Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [277]
“I never owned my strength,” Arnaud said, surprised to hear himself utter it.
“No man does.”
Though Arnaud expected Tocquet to have spoken, the voice belonged to Bazau, who flanked him on the right. He glanced at the black man, but Bazau was looking through the gate posts, his profile calmly smoothed of all expression. They cleared the gate to the sound of hooves and harness and the more distant noise of fighting toward the coast. None of the three of them said anything more as they continued their way across the fire-blackened Rue Espagnole.
28
The little painted pendant went on troubling Maillart, for he couldn’t determine what to do with it. As it would certainly be compromising to Antoine Hébert’s sister, he ought probably to have got rid of it—tossed it into the canal with the rest of the trinkets out of Toussaint’s trophy box. The order to treat any white woman who’d consorted with a black as a prostitute had rather shaken the major. There’d be more than one colonial dame brought low if that directive were broadly applied. More than one of Maillart’s own acquaintance. He wondered, too, what lay behind it, what other disagreeable orders there might be.
And still the pendant’s image reminded him so of Isabelle that he could not quite bring himself to dispose of it. It was not her portrait, yet it recalled the brightness of her eyes, the coyness in that finger laid over lips stung red by kissing. At moments he thought private, he’d cup the pendant in his hand and study the image on the small ceramic disk, wondering where Isabelle was now, if she had reached some place of safety. He was confident she had, for Isabelle was a cat who fell on her feet, though by this time she might have consumed a few of her spare lives. He’d caught young Captain Paltre a time or two, peering over his shoulder, trying to see into his palm, but then Maillart would fold his fingers over the teasing face and drop the pendant back in his coat pocket. He could not quite control the habit of worrying it between his thumb and forefinger there, but the surface of the disk was thickly glazed, so that this handling did not wear away the image.
They’d been on the march out of Port-au-Prince for several days, since news had come that General Debelle had been pushed back, with surprising losses, from a little fort above Petite Rivière. Maillart knew the fort, and thought little of it. The place was well chosen, to control a key point of entry to the interior via the Grand Cahos, but the fortification itself did not amount to much, and though it stood on a high cliff above the Artibonite River, it was too easily attacked across the inconsequential slope rising from the town.
And yet it seemed to be their target. Captain-General Leclerc appeared to believe that here Toussaint had gone to ground. Maillart did not much think so. Toussaint did not willingly put his back to any set of walls. But maybe he’d been forced to it; it might be true, and so the major kept his opinion to himself. For the past two days they’d been maneuvering inland, and General Boudet had detached the advance guard to press as far east as Mirebalais, under command of the Adjutant-General d’Henin, who’d taken some losses capturing a small redoubt, then found the town in ashes. D’Henin returned to Boudet gray-faced, with a tale of three hundred white corpses weltering in their blood where they’d been hacked to death on Habitation Chirry, and all the countryside in flames.
Now, toward the close of day, Boudet’s reunited division moved along the south bank of the Artibonite toward the town of Verrettes. Maillart contrived to feel mildly optimistic on this ride, despite the nervous whispering of d’Henin’s men. He rode along to Paltre