Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [366]
“A ship! A ship!” Little Dieufait came galloping down from the church, beckoned at large, and ran back up the hill. A gaggle of the smaller children of the lakou went after him full tilt. Paul followed at a somewhat more dignified trot. Nanon and the doctor walked after them.
Claudine now stood at the brow of the hill, gauntly erect beside the three crude wooden crosses that had been restored to that spot after the fire. Her hair blew out behind her in the stiffening evening breeze. The cloud that had covered the sun blew clear of it, and light fell harshly on the whitecaps of the harbor. Among them L’Océan had dropped its anchor and the men were lowering the sails. Two longboats were rowing from ship to shore. The doctor reached for his spyglass and took a closer look: the dark woman’s head was Isabelle Cigny, and the fair one was his sister.
“They’re back.” Absently he handed the glass to Paul. “Let us go down to greet them,” he said, half-reluctantly, for a touch of that queer premonition clung to him still.
Daspir sat in the bow of the first longboat, facing the other passengers, enjoying the light salt spray on the back of his sunburned neck and covering Isabelle with a dazed smile of sexual satiety. This excursion had certainly been his happiest interlude since he first disembarked in Saint Domingue. Pauline, in collaboration with Isabelle no doubt, had been shielding him from Leclerc’s ill-treatment. The Captain-General, for whatever reason, had redirected his most unwelcome attentions to Paltre. It was Paltre, and sometimes Cyprien, who’d accompanied Leclerc and Xavier Tocquet in the search for sites for the hospital Leclerc meant to install there. Meanwhile, Daspir had been free to accompany the ladies, mushrooming, flower-gathering, and the like . . . and Isabelle had introduced him to more than one mossy and secluded bower.
The boat knocked against a piling of the dock, and Daspir, startled from his revery, climbed out and secured the bowline. The second boat was still no more than halfway from ship to shore, since it had taken a long time for all of Pauline’s paraphernalia, with the lady herself, to be stowed in it. Daspir stooped and stretched down to help Elise up the ladder from the boat, then gave his arm to Isabelle. She swayed against him for a moment as she came up onto the dock, depending on his elbow, then let go and assumed her independent balance. Her release was just sudden enough to perplex Daspir a little.
Their arrival had attracted the usual assembly of small black children and waterfront idlers. Daspir picked out Doctor Hébert on the far side of the street, standing with the gorgeous mulattress Nanon. There too was Guizot, who raised his hand with a watery smile, and beside him Major Maillart, fingering the end of his mustache as he studied Isabelle with an interest that made Daspir slightly uneasy. The wind was twisting, raising dust and small specks of debris in spirals from the ground. As the red sun lowered toward the ridge of Morne du Cap, the wind hurried darkening clouds across it. Daspir had learned to feel the tension of this moment, when it would either rain or not. He felt his spirits lift and twist, without knowing which way they would blow.
Paltre might have had something of the same perturbed sensation. “Ah, the good doctor,” he said, raising his hat with a queerly fixed grin. “I see you’re reunited with your whore.”
The doctor seemed to wobble slightly as he rolled across the street toward them, like an egg wobbling when it rolls. He was a small and oddly shaped and unimposing figure, and yet he moved with a startling efficiency. A length of stove wood was in his rising hand, and Daspir had just time enough to register its splintered edge before it smashed full into Paltre’s face. Paltre reeled