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By Root 2083 0

himself lay calm but wakeful, though he had every right to be weary himself. They’d spent some joyful hours with their mother, who’d insisted on serving them a second supper. Afterward she’d taken pleasure in showing them over the house, which was much more elaborately furnished than any residence Placide had known in the colony. He could remember when the five of them had shared a one-room case at Habitation Bréda (though Isaac had probably forgotten those days), and their lodgings around Saint Michel and Saint Raphael, where Toussaint had sent them for shelter from the first months of the fighting, had not been much better. Perhaps Isaac was not so much impressed—the grand’case of Sancey was no palace in comparison to the Tuileries—but everything here spoke to Placide of his father’s sagacity and power.

Beside the clock on the mantel (the mantel itself no more than an ornamental shelf, as there was no need for a bedroom fireplace in this climate) there stood among other smaller bibelots a gray-and-green vase decorated with images of certain battle triumphs of Toussaint Louverture—victories over the Spanish and the English, rendered in the classically heroic manner. This article had been commissioned and presented to him as a compliment by some French general. Isaac had been fascinated with the vase, earlier that night, and had taken it to turn in his hands and study very closely.

Placide would have liked a closer look now, but fatigue and a growing somnolence held him in his bed. The clock ticked to the swing of its pendulum. Above the face it had a dial on which revolved a painted sun, smiling down on scenes of a European landscape. Then it seemed to be beating faster, faster, triple time—

Placide snapped upright in the bed, realizing that what he heard was the beat of shod hooves in the drive outside. He jumped into his trousers and in a flash was out the front door—his mother only a pace or two behind him. A squadron of cavalry had pulled up in the oval drive below the gallery, and the men were just beginning to get down from their horses, their figures dark and crisp in a wide spill of moonlight. There was his father, his silhouette plainly recognizable, between two banners hanging slack against their poles, sitting a horse Placide did not recognize.

“But where is Bel Argent?” Placide blurted. It seemed an idiotic question, but in his mental image of this moment, he must have placed his father astride the great white stallion.

Toussaint did not answer, or even appear to have heard. When they wrapped their arms around each other, Placide realized he was much the taller. How long could that have been so? Then Isaac rushed to join them with an impact that rocked them on their feet.

Awkwardly they climbed the stairs, loath to let each other go. They’d just begun to settle in the parlor opposite the entrance way, when Coisnon appeared in the doorframe, the remains of his gray hair sticking up around his bald spot like a tonsure. The white nightshirt fluttering around his shins was the reverse image of the black cassock he ordinarily wore by day.

“Father, it is Monsieur Coisnon, our preceptor.” Isaac’s voice creaked like a rusty gate, and when he turned toward Toussaint, it stopped altogether. But Coisnon stretched his arms theatrically wide.

“Is it Toussaint, the servant and faithful friend of France, who holds out his arms to me?”

“Could you ever doubt it?” Toussaint folded Coisnon into an embrace fully as powerful as the one he’d given his sons. Then he held the Frenchman at arm’s length.

“So it is you who has schooled my boys,” he said. “They have learned Latin. Mathematics.” Toussaint’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Engineering, perhaps, and something of the science of fortification.”

“Indeed they have learned many things.” Coisnon held his wide smile fixed. “But you shall hear all from themselves—they come to you now as faithful interpreters of the First Consul and the Captain-General Leclerc. Believe in their innocence and the purity of their sentiments—every word they say to you will be the truth.”

As Coisnon