Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [37]
“You must wait!” the soldier said, as he backpedaled Maillart out into the hall. Across the musket stock, Maillart caught the eye of the officer at the desk, who had once styled himself the “Sieur de Maltrot” after the French nobleman who was his father, but was more commonly known as Choufleur.
Then the door closed in his face. Maillart turned and found Tocquet, looking at him coolly, an unlit black cheroot pinched at the corner of his mouth. If not for the other’s presence, Maillart might have stamped his feet and shouted; as it was he struggled to contain himself. Tocquet turned away from him without saying anything and went back out into the yard. The man had followed him soundlessly—even wearing riding boots, he walked as quietly as a cat.
Where was Laveaux? Maillart stared at the boards of the door. It occurred to him that he had not seen any white officer or enlisted man since arriving at the casernes. Since serving under Toussaint he had grown accustomed to a darker color scheme in the ranks, but here it might well be a trouble sign. After a moment he heard Choufleur’s voice in the other room.
“Bring him in.”
The door opened. Choufleur did not rise to greet Maillart, or offer him a seat. He continued writing for a moment, the pen’s plume wavering between the two candles either side of the paper, before he looked up. His features were African but his eyes were bright green and his skin very pale, except for the spattering of chocolate-brown freckles all over his face—as if the white and Negro blood in him had somehow remained separate in the mix. Maillart had last seen him across the groove of his pistol barrel—had in fact been trying to kill Choufleur, during the mutiny of the mulatto Sixth Regiment.
“I have come with messages for General Laveaux,” Maillart said stiffly.
“Yes . . .” Choufleur said, lazily, and as if he were responding to some completely different idea. “Yes, I do remember you—though not your name.”
Maillart opened his mouth to supply this information, then stopped himself.
“Of no importance.” Choufleur leaned back in his chair and waved his hand airily—a long-fingered, graceful hand, freckled like his face. “You were certainly one of those royalist officers, I recall.” He rested his elbows on the desk top and squinted more closely at Maillart, who began to wonder just how well Choufleur might remember their previous encounters.
“I have it now,” Choufleur said, snapping his long fingers. “Were you not the friend of that queer little doctor—Hébert? Who had taken up with the femme de couleur, Nanon . . . is that alliance still in effect? Where are they now?”
“At Habitation Thibodet, near Ennery.” Maillart was surprised into this reponse. He wondered why Choufleur would ask so pointed a question, and on such an irrelevant matter.
“I have come to see General Laveaux,” he repeated.
“There was a child, as I recall,” Choufleur said musingly. “Of course, one does not know if it were his, in fact—does he acknowledge the child, your friend? Or did it live?”
Maillart felt his neck swelling in the collar of his shirt. “My dispatches are of some urgency,” he said.
“As you like,” Choufleur said airily, shifting his seat to glance at the dark window. “Laveaux is at Port-de-Paix. In his absence, Villatte commands, but as he is not here at present, you may give your messages to me.”
Maillart tightened, aware of a compression of breath and blood in his throat, as though he were being throttled. He drew himself up and touched his waistband. Under the cotton weave of his loose white shirt he could feel the handle of a dirk and the butt of his pistol. He had come on this journey in civilian clothes, dressed in the same fashion as Tocquet, and concealing his weapons as a pirate would. Both a French and a Spanish military uniform were packed in his saddlebags, but it would not have done to come here wearing either.