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By Root 2106 0

uncomfortable to sit and read with the hilt of it sticking into his side. He’d hung scabbard and belt and all over a waist-high post of the gallery rail and propped back his chair against the wall as he delved the story of Paris and Syrinx out of the Latin, how the nymph escaped by changing herself into a reed which the satyr then harvested to trim into a flute. It was a slow pleasure, won with difficulty, but Isaac gave it all his patience, knowing that while Toussaint prized a fluency in Latin, he did not really understand the language as blancs did, but could only scatter a few phrases he had picked up from church liturgy. If Placide had made himself a warrior for their father, Isaac might evolve into a scholar, and so, in the peace which was now begun, might prove of equal value to his brother, if not greater.

He was so well drowned in the depths of this reading that he was slow to notice the noise of shooting from the direction of the road. By the time he had laid down the book and risen, his mother had come out to stand at the head of the stairs, the blue headcloth tight above her eyes, gazing through and beyond the line of French grenadiers who, bayonets lowered, had flushed a crowd of skirmishing field hands out of the woods around the lane. Saint-Jean had pressed himself against her, and Suzanne held him under her crossed hands, in front of her, both of them facing the soldiers as they advanced.

Guerrier and Bienvenu ran up the steps, well ahead of the others in retreat, Guerrier clasping his right arm to his side. Blood came trickling through his fingers. Bienvenu snatched Isaac’s sword from the post and thrust it toward him, as Guerrier said between his gritted teeth, “Hurry, there is still time to get away, a horse is waiting in the stable yard—”

But Isaac’s feet were rooted to the floor. “If they have already killed my father—” he began. His whole face was numb, not only his tongue. “There is no reason for me to save myself.”

There was a racket from within; they had broken into the back of the house. Sound of a slap and a woman’s shriek, then one of Isaac’s girl cousins raced with her hands over her face and cowered against Suzanne Louverture. A blanc soldier appeared in the doorway, and Bienvenu dropped Isaac’s sword to draw a pistol, but there was only a dead click when he fired, for the weapon had already been discharged. Bienvenu howled his disappointment as he vaulted over the rail, rolled, and ran after Guerrier, who had already taken the same way to the ravine.

The soldier raised his bayonet as Isaac approached him, but Isaac shouldered past him and went to his father’s scriptorium. One officer was scattering paper from the desk; he kicked the orary which Isaac had salvaged from Sancey against the wall, bending the mechanism. Captain Cyprien was doing his best to stuff the vase depicting Toussaint’s triumphs into the pocket of his coat, though it was too large to fit.

“Captain,” Isaac said. “I did not take you for a thief. That is my father’s property.”

At once another grenadier backed him to the wall with a bayonet to his throat, and one of General Brunet’s aides-de-camp turned from the mantel to sneer, “Your father has no property.”

“Why,” said Isaac, outraged, “you have stolen my plume.” In fact the aide-de-camp had taken the fine feather from the hat which completed Isaac’s dress uniform, and which had been hanging in the scriptorium, and placed it in the band of his own hat. In one hand he also held Isaac’s ornamental spurs.

“Let the prisoner be silent,” smirked the aide-de-camp, and then as he turned back to the mantel he addressed the room at large: “Can you imagine the effrontery, to clothe the Madonna in this gaudiness?”

On the mantel stood a foot-high image of the Virgin, a gift to Toussaint from General Clairvaux. The aide-de-camp pulled the gold coronet from her head and snapped off the hand that wore a ruby ring and broke loose her china ears to get the pearls in them. As he dropped this loot into his pocket, Isaac lunged out from the wall to stop him, but the grenadier smacked