All Souls' Rising (44 page)

In the middle of the night he came alive to the sound of hoarse screaming and the grip of hands restraining him. He shook himself upright gasping and, on discovering where he was, he recognized the hands were Nanon’s, her voice softly calling him,
stop, wake up, you are dreaming
…He let his breath out in a whistling sigh.

“What was it?” Nanon said. “Was it the camps?”

“Nothing.” The doctor got out of bed, wiping a slick of sweat from his forehead. “I have forgotten.” In the dark, he padded toward the baby’s cradle and crouched beside it, his head cocked till he heard the light sound of his breathing, a series of the clicks and gurgles the child would make in sleep…

His knees cracked as he stood back up. Nanon was still sitting up in the bed; her face turned in his direction; he felt this though it was too dark to see.

“What was it?” she asked again as he rejoined her.

“
C’etait rien
,” he said. Superstition prevented him from telling a dream before daylight, lest it come true. He fumbled on the night table among his keys and watch until he found the shard of broken mirror he’d kept all through the time of his captivity among the risen blacks and carried daily in his pocket still. His
ouanga
, it might be. In the darkness he could not see a trace of its reflective glint but the pressure of the broken edge against his palm helped relocate him. He put the mirror piece back on the table.

Nanon snorted and rolled onto her stomach; the doctor stroked his fingers over the small of her back. The nightmare image printed and reprinted itself on his inner eyelids. A golden infant thrust aloft into the clouds, skewered through its rib cage on a spear. He forced his mind away from the image, thought of anything else at all. As usual, he was only able to calm himself by imagining the look of his weapons and the weight they’d have in his hands. It was something under an hour before he could return to sleep.

T
HE LENGTHENING OF THE FALL
brought cooler weather, and so the fever season was somewhat abated. Doctor Hébert had been casually impressed into the makeshift medical corps that treated both the new troops and the old. As always among soldiers so freshly out from Europe, disease was rife: dysentery, dengue, malaria, a few fatalities from
mal de Siam
. The doctor grew popular among the troops for his success in easing the symptoms of several of these afflictions, though some would also mock him for the herbal concoctions he employed, calling him an old woman and a witch.

But many of his preparations worked. At least they’d seem to palliate most fevers. For
mal de Siam
he understood no cure, although some few patients did survive it. He knew the symptoms well by now; the yellowed eyes, chills and fever and the deeper bone ache, then days of black treacly vomiting which usually presaged death. As for himself, he was immune and knew it now. Perhaps some time before he’d suffered a mild case—a spell of fever with mild nausea, in his first days at Habitation Thibodet, or even at Arnaud’s, or in the camps. Sometimes, inexplicably, an attack was fairly mild, and left the survivor inoculated against another. The doctor was acclimated now, as much as any seasoned slave or soldier. Death was ever at his shoulder, it was everywhere among the military hospitals, but now he knew he would not die of fever.

Of an evening he inattentively played
chemin de fer
against the house bank of the Regiment Le Cap. Arnaud, Captain Maillart, and the
négociant
Grandmont were playing too, while the roly-poly young Lieutenant Baudin served as banker. Only Arnaud was on a winning streak, the others were all losing—Grandmont quite heavily. The doctor played more cautiously than the others, though he was slightly drunk, folding his poor cards early, letting his small stakes leave him as the price of an hour of male company and a share of brandy and water from the regiment’s store.

“Well, and what of your patients today?” said Captain Maillart.

The doctor shrugged. “Much the same as yesterday,” he said. “Some recover and others fall ill. I’d give you a third or quarter of them
hors de combat
.”

“Among the new troops?” Arnaud said.

The doctor nodded, and folded his hand. Grandmont grinned with his bad teeth as he flipped over his losing cards and shoved his stake across to Baudin. The seriousness of his losses did not seem to trouble him much. Laughing, he rose and walked to a shelf where he took up a pen and wrote out another note to borrow yet more money from the bank. Already he had gambled away perhaps three hundred pounds of sugar…Mentally, the doctor tried to translate the loss into
main-d’oeuvre
, the labor and lost lives of slaves, but could not do it. He sipped his brandy. Arnaud was still looking at him with an odd fixity.

“And are more affected among the troops of the line?” he said. “Or among those National Guards?”

The doctor noticed that Maillart had shut his cards up in his fingers and was awaiting his reply with a close attention.

“I couldn’t say.” The doctor forced an unnatural chuckle. “Diseases don’t commonly make such nice political distinctions.” He looked back and forth from Arnaud to Maillart, thinking it odd how thickly they’d thrown in together these last weeks, when their characters were so poorly matched, or so he thought. Of course Arnaud had lately been very energetic in raising companies of militia…and yet the regular troops of the line would ordinarily despise such reinforcements.

“
En tout cas
,” the doctor said, seeking to turn the conversation, “it would be for the better if all these fresh troops were moved out of the city. Away from the coast and the bad air of the
marais
…”

“Yes, and where they might accomplish something,” Arnaud said, returning his attention to the fresh hand he’d been dealt. “So long they’ve been here, and not the first move against the brigands. No, they leave the troops to rot in Le Cap until they are decimated by disease. This Desparbés is a weak old man…”

“Desparbés is a good soldier,” Captain Maillart said rather sharply. “But he’s hamstrung by the commissioners. They will not give him rein enough to act…he has no course but to hold his hand.”

“And a plague on the Commission too,” Arnaud snapped. “What have they done since they arrived but stir up the white
canaille
against us?” He drew to nineteen—a jack turned up—and disgustedly shoved his coins toward Baudin.

“Perhaps Roume will accomplish something with them,” Grandmont said reflectively. Roume, the only member of the first commission still in the colony, had come up from the west to confer with his successors; previously no one had much trusted him, but now, by contrast to these new Jacobin commissioners, he was much better liked among these circles than before.

“Ridiculous,” said Arnaud. “He’ll succeed as well as Blanchelande did.”

“There’s a man I pity,” Grandmont said, turning up the corner of his hole card.

“
Comment ça?
” Arnaud said. “A waste of your emotion.”

“He has a date with Madame Guillotine,” Grandmont said.

Captain Maillart sniffed. “But he requested his own recall.”

“That was before,” Grandmont said. “Sonthonax deported him—in disgrace, as you’ll remember. They’ll put him on trial when he reaches France—well, a trial is what they call it.”

The worn pasteboards whisked through Baudin’s hands as he shuffled, redistributed. The sound put the doctor briefly in mind of the whisper and rush of a dropping blade. The silence persisted a moment before Arnaud spoke.

“That’s his desert for trying to serve two masters. If not more. One must be bold enough to take a stand and hold it.”

Captain Maillart frowned at him; Grandmont looked away. The silence lingered. Captain Maillart cleared his throat.

“Have you been riding out today?” he said to the doctor. “Gone for your sea bathing?”

“Yesterday,” the doctor said. He pushed his top card to one side—a queen.

“What do you mean, sea bathing?” asked Baudin.

“Why, this one rides over the hills every day to swim at the beach beyond the point,” Maillart said.

“What,
alone?
” Baudin said.

“Not every day,” the doctor said mildly. Unconsciously, he scratched his scar through his sleeves. “Not since my arm has healed—I only go to find the herbs I need.”

Baudin stared at him. “
T’es fou
,” he said. “It’s utter madness.”

The doctor shrugged. “I never see anyone in the hills—almost never.” He turned over the ace beneath the queen.

“Yes, you are a witch,” Baudin grunted. He pushed over a small scattering of coins. Arnaud also had won again, a larger bet; he gathered in the money and stacked it up in rows. It was quiet again except for the suck of Grandmont’s breath as he leaned to light a cigar in the candle flame. Then they heard the clatter of hooves, iron shoes clashing on the stones of the court. Immediately there followed a hammering on the door. Maillart got up and jerked open the door so suddenly that the knocker almost tumbled inside.

Major O’Farrel of the “Dillon” regiment—the Irishman was a stranger to the doctor. “Where’s Colonel Cambefort?” he said, in his weirdly accented French. “There’s news—it’s urgent.”

“A raid?”

Arnaud and Baudin were also on their feet, while Grandmont leaned back, smoking. Not long since, a party of insurgent blacks had breached the defenses of Le Cap and penetrated as far as the civil hospital before they were turned back.

“No, the king,” said the Dillon officer. “Word just came in at the harbor…”

“What, dead?” said Arnaud.

“Deposed,” the Dillon officer said. “Quickly, we must find Colonel Cambefort.”

There must have been others come with him from the harbor, for the square courtyard of Les Casernes was milling with troops by the time they went outside. Men were shouting confused tidings; the doctor thought he could make out that a mob had stormed Les Tuileries, that the king was divested of all his powers, and some sort of new government had been installed in Paris.

In the midst of the tumult and tossing torchlight, Colonel Cambefort appeared on a high step. He held out his flattened palms and waited for silence; when it came, he snapped a crisp order for all to return to their quarters. Beckoning Major O’Farrel and a couple of others to follow, he turned smartly on his heel and walked inside. Captain Maillart and Baudin surged forward, along with other officers, but the door slapped shut in all their faces.

They reconvened around the card table, but no one had heart to continue the game. Grandmont still sat in the same chair, contemplatively chewing the wet end of his cigar while the other smoldered. Had he risen to follow them out at all? The doctor was not sure of that.

“
C’est foutu
,” Arnaud said, and cracked his cane against a chair leg. “You see, this decline won’t stop before the Jacobins are dictators over us all.”

“Sit down,” Grandmont said, pulling the cigar from his mouth, as Arnaud whirled in the corners of the room. “It may be that something may yet be done here.” He glanced at Captain Maillart, who nodded.

“We must look to Cambefort,” the captain said slowly.

“Yes, and to Desparbés.” Grandmont blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling.

Among them all there seemed no one who’d willingly meet the doctor’s eyes. He scraped back in his chair. “I believe I must be going.”

Baudin winked at him then. “
Mais oui
, you’ve got such a sweet morsel to return to…” Lasciviously he kissed his fingers.

The doctor stared, not precisely at him, but directly through a point on the bridge of his nose to a chip on a brick in the wall behind his head, like lining up the two sights of a gun. It was a trick he had learned in the camps. He touched the shard of mirror in his pocket. In a moment, Baudin had dropped his eyes and turned away in some confusion. The doctor drained his glass with an air of carelessness, stood up, bowed, and took his leave.

The streets were full of criers and couriers, and all the
petit blancs
were in a state of high excitement. Another day, the troops would have turned out to drive them back inside their doors, but since the arrival of Sonthonax, the soldiers were kept in barracks and the popular demonstrations continued unrestrained. No sign of a uniform anywhere tonight. The doctor passed by a tavern which had become a meeting place for one of the Jacobin clubs Sonthonax had encouraged among the
petit blancs
. The place was jammed, a mass of jerking heads. Through the orange-lit window he thought he saw some hero raised aloft on a chair. Moved by curiosity, he turned back and went in.

Another night he might have been challenged at the door. As best as he might make mystery of his political sentiments, whatever they were, he could have been denounced as an associate of officers, aristocrats, the
grand blancs
in general. But tonight the mood of elation was too high for him to be noticed at all, and besides he saw no one he knew even by sight, except for the baker, Faustin.

He did not know the man they’d swung aloft in the chair to cheer him. He was a lean black-bearded fellow, hatless, with the red cockade stuck behind one ear. Almost everyone in the common room was also sporting the
pompon rouge
; the doctor rather felt naked without one of his own. But no one seemed to have remarked him or his lack. A barrel of rum turned longways on a high counter flowed from its bunghole while cups or cupped hands were thrust under the stream. The doctor saw one half-shaven enthusiast twisting his face sideways to lap at the overflow like a dog…

Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!
There was a massive outcry of these slogans, while from other quarters of the room began a garbled anarchic rendering of
La Marseillaise
. Someone jostled the doctor into the door frame. In an opposite corner he saw the farrier Crozac, grinning and shouting with the others…There was a crack as the chair leg snapped, and the black-bearded fellow fell down laughing into the crowd. But not all were so amused. The doctor saw the splintered chair leg rise again, come clubbing down. A fist swung in a semicircle, blood, a grunt and the click of a splintered tooth against the wall. A surge of men rippling out from the focus of the fight pressed the doctor back out the street door.