Tonight Toussaint wore a small tricorne hat, adorned with black and white plumes, and a single red one. Aside from that his dress was simple: trousers and jacket of an extremely fine white linen. As he began his circuit of the room, conversation resumed, though in lower tones. Riau and Guiaou walked just at his back, sometimes pausing a moment to converse with a group from which the Governor had just detached.
As Toussaint drew nearer to their own cluster, Doctor Hébert shot an alarmed glance at the two women in his charge. Although Toussaint encouraged white ladies at these gatherings, he had a prudish dislike of the fashionably exposed bosom, so that most of the local belles presented themselves dressed as if for church, demurely buttoned right up to their chins. Absentminded as he was in such matters, the doctor seemed to recall that Elise’s toilette fell rather short of the requisite standard. But when he looked now, he saw that she had cunningly tucked a handkerchief into her bodice, folded and teased into a ruffle which successfully camouflaged the vista of ripe flesh that he’d remembered . . . Toussaint was bowing, murmuring over her hand, then Isabelle’s. Madame Cigny, the doctor took in, had deployed a similar device over her own bodice.
The doctor presented Captain Howarth, “lately recovered from mal de Siam.”
“So?” Toussaint pulled himself straighter and raised his head, looking from Howarth to the doctor. “It is not the fever season.”
“Apparently shipborne,” the doctor muttered. “At any rate it has not spread into the town. Since Wednesday the quarantine is lifted from his vessel.”
“Excellent,” said Toussaint. “We are favored by Providence.”
“In addition to which,” Captain Howarth put in, “I credit this gentleman with my survival.”
Toussaint smiled and in the same movement masked his bad teeth with one hand. The other he laid on the doctor’s shoulder. The two of them were roughly the same height, Doctor Hébert perhaps an inch or so taller, but Toussaint had a knack of projecting some force outward from himself, which made him seem much larger than he really was, when one was near him.
“The first among my men of medicine,” Toussaint said. He squeezed the doctor’s shoulder and let it go.
“You give me too much credit,” the doctor said, genuinely embarrassed. He knew that Toussaint knew how very slight was his knowledge of the yellow fever.
Toussaint nodded to Howarth’s bow, then continued his perambulation. Christophe had lingered to speak to Isabelle. Riau brushed the doctor’s hand in passing. Howarth turned to say something to Isabelle, for Christophe’s attention seemed to vex him a little. The burr of conversation grew generally louder. Maillart caught the doctor’s eye, cleared his throat, and then shook his head.
“No, no, of course,” the doctor said. “I’ll find you later.”
He walked to the refreshment table and found himself some cold meat and cheese. After all, he did not much enjoy these occasions . . . It took Toussaint almost an hour to complete his circuit of the room. Toward the end of his tour, the musicians struck up a country minuet. In the arms of Colonel Sans-Souci, Elise came smoothly gliding onto the dance floor. The doctor felt his pulse leap upward. Toussaint, who was himself no dancer, watched the couple with an indecipherable expression, one hand at the white neckcloth which swathed his throat. Presently a few other dancers joined the first couple, and Toussaint turned away.
As the Governor withdrew in the direction of his offices, Riau and Guiaou made discreet signals to certain members of the company. Isabelle, the doctor, and Captain Howarth were elected. Elise, still on the dance floor, was not.
It was not quite the inner sanctum, but the outer office, which Doctor Hébert knew well, and which could comfortably seat some twenty people. Included this evening were Christophe; Borghella, an important merchant visiting from Port-au-Prince; a couple of other members of Toussaint’s constitutional assembly; the priest Anthéaume; Julien Raymond, a mulatto who’d served on the last commission sent out by the French government; Pascal, a Frenchman who now served as one of Toussaint’s principal secretaries and who also happened to be Raymond’s son-in-law; and a few others, besides the doctor’s party, of similar status or interest in the colony. Toussaint presided, sitting in a carved wooden armchair facing the outer door from a corner. He had taken off his hat, beneath which he wore, as almost always, a yellow madras cloth bound tightly over his brow and knotted at the back. He addressed himself first to Isabelle Cigny.
“What news have you of your children, Madame?”
“None at all for some weeks now,” Isabelle said, with a petulant moue. “I expect them hourly in the port.” She laid her cheek aslant on her wrapped hands and looked charmingly wistful.
“Ah, they are returning? That is good,” Toussaint said. “What age have they?”
“Robert is twelve,” Isabelle said. “And Héloïse—my baby!—is now ten.”
“So the eldest is of an age to have been confirmed in the faith.”
At this the priest roused himself to a greater display of attention. Isabelle lifted her head from her hands and sat primly upright.
“As to that, there has been some delay, but I and his father intend to accomplish his First Communion once he is safely arrived here.”
Toussaint nodded. “So he, and the younger girl also, must be well instructed in their catechism.”
“So I must presume. They have been installed in a convent school in Philadelphia—it is all quite correct.” Isabelle hesitated, as if aware of the stiffness that had come into her voice. “You understand, it has been some years since it has been possible for me to examine them in person.”
“Sa bay tristesse,” Toussaint said. That gives sadness.
“So it does,” Isabelle said, and the expression she’d artfully put on dissolved into a look that seemed sincere.
During this parley, glasses had been handed round, and now a servant appeared with two bottles of wine. Toussaint studied them with some care, giving more attention to the seals than to the labels, then nodded that the corks should be drawn.
“You put out from Charleston, Captain,” he said to Howarth. “So I am told.”
“It is so, Governor,” Howarth replied. The doctor studied his profile. Howarth had a square, bony face, and wore the sort of sailor’s beard which sketched a line from one ear to the other along the outer edge of his jaw.
Toussaint made inquiry into certain particulars of his voyage and the trading he had done along the way, especially at Martinique, where the ancien régime, including slavery, persisted, and nearby Guadeloupe, where the slaves had freed themselves through revolution, as at Saint Domingue. Howarth made his answers with an air of unconscious frankness, but the doctor, as he nursed the wine which had been served him, thought he must be aware that a net was being subtly arranged around him.
“Governor,” he said at last. “I would not venture to make a comparison of those two places. That is a political question with which I do not engage. I am only grateful for my right of entry to those ports—at Martinique and Guadeloupe, and here.”
Toussaint nodded. “You know very well the port of Charleston, I imagine. There is a great importation of slaves there still, is there not? Tell me, how many?”
“What?” said Howarth. “By month, by year? How do you mean?”
“Let us say by year.”
Howarth thought for a moment, frowning, then produced a number.
“And the cost of a slave?”
“On the block at Charleston? But that depends on many things.”
“Let us say a young and healthy, able-bodied male.”
Howarth frowned. “Still it depends, on the sagacity of the buyer and the cunning of the seller. Such sales are made at auction as you may know. But . . .” After a moment he produced another figure.
“And in Africa?” Toussaint said.
“In Africa?” Howarth was now genuinely perplexed. “Truly I don’t know—five sticks of tobacco and an iron axe head? If you mean to suggest that the
profit margin is very great, it certainly is so, but—”
“You yourself have never undertaken such a voyage?”
Captain Howarth put aside his half-drunk glass of wine and drew himself ramrod straight on the edge of his chair. “I have not, sir, and I would not.”
Toussaint leaned forward. “Tell me your reasons.”
Howarth seemed to relax, just slightly, just visibly, though he remained at the edge of his seat. “I have seen those ships discharge their loads.” He stroked a hand backward over his head. “I have even visited their holds. Well, once—it was sufficient. The conditions there are much worse than for animals. There is much loss of life on that passage. And it is human life.”
He paused. It was now so quiet in the room that the doctor could hear his neighbors breathing. Through the closed door came dampened strains of the country dance tunes.
“I abhor it,” Captain Howarth said finally. “Oh, I don’t judge the other captains who pursue it. They are my friends, some of them, even my partners on occasion, but in other enterprises. I will carry any cargo but not that one. I abhor the slave trade for myself.”
Toussaint folded his arms across his narrow, wiry chest and looked very piercingly at Captain Howarth. A ring of white appeared around his eyes. For perhaps a whole minute the two men’s gazes were locked. Then Toussaint breathed out, nodded, and turned to ask Borghella some unrelated question.
At that, the mood in the room relaxed, and the conversation became somewhat more general, though subdued. The session continued about an hour more. Then Toussaint rose and beckoned Pascal and one of the other secretaries. Bidding his company good night, he led his scribes into the inner office and shut the door.
“A cat may look at a king, they say,” Howarth muttered to the doctor as they shuffled out. “He asks the hard questions, your Governor.”
What do you think of a nigger republic now? the doctor thought, but it would have been spiteful to say it aloud. It was not the first time he’d witnessed such conversions. People under Toussaint’s scrutiny would blurt out things about themselves they didn’t know they knew.
“I thought he’d drill me through the wall with that examination on the slave trade.”
“He wanted to know the prices, I think,” Doctor Hébert said. “There is a clause in his constitution which authorizes the importation of slaves.”
“You’re joking.”
“Oh no,” said the doctor. “The object is to reinforce the army, I believe. It is not yet much practiced so far as I know, but there it is written in plain black and white—I have copied out those lines myself.”
In the large reception hall the musicians went on playing merrily. Isabelle inserted herself into the doctor’s arms and waltzed him away from Captain Howarth’s astonished face. He was an indifferent dancer as a rule, but Isabelle had skill and verve enough for both of them. She led him so easily that the doctor forgot to worry about his feet and began to enjoy the music, which was very accomplished, despite the odd combination of instruments. Sometimes the Government House evenings were attended by a more orthodox orchestra, drawn from the military bands, but this evening’s troubadours, as they were styled, were making the most of their occasion. The violinist shot an occasional glance of resentment at the two trumpeters, though both had their instruments muted with rags.
The doctor glanced about the room for his acquaintances as he danced. Most were still present, but Guiaou and Riau, he noticed, were no longer to be seen. On a violin crescendo, he saw his sister drop backward almost as if fainting, giving the full weight of her shoulders to Colonel Sans-Souci’s crooked arm. She had undone the handkerchief from her bodice (probably as soon as Toussaint had retreated with his inner circle of the evening) and it now trailed from her right wrist, a flag, a signal, sweeping the dance floor at the end of her limp arm as her body turned with Sans-Souci’s expert pirouette, the white of his grin turning on the same axis above her upturned face. With her head thrown back and her free arm trailing, the blue veins beneath her jaw and on the pale underside of her free arm were brought helplessly near to the skin. The doctor was struck by that effect, in the moment before Sans-Souci’s tightening spin brought her upright again, into his embrace, flushed and excited and laughing . . . Others, too, observed them from the edges of the dance floor, General Christophe slowly stroking his chin as he studied the steps of Sans-Souci.
“There has been a letter from the First Consul, I have heard,” Isabelle whispered discreetly in his ear.
“Oh indeed.” Doctor Hébert returned his attention to his partner. One source of trepidation intruded on the other. Elise had been dancing only with Sans-Souci for more than an hour, or so it appeared. It amounted to making a public declaration. That was not the first time Elise had made some stroke of scandalous boldness. Nor was she the only white woman to consort with the black officers in these latter days. Yet with Tocquet expected any moment now, it was a little unnerving. One did not trifle with Xavier Tocquet, in any matter serious to him.
“But you are distracted,” Isabelle breathed in his ear.
The doctor returned to the moment: her small, light, bird-boned body, the steely strength he knew it hid. She laid her dark head on his collarbone.
“There is to be an expedition,” she murmured. “He sends his sister, that famous belle, Pauline.”
“In command of the expedition?”
Isabelle laughed and rapped a finger on his forearm as they waltzed around. “Oh no, of course not, but her husband . . . I forget his name.”
“And in what force?” the doctor said. At once he remembered what Maillart had begun to tell him earlier, about Vincent.
“I don’t know. You might ask Pascal—he must have seen the letter. I thought you might have seen it yourself.” Isabelle looked at him sharply to see if perhaps he actually had. “The letter is reported to say that enough troops will be sent to ensure that French sovereignty is respected.”
And just how many would that be? The doctor felt the bottom of his stomach drop. Following Isabelle’s expert lead, he spun and caught a glimpse of Maillart, beckoning to him as he moved toward the outer door. By good luck Captain Howarth, on the other side of the ballroom, was signaling his interest in a dance with Isabelle. Doctor Hébert surrendered his partner with a smile and followed the major onto the steps outside.
It was calm and cool outdoors beneath the crescent moon, and a breeze was shivering the leaves of the tall palms. A few other men stood smoking, talking quietly lower on the steps. Farther in the courtyard or beyond the gate, some of the guests had brought their ladies to still more private colloquies. Maillart offered his flask and the doctor took it gratefully and drank. The burn of new white rum spread through him. He was humid from the effort of his dancing, but now he felt a little cooler from the breeze.
“Vincent,” he said. “Elba—what does it mean?”
“As you may imagine,” said the major, “Toussaint’s constitution, which Vincent was charged to present to the First Consul, was no better received than he had predicted before he left here.”
“I can imagine all too well.” The doctor returned the flask to Maillart, who nursed at it contemplatively.
“Yes,” he said. “In such cases the messenger sometimes must suffer, as everyone knows. But Vincent, despite being so compromised, was recalled more recently to give his opinion on the advisability of sending an expedition in full force.”
“ ‘To ensure that French sovereignty is respected,’ ” Doctor Hébert quoted. “And Vincent’s opinion?”
“Against,” said Maillart, as he capped the flask and slipped it into the pocket of his coat. “By his own account, Vincent advised the First Consul simply to reject the constitution. That he send a token force escorting a new governor. Toussaint would then be left the choice of submission or open rebellion against France.”
“I do not think he would openly rebel,” the doctor said.
“Perhaps you are right,” said Maillart. “Do
you think he would submit to a new governor? When the constitution which you yourself have copied out names him Governor for life?”
The doctor exhaled, with a noisy flutter of his lips.
“So,” Maillart went on, “when pressed on the point of a military excursion, Vincent advised that it would be most unlikely to succeed, since there are forty thousand natives under arms in some fashion or other, which a force of twenty thousand French soldiers could not—in his opinion, mind you!—reduce. The native troops, who can live on nothing, would hold out in the mountains, beyond pursuit, harrying the European soldiers who would be rapidly dying of fever, the climate, their inevitable privations . . . along with casualties inflicted by a numerically superior force.”
“An uninviting prospect,” said the doctor.
“Yes,” Maillart said. “Of course, one does not safely suggest to Bonaparte that his arms could ever fail. For that reason, we may presume, our friend Vincent now finds himself addressing his correspondence from Elba.”
In the ensuing silence, Pascal emerged onto the steps, biting at his thumbnail.
“I thought you were in for a night of it,” said the doctor, who himself served often enough as one of Toussaint’s many scribes. Toussaint required no more than a couple of hours’ sleep out of twenty-four, and would often drive his secretaries until dawn.
“No,” said Pascal. “The Governor has left the town.”
“Where was he bound?” Maillart inquired.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 4