“If so,” said Daspir, “I have not been privy to it. For I was assigned at the beginning to escort Toussaint’s sons. Quite likely the details of the First Consul’s strategy were not opened either to me or my comrades in that duty. The reasons are obvious, I think.”
“Fair enough,” Maillart said. There was something more he might have added, but he could not articulate it. He offered Daspir his hand and, after a barely noticeable hesitation, the captain took it.
As he went off in search of the doctor, Maillart found himself thinking of Major O’Farrel, an Irish mercenary of the Regiment du Cap, who had at one time claimed a considerable share of Isabelle Cigny’s affection. Maillart would have fought over her once. It seemed a long time ago. O’Farrel had laughed him off, though in a friendly manner. He had made Maillart see that the game was not worth bloodshed. Maillart would have liked to do the same for Daspir. He felt a certain affection for the boy, because they shared an enthusiasm. That was the way O’Farrel had seen it. He wondered where O’Farrel was, if he were still alive. He had gone over to the English, along with many of his regiment, when the English invaded Saint Domingue in 1794, and no doubt had left the colony when the English abandoned it. At any rate, Maillart had heard nothing of him since then.
The doctor had only just left the hospital when Maillart arrived there, and he missed him again, though narrowly, at Morne Calvaire and at the Cigny house. At last in the evening he found the doctor drinking with Tocquet in the remains of Elise’s garden. With a nod he accepted the glass of rum he was offered and sat down in one of the low caned chairs that had recently been furnished to the place.
“But why now?” The doctor was pursuing some previous thread. “The difficulties here are apparent enough, but I don’t see it as an especially propitious time to travel down to Ennery.”
Tocquet reached behind his shoulder and lifted the tail of his bound hair so that the evening breeze could reach the back of his neck. “Elise is fit enough to travel now, and I think she will recover more quickly in the country.” He glanced to where she knelt with a trowel by the garden wall a few yards distant, and lowered his voice a little. “I would like to get her away from this latest outbreak of fever. And the children too, especially.”
“Of course.” The doctor polished his glasses and put them back on. “But that is not all you are thinking.”
Tocquet turned his head to spit into the ash-strewn dust. Elise, who was returning from planting her row of flowers by the wall, frowned at this action, but Tocquet pretended to ignore her. He cleared his throat with a swallow of rum.
“Security,” he said.
“What?” said Maillart. “How do you believe Ennery more secure than here?”
“At Thibodet we should be still under Toussaint’s wing,” Tocquet said.
Elise laughed. “Husband, how you have changed your tune.”
“I am as the aeolian harp, my dear,” Tocquet flashed her his crooked smile. “My melody is determined by the direction of the wind.”
Elise stood beside him, her hip grazing his shoulder. She ruffled his hair and laughed again and walked into the reconstructed portion of the house, with a nod to Michau, who sat under the portico washing his upper body with a bucket of water and a rag.
“But Toussaint has no more force of arms,” Maillart said. “He has dismissed his men, even the honor guard.”
“Yes, and where are they?” Tocquet said. “They were meant to report to the Captain-General here at Le Cap, but do you see them? Not Morisset or Monpoint or Magny. Not Riau, or Guiaou, or any of that company.”
“I see,” the doctor said slowly. “Well, but I don’t know. Somehow I feel I am more useful here.”
“They don’t want doctors here,” Tocquet continued. “What they want is a burial detail. Leclerc has scarcely enough European troops here to throw up a screen around his own positions. Suppose Dessalines were to turn on him, or any of the others; he would be hard pressed. I wouldn’t like our chances of getting onto a ship then, and the plain would be on fire from Grande Rivière—where Sans-Souci is still giving them a lot of trouble—all the way up to Limbé, if not further.”
“But Ennery is still more remote,” Maillart said. “Here at least the troops are concentrated.” He didn’t want to mention the likelihood that Leclerc might try to arrest Toussaint, and given what Tocquet had just said, how easy would that be?
“There are not troops enough to concentrate,” Tocquet said. “Once you subtract the colonial troops. And Dessalines, especially, is quite likely to subtract himself. It can go wrong anywhere, I think, but if it goes wrong at Ennery we might try for a ship at Gonaives, or the passes through the Spanish mountains if that way looked better.”
The doctor massaged the bridge of his nose, pushing up his glasses. The skin below his eyes had bagged from his days of fatigue.
“They don’t want doctors here,” Tocquet repeated. “They want gravediggers.”
He pulled three cheroots from his shirt and offered them. Maillart accepted. The doctor shook his head.
“Have a care you don’t dig your own grave,” Tocquet said, and tucked the third cheroot back into his shirt.
Maillart bent toward the flame Tocquet had struck, then leaned back, exhaling a luxurious cloud of smoke and stretching his legs out before him from the low seat of his chair. He looked toward the far wall of the garden, where a couple of brown doves called in their round voices, perched among the shards of bottle glass mortared to the top of the masonry. If Leclerc were to inquire further, he could now say that the subject of going down to Ennery had been broached to the doctor, and he would be telling the truth.
When every course was so uncertain, sometimes no action was the best. It was not hesitation, but stillness, the only way to survive the extremes of heat. Maillart felt how Toussaint was still at Ennery. He found in himself no enthusiasm for proposing that the doctor go deliberately to spy upon him there.
Removing Toussaint would have no more effect than lopping a single head from a Hydra. How would Xavier Tocquet have reacted to what Leclerc had told Maillart this afternoon? But Tocquet was shrewd and thorough in his regard of all such matters, and probably would have already surmised much of what Leclerc had revealed.
Maillart slumped more deeply in his chair, whose short legs raised him barely a foot above the ground. He flicked a little ash from his cheroot to the ashes still scattered across the dirt around him. Already shoots of grass had begun to push up through the paste of earth and ash, and beside the wall the plumes of red ginger Elise had planted were trembling in the evening breeze. A few fronds sprouting from the burnt stump of the yellow cocotier were now big enough to cast their shadows. Maillart kept still and let the breeze drift over him. He felt cooler now, and empty even of desire.
Paltre had grown meager, wasted to his bones. The other three captains visited him daily, but now he seldom knew them when they came. Sometimes he took them for his brothers, or his parents, believing himself a child again in France. Sometimes he did not know that anyone was there at all. Guizot no longer asked the doctor if he would recover. Daspir wondered how it was he did not die.
His hands were palsied and often moved at random, weaving invisible threads in the air. All his joints had turned knobby, the flesh shrinking to the bone, tendons tightening beneath the desiccated skin. Patiently, Nanon held the soup bowl to his lips, while Paltre sipped or gulped or choked. With small, deft movements she avoided his sudden bursts of vomiting, while always remaining near enough to clean his face and soothe him. He did not know her either, but she could soothe him better than anyone, pressing her gold fingers to his wrist or brow.
She must be poisoning him, Cyprien sometimes accused. How could she mean him any good? But Daspir and Guizot hushed him whenever he began in that vein. To Daspir, only Madame Fortier seemed a little menacing, when sometimes she would stand tall and regally erect at the head of Paltre’s mat, arms folded over her narrow chest, expecting his death with a consu
ming patience. Yesterday, Paltre had enjoyed a period of lucidity. He recognized his friends and professed himself to feel relieved of many of his pains. Guizot at least had been encouraged, but afterward Madame Fortier had let them know that such brief rallies were more often than not presage of the final end, and today Paltre was lapsed again into the fever.
Daspir did not like to look at his white lips on the soup bowl. He glanced at the sky, where the sun tilted westward. In an hour’s time, when the heat had begun to fade, he would go to exercise Bel Argent. This had become his daily privilege. Few riders could manage the white stallion. Daspir would certainly plan a route that passed the Cigny house, and hope that Isabelle would appear on the balcony to receive the impression he meant to make on her. If she was there or if she was not, he would call on her that evening. She had not admitted him to any intimacy for more than ten days, and so in his vitals he felt she was bound to do it soon.
Sweat ran stinging into both his eyes, and the discomfort pried him out of this agreeable daydream. He took off his hat, wiped his forehead, and fanned himself with the brim, staring absently toward the gate, through which he’d very much like to be gone. A black nurse, trim in a blue dress and white headband, was working her way along the row of mats with a pail of water and a gourd dipper. The doctor walked behind her, his face in shadow under his straw hat, and when she’d given each man a drink, he stooped to take a pulse or exchange a word or two.
Then the nurse had dropped her pail and the doctor had pushed past her, was hurrying up toward the place where Daspir stood. The straw hat had flown off, but he did not notice it.
“C’est la crise,” Madame Fortier said dispassionately. Her long shadow spread over Paltre’s torso. It is the crisis. Paltre had convulsed and sat up sharply, his knees drawing tight to his chest. His mouth was crusted with a black rime, and blackened blood was running from his nose and even, Daspir saw with an awful fascination, from the corners of his eyes. He sucked for air without success and shuddered, and his eyelids sank shut with a heavy weight, but the balls still twitched beneath them. Nanon was trying to stretch him out, murmuring, pressing a hand to his chest, but Paltre fought her, struggling to hold up his head.
“She’s stopping his breath,” Cyprien hissed through the scented cloth he held over his mouth and nose. But anyone could see that it was the fever stopping Paltre’s breath and not Nanon. Above the cloth, Cyprien’s eyes darted frantically. Daspir could not bear to look and could not look away. Paltre bared his teeth in a terrible grin. The teeth were covered in yellow-white scum. On a front tooth, one of those fat black buzzing flies alighted. Madame Fortier dangled her horsetail whisk from under a folded elbow, but she did not trouble to flick the fly away. Nor could Daspir break his frozen posture to brush away the insect. Paltre arched his neck, and the fly hummed away of its own accord. Nanon cradled his head in her joined hands.
“Do something,” Guizot grated out of his misery.
“Rien à faire,” the doctor said. There is nothing to do. He’d dropped to one knee beside Nanon, and was trying to disengage her. Then all the muscles of Paltre’s body slackened and he lay flat, and Nanon let go of his head and sat back on her heels. Paltre was motionless, save for a twitching around his eyes. His head lay again in the shadow of Madame Fortier’s skirt. Then the twitching stopped, and Madame Fortier turned and walked away, leaving Paltre’s grinning skull exposed to the sudden glare of the sun.
The captains were all avoiding each other’s eyes. The doctor lifted Paltre’s wrist, then laid it down. Daspir took note of the stiffness that had already set into the arm. Cyprien lowered his handkerchief.
“You let him die,” Cyprien said. It was not clear whether he meant to address the doctor or Nanon or both of them together. “You—”
“Stop it,” Guizot said. “Just be silent.” And Cyprien stopped his mouth with the handkerchief.
“I’m sorry,” said the doctor, blinking slowly through his dusty glasses. When no one spoke, he turned to call for help in moving the body.
“No, we’ll do it,” Guizot said, with a glance at Daspir. And Daspir stooped and lifted Paltre’s body by his bare feet, while Guizot caught him underneath his emaciated shoulders. There was no weight to him. The rags of his ruined uniform dripped from his bones. Directed by the doctor, they carried him to the gate and let him down beside five or six bodies of other men who’d perished in the course of the day.
Cyprien overtook and passed them without a glance, walking stiff-legged toward the gate. Guizot took the doctor’s hand and pressed it and turned wordlessly away. But Daspir was still looking at Paltre, the rictus of his death mask, the awful way the fingers hovered slightly off the ground, at the end of his plank-rigid arms. At last he took his eyes away and faced the doctor. It seemed that there was something he ought to have said, but in the end he was as speechless as Guizot had been; he bowed and took his leave.
They caught up with Cyprien a block below the hospital gate. “That yellow bitch,” he began again. “You know she and her paramour had every reason to wish him dead—”
“Oh, be quiet about it,” Guizot said. “They did all they could for him. He died the same as the others do. You could see plain enough for yourself there was nothing to be done.”
Cyprien dropped his head and walked a little faster. In half a block more he muttered, “We ought to have buried him.”
“Who’ll bury us?” said Daspir, without knowing that he would.
“Don’t say that,” Guizot said. “It’s unlucky.”
Cyprien laughed bitterly. “What in this whole damned colony has ever brought good luck?”
“Maybe it was Christophe who cursed him,” Daspir said. It was another image that took him by surprise—the moment at the banquet when Christophe, aggravated by Paltre’s teasing with the wine, had finally threatened to drink blood from his skull . . . And just before that moment Paltre had seemed to be his usual irritable and irritating self. But all the other victims fell ill in the same dramatically sudden way.
“Ah, Christophe will be deported soon enough,” said Guizot. “Along with every other black who’s worn an epaulette.”
“What do you mean?” Daspir said, skidding to a stop in the middle of the street.
“Rochambeau was boasting of it, when he was in drink. All the black generals are to be arrested and shipped off, one by one.”
Daspir considered. Here was the point Maillart had brought to him a day or so before. The other two captains had stopped to wait for him. They were better placed to hear such rumors, he supposed, since they spent their nights carousing while he, Daspir, paid a politer court to Isabelle Cigny. Drink, whore, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. That watchword seemed to work very well on the looser women of the town, professional or not. The shadow of death that lay over all the garrison seemed to have its erotic aroma too. Daspir knew he might have succeeded as well as his friends if he’d chosen to follow them down that road, but somehow, if Isabelle sent him away, he preferred to sleep alone on his plank in the caserne.
“So much the better,” Cyprien said at last. “Let all the black bastards rot on the hulks.”
Daspir fell into step with the others again. He’d realized he was going in the wrong direction—Bel Argent was stabled at the caserne higher on the hill—but he was reluctant to part from the other two just now. Though he couldn’t say he found their company altogether pleasant, the pall of Paltre’s death would weigh more heavily on him once he was alone.
The doctor stayed in the hospital till well after dark and watched the curl of new moon rise above the wall. At sunset Nanon had gone back to the house, to pack and make the children ready for their journey to Ennery. Although he had not planned it so, the doctor found that Paltre’s death released him from his sense of obligation here. He didn’t need to attend all the other deaths that were sure to follow. And Maillart had intimated, though obscurely, that Leclerc would not object to his departure.
Madame Fortier had agreed to
manage the hospital in his absence. In this predicament her skills were equal to his own, there being no cure for the yellow fever. Under the moon and a spangle of stars she helped him arrange the corpses by the gate for the cart that would collect them in the morning.
In the few hours since he had expired, Paltre’s flesh had drizzled from him like melted tar. It was often so with the yellow fever—the bodies were half decomposed already by the time the doomed man drew his last breath. The doctor bore Paltre no resentment. Long before today, he’d ceased to be the person who had insulted him and Nanon. Cyprien’s accusation was false and he thought that even Cyprien knew it. He bore Cyprien no resentment either. Every word and action and death seemed foreordained.
He barely noticed the smell any more, but once the bodies had been stacked and covered with a square of canvas, he was relieved to wash his hands in scalding water from the kettle under the palm. Madame Fortier passed him the towel she’d used to dry her own. She meant to stay a little longer, till her husband came to fetch her with their wagon.
“You know,” the doctor said, “sometimes I wonder why you take such pains to nurse these men.” He hung the towel over a branch near the fire. “It cannot very well be for love.”
Madame Fortier smiled at him from her height. “Have you put that question to your wife?”
“No,” the doctor admitted. He rubbed his chin and looked down at her feet.
“BonDyé desires us to forgive our enemies,” Madame Fortier said. “It may well be that Nanon has the grace to do it.”
“But not you.” The doctor raised his eyes to her again.
“Oh no. Not me.” Madame Fortier held out her strong, square hand and the doctor clasped it.
“Nanon has a greater heart than mine,” she said. “You are fortunate, blanc, to have found a place there.”
She kept her grip on his hand as she spoke, and the doctor reflected that tonight the appellation blanc on her tongue had lost the hostile edge it usually had and seemed, indeed, almost affectionate.
The Stone that the Builder Refused Page 94