Master of the Crossroads (45 page)

Laveaux ought perhaps to have seen it all coming. Perhaps in a way he had. He had known Villatte’s ambition, seen his resentment of Toussaint’s advancement. Indeed, Villatte and the rest of the colored officer corps of the Le Cap contingent had borne the supervision by their French superiors with difficulty and distaste. In the days when Laveaux had been pinned down at Port-de-Paix, Le Cap and its environs had been their principality. No one in that mulatto faction had been overjoyed by Laveaux’s return. For that reason, in part, Laveaux had preferred Toussaint. In truth, he liked the black general better, and trusted him more. But where was Toussaint now?

Laveaux’s stomach made a queasy revolution. This was not fear, but impending dysentery. A consequence of tainted food, impure water. Coupled with fever, or even on its own, this illness might bring him death if he remained here for many more days. Such an outcome would be more convenient to his captors than a mock trial followed by an all-too-genuine execution.

Though he had managed to retain his watch throughout the struggles of his capture, the case had been dented, the crystal shattered, the works stopped by a boot or the blow of a baton. He could not divine the hour, for his touch of fever kept him from counting the bells of the church correctly. His cell had no window to the outdoors, but the wedge of daylight on the corridor floor had long since faded, so he knew that it was night.

Noise came to him indistinctly from the streets surrounding the prison, a batter of running feet and a crying out of voices.
Force à la loi!
Force à la loi!
In his confusion Laveaux was not sure that he heard this right. And what law did the voices invoke? The just law of the French Republic, or something trumped up by Villatte’s faction for the occasion? From their timbre the voices seemed to be those of the blacks to whom he had sometimes referred as his own adopted children. At this thought, Laveaux was moved almost to tears.

The bells of the town were tolling eleven when Maillart rode through the gate into the Rue Espagnole, in the midst of his escort of twenty black cavalrymen. Crossing the mountains had molded his agitation into a grim-edged determination. He had been obliged to restrain his mount—it would have been idiotic to kill horses in the desperation of the ride—and also, as Toussaint had counseled him, to rein in his own responses.

It had taken no more than an hour to draft Toussaint’s letter to the municipal authorities and to make a fair copy. During that time Riau had returned with the Gonaives conspirators in his custody—those who were named on Villatte’s intercepted list. Riau was off again immediately to complete the same mission at Marmelade, while the arrested men went into the guard house, from which the captain doubted they would ever emerge. He was very much encouraged by the speed and efficiency of these measures. And Toussaint’s letter put it in absolute terms that if Governor-General Laveaux were not immediately released and restored to his normal functions, the most dire consequences would follow.

The moon hung over the sea like a scythe. Maillart admired it, his jaws tight. The stiff breeze sweeping in from the water dried the sweat his riding across the plain had raised. As he and his escort advanced toward the town center, they heard the sounds of a general disturbance and presently they were surrounded by many blacks who milled about shouting
Force à la loi.
These demonstrators recognized the men with Maillart as coming from Toussaint, and they were glad. Still chanting, they swirled around the captain’s mounted group all the way to the municipality.

Maillart had thought to roust the municipal authorities from their beds, but he found them already assembled, though it was near midnight when he entered the building, banging his bootheels deliberately on the stone floors. There was more than enough to keep them from sleep, for although Villatte’s faction held the town, they were surrounded by forces loyal to Laveaux—not only Pierre Michel’s trained soldiers but also the larger and less organized bands which still roamed on the plain, and which once unleashed could not easily be restrained again. It was these latter who in ninety-three had burned Le Cap to its foundations. Pierre Michel had promised to repeat such scenes if Laveaux were not swiftly released. Moreover, as the captain had learned when he paused at Haut du Cap to confer with Michel, Pierre Léveillé was not in the custody of Villatte’s conspirators after all, but instead had occupied the town arsenal, from which he defied them. . . .

Maillart flung the letter down on the table, and stood haughtily to watch as one of the group reached to take it up and crack the seal with the nail of a slightly tremorous finger. He watched them crane their heads together to read, and wanted to grin as he saw their faces pale to whey, but he merely pressed his lips to a tighter, straighter line. Out of all that cluster only one man seemed aloof, indifferent; he sat relaxed in a corner, outside the sphere of candlelight, so that the captain had not noticed him at first. It was Choufleur, the
Colonel
Maltrot, though in civilian dress and dandling a gold-topped cane in his freckled yellow fingers. Pleased that in these circumstances he need not acknowledge Choufleur’s rank, the captain let his eyes slide over the freckled face as if it were another stone in the wall.

“We await your answer,” Maillart said in his most imperious tone, then spun about and left the room, banging the door against the wall with a thrust of his arm as he went out. This episode had played very much to his satisfaction. But as he mounted his horse again, perplexity overtook him. Villatte had been nowhere in evidence, only the civil authorities, but might Choufleur be Villatte’s representative, or his spy? For the first time he remembered Nanon’s desertion, or abduction, or whatever it had been, and Doctor Hébert’s distress. But after all there was nothing he could have done just then; it was not the moment for any such personal inquiry. Still, he must hold the thought for later, if a better opportunity should offer itself.

Motioning his men to follow, he spurred his horse to a brisk trot and rode toward the arsenal. That would be the safest, most advantageous place.

In fact Léveillé’s force, though small, was encouragingly determined, and was supported by the throngs of people milling through the town. According to Léveillé, it was Pierre Michel who had inspired the popular movement—not so difficult to achieve since so many of the newly freed blacks looked upon Laveaux as heir to Sonthonax, and hence the father of their freedom.

Maillart was given coffee and rum with which to lace it. Why not, he suggested after his first swallow, dare a dawn attack to reduce the prison where Laveaux was held? But the others present did not agree, and Toussaint’s orders went explicitly against it. Maillart was to deliver his missive, watch and wait. He knew himself that it would be unsound to risk the counterattack on the arsenal which such a sortie might provoke. No one seemed to know exactly where Villatte was at this moment but presumably he was in the
casernes
with the troops he had successfully corrupted, and theirs was still the largest force within the town.

Hold your position, watch and wait.
The admonition ran looping throughout Maillart’s mind throughout the night, whenever he woke, which was often, and even during his periods of fitful sleep. Tempera-mentally, he was ill-suited for such a role, but he had studied it during his service with Toussaint. If he asked himself what Toussaint would do in any given situation, the answer, most often, was nothing.

The next day passed in a cloud of rumor and indecision. Maillart would have liked to go out and look for signs of Nanon or Choufleur or both of them, but this project was also unfeasible, under the circumstances. Léveillé’s little force kept to its stronghold, awaiting developments; the noisy crowds continued to circulate throughout the town. Sometime after midnight Maillart lay down to another extremely uneasy sleep. At four-thirty he was roused by the news that Villatte had fled the town, taking the now very small number of troops still loyal to him to the refuge of a fortified camp on the plantation Lamartinière. The coup, such as it had been, was over. The colored soldiers still in the
casernes
were ready to renew their obedience to Laveaux, and even now the civil servants were on their way, among a large crowd of the townspeople, to release Laveaux from his cell.

Maillart jerked on his coat and boots and, with Léveillé and a few others, reached the prison in time to see Laveaux coming out of the gate. He was haggard and filthy from his days in the cell; Perroud, a pace or two behind him, looked even worse. But Laveaux raised his right hand over the people who met him, like a priest giving absolution.

It was dawn, though the sun’s face would be hidden for some time more behind the hulk of Morne du Cap; the light was coming up quickly. The crowd swept Laveaux directly to the main audience room of the municipal building, where he turned to face the men who had imprisoned him. Once more he raised his right hand, which trembled only slightly from his ague. He announced that,
for the love of the Good,
he would not seek to punish the guilty parties.

Eighth man back in the column, Doctor Hébert rode up the south face of Morne Pilboreau. Riau was ahead of him, Guiaou behind; leading the file was Toussaint Louverture. Still stronger forces, led by Dessalines and Charles Belair, had gone before them to Le Cap. They would not be called upon to fight this time. Nor would the troop with which the doctor rode. Toussaint’s word alone had been sufficient, his finger wagged in warning more than enough. Villatte’s conspiracy was foiled without a shot.

The doctor’s mule picked a delicate way up the switchbacks of the mountain trail. It was the same mule which had carried him to Habitation Fortier and through Toussaint’s campaign around Grande Rivière. He had come to prefer the mule’s surefootedness for mountain rides. With a
paysan
straw saddle the comparative discomfort of a seat on the mule’s bony back was not worth considering. He had even come to appreciate the mule’s self-interested intelligence, which was far greater than that of a horse, though not always placed at the service of the rider.

A balloon of hope seemed to lift him toward the peak. They would reach Le Cap before night. There he might find traces of Choufleur, if not Nanon herself . . . and Paul. Choufleur had been billeted there before he had come to ravish Nanon away from Habitation Thibodet. His involvement in
l’affaire Villatte
was to be suspected. And Nanon, if left to her own resources, might have returned there. She knew how to manage in the town; it was where she and the doctor had first met.

Lost in these images, he floated up the trail. His American long rifle tilted across the saddlebow like an outrigger. The weapon was too long to be side-slung in its scabbard; the barrel would have furrowed the ground.

Farther back in the column some hoof or boot or horny bare foot dislodged a stone which fell over the trail’s edge and went skittering down the dry, dusty slopes, gathering smaller pebbles and clods as it went down. Lizards sidestepped away from the miniature avalanche. The doctor twisted in his saddle and looked back. The switchbacks of the descent behind them were giddily steep. Scrub pine and cedar ran down the gorges, to the sparse
raquette
trees on the dry mud flats. Dry wind had withered a corn planting on a terraced face of the hill opposite. Far below, the chalky plain fanned out toward Gonaives. A blue haze at the horizon marked the coast.

Automatically the doctor touched the mirror shard in his right pocket, then, switching the reins from hand to hand, the empty snuffbox in his left. In this way he recentered himself. In the crushing heat, it dizzied him to screw his head around, but he thought there was no danger of sunstroke. He reached to check the brim of his straw hat. Beneath it he also wore a head cloth, as many of the soldiers did. He had learned that in full sun his bald scalp was apt to blister even through the weave of a hat. The rest of his exposed skin had been fired the color of a chimney brick, and only the bleached hairs on his forearms and in his beard betrayed that his blood was purely European.

As in a mirror, an image appeared to him. Toussaint as he had first seen him years ago, before he had taken the name Louverture, on mule-back and unarmed but for the sack of medicinal herbs he held against the pommel of his saddle. In those days Toussaint’s sole title had been “Médecin du Roi,” which meant in effect that he was camp doctor for Jean-François and Biassou. Dreamily it came to the doctor that he himself had now inherited a similar position.

The men ahead of him were disappearing over the summit of Pilboreau, and in a moment more the doctor’s mule crossed over. He found himself in the midst of the crossroads market. Toussaint had called a halt, to rest the horses from the climb. Those men with means to buy or barter were trading with the
marchandes
for fruit, while others sipped warmish water from the canteens or gourds they carried with them. Carefully, the horses were given a very little water. Riau untied the neck of his salt bag and let his horse lick granules from his palm.

“Pinchinat has gone back to Les Cayes.”

Toussaint’s voice. The doctor looked up. Toussaint did not seem to be addressing anyone in particular, but a loose circle had formed around him, including the white officer Vaublanc, Riau, Quamba and Guiaou. The doctor could not imagine why he should have chosen this moment to begin discoursing on Pinchinat, though he knew the old colored gentleman was a rhetorician to reckon with, and an active intriguer on the part of the mulatto faction for the last ten years at least.

“Do you know?” Toussaint continued musingly. “Some say the words of Pinchinat are more dangerous than bullets.”

The doctor considered. Toussaint must have been chewing on the subject all during their ascent. He would not raise it now without cause, though the doctor could not divine what his reasons might be. There was an endless fascination in pondering Toussaint’s motives. Why, for example, had he delayed so long in coming to Laveaux’s aid in person? One reason, the doctor had already thought, was that he would not shift from his position of greatest strength until the business at Le Cap had been concluded . . . favorably. Another, as he now reflected, was that Gonaives was a better post from which to gather intelligence from the interior and the south.