Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [101]
“Pray excuse the disarray in which we at present find ourselves,” Isabelle was saying. “It appears that we have somehow blundered into a state of war. If our hospitality should be somewhat impaired by that condition, all that remains to us to offer is entirely yours.”
Isabelle placed her keys into Pauline’s hand and, after a moment, produced the battered lock from her front door and laid it into the other. Exhibiting the curve of her famously graceful neck, Pauline inclined her head to study these items. Then she fitted the key to the lock and turned the mechanism as Isabelle had done before, shooting the bolt out, then retracting it, shooting it out a second time. She raised her pretty eyes to meet Isabelle’s. The two women held their gaze for just an instant before they were swept off into a wild gale of mutual laughter.
In the midst of plenty, if plenty there was, Daspir got a very poor supper indeed. No more than a square of moldy hardtack, softened from its concrete consistency in gritty river water and slowly worried to pieces by his teeth. In the darkness he consoled himself with surreptitious sips of brandy; there was no friend with whom he wished to share. They’d bivouacked with Rochambeau’s men once they’d got across the river, and Daspir slept uneasily on the cold ground—it was quite surprisingly cold at night, after the fierce heat of the day. Whenever he woke he reached for the bottle again.
At reveille he sat up with a headache and all his passages shut with phlegm, looking regretfully at the much diminished brandy bottle in the bottom of his pack. But half an hour’s time in the saddle as the troops went swinging down the road cleared his head and warmed his blood and improved his disposition. After all, he’d survived his first day of battle, and not discreditably. After all, they were victorious. And it seemed he had been face-to-face already with Toussaint Louverture.
There was a rumor that Christophe’s soldiers were coming out from Haut du Cap to challenge them, but this did not occur. In all this day’s march they met no organized resistance though gangs of rioters were setting fire to the plantations all around and there was a good deal of sniping from the hedgerows. They marched on; there was no enemy who would stand and fight. Wherever they found a plantation intact, Leclerc detached a few men to guard it. Rochambeau had done the same as he maneuvered across the plain from Fort Liberté, which explained the patchwork pattern of ash and green which Daspir had observed from the heights above Acul.
The image of that raghead Negro on the warhorse nagged at him. Had he truly been so near to Toussaint Louverture? Hardy’s information was not certain after all—it was the women of Limbé who’d claimed that he was there, who’d threatened the French soldiers with his presence even as they ran for cover in the bush. Yet there was the splendid horse, and his riding. And the consensus between Rochambeau’s detachment and Leclerc’s was that Toussaint must have been the one to order all the burning. If he could be brought to bay, then the destruction would be stopped. As he rode, Daspir began to imagine how he might put it to Cyprien and Paltre and Guizot. I might have hit him with a stone from across the river—I was that near. If only the bridge had not been down, I should have won our bet. The bullet hole through his hat would give at least some credence to this claim . . .
Near noon they found themselves marching along an undamaged hedge whose tight-laced branches were heavy with green oranges. Some infantrymen made this discovery, and all at once a part of the column broke up into disorder as the soldiers attacked the hedge. Daspir knew he should be commanding them to cease, but instead he leaned sideways out of the saddle and captured an orange for himself. Under the lumpy green hide the flesh was pale yellow, fragrant, and sweet. Whatever thing he had eaten before under the title of orange bore no comparison to