Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [387]
37
When Maillart’s eyes opened, he found Isabelle quietly watching him from where she reclined on the fringed cushions of her secret chamber, naked except for the sheet that swirled around her hips. She had lit a scented candle which left one side of her face in shadow, while catching a glow in both her dark eyes. Maillart thought he glimpsed some wistfulness there, an echo of the sadness he felt himself as he roused from his brief postcoital slumber. The small, close room was still hot with his smell and hers, the musk only partly covered by the sweet overlay of the candle.
When he reached for her, she pulled away. “It’s late.” Her voice was cool, but without real sharpness—only detached. God only knew what was in her heart; this thought was a habit to Maillart now, having passed through his head so many times. As she twisted free of the embrace he’d attempted, the house key strung around her neck dropped between her breast and ticked against the carved stone penis there. This latter memento no longer disturbed Maillart as it once had done, though at first it had quite unmanned him.
“As you like,” he said. He groped for his trousers, then stood to pull them on, awkwardly balancing in the narrow space between the bedding and the wall. Isabelle put out a hand as if to steady him, light fingers probing his thigh muscle through the fabric.
“Now then, the day’s getting on, as you say.” Maillart squinted up at the single veiled window, which really gave next to no clue to the time. Likely it was only a little after dawn, for he could still hear the cries of charcoal sellers in the street outside the house, and the first scent of coffee was just rising from below.
Isabelle let go of him and reached for her crumpled chemise. As she raised her arms to the sleeves, her breasts lifted around the pair of pendants, cool metal and cold stone, and Maillart felt a pulse of fresh desire, but he suppressed it. He buttoned his shirt and crammed the tails into his trousers. Isabelle tossed back her crown of dark curls and gathered it with a ribbon at the back of her neck. The movement brought the cloth of the chemise tight against her dark nipples; between them the stone pendant bulged.
“I have another token for you,” Maillart said as he put on his coat. Isabelle turned toward him, curious, raising her chin as she lowered her arms. Maillart felt in his coat pocket and spun the china pendant toward her on its filament of fine chain. Now the moment had come, he felt a little loath to give it up. He’d worn it around his own neck for most of his way across the country, but taken it off for this tryst with Isabelle, not wanting any interruption. She pulled the pendant toward the candle’s flame, drawing him after her, for his wrist was still engaged in the chain. The same flash of sadness touched him again when he saw the crow’sfoot marks around the corners of her eyes.
“But this is the one I gave to Elise,” she said. “Do you mean to tell me—”
Maillart felt a flush warming his throat. “I did not have it from her so directly,” he said.
Somehow they’d both released the chain; the pendant fell on the bed between them, too light to make a sound.
“I’d better tell you.” Maillart sat, gingerly, on the edge of the bed.
“Indeed you had,” said Isabelle.
“We found it in a box of souvenirs at Port-au-Prince. I and General Boudet and a few others—it was in Toussaint’s cabinet there.”
“Toussaint? You mean—” Isabelle’s face, with its roundly parted lips, quite resembled the image painted on the pendant, except that her look was frank astonishment, rather than the coyness of the painting. “I had no notion,” she said. “None.”
“So much the better.” Maillart looked at the tapestried wall. “There is an order, I heard there—any white woman known to have consorted with the blacks is to be defamed as a whore and shipped to France.”
Isabelle detached her fingertip from her lower lip and tapped