• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2248 0

the peace. When Dessalines did appear on the street, the people who lined the narrow walkway under the balconies, men and women and children alike, of every color without distinction, prostrated themself before his passage, bowing so deeply that the dust of the street whitened their hair. Only Isabelle Cigny and Claudine Arnaud, who happened to be standing near the gate of the Government compound, took no special notice of Dessalines’s arrival. They remained upright, Isabelle willowy and Claudine somewhat rigidly so, under the parasol that Isabelle held to cover both of them. Dessalines’s eyes swept across the two women, though if he had actually taken any notice of them was hard to discern. The gate to the compound opened to him, with salutes and the sounding of a trumpet, and he strode up in the direction of the building.

“Madame Cigny, Madame Arnaud,” Maillart said. “I present you the General Pamphile de Lacroix—my commander at Port-au-Prince and the battle of La Crête à Pierrot, and a very good soldier on behalf of us all.”

Isabelle smiled and dropped a courtsey. Claudine offered her left hand; Maillart watched Lacroix subdue his start when the stump of her missing finger bumped his palm.

“The General has come from Port-au-Prince,” Maillart went on. “He will remain here with us for a short time before going on to take up a post in the Cibao Mountains.”

“Ah,” said Isabelle. “And how did you find the situation in the west?”

“I find that my departure is precipitate,” said Lacroix. “Like that of the General Boudet not long ago. The colonial troops of that region no longer see before them the generals who led their last campaign, and so their natural mistrust becomes more active.”

“You are frank,” Isabelle smiled, and tapped his cuff with the edge of her fan. “I like that in a general.”

“I like a lady who will not bow before that slaughterer who has just passed,” Lacroix said. “As I noticed you did not. When I think of the massacres at Verrettes and Petite Rivière and Saint Marc—”

“Indeed, one prefers not to think of them,” Isabelle said, as if to arrest his indiscretion. “As for the others—his power awes or terrifies them.”

“Madame.” Lacroix inclined his head. “Your perception of that matter seems most clear.”

“Thank you,” said Isabelle. “I am at home this evening. Major Maillart is most familiar with the way.” With a smile she stroked his coat sleeve with her light fingers, then put her hand on Claudine Arnaud’s elbow and led her, unblinking and apparently oblivious to anything that had occurred, away along the busying street.

With Lacroix, Maillart walked into the Government compound, up the stairs through the main door, and down the corridor. In the Captain-General’s anteroom, Dessalines turned toward Lacroix, though he looked over his shoulder, at the newly plastered fire cracks in the wall, instead of meeting the French general’s eyes.

“I am the General Dessalines,” he said in a harsh voice. “In unhappy times I have heard much talk of you.”

For a moment Lacroix did not reply; then Leclerc emerged from the inner cabinet to give him some brief and dismissive instruction, even as he walked Dessalines inside. Soon Maillart and Lacroix were retracing their steps, back along the corridor and down the steps toward the gate.

“He must feel himself very strong to strike that attitude,” Lacroix muttered. Maillart turned toward him to catch, in a still lower voice, almost a whisper: “I don’t suppose he will look so assured once chained in the hold of a brig bound for France.”

“He is to be deported, then,” Maillart said, scanning his eyes suspiciously over all the people streaming past him along the Rue Espagnole. “When Leclerc has just assigned him a new command?”

“That action is against the instruction of the First Consul,” Lacroix said shortly, as they turned uphill toward the Champ de Mars. “He has ordered quite plainly that Leclerc must rid himself of all the leaders of the insurrection. Thus far he has failed to comply.”

Maillart looked at him curiously. The reasons for Leclerc’s reliance on black troops and