Chapter Twenty-Nine
“WILL I TEACH YOU TO TURN YOUR COAT?” Isabelle Cigny’s voice was low, light, a little husky; her small white teeth were near enough the captain’s ear to bite. He felt her breath against the lobe. It was not the first time she had brought him to the secret room, but it was still a novelty; his throat was yet so swollen with excitement that he could not answer her.
On a small table in the corner, an oil lamp glowed like a ruby within its red glass shade. In the swimming red light she shucked him out of his uniform tunic as easily as peeling a banana, and slid his trousers down the lean poles of his legs. Her deft fingers worked in the crisp black hair of his belly. In a moment she had laid him stiff and bare on a soft mound of carpets in the middle of the floor. Her skirts swung up and over him like a bell and then she settled, nestling, almost like a hen. He smiled at the thought. Then they were joined.
Her long skirts shrouded their point of union; her bare heels locked under his knees and drew them up. From the waist up, she was tidily arranged as for reception in her parlor, only for the mottled flush spreading across her deep décolletage and rising on her throat. Her eyes were half-lidded, there was a hint of hurry in her breathing. Captain Maillart felt a deep desire to work some change in her composure. With certain more assertive movements he was able to move her face into a pinch, a sort of frown, shadowed by the clouds of troubling thoughts, as it appeared. Her mouth twisted; her hand clawed through the fringes of a shawl spread where they lay, long nails driving back into her palm. The captain thought he was shouting at her, perhaps, he could not well hear. Waves of red light from the lamp washed over them like blood. She rode him to a gentler, rocking stroke, and her face gentled, mouth softening as her lips were parted in a sighing ring.
At the end, she slumped over him, holding herself up by her elbows. A strand of pinkish coral beads swung down toward his nose. He raised his head to kiss the cleft between her breasts, but smilingly she turned his chin away. From some distant recess of the house came the muted sound of a small child crying. Abruptly she swung her leg clear of him and sat upon a divan, pinning up a loose tendril at the back of her hair. Her skirts had fallen into perfect order around her when she stood. The captain sat up, a little dizzied by his movement. He was sticky and hollow as an empty, unwashed bowl. On either side of him lay one of a pair of beaded white satin slippers, improbably delicate and frail. He picked them up and, naked still, knelt down to slip them onto her feet. She smiled at him absently. Without, the street door opened and closed.
“You must hurry,” she said carelessly, and left him in the secret room.
It was the first word to pass her lips, after their congress. The door closed softly on her back. Maillart picked up his uniform coat—true enough it was of a different design, since he’d accepted the commission Laveaux had arranged for him. He dressed, and extinguished the lamp before leaving.
DOCTOR HéBERT HAD NOT BEEN WAITING long in the parlor when Madame Cigny came in, carrying Hélo?se on her hip, with Robert at her heels, trailed by his black nurse. She offered him her free hand and he bowed and murmured over it. Robert picked up a gilt-stamped leather book from the sofa and flung it on the floor. With a crafty look around the room, he picked it up and made to throw it farther. The nurse, his slave, looked pained, but would not interfere with him before his mother. Pascal, slouching in an armchair, had preceded the doctor on this call, and had evidently been waiting for some time; he regarded the scene with a faintly ironic air of detachment.
“Well, stop him, someone.” Isabelle set down the smaller child. “Must I do everything myself?” she trilled, flashing her inconsequent smile. With a pretty movement, a flirt of her hem, she bent to pry the book from her son’s chubby fingers. Hélo?se, meanwhile, pulled herself up by the edge of a low table, oversetting a glass of wine which splashed purply all over the front of her white dress.
“Well, take them out then,” Madame Cigny cooed at the nurse. “Change that dress—and see that it’s cleaned immediately.” Her face impassive, the black woman led the children out. As they left the room, Captain Maillart came in.
“Well, you are going then,” said Madame Cigny to the doctor. “Again you are going.” She looked at the captain. “So I am told.”
“Oh, I shall not be long from your side.” Maillart regarded her with something close to open astonishment. How could she have come to this room ahead of him? Fresh as she seemed, she must still be fragrant from their late encounter…He glanced at her slim hand—yes, the palm was still indented with faint nail marks. The captain noticed that Pascal had fixed on him a hostile stare. He grinned at him pleasantly, twirled his mustache, and sat down on the sofa.
“One may venture to hope that this sally will be more successful than your last,” said Isabelle, balancing herself winningly on the edge of a chair.
“After all,” the captain said serenely, “we did return to tell the tale.”
“But of course,” cried Madame Cigny. “A pity that the girl you were protecting could not share in that good fortune.”
The captain colored and emitted a cough.
“Eh bien, she was too good for this world, your Marguerite,” said Madame Cigny. “Or perhaps she was simply too stupid.” She turned smilingly upon the doctor. “And your mission will be the same as before?”
The doctor laughed. “To learn if on a third essay I may at last discover Ennery. I have hopes that my sister may have returned to Habitation Thibodet.”
“Your hopes are grounded?”
“Chère Madame, they are without a clear foundation,” said the doctor. “Like so many human hopes.”
THEY LEFT THE TOWN ON AN EARLY MORNING, eight men well mounted and heavily armed: the doctor, Maillart, a lieutenant named Vaublanc who’d also survived the purge of the Regiment Le Cap, Arnaud, Grandmont, and three other Creole militiamen. The Creoles, since they were white, whiled away the first hours of the journey with bitter and sarcastic commentary on the rise to power of the mulattoes in the town, and the general ascendancy that les gens de couleur seemed to have obtained over Sonthonax and the Commission. The captain held himself aloof from this discussion, and the doctor too kept silence.
On the far slopes of Morne du Cap they dismounted to take their noon repast. They sat cross-legged on stones or stumps, under the cover of the jungle leaves, chewing on chicken legs and cold sweet potatoes, drinking a little red wine from the skins they carried with them. All during the morning it had been raining fitfully, but it was clearing now, though a few drops still pattered on the leaf canopy. A fringe of cottony gray cloud trailed away over the peaks of the southwestern range of mountains, and as the cloud mass parted some shafts of sun leaked through to gild the green of the trees.
Doctor Hébert wore the long duster in which he almost always rode; he’d also acquired a broad-brimmed hat, against the constant rain. Together the two outsized garments seemed to dwarf him. While the others were preparing to remount, he meticulously checked the priming of the two pistols he carried in his belt and of the rifled long gun which was fitted into a scabbard on his saddle skirt. Captain Maillart chuckled audibly to see his concentration. The doctor looked up, alert and inquisitive.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Only—you seem so piratical, in that garb, with all your weaponry.”
The doctor shrugged, and looked at his shoes. “It’s only practical.”
“Hah,” said the captain. “What could you hit with it?”
“Whatever you like,” Arnaud said, from the far side of his horse, whose girth he’d been tightening. He spoke before the doctor could respond. “And that I’ll wager.”
“Oh, let it pass,” said Captain Maillart, a little irritably.
“But I am serious,” Arnaud said, coming around his horse’s head. “Throw up your hat.”
“My hat?” Captain Maillart said. “Throw up your own.”
“I will if you will fire at it,” Arnaud said. “I should be safe enough.” He grinned, and held up a gold piece between his thumb and forefinger. “This says our man of science will be the better marksman.”
Maillart reddened and dug into his pocket.
“Excellent,” said Arnaud. “I knew you for a sportsman. Bernard will hold the stakes.” He passed the coins to Grandmont, who rattled them in his loosely curled fingers, showing his brown snaggle teeth in a sort of smile. Two of the other militiamen came up to him to negotiate a side bet. Arnaud took off his hat and turned the brim through his thumb and forefinger.
“How, with a pistol?” the captain said irritably. “But it is absurd.”
“Mais bien s?r,” Arnaud said. “Hold your pistol down, just so. When I have thrown it, take your aim and shoot.” Arnaud stepped out of cover onto the trail, swinging his hat at knee level. Rain had begun lowering again, fine as mist, stippling the captain’s cheeks as he followed Arnaud into the open, holding his dragoon’s pistol barrel-down across his hip.
“Vous êtes prêtes?” Arnaud said.
The captain nodded. Arnaud flung his hat straight up above him and took a quick step back. The hat rotated smoothly, etched black against the dull overhanging mass of cloud. The captain tracked it, like a fowl, right hand braced over his left wrist. It did not fall so quickly as all that, and yet he knew that he would miss before he pulled the trigger.
Arnaud stepped briskly down the trail and retrieved the unharmed hat. “And now for the good doctor,” he said, returning.
Doctor Hébert stepped onto the trail, fidgeting with the flashpan of his pistol, his lips pursed. Sighing, the captain took off his cap and fingered the bill. He was facing the doctor, twenty paces up the slope of the trail, as if they were preparing for a duel.
“All right, Antoine?” the captain said.
The doctor stood with his pistol hanging down; the overlong sleeve of his dustcoat covered his fingers on the grip. He looked up anxiously.
“Oui, commences.”
The captain flung his cap aloft. It turned unevenly, because of the bill, with a sort of fluttering movement. But Maillart’s eye was on the doctor. He saw the other’s thickish wrist thrust out of the dustcoat sleeve, hand rock-steady on the pistol grip. The clouds parted overhead and a sudden flood of sunshine made the captain blink. He had just time to draw a breath while the powder burned in the flashpan, before the ball discharged. A gasp came from the men around him, then a shout of approbation. The captain’s hat dropped in a stunned curve through the mist-glittering sunshine and caught on a bush twenty-five yards down the gorge from the trail, above a twittering run-off stream.
The captain tapped his boot toe restively. “All this useless shooting may well attract the brigands.”
“Come, don’t be churlish,” Arnaud said, collecting his winnings from Grandmont. “It was a fair contest, was it not?”
“Of course,” the captain said. “Well shot.” He approached the doctor and shook his hand, squinting disbelievingly into his face as he tightened his grip. Then he stepped to the edge of the trail and stared glumly down to where his hat hung on the bush.
“I’ll get it for you,” the doctor said, embarrassed.
“No, no…” Maillart scrambled down.
The damp foliage wet him to the hip as he waded through it. The hat had been shot clean through, front to back. The char-rimmed hole at the front would just accommodate his forefinger; at the back, the felt had been blown out in a tripartite tear. The captain put his hat on and adjusted it. On the trail the other men were laughing at him, but in spite of this he grinned as he looked up. The doctor had not joined in the laughter, but stood recharging his pistol with an uncertain fastidiousness as if he’d seldom done that task before.
They mounted and rode on until dark and passed that night in an old provision ground a hundred yards above the trail. The planting was untended and had all been dug over by looters so they found no provender there excepting a half-rotted stalk of bananas sprung up from a runner shoot. They ate some dried meat they carried with them along with bananas roasted in their skins and afterward slept propped up on their saddles, always keeping two men on watch. In the morning they saddled their horses and went on.
The day was luminously clear, the sun bright and warm upon their backs once the mist had parted, so that they sweated in their rain gear. Ahead of them the involutions of the mountains, carpeted smoothly over with green jungle, went on and on like folds of a crumpled fabric. In the forenoon, as they passed in single file along an exposed and rocky outward bend of the trail, they came in view of an enormous throng of brigand blacks on the plain below—the rebels noticed them soon enough, and set up a great shout and stir, seeing their numbers were so few. A shiver ran over the doctor then, though the blacks were more than a mile distant down the mountain, and could not possibly overtake them on that difficult terrain.
In the afternoon they came upon flocks of birds and shot a great many and strung them up on their saddlebows. The fresh fowl assured them a warm welcome at the fort of the cordon de l’ouest which they attained before dark. That night they passed around the garrison’s fire, talking to the soldiers. The latest news from Ennery was that all continued peacefully there, though the news was not so recent. In the morning they rose and went on at first light.
In the midafternoon of that day Grandmont spotted carrion birds circling over a rocky defile of the mountains about a mile ahead. He pulled his horse abreast of the captain’s and requested a halt. Maillart resisted at first—vultures were no uncommon sight in these parts, these days—but something about Grandmont’s odd conviction finally swayed him.
They drew their horses up above the trail and took positions behind a ragged line of boulders overgrown with fern. There they waited, fifteen minutes, twenty. The captain’s watch ticked in his pocket. There was no talk, but the exchange of fretful glances. The doctor had laid his rifle across a stone, and crouched behind it, aiming at leaves on the trail. The blacks, being barefoot, made no sound when they came up, but seemed to have materialized from nothing beyond the forward bead of his gunsight. There were four of them, dressed in breechclouts or ragged field trousers and all with muskets of the same make. Their leader was a big Congo with broad flat nostrils, and pockmarks all over his face that the doctor thought must have come from a bout with la petite vérole. He stopped the others and sniffed slowly, a luxurious inhalation, turning his head in a slow contemplative curve, eyelids lowered so that only the whites showed. Feeling the force of his attention, the white men all held their breath.
Arnaud wanted to gun them down at once, but Grandmont and the captain held him back; it was well that they did so, because ten minutes after the advance scouts had passed along the trail, the main body came up. The leader, who was also marked with smallpox scars, rode horseback, and from his saddle horn hung by their hair a number of bloody desiccated severed human heads, flies buzzing eagerly around them. The doctor wondered how the horse could tolerate the stench of rot. The men who marched in a regular column behind their mounted chieftain all carried muskets and their bare chests were crossed with bandoliers; there looked to be more than a hundred of them.
It took them some little while to pass, and the white men waited a half hour more when they had gone, before they led their horses cautiously down to the trail. While they were waiting, the captain watched the doctor sighting down his rifle barrel and felt strangely reassured by his proximity. Within the hour they had come to the place where the vultures were turning but down the defile there was only the carcass of a long-horned cow who must have strayed there, already mostly devoured or decayed, the bones showing whitely through the rotten hide.
They passed. Next day they crossed a corner of the plain as speedily as they were able, disliking the exposure when their strength was so slight, and swiftly began ascending the pass that led to Ennery. Toward sundown of that day they came down out of the jungle through the terraces of coffee trees that were the outlying cultivation of Habitation Thibodet. They crossed the irrigation trenches and rode alongside the bristly green carrés of cane. As they filed through the quarters, the gérant Delsart came out the door of a cabin, buttoning up his pants. When he looked up and saw the doctor at the head of the troop he staggered back as though it were a ghost, just catching himself on the cabin’s wattled wall.
They rode down to the stables where the doctor dismounted and scared up a couple of grooms to see to their horses. It did seem after all that many of the Thibodet slaves had remained on the plantation. But the windows of the grand’case were shuttered and silent.
The doctor swung his saddlebags up over his shoulder and started toward the house. The porch bowed and groaned under his feet…long in need of a shoring up. He stepped into the dusky outer room, blinking. The musty interior space was all striped by bars of reddish sunset light admitted through the palmiste strips of the jalousies. The doctor blinked and turned about. A calico cat startled him by appearing out of the shadows to curve and purr against his shins. Atop a tall chest, a fancy clock ticked mutedly, the disk of its pendulum sweeping between four twisted brass columns that supported the works, like a canopy covering a cathedral altar.
Through the rear door there came a scurrying sound. The cat pulled away from the doctor’s boots and loped after it. The doctor proceeded in the same direction, his footfalls dampened by a runner of carpet. Thibodet’s house was scarcely a mansion but its appointments had a greater air of permanence than those of many Creole residences. Elise had brought some of the carpets and furniture out from France with her trousseau; the carpet which the doctor stalked along had once lined a hallway of their house in Lyons.
He stood within the door frame of the master’s chamber. The great carved bed where Thibodet had died was undisturbed, its rich coverings silted over with a skein of dust. Atop the near pillow a glossy black beetle as large as a teacup clicked and shifted its mandibles. The doctor leaned over and brushed it to the floor; it shifted itself under the bed, without haste.
He walked down the narrow passage and into the smaller room beyond the next partition. It was not so different from the room he’d slept in at Arnaud’s, or from a spare room at any other grand’case in the colony. As the single window was quite small and faced away from the sunset glow, it was rather dark inside. The bed was a low wooden frame strung with rope to support the mattress. The doctor dropped his saddlebags in a corner, divested himself of all but one of his pistols, and turned to hang his duster on the accustomed peg. Here he’d lain night after night, pondering the disappearance of his sister and listening to Thibodet’s delirious ravings as they floated over the top of the partition, wondering if he’d desire to cure this man of his disease, supposing it had lain in his power to do so.
He went back out onto the gallery where Maillart, Vaublanc, Arnaud and Grandmont had seated themselves in chairs. As the doctor approached them, Maillart looked up.
“No sign of your sister, then?” Maillart said.
Before the doctor could reply, Delsart came up hurriedly and swept off his hat to make a low bow. As he straightened, the doctor observed that his handsome, rather swarthy features were marred by several venereal sores.
“There will be eight to dine and pass the night,” the doctor said. “Have we hands enough to manage that?”
“Without a doubt,” Delsart said. “I shall give the orders now.” He struck out briskly for the outbuilding housing the kitchen, only staggering slightly from his visible drunkenness.
“If that’s your manager,” said Maillart, “I’d say you haven’t by any means returned too soon.”
THE MOON WAS FAT AND SLEEK THAT NIGHT, only one day short of the full. It rose early, large and yellow, and whitened and shrank as it climbed the sky. During the moonrise the white men dined inside the house, drank a decent amount of brandy, and went early to bed, as all were fatigued from their days of hard riding.
Propped up on his low bed with his back against the wall, Doctor Hébert flipped through a botanical book he had left in this house at his last departure, but his attention failed him. Damp had worked its way into the paper and a gray-green mold was forming a filigree over the print. The doctor could not force his mind beyond this pattern.
The doctor let the book fall shut, and closed his eyes, but his mind was still too active for repose. After a little time, he got up and carried the candle into the master’s room. A maid had come to clean at his instruction; the floor was swept and the bed freshly changed. The doctor pulled open the big mahogany wardrobe and fanned his hands across Elise’s dresses which hung there. Many of them were expensive, but they had not been aired for a long time and the damp had somewhat damaged them; a few were stained with mildew. Some he recognized from France, but most were new. Unlike Elise to abandon it all here. The wardrobe door drifted from his hand; he clicked it shut.
In the main room, some brandy still remained in the bottle. Delsart had run very heavily into Thibodet’s stock, but the supply had been large to begin with, so there was still a reasonable amount in store. The doctor took the bottle by the neck, then changed his mind. The moon shone so brightly at the windows that the light of his candle was inconsequential. He snuffed it out and went onto the gallery.
The chairs stood empty along the board floor. It was quite pleasantly cool, and there were no mosquitoes just at the moment. Under the brilliant moonlight, the doctor walked down through the quarters and beyond. The wind drifted caressingly through the cane, the long leaves whispering together. This rustle receded as he began to climb the terraces of coffee trees. The stiffness of the ride was loosening from him, and he felt cheerful and alert.
Where the coffee trees ended and the jungle climbed uninterrupted over the mountain, he stopped also. Habitation Thibodet was spread before him like a pale shawl in the moonlight, which silvered the irrigation ditches that marked out the carrés of green cane. No human light shone from any building, but in the quarters a woman’s low voice rose to sing a mournful tune in some African tongue. The doctor wondered passingly if it was an infant she was soothing, or if she sang to please herself, for her own comfort. At his back the jungle insects had composed a wall of sound. If he had chosen, the doctor thought, he might have gone farther into that warm wet darkness, with small fear. So much at his ease he was, he had not even troubled to bring along a pistol—though it was strange, for this wild place had seemed pregnant with menace when he’d first come here months before, and certainly it was no safer now.