Master of the Crossroads (81 page)

Captain Maillart fell in with the doctor, behind Toussaint. “What is it?” he said. “Who sent for me?”

But already they heard the snapping of gunfire and someone’s outraged shout. The rear guard was galloping forward toward the sound, and Maillart, grimacing, spurred his force to overtake them. Toussaint, however, kept on at the same leisurely trot, as if he had heard nothing and had no concern. The doctor drew abreast, then passed him.

Around the bend of the road, the two guardsmen were racing the runaway coach, while several others had dismounted and were firing on fleeing attackers through the trees at either side of the road. The doctor gave Bel Argent his head. The white stallion overtook the coach just as one of the guardsmen leaned down to catch the harness of the nearest horse and jerk the whole equipage to a halt.

The driver had fallen from the box and lay doubled over the left shaft of the coach, his fingers dragging furrows in the dirt. The coach doors were shot to splinters on either side. Toussaint’s hat still lay on the seat, its red and white plumes broken by bullets, and the leather upholstery was perforated like a sieve.

Maillart reined up beside the doctor. “Antoine,” he said. “Antoine.” But the doctor had no answer to the question in his eyes. He did not know himself how he had known.

Only the coachman had been killed. The guardsmen made their report to Toussaint in low voices: one of the assassins had been shot down but the rest had managed to escape into the surrounding brush.

Toussaint did not seem astonished by anything they told him. He listened gravely to the report, but made no reply. Retrieving his hat from the shattered coach, he plucked out the broken feathers, and settled it on his head. They rode on, speechless, into the gathering dark.

34

That first morning when she woke in the inn at Dondon, Isabelle was seized with nausea the moment she sat up. Her throat bubbled up, and she hunched over, spilling vomit onto a square of cloth she had just time to snatch under her chin. She spat, swallowed, and regained partial composure, though her eyes watered still and her gullet burned.

Nanon was asleep, or feigning to be, and without any servant at all, Isabelle hardly know what to do next. She felt ashamed. But she rolled up the cloth into a damp, foul-smelling package, and, holding it away from herself in her left hand, she tiptoed outdoors, barefoot and wearing only her shift.

It was still very early and quite cool. The town was unusually quiet, since almost all the soldiers had poured out of it the day before. A few chickens scratched in the dust of the main square and at the well several women were filling clay vessels and swinging them to a graceful balance atop their heads. Isabelle was ashamed to approach them, though water was what she wanted. In the other direction she could hear the sound of a stream and so she turned and walked toward it.

A few black women sitting on their doorsteps looked at her curiously. The cloths that covered their doorways had been cinched in the middle, like a woman’s waist, for light and ventilation indoors. After two blocks of low houses like these, a ravine bordered the edge of the town. Isabelle peered over the edge and decided she could manage to get down there, skipping from boulder to boulder and holding onto the hanging vines. The effort focused her, and by the time she reached the level spit of gravel by the water, the last traces of her nausea had receded. She knelt at the streambed and let the current wash clean her soiled cloth. The stain came out easily enough when she rubbed it over the stones. She washed her face in the cold water, and took a cautious sip—only enough to moisten her throat. She wanted next to nothing in her stomach, still.

With the damp cloth wrapped around her wrist, she walked downstream, looking for an easier way to climb back to the town. As she followed the stream around a bend, she came face to face with another woman, younger than herself and bare to the waist as she labored over her own washing. Startled, the other woman broke into a bright white smile. Isabelle curtsied, blushing at the absurdity of her gesture, which still somehow felt right. The black woman straightened, her hands on her hips, her full breasts trembling as she threw back her head to laugh.

Behind her, two small children played on a strip of fine sand. The infant boy was bare-naked, his polished skin a rich, iridescent black. Whenever he crawled for the water’s edge, the older child retrieved him. It was a sweet moment, and the sun was warming on her back, but when she heard a bell begin to ring in the town, Isabelle knew she had better return.

“Koté m kab monté?”
she asked, and the other woman smiled again, and turned to point farther down the stream, where Isabelle could see the foot of a much more feasible trail than the one she’d descended. She made her thanks and walked by. Halfway up the trail, she stopped and looked down through the hanging lianas, and waved the free end of the cloth at the woman and her children, but they were all unaware of her now. Nevertheless, her feeling of exhilaration sustained itself. At this instant she had nothing, was constrained by nothing but her body and the cloth that covered it, and there was no connection to her history here, except Nanon, who was herself such a mystery.

The feeling could not last forever, and already she began to feel oppressed as she walked back toward the tavern in the mounting heat. The others were eating a morning meal which she declined to share (though Madame Fortier cautioned her she’d see no more till nightfall): bananas and warm, runny eggs and pork dried on the
boucan.
Her stomach writhed at the odor. Monsieur Fortier seemed to be looking with disapproval at her bare, dusty feet. She went to the room she’d shared with Nanon and put on more confining clothing, along with her shoes and a bonnet which hid her hair and most of her face.

Madame Fortier sat on the wagon box beside her husband, while Nanon and Isabelle used the bed, which was three-quarters full with provisions purchased or bartered for in the town. There were various clay vessels packed in straw, and barrels of dried fish and peas and salt meat, and several rolls of calico against which they could recline, so they were not so terribly uncomfortable, though nothing could completely blunt the jouncing of the wagon over the worst parts of the road.

By midday, Isabelle’s stomach had begun to turn, for all the pains she’d taken to leave it empty. The hollowness cramped upon itself, and the heat made everything worse. She found herself hanging over the edge of the wagon, coughing and retching up clots of burning foam. A line of Fortier retainers who were following the wagon with baskets balanced on their heads carefully sidestepped around the wet spots in the dust. Nanon rose to her knees and laid a gentle hand on Isabelle’s shoulder.

Then the wagon lurched to a halt, so that Isabelle bruised her breastbone against the siderail. Presently she felt a hard grip on the back of her neck, thumb gouging, probing between the tendons at the base of her head. She was lifted, and the same grip dug harshly into the underside of her wrists. It was painful, but the nausea receded. Madame Fortier was holding her by the chin and peering at her face in the shade of the bonnet.

“How long has it been?”

“What do you mean?” Isabelle began weakly, but the evasion seemed pointless under Madame Fortier’s firm hand and keen eye. She pulled back and covered her face with her forearm. “Between two months and three—I can’t be certain.”

She felt the tang of vinegar on her lips; Madame Fortier had moved her arm aside and was cleaning her face. The sharp smell of the vinegar brightened her.

“Eat this,” the older women said, pressing a wedge of cassava into her hand. “Or only hold it in your mouth—it will do you good.” She folded the fingers of Isabelle’s other hand over the soaked rag. “And use the vinegar.” She pointed to one of the stoppered clay jars.

“Yes,” said Isabelle. “I’ll do as you say. And thank you.”

The firm hands squeezed her shoulders, then withdrew. Cautiously, Isabelle nibbled a corner of the cassava. Her stomach clenched, and she simply held the bread in her mouth, letting its faint sweetness dissolve. Monsieur Fortier muttered something to his mules, and the wagon wheels began to turn. Isabelle lay back, propped against one of the long bolts of cloth. They had stopped just short of a peak in the zig-zag trial, and as they passed into the descent, the wagon began to roll faster, with Monsieur Fortier grunting from time to time as he pulled back on the long bar of the brake. The barefoot women behind the wagon swung into a rhythmic trot to match the quicker pace, singing as they jogged along, words which Isabelle could not completely understand. If the nausea rose, a sniff of the vinegar rag seemed to quell it, and it was true that the cassava bread had put a more stable foundation beneath her stomach; without realizing it, she seemed to have eaten it all.

She became aware that Nanon was watching her with her usual air of self-enclosed composure, a moment before the other woman spoke.

“Is it always so with you?” she said. “When you are expecting a new child?”

“Not always,” said Isabelle. “With the first, but not the second.”

“Ah,” said Nanon. “Robert.” Her molasses tongue softened the name so wonderfully:
Wobè . . .
“I remember him well from the time when I first came to your house. And the second, Héloïse, was only a baby then.”

“Let us not speak of it.” Isabelle’s eyes were pricking; she turned her face away and looked out blurrily over the precipitous fall of jungled escarpments, down into the basin of Grande Rivière. She could still hear the strange singing of the women who trotted behind the wagon. Some language of Africa; it was not ordinary Creole. She felt a terrible loneliness that seemed to come from her own hollow core. The moment she’d shared with the black woman and her children by the river returned to her. It seemed to her now that never in her whole life had she been so free as that woman was, unless in her earliest childhood. Perhaps even then her sense of liberty had been illusion.

Then a shadow blocked the sun, and she felt Nanon’s warm weight settle against her side. The soft, rather heavy arm about her shoulders drew her in.

“When Paul was lost from me,” Nanon murmured, “I was sad two times each day. In the morning when I woke, and at night, before sleeping.”

“How terrible it is, sometimes.” Isabelle heard her own whisper, as if from a long, echoing distance, returned to her from the vertiginous valley below.

“At night was worse,” Nanon said. “But the morning was bad too.”

Isabelle stirred against her, drowsily. She felt herself beginning to drift. Long ago, a lifetime it seemed, she had had an intense romantic friendship with a colored girl of her father’s household in Haut de Trou. They had been permitted great intimacy, and had adventured considerably into one another’s bodies, before either of them had ever known a man. Isabelle did not know what had become of the girl afterward.

This was not that. But it was pleasant. A kind of mother comfort—how long since she’d known that? She let herself be cuddled, like a little cat, feeling Nanon’s fingers loosening her bonnet strings and walking the taut tendons of her neck. She let her head slip down to Nanon’s shoulder. Before she knew it, she was sleeping, so soundly that she did not wake until that evening as the wagon began to climb the rim of Haut de Trou.

Madame Fortier claimed the front bedchamber, which Nanon had formerly occupied with Choufleur, for herself and her husband to share. Nanon had no objection, while Isabelle was in no position to object. Nanon sensed this, though she had no certain knowledge. The charade of Isabelle supervising
her
pregnancy had seemed rather thin from the beginning, and since Isabelle’s own condition had been discovered, Nanon supposed there must be something irregular about it, though she did not give her notion any further thought.

On the evening of their arrival, Madame Fortier inspected the front bedchamber with her lips pursed and her nostrils flaring. She ordered all the bedding to be aired, and the mattress to be thoroughly beaten. With an air of distaste she fingered the collar of scars which Nanon’s chain had left on the heavy mahogany bedpost during that time when she’d been left to circle the room like a dog tied to a tree and abandoned.

Next morning, Nanon found Salomon working round and round the the bedpost with a file made of sharkskin wrapped round a lathe. His eyes flashed white when he noticed her, and then he bent more closely over his work, giving her his shoulder. By the end of that day he’d ground down both posts at the bed’s foot to the same degree, so that they remained symmetrical; he oiled them so carefully that scarcely any trace of the alteration could be seen.

Nanon had spied Madame Fortier, sitting on the gallery with a couple of mildewed ledgers under her hand; as she had no refreshment by her, Nanon went at once to the kitchen herself. The women were preparing coffee, but Nanon took the task out of their hands. She prepared a tray with two cups, a pot, a bowl of brown sugar, some wedges of cassava bread, and a sprig of bougainvillea in a vase.

Madame Fortier looked up abstractedly as Nanon placed the cup before her and poured. “My son, your particular friend, was not a great hand with his accounting,” she said. “All this is the work of his father.” She turned the pages fretfully. The paper was worm-holed through and through, but still mostly legible; scrambling over the lace-like sheets Nanon could recognize the pale, insectine script of the Sieur Maltrot.

“Jean-Michel never opened this book, I don’t imagine,” Madame Fortier said. “It’s been years since any note was made at all.” Peevishly she slammed the ledger shut and looked up. “Well?”

“C’est pour Monsieur,” Nanon said, glancing at the second cup.

“Oh,” said Madame Fortier. “He has gone to the terraces, long ago. The second coffee is yours, my dear. Sit down and drink it.”

Nanon obeyed. After she had taken her first sip, Madame Fortier covered her hand with her own. “You are not to play the servant, child,” she said. “You are at home, as much as anyone here.”

Nanon felt a warmth spread across her face. She lowered her head and looked at the dark swirl of her coffee. Madame Fortier applied a light pressure to the back of her hand. Then they both turned toward the interior of the house, their hands slipping apart, as they heard the distantly disagreeable sound of Isabelle retching.

In the next weeks, Monsieur Fortier labored mightily in the coffee terraces, which had fallen into desuetude once again, since Choufleur had vanished from the scene. For her part Madame Fortier took inventory of the
main-d’oeuvre,
comparing the slave lists of the Sieur Maltrot (which were detailed and thorough) with the present population of free blacks on the plantation. The discrepancy was less, she told Nanon and Isabelle, than she might have expected. Toussaint’s orders were generally respected in this region, and most of the former field hands remained on the property, though many of them, perhaps more than half, seemed much more inclined to work their own gardens for their own benefit, rather than trouble themselves with the coffee. Also there had been more births, and more surviving children.

There was at first some difficulty in returning a sufficient work force to the coffee groves, but after certain messages had been sent down the mountain, a troop of Moyse’s regiment appeared from Ouanaminthe, and stayed long enough to remind the field hands that work was the price of freedom. By the time Isabelle had passed through her phase of morning sickness, the coffee trees had been carefully freed of parasitic vines and weeded round their trunks and returned to a state of productivity.

Nanon’s own pregnancy went more smoothly; she had no nausea to contend with, and though she was further along than Isabelle, she carried the child more easily. Of course, she was the larger woman, if not so clearly the stronger. Isabelle was more resilient, far less fragile than she looked; Nanon knew her toughness well. But this pregnancy looked as if it would try her strength severely. Even Madame Fortier whispered, privately to Nanon, that it had been inadvisable for the
blanche
to have come on horseback as far as Dondon.