Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [54]
“I won’t deny it.” Elise looked away. Through the arched doorways the slate-colored line of the horizon appeared, beyond the red-tiled roofs descending the slope to the harbor front. “But now . . .”
Isabelle resumed smoothing her skirt. “Of course I cannot say from my own experience what it might be like to marry one’s lover . . .”
“You who are so well versed in ennui?” Elise said, and then, at once, “Oh, do forgive me that.”
“Consider it forgotten.” Isabelle allowed Elise to take her hands and search her eyes. “It’s not ennui I see in you,” she said. “That is not a feeling that our Monsieur Tocquet would be likely to inspire. No, I think it is resentment—that you feel yourself neglected.”
Elise had the impulse to pull away again; to contradict it she squeezed Isabelle’s hands and brought her face in closer. A dozen years since they’d first met—Elise brought out from France as the bride of the planter Thibodet, and Isabelle the Creole demoiselle, born and raised and married in the colony; she’d seemed to know everything Elise had yet to learn. From the first they had looked well together. Isabelle’s smallness, with her dark eyes and black hair and her ice-white skin, had set off Elise’s blond hair and high coloring and her willowy height. If their different beauties had not been so complementary, perhaps they might never have become friends at all.
Elise leaned in to kiss Isabelle’s cheek, then observed her from the nearer range. Isabelle took great good care of herself, and yet when one looked so very closely there were crows’ feet faintly fanning from the corners of her eyes, and other pale lines lay across her throat.
“Would you have married Maillart if you could?”
Isabelle laughed merrily. “Not him, not O’Farrel, nor any of those. Well.” She let go of Elise and put her hand to her bosom, covering a pendant that lumped beneath the cloth. Elise looked at her curiously.
“In a different world, I might have married Joseph Flaville.”
Elise felt her mouth plop open. And yet, somehow she had always known it—only now it had been voiced, she could recognize what she knew.
“Do I shock you?” Isabelle said. “Of late, my dear, you have equaled me even in that adventure, or almost, and yet the world as it is constrains us still. If your brother—”
“That my brother should remind me of the proprieties,” Elise said sourly. “When he himself has actually married a mulattress.”
“I meant to say that an indiscretion must be very flagrant to be noticed at all by your brother,” Isabelle told her. “He who has no eye nor ear for such things. If he is troubled, you must see that you really have gone very far. Yet I think what troubles him is not propriety, but that you may provoke Xavier too much.”
“Xavier has a sense of justice.”
“So he does,” said Isabelle. “Are you certain you know exactly how it operates?”
The thump of a distant cannon brought them to their feet. In an instant they were both craning out over the filigreed iron railing of the balcony. But the harbor was calm and quiet as it had been before, all the way to the cliffs on the promontory that hid Fort Picolet from their view.
“It is nothing,” Isabelle said finally. “A salute, a signal shot . . . but I must go—I don’t like to be so long away from Robert and Héloïse, until it has all passed over.”
“Of course it will pass over,” Elise said. They kissed at the parlor door, then Elise drew it open, starting to see Zabeth at her sewing on the landing.
“How long have you been here?” she said, more sharply than she’d meant, and then, “Have you brought Doctor Hébert?”
Zabeth stood up, the baby dress trailing from one hand by its halffinished hem. “Oui, madanm,” she said. “But General Christophe took him into his carriage. Just there—” She pointed, through the house walls, in the direction of the Rue Royale.
“Took him where?”
Letting the dress fall in the basket, Zabeth turned up her empty palms. “Pa konnen, madanm. I don’t know. They were going toward the harbor.”
Isabelle and Elise exchanged a glance. “He will have all