Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [178]
At evening the drovers stopped at Plaisance, but Fontelle stayed there no longer than to water her donkey, get a drink for herself, and refresh her face and hands with a little cool water. She did not look for a meal at Plaisance, but rode on through the deepening, greening twilight, up the switchbacks of the northern approach to Morne Pilboreau. The vast hollow of the Plaisance river valley to the east gave her a touch of vertigo, and she would look in that direction only from the corner of her eye, suspicious of spirits in the vacant air that might hope to tempt her to the brink. Earlier that day something had blown into the ear of a yearling bull, who’d then plunged over the cliff into a chasm, trailing a frayed rope’s end behind him, followed by the desolate cries of his owner.
Eastward, the peaks were shrouded in rain cloud, a gray wall drifting slowly toward her as the light dimmed further. It grew colder; Fontelle took a shawl from her straw pannier and wrapped it over her shoulders. She found a boiled egg and a banana in the pannier beneath the shawl, and nibbled at these as she rode along. From beyond the clouded peaks in the direction of Marmelade she heard the thundering fire of cannon and the brighter, sharper sound of musketry.
The shooting had stopped by nightfall, when Fontelle reached the height of Pilboreau, but the crossroads was crowded by many people who had come up the trail from Marmelade to get away from the fighting there. Fontelle sat quietly at the edge of their fires and learned from listening to the talk that Christophe and the Second Demibrigade had been driven from Dondon the day before—the fighting today was at Morne à Boispins. She spread her cloth on the ground and slept for three or four hours. Near midnight, when the stars were cold, she was roused by the murmurs of the marchandes making ready to travel, and she untied her donkey and rode among them down the southern cliffs of Pilboreau toward Ennery and Gonaives. The moon was near full and high in the sky, but the wet wind brought the clouds from the east to block the stars off one by one until the moon was darkened too and it began to rain. Fontelle wrapped her shawl around her head, but was soaked through soon enough just the same. The marchandes strode either side of her in the dark, their baskets solidly balanced on their heads despite the chattering of their teeth.
Before dawn the rain abated and finally stopped, and as the road leveled off from the mountain, the marchandes broke into a swaying trot and sang to warm and encourage themselves as they advanced. Under the old trees by the stream at the crossroads for Ennery, they halted and unpacked their baskets. Fontelle, who had a little store of money, bought a quantity of small, rosy mangoes and a stalk of bananes Ti-Malice. She wished good day to her companions of the night and urged her donkey up the trail toward Ennery. As sunlight began to leak yellow through the small round leaves of the lemon hedges that lined the road, she began to hear more musket fire from the ridges ahead. Though she did not much like to be riding in that direction, she kept on. There was no other disturbance except the distant shooting, and it seemed to have approached no nearer when she reached the gate of Habitation Thibodet.
Doctor Hébert lay spooned with Nanon, a little wakeful in the last hours of the night. He pushed his nose into the fragrant mass of hair at the nape of her neck, never mind the tickling. She stirred a little, did not wake. The doctor listened to rain driving down on the roof. As the rain began to taper off, he slept, then woke with a terrible start, his heart throbbing at the top of his throat, it seemed. Now the rain had stopped completely; there was a trace of sunlight beyond the jalousies. The sound that had roused him was not thunder, then, but cannon fire, somewhere away in the mountains. Nanon caught his wrist as he jumped out of the bed.
“Stay.” Her eyes were large and liquid with concern.
“You had better get up yourself,