All Souls' Rising (36 page)

“And then Madame Arnaud stood up,” she said. “Like a statue, or a figurehead…”

“Like a goddess.” Madame Bourgois supplied the simile.

Like a witch
, Emilie thought privately. “She denounced them,” she went on. “She shamed them from our path.”

“‘In the name of God,’” said Madame Cigny in a ringing tone. “‘Let us pass.’”

There was a moment’s silence. Claudine turned her palm up so that her stigmatum could be witnessed. As customary, the description of her actual sacrifice was elided.

“She saved you,” Madame Bourgois, pinkening with excitement, said to Emilie, “from a terrible violation.”

Claudine watched the pulse beating in the hollow of the young wife’s throat.
Dear lady
, she whispered to herself,
you would not have enjoyed the fact so much as you seem to enjoy the thought
.

“Yes,” Emilie murmured, with a lopsided smile. Her eyes looked as if they would well over. “Yes, of course.” Many had turned to admire the purity of her virginal emotion. In the interest of her daughters’ futures, Madame Lambert had concealed what actually had happened to them. Thus the stage was inadvertently set for the exquisite cruelty of these recitals to be visited upon them all.

“Others have been less fortunate,” Claudine said, releasing Emilie from the skewer of attention.

“
Vraiment
,” said Isabelle Cigny. “Even some of those who owed you their salvation.” She turned to Maillart. “We have heard from your gallant cousin that Doctor Hébert and the girl Marguerite were lost on that unlucky expedition.”

“Yes,” Maillart said gravely. “Thus far there has been no word of them.”

Isabelle Cigny clicked her tongue. “So reckless of them. To expose themselves a second time. Can one look for
two
miraculous interventions?”

“We must pray for their safety,” Maillart said sonorously. “There may still be hope.”

A silence fell. After a moment, Madame Bourgois punctured it. “The horrors one hears of,” she said, bending again toward Emilie. “From those less fortunate than yourself.”

“Madame Dessouville, for example,” Claudine said. All attention at once swung back to her, that she would raise this subject in mixed company.

“I have not heard of Madame Dessouville,” Madame Bourgois said expectantly.

“She was waylaid with her husband in attempting to escape from Dondon,” Claudine said. “They raped her across her husband’s dead body, though she was pregnant and near her time. When they had done, they cut the infant from the womb and slaughtered it before her dying eyes.”

“
Tout á fait comme d’habitude
,” Isabelle Cigny said quickly. What she said was true enough, though the routine character of such atrocities was seldom alluded to. She smiled thinly around the table, then stood up. The ladies would withdraw for coffee, leaving the gentlemen to their wine. Claudine had the right of precedence, but she hung back, and Madame Cigny caught her sleeve and held her in the doorway.

“Should I apologize?” she asked.

“
Comment?
”

“For making you a spectacle,” said Isabelle Cigny, and Claudine thought fleetingly of strangling her or clawing her eyes out there on the spot.

“I did so want to meet you,” Isabelle continued.

“Yes,” Claudine said. She looked into the other woman’s face and found her stare met firmly. After all, she could not quite dislike her. Isabelle Cigny clutched at both her hands.

“Tell me, how did you do it
really? La verité
.”

“The truth?” Claudine said. “I wanted to know if I could feel something.” She smiled politely, let it fade, and turned to follow the other ladies toward the drawing room.

I
N THE MORNING
A
RNAUD
left Grandmont’s house rather early to set out for Les Ursulines. It was a considerable distance, but he walked the whole way, scarcely noticing his surroundings. He carried the cane Grandmont had given him, though he found he could not swing it so freely as he’d been wont to do with the one he’d formerly possessed, but had to make actual use of it sometimes, to support him through the dizzy spells that occasionally overtook him.

Midway he crossed the path of a pair of Negroes bound together in a cart, en route to their place of execution. A crowd was milling all around, screaming insults and throwing stones. Arnaud took only the slightest notice. The cart rolled by, the crowd went with it, the noise and shouts receding. He went on until he’d reached the convent, where he made his business known. A nun escorted him to a small stone room, undecorated but for a brass crucifix screwed into the masonry. He waited. The room was cooler than he would have expected, almost dank. Vines laced over the iron grille that covered the single small window, so that it was quite dim inside.

Presently Claudine came in and sat in a chair beneath the crucifix, at the opposite end of the room from him. Arnaud inspected her from his own seat, not knowing what to say. She wore a loose pale shift and her hair was pulled back very tight, drawing the skin sharply against the bone of her face. In her temples, blue veins forked like lightning.

“My husband,” Claudine said tonelessly. “You’ve fallen off.”

Arnaud glanced down at his bagging breeches. “I was taken prisoner,” he said. “After my escape I was a long time wandering.” He gave no more detail and she requested none. His eye roved to the crucifix, then to the window, where a hummingbird hovered before a blossom on the vine. Claudine sat with her gloved hands decorously folded, right over left in her lap. Arnaud used his stick to help him to his feet.

“They tell me you are become a sort of heroine,” he said.

“They are greatly deluded.” Claudine turned her face to the wall. He crossed the room more quickly than she could react, raised her maimed hand and turned it over. For an instant it appeared to him that the pin passed not only through the glove’s palm but also the skin beneath.

“Everything is destroyed,” Arnaud blurted. “All our plantation. It’s all gone as if it never was—all but the dog shed. There’s something in there—did you know of it?”

Claudine mutely shook her head. Her lips sucked in across her teeth; she would not look at him. Arnaud dropped to one knee. He clawed the glove from her left hand and frantically began kissing the stump. In a moment she had snatched her hand away from him. Arnaud fell back and groveled at her feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I’ve done you many injuries.”

“No—it’s nothing,” Claudine said. She had placed both hands across her stomach, as if to quell a pain. “It’s only—I am with child.”

Arnaud got to his feet and took a backward step, staring at her in amazement, wonder even.

“Don’t mistake yourself,” Claudine said. “It’s no cause for rejoicing. If ever you see it, you will know.”

“Do you mean—?”

“I don’t mean that,” Claudine said. “The child is yours.” She rose silently from her seat; wraithlike, she left the room.

A
RNAUD REACHED THE STREET
in a welter of unfamiliar feelings. He stumbled along for quite some distance without paying any attention to his direction. As he began to regain a sense of his surroundings, he noticed a young mulatto in a brocaded coat coming along the way toward him.

“
Bonjour
,” Choufleur said, smiling ironically. “So pleased to see that you are well.”

Arnaud’s eyes bulged. He looked at the cane which Choufleur was negligently dangling. “That cane belongs to the Sieur Maltrot,” he said.

“Formerly,” Choufleur said. “It
belonged
. I have inherited it.”

“You yellow bastard,” Arnaud said, and swung Grandmont’s bull pizzle back behind his shoulder for a blow. “When I denounce you, you’ll be hung from the nearest lamppost—I’ll see you broken on the wheel.”

Before he could bring down the stick, Choufleur darted inside his striking range and grabbed him by the neck. There was strength enough in his one free hand to shut down Arnaud’s air supply.

“And if I denounce
you?
” Choufleur hissed. “The
Pompons Rouges
have a recipe for royalist conspirators. Don’t you remember
le chevalier de Mauduit?
They’ll cut your balls off and make you swallow them, just as they did with him.”

Choufleur shoved Arnaud against the wall. “Do you see the strength of our mutual interest?” he grinned. “Good day.”

For a moment, Arnaud floundered dizzily, small black dots spinning behind his eyes. He coughed and regained his breath. Rage swelled all through him as he pushed himself upright with both hands on the stick, but Choufleur was right; he could do nothing now. He kept on walking, there was nothing else to do. But with the flood of anger in him, he felt much more himself than he had done for a long time.

Chapter Twenty-Three

A
LITTLE BREEZE TURNED OVER THE LEAVES
of the thorn trees that grew alongside the hospital
ajoupa
, and ran through the open sides of the
ajoupa
itself, stirring the yellowing palm leaves of its thatch. It cooled the sweat that was running off the freckled bald slope of Doctor Hébert’s head, gathering in droplets on his eyebrows. He looked up from his task for a moment, turned his face into the wind. His patient relaxed his gritted teeth and sighed. Behind him, a few places down the row, the doctor could hear the click of the priest’s rosary and the murmur of a prayer.

“
Sa ou fi mâl?
” The doctor looked down at the injured man, who smiled back at him thinly. He was cheerful enough, under the circumstances. Foraging far from the camp, he’d stumbled into a deadfall trap dug out by some other hunter, and skewered both his feet and calves on the bamboo stakes at the pit’s bottom. The wood had broken off in the wounds and the doctor had been engaged for more than an hour in fishing out the fragments with a pair of long-nosed pliers.

The priest’s daughter Paulette was looking on; she’d recovered herself enough to help around the hospital now, and the doctor found her quick and willing. “
M’ap kòmâsé
,” he told her now, and Paulette, sucking in her yellowish cheeks, tightened her grip on the hurt man’s right ankle. The doctor probed at the ball of the foot. A stake’s point had broken off well inside the wound, and so far he’d been unable to extract it. It splintered further whenever he tried to grip it with the pliers. The iron edges of the instrument grated on the edge of the tough callus at the borders of the cut. The leg stiffened, kicked reflexively. Paulette, ever determined, swung her leg over the shin and rode it like a bucking horse. The doctor loosened his grip on the pliers and straightened. The breeze had died, and he blinked back the salt of the sweat than ran into his eyes. He called down the slope for Marotte, who was tending the fire, to come and help.

“Be still, man,” the doctor said, as the wounded man grunted and flexed his bloody toes. “It’s not so bad. You won’t lose the leg.” The doctor was cheerful saying this, confident that the promise would come true. He had learned enough of herbal medicine to be sure enough that he could keep off gangrene.

“All the time I tell him to be still,” the hurt man said, sighting down the bare length of his leg. “But he keep moving.”

Marotte slapped him on the muscle of his thigh, and hunkered down to fasten her hands on the shin just below the knee, giving Paulette a wink as she took her position. The doctor stooped and dug again, spreading the pliers’ jaws slightly within the wound. The broken butt of the bamboo shifted from him, and the injured man gasped and twisted his head, but Marotte and Paulette held him fast between them. The stub slipped within the pliers’ mouth and the doctor felt that he had caught it. He groped a little farther toward the point, grasped and pulled back with a smooth, steady pressure. The sliver resisted, gave a little, and plopped free in his hand. The patient’s breath hissed out and, as if with the same exhalation, a quantity of blood flowed from his foot, spilling onto the doctor’s fingers. With his free hand he flexed the corners of the foot. The blood looked clean. A centipede was walking off the edge of the straw
paillasse
, jointed and metallic; the doctor couldn’t see its feet. He straightened up, waving the two-inch bamboo splinter over his patient’s head.

“You see?—No barb.” He waggled the splinter between the teeth of the pliers. “You are lucky. And not poisoned either, I don’t think.”

The hurt man’s eyes had slid half closed, but they suddenly started open again, as Marotte thrust his foot into a kettle of disinfectant brew that had just come off the fire. He twisted to one side and tried to raise his knee.

“Leave it,” the doctor said. “Let it work, it will draw the corruption.” The hurt man breathed out whistlingly through his teeth, and relaxed enough to let Marotte bring his foot back into the hot water. The doctor turned and flicked the splinter away, spinning it past a live thorn-studded sapling that Riau had incorporated into the roof’s support. He wiped the pliers on his pants leg and walked down to the fire to wash his hands. In a moment, Père Bonne-chance had joined him.

“Success?” the priest said. The rosary was still looped over his hands and he inattentively continued to shift the beads under his thumb.

“
Je pense que oui
…” the doctor said. “She’s a very useful person, your daughter.” He had come to the point that he could allude to the priest’s children without any particular self-consciousness.

“She might owe you a lifetime of usefulness,” the priest said, inclining his head. Doctor Hébert reddened slightly and looked away.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “And yours?”

“That one has died,” said Père Bonne-chance. Drying his hands on a shock of grass, the doctor turned to face him.

“Are you certain? Come then, let’s go look at her.”

They reentered the hospital
ajoupa
, and the priest led the doctor to the pallet where the dead girl lay. The doctor knelt, felt for a pulse, held a finger underneath her nostrils, but a glance would have sufficed to confirm the priest’s diagnosis. The girl was ten or twelve years old, or had been. She lay on her back with her mouth slightly open, the white of her teeth and her eye whites exposed. The velvety black of her skin was turning gray. Her arms and legs were so emaciated that the knobs of her joints looked painfully swollen, and the gaseous balloon of her belly puffed out between the sharp blades of her rib cage.

“Starvation,” the priest muttered.

“Yes, or worms, possibly.” A fly circled the dead child’s head and the doctor fanned it away before it could light. He stood up. Down-hill, a plunking of sour-sweet notes began; it was Riau, playing an instrument he had lately made for himself, which he called a
banza
. Another fly swooped toward the dead girl, but this one was a dragonfly, and it whirred past without stopping. The doctor followed it out, stooping a little to pass under the fringed eave of the
ajoupa
. Beyond it, several dragonflies were circling each other in a green and sunstreaked glade.

From here he could look down to see Riau, who sat just outside the
ajoupa
where they slept at night, cradling the
banza
in his crossed legs. The instrument was made of a planed length of mahogany attached to half of a large round calabash over which had been stretched a drumhead of sheepskin parchment. There were three strings, twirled out of the guts of an
agouti
Riau had killed. The doctor admired the ingenuity of the whole production, though the music the thing could make grated on his nerves, tending to produce melancholy. He raised his eyes toward the horizon, where the lush green of mountains blued in the distance, the plain a scorched gap passing in between them.

“They’ve been a long time gone,” the priest said, as he came out, echoing the doctor’s thought. He was referring to the pair of mulattoes, Raynal and Deprés, who had gone to present the peace proposal so carefully drafted and signed by Toussaint and the others to the Colonial Assembly in Le Cap some days before.

“I wonder…” the doctor said, trailing off. The child Merbillay and Riau called Caco came out of the
ajoupa
and began turning bowlegged circles to the notes of the
banza
. Riau beat out a rhythm with the heel of his hand on the skin head as he plucked.

“If it goes well?” the priest said.

“How could it not?” the doctor said. “We—
they
ask so little. Four hundred manumissions, to bring all the rest of them back to the fields?”

“If they
can
bring them,” the priest said softly.

“They’re starving,” the doctor said. “I’d think many of them would gladly come in.” He moved toward a twig where a dragonfly had lit, its opalescent wings shimmering in the uneven light. The insect flew, and he turned back toward the priest, who’d seemed to shrivel in his brown robes over the weeks. The doctor felt the boniness of his own face and hands. They’d all become familiar with short commons. These great encampments laid waste to the land like a plague of grasshoppers or locusts.

“It would be madness for the assembly to refuse,” the doctor said.

“Yes…there is madness enough to go round, I think.” From the hollows of his sinking eyes, the priest held his gaze. “Well, but it is an unpleasant thing.”

The doctor looked down through the trees, toward where Riau played the
banza
and his son danced around him in slow circles. “What do you mean?” he said.

“Betrayal,” said the priest. “These hundred thousand given up to buy the freedom of their leaders.”

“Do you see it so?” The doctor stooped and picked up a bright seed of a bead tree and began scraping the mud from it with his thumbnail.

“What’s your opinion?” asked the priest.

“I don’t know,” the doctor said truthfully. “It isn’t at all clear to me.”

“Now that’s a feeling I have shared,” the priest said, and gave his unaffected smile. He let the rosary drop to his waist and began making his way down the slope, holding to the thorny saplings to preserve his balance.

The doctor watched him out of sight. He’d felt no guilt, in fact, in helping to work up the compromise, for after all he’d made no promise that could be betrayed, and yet he was uneasy in his mind. Here in this place, he came and went much as he would—seemed free without truly being so. The prospect of real freedom had unbalanced him. His bones seemed to ache for it, but he was also more afraid than he had been in quite some time.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THAT AFTERNOON
, the doctor retreated into the shade of the sleeping
ajoupa
, and dozed off there without quite meaning to. Strangely, he dreamed of being cold, of wandering in a featureless, snow-covered landscape like nothing he’d ever known in his waking life. From behind the icy crest of a ridge, a huge howling rose to the violet sky. Wolves. He woke then, sweating and confused. He could still hear that howling—it was still going on.

Nine or ten blacks, all strangers to him, came bursting into the
ajoupa
. The doctor got up onto one knee and was jerked forward, out of the shelter. He saw that the priest was similarly chivvied out, his harriers pricking at him with swords’ points. They were sweeping through the hospital as well and flushing out such whites as lay there ill or injured. Fontelle had collected all of her children that were at hand and was shepherding them uphill into the bush. She looked back at the priest but he could not see her. Someone had hit him in the face and blood was running into his eyes.

A couple of musket shots sounded, random, people firing at the sky. Conchs were whistling here and there, their shrills punctuating the deep, throbbing ululation that seemed to blend into a single voice, like a low chord on an organ. The doctor was running willy-nilly down the slope, branches lashing across his face. They menaced him with cutlasses from right and left, and someone directly behind him kept slamming him across the shoulders and the lower back with something that felt like either a tree limb or a plank, blows so powerful he could scarce keep his feet. The whites were being herded in from all directions, toward the clearing within the grove where the white women slept; they were all screaming and weeping now. The blacks pressed on them from every side, cursing them and howling. Among the white men there was a half-organized effort to link arms to shelter the women in the center but there were not enough of them to close a circle.

Doctor Hébert locked elbows with the priest and stood breathing shallowly against the bruises on his back. Behind, a woman’s voice kept plaintively calling something indistinct. In the moil of shrieking black faces turned against them the doctor could make out no single individual he knew.

Then an avenue opened in the mob and at its farther end Biassou appeared. The blacks nearest him quieted a little, so that the doctor hoped for some return to order, some revelation of the logic of the situation, if any there was. But Biassou raised both his hands above his head, one holding a short knife whetted to a silver gleam, and cut shallowly across his other palm and waved the hand to show the blood around. A froth was sizzling at the corners of his mouth; he was transfigured. “Kill the white men!” he was shouting. “Kill the women. Kill them all.”

Behind them, within the circle of linked arms, some of the women renewed their screaming. Among the blacks, there seemed a total willingness to carry out Biassou’s suggestion on the spot, but before the butchery could begin, Toussaint appeared at the head of a troop of the best-disciplined men, all of them carrying new Spanish muskets. They cut between the prisoners and the mob and quickly formed into a line.

Toussaint was standing directly in front of the doctor, his gray pigtail twisted over the greasy collar of his old livery coat, green fabric stretched taut across his shoulders with the browned old bloodstains scattering over it like the map of some undiscovered archipelago. Toussaint spread his hands high, palm-down over the crowd that faced him. He made a number of smoothing motions, like a woman smoothing dough across a bread board. The people nearest him lowered their knives and began to listen with a sulky attention. Even Biassou was silent. The doctor had not heard what he had said.

Toussaint turned around to face the white people. “Kneel down,” he shouted. “All of you down on your knees.” The doctor wanted very badly to connect with Toussaint’s eyes, but they shot over his shoulder, even as Toussaint switched his leg and hooked the doctor’s feet from under him so that he dropped deadweight onto the ground. Then all the white men began loosing their arms and kneeling. The doctor bowed his head and looked at the scuffed dirt; he felt as if he were waiting for the fall of an executioner’s ax.

“Put them in irons,” Toussaint shouted out. The doctor squinted up at him sidelong. The kerchief that covered his head was dark with sweat, his face was twisted, his eyes were shriveled away in their sockets. He was still shouting, something unintelligible, as if his rage was one with Biassou’s. A cart pulled up, drawn by a donkey; Riau and another man walked alongside it. The bed of it was piled high with rusting old slave shackles. Toussaint dropped his fisted hand, or let it fall. The whole crowd sagged accordingly. In the quiet that followed they could hear the birdcalls and the chink of the chains as Riau began tossing them down out of the wagon onto the ground.