“Well, if you would undertake it . . .” Isabelle let her resistance slip. She forced a bright jingle into her voice. “Only take care that no one is abducted! And don’t be too long in the full sun.”
As she spoke she crossed the hallway to give Héloïse a pat on the head. In the same impulse she kissed Nanon’s cheek. “Elise has gone out?” she whispered.
“Yes,” said Nanon. “Since half an hour. She has gone to see to the work in her own house.”
As the distance was short, Isabelle went on foot, carrying the parasol with its handle wrapped in the scented handkerchief, though in truth she was so accustomed to the smell of ordures and decay and stale smoke that she seldom troubled to raise the scented mask to her face. In Elise’s garden, some freshly planted flowers struggled to bloom. Hammers clattered on the second-story wall, where Michau supervised a gang of four carpenters. When Isabelle appeared in the gateway, Michau pointed her to a rebuilt room on the ground floor at the back, where the doctor was now storing some of his salvaged books and journals and herbs and specimens. Elise sat there at a round three-legged table, perusing a large gray-bound ledger by the light slanting from the aperture of an unglazed window beside her.
“Well!” said Isabelle, as she took a seat. “There’s an unaccustomed study. You are preparing to join your brother as a nurse?”
“He will soon need more of those than he’s got,” Elise said absently. “But no.” She raised her hollow eyes to Isabelle.
“You don’t look well,” Isabelle said. In fact Elise looked distinctly nauseated, as she had every morning for the last ten days or two weeks.
“I am not well,” Elise said. “I am—” Her face shattered, and she began to wail, tears pumping out of her reddening face. Isabelle moved her stool around the table and put an arm over Elise’s shoulders. “There now, stop. You’d better stop—they’ll hear you.”
“Who could hear anything with those infernal hammers!” Elise shrieked. “I feel like they’re hammering right on my head.”
But she did begin to swallow her sobs, and let Isabelle dab tears from her face with the scented handkerchief.
“Now then, now then,” Isabelle kept saying, in the same rhythms she’d have used with an hysterical Héloïse. “What can it be, then? What is it?”
“Oh, nothing,” Elise said. “Nothing, only the end of my life.”
Isabelle caught herself. Somehow she felt uneasy to pursue. For distraction, she scanned the open ledger, though without taking in the sense of the words.
“That does not resemble your brother’s hand,” she said.
“It isn’t,” Elise sniffled. “It is the work of Abbé Delahaye—he gave some of his notes to Antoine for safekeeping since there has been so much turmoil at Dondon.” She picked up a trefoil of dry grayish-green leaves that had been pressed between the pages, and when it crumbled her sobs broke out again.
“Useless,” she said. “None of it’s any use.”
Isabelle looked past her trembling hand to the page. Under the dust of crumbled leaves the plant was more vividly rendered in a drawing that must also have been the work of the priest. Below was inscribed in his frail cursive: thyme à manger—avorticant, used according to Toussaint Bréda by Women who wish to be cured of Pregnancy . . .
“O,” sighed Isabelle. The syllable seemed to pull a hole clean through her. “You don’t mean—”
“I do.” Elise clenched the leaves in her hand to powder. “That is the very thing I mean.”
“It is a long time since anyone called him Bréda,” Isabelle said. “I suppose those leaves really have lost their virtue.”
Elise did not respond. She pushed the leaf crumbs around on the page. Isabelle leaned back, though the stool had nothing to support her, and raised her arms to loosen the third chain clasped around her neck. The movement brought the china pendant out of her bodice, into the hollow of her throat. Elise’s face drained with the recognition.
“You never shared this conquest with me,” Isabelle remarked.
“No,” said Elise. “I thought it indiscreet.”
“Entendu,” said Isabelle. She laid the chain and pendant on the page of the open ledger and smoothed a hand down over her bosom. “By the grace of Providence and Major Maillart, I can return you your indiscretion more or less intact.”
“Maillart knows, then?” Elise covered the pendant with her hand.
“He will say nothing. He means to protect you. Apparently he has learned that Leclerc bears some secret order for the deportation of all white women known to have consorted with the blacks.”
“Oh Bon Dieu—”
“But—” Isabelle said. “Maillart has kept you safe. There is no evidence . . . and if even I did not know?”
“No evidence? Consider this.” Elise wrapped her hands around the bottom of her belly and leaned forward as though she would vomit.
Isabelle bit into her lower lip. “The father is certainly Toussaint?”
“No,” Elise. “That was just the one time, and—it was safe enough. No, the father is almost certainly Sans-Souci, and very certainly not Xavier, who was absent for a full six weeks on that errand after guns in Philadelphia—”
“I see,” said Isabelle. She spread her fingers over her throat. “But yet— to kill your unborn child?”
The hammers stopped just as she spoke, so that her words rang louder than she’d meant. Elise stared at her angrily from her red eyes.
“You may well talk,” she said. “You had all your joy of Joseph Flaville, and went away to bear his child in secret, and afterward fobbed the bastard off on my brother.”
“Who told you that?” Isabelle said in her first shock. The hammers had resumed their pounding. Elise pressed her palms to her temples and grimaced.
“None but my own eyes,” she said, and looked away.
Isabelle drew her slim torso very straight and folded her hands into her lap.
“You will recall that I also had the pleasure of seeing Joseph Flaville blown to ribbons by a cannon load of mitraille,” she said. “On the order of your own recent lover, it appears. As for Gabriel, I nearly died bearing him, and if not for the charity of Nanon and Madame Fortier, I would not have survived. And with all that I had to give him up.”
“You have him in your household even now.”
“But never to be mine.” Isabelle’s voice broke.
“I’m sorry,” Elise said. “Your reproach stung me, I suppose.”
“I meant no reproach.” Isabelle raised a hand but her palm seemed to stop on an invisible membrane between her and the other. “It’s only that I fear for you, Elise. That action you consider would wound you in your body and your heart.” She swallowed. “You must know that I would never judge you. I think you have never judged me.”
At that Elise did open her arms and the two women leaned together, rocking each other on their half-balanced stools, cheek to wet cheek.
“But what can I do?” Elise murmured damply into Isabelle’s ear. She pushed back, breaking the embrace. “I can’t get away to the mountains to bear the child secretly—we are all trapped here together in this town.”
“I do see that.” Isabelle touched a finger to the corner of her mouth, then reached to shift the pendant from the open book. She folded the worn gray cover shut. “But whatever it is, you cannot treat yourself so,” she said. “It’s plain you don’t have knowledge enough, and in that matter I have none.”
“What, then,” Elise said dully.
“I’m not certain,” Isabelle said. “But first, let us go to your brother.”
It was very hot when they stepped into the street, and Isabelle began to wish they had arranged for some conveyance. They might have done so at her own house, but Elise seemed stubbornly determined to walk. As if overexertion in the heat might put a natural end to her predicament, and indeed it might.
Isabelle drew closer to Elise, to share the shade of her parasol. When they entered the Place d’Armes they crossed ways with
Cyprien and Paltre, walking in the direction of the Governor’s house. As the women went by, Paltre looked at them sneeringly, then passed some remark to Cyprien behind his hand.
“The bloodsucker!” Elise whispered as they walked on. “How I wish Antoine had shot him, as he meant to do.”
“No more than I,” said Isabelle. She flexed her grip on Elise’s upper arm. “Keep up your courage. Hold your head high.” Though she thrust her own chin up with that remark, she felt herself bared and wretchedly exposed by this encounter. It seemed to her that Paltre’s eyes still probed her from behind, but she would not look over her shoulder now to see if it were true.
In the rising heat, Doctor Hébert moved slowly, deliberately, among the rows of sick and wounded men. There had been a recent hatch of fat black flies to add to the irritation of the mosquitoes that boiled ceaselessly up from the ravine. The flies increased the risk that wounds would be infected, and the doctor had just finished curetting one such when one of his nurses called to him from the gate. Stiffly he got up from his knees and passed his instruments to another of the women aiding him, who plunged them into a bowl of scalding water. Isabelle was calling out to him cheerily from the gateway, and the doctor moved toward her, swabbing his sweaty face with a large blue handkerchief.
“My dears,” he said. “I’m delighted to see you, but you shouldn’t have come.” He looked uneasily over his shoulder toward the wall where his barely breathing fever victims lay.
“We ought to be sufficiently proof against the fever,” Isabelle said. “But do let us find a little shade.”
The doctor led them beneath the tree where his hammock was strung. Nearby a kettle of fragrant herbs was simmering on its tripod. Elise sank into one of the low chairs. Another of the women, murmuring at her flush, brought her a gourd of cool water.
“Sister, you do not look well,” the doctor said. In fact Elise’s face seemed to reflect the nausea he’d felt himself when scraping maggots from that wound. “You shouldn’t stir out in such heat.”
Elise said nothing. Her flush had faded, leaving her face pale beneath its sheen of sweat. Maybe she was not so acclimated against fever as Isabelle supposed, the doctor thought. The water seemed to choke her when she sipped it.
“It’s for that she came,” Isabelle said, a little shortly. “Well, I’ll leave you.” She moved away, in the direction of the gate.
“What is it then?” the doctor said softly, feeling the first twinges of real alarm. “It could not wait till evening?”
“It has already waited far too long,” Elise said. She glanced at the woman who’d given her the water. The doctor motioned her away.
“I am with child,” Elise announced, once the nurse was out of earshot.
“A blessing,” the doctor said, though he felt his tongue thicken in his mouth.
“A curse,” Elise said. “The child will be the color of your Gabriel.”
Abruptly the doctor sat down on a stone beside her chair. He looked absently toward Isabelle, who stood with one hand on the rust-red iron of the gate. She’d laid her parasol aside and the sunlight pouring through the bars seemed to have bleached the features from her face.
“Why should I look for help from you?” Elise said bitterly. “I set myself against Nanon, and drove her out, and drove out Paul—”
“Don’t reproach yourself,” the doctor said. “That was long ago and has been forgotten.” He twisted his sweaty handkerchief into a rope between his hands. “The trouble is, I haven’t the skill for . . . what you require.”
“You have your potions.”
“But you say you have waited too long. When was—when was your last—”
Elise told him.
“It’s as I thought,” the doctor said. “It’s not my practice, but I think that after such a time, the herbs will not be effective.”
“Then I am ruined,” Elise said. “If Xavier does not kill me.”
“Hush,” the doctor said. “I’ve got to think.” But he could not summon any useful concentration. It seemed an age ago he’d seen her dancing at the Governor’s house, wilted over the bend of Sans-Souci’s arm. He had said something to her then, but there was no use recalling it now.
“It’s not my practice,” he repeated. “It’s not a skill I’ve cultivated. If it must be done, I think you had best go to Maman Maig’.”
“Why not admit you are afraid to do it!” Elise jumped up. The doctor too was on his feet.
“I am afraid to see you die of it,” he shouted. But Elise had whirled away from him and was stumbling toward the gate.
Huddling under the parasol, the two women had almost reached the waterfront before Isabelle could coax from Elise the burden of the doctor’s message.
“He may be right,” she said when she had heard it.
“To put me in the hands of that black witch?” Elise snapped. “I’d just as well throw myself into the sea.”
Through a gap between the buildings they could see spume flying up from the waves smashing into the rocks below the Batterie Circulaire. Isabelle caught Elise’s wrists and pulled her to a stop. The parasol tilted from her grasp and though the hooked handle caught on her elbow, the bright fabric scuffed into the ground.
“Maman Maig’ is an expert midwife—and I know you have seen it for yourself, whatever else you may think of her—Stop it!”
Elise was wagging her head like a mule; a hank of her pale hair came loose and flapped from side to side across her cheek. Isabelle caught her chin and held it still.
“If not for such a one as her, I would have died, with Gabriel,” she said. “Now listen to me. You must follow your best hope. I will go with you to Maman Maig’.”
Elise pulled her chin free and tucked it. “I’m afraid,” she stuttered. “I’m so afraid.”
“Of course you’re afraid,” Isabelle told her. “Only a fool would not be.” She repeated the words softly, as if they were soothing, and pulled the parasol upright. Elise let herself be guided by her hands.
At the foot of the nearest trail that climbed to Morne Calvaire, Maman Maig’ sat in the shadow of an overhanging boulder, behind a sagging, waist-high wooden gate. Half blinded by the glare of the sun, Isabelle could not make out the huge black woman’s expression in the shade, even when Maman Maig’ got up to her feet to address them.
“Sa ou vlé?” she said. Her tone was neutral, her face almost invisible in shadow. What do you want?
Elise said nothing, but gathered her hands at the waistband of her skirt.
“Sé sa. Renvoyé youn pitit,” Maman Maig’ said, in the same flat tone. You want to send away a child.
Elise simply dropped her head and let it hang.
“Ou mêt monté,” said Maman Maig’. You may come up.
She tugged the gate open and beckoned Elise through. A set of hand-hewn steps made a tight curve around the boulder toward the lakou above, and when Maman Maig’ moved, Isabelle saw Paulette rising from an upper step; the girl held out her hand to help Elise. For the first time it struck Isabelle as slightly sinister that they had fallen into this path to Morne Calvaire, rather than the higher way that passed the crosses and the church. But she pushed the thought down as she moved to follow. Maman Maig’ blocked her with a heavy arm.
“W’ap reté,” she said. You stay.
She pulled the gate shut behind her and turned away, her vast black body closing Isabelle’s view of the ascent.
For several minutes after Isabelle and Elise had disappeared from his view, the doctor remained in the portal of the hospital, gazing vacantly in the direction they had taken. His mind cranked in quick constricted circles. He ought to have stopped Elise, but how? The risk of abortion was not acceptable. The risk of bearing the child no more so. Tocquet’s reaction could in no way be predicted. At least Tocquet was for the moment away from the town. If Elise could also be got away—to Thibodet or somewhere more remote—but that was hardly possible now, and Tocquet was not the creature of habit Bertrand Cigny had b
een; there was nowhere on the island he could be guaranteed not to appear.
When he became aware of one of the women patiently waiting at his elbow, he made some half-audible apology to her and walked out through the gate. Two blocks down the hill he realized he had forgotten his hat, but it didn’t seem worth the effort to climb back for it. He shook out the blue handkerchief and tied it over his bald scalp to stop it blistering in the sun. Maillart fell into step with him as he crossed the Rue Espagnole.
“You look peculiar with that head rag,” he said, and then, when the doctor did not respond to this jocularity, “What’s the matter?”
The doctor didn’t seem to have heard that question either. They walked on. Maillart was sufficiently used to his friend’s impenetrable reveries, though this one seemed colored with unusual foreboding. They said no more till they met Isabelle coming the opposite way along the Rue du Gouvernement.
“Where is my sister?” the doctor blurted, seeing that she was alone.
“She has followed your suggestion,” Isabelle said. Her hands worked on the handle of her parasol. She looked over her shoulder toward the rise of Morne Calvaire.
“By herself?” the doctor said.
“Maman Maig’ turned me away. But she is not alone there. Paulette is with her.” Isabelle’s expression flickered. “Oh, the children —I think they have gone to the beach alone, on the road to Picolet—if they have defied what I told them. Paulette was meant to go along, but she did not.” She turned to retrace her steps, but the doctor caught her elbow.
“Wait,” he said. “You would do better to go home. You have already been too active in this heat, and the sun is at its height. We’ll see to the children and let you know afterward.”
“Oh,” said Isabelle, wilting a little. “I just now thought—Nanon is with them. I forgot she volunteered to go.”
“Nanon?” said the doctor. “So much the better. But we are walking that way, all the same.”
“Or I might walk with you,” Maillart offered.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 86
