Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [114]
“What news?” the doctor said. He walked toward Isabelle, his eyeglasses glinting from his grimy face.
“Madame Leclerc’s canary has perished,” Isabelle announced. “We are on a mission to find her another, and didn’t you once know—”
Her words were cut off by the collapse of a charred beam, whose fall brought down a quantity of the recently placed thatch. Cigny cursed and wriggled to shrug off scraps of leaf. He stared up through the vestiges of his roof into the cloudless, azure sky, then abruptly rounded on his wife.
“It’s not enough for you to complete your morning calls in the midst of this catastrophe, but now you propose to go galloping off after canaries?”
“What would you have me do?” Isabelle inclined slightly, spreading her empty hands. “I can be of no great use here. It was not I, after all, who incinerated the town.”
“No, but you might have got yourself out of it, and taken the children to some place of security—as indeed you were urged to do.”
“If I ought to have done so, that cannot be helped now,” Isabelle said. “And the children are better to go with me than to stay here in the ash and smoke. Now I shall want you,” she said, turning to the doctor. “And I think I might take Michau as well—”
“Off hunting canaries?” Cigny shouted. “In this midday sun—have you gone quite mad?” He was taking in breath for a louder protest when Arnaud stepped across and laid a hand on his arm.
“Let her go,” Arnaud murmured, too softly to be heard by any but Cigny. “If it seems frivolous, you must consider that the favor of the Captain-General may mean a great deal to all of us now, and they say his wife has larger influence with him than any man.”
Cigny clicked his tongue but said no more; he let Arnaud guide him back to the thatching.
“I may as well accompany you,” the doctor said. “My handiness at this work is not such that I will be much missed—but you must leave Michau, for he is truly wanted here.”
Captain Daspir went along with this new procession: Isabelle, Doctor Antoine Hébert, Robert, and Héloïse astride one of the two little donkeys Michau had been able to commandeer. The excursion looked a more cheerful pastime than any other open to him now, and he’d decided that Pauline’s dismissive nod must be sufficient to release him from any other duties of the day. Yesterday all had moved efficiently enough, when there was fighting to be done, but now that the army was regathered on this ruin it had conquered, it seemed that half its members were disoriented, stumbling through their shock. The night before, Cyprien had conducted Daspir through the blasted streets to a bawdy house he had frequented during his earlier visit here—where he had known pleasures of wine and gambling and especially the favors of many gorgeous colored women, so delicately shaded one could scarce tell them from white . . . Now there was nothing left of this establishment but a smoking hole in the ground. Or possibly, Cyprien muttered, it had been in some other street. Daspir had forborne to point out that all the streets were in a similar state of utter devastation.
Now they passed along the blackened wall of what the doctor told him had yesterday been his hospital. At the end of the block the road curved into the jungle and went winding up into the hills. Soon it had narrowed to a trail. This was farther than the fire had reached, and the air, filtered through dense foliage, was moist and fresh. Though the heat and the sharp grade of the ascent had Daspir sweating in his wool uniform, he felt encouraged by the change of scene. His head was light and his stomach shrunken (he’d had nothing to eat since the orange he’d plucked from the hedge yesterday but a scrap of rock-like, moldy hardtack for his supper, and a cup of very weak tea this morning chez Pauline), but he did his best to keep up some conversation with Isabelle. As the climb did not