Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [173]
That he should be so fastened to a woman! When Elise had come to him a decade previously, tousled and uncertain, with Sophie in her arms, Tocquet had known that he must be responsible for her afterward, since he had lured her wholly out of the respectability of her marriage. So he had married her himself, once Thibodet was dead. And then? Well, he might have a woman or so, elsewhere, a black woman or a mulattress. There might be a couple of outside children—but Tocquet never rubbed Elise’s nose in that. Any such liaisons were kept far off from Thibodet, or from their domicile in Le Cap, for that matter. It was also possible that he’d had some love passage during his American voyage, as Elise seemed most recently to suspect, but that would be merely a passing fancy, nothing to which he meant to return.
And what of her? Had she not been as chimerical with him as he had ever been with her? If she did not care for the dull strictures of the Spanish society east of the border, she could herself be quite a stickler for propriety. The subject of their worst quarrel, and a bitter and enduring one it had been, was her brother’s attachment to Nanon. And her stubbornness in digging herself in at Thibodet now, under these circumstances, was truly maddening.
But there she would remain, unmoved. Tocquet understood, as they climbed toward the pass to the plateau, that he’d never really believed today’s tactic would work. Better perhaps that he should have taken Sophie with him. He did not like to leave the girl in the danger he foresaw—nor Mireille, but Mireille was too small to engage him personally. If he had taken Sophie, might Elise have followed after all? But she might be too stubborn even for that—there was no overestimating it. And furthermore, he had waited too long, so that he was no longer certain if it was safer to go or remain.
The bright sky darkened as they came up through the pass. Tocquet felt all the more hemmed in by gloom. He was used to tricky times—all times were tricky in this country—but he’d never felt such a dreary uncertainty as now. He spotted the French column before he was seen, and knew it must belong to either Hardy or Rochambeau—Tocquet was assiduous as Toussaint in gathering intelligence, and used several of the same sources. He’d meant to go to the hatte he kept on the plateau near Terre Cassée, but though he might have avoided the column still, he decided not to try it. On this perverse day, there was a sort of sour satisfaction in watching himself—Xavier Tocquet—run his head into a snare. Permitting himself to be made prisoner, or the next thing to it, by a callow French captain with his arm in a sling.
By the time his military escort brought him into Saint Michel, the rain was coming down in rivers. The road had become a slough of mud; the men slogged through it, ankle deep. If it kept raining through the night, Tocquet considered, the French advance would be very thoroughly bogged down. So many men would make a morass of whatever ground they moved on, in this wet. He estimated the numbers as they rode through the milling troops toward the village square—close to two thousand, by his best guess.
Rochambeau had established a headquarters in what passed for the hôtel de ville—a ramshackle wooden building closing off the north side of the Saint Michel town square. Guizot brought Tocquet to the foot of a long table where the French general sat, studying maps in the gray rain-washed light, surrounded by several of his staff and a black freedman Tocquet knew slightly, whose name was Noël Lory. After a moment, Rochambeau acknowledged his captain.
“What news?” he said, creaking back in his chair. “Have you explored the passes?”
“We were prevented from going so far by the rain, mon général, ” said Guizot, “but we have met this trader,