Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [427]
“They don’t want doctors here,” Tocquet repeated. “They want gravediggers.”
He pulled three cheroots from his shirt and offered them. Maillart accepted. The doctor shook his head.
“Have a care you don’t dig your own grave,” Tocquet said, and tucked the third cheroot back into his shirt.
Maillart bent toward the flame Tocquet had struck, then leaned back, exhaling a luxurious cloud of smoke and stretching his legs out before him from the low seat of his chair. He looked toward the far wall of the garden, where a couple of brown doves called in their round voices, perched among the shards of bottle glass mortared to the top of the masonry. If Leclerc were to inquire further, he could now say that the subject of going down to Ennery had been broached to the doctor, and he would be telling the truth.
When every course was so uncertain, sometimes no action was the best. It was not hesitation, but stillness, the only way to survive the extremes of heat. Maillart felt how Toussaint was still at Ennery. He found in himself no enthusiasm for proposing that the doctor go deliberately to spy upon him there.
Removing Toussaint would have no more effect than lopping a single head from a Hydra. How would Xavier Tocquet have reacted to what Leclerc had told Maillart this afternoon? But Tocquet was shrewd and thorough in his regard of all such matters, and probably would have already surmised much of what Leclerc had revealed.
Maillart slumped more deeply in his chair, whose short legs raised him barely a foot above the ground. He flicked a little ash from his cheroot to the ashes still scattered across the dirt around him. Already shoots of grass had begun to push up through the paste of earth and ash, and beside the wall the plumes of red ginger Elise had planted were trembling in the evening breeze. A few fronds sprouting from the burnt stump of the yellow cocotier were now big enough to cast their shadows. Maillart kept still and let the breeze drift over him. He felt cooler now, and empty even of desire.
Paltre had grown meager, wasted to his bones. The other three captains visited him daily, but now he seldom knew them when they came. Sometimes he took them for his brothers, or his parents, believing himself a child again in France. Sometimes he did not know that anyone was there at all. Guizot no longer asked the doctor if he would recover. Daspir wondered how it was he did not die.
His hands were palsied and often moved at random, weaving invisible threads in the air. All his joints had turned knobby, the flesh shrinking to the bone, tendons tightening beneath the desiccated skin. Patiently, Nanon held the soup bowl to his lips, while Paltre sipped or gulped or choked. With small, deft movements she avoided his sudden bursts of vomiting, while always remaining near enough to clean his face and soothe him. He did not know her either, but she could soothe him better than anyone, pressing her gold fingers to his wrist or brow.
She must be poisoning him, Cyprien sometimes accused. How could she mean him any good? But Daspir and Guizot hushed him whenever he began in that vein. To Daspir, only Madame Fortier seemed a little menacing, when sometimes she would stand tall and regally erect at the head of Paltre’s mat, arms folded over her narrow chest, expecting his death with a consuming patience. Yesterday, Paltre had enjoyed a period of lucidity. He recognized his friends and professed himself to feel relieved of many of his pains. Guizot at least had been encouraged, but afterward Madame Fortier had let them know that such brief rallies were more often than not presage of the final end, and today Paltre was lapsed again into the fever.
Daspir did not like to look at his white lips on the soup bowl. He glanced at the sky, where the sun tilted westward. In an hour’s time, when the heat had begun to fade, he would go to exercise Bel Argent. This had become his daily privilege. Few riders could manage the white stallion. Daspir would certainly plan a route that passed the Cigny house, and hope that Isabelle would appear on the