Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [310]
“Ah,” said Maillart, “but to the best of my knowledge he is now with Moyse.”
The doctor watched Claudine Arnaud, who had raised her chin alertly at the mention of Flaville . . . a man who had come a long way, in a short time, to be considered an ally by such whites as these. In ninety-one, as all of them could not help but remember, Flaville had contributed as much as anyone to the terror on the Plaine du Nord.
That night the doctor dreamed of Choufleur’s salon of decadent delights, in such concrete and accurate detail that he might have been living those moments for a second time. But with one difference. In the floating eye of his dream he saw Riau take a loose cloth bag from his coat pocket and pour from it a small mound of salt on the table before the place where Nanon sat, wearing her fetter and chain. Her dead eyes flickered at his movement. Tentatively she reached forward and dipped a finger in the salt and brought it to her lips. As the salt spread on her tongue, she lifted her face and her eyes enlivened, but what she saw the doctor woke too soon to know. He wanted to ask Riau about it, but laughed off the notion—that Riau should be accountable for what he did in someone else’s dream.
For two days the mood was so very tense that Doctor Hébert scarcely thought of his appointment with Choufleur. Refugee planters kept coming into Le Cap, full of wild reports and rumors. The town was too lightly garrisoned at the moment for any sortie to be risked—indeed it was poorly defended against a landward assault from rebel blacks, if one really came. The mood at Government House approached desperation. Pascal had mutilated his thumb to the point that the doctor threatened to tie his arm behind his back. In his effort to undo the disaster wrought by Sonthonax, Hédouville had drifted more and more into alliance with the remains of the mulatto faction in the north, but these were not sufficient to uphold him in the present crisis. And wherever Toussaint might be, he was unresponsive.
Hand in hand with Paul, the doctor walked toward the village on the hill. Paulette held the boy by his other hand, so he was happy, and the doctor, glancing at their joined fingers, felt a bittersweet happiness of his own. Thank God for this girl’s durable feeling for his child, without which he might have been lost forever. She had borne her losses—her martyred father, the Père Bonne-chance. Thank God, also, for Fontelle . . . Paulette had something of her mother’s grace; her step was light, her back sinuously erect as she walked, though she balanced a huge basket of laundry on her head. When they reached the steep, twisting path which ran up the foot of the mountain to the church and beyond, she did not break her stride, and neither did Paul, though the doctor proceeded with much greater difficulty, sometimes obliged to use a hand to balance himself as he slipped on the shale.
Paulette found her mother and the two of them began to lay out the laundry, still slightly damp from the river, to finish drying in the wind and the sun. Paul had joined his friends and headed for the cliffside. The wind sprang up sharply off the harbor; the doctor caught his straw hat as it peeled from his head, and carried it against his thigh as he walked around toward the front of the church. Moustique was sitting on the steps, dressed in his rough white vestment and the purple stole he had taken from the Abbé Delahaye. The doctor went to join him, taking a seat a step below.
The wind raised his remaining wisps of hair to stand straight up on his peeling scalp, and this reminded him to jam his hat back on to protect himself against the sun. The sight of the stole made him think of confession. Of a sudden he had the impulse to be shriven, before presenting his breast to Choufleur’s pistol . . . though he had no doubt that he could do away with Choufleur with his own first shot. Still, perhaps it would be better to settle this question in advance, as he himself had suggested to his opponent. With a feeling of bewilderment, as if out of nowhere, he remembered