Master of the Crossroads (15 page)

Maillart sat down and called for coffee. The major jumped up, twitching.

“If you mean to dally after that devil of a woman,” he said, “consider if it’s worth your life. You waste your time, in any case—she has forsworn her
amours
to devote herself to that swinish husband, for what reason I do not comprehend. Or perhaps she is moved by some other fancy.”

Maillart burst out laughing and leaned back in his chair.

“I am delighted to have so amused you,” O’Farrel said frostily.

Maillart caught his breath. “I mean no offense,” he said. “Indeed I’m grateful for the warning.” He touched a cautious finger to the swelling on his cheekbone. “But go—before you’re compromised by being seen here. I’ll not be ten minutes behind you.”

At the edge of town Maillart took counsel with a convoy of water sellers headed for the river, and was directed to a trail barely passable by horsemen, which in theory led directly across the peninsula down to the town of Gonaives. In an hour they had reached the height of the dry mountains. Maillart pulled his horse up sharply and turned back toward Le Môle. He dismounted and, while the black men watched him gravely, took off his civilian shirt, ripped it down the middle and tried to throw it off the cliff. The wind caught the shirt and blew it loosely back so that Maillart’s horse shied and bucked. The captain choked up on the reins and calmed his animal, then turned toward the distant sea and began to shout, cursing women and politics equally, mostly in French but with some excursions into English, Spanish and Creole. When he was breathless, the black men laughed and applauded him. Maillart took his French uniform from a saddlebag and put it on, adjusted the epaulettes and pulled the seams straight. Once content with the fit of his coat, he swung back into the saddle and rode on, much relieved.

8

Doctor Hébert had elaborated the water project for Habitation Thibodet many times, both in imagination and in fact, but now it was finally finished in both departments. On the slope above the
grand’case,
a pool had drained the swamp and now fed two channels which divided around the house and then rejoined in a second pool, directly in front of the gallery where the doctor sat now, drinking his morning coffee and nibbling at a sugared piece of flat cassava bread.

The lower pool was edged with stones, laid in a ring without mortar. At its far rim, another channel took the water out, down toward the kitchen garden. The doctor thought the irrigation might reclaim the yard before the house, which had degenerated into a bare expanse of baked clay or mud, depending on the season, trampled by the feet of men and horses. He had already planted a few flowering shrubs around the pool, and four coconut palms which might one day grow tall. He closed his eyes, pictured a fountain, but that was absurd.

“It’s lovely . . .” The voice was melodic, soft, but a little teasing too. The doctor opened his eyes to greet his sister, who had just settled into the chair next to his own.

“Lovely . . .” she said again, smiling sleepily at him. “But now how will you fill your days?”

“Haven’t I enough to do?” The doctor heard the note of pique in his own voice and realized Elise was right: he would miss his pet project. “There’s the coffee and the cane,” he said more mildly. “And the infirmary, as always.”

“I rather meant some avocation,” Elise said, turning languidly to accept a cup of coffee from the maid, Zabeth. “To occupy your imagination. Something apart from ordinary work.”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “There’s a great deal of botanizing I had meant to do. . . .”

His own words echoed back at him from the damp, mist-laden air. It was strange to search for an activity to pass the time, in such a situation, when all of the colony was immersed in war of one kind or another. But ever since Toussaint’s party had returned from the Spanish side of the mountains, Habitation Thibodet had been strangely becalmed. Not for the first time, the doctor reflected that this state of affairs was unnatural and perhaps portended ill.

Between Toussaint and Biassou, the situation seemed to be worsening, and the doctor was inclined to suspect the growth of a breach between Toussaint and the Spanish high command. There had been no word from either Maillart or Tocquet on their mission to Laveaux, and though Tocquet’s mysterious vanishings were routine, the doctor thought Maillart was overdue.

“Or of course you might devote yourself to further perfection of the arts of love,” Elise seemed to be saying.

The doctor renewed his attention to her; she returned his gaze calmly, not to say brazenly, her small rose-petal lips slightly parted, her blue eyes amused. Such a conversation between them would have been unthinkable in France. For that matter, in their father’s house Elise would never have thought to appear outside her bed chamber in the extremely diaphanous garment she now wore . . . but in Saint Domingue it was all attributed to the heat. In truth, Elise had thrived here, the doctor had to admit, where many Frenchwomen died or withered or went mad. In most respects, by contrast, his sister seemed to have become a Creole.

He was the first to break their gaze, turning to look back toward the pool. “I should have liked to brick that rim,” he said. “But for the moment there’s no possibility.”

“I think the stones look well enough.” Elise’s sugar spoon clinked against her coffee cup. She cocked her head toward a child’s voice—a peal of laughter, then an indistinguishable word. “Is she—” Elise said. “No, she’s going to wake Paul.”

“But it does lack something,” the doctor said, still staring at the pool.

“A fountain,” Elise said, following his glance.

“I thought of that,” the doctor said. “But there are no means.”

“No.” Elise laughed and shook back the blond waves of her hair. “Goldfish, then.”

The doctor snorted. “Why not swans?”

“Or water lilies,” Elise said.

“Why yes!” the doctor began, but just then the two children came tumbling out onto the gallery, Paul and Sophie. The little boy toppled over, catching himself on his palms and looking up, puzzled. Sophie, who was not quite two years his senior, stooped soberly to help him up. Zabeth put her head out the doorway, saw that the children were attended to and withdrew. Paul marched over to the doctor, who lifted him to his knee and kissed his solemn, ivory-colored face.

“Bonjour, mon cher.”

“Bonjour, Papa.”

Paul straddled his father’s knee. The doctor jogged him idly, speaking again to his sister.

“Well, there is a place with water lilies . . . of a kind,” he said. “A pretty little pond, up in the mountains.”

“Is it far?” Elise toyed with her daughter’s long black curls, drawing the dark-eyed girl against her hip.

“I’d say an hour’s ride,” the doctor said. Paul began to twist up in his lap; the doctor tore off a bit of the sugared bread to give him.

Elise became animated. “Oh, do let’s go together,” she said. “I’m bored with rusticating here—Xavier’s been so long away. We might make an outing for the children.”

The doctor considered. “Well, if we wait for Nanon to get up . . .”

“But no,” Elise said. “She’ll sleep till noon—you know her ways. And by then it will be much too hot. No, it’s better we should go at once.” She stood up and began calling orders to the kitchen.

Within the hour they had left the compound, the doctor carrying Paul before him on the saddle of his horse, and Sophie riding with Zabeth, sidesaddle on a donkey. The children giggled and called to one another, their voices waking voices of the birds. Elise, who had dressed in one of Xavier’s piratical blouses and a pair of trousers cut so full that each leg appeared to have a skirt of its own, rode astride a white mule. An unlooked-for talent, the doctor remarked, and certainly an unlooked-for posture. Elise shook her hair back carelessly and let him know that she had ridden mule-back all the way over the mountains from Spanish Santo Domingo, during which journey she had often found herself in postures more unexpected than this one.

The doctor fell silent, listening to the liquid trilling of the birds moving in the trees overhead. They had ridden to the height of the coffee plantation and now were circling the rim above the steep valley of Habitation Thibodet. Through the foliage, they caught glimpses of the buildings below, and the tents and
ajoupas
of Toussaint’s military encampment, with smoke beginning to rise from fires where the men were preparing the morning meal. Then they had crossed over the ridge and were descending a snake-like trail that wound the crevices of the far side of the
morne,
twisting through tall, saw-bladed grasses and clumps and clusters of bamboo. The doctor carried a
coutelas
which he used to slash overgrowth from the trail, restraining Paul with his left hand cupped over the child’s round, firm belly.

In something over an hour they had arrived at their destination, before it had grown truly hot, though the damp, still air had raised a sweat on them and on their animals. The pool was sheltered on three sides by bearded fig trees and a green calabash, and on the fourth it backed into a face of rock some thirty feet high, overgrown with slender hanging vines that sprouted small, pale flowers. Water seeped from springs in the rock, and the surface of the pool itself was covered with the violet flowers called
bwa dlo,
along with floating, flowering plants that much resembled European water lilies.

Elise dismounted and breathed deeply, hands on her hips as she arched her back to look up at the rock face and the vines. “C’est très joli,
ça,”
she said. “A waterfall of flowers.”

She twisted her hair up at the back of her head and, with Zabeth, began spreading a checkered cloth over an area of grass a couple of yards above the edge of the pool. Together the women laid out the food that had been prepared for the excursion: green oranges, small fig bananas, cassava bread, a bit of cold chicken . . . The doctor took a bottle of white wine (Tocquet’s extraordinary foraging skills had furnished them a supply) and sank it at the pool’s edge where it would cool. He pulled off his boots and stockings, rolled his trousers and waded calf-deep in the water, which was cold enough that he felt the first shock in his teeth. The bottom was covered with fine, shaley gravel. He turned and looked up into the trees surrounding it. Zabeth was staring at the calabash tree and the doctor looked in the same direction; since he’d last come here someone had tied up several of the green gourds to shape them for future use as vessels. Also there were several red rags tied to branches, for no material purpose. The doctor experienced a moment of doubt. The pool was on the trail toward Camp Barade, on the outskirts of Toussaint’s direct influence. Stragglers from the camps of Biassou or Jean-François were likely to be much less well disciplined than Toussaint’s men . . . still, it was calm here now, and they would not stay too long.

He climbed out of the pool and went to join his sister, who had curled catlike on the cloth, her legs tucked under her, chewing an end of her own hair at the corner of her mouth. The food was still covered with napkins on the plates and woven trays. Paul followed him, suddenly petulant.

“Pa oué Maman?”
he complained. “Where’s Mama?”

“There now,” the doctor said, kissing his forehead absently. “You’ll see your mother soon enough. Now go with the Sophie and Zabeth.” He turned the boy about and gave a push which sent him trundling back down toward the pool. When he looked up, Elise was frowning.

“You are too indulgent with him,” she said.

“One might say the same of you, with Sophie . . .” The doctor’s tone was mild enough. It was traditional, after all, for Creole children to be hideously spoiled.

“It is not at all the same.”

The doctor looked away. Zabeth had tied up her skirt behind, to wade into the water with the two children. Paul was well distracted now, scooping up flashing bits of mica from the bottom and letting them fall in the sparkling water. It was idyllic here, and yet the doctor sensed a whole hidden agenda in his sister’s words. There’d been perhaps a particular reason she’d wished to make this excursion without Nanon.

“You mean the difference of a son from a daughter?” the doctor said, with a certain sense of heaviness. “After all, they are both little children.”

“Childhood is sweet,” Elise said. “But as adults, those two can never live as cousins. Neither here, nor in France.”

The doctor looked at his sister. Her hair was loose around her face, her breasts fell unrestrained against the coarse cloth of her husband’s shirt . . . She was wearing trousers, for God’s sake; she rode astride a mule. It was very strange to hear her instructing him in the proprieties of this country. Elise was no more
farouche
than many other Creole women, or not much more, and yet whenever he looked at her, he thought of their manner of life in their father’s house in France. It now occurred to him, for the first time, that she might be measuring him against a similar standard. His sense of heaviness increased.

“You sound very much like your friend Isabelle Cigny,” he said.

“That’s reasonable,” said Elise. “It was she who first educated me in all the ways of this place.”

The doctor looked down at the two children splashing in the pool. Sophie floundered deeper into the water and suddenly sat down, perhaps unintentionally, her skirt spreading on the water around her. She looked distressed at first, but then began laughing. Zabeth laughed with her, a bright smile splitting her dark face, and scooped some water in a mock threat to put it on Sophie’s hair. Paul spun aimlessly beside the two of them, his palms stroking the lily pads like fan blades.

“It’s well enough for now,” Elise said. “But the system here will divide them as they grow. You must see this.”

The doctor looked down at the pool again. There was little to choose between the skin tone of the two; Sophie was even slightly the darker, for she had taken her father’s coloring—this assuming that her father was in fact Xavier Tocquet, and not Elise’s former husband, the late proprietor of Habitation Thibodet.

“What I see is the ‘system’ here lying in ruins,” the doctor said. “With revolution here and in France . . . it is a great uprooting.”

Elise sighed. “Some things can never be revolutionized.”

The doctor said nothing. Elise sat up straight, crossing her legs like an Indian.

“What of the future?” she said. “There are some who live in such liaisons, and even openly; it is not unheard-of, though—” She looked at him pointedly. “One must never take such a woman to wife. But the children of these unions create difficulties in time.”

The doctor felt his first flash of real irritation. “There are irregularities in your own career,
madame ma sœur,
which I have forborne to reproach you with.”

Elise failed to blush as expected; she returned his glance calmly, her blue eyes clear.

“To summarize . . .” The doctor tugged at the point of his beard. “I arrive in this country to find you absconded from your husband, absolutely disappeared—yes, I admit he was a brute, but we now speak of law and propriety. You abandon him, you dash off who knows where, to Santo Domingo as I am eventually to learn—I don’t know if there were other stops on your itinerary—with a man apparently your lover, this Xavier Tocquet, whose own reputation seems very extraordinary. Let me say that for my part I much prefer your second choice to your first, but still, Madame, your manner of arranging yourself provokes notice, does it not? As for the child of the first marriage, whom you have stolen away in your elopement, I discover—from your bosom friend Isabelle Cigny, no less—that her legitimacy is somewhat in question. Well, the matter is finally settled decently enough, for across the Spanish border you are married to our Monsieur Tocquet. But I have taken care not to ask the
date
of this marriage, lest it be discovered bigamous, for I do know very well the date of your first husband’s demise, since it was I who attended his final illness, during your very conspicuous absence from your place at his side.”