Chapter Thirty-Five
“YOU ARE FORTUNATE,” Monsieur Bourgois informed the doctor, “or they are fortunate on whose behalf you manage these affairs…That Thibodet brown sugar was certainly one of the last cargoes to be safely embarked; were you to arrive with it today, we scarce could contrive a secure passage. But as it is…”
Monsieur Bourgois reversed the ledger on his desk, so that the doctor might examine it. His face was even ruddier than Doctor Hébert remembered it, the cobweb of burst capillaries spreading farther from his nostrils across his cheeks. The négociant gave his amiable smile and stood up as the doctor leaned forward to peruse the latest figures. A tidy balance in the favor of Habitation Thibodet was there recorded. At his usual somnolent, drifting pace, Monsieur Bourgois had reached his drinking cabinet.
“…let us toast your most excellent profit.” The négociant stepped from the cabinet, holding a brandy bottle in his right hand, two tumblers pinched together in his left.
“Vous êtes gentil,” said the doctor, as Bourgois poured the first measure. “I think I must accept.”
“Santé,” said Monsieur Bourgois. They clicked their glasses.
The doctor sipped and lowered his glass to rest beside the open ledger. Noticing the heavy book, Monsieur Bourgois folded it shut and slipped it into a desk drawer. Hitching halfway around in his chair, he turned his hazy regard to the window. The doctor followed the direction of his glance, enjoying the threads of alcoholic warmth that spread through his belly from the drink. The middle of the afternoon was just passing, with some slight abatement of the heat. Beyond the casements, the air was brilliant, clear, and still.
“No word of Madame Thibodet?” said Monsieur Bourgois.
“I have had none whatever,” the doctor said. “I suppose I need not ask if there has been any result to your inquiries.”
“Not the slightest.” Monsieur Bourgois tilted the bottleneck to pour them each another glass. “I’m told that you have been most assiduous in your searching.”
“One may say that I have fairly quartered the country.” The doctor delivered himself of a wintry smile. “Whether by accident or design.”
“I fear for her, and the child most of all.” Monsieur Bourgois’s eyes were welling, the doctor was surprised to see. Perhaps only from the sudden vigor with which he took his brandy. “There have been so many atrocities since the time they chose to vanish…”
“Oh, I have hope still she may have escaped all that,” said the doctor. “It may be they were out of the country before the troubles came.”
“But it’s I who ought to be reassuring you,” said Monsieur Bourgois. “I ask your pardon.”
“Well, never mind it,” the doctor began. But just then came the sound of heavy feet upon the stairs, and an urgent rapping on the office door. Monsieur Bourgois called to the knocker that the door was open. His black beard bristling, Monsieur Cigny strode into the room.
“You’re in a state,” said Monsieur Bourgois. “What is it, man? You’d better have some brandy.”
“You’d better lock up your bottle and come along to the quay,” Cigny said. “Something’s happening—in the harbor.”
Monsieur Bourgois stood up with unusual alacrity. “Galbaud.”
“What of Galbaud?” said the doctor. “I thought he had been deported.”
“He took ship, but has not left the harbor,” said Cigny. “There were boats going back and forth from ship to ship for half the night, and on into the morning.”
“More deportations, doubtless,” Bourgois said. “It no longer requires even a word against these Jacobins—if only a thought should cross one’s mind, then Sonthonax descends.”
“Yes, but I think he has overstepped himself this time,” said Cigny. “You know how his mulatto troops have been harassing the sailors on the quay…I think it is more than their pride will bear. But you would do well to come see for yourself.”
Through the open casements of Bourgois’s window, the doctor could see only an irregularly shaped section of the harbor, bounded by roofs of the intervening buildings. A pair of warships anchored in the area of his view were lowering longboats full of men—one, two, three…It was difficult to tell from this angle (and now Monsieur Bourgois had thrust his head through the window frame, interrupting more of the doctor’s view), but the boats seemed to be making in the direction of Fort Bizoton.
“Come down,” said Monsieur Cigny impatiently. “You can’t see anything here.”
There were a good many other onlookers already hurrying out of the warehouses all along the waterfront, though not enough to constitute a crowd. Some were already raising shouts of excitement, or dismay. It seemed that every ship was lowering its boats and all the boats were full of armed men. Some few of them were rowing toward the harbor forts and the rest were coming straight for the quay, toward a point near the fountain some way to the left of where the doctor and his companions stood to watch.
“How many sailors with the fleet?” the doctor asked.
“Two thousand, three thousand.” Cigny’s teeth flashed in his beard. “You may count them for yourself.”
“Then there are the deportees, who knows how many hundreds?” said Bourgois. “All the ships of the harbor are cram full of those.”
“I believe they have decided to undeport themselves,” said Cigny. “Look there—they have reached the fort.”
“The soldiers are not firing on them,” Bourgois said wonderingly.
“No, and I don’t think they will,” Monsieur Cigny said. “Those are troops of the line in those forts—the last shreds of the old regiments. Sonthonax stuck them there to be out of the way, you see? So they would not interfere with the oppressions of his colored army in the town…”
“Let him reap the fruit of that wisdom now.” Monsieur Bourgois was grinning too.
“Indeed. Galbaud is still governor-general to those soldiers,” said Monsieur Cigny. “No matter what fault that slithering weasel of a law-parsing Sonthonax may have found with his Commission—and be damned to every trick clause hidden in the disgusting loi de quatre Avril.”
The doctor stared. The men in the boats so rapidly approaching appeared to him as on the opposite side of a thick glass wall; doubtless the humidity promoted this odd sensation. He took off his hat and wiped a film of sweat from his balding dome. The beginnings of an unpleasant headache were focusing behind his eyes. The men laid on their oars so smartly that the boats almost seemed to leap from the water, and now the doctor could hear the goading shouts of a coxswain as the boats drew near. Monsieur Cigny had laid a brotherly arm around each of their shoulders.
“Mes amis,” he said, “I think we shall see a great righting of wrongs this day.”
Smoothly, Monsieur Bourgois disengaged himself. “I hope you are right,” he said. “Still, each must look to his own good now. I know for a fact those navy men have not had one pay in six these last nine months…”
“évidemment,” said Cigny. “There will be looting, certainly.”
“Therefore I beg you to excuse me.” Monsieur Bourgois set out for his offices, at a high bounding step. The doctor remained in Monsieur Cigny’s peculiar embrace.
“He’s right about the looting,” said Cigny. “We’ll see a lot of that. You had better round up your colored harlot and her brat and bring them back to our house, for the moment. Oh, they have been comfortable enough there before, have they not? No, don’t say a word—we should be glad of another arm.” Still holding the doctor in the crook of his elbow, Cigny winked at him. “Arnaud has told us of your prodigies of marksmanship. You would be doing us a favor.”
“Is it so?” The doctor freed himself, ducking under Cigny’s arm. “You have a curious way of asking it.”
THE TROOPS OF THE LINE IN THE HARBOR forts went over to Galbaud’s party without the slightest hesitation, and soon had joined the assault on the town. With his brother Cézar leading part of his force, Galbaud struck first at the arsenal, which was easily taken, none of the whites of the town being of a mind to defend it from them. Most of the petit blancs went over to Galbaud’s faction immediately, acting in concert with the grand blancs on this one rare occasion.
Sonthonax himself, however, was not to be so easily overcome. The National Guards, under Laveaux’s command, remained loyal to the commissioners, and the mulatto brigades were fighting well enough—so well that Cézar Galbaud, who’d overextended himself in their vicinity, was made prisoner before the end of that first day. To further boost the commissioners’ morale, all the black slaves of Le Cap spontaneously volunteered to fight in support of the affranchi and mulatto troops.
“Slave master! Whoremaster! Traitor to France!” Sonthonax was in such an apoplectic state that he sprayed Cézar Galbaud with spittle when the prisoner was paraded before him in the old Jesuit House where the commissioners were in residence. “Chain him! Let him taste iron for himself, and feel the shackle. But best of all, get him out of my sight.”
Cézar, speechless, was taken out. From a corner, Choufleur observed the scene, chewing on a cinnamon stick and half concealing his sardonic smile behind his fingers. Laveaux and Polverel sat soberly, though both were electrified by the general tension.
“Those ingrates who called themselves Jacobins—their treason is most bitter.” Sonthonax was traversing the room in a series of short lunges from his desk, like a wild dog roped to a tree. “I brought them the rights of French republicans, but they are all repulsive traitors, all aristocrates de la peau…”
“Yes, of course,” Polverel said, a trifle wearily. The older commissioner saw no use in observing that Sonthonax had disbanded the local Jacobin Club months before and since then had used his mulatto troops to hold its former members under martial law.
Sonthonax spun toward them, his pale face shining under the usual slick of sweat. “The slaves have joined us—good,” he said. “Now, we must lay open the prisons.” He aimed a vibrating finger at Laveaux. “Go at once and—no, you are worse needed here.” Sonthonax rushed over to Choufleur and hauled him up by his elbow. “You will go and liberate the prisons…” Together, they left the room; Laveaux and Polverel could hear Sonthonax’s voice still raving on the landing beyond the door.
“It’s not my place to say it,” said Laveaux, “but this decision strikes me as intemperate.”
“He is in a transport, as you can easily see,” said Polverel. “It may be that he believes this will be a reprise of the storming of the Bastille—I think he regrets missing it the first time…”
GALBAUD WAS UNABLE TO REDUCE the Jesuit House that day; at night-fall, he withdrew most of his force to the safety of the ships. The town was not left precisely quiet, however, for there were parties of sailors still roaming the streets in search of pillage, skirmishing with bands of the local slaves who were abroad on similar missions of their own.
The night was busy with scattered shots, isolated cries. At the Cigny house, no one even tried to sleep. Arnaud and Grandmont had joined in the defense of the place, along with the doctor; Arnaud had tried to bring his wife to this shelter, but she insisted on remaining at Les Ursulines. Pascal, Madame Cigny’s disfavored young dandy, had also sought refuge chez Cigny. The men would periodically climb onto the roof to stare toward the harbor, and to soak the shakes with water; no fires had broken out near them as yet, but fire was their great fear, in this disorder. There were no slaves to perform this labor now, since all the household slaves but the children’s nurse had absconded to loot, or join the commissioners.
Monsieur Cigny, for his part, seemed less irascible than usual at passing the entire evening in his own salon. He and the doctor whiled away the time by teaching Isabelle and Nanon to load and prime the firearms. The doctor was feeling too unwell to join the bucket brigade on the roof. His strange sensations of the afternoon seemed to be flowering into fever, and now he very much regretted that he had not taken time, in going for Nanon and the child, to collect his herb stores from his makeshift laboratory.
Sometime short of midnight, there was a commotion on the street, and someone lobbed a stone through one of the Cignys’ ground-floor windows. Pascal, who’d been increasingly agitated for most of the night, returned fire with a pistol shot taken targetless from the middle of the room before the doctor could move, somewhat woozily, to prevent him.
“Sit down, you stupid whelp,” said Monsieur Cigny, seizing the hot gun from Pascal’s powder-blown fingers. “Go whimper in the corner if you must, but keep out of the way.”
From the street came a shout in Creole to the effect that if they did not open and surrender their valuables, the marauders would set the house on fire.
“Well, it doesn’t sound like he hit anyone,” said the doctor.
“No,” said Monsieur Cigny. “But I don’t like those torches.”
They had blown out the lamps within at the first disturbance so they could be less easily seen from the street, and now the torch-light threw a gay, red glow through the windows and onto the litter of broken glass in the middle of the carpet. The doctor picked up his rifle and went to the second-floor salon, where the women were waiting. Isabelle had crept to the window and was covertly observing the situation outside. As they came in, she turned toward them with pinched lips and her hands cocked on her hips.
“My own footman, if you please. Come back to sack the house…”
“And in his livery too,” said the doctor.
He settled himself beside the other window, kneeling down and bracing his heavy rifle barrel on the sill. There was a gang of twenty-some blacks on the street below him; he didn’t know if they’d seen his movement, but they brandished their torches and cried out new threats.
“He will certainly know where the plate is hidden,” said Isabelle.
“Sans doute,” said Monsieur Cigny. “But come away from the window, please.”
The doctor leaned over his long gun and sighted on the footman, who was the largest man among the group, and, in his bright and fancy livery, far and away the most inviting target. Then he sat back on his heels, to take a more general view. The thought came to him that some among the mob might know his reputation as an herb doctor…which was the next best thing to h?ngan.
“Listen to me!” the doctor called. “You have no business with us—we don’t intend you any harm, but we are well armed and ready to defend the place. It’s I, Doctor Hébert. Leave us be, I say. Pass on.”
There was a stir among the blacks, some of them expostulating. Doctor Hébert could make out only the phrase dokté-feuilles, frequently repeated. He changed his angle (keeping his head well within the window frame) so he could peep down to the ground floor. Musket barrels belonging to Arnaud and Grandmont were lipped over the sills below.
“Bring that villain down for me.” Monsieur Cigny pointed at the footman.
“But what if it only enrages them,” said the doctor. “Perhaps a warning shot?”
Among the gang, a fissure of disagreement seemed to have opened, with some apparently willing to withdraw, while others influenced by the footman were urgent to press the attack. The doctor laid his cheek against the cool curve of his rifle stock. A triangle of silver brocade at the peak of the footman’s tricorne hat seemed to make an appealing mark. When he closed one eye, the brocade seemed to leap to the very end of his gun barrel. He squeezed the trigger smoothly and the hat flew backward. The footman slapped at his head and howled.
“Grand Seigneur!” said Cigny. “Arnaud did not exaggerate.”
The mob broke up and scattered either way along the street. The punctured hat had fallen on a doorstep, near a dropped torch that slowly died, smothered by the dust of the unpaved thoroughfare.
Hébert stood up, passing the rifle to Nanon to reload. The report of the shot had awakened the child, and the doctor took him from Nanon’s arms, seeing she was very weary. He walked up and down the hall outside the salon, murmuring and singing snatches of song that he remembered from his own childhood in Lyons—odd how they returned at such a time. The baby’s mouth was damp against his shirt and his collarbone, lips slackening as the child relaxed again toward sleep. The doctor’s ears were ringing, and not only from the shot. He hoped his indisposition might be one of the more survivable malarias, not mal de Siam, but the headache worried him considerably.
A couple of hours before dawn, a party of marauding sailors from the fleet approached the house. They did not threaten it with fire, but seemed willing to beat in the doors with the axes that they carried. Inside, the men took up their firing positions as before.
“Gentlemen,” Monsieur Cigny called from the second-story window. “We are in total sympathy with your aims—you are our liberators! Here’s to the governor-general, Galbaud! Understand just the same that we are determined to protect our property. Trouble us and we won’t hesitate to shoot you.”
“Open to us,” said one of the sailors, “if you are friends, open and let us drink the health of the governor-general in your wine.”
“I don’t think so,” said Monsieur Cigny, who might have laughed, if not for the strain. “But I can say you’ll find the houses of the richest niggers near the Place d’Armes or the Place de Clugny.”
When the sailors had gone by, there was no more unrest in their immediate vicinity. As the light began to blue into the day, the town slipped into its first full silence of the night. Nanon led the doctor upstairs to the room she’d formerly occupied, and forced him to lie down, for she saw that he was sickening. For a couple of hours he slept fitfully, twisting through the weirdness of his dreams. But by midmorning he was awakened by the sound of a cannonade.
THAT MORNING GALBAUD RENEWED the attack and, fighting steadily from street to street, soon overcame the remaining resistance except for the defenders of the Jesuit House. Infuriated by their stubbornness, Galbaud brought up cannons from the fleet and began to bombard the building. Sonthonax, whose passions had plagued him so violently he had not slept a moment of the night, emerged onto a balcony to harangue the opposing troops—being as ever a convinced believer in the powers of his own rhetoric. Galbaud had his gunners aim at him directly, and a cannonball must infallibly have carried him away, if Laveaux and Polverel had not dragged him back.
The building was not defensible against artillery. Villatte, Laveaux, and Choufleur marshaled their troops and managed to conduct an orderly retreat. The commissioners reached the fortified lines inland of the city with their small force intact, which under the circumstances was no mean achievement. Galbaud, meanwhile, was technically master of the town, though by no means in complete control of it. Apart from the troops of the line who’d deserted from the harbor forts, the discipline of his motley army was very poor, and once the real fighting had lulled, the general looting was redoubled. Looking in the direction of the harbor from the roof of the Cigny house, Arnaud and Grandmont could see isolated columns of smoke betokening houses set afire—but it seemed that there was still enough organization among the citizenry that these, if not completely extinguished, at least did not spread generally.
The commissioners still held Cézar Galbaud—this hostage was their best negotiating pawn. At noon, they dispatched an envoy, Polverel’s son, across the sweltering flats between their lines and the town. The proposition was that Cézar be given up in exchange for Galbaud’s complete withdrawal, and even Sonthonax had not laid much hope upon it. He was playing for time, though he did not yet know what use he would make of whatever time he could recover.
Before they had word back from this sally, the commissioners removed their seat to Haut du Cap, and had taken over the grand’case of Bréda as their temporary headquarters. It was there that the envoy’s escort reached them with the lugubrious intelligence that Galbaud, flouting the flag of truce, had made the junior Polverel his prisoner and now proposed to trade him for Cézar.
Sonthonax had an unfailing instinct for the dramatic moment, even when his passions were only those of impotence. Twirling his coattails in the middle of the Bréda drawing room, he banged his right hand across his heart, stabbed his left hand toward the chandelier, and declared that the decision must pass to his colleague. “Tu es père,” he declaimed. “You are a father. Do what you must; I agree to anything.”
Polverel was not ordinarily given to such demonstrations, but now he was weeping openly, though he remained seated, stolidly as ever, in an armchair which had molded somewhat since Bayon de Libertat and his family had decamped.
“I adore my son…He might perish…I will make that sacrifice to the Republic…My son was a parliamentarian treacherously arrested by rebels…Cézar Galbaud was taken with arms in his hand against the delegates of France…No, my son cannot be exchanged for a guilty party.”
Hearing this, Sonthonax passed to an even greater height of exaltation. He looked as though he’d weep himself—perhaps he did, a little.
“My friend, your words do you great honor,” he said. “They will not profit by this treachery. We will defeat them, against all odds.” But this speech seemed to deflate him as he uttered it, and he crashed down into a chair opposite Polverel, who reached to press his hands.
“I fear we have no hope of defeating them against the odds which we now face,” said Polverel.
Then Choufleur turned from the window—for the last hour he’d been staring out, in what seemed a sort of rapture of ennui.
“There is a way,” he said.
Sonthonax looked up at him, uncomprehending, his eyes sunken and dark from the sleepless night. Choufleur had not troubled to remove the cinnamon stick from his mouth; it continued to ride his lips as he spoke.
“Pierrot and Macaya,” he said laconically. “They are encamped not two miles distant—with ten thousand men.”
Sonthonax stared at him, agape. He had not a word to say.
“You will remember them, I think? Pierrot? Macaya?”
“Absolutely.” Sonthonax’s teeth clicked as he set his jaw. “So,” he said. “If we promise them liberty?”
“I think so,” said Choufleur. “I think you must also promise them the town.”
Sonthonax paled, even he, at that. “What do you mean?” Although of course, by then he knew.
“They would never try to hold it,” Choufleur said. “Only…a matter of a day, a few…” He took the cinnamon stick from his mouth and inspected it with an air of surprise, then looked at Sonthonax more sharply. “The choice is yours. I will arrange it, if you wish.”
BY THE CLOSE OF THAT DAY, Le Cap seemed on the verge of calm, at least from the windows of the Cigny house. The doctor was feeling better, able to drink some broth, and pace the floor. He was thinking it might soon be safe enough for him to go and recover his medicine bags, which he would have liked to accomplish before dark. When night fell, he expected his fever to worsen.
Above the harbor, the sun had slipped away through a slit in the cloud cover. A great trunk of cloud sprouted up from the horizon line, expanding at the top into a bloom or an explosion. Diffuse sunset radiance tinted this whole mass of vapor with rose and a sulfurous yellow. In a fever just high enough to make him slightly giddy, the doctor gazed upon this spectacle.
It was very still, until a heart-stricken cry went up from the roof, where Grandmont and Arnaud had gone for their hourly reconnaissance. Without thinking, the doctor snatched up a pistol and ran to the top floor, where he scrambled out a dormer to see whatever it was they saw. He joined the other two men astride the rooftree.
Both Arnaud and Grandmont were staring, aghast, in the direction of Morne du Cap; they both seemed petrified, but at first the doctor could not make out what it was that had so transfixed them. From the fever, his vision was rather blurry, but he squinted and rubbed his eyes. There was a movement on the face of the mountain, as if all Morne du Cap were a vast anthill, with marching columns of army ants all swarming out of its core.
“What is it?” the doctor said, for if he saw, he did not quite believe it.
“The brigands.” Grandmont’s voice was strangled to a whisper. He cleared his throat but it didn’t seem to help. “Do you see? No one is defending the line—they have already passed it.”
The air stirred now, a draft opening in the thick wet suck of the humidity. A land breeze was starting up, combing back their hair and cooling the sweat on their faces. It was true what Grandmont said. The first wave of the huge black mass had already passed the landward earthworks and was coming to the fringes of the town, across the lowlands around La Fossette.
Arnaud pointed his pistol in the air and pulled the trigger. “The brigands!” he shrieked. “The brigands are coming!”
No one heard him. The hot wet air closed over his words. Arnaud kept holding the pistol high, as if despair immobilized his arm. The wisp of smoke from the warm barrel broke up into particles and slowly sailed away down to the water.
The men of Macaya and Pierrot had no vestige of military organization, nor were they especially well armed, but these disadvantages didn’t matter much, because Galbaud’s troops were dispersed and mostly drunk by the time the first wave of the attack struck into the town. Besides, the numbers of the blacks were completely overwhelming; it was one of those mad, berserker charges, like the suicidal charges against cannon in the revolt’s first days. But now the few cannons available were not in position to do them any harm.
The blacks had seen it all before, among the plantations on the plain, though never on such a grand scale as this. Never till now had they breached one of the cities of the coast. Still, the order of operations was much the same as elsewhere: kill, rape, loot and burn.
Some of Galbaud’s men held out better than others. There were pockets of stubborn fighting, house to house and street to street, up until nightfall. But in the end the white men could not hold. The attackers were innumerable and they seemed to come directly out of the fire, like salamanders, or like legendary demons. Fire was general now in the town, driven ahead of the strengthening land breeze, down toward the harbor. Now it was night, but there was no darkness.
From the Cigny roof, Doctor Hébert and Grandmont could see very well how the fires proceeded, lashed by the strengthening wind from roof to roof, and constantly joining with each other to form one larger, more colossal fire. Fish crows flew screaming, ragged-winged, through the black cinders that rose up to blot the sky. The fire was not two houses from Cigny’s—it was not even one. The roof next to theirs was already blazing, with a heat so great the doctor felt his eyebrows singeing, his lips begin to parch and flake. He wet his shirttail in one of the buckets they’d brought up to dampen the roof and pulled the wet cloth across his nose and mouth. Smashed horizontal by the wind, the flames on the next roof sped across the gap between the houses to flutter over the Cigny shingles. On the lower floors, the window glass began exploding from the heat.
Grandmont stood tall and heaved his bucket hopelessly into the fire on the next house. Then he ducked inside through the dormer window. Breaking his horrid fascination with some difficulty, the doctor followed him.
On the second floor, Isabelle Cigny was folding garments into a trunk, aided by the children’s nurse; Robert and Hélo?se were watching her, frightened but quiet, clinging to the nurse’s skirt. Monsieur Cigny also looked on; the doctor paused beside him. Stooping over the trunk, Isabelle felt a stray lock of hair tumbling in her face. She straightened and turned to the mirror to adjust it, without either haste or lingering, then went back to her work.
“Look at her,” said Monsieur Cigny, laying his hammy hand on the doctor’s forearm. “Say what you will about Creole women—what should I care for the horns she gives me?”
Even under these extraordinary circumstances, the doctor thought it unwise to respond to that question. A spatter of gunfire from outside distracted them all. The doctor stepped to the shattered window to see. A squad of sailors was retreating down the street toward the harbor, hotly pursued by seventy or eighty blacks who could just barely be held at a distance by small-arms fire—there were enough of them to choke the street.
Isabelle had closed the trunk, Monsieur Cigny swung it up onto his shoulder and carried it toward the stairs. He seemed to handle its weight and awkwardness with ease, though he could not be much used to physical work, the doctor thought; no white man could be, in this country.
It was chokingly hot going down the stairs, from fire already pressing against the near wall. Monsieur Cigny descended first, balancing the trunk. The nurse led the two children after him. Her eyes were closed, and through her tight jaws came a keening sound, with now and then a word of Creole, song or maybe a vodoun supplication. The doctor followed them down. On the ground floor, Arnaud, Grandmont and Pascal had hoisted bundles and bags of the Cigny belongings. The horses of the household had bolted or been stolen earlier in the day, so they must make their way to the harbor on foot.
The doctor took the child from Nanon, and arranged his loads, two pistols in his belt, the rifle in his right hand, child in his left arm, forked across his hip. Balancing a bundle on her head with her unique grace, Nanon glided through the door onto the street. In the approach of his evening delirium, the doctor thought he saw her as he’d seen her first, striding ahead of him through the throngs at the market in the Place de Clugny, wearing the basket of fruit like a tiara. But the men who pressed around her now had less benign intentions.
The rifle discharged as he dropped it—the range was too short for him to use it now, even if he could have managed it one-handed. The doctor shot the nearest one point-blank in the face and handed the pistol to Isabelle Cigny to reload and drew the other to shoot the next man in the chest, twisting sideways to shelter the child on his hip the best he could. Isabelle handed him the first pistol reprimed and he dropped another man with a shot to the temple and the others ran away. There had been six of them, stragglers from the larger mob that had just passed through.
The doctor sank down onto one knee, heavily; his head hurt horribly and his fever was suddenly very much worse. The child clung to him, pressing his face against his chest. It had all taken hardly an instant, was over faster than any of the other men had even been able to train their arms, but this time no one paid the doctor any compliments on his marksmanship. He could not make out which were the men he had just killed because there were so many other corpses littering the street. Blood and scorched flesh covered them with its stench. The doctor saw that Robert, clinging to his nurse’s arm, was looking at the bodies too.
“Come quickly,” said Monsieur Cigny.
The doctor stood up. Nanon had reloaded his second pistol; he took it from her and tucked it in his waistband. In the house next to the Cignys’ a beam gave way and the entire roof collapsed in a cascade of sparks.
“We are not going to the ships,” the doctor said. “We have concluded to go instead to Ennery.”
Isabelle Cigny dropped what she was carrying and took a step nearer him. “You’re delirious,” she said. She looked at Nanon. “This man’s insane.”
Nanon gazed at her steadily; she could not gesture with her head, or the bundle would have fallen. “We have spoken of it earlier,” she said calmly. “It’s as he told you.”
Isabelle walked closer to the doctor. The fire illumined her face with a strange red glow; he thought that she might scratch him with her nails. “Is it your romance?” she said. “Is it love? Don’t be a fool. In another country she could pass for white.”
The doctor looked from her face to the others. In the hellfire light cast all about them, there was no longer any skin tone; Isabelle was exactly the same hue as her black servant. The doctor could not speak at all. Stupid, brutal as a beast, he only shook his head.
Isabelle Cigny turned again to Nanon. “The man’s insane,” she said again. “But save yourself. You must come with us.”
When Nanon had murmured her refusal, Madame Cigny’s shoulders clenched as with a sob. It was the first time, the doctor thought cloudily, that he’d seen her show the faintest sign of weakness. Her husband’s admiration might have been well placed. He watched as she leaned forward to kiss Nanon on the lips.
“God help you then,” she said. “I will not see you again upon this earth.”
ARNAUD SAID NOTHING TO THE DOCTOR as they parted; he could not think of anything to say. Armed with a pistol and a musket, he was bringing up the rear of the Cigny group. At the first corner, he looked back and saw the doctor and Nanon still standing near the burning houses; when he looked again, thirty paces farther along, they had gone. In the next block, the Cignys fell in with a platoon of regular army soldiers who were still making forays into the town to evacuate what citizens they could. There were several other families already in their charge, and in this strength they made their way to the harbor in greater safety than they could have hoped.
The ink-black surface of the water threw back eerie reflections of the flames that blanketed the town. Still, the fire would not pass across the wide stone esplanade dividing the harbor from the burning warehouses. Some hundreds of white refugees were clustered on the paving stones, babbling, weeping, or cursing their enemies—all those not struck completely dumb by what was passing. East-ward along the waterfront, a double line of soldiers fired alternating volleys in a regular one-two rhythm, holding off some two thousand of the blacks.
There were not enough boats, and too many people were trying to get into those there were. Someone was crying out in loud disgust that Galbaud himself had been seen to fling himself into the water in his urgency to secure a place in one of those few boats. Arnaud listened without attending. He had not thought of his wife all day, but now her image ballooned to fill his mind.
WITHIN THE WALLS OF LES URSULINES, the nuns were at vespers, singing and praying for deliverance, but Claudine Arnaud had remained in the small cell she paid them for, embroidering a little dress for the layette of the infant she expected, in whose existence only she believed. When the fires overarched the convent roof, one of the sisters, Félicité, came in and urged Madame Arnaud to flee the place with them. Claudine ignored her. She had lately come to dislike the nuns, because they stole her baby clothes while she was sleeping, hoping thus to distract her from her mania.
“Maybe you have the right of it.” Sister Félicité was weeping, tears scalding on her round pale cheeks as the ovenlike heat from the stone walls blasted them. “It won’t go much better for us outside than in.”
But Sister Félicité was not long gone before the furnace heat drove Claudine out also. The nuns were descending the steps of the convent in orderly single file, demure in their black robes and white wimples, hands folded before them in prayer. As they reached the foot of the stair, the blacks laid hold of them and yanked their skirts above their heads to rape them, or sometimes simply slit their throats.
At the head of the stairs, Claudine Arnaud drew up her skirts and pushed her hands against the bare skin of her shrunken belly. All around her burning embers were crashing down from the roof.
“Now hell has finally come to us, little one,” she cried to the thing she addressed inside her. “Now at last you can be born.”
One of the blacks mounted the stairs to snatch at her. Claudine picked up a burning stake and stabbed it at his face, her skirts dropping around her legs again when she released them. The first attacker fell away, but another came from the other side; it seemed to her that he was that same Congo, from the other time, though he was no longer dressed in women’s clothes. She swiped the burning stake at him, but he grinned and swayed back from his hips, mocking her with his dancer’s grace, letting the fire pass over him, then springing back to his place. She thought to show him the stump of her finger then, but he only laughed at that.
She saw that she must show him something more. It was only a light shift that she had on; with one hand she could rip it to the hem. When she’d shrugged out of it entirely, she stooped and picked up a second brand, holding it by its hot coal, for its whole length was afire. She rubbed the flames over her bared skin, smiling to show her indifference to the pain and harm of it. Then she began to dance and shriek in much the same manner as the blacks all around her. Seeing her to be possessed by some spirit too powerful for him to master, the Congo ran off, and was followed by the others.
When Arnaud reached the convent, she had just had the inspiration of setting her hair aflame. He saw her in that fiery halo, raising a blazing sword above her head in her two joined hands. She stood on tiptoe, her head thrown back and to one side, resting on her collarbone, bare scorched breasts lifting and her muscles strained as if she were depending from a hook somewhere above her. Arnaud recognized her posture but without knowing why. When he called to her she did not seem to hear him. But when he was near enough, she brought her flaming sword down on him with all her force.
The brand cracked across his shoulders. Arnaud ducked, came up again, once more he called her name. Her hair had burned down almost to the scalp. She hissed and thrust the burning stake at him; he caught it firmly between his two bare palms and closed his grip. The shock of the pain slammed all the way into his shoulders, but he did not let go. Now he felt the very thing that she was feeling, and he saw, when he looked in her eyes, that she acknowledged this.
Together they rolled down the steps, and as they did so, much of the fire about her was extinguished. With his blistered palms, Arnaud beat the flames down in the blackened stubble of her hair. When he was done, he saw that she had fainted. He picked her up and carried her back to the harbor, where a few boats were still plying, picking up the last survivors. The town was all in flames around them as they went, and by some freak, no one troubled or hindered them all of their way.
THE DOCTOR TRIED TO SECURE a dampened cloth across the nose and mouth of the child, to protect him from the smoke and ash, but the contact troubled him and made him cry. Without it he was quiet, so the doctor gave it up. He and Nanon began walking, generally in the direction of the Place d’Armes, although many detours were required because of the fires. A great number of bodies were scattered about—soldiers and sailors and civilians, women and children mixed with them indiscriminately, some mauled and mutilated, others just dead. Many of the black invaders had also been killed. In one block they traversed, the corpses had been dragged out of the middle of the street and neatly arranged along the house walls, so that the doctor was moved to wonder what agent had accomplished this work and with what purpose.
How exotic was this impulse to bring order into hell’s worst chaos! As the doctor was contemplating this phenomenon, two gangs of hostile blacks appeared at opposite ends of the street they were traveling. As it happened, they were just by an alleyway that would have let them directly into Crozac’s stable yard, but unfortunately this passage was sealed by walls of flame.
The doctor returned the child to Nanon and produced one of his pistols. Two men were rushing up in advance of the first group and one had painted designs on his face and chest with gouts of human blood. The doctor fired and brought him down and felled another with the second pistol, but Nanon was not yet ready with the first; he had passed them both to her too quickly, and she was busy with the child. The blacks did not seem greatly dismayed in any case. There were so many corpses strewn over these streets that a couple more did not much matter.
He aimed the rifle and pulled the trigger, but there was not even so much as a click; he had forgotten to reload it after it had accidentally gone off in front of the Cigny house. The blacks on either side no longer seemed to hesitate. The doctor thought that maybe there was nothing for him to hope for at Crozac’s—the whole place might already be destroyed. Certainly the tavern where he’d once resided was already rising in a crackling cone of flame. But as they were without alternatives, he gathered Nanon in the crook of his arm and rushed her into the burning alley.
Through the fire’s roaring came a hoarse scream that might have been either hers or his own; he could not tell. The carpet of coals they walked across was searing through his boot soles—he could well imagine what it must be doing to the fragile shoes she wore. He felt himself coughing but could not hear the sound of it. The flames leaping in their faces refined themselves yellow to blue, next to a crystalline, piercing white, finally a single colorless blade of heat.
Then they were through, stumbling into the stable yard. One of Crozac’s grooms was running from stall to stall opening all the doors; the fire had already caught the stable roof though it had not yet burned through. The horses and mules all came out in a screaming terror. The groom swung himself up to the bare back of one and rode out the opposite corner of the yard, where there seemed to be no live fire but only smoldering, another unnumbered horseman of this apocalypse.
When the doctor pried the child’s head away from Nanon’s bosom, he straightaway began to howl, an excellent sign he had not been seriously injured. Relieved, the doctor sat down on the ground and began reloading all the guns. At Nanon’s desperate shriek he jumped up with a pistol in either hand. One of the blacks had been frenzied enough to follow them through the fire after all, but before he had quite emerged from the alley, the doctor shot him through the forehead and he toppled over backward into the bed of multicolored flames.
The child was sobbing quietly now, exhausted from his screaming. Nanon opened the bodice of her gown and gave him suck to comfort him. Her head was bare now, hair all scorched and singed; she’d lost her bundle in their passage through the fire.
The doctor reloaded his pistol and walked over to peer in the open door of Crozac’s living quarters. It appeared that the fleeing groom, or someone else, had paused to slit the farrier’s throat. The dead man lay in a scorching pool of his own blood; all around him, fire was gnawing through the floorboards.
“Don’t look,” the doctor said to Nanon, and all at once was racked with laughter. The idea she should be disturbed by the sight of a dead body…Tears spurted from his eyes; his sobs were like vomiting. She remained ice-white, ice-calm before him, as if she were walking in her sleep. Or was it really vomiting? Really mal de Siam, in the end? He was on his hands and knees, her hands on his shoulders, pressing to soothe him. At length he composed himself enough to stand.
He had brought them there in hope of finding a horse, but they had all stampeded off when the groom had let them go. The doctor walked along the row of empty stalls. In the last but one, there was a mule; the stall was open like the others but for some reason the mule had been tied to the feedbox, and stood there snorting and lashing against the restraint. The doctor slipped to its head and undid the lead and brought it out. Seeing the flames, the mule began to jerk its ax-shaped head and scream. It took all the doctor’s remaining strength to keep control of it.
The animal was too panicky for Nanon to mount, and because the tack room was fully on fire there was no question of bridle or saddle. They left the stable yard still on foot, following in the direction the groom had taken. The northern quarters of the town were already burned almost to rubble, and the marauders who still frolicked among these ruins were too engaged in their own ecstasies to notice the pilgrims who crept by with their half-mad mule.
From La Fossette a pestilent fog was boiling, cool and full of mosquitoes and of mauvaisces humeurs. The doctor was glad of this thickening of the darkness. Now the mule had calmed enough for Nanon to ride, first slashing a vertical rip in her long skirt so she could straddle the animal. The doctor handed the child up to her, noticing then that her light satin shoe was burned to a rag around her ankle. The sole of her foot was horribly blistered; he lowered his head and kissed the air above it.
He led the mule around the lower curve of Morne du Cap and on into the jungle. Maybe he had at last become familiar with the ways and byways, or maybe it was the gruesome pain in his head that led him onward like a beacon, but whatever the cause he seemed able to choose their direction without hesitating. They went on.
IT SEEMED TO HIM THAT IT WAS day again and that he was slumped over the mule’s back, Nanon leading it and also carrying the child, and while he tried to protest she insisted he must ride and rest. Again, some other time, another night, Nanon was feeding him a paste of mashed bananas she must have foraged somewhere, but he could not swallow it and he signaled her that she must give it all to the child instead. His fever no longer abated with daylight; instead it seemed to worsen. Now he could not even keep down water. He crawled away from the trail on hands and knees, puking a black stinking bile he knew was his own rotten blood. Another time, lying on his back, he saw some sprigs of herbs he thought might help him, and he motioned Nanon to pluck them and put them in his mouth to chew. The leaves could not be brewed, for out of all that fire and destruction they’d brought away no means to strike a light of their own.
They went on, through dark to light to dark again. The doctor chewed his bitter herbs, which won him no remission. How greatly he had deluded himself with his belief he would not die of fever. The pain was extraordinary, like a nail through his skull, and he heard himself repeating the phrase aloud: Comme cloué, comme cloué. Then, No, another voice answered, you are not nailed. Nanon’s hand upon his forehead was now Toussaint’s, but he had to tell this darker man that he was surely dying. Then Toussaint said that he would not die yet, that there was still a use for him upon the earth. At this the doctor choked on a cry and protested that he had lately killed more men than he’d had the leisure to count and that he was not a healer but a murderer. Toussaint smiled and stroked his burning brow and said that out of all this death and ruin it would still be possible for them to work a healing.
On his fire-blistered feet the doctor staggered through mountain passes always leading the mule where Toussaint, dressed in his green coat and knotted headcloth and carrying his bag of herbs across his knees, seemed to have replaced Nanon and the child. As he had sometimes done before, Toussaint quizzed him about European politics and science and asked him his interpretation of all he recently had witnessed.
Tell me, Toussaint said. Tell me all you think of what you’ve seen. Let me know the reasons that you’d give for it.
Well I don’t know, the doctor said. But there must be some reason.
Why must there? Toussaint said. Give me the reason of it. What does it mean?
The doctor’s back was to Toussaint on the mule but still he heard him well enough and felt the old man’s foxy smile.
I can’t tell you. But it does mean something. It must mean something. It can’t mean nothing. It cannot.
That night he slept beside the trail full of a confidence that the world was as sensible as he’d declared it was, even if he’d never grasp the sense of it. When he woke, an hour before dawn, his fever had completely broken. At first light they continued their way. He was visited by no more hallucinations and whenever he looked back he recognized it was Nanon astride the mule with the child on her lap looking about with calm alert interest at everything they passed. The distance still to go was less than he’d supposed and the sunrise was just clearing the mountains when they came into the groves of coffee above Habitation Thibodet.
If his head still hurt the pain was comfort, now an aspect of the clarity he had regained—he contained it, rather than it surrounding him. There was order in the world spread out below him. In the camp of Toussaint’s six hundred, they were just extinguishing their breakfast fires. From the quarters, the slaves came marching in a double column toward the cane, Delsart directing them and their commandeur counting cadence while the rest of them all sang cheerfully enough. The doctor looked up at Nanon, who returned his smile, gazing at him dreamily. He snapped the lead rope and led the mule down past the coffee trees and through the cane fields into the yard.
There was someone on the grand’case gallery, a total stranger, though he did not seem unfriendly. He had on a loose white shirt and long dark hair gathered loosely at the back and he was cleaning his nails with an enormous knife. He looked up at them with some considerable surprise, then turned to shout a word into the house, perhaps a name.
What a sight they must present, indeed. The doctor felt like laughing. He took the child from Nanon and set him down. A semi-circular area of grass had been maintained just in front of the gallery, and now the doctor noticed that some flowers had been freshly planted round the border. He offered his hand to help Nanon get down. When she had dismounted, he noticed for the first time that the mule was a dark whiskey color and that there was a blue cross over its shoulders and down its spine.
Up the hill among the coffee trees there was still a late cock crowing, though now the sun’s round was fully in the sky. The child sat cross-legged in the grass, chuckling and fingering the blades; some of them were still damp with the dew. He was too young yet to stand unsupported, though he might pull himself up on the edge of a table or a chair.
A door clapped inside the house, and in his inner ear the doctor heard the name that the man had called. Elise. It was not his sister though, who first appeared, but a little girl in a blue-printed dress, running barefoot down the steps toward them. Her eyes were only for the baby, the doctor saw. She ran toward where he sat in the damp grass, waving her arms in winglike sweeps and shaking dark ringlets back from her face. But when she had come almost within reach of them she stopped and stood abashed.
The doctor looked toward the grand’case. Now Elise had appeared on the gallery; she froze for an instant, then drew in her breath and came forward again, walking down the steps toward him. Her robe was somewhat overlong so that he couldn’t see her feet, so that she seemed to float. After all, he could not absolutely meet her eyes. He looked down. The baby had scooted on his bottom, nearer to the little girl, and he was reaching both arms up to her, wanting to touch the pattern of her dress, or possibly to raise himself on her. The little girl looked up at the doctor uncertainly.
“Yes,” the doctor said. “He is your cousin. You may take his hands.”
Envoi
THE FIRE IN LE CAP BURNED FOR THREE DAYS. Throughout that time no darkness fell, the night was brighter than the day, sufficient for men on the decks of the ships in the harbor to read their letters and despatches without the aid of other light, while ash and cinder rained all over them, and during that first darkless night the same fiery glow was cast on Polverel and Sonthonax in the salon of the great house of Bréda where the older man paced along the windows in rapidly exchanging states of exaltation and despair, as the younger one would more commonly do, but now Sonthonax had entered that state of grim fixity he would reach whenever the world itself outran his tongue and so with the blades of firelight redly flicking at his page he wrote:
WE DECLARE THAT THE WILL OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC AND OF ITS DELEGATES IS TO GIVE FREEDOM TO ALL THE NEGRO WARRIORS WHO WILL FIGHT FOR THE REPUBLIC UNDER THE ORDERS OF THE CIVIL COMMISSAIRES, AGAINST SPAIN OR OTHER ENEMIES, WHETHER INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL—
…and he licked the tip of his pen and wrote:
THE REPUBLIC AND THE CIVIL COMMISSAIRES ALSO WISH TO IMPROVE THE LOT OF THE OTHER SLAVES—
…and upon the conclusion of this sentence he thought for a moment more and then he wrote:
ALL THE SLAVES DECLARED FREE BY THE DELEGATES OF THE REPUBLIC WILL BE EQUAL TO ALL FREE MEN…THEY WILL ENJOY ALL THE RIGHTS BELONGING TO FRENCH CITIZENS—
…all these words being necessary (at least to him) because Sonthonax, ever the avocat, forever sought to clothe the event in words to give it a more advantageous meaning, or perhaps he even believed what he was saying, and had always intended it, as his admirers and accusers would later maintain (later, when the fire flashed in their eyes) and some would claim that Sonthonax intended these words only to frighten Galbaud away, but that would have been superfluous: Galbaud and his whole faction being already so thoroughly disposed of that on the morrow morn the entire fleet set sail, away from the unceasing precipitate of ash and coal (dawn being darker than the night in truth, so long as that great fire still burned) toward Baltimore, where some of those several thousands of refugees would forget Saint Domingue in their urgency to begin new lives, and others would gnaw their bitterness until they died, and others still would plot to recover all they’d lost and some of these latter would indeed be determined or mad enough to return—still none of them tarried to impress themselves with Sonthonax’s latest proclamation; they were gone, and with their going came if not the absolute end of white power in Haiti, at least the beginning of that end, a thought which those mostly African illuminati must certainly have cherished as they reveled in the roast and ruin of Le Cap throughout the three days Sonthonax had promised them and would faithfully deliver (although General Lasalle had come up with fresh troops from the south and begged to be allowed to restore order in the city), for Sonthonax was after all a man of his word—while Polverel fretted and chewed his nails to the bloody quick and Choufleur sucked his cinnamon stick and smiled behind his hand—all of them foregathered in the house at Bréda where the first agents provocateurs had made Toussaint the initial payment for organizing this all-too-successful provocation, and by day or night the firelight bathed them; it would be with them all their lives, as it pursued Galbaud’s fleet on its voyage to North America, shining so winningly on the billows that bore up the ships, for this was a most assiduous fire, determined to throw its light upon the future; it would not burn low, and it still burned in Sonthonax, tingling to his fingertips when, before the end of summer (still astonished at the fact that the bands of Pierrot and Macaya, once Le Cap had been utterly despoiled, abandoned the white French republicans to return to their roving on the northern plain, indifferent to any enticements in or out of his power to offer them), he wrote another proclamation which emancipated ALL THE SLAVES, not freeing them any more than Lincoln did in the next century but simply admitting that they were free (and it may be that Sonthonax believed so all along but he was so devious, so studied in his cunning, that none could ever fathom his beliefs) and so the fire passed over Sonthonax as well, razing him to a scorched stump at last in spite of his remarkable resilience, for this wise fire was all-consuming as history itself, as Toussaint might have put it, there in his camp at Ennery or later in the Fort de Joux, Toussaint having been as best he could manage a student of history all his life, learning that what had once been could be again, so coming to believe that he could be in truth the black Spartacus Abbé Raynal had predicted to come forth and achieve the freedom of his people; therefore the fire was his intimate friend, and he knew how to use it (certainly Toussaint used all his friends, being far more cunning than even Sonthonax) as a weapon or simply as a light, a light he’d live with longer than he wished to, for it shone on him (however faintly) through the layered bars and gratings of his cell at the Fort de Joux, so that he stretched his hand and probed his fingers through the grate, turning and turning them in hope of reaching some shadow of the warmth of that old fire, but it was useless; he had passed too far into the future, and those coals were dead for a decade, were they not? or perhaps indeed they were not, so that if Toussaint had been able to lure the First Consul to his cell, he could have produced a live coal from the pocket of his waistcoat, holding it between his finger calluses in the manner of a countryman lighting his pipe—but Bonaparte would not come, so that Toussaint must turn backward toward that time when the fire originally was bright, when by the light which disseminated itself from the pyre of Le Cap to Ennery he first began to scrutinize the intentions of Sonthonax, wondering if they were more or less consonant with his own design than those of the Spanish, or the English, or even the Americans toward whom he also turned this illumination; meanwhile he began to pass over the country in his own extraordinary fashion (those first six hundred men increasing to tens of thousands) and the fire followed him but did not consume him or his works; under his command nothing was burned nor any man killed without reason—not all or everything was saved but everything was used for a purpose—and General Laveaux, seeing these things, threw down his hat and declared “this man makes an opening everywhere” (but he was already Toussaint-Louverture; he had already finished the letter) and he would still use the fire as need presented, knowing the old coals could always be blown again to life, as he would rekindle them a few years later to burn rebuilt Le Cap to the ground a second time—yes, if he had to he’d use this instrument more broadly still, denying the land to white invaders, he would burn the island so close to its bedrock that a crow could not fly over it without risk of starvation—let the fire take it before the enemy enjoyed it—and it was ever a hungry fire, rapacious to consume time as well as distance, reaching with its lava-dripping salamander digits to grasp and devour Galbaud, Sonthonax, Leclerc, Napoleon himself, whoever sought to leave it in the past it would pursue them, still burning across oceans, across centuries, a wind out of time’s vortex driving it on to level cities of the new lands of the future for whenever it burned down to coals a breath would bring them back to the flame-flower (this fire would return from the least spark even, being so tenacious); and out of that long smoldering the fire that started in Le Cap is burning still, still rendering and dividing, so that everyone must be compelled to admire how whitely the flames rise in their pallor above the black charcoal, though the firelight has such a terrible time to travel through, like the light of a long-dead star, emerging from a history so remote and distant it seems almost quaint: the far-off screaming deaths of all those people whose fat came sputtering down into the coals of the ruined city’s white-hot foundation, whose stories were written on their skins as if their skins became the parchment of the pages you turn and examine by the light of a lamp whose oil was rendered off their bones—such a fire as that may fade but never grow entirely dark, never to be extinguished altogether, it is burning still, still striving to find its way into the future, wanting to burn through to you who believe yourself inured to atrocity, to murder in the streets, to throw some illumination on your life be it faint and slight as the pinprick of green luminescence on your watch dial—it is coming still, it is still here. But no one sees the light.