Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [91]
On the summit of La Vigie, some hundreds of refugees were clustered. The couple of houses that stood there were already full to bursting with infirm or injured people. The doctor’s party settled on the ground. They’d got out with little more than the clothes they were wearing, but Isabelle produced a scrap of sheet for them to sit on.
The doctor went off to tether the mule by a clump of trees where he’d noticed several horses. There he found Michau tending the two saddle horses from Elise’s stable. A bit of good fortune he had not expected. He gave Michau a squeeze on the arm and left the mule in his care as well.
The cannons at Fort Picolet were long since silent. There was no more artillery fire at all, though the doctor could hear small arms popping in the burning town, as he made his way back to the Cigny group. From this height the view was panoramic, and he saw the lights of the French ships sailing into the harbor, though none of them approached the burning waterfront. It was for this spectacle he’d stayed, he thought. The town was on fire from one end to the other.
The doctor settled his haunches on the piece of sheet, by Isabelle. Héloïse had now cried herself into collapse and snuffled gently against her mother’s blouse. This high on the hill, it was rather chilly at night, though their faces were warmed by the fire below. The doctor watched firelight flickering on Robert’s face, wishing again that his son Paul were nearer. Isabelle’s boy seemed calm enough, fascinated. And certainly the vision was both awful and grand. The cathedral and the customs house were two great bonfires. The doctor looked toward Government House in time to see the whole of its roof collapsing in the fire. He picked out the enclosure of his hospital, it too engulfed in flames. Then the powder depot of the Batterie Circulaire blew up, blasting the embers of its building into the star-speckled sky. The crowd on the hill responded with an awestruck moan. Isabelle turned her ashen face toward the doctor.
“That was he,” she said in a soft voice. “You saw him too—riding Bel Argent. That was Toussaint we saw.”
“Yes,” said the doctor, thinking that this was another sight he had stayed to behold. “I believe it was.” As he spoke, the arsenal of the caserne blew up, and another deep moan passed through the crowd like wind.
10
During those two days when Leclerc’s portion of the fleet lay waiting outside the harbor of Le Cap, rumor of Christophe’s defiance glided from one vessel to another in the manner of the wandering gulls. On La Vertu it was received with hope. The leaders of the mulatto rebellion against Toussaint walked the deck and sniffed the air, as if to test the limits of their prospects. The pink-roofed town was tranquil in the pocket of the bay. Rigaud, Villatte, Boyer, Pétion—these colored gentlemen who’d been defeated and driven into exile by the armies of Toussaint had all got wind of the semi-secret order which Leclerc bore from the First Consul. They knew that if Toussaint resisted, their knowledge of the land and its people would be recognized as of inestimable value—they would certainly be sent into the field and with luck might receive commands of their own. They also had a good idea that if Toussaint were to receive the French fleet peaceably, their presence here would be judged a liability.
Aboard the Jean-Jacques the mood was much the opposite. Isaac had no direct memory of Le Cap, since he was too young when he had left it. And neither boy had ever spent much time there before they’d been sent to the Collège de la Marche in France. But Placide remembered enough