Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [368]
Paltre had stopped bleeding by the time Daspir set the cups down on the table; he sat with his head tilted back against the top rail of his chair, delicately massaging the crushed cartilage of his nose.
“What the devil did you want to challenge him for?” Cyprien said and gulped at his clairin.
“He struck me! You saw it, you all did.” Paltre righted his head to speak, and a little blood trickled over the black crust that ringed his left nostril. “He has broken my nose again, I think—God rot him.”
“Anyone would have struck you, after that remark,” Daspir told him.
“What I said was only the truth.” Paltre looked at Cyprien. “You remember the wench as well as I do, from Choufleur’s house in ninety-eight. He used to lead her around on a chain, and offer her favors to any who wanted them. She would drink from a bowl on the floor like a dog.”
“I remember,” Cyprien said. “You’ve made sure her husband remembers it too.”
“How should I know he had married the bitch?” Paltre snapped. “It’s not an idea that would come to most men.” He snorted, then quickly clapped the handkerchief over a fresh flow of blood from his nose.
“It must be that I remember Choufleur’s house more clearly than you,” said Cyprien. “I recall most plainly when this doctor came for his woman there. Choufleur challenged him the same as you have done. The doctor threw up a playing card and shot the pips out of it with his pistol. I mean to say, it was the same hand as threw the card that fired the pistol.”
Guizot exhaled a hollow whistle. Paltre looked palely at Cyprien.
“I don’t remember that,” he said.
“Then you must have been blind drunk,” said Cyprien. “I was drunk too, but I’ll never forget it. I never saw such shooting in my life.”
Paltre folded the bloodstained handkerchief and ran the crease of it through his fingertips. “He is a traitor anyway, your doctor. He was fighting with the rebels at La Crête à Pierrot.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Guizot. “He was their prisoner.”
“So he claimed afterward,” Paltre said. “When your bayonet was at his throat. But I remember him from earlier days, and he was always as thick as molasses with Toussaint—as much as Pascal, certainly, or any of the other collaborators who’ve been deported for it.”
“You’d stand to be deported yourself,” Cyprien said, “if Leclerc should get wind of this affair of honor.”
“I?” said Paltre. “Come, what can you mean? Any of that crew around the Cigny house might be sent off well ahead of me. Xavier Tocquet for one—he smuggled guns for Toussaint these last four years and everybody knows it.” He smiled unpleasantly at Daspir. “Just one word in the right ear and your beauty Isabelle would be shipped to France as the harlot she was—consorting with black officers. Oh yes, she entertained them without reserve—and everyone knows that too.”
Daspir heard the crash like a distant gunshot. It was his own fist that had come down on the clay vessel that had held his rum, and smashed it to a sticky powder. Paltre seemed to be transfixed by Daspir’s gaze, and Daspir felt a hardness in his own eyes he’d never been aware of, something like what Isabelle claimed she had seen, the first night they’d slept together.
“Look at us,” Guizot said, his voice slightly trembling. “We meant to be good comrades when we came. We were going out just the four of us to bring in Toussaint Louverture—do you not remember? And look at us now, at each other’s throats, and everyone’s.” He pushed up his sleeve to the shoulder, revealing a red-and-white spiraling scar. “I’d have lost my arm, if not for that doctor—and you want to kill him, or make him kill you. Where’s the sense in it?” Guizot shook all over, as if from an ague. “Where’s the good sense of any of this war?”
“Be careful what you say.” Cyprien leaned forward on his elbows, lowering his tone, as he looked uneasily about