Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [60]
Tocquet unfastened the leather thong that bound his long queue in the back. He pulled the rope of his hair forward and began combing water out of it with his fingers onto the floor. Elise stifled a sigh as she watched him. Finished, Tocquet shook his hair loose over his back, refilled the glass he’d appropriated, and strolled toward the doors which opened on the balcony.
“Zabeth,” the doctor said, for the girl still stood by the door she’d opened for Tocquet. “If you please, bring us more glasses.”
“Aye,” Tocquet grunted, settling into a chair near the balcony. “I had more trouble coming this way from Ouanaminthe than I have seen for a good many years. All the field hands have thrown down their hoes and are shouting Aba blan! Aba lesklavaj!—though they’ve burnt only a few fields yet . . .”
“Claudine.” Arnaud was on his feet and making for the door.
“Don’t be a—” Tocquet cut himself off, as he pushed up to his feet also. “Pardon, but it would be folly to leave the town tonight. If your wife is at Habitation Arnaud—she has such credit with the blacks, she will be safer there than you. Think of it. In any case there is no word as yet of trouble in Acul.” He put one hand on Arnaud’s shoulder, and with the other produced two lumpy black cheroots from the inside of his canvas shirt. Arnaud accepted one of these and moved away from the door.
“But can they really mean to restore slavery here?” said Isabelle.
Tocquet had returned to the balcony doors to light his smoke. “You know it hardly matters what their intentions are,” he said, exhaling a thin blue wreath, “but what they are believed to be.”
Zabeth came in with a smooth gliding movement, her steadiness betrayed only by the slight clinking of the glasses on the tray she bore. As the doctor reached to take one from her, the paper he’d forgotten rustled in his shirt. He plucked it out.
“Here,” he said. “I have one of the papers I saw Lebrun let fall.”
There was a general movement to snatch it from his hands. The doctor yielded it to Monsieur Cigny, who, having settled a pince-nez on his nostrils, brought the document near to a candle and began to read in a slow, sermonizing tone.
From the First Consul to the inhabitants of Saint Domingue
Whatever may be your origin or your color, you are all French, you are all free and equal before God and before men.
France has been, like Saint Domingue, preyed upon by factions and shredded by civil war and by foreign wars; but everything has changed: all peoples have embraced the French and have sworn peace and friendship to them; all the French have embraced one another as well, and have sworn always to be brothers and friends; come also yourselves to embrace the French, and rejoice to see once more your friends and brothers from Europe.
The government sends you the Captain-General Leclerc; he brings with him great forces to protect you against your enemies and the enemies of the Republic. If anyone should say to you: These forces are destined to tear your liberty away from you; reply: The Republic will not suffer it to be taken from us.
Rally around the Captain-General; he brings you peace and abundance;rally around him. Whoever may dare to separate himself from the Captain-General will become a traitor to the fatherland, and the wrath of the Republic will devour him like fire devours your dried cane stalks.
Dictated in France, at the palace of the government, 17th Brumaire in Year Ten of the French Republic.
The First Consul
Signed Bonaparte
“So,” said Isabelle, as her husband passed the paper to Arnaud. “There is nothing in those to cause any disturbance or alarm.”
Tocquet snorted. “Would that those words accorded better with the actions. I must point out that Rochambeau, at least, has less the aspect of a friendly force than that of an invading army, as he cuts his way through Grande Rivière.”
“Grande Rivière?” Elise said sharply.
Tocquet gave her a narrow look. “I do not know what