Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [376]
“Ah,” she said, looking up at the doctor. “I had been wondering if you would come.”
“I didn’t know we were expected.” The doctor hopped off his donkey and followed Paul in through the gate. “I hope we do not trouble you. It was a fancy of my son’s.”
“An inspiration,” said Madame Fortier. “You are quite welcome. Though we are in disorder here. At this hour I have only water to offer you.”
“We wish for no more,” said the doctor, whose throat was in fact rather dry from the dust the crowds had raised around the market.
“Agnès!” Madame Fortier raised her voice. “Poté nou dlo tannpri!”
In a moment a slender girl of perhaps thirteen appeared with a blue-tinted bottle and a couple of glasses, which Madame Fortier took from her hands.
“My niece, Agnès,” she said. “I present Paul Hébert, the son of Nanon and of this gentleman.”
Agnès stood poised, light as a deer, her lips slightly parted. Her hair hung in loose waves around her honey-colored face. She was meltingly pretty, the doctor took note.
“What are you looking at?” Madame Fortier said. “Go on—take him into the garden.”
Agnès plucked at Paul’s wrist, withdrew her hand quickly with a laugh, then covered her mouth with her fingers, looking abashed. With a glance at his father, Paul trotted after her, around the corner of the house, where a gang of carpenters was raising the frame of the roof above the second story. The lowering sun silhouetted them sharply—one turned the point of his beard toward the doctor and raised a hand. Uncertain, the doctor returned the wave.
“You will excuse Fortier, I am sure.” Madame Fortier squinted at the carpenters. “One hopes to achieve the roof, before the rains begin. But come,” she motioned. “There is shade.”
The doctor followed her to three low chairs grouped under an almond tree in the corner of the wall. The trunk was scorched but the leaves were full—it had not been so much damaged in the fire. As if unconsciously, Madame Fortier spilled a little water from the bottle onto the struggling grass before she poured their glasses full and gave one to the doctor. She set the bottle on the empty chair between them.
The doctor sipped his water, clean and sweet and just a little lemony. From behind the house the voices of the children rose and fell. They were out of sight beyond the garden shrubbery. The doctor felt nothing at all of what he had expected here.
“It will not be so opulent as when you knew it before,” Madame Fortier said. “We lack for time, and hands, and material—well, all that you know.” She swung her hand in an airy circle toward the clatter of reconstruction of other houses beyond the wall. Within this enclosure, the plan of the house which the Fortiers were restoring was much the same as it had been before, though only a quarter of the ground floor had its solid walls; the rest was a skeletal framework. But—he had expected to be smothered in these images, and instead he had to force himself to re-create them—there he had entered, and there was the gambling table, where Choufleur presided over the cards, and there the spot nearby where Nanon stood, the chain locked around her neck drooling links to the floor, looking through the doctor with her dead eyes, without a ghost of recognition.
“The place held evil memories for me too,” Madame Fortier said. “In my youth, I was much mistreated here by my son’s father.”
“The Sieur de Maltrot,” the doctor said. “I wonder that you should return here.”
“With all the fighting, one cannot peacefully remain either at Vallière or at Dondon,” she said. “Besides, I own it, since my son is dead. I own it with everything it holds. Sa nou wé ak sa nou pa wé yo.” All we see and all we don’t.
The doctor turned to look into her face. “You’ve done something here. It’s not what I expected.”
“I asked for the mambo from Morne Calvaire to send