Master of the Crossroads (71 page)

A few days later, when the British embarcation was complete, General Maitland appeared as if from nowhere, outside Toussaint’s tent at Pointe Bourgeoise, escorted by Maillart and Riau and the merest handful of junior British officers. All the rest of the British troops had boarded their vessels, though the ships were still in the harbor. At Maitland’s arrival the doctor felt a flutter of real uncertainty. If the British general had been expected, he had known nothing of it. What he did know was that Toussaint had just received a letter from Commissioner Roume, who was still residing in Spanish Santo Domingo, urging him to arrest General Maitland at any opportunity presented. Toussaint had rolled this very letter into his hand as he went out to greet his visitor.

“You do me honor, General,” he said. “And here is something which may interest you.”

Maitland leaned toward the paper which Toussaint had unfurled in his direction. “Treachery,” hissed a British subaltern who was peering over his shoulder, but Maitland silenced him with a brush of his hand, then looked up at Toussaint with an expression just short of dismay.

“What should interest you still more is my reply.” Toussaint passed him a second sheet. After a line or two, Maitland began to smile, and pivoted toward his companions to read a portion aloud to them, pausing between segments to translate:

What? Have I not given my word to the English general? How could you suppose that I would cover myself with infamy in violating that promise? The confidence which he has in my good faith engages him to deliver himself to me, and I would be dishonored forever, were I to follow your advice. I am wholly devoted to the cause of the Republic, but I shall never serve it at the expense of my conscience and my honor.

As Maitland concluded wonderingly, Toussaint uncovered his own smile from behind his hand.

“Sir,” Maitland told him. “Your sentiments are more than noble. One might call them . . . royal.”

Toussaint’s expression faded into watchfulness. He drew back the tent flap and beckoned Maitland within—alone. Before he went inside himself, he dismissed the sentry who’d been standing before the tent and called Riau to take his place.

“I’d give a good golden louis,” Maillart yawned from his hammock, strung next to the doctor’s, “to know what passed between them.”

“You haven’t got a gold louis,” the doctor said.

“Who’s to say I haven’t?”

“Who in this army has been paid, in recent memory? Even so much as a copper?”

“Oh,” said the captain, “but suppose the gentle Agathe should have given me a present . . .”

“You are intolerably smug.”

“Well, she didn’t,” the captain acknowledged. “At least, not a present of money.”

“Have your information for nothing then,” the doctor said. “Maitland proposed that Toussaint should make the colony independent and that England would recognize and support him as its king.”

Maillart sat up so suddenly that his hammock ejected him onto the dirt floor.

“How did you come by that piece of knowledge?”

“Riau,” said the doctor. “His scavenging, during
marronage,
has sharpened his hearing very much. He can hear a louse walking on the hair of a wild goat.”

“Listening at tent flaps is an excellent way to get shot.” Maillart got up and dusted off his knees.

The doctor pushed his heels against his hammock to set it gently swaying. “Oh, but perhaps Toussaint wishes the proposal to be known, together with his reply to it.”

“To wit?”

“He declined.”

“In high dudgeon, one imagines.” Maillart’s shoulders brushed the canvas as he turned in the low space of the tent. “As the faithful servant of France, and so forth.”

“No, it seems to have all been very cordial.” The doctor paused. “You may recall, at Gonaives, Toussaint took a special interest in the news from Egypt—Bonaparte’s landing there, I mean.”

“Which all the power of the British navy could not prevent.” Maillart ran his thumb down a seam of the tent. “I see. The point is well taken.”

“All very cordial, as I say, though Toussaint refused the crown,” said the doctor. “He and Maitland have signed a secret protocol—an addendum to the official accord for the withdrawal.”

“Riau deduced this from the scratching of the pen?”

“The British navy will leave the ports of Saint Domingue open to merchant ships of all nations,” the doctor went on, unperturbed. “England will have the right of trade, but not exclusively, in all ports of the colony controlled by Toussaint Louverture. Toussaint undertakes not to invade Jamaica and not to engage in subversion there. The English make the same undertaking with regard to Saint Domingue. Oh, and the lives and property of those French colonists lately allied with the British are to be fastidiously respected.”

“In all areas of the colony controlled by Toussaint Louverture.” Maillart exhaled, with a hint of a whistle. “Well, strike me dumb. Hédouville won’t like it. Not the part about the trade, and not the part about the landowners. Why, the very existence of such an agreement must offend him.”

“I don’t think he’s meant to know of it.”

“Christ—he’ll see it happening all around him.” Maillart gripped the edge of his hammock with both hands and carefully levered himself into it, settling his weight with a grunt. “There will be trouble.”

“Aye,” said the doctor. “When was there not?”

As of October 10, 1798, there remained not one single foreign soldier on the soil of Saint Domingue—not in theory, at least, since the likes of Major O’Farrel had been integrated into the French forces under Toussaint Louverture. Toussaint sent an order throughout his entire command, that all his officers should call upon their men to pray twice daily, at evening and morn, wherever they might happen to find themselves—beginning with high mass, at which the Te Deum must be chanted in thanks to heaven for having facilitated the expulsion of the enemy without bloodshed, and with particular gratitude to Divine Providence for permitting several thousand persons of all colors to reenter the fold of French citizenship. Though these latter had been led astray, both the Lord and the state would receive them with open arms and without reproach or punishment. The religious rubric under which this formula unfolded would be difficult (the doctor reasoned with the captain) for Hédouville to reject.

Thanks to that same Divine Grace, some twenty thousand men would now be returned to labor in the coffee groves and cane fields. A good number of them would stand down from the army, turning in their muskets for hoes. If ever a new threat to liberty should arise, their weapons would be restored to them. Did Toussaint hope to placate Hédouville with this pronouncement? the doctor and Maillart asked one another. If so, he did not trouble himself to measure the success of his effort, but returned from Le Môle to Gonaives by way of Bombardopolis, with no detour to pay his respects to the French agent.

The doctor rode back to Le Cap with Captain Maillart and the cavalry troop in Riau’s command. Toussaint’s announcement of the labor program had cast a pall over the black soldiers, and Riau was silent and edgy throughout the trip. The doctor’s mood was also dark. Even his reunion with Paul did not lighten it; on the contrary, the child’s insouciance almost annoyed him, as did Isabelle’s brilliant good cheer. Her family fortunes seemed certain to be improved by Toussaint’s program, and she even talked of sending to Philadelphia for her own children, but the doctor was in no mood for other people’s happiness.

In Hédouville’s camp there was little rejoicing over the expulsion of the British. The sentiment seemed rather to be that Toussaint had stolen the credit for that event. Pascal had gone back to his nail-biting, poultice or no. The doctor stopped going to Government House. When he visited the
casernes,
he felt that Riau was avoiding him; Maillart said that Riau seemed to have gone off the white officers generally.

Then he met Riau as if by chance, behind the white church on the hill, where he had gone to collect Paul from his playmates of that
lakou.
Riau was out of uniform, barefoot, and seemed much more at his ease. He came to the doctor with his usual friendliness and a light touch on his arm.

“I see you have left your third eye in the
hûnfor
.”

He said no more, but the doctor felt his approval, and he felt lightened for the first time in three days. That night he dreamed of clouds passing over the mirror where it lay between the cairns of stone, cloud and blue sky flowing infinitely through that bright irregular window in the dust. This eye which remained open even while he slept, able always to learn and to know.

Next afternoon, he went, with a dreamer’s certainty, first to the
casernes.
He had meant to find Maillart, but when he found that the captain had gone off with O’Farrel, that too seemed inevitable. Riau presented himself, as if by prior appointment. Together they walked across to the Maltrot house in the Rue Vaudreuil.

The doctor took the bars of the gate with both hands and shook it till the locking chain danced up and down. Whether because of his own urgency or Riau’s uniformed presence, the servant scuttled up quickly and scraped the gate back for them to enter. Doctor Hébert walked through, slapping speckles of rust from his hands. The court was littered with broken glass, evidently from bottles flung out the windows, and some chunks of the glass were irregularly cemented along the tops of the surrounding wall.

The entryway was dark, and smelled of blood and vomit. A wizened old woman crouched in a corner, doing something with a bucket in a rag. The doctor pushed open a door to his left, comforted to feel Riau coming in behind him. The shuttered room they entered was a large salon, but dark and smoky and dense, with a few patches of candle or lamplight here and there. A stench of tallow and spilled liquor. Beyond an overturned upholstered loveseat toward the center of the room, a number of people sat gambling around a long, oval mahogany table. Nearer the door was another pool of light, over a low sofa where a woman lay face down with her knees drawn up under her and her dress rucked up to her shoulders. A tall sallow man crouched behind her, thrusting with an energy that fluttered her buttocks and imparted a serpentine movement to her spine. Several onlookers stood around, making low comments, maybe waiting their turns. One held a watch in his palm and there seemed to be a wager, though the doctor could not guess what was in gage. Among the spectators he recognized young Cypré, one of the newcome officers Maillart particularly detested; he seemed to be extremely drunk. The woman’s face scrubbed against the velvet of the sofa, insensible from rapture or indifference it was hard to tell, her eyes showing rings of white and her lips slackly open on a stain of drool. The doctor did not know her.

Cypré drew himself up and said with a hiccup, “No niggers wanted here. This is a private establishment.”

Riau walked past him as if he were invisible, toward the gambling table. The doctor followed.

Here Choufleur himself presided over the entertainment. There was a deck of cards by his left elbow, but these were not in play; instead he rattled a cup of dice above a mound of mismatched stakes: coins of several different mints, a watch, a bracelet, a jeweled stickpin . . . Six or seven men in the game, and one woman who looked white, with wispy blond hair and small pink pimples all over her cheeks—she wore a dull and dazed expression.

Choufleur glanced up at the doctor with no sign of surprise. He tipped the dice cup onto the table. Eight, numbered the black dots drilled into the bones.

“Encore de la merde,”
complained the pimple-faced woman. She swayed against the mulatto beside her, nuzzling his uniformed shoulder, then pouting when he shrugged her off.

Choufleur glanced from Riau to the doctor. “I don’t object to you,” he said. “But in this house I don’t like to see any face darker than a good
café au lait—
unless on a servant, of course.”

The doctor barely registered this remark. His eyes were on Nanon, who sat to Choufleur’s right. Her bodice was loosened and pushed down below her breasts, whose exposed nipples excited a feeling of sorrow in him. Around her neck was a riveted iron collar with a light chain running down her back from its ring. She did not seem aware of the doctor’s presence, though she was looking in his general direction. Her eyes were dead.

“Faites vos jeux,”
Choufleur said.

He cupped the dice and handed them to his left, then leaned down and collected the free end of the chain from the floor beside his chair. When he gave the chain a brisk tug, Nanon responded as woodenly as if that collar were locked around a post.

“Shall we cut the cards for her?” Choufleur proposed, widening his eyes at the doctor. He opened the deck with his left hand, turning up the ace of spades. “Ah well—hard luck,” he said. “But never mind. To me, it is all one. You may have the use of her for an hour if you like.”

He offered the doctor, who stood frozen, the chain’s end.

“No?” Choufleur said. “But I can tell you, she is not quite sucked dry. There’s still a drop or two of good juice to be wrung from her.”

The doctor did not answer this either. A step behind him he was aware of the deep flow of Riau’s respiration—this was not audible, exactly, but he seemed to draw inspiration from the other man’s breathing. Choufleur shook the chain once again, then let it all fall to the floor.

“Perhaps another will be tempted,” he said lightly. “
Putain c’est
putain.
Am I right, my dear?—a whore is forever a whore.” He turned his head toward Nanon, who remained as dull and lifeless as before. Then to the doctor. “Of course, it makes for a short career.”

The doctor swiveled away from him and went to the floor-length window facing the street and wrenched the shutters open. The men at the nearer end of the table flinched from the last light of the day; one of them muttered a complaint. Round the sofa at the far end of the room there was laughter and a few handclaps—apparently that embrace had reached its goal.

Slowly the doctor walked back around the table. At the head, Choufleur sat very upright, his hands palm down before him, facing the fresh light from the arched window. Nanon had begun reeling the chain up from the floor and was gathering it into her lap with both hands. Without breaking his step, the doctor leaned across and slapped Choufleur on the side of his face, thrusting his weight into the heel of his palm to add as much injury to the insult as possible. A gasp from the other gamblers. Choufleur’s head snapped sideways, then slowly revolved toward the doctor again. His freckles seemed to shrink and concentrate, hot and dark on the pale skin like stipples on the dice. His finger found a runnel of blood at the corner of his mouth.