Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [353]
As they came clattering into the main compound, the doctor was roused from his doze and pulled his mare up sharply. A work of construction was afoot, exactly where that shed had been, and Moustique was busy directing it.
“Ki sa y’ap fé?” he inquired of the boy who came out from the stable to take charge of his mount. What are they doing?
“They are raising a church,” the boy told him, with a brilliant grin. One of Claudine’s catechumens, the doctor imagined.
He dismounted, took off his straw hat, and began unconsciously to scratch at his dry scalp as he considered the history of that square of ground. Once it had housed Arnaud’s vicious slave-catching mastiff. Then Claudine had used it to martyr her maid. Now it looked as if Moustique meant to place the very sanctuary of his chapel exactly there. Perhaps it was fitting. Moustique noticed him and waved, with a smile. The doctor wondered how he’d hit on the spot, if someone had told him, or if he had simply been drawn to it somehow. There was a numinosity to places where blood had been shed.
Flaville had also noticed the construction and ridden in a wide ellipse around it, toward the cane mill. The doctor replaced his hat and followed him, on foot. He found Arnaud in the lower level of the mill, supervising the hands as they spooned with their long ladles from the tanks. The two skilled refiners had gone out to meet Flaville, almost as if they had expected him to come.
“What news?” said Arnaud, genially enough, as he wiped his hands on his shirttail.
“Beauvais has left Jacmel,” the doctor said, after a moment’s consideration. There was other news, in fact more urgent, but he was not eager to deliver it.
Arnaud stepped a little nearer, so he could lower his voice. “Has he come over to our side at last?”
“No,” said the doctor. Interesting, he thought, that Arnaud should identify Toussaint’s side as his own. “He’s fled the country, since Roume declared him in rebellion. Apparently he means to go to plead his case in France.”
“Ridiculous.” Arnaud walked out from under the roof’s overhang and spat on the ground. “He was a fool to think he could conserve his neutrality in such a situation.”
“Oh, Beauvais is a man of honor,” the doctor said. “One might say, meanwhile, that his conscience has given him a twisted path to follow.” He cleared his throat. “His men are very discontented with him, according to the spies.”
“So Jacmel will come over.”
“Unfortunately, no. Jacmel has declared for Rigaud and set in for a siege. I’m not sure who commands there now, perhaps Pétion.”
Arnaud grimaced. “The man is capable.”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “But gravely outnumbered all the same. Dessalines has the town completely encircled by land, and Toussaint hopes for help from the Americans at sea.”
“That’s something,” Arnaud said.
“It may be a great deal. Rigaud was ill advised to send his corsairs against the American merchantmen.”
“Let’s have a drink on it, then.”
“Willingly.”
Somewhat to the doctor’s surprise, Arnaud began walking away from the grand’case. He followed, along a rocky trail, toward the invisible rippling of a spring. Yellow butterflies flickered around the shoots of red ginger at their feet. The doctor began to smell smoke, and fermentation. They turned a bend in the trail and came in view of a rectangular open shed covering a fire, a cauldron, hood and coil. An old women tended the cauldron, using wooden implements strapped to the stumps of her hands. She did not look at them.
Arnaud lifted a bottle from the coil’s tip and in the same motion replaced it with a long-necked gourd. He drank and offered the bottle to the doctor. The rum was