Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [242]
“I have heard nothing from Xavier,” Elise said. “No personal word, that is, for sometimes he sends money. And gathers intelligence too, I imagine.”
“So far we are in the same case,” the doctor said, though it occurred to him that he had no such way of knowing that Nanon was even still alive.
“Yes,” said Elise, and turned to face him, the moon shining in the dark hollows of her eyes. “One must have faith, and hope. I have done what I can to make things right.” She bowed her head for a moment and then raised it. “So as to be at peace with myself, at least. No matter what may come from another.”
Her hand crept across the table toward him. The doctor took it in his own.
“La paix,” he said, as if in church. He pressed her hand, and went on holding it. Linked thus, they faced the cool light of the moon.
The Desfourneaux plantation, which Toussaint had acquired, abutted upon Habitation Thibodet, just as the black general had said. The doctor arrived there early the next morning to collect the boys, having sent word of his coming in advance. They were ready for him, their small valises packed. Suzanne waited with them on the gallery of the Desfourneaux grand’case, now her own house. Madame Louverture!—consort to the great and terrible black general. But she gave herself no airs at this elevation, dressed in no higher style than a country woman on market day: a clean, pressed cotton dress with an apron, a blue mouchwa têt bound tight to her brow. Her face was wonderfully calm, expressionless, as the doctor bowed over her hand. She embraced the boys quickly, Isaac and Placide, and with a little shove sent each of them from her, toward the gallery steps.
The lads had their own horses—good ones too—and were quick and confident in the saddle, as one would expect of Toussaint’s sons. Both kept their eyes on the road ahead as they rode out. Only the doctor looked back once, to see Suzanne standing mute in the doorway of the house, her hands hidden in her clothing, while Saint-Jean peeped from behind her skirts.
Doctor Hébert had a liking for both boys, especially Placide, whom he took to be the more intelligent. Isaac clowned all the way up the mountain to Plaisance and beyond. He persuaded one of Toussaint’s guardsmen to lend him a plumed helmet, so much too large for him that it kept slipping down over his face. Whenever this happened, the boy’s blind movements would make his horse shy and threaten to buck, and though Isaac could easily bring his mount under control, he would not give up the helmet, so that the same scene kept repeating itself throughout the journey. Placide, meanwhile, asked constant questions, about the ocean voyage, about life in France, about the Collège de la Marche where he and his brother would be enrolled, at such a level of detail that finally the doctor could no longer answer them.
Sonthonax received the boys in his house as he had said he would, treating them with the greatest consideration. Laveaux also, whom they had been taught to regard as a distinguished uncle, called on them, and gave them many hours of his time during the two days prior to their departure. The doctor turned out on the waterfront to see them board the Wattigny, and as they stepped down onto the deck of the ship and disappeared from his view, the notion struck him: What if they do not return? What if I never see them again? But this was one of those wandering, unattached thoughts that sometimes brushed him in the colony—it was not properly his own.
Then, at the height of the fever season, the doctor had all the practice he could desire among the newly shipped soldiers, who were all suffering the usual maladies of acclimatization. Enlisted as messenger and liaison between Sonthonax and Toussaint, he was too often on the road to bother renting a room at Le Cap. At first he slept in the casernes, among his military patients, but when Isabelle Cigny learned of this, she insisted that he come to her. Arnaud and his wife were semi-permanently installed in the Cigny house,