Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [151]
“Bonjour ma fille, mon frère.”
But both of them quietened, almost apprehensively, at this greeting. “Bonjour Maman,” Sophie said, but with an air of caution. She slipped off the doctor’s foot and went unbidden into the house, so that Zabeth might bathe and change her. In the doorway she turned back with a toss of her ringlets and a smile on her plump red lips for the doctor, then skipped into the shadows of the hallway. How naturally the gestures of flirtation came to her, Elise thought—Ai, in a few short years the child ought to be sent to school in France, but could she bear to part with her? And yet she knew too well the wantonness fostered by a Creole upbringing . . .
Surely today must be a better day. The doctor had turned his injured eyes from her. He set his relics on the table—the shard of mirror and the silver snuffbox—and gazed down at them as moodily as a Negro contemplating his fetish. Elise reached across and tapped the snuffbox with her fingernail.
“What in this article fascinates you so?” she asked him, flinching at the harshness of her tone.
The doctor’s eyes passed over her and away. “It was a souvenir Nanon kept by her,” he said, and looked out beyond the pool to the yard where men were leading out saddled horses. “I suppose it puzzles me that she would go away without it.”
“I found it in her bedclothes,” Elise said, with a studied carelessness. “Of course, she left in haste. . . . I never knew her to take snuff, did you? But whatever was in it I couldn’t make out. A mushroom maybe, but with the smell of corruption. Some witchery, I’d imagine.”
As she spoke, she felt perturbed again by the sharp and sour flavor of her voice. Inside herself she felt hard and dry, desiccated as if by a desert sun. The doctor sighed and pocketed the snuffbox, then, after a moment, the shard of mirror too.
“Today I must take my leave of you,” he said.
“Oh?”
“With Toussaint’s troops.”
“Where is he bound?”
“As to that, he has kept his own counsel.” The doctor smiled distantly, and not for her benefit. “But today he is moving large numbers of men—across the whole cordon as far as Dondon, I believe.”
Someone among the uniformed blacks in the yard called out his name. He stood, looking diffidently at the floorboards.
“Well, my horse is ready.”
Elise felt her hardness cracking out into anger. Was she not justified, after all? But she did not want to parch and crack, as Madame Arnaud had done. Of a sudden she felt terrified by his departure.
“My brother,” she said, softly as she could manage. “Believe this much: I never meant to wound you.”
“No,” the doctor said abstractedly. “No, I don’t believe you intended any harm to me.”
Cold comfort. He stooped, taking her hands limply, leaning forward far enough to brush the dry outer scales of his lips across her cheek. Then he straightened, pulled back the skirt of his coat to check his pistols, and walked down the gallery steps toward the horses.
Elise sat stirring the dregs of her coffee. A crow flew ragged-winged across the pool. She looked up at the geckos which clung upside down to the gallery ceiling. Sometime after the horses and men had moved out of earshot, Sophie reappeared, fresh-washed and dressed.
“Ki bo tonton Antoine?”
“Français, Sophie,” Elise said. “‘Where is my Uncle Antoine,’ you should say.”
“M’rinmin li,” Sophie said. I love him.
“Dis, ‘Je l’aime,’ ” Elise said, drawing the child to her. “I am very happy that you love your uncle. But today he has gone off with the soldiers.”
Sophie, petulant, pulled away. “Well? Then when is Papa coming back?