Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [322]
Franz was a seasoned soldier, that much was evident from his bearing, from his age and the long pigtail he still wore. Toussaint supposed he had likely fought with the first sans-culottes, and maybe he had been with Bonaparte in the days before Napoleon had exalted himself to the status of First Consul. The more Toussaint’s body weakened, the more Franz grew solicitous of him, though in extremely discreet ways none other could detect. In Franz’s eyes he thought he saw the gleam of devotion of men like Guiaou and Guerrier. The need and the trust he had found in such faces had driven him a long way over his road—it had become a part of his own power.
His entrails clenched to expel the sausage. Toussaint lunged across the room to vomit in the slop jar. Empty, he replaced the lid and leaned his weight on it. At last he recovered enough to stand, to rinse his mouth with water and settle himself again into the chair.
Somewhere during his bout of nausea, he’d counted seven strokes of the castle bell. If there were no surprise searches in the meantime, which depended on the will of God, he’d have five hours before the trencher was removed. In that time he would pass the food through his system in one way or another, so that Franz’s action would not be discovered. Probably the cheese would be easier to keep down.
He drifted as his fever rose. The fever was a sort of padding against the pain. The pain belonged to someone else, was trapped in Toussaint’s body, at the bottom of a well. Now the faces of Guiaou and Guerrier hovered before him: Guiaou with his terrible scars which left his eyes the more expressive, and Guerrier’s broad features animated wholly by the same mute trust in Papa Toussaint. The truth was that men like these were rare. Riau was the more common type. Riau who would never give himself entirely, who held something always hidden behind his head, who always remained a marron in his heart. Moyse had always been the same. These latter days, when Moyse’s one-eyed visage floated up, Toussaint could say to him, la paix. No more than I, you did not live to cross the Jordan. But without you, without five hundred thousand like you, we could not have won. God’s peace be with you.
And the absurdity of Amiot’s program of searches . . . The giddiness of rising fever made Toussaint want to laugh. There was no contraband information left to discover, any more than there was an object to find. The blancs already owned every piece of information. They knew everything and understood none of what they knew.
Toussaint tightened the knot of his mouchwa têt. Firm pressure worked to dam the flow of pain through his head. With a fingertip he checked the tiny fold of paper beneath the cloth just above the knot. Here he had cached his final testament—let Amiot find it after his death. A footnote to the long, dissembling memorandum he’d composed for the First Consul—no more than a line or two, but sufficient to make sense of all the rest.
You thought I was deceived by Brunet’s letter. Fool, I knew what was to come. I knew when you faced me, you faced one leader. When you removed me, you would face five hundred thousand.
Outside, the wind had risen. Now it moaned across the grate. With the wind, a puff of fine snow spiraled through the grate into the cell. A dusting of snow on Toussaint’s face refreshed him momentarily from his fever, like the touch of a cool cloth. A scatter of snowflakes settled on his open hand, prickling at the skin like furry legs of bees. Then the flakes melted and joined in a droplet which magnified the crossing of lines on his palm. Toussaint let his arm go slack, spilling the water onto the ground, as fever washed him into sleep.
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