Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [354]
All the broad expanse of the Baie d’Acul was a still, glassy mirror surface, returning the brilliant blaze of the sun. Near the mouth of the bay a pod of porpoises broke the horizon line into dark running curves, reminding Maillart of thoughts he’d like to drown. So long as he was active in the water—splashing the black boys and even Guizot—he was sufficiently distracted. The day was calm and sweet, and the doctor’s peculiar sense of safety seemed justified.
Later, though, when he’d resumed his clothing and remounted, Maillart could not lose consciousness of the pendant strung round his neck on its frail gold chain. He’d taken to wearing it so for fear of losing it, though like as not it would be better lost. The light touch of the disk on his collarbone recalled the coy painted face with the cautionary finger laid across the lips. When he thought of Isabelle unhusbanded, his heart flopped and rolled in his chest like a puppy, yet this sensation merely confused him; he didn’t know what to make of it or the circumstance. And the secret of the pendant was not Isabelle’s. Maillart did not enjoy the possession of secrets. If he considered, he thought it probable that there was some darker secret, deeper than the order Boudet had revealed and which Maillart had tied up in the pendant—a secret he had no desire to discover.
34
“I have made one of the most painful campaigns it would be possible to make,” Leclerc had reported to his brother-in-law from his temporary headquarters at La Crête à Pierrot, “and I owe the position in which I find myself only to the rapidity of my movement.”
Billeted now to Leclerc’s staff, Captain Daspir had the opportunity to overhear this snatch of dictation. Since then, the Captain-General had somewhat recuperated from the strains of his difficult campaign. His bruised groin had healed enough that he could ride a horse again. At Port-au-Prince he had spent a few apparently festive evenings with the beautiful Pauline, before she returned by boat to Le Cap. One would thus surmise, as Cyprien whispered to Daspir and Paltre, that Leclerc had taken his boots off more than once—though Toussaint Louverture remained very much at large.
Their movement was rapid enough, Daspir reflected as they flung themselves once more over the mountains in the direction of Le Cap. But their speed never seemed quite equal to what the enemy could sustain. Leclerc’s sense of urgency was probably stimulated by the knowledge that Pauline’s ship would have reached Le Cap before him, and reports from the north had been troubling, especially in the last few days. In committing so much of his force to the pursuit of Toussaint from Gonaives to (as he’d supposed) the Artibonite, Leclerc had left Le Cap defended only by Boyer’s sprinkling of colonial troops and the sailors in the fleet, and there was no word of the reinforcements from France that had long been expected there. Meanwhile, both Toussaint and Christophe were said to be ravaging the Northern Plain, along with a dozen other rebel chiefs of lesser notoriety.
Yet when they crossed the mountains, there was no enemy to confront. Snipers and skirmishers harassed their column as it wound through Plaisance and Limbé, but these hill bandits would not risk an all-out engagement with a division marching in such strength. Where the road leveled out, north of Limbé, all was peaceful, the warm morning sun dappling fields of cane and corn which were still standing, ripening. Market women gathered at the crossroads to offer their wares to the passing