Chapter Thirteen
IN LE CAP THERE WAS NO SUNRISE; billows of black smoke rolled in from the northern plain and blotted out the light. All through the town it was raining feathery flakes of ash, and hot cinders too sometimes, which threatened to set the roofs alight. But few attended to this danger. No blacks from the plain had breached the town’s defenses, but the petit blancs had risen in a riot and traveled the streets in mobs, hanging whatever mulattoes they might find from the lampposts or shooting them or slashing them to death with knives, for as the first white survivors began to trickle in from the plantations the rumor spread that Ogé’s colored co-conspirators had raised the insurrection of the slaves.
Captain Maillart rode about aimlessly from quarter to quarter of the town; he had been doing so for a little better than an hour. Together with the saber and dragoon’s pistol he commonly carried, he had equipped himself with an infantryman’s musket, carried in a makeshift sling against his saddle skirt. He had been one of the small scouting party that went out into the plain at dawn as the first refugees straggled in from the countryside, and one of a few to survive a misfortunate encounter with a huge band of brigand blacks. Badly as he’d been shaken by what he’d seen then, he’d volunteered at once for the expedition to Limbé, but Thouzard had detached him along with some few others to remain and keep order in the town—now a plainly impossible project.
Most of the other soldiers had shut themselves in the barracks to wait for the riots to wear themselves out, knowing that the petit blancs might attack them, in their weakened numbers, almost as readily as they’d set upon mulattoes or blacks. Maillart, however, preferred to remain on the move, though unsupported as he was he could do little of real use. The town’s small body of regular police had either joined with the rioters or barred themselves behind their doors to wait it out. Some householders had banded together to do what they might to contain the present danger of fire, wetting down roofs and wooden walls and smothering hot cinders before they could ignite. The wind that brought the coals and ash in from the plain could spread a fire quickly all over the city if ever a fire was well started.
His horse at least was a steady campaigner, unafraid of smoke or sparks. But at the edge of the town even this horse grew restive, shifting its hooves and flaring its nostrils. Captain Maillart himself felt a shock to the roots of his system repeated each time he looked at the spectacle there. Beyond the ridge of Morne du Cap was something that his imagination could only compare with a storm over some brimstone lake of hell. A hundred degrees of the horizon were luridly edged with a red fire glow. Above this smoldering ring rose great black billows of smoke like thunderheads with long tongues of flame stabbing up through them to lick the belly of the sky. But there was no sky, only the sooty haze from which the ash and coals kept hailing down.
Here some few other officers of the Regiment Le Cap were ministering to the survivors still intermittently trickling out of this inferno. Most were advised to seek shelter in the houses of friends, if they had friends, since the hospital and the convent were already overcrowded. Captain Maillart looked over their soot-streaked staring faces. He would have liked to inquire about his friend Antoine Hébert, but he saw little hope in doing so. Most who survived were women and children and these could report that their men had been mostly slain on the spot, before their eyes. Maillart knew from the events of the morning that women and children would not always be spared either.
He headed his horse back into the town, where the prospect was no more encouraging. The streets were awash with a surf of petit blancs, scouring the neighborhoods for new victims, some now openly breaking into mulatto houses. There were no blacks or gens de couleur abroad, save those who hung bloody and loll-tongued from window embrasures and posts. By now the wave of murderous retaliation had mostly passed over, leaving a festival of rape and looting in its wake. Maillart was not an especially canny political analyst but he did understand that these outrages stemmed as much from resentment of mulatto wealth as from any connection les gens de couleur might have had to the slave rebellion. Also he recognized, exchanging glances with the pop-eyed dangling men he passed, that many in the mob would be as glad to see him swing among them.
In his unhappiness over the likely doom of the doctor, Captain Maillart began to think of Nanon and the other mulatto women who were variously attached to his regiment. Immediately he felt certain of what must have already happened to them, but just the same he nudged his horse into a trot and rode up to the area below the Place d’Armes where most of these women kept their lodgings. As he’d expected, the door to Nanon’s rooms was stove in. He dismounted and stepped over the threshold, holding the horse at the length of the unslung reins. The front room was dim and quiet, there seemed to be some scurrying noise in the back. In the poor light he stepped on something and almost lost his footing: a pawn from the chess set that shot out from under the edge of his boot and twirled into a corner. The room was a ruin, all the fragile furniture overturned and dismembered, hangings slashed, the glass all hammered out of the mirror frames. At the sound of his movement a squirrel face poked out from the bedroom, a looter rolling opulent dresses into a large bundle.
“Come out of there,” Maillart called brusquely, but the looter only dodged behind the door frame. The captain cursed and looked over his shoulder at the horse; he didn’t dare step away from the animal, certainly not leave him tethered there. He called a warning, drew his pistol and after a moment’s pause fired through the inner doorway. The looter did not stir or show himself but the ball struck loose a hinge from a bamboo jalousie and through the window thus uncovered Maillart could see some commotion in the inner courtyard. He reloaded his pistol and primed it and remounted and rode around to investigate.
Immediately he recognized the woman Fleur, with whom he’d enjoyed the occasional most exquisite dalliance; she was lying on her back near the central well with a number of men raping her in turn. There seemed no longer any need to hold her down; her arms shivered loosely in the dust like the wings of a hen under treading, and her eyes showed only white, as if she were dead. Captain Maillart wondered if she were not dead, in fact. With each lunge of the man who’d presently skewered her, the top of her head knocked against the well’s bricked rim. In the shadows under a shanty lean-to against the rear wall of a house a great fat black woman in a white headcloth stood watching the scene impassively with her heavy lips set firmly together. Near her two shirtless blacks stood similarly immobile, one holding a spotted pony on a rope. They seemed less interested than the animal they held, but Maillart was no more appalled by their indifference than by his own. He could feel nothing and he thought that there was nothing he could do. With a snort one rapist withdrew and another assumed his place and despite his grunts and the mutters of those encouraging him the sound of Fleur’s head bumping on the bricks seemed louder than anything else.
He would likely have done no more than ride away at this point, but just then someone burst out of the lean-to, a woman with her hands held out to him. He was distracted for a moment because the spotted pony had begun to kick and buck, jockeying the two blacks halfway across the courtyard to the well as they strove to control it. But the woman was Nanon; they must have hidden her there, beneath that heap of tattered sailcloth someone had been remaking into slave clothes. Her face was a welter of snot and tears and she called out chokingly for him to save her from the men who’d already diverted themselves from Fleur to seize her and tear at her clothing. There was Faustin the baker along with a man Maillart had never seen before, and the disreputable farrier Crozac. Maillart shouted for them to stop and took the musket from its sling without waiting to see their response.
Faustin caught Nanon by the wrist and she spun half around with both arms spread wide; she had not quite reached Maillart’s horse. The captain chopped out another order and deftly fixed the bayonet to the musket. He sat the horse, balancing the unfamiliar weapon with one hand round the trigger guard. Nanon could not break Faustin’s grip, but she drew her captured wrist toward her face and closed her wide mouth over his hand, crunching down on the small bones clustered like a chicken back. Faustin shouted and let go; he would have hit her with his unhurt fist but he saw the bayonet probing for his face and he fell back, along with the third man. The dozen or so other men in the yard had formed a loose line around Maillart’s horse and were waiting to see what would happen.
Crozac rushed up and clutched at Nanon’s hair, yanking her head back by the scalp, exposing her long pulsing neck and a taut face distorted by the sudden pain. Maillart spoke to him crisply, not too loud, trying for the tone of authority which these folk would often follow before they fully knew they would obey, but Crozac was beyond this. His eyes were furrowed shut like badly sutured scars and his face looked nothing but a mask of bad teeth. In his unconsciousness he had pressed the woman full against the saddle skirt and Maillart’s booted foot. The captain touched him with the bayonet point, at the neckless join of Crozac’s head and shoulders, but the man did not seem aware of him at all. Maillart returned the glance of some of the whites watching him and thought of the hanged men who’d be his blind and silent companions if his choice of action proved to be mistaken. He reversed the musket and gripped it with both hands about the barrel and brought it down with maybe half his force into the center of the farrier’s forehead.
Crozac sat down sharply with a whumpf and a puff of dust. His eyes jumped farther open with the blow and he took a noisy breath in through his mouth. Maillart held out a hand to Nanon and she swarmed up his whole arm at once, swinging a leg over the saddle and splitting her skirt as her weight settled down. The captain lifted the reins with his left hand and with the other brandished the musket over his head like a javelin. Her arms cinched around his waist as he dug heels in the horse’s side and cantered out of the yard.
DOCTOR HéBERT AND HIS BATTERED and exhausted party had reached Le Cap at last, exactly when he could not say. The cinder-black sky gave no clue of the time and he felt himself to be passing within some sort of damned eternity. The Flaville family kept a house in town where the women might retreat, but after the doctor had escorted them there he excused himself and headed for the Place d’Armes, going afoot and leading his spent horse by the reins. The scenes through which he passed defeated his understanding. There was as much ruin and death about as if the slaves had overrun the town although he had been told that this had been prevented. Whatever rage had swept the place had drifted into its doldrums and he was alone on the streets now except for the dead. He was itching to find Nanon; though there was no vestige of passion in him or even interest really, he felt a blunt obligation to see to her safety if he could.
He hitched his horse to a rail by her broken door and walked across the gutted ruin of her rooms. The floor was carpeted with splinters of furniture and chunks of broken mirror glass. The doctor stooped and picked up one of these, just large enough to show him his own eye. A heap of fresh human excrement fumed warmly near one wall. Everything that was not stolen had been carefully insulted and destroyed. The bed was stripped and marked with crisscrossing streaks of urine. The doctor stepped through the back door into the courtyard, where he saw a woman struggling feebly to get up onto her knees. She looked to have been raped to ribbons, and the doctor was becoming so inured to such sights that it took him a moment to realize that this was Nanon’s sometime companion, Fleur.
He moved to lift Fleur by the shoulders, but she would not or could not stand. Her lassitude was more uncooperative than dead weight. The doctor twisted his head around until he noticed Maman-Maigre hunkered in her lean-to, and he began to back in that direction, Fleur’s heels furrowing the dust as they dragged behind.
Three chickens clucked and scattered from their way. The doctor laid Fleur’s shoulders down softly as he might by the dead embers of Maman-Maigre’s cook fire. There was a pail of water standing near and the doctor sopped a rag of rotten sailcloth in it and uncertainly began cleaning the crust from Fleur’s belly. At his first touch she moaned and convulsed onto her side. Maman-Maigre took the rag from him and continued the task herself and the doctor gratefully turned his eyes elsewhere. He did not look again until Maman-Maigre had covered Fleur’s legs with the remains of her clothing. The black woman sat cross-legged, holding Fleur’s head on her hammy thigh. The younger woman’s eyes were closed completely now and she breathed easily as a sleeper. All over the yard the ghostly ash continued to feather down. The doctor asked Maman-Maigre several times over if she knew what had happened to Chloe or Jasmine or Nanon, but though he spoke slowly in the clearest Creole he could manage, she would not answer him at all.
At dusk he came stumbling through the northmost quarter of the town into Les Casernes, where he thought he might at least safely stable his horse. When he asked for Maillart the captain came running and almost knocked him over with the surprise of his embrace. He conducted the doctor to his quarters where he broached a bottle of brandy which the doctor was very glad to taste. With his throat so warmed he told of what had happened to him and what he had witnessed: the slaying of Lambert, and how Duvel’s head had grinned down on him from its stake, and how Madame Arnaud had saved them all, as he believed, by sacrificing her finger to the Congo.
At that the captain drew in his breath and looked as if he would make some remark, but when he did speak he told another tale. How he’d gone out at dawn to reconnoiter on the plain with a small body of foot soldiers who’d unexpectedly fallen in with rebel slaves, surprised and outnumbered so completely they’d all been slaughtered save himself and a few others who’d outdistanced the marauders on horseback. Because it was only Antoine Hébert and not another military man the captain could confess the shame he felt at fleeing before blacks and the shock of knowing he had no better hope to save his life. And here he hesitated, but finally went on to say he’d seen something more dreadful than a head raised on a spear: an infant’s corpse and what was worse it seemed to have been torn untimely from the womb.
The doctor set his glass aside and rubbed his eyelids with his fingertips.
“Can you imagine such bestial cruelty?” the captain said.
“Unfortunately I don’t have to imagine it,” the doctor said. He held his hand out before him flat and planed it back and forth across the air as if to show himself that it was steady.
“What does it mean?” the captain said. “What can it mean?”
“Ours is the age of reason,” the doctor said. He took from his pocket the wedge of broken mirror he’d saved from Nanon’s room and squinted into its minute reflection. “Reason must afford some answer to your question.”
At that the captain only sniffed and rolled the remains of liquor in his glass.
“Hogs may eat their young,” the doctor said. “They sometimes do. But not display a piglet as a trophy.” He put the bit of mirror back into his pocket.
“The woman Nanon,” said Maillart.
The doctor raised his head and stared at him with his bloodshot eyes. He’d been helplessly filling Nanon into Fleur’s situation and now he only expected to hear some such event described more closely.
“Oui, ta petite amie,” the captain said. “I happened to meet her before she’d been harmed. I took her to Les Ursulines…”
The doctor exhaled. “You astonish me,” he said. “I passed by her place—it looked as if the slaves had sacked it.”
“Yes,” the captain said. “She’s quite all right. A little frightened. One might look out some other lodging for her. I don’t suppose she’s very well suited for convent life.”
Then over the captain’s protest the doctor went out again into the smoking evening. There was a new tumult in the streets because the main body of troops led by Thouzard had just reentered the town, having fallen back from Limbé in time to repulse a horde of blacks who’d overrun Fort Bongars. News of the garrison’s massacre there…The roof of the house next to the Cignys had caught fire from some floating spark no doubt and a mixed part of slaves and whites were hurrying to extinguish it. But at chez Cigny the liveried footman was still at his post and when ushered into the drawing room, the doctor found Madame Cigny playing carelessly with her son Robert.
The boy had undone a little kit of nécessaires and Isabelle Cigny was laying out the instruments and prattling to him about their use. A compass, a pair of glass vials, a penknife and a small scissors…That dainty fop, Pascal, balanced on a spindly chair and played a country air on a violin with a disconsonant expression of seriousness. The doctor could not quite make out whether all this insouciance was courage or idiocy, but remembering Madame Arnaud he thought he would do well to reserve his judgment. Soon he found himself telling the story of his trials again under Madame Cigny’s cheerful questioning, though as briefly as she would allow. While he was speaking she quietly removed the scissors from Robert’s hand before he could do himself the injury he seemed to intend and raised the boy onto her lap and held him there. The doctor paused.
“Not to fatigue you with these horrors,” he said. Through the cloth of his pocket he fidgeted with the bit of mirror glass. “I came for another reason…to ask your hospitality, your charity, I mean.” He fumbled. “Not for myself but another…”
“A woman?” Madame Cigny said with her provocative smile.
“C’est ?a,” the doctor said. He picked up the nécessaire box and examined the miniature painted on its side, a couple standing by the steps of a tiny Grecian temple all open to the air. “Une femme de couleur…hmmm…her home has been rendered uninhabitable. And it seems unsafe generally now.”
“A woman in whom you must have some peculiar interest?” Madame Cigny lifted a fan and hid her mouth behind it; above its fluted rim her eyes looked dark, almost angry. The violin abruptly ceased and in its absence shouting voices reached them more plainly from the street. The doctor felt that he was turning purple. He knocked over the nécessaire box in replacing it on the table and had to reach again to set it right.
“What are her virtues, this girl?” said Madame Cigny. “Has she accomplishments?”
“Why yes…” The doctor bethought himself that most of Nanon’s accomplishments were strictly unmentionable. “Well, she can cook. And sew.”
“Vraiment?” Above the fan, Madame Cigny’s eyes turned merry. “Then I suppose we may find some place for her here. Out of Christian charity, as you suggest. And temporarily, bien entendu.”
“Thank you,” the doctor said. “May I bring her directly? Or no, the morning would certainly be better.”
When he took his leave he was surprised to find that Pascal would accompany him out. Robert wiggled his plump hands happily, trying to reach the scissors again. And as the parlor door closed they heard Madame Cigny begin singing him a little song in Creole.
“Indeed you are a very droll fellow,” Pascal said when they had reached the street.
“What do you mean?”
“To ask a Creole lady to harbor your mulatto wench?”
“I didn’t see it in that light,” the doctor said. “The town’s in a state of emergency.”
“It’s of no consequence. Though I suppose the ladies must inevitably be weary of seeing their husband’s bastard get in the arms of these colored women. And you must know that our Isabelle was one of the ladies who brought about the sumptuary law.”
“Oh but I have only been in the country a couple of months,” the doctor said.
“At the behest of our ladies an ordinance was passed which for-bade the mulattresses to wear their fine clothes—out of their own doors. Nor any jewelry or ornament…but the women rebelled and refused to go out at all. They refused to entertain. I think you know their touch with entertainment? And so the law was hastily repealed.”
“Thank you,” the doctor said. “You have been most enlightening.”
They parted, and the doctor went on to Les Ursulines where with some difficulty he persuaded the nuns to admit him at last. A nun was present throughout his interview with Nanon and so he remained across the room from the place where she was seated while he gave his news. After all he hardly knew how to comport himself and really it relieved him that they were not left alone. He had no wish to be touched or to touch anyone for the time being, if he could avoid it. And she seemed mute and uncomprehending; her still beauty was a mask; he had to repeat himself several times before he thought she’d understood. Then she crossed the room more quickly than the nun could stay her, sank down and wrapped her arms around his legs and laid her cheek against his knees.