The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  He must not stare. Daspir looked around the room at random. The Cignys had not rebuilt with such exactitude as Pauline Leclerc had been able to command, but certainly they must have some resources. There were a new roof and new floors smelling of fresh wood, though Isabelle apologized for the boards being covered with painted canvas rather than the rugs lost in the burning. The walls were all bright with fresh paint and each of the round-topped doorways of the salon framed a new wooden door, now folded open onto the balcony with its new railings of filigreed iron. The afternoon downpour had freshened the air, but still mosquitoes kept floating in through the open doors. Daspir winced, crushing one against his neck, and lowered his hand with its bright dot of blood.

  Claudine Arnaud, who sat beside her husband in a straight wooden chair against the wall, seemed to look with disapproval on this action. Furtively, Daspir crumbled the mosquito beneath his chair. Madame Arnaud sat painfully upright, stiff in a black silk dress that rustled if she moved a hair, though for the most part she held herself perfectly still, silent, her three-fingered hand curled in her lap inside the whole one. Of course her every look seemed disapproving, no matter what came before her long sharp nose and glittering eye. She was reputed to be quite mad, though tonight she did not give much sign of it, unless her silence was a sign. She said nothing, and let the other women’s prattle shower over her.

  For the past ten minutes, Paltre, sitting with his legs sprawled a little too widely for politeness, had been half-surreptitiously kissing his fingers to Nanon, and now abruptly he crossed the room to join her on the small striped sofa where she sat, though she did not seem to much welcome his company. A closer look at the talking bird was his pretext, but his real mission seemed to be to get a hand on her haunch. Of a sudden, the bird flew into his face and scratched it. It rather looked to Daspir as if Nanon had launched it there.

  “Putain!” Paltre flailed the bird from his face and started back, then clutched the crotch of his tight white trousers to make it plain that his “Whore!” was no random expletive, but quite personally intended. Daspir found himself on his feet, his two hands tightening, but Leclerc had also drawn himself up to his meager height.

  “Captain Paltre!” he rapped out, and Paltre deflated, turning away from Nanon, who sat with her knees together and her head lowered. The posture reminded Daspir of how he’d borne his own humiliations recently.

  Leclerc bowed to Isabelle. “I must ask that you excuse us,” he said. “We have a tour of duty to perform.”

  Isabelle arched her neck and simpered something which Daspir did not catch. Leclerc had already stooped to touch Pauline’s fingertips. He beckoned crisply to Paltre, who followed him out of the room. As their boots went thumping down the stairs, Nanon also rose and silently departed.

  “La pauvre!” Pauline coaxed the parakeet onto her wrist and fondled the feathers between its wings. Poor thing! The bird hunched its green shoulders uncomfortably.

  Daspir sat down, a little confused by his own reaction. But Isabelle was certainly looking at him now. It was not her flirtatious glance, but something steadier, more decided. Though he did feel an inward flutter, he had no difficulty holding her gaze; in fact it communicated to him something of her certainty. She caught her lower lip and let it go, reddened and plumped by the white points of her teeth. Daspir’s response to this tiny gesture was so vivid and ardent that he had to sit up straighter and cross his legs to cover it. But by then Isabelle had rejoined the ladies’ talk.

  “Captain-General,” Paltre began, as soon as they had reached the street. “I beg you to understand—I know that colored wench of old—”

  “It is the hospitality of Madame Cigny you have abused,” Leclerc gritted, without looking at him. “Never mind the mulattress.”

  “But—”

  “Be silent!” Leclerc said, and Paltre obeyed. Biting his lips, he walked a pace behind the Captain-General. They were afoot, as they’d left Pauline’s conveyance stationed at the Cigny house. It was no distance, in any case, either to the Governor’s house or the barracks of the Carénage. But Leclerc did not seem to be going there. With Paltre still trailing him, he strode up the grade, crossing the Rue Espagnole and marching on toward the Champ de Mars.

  At the hospital gate, Paltre dared to pluck his sleeve. “Mon général,” he whispered urgently. “It is unwise to visit here. You must have a better care for your health, for here there is contagion—and you just lately recovered from a fever.”

  An aged black had already begun to unwrap the chain from the bars of the gate. Leclerc looked at Paltre coldly.

  “If you are afraid,” he said, “I will dismiss you.”

  It seemed to him that Paltre blanched in the light of the stars that turned above them. Then the captain saluted and so took his leave.

  Leclerc watched him descending the street, surprised that he’d chosen to swallow that last remark, with no attempt at redeeming its implications. Could the risk of infection be so great? Paltre had more experience of the colony than did Leclerc, having been here previously with the mission of Hédouville . . . but that was a useless thought. Leclerc’s pride stiffened him—he pulled his collar straight and marched through the gate the old black had dragged open for him.

  No physician was to be found within the hospital walls. Whatever rogue was in charge of the place must have slunk away to his own dwelling. Leclerc was so short of medical officers that he’d been forced to fall back on the local barber-surgeons, who were by and large a sorry lot. He’d not brought out sufficient doctors with him, and the mortality of those who had come had been shockingly high. In every letter to the First Consul or the Minister of Marine he petitioned for more medical men, but then he asked for many other things he also did not get.

  Stooping over a cane, the old man shuffled after him into the hospital yard. Among the sick and wounded men there drifted half a dozen black or colored women, dressed and coiffed in white. Their movements flowed on the night breeze, in a manner both peaceful and a little eerie. Whenever Leclerc came near to one, she turned a brief and brilliant smile on him, then ducked her head away into her modesty. His response to these smiles was a slight catch in his chest.

  The masonry walls enclosing the compound were still blackened and cracked from the fires, and the destroyed roofs were not yet reconstructed. Rags of sailcloth, or more often merely palm leaves, haphazardly covered the charred beams. Of course it was a scandal. But even without the fire and destruction the ailing men would not have had roofs enough. In their hundreds, they lay in the open courtyard, under the chilly stars and the shivering leaves of the tall palms, exposed to the dangerous night miasma.

  He walked among them, following the floating courses of the white skirts and white headcloths of the nurses. The old man limped behind him with his cane. There was hardly enough room between the pallets for Leclerc to set his feet. He had five thousand men in all his various hospitals, by the latest count. Here and elsewhere they were laid low by dysentery or, still more fatally, the fevers. Some survivors of amputation were recuperating here, but in this murderous climate no one wounded in the body cavity was likely to live long enough to reach a hospital. He had almost five thousand dead on top of those out of action in the hospitals, and more of these were battlefield casualties than he would ever disclose to the First Consul—it was simply not credible that so many veteran soldiers could be killed outright in the mere suppression of a slave revolt.

  Wherever a man was lucid enough to recognize him, Leclerc stooped to offer his hand, with a few words of encouragement, or perhaps some joke. He did not like to touch these infirm people, though he thought he hid his repugnance well enough. Paltre’s warning had perhaps polluted his mind. And, with the dysentery and the rotting wounds, the odor was very disagreeable, and worsened by the stench of the ravine beyond the northern wall.

  Here Leclerc paused before a row of bodies stacked like cordwood. The smell was rank. He swallowed phlegm.

  “How did these men die
?” he inquired of the nurse who stood by him.

  “Lafièv.” Her cushioned lips softened away the r that should have finished the word fever. The deep rich timbre of her voice both thrilled and a little disturbed him.

  “Let them be buried more quickly,” he announced. “Their proximity is dangerous to those who still live.”

  “Yes,” said the nurse. “In the morning the cart comes.”

  “Every morning,” added the old man, who was always following. He smiled agreeably at Leclerc, over gnarled hands coiled around his cane. His head was fully covered with close-cropped white hair, and Leclerc could just make out a pattern of finely etched scars that scrolled around the natural wrinkles of his face.

  “Every morning the cart takes the dead away to La Fossette,” the old man said.

  A cloud of tiny mosquitoes floated over the wall from the ravine and settled like a veil on Leclerc’s face. Frantic for a moment, he batted them away. A sickly heat suffused him. He was faint. The whine of the mosquitoes seemed to separate into words, but when he had recovered a little he recognized a woman’s voice singing, one of the nurses who stood over a small fire near the gate. Though the words had the sound of French, he could not make the least sense of them. That was the worst of their damned patois, it made one think one had lost one’s mind. The song was resonant, keening, and how he wished she would not sing it—the melancholy of this tune would depress and agitate the dying men. Yet he was walking toward her, into the music that poured from her throat, or no, he meant to be returning to the gate. Now he had passed the gateway, and the old man was still smiling doggedly through the bars as he refastened the chain.

  The song faded as Leclerc walked down the hill. Now his head cleared, and he felt cooler, though still clammy. He fingered the welts of fresh mosquito bites along his jawline and his throat. True enough, as Paltre had reminded him, he had suffered from fever not long ago; true also that it tended to recur. Still, for the moment he felt sound enough. The sky above him had steadied from its recent tilting; he could pick out the Great Bear and the Corona Borealis. The pain in his injured groin was no more than a hitch, these latter days. Let this mission be soon completed and he’d be whole and well as ever.

  A sentry saluted him from a post on the corner of the Rue Espagnole, looking a little surprised to see the Captain-General walking alone at this hour of the night. Leclerc smiled at him enigmatically and went on, his mind reaching forward to the correspondence he ought to complete before he slept tonight. The rhythm of his steps beat out the phrases of a letter he’d sent the Minister of Marine a few days before, when he was still at Port-au-Prince: Toussaint is not an ordinary man. He has force of character, and a large head. And if he had been, like ourselves, a witness to the events which happened in Europe during the last ten years, if he had not been spoiled by the successes he obtained over the English, and if he had begun with a better idea of the power of France, this country would be lost to us beyond return.

  And this by-no-means-ordinary man had just driven Hardy out of Dondon, and cost him four hundred and fifty men in the bargain—while in practically the same breath he told Boudet in Port-au-Prince that he, Toussaint, remained unswervingly loyal to France, while the carnage and destruction of the colony was all to be blamed on Captain-General Leclerc. Outrageous, yet Leclerc had ordered Boudet to make a temporizing reply, leaving the door ajar for negotiation. If he did not receive serious reinforcement soon, it might be better to come to terms with Toussaint, who remained capable of causing a great deal of trouble, despite the costly victories Leclerc claimed in the Artibonite campaign just concluded. Though certainly he’d prefer to see Toussaint’s impressively large head lolling out of a hangman’s noose . . .

  At the gate of the Governor’s house the guard admitted him silently; Leclerc forebore to ask if Pauline had returned. When he reached their private chambers, he found that she had not. In the adjacent cabinet he lit two candles and took up the letter to the Minister of Marine he had begun before going out that evening, and reviewed his complaints about the reinforcements he’d recently had by way of La Zélée and La Tourville. A scant eight hundred men—their number a mockery of the thousands he’d requested and desperately needed—ill clothed and unshod and without a single musket to arm them. Moreover, fully a third of them had gone direct from the ships to the hospital.

  Another blanket of mosquitoes unfurled over his hands and forearms. He killed a dozen, slapping the palm of each hand on the back of the other. The insects did not start up fast enough to save themselves, if they were battening on a vein. But these black rebels were the same as the mosquitoes. No matter how many one destroyed, there were always more and they arrived from all directions.

  Stop that thought. In search of something more constructive, Leclerc fastened on the evening’s discussion of La Tortue. The idea of a hospital there bore further investigation. It sounded quite a salubrious place. Perhaps he’d visit personally, maybe even with Pauline. Let him once acclimate his men and he would win this war definitively. Leclerc shook off the chill that had come over him. He lifted a pen and dipped it in the well. I will restore a bit of order here, he wrote, for thus far we have walked in chaos and ruin.

  When they departed from the Cigny house, Daspir and Cyprien lingered a little on the far side of the street, for the spectacle of Pauline embarking in the sedan chair contraption she favored was worth the observation. She’d decked out five more blacks in the same feathered turbans and robes as her “Moustapha”—all fine, strong men who bore these costumes with a dignity that made them somewhat less ridiculous.

  “It is her fantasy of the Mameluke style, I suppose,” Cyprien said in a low tone.

  Daspir glanced at him, half curious. Cyprien claimed to have been with Bonaparte for a time in Egypt, though he looked a little young for it. Daspir himself was far too young to have joined that campaign. But at the moment he was so distracted by his image of Isabelle that even the sight of Pauline’s artlessly engineered disarray barely held his attention.

  Four of the turbaned blacks had raised the litter by its poles, and stood there stolid as a team of plow horses, while the other two lifted her aboard, settled her, packed striped cushions and shawls around her. At the crook of her finger, Moustapha handed her the parakeet, which settled on her wrist to preen. On the balcony of the Cigny house, two female figures appeared to raise their small hands in the last au revoir. Instantly Daspir picked out Isabelle, the smaller one, though he could not make out her face within the silhouette, and he could not tell if she saw him at all.

  Maybe her looks and gestures had meant nothing after all. Pauline’s litter bearers were trudging away—Moustapha processing ahead of them with a torch, and the sixth man bringing up the rear. The women left the balcony, and the slim doors closed in the arch behind them, though light still glimmered at the cracks.

  “The night wears on,” said Cyprien. “There was a little night life here, before . . .”

  He yawned, with a slightly morose air, and Daspir followed him along the outer wall of the Cigny house, whose rows of lower archways were shuttered dark and tight. A faint scorched smell still clung to everything, despite the renovation. When they reached the corner, a sound behind him made him halt. It was like a hiss, in the form of a whistle. When Daspir turned, a door had opened, though there was no light behind it. Isabelle’s serving woman Zabeth stood with her hip cocked out of the door, just pulling her fingers from the corners of her mouth.

  “Ah,” said Cyprien. “If not the mistress, why not the maid?”

  He gave Daspir a shove that wrenched the sore spot behind his shoulder blade, though he knew it was meant for encouragement. Indeed it was to him, Daspir, that Zabeth beckoned. As he approached, she melted into the doorway. With scarcely a tick of hesitation he stepped into the narrow passage. But Cyprien must have misconstrued the situation, for there was a man with her, another of the house servants. He closed the door behind Daspir, and beat the heavy iron hook into its
eye with the heel of his hand. Now there was no light at all, and Daspir felt a quick thrust of alarm. He could smell the other man’s sweat alongside his own odor (of which he was suddenly, uneasily conscious), and the woman’s sweeter, muskier scent, all mingled with the persistent smell of burning. Zabeth brushed his fingers and he moved in the direction of her touch, no longer afraid, though the other man was still somewhere behind him in the dark. He balanced himself with one hand on the roughly plastered wall.

  Then they were climbing the tight turning of a stair. The man’s voice said something indistinct from the lower level where he had remained, and there were other voices vaguely audible from elsewhere in the house, and a peal of Isabelle’s laughter. Above the stair there must have been some ghost of light, because he could see the fabric of Zabeth’s dress, stretching rhythmically over her haunches and her undulating back. The dress was pale yellow, he remembered from when she’d served the coffee tray in the salon, but in this darkness he could not have told the color.

  She opened an inner door, and Daspir stepped through it, feeling a curtain brush over his arm and shoulder. Zabeth’s fingers were outlined in a red glow. She had lit a candle in the cup of her hand, and now set it down beside a bed that almost completely filled this tiny chamber. Daspir’s shins were nudged into the bedding, while his back was against the wall. From beside the door Zabeth surveyed him, swaying a little from her hips. Her smile was bright, amused, like her eyes. The yellow dress brought out the dark luster of her skin. The dress was demurely buttoned up to her collarbone, but Daspir’s eyes caught on the rounds of her breasts swelling into the fabric, and his breath caught in his throat.