Master of the Crossroads (9 page)

Outside, the new moon hung like a silver knife blade, above the
casernes
courtyard and the black hulk of Morne du Cap. The outline of the mountain was traced by stars appearing in the sky beyond it. Two of their party were just then returning from stabling their horses. Tocquet spoke.

“Gros-jean, Alsé—anou alé, chaché manjé.”
He made a drinking motion with his hand as well. They departed, Tocquet walking in between the other two. Gros-jean and Bazau had been owned by Tocquet before the insurrections, Maillart knew. Though the two blacks were now enrolled in Toussaint’s forces, that had not apparently changed their relation with their former master—which often seemed to be a partnership in mischief. They answered to Toussaint or Tocquet with equal alacrity, and no one had so far found any inconsistency in this arrangment.

Maillart sat down on the single step that raised the door sill from the cobblestones of the barracks yard. A knot of men on the far side of the court seemed to be speaking in ordinary French. Perhaps they were remnants of the republican brigades that had come out with the second commissioners. Maillart did not expect to know them. His own regiment had been deported
en masse
by Sonthonax, sometime after the excecution of the King in France, after his own consequent defection to the Spanish party. The Dillon regiment, where he’d had friends, was transferred to Le Môle on the western peninsula, past Port-de-Paix. He had lost many of his friends before that time, to disease and accident and actions against the Negroes in revolt on the plain outside Le Cap. On the marshy burial ground of La Fossette his regiment had fought an all-out battle with the rebellious mulatto Sixth. Maillart had seen a close friend killed in that engagement, not two paces from where he stood himself. He had fired his pistol at Choufleur but failed to hit him. Now this leader of that mutiny was an officer in apparent good standing with the French military while Maillart himself could not safely choose a uniform to wear. The world had indeed become strange to him.

Tocquet and the others returned across the courtyard, supplied with ship’s biscuit and smoke-dried goat meat they had managed to requisition somewhere. There was a gourd of fresh water and, miraculously, another of the new cane rum called
tafia.
Alsé carried a bundle of hammocks under one arm as well. There were no plates or forks or cups. They sat crosslegged in a circle to eat, passing the gourds among them. Maillart was softened by the effects of the rum. He chewed the stone-hard victuals slowly.

When they had eaten, Tocquet produced a pair of dice and they gambled for the sleeping places. Tocquet himself won the second of the four hammocks that had been obtained. Maillart won the rope-strung bed, if that were victory. The last three men stretched out on the bare floor beside him, underneath the heavy sway of the hammocks above. Above and below, their shoulders all touched; the room was close as a ship’s cabin.

Ti-jean slapped at a mosquito. “Sweet blood,” Tocquet mocked from his hammock.
“Ou gegne sang doux.”
Ti-jean cursed.

Maillart believed he would not sleep at all, then woke near dawn with a rope burn on his cheek. By good daylight they saddled their horses and bluffed their way past the light guard at the gate of the
casernes.
They provisioned themselves at an inn in the town and set out on the road to Port-de-Paix.

Laveaux’s force was quartered at the Grand Fort on the Point des Pères—a promontory overlooking Port-de-Paix harbor. In size the structure no longer lived up to its name; it had been sacked and dismantled by enemies and a smaller enclosure erected within the original boundaries. Maillart left Tocquet and the black soldiers to wait for him, sitting on the rubble of the hundred-year-old walls. He climbed to the gate of the newer barrier alone.

In the event he was rather uncomfortable in meeting his former commander. The clothes he wore seemed the badge of his dishonor. He expected Laveaux’s glance to rake him collar to cuff, but in fact the general looked him only in the eyes, while taking his hand and greeting him cordially.

Maillart faltered through congratulations on the other’s promotion—Laveaux had still been a colonel when last they had met. Laveaux’s responding smile was thin, ironical. Deep lines were graven around his mouth and eyes, despite his youth. He had lost flesh from both his face and limbs. He beckoned Maillart into a low stone room of the fort.

“Would that I had wine to offer you,” he said. “But we are in a bad case here, officers and men alike. Myself, I take six ounces of bread a day, and drink nothing but water.”

“But in Le Cap they seem well enough provisioned,” Maillart said. “The . . . colored officers.”

“Ah,” said Laveaux, with the same thin smile. His chair creaked, or perhaps it was his bones, as he craned his head to look up at the low ceiling beams. “Those gentlemen dispose of private means. Whereas my own have long since been exhausted.” He fluttered a stack of correspondence with his left hand. Peering across the table, Maillart recognized, upside down, the florid signature of General Whitelocke, who commanded the English invaders in the Western Department.

“The English offered to repair my fortunes with a bribe of
cinquante
mille écus,
” Laveaux said. “A modest price for the surrender of my command . . .”

“You’re joking.” Maillart was genuinely shocked.

“Not at all.” Laveaux restacked his papers. “I have the letter somewhere—well, never mind it. The colored commanders have been offered more, I’m told. Rigaud, for instance, in the south. I might perhaps have negotiated a higher price . . .” Laveaux’s eyes narrowed and turned inward. “Also they assured me I could keep my property—which is reduced to this.” He pinched the threadbare cloth of his coat sleeve. “With my trousers and boots—not that they would bear a very close inspection. And of course my arms.” He looked at Maillart. “I must confess I miss tobacco most of all. One does not know what to do with one’s hands. It’s cheerless to sit here. Let us go out.”

Maillart ducked under the low lintel and followed Laveaux into the open air. “But how did you respond to Whitelocke?” he inquired.

“I informed him that, enemy or not, he had no right to offer me such a personal insult,” Laveaux said. “I demanded satisfaction—in short, I challenged him to a duel. The choice of weapon to be left to him.”

“And then?”

Laveaux laughed, attracting the attention of a soldier who stood watch behind the brick-and-mortar wall. “Why, to be sure a single combat would have been much more to my advantage than his—speaking strictly from the military point of view. Therefore he had small reason to accommodate me. He has shifted his ground, and now sends me appeals to my ‘nobility’ as he likes to put it, meaning my former title as a count.”

Maillart flushed and looked away across the battlements. At the edge of the little town, dark surf strummed on a gravelly beach before a single row of trees. Beyond the breakers, within rowing distance as it looked, the island of Tortuga was gloomy under its cover of jungle.

“It is well for us that the English prefer to purchase their victories,” Laveaux said. “Otherwise we might be overwhelmed in half a day here. Look at that one—” He lowered his voice. “Not too directly.”

Maillart glanced sidelong at the sentinel, whose tunic and trousers hung in rags. He was barefoot, starveling, a mad glint in his eye.

“He’s representative, you see,” Laveaux said. “I must send them to post barefoot, like slaves.”

“Have you much illness?”

“Fortunately no,” Laveaux replied. “The men are well acclimated now—those who survive. The problem is rather starvation. We are dangerously low on both powder and shot. Nothing comes from France, not so much as a word. I write to plead my case, protest my loyalty . . . I would do as well to throw the letters on the fire and hope the smoke might be seen in Paris.”

“And the commissioners?” Maillart said. “Sonthonax can procure you no supplies?”

“Both he and Polverel are recalled to France,” Laveaux said. “The change in government, you know—they must answer for their excesses.” He snorted and spread his arms wide. “I am the highest French authority in all this land!”

The sentinel turned and looked at him strangely, tattered mustachios fluttering in the strong northwest wind from the sea. Laveaux sobered and dropped his arms. He studied a small lizard walking a crevice of mortar in the wall, as if perhaps he’d make a snatch for it.

“Truth,” he said. “I will not surrender. I will retreat from hill to hill still fighting. Albeit soon with muskets used as clubs.”

“Listen.” Maillart’s throat worked; he swallowed a portion of his shame. Below the rampart he saw Alsé holding his own horse: French uniform in the left saddlebag, Spanish in the right. Himself in mufti, uncommitted. The horse itself was a stunted specimen, raised on short commons and hard work. Maillart had turned his coat for the death of a king. It seemed foolish now, unconvincing. His connections to the aristocracy of the
ancien régime
were far more tenuous than those of Laveaux, who looked at him now, attentively.

“When I—when I . . . left Le Cap,” Maillart swallowed again with some difficulty.

“Yes, man, go on.”

“I entered Spanish service.” It was said. The words came more readily now. “Since then I have been under orders of one of the black chiefs, he who is known generally as Toussaint Louverture—perhaps you may have heard of him.”

Laveaux looked peculiarly interested. “Not only that, but I have tried to send him various messages—through l’Abbé Delahaye. Tell me, do you bring an answer?”

“No—I don’t know—not exactly,” Maillart stuttered. “I don’t know anything about that . . . but it would be like him to open communication on several lines at once. I am to tell you that he would be . . . receptive.”

“Receptive.” Laveaux’s regard was fixed.

“He now commands four thousand troops, or a little more—not the largest force in the interior, yet others might join him were he to change sides. His men are well trained and well disciplined. I myself—”

“Of course, of course,” Laveaux said. “What does he ask?”

Maillart looked over the rampart. Tocquet stood smoking, beside the horse, a tendril of smoke curling up from his straw hat. How painful the sight, the odor, must be to Laveaux in his deprivation. Maillart was grateful that he himself had never really taken to the habit.

“I can only convey him your proposals,” Maillart said. “But . . .”

“In your opinion?”

“He would wish to retain his rank.”

“Which is?”

“In the Spanish service,
maréchal du camp.
”

“But certainly, or no, a promotion even,” Laveaux said. “Beyond that? You understand there is no money to be offered . . .”

“I believe that none would be asked. Only liberty—general liberty, for all the former slaves.”

“My friend—” Laveaux seized Maillart’s hand in both his own. “C’est
assuré.”

Suddenly the two men were hugging and thumping each other on the back. Maillart’s throat constricted, his eyes pricked, he felt himself relieved of his guilt, pardoned for the news he’d brought. He had always liked Laveaux, in spite of politics. But for a moment he broke the embrace and leaned over the wall, frightening the lizard, to call down to Tocquet.

“Xavier, come up quickly, and if you please, bring your cigars.”

Tocquet and Laveaux struck an amiable acquaintance, which rather surprised Maillart, who had known his traveling companion to be altogether wary of regular army officers. Perhaps it was the cigars, the almost humble gratitude of Laveaux’s acceptance, that eased their meeting. But Laveaux was generally without any pretension which might have been associated either with his former title of nobility or his present military rank. A Jacobin? Perhaps at the least he was a truly convinced republican. Maillart mused on the thought, listening to the others talk. Tocquet had become unusually voluble, for him.

“My ancestral home,” he announced, gesturing with the tip of his cheroot at Tortuga off beyond the breakers.

“Then you must be a
flibustier,
” Laveaux said.

Tocquet shucked up his shirt sleeve and pumped his arm to raise a vein. “The blood of pirates, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Indians . . .” He traced the blue line on his inner forearm. “Possibly Africans. Certainly whores.” He laughed and dropped his arm, looking toward the jungled island. “My grandfathers came out of there, it’s true. Buccaneers to the bone, I can testify.”

“Then it was they who won this colony for France,” Laveaux said with a thoughtful air.

Tocquet’s face shadowed. “As you prefer.” He tipped ash over the parapet, frowning, reached for a drink that wasn’t there. For the moment, no one spoke. A dark cloud hovered over Morne des Pères, behind and above the fort, and in the opposite direction the sea purpled with the approach of night. Someone shouted from below the wall. Tocquet leaned over, called an answer, then turned to Laveaux with his crocodile smile.

“Order them up,” he said. “They’ve been requisitioning.”

Presently Bazau and Gros-jean appeared, carrying a stalk of plantains, green-skinned oranges, a rough-surfaced ceramic jug of
tafia,
and two live chickens.

“I’m overwhelmed,” Laveaux confessed. He sent one of his barefoot soldiers to find cups.

Tocquet took one of the speckled hens and whipped off its head with a practiced twirl, then handed it to Gros-jean to pluck.

“I’ll cook for you,” he said.
“Façon boucanière.”

They ate together, the six black soldiers and the three white men, seated on chunks of masonry from the old fallen walls. Tocquet had built his fire in the lee of some few stones still mortared together. He cooked the chickens spitted on a green stick, roasted the plantains in their skins. As they ate, Laveaux quizzed the black soldiers about details of their service with Toussaint. Afterward, they drank rum flavored with chunks of the oranges. The wind had shifted, bringing a swamp smell and clouds of mosquitoes from
l’étang du Coq.
Maillart accepted one of Tocquet’s cigars, hoping the smoke would discourage the insects.