Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [322]
I wondered if perhaps Arnaud practiced his old cruelties on them when no one else was there to see, but I learned from the people that this was not true. This I found out mostly from Bouquart, because he had taken up with a woman there, who gave herself to him freely, and that was a good way of getting the news. I teased him about Zabeth at Ennery, but there was not much heart in my teasing. Bouquart told me that the people were not downhearted for anything Arnaud had done to them, but because of Toussaint who had ordered that any man not in the army must work and stay on the land he worked for his whole life long, or else be punished by the soldiers with their guns. Also Toussaint had taken away many of the Sonthonax guns from the men who worked the land, saying he would return them if there was need to use them. No one said it was like slavery again, the way they had spoken about Hédouville, but I could feel them thinking so, although they would not say it to my face.
Bouquart was always away with his new woman at night, so I was alone in the case. I did not like this, and often I could not sleep. One night I rose as if a voice had called me and walked around the cane mill to the open yard before the grand’case. The moon was two days past the full, and in the light of it Claudine came drifting from the house and stopped in the burnt circle of the shed where Arnaud had once kept his slave-catching dog which the doctor had shot, and where later Claudine had murdered the maid named Mouche. She turned within the walls which were burned down, turning and turning under the moon.
From the shadow of the mill wall, I watched her. Arnaud was watching too, from a seat on the gallery of the grand’case. He sat very still—only the pommel of his twisted stick kept falling from one of his hands to the other. It made me uneasy to think that he probably saw me too, inside the shadow of the wall. Riau had more power than Arnaud then, but for that moment I did not quite believe it.
After a while I saw that someone else was watching too, a woman who stood inside a fringe of trees, across the clearing from the mill. I went to where she was standing, exposed to Arnaud’s eyes under the moon, though he made no sign that he had noticed me. The woman was Cléo, a mulattress who had been housekeeper here. I had known her in the camps of Grande Riviere, where she had run after Claudine slashed the throat of Mouche in the shed. It was Cléo who told me all that story.
“Zombi,” she said now, pointing her chin at Claudine where she turned, but I shook my head.
“No, she is waiting for Baron,” I said.
Cléo turned to me with her mouth round in surprise, and I told her what I had seen at Le Cap, in the hûnfor, how Baron, or sometimes Erzulie-gé-Rouge, would mount the head of this whitewoman.
When Cléo had understood this, she stepped out of the cover of the trees and went to Claudine and took one of her hands in her own and put the other hand at the base of Claudine’s head. A breath went out of Claudine like wind, and she let her head roll back against Cléo’s hand. Cléo led her slowly to the house. All the time Arnaud was watching from the gallery, as if he had expected all these things to happen, though it had been years since Cléo set her foot on that plantation.
Two days later we were riding back to Le Cap, the doctor and Bouquart and I, and the other men in my command, to report to Toussaint that soon Arnaud would be sending brown sugar to the port, along with many other planters on the plain. That sugar would be loaded onto ships for England and America and would be traded for more guns and powder