Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [298]
Elsie heard him entering and came to the door of her bedroom to give him a quick sleepy hug, her nightgown clinging damply to her, her body warm and heavy from the bed. The doctor thought he heard Tocquet’s voice muttering somewhere in the dark behind her. He groped his way to his own room and dropped his saddlebags on the floor. The moist night breeze stirred the jalousies, and there was just enough moonlight slipping through the slits to help him find a candle stump. Cupping the yellow flame, he looked into Paul’s room and for a moment watched the boy breathe in sleep. Then he snuffed the candle, pulled off his boots, and stretched out fully clothed on top of the covers of his own bed. Down the hall he heard Elise’s voice, rising in the breathy excitement of love. At that he made a wry face in the moon-striped dark, but soon afterward he was asleep.
Next day he went up to the hillside camps to deliver various small articles Guiaou and Riau had separately commissioned him to bring for Merbillay and her children, Caco and the infant Sans-chagrin: white flour, a bag of peppercorns, dried beans, and a bolt of cloth. He satisfied himself that both children were healthy. With that accomplished, he had trouble finding anything to do with himself, and moped around the house for several days. Toussaint had gone down to Gonaives, but did not immediately send for him. He could not settle. Paul was happy enough, it seemed, and spent most of his days frolicking with Caco. Tocquet and Elise were almost ostentatiously blissful, and Sophie was so very glad to have her father home again—the doctor knew it was churlish for him to envy their reunion, but he still did feel rather like a beggar, peering through a pane of icy glass at the rich around their banquet table.
He could not bring himself to speak to his sister about anything that had happened with Nanon, but one night he did give Xavier Tocquet the barest account of the circumstances. Tocquet made no comment, only pulled on the ends of his mustache and looked elsewhere. But a day or so later Elise came to him where he sat at the gallery table, brooding over the snuffbox and his mirror shard.
“Brother,” she said. “May I sit with you?”
He looked up curiously, for she did not usually address him in this formal fashion.
“Of course,” he said. “After all, it is your house.”
Elise took a chair, folded her arms and looked at him closely. “Are you angry with me still?”
“No,” he told her. “You’ve done what you could to put it right.”
“But not enough,” said Elise, “for you have not regained your lover.”
The doctor picked up the bit of mirror and used it to fire a reflected sunbeam out over the bougainvillea that climbed the gallery rail.
“What do those objects mean to you?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” The doctor considered. “Sometimes I think they are like chessmen, and if I only position them just so . . . Or sometimes I feel they are connected to other people in my life.”
“I’ll say that I do not quite understand her conduct,” Elise said. “I would admit that I have wronged her. That I told her an untruth.”
The doctor shrugged. “Perhaps she simply prefers the other man.”
“You might make her an offer of marriage.”
“You astonish me,” he said. “Why, even your friend Isabelle Cigny warned me that if I did such a thing, I’d find myself transformed into a black.”
“Antoine,” said his sister. Her eyes welled up, magnified a larger paler blue. “I confess I’ve wronged you too. Can I not be released from my own error? In France it is one thing, but here another. I will make my own life here—I will not freeze my heart in France.”
The doctor reached across the table to take her hand. “If my forgiveness will make you free, you have it.”
He gave her fingers a gentle pressure and let them go. Elise sat back.
“When you next go to Le Cap, I think you ought to take Paul with you. Isabelle would keep him, I am sure.”
“But why? To lure the mother? Her maternal sentiments don’t seem to have