Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [12]
The doctor, who felt he had already overspoken, said nothing more.
“Well then,” Elise said, snuffing the candles decisively as she rose to leave the room, “don’t let us dwell on it.”
As was his habit on any ordinary day in town, the doctor rose just at first light, took nothing but coffee as his morning refreshment. He’d arrived at the hospital gate by the time the sun began to spread fingers of light down the sloping street from the mountain above. Two corpses lay on planks under the tall palms of the enclosure, covered with a single sheet of sailcloth.
“I will send for the cart from La Fossette as I go down,” Guiaou told him.
The doctor inclined his head, and touched the black man on the shoulder as he went out the gate. As the hoofbeats of Guiaou’s horse receded over the paving stones, he lifted the canvas from the stiffened visages of the two dead crewmen, then let it fall.
In the dormitory the ship’s second officer still tossed in delirium. One of the night-shift women stayed by him. Captain Howarth and the surviving crewman slept calmly. The doctor touched Howarth’s head and hands, then took his pulse, which had slowed remarkably. The night-shift woman watched the procedure, her eyes grave below the crisp line of her white headcloth. The doctor nodded to her and let out a sigh that almost amounted to relief.
When he heard the creaking wheels of the cemetery cart, he went out to supervise the loading of the bodies. He directed that they should be buried deep—futile instruction for La Fossette, a swampland where the single length of a shovel blade was likely to strike water.
Captain Howarth sat propped on a bolster when the doctor returned to the dormitory, sipping from a cup of tea his own hands now had strength to hold. His eyes were very weary, ringed with shadow, but looked clear.
“I think you’ve saved my life,” he said, and raised his cup a quarter inch in token of a toast.
“Not so,” the doctor said. “You must give thanks to God, and the strength of your own constitution.”
Captain Howarth looked at him narrowly. “Are you a religious man?”
“Sometimes,” the doctor said, inclining his head toward the sunlight that now streamed over the doorsill. “When I see miracles.”
In the following days, both Captain Howarth and the third crewman rallied rather quickly, while the second officer passed through the crisis of the fever and looked likely to recover altogether. Doctor Hébert took private note that this rate of recovery was quite unusual for the disease in question, and that he had no idea what had brought it about. Midweek, Captain Howarth had himself rowed out to the Merry Bell, where he learned that all surviving members of his crew were sound. Unlikely there would be an epidemic in the town. Lifting the quarantine, the doctor breathed out the last vapor of his relieved sigh.
By Friday, he pronounced Captain Howarth fit to attend one of the evenings at Government House, about which the American had expressed great curiosity. At this good news Isabelle Cigny claimed Howarth as her escort, since her husband would give little time to such social exercises, and in any case was absent from the town, tending his plantation on the Northern Plain. Accordingly, the four of them descended on the palace together, Isabelle on Howarth’s arm, and Elise on the doctor’s.
The doors were swung open for them by Guiaou and Riau, the latter a black captain of the Second Colonial Demibrigade. The doctor clapped his hand on the shoulder of Riau, who had often served as orderly in the hospital or on the battlefield, and who now returned his smile. Within the main reception hall, several dozen people were circulating: the principal white men and women of Le Cap, along with some visitors from other regions or abroad; a sprinkling of the colored men still trusted by Toussaint, some accompanied by their wives or daughters; and numerous of the senior black officers, looking a little stiff