HF - 04 - Black Dawn (32 page)

And every one with a black face. Then was he dreaming all over again?

'Richard Hilton,' said a voice, amazingly in English. 'You are Richard Hilton?'

He turned his head once again, and discovered that one of the officers had reached the side of his bed. One of the officers? That could not be. This man carried no sword. But then, he did not need a sword. He was several inches taller than six feet, and bareheaded; again unlike the others, he did not carry his hat beneath his arm. His forehead was high, his eyes widespaced; they were sombre eyes, hard, and even arrogant, and yet also containing a remarkably wistful expression. His nose was big, his chin thrusting. His mouth was wide, and as interesting as the eyes. When closed, it suggested no more than a brutal gash; when smiling, as now, it revealed a delightful humour, an almost childish delight in the business of being alive.

'Has he spoken?' he asked, in French.

'He asked for water, Your Majesty,' said one of the girls.

Your Majesty, Dick thought. My God.

The man sat beside him on the bed. 'You may say what you wish, to me, in English,' he said, speaking English. 'My people understand little of it. Do you know who you are?'

Dick concentrated, made an immense effort. 'I am Richard Hilton,' he whispered. 'Of Plantation Hilltop, in Jamaica.'

He was bathed in the tremendous smile. 'I hoped you would say that. Do you know how you came here?'

Dick attempted to shake his head, and found he could not. 'There was a storm. My ship was sunk. And when I reached shore, I was attacked.'

'My country is beset by outlaws,' the man said. 'It is too large, we are too few. But they will be destroyed. I give you my word. And you escaped from them, sorely wounded. Do you know how badly wounded?'

'I fell,' Dick said. 'From a hillside. That is the last I remember.'

'Ah,' said the man. 'We wondered how you came by such terrible injuries. Your leg was broken and your arm. Your ribs were broken. But you would not die. You crawled, in that condition, for a very long way. My surgeons tell me you must have been in that condition for three days, still crawling. And at last you crawled into an encampment of my soldiers. They perhaps would have left you to die, but it so happened that I visited them, on a tour of inspection, that very day, and saw you, and was told how you had crawled. I thought then, here is a man of remarkable courage, remarkable stamina, remarkable determination. Such a man should not die. That was before you spoke.'

Dick frowned at him.
‘I
spoke?'

'You were delirious. And . . .' For the first time the black man lost some of his confidence. 'You had other injuries, which made it difficult for you to articulate. Yet sometimes you whispered, and sometimes you screamed. You screamed your name. Do you know me?'

He waited, saw the uncertainty in Dick's eyes, and smiled. 'I am Christophe. The Emperor, Henri the First, of all Haiti. But to you, Christophe.'

'To me?'

'I knew your parents. Your mother was a woman of rare beauty, rare courage, rare determination. A fitting mother for such a son. And your father sought to help the black man. Does he still do so?'

'Yes.'

'Ah. Fate is a strange business, Richard Hilton. That I should be able to save their son.'

'Why?' Dick asked. 'I am a planter, not an Abolitionist. And you destroyed my aunt.'

The smile faded, the face became hard, for just a moment. But even a moment was long enough for Dick to know that this man would be the most implacable, the most ruthless enemy he would ever have, were he ever to become an enemy. Then the smile returned. 'I would have you regain your strength, and get well. You and I have much to discuss. Much to remember, perhaps.' The smile went again, but this time the face was sad. 'I do not hide the truth. Your injuries were terrible, Richard Hilton. You were near to death for weeks. And you have lain in a fever, unable to move, for weeks more. My people have fed you and cared for you, and you will be well again, and as strong as ever before in your life, should you choose to be. But even a broken arm, a broken leg, three broken ribs, were not the full extent of your injuries.' He snapped his fingers, and one of the girls hurried forward carrying a looking-glass in a gilt frame, handed it to the Emperor.

'Now, Richard Hilton,' Christophe said. 'As you are the son of Suzanne Hilton and Matthew Hilton, and, as you are a man of courage and determination, as you have proved, look on yourself.'

The glass was held immediately above him, and he stared into the reflection. Because it was a reflection. Christophe had said so, and indeed, he could see the cambric pillow case spreading away from him on either side, and also the fair hair, which had grown to an inordinate length, and scattered to either side as well. But the face between. His heart seemed to slow, and a wild desire to scream filled his brain.

But perhaps it was merely the glass, which was distorted, and thus made him distorted. Because those were his eyes. When he blinked, they blinked. He could stare at himself, in his eyes. So, then, no doubt he was wearing a mask, with slits through which his eyes could peer. And the mask was carelessly made, and perhaps trodden upon by that careless maker. The forehead was high. He had always had a high forehead. But never one split by a deep, jagged groove, ridged with scar tissue. The chin thrust. He had always had a thrusting chin. But it had thrust forward, not to one side in a lopsided lurch, which carried his
mouth with it, elongating the li
ps, making the mouth seem twice as wide as it really was. And he had once possessed a nose. The Hilton nose, the feature above all others which made Mama beautiful and her sons handsome, small and exquisitely shaped. This face lacked a nose. Rather it possessed two nostrils in the centre of an unspeakable gash, which gave the other grotesque features an appearance of anxious horror.

Christophe snapped his fingers again, and the glass was removed.

'A man should count, first of all, his blessings,' the Emperor said. 'When you fell, from your hillside, you landed on your face. On your nose, I suspect. So you are disfigured. But your brain, I think, is undamaged. And you have lost only a few of your teeth. And you are alive.'

'I am a monster,' Dick whispered.

Christophe smiled, and stood up. 'You are a man, Richard Hilton. Get well, and strong. I have known handsome men, whose beauty disguised hearts of hell, and I have known lovely women, whose beauty sheltered the most vicious of desires. A man is what he is, Richard Hilton. Not what he appears to be. Get well, and we will talk.'

He left the room, his entourage at his heels, and Dick was surrounded by the girls. Now he gazed at them with horror, waiting for the disgust which must animate their faces. But they remained seriously composed, adjusted his covers, raised his head again to offer him another drink. And this time it was rum suitably diluted with lemon juice, but strong enough to send his weakened brain whirling through shadowed corridors. Christophe would take no risks with his sanity.

His sanity. Well, then, what was sanity? He doubted he would ever be sane again. Sanity was, first and foremost, an understanding of oneself and one's surroundings. But his surroundings were unimaginable. Black people, in his experience had been slaves, or, if free, paupers, wearing nothing more than a pair of drawers or a chemise, barefooted, uneducated, amoral. They had lived in one-room logies, and been allowed to die as they became useless, to give birth as they had become pregnant. They had been humble, and they had been afraid. Without, indeed, the fabric of fear which was inextricably woven into the very heart of West Indian society, slavery could not exist.

So then, there was no sanity, in Sans Souci. Because that was the name of the palace in which he now found himself. And it was a palace. Ellen Taggart had called Hilltop a palace. But compared with this endless edifice it was a hut. No doubt Christophe, with his background of slavery, intended it so. Quite unashamedly he had borrowed the design, no less than the name, from Frederick of Prussia. Of all the white men he admired, indeed, and there was a surprising number, Frederick the Great ranked highest. Dick had never been to Prussia. Nor could he see the need, now. In Prussia it was occasionally cold, often damp; the sun did not always shine. At Christophe's Sans Souci there was no natural impediment to endless splendour, endless pleasure, endless delight. Sometimes the trade wind, booming in from the Atlantic, had skirts fluttering, chandeliers swinging, but this same trade wind dissipated the heat, kept the palace cool, kept its inmates smiling.

These were numberless, men and women, treading parquet floors or soft carpets, high heels or spurred boots clicking, silks rustling, swords clinking; and their faces were black. Nor were they overawed by their surroundings. Dick was. When first he left his bed, some weeks after his initial reawakening, he was escorted along endless corridors, decorated in royal colours of brilliant blue, gleaming red, gentle green, imperial purple, hung with paintings of the magnificent country into which he had so strangely strayed. The corridors had ended in galleries, which looked over even more splendid parquet floors, sentried by red-coated guardsmen, armed with musket and bayonet and even bearskin, with ceilings decorated in the classical Italian style, and rising thirty feet above the floor beneath them. To reach the floor he must descend a slowly curving staircase, marble-stepped, gilt-balustraded, down which an endless sweep of superbly dressed, superbly poised, men and women paraded. And they were black.

And beyond the hallways, the reception rooms, with grand piano and upholstered chaise longue, monogrammed silk drapes, twenty-foot-high glass doors leading to the gardens. In here often enough music tinkled and the Haitian nobility indulged in the newest Viennese waltz, a panorama of bare breasts and shoulders, of gleaming uniforms, of witty conversation and whispered flirtation. But the gleaming shoulders and shining faces were black.

And beyond the glass doors, the miles of garden, the shell-strewn walks between the packed flowerbeds, where white-stockinged ministers strolled, gloved hands behind their backs, listening to the pronunciamentos of the Emperor. Where the sea breeze reached its fullest strength, and murmured in the pine trees with which the gardens were surrounded. Where plumed guardsmen, dismounted for their sentry duty, stood to attention with drawn sabres resting on their cuirassed shoulders. And the guardsmen, and the ministers, were black.

Much about them, about the palace, was no doubt ridiculous. At least to European eyes. Most ridiculous of all was the conscious aping of Europeanism, and within that, of Napoleonism. Christophe was the Emperor, and ruled with all the trappings of Paris or Vienna, reviewing his magnificently uniformed guard every morning, conferring far into the night with his ministers, issuing directives, sentencing offenders, making plans, while in the evening he invariably attended the ball which took place in the great hall, accompanied by his queen, middle-aged and soft-voiced, but imperial of presence, with diamonds sparkling in her hair and round her neck, with the train of her white lace gown sweeping the floor. Perhaps it was ridiculous for powdered black people to dance the waltz. Certainly it was ridiculous for the nobility Christophe had created around him to sport names like the Duke of Marmalade, the Count of Sunshine. But there was nothing ridiculous about the gravity, the conscious d
etermination, with which each m
inister, each belle, each servant and each guardsman went about his duties. Dick took a great deal of persuading to leave his bedchamber, even when he was strong enough once more to walk; he feared that his ghastly face would be an object of ridicule. But no doubt they had been prepared, and indeed, no sooner had he left his room than he encountered the Empress, obviously waiting to insist upon lending him her own arm to descend the stairs, and receive the bows of her people, and never a smile at the disfigured white man.

So then, perhaps it was ridiculous to sit for dinner at a table twice the size of that at Hilltop, with other tables leading off, so that some hundred and fifty people sat down for the meal, to sip French wine and eat breast of chicken fried in butter, to finish with iced sorbet delicately flavoured with soursop, the most sensual of fruits.

But why, he found himself wondering, was it ridiculous? For people consciously to raise their status, from the lowest to the highest, in a single generation? There was achievement, not absurdity. No doubt, to his eyes, incongruous was the more accurate word. And what was incongruous, but a synonym for surprise, for the unusual.

And then, he was forced to reflect, as he strolled the gardens, attended always by his bevy of white-gowned girls, and now supported by two armed guardsmen always at his call, and listened to the bustle of empire just beyond the walls, nothing could even be incongruous, where so much had been achieved. In Jamaica, they had supposed Haiti to be a savage jungle peopled by wild Africans no doubt given to cannibalism, and surviving in the depths of poverty and degradation, at the mercy of the wild superstition they called Voodoo. If the palace of Sans Souci was representative of the culture Henry Christophe had created, then was Jamaica the uncivilized poorhouse.