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By Root 2329 0

that the game was not worth bloodshed. Maillart would have liked to do the same for Daspir. He felt a certain affection for the boy, because they shared an enthusiasm. That was the way O’Farrel had seen it. He wondered where O’Farrel was, if he were still alive. He had gone over to the English, along with many of his regiment, when the English invaded Saint Domingue in 1794, and no doubt had left the colony when the English abandoned it. At any rate, Maillart had heard nothing of him since then.

The doctor had only just left the hospital when Maillart arrived there, and he missed him again, though narrowly, at Morne Calvaire and at the Cigny house. At last in the evening he found the doctor drinking with Tocquet in the remains of Elise’s garden. With a nod he accepted the glass of rum he was offered and sat down in one of the low caned chairs that had recently been furnished to the place.

“But why now?” The doctor was pursuing some previous thread. “The difficulties here are apparent enough, but I don’t see it as an especially propitious time to travel down to Ennery.”

Tocquet reached behind his shoulder and lifted the tail of his bound hair so that the evening breeze could reach the back of his neck. “Elise is fit enough to travel now, and I think she will recover more quickly in the country.” He glanced to where she knelt with a trowel by the garden wall a few yards distant, and lowered his voice a little. “I would like to get her away from this latest outbreak of fever. And the children too, especially.”

“Of course.” The doctor polished his glasses and put them back on. “But that is not all you are thinking.”

Tocquet turned his head to spit into the ash-strewn dust. Elise, who was returning from planting her row of flowers by the wall, frowned at this action, but Tocquet pretended to ignore her. He cleared his throat with a swallow of rum.

“Security,” he said.

“What?” said Maillart. “How do you believe Ennery more secure than here?”

“At Thibodet we should be still under Toussaint’s wing,” Tocquet said.

Elise laughed. “Husband, how you have changed your tune.”

“I am as the aeolian harp, my dear,” Tocquet flashed her his crooked smile. “My melody is determined by the direction of the wind.”

Elise stood beside him, her hip grazing his shoulder. She ruffled his hair and laughed again and walked into the reconstructed portion of the house, with a nod to Michau, who sat under the portico washing his upper body with a bucket of water and a rag.

“But Toussaint has no more force of arms,” Maillart said. “He has dismissed his men, even the honor guard.”

“Yes, and where are they?” Tocquet said. “They were meant to report to the Captain-General here at Le Cap, but do you see them? Not Morisset or Monpoint or Magny. Not Riau, or Guiaou, or any of that company.”

“I see,” the doctor said slowly. “Well, but I don’t know. Somehow I feel I am more useful here.”

“They don’t want doctors here,” Tocquet continued. “What they want is a burial detail. Leclerc has scarcely enough European troops here to throw up a screen around his own positions. Suppose Dessalines were to turn on him, or any of the others; he would be hard pressed. I wouldn’t like our chances of getting onto a ship then, and the plain would be on fire from Grande Rivière—where Sans-Souci is still giving them a lot of trouble—all the way up to Limbé, if not further.”

“But Ennery is still more remote,” Maillart said. “Here at least the troops are concentrated.” He didn’t want to mention the likelihood that Leclerc might try to arrest Toussaint, and given what Tocquet had just said, how easy would that be?

“There are not troops enough to concentrate,” Tocquet said. “Once you subtract the colonial troops. And Dessalines, especially, is quite likely to subtract himself. It can go wrong anywhere, I think, but if it goes wrong at Ennery we might try for a ship at Gonaives, or the passes through the Spanish mountains if that way looked better.”

The doctor massaged the bridge of his nose, pushing up his glasses. The skin below his eyes had bagged from his days of fatigue.