Barthelmy’s nostrils flared slightly; that was his sole response. About thirty of the captured defenders stood with him, already disarmed, their backs to the fort’s central blockhouse. They were standing in another kill zone, Guizot realized, where the first of his comrades to storm the outer wall had been caught in fire from loopholes from the central redoubt. Some death detail had already dragged their bodies into rows beneath the shadow of the battlement behind them.
Rochambeau rounded on Guizot. “Captain,” he said, “you bring me fresh troops.”
“Oui, mon général.” Guizot drew himself to rigid attention, thinking uneasily that neither his men nor their officer was anything like fresh. Rochambeau’s small, dark eyes lazed over him. Guizot was acutely conscious of his soot-streaked face and grubby uniform. But it was the extra sword that puzzled the general. Rochambeau took it from Guizot’s hand, looked at the fancy chasing of the hilt, and raised it closer to his face to study an inscription engraved on the blade.
“I have lost too many men to these rebellious brutes,” Rochambeau said. “And not only the son of the Duc de Châtre.” He aimed the sword’s point at Barthelmy and his men. “Don’t waste your powder on them, Captain.” Rochambeau returned Guizot’s salute and stalked out of the enclosure.
Guizot’s heart bulged and his breath went short. He looked at the master sergeant. What was his name? It was an order Rochambeau had given; certainly it amounted to an order and its purport was sufficiently clear. Guizot’s mind scurried. There was no evading the order. No matter where his thoughts went scrambling, there was no way out. It would be necessary to set the example for his men.
Guizot reached for the sergeant’s musket; for a moment their eyes met. Aloyse, that was the man’s name. Sergeant Aloyse. Guizot felt a pulse of affection for him. The sergeant had been at his elbow all that day, ready to support him if he hesitated. But Guizot had not faltered. He had done every necessary thing.
There was a shuffle of boots on stone as Guizot’s men moved up, a pace behind him. One step more would bring him into contact with Barthelmy. Guizot held the sergeant’s musket, bayonet fixed, low by his hip. He caught the acrid, slightly foreign odor of the black commander’s sweat. Behind him, the row of loopholes in the blockhouse wall stared like empty sockets. Barthelmy stood in a correct posture, erect though not stiff, his hands apparently relaxed at his sides, though the skin of his face looked tight on the bone. A handsome face, in its alien way: strong jaw under a day’s growth of beard, mouth set firm, eyes deep-set and intelligent, the whites of them vivid against the dark skin. He must not look at the man’s face, Guizot realized, and shifted his focus to the spot below the breastbone. The bayonet’s point shuddered at his side.
“Aba blan,” Barthelmy pronounced. Guizot didn’t know if he was shouting or whispering.
Aba lesklavaj!
Guizot stepped forward, twisting his hips into the hooking upward thrust, a movement he had practiced many times before on bales of straw.
At dawn of the next day, Guizot joined a burial detail, digging shallow graves for the grenadiers who’d fallen outside the walls of Fort Labouque. Or rather he helped to supervise the digging, for although he would have liked to occupy himself by throwing his strength against the handle of a spade, it was no work for an officer of his rank. The graves were shallow of necessity, since the ground on the promontory by the fort was rocky and hard. The ordinary soldiers covered the bodies of their dead fellows as best they might, and at Guizot’s suggestion piled cairns of stones to mark each spot. As for the bodies of Barthelmy and his men, they had been tumbled into the harbor the day before, a feast for the sharks or for crabs.
Guizot watched the awkward heaping of the stones. His head ached and his tongue was thickly swollen in his head. Great stores of colonial rum had been tapped after yesterday’s fighting. Guizot had swallowed his ration and more. While thoroughly drunk, he’d done his best to wash his uniform in the mouth of a creek that ran into the harbor. The effort had not been wholly successful—today the bloodstains on his tight white trousers persisted as blurry streaks of brown.
Crouched barelegged by the bivouac fire, Guizot had drunk a great deal more rum, listening to stories of other battles told by the veterans and the sergeant while he waited for his trousers to dry. Despite the ugliness of those tales, they were only strings of words and served well enough to distract him from the actual events of his day, until at last he’d had rum enough to suck him down into a dense unconsciousness.
The ornamented sword of Rochambeau’s aide-de-camp stuck out of the cairn of stones that marked his grave. The general himself had thrust it there, nodding to Guizot as he did so. A gesture of approval, Guizot supposed. He might have made progress in his commander’s favor, though this thought seemed distant from him now, masked in the fog of his hangover.
How quickly the light came up in this tropical place! As they turned from the grave site it was already blazing day. Already it was growing very hot.
There was much work to be done in the town. The fortifications they’d done their best to shatter yesterday must be slapped back together somehow today. The fire-damaged roofs must be patched sufficiently to protect the stores laid by beneath them. Guizot, however, was ordered to lead his men to reconnoiter outside the town. It was a privilege to be sent on this mission, rather than be reduced to manual labor as most other soldiers would be. Guizot saw that notion reflected in the expression of Sergeant Aloyse when he relayed the order. And yet Guizot would rather have been rebuilding a wall or something of that sort; mere marching left him too freely at large in his own thoughts.
The civil authorities of Fort Liberté had received Rochambeau’s division willingly. Today they went on cooperating, doing all they might to preserve their property. The fire damage, overall, was rather less than one might have expected. The partisans who’d fought the French troops street to street had evacuated the town when the battle turned against them, taking with them a good number of white hostages inland toward the Rivière Massacre. Guizot’s small detail went on their trail, following the road toward Ouanaminthe and the Spanish border.
Guizot marched in a rum-sodden daze at the head of his men. The heat increased his feeling of oppression. He thought of his brother novice, Captain Daspir, wondering what had come to him in the twenty-four hours since they’d parted. Had Daspir found the tasty food he always craved? had he caught so much as a glimpse of the general Toussaint Louverture? had he received his own baptism in the bloody art of war? When Guizot reached for the sense of competition he’d felt when he’d clasped hands with the other three captains at their parting the day before, he could find no trace of it. Then Sergeant Aloyse jogged his elbow and pointed, west of the road, to where the V-shaped forms of carrion birds were circling around a thread of smoke.
It had been a coffee plantation, and though the enemy in retreat had tried to fire the groves, the trees were green and had not burnt—some few were smoldering, but most would survive. Likewise the citrus hedges that lined the approach to the main compound. The plantation’s grand’case was burned to the ground; here the ashes were still hot, and the smoke still rising.
The house had been built on a low hill which afforded Guizot his first broad view of the surrounding country since they’d left Fort Liberté that morning. Eastward, the path of the enemy’s retreat was evident in more smoke fingers smudging the sky, receding toward the mountains. Unless, perhaps, they’d gone the opposite direction after all, or both at once. To the northwest, across the great Northern Plain toward Le Cap and the blue curve of the ocean, there were further blots of smoke scattered above what must be burning cane fields.
The vultures were making a tight spiral behind the smoking ruin of the grand’case. At Sergeant Aloyse’s nudging, Guizot moved in that direction and discovered the bodies of two white men spreadeagled on a hedge. The proprietors of this place, he supposed, or managers of someone else’s good. It was thus that shrikes, in European fields, would pi
n their kill to thorns. But there was something more, a sign.
Aba blan. Aba lesklavaj.
The scavengers had already picked the eye jelly from those two bloodless heads. As Guizot turned his face from the dead men, the image came to him unbidden: Charles Barthelmy spewing blood from his mouth as he doubled over the upthrust bayonet, the blood-slick on the surface of the harbor, under the hot sunset light, and bodies turning, thumped by the hungry sharks . . . In another flash he saw the stump of that unlucky sailor’s hand. An instant more and all those pictures disappeared, into the oubliette where Guizot wished with all his power to consign them. He shaded his eyes and looked away at the blotches of smoke on the sky above the distant plain.
The sun was directly overhead by now, and Guizot’s skin was burning. His thighs were chafed and burning also—there’d been too much salt in the water in which he’d tried to wash his trousers. He saw relief in the eyes of the men when he announced their return to Fort Liberté, and even in the expression of Sergeant Aloyse. There’d be nothing to find if they went forward, he was sure enough, except for more of the same.
Guizot made his report to Rochambeau, then went to his meal and his ration of rum. He did not drink as much as the night before. Bone-weariness was sufficient now to send him into the dreamless sleep he coveted.
At dawn the next day he was back on the march. Leaving just enough of a garrison to secure the town, Rochambeau formed a column of most of the eighteen hundred men he’d arrived with, and set out briskly, urgently, into the Northern Plain.
6
At the close of the intermission, Doctor Hébert took note that his sister had not returned to her seat. Isabelle Cigny was still chattering with an acquaintance to her right when the house lights were snuffed, but Elise was nowhere to be found. Someone shushed Isabelle as the curtain was raised. The doctor shifted restlessly, rearranged his legs; there was a cramp in the left one, most likely from nerves. He had been cajoled, not to say coerced, to attend the theater with his sister and her friend—the lone male escort available to them. Monsieur Cigny was absent on his plantation; Major Maillart away on some military mission to the eastern part of the island. Xavier Tocquet had, with small ceremony, declined the evening’s program of entertainment. The doctor thought there was more to his aloofness than his usual lack of interest in such pastimes. In the weeks since his return from the North American Republic, a chill seemed to have settled over Tocquet’s relations with Elise.
The doctor’s eyes swam as he looked at the stage, a blur of cheap, bright-colored fabric, the glitter of costume jewelry streaming in his tears of ennui. He could make no sense of what the players were saying to each other. Fatigue and distraction—he might have dozed off, but he knew that Isabelle’s sharp elbow would rouse him. The empty seat on his other side oppressed him. He understood now that Elise would not return; the whole excursion was no more than a ruse, to which he’d been made an unwitting accomplice. That afternoon he had picked up from Pascal that Colonel Sans-Souci was making one of his flying visits to Le Cap from his post at Grande Rivière . . . visits whose frequency had by no means decreased since Xavier Tocquet’s return to his household.
When the performance had finally ended, he remarked on Elise’s disappearance as he left the theater with Isabelle depending lightly on his arm.
“O,” said Isabelle. “She complained of a headache.” Her eyes held the doctor’s eyes quite as steadily as if she believed she was telling the truth. “I’m certain she has gone home to her bed.”
Or to someone’s bed somewhere, the doctor thought, but he held the retort behind his teeth. They descended into the Rue Espagnole, where Isabelle’s carriage waited.
During the short ride to the Cigny house, they did not converse, though now and then Isabelle leaned out to wave at some passing acquaintance. The carriage was a recent purchase, thanks to the renewed prosperity of the plantations under Toussaint’s regime. Its excellent springs made the ride silky smooth, and Isabelle snuggled into the cushioned seat with all the delight of a child.
At the Cigny house the doctor got out to help Isabelle down. A black footman waited in the open doorway, candles aglow in the room behind him.
“Do come in,” Isabelle said. “Perhaps a brandy?”
“No, I think not,” the doctor said. She laid a hand on his sleeve as if she would stay him.
“Never fear,” he snapped. “I mean to take a very long walk—I will not risk returning to my sister’s house before her.”
“O, don’t be cross,” said Isabelle.
“Pardon,” said the doctor, stifling his annoyance. “But let us have an end to this dissimulation, at least between you and me.”
“Why, what can you mean?” she said, her tone still light.
The doctor glanced at the impassive face of the servant within the doorway. “It is foolish, never mind the rest of it, for Elise to deceive Xavier—or to think that he is likely to remain deceived for long. And if I cannot influence her otherwise, at least you two must not make me a party to it.”
Isabelle’s upturned face went serious. “Perhaps it is I who should ask your pardon,” she said. “I . . . I had not thought that you . . .”
“You hadn’t thought I noticed anything? Well, often enough I don’t. But something of this magnitude is hard for anyone to overlook. One might argue that a dalliance with a black officer is folly enough, but to carry it on under the eyes of the husband, and such a man as Xavier Tocquet—”
“What is folly is to stand discussing such a matter in the street,” Isabelle said. “Come in, and I will hear you out at leisure.”
“But no,” the doctor said. He took her hands. “I don’t mean to quarrel with you, yet I am weary and my temper is short—let us leave it for another day.”
“As you prefer.” Isabelle stood tiptoe to kiss his cheeks, then loosed his hands and went inside.
Doctor Hébert walked two blocks down the slope to the harbor—a maneuver which took him well clear of Elise’s new house—and turned into the Rue Royale. A reception was under way, with a great many people coming and going, at the house of General Henri Christophe. Military commander of the town and its surrounds, Christophe had built a mansion of the most spectacular opulence—the fêtes he held there were second only to those put on by Toussaint himself in the Government House. Someone hailed the doctor as he passed, beckoning him into the torch-lit court behind the gate, but with a wave of his hand and some muttered reply he walked on, without quite recognizing who it was who’d invited him.
Gaiety still surrounded him for the next couple of blocks. Le Cap night life had resumed in force, propelled by the recent surge of prosperity. It was nearly ten years, the doctor reflected, since the whole town had been burned to the ground, but now it was rebuilt to an even higher standard of luxury (not to say ostentation) than before. Save for the scorch marks clinging to some foundations (though tonight he could not even see those, in the dim), no visible trace remained of that old conflagration. The doctor did not know just why his thoughts had turned in such a direction. Perhaps it was an overflow of his apprehension about Elise and Xavier Tocquet. Ahead there were torches blazing in the Place Clugny, but they were there to furnish light rather than destruction.
A chorus of deep-voiced drumming grew stronger as he entered the square, slipping around the edges, away from the light. White faces had disappeared from the pedestrian traffic in the last couple of blocks he had walked. What he approached was an almost purely African festival. He kept to the shadows, where no one seemed to notice him or pay him any mind. Three drums were beating, west of the carved stone fountain with its Latin inscription. It was unusual for drums to emerge in the center of town, but the Place Clugny was the site of the Negro Market, and sometime theater of popular entertainments for the blacks. Here too a guillotine had once been erected, when the French Jacobin Commissioner Sonthonax had ruled the region. But after a single beheading, the blacks who witnessed it had torn down the machine, all in one
spurt of spontaneous rage—too appalled by its mechanical cruelty to let it stand.
How darkly his thoughts were running tonight! The doctor gave his head a brisk shake, and then the drumming filled it. An old woman in a blue headcloth and a long striped skirt was dancing before the drums, pirouetting with the light grace of a girl. There were other dancers, a few men and women dressed all in white, dancing less with one another than with their own shadows, the unseen patterns of the drums . . . beating, beating with the pulse at the back of his head. Relaxing, the doctor let himself be drawn toward it further, further down into the throb of it. After a time it was the sustained overtone, a great hollow drone, that one heard and attended to, above and beyond the percussive strokes of palm or stick. He thought of Claudine Arnaud, well known to participate in such dances to the full. But he would remain observing from the outskirts, like those black men in uniform who watched from the opposite side, still without being rigid.
The tone of the drumming went harsh and dry, as the tempo picked up speed; the doctor seemed to feel it fluttering in his throat. His attention was drawn to a tall man who stood behind the drums, clashing two pieces of iron together with a fierce, piercing sound. A rusted rivet, and yes, a curved piece of a broken manacle, which he tossed in his hand to make it ring. The sound of the irons was like the crack at the end of a whip’s uncoiling. The people pressed in, knotting more tightly around the drums and dancers, singing now:
Kalfou, sé Kalfou ou yé
Maît Kalfou, sé lwa . . .
Sé Kalfou ki vini nou
Kalfou k’ap pase baryè-a . . .
And with those verses a small figure burst into the circle with arms stretched wide. The upper part of his face was hidden by a fringe of hanging leaves bound to his forehead by the edge of the blood-red headcloth he wore. His movement drove the other dancers backward, like magnets repelling yet at the same time attracted. A small, knotty figure, dancing and turning with slightly bowed legs, arms rigidly outstretched, like wings of a gliding hawk. The arms were trembling, they were held so taut. The doctor watched, fascinated. Under the leaf-mask the jaw was heavy and underslung, the mouth a grinning rictus, the head overall too large for the body. The arms trembled with their tension as the dancer turned his back—the doctor could see the small muscles along his shoulders twitching.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 11