Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “An eye for an eye,” Isabelle said. “They understand each other here. They’ve shared things. Claudine once said that it must all be washed away in blood. That was in her madness, but I begin to think it quite a reasonable remark.”

  “How did you come to know?” Maillart said. “About Cléo, in the camps, I mean.”

  “Joseph told me.” As if unconsciously, Isabelle passed a hand over her abdomen. “Joseph knows that whole history of Claudine as well—I’m sure of it, although he never told me.”

  Next morning they set out at an early hour for Habitation Cigny. Paul became restless by the time the sun was high; whether he shared the carriage with the women or Maillart’s saddle, he could not be still. When the opportunity presented itself, the captain bought a donkey from a drover who was bringing a string of them down to market, and set Paul astride, bareback, with an improvised rope bridle. The boy could manage his new mount well enough, and the work of it relieved his boredom. Since they still had the constant difficulty of negotiating the carriage across tricky places in the road, the donkey had no trouble keeping up with the rest of their caravan.

  When they reached the Cigny plantation at Haut de Trou, Isabelle and her husband began to quarrel straightaway, though in muted voices and, as far as possible, out of earshot of their guests. Over dinner they continued to snipe obscurely at each other. The captain grasped that Isabelle had found undone a great deal of restoration she expected to have been accomplished at her father’s house and gardens. Cigny’s position seemed to be that every available hand was needed to produce cash crops. He had graver matters on his mind besides: the rumors Maillart had described had already reached his atelier. Cigny’s field hands had been roused to rebellion during the disturbances leading to Hédouville’s flight, and now they showed considerable discontent with Toussaint’s still more stringent labor policy, though so far they’d remained at their hoes.

  After everyone had retired for the night, the marital dispute continued, at a higher pitch. The partitions were thin, so Maillart could hear the querulous burr of their voices, though he was only able to distinguish a few words. Finally he heard Cigny raise his voice to a shrill and breaking pitch.

  “You will not!”

  “I will,” said Isabelle.

  Then silence, and the captain slept.

  At first light he had gone to see to the state of the carriage, whose left rear wheel had developed a worrisome wobble in the course of the previous day, when he heard her voice behind him.

  “We’ll leave that thing for firewood. We shall ride.”

  “You can’t mean it,” he began.

  “Come,” said Isabelle. “Consider the road to Dondon. And beyond?”

  The captain saw that a groom was already leading out a mare and a gelding, each improbably outfitted with a sidesaddle.

  “But—” He was thinking of the danger, but Isabelle’s expression told him, with unspeakable clarity, And what if I did lose this child? He swallowed, and turned around in a circle. Cigny was nowhere in sight, but Paul’s donkey had also been brought out, along with his own saddle-horse. Isabelle mounted the gelding, brushing aside the assistance of the groom, and then Nanon got onto her mare with the ease of a countrywoman getting aboard a donkey.

  They rode out, attended by the cries of the little cocks hidden beneath the hedges on either side. As they reached the road, Maillart bethought himself that Nanon was pregnant too, and wondered if she shared Isabelle’s attitude. But after all, they’d not get a worse jolting horseback than they would have done in the carriage.

  He rode on the inside of the black cavalrymen, flanking Isabelle and a few paces behind, where he could admire her slim, straight back, sprouting from the saddle like a green tree. He imagined her a man, a soldier. Brave to the point of recklessness, but without quite crossing that line. Some reckless men would crumble if the danger they courted responded to them, but Isabelle was of the type that grew more firm and steely in such circumstances. Through the thundering cloud of his other emotions, he could see that her affair with Flaville must have been her own most extreme means of daring the devil. Might he have done the same, in her place? But here his imagination failed him.

  Dondon was boiling when they reached it, with soldiers rushing in all directions, preparing to move out.

  “What are you doing here, Captain?” Moyse called harshly, fixing Maillart with his stubby finger. “No matter—take your men and report to Vaublanc.”

  Maillart told Isabelle and Nanon to wait where they were. He slipped to the ground and led his horse diagonally to the point where he saw Vaublanc assembling his troop.

  “What the devil?” he inquired, though in truth he was not so very surprised.

  “Rigaud has attacked Petit Goâve,” Vaublanc told him. “Surprised Laplume and drove him back to Léogane.”

  “And now?”

  Vaublanc swept his hand around the bustling square. “As you see. Toussaint has already crossed the Ester—we are to join him at Port-au-Prince. Dessalines is with him too, as best we know. How many men have you?”

  “Six,” said Maillart. “They are well mounted.”

  “Excellent,” Vaublanc said. “I hope the horses are fresh—we’ll be riding a long way in a short time.”

  “Allow me a moment,” Maillart said. “I have these women . . .”

  He turned and in a flash of panic realized he could no longer see Isabelle sitting her horse. But there was Nanon, Paul too. For some reason both of them had climbed into a wagon alongside a tall and rather elegant-looking mulatto woman. Maillart handed the reins of his horse to one of his men and cut back across the square toward them. He felt himself raked by Moyse’s regard, the good eye and the crater of the missing one. Moyse was wont to uncover the empty socket before riding into battle. A general superstition among the black rank-and-file held that the lost eye looked always into the underworld.

  Distracted, the captain cannoned into Isabelle before he saw her. They clutched each other by the shoulders to keep from falling down.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “We’ve found friends.” She turned her chin toward the wagon. “Nanon knows this woman—so does Antoine. They will take us to Maltrot’s old property at Vallière.”

  “But Choufleur!” Maillart blurted.

  “You told me yourself he is with Rigaud—he will be otherwise engaged. And we will be protected. But you have orders—you must go.”

  She raised herself on her toes to embrace him, laying her cheek to his. There was a dampness through the dust. Then her sharp fingers pushed him back.

  “Go quickly.” She’d already turned away.

  Maillart returned to his men and his horse. By the time he had mounted, the wagon had left the square. She was gone from him, into the unknown; he could not predict whether she’d emerge from it again. But it was no time for sentiment, and that, he reflected as Moyse led them down from Dondon, was doubtless a good thing.

  33

  Toussaint’s sweep south to Port-au-Prince was so rapid and relentless that there was no thought of a stop at Ennery; the doctor, welded to his saddle after twelve hours’ hard riding, congratulated himself on having sent Nanon and Paul out of the way . . . supposing they had safely arrived where they were meant to have gone. At any rate he was too exhausted to worry much when, in the train of Toussaint’s cavalry, he rode into Port-au-Prince. Toussaint went directly into a war council, but the doctor was given leave to retire. He found a billet in the casernes, and despite his weariness went for clean water and changed the dressing on his left arm. The wound from Choufleur’s pistol ball was slight, but slow to heal, and in this climate it could not be neglected. With the fresh bandage tightened, he stretched out and lay motionless as a plank. In the night he had fleeting dreams of Suzanne Louverture and her three sons, tucked safely away on the central plateau, across the Spanish border, during that period before Toussaint had entered French service; the lingering images of those dreams reassured him next morning wh
en he woke to the rattle and clash of new arrivals.

  Moyse had just brought in his regiment, and Captains Vaublanc and Maillart soon searched the doctor out. His question must have been plainly legible on his face, for Maillart was quick to tell him that all was well.

  “They found a friend to take them to Vallière,” he said. “A tall mulattress—she seemed a person of substance. I had not time to learn her name, but Isabelle told me that you’d know her.”

  “That would be Madame Fortier,” the doctor said, considerably relieved. He squeezed Maillart on the shoulders. “I’m in your debt.”

  Maillart nodded dizzily, dragging the back of his wrist across his sweaty and dust-streaked face. He pulled off his boots and collapsed on the cot the doctor had just vacated.

  At the well, where he went to wash his face, the doctor met Riau and got the news. Rigaud had attacked Laplume at Petit Goâve with a superior force and driven him back to Léogane—Laplume’s men were mostly scattered and he’d barely missed being captured himself. The whites of Grand and Petit Goâve had been massacred, and the invaders had taken special care to slit the throats of landowners of whatever color who were known to have accepted the grace and favor of Toussaint for the restoration of their plantations. The mulatto Pétion, who served under Laplume but was believed by Toussaint to be a more valuable officer than his commander, had gone over to Rigaud’s faction, whether out of loyalty to his caste or out of doubt that Toussaint would continue to trust him. Indeed Toussaint, as Riau whispered from a shadowed face, was already arresting certain of his black subordinates whose allegiance seemed dubious to him. But Pétion’s defection galled him especially, for Pétion had been well placed to report on Toussaint’s strength and disposition.

  The colored General Beauvais, long Rigaud’s second in the south, had gone to his post at Jacmel on the south coast immediately following Toussaint’s tirade against the mulattoes from the cathedral pulpit at Port-au-Prince. He remained there, declining to announce himself in favor of either Toussaint or Rigaud, as if he hoped to conserve neutrality—and a doomed hope too, the doctor was certain. But Riau told him also, in a lowered tone, that Moyse seemed to be in a parallel frame of mind with Beauvais; Moyse felt small enthusiasm for what he saw as a war between brothers, though certainly he would do as Toussaint ordered him, being the next thing to Toussaint’s blood kin.

  Before noon their combined force pushed on to Léogane, twenty thousand strong or better. Numbers were firmly in their favor, but Toussaint was taking pains in his plan for a counterattack. He had a healthy respect for the talent in Rigaud’s officer cadre and the motivation of his men—fresh from a victory and with much to fear from a defeat. But before he could mobilize further, word came from the north that mulatto rebellions had broken out all through the Artibonite to the north coast and west to Môle Saint Nicolas on the farthest tip of the peninsula.

  There were rumors of trouble at Le Cap, and the agent, Roume, was horribly agitated. Even Gonaives was restless—the town which had been Toussaint’s best bastion on the coast since he was serving under the Spanish. Toussaint called out his secretaries to inscribe his commands; the doctor was assigned the fair copy of a letter to the commander of Le Cap, Henri Christophe, which concluded thus:

  The arrondissement of the east must still be the object of your solicitude in such critical circumstances. You know how volatile the inhabitants of that area are; set up camps which will keep order respected in that place, and you must even bring armed cultivators down from the mountains as you need them, to guarantee the security of the area; the colored men are as dangerous as they are vindictive; you must not take any half-measures with them, but have them arrested and even punished by death, whoever among them seems tempted to begin the least machination; Vallière should also be the object of your closest attention . . . I count more than ever on your imperturbable severity. Let nothing escape your vigilance.

  Toussaint put Dessalines in charge of the force facing Rigaud, demoting the defeated Laplume in his favor, and whipped north, bringing with him Moyse and all his men. There were revolts in favor of Rigaud at Arcahaye and all across the Artibonite Valley, but Toussaint smashed them to flinders as he galloped through, disarming all ablebodied mulattos not already a part of his own forces, and executing exemplary numbers of them, without the formality of trial; some were led in front of cannon and mowed down with grapeshot, while certain others simply were bayoneted, and others were taken out to sea and drowned.

  When they arrived at Arcahaye, the doctor saw Toussaint shudder, groan, even seem to weep, at the discovery that his orders along these lines had been exceeded. “Aii,” he was heard to moan, before numerous auditors, “the people here are terrible. I told them to trim the tree, not to uproot it.”

  In fact a frightening number of colored men had been done away with before Toussaint reached the town; on whose authority was somewhat unclear. The doctor, moved by shock to make inquiry, was unable to discover if the orders came directly from Toussaint. “What does he want?” was all Riau would say. “When it rains, everyone gets wet.”

  So the doctor could not know if Toussaint was shedding crocodile tears or real ones—a mixture of both, he was inclined to think. In a strange contortion of their usual attitudes, mulattoes seeking clemency now found more compassion from Moyse than from Toussaint. On the other hand, Toussaint harmed no colored women or children, though Rigaud was quick to accuse him of doing so (and though the colored women were often found up to their necks in conspiracy).

  What was one to expect, indeed? The doctor worried and gnawed on the question in his mind, dreamy with exhaustion as they rode farther north day after day. The mention of Vallière in Toussaint’s letter had made him ill at ease, though he had a high regard for Christophe (who was also, fortunately, acquainted with Nanon). But what if the Fortiers were for Rigaud, or by some unhappy chance could falsely be connected to him? All over that region of the country, the Rigaudins were celebrating the fall of Toussaint, whose ruthlessless, when he reappeared, was meant to make them understand the extent of their prematurity. Wherever he advanced, Toussaint roused the field workers with the announcement that Rigaud and his partisans meant to restore slavery, and he gave them back the guns he’d promised to return whenever such an emergency arose. The whites of the areas Toussaint retook continued to be respected, and some were able to negotiate mercy for their colored children. But at the same time, all the white men fit to bear arms were drafted into the army on an emergency basis and sent south to report to Dessalines, while Toussaint continued his drive north.

  Thus far, the campaign had presented itself to the doctor’s view more as a police action than a real war. There’d been no battles, properly speaking, only arrests and executions, except at Pont d’Ester, where they’d met with some resistance when they crossed the river. But on the western peninsula it would be war indeed. The Rigaudins, who had raised the rebellion at Môle Saint Nicolas, had mounted a full-bore attack on Port-de-Paix, where Maurepas commanded for Toussaint. Word was that Maurepas was badly outnumbered, and hard pressed to hold on.

  At night in the tent they usually shared, the doctor was kept awake by Maillart’s uneasy fretting. The captain was not one to jump at shadows, but he was worried now that Toussaint might have made a strategic error in responding to the diversion in the north. The real threat, he proposed, came from Rigaud, who with sufficient resolve might break Dessalines’s cordon at Léogane and attack Toussaint from the rear.

  “But Dessalines has ten thousand men between Léogane and the mountains of Jacmel,” the doctor objected. “Rigaud has not half that number.”

  “No, but consider their quality,” the captain muttered. “Those are crack troops in Rigaud’s command, and the smaller force is more mobile too. Think what Toussaint was able to accomplish in the old days with only four thousand men. And Rigaud has more reason to be bold—if he hesitates now, he will be crushed.”

  “I would not like the assignment of forcing
a way through Dessalines,” the doctor said. “Dessalines is not to be underestimated.”

  “That he certainly is not,” the captain said. “Only I fear that, just now, Rigaud is more in danger of underestimation.” He turned on his blanket, banged his elbow on a protruding root, cursed and went on grumbling while the doctor struggled to sleep. He was tired and ennervated by the constant state of alarm, and when he ought to have been sleeping, the ache and itch of his hurt arm annoyed him. He only hoped they would soon make their way to the seacoast, where he could bathe the wound in brine.

  Often enough they moved at night. After the mass of the army had camped and cooked its provisions, Toussaint was apt to strike the tents of his immediate staff and move to some other location, away from the main bivouac. Sometimes he shifted his position more than once under cover of darkness; no one was ever quite sure where he slept—if he did sleep.

  That night at Gros Morne, the doctor was unsurprised when Riau roused him by shaking his foot. He rose and poured himself into the habitual routines, saddling the mare, tying up the metal fittings of both saddle and bridle with rags to stop their jingling. Maillart was mutely furling up the tentcloth, then strapping the roll behind his saddle.

  At this height, at this hour, it was rather chilly. A sliver of moon hung over the bowl where the army had camped, like a shaving of ice—but the men were gone. The main force had been filtered out earlier, in what direction the doctor did not know. Toussaint’s little entourage was following a different route, apparently, for no one else was near them.

  In silence, single file, they rode down a rocky defile in the general direction of Jean Rabel. The doctor stroked the withers of his mare. She had grown somewhat calmer, these last months, and was actually easier to manage by night, when less was visible to alarm her nervous eye. The doctor yawned, but quietly as a cat. At a turn of the descending path, he caught a glimpse of Toussaint. The size of his warhorse set him above the others, but he was not wearing his general’s hat tonight, only the less conspicious madras headcloth.