Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [390]
“Well!” said Isabelle, as she took a seat. “There’s an unaccustomed study. You are preparing to join your brother as a nurse?”
“He will soon need more of those than he’s got,” Elise said absently. “But no.” She raised her hollow eyes to Isabelle.
“You don’t look well,” Isabelle said. In fact Elise looked distinctly nauseated, as she had every morning for the last ten days or two weeks.
“I am not well,” Elise said. “I am—” Her face shattered, and she began to wail, tears pumping out of her reddening face. Isabelle moved her stool around the table and put an arm over Elise’s shoulders. “There now, stop. You’d better stop—they’ll hear you.”
“Who could hear anything with those infernal hammers!” Elise shrieked. “I feel like they’re hammering right on my head.”
But she did begin to swallow her sobs, and let Isabelle dab tears from her face with the scented handkerchief.
“Now then, now then,” Isabelle kept saying, in the same rhythms she’d have used with an hysterical Héloïse. “What can it be, then? What is it?”
“Oh, nothing,” Elise said. “Nothing, only the end of my life.”
Isabelle caught herself. Somehow she felt uneasy to pursue. For distraction, she scanned the open ledger, though without taking in the sense of the words.
“That does not resemble your brother’s hand,” she said.
“It isn’t,” Elise sniffled. “It is the work of Abbé Delahaye—he gave some of his notes to Antoine for safekeeping since there has been so much turmoil at Dondon.” She picked up a trefoil of dry grayish-green leaves that had been pressed between the pages, and when it crumbled her sobs broke out again.
“Useless,” she said. “None of it’s any use.”
Isabelle looked past her trembling hand to the page. Under the dust of crumbled leaves the plant was more vividly rendered in a drawing that must also have been the work of the priest. Below was inscribed in his frail cursive: thyme à manger—avorticant, used according to Toussaint Bréda by Women who wish to be cured of Pregnancy . . .
“O,” sighed Isabelle. The syllable seemed to pull a hole clean through her. “You don’t mean—”
“I do.” Elise clenched the leaves in her hand to powder. “That is the very thing I mean.”
“It is a long time since anyone called him Bréda,” Isabelle said. “I suppose those leaves really have lost their virtue.”
Elise did not respond. She pushed the leaf crumbs around on the page. Isabelle leaned back, though the stool had nothing to support her, and raised her arms to loosen the third chain clasped around her neck. The movement brought the china pendant out of her bodice, into the hollow of her throat. Elise’s face drained with the recognition.
“You never shared this conquest with me,” Isabelle remarked.
“No,” said Elise. “I thought it indiscreet.”
“Entendu,” said Isabelle. She laid the chain and pendant on the page of the open ledger and smoothed a hand down over her bosom. “By the grace of Providence and Major Maillart, I can return you your indiscretion more or less intact.”
“Maillart knows, then?” Elise covered the pendant with her hand.
“He will say nothing. He means to protect you. Apparently he has learned that Leclerc bears some secret order for the deportation of all white women known to have consorted with the blacks.”
“Oh Bon Dieu—”
“But—” Isabelle said. “Maillart has kept you safe. There is no evidence . . . and if even I did not know?”
“No evidence? Consider this.” Elise wrapped her hands around the bottom of her belly and leaned forward as though she would vomit.
Isabelle bit into her lower lip. “The father is certainly Toussaint?”
“No,” Elise. “That was just the one time, and—it was safe enough. No, the father is almost certainly Sans-Souci, and very certainly not Xavier, who was absent for a full six weeks on that errand after guns in Philadelphia—”
“I see,” said Isabelle. She spread her fingers over her throat. “But yet— to kill your unborn child?”
The hammers stopped just as she spoke, so that her words rang louder than she’d meant. Elise stared