Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [255]
I lift up my eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my hope. There was the Bible’s answer to Deyè mòn gegne mòn. He rose from his caned chair and took a few steps to the gallery rail. Dusk settled into the long, deep valley; the mountains ranged away toward the horizon in blue-green shades of smoke. He turned and faced Gabart and Pourcely, who sat quietly in chairs on the opposite side of the gallery from the table where Toussaint’s writing implements still lay. In the confusion he’d been separated from the most skilled of his secretaries: Riau, Pascal, Doctor Hébert, but there was a young griffe in Pourcely’s command who wrote a fair script, and Toussaint had already dictated his order to Christophe, before the light began to fail. Christophe would rally the Second and Fifth Demibrigades and move north, raising men in the hills of Grand Boucan and Vallière and Sainte Suzanne and Port Français; in a few days’ time he should be able to start insurrection on the Northern Plain, and possibly even threaten Le Cap.
But Toussaint was distracted by the thought of Tocquet and the two white women—why couldn’t he leave them to look to themselves? Something about them continued to pick at him, though he bent his mind back to his tactics. Sylla was harassing Desfourneaux in the mountains of Plaisance, though Sylla’s force was negligible, and Romain was fighting a similar campaign in the heights of Limbé—there were two old maroon leaders who’d kept their faith with Toussaint’s army, unlike the magouyè traitors: Laplume, Lafortune, Lamour Dérance. If not for the treachery of those three, Dessalines would almost certainly have destroyed Port-au-Prince. Toussaint forced himself past his rage at their betrayals. To the matter at hand. From Marmelade he might drive Desfourneaux from Plaisance, or better yet, with Sylla’s support, annihilate him altogether. Then he would press on through Gros Morne and finally, finally rejoin Maurepas and the Ninth, who’d been resisting so brilliantly on the northwest peninsula, according to the last Toussaint had heard. But that had been many days ago, and since then there were rumors that Maurepas had surrendered. Toussaint had feared that outcome since his communications with the northwest were broken by the loss of Gonaives, but he would not accept it. He needed Maurepas and the Ninth, for that was the force he’d bring back to surround Leclerc, once the Captain-General had been baited into concentrating his whole army on La Crête à Pierrot.
A warm scent of callaloo floated from the rear of the house across the gallery. Toussaint watched Pourcely and Gabart react, each man shifting his weight, recomposing himself, folding his hands across his stomach. At Descahaux lived one of those ancient incorruptible granns whom Toussaint trusted to prepare this dish for him—toothless, wizened as a wadded parchment, her bones as light and fragile as the hollow bones of a bird. Tonight he’d leave his usual regime of bread and water and with his officers enjoy the comfort of callaloo.
The two white women nagged at him, though—the suddenness with which they’d disclosed their faces from the dust-guard scarves, and Elise shaking out her yellow hair. What token had she given him?—the little painted pendant, whose portrait, now that he thought of it, much more resembled Isabelle Cigny than the blond Elise. There was a trace of the racine of Africa in that Madame Cigny, though so faint she might not know it herself. Tocquet had it too, along with a touch of the Indian, blood of the old caciques, and Tocquet almost certainly did know it. Toussaint felt no great indebtedness to Tocquet for the guns he had brought, knowing that he’d sell wherever there was profit. Tocquet was a pirate, descendant of pirates; he had no loyalty but to his own interests,