Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [391]
“You may well talk,” she said. “You had all your joy of Joseph Flaville, and went away to bear his child in secret, and afterward fobbed the bastard off on my brother.”
“Who told you that?” Isabelle said in her first shock. The hammers had resumed their pounding. Elise pressed her palms to her temples and grimaced.
“None but my own eyes,” she said, and looked away.
Isabelle drew her slim torso very straight and folded her hands into her lap.
“You will recall that I also had the pleasure of seeing Joseph Flaville blown to ribbons by a cannon load of mitraille,” she said. “On the order of your own recent lover, it appears. As for Gabriel, I nearly died bearing him, and if not for the charity of Nanon and Madame Fortier, I would not have survived. And with all that I had to give him up.”
“You have him in your household even now.”
“But never to be mine.” Isabelle’s voice broke.
“I’m sorry,” Elise said. “Your reproach stung me, I suppose.”
“I meant no reproach.” Isabelle raised a hand but her palm seemed to stop on an invisible membrane between her and the other. “It’s only that I fear for you, Elise. That action you consider would wound you in your body and your heart.” She swallowed. “You must know that I would never judge you. I think you have never judged me.”
At that Elise did open her arms and the two women leaned together, rocking each other on their half-balanced stools, cheek to wet cheek.
“But what can I do?” Elise murmured damply into Isabelle’s ear. She pushed back, breaking the embrace. “I can’t get away to the mountains to bear the child secretly—we are all trapped here together in this town.”
“I do see that.” Isabelle touched a finger to the corner of her mouth, then reached to shift the pendant from the open book. She folded the worn gray cover shut. “But whatever it is, you cannot treat yourself so,” she said. “It’s plain you don’t have knowledge enough, and in that matter I have none.”
“What, then,” Elise said dully.
“I’m not certain,” Isabelle said. “But first, let us go to your brother.”
It was very hot when they stepped into the street, and Isabelle began to wish they had arranged for some conveyance. They might have done so at her own house, but Elise seemed stubbornly determined to walk. As if overexertion in the heat might put a natural end to her predicament, and indeed it might.
Isabelle drew closer to Elise, to share the shade of her parasol. When they entered the Place d’Armes they crossed ways with Cyprien and Paltre, walking in the direction of the Governor’s house. As the women went by, Paltre looked at them sneeringly, then passed some remark to Cyprien behind his hand.
“The bloodsucker!” Elise whispered as they walked on. “How I wish Antoine had shot him, as he meant to do.”
“No more than I,” said Isabelle. She flexed her grip on Elise’s upper arm. “Keep up your courage. Hold your head high.” Though she thrust her own chin up with that remark, she felt herself bared and wretchedly exposed by this encounter. It seemed to her that Paltre’s eyes still probed her from behind, but she would not look over her shoulder now to see if it were true.
In the rising heat, Doctor Hébert moved slowly, deliberately, among the rows of sick and wounded men. There had been a recent hatch of fat black flies to add to the irritation of the mosquitoes that boiled ceaselessly up from the ravine. The flies increased the risk that wounds would be infected, and the doctor had just finished curetting one such when one of his nurses called to him from the gate. Stiffly he got up from his knees and passed his instruments to another of the women aiding him, who plunged them into a bowl of scalding water. Isabelle was calling out to him cheerily from the gateway, and the doctor moved toward her, swabbing his sweaty face with a large blue handkerchief.
“My dears,” he said. “I’m delighted to see you, but you shouldn’t have come.” He looked uneasily over his shoulder toward the wall where his barely breathing fever victims lay.
“We ought to be sufficiently proof against the