Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [151]
“You don’t believe Toussaint will harm us?”
“With his own hands, no. But the bloodiest work is always done by someone among his subordinates. Listen,” he said and lowered his voice. “Isabelle and Elise believe that they are safe because Toussaint is here. And that was your own theory, if I remember well— but now the French columns are certainly closing on this place, for the same reason.”
“You know this?”
“I have no certain information, but it must be so. What else? Suppose Toussaint is hemmed up here, and has to cut a line of retreat. Toussaint likes us well enough, but then we will be hostages, not friends. And if the retreat is too hard pressed, we’ll finish with our throats slit by the side of the road, man, woman, and child alike. You know very well it has happened before.”
The doctor felt he’d inhaled a shadow. “But Toussaint is negotiating with Leclerc.”
“No doubt,” said Tocquet. “The old fox!—but what if he’s only playing for time? If you were Toussaint, after all that has passed, would you give yourself up to a French general without a struggle?”
The doctor looked down at the still surface of the water. There was enough light now that he could see his silhouette by Tocquet’s, quavering among the floating flowers, their buds still sealed.
“Well, my friend,” Tocquet said. “I do not want to leave you in this fish trap, no more than Elise or our daughters. I will stay a few days more, and hope I have not stayed too long. Maybe you can reason with your sister, or have a word with Isabelle.”
“I’ll try it.”
“In spite of her stubbornness, I think she is afraid,” Tocquet said. “Elise, I mean. And I have never known her so. I’ve seen her wild with passion or with grief, and seen her cold and calculating, even cruel. When she abandoned Thibodet to go with me the first time, she threw away everything a white woman has to lose in this country, and yet she showed no fear. But now . . . Now I feel that she is very much afraid of something, but of what? For what there really is to fear ought to send her away from this place without delay, instead of keeping her stuck here like a barnacle . . .”
Tocquet drew two cheroots from his shirt pocket and offered one to the doctor, who shook his head. He shifted his feet and looked to the east, where yellow sunlight was just straining through broad leaves of a banana planting on the lower slopes. It surprised him how well Elise had apparently succeeded in keeping her most recent indiscretions from her husband. And yet she was afraid of something, though the doctor had no better idea than Tocquet exactly what it was.
Toussaint paced the length of the headquarters porch and stopped at the corner of the rail. From here he could see to every quadrant of the compass. South, the white dust of the Savane Désolée. Westward, the sea. North, the mountains of the Cordon de l’Ouest, running back to the other ranges that closed the Spanish border to the east. The sun had not yet crossed those mountains, but its light washed over all the clouds that domed the sky, in colors of gray and blue and rose. Among them the moon’s disk hung, pale and ghostly, still persistent.
The review of his guard on the Place d’Armes was fifteen minutes in the past. Placide had been absorbed into that body, loyal son that he’d proved to be. Isaac, the weaker reed, would be well on his way to his mother at Ennery by now, with the two French captains whom Toussaint would hold for the duration of the armistice Leclerc had offered. Now, and for the next few minutes, Toussaint was entirely alone.
All his orders had been sent. Let them be delivered safely! Let them be obeyed! He stepped back from the balcony rail, closed his eyes, and closed his arms across his chest. By reflex he sank slightly in the knees, as though he were still astride a horse. His nostrils flared.
In the northwest, at Port-de-Paix, Maurepas and the Ninth Demibrigade would