Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [217]
Sophie did not ask after Paul any longer. She had given up asking for her father as well. Tocquet had abandoned them, perhaps permanently—Elise had no way of knowing. He did send money, from time to time. Every six weeks or so either Gros-jean or Bazau appeared to give her a little bag of coins, gold and silver, struck by several different nations like a pirate treasure.
After the first weeks of Tocquet’s desertion, Elise had pulled herself up from her initial collapse. She walked through her days, although with a bitter, shriveling heart. As for Sophie, once the first flood of her sorrow had passed, she seemed the same as before, yet Elise knew that her losses were too great to have had no effect on her at all.
What was the man waiting for? She knew that Bazau and Gros-jean would be bringing him reports. Perhaps Tocquet was waiting to hear that she had given up and gone to France, in which case he might swoop down to reclaim Sophie and the plantation which was hers through her first marriage, and now his. But maybe he cared only for the land, for she would take Sophie with her if she did go to France. Did he not know it? If she were to go . . . Once her pride had returned, it prevented her from cross-examining Gros-jean or Bazau as to Tocquet’s whereabouts or his activities. But the men gossiped enough around the military camp that the news came back to her eventually, through Zabeth or Guiaou or Riau, sometimes even from one of the French officers, Maillart or Vaublanc. She knew that Tocquet was based in his cattle corral on the central plateau, that he was selling beef to the French Jacobin army, and trading tobacco along the smuggler’s run from Dajabón to Ouanaminthe to Fort Liberté.
Elise’s humors ran from sorrow and regret to indifference to anger, day by day. If she had not done what she had done! . . . or if, somehow, she could undo it. In one of her irritable moods, she began taking Tocquet’s things out of the wardrobe, with the idea of discarding them or throwing them away. On the floor of the wardrobe, under a pile of folded trousers, was a long wooden box with a sliding cover. Its weight was surprising. Elise heaved it onto the bed and wrestled the lid back. The groove was warped and sticky from the damp. Inside, two long dragoon pistols and a short, broad-bladed sword. There was powder and lead and a bullet mold and a roll of papers in oilskin which seemed to be maps, though she did not look at them closely.
Elise picked up one of the pistols and aimed it wobbling around the room. The thing was monstrously heavy. Only by bracing the barrel across her forearm could she hold it steadily level. She sighted into the mirror, her own eyes hard above the hollow eye of the gun barrel.
From the gallery, she caught sight of Guiaou crossing the yard below the doctor’s lily pool. She hailed him: “Vini moin!”
Guiaou reversed his direction, glancing toward her, and climbed the steps.
“What must I do to shoot this thing?” Elise said, carelessly waving at the pistol on the table. “Show me, if you please.”
Guiaou shook his head, but he was accustomed to obedience, first by slavery and then by military discipline. He showed her how to prime the pistol and patch a ball. Elise lifted the weapon and pointed it at a palm trunk below the gallery. When she pulled the trigger, the barrel