Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [83]
The Cross
The rebels of Saint-Domingue, the western portion of Hispaniola, knew little of European politics and cared even less. It’s not easy to take an interest in global concerns when you’re struggling to survive in a dark, sodden jungle interior, knowing that your relatives are being held hostage to casual torture in the nearest settlements. However, even the most hardened disciples of the late Mackandal must have noticed that the French authorities were somewhat distracted in the early 1780s.
It was the war, of course. The war between Britain and America, into which both the French and the Spanish had been dragged. France had neither the resources nor the patience to concentrate on a little thing like a mercilessly bloody slave uprising. As a result, the Maroons – those most organised, most disciplined and most religious of rebels – took the opportunity to do everything they could to weaken the slavemasters’ resolve. When they weren’t trying to poison the wells, they were using weapons of a more psychological kind. Skulls would be planted at strategic points around the French settlements. Mutilated cadavers would be lashed to trees. The original settlers of Hispaniola had been pirates, and the rebels took up the old standards with relish, planting the skull-and‐crossbones on the verges of the territory they felt to be theirs. If Hispaniola had a truly national flag, it was the Jolly Roger.
On August 15, the slaves held a crucifixion, every bit as symbolic as the one dreamed of by Rebecca. It was only a matter of time: the Maroons, before they’d escaped slavery, had been drilled in Roman Catholicism. Mackandal himself was a black Christ in the eyes of many, and to those who’d grown up under the sadism of the Church the image of the nail in the flesh was irresistible.
It was close to midnight when the wooden cross was hoisted into position in the jungle, close enough to a French settlement to make a point, far enough away that the victim wouldn’t be found until after his death. Fires were set on either side, the only beacons of light in the wet darkness. Those responsible for the execution retreated as soon as the victim, still dazed from the drugs he’d been given after his capture, had been nailed into position. The victim himself was nobody of consequence, a young man in the employ of the French administration, thought to be an adjutant to a local bureaucrat. He’d only left France four months earlier, so he’d probably never even set foot in the jungle before he’d been bludgeoned and half-poisoned by the Maroons.
The rebels were still nearby, and the fires were still burning, when the foreign man in the velvet suit casually walked into the clearing.
The witness to this event was a seventeen-year‐old Maroon recruit called Lucien Malpertuis. He’d later fight alongside both L’Ouverture and Dessalines in the Napoleonic wars, when the French Emperor would take up tactics even more brutal than those of the slavemasters in order to quash the rebellion. After L’Ouverture’s death in a French prison cell, Lucien would travel to Scotland, where he’d write his memoirs (in uncertain English) and provide the west with many important accounts of the struggle in Hispaniola. Lucien was one of several Maroons lurking close enough to the crucifixion site to notice the white stranger arrive, and to watch him with caution from the cover of the trees.
They must have been surprised when the stranger arrived. They must have been somewhat more than surprised when he looked up at the semiconscious figure on the cross, shook his head, and began looking around the clearing for the largest fallen branches available. Within minutes he’d made himself a makeshift stepladder from foliage and fragments of trunk, which he promptly used to climb up towards the condemned man.
It was at this point that the Maroons decided to make their presence felt. At the lead was Émondeur, an ageing, stick-thin, but particularly hard-headed