Chapter One
YOU COULD NOT CALL IT an actual crucifixion, Doctor Hébert thought, because it was not actually a cross. Only a pole, or a log rather, with the bark still on it and scars on the bark toward the top, from the chain that had dragged it to this place, undoubtedly. A foot or eighteen inches below the mark of the chain, the woman’s hands had been affixed to the wood by means of a large square-cut nail. The left hand was nailed over the right, palms forward. There had been some bleeding from the punctures and the runnels of blood along her inner forearms had hardened and cracked in the dry heat, from which the doctor concluded that she must have been there for several hours at the least. Surprising, then, that she was still alive.
Pulling against the vertex of the nail, her pectoral musculature had lifted her breasts, which were taut, with large aureoles, nipples distended. Although her weight must have pulled her diaphragm tight, the skin around her abdomen hung comparatively slack. At her pudenda appeared a membranous extrusion from which Doctor Hébert averted his eye. Her feet were transfixed one over the other by the same sort of homemade nail as held her hands.
Sitting his horse, Doctor Hébert was at a level with her navel. He raised his head. Her skin was a deep, luminous black; he had become somewhat familiar with the shade since he had been in the country, but was not knowledgeable enough to place her origin from it. Her hair was cut close to the skull, which had the catlike angularity which the doctor, from the sculptural point of view, found rather beautiful. Her large lips were turned out and cracking in the heat, falling a little away from her teeth, and the look of them made the doctor’s own considerable thirst seem temporarily irrelevant. When he had first ridden up, her eyes had shown only crescents of white, but now the lids pulled farther back and he knew that she was seeing him.
The cat-shaped head hung over on her shoulder, twisting the cords of her neck up and out. He could see the big artery bumping slowly there. Her eyes moved, narrowing a little, at their sideways angle. She saw him, but was indifferent to what she saw. The doctor’s tongue passed across his upper lip, once, twice, stiff as a file. He turned in the saddle and looked back into the long allée down which he had come. This avenue ran east to west for almost a mile, bordered by citrus trees whose branches had laced to the density of a thick hedge. From the far end of the allée, the pole had first appeared to him centered like the bead in a gun sight. Now the red round of the sun was dropping quickly into the notch where he had first entered, and the glare of it forced him to squint his eyes. He had gone astray some time that morning and had ridden through the afternoon over ill-made roads, if they were roads at all, without meeting anyone. When at last he came to the edge of the cane fields, he had called out to the cultivators there, but had not been able to understand what they said in reply.
Night came quickly in these parts. It might be dark before he could retrace his way to the other end of the allée. Doctor Hébert pressed a heel into his horse’s flank and rode around the pole. The citrus trees, more sparsely set, fanned out around the edges of the compound as though they had meant to encircle it but failed. What vegetation there was looked completely untrained and much of the yard was full of dust. From one of the scattered outbuildings, a deep-voiced dog was barking. The doctor rode within a few yards of the long low building which was the grand’case, dismounted and walked the remaining distance to the pair of wooden steps to the gallery, where a white woman in déshabille was sitting in a wooden chair with her head sunk down on her chest.
“Your pardon,” Doctor Hébert said, mounting the first step.
The woman raised her head and rearranged her hands in her lap. In one hand she held a glass half full of a cool-appearing liquid with a greenish tint. “Oh,” she said. “You have come.”
The doctor stepped onto the planks of the gallery, removed his hat and inclined his head. “I have a terrible thirst,” he said. “I beg you.”
“Bien s?r,” she said, and clapped her hands sharply together. The doctor waited. His horse, waiting in the yard with the reins on its neck, lowered its head and snorted at the dust and raised it. There were steps from within and the doctor turned. A mulatto woman in a madras turban came scurrying out of the central door, carrying another glass which she presented to the doctor with a sort of crouch. He took a long rash gulp which made him gasp, and held the glass a little away from him to look at it. The concoction was raw cane rum with lime juice and a cloying amount of sugar. He finished the drink in several more cautious sips, while the white woman spoke to the mulattress in Creole.
“It is arranged,” she finally said, turning back to the doctor, who now noticed that her eyes seemed a little bloodshot. “My husband…” Her head swung away as her voice trailed off. She looked out across the compound toward the pole.
“Je vous remercie,” Doctor Hébert said. There seemed no place to leave the glass; he stooped and set it on the floor. The horse shook its head as he approached. He took the reins and led it around the back of the grand’case and wandered among the outbuildings until he discovered the stable. At the rear of the roofed hall was a water trough made from an enormous dugout log. The horse drank and snuffled and blew onto the water and drank deeply again. The doctor watched its big throat working, then knelt and put two fingers into the trough. The water was cool and clear and he thought that it must often be replenished or changed. He cupped his hands and drank and ran his wet palms back over his hair. With a forefinger he detached a long soggy splinter from the side of the trough and watched it drift logily to the bottom.
A groom of some sort had appeared at his back, but Doctor Hébert waved him away and led the horse to a stall himself, where he unsaddled it and gave it a bit of cane sugar from a cake he carried in the pocket of his duster. Slinging his saddlebags over his shoulder, he left the stable and walked back toward the grand’case.
The barking had taken up again and the doctor approached the shed it seemed to come from. When he put his eye to the crack in the door a big brindled mastiff smashed against it, backed off and lunged again, striking head-on into the wood with all its weight and force. The doctor withdrew abruptly and continued his path to the house.
A dark-haired man of middle height stood on the gallery. He wore a white shirt and breeches bloused into riding boots, and he held a gold-pommeled cane in both hands across his thighs.
“Bienvenu,” he said, “to Habitation Arnaud. I myself am Michel Arnaud. You will dine here. You will pass the night.”
“Heureux,” the doctor said, and bowed. “I am Antoine Hébert.”
“Please to enter,” Arnaud said, indicating the open door with his cane. As the doctor passed through, another domestic relieved him of his saddlebags and carried them away through another doorway at the rear of the large central room. It was dim within, the oilpaper over the windows admitting little of the fading light.
“In perhaps one hour we will go to table,” Arnaud said. Standing at the outer doorway, he swatted his thigh with the cane. “You will wish to rest, perhaps.”
“Yes,” said Doctor Hébert. “Your people, they will feed my horse?”
“Immediately,” Arnaud said, slapping himself once more with the cane as he turned farther out onto the gallery.
In the small room at the rear the slave had hung the doctor’s saddlebags on a peg on the wall and stood waiting beside it, bobbing his head. He was barefoot and wore short pants and a loose shirt of the same coarse cloth and, incongruously, a black coat that looked as if it might have been cast off by the master.
“De l’eau?” Doctor Hébert said, without absolute expectation of being understood. The slave bowed out. Doctor Hébert hung his duster on the wall beside the saddlebags and sat down in a chair to remove his boots. His temples pounded when he straightened up, the rum undoubtedly contributing to this effect. In the room were one other wooden chair and a paillasse and one small oilpapered window. With a little clink, the slave set down a crockery pitcher and cup on the floor, then backed out quietly, closing the door. Doctor Hébert poured a cup of water and drank it and lay down on his back. The papered window was no more than a pale patch dissolving slowly on the wall. After a time he became aware of the shifting of bare feet in the outer room. At the jingle of a little bell he got up and replaced his boots.
Four candles in heavy candlesticks were burning on the long table in the main room, and the table was laid with covers of silver and heavy imported faience. Arnaud, standing at the head of the table, indicated to the doctor a place at his right. A slave drew back the chair and then adjusted it once the doctor had seated himself. The slave in the black coat, who seemed to fill some sort of butler’s role, settled Arnaud in the same way, stepped back and waited. Above the table, a circular fan of boards began to move when a boy in a corner pulled a rope. At the end of the table opposite Arnaud, a fourth slave stood in attendance, although no place had been laid there.
“My wife is unable to join us at this moment,” Arnaud said.
“She is unwell, perhaps,” the doctor said, wondering if his glance had betrayed some false expectancy.
Arnaud stared at him. “Pour un coup de tafia elle ferait n’importe quoi,” he said. For a shot of rum, she will do anything. “Alors, mangeons.” At that, the slaves moved forward to lift the covers and present the several platters one by one. This burst of activity allowed the doctor to cover his moment of confusion. He had been on the point of offering his professional services, which evidently would not have done at all.
There was a platter of highly seasoned pork slices, a sort of ragout of sweet potatoes, nothing green. A bowl of pickles, one of jam, and a loaf of rather leaden bread. The wine was more than tolerable and Arnaud poured it liberally, or rather caused it to be poured, by making minute gestures with a finger. As on other such occasions the doctor was slightly unnerved by the silent presence of the slave behind his chair; whenever he thought of reaching for anything on the table the slave would move to anticipate him.
Arnaud ate with dispatch, if not relish, and did not seem disposed to offer further conversation. In the candlelight his face had an olive tone. He had a weak chin, plump cheeks and a small plummy mouth like a woman’s. In spite of the fan’s agitation a sheen of sweat had appeared on his forehead. The doctor himself felt a little flushed, perhaps by the high seasoning of the food. He hoped most sincerely that he was not taking fever.
When the edge of his appetite was blunted, he allowed his eyes to slide around the larger area of the room, though there was little for them to dwell on. Only the other doorways interrupted the walls; there were no pictures and no other ornament except for a large gilt-framed mirror. Toward the door to the gallery some more empty chairs were grouped around a low table made of local wood.
“We are very plain here,” Arnaud said.
“Perhaps your stay is temporary,” said Doctor Hébert. “You will make a great fortune and return to France.”
“It seems unlikely that France will be any longer in existence when and if I ever amass a great fortune,” Arnaud said. “News reaches us so slowly, it is more than possible that they have already burned and murdered their way from one end of the country to the other at this moment, only we have yet to hear of it.”
“I do not believe that matters are quite so desperate,” the doctor said. “Although certainly they may set one’s head awhirl.”
“You may expect heads to be whirling down the public roads before this time is done,” Arnaud said.
“Of course,” the doctor said, “one hopes for a degree of moderation.”
“I do not see that any middle course is viable,” Arnaud said. “Not if the madmen in the National Assembly fall any further under the sway of Les Amis des Noirs. They understand nothing of the real conditions here. All this jabbering of liberty may be very well in France but among us it is nothing but incendiary. We will be brought to anarchy. Civil war. And worse.”
He snapped his fingers and the three slaves moved to clear the table of the platters. When they had gone out toward the kitchen shed, the room fell quiet, except for the creaking of the fan. Doctor Hébert watched the black boy who crouched in the corner, pulling at the rope. His face was turned away toward the wall and a large ear stuck out at right angles to his head.
“Restraint on the part of all factions is undoubtedly to be desired,” Doctor Hébert said. He had accustomed himself to uttering such platitudes since he had first arrived in the colony. All political subjects were dangerously volatile, and he found it difficult to make a quick and accurate estimate of where anyone stood on them. He would have hesitated to express a sincere conviction even if he had had the opportunity of forming one.
“I should like to see the Pompons Rouges restrained with a weight of chains,” Arnaud said. “That rabble at Port-au-Prince will ruin themselves as well as us if nothing is done to contain them. Though they do not know it. It is an appalling blindness. We got off easily from that affair of last October but I would not expect such a matter to go so fortunately a second time.”
The slaves were now returning from the yard, carrying a silver coffee service and a platter of mango and lemon slices and another of small dry cakes. Doctor Hébert accepted some pieces of fruit, tasted the mango, and sipped at his coffee.
“One might say that it went quite unfortunately for Ogé,” he said.
“I am little concerned with Ogé’s fortunes,” Arnaud said. “He had done better to remain in France.”
“Where many think it a hard punishment to be broken on a wheel of knives,” the doctor said. “For a mulatto or for any man.”
“Let it dissuade them from following his example, in that case,” said Arnaud. “Ogé would have raised the cultivators. It is unthinkable.”
“You speak freely,” Doctor Hébert said, with an involuntary glance at the slave who stood behind Arnaud’s chair, his face composed to a perfect blank.
“Free?” Arnaud said. “Sir, I have begun to develop a distaste for the sound of that word.”
Above them, the fan creaked on its axis, wood fretting against wood. A film of sweat on the doctor’s forehead was turning slightly chill. He moved his hand toward his wineglass and the slave behind him leaped forward to refill it.
“You are lately come from France yourself?” Arnaud inquired.
“I have been here for about five weeks,” the doctor said.
“And where were you bound when you came here?”
“From Ennery to Le Cap,” Doctor Hébert said. “From Habitation Thibodet, near Ennery. The husband of my sister was the proprietor there.”
“I do not know him.”
“I believe you are fortunate,” the doctor said. “He appears to have been seven parts scoundrel. The marriage was inadvisable—by the result at least. My sister had departed before I arrived and as yet I have been unable to trace her.”
He stopped speaking and cleared his throat, realizing that in his haste to avoid politics he had steered too deeply into personal confidences. He did not much care for the fruity smile on Arnaud’s little mouth.
“And what of his other three parts, this Thibodet?”
“Oh, I would not deny him a degree of roguish charm, when he wished to exercise it. But he was three parts solid gold. I do not mean to be metaphorical. He was an extremely wealthy scoundrel.”
“You employ the past tense.”
“He died,” Doctor Hébert said. “Quite suddenly, soon after my arrival at his house.” He had not killed his brother-in-law, but there was that about Arnaud that made him wish it to appear as if he might have done so.
“It is an unhealthy country,” Arnaud said. “Many die here.”
“Yes,” Doctor Hébert said. “I should mention that I am myself a physician. And I would repay your hospitality—”
“We have no illness here,” Arnaud said. “Though you are kind.” He pushed his chair back, and the slaves again commenced to clear the table, as though his movement was a signal.
“And yourself?” Doctor Hébert said. “In what part of France did you originate?”
“I was born here,” Arnaud said shortly, and stood up. “Excuse me.”
He picked up a candlestick and moved to a door behind his seat, which was shut with a padlock, and opened it with a key he took from his breeches pocket. From behind, his plumpness made him almost pear-shaped, and there was a hint of effeminacy in his step. The slave in the coat followed him into the room, where there must have been a draft, for the candle guttered. It was a storeroom, the doctor saw, with shelves of flour and other imported foods, many ranks of bottles, and more shelves of tools. Arnaud emerged with an ax in his hand. The slave came after him, carrying two mattocks.
“I have a little task outside,” Arnaud said. “I will return momentarily.”
“I believe I will accompany you,” the doctor said.
Arnaud arched an eyebrow, but said nothing. The doctor followed him through the outer door. The slave who had waited on him at table now stood on the gallery with a lighted torch. At a word from Arnaud he led the way down the steps into the compound; Arnaud and the slave with the mattocks went after him. Doctor Hébert lagged a little way behind the procession. It was markedly cooler outside by this time. Though there was no moon, the sky was clear and so long as he kept away from the torchlight the stars were extraordinarily bright.
At the foot of the pole, Arnaud stopped and took the torch from the slave and raised it. From a few feet back, Doctor Hébert saw the woman’s body illuminated as high as her rib cage. There was no evidence of breathing.
“Well, it is finished,” Arnaud said. He spoke to the slaves in Creole: “Ou kómasé travay la.” With a reluctant sluggishness the two blacks took up the mattocks and began digging at the base of the pole, which the doctor now saw was supported by a packing of rocks and earth. Arnaud watched the mattocks swinging. He set the ax head on the ground and leaned his weight on the handle. When the slaves had cleared the base of the pole, he smacked it with a one-handed swipe of the ax’s blunt end. The two slaves sprang away as the pole fell backward. The woman’s head bounced slackly against the wood, with a dense, compact sound. The pole rolled over a quarter turn and was stopped from rolling farther by her body.
Arnaud passed the torch back to the slave who had been holding it before and stood looking down at the corpse. He held the ax in both hands across his thighs in the same way he had earlier held his cane, the handle indenting his flesh slightly. The doctor stepped a little nearer to him.
“And what will become of the infant now?”
Arnaud snapped his head around. “How did you come to know about that?”
“My profession,” the doctor said drily, and pointed. “She had not even time to pass the afterbirth.”
“Time?” Arnaud said. “She killed her child the moment it was born. She stole a nail and drove it through its head. That nail.” He raised the ax high and struck down at the impaled hands, severing them both crisply at the wrists. The doctor was impressed by the force of the stroke.
“It was a child of the pariade,” Arnaud said. “Some sailor’s bastard, a half-breed like your Ogé.” He swung the ax again, and again. It took him four or five blows to cut through the ankles and he was breathing hard when he had done it.
“There,” he said. “Let them raise that.”
Doctor Hébert glanced at the two slaves, who stood as woodenly as they had behind the dinner table. “Do you really believe that they can raise the dead?”
“It is not a matter of what I believe.” Head down, the ax angled out from Arnaud’s hand, describing a pendulous arc over the dead woman’s head. “I paid twelve hundred pounds for that, and not eight months ago. Breeding stock, if you like. It is ruinous. If not abortion, it is suicide. They are animals.”
“One does not ordinarily torture animals,” the doctor said. “I have never known an animal to be a suicide.”
“You are a sentimentalist, perhaps,” Arnaud said. “You believe they are like little children.”
“I believe they are like men and women,” Doctor Hébert said.
“Indeed,” said Arnaud. “Then you must be a Jacobin.”
“I consider myself to be a scientist,” the doctor said.
Arnaud stared at him, then sighed. “You have lost your way,” he said. “If you were going to Le Cap you have strayed considerably. There is a passable road from here to Marmelade and there you may rejoin the grand chemin.”
“Thank you,” the doctor said, looking back toward the grand’case and the small yellow squares of its candlelit windows. Behind the house the dog had recommenced to bark. “Well, I see that it is late. I had better retire.”
“I am in a position to offer you a glass of brandy,” Arnaud said.
“I think I had best decline,” the doctor said. “I have had a long ride today and look forward to another tomorrow.” He bowed and walked out of the circle of torchlight.
There was a glow from the crack beneath his bedroom door when he approached it, but he thought nothing of this; a slave had probably brought a candle while he had been in the yard. Head lowered, he sat down on a chair and dragged off his left boot, not looking up until something suddenly blocked the light. A woman stood between him and the candle, which glittered through the loose weave of her clothing and outlined every detail of her body in black. The doctor had not yet got used to the degree of undress Creole women affected. He stood up abruptly and stumbled forward on his unshod foot. The woman hooked her hands into the waistband of his breeches and sat down backward on the paillasse, drawing him down after her.
The doctor was obliged to brace his hands on her shoulders to keep his balance. The bare skin was a bluish white and hot to his touch. He had suspected some misguided extension of Arnaud’s hospitality, sending a mulattress to his bed, but it was the same woman he had seen on the gallery when he arrived, Madame Arnaud, presumably. She had let her hair down; it hung in thin pale crinkles into the loosened throat of her negligee. Her face still had a prettiness about it, but was puffed out of shape, and the spots of high color at her cheekbones looked unnatural, though they were not paint. Her eyes were gray-green and the left pupil had shrunk smaller than the right because it was nearer to the candle. The eyes were aimed at Doctor Hébert but he would not have ventured to suppose what they saw in his place.
Removing her hands from his waistband felt like plucking the claws of a dead bird from a branch. He took a step backward, unsteady between his bare foot and his booted one.
“I am sorry to see that you are unwell,” he said. “I do not think it very serious, however. An agitation of the nerves. You must rest for three hours in the heat of the day and of course take care to avoid the sun. Have your cook prepare a strong consommé each evening. Lemons and oranges are plentiful here; I would suggest that you partake of them often. It would be best to abstain from spiritous liquors for a time. Some wine, perhaps, to strengthen your blood. But for the moment, sleep will be your great restorer.”
Madame Arnaud had gathered her hair and was holding it with one hand at the nape of her neck. A thin blue vein wriggled beneath the clear skin of her temple. Doctor Hébert recalled what her husband had said, For a shot of rum, she would do anything. However, it was common usage to keep the storeroom locked wherever there were so many house slaves. Also common usage for the mistress of the house to keep a key.
Madame Arnaud put her head to one side and smiled at him with a queer jerk, the style of coquetry one might expect from a marionette on strings. The smile erased itself as quickly as it had appeared, and she rose and moved past him in short tripping steps and left the room. As she opened the door to depart, the doctor thought he might have seen Arnaud standing on the gallery, fidgeting with his cane. He shut the door after her and leaned on it with his palm. His head felt light and his stomach was uneasy, and when he pulled his hands away, he saw they had acquired a tremor. He undressed rapidly, hanging his garments one over another on the last peg on the wall. Kneeling beside the paillasse he crossed himself and said Our Father once hurriedly. At the rear of his mind the phrase repeated, O let it not be fever.
After the brief prayer he swung his legs up onto the bed and covered himself and lay there, concentrating on composure. The fevers here could cut a man down almost as quickly as the guillotine. The doctor breathed with care, deeply and deliberately, in and out. In a high corner of the room, shadows wavered over a spiderweb. When he reached to pinch out the candle, his hand had grown perfectly steady once more. But a little light still reached the room, over the partition walls, which stopped a few inches short of the ceiling. In the next room he could hear the sound of someone breathing. He lay in the half dark, rubbing the burned tallow from the candle between his thumb and forefinger, thinking uselessly of one thing and another. Thibodet had seemed in perfect health the day he had arrived. Afterward, his affairs appeared a wretched tangle, despite the evidence of great wealth somewhere, or perhaps it was only because the doctor understood so little of plantation management. He did not much trust the gérant, who appeared to have partnered his brother-in-law in most of his debaucheries. Perhaps he too would die before long. In a week Thibodet had lost half his body weight and his skin had shrunk and yellowed on his skull and a black effluvia poured from his every orifice, soiling the bed faster than the slave could clean it. He lashed his head from side to side and cried that he had no notion where Elise might have gone, though he hoped she was at the devil. She had had as many lovers as he, he declared, and had probably eloped with one or another, to Jamaica or Martinique. She might have sailed in an American naval vessel, she might have run away to join the maroons. Thibodet bolted up and turned to vomit into a pan. The movement tumbled him out of the bed and the doctor felt himself spinning too, delirious, as he saw her coming painfully toward him on the stumps of her ankles, arms outstretched. Madame Arnaud, or no, it was Elise herself, younger than she ought to have been, her face at sixteen, seventeen. Her gown was hanging off one shoulder. Blood spurted mightily from her severed wrists, and as she reached out to embrace her brother she opened her mouth and howled like a wolf. The doctor was on the floor beside the paillasse, bunched on his knees and knuckles, gasping and trembling. He shook himself and sat back on his heels. Now it was completely dark in the room, and a cool sweat bathed him. In the shed outside, the howling declined and broke off into that same deep-throated barking as before.
No, it was not fever, the doctor thought with a slight inward smile. Merely an agitation of the nerves. He got up and found his trousers on the peg and put them on. Barefoot and bare-chested, he went out to the gallery. A breeze was shivering the cane mats that closed either end of the long porch. In the exhilaration of his escape from the nightmare, the doctor felt preternaturally sensitive; he could have counted the hairs on his chest when the breeze lifted them, or numbered the splinters on the post when he placed his palm against it. He was not leaning for support, but only caressing the wood.
Behind the house the dog stopped barking and he heard the scratching of its claws against the dirt as it began to run and then the muted smash of its body against the heavy door. There was something else. He went down the two steps from the gallery and started across the compound, toward the ragged line of trees that scattered away from the denser hedging of the entrance allée. His feet were tender; he could feel the powdered dust caking up between his toes, and whenever he stepped on a pebble, he winced a little. By the time he had reached the trees his eyes had adjusted to the starlight. Beyond them the land dipped gently down and rose farther on and he could see one field after another checkered by the tight shrubbery of citrus trees that divided them, and he saw the starlight shining on the narrow channels that brought the water in. Where the cultivation ended the land rose sharply up and up and was a mountain, and he could not have measured the height of it if not for the stippled patterns of stars that began to appear at its limit. That was where the drumming came from, one pattern so low he could not really hear it, only feel a dim vibration of the small bones in his ears, and another drum sounding higher, beaten intermittently, like a voice calling to someone and waiting for answer and calling again. Surely it would have awakened any dreamer. The doctor’s hands were curled over the prickly twigs of the two trees he had stopped between. His heart and lungs were working powerfully and there was a potent sense of health and vigor that seemed to rise through the soles of his bare feet and work through every vital part of him. He stood still there for quite a time and then began to circle around the edges of the compound.
The pole still lay where it had been, but every part of the body had been removed and the nails also had been pulled out. Doctor Hébert stepped over it and walked back toward the grand’case. Arnaud was sitting on the gallery, dandling his cane, balancing it and letting it drop from the vertical and catching the ornate pommel just before it tilted out of his reach. The reddened point of his cheroot glowed and faded and swept down to his knee. The doctor wondered, as he came up, if he might have failed to notice his host there when he first left the house.
“You are wandering,” Arnaud said. He rested the cane against his outstretched leg.
The doctor walked up the steps and stood beside him. “Something woke me,” he said. “A silence. The dog stopped barking.”
“That’s how it is,” Arnaud said. He held a bottle up to the doctor, who swallowed from it, tasting a grapy thickness of sticks and stems and then the brilliant heat of eau-de-vie.
“The dog,” the doctor said. “That is an animal you have there. Do you always keep him penned?”
“It’s necessary,” Arnaud said. “I trained him for the maréchaussée. He only understands killing, this dog. There is a band of maroons in the area, very troublesome.”
“There?” Doctor Hébert said, swinging his shoulders toward where the pitch-black of the mountain interrupted the spangled blue-black of the sky. The movement of the deeper drum still trembled at the limit of his hearing. He noticed the shape of the mountain’s dark to be vaguely reminiscent of a hog’s head.
Arnaud pulled at his cheroot and flipped it over the edge of the board floor. It rolled a little way, sprinkling sparks, then stopped, the coal paling against the ground. Arnaud took the bottle from the doctor’s hands and poured from it into the glass he held. “That may be,” he said. “There will be slaves from this plantation, certainly. And from others which are near.”
“Why do you not forbid such gatherings?” said the doctor.
“Oh, of course they are forbidden,” Arnaud said, proffering the bottle. Doctor Hébert took it and held it out from the overhang of the roof so that it caught a glitter of the starlight. It was a slender, tapered vessel, the body just double the width of the elongated neck.
“They will be dancing,” Arnaud said. “There are dances for the dead. One knows, even when one does not hear.”
“Truly,” Doctor Hébert said.
Arnaud swallowed noisily from his glass. “To them everything is forbidden,” he said, “and to us everything is permitted. As you are a scientist, I leave it to you to determine the precise difference of our conditions.”
“You surprise me,” the doctor said, and took a last drink from the bottleneck. “Well, that will not be the work of a moment. I thank you again for everything.” He set the bottle on the floor by Arnaud’s chair and withdrew into the house.
The remainder of the night he slept without stirring, and woke automatically just at first light. He dressed quickly and quietly, lifted his saddlebags and passed through the main room, which seemed dim and dingy at this hour. There was no sign that anyone else had awakened within. Outdoors the compound was also deserted, except for a pair of chickens picking gravel around the back, but the dog began barking when he passed its shed. The doctor’s temples tightened at the sound.
In the stall the horse was nosing at the last scatter of a flake of hay. Doctor Hébert saddled and bridled it and gave it water at the trough. He had no appetite himself, and was eager to be gone. When the horse had drunk, he broke off another corner of sugar to give it. The horse took the sugar and then went on nuzzling and lipping the butt of his palm. The doctor curved his hand up to stroke the soft dark skin around its nostrils and spoke to the horse in gentle nonsense syllables. Thibodet had named it Espoir, which struck the doctor as somewhat ridiculous, considering that it was a gelding.
The dog broke off its barking sharply as Doctor Hébert led the horse outside and swung up into the saddle. He had scarcely had time to take note of the silence when he saw the chickens scatter and loft themselves into clumsy flight and the dog coming grimly between them, straight for him at a dead run. He yanked the horse in the direction of its leap and the dog struck the horse on its shoulder, sprawled back on the ground, and was up again instantly. The horse reared and let out a panicked whinny, wheeled and bunched itself to kick. The doctor leaned down into the horse’s mane and groped in the bottom of his right-hand saddlebag, blindly turning over his instruments and the sacks of medicines there. Again the dog was trying to close and, turning the horse more tightly with his left hand, the doctor kicked out at it clumsily with his boot still in the stirrup. The dog’s teeth clicked against the stirrup iron and it fell back and recouped itself. Doctor Hébert straightened up in the saddle, bringing the heavy double-barreled pistol out of the saddlebag and bracing it over his left arm, which held the reins. When the dog launched itself he shot it once in its open mouth, and the bullet, exiting from the base of the skull, flipped it over backward. The dog lay thrashing on the packed ground and the doctor sighted at a place behind its ear and fired the second barrel. The dog convulsed and stretched its legs, and the doctor felt confident that it was dead.
It seemed brighter and warmer than it had been, and from all sides there was a jabbering in Creole. Several of the house slaves had come out of the different outbuildings and were edging in cautiously on the carcass of the dog, whose big splayed paws were still twitching in the dust. The horse was moving in nervous jerks, and Doctor Hébert stroked its neck with the two free fingers of his left hand to calm it. His right hand still held the pistol pointing straight up. His ears were ringing from the shots and he felt giddy, as though the gunpowder smell had made him drunk. Arnaud had come out the back door of the grand’case and stood with his feet apart, looking from the doctor to the dog’s body and back.
“Accept my apologies,” Doctor Hébert said. “I had to give myself permission. You understand the predicament, I am sure.”
Arnaud said nothing in reply, but merely went on looking. He was standing just as the doctor had first seen him when he had arrived the afternoon before, holding his cane in two hands and pressing it into the meat of his thighs. The doctor contemplated the curious thought that possibly everything which had occurred between the one stance and the other was an illusion and no time had really passed at all. He saluted Arnaud with the sulfurous barrel of the pistol, and kicked the horse and cantered around the corner of the house toward the mouth of the green allée.