Chapter Thirty-Three
EAST OF THE TOWN OF SAN RAPHAEL were the traces of a large encampment recently departed: tent-peg holes, ajoupas abandoned, the grasses beaten down and the earth churned by horses’ hooves and the feet of many men. Tocquet rode through, his head inclined, eyes bent hawklike on the ground, reading sign. Maillart and Vaublanc followed him in single file, the two blacks, Gros-jean and Bazau, bringing up their rear. The captain aimed his own glance wherever Tocquet seemed to look. Here and there was the impression of a booted foot but it seemed that most of the legible tracks had been left by barefoot men.
“De la merde, encore,” Tocquet clicked his tongue. “I believe we have missed him.”
“Where have they gone?” said Vaublanc.
“I suppose they must be invading you,” Tocquet said, without looking back at his interlocutor. “Invading us rather…would it be?” He chuckled, perhaps—a growling sound low in his throat. “We shall see who is left in the town, if anyone. Ouais, on verra, on verra…”
The principal street of San Raphael looked no great matter. It was unpaved, so that the hoofbeats of their horses were still muted as they rode. A flock of speckled hens scattered in advance of them, cackling, and a little black boy dressed in only a shirt ran into a doorway and turned to peer back out. They halted before one of the more considerable dwellings, built in the Spanish fashion around a central court. Tocquet dismounted and knocked on the door. When some minutes had passed without response, he took a pistol from his belt and hammered much more loudly with the butt of it.
Presently, a young man in the uniform of a Spanish lieutenant opened the door; he raised his eyebrows superciliously but said no word. Tocquet winked at him.
“Is the general here?”
The lieutenant remained mute.
“Yes, he will receive us,” Tocquet said decisively.
He put some pressure on the door, and the lieutenant gave way and let it swing completely open. Tocquet entered, the two French officers following. As the white men walked into the house, Bazau and Gros-jean led the horses around the outer corner of the building. Maillart blinked his way through the dim, stale-smelling interior. They emerged into the center court, which was unevenly paved with flagstones. In one corner a huge iron kettle rested crookedly on the dead embers of an extinguished fire. Some few straight chairs were grouped around the wicker table where they all took seats.
“He will be with you shortly,” the lieutenant said, and went back into the house.
Captain Maillart slumped in his chair. He was stiff and sore from their hard and rapid ride from Dajabón, and would best have liked to recline, to sleep. Neither of his companions spoke. Maillart rolled his head back on the top rail of the chair and looked dreamily up at the fat cottony clouds suspended in the blue well of the sky. Beyond the house wall, a hummingbird shot up vertically from the bowl-shaped orange blooms of a tree.
A woman’s voice roused him, and he pulled himself erect. She was a white woman, but oddly dressed in a short jacket and a man’s white shirt. Also her thick straight hair was cut very short, just below the lobes of her small ears. Maillart thought that Tocquet had not embraced her; he only dallied his fingertips on the edge of her small hand.
“Je vous présente Madame Tocquet.”
Cutting off his yawn, Captain Maillart jumped to his feet and bowed; Vaublanc was a little in advance of him with this courtesy. The woman nodded, smiling. Her chin was a little weak, but it was an agreeable smile, and her large brown eyes looked merry.
“Please sit down,” she said. “You must be weary…”
Maillart resumed his seat. The woman took a step back from the table, hands on her hips, and as she moved her black skirt separated and he saw that it was not a skirt at all, but rather a pair of loose-cut trousers that stopped just short of her ankles.
Madame Tocquet had caught him staring at the division of her legs. She smiled more brightly still. “My husband has lately presented me with a mule,” she announced. She spun around, presenting herself to Tocquet; her trouser legs flowed together and joined again as one. “Will this win your approval as a riding habit?”
“Yes, I believe so.” Tocquet grinned, half concealing his mouth behind one hand as he turned to the French officers. “One cannot ride sidesaddle, where we are going.”
Vaublanc started. “You cannot mean to take your wife into those mountains.”
“Oh yes,” the woman said. “I am going to Ennery.”
Tocquet nodded. “She has an inheritance to claim.”
She faced them, still smiling confidently, while the captain stared and reappraised her. It was the same, the eyes, the lips, the ears quite small but curiously shaped like cup handles. Even the weak chin, which the doctor’s short beard sought to conceal, was much the same. Of course he had seen her in Lyons a time or two but that was long ago when she was a child.
“But you must be Elise Thibodet,” the captain blurted. “I mean to say, Elise Hébert.”
“Elise Tocquet—as I now find myself.” She glanced at the man. “It’s as he told you.” Now she seemed more careful to choose her words. “We were married after the death of my first husband.”
“Pardonnez-moi,” the captain said. “I am the friend of your brother Antoine—I have been in your house in Lyons, even. I think you would not remember. But your brother will be overjoyed to recover you—he is at Ennery now, if you are going there, I left him at Habitation Thibodet.”
“I did not know he was in the colony.” Elise had colored, placing her fingers to her throat.
“Why, he has been here for several months, and searching for you everywhere.”
A door hinge whined and boots came clattering over the irregular paving stones: General Cabrera was approaching, flanked by the lieutenant and another orderly. Elise dropped them a curtsy, fanning the loose cloth of her trousers as though it were a skirt after all, and went hurriedly toward a door at the opposite side of the court.
“You are behind the time,” the general said to Tocquet, and looked askance at the two officers in their French uniforms.
“These gentlemen are seeking to enter the Spanish service,” Tocquet said. “Out of loyalty to their murdered king—and the other usual motives.”
“Interesting.” Cabrera continued to eye them coldly. Maillart felt the stiffening of the muscle along his spine.
“Perhaps you will find them suitable uniforms, at least,” Tocquet said. “I will bring them to Toussaint myself—if you have cargo for me.”
“Yes, I think so.” The general turned and directed one of the orderlies to go in quest of uniforms, then looked again at Tocquet. “Certainly they will have need of powder and more lead. We may also find some victuals for you to carry…Though Biassou may be in greater need—his is the larger force.”
“Toussaint is the wiser quartermaster,” Tocquet said. “When one furnishes him powder, one may at least believe it will not be set afire to please the vod?n.”
“You overestimate the man,” Cabrera said. “He is too old, he was too long a slave. He has the slave’s servility, which has shaped his mind.”
“Do you think so?” Tocquet said.
The general sniffed. “Reading Epictetus—what sort of military man would be guided by the philosophizing of a slave?”
Tocquet laughed aloud and slapped the palm of his hand upon his thigh. “Meanwhile I doubt that Biassou can read as much as his own name.”
“Well, we do not employ these fellows for their scholarship,” the general said, glaring at the Frenchmen. “If your companions have determined to join Toussaint, I shall not quarrel with them—let him make of them what he can.”
“Well enough,” Tocquet said.
Captain Maillart felt a discomfiting desire to wriggle, though he held himself perfectly still. He’d been brought closer than he’d ever thought to be to the sentiments of a slave displayed on the market block.
“What news have you,” Tocquet asked.
“What is there?” The general seemed to muse. “Oh yes, it appears that Galbaud has managed to pass the English blockade and is safely arrived at Le Cap.”
Tocquet snorted. “Exchanging the devil for the witch.”
“Galbaud?” Vaublanc inquired.
“Sent out from France as the new governor-general,” Cabrera said.
“A curious choice,” said Tocquet. “I think there will be trouble there. Galbaud is married to a Creole lady and I have heard he has considerable property here.”
“I have heard the same,” said the general. “It has long been the French policy to set the governor-general at odds with the intendant.”
“But there is no longer any intendant to reckon with,” Vaublanc said.
“There’s Sonthonax,” Maillart said.
“My thought precisely,” Tocquet said. “It’s much the same thing.”
“If the military and civil authorities owe fealty to different factions,” Cabrera said, “they are less likely to conspire together.”
“Small chance of conspiration, these days,” Tocquet said, stroking the stubble along his jaws. “Paris is far distant for the management of marionette strings as long as that. I wonder if this policy has perhaps outlived its usefulness.”
“I suppose,” said Maillart said, with more bitterness than he’d thought, “that if Galbaud ventures to dispute the Jacobinism of Sonthonax, he will only go the way of Desparbés.”
“I take your point,” Tocquet said, “but Galbaud is not so elderly a man as Desparbés, nor yet so frail. Attendez, on verra…”
As he spoke, the orderly came back into the court, carrying two uniform coats across his arm; he had brought no trousers at all. Expressionless, he displayed the goods. Both were faded and riddled with moth holes; one was missing all but one button and the other had most of the frogging ripped away. Captain Maillart felt the blood draining from his head, though he couldn’t know for certain that the insult was deliberate.
“Control yourself.” Tocquet watched him intently; his voice was sharp. “I tell you, Toussaint is the better quartermaster. Leave it to him to fit you out. Till then, I’ll find you clothes of my own to wear.”
NEXT MORNING THEY RODE OUT AT THE HEAD of an eight-mule train and by midday were well into the mountains, despite delays caused by the uneasiness of Vaublanc’s and Maillart’s horses on the abrupt and tangled slopes. Tocquet’s horse, meanwhile, seemed preternaturally adapted to the difficult ascent, quite as nimble as a mule. And for the first hours of the journey he carried the little girl before him in his saddle, while Elise bestrode her white mule all alone, and ably as any old campaigner.
The child, whom they called Sophie, was Elise’s, and it appeared that Tocquet claimed paternity; the girl let herself go to him with a familiar ease. Vaublanc had been shocked all over again by her appearance among their party, for the little girl looked altogether too delicate for such a trek, with her pale stick-thin limbs, her large dark eyes, and general air of frailty. She could have been no more than two. Captain Maillart, however, had grown numb to new astonishments. At first the little girl was sufficiently cheerful in her place, prattling and pointing and staring round-eyed at everything they passed. Tocquet kept one arm close around her waist, managing the reins with his other hand, and she seemed secure and comfortable. But later on Sophie grew restive and began to cry.
“This won’t do,” Tocquet said, after trying a few minutes to calm her, without success. “They can hear her howling for twenty miles at least.” There was no asperity in his tone; he was simply stating the neutral fact. He dismounted, then lifted the child down and carried her to Elise, who took her up into the mule saddle. But Sophie was not reassured; she cried even louder.
“I don’t want to ride anymore,” she said. “I want Anna, where is Anna?”
“Anna could not come with us,” Elise said softly.
“Why couldn’t she?”
“Because she cannot ride a mule.”
“Mais pourquoi pas!?”
There was a thunderhead on the mountain; in its shadow, Elise’s face looked worn and fatigued. She caressed the little girl’s shoulders, gathering the loose folds of her brown-figured calico dress. When this failed to soothe her, Elise opened her shirt and gave suck to the child, who instantly closed her eyes and quieted. To manage this, the woman dropped her reins on the mule’s neck, and the mule found its own way forward without guidance, following Tocquet, who had not once looked back. Captain Maillart would have liked to render her some assistance, but he was in difficulties of his own; he must needs get down and lead his reluctant horse across an especially problematic passage of their climb.
He could tell from the other man’s sharp inhalations that Vaublanc had been dismayed once more at these fresh improprieties, but Captain Maillart, for his own part, was simply interested. The only thing he dreaded was the rain, but it did not begin; instead the cloud dragged its cold tendrils over them and shifted to a farther slope. In the fresh sunny radiance, Maillart regarded Elise and the nursing child as frankly as he might have gazed upon a painting, and indeed, she seemed as tranquil as any madonna, all unaware of her surroundings. Sophie was sleeping now, black lashes long upon her cheek, her face tucked against a milk-wet spot on her mother’s thin chemise. Both seemed entranced, and Maillart also moved as in a dream, thinking of Isabelle Cigny again but without even wistfulness, only curiosity. It would have seemed impossible to imagine her in such a situation, but now he was not, after all, so sure…
So they went on, the two French officers afoot more often than not, leading their eye-rolling, head-tossing horses unwillingly along behind. It grew chill as they climbed higher, but still Maillart sweat-soaked the clothes Tocquet had lent him. The trousers were enough too long that their cuffs kept slipping under his bootheels; slickered with mud, they sometimes made him fall. Both he and Vaublanc were tired and irritable, but in the presence of the woman and the child they did their best to refrain from cursing. Presently Sophie awakened, but now she made no complaint; she contented herself in her mother’s lap and looked around her owlishly.
By late afternoon they had completed numerous ascents and descents of the crags and sharp defiles of the mountains, and had come to the height of another peak whence they could see the sun streaking the western hills with an orange light. Tocquet had brought them faultlessly to a strange unlikely pathway made of rocks wedged in the mud; it ran ribbonlike down the mountain’s spine, not quite wide enough for two men to walk abreast on it. Tocquet got down from his horse and walked a little way ahead with his eyes lowered, examining the surface of this trail.
“Incroyable,” said Maillart. “How did this come here?” Vaublanc had come up breathlessly beside him.
“An Indian road,” Tocquet said. “From the time of the caciques.” He stooped and shuffled through leaves at the trail’s edge, then raised a horseshoe in his muddy hand; the iron was bright along a cut where a sharp stone must have gashed it.
“He’ll make someone answer for the loss of this.” Tocquet laughed shortly as he brandished the shoe. “If I know him.”
“Who?” Vaublanc said.
“Toussaint.” Tocquet hung his hat on a pack saddle and lifted the sweaty mass of hair from the nape of his neck. Following his eye, the captain saw that indeed there were prints of hooves and human feet to either side of the rocky road, which was so firmly laid that there was no mark directly on its surface.
“He will be going to Dondon, I think,” Tocquet said. “That will be convenient for us.”
He called out crisply to the two blacks. Bazau began loosening the girths of the pack saddles, while Gros-jean took a coutelas and began chopping undergrowth above the trail to clear a space where they might camp. Tocquet held up his hands to Elise and took the child onto his hip, then helped the woman down from the mule. They were still hand-in-hand as they left the trail and walked toward the sound of rushing water. Tocquet looked back and beckoned to the Frenchmen.
“Come.”
So they followed him across the slope, among flat glossy elephant ears that grew against the larger trees, across a carpet of strange ferns. The rush of water became almost a roar. It was dim in the shade where they were going, but of a sudden they came into an open space where evening sunlight poured into a pool carved out of rock. A waterfall dropped sparkling from a stone lip fifteen feet above the pool, and Maillard wondered at how it steamed when the column met the smoother liquid surface.
“Hot springs,” Tocquet said, as if he’d asked the question. He kissed Elise’s cheek, then handed her down toward the water. “Just as I promised you.”
The woman smiled at him and took the child from his hip, then made her way surefooted down to the gravel shoal beside the pool. Tocquet crooked his finger at the other men and they began climbing around to the lip of the falls, clinging to saplings to make their way. The captain staggered and panted out a laugh; Tocquet looked back at him curiously.
“You know, the Normans claimed that a horse must go anywhere a man can go without using his hands,” the captain said. “I believe you have even exceeded that standard…”
Tocquet stepped out onto the rim above the falls, the two others in his train. From below came the delighted giggle of the child, Elise’s musical laughter chiming in. Sophie was naked, waist-deep in the steaming pool, and Elise had rolled up her trouser legs to wade after her. She looked up at the men and waved; Tocquet smiled back.
“Come, let us give them privacy,” he said. “I promised her this, at the day’s end.”
They went upstream, some hundred yards, clambering over boulders, then Maillart threw back his head and gasped. Above was a much higher fall; a sheer drop of sixty feet or more. Tocquet was already climbing toward it. The way grew steeper, vertical in spots, and the captain found himself climbing by notches in an ancient log. This rather unnerved him; he paused and called ahead.
“Will they be safe? Down there alone?”
“They’re not alone.” Tocquet was just reaching the foot of the larger fall. “Bazau and Gros-jean will look out for them. Besides, there’s no one here. Those steps were cut a hundred years ago.”
Maillart scrambled up beside Tocquet. The fall drove into a wider, shallower stone basin than the one below, and here too it was steaming. Tocquet shucked off his boots and stripped himself and stood directly beneath the tumbling stream with his legs set wide, gasping, his neck arched back so that the water blasted on his face and throat. In a moment he had moved away and was floating idly in the shallow water of the basin.
In his turn, Maillart undressed, then walked over, carefully on the slick underwater stone, and stood breathless under the weight of the warm falls. He dropped his head like a weary ox and let the stream pound the soreness out of his shoulders. Vaublanc joined him, laughing crazily. Water sluiced through the captain’s ears. He withdrew from the waterfall and lowered himself gingerly onto his back so he was floating on his elbows not far from Tocquet.
“It’s wonderful here,” the captain said. “Nature…never have I seen nature so powerful.”
“I agree with you.” Tocquet lay back with his eyes half-lidded, black hair snaking around his head in the water. “Nature is very strong here indeed. A man could come up with nothing but a coutelas and a fire-drill and live out the rest of his natural life in happiness.”
The captain stretched his toe in the warm water, thinking that Tocquet might already have put this notion to the test.
“The caciques might have held out forever here,” Tocquet said. “The Spanish would not have reached them with an army, in these mountains.”
“Why didn’t they?” Maillart said.
Tocquet sat up and tossed his hair back over his head. He propped his back against a boulder. “I think they died of grief,” he said. “Some say they were a gentle people. I believe it. Anyway, they would not be slaves. They threw themselves from the cliffs in droves—five hundred thousand of them.” He scratched his stomach idly and let his fingers trail off in the water. “You see, it’s not the first time this island has been washed in blood.”
The captain drifted, the warmth of the water rather stupefying him. Vaublanc was floating alongside them. “How did you ever find this place?” he said.
Tocquet twirled a finger in the air. “I belong here,” he said. “It may be that I have a touch of the brush, you know. Carib blood, not black.”
“Blood will out?” the captain said.
Tocquet stirred his legs in the water. “Then there were no other women here, but Indians,” he said. “My great-grandfather was a pirate. One of the faction that won Saint Domingue for France. But neither France nor Spain can hold it. It is mine and it is no one’s. Or yours too, as you find it.” Tocquet raised his dripping hand and spread it on a stone. Near his fingers, a small striped frog sat unalarmed, eyes protuberant and its loose gullet pulsing.
“I don’t follow,” Maillart said.
Tocquet gave his caiman smile. “I will tell you my great secret, then. I am the only one to know it. No man can own land or people, though a man may have their use. Those two down there, Gros-jean and Bazau—I paid a sum of money for them, but all three of us know that each belongs to himself alone. Do you understand me?”
“No,” the captain said, feeling himself strangely incapable of lying.
“My friend, you had better think a little harder,” Tocquet said. “Consider, who owns you? A week ago you were a Frenchman. What are you today?”
AT FIRST THEY FOUND THE GOING MUCH EASIER when they set out on the following day. But the Carib road did not run uninterrupted all the way to Dondon. It petered out, or was washed out altogether, and again they found themselves struggling through the untracked jungle, a day, a night, another day, and so until at last they struck the road again, near Ennery. They followed the road for four miles more and camped above it as they had done on other nights. On the afternoon of the next day they left the road again according to Tocquet’s estimation of their position and soon broke out of the jungle into the coffee plantings above Habitation Thibodet.
From the hilltop they could see at once that the crops were well tended and they could see the slaves at work in the cane, a white man in a tattered straw hat directing them. As yet the new arrivals had not been observed and the work went forward with no interruption. The slaves were singing as they swung their hoes and the sound came thin but clearly to Tocquet’s party on the crest of the hill.
“Look there,” Tocquet said, drawing his horse up beside Elise’s mule. “All in good order, just as I told you…” He reached across to ruffle Sophie’s hair. “What are you thinking, little one?”
The child rocked between her mother’s knees as the mule’s feet shifted. She looked down dazedly over the plantation.
“Of course she doesn’t remember,” Elise said. “When we left here she was a babe in arms.”
A shout went up from the atelier. They had been seen. There was a stir among the workers, but their foreman soon reorganized them—all save one, who was dispatched to run quickly back across the main compound and over to the provision grounds south of the grand’case. Another slave came out of the cane mill, paused to stare up the hill, and went for the grand’case at a trot.
Now the single runner had reached the new-cleared area above the provision grounds, which had been pitched with military tents. Some hundreds of black soldiers were there involved in a parade-ground exercise.
“So,” Tocquet said. “It isn’t Dondon.” He reached into his saddlebag and raised a small brass spyglass to his eye. In response to whatever message the runner had brought, a detachment of twenty men fell out and began marching back down toward the grand’case, guided by one officer.
Tocquet sniffed. “Well, we are to be received with military honors.”
“If we are not to be repulsed,” said Captain Maillart.
“No, it’s all right.” Tocquet passed the glass to the captain. In its ground glass circlet, Maillart saw that the officer commanding the twenty, a coal-black man with heavy, shelving brows and lips, wore the insignia of a Spanish major.
“Moise,” Tocquet said. “He’s Toussaint’s nephew—so they say. A capable fellow, I think you’ll find.”
He squeezed his horse with his heels and moved to the head of their small column. In a few minutes they were on the flat and leading the mules through the cane. As they came abreast of Delsart he recognized Elise, tore off his hat and burst out laughing in amazement. Elise gave him a weary smile; Tocquet saluted him half-mockingly as he turned toward her from the saddle.
“That scoundrel looks in better health than when I last laid eyes on him…”
Elise’s eyes, ringed by fatigue as if with kohl, were riveted on the house; she did not answer. The twenty black soldiers were drawn up in a double row at the yard’s edge. Tocquet greeted Moise with a sharp upward jerk of his fist, then turned to point at the pack train.
“Munitions for your general, major,” Tocquet said. “With your permission, we’ll go straight along. Only, I think we’ll leave the mistress to settle herself here.”
Maillart looked over the black soldiers, barefoot men. Irregularly dressed, they still stood stiffly to attention, each with a musket held at the present-arms position. He searched their inexpressive faces; their eyes stared through and through him blindly as the eyes of statues. Tocquet, meanwhile, dismounted and lifted the girl down from the mule saddle. Sophie kicked up her leg and ran in a merry half-circle, holding her skirt out in both hands and flouncing it about. Elise took both of Tocquet’s hands and swung lightly down to stand beside him.
“Come, Sophie.” She caught the little girl by the hand and led her toward the steps of the grand’case gallery. Tocquet touched her on the shoulder as she passed, then swung back up into his saddle. The pack train moved along; Moise’s soldiers faced left at his command and marched alongside of the mules. As they went by, Bazau reached out and caught the dangling reins of Elise’s white mule and led it on behind the others.
At the top of the gallery steps, Elise hesitated, looking toward the darkness of the door, and then went on.
Formerly, in those last months, she had endured a lowering of her spirits whenever she passed this doorsill. Now she felt nothing of the kind. The main room was much as she remembered it, warm and humid, dominated by the ticking of the clock. At once, Sophie let go her hand and went to stand below the chest where the clock was placed, rapt in the swinging movement of the pendulum.
“Yes, you may touch it,” Elise said, thinking how much Thibodet would have disliked her to do it. Tentatively, the child reached up her hand and arrested the swinging disk. The clock stopped. Elise began to laugh as Sophie turned to her, moonfaced with surprise. In the silence left where the tick had been, an insect whirred and thrummed behind a jalousie. Apart from that the house felt empty; there was no sign of Antoine.
“Come.” Elise led the girl into the bedroom of her husband.
It was brighter here, for the blind was rolled up, and the room’s window faced the sun. Thibodet’s effects had been removed, but otherwise all was much as it had been before. The sight of her marriage bed did not particularly affect her, except that she was glad to see that it looked freshly made. She pulled open the door of her wardrobe and saw that her dresses seemed mostly intact. Impulsively she gathered clusters of the fabrics to her cheek and closed her eyes. The odor of the cloth was only slightly musty. She had been able to take scarcely anything with her when she made off with Tocquet, and she detested what fashions were available in Spanish San Domingo. She sat on the bed and spread a striped silk skirt across her knees. The calico cat came into the room and jumped into her lap. Smiling, Elise lifted it from the silk and sniffed its fur.
Sophie had picked up a tiny porcelain vase and was closely examining the enameled pattern of flowers and vines. Just then Zabeth came into the room.
“Ma?tresse? Oh!” She sank to the floor and gazed at Sophie. “Look at the child.” Zabeth winked, then wrinkled her nose like a rabbit, while Sophie put her finger in her mouth and smiled around it.
Elise sat down on the edge of the bed and began dragging at the heels of her riding boots. Immmediately Zabeth moved to help her. As the the second boot sucked off, Elise gasped with the pleasure of relief. “Oh, Zabeth,” she said. “I’m glad to see you.”
Zabeth smiled up at her with real good cheer, her fine teeth bright in her full, pleasant face. Elise saw that her own feeling was genuinely reciprocated.
“And my brother?” Elise said. “I had heard that he was here…”
“Ma?tresse, he would be desolated to have missed you—he has gone on an errand of business to Le Cap.”
“And will return?” Elise drew her legs up onto the bed, too weary to attend to Zabeth’s answer.
“Yes, of course, he will return, within the fortnight,” Zabeth said. “A bath, ma?tresse?”
“Oh yes, a bath.” Elise stretched her back against the coverlet, half closing her eyes as she flexed her cramped toes. “A bath, with plenty of hot water.”
ABOVE THE PROVISION GROUND, Toussaint’s camp was flawlessly neat, free of debris, the ground hard-packed by movements of the men and horses. Tocquet and the two French officers dismounted outside the general’s tent. As they did so, a hand pulled back the tent flap, and Toussaint stepped out and straightened in their presence. Maillart was somewhat surprised to recognize the man—he remembered seeing him, inconspicuous among the other blacks who’d delivered Doctor Hébert and the other prisoners to Habitation Saint Michel—but he looked different now. In the uniform of a maréchal de camp he seemed much more imposing, though the cavalry sword suspended from his sash looked almost absurd against his short jockey’s legs. His posture was very straight, and he looked at Maillart and Vaublanc unblinkingly for a long time while Tocquet explained to him their reason for being there. The whites of his eyes were in fact somewhat yellow, with an amber, tobacco tint, like the eyes of many aging Negroes. Still, something in his look seemed to hold the captain in thrall, so that when Toussaint spoke he saw his lips move but did not hear a word of what he said.
Another black, in a captain’s uniform, held up the tent flap, and Toussaint and Tocquet went in. Automatically, Maillart made to follow, but the black captain barred his way.
Tocquet looked back from the gloom of the tent’s interior. “No, no, he’ll see you later,” he said. “After he’s done with me.”
Vaublanc smirked, then turned three-quarters away from Maillart and stared at the ground. Across the beaten earth from them, a mule hitched to a gun caisson lifted its tail and defecated. Immediately a man ran out from behind the general’s tent and spaded up the steaming dung and carried it down to scatter on the potato vines in the provision ground.
There was a drumbeat, not the drums of vod?n, but a regular French military snare. A division of men was drilling to the beat, the officer called Moise commanding them. Some few of these black infantrymen wore complete Spanish outfits, while most were as irregularly garbed as militia. An effort had been made to give them a more uniform appearance with a standard issue of belts, slings and cartridge boxes. Certainly their weapons, short smooth-bore muskets each fixed with a bayonet, were standard, and most of them seemed quite familiar with their handling. Maillart saw that the commanding officer had dispersed the green recruits in among the veterans, so that the inexperienced men could be supported, wherever they looked, by someone else who knew the drill. As it looked, there were many more green men than seasoned, but all in all there was much better order and discipline among them than Maillart could conceivably have anticipated.
The familiarity of the drumbeat lulled him into a sort of daze. He was much wearier from their traveling than he’d known, he was swaying, whirling on his rubber legs…When Tocquet tapped him on the shoulder, he started fully awake.
“He’s ready for you now.” All traces of the intimacy that had grown among them in the mountains was now gone from Tocquet’s smooth and neutral tone.
Maillart lowered his head to pass under the tent flap. Within, no lamp was lit, only daylight straining through the canvas, so that Maillart, as he took the place indicated for him on a camp stool, thought that he could be seen much more clearly than he could see. Toussaint sat on a similar camp stool, a wooden lap desk balanced on his knees. The black man in the captain’s uniform stood behind his chair.
“Your name, sir? Your rank in the French army? Which is your regiment?”
Maillart related these statistics. He had expected Toussaint’s searching look so he was surprised that it was withheld. Toussaint had turned his face sideways, seemed not to look at Maillart at all, seemed only to be listening. Above his seat, the face of the black captain was hawk-like, cruel; there was anger there but Maillart could not know if he was the object of it.
“Tell me, sir, why you are out of uniform.”
Maillart told of their circumstances. He had launched an account of their discomfiting meeting with General Cabrera before it occurred to him that it was not strictly necessary for him to do so. What was there in the black general’s disposition that invited such extraneous confidences? Toussaint had taken off his hat, but his whole head was bound up in a madras cloth, triple knotted at the base of his skull, after the fashion affected by many slaves and by some wealthy planters. Against his crisp field uniform it made a strange impression. Toussaint asked him another question; Maillart replied. Each time, he told more than he must, and found himself, surprisingly, giving a full account of his relations with Laveaux, the expulsion of Desparbés, and the battle that had erupted between the mulattoes of the Sixth and the Regiment Le Cap.
The black captain had taken the desk from his general’s legs and begun making notes. Maillart kept talking, adding details—a strange fit of glossolalia. Toussaint gave no sign whether he had any prior knowledge of the events of which Maillart was informing him. When he did turn his full gaze on the captain, Maillart was startled by the full force of it. Emerging from the shadows of the tent, Toussaint’s eyes were more penetrating. They probed his face through to the bone, searching his features inch by inch, as if the black general thought to sculpt his portrait.
“Well, I am satisfied with you, captain,” Toussaint said at length. He stood up, and Maillart followed suit, clicking his heels.
“You will retain your former rank,” said Toussaint. “You will report directly to Major Moise.” He made a quarter-turn toward the black captain at his left. “Captain Riau will find you the suitable uniform—without mothholes, but with buttons.”
Maillart saluted. “Thank you, sir,” he said. He thought of permitting himself a smile, but Toussaint had remained wonderfully inexpressive.
“Since the troubles began,” said Toussaint, “We have learned much of European warfare.”
“I can well see that,” Maillart replied, somewhat impulsively.
“We have still much to learn.” Toussaint remained correct, unbending. “You will remain with Captain Riau. Captain Riau will make you familiar with your men. You will instruct Captain Riau in the arts of European war. Each of you will be a guide and teacher of the other. Do you understand?”
“Oui, mon général.”
This time, Toussaint returned Maillart’s salute. The captain was warm with a blush as he stepped out of the tent into the full day-light, so that Vaublanc looked at him oddly when they passed. Maillart had resolved, days before their arrival here, to treat Toussaint with complete military courtesies, but what confused him was that he had done so without thinking.
Twenty minutes later Captain Maillart, now arrayed in a good, newish uniform from Toussaint’s supply store, stood to stiff attention on the impromptu parade ground while Captain Riau, in a loud harsh voice, announced him to the troops. Now he could see them clearly, much more clearly. Perhaps three-quarters of them must have come straight out of Africa: Congos, Mandingues, Ibos and Senegalese…a year or five years since they would all have been fighting each other with bows and lances and clubs. Now, but for the masks of tribal scarification, the filed teeth, dyed locks and feathers braided in the hair, there was not so much in their bearing to distinguish them from the Creole blacks and the scattering of colored men.
He began to command them. They obeyed him readily, smartly enough, marching, wheeling, forming into squares, then columns—though it occurred to him that many probably could not comprehend his French. When they reversed direction from him, at his order, he saw on the backs of many the cicatrix lacings of ancient whippings. For all of that, their spines were stiff enough.
Beside him, Captain Riau stood in a posture of attention that somehow, weirdly, also seemed relaxed. Captain Maillart found him most inscrutable, though he also felt certain that his own least gestures were being very minutely observed. Maillart stared into the faces of the men arranged before him in a single line, their arms at rest. He seemed again to feel the doctor’s lips at his ear: If a white man and a black man come together, what will you call their offspring? The captain looked into the black and yellow faces with a curiosity he’d never felt before. Is it something else or is it human? Maillart was very weary; for a moment, the faces before him blurred and swam together. One face, one fa?ade—this fa?ade was Toussaint’s. His vision cleared. The face of this seedling army was Toussaint’s face, the one he chose to show—impossible that it could be so simply what it seemed.