Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [66]
For Pauline’s fancies, all the best cabins of the flagship L’Océan had been refitted as boudoirs, parlors, antechambers, and stuffed brimful with musicians, poets, chefs de cuisine, dancing masters, lady’s maids, mummers and players and jugglers and all the indispensable accoutrements of the court she meant to install as soon as they had occupied Le Cap, renowned as the most beautiful city in any colony of France: the Jewel of the Antilles. It was a great nuisance and distraction to a man in command of a military enterprise.
On the bridge, Pauline was on the point of losing one of the forty-odd kerchiefs which, after all, left her mostly uncovered. The attendant officers blundered into each other in their haste to retrieve the stray rag for her. Despite his irritation, Leclerc did not immediately look away—this tableau held the eye, like the glitter of a diamond or a bit of broken glass.
Were it not for Pauline, he would never think of temporizing now. He did not like to think of it. If Rochambeau had met resistance at Fort Liberté, he would certainly by this time have hammered it to dust . . . and General Boudet would be doing the same at Port-au-Prince, and Kerverseau on the Spanish side of the island, while Captain-General Leclerc had the chore of taking Le Cap undamaged, preserving its most fragile charms for the delectation of his wife.
Leclerc turned in the direction of the sea. He thumped the folded letter against his tightly trousered leg. The day was fine and clear, the air rinsed clean by yesterday’s storm. If he decided to force a landing, the weather conditions could be no better . . . as Villaret-Joyeuse had already mentioned this morning.
To his port side the ship La Vertu swung at anchor, crammed to the gunwales with all the surviving leaders of the mulatto faction in the colony’s recent civil war. Pétion, Rigaud, Villatte, Léveillé, Boyer, and dozens of others all eager to try their swords one more time against Toussaint, who had defeated them and driven them out of the colony. Their knowledge of the place, along with their passion for revenge, might well prove useful if it came to war again and everything had to be done by main force. If the colony could be occupied peacefully, however, Leclerc had orders to ship the mulatto chiefs to Madagascar, never allowing them to set foot in Saint Domingue.
He turned to starboard and studied the Jean-Jacques, the vessel which contained Toussaint’s two sons—Leclerc’s best instruments of diplomacy. To prevent the effusion of blood, and the wrecking of cities, he might send them with their tutor to join their father; they might well persuade Toussaint to cede his command of the colony without a fight. The difficulty was not knowing where to send them. Toussaint was somewhere on the island, presumably, but no one seemed to know just where, not even the officer he’d left in command of Le Cap. Leclerc shook out the creases of the letter, and continued, reluctantly, to read.
. . . until his response has reached me, I cannot permit you to debark. If you have the force with which you threaten me, I will offer you all the resistance proper to a general; and if the issue of arms should be favorable to you, you will not enter the city of Le Cap before it has been reduced to ashes—and on those ashes, I will fight you still.
7
Couachy, to whom Papa Toussaint had given the two letters for Paul Louverture, led their way south from Point Samana toward Santo