Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [60]
Maillart climbed to O’Farrel’s apartment, knocked and waited, but there was no answer. Perhaps the major was at table. Maillart went back down and crossed the yard diagonally toward a building that looked promising, opposite the main gate. A British corporal shouted to him that a horse needed shoeing on the other side of the square. Maillart started, bristled a bit, then went on with an inward smile. Another effect of his civilian garb.
In the stone hallway the heat seemed somewhat less crushing. Maillart put his head in one door and another, looking for an officers’ mess. What he found instead was perhaps the commander’s council room; at any rate a map of the colony was spread out on a table. Maillart strolled over and glanced down at the map, then leaned closer, bracing his knuckles on the table’s edge. The disposition of forces was marked out with colored pins: red for the English, blue for the French, green for the Spanish . . . On the northwestern peninsula, Le Môle was a prick of red in a forest of blue. The British were isolated here, except by sea, commanding nothing but the town and its harbor.
“Your business!”
Maillart shot upright and turned to face a redcoat major in the doorway; balding, mustachioed, and florid either from the heat or irritation.
“Your pardon—I was looking for Major O’Farrel.”
“You will not find him here today—he has gone out to Fort Villarie. You are?”
Maillart bowed and stated his name.
“Your business with Major O’Farrel?”
“I—we were acquainted sometime ago. When the major served at Le Cap.” Maillart felt his whole face breaking out in pustules of sweat; trickles ran down from his armpits over his ribs.
“Served the Carmagnoles, you mean, your revolutionary rabble?”
“No! Far from it, uh . . .” Maillart closed his fingers loosely against sweaty palms. “No, he took the other part . . .”
The British major stared, then closed his eyes and covered them with his hands for a moment, as if his head pained him terribly. Then he snatched his head upright and shouted, “Winston!”
A sweating guard snapped to attention in the hallway.
“Show this gentleman to the gate.”
“Yes, Major Grant!”
The major pointed a forefinger at Maillart. “You, sir, have yourself properly announced if you come here again.”
“Of course,” Maillart said. “I’ll remember that.”
“See that you do.” Major Grant stamped down the hall.
When he returned to the Monot house, Maillart was sweat-soaked and dizzy from the heat and his own self-disgust. In his bedroom he took off his drenched shirt and sniffed it. True, the sweat of fear had a worse stench than the ordinary. It was the falsity of his position—but this reasoning did little to repair his self-respect.
As best he could determine, the house was still empty except for a couple of servants padding barefoot in the halls. Maillart went down into the garden, hesitated a moment, then shucked off his trousers and lowered himself into the bathing pool. The water was just cooler than tepid and felt very pleasant to his skin. He inhaled and slid completely under, on his back, holding his breath and looking up through the water at the wavery blue of the sky, green smudges of leaves on an orange tree over the pool, fallen leaves and their shadows floating on the surface. His head began to pound, his lungs to burn, and finally he sat up, spouting and shaking his head, then leaned back and rested his elbows on the tiles that flanked the pool. The dizziness passed and he felt much better.
The house door opened just as he had begun to think of calling for a drink but, instead of a servant, Agathe appeared, clothed in a loose white shift belted at the waist, that hung to her bare feet. She looked at him indifferently, as if he were a plant, as she passed toward a table between the lily pool and the garden gate. Maillart noticed that several of her toes were adorned with fine gold rings. O’Farrel had been correct, he thought, as his eyes tracked the flow of her hips underneath the thin cotton. Agathe sat at the table and opened a book and a Chinese fan, spreading