Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [347]
On the evening of their arrival, Madame Fortier inspected the front bedchamber with her lips pursed and her nostrils flaring. She ordered all the bedding to be aired, and the mattress to be thoroughly beaten. With an air of distaste she fingered the collar of scars which Nanon’s chain had left on the heavy mahogany bedpost during that time when she’d been left to circle the room like a dog tied to a tree and abandoned.
Next morning, Nanon found Salomon working round and round the the bedpost with a file made of sharkskin wrapped round a lathe. His eyes flashed white when he noticed her, and then he bent more closely over his work, giving her his shoulder. By the end of that day he’d ground down both posts at the bed’s foot to the same degree, so that they remained symmetrical; he oiled them so carefully that scarcely any trace of the alteration could be seen.
Nanon had spied Madame Fortier, sitting on the gallery with a couple of mildewed ledgers under her hand; as she had no refreshment by her, Nanon went at once to the kitchen herself. The women were preparing coffee, but Nanon took the task out of their hands. She prepared a tray with two cups, a pot, a bowl of brown sugar, some wedges of cassava bread, and a sprig of bougainvillea in a vase.
Madame Fortier looked up abstractedly as Nanon placed the cup before her and poured. “My son, your particular friend, was not a great hand with his accounting,” she said. “All this is the work of his father.” She turned the pages fretfully. The paper was worm-holed through and through, but still mostly legible; scrambling over the lace-like sheets Nanon could recognize the pale, insectine script of the Sieur Maltrot.
“Jean-Michel never opened this book, I don’t imagine,” Madame Fortier said. “It’s been years since any note was made at all.” Peevishly she slammed the ledger shut and looked up. “Well?”
“C’est pour Monsieur,” Nanon said, glancing at the second cup.
“Oh,” said Madame Fortier. “He has gone to the terraces, long ago. The second coffee is yours, my dear. Sit down and drink it.”
Nanon obeyed. After she had taken her first sip, Madame Fortier covered her hand with her own. “You are not to play the servant, child,” she said. “You are at home, as much as anyone here.”
Nanon felt a warmth spread across her face. She lowered her head and looked at the dark swirl of her coffee. Madame Fortier applied a light pressure to the back of her hand. Then they both turned toward the interior of the house, their hands slipping apart, as they heard the distantly disagreeable sound of Isabelle retching.
In the next weeks, Monsieur Fortier labored mightily in the coffee terraces, which had fallen into desuetude once again, since Choufleur had vanished from the scene. For her part Madame Fortier took inventory of the main-d’oeuvre, comparing the slave lists of the Sieur Maltrot (which were detailed and thorough) with the present population of free blacks on the plantation. The discrepancy was less, she told Nanon and Isabelle, than she might have expected. Toussaint’s orders were generally respected in this region, and most of the former field hands remained on the property, though many of them, perhaps more than half, seemed much more inclined to work their own gardens for their own benefit, rather than trouble themselves with the coffee. Also there had been more births, and more surviving children.
There was at first some difficulty in returning a sufficient work force to the coffee groves, but after certain messages had been sent down the mountain, a troop of Moyse’s regiment appeared from Ouanaminthe, and stayed long enough to remind the field hands that work was the price of freedom. By the time Isabelle had passed through her phase of morning sickness, the coffee trees had been carefully