Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [13]
“Well, let me see you.” The doctor embraced Maillart, then held him at arm’s length to admire the new insignia. “Why, yes, the change becomes you.”
“And leaves my accomplishments much as they were,” said Maillart with a wink. He’d languished so long in the colonial service without promotion, through the period when the black officer corps was rocketing higher and higher in rank, that the matter had become almost indifferent to him.
“What news have you?” said the doctor. Because of the fever outbreak he had not seen Maillart for nearly two weeks. The major rolled his eyes and caught him by the sleeve.
“Vincent has been exiled to Elba.”
“What?”
The doctor contained his response to a hiss, and yet he felt it had been too loud. Isabelle and Elise were taken up in an exchange of compliments with Colonel Sans-Souci and a couple of other black officers, but Captain Howarth, unattached for the moment, seemed to be looking at them curiously.
Maillart pulled the doctor a step further away and stooped to mutter in his ear. “I had a letter sent direct to me, or rather it had been smuggled out, I—”
The sounding of a trumpet stopped the conversation. All around the room people left off their chatter and turned to face the entrance, where Guiaou was just lowering the horn from his lips. Those who had been seated got quickly to their feet. The doors swung wide for the entrance of Governor-General Toussaint Louverture.
The doctor stole a glance at Captain Howarth to measure his reaction. The Merry Bell put out of Charleston, South Carolina, where slavery was quite vigorously in force, and before he fell ill Howarth had passed a couple of remarks about the oddity of finding himself landed in a “nigger republic.” Might Toussaint cut a comic figure in his eyes? The black general was slight in stature, with a jockey’s build and the slightly bowed legs to go with it. When he was dismounted, his head, with its long heavily underslung jaw, looked ill-balanced and distinctly too large for his body. General Henri Christophe, commander of the Second Colonial Demibrigade, seemed to tower over Toussaint as he walked beside him, stooping to catch his murmured words.
Tonight Toussaint wore a small tricorne hat, adorned with black and white plumes, and a single red one. Aside from that his dress was simple: trousers and jacket of an extremely fine white linen. As he began his circuit of the room, conversation resumed, though in lower tones. Riau and Guiaou walked just at his back, sometimes pausing a moment to converse with a group from which the Governor had just detached.
As Toussaint drew nearer to their own cluster, Doctor Hébert shot an alarmed glance at the two women in his charge. Although Toussaint encouraged white ladies at these gatherings, he had a prudish dislike of the fashionably exposed bosom, so that most of the local belles presented themselves dressed as if for church, demurely buttoned right up to their chins. Absentminded as he was in such matters, the doctor seemed to recall that Elise’s toilette fell rather short of the requisite standard. But when he looked now, he saw that she had cunningly tucked a handkerchief into her bodice, folded and teased into a ruffle which successfully camouflaged the vista of ripe flesh that he’d remembered . . . Toussaint was bowing, murmuring over her hand, then Isabelle’s. Madame Cigny, the doctor took in, had deployed a similar device over her own bodice.
The doctor presented Captain Howarth, “lately recovered from mal de Siam.”
“So?” Toussaint pulled himself straighter and raised his head, looking from Howarth