Daspir turned and started downstairs, grateful for the darkness of the stairwell, which covered his angry blush. Michau still stood in the doorway on the ground-floor passage, watching impassively as they went by. On the street Maillart stood facing them, casual, almost uninterested, as if his only real concern had been to herd them out of the house. Was it possible, Daspir thought, that Isabelle no longer wanted to receive him? If so, he had Paltre to thank for it—it was Paltre who forced Isabelle to side with her friends, her house guests, in the quarrel he’d provoked. Or Daspir could blame himself, to a degree, for under the present circumstances he and Guizot would have done better to send up their names and wait below, instead of bursting in as they had done. But he had been too eager—too anxious, he might even say—for maybe it was Major Maillart who presumed too much, who might have particular reasons of his own to put himself between Daspir and Isabelle.
“As you are here,” Maillart said, “I may as well let you know that Doctor Hébert prefers to settle this affair tomorrow, and hopes that Captain Paltre will accommodate him.”
Guizot shifted his feet and cleared his throat. “We are charged to tell you that Captain Paltre regrets his impetuous remark and will offer an apology, if it were acceptable.”
“Really?” said Maillart. “It is very unusual.” There was a touch of sarcasm in his tone, but he also seemed to have been genuinely startled.
“Look,” said Guizot, dropping his formal manners. “We all stood shoulder together at La Crête à Pierrot. In the larger struggle we must stand together still. Surely there is some way to resolve the quarrel without bloodshed. The waste of it all is appalling to me.” His voice cracked. “If not for your friend I’d have lost my arm, and maybe my life along with it.”
“Yes, all right,” Maillart said. “I’ve nothing against the two of you.” He put a hand on Guizot’s shoulder and glanced at Daspir a trifle more coolly. “I know it can’t have been easy for you to bring such a message here. But Captain Paltre’s remark was odious, rather than impulsive. And . . .” Maillart stepped back and looked up at the sky for a moment, then again at the two captains. “You should know that my friend is a peaceable man, and ordinarily he is very slow to notice an insult. But when you have once roused such a man to anger, it is difficult to alter his disposition. I have never seen him so determined as he is now.”
“You mean?” said Guizot.
“I’ll present your offer,” Maillart said slowly, and raised his eyes to the glowing doorways of the balcony above. “But not, I think, tonight. Tomorrow it might have better hope of success. If not, Captain Paltre must plan to keep his appointment in twenty-four hours’ time.”
With a nod, Maillart stepped back into the house. Michau shut the door behind him. There was the sound of the hook scraping into its iron eye. Daspir and Guizot walked back the way they had come, in the direction of the Carénage. From a block distant came the muted sound of the waves beating on the embarcadère. Neither spoke until they were crossing the arched stone bridge that crossed the ravine.
“Do you think Paltre will go through with the apology?” Daspir said then.
To that, Guizot merely shrugged. And Daspir knew there was no definite answer to his question. The only sure thing was that Paltre was plainly unwilling to face certain death for his point of honor. Otherwise he was in such a volatile state that no one could predict what he might do. For that, Cyprien had stayed with him tonight, to supervise his drinking himself unconscious.
“Did you ever suppose he deserved to be shot?” Daspir said.
“Paltre?” Guizot said. “I don’t know. Lately I wonder if anyone deserves to be shot.”
In spite of himself, Daspir let out a dry laugh as they turned into the barracks gate. “Now that’s a very odd thought for a soldier.”
As soon as Maillart had shouldered Guizot and Daspir down the stairs, Nanon gathered up her sewing, rose from her chair, and retired from the room with a ghostly calm. Conversation had faltered, but Isabelle, with much tossing of her head and fluttering of her hands, forced it back to a semblance of life. The doctor sat in the stupor of his exhaustion. In five more minutes, when Maillart had still not returned, he pleaded fatigue and excused himself.
Nanon’s small room beneath the eaves was dark. The doctor groped his blind way into it, trailing a hand along the angled ceiling. Just as he had shrugged out of his shirt, she caught at his waistband and pulled him down. Her mouth fastened hot and tight as a lamprey’s into the hollow below his breastbone. They coupled with a wild ferocity, with no words. When they had finished, the doctor dropped into darkness like a lead weight, but twenty minutes later he shot awake with his heart pounding and a sick tightening in his gullet.
Since La Crête à Pierrot he had known many such awakenings. He’d learned a special concentration which could slow his heart and ease his breathing. Tonight let us be merry, he repeated like a silent prayer, for tomorrow we die. It was strange how this sentence always did soothe him. At his side, Nanon slept peacefully, drawn up into herself, turned away from him. She had a talent for deep sleep, no matter her trials. It was only one of her several accomplishments. The doctor replayed the details of their embraces, detached as though he were some voyeur watching. It had been a virtuoso performance, much aided by her experience and expertise. They knew each other’s likings very well, and could anticipate each other’s movements, like a pair of long-familiar dancers, but for all of that each of them might have been anyone to the other that night.
After all he had hoped for, and even had begun to taste when they first found each other that afternoon, it was a bitter disappointment. But the doctor divorced this feeling from his heartbeat, watching the round of faint starlight cast by the unglazed round window on the angle of the ceiling and the opposite wall. Tomorrow he would want a clear eye and a steady hand. It was Paltre who had turned their love to lust, and the doctor looked forward to killing him for it. The thought relaxed him, and he slept.
A little before dawn the doctor rose, slipped on his drawers, and crept downstairs bare-chested, carrying his pistols wrapped in his shirt. On the ground floor he lit a candle and sat at the dining table, to clean and sight the pistols. Somewhere on an upper floor one of the smaller children began to whimper and was shushed. A few minutes later, Zabeth appeared, up before her accustomed hour. She must have been up and active for quite some time, for she served the doctor a bowl of steaming soupe giraumon, with a fried egg and a boiled plantain. He smiled his thanks, and ate with good appetite. The pistols lay barrel to butt by his right hand, but Zabeth appeared to take no notice of them, though doubtless she was perfectly well aware of his program for the day.
Maillart arrived with the first light at the windows, a little later than the doctor had expected him.
“They will be waiting for us at La Fossette,” he said.
“No hurry,” Maillart said. He looked from the doctor’s bowl to Zabeth, who brought him his own portion.
“What do you mean?” the doctor said. For the first time that morning he felt a little restive. He very much wanted to be on his way before Nanon or his sister appeared.
Maillart interrupted his spoonfuls of soup. “We are not expected at La Fossette today,” he said. “Captain Paltre has offered an apology.”
“An apology?” The doctor sat back.
“If you reject it,” Maillart said, “the encounter will take place tomorrow.”
“Let him cut out his own malicious tongue,” the doctor said. “I will accept that as a token of repentance. Otherwise, he will have the satisfaction he has asked for.”
“I surmise that you mean to reject the apology,” Maillart said. “Yes? For form’s sake, I might just remind you that the Captain-General takes a dim view of dueling at present—officers of whatever quality being in short supply.”
“That is no concern of mine,” said the doctor.
“So be it, then.” Maillart pushed away his bowl. “Captain Guizot is waiting for you in t
he street. On a different errand—it isn’t his fault. The Captain-General requests your presence at the hospital.”
“I’ll be going then,” the doctor said, happy enough to have something to occupy his time. He got up from the table, holstered his pistols, collected his straw sack of herbs, and went out to the street.
Leclerc had sent a coach for him. Sergeant Aloyse sat on the box. Guizot stepped down and held the door for the doctor, then climbed in after him. Sergeant Aloyse snapped the reins across the horses’ backs and the coach creaked around the corner and up the slope toward the Rue Espagnole.
“The position is awkward—” Guizot commenced.
“We needn’t speak of it,” the doctor said. He faced strictly forward, his eyes tight on Aloyse’s salt-and-pepper pigtail.
“But I—”
“We needn’t speak of it,” the doctor said. His throat relaxed as he turned toward Guizot, with an involuntary smile which reminded him that, after all, it was more pleasant to save a life than to take one.
Leclerc awaited them already, just within the hospital gate, which the old guardian began to drag open as soon as the coach appeared. Though the doctor had seen him several times from a distance in the aftermath of La Crête à Pierrot, this was the first time the Captain-General had appeared to take any direct notice of him.
“Doctor Hébert,” he said, “I am most pleased to make your acquaintance. I am told that you are expert not only in the treatment of wounds but also in dysentery, and these devastating fevers which we suffer.”
“I fear my skills may have been exaggerated,” the doctor said, barely attending to this formula as he uttered it.
“I have heard also that you have come through many trials at La Crête à Pierrot.”
Leclerc’s look was sufficiently pointed to remind the doctor of what Tocquet had said the night before. “Like all who survived that experience,” he said, “I must thank God and my guardian angel.”
“To be sure,” said Leclerc, with a beckoning gesture. “Do walk this way, and give me your opinions. I must tell you that our expedition suffers a terrible shortage of qualified medical men, and here especially I am not at all satisfied with the arrangements—”
“I would resume charge of this hospital if you wish,” said the doctor. “It had been my responsibility, before your landing.”
“That was my very hope,” said Leclerc, rubbing his hands together. As he spoke, the rising sun cleared the hospital wall, spreading a band of warmth. They were walking along the rows of patients on their straw mats on the ground. A few of the nurses came up to greet the doctor with quick hand clasps and shy smiles. Behind them, Guizot and Aloyse were maneuvering the coach out of the gateway, so that the cart from La Fossette could come in.
“Mortality from these fevers is very troubling to us,” Leclerc said. “I am told that you have an unusual skill in treating them.”
“There are some local herbs effective against certain fevers,” the doctor said. “In the case of malaria, cinchona is best.” He stopped and looked at Leclerc more closely, noting his skin tone, a slight discoloration of the whites of his eyes, the ghost of a tremor at his fingertips.
“I might recommend such a course to you, Captain-General,” he said. “Unfortunately, cinchona must be imported. I had laid in a good supply just before your arrival, but I am sure it has all been incinerated. And now I don’t know what merchant ships, if any, may be calling at our ports.”
“I will look into it,” Leclerc said. They resumed their promenade. The old guardian, having closed the gate, now stumped along behind them with his stick.
“And there,” said Leclerc, as they reached the wall above the ravine, with a gesture at this last row of moribund patients. “For that fever, what is your specific?”
One of the nurses had stooped to help the nearest man, catching a spew of his black vomit in a gourd. Delicately she wiped his lips and laid his head back on the mat, then pressed his arms to still them, for they writhed in a fading convulsion.
“None,” said the doctor. “That is mal de Siam, the yellow fever. There is no treatment. Few survive.”
“And what accounts for the survival of those few?”
“I do not know,” the doctor said. “I am myself a survivor, but I don’t understand the reason any more than you do.” He paused, looking down the row along the wall. At the lower end of it the grave tenders had begun to lift corpses onto their cart.
“The yellow fever spreads very rapidly among those newly arrived to the colony,” the doctor said. “You may expect it to grow worse with the spring rains. The best solution is to send your new men quickly into the mountains. The bad air of the marshes on the coast promotes the fever.”
Leclerc turned his face toward the wall, fingering his long silky sidewhiskers. The doctor observed his handsome profile. Leclerc was no taller than himself, he noticed, perhaps not even quite as tall. He knew that most of the French troops were already unfit to march into the mountains by the time they arrived, and he expected that the mountain posts were too insecure for his advice to be very safely followed.
“At the least these men should be quarantined once they have taken the yellow fever,” he said. “That the contagion may not spread to others here, who might have better hope to recover.”
Leclerc faced him. “And you suggest?”
“There are the old slave barracoons at La Fossette,” said the doctor. “I don’t know how well they survived the fire, but they were distant from any other buildings.”
“I would not send my troops to the barracoons,” Leclerc said crisply. “And such proximity to the cemetery would be disheartening, is it not so?”
But they’ll mostly die anyway, the doctor thought, and it would be more convenient for the burials. Instead of saying it aloud, he raised his eyes to the hills above the wall.
“These victims might be carried to the height of La Vigie,” he said. “The transport is more difficult, but the air is more salubrious once they arrive. There is no shelter up there since the fire, but if you can furnish me men and material . . .”
“I will see to it.” Leclerc drew out his watch and snapped it open. “Doctor Hébert, you give us hope. I will call on you soon again, but for the moment, please excuse me.”
The doctor bowed, and Leclerc withdrew. He climbed into the coach with Guizot and drove out through the gate behind the graveyard cart.
For the remainder of the morning the doctor surveyed arrangements at the hospital. It seemed to him that the nurses were doing almost everything that could be done—though there were too few of them; too many women had been frightened away by the yellow fever. He would need to recruit more, and he would need to organize an herb gathering, and the supply of fresh water and ordinary grains for those with dysentery also appeared to be insufficient.
The women had even saved his hammock for him; it had been rolled up and stored. At midday he strung it in the accustomed place, and dozed through the hottest hour of the afternoon. When he awoke, he left the hospital and strolled down toward the waterfront, zigzagging block by block, for he was in no special hurry to return to the Cigny house. At the lower gate of the Morne Calvaire lakou, he happened upon Paul, who shouted with pleasure and ran to greet him. The boy bumped his shoulder against the doctor’s hip, and stuck close to him as they moved a little awkwardly along the street toward the Batterie Circulaire.
“Papa,” Paul said. “I wrote you the letters. All the time you were away I wrote the letters.”
“Do you have them still?” said the doctor.
“No,” said Paul. “We could not send them, so I sent them up in smoke.” He pulled away from the doctor’s side and looked up at the hill of Morne Calvaire.
“Well,” said the doctor. “Maybe we were near in spirit then.”
Paul turned toward him, smiling, knocked again into his hip. The doctor draped a hand over his shoulder.
“Papa!” Paul said. “Do you remember Madame Fortier? She is a gran
de dame de couleur—she is very tall?”
“I remember her,” said the doctor, with a vague sense of foreboding. “I am surprised that you do.”
“But she is here now, at Le Cap—I saw her only a few days ago,” Paul said.
It was unusual for him to be so talkative, the doctor thought. Ever since that time he had spent abandoned in these streets so long ago, he had been, though apparently calm and contented enough, quiet and a little withdrawn.
“She said she would come to visit Mami,” Paul continued. “But she has not come, or I did not see her—Papa, can we go to her house? It is in the Rue Vaudreuil.”
“Now?” said the doctor. “What do you want to go there for?” He knew very well where the house must be and had no desire at all to visit it. “And it is far—too far to walk.”
Paul only brightened. “M’ap chaché bourik pou nou!” He ran back toward the lower gate of Morne Calvaire. I will look for donkeys for us.
The doctor looked after him, feeling somewhat dour—his sister would have reproved the boy for blurting out Creole instead of good French, and Paul was running a little wild. Probably he ought to be in school, but then the schools had all been burned, their masters scattered. Now he came bursting back out of that gate, leading two donkeys with their woven straw saddles. A little girl in a red dress glared after him, fists to her hips.
“Wait,” said the doctor. “Did you just take those donkeys from her?” But the girl had disappeared into the gateway, and Maman Maig’ stood where she had been, smiling and waving them on their way.
The Rue Vaudreuil was some considerable distance, but it was pleasant to ride along the harborfront. At the end of the long quai, they swung up into the town and circled out around the hum of the market at the Place Clugny. The house they were looking for ought to have been in the next block, but the doctor could scarcely recognize the work in progress that stood in its place—the original had been all built of wood, and so the fire must have razed it. Before it had been rather garishly painted—a bawdy place, run by Choufleur as a bordello and gambling house, much frequented by the most dissolute French officers in Le Cap. But now . . . the doctor would not have even been sure of the location, if Madame Fortier had not appeared, to open a new iron gate set into a wall rebuilt waist-high.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 82
