Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [59]
“Where have you been all the day?” Elise said, and then, when she saw what he was carrying, “As bad as that?”
“I don’t know how bad it is,” said the doctor. He refilled his glass and set the bottle on a small mahogany table. “What news do our friends bring?” He saw Michel Arnaud at the rear of the room. Isabelle, somewhat uncharacteristically, was in the company of her husband, Bertrand Cigny.
“French ships were sighted outside the Baie d’Acul,” Arnaud said. “Such is the rumor—I did not see them. There is no news of a landing. But there is some tale of trouble at Sainte Suzanne.”
“I heard the same, Monsieur,” Cigny added. “A man passed me on the road, coming down from Haut Limbé. From the height, he told me, one can see smoke over Grande Rivière.”
“But you must know much more than we,” Isabelle said. “If you have been with General Christophe until now.”
“I’m not sure what there is to know.” The doctor sank into a chair. Fortifying himself with another warm swallow of rum, he began to recount the events of his day.
“I can’t make out why he wanted me there,” he said as he concluded. “There was nothing at all for me to do, neither at the fort nor at Government House.”
“Except to witness his loyalty to Toussaint—” Isabelle blurted.
“I thought of that,” the doctor said, “but . . .” He had not mentioned the curious business of Christophe’s long retreat to the inner cabinet. He hesitated now, looking at Elise, who sat with one hand covering her mouth, her face turned to the shadows that edged the room beyond the candlelight. If there was fighting at Grande Rivière, the doctor realized, Sans-Souci would probably be in the thick of it. The strange scene before the drums in the Place Clugny returned to his mind’s eye, though it seemed the intervening time had been a year.
“And where is Toussaint?” Isabelle was saying.
“In Santo Domingo,” the doctor muttered. “According to report.”
“But such reports mean nothing,” Isabelle snapped, with an impatient flourish of her hand when Monsieur Cigny murmured to quiet her. “Can Toussaint mean to resist a French landing? He is loyal to France to the marrow of his bones—or so he has always claimed.”
“Doucement,” the doctor said, though for the moment he was losing faith in the magical efficacy of this word.
“Doucement?” Isabelle snorted. “If fifteen thousand men should fight their way to shore tomorrow, how sweet and gentle will that be?”
“Oh, I don’t think—” the doctor began, but a commotion below made him stop. Certainly that was the creak of the house door opening, and he could hear the voices of Gros-Jean and Bazau, two black men who went almost everywhere with Xavier Tocquet, like his twinned shadow.
“I don’t think it will come to that . . .” The doctor let the sentence trail away; the stairs were creaking and all eyes were on the door. He picked up his glass of rum and drained it. Then the door opened and Tocquet walked in, Zabeth’s unreadable face just visible in the shadows behind him. He had been caught in the rain somewhere, for the film of dust on his clothing was dampened to a film of clay. Above a line of crusted grime, the pallor of his forehead showed where his hat had covered it.
“What news, Xavier?” Isabelle was on her feet and staring.
Tocquet appraised the anxious faces in the room, then raised one finger, signaling for patience. He picked up the doctor’s glass and poured himself a mighty dose.
“Your health,” he said to all in general, and raised the glass and drank. “Rochambeau has landed at Fort Liberté. There has been a full day’s fighting, but Rochambeau is master of all the forts and the town itself, and he has put the defenders to the sword.”
The ripple that ran around the room set Isabelle