Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [24]
In the event, however, their ship had remained moored for a very long time at Brest, while soldiers and supplies were assembled and embarked. La Sirène had put out in the midst of the entire fleet. For many days, Placide and Isaac believed that somewhere in the mid-Atlantic their ship would simply put on more sail and speed out ahead of the others, bearing the two of them, and the First Consul’s letter, to their father. Isaac, at least, had believed wholeheartedly that such a thing must happen, while Placide, experienced in voyages of disguised destination and in being used himself as a decoy, had privately been a little doubtful from the start. And now they must be less than fifteen days from their landfall in Saint Domingue. What if a different ship had sailed ahead—the one that carried Rigaud and his cohorts, or some other?
It might be for that that Lasirène seemed angry: she had been deceived, ill served. Mais ce n’est pas de ma faute! Placide cried mentally, I couldn’t help it! A spirit might pardon your failure if it was plain you could not have prevented it. Placide thought he remembered that much, though Toussaint had been very firm in directing his sons away from the hounfors and into the Catholic Church. Still, with his father’s long campaigns and frequent absences, there were times when both he and Isaac had followed the drums. Placide had seen the gods come down, seen the people who bore them totter with the shock of their descent.
This was the mystery into which he sailed, and he was helpless to change his course. Let it be, then. Let it come to him, to them all. He closed his eyes and made his breathing slow and even, though he no longer had the least desire to sleep.
3
“You were uneasy in the night,” Michel Arnaud remarked to his wife.
“Oh?” said Claudine Arnaud, pausing with her coffee cup in mid-air. “I regret to have disturbed your rest.”
“It is nothing,” Arnaud said. He looked at her sidelong. The suspended coffee cup showed no hint of a tremor. In fact, Claudine had appeared to gain strength these last few months. She was lean, certainly, but no longer looked frail. Her face, once pallid, had broken out in freckles, since lately she took no care against the sun. She sipped from her cup and set it down precisely in the saucer, then reached across the table to curl her fingers over his wrist.
“Don’t concern yourself,” Claudine said with a transparent smile. “I have no trouble.” Behind her chair, the mulattress Cléo shifted her feet, staring mistrustfully down at Arnaud, who raised his eyes to meet hers briefly.
“Encore du café, s’il vous plaît.”
Cléo moved around the table, lifted the pot, and poured. The pot was silver, newly acquired—lately they’d begun to replace some of the amenities lost or destroyed when the rebel slaves burned this plantation in 1791. Household service was improving too, though it came wrapped in what Arnaud was wont to regard as an excess of mutual politeness. And Cléo’s attachment to his wife was a strange thing!—though he got an indirect benefit from it. In the old days, when Cléo had been his mistress as well as his housekeeper, the two women had hated each other cordially.
He turned his palm up to give his wife’s fingers a little squeeze, then disengaged his hand and stirred sugar into his coffee. White sugar, of his own manufacture. There was that additional sweetness—very few