All Souls' Rising (31 page)

Then I did not know to go or stay. For days and weeks I did not like to see the child, a stranger with his whiteman name. Merbillay would not go to Bahoruco. She thought that Riau was not sure of the way there and she did not like the walking it would be. I did not have a horse anymore because Jeannot had taken it away. So it happened that I was going alone with Jean-Pic, carrying only the pistols I had kept hidden from Jeannot. But when Toussaint called me, I could not help but come.

At first he spoke over his shoulder without looking at us, only his voice. Then Jean-Pic stepped back into the trees, but I went toward Toussaint like I was dreaming, like there was a
loa
in my head. When he turned toward me I saw him taking a book from his coat pocket and holding it out so I could see it well. The whiteman with the short beard who killed the dog had come down to stand beside him but I did not pay him any attention then.

“I have been wanting to find you, Riau,” Toussaint said. “I think that you remember how to read.”

He held the book to me even nearer. It was a book I knew. Toussaint taught me to read from it along with others. Also it was the book he had been carrying when the whiteman beat him for reading in the street of Haut du Cap.

“You can read it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where you begin.”

When I took the book it seemed to burn my hand like
manchineel
. I let it open anywhere. The words were squirming on the pages. I saw they would burrow through my eyes like worms into my brain, to rule me. My voice was cracked and choking when I read them out.

If any person was intending to put your body in the power of any man whom you fell in with on the way, you would be vexed: but that you put your understanding in the power of any man whom you meet, so that if he should revile you it is disturbed and troubled, are you not ashamed at this?

If there was shame, it did not change anything. This was Epictetus, who had been a slave, speaking to me from the paper. But it was Toussaint, a long time before, who put the words inside my head. So it did not matter if I closed the book or burned it. Jean-Pic went on to Bahoruco, by himself, but I went following Toussaint.

A
UGUST
1802

The interior of the coach was dark, sweat-smelling. Toussaint and his valet Mars Plaisir sat shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. There was no space for them to move apart, and a sweat glue seeped through the fabric of their clothing, binding them together. Mars Plaisir’s knees were uncomfortably cramped against the opposite wall of the cubicle, under the coachman’s box, which was invisible to him. He stretched his long neck toward the gap between the slats nailed and blackened over the window at his right, and flared his nose for a gasp of the outside air. To his left, Toussaint was spottily illuminated by chinks of light that came through the covered window on his side, shining on the gloss of sweat that coated his cheeks. He sat erect, both alert and relaxed, as if he were mounted on a warhorse instead of nailed into this box. There was too little light for Mars Plaisir to fully see his face or make out his expression.

That none should know who was being conveyed, the windows of the coach were sealed. The guard was strong—twelve mounted artillerymen, two gendarmes and their officer—but not so numerous as to attract undue attention. A separate body of soldiers went some miles ahead to clear the roads before they’d pass. The route itself was meant to be the closest secret, but in several of the towns where they were quartered for the night, they seemed to be anticipated, and crowds of curiosity seekers pressed around the coach, vying uselessly for a glimpse of the interior.

Then would come the curses of the mounted soldiers, the warning snap of the coach whip, once the sodden crunch of a musket butt into some overeager voyeur’s teeth. Next, except for the harness jingling and the beat of hooves, silence restored. It was not possible by squinting through the cracks in the window hatches to make out where they were at all in this strange land.

Holding his breath, Mars Plaisir broke wind, or let it slip as quietly as he was able. He twisted his face away from the smell of his interior corruption. He was ashamed, though Toussaint did not react. He never did, but rode in what seemed to be an easy silence, interrupting it at rare moments to tell some anecdote, often of his childhood, or the recollection of some episode he and his valet had shared. Mars Plaisir had little notion what he really might be thinking. The fetid smell lingered, and he recalled the tales he’d heard of slave ships, but those were worse. He and Toussaint were let from the coach to answer nature’s call (when absolutely necessary) and at night they were taken out to bed on pallets in the jail of some small town or other. Here the local dignitaries often made a discreet visit. They came to gape, but not to mock, and usually they observed the forms of courtesy.

They were bound for the Fort de Joux, near the Swiss frontier in the Jura mountains, though neither of them yet knew it. Toussaint had had no answer to his letters to Bonaparte. He was preparing, nonetheless, to be brought to trial. But in the air around the coach, more letters of Leclerc’s invisibly pursued him.

Dans la situation actuelle des choses, sa mise en jugement et son exécution ne feraient que aigrir les esprits des noirs…. Ces hommes se font tuer, mais ils ne veulent pas se rendre
.
^*11

I
N THE CLOSE INTERIOR OF THE COACH
, there was a stuttering sound, a buzz, and a leggy thing brushed across the valet’s face. Startled, he gasped and clawed at himself. The fly, a huge one, bumbled across a wormhole’s worth of light so that he saw it briefly. He clapped his hands around it and for an instant felt its thin legs whispering on his palm, but it worked through the lacing of his fingers and eluded him. As he moved again to seize or crush it, Toussaint caught his arm and restrained him gently.

“Quiet now,” Toussaint said. “Listen.”

At first, Mars Plaisir could hear nothing but the fly, whirring at cracks which were too small for it to squeeze through; he could no longer see it in the dark. Then there was something, beyond the clumping of their escort’s hooves, some other party. Mars Plaisir felt his throat tightening, an odd electricity leaping in his veins. Some days previous a band of horsemen had been seen crossing the Loire and coming in their direction. They’d made no attempt, but their mere appearance brought great consternation among the guard. Toussaint had said nothing of it, but of course he would not speak of it even if there were a plan.

The two patterns of hoofbeats merged, then stopped. The coach pulled itself up shortly. Someone was arguing with the captain of the guard. In his agitation, Mars Plaisir lost his comprehension of the words, but he followed the conversation by its tones: resistance, assertion, a reluctant agreement. Someone prized open the left door of the coach. Mars Plaisir saw the fly escape, dwindling like a mote in his eye, and he blinked as the surprise of sunshine dazed him.

They were officers of the Eighty-second Regiment of the line, once garrisoned in Saint Domingue, and for time under Toussaint’s command. Mars Plaisir recognized a few of their faces: Majeanti, Sigad, a couple of others. The rest were officers who’d only heard of the black general and beheld him now for the first time. It was not a rescue, but a welcome of sorts. They’d come to greet him, make obeisance, lay a finger on his sleeve. Mars Plaisir’s eyes were streaming, and the light had also stunned Toussaint, who reached his hand out, like a blind man, to touch their upturned faces.

Part III

EXCHANGE OF PRISONERS

November 1791—April 1792

Maman w ak apap w tonbe

Nan basen an, Nan basen yo tonbe

Adan avè, w tonbe wo

Nan basen an, nan basen yo tonbe

Pitit ou avè w tonbe

Nan basen an, nan basen yo tonbe

Eve tonbe

Nan basen an, nan basen yo tonbe

Eve o Eve o Eve

—B
OUKMAN
E
KSPERYANS

Chapter Twenty

N
OVEMBER WIND SWEPT A THIN
ragged rain cloud over the streets of Le Cap. Most passersby scurried for shelter in the doorways, but Monsieur Cigny, determining from a glance at the sky that the shower was unlikely to last long, kept striding down the middle of the way, a few raindrops collecting on his thick black hair, glistening in the curls of his beard. He was returning from the government house to his offices on the quay, but he had it in mind that he might in passing make one of his rare appearances at his wife’s salon.

The cloud passed over; it had rained scarcely enough to settle the dust. The sun shed a weak radiance through the haze. The wind had died, replaced by a damp calm settling. Monsieur Cigny crushed a mosquito against his cheek. He entered his house and mounted the steps, absently crumpling the insect’s legs between his fingers.

He came into the parlor unannounced; there was a stir on the sofa cushions as his weighty steps crossed the threshold. It was Pascal, that frail and foppish youth his wife kept dangling from one of her several spider’s threads, straightening hastily from where he’d been lolling on the sofa, his head in her lap perhaps? Isabelle twisted to smile at him across the sofa’s back.

“An unexpected pleasure,” said Madame Cigny. Her husband studied her, wondering if her flush had a source other than the humid heat. But surely it was unlikely that she would carry on her dalliance in the presence of her son, not to mention that mulatto courtesan she’d been, inexplicably, sheltering here these last few months. Nanon was sitting in the corner, amusing Robert with cat’s cradles.

“
Monsieur
.” Pascal jumped to his feet and bowed.

“
Asseyez-vous
.” Monsieur Cigny circled the sofa and walked into the center of the room. Robert ran to him; he swung the boy up into his arms. Pascal shifted a silver flute from a cushion before he reseated himself. Monsieur Cigny noticed a sheaf of music on the low table there; perhaps it was this that had brought Pascal and his wife
tête-à-tête
.

“Well, I have seen our new commissioners,” he announced. “
Messieurs Mirbeck, Roume, et Saint-Léger
…”

“Do you approve them?” Isabelle’s dark eyes narrowed as she spoke. Monsieur Cigny smiled down at her, quite naturally. He recognized her good political sense, and could make use of it even when other departments of their marriage were in utter disarray.

“One must distinguish the men from their mission, I believe,” he said. “Of course they are radicals, though not of the worst kind.” He paused to ruminate.

The three commissioners, sent out to do what they might to resolve the disturbances in the colony, had been selected by the French National Assembly at the time of the decree of May fifteenth, which granted political rights to mulattoes, but, between their appointment and their actual departure from the metropole, there had intervened a new decree, which restored authority over all such matters to the internal governing bodies of the colony itself.

“But they are bound to support the decree of September twenty-fourth,” said Isabelle, anticipating him.

“Indeed, and I believe they will not fail to do so,” Monsieur Cigny said. “But they bring better news than that.” Robert was tugging at his beard; wincing a little, the father disengaged the child’s plump fingers and set him on the floor.

“There are troops coming,” he declared. “Or so they say.”

“A good number?” asked Isabelle.

“Sufficient. As many as ten thousand I have heard. Enough to put down this slave revolt once and for all.” He watched Robert, who had returned to Nanon’s knees.

The woman took up her loop and twirled it dexterously among her fingers. Two dancing figures made of string approached each other, suspended in the cat’s cradle. Monsieur Cigny felt a returning twinge of the irritation that had pricked him when he first came into the parlor. Nanon had rebuffed him the couple of times he’d visited her room at night—this in spite of the obvious pregnancy that proved she could not be so nunnish as she affected to behave with him.

“I thought you’d want to hear the news,” he muttered.

“Oh yes,” said Isabelle, “I am very glad of it.”

“Well then.” He stared at Pascal. To be cuckolded by such a creature, whom he could have broken like a stick across his knee. And would have, if he knew for sure…“I must improve the hour, I suppose.” He nodded, a stiff jerk of his neck, and went out.

On the street his confusion dissipated and again he felt quite cheerful. That the revolt should be suppressed at last—their property on the plain would finally be recovered. He smiled to himself a little as he walked. A freckled mulatto in fancy dress was coming toward him in the opposite direction, swinging a slim, gold pommeled cane. Cigny knew him to be some
grand blanc
’s bastard, though for the moment he did not recall just whose. The decree of September 24 not withstanding, the mulatto did not seem disposed to make way for him. But Monsieur Cigny was as emboldened by the thought of ten thousand French dragoons as if they were already at his back. Coming abreast of the mulatto he swung his shoulder forcefully into his chest, unbalancing the slighter man so that he stumbled into the gutter, with a hissing exhalation of breath. After several more paces, Cigny could not resist looking back. The mulatto was staring after him, twisting his spotted hands on the pommel of the cane in a spasm of impotent fury. Monsieur Cigny smiled at him ironically and continued his way, well pleased.

I
N THE PARLOR
, Pascal had taken up his flute again. He held it cross-wise to his lips and blew across the sounding hole, with a noise like the wind in a bottleneck, short of a true note. Isabelle crossed the room to the window and stood pensively looking down at the street below, then she turned to face the room again. Pascal lowered his instrument.

“The news is good,” he said hesitantly. “The troops?”

“Oh the
troops
,” Isabelle said, in her jingling tone. “I will believe in them when they debark—if then.”

“What do you mean, ‘if then’?”

“An English general sailed later with eighteen thousand men to conquer Cuba,” said Madame Cigny. “Two months later, he had eighteen
hundred
left to him.”

“I’ve heard that story.”

“Yes, it’s well known.” Madame Cigny wrapped her arms about herself and shuddered. “I’m chilled,” she said, though in fact there was a light sheen of perspiration overlying the pallor of her face. She clapped her hands and sent the footman for wine.

In the corner, Nanon was showing Robert how to arrange the cat’s cradle string on his own fingers, but the boy soon lost patience and began shrieking and yanking furiously at the loop. Isabelle, who’d been pouring the wine, replaced the decanter on the tray and went to pick him up. Robert kicked and twisted in her arms, his face empurpling. Disgusted, she set him down and he slid belly-down to the carpet, crying and writhing. Nanon watched him with her large liquid eyes. In her hands another cat’s cradle spun itself, as if unconsciously.

The footman entered and announced the name “Maltrot.” Isabelle, wineglass in hand, beckoned for the caller to be admitted. Choufleur walked into the room holding the slender cane with two hands across his groin, smiling into the corners of the room, a strangely fixed expression on his face, like a petrified cat.

“Ah,” he said. “Good afternoon.”

He looked around, his eyes passing over Nanon with no particular sign of interest. Robert’s tantrum had wound down. He still lay on the floor, with his feet cocked up and crossed behind him, raised on his elbows to watch her cat’s cradles through his drying tears.

No one answered Choufleur’s greeting. Pascal’s hands were trembling slightly, rustling the sheets of music he’d picked up. Madame Cigny’s skin stretched over the sharp bones of her face as if it were tacked to season on a tannery wall.

Choufleur propped the cane on the arm of the sofa. He stooped over the tray for the decanter, poured himself a glass of wine. The glass was egg-sized, leafed with gold, supported by a garnet-colored stem. Choufleur raised it as if in a toast.

“
Santé
,” he said, and drank half the glass. “And thank you.”

“I regret that I can
not
make you welcome,” Madame Cigny said brittlely.

“Is it so?” Choufleur said. “As it happens, I’ve come to call not on you but on this lady.” He looked at Nanon, who averted her eyes. Robert had climbed up from the floor and stood beside her knees; one of her hands went carelessly combing through his curls.

Choufleur looked at Pascal and Madame Cigny as if he expected them to clear the room to afford him greater privacy for his interview with Nanon. He drained his wineglass and replaced it on the tray, then picked up his cane. The silence that followed the tap of the glass on the tray was so heavy that they could all hear one another breathing.

Nanon stood up. She wore a long loose shift of white cotton, and when she rose it hung to the floor uninterrupted from her breasts, so that her pregnancy disappeared behind the straight, clean fall of it. She left the room at the measured pace of a sleepwalker, looking neither left nor right. Choufleur favored the others again with his catlike smile and followed her.

“The audacity—” Pascal began, but Isabelle signaled him to be silent. Robert, looking at the knotted loop of string abandoned on the cushion of Nanon’s seat, looked as if he might weep again. Madame Cigny sent him out with the footman, off to find his nurse.

“The effrontery of that creature, to come here!” Pascal said. “To impose himself upon you—with that name.”

“Oh don’t be tiresome.” Madame Cigny looked across at him with unmasked contempt. She picked up the glass Choufleur had used and rolled the bowl of it across the palm of her left hand.

“If my husband had still been here…” she mused.

“Ah, madame, your
husband
…” Pascal said.

With a quick spasmodic clench she crushed the glass in her left hand; it made a muffled sound like a wet stick breaking. She let the stem fall to the floor and opened her hands to dust the bloodstained shards down onto the carpet. Pascal gasped.

“You’ve hurt yourself.”

“It’s nothing.” Madame Cigny covered her palm with a handkerchief. “Now leave me, please.”

When he had gone, she stood at the window again, alone, squeezing the ball of her handkerchief in her left hand. After a few minutes, she inspected her palm: the pale crisscross of fine cuts there—mere scratches, really.

N
ANON’S ROOM WAS A WHITEWASHED CUBBYHOLE
underneath the eaves. There was a single small window, circular like a porthole on a ship, overlooking an alley beside the house. Its light passed through the fabric of her dress and outlined the rondure of her pregnancy again.

“This room is better made for lying than standing,” said Choufleur, who had to stoop under the slanting eaves.

“Do you think so?” Nanon motioned him toward the single straight-backed chair. There was a white-sheeted pallet and a small table near it, but no other furniture. Choufleur sat down, balancing the cane across his knees.

“It makes a change for you,” he said. “I would not have looked for you in such a spartan setting.”

“I am well enough here,” said Nanon, who remained standing near the window. “Or I was, until today.”

“Yes, I see that.” Choufleur pointed the cane’s tip at her midsection. “Is it his?”

“Whose?”

“You know very well what I mean.” Choufleur’s lips twisted unpleasantly around the words. “Am I to expect a bastard brother?”

“You have nothing to expect from me,” Nanon said.

Choufleur did not speak for a moment. He sat, rolling the cane on his knees. A mosquito dropped from the ceiling and whined elliptically to settle on the back of Nanon’s neck. Inattentively, she pinched it away.

“You’ve taken on his manner,” she said. “Along with his name…and his stick. It doesn’t suit you.”

“The cane, you mean?” Choufleur released the catch and exposed two inches of the sword stick blade, then shot it back into its wooden sheath. Nanon smiled, in spite of herself.

“No, the sword stick agrees with you very well,” she said. “I meant the manner. And what would he say to hear you use his name?”

“The name is mine,” said Choufleur. “I’ll be his heir. In name, in property, and all the rest.”

“Impossible.”

“I claim it,” Choufleur said. “It is my
birthright
. Besides, he’ll have no other. I will make this be.” He stood up, round-shouldered under the eaves, and reached to touch her face. She broke from him, turning to the window.

“You prefer white men,” Choufleur said. “To live in a white household…as a
ménagère
or what you will. To bear white bastard children.”

“When have you offered me
your
protection?” Nanon said. “You were away—you didn’t see what it’s been like. If they had not taken me in here, I’d have been killed in the streets, or worse.”

“There is no worse,” Choufleur said.