Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [2]
It was late morning when he woke, as he knew by the color of the light leaking in through the half-inch mesh of the grating; high under the vault at one end of the cell, it supplied his only traces of the light of day. The usual draught sucked through the space, flirting from the grating to the narrow crack beneath the door. He had slept considerably later than was his custom. While he was unconscious, they had come to bring more firewood and replenish his small store of food and water.
He got up slowly, bare toes freezing against the flagstones. The cold contact shocked him into brighter consciousness; he welcomed it for that. His joints ached, but for the moment he felt neither chill nor fever. That was well, though he knew that as the day wore on his symptoms might renew themselves.
He knelt on the hearth stones, uncovered the fading coals from the ash, and breathed on them till their life returned, then fed them with splinters till stronger flames began to rise. In one of his small, sporadic kindnesses, Baille had furnished a bag of cornmeal, knowing that Toussaint preferred this to oats. Boiling water in a small iron kettle, he made an adequate serving of mush. Maïs moulin...1 there were no beans, and no hot peppers. Scarcely sugar or salt enough to give it any flavor at all. He ate dutifully, for the sake of his strength, his lucidity, and cleaned the bowl with a scrap of ship’s biscuit, which was itself too hard for his shattered teeth to break. He held it in his mouth a long time while he thought.
A bell tolled in some distant tower of the Fort de Joux, and as if in answer a current of cold air swam through the cell. The beads of water on the inner wall, raw stone of the mountain, had taken on a pearly luminescence. It was months since Toussaint had left his cell, but the wind and the cold without had struck him when he’d first been brought here, though that was a milder season. Here in the Jura Mountains the peaks were snow-capped all summer long, and the wind cut and whistled like a whip.
He had marked the stones to count the days of his confinement; his mental calendar was clear. Twelve days since Bonaparte’s agent, Caffarelli, had departed, bearing Toussaint’s own memorandum to the First Consul. For the past four days, Toussaint had felt his anticipation of response spreading like an itch on saddle-chafed skin. As a general in the French army, he merited a reply from his ultimate superior. He was due his trial, his day in court; in justice he must pass before a tribunal. In the memorandum he had sent, the case was thoroughly presented. Blame for the war still rumbling in Saint Domingue, while Toussaint sat in this freezing cell, was shifted to Napoleon’s brother-in-law, the Captain-General Leclerc, whom Bonaparte had sent to attack him without cause. Yes, without the least legitimate reason, when Toussaint Louverture had never faltered in his loyalty to France—and was recognized too, as Governor-General of the colony. If Leclerc had presented himself in a friendly fashion, instead of forcing his entry everywhere with cannon and sword, much bloodshed would certainly have been avoided.
At last the hardtack gave way and crumbled on his tongue. He swallowed, took a sip of water. The fire returned a faint warmth to the arches of his outstretched bare feet. With his thumb, he checked the corners of the three letters sewn into the lining of his coat. He’d asked Baille for a needle and thread to refasten some loose buttons. The jailer had consented, more than