Bienvenu had reason to wish Arnaud dead, because in that time Arnaud was known as the cruelest of slave masters. Maybe I was wrong to tease Bienvenu about it. The woman took our gourds away and began to wash them from a jar of rainwater, singing softly to herself as she washed. I would have liked to stay near the softness of that song, but I went away to sleep in another place so Bienvenu could be alone with the woman.
The next day Christophe rode out of Marmelade, with most of the men who had come with him. They rode out the same way they had come the day before, along the road to Dondon. Toussaint had ordered Christophe back to the Cordon du Nord, and ordered him not to do any more talking with Leclerc.
By noon that day Guiaou had come back from Ennery again. Merbillay sent with him a basket of the small, sweet rose-colored mangoes of Ennery, and these Guiaou shared with Riau. In the hottest part of the day we slept in the shade of the ledge where Bienvenu was camped. Then late in the afternoon Placide came to wake us. Riau and Guiaou were ordered to go with Placide and Toussaint out on the road toward Dondon.
I never knew what was Toussaint’s purpose in going on that road that day, though later I thought that maybe he already knew what was coming to meet him there. Sometimes he rode out with Placide to teach him things about the country and his way of moving through it and of using it to fight the blancs, and sometimes he would bring Riau into that talk. But today Toussaint sent Riau and Guiaou ten horse lengths ahead of him, while two other guardsmen in their silver helmets rode at the same distance behind. With Toussaint and Placide were Chancy and Charles Belair, but we were too far apart from them to hear any of their words.
The time of the heavy rains was not yet come, but it was going to rain again that day in Marmelade. Gray clouds sank over the tops of the mornes to the northeast, and Guiaou and I looked at each other because we could both smell the rain on the wind. Then Guiaou held up one finger.
“Listen,” he said.
I turned my ears up the road, but I heard nothing. We had stopped before a bend where the road turned to follow the curve of the morne we were climbing. Behind us, Toussaint and the others had stopped. They were passing a spyglass among them and pointing to something down in the ravine we could not see.
“Kouté,” Guiaou said again. Listen.
I thought I heard the wheezing of the horse before I heard the hoofbeats, but before I had well understood either sound the rider rushed around the bend, so fast that our two horses were frightened, and Guiaou’s horse almost went over the edge into the ravine. Guiaou sawed on the reins to bring his horse back, and his lips and the edges of the scars on his face turned gray. The rider pulled his horse to a stop just before it knocked into our horses. Its split hooves knocked small stones into the ravine. When the horse hung down its head, strings of white slobber hung out of its mouth, and mixed with it were threads of blood. I saw he had killed this horse with hard riding. It made my stomach tight to see it.
“Where do you come from?” Guiaou said. He still could not stop his horse from dancing. He was holding the reins too tight.
“Sans-Souci,” the rider said, breathless. “I have a message—where is Toussaint?”
But by then Toussaint had already come up. Behind him, Placide’s face showed a moment of fear, but then he gripped in his right hand the red mouchwa têt Guiaou had given him, and his face closed.
“What is it?” Toussaint said, in his most gentle voice.
“I come from Sans-Souci,” the rider said. “Christophe—” He stopped for breath. This rider was almost as windbroken as his horse. Whenever I looked at that horse my stomach shrank tighter. I wanted to shoot it and push it into the ravine where I would not see it any more. There was nothing to do but shoot it, but I knew we must take it back to camp, because there were men there who had not tasted meat for many weeks.
“Christophe has given up to the blancs,” the rider said. “He has given up all his posts, from Dondon to Pont Français. Grande Coupe, Mornet, Grande Rivière . . .”
“Grande Rivière?” Toussaint said. “Where is Sans-Souci?”
“He got away to Cardinaux. Christophe would have killed him, but he got away,” the rider said. “He has still a few men with him. Perhaps two hundred.”
Toussaint made the sign of the cross with a small movement, as if he hoped no one would see. He held his two hands over his heart.
“What a misfortune,” he said slowly.
Toussaint was looking out across the ravine to all the clouds thickening in the sky. His hands lowered, and one of them reached under his coat to touch the string of small wooden skulls he always kept hanging from his belt. We heard the skulls clicking one against the other.
Then Toussaint turned to Placide, as if he would explain to him, but Placide had learned enough by then to know the meaning of what had happened. With all those posts in the hands of the blancs, there was nothing to protect Marmelade any more, or the passes to the Central Plateau. It was for nothing now that we had beaten the General Hardy at Dondon. Toussaint had made a lot of plans. When the rains flooded the Artibonite River, he meant for Dessalines to take back La Crête à Pierrot. Vernet was supposed to take back Gonaives and Toussaint himself would ride from Plaisance to Limbé. Then the blancs in the north would be cut off from the blancs in the south and Toussaint could beat them one by one. But now none of these things could happen. Sans-Souci might hang on in the mountains, but he would have to run after every fight. I remembered how well Sans-Souci had received Riau two days before, and I almost wished I had not left him.
Toussaint stood quietly, very calm, except for the clicking of the skull beads. Maybe his lips moved in some prayer to Jesus. I could not see what was behind his head, and if he was truly surprised by what had happened I never knew. Another day, when Toussaint rode down to Marchand to bring the news to Dessalines, Dessalines rose up in anger from his fever bed. Dessalines was one of very few who dared show his anger before Toussaint.
“I know him,” Dessalines said, when Toussaint told him what Christophe had done, “and he would never do this thing without your order.”
The day Sans-Souci’s rider came, we led the ruined horse down to the place where Bienvenu was camped. Bienvenu and Guiaou bled it, skinned it, boiled the brains, and roasted the meat of it on the boucan. I, Riau, I ate my share, though without pleasure. I needed strength for when Toussaint would call me to copy letters late into that night. And afterward I could not sleep, lying in the dark beside Guiaou, who in his trust of Toussaint always slept deeply. Words of the letters flew like bats among my thoughts. Maybe Christophe had betrayed Toussaint, as it appeared, as Toussaint wanted it to appear. Or maybe he gave Christophe a secret order, in the headquarters room behind the rain, to give in to the blancs while Sans-Souci kept on fighting them. That was much like a thing Toussaint would do, to work with both hands, to use one hand against the other. But I could not see his reason for it now. And it did seem that Toussaint really felt betrayed. I, Riau, I wrote for him until the candle wax ran down and hardened on the table, copying angry, bitter words to send Leclerc. The letter ended this way—Whatever might be the resources of the French army, he would always be strong and powerful enough to burn, ravage, and sell very dearly a life which had also sometimes been useful to the mother country.
37
When Maillart’s eyes opened, he found Isabelle quietly watching him from where she reclined on the fringed cushions of her secret chamber, naked except for the sheet that swirled around her hips. She had lit a scented candle which left one side of her face in shadow, while catching a glow in both her dark eyes. Maillart thought he glimpsed some wistfulness there, an echo of the sadness he felt himself as he roused from his brief postcoital slumber. The small, close room was still hot with his smell and hers, the musk only partly covered by the sweet overlay of the candle.
When he reached for her, she pulled away. “It’s late.” Her voice was cool, but without real sharpness—only detached. God only knew what was in her heart; t
his thought was a habit to Maillart now, having passed through his head so many times. As she twisted free of the embrace he’d attempted, the house key strung around her neck dropped between her breast and ticked against the carved stone penis there. This latter memento no longer disturbed Maillart as it once had done, though at first it had quite unmanned him.
“As you like,” he said. He groped for his trousers, then stood to pull them on, awkwardly balancing in the narrow space between the bedding and the wall. Isabelle put out a hand as if to steady him, light fingers probing his thigh muscle through the fabric.
“Now then, the day’s getting on, as you say.” Maillart squinted up at the single veiled window, which really gave next to no clue to the time. Likely it was only a little after dawn, for he could still hear the cries of charcoal sellers in the street outside the house, and the first scent of coffee was just rising from below.
Isabelle let go of him and reached for her crumpled chemise. As she raised her arms to the sleeves, her breasts lifted around the pair of pendants, cool metal and cold stone, and Maillart felt a pulse of fresh desire, but he suppressed it. He buttoned his shirt and crammed the tails into his trousers. Isabelle tossed back her crown of dark curls and gathered it with a ribbon at the back of her neck. The movement brought the cloth of the chemise tight against her dark nipples; between them the stone pendant bulged.
“I have another token for you,” Maillart said as he put on his coat. Isabelle turned toward him, curious, raising her chin as she lowered her arms. Maillart felt in his coat pocket and spun the china pendant toward her on its filament of fine chain. Now the moment had come, he felt a little loath to give it up. He’d worn it around his own neck for most of his way across the country, but taken it off for this tryst with Isabelle, not wanting any interruption. She pulled the pendant toward the candle’s flame, drawing him after her, for his wrist was still engaged in the chain. The same flash of sadness touched him again when he saw the crow’sfoot marks around the corners of her eyes.
“But this is the one I gave to Elise,” she said. “Do you mean to tell me—”
Maillart felt a flush warming his throat. “I did not have it from her so directly,” he said.
Somehow they’d both released the chain; the pendant fell on the bed between them, too light to make a sound.
“I’d better tell you.” Maillart sat, gingerly, on the edge of the bed.
“Indeed you had,” said Isabelle.
“We found it in a box of souvenirs at Port-au-Prince. I and General Boudet and a few others—it was in Toussaint’s cabinet there.”
“Toussaint? You mean—” Isabelle’s face, with its roundly parted lips, quite resembled the image painted on the pendant, except that her look was frank astonishment, rather than the coyness of the painting. “I had no notion,” she said. “None.”
“So much the better.” Maillart looked at the tapestried wall. “There is an order, I heard there—any white woman known to have consorted with the blacks is to be defamed as a whore and shipped to France.”
Isabelle detached her fingertip from her lower lip and tapped the china pendant with her nail.
“Well,” said Maillart. “None but I could have known its provenance. And no one missed it when I took it from the rest, there were so many . . .”
“Really so many?” Isabelle stared at him.
“Yes, with locks of hair and all of that, and some women had even been foolish enough to write letters.”
“The foolishness of some women knows no bounds.” She paused. “You’re telling me Elise was not so foolish.”
“No. She was not.” Maillart swallowed. “And General Boudet is a gentleman. He burned everything that would take a flame and threw the rest into the canal—yet I thought I ought to preserve this for you.”
“It is kind of you,” Isabelle said abstractedly. She gathered the pendant and chain in her palm. “I suppose Elise might still be denounced.” She caught Maillart’s reluctant eye. “As I might be.”
“Oh, surely not.” But Maillart could not hold her gaze. He was memorizing a pattern of the tapestry: some European bird with its throat open, vomiting an inaudible song. “That wretched Paltre,” he blurted out. “He goes around muttering, and who knows who listens. He saw too much in this house, I fear, when he was here with Hédouville in ninety-eight.”
“If only Doctor Hébert had done away with him.” Isabelle’s hand clenched on the pendant.
“He can’t be killed if he won’t fight,” Maillart said. “We are not murderers.”
“Of course not,” Isabelle said, but it seemed she had scarcely heard him. From the rear of the house, the voice of a cock was repeating its dawn cry. Isabelle’s fingers curled and uncurled over the pendant like the legs of a starfish.
“Let Paltre say one word openly against you and I’ll stop his mouth forever,” Maillart said. Then, in another burst of irritation: “I don’t see why you let that Captain Daspir hang about, mooning like a lovesick calf.”
Isabelle’s laugh was bright, but harsh. “You’ve no call to be jealous of him,” she said. “He is only a very young calf, as you say.”
“Yes.” In spite of himself, Maillart grinned into a fist. “But someone seems to have given him the notion he’s a bull.”
This time Isabelle laughed wholeheartedly, and a little too loudly for discretion. “Oh . . .” She caught his hands in both of hers. “How good it is to laugh.” Her voice lowered. “But now you really had better go.”
The hidden stair curled down to release Maillart into the garden. Nanon and Zabeth were giving the smaller children their breakfast at a small table under the portico, but no one appeared to notice the major, as he glided quietly toward the side gate. Only Gabriel, walking among fresh planted sprigs of aloe, looking for snails, glanced up and caught his eye. A handsome boy, black as he was, and stout for his small size. Maillart smiled and winked at him, and on further thought gave him an English penny from his pocket before he let himself out onto the street.
There were the hollow eyes of Captain Daspir, bearing down on Maillart from across the way. Maybe he had been standing there sleepless all night, shifting from one leg to the other, like a stork. Maillart sent him an easy smile, stretched luxuriously in the gathering sunshine, and touched his hat to the young captain before turning his back and walking away in the direction of the Place d’Armes. As a younger man he too had skulked on the borders of Isabelle’s other assignations, and known all the torments Daspir’s haggard face now expressed.
But Isabelle had told the truth; he had no reason to be jealous of Daspir. The one man who had earned his jealousy had been dead since last November. Joseph Flaville. Maillart had really quite liked Flaville, respected and even admired him a little, though it had shocked him to the bone when he learned that it was he who’d presented Isabelle with the ever-so-unusual stone pendant she still wore. But where had he seen that face so recently that it now came before his eyes? Flaville was dead since last year’s fall—executed for his part in the Moyse rebellion. But— Maillart stopped dead in the center of the Place d’Armes, half aware of the crows that had started up squawking into the trees at his approach. Gabriel, who’d looked at him so closely in the garden—there was the child who now wore the face of Joseph Flaville.
When Maillart had departed, Isabelle sat for several minutes, crosslegged on the rumpled bedclothes, stirring the chain around the pendant in the palm of her hand with a fingertip. At last she rose, slipped on a robe, and went down to the boudoir she had occasionally shared with her late husband. There she rang for a maid to assist her in dressing and arranging her hair. Héloïse came in with the maid, to ask permission to go with Sophie and Robert and Paul to the beaches on the road to Picolet. Isabelle refused, a little curtly.
“And tell the others they are not to go either—not alone.” She cocked a critical eye at herself in the mirror before which she sat, at the same time catching a glimpse of Héloïse behind her, as the girl’s face c
rumpled in a sulk. Isabelle clicked her tongue, then forced herself to relax the expression that had furrowed the space between her eyebrows.
“Ou prêt, madamn,” the maid informed her, her face floating above Isabelle’s in the mirror’s shadow, impassive. You are ready. Isabelle dabbed a little scent on a handkerchief, and in her vexation crushed it in her hand. She could hear Héloïse crying in the garden.
Paul and Robert interrupted her as she was collecting her parasol in the foyer, but she began lecturing them before either could speak.
“I will not have you go so far alone,” she said. “It isn’t safe along that strand—not for young children.”
“I’m twelve years old,” Robert said hotly.
“And by the grace of God you may live to manhood,” said Isabelle, with an air of finality. It was not the risk of drowning that concerned her in that place. Because there was little danger of an attack on Le Cap by sea, Fort Picolet was undermanned by the quite drastically weakened French army, and there were rumors of black rebel marauders crossing the headland from the numerous unsecured areas in the direction of Pont Français and Acul.
Robert stamped his foot and opened his mouth to snap a retort, but Paul nudged him and spoke in his place, with that silky politeness of which he was capable. Four years younger than her own son, Paul had much more self-control, and Isabelle mistrusted him a little for that; Robert had his hot temperament straight from her.
“Madame, we never meant to go alone,” Paul said. “We would meet Moustique and Paulette at Morne Calvaire—maybe Fontelle too—they will be with us on the beach.”
Isabelle hesitated. Her mind was not much attached to this problem; she wished she could have slipped out of the house unnoticed. Nanon’s silhouette appeared at the opposite end of the hall, framed in the doorway to the garden. Héloïse leaned into her, stifling her sobs against her skirt. “I can go with them,” Nanon said. “I think I ought. They are too confined here, really, and a sea bath would be a good thing for the little ones.”
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 85
