Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [275]
She ordered coffee for us to drink, and as we sat there sipping it, we told her what we knew of Nanon, and how we knew it. First I spoke, and then Tocquet.
“Bien,” Madame Fortier said, when we were both done speaking. “She ought to go back to this blanc doctor, I suppose. Assuming he would still have her back. One does not know just what a blanc might do in such a case.”
Tocquet and I looked at each other. Then Tocquet explained how the trouble had begun with the doctor’s sister, how she had wanted to drive Nanon and her son away. Then I told her what had passed later, when Elise had changed her heart and gone herself to bring the boy back to Thibodet, where he was now, as a child of the house. All the time I was speaking, Madame Fortier drew herself up slightly and became more and more alert, like an animal hunting.
“Well, that is something,” she said when I had finished. “It is the loss of that child that has hurt her as much as anything, I think. When I asked her if she would go back to this blanc doctor, she said that she would not. But if the child is there . . . She must not stay here, that much I know. Jean-Michel can bring her nothing but harm.”
She stopped talking, and looked across the gallery rail. A hummingbird was in the air before a bloom, green feathers shining on his back.
“A thing once ruined cannot be brought back,” Madame Fortier said. “As it is wrong to bring the flesh back from the grave, so the love that was once between this woman and my son has become a twisted thing.”
She looked at me deeply, and I lowered my eyes, from respect for the pain which she was speaking. When I looked up again, Nanon had appeared in the doorway of the house, with her blank zombi eyes aimed down toward the gate.
“Vini moin, machè,” Madame Fortier said, and Nanon did come and take a seat beside her. Madame Fortier laid her hand on Nanon’s bare arm and she shifted, restlessly. Since the day before she was all clean, and her hair was washed and carefully arranged, and the bad smell replaced with a sweet one, but the wildness was still in her.
Madame Fortier began to tell her how Paul had been brought back to Thibodet, that the boy was well, and waiting for her there. As she spoke, Nanon’s face began to twist and wrestle with itself. She seemed to be crying, but without tears or sound. At last she calmed herself and swallowed. The mark of the iron collar moved on her throat.
“I cannot go,” she said. Her voice was empty and sweet. None of what had been in her face was in it. “I cannot go there now.”
Madame Fortier took her hand away. There was a bad silence among us all.
Then Tocquet got up and went away behind the house. The silence remained. The watch ticked in the pocket of my captain’s coat. After a while, Tocquet came back with a basin of warm water and crushed leaves. He got down on the floor in front of Nanon and began very gently to wash her feet. The leaves were herbe charpentier, I knew by their smell, and they had a healing power for the hurts on her skin.
Madame Fortier turned in her chair, breathing in sharply, and I felt something of her feeling pass to me. Tocquet was a proud man in his own way, which was not quite the usual way of a blanc, but I had never thought of him doing such a thing. It made me wonder how it might be between him and the doctor’s sister when they were alone with one another.
Madame Fortier looked at me and we both got up and walked down through the garden and stood in the gateway. That same malfini hung in the air above the gorge, as on the day before. Madame Fortier clucked her tongue.
“I do not know if Jean-Michel will ever come back here anyway,” she said. “He has gone to the south, to Rigaud, because the Commissioner Sonthonax would have sent him to France, a prisoner.”
“But now it’s Sonthonax who has been sent away,” I said.
“What does it matter.” Madame Fortier did not look toward me, and I did not feel that