Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Of course,” Maillart said, pausing to suck smoke from his cheroot, “he had suborned all the leaders beforehand. Or rather, he’d brought them back to the fold of the Republic, for they’d first been suborned by the English at Le Môle.”

  “But,” said the doctor, “was it not the election of Sonthonax that set off all this clamor?”

  The captain raised his legs onto his cot and leaned back against the plastered wall. Alarmed by this movement, a gecko retreated higher on the wall, farther from the orb of candlelight englobing the two men.

  “True, he said very little about Sonthonax,” the captain mused, “but I think he managed to give the impression that the blacks could get along as well without him as with him.”

  On October 16, 1796, Governor-General Laveaux boarded a ship for France, where he would take up his legislative duties. With him he bore the strongest testimonials of Toussaint’s filial devotion, and also many messages for Toussaint’s sons in France. His departure left Toussaint without a military superior in the colony, and only one man equal to him in rank: the Frenchman Desfourneaux, who was also a general of division.

  By then, Commissioner Giraud had returned to France, while Commissioner Leblanc had died (in circumstances which gave rise to suspicion of poisoning). Raimond, the sole mulatto member of the Third Commission, was keeping his profile discreetly low, while Roume was more or less incommunicado in Spanish Santo Domingo. The French General Rochambeau had failed to take possession of the Spanish half of the island, which a clause of the Treaty of Basel had ceded to France. Subsequently Rochambeau had been deported by Sonthonax, for this failure and an air of insubordination surrounding it. Meanwhile the Spanish continued to violate the treaty in various covert ways, supporting the English invaders as they might, especially on the border around Mirebalais.

  Now thoroughly detested by the mulatto factions, and generally mistrusted by most of the whites, Léger Félicité Sonthonax was still very popular among the vast majority of the newly freed blacks, and he remained the highest civil authority in Saint Domingue. Though he’d been elected to the French Assembly at the same time as Laveaux (and though his enemies in that increasingly reactionary body had engineered an order for his recall), he seemed to have no plans to leave the colony.

  25

  “Mesdames, messieurs, les jeux sont faits,” Maillart said gaily.

  In fact the only lady present was Elise, looking on benignly though she did not play. Across the table from her sat Doctor Hébert, nursing a glass of rum and sugared lime juice; he had not taken a hand in the card game either. Maillart and Vaublanc displayed their cards, and at once Maillart grimaced and sighed and pushed his chair back. With both hands, Captain Vaublanc scooped in the mound of paper scraps from the center of the table.

  They’d been at this game for two years or better, and though at first Maillart had been the heavy winner, in the last six months Vaublanc had won back more than half of the highly theoretical property he’d originally staked and lost. Now he arranged the paper slips in ranks, picking up one and then another and squinting at it in the candle light.

  “Azor . . . Rosalie . . . Acinte . . . Levieux . . . Lafleur . . . Petit Paul, called by the blacks Bouquart—” Vaublanc halted and brandished the last slip at Maillart. “You’d palm off this one on me, would you?—the beast is worthless, an incorrigible runaway. In ninety-one he was still at large. Give me another.”

  “As you like.” Maillart reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced his own store of paper slips, fanning them between thumb and fingers. He selected one and proffered it and then, as Vaublanc reached for it, drew it back.

  “Consider,” he said, grinning and twisting a point of his mustache. “This Bouquart is here even now, out there . . .” He gestured beyond the gallery rail into the damp, fragrant darkness, beyond the purling sound of the rivulet feeding the pool before the Thibodet grand’case. “This Bouquart has been serving in Riau’s command, but were he mine, I would not give him up. He is fearless. He stands when the others run away, and inspires them all to turn and fight again. And the strength of him—what a specimen you have there.”

  “A Mondongue,” Vaublanc grumbled. “Useless in the fields . . . a bossale who would never bow to the yoke.”

  “You do not surprise me,” Maillart said.

  The talk stopped, while in the outer darkness the wind rose and rushed through the leaves and then subsided. The doctor tasted his rum and rolled the glass between his palms. He pondered. In France, that other Vaublanc of the National Assembly, who was the captain’s distant kinsman, was demanding that Sonthonax be brought to account for all the losses of property he was supposed to have occasioned in Saint Domingue, and behind him was arrayed the whole faction of dispossessed, exiled colonists, whose influence seemed to be waxing. If by some chance slavery were to be restored, would the card game suddenly turn serious? For Maillart, the doctor thought, it was no more than sport, but Vaublanc had actually once owned those people whose names were written on the slips.

  Elise bid them good night and went into the house. Maillart leaned forward to light a cigar stub at the candle flame.

  “Where is your famous brother-in-law?” he said. “The tobacco here is nearly exhausted.”

  To this the doctor said nothing. Maillart blew smoke toward the overhead fan, stilled for the want of a servant to pull the rope, its blades festooned in spiderweb.

  “Simcoe,” Maillart said.

  Vaublanc looked up at him cannily. “A fighter, that one. They say he’s landed thirty thousand troops.”

  “A fighter indeed,” said Maillart, “and the first the British have fielded—since Brisbane.”

  “Exactement.” Vaublanc picked up the cards and shuffled and bridged and let them flutter into a single deck. The pasteboards were sticky from heat and damp and the touch of many sweating hands. “One does not like to be unpatriotic,” he said, “but men like Dessources, or the Vicomte de Bruges—”

  “We have already learned their caliber,” Maillart said.

  “Quite so,” said Vaublanc. “I think that General Simcoe may provide us with a more interesting experience.”

  Doctor Hébert drained his glass and set it on the table; nodding to the officers, he got up and went into the house. Zabeth was just leaving Paul’s room for Sophie’s. When he went in, the doctor found the boy lying quietly under the sheet in the light of a candle, looking up at the shadows of the ceiling. Paul turned his eyes to him gravely, then looked away and up once more. The doctor sat down at the bedside and began telling him a story, interspersed with snatches of song in Creole, though he was no singer. He knew that at this time of night the boy missed his mother most, although, determined in his small stoicism, he did not speak of her. Later in the night there would sometimes be bad dreams.

  Pauline came in, dressed in a shift for bed, and stooped to kiss the boy’s forehead. Smiling shyly at the doctor, she left for Sophie’s room where she now slept—still near enough to hear Paul when he cried out with his nightmares. The doctor went on singing softly, the words tumbling and scraping low in his throat, until the boy’s hand relaxed in his and his eyes closed and his breathing slowed in sleep.

  He carried Paul’s candle into his own room, and by its light took off his clothes and hung them on pegs on the wall. He pocketed the silver snuffbox and the mirror shard and set those articles on the bedside stand beside the candlestick. Kneeling, he examined the sacks of herbs and salves and rolled bandages which would be packed into his saddlebags next day. Then he sat down naked on the edge of the bed and meticulously cleaned his pistols and checked the firing mechanisms and reloaded and reprimed them. As he handled the pistols, he thought of Choufleur in quick bright flashes which he tried to repel as quickly as they came to him. His long gun had been seen to earlier and hung ready on its nails above the door.

  A mosquito whined around the room, and the doctor stalked it carefully, his shadow looming huge and dark in the candlelight. At last he
crushed it against the door jamb, then slipped his legs between the sheets and snuffed the candle. By touch he found the snuffbox and thumbed up the lid. Of late he’d been filling it with sweet-smelling leaves, citrus or jasmine or lavender, as if to mask the faint tinge of rot which in truth had long since evaporated . . . to purge even the memory of corruption.

  Dark of the moon: no light came through the jalousies, but the breath of air was fresh and cool. The doctor’s bare legs twitched under the sheet. Nanon had shared this bed with him, then briefly with Choufleur (he’d extorted the latter scrap of information from Zabeth). It would not do to think of that. He had been with other women, only once or twice, since Nanon’s disappearance, but it was joyless (though the girls were beautiful), dull and distant even at the moment of release. He’d noticed that Maillart, surprisingly, also seemed to have lost his well-established taste for whoring. The doctor turned on his stomach, then on his back . . . he began to think he would not sleep at all, but next he was awakened by the crowing of the cocks.

  The muster had begun before dawn and just as the sunlight began to yellow, they were riding out. Morriset, who commanded the dragoons of Toussaint’s honor guard, led off the column, with Toussaint back by several ranks, riding among his aides and pocketed by the helmeted dragoons. He sat smoothly, easily erect on his huge charger, the white plume waving gaily in his hat. The women and children were lining their way, watching, calling out to certain men and applauding all of them. The children capered about and ran at the heels of the horses. The doctor saw Paul and Sophie come running from the grand’case, pursued by Pauline who was shouting remonstrances, but when she overtook them, she did not make them go back; instead all three joined the other spectators. The doctor pulled his horse out of the line and stood on the bank on the other side of the road, his horse prancing restlessly beneath him. Across the stream of marching men he caught Paul’s eye and smiled and saluted the boy with a touch of his finger on the brim of his straw hat. Paul had found Caco, and the two boys were running up and down the line of the march, taking turns rolling a wooden hoop with a stick. The girls, Pauline and Sophie, stood hand in hand watching more quietly; Zabeth had also come out to join them, though Elise was nowhere to be seen.

  Maillart’s troops passed, the captain winking, grinning at the doctor, then Vaublanc, then Riau, who pulled his horse up to stand where the doctor had halted. Sober, expressionless, Riau reviewed his foot soldiers as they passed. Caco jumped and whooped on the far side of the line, but Riau gave him no notice. He was studying the men in their motley: uniform coats over torn canvas trousers or ragged relics of the tricolor, horizontally striped breeches brought into the colony by republican sans-culottes. These breeches were sometimes trimmed down to shorts, sometimes simply shredded to the hip. Many wore straw replicas of European military hats, and some had remnants of the originals in felt, and many wore tricolor cockades pinned to their headgear and were further ornamented by tribal scarification out of Guinée or brands inflicted by their erstwhile masters on breast or cheek or shoulder, along with punitive mutilations: lopped ears and slit nostrils, and some lacking fingers, a hand, an arm, and a few went along one-legged managing a crutch with one hand and a musket with the other, and some had no garment whatsover but a binding round the genitals and a belt bearing a knife and cartridge box, musket in hand and ready. It was this Riau surveyed (the doctor knew): the condition of their weapons.

  They passed, and finally Riau raised his head and whirled his hat at Caco, whereupon Paul and Caco both leapt in the air in the ecstasy of this recognition and came down clutching one another. The next squadrons were still marching up, but the doctor fell into the ranks and rode beside Riau.

  That day they came to Petite Rivière and camped around the fort: La Crête à Pierrot, raised on a peak above the town, with the slow curl of the Artibonite winding around it. Next day they rode the river valley to Verrettes, where Toussaint had garrisoned another fort, and there they crossed the river and pressed on into the mountains to the south. Before night they came to the crossing of the road that ran from Mirebalais in the interior to Port-au-Prince, where the English were. They camped that night at the fort of Gros Figuier. No cart nor anything on wheels could pass the road to Mirebalais, so during the night the men unshipped the cannon and took the carriages apart. Next day when they marched on, Christophe Mornet remained behind with a small detachment to bar any British coming up that road from the coast. The doctor watched agape as the men, six or eight to each cannon bore, went loping up the mountain ledges as if those loads of ironmongery were no more than bags of feathers.

  The valley of Mirebalais and the hills around it were green and fertile, fed by many rivers, large and small; the source of the Artibonite was not far off, across the Spanish border. The pastures were rich, and there were many corrals and herds of livestock roving, also prosperous coffee plantations, most operated by colored men but some also by whites. As Toussaint’s army passed, the field workers laid down their tools and their baskets and came to the bordering hedges to watch, and sometimes the landowners appeared, raising a hand in neutral greeting. When Toussaint had occupied Mirebalais two years before, he’d taken care to put no plantations to the torch; he had kept order, and though afterward the slave-holding planters had invited the British into the region, and though they might fear Sonthonax and the Republicans, they were not hostile to Toussaint (and some of them, indeed, had had secret notice from him of his arrival).

  The army did not march directly on the town of Mirebalais, which was strongly fortified and garrisoned by a force of two thousand men under the Vicomte de Bruges. Toussaint contented himself with overrunning the camps on the surrounding heights: Grand Bois, Trou d’Eau and others. The enemy survivors of those skirmishes were driven down into the plain of Cul de Sac, whence they might make their way to Port-au-Prince, perhaps. Toussaint ordered the gun carriages reassembled and began deploying his cannon on the heights above the town. At dusk word came that Christophe Mornet had successfully repelled a sortie from Port-au-Prince: seven hundred men led by the Baron de Montalembert had been driven back. De Bruges would not be reinforced from that quarter.

  An hour before dawn of the next day, Riau roused the doctor by waggling his foot, then shushed him with a finger laid on his lips as the doctor jack-knifed from his pallet with a cry of alarm half out of his throat. There would be something interesting, Riau explained, if the doctor wished to accompany him.

  They left the camp, a party of ten men on foot, on a path too steep and treacherous for horses, making their way by touch or memory or by the faint light of the setting half-moon. Full daylight found them high in the mountains with the birds just beginning to stir in the leaves, the fruit bats returning to their daytime hiding places, and sunlight spangling out over mountain after jungled mountain: great, green waves of them rolling away in all directions as far as the eye could see. They went on at a brisker pace. Riau had an advance runner who served as a guide. In less than one hour they began to hear dogs barking, and a hairy black hog burst out of the jungle and bolted grunting to the downhill side of the trail.

  Riau’s advance man pulled up sharply, pointing at a pile of dry leaves sifted across the trail. Another man stooped, lifted the mat beneath the leaves—below was a deadfall mantrap lined with sharpened stakes. A voice spoke from nowhere.

  “Ki moun ou yé?”

  “Nou moun Toussaint,” Riau said. We’re Toussaint’s people.

  A wild man stepped from the bole of a tree, naked but for a bead string round his waist. He had such a great mass of matted hair, his head looked to be the size of a bull’s.

  “Riau?”

  “Himself!” Riau smiled broadly and spread his empty hands, fanning them around his head like fluttering leaves.

  “Then you may pass,” the wild man said, and at that a great number of men like himself stood up from their hiding places above and below the trail, lowering the muskets they had aimed from ambush. The muskets were shiny, n
ew-looking, the doctor noted. A tingle traveled up and down his spine.

  The bull-headed wild man led them on a hidden path, his fellows falling in behind him. More dogs were barking and there was poultry clucking, and the doctor began to see corn tassels sticking up among the wild leaves. They came out into a spiral village of stick and mud ajoupas. Here a great number of men were already assembled in the open, each carrying a new musket with its light wood and bright metal, their women and children admiring them shyly from the doorways.

  “Who are these people?” the doctor hissed.

  “Mamzel and the Docko Maroons,” Riau told him, glancing toward the leader of the band. “But today, they are our Twelth Brigade. Toussaint organized them like that, when he was at Mirebalais before.”

  The doctor digested this information thoughtfully. “And their weapons?”

  “The gifts of Sonthonax,” Riau said, laughing cheerfully.

  To call the Dockos a regular brigade was a stretch of credibility but, under the direction of Mamzel, they moved with a united purpose. They went loping out from their village in a single column, lacing through the mountains with a snake-like movement. Though the heat was mounting rapidly, they held a sharp pace and stopped only rarely for a scant mouthful of water. The doctor poured sweat. His long gun seemed the weight of several cannon—Riau had advised him not to carry it . . .

  At last they made a full halt on a peak above a grassy savanna, while Riau undertook a signal with two flags. He scanned the hills beyond the plain with a little spyglass, and he must have seen the answer to his signal, for he told Mamzel they would press on, and quickly. They came down from the mountain and set off at a dead run across the savanna toward the town of Las Cahobas. The doctor jogged with his long gun clasped crossways in front of him, his pistols banging on his hips, his chest about to explode. A herdsman tending cattle on the plain was staring at them, frozen in astonished dismay. A little too late, he caught his horse to ride for the town, but the Dockos ran him down and dragged him from his horse, and one of them swung into the saddle where he had been and rode at the head of their charge. By that time they already heard the ragged sound of gunfire, for Toussaint had struck the town from the other side with his main force, so when the Dockos rushed into the street, the rout of the defenders had already begun, Spanish soldiers and British redcoats scattering in full flight. With a honking of conch shells and high, thready war cries, the Dockos ran after them into the western hills.