The Stone that the Builder Refused

by Madison Smartt Bell

  That breach was healed. But what was this? Elise turned her head to face him.

  “My husband,” she said. “How have you passed your morning?”

  Tocquet breathed in, wrinkling his nostrils. “I went riding up the road a little way toward Marmelade,” he said. “To see what I might see . . .”

  “And what was that?”

  “People are coming down through Dondon,” he said. “With their households strapped to their backs, or loaded on their donkeys. They’re fleeing the war at Grande Rivière.”

  “You call it war?”

  “It is certainly war that Rochambeau has carried into that region,” Tocquet said. “Though they say that Sans-Souci is holding him, for the nonce, in the mountains of Grande Rivière.”

  He stopped and turned his eyes full on her then. Elise met his gaze without a flinch.

  “And no news from Le Cap?” she said.

  “Thus far, none.”

  “But if it is peaceably settled there—”

  Tocquet clicked his tongue and looked away across the pool toward the cane mill at the far edge of the yard. “That I think is most unlikely, since the slaying of the garrison at Fort Liberté, and all that Rochambeau has accomplished since.”

  To this, Elise said nothing. She watched the children on the lawn. Nanon had lured them from the pool’s edge: Gabriel was walking with a certain confidence, while François still preferred all-fours.

  “You know my mind,” Tocquet said. “It would be well to take the children over the border, and even as far as Santo Domingo City, while we may. If Rochambeau breaks out of Grande Rivière, I think the passes toward Saint Raphael will be closed.”

  “But—it was your own notion that we should be safest here!” Elise burst out. “There’s Suzanne Louverture with her youngest son, quite tranquil at Habitation Sancey—I saw her there this very morning. And— you’ve said so yourself—Toussaint is bound to protect this whole region, so long as his family is here, so where on the whole island could be better?”

  “I don’t know that Toussaint is bound to do anything,” Tocquet said. “All I know of him for certain is that he has not been in evidence—not here nor anywhere else—since that fleet first appeared on our horizon.” He paused. “Also, if I need say it, I would not trust our safety to the force of another.”

  “But what have we to fear from the French?” Elise flung out. “When after all we are French ourselves.”

  “Look to yourself then,” Tocquet said softly. “You have your freedom.” He pushed up from his seat and made for the steps.

  “But you are chimerical with me!” Elise said sharply.

  Tocquet turned his arched eyebrows toward her for a second, then continued his descent. He bowed in Nanon’s direction, then strode across the yard and went into the cane mill.

  Elise stared blindly at the brick face of that building. Why are you chimerical with me? was the usual form of that reproach. But she had not put it as a question, for fear of the answer she might have.

  Freedom. How was it now that all her friends so loved to tax her with that word? Isabelle had been the last, before Tocquet this morning. Yet she wished that Isabelle were here. It seemed peculiar for her to have chosen to stay at Le Cap, amid such pressing dangers. But that had ever been Isabelle’s way.

  A thread of smoke leaked from the window of the cane mill. Tocquet was smoking in there, of course, and most likely reading a book about chess, maneuvering pieces on a board according to the book’s suggestions. The mill machinery was idle—refining sugar was a complicated business and Elise had thought it better to turn their resources to the production of coffee, which was easier to cultivate at Ennery in any case. They did still grow a little cane, for rum. Though Tocquet kept them in money with his smuggling, he had no head for plantation management. Elise had never resented this. His latest sally to Philadelphia had turned a very handsome profit, on that shipload of guns he’d delivered to Toussaint. Though had it not been for his long absence, she would not—

  She stopped that thought. Oh, but she did not wish at all to go to Santo Domingo City!—or anywhere else in that dull and primitive Spanish colony. Even in the capital, society was strait and prudish, and Elise had already a reputation there, from her first elopement with Tocquet. In Santo Domingo, she would have small use of her freedom indeed.

  That word again. Oppressed, Elise pushed aside her cup and stood up, resting her hands on the railing. Vines of the purple-flowering bougainvillea twirled through the bannisters, briers grazing the heels of her palms. She looked at Nanon, who stood a little apart from the two boys, watching them. In Isabelle’s absence, she might have confided her trouble to Nanon, who was certainly discreet enough for that purpose. Yet something held her back from it.

  Gabriel and François stood loosely embraced, like waltzing bears, uncertainly balanced on their hind legs. Then François lost his grip and plopped down on his bottom. This time he laughed, instead of wailing. At her remove, Nanon joined in the laughter. Gabriel, meanwhile, remained standing, rocking a little, his balance sure enough. His face was grave, his large head slightly lowered between his heavy shoulders. Already he had the build of a little man, and there was something familiar in that pose. Elise leaned further over the rail to peer more closely: the features of Joseph Flaville came rising to meet her, like the face of a drowned man surfacing from dark water.

  Her stomach rolled; she clenched her jaw and forced herself to swallow. No, she would certainly keep this down. They had all kept it dark from her. Joseph Flaville, whom Isabelle would have married, in a differentworld. Perhaps Isabelle had been trying to tell her, in her way . . . and long enough after the fact. Well, no white woman had so much freedom as that to exercise. Elise raised her eyes, and Nanon met her gaze. Her melting look of patient resignation—in times gone by, Elise had wished to slap it off her face. She felt nothing of that now, though Nanon must have known from the beginning.

  An infant’s cry sounded from within the house. Elise turned from the rail and hurried toward it. Her stomach rolled again with the sudden movement; again she swallowed the sour taste. In the nursery she found it was her own child, Mireille, who’d awakened wet and screaming, while Zabeth’s Bibiane lay, alert but silent, on her pallet on the floor. Elise took up Mireille and held her to her shoulder, crooning as she patted her back, but the child seemed difficult to calm, and when Zabeth came hurrying in, smelling of milk, Mireille stretched out her arms and cried for her.

  Elise sat down, while Zabeth gave Mireille her breast. The nausea subsided, once she was still. Bibiane lay on her back, her brown eyes bright, reflective, watching patiently. Now it was calm. Elise had thought it one of Isabelle’s quirks, a whim, to accompany Nanon for her confinement to Vallière—a place so remote that there’d be no witness of any importance to what births might chance to happen there. Clearly it had been no whim at all. And what of her brother—he must have known too, afterward if not before. But he would simply have declined to see it, that was his way.

  Mireille’s lips slackened from the nipple, and she rolled to her back in Zabeth’s cradling arm. Zabeth got up and made to change her.

  “No, let me,” Elise said, rising. “Bibiane must have her share.” Zabeth smiled briefly, brilliantly. She stooped to the pallet, raised Bibiane and gave her suck. At such moments there was always a bloom of warmth in Elise’s belly and beneath her breastbone, and she felt she shared it with her maid. She kissed a bubble of milk from Mireille’s mouth, then cleaned her bottom and powdered it well. The child was cheerful now, gurgling and smiling up at her. But Elise’s fingers froze on the hem of the fresh diaper. There might be something else she had failed to recognize, though all the signs were obviously before her. And possibly Isabelle had meant to warn her of this also, in her elliptical fashion. But what if it already was too late?

  12

  Dermide, who was the Captain-General’s sole heir thus far, was three years old, but large for that age, and heavy to boot, if n
ot overfed. He had the squatty figure of a little troll. What were his mother’s marks of beauty had in him gone wrong: the plump lips pursed but seldom smiling, the full cheeks so swollen that they pressed his eyes to slits.

  Or maybe it was Isabelle’s jaundiced eye. She had brought her own children to play with the little paragon and had undertaken the task of minding them herself, mostly as a matter of policy. She was curious about Pauline, but it took small perspicacity to see that the Captain-General’s lady was not naturally fond of other women, especially those attractive enough to draw attention from her own suite of admirers. Therefore Isabelle had dressed for this visit much more severely than was her wont, which was easy enough since most of her town wardrobe had been destroyed in the fire, so that she had been constrained to make over a dress of one of her maids. She watched the children without interfering, though Dermide was a little brute.

  In the wreckage of the Governor’s residence, Pauline had imagined a sort of Bedouin tent, roofed by sailcloth stretched over the fire-blackened masonry, and furnished quite opulently with the articles brought from her refitted cabins aboard the flagship L’Océan. By arrangement of the furniture the space under the canvas had been divided into three distinct areas. Pauline reigned over one, reclining on a divan with her head elegantly propped on an elbow, while the officers of her husband’s staff jockeyed to improve their nearness to her, and those who were less successful consoled themselves by slighting the local gentlemen who’d managed to be admitted to her presence. A second area, suggestively curtained in damask, served as the boudoir. Isabelle watched the children in the third.

  This latter space was scattered over with all sorts of elaborate toys, none of which seemed to much interest Dermide. Many of them were probably beyond the grasp of a three-year-old’s intelligence, to be sure. Robert, nearly ten years older, had fallen upon Dermide’s several regiments of toy soldiers and had laid them out in battle array—French opposing the English. He picked them up man by man and studied them lovingly, for the markings of each uniform were painted in the most up to the minute detail.

  Dermide, meanwhile, had no thought but to snatch away a little cloth doll Héloïse was cradling—an inconsequential thing but dear to her, since she had carried it on her voyage from the North American Republic. She was a year senior to Dermide, but smaller and more delicate, and so unused to being mistreated that she made no cry or movement when Dermide grabbed the doll, though her mouth popped open in a round of silent surprise. Isabelle watched but took no action. Dermide, smirking, took a few backward steps with his prize, then Robert’s foot snaked out to trip him and he fell over backward, a dead weight, slapping the back of his head on a flagstone. After a moment he set up a howl.

  “Oh the poor darling!” Isabelle cooed, and rushed to pick him up. “Has he hurt his head?” She gave him a quick sharp pinch on the roll of his belly fat least visible to Pauline and the others. Dermide shrieked louder and struggled in her grasp. A couple of the officers had turned their heads at the racket, but Pauline seemed deaf to it—the maternal was not first among her instincts.

  Isabelle let Dermide slip down to the floor. Enraged, the boy cut a swath of destruction through the toy soldiers with a great swing of his foot; the vigor of the movement overbalanced him and he fell again, this time on his bottom. Winded, he fell silent instead of crying out. Robert, meanwhile, had removed himself from the scene of his sly crime and stood with his back to the room, turning the crank of some odd mechanism Isabelle had not much noticed before. The air was filled with a high piping music. Héloïse, who’d recovered her doll when Dermide dropped it, skipped toward the sound. Even the conversation on Pauline’s side of the room took a pause.

  “Oh, it is charming!” Isabelle trilled. “But whatever can it be?”

  Pauline rose from her divan, assisted by several eager hands which she shook off once she was balanced on her feet. She crossed toward the children’s area in a wave of scent and fluttering scarves. A handful of her courtiers followed in her train, helpless as iron dust swirled by a magnet. Robert turned the crank again and the whistling tune progressed a few more notes.

  “It is meant to teach our canary to sing,” Pauline said, turning upon Isabelle her bright artificial smile. Dermide attached himself to her leg, snuffling urgently into her flimsy skirt. She gestured then at an empty cage which swung above the crank-turned organ. “But the wretched creature fell down dead in the middle of our passage.”

  “How dreadful for you,” Isabelle said. “We must find you another.”

  “It is no matter,” Pauline said, her interest dimming. She peeled Dermide’s fingers from her skirt, sniffing distastefully at the dampness he’d left on the fabric, and ambled lazily back to her couch. Her officers followed, all but one, a young captain with a pleasantly full olive face, who remained at Isabelle’s elbow, looking at her with some interest.

  “Is it true?” he said.

  “What do you mean?” said Isabelle. This officer had been giving her sidelong glances since the previous day, she realized—the only one of them all to have eyes for anything other than Pauline. A presentable youth, some years her junior. Half-consciously she turned her face a little from the light, giving him her fine-cut profile and also perhaps concealing a few faint lines around her mouth and eyes.

  “That you might find her another bird?”

  “Why yes,” said Isabelle. “Of a sort, perhaps.” She gave him a brief direct look and as quickly turned away. “I would require some assistance, I think.”

  “Allow me.” The young officer bowed low. “I am Captain Georges Daspir—entirely at your service.”

  The ruins of Le Cap fumed all around them; in some spots they were still aflame. Latouche-Treville’s sailors continued to convey fire pumps among the points of active burning. The few human corpses had by then been collected and carted away to La Fossette, and squads of infantry were now engaged in hauling off dead animals. Isabelle, her skirts hitched up above the ash and her face masked with a handkerchief, led her small group from the Governor’s house toward the remnants of her own home. With her free hand she held tight to Héloïse, who was similarly masked against the smoke and dust. Robert walked a pace behind, answering the questions Captain Daspir put him about life in Le Cap before the holocaust. Of course Robert’s replies were generously invented, since he had scarcely returned here himself before it was all destroyed one more time.

  Well, Isabelle allowed herself to think, perhaps after all they should have gone down to Ennery with Elise and Xavier Tocquet. Certainly they had preserved little enough by remaining here. They turned a corner and hove in view of the ash pit that had been her house. The rafters had burned out from under the roof, sending a cascade of rose-colored tiles down through smoldering holes in the second floor. Some parts of that planking were still intact. Doctor Hébert, Arnaud, Bertrand Cigny, and Michau were all at work shoring up those remnants for a temporary shelter. Sailcloth or canvas of any kind was at such a premium they had not been able to get any, but Michau had negotiated for some bundles of palm leaf from the countryside, which might be used for thatch. In the heat the three white men had stripped to the waist and were so soot-coated as to be indistinguishable from their black companion.

  “What news?” the doctor said. He walked toward Isabelle, his eyeglasses glinting from his grimy face.

  “Madame Leclerc’s canary has perished,” Isabelle announced. “We are on a mission to find her another, and didn’t you once know—”

  Her words were cut off by the collapse of a charred beam, whose fall brought down a quantity of the recently placed thatch. Cigny cursed and wriggled to shrug off scraps of leaf. He stared up through the vestiges of his roof into the cloudless, azure sky, then abruptly rounded on his wife.

  “It’s not enough for you to complete your morning calls in the midst of this catastrophe, but now you propose to go galloping off after canaries?”

  “What would you have me do?” Isabelle inclined slightly,
spreading her empty hands. “I can be of no great use here. It was not I, after all, who incinerated the town.”

  “No, but you might have got yourself out of it, and taken the children to some place of security—as indeed you were urged to do.”

  “If I ought to have done so, that cannot be helped now,” Isabelle said. “And the children are better to go with me than to stay here in the ash and smoke. Now I shall want you,” she said, turning to the doctor. “And I think I might take Michau as well—”

  “Off hunting canaries?” Cigny shouted. “In this midday sun—have you gone quite mad?” He was taking in breath for a louder protest when Arnaud stepped across and laid a hand on his arm.

  “Let her go,” Arnaud murmured, too softly to be heard by any but Cigny. “If it seems frivolous, you must consider that the favor of the Captain-General may mean a great deal to all of us now, and they say his wife has larger influence with him than any man.”

  Cigny clicked his tongue but said no more; he let Arnaud guide him back to the thatching.

  “I may as well accompany you,” the doctor said. “My handiness at this work is not such that I will be much missed—but you must leave Michau, for he is truly wanted here.”

  Captain Daspir went along with this new procession: Isabelle, Doctor Antoine Hébert, Robert, and Héloïse astride one of the two little donkeys Michau had been able to commandeer. The excursion looked a more cheerful pastime than any other open to him now, and he’d decided that Pauline’s dismissive nod must be sufficient to release him from any other duties of the day. Yesterday all had moved efficiently enough, when there was fighting to be done, but now that the army was regathered on this ruin it had conquered, it seemed that half its members were disoriented, stumbling through their shock. The night before, Cyprien had conducted Daspir through the blasted streets to a bawdy house he had frequented during his earlier visit here—where he had known pleasures of wine and gambling and especially the favors of many gorgeous colored women, so delicately shaded one could scarce tell them from white . . . Now there was nothing left of this establishment but a smoking hole in the ground. Or possibly, Cyprien muttered, it had been in some other street. Daspir had forborne to point out that all the streets were in a similar state of utter devastation.