Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [253]
Toussaint! The army of Toussaint is at the gate!
Bazau, his face empty, got up to calm a pack mule loaded with salt— the animal had begun to jerk its head against the tether, distressed by the sudden commotion. The women were staring at each other, more in surprise than in alarm. Now the armed contingent of soldiers began to come running up from the post, in the same disarray that the work gangs had been, though no one looked to be pursuing them.
Tocquet got up and dusted off his trouser seat and caught the arm of a corporal who was frantically hauling the line of a little shallop moored to the embarcadère. “What is it, friend?” he asked. “Is Toussaint here— did you see it with your own eyes?”
“Yes!” the corporal declared. “He has been on our heels from Saint Michel to here and all of his black devils with him.”
“And all of them ravening to drink human blood?” Tocquet kept his tone neutral, but Bazau slumped into the side of the mule, to bury his laughter in the sacks of salt.
“Yes, and thousands of them,” the corporal panted. “They have massacred Leclerc at Petite Rivière, down to the last man.”
“Who told you so?” Tocquet said more sharply.
“It’s on the wind.” The corporal shot a quick look around their faces, then jumped down into the boat. All along the embarcadère his fellow soldiers were doing the same, in such a hasty confusion that several of the boats risked capsizing. On one of the warships moored farther out, a cannon coughed out a plume of smoke—a signal, maybe, as there was certainly no enemy in view.
The corporal looked up from the rocking shallop. “We are all lost if we don’t get off this cursed island. Are those white women? They had better come too.”
“Well, yes.” Tocquet looked to Elise. “I think I mentioned that there might be trouble. You might best wait it out on one of the ships, while we see what it amounts to.”
“Nonsense,” Elise said. “I won’t leave you so.”
“Even if it is my bidding?”
“If I were so biddable, sir, I would never have come away with you in the beginning.” Elise’s color was up in her cheeks and her eyes were bright; she looked well, with the wind ruffling her hair. Tocquet turned from her and spat into the water, to signify an annoyance he didn’t entirely feel. Then he looked at Isabelle.
“I won’t,” she said, before he could speak. “Nanon is alone at Thibodet and I won’t leave her and I won’t leave the children.”
“You had rather die?”
“Yes.” Isabelle stuck up her chin. “I had rather die if it comes to that.”
“Well damn you both for a pair of donkeys!” Tocquet snapped. “I never saw such stubborn women.” He looked toward the shallop but it had already pushed off, the men leaning into their oars as they pulled for the ships. A black-backed gull swooped down and knocked one of their abandoned bowls into the water and rose with a scrap of plantain in its beak.
“Come on then,” Tocquet said. “Get yourselves mounted, if you won’t hear reason, and we’ll see what it is we have to face.”
They saw no sign of Toussaint until they’d reached the Pont des Dattes, where they found his corps ranged on the other side. It was nothing like the horde that corporal had been gibbering about—Tocquet took in that much at first glance. Toussaint had only a light force of regular troops and cavalry, though still probably enough to overwhelm the little French garrison left at Gonaives. Behind the regulars waited some hundreds of wild-looking men from the mountains, many of them armed with muskets which looked very much like the ones Tocquet had recently brought in from Philadelphia.
“Salut, Governor, good day to you.” Tocquet raised his hat two inches from his head and then replaced it. “You may advance with no fear if you like—the French have already taken to their boats.”
“Have they done so?” Toussaint, sitting his white stallion, touched his hat brim lightly.
“Yes,” said Tocquet. “The town