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By Root 1000 0

he had imagined. He had put his own hands to this work not only for the shortage of main d’oeuvre but because it was easier for him so. He had not been in Saint Domingue long enough to accustom himself to slavery (which was now officially at an end in the colony, at least in those areas still controlled by the Republican French) and so he found it simpler to demonstrate his intentions rather than merely ordering that they be accomplished. He had worked most of the day with little respite before the approach of the rain and then had returned to the grand’case, where he’d washed himself and undressed to his shirt before stretching out on the bed.

The murmuring of the women faded in the other room and Doctor Hébert lay quietly, listening to the rain. Presently he heard Nanon come in and opened one eye to see her silhouette briefly framed in the doorway to the gallery. The rush of the rain water sounded louder for a moment until she closed the door.

“You’re sleeping?” Nanon said in a low voice.

The doctor did not answer her. Because of the rain and the closed jalousies there was not light enough in the room for them to see one another very plainly at all. He closed his eyes as she approached the bed, and soon he felt one of her hands, cool and slim-fingered, smoothing over his brow and the sunburned baldness of his head. She paused, then with her other hand turned up his shirt tails and found him there.

“Voilà que ce monsieur reste en réveil, au moins,” she said in a sly whisper. Both her hands withdrew as she straightened from the bed. The doctor could not see her face, only the shadows of her arms unloosing the long scarf that bound her hair. The moist rain-swollen air was cool on the bare exposed fork of him. Her dress dropped in a whispering pool around her feet. When she came to the bed, he raised up onto his elbows and caught the corner of her mouth with a dry kiss.

“And Paul?” he said.

“Zabeth has taken him,” Nanon whispered. The warm weight of her breasts pressed into his shirt front, and he dropped backward onto the sheets.

In the small brick-walled office of the cane mill, Toussaint Louverture sat reading drafts of letters by the light of an oil lamp. The rain made a steady roaring sound on the roof, and he had left the outside door open so that he could, at times, glance over and see the rain beyond the sill and eaves, a flowing wall of water. The letters were, in principle, his own, and all addressed to the same person, General Etienne Laveaux, who commanded the Republican French army in the Northern Department. Indeed there was only one letter, in principle, but Toussaint had not yet selected its final version. He had ordered different drafts from several of his sometime secretaries: Doctor Hébert, a mulatto youth who was called Moustique and who was the son of a renegade French priest, and Captain Maillart, a Frenchman who was now one of Toussaint’s officers but had formerly served under Laveaux and so had the advantage of knowing him personally.

Toussaint arranged and rearranged the three sheets of paper in the soft-edged, yellow circle of lamplight, smoothing them with his large hands. None was yet perfect, no version complete. Another Frenchman had turned up in camp that day, claiming to have recently deserted from Laveaux. Toussaint did not much believe his story, for the Frenchman, who called himself Bruno Pinchon, had more the air of a soldier of fortune than that of a regular army officer. Nevertheless, he now thought of exploring the newcomer’s epistolary style, on the following day, if not later that evening. He had sent Pinchon to dine with the white people who stayed in the grand’case.

Now he folded the letters away and turned his chair slightly to face the door and the rain flooding down beyond it. His eyes half-closed, he pictured places and the people in them as if on charts—as he commissioned letter-writing, so he commissioned the drawing of maps, and one way or another these maps were always drawing themselves before his eyes.

Here was Habitation Thibodet, in the canton of Ennery, and