Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [351]
“Ba’m nouvel’w,” the doctor said. Give me your news.
“All is well,” Moustique said. The doctor studied his profile. Moustique was still rail-thin as ever, but had outgrown his gawkiness, and seemed much more comfortably settled in himself.
“Your family?” the doctor inquired.
“Marie-Noelle has taken the children to Le Cap,” Moustique said. “That is why you do not see them here. They went with Monsieur and Madame Arnaud and Nanon and Madame your sister with her husband, and all the children too. Also Madame Cigny went with them. They are all well.”
He paused. The doctor felt the rum flushing through him along with the gladness of relief. He’d come to Habitation Arnaud thinking that the others would have stopped here, but had not dared put that question to Cléo and Isidor. And if Moustique had sent his own wife on with them, the doctor’s instinct was that they must all in fact be safe.
“They are all well except for Monsieur Bertrand Cigny,” Moustique said. “He was killed when Sylla’s men struck his plantation, and his own atelier rose against him.” Moustique inclined the gourd and let a drop fall on the ground, then made the sign of the cross before he drank. He offered the rum to Maillart, who did not at first seem to notice it. His eyes had widened at the last news, and he covered the lower part of his face with a fist.
Guizot was paying no attention; he stood rapt, watching skirts whirl by in the dance. The girl Riau had chosen was exceptionally pretty; the doctor’s eye was on her too. Her slender back curved over the crook of Riau’s arm like the stem of a wild flower. She dipped, came straight, and spun away from him, her dotted calico spinning out from her slim hips, her eyes bright in a dark chocolate face. Riau caught her close again, stooped to whisper something in her ear. The girl protested, laughing, beating her palms lightly on his chest. Riau leaned closer, urging still, and the girl’s face quieted and resolved. She broke from Riau and moved boldly toward Captain Guizot, eyes shining on him. With a phrase of Creole he could not understand, she caught his hand and pulled. Guizot remained as obdurate as a post.
“Dance with her, you idiot,” Maillart said. He’d recovered himself enough to take his tot of rum. “If you’d turn away a belle like that, there is no place for you in the French army.”
Guizot yielded and let himself be drawn among the dancers. He had a reasonably quick step, the doctor noticed, and though the girl was infinitely more graceful, she adapted herself so flawlessly to him that soon Guizot was lit by an unconscious smile.
Then the music halted and dancers drew back. Into the orb of the space they opened stepped Cléo and Isidor. As the fife took a minuet, she returned a courtesy to his bow, and they began a pas de deux. Cléo was not so fluid as the young girls, but more accomplished, achieving grace with a smaller, more neatly contained effort. The younger people all stood by, swaying and smiling and clapping to the drum beat. It was quite as if the master and mistress had come down from the château, the doctor thought, to lend a little honor to a peasant festival. And surely, the rusty frockcoat draped upon Isidor was the property of Michel Arnaud, while Cléo’s gown was some long-closeted finery of Claudine’s.
As if this couple had slipped into the skins of the absent others. The doctor was startled by that thought. He felt a scaliness creeping over him, and was struck by the oddly vivid fantasy that he was being absorbed into the skin of the cayman he had shot. Surely he had not drunk so much as that—yet his fingers were numb, accepting the gourd from Maillart. It was the drums. The drums were doing something to the back of his head where it joined his spine. He could no longer hear the fife, though he could see the man who was playing it.