Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [293]
The doctor experienced an inner recoil. “If Toussaint were to learn of that, it would surely explain his distemper.”
“Indeed, it was let slip to him intentionally.” Pascal’s teeth drew blood from the corner of his tattered thumbnail. “It may be that he was even placed so as to overhear the actual conversation with Rigaud.”
“But why should General Hédouville—”
“Because he has no substantial force of his own,” Pascal said, looking somewhat unhappily at his wounded digit. “He must set the leaders against one another, and hope to insinuate his own officers among the cracks that open.”
“I call that a very dangerous game.”
“Agreed. But he played it to a victory in the Vendée, or so we are constantly told.” Pascal said. “No doubt he hopes to do the same thing here.”
“Give me your hand,” the doctor said, taking it in his own as he spoke. He squinted at the swollen area around the base of Pascal’s thumbnail.
“As for Toussaint,” Pascal told him, “I think we may reassure ourselves that this idea of retirement is a similar ploy. Only observe your own reaction—everyone else will feel the same. Even his enemies, or those who feel that he has simply become too powerful. For the moment, there is no one else who can hold things together here.”
“Let us take what comfort we can from that.” The doctor shook his head, wagging Pascal’s hand in his. “But this nail biting is truly a vicious habit, in a hot country. Look, you have already a bad spot here. You must let me poultice this.”
When he had tended to Pascal’s hand, the doctor parted from him and went on foot to the Cigny house, half dizzied by the heat and glare of the noonday sun. Arriving, he bypassed the front door without quite knowing his reason for doing so, and instead went round to the small crooked courtyard at the back, where a couple of servants whom he knew were resting in the shade. They smiled when they saw him, and at his indirect inquiry let him know that Madame Cigny was absent, having gone to call on a friend elsewhere in the town. When the conversation ended, they made no objection to the doctor’s entering the house by the back door.
He went up the stairs, unpleasantly conscious of the noise of his boots and the creaking of the planks beneath them. But no one was about to notice. From the bedroom on the second floor, the snores of Monsieur Cigny resounded, as the master of the house slept away the worst of the day’s heat. The doctor kept on climbing to the attic.
The door of the little room was slightly ajar; a nudge of his fingertips sufficed to send it floating inward. Nanon sat up on her cot with a gasp, and quickly pulled the sheet up to her collarbone. She’d been napping in the nude, as was her habit.
“Why have you come here?” she said.
“To let you know that our son is well.”
Nanon flinched, turning her face to the wall, as if he’d slapped her. The doctor’s pulse slammed at his temples. He had not considered before he spoke, but why was it the wrong thing to have said? Nanon drew the sheet higher over her shoulders, gripping the fabric from the end, tight as the hands of a corpse upon a shroud. She was thinner than before and there was a line of discoloration across her throat like an ugly necklace. Rust. The loss of weight brought a fragile edge to the beauty he remembered. So long since he had seen her at all, but she agreed very well with his memory. The heat bore down terribly here on the top floor, and the sheet clung humidly to the contours of her body. The doctor was aware of the grime caked on him, of an unpleasant taste in his mouth.
“I mean no harm,” he said, squatting at her bedside, extending his hand. “Quite the opposite.”
“Don’t,” Nanon said. “Don’t, I beg you. Je t’en prie.”
The doctor’s hand had stopped in the air. She would