Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [237]
Outside the church considerably more people were gathering than had attended the service. Bayon de Libertat was nowhere to be seen.
“I believe he was in a hurry to return to Bréda,” the doctor said to Arnaud’s question. “This issue of the émigrés has become very thorny, even though Bayon enjoys the best of Toussaint’s protection and goodwill.”
“How well I know it,” muttered Arnaud, who would himself be counted as an émigré. The ocean breeze had dried his sweat again, and he felt very much more himself. His former self. “But all this comes from Sonthonax,” he burst out irritably, twitching his cane against his thigh. “One does not encounter such prejudice from Laveaux, nor even from Toussaint.” The familiar fabric of his fears and interests and resentments closed around him like a cloak.
The doctor turned his face toward the water. It was dark, the moon just rising from the waves. Arnaud subsided. He knew that the doctor was privy to the councils of Toussaint with Sonthonax, and also that he served as intermediary between them when they chanced to disagree. It piqued him, sometimes, that his own hopes were strongest with Toussaint, that this former slave tricked out as a general should be in better sympathy with the old plantation owners, whom Sonthonax had damned as aristocrats and émigrés. At other times he saw more plainly that he must accept Toussaint’s favor, and even court it, if he and Claudine were to survive in this land.
But now the drummer was coming down the steps from the church door, with the great drum hoisted on his shoulder, gripped by one of the heavy pegs which tuned the head. A current in the gathering on the hilltop moved Arnaud to follow him around the rear of the building. Claudine was in the van of this procession, walking between Moustique and Fontelle. Also near her was the black major, Joseph Flaville, though, as he was not wearing his uniform, it took Arnaud a moment to recognize him. He followed, but the others had closed the gap between them; he could not reach his wife.
They were walking down over broken ground, stepping over ditches slashed by runoff from the mountain. The ajoupas on either side of their way seemed to be empty now, but there was a hum of voices from an enclosure further ahead: an oval shut off by flat shield-shaped panels woven of palm fronds. Torchlight from the interior pushed up against the bluish light of the moon.
Crossing a ditch, Arnaud slipped on a stone and fell but caught himself on a fist and scrambled up the other side, his stick trailing uselessly. Claudine had already crossed into the peristyle, but when Arnaud reached the opening in the palm panels, two black women crossed a pair of lances, draped with flags, to bar his way.
“W pa kab pasé,” said one, her eyes remote beneath the crease of her red headcloth. “Sé pa pou blanc.”
“But—” Arnaud began. The doctor was plucking at his elbow. He let himself be led away. You cannot pass, the woman had said, it is not for whites. But Claudine had entered there. A path led around the outside of the frail palm-paneled wall, through which the torchlight flickered, and then more roughly to a ledge that ascended to higher ground above the peristyle.
“Here,” the doctor muttered, coming to a halt. “They will not mind us.”
Craning forward, Arnaud nearly toppled into a brushy ravine below the narrow ledge. He braced his stick on the crumbling dirt and pushed himself back. They were looking into that pagan temple as if into a bowl. Arnaud could make small sense of what he saw. A throng of blacks milled about inconsequentially under the light of burning splints of bwa chandel. Disorder in all directions, so far as he could see. The big drum from the church had been placed between two smaller ones that played a