Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [360]
Here Leclerc paused before a row of bodies stacked like cordwood. The smell was rank. He swallowed phlegm.
“How did these men die?” he inquired of the nurse who stood by him.
“Lafièv.” Her cushioned lips softened away the r that should have finished the word fever. The deep rich timbre of her voice both thrilled and a little disturbed him.
“Let them be buried more quickly,” he announced. “Their proximity is dangerous to those who still live.”
“Yes,” said the nurse. “In the morning the cart comes.”
“Every morning,” added the old man, who was always following. He smiled agreeably at Leclerc, over gnarled hands coiled around his cane. His head was fully covered with close-cropped white hair, and Leclerc could just make out a pattern of finely etched scars that scrolled around the natural wrinkles of his face.
“Every morning the cart takes the dead away to La Fossette,” the old man said.
A cloud of tiny mosquitoes floated over the wall from the ravine and settled like a veil on Leclerc’s face. Frantic for a moment, he batted them away. A sickly heat suffused him. He was faint. The whine of the mosquitoes seemed to separate into words, but when he had recovered a little he recognized a woman’s voice singing, one of the nurses who stood over a small fire near the gate. Though the words had the sound of French, he could not make the least sense of them. That was the worst of their damned patois, it made one think one had lost one’s mind. The song was resonant, keening, and how he wished she would not sing it—the melancholy of this tune would depress and agitate the dying men. Yet he was walking toward her, into the music that poured from her throat, or no, he meant to be returning to the gate. Now he had passed the gateway, and the old man was still smiling doggedly through the bars as he refastened the chain.
The song faded as Leclerc walked down the hill. Now his head cleared, and he felt cooler, though still clammy. He fingered the welts of fresh mosquito bites along his jawline and his throat. True enough, as Paltre had reminded him, he had suffered from fever not long ago; true also that it tended to recur. Still, for the moment he felt sound enough. The sky above him had steadied from its recent tilting; he could pick out the Great Bear and the Corona Borealis. The pain in his injured groin was no more than a hitch, these latter days. Let this mission be soon completed and he’d be whole and well as ever.
A sentry saluted him from a post on the corner of the Rue Espagnole, looking a little surprised to see the Captain-General walking alone at this hour of the night. Leclerc smiled at him enigmatically and went on, his mind reaching forward to the correspondence he ought to complete before he slept tonight. The rhythm of his steps beat out the phrases of a letter he’d sent the Minister of Marine a few days before, when he was still at Port-au-Prince: Toussaint is not an ordinary man. He has force of character, and a large head. And if he had been, like ourselves, a witness to the events which happened in Europe during the last ten years, if he had not been spoiled by the successes he obtained over the English, and if he had begun with a better idea of the power of France, this country would be lost to us beyond return.
And this by-no-means-ordinary man had just driven Hardy out of Dondon, and cost him four hundred and fifty men in the bargain—while in practically the same breath he told Boudet in Port-au-Prince that he, Toussaint, remained unswervingly loyal to France, while the carnage and destruction of the colony was all to be blamed on Captain-General Leclerc. Outrageous, yet Leclerc had ordered