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By Root 2101 0

sense in Leclerc’s muttering. The black troops who’d lately submitted outnumbered the French by a factor Maillart didn’t care to calculate. To play one leader against another might be the only feasible diplomacy. Maillart pictured Dessalines and Christophe and Maurepas sitting in this shadowed room, together or separately, with the oily yellow lamplight playing over the sweat-sheen of their indecipherable jet features. It was quite as likely that these three had got up a cabal to manipulate Leclerc as the other way around, and what would be their end? All three had reason to fret about Toussaint. Dessalines because he hoped to supplant him—because Dessalines had not been willing to suspend the fight. Maurepas and Christophe because their surrenders to the French would put them out of favor if Toussaint should ever return to any place of power. Maillart knew that Toussaint had refused Christophe’s most recent overture, and he had even rebuked his own brother Paul, for surrendering Santo Domingo City on the strength of a false order Toussaint had composed himself as a ruse.

“You were close to Toussaint yourself at one time, I believe,” Leclerc was saying.

Maillart stopped the windmill of his thoughts. Best to go carefully now, but he shouldn’t take too long to reply. “Faute de mieux!” he said brightly. For want of anything better! He scratched his head, for the aspect of innocent puzzlement the gesture might convey, and then went on, “We were all brothers in arms for a time, as you know, when Toussaint left the Spanish to join Laveaux in ninety-four.”

“I understand you,” Leclerc said. “Do sit down.” He took a seat himself, between the dusty shelves and the table. Apparently he was satisfied by Maillart’s response, and Maillart himself felt pleased with it—true as far as it went, though it omitted that Maillart had commanded under Toussaint well before the latter had switched sides to the French. It was the sort of answer that Toussaint himself might have devised.

“And your friend Doctor Hébert—he has been very, very thick with Toussaint, I believe?”

“What?” said Maillart, now really alarmed—he remembered Pascal and Borghella and several other Frenchmen whom Leclerc had ordered deported to France as collaborators with the rebel regime. “In a way, but generally under duress—you know he survived at La Crête à Pierrot only because Dessalines wanted his services as a doctor, and from ninety-one on it has been the same. He met Toussaint as a prisoner in the camps of Grande Rivière.” This reply was probably more in the doctor’s interest than the one he would have given if he had been present to speak for himself. Leclerc was smiling, Maillart saw with some relief. The fever sweat shone on his forehead.

“No, no,” he said, smoothing his damp hand over the dark mahogany surface of the table. “I mean no accusation. I only thought—” He looked up, his illness shining through his eyes. “. . . your friend might sound Toussaint for us. Discreetly. If he were to go down to Ennery, where I understand he has some connection.”

“Of course, if you desire it,” Maillart said automatically. “But is he not more urgently needed here, with the cases of fever increasing?”

“It seems no doctor can do any more than nurse our men along to their deaths,” Leclerc snapped, then lowered his voice. “I am sure Doctor Hébert is more knowledgeable than most, yet it might be a greater service to France . . .”

“And do you believe Toussaint so dangerous?” Maillart said. “When he has so lately sworn his loyalty, and laid down his arms.”

“No oath of his is worth the breath it takes to utter it,” Leclerc said, pushing back and knocking his shoulders into the shelves in exasperation. “He would rejoin the battle again at the first opportunity—well, if you doubt it, read this.” He pushed the sheet of paper toward Maillart, who hesitated for a moment, then spread it smooth. The letter was addressed to Adjutant-General Fontaine, not long since one of Toussaint’s staff officers.

You don’t give me enough news, citizen. Try to stay in Le Cap for as long as you can.