Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [361]
On March 13, 1800, the army of the north marched into Jacmel. The mood was less of triumph than of exhaustion, and the doctor had more work than ever before, for the acres of wounded soldiers surrounding him were compounded by hundreds of sick and starved civilians who had survived by a breath or two. The streets and squares were littered with the carcasses of mules and donkeys and draft horses which in the last days of the siege had been devoured to their ligaments. Vultures lined the rooftops, hungry for more death.
In a couple of days Toussaint rode in, to take formal possession of the town. Within the week he’d ordered Dessalines on the attack again, to press the advantage against Rigaud. Dessalines marched against Grand Goâve. Toussaint, meanwhile, summoned the doctor and some others of his staff, and told them to make ready for a fast gallop to Le Cap, where a new commission from France had recently arrived.
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The casernes of Le Cap were not so crowded as usual, since so many men had been dispatched to the south, but there was still a strong garrison in the barracks, and the doctor, with Maillart and Arnaud, made a private retreat to the Cigny house, where accommodations would be more congenial. The house was dusty when they arrived, and the news was thin. Monsieur Cigny had been in town within the week, but according to the servants he had no recent word from his wife, nor any apparent concern about her silence. The indifference which covered her romantic adventures must cut two ways, the doctor reflected. Cigny had deposited a quantity of brown sugar with his broker and then, after two days, returned to his plantation.
“So he was not conscripted,” Arnaud began to grumble.
“He is well past the age for military service,” Maillart pointed out.
“Yes, and he can only produce brown sugar now, while I was sending out white.”
“One could hardly imagine him absorbing even a single musket ball,” the captain said. “Much less half a dozen, like yourself.”
As Arnaud began to soften under the warmth of this flattery, the doctor followed the servants into the yard. There was one old woman who had a particular fondness for Isabelle, whom she’d known since childhood. And she did have news, but it had come by a long and crooked route. Someone in the harbor at Fort Liberté had spoken to someone who’d brought out a load of coffee from the mountains of Vallière, and that person had passed the word to another, and so it had traveled from mouth to ear until it reached the Place Clugny in Le Cap. All was calm enough at Vallière; there had been no raids, no disturbances or revolts, and that plantation which had passed from the late Sieur de Maltrot to Choufleur was even producing a good deal of coffee now. A woman in the grand’case there was supposed to have had great trouble in childbirth, so severe that they’d had to send for the wisest leaf woman in the hills.
“Did she live? What of the child?” the doctor blurted. “Tell me, grann, was it Nanon?”
Here the old woman’s lips closed to a thin seam; she gave the doctor a canny look, but she would say no more.
That night the doctor slept uneasily, though exhausted from the last couple of days in the saddle; Toussaint had pushed them from Jacmel to Le Cap in half the time humanly possible. He kept starting awake in a flush of fear, for the child he knew (but Paul was safe at Habitation Thibodet) and for the child he might never know . . . At dawn he rose and washed and dressed and went to Government House to look for Pascal.
“There are three of them this time,” Pascal advised him. They strolled the avenue by Government House, keeping their distance from others on the promenade. “General Michel, Julien Raimond whom you know, and Colonel Vincent.”
“The engineer,” the doctor said. “I know him too.”
“They landed in Spanish Santo Domingo,” Pascal said. “When they crossed the border they were arrested!—by Moyse, I believe.