The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  The flagship L’Océan weighed anchor and sailed for the harbor’s mouth; La Vertu and the other vessels followed. Their entry was slow; since the channel markers had been taken away the day before, Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse was obliged to send a small boat out to take soundings in advance of the deep-draught warships. Gradually the men on the deck of La Vertu coasted into full view of the burning town.

  Villatte, who’d served as commander of Le Cap during the time of greatest mulatto ascendancy there, stared numbly out at the fire. Rigaud studied his face, which seemed bloodless and drawn in the fierce firelight. He gave Villatte a slap on the shoulder. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said. “It has all been burned and rebuilt before. And of a certainty, we shall not be sent to Madagascar now.”

  Captain Cyprien, meanwhile, was free to pace the deck of L’Océan, as the flagship meandered after the sounding boat. He stared moodily out at the conflagration. Madame Leclerc had gone below. The reduction of Fort Picolet had excited her, and even the first sight of the burning town had been something of a thrill at first, but as it sank in that the Jewel of the Antilles would surely be reduced to a heap of cinders before she ever set her satin slipper on the quai, the expression of her small features shifted from amazement to petulance.

  Pauline had retired in a very bad humor, and Cyprien felt quite sufficiently morose himself. Since he’d come aboard the flagship, the other staff officers had been quizzing him about the pleasures of Le Cap, where he’d been posted . . . years before, during the not especially successful mission of General Hédouville. Cyprien had had a good deal to report about the voluptuous joys of the town, wine and song and especially women . . . those extraordinarily beautiful and remarkably skilled colored courtesans who’d been so readily available to the officers of Hédouville’s suite. But tonight no one approached him. The town was nothing but a bonfire. Even at half a mile’s distance it seemed he could feel the heat of the blaze full on his face.

  It would be hard duty once they got ashore. That much seemed plain. Clearly, Leclerc’s encircling maneuver had fallen well short of its goal. Where was Daspir now, Cyprien wondered, and what might have become of Guizot, with Rochambeau at Fort Liberté?

  On shore a powder depot went up like a volcano, hurling chunks of masonry and boulders into the night sky. A sighing moan of awestruck response could be heard all across the decks of L’Océan and even, Cyprien thought, from one ship to the next. He turned in the direction of the Jean-Jacques. If Placide and Isaac had stayed on deck to see the spectacle, what must they be thinking now, and what would they be saying to their tutor?

  At dawn the doctor pushed himself upright, creaking and stiff after the scraps of sleep he had snatched, lying on the open ground. All around him he heard people coughing, for the whole hilltop was smothered in smoke, and there was a woman crying somewhere off to the left. Isabelle slept sitting up, her lips slightly parted, propped on the bear-like mound of her husband, who lay snoring on his side. Héloïse lay in her lap and Robert was quietly curled nearby. Arnaud was nowhere to be seen.

  The doctor got up and walked through the trees where the horses were tethered till he had found a sufficiently sheltered place to open his flies and relieve himself. As he was refastening his trousers, a lady came bursting out of the bushes and gave him an exasperated look as she shook her skirts down over her legs. She had a fashionable, lofty coiffure, rucked a little to one side, and her face was striped in rice powder and soot. The doctor had seen her at the theater and other such places but could not recall her name, and she had already flounced off toward the clearing before he could formulate a greeting or apology.

  He returned to the horses. Michau was sleeping tranquilly on the ground beside them. The doctor gave some of the raw sugar he habitually carried in his jacket pocket to the two mares in turn and then to the mule. The mule’s rubbery lips warmed and moistened his palm, searching to capture the last crumbs. The doctor himself did not feel hungry, though his belly was hollow and his head somewhat light.

  The wind turned, carrying the smoke and clouds of ash out over the harbor. The doctor stood on the crown of the hill, looking out over the fuming ruin of the town. The devastation seemed to have been quite perfect. Every house and building was a well of coals and ash and not a single roof was left intact, though many walls were still standing, smoke-stained and cracked from the heat. The doctor had missed seeing this aftermath when the town was burned in ninety-three, for he and Nanon had fled the environs while the fires were still raging through the streets.

  All those streets were lifeless now, except for smoldering embers. The clouds of smoke obscured the harbor. At the end of the town, near the gateway of the road to Haut du Cap, the Second Demibrigade was massed and waiting.

  Something plucked at his trouser leg; he looked down and discovered Héloïse.

  “J’ai faim,” she said, in a neutral tone. I’m hungry. Reflexively the doctor put a hand into his pocket, but he had already given all the sugar to the horses. He peered at the little girl’s smudged face. Her First Communion would be long delayed, he realized, as the cathedral lay in ashes at the bottom of the hill.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Let us go and find your mother.” He led Héloïse back to the spot where the others were still sleeping. To the best of his recollection they’d come away empty-handed the night before, but when he cast about now he came upon a sizable basket, covered with a grease-stained cloth, which proved to contain the cold chicken and fruit from the supper they’d not had leisure to consume the night before. He picked out a whole banana and broke the peel for Héloïse, then hunkered down to watch her eat it. She was rather a striking child, with her mother’s coloring and dark hair, and eyes such a very dark blue they were almost purple.

  “Save a little something for your brother,” he told her, as she tossed away the banana peel and went to forage in the basket.

  “J’ai soif,” Héloïse replied, pausing to look up at him. I’m thirsty.

  The doctor stood up and leaned backward, feeling his vertebrae crack. There was no water. No spring or well nearby. And now, with the sun just rising over the bay, it was already hot. He dug in the basket till he found an orange for Héloïse. As he cut into the peel with his thumbnail, Arnaud came hurrying up, in a sweat from some exertion.

  “Ah, my friend,” he said. “Your skills are wanted.” He pointed toward the two low houses where the more infirm of the refugees had found shelter the night before.

  The doctor left Héloïse trying to wake Isabelle and followed Arnaud to survey the sick and wounded. There were the predictable cases of shock and hysteria, a few people ill from want of food or water or both, a couple of incipient cases of fever . . . Several people had been injured by rock flying out from the explosion of the powder magazines. Most of these hurts were fairly slight, but one man had a hand so badly crushed that amputation was the only option.

  For the next couple of hours he bandaged and poulticed, muttered and comforted as best he could. He awakened Michau and set him to brewing tisanes over a small fire. When it came time for the surgery, Michau and Arnaud were both engaged to hold down the hapless patient. There was no rum or any other liquor to blunt the pain, and the screams of the victim were most distressing to the other sufferers in the vicinity, until, finally, he passed out. By the time the tourniquet had been fixed, the doctor was sweat-stained and trembling and could have done very well with a tot of rum himself, though he didn’t think he was likely to get one.

  He walked out of the building, swinging his arms to loosen his cramped shoulders. A cluster of people had gathered at the trail head and were watching a dozen soldiers of the Second who were climbing up. Perhaps they meant to bring some succor. But when they’d reached the hilltop, their officer declared that he had orders from Christophe to burn the houses here.

  Télémaque, still an imposing figure though the vestments of his office were grubby with soot and torn in the trouser legs from last night’s struggle up the hill,
drew himself up to protest. “You cannot mean to carry out such an inhuman action,” he declaimed. “There are women and children who are sick and hurt, and all of them have lost their homes. You cannot mean to destroy the last meager shelter which is left to them.”

  “General Christophe suggests that you and your people remove to Haut du Cap,” the officer said stolidly, pointing to the town’s lower gate where the rest of the troops were still collected. “You will not be harmed. The houses on La Vigie are to be destroyed.”

  “Impossible,” said Télémaque. “We have for example a man who has just lost his arm and he is in no state at all to be—” But the doctor had already turned from the debate and walked inside his makeshift surgery. Save for the amputee, who still lay moaning in a faint, most of the patients could shift at least a short distance under their own power.

  “A moment,” he said, raising one finger to Christophe’s officer, who’d followed him into the building. The doctor knew the man, by sight though not by name; he was an acquaintance of Riau. Grasping his meaning, the officer followed him to the edge of the woods and helped him trim two stout green sticks and set one of his men to help Michau weave strips of torn palm leaf between them.

  On this rude stretcher they moved the amputee to the shade where the horses had been tied. The first of the two houses was already being knocked down. The soldiers had not brought tar up the hill (perhaps that substance had been completely expended the night before) and the buildings were sluggish to catch fire. The soldiers fell to knocking them to pieces with blows from their boots and musket stocks. The woman with the cockeyed hairdo, whom the doctor had encountered that morning, ran at them, screeching incoherently. One of the soldiers rounded on her and marched her back to the other onlookers at the point of his bayonet.

  They tried setting the rubble afire again before they left; the splintered planks burned fitfully. With the help of Arnaud and Michau, the doctor cleared horse manure from the area where the stretcher had been laid and began to rig up leaf-topped shelters to cover the feeblest of the refugees from the furiously blazing sun.

  Perhaps it would have been better to go to Haut du Cap, though the doctor did not much like the thought of lugging the stretcher so far. Hand on his hip, he walked to the edge of the hilltop. Télémaque was debating the alternatives with most of the white women and the other civil functionaries and men of the municipal guard. The doctor took a few steps out of earshot and shaded his eyes. In compact order, the Second Demibrigade was marching through the gateway and onto the road away from the town.

  At a nudge to his side he glanced down and saw Isabelle. Though her dress was grimy and limp and her hair bedraggled, her eyes were clear and bright and she did not seem so much the worse for the night spent in the rough.

  “Look there,” she said. “I believe they are landing.”

  A shift of the wind was now carrying the smoke over the headland and Fort Picolet, so their view of the harbor was clear. Indeed, several of the ships had sailed up to moorings along the quai, and something was being unloaded on the docks before the Batterie Circulaire. The doctor unfolded his pocket spyglass and set it to one eye.

  “Fire pumps,” he said. “They are unloading fire pumps there—though they have come a little late for the occasion.”

  “Give it to me,” Isabelle said, and plucked the instrument from his hand. The doctor looked in the direction of her focus. With his naked eye he could see some sparkling commotion on the after deck of the flagship L’Océan.

  “Why, certainly, that is Pauline Bonaparte!” Isabelle said. “I mean of course Madame Leclerc—and she is preparing to land.”

  The doctor reclaimed the glass and peered through it. Yes, it did seem that a lady of high station was the center of all the bustle on the deck of L’Océan.

  “But we must go down to receive her!” Isabelle cried.

  “Are you mad, ma chère?” It was the same lady with the lopsided hair, who’d pulled away from the discussion around Télémaque, possibly attracted by the spyglass. “How can we appear before such a one, as we are now, my dear?” She spread her stained and tattered skirts to demonstrate her point.

  “We’ll appear as we must,” Isabelle said, turning on the lady with a somewhat cutting smile. “I certainly mean to greet her. You, ma chère, may do as you like.”

  “But no matter what, we can’t stay here,” the doctor said. He took a step between the two ladies and squinted up at the pale sky. Vultures had been circling La Vigie all through the morning, and were turning closer now and seemed more bold to land. It was plain enough as well that they could not stay where they were, without water, through the broiling heat of the afternoon.

  In the end the party of refugees separated. Arnaud led a group which included most of the women and children out in the direction of Haut du Cap, where he hoped among other things to get some intelligence of what might have happened on his plantation at Acul. Télémaque and his retainers, meanwhile, would descend to make contact with the French landing party. Isabelle and her husband elected to go down with Télémaque. She insisted on keeping her children with her, and the doctor decided to stay with them. Arnaud had taken charge of conveying the stretcher with the amputee as far as Haut du Cap.

  When they had got down to street level from the trail of La Vigie, the ground underfoot was so very hot it was difficult to walk. Again the doctor felt grateful to Michau for his calm and his loyalty in saving the horses. He got Isabelle up on one of the mares. She took Héloïse on the saddle before her, while Robert scrambled up on the other mare behind Cigny, and the doctor and Michau went double on the mule.

  “Let us go home, then,” Isabelle said. Télémaque’s group had already moved further downhill toward the waterfront.

  “My dear—” Cigny started to say, but Isabelle stopped him with a movement of her hand. They rode across the Rue Royale, their mounts uneasy with the smoke and the hot street surface, but manageable all the same. They passed the wreck of Christophe’s mansion. Elise’s house was utterly destroyed, the small rear garden a waste of cinders, that slim green palm shoot obliterated. The doctor took out the bundle of keys with which he’d locked up the place so carefully the day before and tossed them idly in his hand.

  A finger to her lip, Isabelle counted scorched foundations from the corner of her street until she’d found her own. She slipped down from her mule, setting Héloïse onto her feet, and began to kick over the ashes with her slipper, wincing a little for the heat. Héloïse stood mute and still as a doll. Presently Isabelle found a scrap of ironwork, with a twisted remnant of the “C” monogram on their gate. She loosened one of the rods with a slight effort and began to use it as a tool to probe the ruin. Robert slipped down and got his own remnant of iron and began to pick over another area, while Cigny stared down at them, apparently stupefied.

  Robert discovered one thing and another and brought them to show to his sister, a broken saucer, a pair of spectacles strangely unbroken, with the lenses just recently smoked, a bit of glassware melted down into a colorful swirl. Watching his excavation, the doctor began to wonder if it might somehow be possible that a whole bottle of rum had survived the holocaust . . . Isabelle stooped to the ashes abruptly and came up holding the lock for her front door. Moved by the same impulse as the doctor, she pulled out her keys from a slit in her skirt and found the right one and tried it till the mechanism turned.

  At the Place Montarcher they found the masonry of the fountain shattered and the headless carcass of a goat jammed in the well shaft. The doctor and Michau dragged the bloated goat away, turning their faces aside from the stench. Water pooled out over the pavement once the obstruction was removed. Now the cracked coffee cup which Robert had salvaged from the ruins proved to be very useful indeed, for they could use it to share a drink. Then Isabelle tossed a few cupfuls over his face and hair, which she shook out and tied at the back with a strip of ribbon. She cleaned Héloïse’s face and hands with the dampened tail of her skirt, then o
rdered Robert to wash himself. In the unflatteringly brilliant sunlight her face showed a few lines under a fresh pink sunburn, and yet she looked as vital as the doctor had ever seen her.

  “Well,” she said, looking around the square as she smoothed her damp hair back from her forehead. “It does not appear that Christophe is offering any great battle for these ashes now.”

  Remounting, they rode downhill toward the quai. There were some dead goats and dogs and burros in the street, with the carrion birds beginning to settle on them. Whenever a human corpse hove into view, Isabelle covered the eyes of her daughter with both hands so that she would not see.

  Presently they emerged onto the waterfront and turned in the direction of the Batterie Circulaire. Here it was sticky underfoot, for the sugar in the warehouses had melted down and run over the roadway. There was now a stiff breeze coming off the ocean, which fortunately discouraged the flies and bore away the smoke; most of the buildings were still smoldering. The wind was pleasantly cool on the doctor’s face. The movements of the mule made his belly slosh with all the water he’d gulped down in the Place Montarcher, and he was beginning to feel some trace of an appetite, alongside his craving for rum.

  As they approached the shattered walls of the Customs House, they encountered a queer sort of palanquin, improvised from hammocks and pieces of sailcloth. It contained Pauline Leclerc, litter-borne on a tour of the town. Four stout sailors carried her craft, a couple of army officers walked alongside, and there was a gang of disconsolate-looking courtiers in her train.

  Isabelle slipped down from her mare and made a graceful curtsey. “Madame Leclerc—it must certainly be you,” she said. “Your reputation precedes you, and that of your illustrious husband. Allow me to present myself, Isabelle Cigny—allow me to make you very welcome to our town of Cap Français.” She swept her hand toward the slopes of smoking ashes which surrounded them.