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By Root 2185 0

sat in the open doorway of the tent, drinking rum and watching the rain. For his part, Tocquet offered round his supply of cheroots. Guizot declined—he was getting a cough—but Aloyse accepted with enthusiasm. Warmed by the rum and the tobacco, he began to tell tales of the European battles he’d attended. Tocquet seemed more than interested, and Aloyse was in any case an engaging raconteur. Guizot watched them, their hawk-like faces leaning together over a sputtering stump of candle the sergeant had waxed to a board. Tocquet’s long hair matched the sergeant’s snaky pigtail; their heads were joined in a mutual cloud of blue smoke. Guizot felt a little set apart. He felt the beginnings of a cold—from overexertion in the heat, followed by this damp and chill. A throb in his arrow wound worried him a little, though probably it was only caused by rum—there was no sign at all of proud flesh. He watched Tocquet curiously—Tocquet had let it drop that he descended from the flibustiers and boucaniers who had made the first French settlements here, so he really did come from pirate blood. However, he said little more about himself, said very little at all in fact, except to encourage the sergeant to continue if he paused.

Long after they’d pinched the candle out, Guizot lay wakeful on blanket and boards, listening to the sergeant’s snores and the steady beat of rain on canvas. The tickle in the back of his throat held him away from sleep, and at the same time his thoughts kept crawling. General Rochambeau had instructed him to keep a close eye on Tocquet, without going so far as to place their visitor formally under guard. With that in mind, Guizot had laid out his blanket across the doorway of the tent. Not the most comfortable position, for it seemed to leak a little around the flap, but then it seemed to leak a little everywhere else too. If Guizot put his finger into a crack between the boards, he found half an inch of running water there. The whole of the square had been trampled to a marsh.

He occupied himself with rehearsing the sergeant’s tales, and Tocquet’s occasional promptings. Most of Aloyse’s listeners, Guizot included, would quiz him about Bonaparte, but Tocquet seemed more interested in the general officers now in Saint Domingue: Hardy, Humbert, Leclerc himself. After all the drone of rain on the tent was soothing. When he closed his eyes, his mind presented him the dark face of the woman who had shot him. With his fingertip he touched the stone arrow point through the rough wool of his trouser pocket. There was her face in the leaves, heavy and handsome as a stone idol, beneath the shock of untameable hair, and there again looking down upon him from the cliff top, with nothing he would call malevolence—instead a calm challenge. Did the child she carried wear that same face?

Guizot sat up sharply, and coughed into his hand. He’d been asleep, for some time probably. Now his head ached from the rum. The sergeant’s snores were still resounding against the background of the rain, but the third place was empty, and water poured through a vertical slash in the back of the tent.

Quick as a thought, Guizot was through the tear in the canvas, dressed only in his trousers, wincing as his wounded arm brushed a stake. He put his left hand in his pants pocket to support the arm. The strip of cloth he’d been using for a sling was tangled somewhere in his bedding in the tent. The rain washed over his bare chest and head—he pushed his wet hair back. He could just make out a lean tall shadow slipping around the edge of the sodden encampment; by the wide hat brim it ought to be Tocquet.

The man was a spy then, as Rochambeau must have suspected all along. If he followed, Tocquet might lead him to Toussaint. Guizot might still be first to lay a hand on the raghead Negro. A flush of excitement propelled him forward, his bare toes spreading in the mud. For the moment he’d forgotten that he was nearly naked and unarmed. A sentry stood, ill-sheltered by a tree, in the southeast corner of the square, but he seemed to notice nothing when