Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [317]
“Antoine!” he cried. “My Christ, how did you come here?”
Maillart jumped down and threw an arm over the doctor’s shoulders. Holding him so, he turned to Guizot.
“What do you mean by it?” he said. “This man is one of us—and my oldest friend in this country.”
But the captain did not seem to register this question. He made no effort to recover his pistol either. His face was rigid, and he did not seem to be aware of the tears that rolled over his cheekbones and splashed on the ground beside his boots.
“Let him be,” the doctor said. “You can see he’s not himself.”
He slipped out of Maillart’s embrace and took a step toward Captain Guizot, reaching for his empty hand.
“I’m only a doctor, you see,” he said. “You’d better let me have a look at that arm.”
Fort de Joux, France
March 1803
The snow continued to sift down, blunting the edges and points of the parapets and towers into indistinct, soft rounds. Amiot walked the battlements, gazing in the direction of the chasm and the sheer cliff wall beyond it, though both were completely hidden now, obliterated by the shifting curtains of snow. In fact he could not see a yard beyond his nose. It had been snowing for three days straight, and yet to Amiot it felt more as if the snow had never stopped since the first of January, when he’d relieved Baille of his command of the Fort de Joux. The snow obscured the light of the dawn, though Amiot knew, from the recent tolling of the castle bell, that dawn was soon to come.
Like every sound, the bell’s tones were swaddled and muffled in wrappings of snow. There was no wind; the whole world seemed afloat. The snow had risen halfway to the tops of Amiot’s boots, so that it was real labor to trudge through it. When the light grew strong enough, he would order the soldiers to clear it away.
He passed a sentry, his hat made shapeless by the snow collected on it. Amiot was perhaps invisible to him, for the sentry did not salute as he passed by, but only coughed into his hand. Amiot decided not to notice this small dereliction. He had after all been pacing this area for upward of a half an hour. When he reached the corner of the wall he stopped and turned. What was the end of his exercise? Since his last search of Toussaint’s cell, he’d not been able to return to sleep.
Amiot inhaled profoundly, snow stinging his nostrils, drawing cold threads of the thin mountain air to the bottom of his lungs. In a moment he felt the invigoration of the deep breath coursing in his blood, but his mind remained remote from that refreshment, heavy and drooping. Truly, there was something debilitating in this duty. Amiot had felt only contempt for Baille when he’d departed, a man grown old beyond his years in a few months of untaxing service—who’d never had heart for the regime he was required to impose. Without a trace of sympathy or interest, Amiot had watched Baille’s figure shrink and stoop away, but now he began to feel that the miasma of the former commandant’s weak will still infected the rooms which he himself now occupied.
Indeed, he’d ordered two searches that night: the first at midnight, the second at four. In the course of both, the prisoner had been stripped to the skin, his few belongings shaken and tumbled, his clothing picked over with a needle, the crevices of his cell probed with the point of a knife . . . as usual. It was all too usual, perhaps, to be effective. Of course there was no object to find; the prisoner could not have kept a fly’s wing hidden against such an onslaught of investigation. It was in his misshapen head that something might still be concealed . . . some final shred of information,