Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [148]
“Savage as it may be, it draws one,” she said. “Sometimes I feel drawn to go.”
“Please,” said Maillart. “You mustn’t think of it.”
Isabelle shook herself. “Of course, I do not go,” she said, looking down the slope. “Claudine has been.”
“You amaze me,” Maillart said. “She must be quite mad.”
“Oh, the peasants would not harm her,” Isabelle said. “They respect her. Fear her, even. Perhaps in some way they worship her. They believe her enchanted, raised from the dead—a zombi, Joseph told me. Or some believe she is only possessed.”
“‘Only,’ ” Maillart repeated. “Perhaps they are right.”
The wind lifted, and Isabelle seemed to shiver again, so that Maillart was moved to put his arm about her shoulders, but instead he only tightened his grip on her hand. This reaction against his first impulse annoyed him. It was a puzzle, the idea of friendship with a woman, a business he had small competence to conduct. Among the palm stumps, Claudine Arnaud leaned slightly forward into the wind, the sleeves and hem of her pale garment fluttering like sails.
“Is it true what you told Laveaux,” he asked, “about the water?”
“Oh yes,” Isabelle said. “Very much so. She carries buckets on a wooden yoke across her shoulders like a slave woman, and serves the field workers with her own hands. Nothing will restrain her from it—it ought to kill her, in that midday heat, but she is not easily killed. She conceives it as some sort of penance, I believe.”
“Has she not already suffered?”
“Amply,” said Isabelle.
For some minutes there had been silence in the cleft of the hills, but now a guttural grumbling began, a half-human-sounding voice that rose toward a melody, chanting, singing in an unknown tongue, perhaps some African language. The drums began. Maillart became aware of a darker figure, standing still as a tree some thirty yards from Madame Arnaud, farther down the boulevard of stumps.
“It is only Joseph,” Isabelle said. “He follows her sometimes, when she walks at night. To see that she comes to no harm.”
“Strange.”
“Perhaps.”
With a sudden impatient movement, Isabelle pulled her kerchief off and held it in her free hand; the cloth went flagging in the wind. She shook her head back so that her dark hair loosened and flowed freely off her shoulders. The gesture seemed almost a signal to the man below, but that was a ludicrous notion, Maillart thought. When she tossed her head, the gold chain came tight against the tendons of her neck, and he thought of the stone phallus nudging the space between her little breasts. The idea was erotic, but abstract.
“He witnessed it,” Isabelle said. “When Claudine chopped off her finger.”
“Who?” Maillart shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“Joseph Flaville,” Isabelle said. “That was in the first rising of ninety-one—Claudine was in a wagon with some few survivors of the gérant’s family . . . from Habitation Flaville, you know, where she had been a guest. They were trying to make their way out of the plain to Le Cap, through the bands of renegades roaming the roads and the fields. Joseph was not as you see him now. Oh, he would not tell me so much, but he must have been fresh and hot from murdering his own master, or something of that sort. He was among the band that intercepted their wagon.”
“I’ve heard the tale, at second hand,” Maillart said.
“One of them wanted to take her wedding ring, but it would not come over the knuckle of her finger. So she snatched a knife and hacked it off and gave them the ring as a price of passage. But Joseph said that she spoke to them in a devil’s voice like what we just heard there.” Isabelle tilted her chin toward the cleft in the hills where the drums still rolled. “All those marauders were much impressed, because they had not known a white woman could be taken by a spirit so.”
You seem very much in the confidence of your Joseph, Maillart thought again, but it seemed unfriendly, petulant even, to say as much aloud.
“She escaped by a hair’s breadth, at any rate,” Isabelle said. “And again, more recently, that