In France, meanwhile, Léger Félicité Sonthonax confronted accusations leveled against him by the land- and slave-owning colonists of Saint Domingue who had brought their case to Paris. Skilled in debate and in the law, Sonthonax now faced a much more conservative French government than the one under which he had proclaimed the abolition of slavery in 1793. His accusers sought to blame him for many offenses, including the surrender of Port-au-Prince to the British invasion and the burning of Cap Français in 1793. In October 1795, Sonthonax was completely vindicated. In the spring of 1796, he was placed at the head of a new Commission, including two other white men, Leblanc and Giraud, and one mulatto, Julien Raimond—and thus began his second tour of duty in war-torn Saint Domingue.
21
In the mornings the mountain air was almost cool enough to sting, and cool, blue breezes shivered the leaves on the trees that surrounded the house. Since Paul had gone, Nanon had begun to wake near dawn; though such early rising was far from her habit, she could sleep again in the child’s absence. She did not fret, but rose, brushed her hair and caught it up in a madras cloth, belted a cotton robe over one of the diaphanous fancies Choufleur had given her to wear to their bed, and went to take coffee on the gallery, with perhaps a little fruit, like the great lady of some lonely manor.
There were few people about the place, since Choufleur had gone to Le Cap with Paul: only the cook and a couple of house servants, and four armed men for her protection, led by a sacatra named Salomon. It was true, perhaps, that there was still some danger, for the whole canton of Vallière was a wild and remote place, and near the Spanish border too. When she was a girl, the area had been the resort of maroons, and the maréchaussée came through constantly in pursuit of them. Also there were sometimes incursions of Spanish from across the border, for the boundary line was in constant dispute. The difficult slopes of these mountains were no great temptation as farmland to the slothful Spaniards, but there was supposed to be gold around the headwaters of Grande Rivière, so sometimes the Spanish crossed and burned the French plantations. More recently it had been black men in Spanish pay—Jean-François and the troops he commanded, who had fallen back into these mountains after the winter battles in the valley of Grande Rivière. These bands were ill-disciplined, nothing like Toussaint’s troops which Nanon had grown used to seeing camped round Habitation Thibodet, but as Choufleur seemed to have a special understanding with Jean-François, his establishment was never molested. But the war between the Spanish and French was officially ended, and Jean-François had sailed to another country, leaving his men scattered in small roving bands, living as maroons once more. Sometimes they raided the provision grounds here, but there had been no threat to the main compound. In any case Choufleur had assured her that four well-armed and determined men would be more than sufficient to defend the house successfully.
Nanon was not fearful, only freighted with ennui. She sipped her coffee and nibbled uninterestedly at a small sweet banane-figue, watching the garden below the gallery, which had gone half wild, the jungle encroaching at the edges of the circular clearing. The breeze came up and the leaves lifted and swirled together, then flowed toward her. At the bottom of the garden she saw Salomon pass between the brick gateposts, and look up at her coolly for a moment before he disappeared. The garden was empty except for the little finches sitting in the trees.
The housemaid came out on the gallery and shook out a tablecloth over the railing. “Ba’m jis chadek,” Nanon called, imperiously. The maid lowered her head and went to do her bidding, returning a moment later with the grapefruit juice she had requested. Nanon tasted it, but the juice was bitter following the coffee; after all, she did not want it. The commanding airs of a mistress had diverted her for a time, but as there was little to order to be done, the novelty had soon faded.
And yet her first weeks here had been deep delight. Here was her home, her own true country; she had not known how much she cared for it till her return. She had never thought to return to Vallière, but now she was here—and free. Then too, there were the pleasures of love. The release of Choufleur’s long-bottled passions excited her; he had convinced her with his body that they had truly been waiting all their lives to be joined. He was a fiercer lover than the doctor, and if he sometimes frightened her a little, the fear was no more than the shivering edge of the thrill. The doctor had been tentative at first, seemed inexperienced; she had had to teach him a great many things, though she had enjoyed the project. He was a willing student too, and in the end he had learned to please her very well. It was also true that his was the first man’s touch that she had come to enjoy. She did not think of the doctor when she was with Choufleur, but Choufleur had been away for some weeks now, and so sometimes she remembered the doctor’s gentleness with her, though she did not miss him as much as she did her son.
She watched the little birds flickering from tree to tree among the heavy leaves, and thought of Paul, pressing her fingers against the hollow of her throat. In their first days here she had taken the boy to the places where she had played herself as a little girl; it gave her joy to teach him her childhood games. And Paul was happy, happy enough, though at first he cried for Zabeth and Sophie, and he asked many questions about the doctor, whom he had called Papi. Nanon twisted her head restively, pressing the join of her collarbones. She pictured the doctor holding Paul by both hands and joggling him on his raised instep, both of them grinning and laughing wildly at each other. But Paul was so young; he could forget.
There was nothing in this image, nor in any image she had of the doctor, which agreed with the story Elise had told of him. Nanon had returned to this inconsistency many times since she had come to Vallière, and all the more in Choufleur’s absence, which left her too much to her thoughts. Particularly, the doctor’s first ineptitude as a lover did not fit with Elise’s proposition that he was a careless and callous seducer. Well, perhaps a man might falsely play the ingenue the same as a girl (though in her considerable experience Nanon had never encountered such a thing). But the doctor’s affection for Paul had seemed so genuine! Yes, but with a child so young, she told herself, there was no difficulty. Love of the bastard infant diminished as the child grew taller and began to occupy a larger space in the world. Nanon had seen it many times. Her own father was a white man, and she had a few bright, furry memories of him dandling and petting her when she was very small, giving her special chocolates from Europe whose remembered scent and taste still made her salivate. But after she was three or four years old, she did not see him anymore.
A tiny spider climbed the juice glass, no more than a moving crimson dot. She watched it cross over the rim and fall into the liquid it contained. The spider was too light to sink. Nanon imagined its struggles, which she could not see because the spider’s legs were too small for her to discern. She went indoors and dressed and walked barefoot down from the gallery through the garden to the gateposts. Hinges had been set in the masonry, but the metal gates had never been delivered or hung. All such enterprises had been suspended when the Sieur de Maltrot had disappeared into the mountains of Grande Rivière five years before.
Nanon worked her toes in the fine dust which lay between the posts. Choufleur did not like her to go barefoot—it made her feet hard and horny, and he claimed that it would also make them splay out like the flat, ugly feet of some market woman. But he was not here to prevent her, and she liked to feel the earth and the plants with her feet. To walk barefoot made her feel independent, free, though she knew this notion was ridiculous.
To the left of the gateposts, deteriorating terraces of coffee trees ran down a partially cleared slope. Infrequently tended, the trees were in a poor state, tangled with parasitic vines, taken over by the strangler fig. Still they did produce some beans. Beyond, the mountains rose to pierce the swagging wet bellies of the clouds that always overhung the highest peaks.
To the right was the deep green slash of Trou Vilain, and the trail running down the near side of that g
orge toward Fort Dauphin and the coast. Nanon shaded her eyes, for she thought she’d seen some movement on the trail. But nothing. She looked to her left and saw the sacatra Salomon passing between the coffee trees, a fowling piece balanced in one hand. The trail was still empty when she looked again. The knowledge had risen in her mind, however, that Choufleur would come back this day, and that all would not be well when he returned.
One of the little hawks called malfini came gliding over the deep slash of Trou Vilain and turned and folded its wings to stoop. It rushed down toward the earth like a bullet and disappeared behind the foliage and then in a moment labored up into the air again with a large, long-tailed something wriggling in its talons. Rat. Trou Vilain was full of rats. They had come from ships in the harbors below and now lived in their own marronage on the jungle floor.
Nanon turned through the gateposts and walked clockwise around the hedges that enclosed the house, glancing up at the fret-sawed boards that ornamented the upper stories. She put the house between herself and Salomon, who might still be watching her from down in the coffee. At the rear was a gap in the hedge where the house servants came and went, and from it a trail ran around the brow of the hill behind the house and off among the trees. She walked, swinging her hands and humming, but the sense of foreboding clung to her. She had been astonished, even dismayed, when Choufleur announced that he intended to take Paul with him to Le Cap—and without her, for it was some tricky political errand that took him there. At once she had controlled herself and tried to think better of the plan, for Choufleur, as if he had expected her consternation, explained gently that he wanted time alone with the boy, that they could come to know each other better, as was desirable if (but here Choufleur, who had been dressing for his journey, turned from her and spoke into a corner of the bedroom walls)—if Paul were to be as his own son. And besides, he went on, adjusting his cuffs as he turned toward her again, the boy ought to see his birthplace, and learn something of the town.
Nanon gave her consent, for what it was worth. Had she withheld it, there would have been a great quarrel and the outcome would most likely have been the same. She brought herself to hope that what Choufleur said of the shared journey might prove true, but at the same time his manner with the boy up to that time gave her little encouragement. From the beginning Choufleur had treated Paul with the sort of studied calm one uses with an untrustworthy animal, a dog known to bite. He made no sudden movements, he was not unkind. As for Paul, he kept well away from Choufleur whenever Nanon did not urge him to approach. The situation never promised intimacy, but perhaps the two of them had attained some closeness on their excursion to Le Cap.
As she climbed the trail, it grew cooler, damp. She was ascending into a cloud. The black trunks of the trees around her were slick with condensed water. In a cut she sat on a felled tree and listened to water rushing in an invisible stream nearby. She had plucked a green orange as she came up, and now she peeled it with her nails and ate it, spitting the seeds accurately at the center of an elephant’s ear leaf a few feet from her. She felt that Salomon was somewhere near, though she did not see him. When her mind had emptied, she got up and went on.
These days she often went on long rambling walks which sometimes lasted all the day. There was little to do in the house or around the compound—supervise the cook, or the laundress . . . With more attentive management, something more might have been made of the coffee, but Choufleur did not like her to interfere in such matters, and she had little disposition to do so anyway. When she had first arrived on the arm of Choufleur, she had played the great lady before the house servants to such an extent that she could not now descend to a more ordinary level of companionship with them. She now regretted this a little; it left her walking, solitary. She had lost weight, as she ate less than usual and exercised more, and so regained the girlish slenderness which she had lost after childbirth. Choufleur was pleased at this result. Nanon did not particularly enjoy the walks herself, but they did calm her.
Now she circled to the right, climbing a steep path cut in the stone, her bare toes working on the wet rock surface. The trail leveled and curved outward and began to descend. A spur ran further up the hill toward palm-leaf panels enclosing a hûnfor. There were no drums at this hour, no sign that anyone was present; still Nanon took care not to look in that direction as she passed. In the cleft of a tree she found a wild orchid and picked a bloom, carrying it in her right hand as she went down through scattered banana trees into a clearing gilded by the sun. It was past noon, and the warmth was agreeable after the chill of the rainforest. She took a ripe banana from a stalk, and walked toward the tombs at the far side of the clearing. The larger one was a great rectangular stone covered on all four sides with hieroglyphs, thought to be the grave of a great Indian cacique. A smaller stone, less ornamented, more completely covered with vines, was supposed to cover the grave of a child.
She sat on a stump with the tombs at her back. The clearing spilled downward, banana leaves tilting crazily around the borders, and gave her a long, clear view across the next gorge to the cloud-covered peaks beyond. She ate the banana. As she tossed away the peel, she saw Salomon passing, half hidden by the trees at the edge where the jungle resumed. He still carried the fowling piece and, if challenged, would claim to have been hunting, though he would return to the house without game, and though Nanon knew he had not fired his gun even once, for she had not heard it. Salomon followed her on her ramblings. He was never far from her, just barely out of sight. He was acting on Choufleur’s orders, or on his own interpretation of what Choufleur’s wishes would be. All for her safety, but Nanon did not like it. Salomon had motives all his own mixed in, she thought, suspecting that he looked at her lasciviously. She did not like to be spied on, although for the time being she had nothing to hide.
She sat for a while longer, trying the pale blue orchid against her wrist, or tucked into her bodice. She lifted it to her nose, but there was no scent. Presently she got up and went on, still carrying the flower.
It was not yet sundown when she returned to the coffee terraces below the house, but the quality of the light was tempered, changed. She looked at the empty trail, then up into the sky, where the malfini circled again, its claws empty. Or perhaps it was another hawk. When she looked again, Choufleur was riding slowly up the difficult trail, leading a second, riderless horse behind him by the reins.
Paul was nowhere to be seen. Nanon looked for him, twice and again. At first she felt a numbness from her skull to her heels, then nausea, then she controlled herself more tightly. Digging her nails into her palms, she slipped off through the coffee trees. Choufleur must not see her yet. She hurried through the garden and into the house, calling orders: The master has returned! Heat water for the bath, and so on. By the time Choufleur had stabled his horses and climbed the gallery steps, Nanon had put on shoes and a finer dress. With the orchid pinned in her hair, she sat behind a tray of cool limeade, wearing a tremulous, insincere smile of welcome.
She had never seen him look so haggard, his expression so very dark. The black glare in his eyes struck her first, and then she began to take in the details. A coating of dust from the road covered his hair like powder on a wig, and was caked all over his face too, which was streaked with sweat. He was out of uniform, and his light riding trousers were dirty and covered with horsehair and sweat-stained at the crotch. No evidence of his usual fastidiousness. For several days he had not shaved, and the effect was unfortunate, for his beard was sparse and came in patchily among the freckles. He stopped with his hand on a chair back and looked past her.
Nanon poured a glass of the limeade and offered it. “What news from Le Cap?” she asked. The question seemed neutral enough to be safe.
Choufleur accepted the drink, sipped and grimaced. He turned toward the door of the house and, though no servant was in evidence, shouted loudly, “Bay nou rhum!” He dragged the chair back and dropped heavily into it, passing his hands across his face. When he unc
overed his eyes, they looked more weary than enraged.
“The news is bad enough,” he said. “Villatte has bungled it all. Or he was misled by Pinchinat—the weasel! Or—what does it matter? Toussaint and his black rabble are too many. And now Laveaux embraces him, calls him the Black Spartacus—Faugh!” He turned and spat over the railing.
The housemaid brought the bottle of rum. Choufleur slung away his lime concoction in the same direction he had spat, poured three fingers of rum in the glass and drank it down. He coughed and cleared his throat.
“Laveaux,” he said. “A weak man, I tell you. For all his honor and his airs. It is weakness that makes him set those Africans above us. Well, Villatte said, as I left him, that he would like to see Laveaux’s throat slit by those very Negroes he embraces. And I confess, I feel the same.”
“Where is Villatte?” Nanon said, having grasped the essentials of the situation.
“At Habitation Martellière. ‘Camp Villatte,’ as he has christened it. His little empire—there is the height of his ambition now. He will give himself up soon enough—or be killed. But I know him, he will surrender.”
“And for yourself?” Nanon reached her hand partway toward his, then stopped.
Choufleur’s eyes grazed over her face. “I’ll bide my time.” He poured a mixture of limeade and rum and sipped it more conservatively. “Word is that Laveaux has claimed there will be no reprisals, but we shall see. Villatte will certainly be arrested, but I tried not to show myself too close to him in all this affair . . .”
“That is well,” Nanon told him. “My dear, I have ordered you a bath.”
Choufleur nodded absently, as if he had not grasped the sense of what she said, but he rose and followed her into the house. As they passed through the bedroom, he caught her shoulder and whirled her around, then seized and crushed her to him. Nanon had a confused impression of bristles and dirt and horse and human odors intermingled. The rum was a veneer on the sourness of his breath.
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