Chapter Eleven
THE EVENING OF AUGUST 22 found Claudine Arnaud sitting upon the gallery of the grand’case at Habitation Flaville. Wine had been offered her; she had refused it. An embroidery hoop lay on her skirted knees, and once in a long while she might make a few desultory stitches, but her real purpose was to hold one hand concealed beneath the pale square of linen. If any hallucination appeared to plague her she would surreptitiously prick her thumb with the needle’s point and the sharpness of the pain would most often banish the specter, whatever it was.
She was alone on the gallery but for the girl Marguerite, who sat idly, her plump milky hands folded in her lap. This was some distaff cousin of Flaville’s gérant, an orphan or something of the sort, who’d been sent out here from France to catch herself a husband. Claudine’s near-professional appraisal was that the girl made quite delicious bait. She was well formed, a flaxen blonde, with large liquid blue eyes that seemed to show intelligence, though in truth there was next to none. In its place were a few decorative accomplishments—watercolors, playing the spinet—and a deep bovine tranquillity. She sat now, a slave fanning her, her lovely blue gaze bent on nothing at all, as pleasantly vacant as a cow chewing its cud. Some man would surely value this quality, Claudine suspected, if not to preserve and protect it, then to lay it to waste. Since she had come here she had shared a bedroom with pretty Marguerite and she believed the girl was so perfectly blank she did not even dream.
Within there was a dampened clatter of plates and utensils being laid for the evening meal. Out of the speedily gathering dark at the end of the lane which led through the cane fields in the direction of Le Cap, Claudine thought she saw a horseman coming. She moved the needle nearer her thumb beneath the hoop, but this rider lacked the pearly shimmer of most of her other phantasms…only the tails of his duster fluttered deliriously over the hindquarters of the horse. She glanced at Marguerite but of course there was little to infer from the lack of reaction there.
As the horseman came nearer, at a brisk trot, she thought she could see a white blaze on the horse’s forehead. A moment later, she recognized the doctor. Now that was a peculiar cruelty, and a new one, a phantom appearing to remind her that there had been a time before—when she had seen him coming just this way, expanding from a dot at the farthest remove down the string-straight line of Arnaud’s allée. To imagine that on that day itself she’d thought her situation was unbearable, that thought seemed laughable now. This zombi had been sent to tantalize her with the thought of going back in time to reach that day of innocence again. She sank the needle deep into her thumb and twisted it, biting her lips the while. When she opened her eyes again the doctor was still there and had in fact dismounted from his horse.
“Your pardon, ladies,” he began. “Can you tell me, how far have I to go to reach Ennery?”
Claudine began to speak and caught herself. She cut her eyes toward the girl, in search of any clue at all. Marguerite overlooked the apparition blandly and spoke in her most musical tone.
“I don’t know how to answer your question, monsieur, but I’m sure you are most welcome here.”
Claudine breathed out. She rose to her feet, blotting her wounded thumb on the underside of the embroidery before she laid the hoop down. She saw from Doctor Hébert’s look that he had not recognized her. Assuming an ironic smile, she made him a curtsy, thinking that if she had attempted any such gesture at their first meeting she would most likely have fallen down. But she was well beyond embarrassment and now that Marguerite had answered for the doctor’s presence on the physical plane, she found that the unlikeliness of the event almost amused her.
“You are well out of your road once again,” she said, rising and putting out her hand with a mock-regal gesture as he came up the few steps to the gallery. “This is not Ennery but Acul.”
“Madame Arnaud,” the doctor said. “My happiness to see you.” He bowed over her hand. “But how…”
“Oh, I am a guest here myself, you understand.” Claudine emitted a sort of social laugh, but this joviality was too much and nearly strangled her. She cleared her throat. “This is Habitation Flaville, but as the family is from home, Monsieur and Madame Lambert are my hosts and will be yours.”
The doctor released her hand. “Oh, but I should not intrude.”
“Nonsense, you will stay, of course.” Claudine smiled, not quite cuttingly. “After all, the road you can’t find by daylight is unlikely to appear to you after dark.” She turned, rustling in her crinolines. “Marguerite, had you not better go and tell Madame Lambert that there will be one more to dine?”
The blonde girl rose from her seat and turned her face aside as if in modesty, most wonderfully displaying her soft profile and long alabaster neck. She held the pose for a moment, then moved with her sleepy rippling grace into the house. Claudine watched the doctor narrowly, but if he’d been impressed he did not show it.
INSIDE THE HOUSE, the doctor delivered himself of a group of apologies, demurrals, and finally thanks to Madame Lambert. She was a short woman, tiny almost, but she seemed strong and full of practical energy. Her three daughters all bustled about, ordering adjustments to the dinner table and sending house slaves to make up another room. The doctor’s saddlebags were sent for, clothes hung up and brushed. Someone pressed a drink into his hand. In the midst of all this Monsieur Lambert returned from overseeing the cane fields, with him a youth named émile Duvel, who was an expected and invited guest for dinner and the night. Introductions were made. The doctor tottered on his rubbery legs. Long hours riding after his idle stay in Le Cap had left him saddle sore again, and he was chagrined at having lost his way so thoroughly. Madame Lambert plucked at his elbow and conveyed him to the rear of the house on the pretext of showing him his room.
Within the chamber she slapped the door shut with her round forearm (she was rather a stout woman though small) and wheeled on him with a bristling vigor that was almost alarming. He took a step back.
“As you are a physician,” she said, “you must tell me what you think of Claudine.” She spoke in a loud forced whisper. Short as he was himself, she scarcely reached his breastbone. Her round black eyes crackled at him, their pupils large.
“Tell me, what is your concern?” The doctor made a series of evasive motions with his hands.
“Oh, I cannot say exactly. She has changed. She scarcely will eat a mouthful at any time of day, and takes no wine or spirits either, when she used to be so, so…”
“Enthusiastic?” the doctor finished, thinking he saw in her expression some knowledge of Madame Arnaud’s dipsomania. Madame Lambert looked at him closely and he was careful not to smile.
“Might it be some wasting fever?” she said. “Often she seems to stare at nothing, sometimes I seem to hear her speak to no one. In her room she speaks when no one is there.”
“I see,” the doctor said. As it struck him, these were symptoms of insanity rather than illness. “Of course, if the lady does not choose to consult me…but I will be as observant as I am able.”
Madame Lambert seemed a little deflated. “I should be grateful for any opinion…I fear for her, indeed. She was once a dear friend to me, and yet she always seemed ill-suited for this country.” She nodded to him and went out. The doctor followed her back to the others.
At table he endured some raillery about his poor sense of direction. Claudine Arnaud began the joke, but did not join in the laughter it produced. The girls were giggly, all but Marguerite, whose bland state of calm seemed quite unshakable. émile Duvel, who clerked on the nearby Noé plantation, cut through the hilarity, raising a finger as he looked at the doctor.
“Still it is no laughing matter to ride over this country alone, whether one knows his way or not. So much unrest among the cultivators.” The table quieted, but for Duvel’s voice. “And if there really were to be—”
“Assez.” Monsieur Lambert spoke from the table’s head. “Why look for trouble? I’m sure it’s all been settled now, besides.”
“Monsieur, you are too good.” Duvel turned to the doctor again. “Do you know what this man did?”
“émile…” said Monsieur Lambert. But Duvel continued. The girls on either side of him were smiling, anticipating this version of a tale they’d heard before.
“Last week a fire was set to some buildings at Chabaud’s. They caught the man who did it—he proved to be a commandeur, but from another plantation. And when examined he confessed there was a plot among many commandeurs to raise a general insurrection of slaves in these quarters.” Duvel looked to the head of the table. “And why should he confess it if it were not true?”
“Naturally, to shift attention from himself,” Lambert said. “And under such ‘examinations’ as they are wont to give, a man might contrive any fantasy.”
“Perhaps,” said Duvel, “and yet, a commandeur? Après tout, he was not some bossale or maroon as you know. And if there was no plot what would bring him from Desgrieux plantation to work such mischief on Chabaud?”
“If in truth he did so,” Lambert said mildly. “It may be that since he had come from elsewhere he was the likeliest to be falsely accused.”
“You are ingenious in your defense of them,” Duvel said. “Be that as it may, the authorities of Limbé determined from this fellow that there was indeed a plot and that several of the leaders were here, chez Flaville. Can you imagine what would take place if such an intelligence came to some other gérant?”
Sidelong, the doctor had been looking at Madame Arnaud, as his hostess had requested. It was true that she only picked at her food, and interesting that she took neither wine nor liquor. She seemed inattentive to the anecdote, but the doctor would not necessarily have said she was in worse health than when he had first met her. One corner of her mouth was drawn down, though; perhaps she’d been victim to apoplexy?
“Can you imagine?” Duvel was repeating. The doctor roused himself.
“Indeed, I think I can,” he said. His eyes were on Madame Arnaud’s hands lying idle by the sides of her plate, but what he seemed to see was a pair of black hands crossed and transfixed with a nail through their pale palms.
“Quite,” Duvel said. “But this gentleman gathered all his slaves together and when he told them of the accusation he said that he could not believe it. Your words, sir—” Duvel raised his voice to overwhelm Lambert’s nascent protest. “Your very words: ‘If I have given you any reason to seek my life, you may take it now with no resistance and without the trouble of a general riot.’ And to be sure they all wept and protested their fidelity.”
“I took no risk,” Lambert said.
The doctor looked at him. His close-cut curly hair was grizzled and his face was creased with friendly wrinkles, like an old hound’s.
“Kindness is repaid with kindness,” he went on; “abuse with abuse.”
“Well, we must all hope that you are right,” Duvel said. The doctor noticed that his tone had changed, and he now looked at Lambert with almost a doglike devotion.
“If all the owners and gérants shared your goodness,” Duvel said, “it’s true we’d have much less to fear.”
“I believe we have dispatched this subject,” Lambert said, and nodded to the doctor. “Do tell us something of yourself.”
In his effort to comply, Doctor Hébert let it slip that he was unmarried. This news created a partially suppressed sensation, for it seemed that Duvel was the only frequent courtier at this house, though not for any want in its attractions. The Lambert daughters were pretty and charming all three: Hélo?se, Madeleine, Emilie. They were small and dark-haired like their mother, with ice pale skin carefully maintained. Their being close in age, the doctor had trouble distinguishing which was the elder, which the younger; besides they often seemed to speak and react almost in unison.
WHEN THEY HAD DINED and the slaves had cleared away the table, Marguerite made a display of her skill at the spinet. émile Duvel stood by the instrument, joining his tenor to her high piping voice, until the three sisters became restless and organized an attempt at dancing. Claudine sat at the room’s farthest edge, near a window covered with mosquito net, one hand covering the other with the embroidery hoop caught between, studying the situation as it evolved.
The shift to dancing was a little coup for the Lambert girls. Claudine was aware of a rift developing between them and Marguerite these days. They were bright and quick where she was slow and languorous, so perhaps it was natural they should not well like her, all but Emilie, who had formed an attachment. But even she would not break with her sisters in the matter of émile Duvel, who was their property as they saw it (though before Marguerite had come they had not liked him so much either). So they would dance, leaving Marguerite to the provision of accompaniment, fastened to her bench.
The doctor was game to play his part, though shaky from the saddle as Claudine could well see, and she surmised he was no virtuoso of a dancer at the best of times. He propelled Hélo?se around the floor in a bearlike fashion, and though she tried to engage him in conversation he was too much occupied by his effort not to step on her feet or knock over the smaller articles of furniture. Duvel was far nimbler, but perhaps less obliging. The two men kept dutifully sharing the three sisters round, but Duvel’s eyes kept running to Marguerite, over the neat dark head of his partner.
There was a crackling sound that seemed to come from beyond the window, plainly audible to Claudine over the spinet’s tinkling, yet knowing it must be an echo from within her skull, she tried to ignore it. At last she could not help herself from glancing out to see the phantasmal tongues of flame licking through the cane fields. Her lips worked drily. Often the appearance of her demon was fore-told by such displays, and this time there even seemed a taste of smoke in the air. She stabbed her needle deep into her thumb, gasped, and resolutely turned back toward the frail bright bubble of the room, where the parents overlooked the dancing with fond glances, or maybe only with fatigue…
Duvel gave over the dance just then, pleading breathlessness, and strolled over to lean on the spinet. Hélo?se and Madeleine faced each other, mirror images almost, and arms akimbo, then shrugged and took one another as partners. Doctor Hébert, quite red in the face, ferried Emilie around in a ragged ellipse, apologizing for his clumsiness even as he committed it. The spinet made a rattling sound to Claudine’s soured ear, like teeth shaken in a jar. A foolish smile spread over his face, Duvel was admiring the movement of Marguerite’s plump fingers over the keyboard, but suddenly she broke off and looked up crossly.
“What is that gruesome noise?” And suddenly she was on her feet; Claudine had never seen her respond to anything so quickly. Indeed the crackle was much louder than before and with the spinet silent it seemed to fill the room, along with a roaring behind it. Monsieur Lambert shifted in his seat, the ghost of a frown crossing his face. One hand pressed over her pale throat, Marguerite began walking to the door. The others remained frozen as she passed onto the gallery, but Claudine rose immediately and followed.
A dry wind blew toward the house, pushing a low roller of black burned-sugary smoke ahead of it. It was the wind that roared, and mixed with that was the feverish snapping of the burning cane, and something else: a low throbbing ululation like the wind howling over a broken bottleneck. The wind shifted and the billow of smoke rolled away. The gallery was flooded with a hot orange light, though the fire was still far back in the cane field. In silhouette against the blaze Claudine saw a larger host of devils than any hallucination had figured forth for her till now.
Then she realized that Marguerite saw them too. It must be that ululation came from human throats. Marguerite screamed, staggered down the steps and began running across the compound parallel to the fire. After hesitating a bare instant, Claudine pinched up her skirts in one hand and went after her. Unused to haste, the girl ran awkwardly and was easily overtaken. Claudine snatched her hair at the nape of her neck and hurried her along a great deal faster. The compound was bordered on three sides by cane fields and Claudine rushed them into an area of cane that was not yet alight.
THE DOCTOR GAINED THE GALLERY a step behind Duvel, and by then the rebel slaves were already pouring up the steps and vaulting up over the railings. Duvel stopped with his mouth agape. A red-skinned man crouched and took a careful aim at him with a long nail spliced to a staff and drove it hard into Duvel’s neck. Duvel hissed, air rushing from his trachea. The red man drew back and made another strike and when he withdrew the nail this time, a crimson jet blasted from Duvel’s throat like wine spurting from a heavy, punctured skin. The bloodstream splattered a gallery post and passed beyond it into the darkness and indistinct firelight. Experimentally, Duvel placed a forefinger over the tiny wound, and a fine spray arced out to stain several of his attackers.
Someone struck at the doctor with a cane knife and he interposed his open hand. The blade cut deeply into his palm, though for the moment he did not feel it. Duvel had fallen on his side; his eyes showed white and blood was pooling darkly round his cheek and jaw. In the cane the flames shot suddenly high and brightened all with a hellish clarity. Monsieur Lambert appeared in the door frame. His lips moved in some speech the doctor could not hear for the choral voice of the rebels throbbing in his ears. Lambert’s hands were flattened before him in a mosaic gesture as though he would calm a turbulent sea. Meanwhile the blacks were tumbling through the windows at either side of the door, carrying away the mosquito nets as they burst through, and within all the women had begun screaming together. The doctor glanced through the naked window frame and saw a tall lean man with his head swathed in mosquito netting like a beekeeper’s veil snatching at Hélo?se and divesting her of all her clothing in a single rip. Another smashed on the spinet keys with his fists, releasing loud discordant clusters of notes, while Hélo?se shrieked and jigged up and down in a parody of the dance they’d enjoyed earlier, her white buttocks fluttering.
An enormous ink-black rebel whose muscles shone with oil swung a long-bladed hoe down at Monsieur Lambert’s head. Still in the midst of his temporizing discourse, Lambert sidestepped. The hoe fell on his collarbone and the doctor heard plainly the crack as it broke and Lambert pitched forward on his knees. He was surrounded, but the rebels confused themselves, all striking at once with their blades tangling in midair. Lambert’s hands were upturned now; a palm filled with blood. For an instant the doctor caught his liquid eye. The hoe swept down again, the blade raking away the scalp to expose the hideous whiteness of his blood-skeined skull. Under the force of the blow Lambert’s head dropped forward and remained. A rebel directly in front of the doctor drew back his coutelas to swing at the exposed neck, but the doctor locked an arm around his throat and dragged him away.
The main wave of attackers had passed on into the house or beyond it to the sugar mill, and no one seemed to notice the struggle the doctor was engaged in. As the rebel tried somehow to bring his knife to bear, the doctor tightened his stranglehold and overbalanced backward. His hip broke the rail as they both fell over into a patch of darkness which the house corner shaded from the fire. They wrestled there, the doctor’s hands slipping on the rebel’s oiled body, feeling the first pain of his slashed palm. His choke hold was broken but the other had apparently lost his knife and was content to run away once he had freed himself. A cloud of smoke blew over and the doctor gathered himself on hands and knees, coughing and spitting. When the smoke swirled away he saw Marguerite at the border of the cane field east of the compound. The white dress she wore picked her out plainly even though the fire did not much illuminate that area, and she was struggling as it looked with some darker figure. He scrambled up and ran to her.
What seemed an attacker was only Claudine in her rust-red dress, hustling the hysterical Marguerite along willy-nilly through the cane. The doctor drew abreast of them. Claudine was moving with a firm purpose though he had no idea where she thought she was going. Then some hundred yards ahead of them another fire exploded, leaped high and fanned on either side. The ululation rose again like a wall and there was a more fragmentary hooting on conch shells. The doctor swung an arm at the fire, staring at Claudine.
“Keep moving,” she said, her face twisting as she splattered his face with spittle. “The ditches—”
Marguerite’s feet turned under and her weight sagged. The doctor caught her other arm and went with Claudine half dragging the girl along between them. He had no notion why they should run toward the new fire and the rebels they could hear approaching them from it, except there was no good reason to remain at the compound either. Ahead, the marauders were so near that the single wall of sound they uttered began to separate into individual voices howling this or that. But before they came in sight the doctor’s foot slipped out from under him and he slid down on his coccyx into a narrow irrigation trench.
Instantly he understood, and flattened himself facedown to the bottom of the ditch. With the drought there were only a few inches of water here; it was a hot sticky mud hole. Claudine was lying almost nose to nose with him, her arm across Marguerite’s back. The girl said something and began to raise her head, but Claudine mashed it back into the mud and held it there, fingers digging into her scalp. Small clouds of mosquitoes moved toward them from either direction along the trench. Claudine’s eye glittered in an almost reptilian way. The doctor would have liked to kiss her. Mud was sucking at his ear hole and he could see out of only one eye. Beyond the women’s prostrate bodies, twenty or thirty yards along the ditch, a new band of blacks began to jump the barrier, lit now by the fire in the other carré. A couple of them stumbled or fell crossing the ditch but even then they hardly looked about themselves, so great their haste to reach the compound or outdistance the fresh fire racing up behind them.
When he thought they had all passed the doctor raised up on his elbows, in spite of Claudine’s angry glance, and looked to where they’d come from. The fire was lacing through the standing cane stalks and, with the wind behind it, the speed of its advance beggared belief. A blast of heat parched his eyeballs; he dropped his face into the ditch. He’d thought the trench must halt the blaze, but the flames were shooting out laterally as if thrust from dragons’ throats, across and into the cane on the other side. For a minute or more the three of them were overshot by long sheets of fire. A flight of mosquitoes combusted all at once with no flame touching them, only from the pure heat; they glowed like transfigured ideas of mosquitoes for an instant and were gone. The fire caught at Marguerite’s loose hair and tore among Claudine’s crooked fingers there. The doctor scooped a handful of sludge from under himself and doused it.
The fire had passed. A spiral of silence twisted at the doctor’s ear as the roar of it receded toward the compound. He felt with his fingers around the trench. Most of the moisture had been baked away and the walls of the ditch were parched and cracking. The wind began to silt it in with flat flakes of hot ash. He could hear the shrieks of the women in the house, and horses screaming in the stable, which made him wonder if it too were afire. But now the fire was lowering at the edge of the compound, where the cleared area was too large for it to pass. At the edge of it three of the blacks did a wild dervish dance together, each holding a small keg of rum and alternately drinking from the bunghole or splattering liquor to boost the dying flames.
Inside the house the cries of the women kept ascending as if they would eviscerate themselves with screams. Marguerite lifted her fire-blackened head to peer over the rim of the trench, but there was little to see; the house was dark.
“What are they doing,” she quavered. “What are they doing there?”
“They’re getting married,” Claudine snapped. “Didn’t you want to get married too?”
The girl began to moan, her teeth chattering, and Claudine pushed her face down in the dirt. “You’d best keep silent,” she muttered stiffly, “or someone will come along and marry you.”
AT DAWN, WHEN IT HAD everywhere been silent for an hour, the three of them crawled out of the ditch and approached the house across the ashen waste of the cane field. None of the buildings had been destroyed except the sugar mill, which had been dismantled board by board and all the clay forms shattered. It seemed the horses had all been stolen or driven from the stable, though it had not burned. The bodies of Lambert and Duvel lay tumbled in the yard below the gallery, identifiable chiefly by their clothing, as neither any longer wore a head. Reluctantly, the doctor followed Claudine into the house. As they entered, Madame Lambert stirred on the floor and moved her hands to cover her blood-smeared thighs.
“It is worse than death,” she said, but tonelessly.
“It is not,” said Claudine. “But if you don’t stir yourself you’ll have a chance to make the comparison. You must get up and look to your children.”
The Lambert girls were huddled in a corner, tangled with each other like a pile of terrorized puppies. Roughly Claudine hauled on their limbs to make them rise. At the opposite end of the room, the doctor looked them over, with what detachment his professional point of view could still achieve. They were bruised and torn between their legs but he thought no direct attempt had been made against their lives. Their nakedness was that of corpses; their eyes stared through and through him as though he were made of glass. Behind him, Marguerite uttered a choking sound and collapsed sobbing in the doorway.
“O tais-toi, tu m’enmerder,” said Claudine. “Go find some clothes to put on these people—anything, sacks…”
This seemed pretext enough for the doctor to retreat into the rear of the house. In the room he’d been meant to occupy he found his spare clothing had all been taken and the pistol was gone from his saddlebags. His medicaments had been scattered but few removed; he gathered them back into their drawstring pouch. In another room he found strewn about some articles the women might wear but when he came back to the main chamber they had already managed to cover themselves with shifts and trousers the slaves had discarded during their sack of the premises.
Claudine had entered the broken storeroom and stood there clucking her tongue. “Look,” she said as the doctor joined her. She peeled back a cloth covering from a silver coffeepot. “The Flaville plate—they left a fortune here.”
“Strange,” the doctor said. He followed Claudine out onto the gallery. It was in some ways an odd pattern of looting. They’d made off with all the wine and rum and everything resembling a weapon. The women had been stripped of their personal ornaments and yet a pair of solid gold candlesticks were abandoned in plain sight in the main room.
“Well, we may save that plate at least,” Claudine said.
“Along with our lives, if luck favors us,” said the doctor.
“Yes, and what are you standing there for?” she said. “Go and catch that horse.”
The doctor looked along her pointing finger and recognized his own mount, Espoir, picking his way along the edge of the burned cane field, trailing the broken reins of his bridle. Someone had tried to ride off on him then, and had probably been thrown. He was unsaddled and spooky as could be. Each time the doctor was within a hand’s reach of him he picked up his head and went jittering off. At last he was able to catch one of the dragging reins. He stroked the horse till he was reasonably calm, led him into the stable to search for a saddle, but there was none. On the way out he picked up a riding crop from the dirt and stuck it into his waistband. He mounted bareback and managed to overtake and noose a dun-colored mule he saw wandering near the wreck of the sugar mill.
He rode back to the house leading the mule at the end of a length of rope. Under Claudine’s direction the other women were loading a flat wagon with the plate and covering it over with straw and corncobs from the outbuildings, all moving like automatons. Marguerite came dragging from the well with two slopping pails of water. The doctor hitched the mule to the wagon and they set out.
There was no conversation. Claudine drove the mule and the doctor rode alongside, his heels dangling on the horse’s flank. Marguerite lay prostrate in the wagon bed and was perhaps unconscious. Claudine had forbidden her to wash herself at the well with the warning You may yet meet a bridegroom on the road. Soot-stained and mud-plastered as she was she was hardly an erotic spectacle.
The other women slumped silently around the wagon rails, staring blindly in different directions, but the view in all quarters was the same. When the doctor had come down this road the previous day it was like riding through a tunnel of cane, but now he could see across the wasteland as far as the warped line of the horizon. Though it was full day the sun had never really risen, as if the charnel fires had laid a permanent stain across the firmament. All around them the blasted fields still smoked dully, and fitful gusts of wind stirred up black masses of ash and blew them in their faces. Some of the cinders were still hot and the women were at pains to keep the straw in the wagon from igniting. The doctor rode along blinking often and painfully with his bare reddened eyelids. His eyebrows and lashes had been seared away when he’d raised his head from the trench to look at the fire the night before. The cut through his palm was swollen and sore. High in the soot-speckled sky a single vulture held a position directly over their heads. Every so often it spun away in an uneven loop and then returned magnetically to its pole.
They had traveled perhaps four miles in the direction of Le Cap when another party detached itself from the horizon of the road ahead. Madame Lambert turned her head wretchedly on the rail.
“Is it the troops?” she said in a cracked voice.
Claudine snorted. But the doctor didn’t think it was such a stupid question. The others seemed to march in a tight mass and a standard of some description was borne among them. In any case there was no possibility to turn aside with the wagon and they were already in plain view, so they simply went on at the same pace as before, Claudine snapping the reins occasionally across the mule’s dun back.
After fifteen or twenty slow-moving minutes, the doctor could descry that it was a band of blacks approaching. He could not quite make out the standard raised on the pole but thought he could guess what it was and well enough he did not wish to see it any nearer. But they were coming on apace. Claudine lifted her chin to him.
“You’ll outdistance them easily,” she said. “They have no mounts, comme vous voyez.”
This possibility seemed so repugnant to him it was almost comical. He didn’t bother to answer her, but she clucked her tongue and spoke again more urgently.
“Will you defend us with your riding crop? It’s the men they want to kill. If you save yourself we may come through.”
The doctor hesitated, shifting the reins off the slash in his palm. The band was near enough that he could begin to count its members, and he thought they were probably about twenty strong.
“Go,” Claudine said, her voice dropping to a low mesmeric tone. “I’ll bring us through and we’ll rejoin you.”
Shrugging at her, he took the riding crop from his waistband and touched up the horse, bringing it quickly to a canter, and rode down on the center of the group ahead. If they had held their ground they might have stopped the horse or dragged him from it but as he bore down on them they moved to scatter as he’d trusted they would. As he burst through the shifting line he leaned out to cut with the crop into what faces he could reach. This effort nearly cost him his seat on the horse’s bare back; he dropped the crop and clung to the mane. The thing on the pole tilted toward him with its underjaw unslung as if it would bite. A hand seized at his knee and was torn away.
He had hoped to anger them with the crop and so draw them off, and a few of them did come yelling after him for a short dash before they saw the futility of the chase and gave over. The doctor pulled up the horse and swung it round to a standstill, but the band would not try for him again. They were all moving down the road toward the wagon now.
A CRAZED TATTERDEMALION CREW, uniformed in grease and bare skin or in odd assortments of the clothing they’d looted. They bore the arms of any peasant rising: sticks and staves, machetes, hoes and makeshift pikes. Some carried the whips that had been used to drive them. A few had guns and some of these Claudine could recognize from the Flaville house. One went along swinging a fowling piece by its barrel like a club and the others who had blundered into possession of firearms seemed to have little clearer idea of their use.
When they were little better than a handspan away, Claudine let the exhausted mule halt and stood straight up on the wagon seat. Her rust-colored dress clung to her stiffly and her mud-matted hair stuck out in several directions like a Medusa’s snakes.
“As God sees you,” she said in her raven’s voice, “or whatever demon of hell you may worship, there is nothing more to be taken from us. Let us pass.”
The group stopped staring. A Congo detached himself and approached the wagon. A gentleman’s powdered peruke was crookedly perched on his huge shaven head and his ragged teeth had all been carefully blackened to resemble little chunks of coal and he had put on backward the sky-blue dress Emilie had worn the night before. The V of its back could not close over his chest and so he was bare almost to his navel. He carried a soldier’s bayonet stuck through a rip in the cloth so it knocked against his belly and at the back of her mind Claudine wondered how he might have come by that.
He passed her, laid his hand on the wagon rail, and walked around it, humming tonelessly. Claudine felt that he was looking at the other women though she did not turn her head to see.
“Those have had the juice well wrung from them,” she said. “As you may know.”
The Congo grunted, circling around the wagon tail. Claudine could not help herself from glancing briefly back at him. It might have been comical, how his shoulder blades protruded from what had been meant for décolletage. He reached into the bed and gouged into Marguerite’s leg with one finger, but the girl lay catatonic and did not stir.
“I think she’s dead, that one,” Claudine said. “Although perhaps that’s what excites you.”
The Congo spat into the mat of ashes that covered the road and continued his circuit. The lusterless gaze of the other women drilled through him on its way to the charred horizon. Claudine watched the mule’s ears revolving, forcing her eyes away from the spot in the straw where the plate was hidden. There was a blue cross over the mule’s dun shoulders where several flies were rising or alighting. As the Congo passed below her again she saw framed in the bodice of the dress gray cicatrice ropes of old whippings on his back.
His eye caught the wedding ring on her dangling hand and he turned back and clutched at it. Reflexively Claudine pulled back, then relaxed. Another jerk brought her down from the wagon. The wig had slipped forward over his eyes and he stopped and used both hands to adjust it, for all the world like a fop before his mirror. Claudine twisted at the ring, but her finger was so swollen to it, it would not even turn. While the Congo still fiddled with the wig, she snatched the bayonet from its cloth hanger.
A murmur ran through the band and the pole tilted, the severed head of émile Duvel slackly smiling down on the scene with its even bloodstained teeth. The Congo surged upon her, but she indented his belly skin with the bayonet’s point and made him hesitate.
“Attends,” she said. “Regardes.”
She turned and laid her hand over the wagon wheel, the one finger flattened on the iron-shod rim and the other three pressed down against the side of it. She pushed her weight against the hand to separate the finger more completely from its fellows and better expose the joint behind the ring. The blade rose to the length of her right arm and came down with a whistle and a flash. The edge of it clashed on the iron wheel rim, and ring and finger sprang from her hand in opposite directions.
The stump was mottled pink and white, too suddenly shocked to bleed at first. She tried to ball it in a fist; her other hand let the bayonet drop in the cinder-strewn roadway. “Now you will let us pass,” she said woodenly, and clambered back upon the wagon seat.
The Congo stood with the ring in one hand and the finger white and wormlike in the other, gazing up at her with round vivid eyes. She crushed her left hand into the fabric of her skirt and with the other cracked the reins lightly on the mule’s back. The wagon wheels began a slow turning. The Congo spoke gutturally in some African tongue and the band divided itself silently and the wagon passed through.
By the time they reached the doctor, Madame Lambert had gathered herself to climb onto the wagon seat and take the reins. She would have put an arm round Claudine’s shoulders but Claudine shook her off and sat a little apart from her with her head slightly bowed. Several times the doctor sought to examine her wound but she would not allow it. They kept riding on and on speechlessly along the bald burned turning of the earth.