Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Maillart took coffee in the garden (alone, for it seemed that Monsieur Monot had gone out on some errand) and ate an omelet slowly, hoping for a glimpse of Isabelle, who did not appear. In spite of the still, arid heat, he called for his horse and rode to the barracks on the hill, thinking to renew his approach to O’Farrel. He had not yet made it clear to the major just what Toussaint’s presence on the scene might signify—and had their positions been reversed, Maillart knew that he would have had difficulty grasping this point himself.

  He sent in his name at the gate of the casernes, and waited under the same wild fig tree as before. The shade was not adequate now against the noonday heat. Beyond the town and the peninsula’s tip, the sea was a flat, turquoise pancake, motionless; there was no wind. After half an hour, when no one had come, Maillart got up and walked in through the gate, fanning himself with his hat. No one challenged him. The British soldiers in the barracks yard seemed disoriented, stunned by the heat. They were not acclimated and many, no doubt, were beginning to fall ill . . . Sweating in their red woollen coats, they stank like wet sheep.

  Maillart climbed to O’Farrel’s apartment, knocked and waited, but there was no answer. Perhaps the major was at table. Maillart went back down and crossed the yard diagonally toward a building that looked promising, opposite the main gate. A British corporal shouted to him that a horse needed shoeing on the other side of the square. Maillart started, bristled a bit, then went on with an inward smile. Another effect of his civilian garb.

  In the stone hallway the heat seemed somewhat less crushing. Maillart put his head in one door and another, looking for an officers’ mess. What he found instead was perhaps the commander’s council room; at any rate a map of the colony was spread out on a table. Maillart strolled over and glanced down at the map, then leaned closer, bracing his knuckles on the table’s edge. The disposition of forces was marked out with colored pins: red for the English, blue for the French, green for the Spanish . . . On the northwestern peninsula, Le Môle was a prick of red in a forest of blue. The British were isolated here, except by sea, commanding nothing but the town and its harbor.

  “Your business!”

  Maillart shot upright and turned to face a redcoat major in the doorway; balding, mustachioed, and florid either from the heat or irritation.

  “Your pardon—I was looking for Major O’Farrel.”

  “You will not find him here today—he has gone out to Fort Villarie. You are?”

  Maillart bowed and stated his name.

  “Your business with Major O’Farrel?”

  “I—we were acquainted sometime ago. When the major served at Le Cap.” Maillart felt his whole face breaking out in pustules of sweat; trickles ran down from his armpits over his ribs.

  “Served the Carmagnoles, you mean, your revolutionary rabble?”

  “No! Far from it, uh . . .” Maillart closed his fingers loosely against sweaty palms. “No, he took the other part . . .”

  The British major stared, then closed his eyes and covered them with his hands for a moment, as if his head pained him terribly. Then he snatched his head upright and shouted, “Winston!”

  A sweating guard snapped to attention in the hallway.

  “Show this gentleman to the gate.”

  “Yes, Major Grant!”

  The major pointed a forefinger at Maillart. “You, sir, have yourself properly announced if you come here again.”

  “Of course,” Maillart said. “I’ll remember that.”

  “See that you do.” Major Grant stamped down the hall.

  When he returned to the Monot house, Maillart was sweat-soaked and dizzy from the heat and his own self-disgust. In his bedroom he took off his drenched shirt and sniffed it. True, the sweat of fear had a worse stench than the ordinary. It was the falsity of his position—but this reasoning did little to repair his self-respect.

  As best he could determine, the house was still empty except for a couple of servants padding barefoot in the halls. Maillart went down into the garden, hesitated a moment, then shucked off his trousers and lowered himself into the bathing pool. The water was just cooler than tepid and felt very pleasant to his skin. He inhaled and slid completely under, on his back, holding his breath and looking up through the water at the wavery blue of the sky, green smudges of leaves on an orange tree over the pool, fallen leaves and their shadows floating on the surface. His head began to pound, his lungs to burn, and finally he sat up, spouting and shaking his head, then leaned back and rested his elbows on the tiles that flanked the pool. The dizziness passed and he felt much better.

  The house door opened just as he had begun to think of calling for a drink but, instead of a servant, Agathe appeared, clothed in a loose white shift belted at the waist, that hung to her bare feet. She looked at him indifferently, as if he were a plant, as she passed toward a table between the lily pool and the garden gate. Maillart noticed that several of her toes were adorned with fine gold rings. O’Farrel had been correct, he thought, as his eyes tracked the flow of her hips underneath the thin cotton. Agathe sat at the table and opened a book and a Chinese fan, spreading her hand over the pages and fanning herself slowly, in profile to him, looking at the flowering vines that hung down over the garden wall. Maillart wondered if she had recognized him after all, last night on the balcony, and what she had thought, and what she might think, tonight, if . . . He felt himself begin to stir, beneath the water.

  The house door clacked again, and Maillart lazily turned his head. Isabelle was crossing the garden, more casually dressed than yesterday, in a red-and-blue cotton dress of faux peasant fashion, with a straight skirt and tightly laced bodice. She called out something to Agathe, who responded with a smile and a torpid nod, then noticed Maillart with an exaggerated reaction of surprise.

  “So . . . you seem to have found your relief from the heat.” She kicked off her shoes and settled herself on the tiles by the pool, drawing her bare feet up behind her.

  “For a moment, yes,” Maillart said. “But at the sight of you I am all at once in a fever again.”

  Isabelle stretched out opposite him, propping herself on an elbow. “Such gallantry.” She inclined her head to look into the water, so shallow, Maillart now realized, that it afforded him little privacy.

  “Almost rampant gallantry, one might say . . .”

  Maillart colored. He would have liked to say something extremely witty, but a swelling in his throat hindered him, and besides no suitable bon mot came to his mind. Isabelle lowered her hand into the water, just to her wrist, and made a whirling motion with her fingers—she had not actually touched him, but Maillart felt his natural part swirl into the current she created. He closed his eyes, then opened them as a droplet of water broke on his forehead. Isabelle hovered over him with her wet hand drooping in the gesture of a sorceress.

  “I baptise you, in the name of . . . what name shall it be?”

  She flicked more water into his face. Maillart shouted, shifted his position and made as if to splash her with his palm. Isabelle scrambled to her feet and took a step backward from the pool.

  “I should like to ride out to le môle, itself, the breakwater.” She pouted. “But I don’t like to go alone.”

  “At your service.” Maillart began to stand up from the pool, then caught himself. Coyly, Isabelle turned her back and allowed him to retrieve his trousers.

  The wind had come up by the time they left, so that it was considerably cooler. Isabelle rode gracefully, sidesaddle on a small gray mare, her skill somewhat surprising Maillart, who had never been riding with her before. They talked of negligible matters as they crossed the town, sometimes interrupted by pedestrians who greeted Isabelle, but once they rode out onto the peninsula they were alone. Le môle itself was a natural breakwater, a narrow spit of stone which sheltered the north side of the bay from the open ocean. Now they rode in silence, except for horseshoes clanging on the stone—the whole surface was black volcanic bedrock, where only a few lichens grew.
To their left, the sun lowered on the bay, whose calm surface became a burning plate of gold. On the opposite northern side, tall dark waves rushed against a ten-foot cliff. Out here the wind was stiff indeed, and Maillart pulled his hat low over his eyes so as not to lose it. Isabelle also wore a large floppybrimmed hat, secured under her chin with a scarf.

  At the peninsula’s western extremity, Maillart helped Isabelle down from her horse, then slipped the reins under the stirrups. They clambered over the bayside rocks, Maillart lending a hand as necessary, finally swinging her down to the meager beach. Down here, the rocks behind them partially broke the wind. Isabelle let go his hands and took a pace away from him, shading her eyes with hand and hatbrim as she gazed westward into the reddening sunset. Maillart looked in the opposite direction, toward the town, miniaturized by distance and very pretty in the tempered evening light.

  Isabelle removed her hat and held it high so that it caught the wind and fluttered, with a whipping sound. She smiled teasingly at Maillart, then let the hat go. He lunged for it hopelessly, and fell to his knees on the sand, as the hat blew out and landed on the bay, floating with the scarf unwinding in the water. He scrambled to his feet, turning to Isabelle, who laughed and threw back her head, her hair blowing loose all around her face. A thin gold chain gleamed on her collarbone. Maillart wrapped his hands around her tiny waist and kissed the white curve of her neck, then her mouth, and felt her quick tongue darting. When his hand rose to her breast she knocked it away.

  “No, I don’t want it.”

  Maillart pulled her to him, hand at the small of her back, and thrust once, to make her gasp—the gasp was quite well known to him, encouraging. He kissed her more deeply, inhaling her breath, as his free hand worked loose the bodice laces with a desperate ingenuity. His fingertips brushed something unexpectedly hard and cold, then burrowed toward the more familiar softness. He was trying to pull her down to the sand. Isabelle bit through his lower lip, then, as he recoiled, hit him hard on the cheekbone with her closed hand.

  Maillart backed off and spat blood in the sand, touched his finger to his lip, staring at her in astonishment.

  “Tu me fais mal.” Isabelle tucked her small breast back into her bodice in a businesslike manner, and fastened the laces back up to the neck. “And you’ve also broken my necklace.”

  Maillart glanced down at his right hand; the ends of the gold chain unspooled from his fingers. On his palm lay a dark cylindrical object—a carved stone penis, life-sized or near.

  “But what is that?!”

  “Un objèt d’art, évidemment,” Isabelle snapped, “A souvenir from the time of the caciques.”

  Maillart’s eyes bulged at the stone phallus. He had seen arrowheads and thunderstones and a few carved fetishes of the long-vanished Arawaks, but nothing remotely resembling this. “They worshipped these?” he asked.

  “No more than you worship your own. Bah, you have destroyed the chain.”

  Maillart’s back stiffened. “Allow me to have it repaired for you.”

  “No, give it to me.” Isabelle took the chain, squinted, and closed the broken link with a pinch of her nails. She reached behind her neck to refasten the clasp, then thrust the pendant back into her bosom. Maillart glared as she shook out her hair.

  “Ça va?” he said with an ironic lift of his eyebrows. He wiped a little blood off his chin.

  Isabelle turned toward the west, where the sun was a red disk dissolving in the molten water. “You misunderstand me,” she said. “When I come here at this hour, I think of my children.”

  The captain considered this for a moment. “Accept my apologies,” he said.

  “But it was I who provoked you,” Isabelle said. “After all, you are only a man.”

  “True,” the captain said, with an unaccustomed sense of humility. “I admit that.”

  His heat had by now completely subsided, and he felt his anger fading too, leaving confusion, then a kind of calm. They stood at arm’s length from each other, until the sun had cut entirely through the surface of the water and dropped under like a coin in a slot. Behind was a wake of color streaked across ragged scraps of cloud. Seagulls crossed the red-rippled sky, crying as if the sun was something they had lost.

  “We had better go in,” the captain said practically. “A horse might break a leg on these rocks in the dark.”

  Isabelle nodded, speechless. The captain assisted her back to the horses. When she had mounted, she retained his hand a little longer.

  “I have still a need for friendship,” she said.

  “I offer whatever you will accept.”

  They rode back to the town in the same silence in which they had come. The captain glanced back once to look for Isabelle’s hat, but it had either foundered or floated out of sight.

  Dinner chez Monot was convivial enough—Isabelle seemed rather more animated than usual, and Maillart managed, at last, to rise to the occasion. If Monsieur Cigny suspected anything, he gave no sign of it . . . and after all, this time there was little to suspect. Maillart retired to his room, resolved to stay there, renouncing any adventures on the balcony . . . Beyond the enclosure of the house, the donkeys brayed as usual. He lay down expecting a restless night and was amazed to awaken, what seemed seconds later, to the full light of day.

  Major O’Farrel was waiting for him downstairs, fingers drumming on the table. “At last,” he said, as Maillart strolled in. “Your horses are fed and watered and saddled and your men are waiting at the gate. As I believe your business here is very much concluded—”

  “Doucement,” Maillart said. “I have not yet breakfasted.”

  “I would not linger over the meal,” O’Farrel said, “unless you want to be hanged for a spy. Major Grant has taken very much against you—he has been making inquiries, since your visit. Were he ever so slightly less muddled, you would have been in the guardhouse since yesterday noon. You understand, I can do nothing—I have already done more than I should.”

  Maillart sat down and called for coffee. The major jumped up, twitching.

  “If you mean to dally after that devil of a woman,” he said, “consider if it’s worth your life. You waste your time, in any case—she has forsworn her amours to devote herself to that swinish husband, for what reason I do not comprehend. Or perhaps she is moved by some other fancy.”

  Maillart burst out laughing and leaned back in his chair.

  “I am delighted to have so amused you,” O’Farrel said frostily.

  Maillart caught his breath. “I mean no offense,” he said. “Indeed I’m grateful for the warning.” He touched a cautious finger to the swelling on his cheekbone. “But go—before you’re compromised by being seen here. I’ll not be ten minutes behind you.”

  At the edge of town Maillart took counsel with a convoy of water sellers headed for the river, and was directed to a trail barely passable by horsemen, which in theory led directly across the peninsula down to the town of Gonaives. In an hour they had reached the height of the dry mountains. Maillart pulled his horse up sharply and turned back toward Le Môle. He dismounted and, while the black men watched him gravely, took off his civilian shirt, ripped it down the middle and tried to throw it off the cliff. The wind caught the shirt and blew it loosely back so that Maillart’s horse shied and bucked. The captain choked up on the reins and calmed his animal, then turned toward the distant sea and began to shout, cursing women and politics equally, mostly in French but with some excursions into English, Spanish and Creole. When he was breathless, the black men laughed and applauded him. Maillart took his French uniform from a saddlebag and put it on, adjusted the epaulettes and pulled the seams straight. Once content with the fit of his coat, he swung back into the saddle and rode on, much relieved.

  8

  Doctor Hébert had elaborated the water project for Habitation Thibodet many times, both in imagination and in fact, but now it was finally finished in both departments. On the slope above the grand’case, a pool had drained the swamp and
now fed two channels which divided around the house and then rejoined in a second pool, directly in front of the gallery where the doctor sat now, drinking his morning coffee and nibbling at a sugared piece of flat cassava bread.

  The lower pool was edged with stones, laid in a ring without mortar. At its far rim, another channel took the water out, down toward the kitchen garden. The doctor thought the irrigation might reclaim the yard before the house, which had degenerated into a bare expanse of baked clay or mud, depending on the season, trampled by the feet of men and horses. He had already planted a few flowering shrubs around the pool, and four coconut palms which might one day grow tall. He closed his eyes, pictured a fountain, but that was absurd.

  “It’s lovely . . .” The voice was melodic, soft, but a little teasing too. The doctor opened his eyes to greet his sister, who had just settled into the chair next to his own.

  “Lovely . . .” she said again, smiling sleepily at him. “But now how will you fill your days?”

  “Haven’t I enough to do?” The doctor heard the note of pique in his own voice and realized Elise was right: he would miss his pet project. “There’s the coffee and the cane,” he said more mildly. “And the infirmary, as always.”

  “I rather meant some avocation,” Elise said, turning languidly to accept a cup of coffee from the maid, Zabeth. “To occupy your imagination. Something apart from ordinary work.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “There’s a great deal of botanizing I had meant to do. . . .”

  His own words echoed back at him from the damp, mist-laden air. It was strange to search for an activity to pass the time, in such a situation, when all of the colony was immersed in war of one kind or another. But ever since Toussaint’s party had returned from the Spanish side of the mountains, Habitation Thibodet had been strangely becalmed. Not for the first time, the doctor reflected that this state of affairs was unnatural and perhaps portended ill.