Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [125]
Tocquet clucked to his horse and rode toward the river. On the bank, they asked a woman washing clothes in the shallows where they might cross without swimming their horses. The river had gone down since the night before and came no higher than Tocquet’s boot heel at the deepest point. They scrambled up a muddy bank on the eastern side, and rode on toward Fort Dauphin.
Now on either side of the road, spindly second-growth cane was coming back from the ashes of fields that had been burned. Some of it seemed to have been harvested, though in no very systematic manner. They rode on. Midmorning, the horizon ahead broke up and began to swarm. As they drew nearer, the spectacle resolved itself into a mass of men—the black auxiliaries. They had settled around an old fortified camp erected by a colonial governor on this plain. The works were a square of cabins connected by a palisade, but some years before the slave rebellion the camp had been abandoned by the whites and much of the wood had been pilfered for other constructions elsewhere. In any case there were far too many men here to be quartered within the old fortifications—they’d overflowed those boundaries and camped willynilly all around.
A party of black soldiers wandered down to the road to challenge them; from this encounter Tocquet confirmed that the auxiliaries were under the command of Jean-François. Though it was not long since he had traded guns to that black general, he did not choose to tarry now. There was an air of ill-discipline and disorder in all of this encampment—a far cry from Toussaint’s camps around Ennery—and something in the feeling of the place made Tocquet’s hackles prick. As one of the men who’d accosted them was a friend of Gros-jean, they were allowed to pass without hindrance or delay, and by afternoon they rode into the town of Fort Dauphin.
Tocquet left his horse with Gros-jean and Bazau, dispatching them to a tavern they knew. On foot, he entered the Place d’Armes, where a grizzled, string-bearded Spanish officer was directing the movements of a few ratty troops with a broken umbrella. The men were all Spaniards of the Regiment de Contabre—no sign of the black auxiliaries here. On the road Tocquet had heard, from a friend of Gros-jean, that the men commanded by Jean-François were forbidden to enter the city.
He made a leftward circuit of the square, glancing into the church and the Maison du Roi. Although the Spanish seemed to be in possession of all the official buildings, there were also many Frenchmen wandering in the square, dressed in the manner of grand blancs—expensive costumes, which, however, showed signs of harder, longer wear than intended. Some of these Frenchmen were promenading their wives, and others also had children in tow. Tocquet, who kept his hat brim low, saw no one he knew personally.
At last he came to the fountain at the center of the square and sat down on the edge of the basin. He trailed his fingers in the water, then removed his hat and dampened his temples. It was very hot, and his hair was stiff with sweat and the dust of the road; the streets of Fort Dauphin were all unpaved. He soaked a kerchief in the water, rolled it and wrapped it around his neck, before he replaced his hat. When the drilling soldiers next about-faced, he was able to catch the eye of the man he’d hoped to find—a supply sergeant named Guillermo Altamira. As soon as the drill ended and the men were dismissed, the sergeant tugged off his cap and came to join Tocquet at the fountain.
Altamira was a short, stout man, with smooth round cheeks and an olive complexion, his face bordered by glossy curls of hair and beard. Tocquet had always known him to be well informed, well supplied, and cheerfully enterprising. In the first days of the slave insurrection, the sergeant had sold him the guns he ran over the mountains to the black insurgents on the French side. As this project had certainly been sanctioned and encouraged by the Spanish high command, Tocquet