Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [49]
Isabelle’s upturned face went serious. “Perhaps it is I who should ask your pardon,” she said. “I . . . I had not thought that you . . .”
“You hadn’t thought I noticed anything? Well, often enough I don’t. But something of this magnitude is hard for anyone to overlook. One might argue that a dalliance with a black officer is folly enough, but to carry it on under the eyes of the husband, and such a man as Xavier Tocquet—”
“What is folly is to stand discussing such a matter in the street,” Isabelle said. “Come in, and I will hear you out at leisure.”
“But no,” the doctor said. He took her hands. “I don’t mean to quarrel with you, yet I am weary and my temper is short—let us leave it for another day.”
“As you prefer.” Isabelle stood tiptoe to kiss his cheeks, then loosed his hands and went inside.
Doctor Hébert walked two blocks down the slope to the harbor—a maneuver which took him well clear of Elise’s new house—and turned into the Rue Royale. A reception was under way, with a great many people coming and going, at the house of General Henri Christophe. Military commander of the town and its surrounds, Christophe had built a mansion of the most spectacular opulence—the fêtes he held there were second only to those put on by Toussaint himself in the Government House. Someone hailed the doctor as he passed, beckoning him into the torch-lit court behind the gate, but with a wave of his hand and some muttered reply he walked on, without quite recognizing who it was who’d invited him.
Gaiety still surrounded him for the next couple of blocks. Le Cap night life had resumed in force, propelled by the recent surge of prosperity. It was nearly ten years, the doctor reflected, since the whole town had been burned to the ground, but now it was rebuilt to an even higher standard of luxury (not to say ostentation) than before. Save for the scorch marks clinging to some foundations (though tonight he could not even see those, in the dim), no visible trace remained of that old conflagration. The doctor did not know just why his thoughts had turned in such a direction. Perhaps it was an overflow of his apprehension about Elise and Xavier Tocquet. Ahead there were torches blazing in the Place Clugny, but they were there to furnish light rather than destruction.
A chorus of deep-voiced drumming grew stronger as he entered the square, slipping around the edges, away from the light. White faces had disappeared from the pedestrian traffic in the last couple of blocks he had walked. What he approached was an almost purely African festival. He kept to the shadows, where no one seemed to notice him or pay him any mind. Three drums were beating, west of the carved stone fountain with its Latin inscription. It was unusual for drums to emerge in the center of town, but the Place Clugny was the site of the Negro Market, and sometime theater of popular entertainments for the blacks. Here too a guillotine had once been erected, when the French Jacobin Commissioner Sonthonax had ruled the region. But after a single beheading, the blacks who witnessed it had torn down the machine, all in one spurt of spontaneous rage—too appalled by its mechanical cruelty to let it stand.
How darkly his thoughts were running tonight! The doctor gave his head a brisk shake, and then the drumming filled it. An old woman in a blue headcloth and a long striped skirt was dancing before the drums, pirouetting with the light grace of a girl. There were other dancers, a few men and women dressed all in white, dancing less with one another than with their own shadows, the unseen patterns of the drums . . . beating, beating with the pulse at the back of his head. Relaxing, the doctor let himself be drawn toward it further, further down into the throb of it. After a time it was the sustained overtone, a great hollow drone, that one heard and attended to, above and beyond the percussive strokes of palm or stick. He thought of Claudine Arnaud,