Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [209]
At this Choufleur shifted his weight and murmured, “Well, but there is slavery in Jamaica, and over the mountains in Santo Domingo . . . other places too.”
The white man turned to look at Paul more closely. “The boy looks white.”
“The father was a white man,” Choufleur said. “The mother, a métive.”
“He is too young,” the white man said. “What can he do?”
“Whatever anyone wishes him to do,” Choufleur said.
The white man looked at the boy again, stroking his thumb beneath his lower lip. “And you will not return for him?”
“Never,” said Choufleur. “No one will return.”
The white man turned on him eyes a startling bright blue. “All right then. You may leave him.”
“But give me something.” Choufleur’s voice turned wheedling, obsequious—a note Nanon had never heard from him.
The white man took a leather drawstring bag from his trouser pocket and probed in it with a stubby finger, his lips puckered. He selected one gold portugaise and placed it on Choufleur’s extended palm. Choufleur shrugged and closed his fingers. The white man clapped him on the back.
“Arrangé.”
“Ça.”
Choufleur swing into the saddle and rode out the gate without looking back. Nor did Paul take any note of his departure. But the eye of the dream followed Choufleur instead of remaining with the boy. The gold piece was still closed in his hand, but as he turned into the Rue Espagnole, he flung the coin away without looking to see where it landed.
Nanon came up from the dream gasping and choking like someone barely saved from drowning. She covered her mouth with both hands to suppress the urge to vomit. For some minutes the dream still seemed to her a fact—more real to her than her actual surroundings. Slowly the world replaced the dream. Striped by moonlight slanting through the slats of the jalousies, Choufleur lay against her hip, sleeping silently, motionless. Even his breathing was completely inaudible. He always slept so, as if in ambush. Nanon took her hands away from her mouth. The story he had told her about the school might well have been true, in whole or in part. At the same time the dream was not only a dream. All she knew for certain was that Paul was not dead, for had he been she would have known it in her bones.
In the days that followed, Choufleur busied himself about the plantation with a fervor she had not seen in him before. Apparently he had a pressing need for money, and there was coffee on the trees, and much work to be done very rapidly in order to convert it into cash. Choufleur was gone each morning when she woke, and usually did not come back to the house until it was fully dark. In his absence Nanon busied herself by ordering elaborate meals to tempt his palate. She sent Salomon on a long excursion after wild mushrooms to be sautéed with game birds. She herself went into the woods to gather wild flowers to decorate the house. In bed she deployed her most subtle wiles to please him.
All the while, Paul lay between them, the bulging presence of the subject neither of them raised again in words. Each night Nanon opened her legs and felt Choufleur rush against her, through her and beyond. He had held her image in his head for the many years of their separation, and now he thrust himself through her, toward that image, which was elsewhere. She saw it would come to no good end. But she would not leave, for it was not yet finished.
One morning she woke to a startling bright, warm light. Choufleur had rolled the jalousies, which usually stayed down throughout the day. The sunlight played over her honey-colored skin—she had slept nude, and he must have pulled the sheet from her. She stretched and lifted her face toward him, but he was looking at her coldly.
“Where is the snuffbox?”
A chill crawled over her bare skin. She looked at Choufleur’s narrowed eyes. The freckles swam across his face. The snuffbox had not been mentioned between them since he had brought her to Vallière. We will wipe out everything which has been before, Choufleur had told her.
“Why do you ask?”
The box with what it contained had been