has gone back to Toussaint at Marmelade, as you suspected.”
Maillart snorted as he stood up, stamping his feet down hard into the heels of his boots. He took his exasperation out of doors, and on the gallery poured himself the dregs of Cléo and Isidor’s coffee pot.
Romain’s men had filtered away during the night or the early morning. Maybe Riau had moved among them. At any rate there was no one now to be seen in the compound but women, children, a few halt old men. And here came Moustique with Guizot from the direction of the cases by the little chapel—Moustique shouldering an unwieldy bundle more or less the size of himself. A little boy trotted under the end of it, raising it above his head.
“You’re coming with us today, then?” Maillart said.
“Yes.” Moustique huffed as he swung down his load. The child swung himself astride the bundle, grinning. Maillart turned to Guizot.
“I trust you passed a restful night?”
Guizot only blinked at him, slowly and dreamily. Maillart rather envied him his girl. He himself had been wholly taken up by the doctor’s crisis. But the young captain’s air of beatitude was so innocent that Maillart found it difficult to sustain his annoyance.
They were on the road before the sun had cleared the treetops, and might have made very good time to Le Cap, had not the doctor insisted on detouring to the shore of the Baie d’Acul so that Guizot could bathe his healing wound in seawater. In the end, all of them went in swimming— the doctor and Guizot and Moustique and the gaggle of boys that trailed along to help them with their pack train, a couple from Thibodet and the rest more recently acquired at Habitation Arnaud. Maillart did not know their names. Only Maillart remained on shore, one hand on his weapon, keeping watch.
Sweat prickled him under his uniform. There was no sign of any life except for a couple of spotted pigs that came grunting down the trail they’d used themselves to wallow in the shallows. The strand was lined with sea grape and small almond trees. Around the further curve of the bay the jungle was a dense and featureless green wall. And if any enemy were to catch them here, their whole wet, naked party would be killed or captured soon after Maillart got off his one shot and perhaps half a dozen cuts of his sword.
He loosened his belt and let the heavy scabbards it supported settle to the ground, then shrugged out of his coat and his shirt, cupping the pendant at his throat to hide it from Moustique, who’d chosen this moment to come glistening out of the water. The situation reminded Maillart uncomfortably of the doctor’s probe about secret orders. He slipped the pendant into his pocket and rolled his trousers around it. Then he dashed into the water, plunged under, swam a length or two, and surfaced to look back. Moustique was dressed and keeping watch after all, with Maillart’s long dragoon pistol balanced on his bony knees.
All the broad expanse of the Baie d’Acul was a still, glassy mirror surface, returning the brilliant blaze of the sun. Near the mouth of the bay a pod of porpoises broke the horizon line into dark running curves, reminding Maillart of thoughts he’d like to drown. So long as he was active in the water—splashing the black boys and even Guizot—he was sufficiently distracted. The day was calm and sweet, and the doctor’s peculiar sense of safety seemed justified.
Later, though, when he’d resumed his clothing and remounted, Maillart could not lose consciousness of the pendant strung round his neck on its frail gold chain. He’d taken to wearing it so for fear of losing it, though like as not it would be better lost. The light touch of the disk on his collarbone recalled the coy painted face with the cautionary finger laid across the lips. When he thought of Isabelle unhusbanded, his heart flopped and rolled in his chest like a puppy, yet this sensation merely confused him; he didn’t know what to make of it or the circumstance. And the secret of the pendant was not Isabelle’s. Maillart did not enjoy the possession of secrets. If he considered, he thought it probable that there was some darker secret, deeper than the order Boudet had revealed and which Maillart had tied up in the pendant—a secret he had no desire to discover.
34
“I have made one of the most painful campaigns it would be possible to make,” Leclerc had reported to his brother-in-law from his temporary headquarters at La Crête à Pierrot, “and I owe the position in which I find myself only to the rapidity of my movement.”
Billeted now to Leclerc’s staff, Captain Daspir had the opportunity to overhear this snatch of dictation. Since then, the Captain-General had somewhat recuperated from the strains of his difficult campaign. His bruised groin had healed enough that he could ride a horse again. At Port-au-Prince he had spent a few apparently festive evenings with the beautiful Pauline, before she returned by boat to Le Cap. One would thus surmise, as Cyprien whispered to Daspir and Paltre, that Leclerc had taken his boots off more than once—though Toussaint Louverture remained very much at large.
Their movement was rapid enough, Daspir reflected as they flung themselves once more over the mountains in the direction of Le Cap. But their speed never seemed quite equal to what the enemy could sustain. Leclerc’s sense of urgency was probably stimulated by the knowledge that Pauline’s ship would have reached Le Cap before him, and reports from the north had been troubling, especially in the last few days. In committing so much of his force to the pursuit of Toussaint from Gonaives to (as he’d supposed) the Artibonite, Leclerc had left Le Cap defended only by Boyer’s sprinkling of colonial troops and the sailors in the fleet, and there was no word of the reinforcements from France that had long been expected there. Meanwhile, both Toussaint and Christophe were said to be ravaging the Northern Plain, along with a dozen other rebel chiefs of lesser notoriety.
Yet when they crossed the mountains, there was no enemy to confront. Snipers and skirmishers harassed their column as it wound through Plaisance and Limbé, but these hill bandits would not risk an all-out engagement with a division marching in such strength. Where the road leveled out, north of Limbé, all was peaceful, the warm morning sun dappling fields of cane and corn which were still standing, ripening. Market women gathered at the crossroads to offer their wares to the passing troops. Daspir bought a stalk of the tiny sweet yellow bananas he had never seen anywhere else but this island, and a stalk of cane to peel and chew—a practice he’d learned from watching the black soldiers of the Ninth who now marched in their company. He traded sections of his cane to Cyprien and Paltre for a future share in the two large gourds of clairin on which they’d pooled their resources. With these provisions they went on reasonably content.
Beyond the Baie d’Acul the aspect changed: fire-blackened fields rolled away from the road they traveled, clear to the horizon of the north coast. The wood of Daspir’s cane stalk, drained of sugar, splintered in his mouth. He spat the pulp into the road. At the time of his first landing, this country had not been so devastated as now, though there had been some burning when he rode this way before. The orange he’d plucked from a slightly scorched hedge was the first fruit he had tasted in this land. Today there were no oranges whatsoever, and all that remained of the citrus hedges was a persistent stubble. The stone gateposts of the plantations that they passed were all soot-streaked, their iron deformed by the heat of burning. Except for the contour of the mountain to their left, Daspir could pick no familiar feature of their progress.
A little way short of Haut du Cap they came upon a large band of black irregulars in open insurrection, who fired one ragged volley at their column and then bolted. As the terrain seemed to offer them no shelter, Leclerc ordered a pursuit. Yet the burned fields, flat and featureless as they seemed, proved to be laced and wormholed with ditches and creeks into which their attackers swiftly disappeared. The three captains had to pull up their galloping horses at
the steep bank of a stream, and then quickly dismount under fire from an unburnt patch of brush forty paces distant.
Paltre, furious that his horse had been shot in the hindquarter, turned his brace of pistols on the brush pocket. Daspir and Cyprien crawled toward it belly-down, under cover of Paltre’s intermittent fire. The brush was vacant when they reached it; only a scatter of torn cartridge paper proved that the snipers had been there. A few muddy footprints showed the path of their escape down the streambed.
“As well try to track snakes in a swamp.” Cyprien spat ash from a pinkish hole in his soot-blackened face.
“Makaya! Gadé Makaya!” An equally soot-powdered black was rushing toward them in a high state of excitement, waving his arms and shouting, “Watch out for Makaya!” Daspir, whose nerves were already jangled, would have shot him if Cyprien had not caught his arm.
“That’s one of the Ninth—he’s one of ours,” Cyprien hissed in Daspir’s ear, though he was simultaneously pulling him down into the cover of the streambed.
“Sé moun Makaya yo yé,” the black soldier babbled as he rushed by, high on the bank. They are Makaya’s people. He seemed to have lost or thrown away his weapon.
“And who is Makaya?” Daspir whispered.
“One of the brigand chiefs hereabouts,” Cyprien said. “I know no more.”
As soon as they started back toward Paltre, they were raked again by musket balls—now from a ditch between them and the road. The same volley knocked down Paltre’s wounded horse and he let the other two slip; they cantered off through the ash with their reins trailing. For the next half-hour, Cyprien and Daspir were pinned down in the brush patch and completely cut off from the infantry. They didn’t know if Paltre were dead or alive; all they could see was the pulsing flank of the downed horse. The other horses had drifted to the edge of the stream. Daspir crept around under cover of the bank and managed to catch both of them.
The voices of Makaya’s men and the men of the Ninth continued to halloo up and down the ditches, amid sporadic gunfire and the occasional howl of a wounded man. Any movement on the open plain stirred up such whirlings of ash that the content of the action was invisible in the cloud. Cyprien and Daspir crouched back to back with the horses between them and each of their pistols trained toward the nearest bend of the streambed. Daspir had passed his left arm through the loop of his horse’s reins, and used it to support his right hand on the pistol grip. The torn shoulder still pained him, though he no longer had to carry the arm in a sling. No one appeared, and the noise of skirmishing receded to the north. After ten or twelve minutes of calm, they cautiously emerged from their cover and found Paltre unhurt, curled against the belly of the wounded horse, which was quietly bleeding to death beside him. Cyprien put it away with a shot between the eyes, then took Paltre up behind his saddle.
“Look there,” Daspir alerted the others, when they’d ridden perhaps two hundred yards toward the road. A gang of Makaya’s men had swarmed out of the ditches and were busy flaying the dead horse and dressing out joints of meat with their coutelas. One scurried away with the saddle, which Paltre had forgotten to salvage. With a curse, Paltre pulled out his pistol and fired, scarcely aiming. The men scattered briefly, then returned to their work.
The rest of Leclerc’s column, similarly disconsolate, was re-forming on the road. A good number of Makaya’s men had reappeared in the open, just out of musket range to the south, blocking the roadway to Morne Rouge. They capered rudely, sounded their conch shells, swirled long whips fashioned from the tails of bulls. Leclerc’s teeth clenched, and his hand crawled on the pommel of his sword. But the men were drained from their bootless pursuit and half-choked on all the ash they’d inhaled. Moreover it was now very late in the day, and heavy clouds were blowing in from the mountains to the east. Leclerc ordered their march to continue toward Le Cap.
They reached the gate with the rain coming behind them in a neat line across the plain, like the blade of a knife scraping crumbs from a table. The troops moved out smartly along the Rue Espagnole. Civilians turned out to cheer them, with some real enthusiasm, lining the streets under the balconies of houses beginning to be rebuilt. A few young women even had flowers to toss. Word was that Hardy had been whipped from Dondon to the gates of Le Cap a few days earlier, so Leclerc’s arrival in force was more than welcome.
Most of the division turned uphill in the direction of the barracks there, but Paltre, Daspir, and Cyprien continued with Leclerc and a few other staff officers in the direction of the Governor’s house. The rain blew after them; the streets were clearing in its wake. Daspir tossed his reins to a groom and hurried under the portico. Here, thanks to Pauline’s pressure, prodigies of restoration had been achieved: the roof retimbered, walls freshly plastered, and any trace of soot whitewashed away. Pauline turned a cool cheek to Leclerc’s embrace. With her was Isabelle Cigny; Daspir went toward her and began to bow over her hand, but Leclerc’s voice arrested him.
“You’ll frighten the ladies, Captain.” Leclerc laughed harshly. “Why, you look like one of our blackamoors.”
Daspir touched a finger to his cheek and looked at the soot on the ball of it. But he was no worse than the others, especially Paltre, who was covered in horse blood along with the ash. He drew himself rigidly upright, snapped a salute at his commander, and stalked out blindly into the hammering rain.
There was no ash left on him by the time he’d crossed the block to the barracks of the Carénage; it was as if the rain had peeled him, though in his angry discontent he scarcely noticed it. He went into the barracks and sat down on the edge of a wooden bench, trembling from exhaustion as much as the wet and chill. Upset as he was, he scarcely noticed his trembling either. Why had Leclerc retained him on staff if he couldn’t stand the sight of him? He had probably saved the Captain-General’s life at the moment when Placide—Placide!—would have cut him down. And yet—well, there was the heart of it, Daspir saw in a quick cold flash: his presence could only remind Leclerc of that moment of his helplessness, and of course the embarrassing wound to his groin as well. For that, Leclerc could not help but make the preferment Daspir had merited a misery to him. An absurd position, Daspir thought, but he saw no way out of it. He rolled his head against the wall and dozed.
A few minutes after the rain had stopped, Cyprien came in whistling and announced that they were bidden to an evening chez Isabelle Cigny.
“I won’t go,” Daspir said gloomily.
“What? Don’t sulk,” Cyprien said. “You don’t want to rust all night in barracks.”
Daspir shrugged and stared at the floor. He felt a scratch in the back of his throat; no doubt he’d take cold from the wetting he’d got. Cyprien sat down beside him and shook him by the shoulder.
“She asked for you particularly,” he said.
“She did?” Daspir looked up.
“She did indeed,” said Paltre, who had come in with Cyprien and was now doing his best to clean the front of his coat with a wet handkerchief. “And we’re told it’s not a favor to ignore.”
Pauline flinched as the parakeet stepped from a fold of the tunic she sported onto the bare curve of her shoulder; she made a moue of exaggerated pain. The tall, cool mulattress Nanon went to her and stroked a finger down the bird’s legs; it took a backward step to this new perch.
“Comme tu es belle,” the parakeet said, turning the bead of its eye on Nanon.
“Faithless—betrayer!” Pauline chided the bird, then shifted her attention back to Xavier Tocquet. “Do tell us more about La Tortue.”
Daspir inspected Tocquet with a certain interest. He reclined in his chair with the air of a crocodile basking in shallow water, completely at ease but not especially responsive. A shadow of suspicion had passed over him, for he was thought to have been one of Toussaint’s arms suppliers, and yet more recently he had been of great service to the expedition in putting down the late rebellion at La Tortue.
“It is as pleasant an isle as you imagine, Madame,
” Tocquet informed her.
“Oh!” said Pauline. “I do so want to see it.”
Tocquet smiled on her lazily, distantly. “No doubt a visit can be arranged,” he said. Daspir saw how Pauline was piqued at his indifference to her.
“I have heard the island might be a good situation for a hospital,” Leclerc said.
Tocquet put his fingertips together and rolled his head indolently toward the Captain-General. “It well might be,” he said. “For convalescents, certainly.”
“But it is a most agreeable place for people in the best of health!” Isabelle began telling a tale of her excursions to La Tortue—edenic idylls she had passed there as a child. The blonde, Elise Tocquet, put in a word or two as well, for Isabelle had taken her there at a later time. In season, one might find quantities of turtle eggs in the sands of the beach—the island took its name from the numbers of big sea turtles in the waters surrounding it, and the meat of the turtle was also delectable if properly prepared. There was wild fruit aplenty on La Tortue, and wild pigs and goats loosed on the island by filibusters generations gone, which could be succulently roasted on the boucan . . . and meanwhile one’s slaves prepared a bower where one might pass a night under the stars. Of course, that had been a more innocent time, before the present troubles had begun . . .
Daspir watched Isabelle, less engaged by her vivid descriptions of delicacies than by her movements, the snap of her dark eyes, the shape of her lips which were so full (though her mouth was small), the wing-like gestures of her hands. Had she really asked for him especially? Cyprien might have deceived him on that point, only to cheer him, and to assure his company at this evening’s entertainment. Both Cyprien and Paltre were now rather drunk, having dipped heavily into their rum gourds before presenting themselves here. Daspir had partaken more cautiously, on the chance that Cyprien’s hint might be true.
But Isabelle did not make him a particular target of her conversation— indeed she was more flirtatious with almost any other man in the room— Tocquet excepted, but Leclerc especially. And if her eyes did sometimes seem to linger on Daspir’s face, he might have merely imagined that . . . There was something, just below the line of her quite daring décolletage, that shifted with the rising of her breath and pressed against the cloth. Now when she turned her head toward Pauline, a gold chain lifted against her throat, so fine it was almost invisible.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 78
