Master of the Crossroads (35 page)

“Major Flaville has them all well in hand,” Isabelle said, as if responding to his thoughts.

“You seem on very close terms with that officer,” Maillart replied, and at once regretted the sullenness he heard in his own tone.

“Some allies are chosen of necessity,” Isabelle said. “A military principle, is it not? For the nonce Flaville is the chief authority in these parts, and without him no one would come to the fields . . . they would only work in their own gardens—if they worked at all.” She shook her head above the ruins below. “We must recover some life for ourselves here, especially so long as the house in town is—”

Maillart turned to face her, inadvertently breaking her light grasp on his elbow. “I meant to tell you, you mustn’t press Laveaux about the house,” he said. “The situation at Le Cap is very difficult just now.”

“Oh,” said Isabelle, “I would not abuse your kindness. If not for you—”

“Never mind that,” Maillart said, and placed his hand palm-out against the moist air between them. It was true that he had spent much of his credit with Laveaux on arranging the Cignys’ safe return to their properties in the northern province. This credit had been considerable, given Laveaux’s astonished gratitude at Toussaint’s shift of allegiance to the French Republicans. Of course, the prize was not a mean one either, for in the ordinary course of things,
émigrés
and other partisans of the
ancien régime
were liable to be executed.

“Only listen,” he said now. The drums shifted rhythm and intensified, forcing an urgency into his words he did not fully intend. “It is this very question of the houses at Le Cap which is causing so much unrest among
les gens de couleur
there. Governor-General Laveaux was so long immured at Port-de-Paix that the mulattoes erected their own little kingdom in Le Cap, under Villatte (who I admit to be a capable officer) and a few others.”

“I have heard of Villatte.” Isabelle nodded. “Joseph is in correspondence with him from time to time.”

Maillart noted this “Joseph” with a certain pique, and remembered that when they’d arrived that afternoon she’d presented Flaville by his first name rather than his rank. Perhaps it was only the Creole dame’s familiarity with her servant. He told himself it was unimportant, and went on.

“Understand that the mulattoes have rebuilt most of those houses at their own cost, when the town was burned in ninety-four. And unfortunately they have since made themselves very much at home. More recently, since Laveaux has shifted the seat of government from Port-de-Paix, Perroud has been taxing them to pay rent on those houses.”

“Indeed,” said Isabelle.

“As for myself, I share your sentiments entirely,” Maillart said. “But from the governmental standpoint these are sequestered properties, and the financial situation is near desperation too. But in any case the mulattoes have been most unwilling to pay. I would not speak of revolt, exactly, but I tell you I was happy enough to leave the town for this tour of the Cordon de l’Ouest . . . so I must urge you, do not press Laveaux . . .”

“Or I might find myself hanged for an
émigrée
.” Isabelle’s ironic smile flashed, then faded. “I suppose I must congratulate myself that the guillotine was not successful here—owing to the tender sensibilities of our blacks.” She laid her hand across the hollow of her throat.

Maillart looked at the fragile gold chain that crossed her collarbone, and thought involuntarily of the stone member of the carved pendant which must now be concealed beneath her hand and the fabric of her gown.

“Don’t think me ungrateful,” Isabelle said gravely. “I understand very well how much you’ve done for us.” Surprisingly, she reached for his free hand, and held his fingertips lightly in her own.

“But tell me,” she said. “Do you know who occupies our house?”

Maillart hesitated. “That freckled mulatto they call Choufleur,” he said. “The ‘Sieur de Maltrot,’ as he styles himself. Who has lately been promoted to a colonelcy.”

Isabelle’s lips contorted in the moonlight. “I confess I find that news distasteful.”

“Yes,” Maillart said. “I did not like to tell you.” He paused. “I don’t know why he chose your house. For his father, the actual Sieur de Maltrot, had as fine a house in the town, which he might have taken without challenge.”

“I think I may imagine his reasons,” Isabelle said, seeming to smile to herself.

“At the worst, the work of restoration which he ordered has been well completed,” Maillart told her, turning his head toward the scorched and overgrown foundation. “And it began with little more than what you see here now.”

Isabelle swung their joined hands, looking pensively down at the wreck of her father’s house. “Did you know, there used to be peacocks here? Almost a dozen of them. The blacks say they still see one sometimes, in the jungle.”

She shook her head. The drums rolled to a crescendo and then cut off, so abruptly that Maillart had a sensation of falling. Below, the revenant figure of Claudine Arnaud looked frozen. From the cleft of the mountains came an ungodly shriek.

“Ah,” said Isabelle, releasing the sound with a shudder. “It comes.” Again she put her hand to her throat. The drums recommenced, on a different beat.

“Savage as it may be, it draws one,” she said. “Sometimes I feel drawn to go.”

“Please,” said Maillart. “You mustn’t think of it.”

Isabelle shook herself. “Of course, I do
not
go,” she said, looking down the slope. “Claudine has been.”

“You amaze me,” Maillart said. “She must be quite mad.”

“Oh, the peasants would not harm her,” Isabelle said. “They respect her. Fear her, even. Perhaps in some way they worship her. They believe her enchanted, raised from the dead—a
zombi,
Joseph told me. Or some believe she is only possessed.”

“‘Only,’ ” Maillart repeated. “Perhaps they are right.”

The wind lifted, and Isabelle seemed to shiver again, so that Maillart was moved to put his arm about her shoulders, but instead he only tightened his grip on her hand. This reaction against his first impulse annoyed him. It was a puzzle, the idea of friendship with a woman, a business he had small competence to conduct. Among the palm stumps, Claudine Arnaud leaned slightly forward into the wind, the sleeves and hem of her pale garment fluttering like sails.

“Is it true what you told Laveaux,” he asked, “about the water?”

“Oh yes,” Isabelle said. “Very much so. She carries buckets on a wooden yoke across her shoulders like a slave woman, and serves the field workers with her own hands. Nothing will restrain her from it—it ought to kill her, in that midday heat, but she is not easily killed. She conceives it as some sort of penance, I believe.”

“Has she not already suffered?”

“Amply,” said Isabelle.

For some minutes there had been silence in the cleft of the hills, but now a guttural grumbling began, a half-human-sounding voice that rose toward a melody, chanting, singing in an unknown tongue, perhaps some African language. The drums began. Maillart became aware of a darker figure, standing still as a tree some thirty yards from Madame Arnaud, farther down the boulevard of stumps.

“It is only Joseph,” Isabelle said. “He follows her sometimes, when she walks at night. To see that she comes to no harm.”

“Strange.”

“Perhaps.”

With a sudden impatient movement, Isabelle pulled her kerchief off and held it in her free hand; the cloth went flagging in the wind. She shook her head back so that her dark hair loosened and flowed freely off her shoulders. The gesture seemed almost a signal to the man below, but that was a ludicrous notion, Maillart thought. When she tossed her head, the gold chain came tight against the tendons of her neck, and he thought of the stone phallus nudging the space between her little breasts. The idea was erotic, but abstract.

“He witnessed it,” Isabelle said. “When Claudine chopped off her finger.”

“Who?” Maillart shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Joseph Flaville,” Isabelle said. “That was in the first rising of ninety-one—Claudine was in a wagon with some few survivors of the
gérant’s
family . . . from Habitation Flaville, you know, where she had been a guest. They were trying to make their way out of the plain to Le Cap, through the bands of renegades roaming the roads and the fields. Joseph was not as you see him now. Oh, he would not tell me so much, but he must have been fresh and hot from murdering his own master, or something of that sort. He was among the band that intercepted their wagon.”

“I’ve heard the tale, at second hand,” Maillart said.

“One of them wanted to take her wedding ring, but it would not come over the knuckle of her finger. So she snatched a knife and hacked it off and gave them the ring as a price of passage. But Joseph said that she spoke to them in a devil’s voice like what we just heard there.” Isabelle tilted her chin toward the cleft in the hills where the drums still rolled. “All those marauders were much impressed, because they had not known a white woman could be taken by a spirit so.”

You seem very much in the confidence of your Joseph,
Maillart thought again, but it seemed unfriendly, petulant even, to say as much aloud.

“She escaped by a hair’s breadth, at any rate,” Isabelle said. “And again, more recently, that massacre at Fort Dauphin . . .” She shook her head thoughtfully. “Perhaps there is something about her.”

The drums went silent. Below, the white woman and the black man seemed hung in a balance, under the oblong of the waning moon, with the damp wind sighing all around them.

“What?” Maillart said. “Do you believe it? All this talk of possession or whatever it may be.”

“Possibly it is only a matter of the words one chooses. ‘Something came over her,’ one might say.” She shook her head slowly. “I did not know her before that time, but they say there was no love lost between her and her husband in those days. She saw no one—he kept her shut up in the country while he pursued his . . . profligacies. So perhaps her action was that of an animal which chews itself free of a snare.” Isabelle wadded the kerchief in her hand, fist clenching over it and relaxing.

“Certainly Arnaud’s reputation was of the very worst,” Maillart said. “On every account—except his horsemanship. He was once brought to law, or near it, for torturing his slaves. And it takes something out of the ordinary to become notorious for cruelty in this place.”

“Yes, there was something of that sort,” Isabelle said. “Whatever it may be, that plantation holds a horror for Claudine, so that she is loath to return there.”

“It is good of you to keep her here.”

“Oh,” said Isabelle, “I do not call it goodness. She fascinates me . . . I mean, her power.”

“I don’t understand you,” Maillart said.

“‘If thy right hand offend thee . . .?’ ” Isabelle flashed her coquette’s smile, her fingers pulsed against his palm. “Power to act on such a precept?”

“But surely that was only her derangement.”

“I don’t know.” Isabelle gazed down over the ruins. “At times she is more than lucid enough. Perhaps not in the company of her peers . . . but when she teaches the little children she is as well reasoned as any convent nun.”

“The children?”

“Yes, she has been catechising the little
négrillons
hereabouts. She lectures them about BonDyé, and she has the fancy of teaching them their letters, which she acquired, apparently, from that rebel priest who was executed at Le Cap.”

“A harmless fancy, I suppose.”

“Harmless?” Isabelle sniffed. She unfolded her kerchief and snapped it toward the ruins of the house and drive and fountain. “Look for yourself at the harm it has done. Blacks reading books—reading the newspapers. Taking on notions of Liberty. Equality.” Her lips twisted over each word. “Fraternity. Your Toussaint, for example—they say now that he has read Raynal, and Epictetus, and so come to picture himself a black Spartacus come to lead his people to their liberation. A black Moses, possibly.” She let go his hand and hugged herself. “There is madness, if you like.” She stared moodily down at Claudine. “Of course, her black brats pay her little mind. They listen so long as they are amused and then they run away . . .”

“Will she stay dreaming there the whole night through?”

“She is free to do so if she wishes. Let her exercise her freedom. But I am cold, and tired. And irritable, I confess it.” This time the smile she sent him seemed apologetic. “Let us go in.”

Maillart offered his arm once more. They returned to the
grand’case
with the night breeze blowing through the space between them. She bade him good night with a press of her fingers against his forearm, and he let her go with no more than an inward protest. A puzzle, friendship with a woman. He began to think he might master it. But when he lay down on the shuck mattress, his blood ran around in all directions without settling, so that he wanted to get drunk, or spend himself upon a woman, any woman, white or black or yellow, who might be willing or who even might be forced. He lay wakeful, smothered in the filth of his imaginings. There was a moment when he thought he heard the love cries of Isabelle elsewhere in the house, but when he woke to find Perroud pulling him onto the floor by his heels, he knew it must have been a dream.

Dawn swept tendrils of gray mist around the house like ghostly fingers. Maillart’s horse had already been saddled by the grooms. He gulped half a cup of coffee, groggily kissed his fingers to Isabelle as he went out. Laveaux and Perroud and the others were mounted, waiting, having already made their adieux to the ladies. He checked the girth automatically with the ball of his thumb, then swung astride his animal. They rode out of the compound and up through the green gorges, through the brightening sun dapples and among the little roosters who crowed from the cover of the trees. Before the day was done, they had reached Dondon.

At evening Toussaint and his troops swept in from the central plateau, where they had lately overrun the town of Hinche. That night Laveaux and his French officers dined with Toussaint and the pick of his subordinates. Maillart watched, with an astonished sense of the inevitable, as Laveaux rose from his place at the head of the table and took each platter away from the waiter and held it in his own hands so that Toussaint might serve himself. And still Toussaint, as was his habit, ate sparingly, no more than bread and water.