Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [258]
As Merbillay withdrew from the gallery, Elise smoothed the paper against her knee. The watcher now stepped clear of the hedge: Guiaou. She had not recognized him at first, because he had put aside the honor guard uniform in which she had grown used to seeing him, and now stood shirtless in a pair of canvas trousers. Of course his ghastly scars made him unmistakable once he had stepped into the rapidly warming sunlight. And the morning was getting on, Elise thought abstractedly, and they should be setting out very soon, given the length of the road ahead. She nodded to Guiaou, who seemed to have been waiting for that, for at once he turned aside and slipped away through the nearest gap in the hedge.
But Riau had been here too, Elise realized. She had not consciously recognized him either, for he too had been out of uniform, but she certainly had seen him with Merbillay, last night or the night before. There was something for Isabelle to study, and maybe for Elise herself: the apparently effortless grace with which Merbillay could manage those two men.
She feigned a cough, raised her hand to her collarbone, and pushed the letter down into the space between her breasts. Paul was busy writing, and Nanon gave no sign. If she had seen, Elise felt sure, Nanon would say nothing.
26
At Port-au-Prince it was quiet enough for some days after Dessalines had been frightened away by all the men of Lamour Dérance and Lafortune and the blanc sailors who came out of the ships on the harbor, and after General Boudet came back from the ashes of Saint Marc with all the French blanc soldiers he had taken with him there. Quiet, yet I, Riau, could not rest easily, though there was no danger that I saw in those days. We did not see any fighting for a while though there was talk of it in other places. No one came to attack the town again, and Dessalines was supposed to have gone off through the mountains toward Mirebalais, killing any blancs he could find on the plantations because he was so angry at being shut out of Port-au-Prince a second time.
Yet when I lay down to sleep at night, my ti bon ange stayed trapped inside my head. It could not get out to wander in the world of dreams, but stayed between the bones of my skull beating its wings like a bird in a jar, while Riau’s open eyes bored all night into the shadows under the roof of the caserne. In the daytime, after such a night, I walked as if a loup-garou had bitten a hole through my chest to suck all my insides out so the loup-garou could travel in my skin. Or maybe some enemy had hired a bokor to send his dead against me. If I had really believed so, I might have looked for a hûngan that I might pay to turn the curse away, but I did not know any hûngan near Port-au-Prince well enough to trust, and I did not really believe I had been attacked by a bokor anyway. I thought my trouble came from my own spirit, or from some spirit that I owed a service which I had not done, and the truth was that I knew well enough what kind of service it was.
At the same time it seemed to me that maybe I had been the good servant of these French blanc soldiers for too long. If I had not brought Lafortune and Lamour Dérance in from the plain, Dessalines could have burned Port-au-Prince when he came, and so weakened the power of the blancs. The blancs recognized the worth of what I had done for them. Maillart especially, for he understood that Dessalines would have put his head on a spear if he had been able to overrun the town that time, even though at other times he and Dessalines behaved as brother officers, especially when Toussaint was near. But the power the French blanc soldiers held began to worry me more and more. However much they declared that all our people would be free forever under their law, I did not like to see how they loaded Pierre Louis Diane and all his officers with chains and held them prisoner in the stinking bottoms of the hulks out in the harbor. Also I could not stop seeing the eyes of the general Pamphile