Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [158]
But Paul Lafrance had turned to Lacroix and addressed him with a trembling intensity. “Mon général, honesty and frankness are all you breathe—tell me, in truth, have you come here to restore slavery?”
Maillart felt his jaw go slack. He had not put himself this question, not exactly, but here it was, announced. In the light spilling in from the rear doorway, the amiable face of Pamphile de Lacroix looked rather pale. Why did he not answer? Maillart pressed his own lips shut. Behind him, something blocked the light.
“Whatever it should be,” the old man said, “old Paul Lafrance will never harm you. But my daughters! my poor daughters . . . to see them slaves I should die of grief.”
“As I myself should die of shame.” Lacroix opened his arms as he spoke, and Paul Lafrance fell into them. It looked to Maillart that the two men were so moved that they were shedding tears on each other’s coat collars, but for some reason he looked over his shoulder and saw Riau’s form filling the rear doorway, his face attentive, still. Sometimes looking at Riau’s face was like gazing into the darkness of a midnight well.
When they had drunk their lemonade and praised it, Maillart and Lacroix made their farewells and departed, leaving Riau, for the moment, behind. After the dim interior the blaze of sunlight outdoors was almost blinding. Maillart flattened his hand above his eyes.
“A touching scene,” he said tentatively.
“Indeed it was.” Lacroix’s tone was rather dry. “And it only reminds us of the need to drive Dessalines away from this vicinity, for all those rumors of slavery are being put about by him, if not by Toussaint Louverture as well.”
“Yes, of course,” Maillart said. He motioned Lacroix to the side of the street, where they could walk in the shade of the second-floor balconies.
“It is a fortunate thing that Laplume has rallied to our side,” Lacroix went on. “Dessalines would present us a much more serious threat if he had not, but still his proximity is dangerous, for aside from those rumors of slavery, he seems to inspire all these people with a terrible fear.”
And not without reason, Maillart was thinking, amid a number of other thoughts which simultaneously surfaced in his mind. If the daughters of Paul Lafrance were in their middle teens, as they appeared to be, then they would hardly have any memory of slavery. Lacroix had not really answered the old man’s question either, except by his gesture. Maillart’s fingers grazed the pendant that still lay in his coat pocket, beneath a crumpled handkerchief. How many secret orders might there be? But then, Lacroix had seemed surprised himself to hear the order to deport white women who had offered their love to black men . . .
Above all this Maillart saw always hovering the face of Riau, watchful and silent, as it had appeared in Paul Lafrance’s rear doorway, absorbing the light. But by the next day all such images were scattered; Maillart was sent out with fourteen hundred men under command of the Adjutant d’Arbois for a day of heavy fighting which ended with the capture of Dessalines’s mountain post at Cabaret-Quart. At the same time, and to Maillart’s utter astonishment, General Boudet commissioned Riau to go as emissary to the large and thus far uncommitted maroon bands that roamed the region of the Léogane plain, led by Lamour Dérance and Lafortune.
17
Dawn at Thibodet came cool and breezy, fresh from the rain the night before. Elise and Isabelle hovered on the gallery, looking down at a pair of wild ducks that had settled on the lily pool. They paddled among the floating flowers, seeming unaware that they were watched.
“One might contrive to trap them somehow.” Elise narrowed her eyes on the little drake. “Clip their wings and keep them here to breed.”
“Yes, but how?” said Isabelle.
“I should send for Caco,” Elise said. “That boy has a hand for catching birds. Where is Paul?”
“You sent him out to gather eggs,” Isabelle reminded her. “With Sophie, and Robert.”
“So I did.” Elise sighed and