Master of the Crossroads (70 page)

Leaving the children on the hill for the time being (Fontelle would walk them back to the Cigny house, she’d said), he went down to Government House to take the measure of the situation there. Pascal was strolling in the courtyard when he entered. The doctor reached for his hand at once and declared that the swelling was greatly reduced.

“Oh yes,” Pascal said. “That leaf pulp you insist on has such a vile taste it has quite broken me of nibbling it.”

“And that is for the best,” said the doctor. “But how does the agent find himself today?”

“What, after his missive from the General-in-Chief? He is in the humor one might expect in a man who sees his policy reduced to nothing, or nearly nothing. Toussaint has scarcely made a semblance of respecting his orders, so that Hédouville is brought to believe that Toussaint is the greater rebel than Rigaud was against Sonthonax, though more circumspect, more sly. His coziness with the old proprietors leads Hédouville to believe that the general is merely their dupe and tool—his words set into his mouth by his so-called secretaries . . .”

The doctor laughed. “You could tell him better than that yourself.”

“But would he believe me?” Pascal cleared his throat. “Now the matter of the army—with the Treaty of Basel eliminating any Spanish threat, and the British clearly on their way out of the colony, Hédouville would reduce the indigenous troops to perhaps six thousand, excluding the gendarmerie, but whenever that subject is raised, up flares an outcry that slavery will be restored, and the agent suspects Toussaint has fed those rumors.”

“Not necessarily,” said the doctor. “What are the men to think—when the
blanc
soldiers seek to replace their guns with hoes, and contract them to the plantation for years at a time? That proverb of Sonthonax’s is still in very recent memory, after all.”

“Who would take
this
from you,” Pascal quoted, raising a list above his head to brandish an imaginary musket, “would take your liberty.” He opened his hand and let it fall. “A nice bit of theater, I give you that.”

“And not without its kernel of truth.”

“I’ll give you that as well.”

The doctor hopped up onto the heavy stone balustrade and sat there, lightly swinging his legs. “Once they have tasted the salt, they will not go back,” he murmured. He looked across at a goat that had wandered into the yard of Government House and was busily eating the lower leaves of the shrubbery.

Pascal looked at him sharply. “What?”

“It’s only something Riau once told me,” the doctor said. “I don’t entirely know what it means.”

“Sounds like some witchery.” Pascal propped himself on the opposite balustrade and crossed his ankles. “Well, grant that the love of liberty is paramount among the freedmen . . . Hédouville suspects that Toussaint has become the dupe of Maitland and the British.”

“Whose final departure he is now engineering.”

“Yes,” said Pascal, “but if the British should coax him into independence?”

“I’ve seen no sign of it.” The doctor swung his bootheels against the stone behind them. He thought of the time at Marmelade, when Toussaint had turned so abruptly and ruthlessly on the Spanish. He’d seen no sign of that either, before it happened, though perhaps there had been signs he had not recognized.

“Let me tell you something else,” he said to Pascal. “What I know of leaves that heal in this land—all that I had from Toussaint himself in the beginning. If not for his knowledge, this day I should be taking that hand of yours off at the wrist, or possibly the elbow. I should know no better than to saw through the bone and cauterize the stump with a red-hot iron and hope that no corruption would spread into your vitals from the wound.”

Pascal blanched and recovered himself. “Have you a larger point?”

“That Toussaint has worked for peace, in the main, and he has rendered justice wherever he was able. If he cannot heal the body politic, I do not know who can.”

“Oh,” said Pascal. “And so, he needs no one to direct him. Scarcely any liaison at all, really, with the government in France.”

“There is that difficulty.”

Pascal pursed his lips. “So Hédouville is left like an ant in a wine bottle. He can see everything, all around the circle, but he can touch nothing. No wonder that he grows a little agitated.”

For some weeks there was nothing out of the ordinary, and scarcely any apparent tension in the town. Toussaint kept away from Le Cap. Hédouville busied himself with a light restructuring of the officer corps within his reach. Now and then he was able discreetly to replace some black officer with one of the Frenchmen he had brought out with him. If there were ripples of discontent, they ran too deep to mar the tranquil appearance of the surface.

The doctor had little, officially, to do. Of Nanon he could discover nothing more. For a time he haunted the Place Clugny and the Negro market which she’d frequented during their earliest acquaintance, but she did not appear there. It did not seem that she went marketing at all, or that she called on anyone, outside the Maltrot house. Unless Choufleur had spirited her off, as Isabelle had suggested, to one of his rural properties. But Choufleur himself was still in Le Cap. The doctor saw him more than once, coming out of the agent’s suite of offices at Government House, haughtily erect in his gold-buttoned uniform, swinging his cane before him as if to make it known to anyone who might be in his path that he would certainly not give way. Rumor had it that Choufleur brokered messages between Hédouville and Rigaud, and that the agent meant to foment discord between Rigaud and Toussaint, a project perhaps more plausible now that Rigaud no longer had the British in the south to occupy him.

On more than one occasion, the doctor was obliged to step aside from the progress of Colonel Maltrot through the streets, and each time Choufleur strolled through the space he’d occupied as if he’d never seen him there at all. Once, the doctor was sufficiently piqued that he followed Choufleur, across the streets and squares of the town all the way to the gate of his house, where, waiting for the servant to open to him, Choufleur turned back with a supercilious smile. After he had gone in, the doctor remained standing on the far side of the street. The house was shuttered, as usual, though far from quiet. On the contrary it had the reputation of a bawdy place, the resort of gamblers and women of loose morals, some colored, and some in these latter days even white. He recognized a horse or two at the hitchrail. Some of the more debauched young men of Hédouville’s suite were known to come here occasionally.

A pair of shutters opened on the second-floor balcony, and Nanon stepped through the rounded arch, and stood facing the doctor below, though without any indication that she saw him there. Rather she seemed to be looking across the roof tiles. Drunken laughter and the rattle of dice boiled out of the dark space behind her. Then Choufleur emerged. He grinned, over her shoulder, spitefully down into the doctor’s face. With one hand he reached under her arm, cupped a breast and raised it so that the nipple pushed darkly at the fragile fabric of her dress. She gave way limply to his pressure, and Choufleur pulled her back inside.

Doctor Hébert was restrained from rushing the house only by the thought that Choufleur must mean to provoke him to do just that. He dragged himself away, though inwardly fulminating. Surely he could do something, find some way. Bitterly he thought of the “sacrifice” Moustique had put him up to—there’d been no change in his direction, no gate had magically opened for him. He was on the same doomed path as before . . . though in truth he was content to be rid of the snuffbox. Perhaps, by the next day, he would have conceived a better way to get into that house. But next morning he and Captain Maillart were both summoned to Môle Saint Nicolas.

Riding fast and hard with a small cavalry squad including Captains Riau and Maillart, the doctor came to Toussaint’s encampment outside Le Môle, just as the black general was making ready to take formal possession of the town. He’d brought ten thousand men to the siege, which now would not take place—about half his effective troops—and every man of them marched into Le Môle at his back.

The British soldiers, in their finest dress uniforms, lined the hedges of the road into town. Again the local dignitaries brought out a dais, and this time Toussaint consented to walk beneath it, the town’s priest bearing the sacraments ahead of him, while acolytes swung censers and women hurled themselves in his path to beg his blessing. Was it his apotheosis? the doctor thought half ironically, sneezing away sweet incense smoke, remembering how Toussaint had rejected this sort of panoply when they’d come to Port-au-Prince. Maillart looked at him narrowly, as if he’d detected the thought.

But now all the bells of the town began to ring, and cannons fired salutes from the batteries and the ships at anchor, as their procession came into the Place d’Armes, where General Maitland had erected a splendid tent for their reception. Two robust subalterns held back the flaps, but Toussaint stopped and turned and stood to attention, watching his infantrymen as they flooded the square and formed into ranks which pressed back into the surrounding streets for many blocks, so great was their number. When they were all properly drawn up, Toussaint saluted them and ordered them at ease, then stooped to go into the tent, with Maitland following him. For the next two hours the black soldiers stood at parade rest under the sun, looking neither left nor right, and amazing all onlookers with the force of their discipline.

A magnificent repast had been laid inside the tent, and the doctor and the captain fell to with real appetite. Maillart found himself seated next to Major O’Farrel, whom he complimented on surviving the wars.

“Thus far,” O’Farrel said with an Irish twinkle, then rather more drily, “but am I promised tomorrow?”

Though Toussaint appeared to be in great good humor, he ate sparingly as was his custom on such occasions, taking only bread and water and whole fruit, with a few tastes of wine during the concluding toasts. At the end of the meal, Maitland offered Toussaint all the silver dishes from which it had been served, along with two brass cannon. The British troops turned out for his review, and he was taken to inspect the palace, whose furnishings would be turned over to him intact, in further token of the esteem of the Britannic Majesty. At evening, with all the ceremonies complete, Toussaint withdrew to Pointe Bourgeoise, with the greater part of his men (the town being rather too small for so many), leaving a small detachment to supervise the transfer of authority as the British embarked for their final departure from Saint Domingue.

Riau went with his men to the
casernes
in Le Môle, but the doctor and Captain Maillart, on the advice of Major O’Farrel, sought the hospitality of that old Acadian, Monot. There they took a light supper and exchanged their news. Monot had no other guests, only his lovely colored attendant, Agathe, sitting opposite his place at the table and pouring his water and wine. The old man grumbled over the British, still resentful of his ejection from Acadia thirty years before. “I am glad to see them go,” he grated. “Though they did not misuse us, I shall be glad to see the last of them. Even if wild Africans come in their place.”

“Oh,” said Agathe, a hand pressed at her fluttering throat. “If Toussaint’s soldiers look like savages, their discipline is very strong—supposing today a fair example.”

“For those men,” Maillart assured her, “today is no different from any other.”

O’Farrel smoothed his sandy mustache against his lip. “If that is so,” he said, “it is Toussaint’s greatest triumph, to have made such soldiers of those men.”

After supper they went into the garden, where Monot explained his irrigation system to the doctor, the thin channels of water glittering under the moonlight. O’Farrel drew Maillart a little aside.

“You may know,” he said, “that of the eight thousand men collected here, only two thousand are British by origin, and the rest colonial troops, from the south and the west. They are seasoned men, but Rigaud would not have them.”

“Shot through with royalists, no doubt,” Maillart said. “And proscribed French
colons
.”

O’Farrel squinted at him in the uneven light. “How long since you were a royalist yourself?” he said. “And in my estimation, you are still a Frenchman.”

“Pardon,” said Maillart, “I was considering the attitudes of Agent Hédouville more than my own.”

“Those six thousand would come over to Toussaint,” O’Farrel said. “They see no future with the British.”

“Oh indeed? And yourself?”

“The same,” O’Farrel told him. “If I would be accepted?”

“By Toussaint? Absolutely.” Maillart reached to clasp his hand. “Well, I have not the authority to say so, but I think I can encourage you to put your mind at rest.”

The events of the day had swept the doctor’s personal troubles from him, but once he lay down on his bed, they all came flooding back. He could not sleep. Also there were mosquitoes. He’d left the door to the balcony ajar, in hope of a breath of sea air. Some noise roused him from his insomniac daze; was it Maillart at the balcony door? It seemed to be his voice, muttering in confusion. But whoever it was passed on and must have found a different reception at another door, for the doctor heard a female titter, a gasp, then panting breaths which gradually sawed into moans of joy.

“Do you not abuse the kindness of our host?” he muttered to the captain over their next morning’s coffee.

“I shall only leave the old man’s housekeeper better content than I found her,” Maillart grinned, and, at the doctor’s sour expression, “Oh come, Antoine, one is only human, and I’ve lived like a monk these last six months. Besides it’s just a bit of unfinished business from my last visit to Le Môle.”

The doctor’s own privation had lasted a good deal longer. He did not desire Agathe himself, exactly, but he still begrudged the captain his conquest. When he identified this feeling, his own perversity displeased him, and he elected to go with O’Farrel and the six thousand colonial troops who would now in all likelihood join Toussaint’s force outside the town.