Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [172]
Comparing his map to what he could see, Guizot thought he was heading for the range of Cahos mountains, but these had hardly seemed to grow closer after an hour’s march or more. Gray clouds billowed down all over the sky, though there was little wind. It was unusual for wind to begin so in this country, at such an early hour, and in this suffocating calm. Sergeant Aloyse stretched out a hand—a plump drop splattered in his palm. Guizot was ready to order their return to camp when one of his grenadiers called out and pointed down the road ahead. Raising the spyglass to his eye, Guizot discerned a short pack train, coming out of a cleft of the mountains that bounded the plateau.
“Forward,” he said, feeling some degree of apprehension, though the other party appeared to be small. Sergeant Aloyse pulled his hat brim down to his eyebrows and stepped out. The pack train seemed to be coming up to them rather quickly; in fifteen minutes they had joined.
Guizot halted at twenty paces’ distance and surveyed the other group, two blacks riding admirable saddle horses and leading a pair of pack mules, and one piratical-looking white man, also well mounted, with an immensely broad-brimmed hat and two colossal dragoon pistols strapped either side of his saddle.
“Where are you bound?” Guizot said. “Who are you?”
“Xavier Tocquet.” The white man took off his hat and passed a palm across his forehead. Beneath the hat he wore a black-and-white patterned kerchief, knotted at the back above the leather thong securing his long hair. Something about this headgear nagged at a corner of Guizot’s attention. The white man had a lean face, a long nose, and hard eyes.
“We are trading, up from the coast,” he said. “Yourselves?”
“What trade?” Guizot deepened his voice. Certainly the man had the look of a smuggler. He glanced toward the mules, whose packs were well wrapped up in canvas.
Tocquet shrugged. “Cloth. Some spices and cinchona. We’re trading for tobacco, if you must know.” He held out his hat to catch the rain, which was still only lightly pattering. “I’m also a landowner in these parts,” he said. “And as the weather is worsening, I think we’d prefer to be on our way.”
With a press of his knees he urged his horse forward, as if he expected the soldiers to part before him. Guizot held up his hand.
“My commander will want to speak to you,” he said.
“Your commander?”
“General Donatien Rochambeau.”
“And what is the errand of your General Rochambeau?”
Guizot drew himself more tautly erect. “To subdue and capture the rebel Toussaint Louverture,” he said. The phrase rag-head Negro appeared in his head; it was this that Tocquet’s headscarf had recalled to him.
“So be it, then.” Tocquet shrugged again. “I hope that you are camped nearby, as we would all do well to get out of the rain.”
Xavier Tocquet had never seen himself as one to be enthralled by sentiment. Nevertheless he had lingered for twenty minutes or longer outside the makeshift gates of Habitation Thibodet. Ten years before, when Elise had finally burst out to join him, those gates had been a splendor of scrolled and gilded iron. How his heart had leapt up then . . . he had not really believed she would come, had already, somewhere in his head, left her behind.
Today she was not coming, not at all. Tocquet sat his horse; the animal shifted and crabbed under him, eager to move. Bazau had dismounted and was feeding his own horse a handful of grain. Gros-Jean had crossed the cactus fence of a yard across the road and stood flirting with a blue-kerchiefed young woman in the curtained doorway of her case. These two gave no sign of impatience, but there was no reason to stay.
“N’alé,” Tocquet said. We’re going. Gros-Jean and Bazau were almost instantly astride. They filed to the east, in the warm dappling of yellow sunlight that leaked through manguiers planted either side of the road. Tocquet expected