Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [247]
The doctor ran to a parapet and raised the spyglass to his eye. He picked out the back of Bienvenu’s head in the middle of a skirmish line deployed across the slope between the fort’s ditches and the burned shells of the town. Since Bienvenu had brought him safe out of the massacre, the doctor had felt the liveliest interest in his well-being, but this skirmish line was going to be destroyed in the next few minutes—there were only a hundred men or so, lightly supported by snipers in the trees on either side, against two thousand French grenadiers already charging with bayonets lowered, and doubtless enraged by the carnage they’d found in whatever was left of Petite Rivière. The slight grade of the ascent did not slow them at all. The skirmishers shot off their muskets, fell back, turned, and ran for the fort—it was the rout the doctor had expected, though all around him the cannoneers had begun to light their matches. Lamartinière and Magny ordered them not to shoot—they’d only mow down their own retreating men if they fired now. The doctor fixed his glass on Bienvenu, who had not been shot, had not been bayoneted, who incongruously seemed to be laughing as he rushed to the edge of a ditch and tumbled in.
“Feu! Feu!” Lamartinière and Magny cried with one voice. The whole skirmish line had vanished in the ditches, so there was nothing now between the cannon mouths and the French charging into point-blank range. The doctor had picked out two generals on the field, and both went down in the first volley of mitraille. One got up and staggered away, supported by subalterns, as the cannons went on crashing, recharging, firing again . . . but the other lay on his back where he had fallen, pumping blood from a huge wound in the chest. There were hundreds more musketeers who’d all along been hidden in the trenches and they now kept up a steady fire, while cannons recoiled, recharged, belched more mitraille. Some black troops, surprisingly, were covering the French retreat. The doctor twisted the lens of his spyglass and made out the insignia of the Ninth Demibrigade—Maurepas’s men from Port-de-Paix. Could Maurepas have surrendered?
Then Lamartinière screamed for the firing to stop, and as the cannonade and musket volleys faded away, a trumpet or a conch shell sounded. Out of the woods northeast of the slope, the cavalry of Monpoint and Morisset appeared to sweep the field. Through his spyglass the doctor discovered Placide, riding down a fleeing French grenadier, cleaving his head with a saber as casually as if splitting a length of firewood, then riding on to slay the next. He lowered the instrument and let the scene blur. When he looked again, the field was empty except for the dead—at least four hundred of them.
The whole business had taken less than one hour. All the men in the trenches were laughing and cheering, and the cannoneers were hugging each other. The doctor felt neither joy nor sorrow. He stood, the spyglass hanging numb in his left hand, until Bienvenu appeared and called to him, then gave him a nudge and spoke again, “Come, Doctor, please, you must come now, they are just bringing in the wounded.”
25
In Toussaint’s eyes the low stone outline of the powder magazine took on the aspect of a tomb, and from its farther end there bloomed the black cross of Baron, as it were wrapped in chains. Reasonably there was no cross, but reason had no application. His reason had been unseated by the fountain of dread that gushed up in him, responding to the black-toothed powers that rushed on him from without. Blood was the conduit of the dread expanding with every beat of his pulse. His heart clenched tight; his head ached terribly. The black cross burned against the sky.
He could not think it only a trick of sun or fever or the two combined. Baron was manifest in the cross. Toussaint’s spirit had been sucked out of him. He was nothing, an empty bottle, wind whistling in the uncorked neck. All at once the warmth of fever drained