The Emerald Storm (16 page)

To our right, or west, was a stone fort. Leclerc’s army had stormed it to recapture Cap-François from the rebels nearly two years before, and it showed fresh repairs from bombardment. Black cannon jutted from embrasures, but soldiers were invisible, artillerymen staying out of the sun. I was struck by the somnolent quiet of the place, a city waiting for the end.

A French lieutenant named Levine was summoned from the fort to study the forged documents I brought. Lord Lovington’s Antiguan office had helped make French and American papers testifying to my diplomatic status.

“Your mission is out of date, monsieur,” he said. He spoke to me but looked at my wife, his eyes a mix of appreciation and speculation. Maybe he expected me to expire of yellow fever within days, removing the annoyance of a husband. I wished the same plague upon him. “We’re told Louisiana was sold to America late this spring.”

News travels slowly, so my surprise was genuine. “If a sale of Louisiana has already been concluded, I couldn’t be happier,” I said grandly. “I had a hand in the early negotiations, and now can take some credit for success.”

“It’s not just that, monsieur. With renewal of war between England and France, our position here is even more precarious. A British blockade could force our defeat. I must counsel that you put your wife in grave jeopardy by bringing her here.”

I turned to scan the sea. “My wife has a mind of her own, and I see no British ships.” This was my little joke, since I was looking directly at the masquerading
Toulon
. “But I would like to bring the freshest assessment possible back to my American government. Is it possible to obtain an interview with the commanding general, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, Vicomte de Rochambeau?”

Levine glanced at Astiza again, as if thinking that was not the best of ideas. “I am sure something can be arranged,” he nonetheless said. “Do you require lodging?”

“If you could suggest a still-functioning guesthouse.”

“It functions. Just.”

The lieutenant called a carriage. Our wardrobe was modest, but we’d borrowed a large empty trunk from Lovington so we’d look the part of baggage-heavy diplomats. Our black hire gave us a quizzical look when he lifted the container into the vehicle. We should have stuffed it with extra blankets, but too late now. Then a crack of the whip and Astiza and I rode into town.

While the main boulevards were cobbled, most of the side streets were dirt or, when it rained (which was almost daily), mud. Some buildings were masonry as firmly rooted as a German burgher’s, but the majority were wooden island colonials, elevated on posts a few feet off the ground. Palm fronds, litter, and lumber hid underneath.

“The stilts let the breeze and water through,” our black teamster told us, in thickly accented French. “Hurricane, too.”

The buildings were mostly two stories high, with a continuous arcade along the bottom floor that ran above the ground like a floating sidewalk. From the bedrooms above jutted narrow French balconies with iron railings, just large enough for an occupant to step from a bedroom to survey the world, hang laundry, or empty a chamber pot. Flowers spilled from planting boxes—ragged looking in the stress of the siege—and paint flaked in the humidity.

Despite the humid decay and stress of war, the whites (some of them French born and some locally born Creoles, like Napoleon’s own wife, Joséphine) dressed smartly, if illogically. Even in the heat there were plenty of splendid blue uniforms, tailed coats, and dresses that closed all the way to the throat, reflecting new fashion. At least the civilian hats were broad-brimmed, and often white or straw.

More eye-catching were the coloreds. Even besieged, the city was at least a third black and mulatto from house servants, field slaves, and freemen who hadn’t joined the rebellion. The worst were in rags, but the mixed-race population formed a secondary aristocracy at Cap-François that was more finely attired. There was a complicated gradation of color with the lightest skin conveying the highest status. Quadroons were the offspring of a mulatto and white, mustees of a quadroon and white, and mustefinos, the finest of all coloreds, were from white and mustee—seven-eighths European but still “colored” by custom and law. Relations between this palette of skin had once been as precisely regulated as court ritual, and now habits were breaking down. Even the loveliest tan had been caught up in an enormously complicated war.

When the revolt began in 1791, Lovington had explained, there were approximately thirty thousand whites, forty thousand mulattos, and more than half a million black slaves in Saint-Domingue. In the last dozen years all three racial groups had at times both allied or been at odds with each other, while forming temporary partnerships with invading Spanish, English, and French. Slaughter had been met with counter-slaughter, and victories with betrayal. Many of the rich had already fled, and I’d seen some of the refugees disembarking two years before in New York City.

Yet what glories of the human skin still mingled in this city! People moved slowly here, but with a floating, flowing gait enchanting in its gracefulness, the sway of the women accentuating hips and bust. Their smoothness made the white troops seem clumsy by comparison, and their beauty was striking with colors from cream through nut, cocoa, coffee, chocolate, and ebony. Teeth were bright, necks high, muscles smooth, carriages erect, and some colored men and women wore fabulous hats topped with plumage as bright as parrots. In gayer times, this would have been paradise.

Cap-François, however, showed the wear and tear of war. Paint was unobtainable. Gunfire pocked bricks from when the city was taken by blacks in 1793 and then back by the French in 1802, with numerous battles between. Several blocks were blackened shells. Even in sections still inhabited, broken windows were boarded rather than repaired, because there was little glazing and fewer glaziers. Garbage lay in heaps because it was too dangerous to cart it to the countryside, and the slaves who’d performed this job had fled. The entire town had a pungent odor of rot, sewage, and smoke, with the redeeming whiff of the sea.

“This place has the smell of disease,” Astiza murmured. “I fear for Horus if that monster brought him here. Martel is no nurse.”

“And Harry is a handful. I’m hoping he’s vexed his captor. Maybe by now the devil wants to give him back.” It was a poor attempt at humor, but we needed to lift our spirits.

My secret worry, however, was that my three-year-old had adapted to captivity and kidnapper quite well, and scarcely remembered his father at all.

Cap-François also had the scent of a farmyard. Some of the burned-out lots now held penned animals, presumably brought into town for food. There were cows, donkeys, sheep, and chickens. Goats and pigs wandered freely. Flies buzzed off deposits of manure.

The city’s squares were still geometrically planted with palms that shaded shaggy lawns and sculpted shrubbery. But instead of statuary there were gibbets from which rebels hung. We passed three decomposing black bodies while journeying from the port to guesthouse, the corpses turning in the breeze like weathercocks. No one but us gave them even a passing glance.

We took quarters on the Rue Espagnole, not far distant from Government House, where we’d find Rochambeau. The British had provided a little money for expenses since we were otherwise destitute; how I missed my emerald! It was just as well there was little to buy in this besieged city since our allowance was so modest: I’ve always felt pinched doing government work, better to stick with trade and gaming.

“Everyone seems to be waiting,” Astiza said as she sat on the bed.

The guesthouse was shabby from neglect, shutters broken and small green lizards clinging to its walls. The maids were sullen, the floors grimy. My dreams of joining the wealthy were once more in abeyance, while Aztec riches beyond imagination beckoned somewhere in the Caribbean.

It was time to spy.

I looked toward Rochambeau’s headquarters. A hundred yards from its door was a guillotine, blade bright in the sun.

Chapter 18

W
hile we waited for an audience with the French general, Astiza and I mapped a plan to explore Cap-François, hoping to sight our son. Given her interest in religion, she’d start at a church and ask about orphans, runaways, or odd parishioners. I didn’t think Leon Martel was likely to turn up in pew or confessional, but it was possible a wayward child or a newly arrived adult of poor character might come to the attention of nuns.

Given Martel’s past, I thought a hunt of brothels would be likelier to find him than a hunt of cathedrals, but I’d been married long enough now to know not to propose that as a beginning. I decided instead to master the military geography of the city in hopes I’d find something useful to take to Dessalines. How we’d cross French lines to this Negro Hannibal I’d no idea, but my experience is that if you poke into a bear den you might find a bear, which had happened during my sojourn with the Dakota Sioux. I don’t believe things always work out, as Sidney Smith claims, but I do believe trouble will find you easily enough, should you go looking.

So I began to stroll, trying to make a crude estimate of the garrison while keeping an eye out for Harry. I’d try to flush Martel out with my mere presence. It didn’t occur that far from hiding, Martel had made himself part of the French government and likely knew of our arrival as soon as we climbed the steps of the quay.

So did others. Survival had become precarious in Saint-Domingue, and the key for all sides was using eyes and ears to prevent surprise.

At first my foot patrol seemed fruitless. The town was desultory, traffic listless, weather sultry, and clouds mounded on the peaks and then clawed overhead like a drawn tarp. There was a growl of thunder to echo the occasional boom of siege guns. Then afternoon downpour turned the streets of Cap-François into temporary rivers. Raindrops as heavy as musket balls rattled while I stood on a boardwalk under a porch roof, watching a slurry of silt and garbage flow toward the sea.

How was I to cross this deluge to continue my scouting?

Someone dark and gigantic came striding out of the murk from the middle of the street, as impervious to the pounding water as a bull in a paddock. “Can I offer you a ferry, monsieur?” A strapping black looked up at me on my boardwalk with a smile that glowed, each tooth dice bright and his gums pink like an orchid.

I peered into the curtain of rain. “Where is your carriage?”

“My shoulders, adventurer.”

I glanced down the street. Another white was boarding the shoulders of another Negro like a toddler climbing aboard his father, the human foot ferry keeping his cargo’s feet clear of the mud. And another, and another. It was clearly the odd custom of this place. The first passenger was carried to the boardwalk on the opposite side of the avenue and deposited like a delivery of mail. A coin changed hands.

“There’s an entire company of carriers,” my entrepreneur explained. “Even in a revolution the black man has to make a living, yes?” I saw another duo go by, the human mule singing African songs with the gusto of a Venetian gondolier while the white hunched with hat streaming. It seemed a parody of oppression. But when in Rome . . .

“What’s your name, broad shoulders?”

“Jubal, monsieur.”

I’ve always found it convenient to have big friends, or quick little ones. This fellow was an extraordinary specimen, six and a half feet tall, with polished skin the color of coal, muscles like a dray horse, and broad smile as brilliant as a snowdrift. He wore a tattered and patched infantry coat that was wet as a washcloth, his pantaloons cut off at the knee so that he could wade barefoot in our tideland of a street. A red kerchief gave his neck a jaunty air, and his belt was wide as a pirate’s. There was poise to his posture completely different from the hunch of the wary slave, and his eyes sized me up with the calibration of an engineer. I was impressed but not surprised. While my race has no shortage of philosophers arguing our God-given superiority, such arrogance has been contradicted by the sheer capability of brown Arab, red Indian, and black African I’ve met in my travels. The races aren’t very different at all, but Europeans seldom believe me. It’s easier to sort people out by pigment.

“Come, monsieur, we will make the voyage to the Left Bank together! I am the Mercury of mire, a Columbus of navigation! Climb on my shoulder and Jubal will take you where you need to go.”

“You seem a very erudite porter.”

“I can read, and even think. Imagine that, from a Negro.”

“And why would an educated freeman work as a mule?”

“Why do you assume I’m a freeman?”

“By your bearing and industry.”

“Maybe I’m just cocky. Climb aboard and find out.”

“And how much for this favor?”

“A franc. But Jubal is the best carrier, so you may wish to give me two.”

It was like mounting a sturdy horse, and off we went into the rain. I’d kept my planter’s straw hat from Antigua, and looked out at the world through a veil of water dripping from its brim. My shoulders were instantly soaked, but the downpour was warm and the ride enjoyable. I felt ridiculous, but at least I wasn’t calf-deep in mud.

Jubal set his own course. Rather than wade straight across to the other side, he splashed to the middle of the avenue and trudged parallel, making us drift toward the harbor.

“No, no, I want to go there!” I pointed. He might not even get his franc.

“You will get there. But perhaps you wish to talk to Jubal first. Out here in the street, in the rain, where no Frenchman can hear us.”

I was immediately alert. “About what?”

“Yes, talk to mighty Jubal, who knows both mountains and sea. Jubal, who has heard of an American diplomat arrived at the harbor with his striking wife, seeking information on the liberation of Haiti. Jubal has heard about this electrician who walks into the lion’s mouth, to ask about the lion.”

My heart beat faster. “How did you learn that?”

“The black man knows all in Cap-François. Who rows first to a ship, hoists a trunk, or drives a carriage? The black man. Who mops out a meeting room, serves at a banquet, or digs new entrenchments? The black man. But should an American ambassador talk only to the French side? Or should he seek information from the African legions as well, the ones who will soon rule this country?”