Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [309]
“I never saw anything quite so bad,” Maillart said, mopping himself with his crumpled shirt. “Not since ninety-one, at least.”
Riau quit the two white men, impassively, with just a flick of a finger at the brim of his hussar’s hat. In ninety-one, as all three of them knew, he had been burning and looting and painting himself with blood of whites all over the northern plain. Riau was also close to Moyse, from their time in slavery at Bréda onward, and Moyse was certainly near the heart of the present unrest, though to blame him for it might be going too far, in Maillart’s opinion. Moyse was not in any way fond of blancs. He had conspicuously failed to share Toussaint’s pleasure at the return of Bayon de Libertat to Bréda (though De Libertat had not especially mistreated him in former times). He liked to say that he would learn to love whites only when they returned to him the eye he had lost in battle.
It had begun this way: Moyse commanded the Fifth Regiment, garrisoned in Fort Liberté, on the north coast near the Spanish border. He had been given an order to capture and return fugitive slaves from the Spanish territory, which had much displeased him and with which he did not comply. From this friction there evolved a rumor that the Fifth Regiment meant to massacre the whites of the region.
“Now,” said Maillart, as he slipped into a fresh shirt. “Enter the Peacemaker of the Vendée.”
Hédouville, it appeared, had seen in this situation the opportunity to relieve Moyse of his command, replace him with a white officer of his own choice, and perhaps disarm and disband the Fifth Regiment altogether. With the collaboration of the civilian officials of Fort Liberté, who were mostly white, Hédouville’s agents had set about this project while Moyse was absent in Grande Rivière.
They might have succeeded, Maillart told the doctor as they left the gate of the casernes and began walking down through the blue darkness toward the Cigny house, and had in fact got so far as locking the Fifth Regiment out of the arsenal and obtaining a reluctant acquiescence of the junior officers to the change of command. But Moyse’s wife (“a woman to reckon with,” said the captain with a wag of his head) had won the soldiers back over, had inspired her husband’s men to break into the arsenal and rearm themselves: she’d counted out cartridges for them with her own hands.
Moyse, for his part, raised revolt among the cultivators of Grande Rivière. This rising, now pouring down out of the mountains onto the Plaine du Nord, had turned Maillart back from his mission to Fort Liberté, and shaken him to his bootheels—perhaps it wasn’t quite as bad as ninety-one (the sky was not yet blackened out by the smoke of burning cane fields) but some plantations had been sacked, bands of armed blacks drifted over the plain, and the white landowners, who’d returned to their holdings in significant numbers, were rushing to refuge at Le Cap—pursued by waves of armed blacks who shouted that Hédouville intended to restore slavery and constantly cried out for Toussaint.
By then they’d reached the Cigny house, which was in some turmoil due to the sudden and unexpected arrival of Michel and Claudine Arnaud in precipitous retreat from their plantation on the plain.
“But where is Toussaint?” said Isabelle.
“He is at Gonaives,” Maillart said.
O’Farrel, who’d arrived separately, added, “Though the agent has ordered him to put down the disturbance at Fort Liberté immediately.”
There was still another rumor—that Toussaint had already traveled to the north, encountered Moyse, and, having taken the measure of the situation, returned to Gonaives without doing anything to quell the rising. No one could say if this were true or not—Maillart could only testify that he had not seen him.
“Oh,” said Isabelle, glancing at the window. “I wish Joseph would come—he was expected.”
“Joseph?” said Maillart in a low tone, looking at her curiously.
“Flaville,” said Isabelle. “He could certainly tell us