All Souls' Rising (42 page)

Michel Arnaud and Doctor Hébert were both present for the execution. Arnaud was aghast, in a state of shock; it seemed that the repudiation of his testimony had shaken him more deeply than anything else that had yet befallen him. The doctor was obviously, catastrophically drunk, swinging a brandy bottle from his slack fingers and weeping openly without shame. Between them stood Claudine Arnaud, watching closely and missing no detail; her eyes were parched and hot as burning stones.

S
EPTEMBER
1802

M.
PLACIDE LOUVERTURE
,
Belle-Isle-en-Mer
,

M. Placide, mon ami fils de mon maître I am write to tell you of what am arrive to M. v. père mon maître. I have been four week one month since we are coming at the end of this one journey across the France. This place is a crête in the mountains as it would be in Sainte Domingue but so much far inside the France and so much high. The name it is Fort de Joux. Going we aren’t to see nothings of where we go there, not I and not M. v. père mon maître. We are in a close carriage with no way of regard outside. we are go up and up through some very tight turning like the lace of a boot and the coach do twist and rock on every side. Worse like the ship but for less long
.

When they have open the coach to take us out we are come again inside the walls so we don’t see nothings of where we are. Only to see the sky one time and feel the cold which is much colder than our mountains even in the summer here of France
.

I am not to see how this fort is there until I am three weeks they take me out bring me away. They take me out though I would not go I would stay near to M. v. père mon maître even if they would make me free but they did not. I am now in this prison of Nantes. I have trapped to myself a sickness of cold from the fort de Joux where it is cold even in summer and wet. No one to me tells what have done what crime

Each day M. v. père mon maître have speak to me of you you mother you brother Isaac
St. jean. Between us we remember much of you and we are talk only of you between us when we together come. If my heart will fall too low he does upraise it, and I so to him when it is able to me. This fashion I serve him and can not any other because we have no things in this two cachot where we are place. May Be that you will have words of M. v père also to you because the commandant of Fort dejoux have allow him things of write
.

Now I will tell you how it is this place of M. v. père mon maître at this Fort de joux that you when you know of it your hearts will be together. One must pass three keyholes to come to this cachot all like an underground. One place wet like a bad hole of crab. Then after that one comes one corridor with two cachots one for M. v. père and one for
MARS PLAISIR
. That is all
.

I would they lock us in one same cachot but not. We are together each day some hour or two only. Some hour each day they will bring me out to walk inside the walls, under the guard as you will see. For M. v. père mon maître, they make this never to him. Only in cachot all day and enduring the night. There is one small fire but not enough of wood
.

Our happiness it is talk of you you mother and you brother and remember between us manything of you. Now we are each alone and in far places. I was nothing when my master raised me up to stand beside him. Now I am in this prison of Nantes, how will I raise him up?

I am pray to n. seigneur jsuschrist, there is no other gods in France. May Be, not even that one
.

I have trapped to myself this one bad sickness. In the chest and in the head. Also in this prison of Nantes I have not the money for food or fire. I would even be at fort dejoux if I am able. So I am not alone like here in Nantes prison. They allow me things of write but I do not well say. I know M. v. père mon maître is each day write to government in French. They will not tell me any crime because I did not do any one
.

When they are take me down the mountain they do not the coach closing. This way I am to see how how much a cold a highplace is this Fort de Joux. Going down these lacets I would not see the fort above the cliffs and turns. After when we were in a low place and there is the Fortdejoux ten thousand lieux above me of the mountaintop. It was not to be brought there and put down but dug there in the mountaintop like the crab digs his hole in mud. It was like a grave of stone. A man will rise from a grave of dirt, but how will he come out of stone?

A day when I am make my walkings by the walls, the guard am bring me back some different way to the cachot from like before. We are stop inside this different voûte, for him me show this well. One well set in the stone going down so long away in the dark I am to think myself it must be slaves of France who are make this one. This one well narrow like one man head but a body would not pass it
.

The guard have give me a pebble to throw in, this one sharp little stone. I have drop it, how he sign for me to do. I have hear this one stone hitting on the sides of this stone well but never have I hear it strike into the bottom. Still I do listen this long time but I don’t hear it strike
.

M. Placide mon ami fils de mon maître, I am pray to n. seigneur jschrist that one day we will all be free. I have trapped a sickness so I don’t know long to live. I do not know how to have a letter or any words of you. I am write you mother you brother also but this another day I am

v. serviteur

MARS PLAISIR

B
AILLE, THE COMMANDANT OF THE
F
ORT DE
J
OUX
, was afraid of something, as Toussaint could sense at once. He was an aging man, heavy, white and lumbering, as though he were unused to daylight or disliked it. Toussaint could feel Baille’s lack of ease, and knew that Baille was not afraid of him but of his being there. This cheered him, though he showed nothing of his cheer.

An officer of the guard stood by the wall. Baille asked Toussaint to empty out his pockets. He did so. With a fearful gingery touch, Baille stirred the articles on the tabletop: a broken quill pen, some coins of small denomination, a couple of letters and a watch and chain. Toussaint had kept back two letters and some gold pieces in an inner pocket; he was concerned about a body search, but it did not come.

Baille opened the watch case front and back, looked first at the face and then into the works. He studied the inaudible contractions of the fine silvery spring that moved the second hand. Toussaint leaned a little forward. He knew what troubled Baille so much: the escape of two imprisoned officers of the Vendée from this very place only a few weeks before. The thing Baille feared must certainly be possible. The fear itself might make it possible…But Toussaint did not show his smile.

Baille returned the watch to him. The other items were put into a bag and taken from the room. Toussaint stood up then, as if it were his prerogative to terminate the interview. Baille did not seem startled or surprised.

They passed along the vaulted corridors in this order: first a guard with keys, then Toussaint, then the officer of the guard, and Baille bringing up the rear. It heartened Toussaint that the commandant was so reluctant to be near him. He kept his face a neutral blank. The cold of the tunnels troubled him but he suppressed any visible shiver. The vaulted ceilings were so low that the taller men must stoop to pass, but Toussaint, with his jockey’s build, could still walk erect.

Baille carried his own ring of keys, and paused to lock each door once they’d passed through it. The door before them was never opened until Baille had locked the door behind. Each door had a small cross-barred hatch set in it, no larger than palm-size, each a head higher than Toussaint’s eye level. The double thickness of the wood of every door was bound with bolts and bands of iron.

The third corridor they traversed was damper than the others; a sheen of water seeped on the raw rock wall to their left side, and water had collected on the floor so that the splashing echoed as they went through. In the next vault, the floor was dry again, or only damp. At its end, the guard unlocked the final door, and stood aside that Toussaint might enter.

When he had gone into the cell and walked as far as the middle of it, he turned to look back. The other three had all remained without, watching him through the doorway. Baille bowed to him, without apparent irony. Toussaint returned the bow. When he raised his head again, the door was already quietly closing. He heard the crunching of the iron teeth of the lock.

He walked first to the end of the
cachot
, where the window was. It had been bricked up over the lower two-thirds of its height, and above this barrier he could just see a section of a slate-blue sky, beyond the outer end of the deep-set embrasure. He turned and walked back, passing the bedstead, a square table with two chairs pushed up under it. To his left was a small fireplace, but no wood.

He had reached the door. His eyes were just flush with the lower edge of the barred peephole. From beyond, he heard the doors locking down along the line of vaults. On the way in, the guard had opened each almost with stealth. Going out, he seemed to prefer to slam them.

Toussaint turned again. The wall opposite the fireplace was quarried out of living stone. There was a glisten of damp on it as well, though it did not run with water so freely as had the wall in the third corridor.

On the table stood a pitcher; when Toussaint lifted it he found it mostly full. He poured some water into his palm and washed his face and hands. There was a cup on the table too, and he poured an inch of the water into the cup and drank it. The water had a faintly brassy taste.

He took out his watch and looked at it, let it depend and swing gently at the length of its chain, then snapped it up into his hand and put it in his pocket. It was just past four, in the afternoon. Certainly it was an illusion that he could
feel
the tick of the watch against his fifth rib.

He walked to the window and again to the door. It was almost automatic to count the steps required for the circuit, but he repressed the number. Standing before the cold fireplace, he became aware that he had wet his boot leather, crossing the third vault.

He picked up one of the chairs and positioned it before the window. Standing on it, he could look over the top of the brickwork. The view was somewhat altered by this change of angle. Now he saw the top of a wall, the corner of a guardpost, and a sentry walking along the rampart.

The iron bars at the end of the embrasure were old and rusting, but the mesh screen beyond the brickwork was much newer. Those officers of the Vendée had filed the bars of their cell, and bribed a guard. Toussaint reached to his arm’s length to touch the screen. The mesh was too fine to admit his fingertips, too fine for even a rolled paper to be pushed through.

He drew his hand partway back, turning it this way and that at the top of the brickwork. An ambiguous current of air stroked across his fingers. A scrap of gray cloud was hastening across the strip of sky he saw above the wall but disoriented as he was, he could not guess which way the wind was blowing.

Part IV

ILLUMINATION

August 1792—June 1793

Don’t try to hold me up

On this bridge now

I got to reach Mount Zion
…

—B
OB
M
ARLEY