Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [361]
At the gate of the Governor’s house the guard admitted him silently; Leclerc forebore to ask if Pauline had returned. When he reached their private chambers, he found that she had not. In the adjacent cabinet he lit two candles and took up the letter to the Minister of Marine he had begun before going out that evening, and reviewed his complaints about the reinforcements he’d recently had by way of La Zélée and La Tourville. A scant eight hundred men—their number a mockery of the thousands he’d requested and desperately needed—ill clothed and unshod and without a single musket to arm them. Moreover, fully a third of them had gone direct from the ships to the hospital.
Another blanket of mosquitoes unfurled over his hands and forearms. He killed a dozen, slapping the palm of each hand on the back of the other. The insects did not start up fast enough to save themselves, if they were battening on a vein. But these black rebels were the same as the mosquitoes. No matter how many one destroyed, there were always more and they arrived from all directions.
Stop that thought. In search of something more constructive, Leclerc fastened on the evening’s discussion of La Tortue. The idea of a hospital there bore further investigation. It sounded quite a salubrious place. Perhaps he’d visit personally, maybe even with Pauline. Let him once acclimate his men and he would win this war definitively. Leclerc shook off the chill that had come over him. He lifted a pen and dipped it in the well. I will restore a bit of order here, he wrote, for thus far we have walked in chaos and ruin.
When they departed from the Cigny house, Daspir and Cyprien lingered a little on the far side of the street, for the spectacle of Pauline embarking in the sedan chair contraption she favored was worth the observation. She’d decked out five more blacks in the same feathered turbans and robes as her “Moustapha”—all fine, strong men who bore these costumes with a dignity that made them somewhat less ridiculous.
“It is her fantasy of the Mameluke style, I suppose,” Cyprien said in a low tone.
Daspir glanced at him, half curious. Cyprien claimed to have been with Bonaparte for a time in Egypt, though he looked a little young for it. Daspir himself was far too young to have joined that campaign. But at the moment he was so distracted by his image of Isabelle that even the sight of Pauline’s artlessly engineered disarray barely held his attention.
Four of the turbaned blacks had raised the litter by its poles, and stood there stolid as a team of plow horses, while the other two lifted her aboard, settled her, packed striped cushions and shawls around her. At the crook of her finger, Moustapha handed her the parakeet, which settled on her wrist to preen. On the balcony of the Cigny house, two female figures appeared to raise their small hands in the last au revoir. Instantly Daspir picked out Isabelle, the smaller one, though he could not make out her face within the silhouette, and he could not tell if she saw him at all.
Maybe her looks and gestures had meant nothing after all. Pauline’s litter bearers were trudging away—Moustapha processing ahead of them with a torch, and the sixth man bringing up the rear. The women left the balcony, and the slim doors closed in the arch behind them, though light still glimmered at the cracks.
“The night wears on,” said Cyprien. “There was a little night life here, before . . .”
He yawned, with a slightly morose air, and Daspir followed him along the outer wall of the Cigny house, whose rows of lower archways were shuttered dark and tight. A faint scorched smell still clung to everything, despite