Daspir found the Cigny house all shuttered tight against the peak of the afternoon heat. He hammered on the door three times before he heard the reluctant scrape of the iron hook. The maid who peeped out through the crack was a stranger to him, and nowhere near as attractive as Zabeth. Madame Cigny was not receiving anyone at this hour, she told him, though he might come back in the evening if he wished. She closed the door on Daspir’s boot toe, which he had thought to insinuate across the sill. As he struggled to pour himself into the narrowing gap, he heard the brassy jingle of a bell from within, and Isabelle’s voice calling rather irritably for the maid to admit whoever had come.
The door yielded in, and Daspir lurched in, stumbling in the shadows of the hall. As his eyes adjusted to the dim, he saw her looking down on him from the top of the stairs. When she recognized him, she clucked her tongue and looked away.
“Well, come up, then,” she said, but without much enthusiasm. She moved away from the upper stair rail. Daspir climbed, twisting his hat in his hands. Isabelle motioned him to her striped love seat, but sat herself in a straight chair across the room.
“I see I have disturbed you,” Daspir said, unable to suppress the petulance in his tone.
“Oh,” said Isabelle, her voice heavy with lassitude. “It is only that I did not expect you at this hour.”
“It’s plain enough that I am not the person you expected.” Though his voice was tight and low, his jealousy was surging. It was Maillart who had turned her affection from him, Maillart who always seemed to interpose himself between Daspir and Isabelle these latter days. How had it happened so rapidly? Daspir had been moved to hurry here when he saw that Maillart would tarry on the beach—had been struck by what a rare opportunity that circumstance presented.
“It’s true,” she said.
Daspir’s heart slammed. The doors over the balcony were also shut tight, and he could not read her expression in the shadows where she’d placed her chair. It was true, then; she had chosen Maillart over him.
“I thought Madame Tocquet might have come,” Isabelle said. “But it is no matter. I meant to rest, but I could not. The heat.” She turned over one hand. “It seems so airless.”
She stood up rather suddenly and moved to open one of the doors which gave onto the balcony. A bright sword of light flashed into the room; Daspir flinched and blinked his eyes. Isabelle was holding the top of her negligée closed around her throat. The harsh midday light picked out the fine lines in her face. She must be ten years older than he, Daspir thought. He had reflected on this probability before, but now it occurred to him for the first time that she must be nearer to Maillart’s age than his own. Yet after all it was not Maillart she had expected. And she was beautiful, and she had guided him to pleasures he had never before imagined, much less known, and also she was rich, or would again be rich once this rebellion had been definitively put down. This latter point was not without significance—to others as well as himself, Daspir had lately begun to realize.
The negligée was familiar to him. It fastened with two dozen tiny buttons down the front, concealed beneath a fold of cloth, and he had spent delectable periods teasing them open one by one, parting the garment slowly from her skin, as she whispered and shivered beneath him . . . but when he looked at her now, he could sense little of the treasure beneath the cloth. Her movement was leaden, and she did not come anywhere near him as she returned to her solitary seat. It did not seem at all likely that she would soon take his hand and lead him to her inner chamber.
“Well, I have disturbed you,” he said. This time his tone was not so sour.
“It is no matter,” Isabelle repeated. She was gazing past him, into the fierce light beyond the balcony; the intensity of the light made her dark eyes seem pale. “I am restless, as I told you. Weary, but restless.” She tossed her head, but without vivacity. “It is the very definition of ennui.”
“I came to warn you,” Daspir said.
“Oh, did you?” Isabelle took her chin in one hand, curled a little into her chair, and looked at him with the expression of a faintly interested cat. The neck of the negligée opened when she released her hand, and an instant of real yearning left Daspir momentarily speechless. He fingered the bullet hole in his hat. At other times, in other moods, Isabelle had affected to admire this souvenir, but now it struck Daspir as almost shameful—to have escaped death so narrowly by mere dumb luck.
“It’s Paltre,” he finally said. “He means to defame you. He means . . . he suspects . . .” He felt the heat spreading over his cheeks. He ought to have chosen his words more precisely, but on his way here from Picolet his mind had gone blurry with the heat and the excitement of the idea that propelled him. Isabelle studied him with that same cat-like detachment. She had lowered her hand from her chin to the space between her breasts, where it must cover that distressing carving she’d strung there. Why would her first thought be to reach for that? As a sickly sweat broke out on his temples, Daspir considered for the first time that Paltre’s ugly hints might have some truth to them. If Isabelle had stretched her ice-pale skin against a black man, and let his darkness cover her . . .
“You needn’t say it.” Isabelle’s manner softened slightly. “Though it is good of you. I have been warned.”
Maillart, Daspir thought again. But for some reason he felt no stab of jealousy this time. He pushed the other image from his mind. It was all Paltre, his meanness and his spite.
“I thought to offer you my protection,” he said.
“Oh no,” said Isabelle. “There’s no solution in this dueling.” Again she seemed to harden slightly. “It isn’t that I would regret the loss of your Captain Paltre, but even if you did away with him, others of his kind would come.”
“It wasn’t that I meant to offer,” Daspir said. He got up, dropping his hat to the floor, and crossed toward her on the creaking boards, feeling at once stiff and a little dizzy—it was all so much more awkward than he had pictured it, when she was so unbending to him now. His joints popped as he sank to his knees and scrabbled in her lap for her limp hands.
“Marriage,” he croaked. All at once he lost track of the phrases he had composed during his rush across the town, but then as suddenly they began to return. “I would offer you the protection of my name, and of my sword. And of course, as well, my undying love and affection—”
When he twisted his head to look up at her face, he saw that she was truly startled and, still worse, a little amused. If she laughs, he suddenly thought, I will strike her. All in a whirl he realized that he might not be able to stop himself, that he might go on to beat her senseless, and that this capacity was one of the qualities unknown to himself which she’d perceived with her first long look into his eyes.
Isabelle did not laugh. The twinkle of amusement left her face and she held his gaze quite seriously.
“It is better to marry than to burn,” she finally said. “That is the dictum of Saint Paul.” She smiled, but faintly; this smile was not particularly for him. “Yet marriage never hindered my burning—this you know.” She disengaged her hands from his and used them to cradle the back of his head.
“You are a good man,” she told him soberly. “One day you will marry a faithful wife. Not me.”
Daspir relaxed. He seemed to have no argument against what she had said. He felt that she was wiser than he, and though he couldn’t quite grasp it at the moment, he was sure that she’d seen something in the future it would be better to avoid.
Resistance drained out of him. He was very tired, so much so that he closed his eyes and dropped his head onto her thigh. Isabelle’s hands lightened on the back of his neck. She sighed. Under his cheek, the muscle of her leg warmed and loosened. A thread of song came in from the street.
Palé O, Palé O
La fanmi Asefi a palé O
Asefi ki jeté youn pitit sèt mwa . . .
Isabelle jumped up and darted onto the balcony. Whatever she saw from that vantage moved her to dash as
quickly down the stairs, leaving Daspir sitting on his heels, touching the edge of his jaw where her knee had popped when she sprang up. There was a clatter and bustle in the foyer below. Daspir collected his hat from the floor and went down.
Elise Tocquet had just come in. On her right was Claudine Arnaud, moving in that rickety, marionette-like way that Daspir always found alarming. She lent Elise some symbolic support, but Elise seemed mostly to be depending on Zabeth on her right side. The song leaked in through the door behind them.
Asefi ki jeté youn pitit sèt mwa
Asefi ki jeté youn pitit sèt mwa
Pitit se byen O, palé O...
Isabelle’s face contorted terribly. “Stop that singing,” she shrieked, and lunged through the door, raising a small tight fist at the urchin in a ragged skirt who ducked away but went on grinning, mocking, chanting.
“Stop her!” Isabelle cried—more shrill than Daspir had ever heard her voice. The carter who must have delivered the women raised his whip, and the other maid, the ugly one, came hurrying through a side door, brandishing a broom.
Palé O, Palé O
La fanmi Asefi a palé O
Asefi ki jeté youn pitit sèt mwa . . .
The maid charged with the broom raised high, and the girl dodged and danced around the corner, her flashing bare heels white with dust.
Though Daspir had picked up a little Creole since he’d come, he could understand nothing in this song. But the women all seemed perfectly deranged by it. They’d left Elise to her own devices, standing with one fluttering hand on the lower stair post, trying feebly to raise her foot to the first step, so that only Daspir was watching when her eyes rolled white into her head and she collapsed backward onto the floor. He moved quickly down the stairs to assist her, but when he stooped, the battlefield smell repulsed him. A dark fluid pooled and spread around her hips. Blood. The blood smell pushed him back; then Isabelle had come between them, blocking his view, lifting Elise’s ankles, while Claudine stood against the wall like a scarecrow. The ugly maid crouched to catch Elise around the waist, and as they began to raise her, Isabelle turned and snapped at Zabeth—“Go back! Go back at once and fetch Maman Maig’!”
Daspir followed Zabeth into the street. Someone, probably Claudine, knocked the door shut behind them as soon as they were through it. The cart had already groaned away, and he and Zabeth stood staring at each other round-eyed on the vacated street, but still imprinted on his vision was the picture of Elise on the floor with the blood spreading so rapidly around her on the floor. The blood had seemed to come from nowhere. When blood ran out of wounded men like that, they died.
“What was it?” Daspir said. “What was it she was singing?”
Zabeth, her eyes still fastened on his face, half-whispered an echo of the tune.
Talk about it, talk about it
Plenty-girls family will talk about it
Plenty-girls threw off a seven-month baby
Plenty-girls threw off a seven-month baby
Children are wealth, O, talk about it. . . .
Zabeth clapped her hands over her mouth and stared at him for one second more. Then she dropped her hands, picked up her skirts, and ran as fast as she could in the direction of Morne Calvaire.
38
Since dawn Guiaou had been mounted, with most of the others of the honor guard, and waiting for the order to ride. The night before, word had passed that Toussaint meant to strike Grande Rivière, to recapture the arms depot that Christophe had just surrendered to the French. Guiaou had stayed up late into the night, making cartridges and polishing all the metal parts of his musket, then slept for five hours, and risen with the morning mist. All the guardsmen were sitting their horses, which were restive, ready to move, but Toussaint was nowhere to be seen and no one else appeared to lead them anywhere. At sunrise, a couple of dispatch riders came clattering in on the road from Dondon. The guardsmen parted to let them through, and they rode on toward the center of town.
After some more time had passed without anything happening, Guiaou dismounted. Many of the other guardsmen had already done the same. Magny and Monpoint and Riau had gone down into the town with the dispatch riders, and no commanders were with them now, and no one knew what was going to happen. Guerrier paced up and down between the horses. Guiaou wished he would stop walking. At last, when the sun had grown warmer, Guerrier stretched out in the shade of the cliff above the road and spread his mouchwa over his eyes.
Guiaou had eaten little the night before, and nothing at all that morning. His stomach was drawn tight for fighting, but now it all began to loosen. He had lost the point of his concentration, and began to feel tired and uncertain. He sat down cross-legged and began to sharpen his coutelaswith a small, hard stone he carried in his cartridge bag, even though the blade was already sharp enough to shave the little hairs from his leg.
The sun had just begun to spread into Guerrier’s patch of shade when Riau came with a new order. About half the guards were dismissed for the day. The rest would ride with Toussaint, but to Marchand instead of Grande Rivière. What their reason for going there was, Riau did not tell, but it looked like they would not be fighting the blancs that day. Guiaou relaxed on the back of his horse, let his heels hang, and after a little while on the road he let himself doze. During his few hours of sleep last night his head had been charged with pictures of the fighting he was waiting for today. Now he was tired, and his head drained.
They went by the back ways through the mountains, hiding themselves from the open ground of the rizières above Ester. By the time they rode into Marchand, the shadows had grown long. Madame Dessalines stood in the doorway of her house and smiled at Toussaint and bent her legs inside her skirts as he got down from his horse. Toussaint ordered most of the guard to go and water and rest their horses by the well in the square, but he kept Riau and Guiaou and Guerrier with him, along with Monpoint and Placide Louverture. Madame Dessalines led them all into the house together.
Toussaint and Monpoint and Placide sat around a long mahogany table, while Riau and Guiaou and Guerrier stood in the shadows of the inside wall, looking through the tall, narrow doorways at the sunlight reddening on the dust of the road outside. Placide Louverture unfastened the red mouchwa têt Guiaou had given him and folded it into a careful triangle and pressed it between his hands before he put it into his pocket. Guiaou felt happy when he saw Placide do this.
A girl brought in cool water from the well. Madame Dessalines poured water into glasses for the three men at the table and the girl gave the clay jar to the standing men to share, smiling at them shyly as she went out. Then there was the sound of hooves outside, and Bienvenu, who had left Marmelade two days before, opened the door for General Dessalines.
When Dessalines had taken his chair at the far end of the table from Toussaint, Toussaint took a paper out of his coat. He held it out toward Dessalines, but the table was too long for him to reach. Monpoint and Placide passed the paper down. But instead of looking at the paper, Dessalines was looking at Guiaou and Guerrier and Riau. Guiaou did not like to have the eyes of Dessalines upon him so.
“Let them stay,” Toussaint said. “There is no secret here today that any of my men cannot know.”
Dessalines turned his eyes to Bienvenu, who began to close the first of three sets of doors that let onto the street. Guiaou moved to help him with the others. Now at last, Dessalines took up the paper.
“I don’t see well in this light,” he said.
“It’s you who have shut out the light,” Toussaint said. “Riau—”
Riau came forward and Dessalines gave him the paper, and when Madame Dessalines brought in a lamp Riau held it near to the light and began to read.
I see with pleasure, citizen general, the part you have taken to submit yourself to the arms of the Republic—
Riau stopped, for a moment, as if his tongue had frozen in his head. The lamplight flickered. Guiaou, who’d felt his stomach shrivel at these words, watched Dess
alines breathe out a long wind of ill humor and sink more deeply into his seat. Riau was watching him too, his brown eyes calm in the yellow lamplight.
“Read it, then,” Dessalines said. He drew his snuffbox from his coat pocket and laid it on the glossy surface of the table.
Those who have sought to deceive you about the true intentions of the government are much to be blamed. Today, we must not preoccupy ourselves in reviewing past evils. I must only concern myself with the means of returning the colony, as quickly as possible, to its former splendor. You, the generals under your orders, as well as all the inhabitants of the colony, need not fear that I will seek out anyone for his past conduct. I cast the veil of oblivion over everything which took place in Saint Domingue before my arrival—
“ ‘The veil of oblivion . . .’ ” Dessalines batted the snuffbox from one hand to another on the tabletop. Toussaint nodded for Riau to go on with his reading.
Everyone here has a new career to pursue now, and in the future I will not recognize anyone but good or bad citizens. Your generals and your troops will be employed and treated the same as the rest of my army. As for yourself, you wish for rest; you have earned your rest; when one has borne the government of Saint Domingue for several years, I imagine anyone would need it. I leave you free to retire to whichever of your plantations suits you best—
“You are running to your doom,” Dessalines said. Guiaou looked at him. His features were heavy, mask-like, rigid—eyes wide so that the white showed around them—it was almost as if a spirit had taken him where he sat. He held the snuffbox under his left hand now, with a grip that might have crushed it. Guiaou could not keep on looking at him any more than he could have held, for more than a couple of seconds, the stony gaze of Baron Samedi. He shifted his eyes to Riau, who seemed to remain calm under the awful mystery he had unlocked from the letters on the paper.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 88