“Ours is a peaceful mission,” Cyprien said, reciting the official line. “As Toussaint Louverture professes loyalty to France, he must certainly bow to the authority of the Captain-General Leclerc.”
“Oh, to be sure,” Guizot snorted. “And for that one requires twentyfive thousand troops of the line. No, you speak of Hédouville and his style of diplomacy—and Hédouville ran home with his tail between his legs.”
Cyprien flattened his hands on the splintery surface of the packing case. For a long moment there was no sound audible above the ocean’s rhythm except the fluttering of the cards. A ship’s rat ran along the groove of the wall and deck and squeezed through a crack in the bow partition.
“I am sure you do not mean to insult me,” Cyprien said.
“Certainly not.” Daspir had spoken; he put down the cards. “Nor you nor Captain Paltre, I am sure.” Daspir looked at Guizot, his eyes grown chill.
“Not in the least, my friends.” Guizot, who was seated between Paltre and Cyprien, looked quickly from one to the other. “No, you are both men of courage and honor.” He hiccuped. “Enough word-mincing, is all I mean to say. Are we to be outfaced by some gilt nigger in a general’s suit? Are we not soldiers?”
Guizot reached for Cyprien’s and Paltre’s hands. Cyprien let his own be taken. At once he felt a surge of confused emotion, as if Guizot had communicated it with his touch. Daspir joined hands with them to close the circle.
“Come, shall we make a pact?” Guizot said. This time it was he who gave a meaning look at the bow partition. “We may be placed to have some special opportunity—and there’d be glory in it. Let it be the four of us who bring the rebel in.”
Cyprien thought of his comrades dead by the roadside, of Hédouville’s abrupt departure, which did have the taste of ignominy. For a second he caught Paltre’s eye. Shadows stroked across their faces with the swinging of the lamp. After all, there was something here to be avenged.
“So be it, then,” he said. “I’ll drink to that.”
There was a squeeze of all their hands, and all at once they cheered. Then Daspir broke the circled handclasp, reaching one more time for his brandy bottle.
Placide woke with such a start he knocked his head against the wall. It was a minute or two before the movement of the sea reminded him where he was. There was that, and Coisnon’s snoring, and the muttering of that young ensign, who often talked unhappily in his sleep. A ship’s rat scuttled in the bilges beneath his plank berth. Through the partition he could hear the muffled, unintelligible voices of the four army officers at their cards and liquor.
What had he dreamed? Billows, above which were billows, rolling one into the next like ocean waves, but these were waves of sand. A searing light over golden dunes, and then rising from the sand the august scarred face of the Sphinx, looming over him with her wounds, the weight of all that stone—it was then that he’d begun to be afraid (his heart still thumping even now) under the weight, fear of the Sphinx and her terrible stony voice, but then it was night, the sand was sea, and there in the place of the Sphinx (but still enormous) was the mermaid spirit Lasirène, glowing blue-green like phosphorescence or like stars, the dark pull of her gravity bearing Placide down beneath the waters.
He put his hand against the curving boards, feeling the pulse of the ocean. The rush of the water outside helped to calm him. He listened to the breathing of the other three in his compartment, to the persistent scrabbling of the rat. What was it they were sailing toward this time?
He needed to relieve himself, but he did not want to walk out to the jakes abovedecks; he didn’t care for the way the four captains looked at him, so late, when they’d been drinking—nor the way they avoided looking at him, sometimes. He found a bottle he’d laid by for such situations, unstopped it, and directed his stream so that it ran soundlessly against the glass wall. When he was done he corked the bottle and wedged it back in the same place. Isaac coughed and shifted in his sleep, and Placide stepped across the narrow space and leaned over him, listening, till his younger brother’s breath grew regular. Then he lay down again on the hard boards of his bunk.
Drowsiness carried him back toward the fearful immanence of the great loa. Lasirène, Erzulie of the waters! Placide had been a long time out of his own country; he had remembered the beauty of this mystery, but not her weight. Coisnon had taught them of Odysseus, how he stopped his crewmen’s ears and ordered himself bound to the mast, that he might hear the siren song without being carried down by it to his own drowning. But that was only an old Greek story.
Placide worked his shoulders against the plank bed. This berth was a privilege of a sort, and yet he would have slept more easily in a hammock such as the ordinary sailors used. But in his discomfort he had pulled away from the dream vortex and the fish-tailed goddess waiting at the bottom. He was thinking with his mind. Surely it must be no accident that this ship itself was called La Sirène. No accident either that she had not yet sailed ahead of the main fleet.
“Your father,” the First Consul had told them when he summoned them to his cabinet at the Tuileries, “is a great man; he has rendered eminentservices to France. You will tell him that I, the first magistrate of the French people, I promise him protection, glory, and honor. Do not suppose that France has any intention to bring war to Saint Domingue: the army which she sends there is not intended to fight the troops of the country but to augment their force. Here is General Leclerc, my brother-in-law, whom I have named Captain-General, and who will command this army. Orders are given such that you will be fifteen days ahead in Saint Domingue, to announce to your father the coming of the expedition.”
Following this reassuring address, Placide and Isaac had been guests of honor at a grand dinner, attended by the Captain-General Leclerc himself, with his seductive wife Pauline, sister of the First Consul. Also the Vice-Admiral Bougainville was there, with state counselors and many other persons of distinction, even Vincent, the colonel of engineers, whom Placide knew to be a close and trusted friend of his father. Yet Vincent had seemed unusually silent and withdrawn that evening, though he was always friendly to the boys. The two of them appeared in the gorgeous dress uniforms they had just been given, and Pauline Leclerc, world-famous for her coquetry as much as for her beauty, made much of Isaac’s fine appearance, while her husband (himself only twenty-nine years of age) pretended to growl at the flirtation.
In the event, however, their ship had remained moored for a very long time at Brest, while soldiers and supplies were assembled and embarked. La Sirène had put out in the midst of the entire fleet. For many days, Placide and Isaac believed that somewhere in the mid-Atlantic their ship would simply put on more sail and speed out ahead of the others, bearing the two of them, and the First Consul’s letter, to their father. Isaac, at least, had believed wholeheartedly that such a thing must happen, while Placide, experienced in voyages of disguised destination and in being used himself as a decoy, had privately been a little doubtful from the start. And now they must be less than fifteen days from their landfall in Saint Domingue. What if a different ship had sailed ahead—the one that carried Rigaud and his cohorts, or some other?
It might be for that that Lasirène seemed angry: she had been deceived, ill served. Mais ce n’est pas de ma faute! Placide cried mentally, I couldn’t help it! A spirit might pardon your failure if it was plain you could not have prevented it. Placide thought he remembered that much, though Toussaint had been very firm in directing his sons away from the hounfors and into the Catholic Church. Still, with his father’s long campaigns and frequent absences, there were times when both he and Isaac had followed the drums. Placide had seen the gods come down, seen the people who bore them totter with the shock of their descent.
This was the mystery into which he sailed, and he was helpless to change his course. Let it be, then. Let it come to him, to them all. He closed his eyes and made his breathing slow and even, though he no longer had the least desire to sleep.
3
“You were uneasy in the night,” Michel Arnaud remarked to his wife.
“Oh?” said Claudine Arnaud, pausing with her coffee cup in mid-air. “I regret to have disturbed your rest.”
“It is nothing,” Arnaud said. He looked at her sidelong. The suspended coffee cup showed no hint of a tremor. In fact, Claudine had appeared to gain strength these last few months. She was lean, certainly, but no longer looked frail. Her face, once pallid, had broken out in freckles, since lately she took no care against the sun. She sipped from her cup and set it down precisely in the saucer, then reached across the table to curl her fingers over his wrist.
“Don’t concern yourself,” Claudine said with a transparent smile. “I have no trouble.” Behind her chair, the mulattress Cléo shifted her feet, staring mistrustfully down at Arnaud, who raised his eyes to meet hers briefly.
“Encore du café, s’il vous plaît.”
Cléo moved around the table, lifted the pot, and poured. The pot was silver, newly acquired—lately they’d begun to replace some of the amenities lost or destroyed when the rebel slaves burned this plantation in 1791. Household service was improving too, though it came wrapped in what Arnaud was wont to regard as an excess of mutual politeness. And Cléo’s attachment to his wife was a strange thing!—though he got an indirect benefit from it. In the old days, when Cléo had been his mistress as well as his housekeeper, the two women had hated each other cordially.
He turned his palm up to give his wife’s fingers a little squeeze, then disengaged his hand and stirred sugar into his coffee. White sugar, of his own manufacture. There was that additional sweetness—very few cane planters on the Northern Plain had recovered their operations to the point of producing white sugar rather than the less laborious brown.
Marie-Noelle came out onto the long porch to serve a platter of bananas and fried eggs. Arnaud helped himself generously, and covertly studied the black girl’s hips, moving deliciously under the thin cotton of her gown as she walked away. In the old days, he’d have had her before breakfast, and never mind who heard or knew. But now—he felt Cléo’s eyes were drilling him and looked away, from everyone; he hardly knew where to rest his gaze.
Down below the low hill where the big house stood, the small cabins and ajoupas of the field hands he’d been able to regather spread out around the tiny chapel Claudine had insisted that he build. The blacks were now taking their own morning nourishment and marshaling themselves for a day in the cane plantings or at the mill; soon the iron bell would be rung. Claudine and Arnaud were breakfasting on the porch, for the hypothetical cool, but there was none. The air was heavy, oppressively damp; drifts of soggy blue cloud cut off the sun.
Arnaud looked at his wife again, more carefully. It was true that she appeared quite well. There was no palsy, no mad glitter in her eye. Last night they had made love, an uncommon thing for them, and it had been uncommonly successful. They fell away from each other into deep black slumber, but sometime later in the night Arnaud had been roused by her spasmodic kicking. She thrashed her head in a tangle of hair and out of her mouth rose a long, high, silvery ululation. Then her voice broke and went deep and rasping, as her whole body became rigid, trembling as she uttered the words in Creole: Aba blan! Tuyé moun-yo! Then she’d convulsed, knees drawing to her chest, the cords of her neck all standing out taut as speechlessly she strangled. Arnaud had been ready to run for help, but then Claudine relaxed, went limp, and presently began to snore.
He himself had slept but lightly for what remained of the night. And now he thought that Cléo, who slept in the next room, beyond the flimsiest possible partition, must have heard it all. Down with the whites. Kill those people!
Down below the iron bell clanged, releasing him. Arnaud pushed back his chair and stood. When he bent down to peck at his wife’s cheek, Claudine turned her face upward so that he received her lips instead.
A hummingbird whirred before a hyacinth bloom, and Claudine felt her mind go out of her body, into the invisible blur of those wings. She had gone down the steps from the porch to watch her husband descend the trail to his day’s work. Behind her she heard Cléo and Marie-Noelle muttering as they cleared the table.
“Té gegne lespri nan têt li, wi . . .”
True for them, and Claudine felt no resentment of the comment. There was a spirit in her head . . . She was so visited sometimes when she slept, as well as when the drums beat in the hounfor. To others, a spirit might bring counsel, knowledge of the future even, but Claudine never remembered anything at all. Unless someone perhaps could tell her what words had been uttered through her lips—but she would not ask Arnaud. Afterward she normally felt clean and free, but today she was only more agitated. Perhaps it was the heavy weather. Her hands opened and closed at her hips. She could not tell which way to turn.
At this hour she might normally have convened the little school she operated for the smaller children of the plantation (though Arnaud thought it a frivolity and would have stopped it if he could). But in the heavy atmosphere today the children would be indisposed. And though her teaching often soothed her own disquiet, she thought today that it would not. She turned from the descending path and walked around the back of the house, swinging her arms lightly to dry the dampness of her palms.
Here another trail went zigzag up the cliff, and Claudine grew more damp and clammy as she climbed. A turn of the trail brought her to a flat pocket, partly sheltered by a great boulder the height of her own shoulders. The trail ended in this spot. She stopped to breathe. This lassitude! She was weary from whatever had passed in the night, the thing that she could not recall. She waited till her breath was even, till her pulse no longer throbbed, then, standing tiptoe, reached across the boulder to wet her fingers in the trickle of spring water that ran down the wrinkles of the black rock. The water was sharply cold, a grateful shock. She sipped a mouthful from the leaking cup of her hand, then pressed her dampened fingertips against her throat and temples.
“M’ap bay w dlo,” a child’s voice called from behind and above her. “Kite’m fé sa!”
Claudine settled back on her heels. In fact the runnel of the spring was just barely within her longest reach. Etienne, a black child probably five years old, bare-legged and clothed only in the ragged remnant of a cotton shirt, scampered down toward her, his whole face alight. I’ll give you water—let me do it. There was no trail where he descended, and the slope was just a few degrees off the vertical, but a few spotted goats were grazing the scrub there among the rocks and Etienne moved as easily as they. He bounced down onto the level ground beside her, and immediately turned to fish out a gourd cup that lay atop a barrel of meal in a crevice of the cliff—Arnaud having furnished this spot as an emergency retreat. Grinning, Etienne scrambled to the top of the boulder and stretched the gourd out toward the spring, careless of the sixty-foot drop on which he teetered.
Claudine gasped. “Attention, chéri.” She took hold of his shirttail. But Etienne’s balance was flawless; he put no weight against her grip. In a moment he had slipped down to the boulder and was raising the brimming gourd to her.
“W’ap bwe sa, wi,” he said. You’ll drink this.
“Yes,” Claudine said, accepting the gourd with a certain ceremony. The water was very cool and sweet. She swallowed and returned the gourd to him half full and when he’d drunk his share, she curtsied with a smile. Etienne giggled. Claudine smoothed her skirts and sat down on a stone, looking out.
Below, the cabins of the field hands fanned out randomly from the little whitewashed chapel. They’d overbuilt the site of the old grand’case which had been burned in the risings of 1791—the house that had been the theater of her misery when Arnaud first brought her out to Saint Domingue from France. More distant, two dark threads of smoke were rising from the cane mill and distillery, and further still, two teams of men with ox-drawn wagons were cutting and loading cane from the wide carrés marked out by citrus hedges.
The higher ground wh
ere Arnaud had built the new grand’case was a better spot, less plagued by insects, more secure. On any height, however modest, one had a better chance to catch a breeze. Claudine realized she had hoped for a breath of wind when she climbed here, but there was none, only the heavy air and the lowering sky, the dull weight of anticipation. Something was coming—she didn’t know what. She might, perhaps, ask Cléo what she had shouted in her sleep . . .
A cold touch startled her. She turned her head; the smiling Etienne was dabbing water around the neck line of her dress. After the first jolt the sensation was pleasant. She felt a drop purl down the joints of her spine.
“Ou pa apprann nou jodi-a,” he said. You are not teaching us today. A statement, not a question.
“Non,” said Claudine. And as she thought, “It is Saturday.”
Etienne leaned against her back, draping an arm across her shoulder. His slack hand lay at the top of her breast, his cheek against her hair. In the heat his warm weight might have been disagreeable, but she felt herself wonderfully comforted.
Idly her gaze drifted toward the west. Along the allée which ran to the main road, about two-thirds of the royal palms still stood. The rest had been destroyed in the insurrection, so that the whole looked like a row of broken teeth. It seemed that the high palms shivered slightly, though where she sat Claudine could feel no breeze. Beyond, the green plain curved toward the horizon and the blue haze above the sea. A point of dust moved spiderlike in her direction.
She shifted her position when she noticed this, and felt that Etienne’s attention had focused too, though neither of them spoke. They watched the dot of dust until it grew into a plume, pushing its way toward them through the silence. Then Claudine saw the silver flashing of the white horse in full gallop, and the small, tight-knit figure of the leading rider. The men of his escort carried pennants on long staves.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 6