Master of the Crossroads (13 page)

There was a louder shout from the yard, and a thump of solid impact. Both men stood and moved nearer the window. Outside the sergeant was doubled over with his hands clasping his midsection, while the mule wheeled free, trailing its lead rope, rolling its eyes malevolently.

“After all, you look like you’ve been through the wars.” O’Farrel looked at Maillart with a certain sympathy.

“At least I recognize myself as a soldier still,” Maillart said. “I am expected to go through wars.”

O’Farrel laughed and clapped him on the back. “But you must come to dinner, at least.” He gave the captain the address of a house in the town.

A little after seven in the evening, as the light shaded orange over the sea and the windward passage, Maillart stood with Major O’Farrel in the garden of a small stone house on the Grande Rue. Earlier in the afternoon he had gone to bathe in the river, and afterward changed into his last clean shirt, carefully conserved for such an occasion: a loose blouse of natural-colored, nubby cotton, the sort of thing worn by planters up the country, or by Xavier Tocquet. Maillart wondered passingly where Tocquet might have got to by this time. When he glanced down at his own sleeve, he realized that he was growing accustomed to seeing himself without the cloth or insignia of anyone else’s army. Perhaps in the end he would be content to become the soldier of his own fortune . . .

A black servant appeared, to offer them glasses of rum from a tray, and when they had accepted told them that their host expected to join them shortly. Maillart sipped and turned to admire the garden, lush with hibiscus and bougainvillea and peculiar orchids he had never seen before. Water had been brought into the enclosure from the canal in the street and branched to irrigate all the plantings and to fill both a small pool covered with water lilies and a larger basin with steps leading into it, large enough to fit two men.

“Monsieur Monot is an Acadian, did you know?” O’Farrel asked. “There were a great many who came here thirty years ago, after the English had expelled them from Acadia. But as you see the land is next to worthless here, never mind the merits of the harbor, and the climate did not much agree with them after the cold of North America. Most have gone to Louisiana now, even Monot’s own sons, but he has stayed and, as you see, not done so badly for himself. But here he is.”

A little man came out of the house, bald, stooped but spry, dressed in an antique manner. He took Maillart’s hand and greeted him, smiling. His eyes were pale blue, under bushy shelf-like eyebrows, with long hairs dangling at the corners like the ends of a mustache. When the servant offered the tray, Monot declined the rum in favor of a glass of grapefruit juice.

Maillart complimented him on the garden and the cunning fashion of its irrigation.

“Yes,” said Monot, with enthusiasm. “And you see, the water runs from this basin here”—he indicated the bathing pool—“and out the back, but come and I’ll show you.”

They followed the rivulet of water through a gate to the kitchen garden at the rear of the house. Here Monot or his minions produced potatoes, peas, herbs, “even
haricots verts,
” as the host declared with some pride.

“Tout pousse,”
Monot said, a glitter in his eye. “Everything grows, and marvelously, once one brings water to it.” The artichokes of the locality, he went on, were perfectly delectable . . .

They returned through the arched gateway to the flower garden. A couple was just coming out of the house: a small dark-haired woman on the arm of a stocky man.

“Ma belle.”
M. Monot straightened perceptibly and spread his arms wide for an embrace. He moved forward, obscuring Maillart’s view, so that he could not see the woman’s face until she had accepted Monot’s kisses and detached herself. His heart tumbled. She was clothed more modestly than he had known her, in a striped silk dress with a cloud of muslin covering her bosom. Tiny, bright and active as a hummingbird, she was Isabelle Cigny.

The captain bowed, profoundly and extensively, holding his abased posture while the blood rushed to his head. When he straightened, he felt he had at least partially recovered himself.

“Mais quelle surprise!”
Isabelle said cheerily. She stepped toward him and clasped both his hands. A tension in her elbows discouraged him from coming closer. Maillart remembered the surprising wiriness of her body, which he had in former times traveled inch by inch.

“The surprise is entirely mine,” he said, and glanced at O’Farrel, who grinned and quickly turned to look out over the garden wall. It was truly bizarre that he should discover both of them here in this remote corner of the colony after so long, so strange he was moved to wonder if it could be a coincidence. It was Isabelle who had inspired his difference with O’Farrel at Le Cap. Maillart felt a thrust of the old jealousy as he let go of her hands and turned to greet her husband.

“Monsieur.”

“Mon grand plaisir.”
Cigny spoke with no obvious irony in his tone. His manner of dealing with his wife’s suspected lovers had always been opaque. Maillart studied him, sidelong; in former times Cigny had sported a heavy black beard, but now he was clean-shaven, an operation which left his broad face jowly.

“But what happenstance has brought you here?” Maillart said.

“Blown off course,” Cigny replied tersely.

Isabelle smiled and dimpled. “We spent a wretched time in the North American Republic, you know, for we had sailed with the fleet of Governor-General Galbaud, when Le Cap was burned and looted by the brigands . . .”

“So I had heard,” the captain said.

“We stayed for some little time in Baltimore, then Philadelphia . . .” Isabelle made a pretty flutter of her hands. “But when we got word of
l’appel aux Anglais,
we decided to return here and seek to repair our fortunes—under the standard of our British allies.”

“God save the King,” Cigny said glumly. “In fact we had meant to land at Saint Marc, but the captain of our ship seems to have exaggerated his abilities.”

“Ship, he says!” Isaballe feigned outrage. “It was rather a fisherman’s coracle. Fourteen days in an open boat—I expected I should be black as an African by the time we arrived.”

Maillart looked at her face more closely. It did seem that a freckle or two had appeared on her nose. He felt a slight pulse of vertigo.

“But by great luck we have fallen among friends.” Isabelle took Major O’Farrel’s arm, drawing him into the conversation. The major twisted the end of his mustache and smiled in a fashion that slitted his eyes. Maillart’s feeling of vertigo worsened.

“And your children?” he forced himself to inquire.

Isabelle’s face shadowed momentarily; she let go the major’s arm. “I would not bring them into such a situation as we have here now,” she said. “They are at school, in Philadelphia.”

Monot, meanwhile, had been speaking softly to a servant.
“Messieurs,
Madame,”
he announced. “Our table is served.”

At dinner they were joined by another young woman, whose name was Agathe, tall and striking, with dark eyes, a slightly aquiline nose, and long, waving black hair parted from the center of her high forehead. An admirable woman. Her lips were very full and red, but she spoke little, except in low tones to Monot himself, at whose right hand she sat, and lowered her head demurely when anyone else addressed her. Sometimes she rose and ambled with a graceful languor to consult with the kitchen between courses, but she had little to contribute to the general conversation.

They began with a plate of artichokes, which quite lived up to Monot’s description, and went on to small, deliciously sweet local lobsters. Next came a sort of bourgignon whose delicacy was crushed by the British salt beef that had apparently been used as the primary ingredient. The dish was helped by fresh peas, carrots and onions from the kitchen garden . . . but in any case Maillart had already eaten more than he’d lately been accustomed to. He could not finish all his beef, and only picked at the fruit which followed it.

The food was praised, over Monot’s demurrals, and the problems of servants were discussed. Le Môle had never been heavily populated with slaves (for the surrounding land would not support large plantations). A party of some three hundred slaves had been brought in to construct the houses of the whites, and many of these had afterward lived in a river gorge beyond the boundary of the town proper. These persons had been liberated, in principle, by the emancipation proclamation of Commissioner Sonthonax, then subsequently reenslaved, in principle, following the arrival of the British here. The extent to which they were influenced by either principle was not precisely known. Some of them still reported for work, while others had certainly disappeared during all the troubles.

Thus the conversations turned to the troubles themselves, to the military situation and to the hopes and interests of the Cignys in particular. Maillart fell silent, but pricked up his ears. By virtue of his marriage to Isabelle, Cigny had become master of two prosperous sugar plantations, one on the great northern plain east of Le Cap and the other in the region of the Artibonite, farther south. For the nonce, the Plaine du Nord was thought to be completely out of the question—for all the company appeared to believe that that area was firmly under republican control from Jean Rabel east to the Spanish border—and perhaps it would be, Maillart thought privately, if Toussaint did change sides. Present company believed that Laveaux’s position at Port-de-Paix was much stronger than was in fact the case. At this juncture, the captain’s private knowledge began to make him uneasy, for he saw that O’Farrel was looking at him narrowly from the opposite chair at the table; Maillart shifted position slightly, so that a candlestick blocked the view.

Meanwhile (the discussion proceeded) the British were firmly in position at Saint Marc, and in the southerly direction they were soon expected to take Port-au-Prince if they had not already done so—but north of Saint Marc, where Cigny’s Artibonite holdings lay, their advance was impeded by the Spanish at Gonaives—under command of “Tusan,” as he was called here. It occurred to Maillart that Cigny, given these accidents of military disposition, might have thrown in with the wrong foreign power so far as his personal ends were concerned, and perhaps Cigny himself was of the same opinion, for he became increasingly plaintive (the more he drank), demanding that O’Farrel explain why more British troops had not been fielded. “Thirty thousand men would wipe this rebellion out in two weeks,” he proclaimed.

“Thirty thousand men is far from a trifle,” O’Farrel said.

But Isabelle broke off a low-voiced conversation with Agathe, and went to work soothing her husband and smoothing O’Farrel. Cigny, she suggested, had suffered an episode of heat prostration during the day (exacerbated by drinking, the captain thought, if it had existed at all). On this pretext, Isabelle and her husband retired, for they were staying at the Monot house. It was soon determined that Maillart would do the same. His host would by no means permit him to bunk with his Negroes that night, or any other night that he was at Le Môle . . .

As the servants cleared the table, Maillart found himself sharing a final glass of rum with O’Farrel in the garden; Monot had also excused himself, advising his guests to make themselves free. A crescent moon hung over the wall, and the smell of the flowers was sweet.

“And the girl?” Maillart asked, breaking a brief silence. “I couldn’t make her out. A daughter? A wife of his old age?”

O’Farrel chuckled in the darkness. The dim moonlight left his face in shadow. “No, she is rather his ‘housekeeper’—as they put it here. She manages the servants and the kitchen—I think you’ll give her credit for being an excellent cook. In point of view of her bloodlines, she is a
mamélouque,
but no child of Monot, I shouldn’t think.”

“I had taken her for white,” Maillart said.

“For that you might be forgiven. Though if you think more carefully—have you ever seen a white woman move like that?” O’Farrel seemed to sigh in the darkness. “As for her other talents and duties—well, I believe the good Monsieur Monot is incapable, owing to his years.”

Maillart could not see the wink, but felt the major must be winking as he went on, “If you have the luck to taste her sweetness, I can only wish you joy.”

The captain’s room was pleasantly appointed, his bed comfortable enough, the air fresh once he opened the French doors letting on to an iron balcony common to all the bedrooms on the front of the second floor of the house. Along with the cool night air, the braying of the water sellers’ donkeys entered the room—it was said the blacks of the town claimed that the donkeys knew the time and reported on the hours.

Maybe it was the intermittent braying that kept the captain awake, or maybe it was the cascade of images of Isabelle, himself with Isabelle: the spiciness of sexual memory stinging like salt on abraded skin. A quick parting of their clothing here and there, flashes of pale thigh or breast, her deeper, rosier openings. He had known her in her own house in Le Cap, where they had carried on in heat and haste, improvising against the chance of discovery by her husband or the servants or even her other swains. He had never seen her wholly naked—no opportunity for such luxury. But though he was astonished by her boldness, they had never been caught outright. It was perhaps her boldness that protected them—she seemed to have no more conscience than a stoat, and could, five minutes following an act of illicit passion, be coolly pouring coffee for her husband in the parlor . . .

He felt certain she must come to him tonight. He tumbled restlessly in the bed; the donkeys brayed and the hours passed, but she did not come. Nor could he sleep. At last he went out on the balcony, his bare toes curling on the cold iron, but all the other French doors were shut and latched and bolted, except the last pair, slightly ajar. When Maillart delicately coaxed the near door open with a finger, it uttered a hideous rusty squeal, and inside Agathe sat bolt upright in bed, sheet clasped to her breast with one hand that rose and fell dramatically. She stared at him, her full lips parted, but made no sound or sign. With that bone trimming of the moon behind him, Maillart knew he was only a shadow to her, she could not see his face. For a long moment he hesitated on the threshold, but at last he returned to his own room, where he slept fitfully, and woke late in the morning with a heavy head.