Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [340]
Christophe turned his head and called an order to the sentry at the gate. Presently Fontelle was brought out, with Paulette and her older sisters, Fanchette and Marie-Hélène. The older girls gave evidence of the charms which might move a priest to break his holy vows. In their present situation they would of course be targets of molestation, though there was no outward sign they had been harmed so far. From the second building, another guard produced Moustique. The boy was bruised around the mouth, and his hands were tied behind him with a straggling end of rope. The guard encouraged him forward with a couple of kicks to his rear.
“You claim kinship with these people?” Christophe inquired. There was a trace of sarcasm in his tone. Arnaud looked past him. The pigs at the stream bed had begun to squeal and lunge at each other, disputing the spoil they’d found. Nearby, a couple of white egrets stood motionless, bone-white, indifferent. Arnaud’s tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth.
“Yes,” Claudine said clearly. “Yes, we do.”
“They are suspect in the rebellion of Rigaud,” Christophe announced. “If you are engaged with them, you too may be colored”—he smiled to underline his pun—“with the same suspicion. Ought I to let them go with you, or shut you up with them?”
At his words, the men of the firing squad raised their muskets. Arnaud, with a turn of his wrist, cocked his cane against his upper arm, as if to parry. He had no other weapon. It had become inadvisable for a civilian white man to go armed.
“Take them, then.” Christophe seemed to lose interest in the whole question as he spoke. He turned his horse away and called an order to his men, who re-formed their ranks and began marching after him in the direction of the town.
With numb hands, Arnaud helped Fontelle and her daughters climb into the wagon. The boards of the floor were bare. The provisions they’d bought for their return to the plain had been left at the Cigny house, but after what had just occurred, he was not much inclined to go back for them.
“We must find some straw for the wagonbed,” Claudine said, “when we go back for our other things.” She was untying Moustique’s wrists. Freed, the boy rubbed his hands together disconsolately.
“Eh? But no,” Arnaud said, with a glance at Christophe’s soldiers marching away toward the town gate. “I think it better not to return for anything, today.”
“But we ought, if only for the straw.” Claudine looked from him to the women in the wagon.
“Is their comfort so important?” Arnaud said. “I call them lucky to be alive.”
“They can be hidden under the straw,” Claudine said patiently. “In case we should meet any incident on the road.”
Arnaud reflected, as he climbed after her onto the wagon box, that she had experience in such matters which he himself lacked. At the price of her ring finger she’d brought a wagonload of white women out of the burning plain in ninety-one . . . As usual his imagination failed him on the threshold of this scene.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said, and, clucking to his horses, he started the wagon for the town. Claudine sat rigidly erect beside him, and now and then he stole a glance at her, in between scanning the road and the horizon for anything that might threaten their passengers in the rear. The usual questions flickered through his mind—how had she brought herself to do those dreadful things she’d done when they were separated? What power drew her to the African dances? How did she reconcile her actions there with her Christian devotion and the prescriptions of Père Bonne-chance? But he had never voiced these questions to her, and did not do so now, because he feared that to ask them when she was calm as she seemed might overset her reason, because they would be overheard by Fontelle and her family, because (as he’d admit to himself in his moments of greatest honesty) he was afraid of the answers she might offer.
Toussaint and his army passed Fort Picolet and entered Le Cap an