Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [383]
“But duty, and the work I owe the nation, retain me here in Saint Domingue. I do not know what you have heard of our recent civil war. Nor is it right or necessary that you should know too much of that, although I hope and expect that you will profit from your schoolmasters’ instruction in the art of war, that you will read and study Clausewitz and the other writers on this subject, and with your full attention.”
The last quarter-inch of coffee in his cup had gone cold, but there was still a vestige of warmth in the cup on the tray. He poured and stirred in sugar, but forgot to taste the mixture, as the next phrase came to him. “Suffice it to say that the civil war which has just ended here, with victory to your old father’s arms, has proved (if further proof were needed) that no conflict is more bitter than strife between brothers. As if the closer the kinship, the uglier and more ruinous the quarrel.”
A wash of sadness spilled over him, unexpected. This was the very thought, if not the words, of Moyse. But that predicament, at the moment, did not bear thinking of. He must concentrate on another sadness—five years since he had seen his older boys. What did he know of them now? They wrote to him often enough, it was true. Their letters were correctly spelled, increasingly elegant in their penmanship and even in their style, and thoroughly unrevealing. The differences between the boys were flattened by this correspondence. Isaac, though the younger, was the bolder, more impetuous, braver (perhaps), certainly more foolhardy. Tête bœuf, Toussaint had called him formerly, bullhead, with a rap of his knuckles on the boy’s hard skull, and not without a certain admiring recognition. Yet Placide, more hesitant, cautious, yielding in his manner, had also the greater capability, Toussaint believed. In Placide’s instinct for self-effacement, he saw something of himself. Beneath those currents of elusiveness might be a tenacity greater than Isaac’s. Or so it had seemed at the time of their departure. But what if the differences between the boys had really been rubbed away by their education? In the old days, before the Revolution in France, mulatto children sent for their education there had been neatly tapped into the mold of French chevaliers, until little remained of them but a set of borrowed morals and manners and assumptions which they did not realize would be useless, even harmful to them, when they returned to the colony . . . Lowering his pen to the paper, Toussaint glided into a Biblical homily, as smoothly as he might have done if the boys had actually been in his presence.
“I trust you remember the story of Jacob and Esau, which we read many times in our old cabin at Bréda when you were very small. How Jacob through his deception stole the blessing and the birthright of his brother, disguising himself in the rough skin of a beast.”
His thought wandered. Had Rigaud reached Paris, had he begun his intrigues there? On this subject, Toussaint’s intelligencers had given no report.
“Be always honest, practice no deception, in your dealings with the world, but especially with one another. No matter what skin you are given to wear, be true to yourself, beneath it.”
There. That was a nice piece of doubling. The censor could find nothing objectionable in this sermonette, but the message, the pwen, would fly past to reach, at least, Placide.
“I am pleased to tell you that peace and prosperity reign from one end of our colony to the other. Those disturbances you knew when you were small are at an end, once and for all. And how eagerly your mother and I look forward to your return!”
He stopped, bathed in a bitterness like gall. It was not so very long since he had actually tried to get the boys back. He had sent Huin, the French general whom he’d trusted with so many delicate negotiations, on a secret mission to spirit them out of their college and across the English Channel, where Maitland was waiting to receive them—under the protection