Master of the Crossroads (50 page)

At night he scavenged the garbage piles among the stray dogs of the town. From the dogs he learned to crack discarded bones for their marrow. He could also gnaw the rinds and seeds of fruit, which did not interest the dogs. Sometimes he was sick from spoiled food, or because an unexpectedly large find obliged him to overeat. Because of the rats he could not keep any sort of food in the barrel.

Then one morning as he cautiously crept into the Place Clugny, he heard his name called and cowered away by reflex.

“Paul!” A colored girl, perhaps fourteen, dressed in a plain brown smock. Her face was honey-colored, her brown eyes kind. Her calloused fingers against his face, turning it up to the light. “Do you remember me? It is Paulette! But no . . . you were too small.”

She looked over her shoulder, continuing to speak, “I knew him, cared for him, in the camps of Grande Rivière.” Behind her stood a mammoth black woman, solid as a mountain.

“I too,” the black woman said. “Yes, I know him.” She lowered herself by degrees until she balanced in a hunker. Her huge hand cradled the back of his head. Paul felt a strange calm spreading through him from the soft center of her palm.

“Zoray li,”
the black woman said. “His ears—such ears! they were the same when he was born.”

Paulette took his hand and he walked from the square beside her, the black woman at his other side. Paul did not exactly remember Paulette, but it seemed natural for her to have charge of him. From her opposite arm hung a basket full of greens and yams and manioc from the mountains. The black woman walked with her hands swinging free, a great basket of charcoal balanced on her head.

They reached the northern limit of the town, where the last houses were tucked among the claws of the mountain where they were fixed into the earth. Above was a little white church on a round hillock, but Paul lost sight of it as they stepped into a courtyard. Several pails of water were waiting by a stairway. Paulette let go of his hand to pick up one of them and indicated that he should do the same. To balance himself Paul took a pail in each hand, though they were very heavy. Following her, he struggled up the steps that twisted among the plastered houses and then became a dirt path corkscrewing still farther up. The black woman came behind them with her charcoal.

At last they emerged onto an area of packed earth surrounded by
ajoupas
of straw and sticks and wattle. Paulette set down her burdens and Paul did the same, a little water splashing on his feet. She panted, smiling at him. He returned the smile. A bright breeze coming in from the harbor cooled and dried the sweat of their effort. If he looked in that direction, he saw the ships in the harbor and the red tile roofs of the town, even Government House and the open spaces of the Place d’Armes and the Place Clugny. They were a little below the level of the rear of the white church. When he looked in the other direction, Paul saw more
ajoupas
scattered up the slope, and higher, where the cliff was nearly sheer, black children his own age were gamboling among the goats.

Sophie did not ask after Paul any longer. She had given up asking for her father as well. Tocquet had abandoned them, perhaps permanently—Elise had no way of knowing. He did send money, from time to time. Every six weeks or so either Gros-jean or Bazau appeared to give her a little bag of coins, gold and silver, struck by several different nations like a pirate treasure.

After the first weeks of Tocquet’s desertion, Elise had pulled herself up from her initial collapse. She walked through her days, although with a bitter, shriveling heart. As for Sophie, once the first flood of her sorrow had passed, she seemed the same as before, yet Elise knew that her losses were too great to have had no effect on her at all.

What was the man waiting for? She knew that Bazau and Gros-jean would be bringing him reports. Perhaps Tocquet was waiting to hear that she had given up and gone to France, in which case he might swoop down to reclaim Sophie and the plantation which was hers through her first marriage, and now his. But maybe he cared only for the land, for she would take Sophie with her if she did go to France. Did he not know it? If she were to go . . . Once her pride had returned, it prevented her from cross-examining Gros-jean or Bazau as to Tocquet’s whereabouts or his activities. But the men gossiped enough around the military camp that the news came back to her eventually, through Zabeth or Guiaou or Riau, sometimes even from one of the French officers, Maillart or Vaublanc. She knew that Tocquet was based in his cattle corral on the central plateau, that he was selling beef to the French Jacobin army, and trading tobacco along the smuggler’s run from Dajabón to Ouanaminthe to Fort Liberté.

Elise’s humors ran from sorrow and regret to indifference to anger, day by day. If she had not done what she had done! . . . or if, somehow, she could undo it. In one of her irritable moods, she began taking Tocquet’s things out of the wardrobe, with the idea of discarding them or throwing them away. On the floor of the wardrobe, under a pile of folded trousers, was a long wooden box with a sliding cover. Its weight was surprising. Elise heaved it onto the bed and wrestled the lid back. The groove was warped and sticky from the damp. Inside, two long dragoon pistols and a short, broad-bladed sword. There was powder and lead and a bullet mold and a roll of papers in oilskin which seemed to be maps, though she did not look at them closely.

Elise picked up one of the pistols and aimed it wobbling around the room. The thing was monstrously heavy. Only by bracing the barrel across her forearm could she hold it steadily level. She sighted into the mirror, her own eyes hard above the hollow eye of the gun barrel.

From the gallery, she caught sight of Guiaou crossing the yard below the doctor’s lily pool. She hailed him:
“Vini moin!”

Guiaou reversed his direction, glancing toward her, and climbed the steps.

“What must I do to shoot this thing?” Elise said, carelessly waving at the pistol on the table. “Show me, if you please.”

Guiaou shook his head, but he was accustomed to obedience, first by slavery and then by military discipline. He showed her how to prime the pistol and patch a ball. Elise lifted the weapon and pointed it at a palm trunk below the gallery. When she pulled the trigger, the barrel flew up with a great red whoosh and all the crows lifted, cawing, from the trees. She reloaded the pistol by herself. Guiaou showed her how to close one eye and sight along the barrel. When she fired this time, a long frond came away from the palm and feathered down slowly to the surface of the pool.

Zabeth stood in the doorway with her mouth a wide round of amazement. Sophie was behind her, clutching her skirts, but she was excited, laughing. Elise passed the two of them with a mysterious smile. In the bedroom she cleaned the pistol with a rag and a stick as Guiaou had recommended, then laid it aside, unloaded. She took off her dress and bound down her breasts with several winds of a long cloth. Then she put on a man’s shirt and a pair of Tocquet’s Spanish breeches, belting them low around her hips. Standing before the mirror, she swept her hair up to the top of her head and fixed it there with one of his broad-brimmed hats.

Not quite. Her face was still too round, too soft, too feminine. She found a blue kerchief and tied it across her mouth and nose—it was not uncommon for riders to mask themselves so against the dust of the road. With the kerchief in place she felt she might pass for a youthful
caballero.
When she picked up the pistol for confidence, she found that it made her reflected eyes steelier and more resolved, even if she held the pistol below the mirror frame.

Swinging a feather duster, Zabeth walked into the room and caught sight of her costume.
“Non, Maîtresse,”
she gasped. She seemed to have read all Elise’s intentions.
“Non, pa vré. Non.”
But Elise only smiled as she pulled off the kerchief.

“It is a masquerade,” she said. “It is nothing.”

Zabeth lowered her eyes and went about her dusting, though Elise could see that she did not believe her. Perhaps it was for the better if she did not.

That evening Elise let Sophie stay up as late as she liked, told her stories and gave her sweets until the child was, in fact, a little ill. Then when she had fallen asleep, Elise lay stretched beside her, listening to the intake of her breath, a long, dark, curly clump of hair tickling her nose and cheek. The great temptation was to take Sophie along on this adventure, but she must not. With luck her errand would not keep her away so very long. And Zabeth, with whatever she had surmised, would be here to care and to comfort.

She slept for a few hours beside her little girl, then woke and rose and went to her own room and put on the man’s garb, belting the short sword to her waist. Carrying her riding boots in one hand and loaded saddlebags in the other, she went out of the house and to the barn, where she saddled her roan mare and led her out. It was Tocquet who had taught her to ride astride like a man—first when they had eloped from Thibodet and later when they had returned here, with Sophie, across the mountains of the interior from the Spanish side of the island.

At sunrise she was on the heights of Pilboreau, and beginning to descend, her good light-footed mare overtaking the market women as they walked down toward Plaisance with their wares balanced in baskets on their heads. The loaded pistols rode in scabbards before her knees, but there was no incident. Small squads of Toussaint’s soldiers seemed to be posted everywhere, and some of them she recognized, though she was relieved that they did not know her. The roads were peaceful all the way. In the late afternoon she rode into Limbé and decided to pass the night at an inn there, as she did not want to risk being caught on the road after dark.

She gave the innkeeper a gold piece from one of the little purses Tocquet had sent. He whistled at the coin, and cut it with a knife before he rang it into his pocket, then gave her an appraising look. Elise’s stomach fluttered, but all he did was offer to find a woman for her pleasure . . . She declined, in the gruffest tone she could conjure. She ate cold chicken alone in her room, and slept as if she had been laid out by a maul. Next morning she was stiff and saddle-sore when she left the bed, and longed for a slow hot bath, though she knew that was impossible. An hour in the saddle limbered her. At midday she entered the gate of Cap Français.

Her brother ought to have been here somewhere, if he was still in the retinue of Toussaint. But she went first to the Cigny town house, for she had learned during Choufleur’s visit that he had established himself there. She gave the door knocker a few noisy, masculine slams, then put her hand on the sword hilt for courage. The person who opened the door was not Choufleur at all, nor any of his retainers either, but her old friend Isabelle Cigny.

Isabelle smiled, swayed and stooped in her half-mocking curtsey—her manner with any strange man. She did not know her, Elise saw, with satisfaction. But in the next instant she saw that Isabelle felt or suspected something. With a flourish she swept off the hat and shook her long blond hair down on her shoulders. Isabelle stood back, gaping, then seized her with both hands and drew her into the house and into a warm embrace.

“We are to thank that half-breed son of the Sieur Maltrot for all this restoration,” Isabelle said, sweeping her hand around her parlor. “The house was burned to its foundation in ninety-three, you know. I cannot complain of the construction, though as for his taste in décor—suffice it to say it is not my own.”

Elise brushed a quantity of dust from her breeches and sat gingerly down on a garishly striped sofa. It was true that the whole room was a gaudy blaze of clashing colors, though the materials were opulent. “Choufleur,” she said. “I had expected to find him installed here . . . though of course I am far happier to find you.”

“My dear,” said Isabelle. “It seems so long ago, that man tried to force his
entrée
here. He thought to carry on his
amours
beneath my roof!—and may have done so later on, when the wheel of Destiny raised him up to take possession of this house. But now that wheel has cast him down again.”

“Where has he gone?”

“Of that I know nothing, and care even less. He was supposed to have been here during the mulatto rebellion—up to his neck in it too, I dare say.”

“And with his woman and her child?”

“I could not say. They had all been routed before our return, you understand.”

Elise reached across the coffee table and took hold of Isabelle’s hands. “Listen,” she said, and she began to explain all that she had done and all that she finally hoped to undo. When she had finished, Isabelle disengaged her fingers and sat back.

“But you do not know if Nanon would return,” she said. “And would your brother have her, now?”

“I think he would,” Elise said. “Oh, I don’t know—I understand nothing anymore, except that I have paid too high a price for this propriety. Why did I prize it so? It has cost me my husband’s love, my brother’s good regard, my own child’s happiness. If I could only find that boy—I did not understand the depth of my brother’s attachment to him. I was wrong. To the devil with propriety, I say now—and up with libertinage, if it must be. I don’t know what Nanon would do, or what she ought to do. Only I would unsay the lies I told her, if I could.”

She stopped talking, and both women listened to the tramp of the squad of Toussaint’s soldiers on the street beyond the round-arched, floor-length windows. A voice called an order, and the footsteps passed by and receded.

“Nanon,” Isabelle said softly. “She is far from transparent, I must say.”

“But you speak as if you know her,” Elise said.

“She is not easy for a woman to know,” Isabelle said, “as you might testify yourself, my dear. She has made it her business to suit herself perfectly to the company of men. But she stayed here until the town was burned. Your brother brought her here for shelter. The child you seek was born here, even. Oh my dear, there is so very much you have not been told.”