All Souls' Rising (55 page)

By late afternoon they had completed numerous ascents and descents of the crags and sharp defiles of the mountains, and had come to the height of another peak whence they could see the sun streaking the western hills with an orange light. Tocquet had brought them faultlessly to a strange unlikely pathway made of rocks wedged in the mud; it ran ribbonlike down the mountain’s spine, not quite wide enough for two men to walk abreast on it. Tocquet got down from his horse and walked a little way ahead with his eyes lowered, examining the surface of this trail.

“
Incroyable
,” said Maillart. “How did this come here?” Vaublanc had come up breathlessly beside him.

“An Indian road,” Tocquet said. “From the time of the
caciques
.” He stooped and shuffled through leaves at the trail’s edge, then raised a horseshoe in his muddy hand; the iron was bright along a cut where a sharp stone must have gashed it.

“He’ll make someone answer for the loss of this.” Tocquet laughed shortly as he brandished the shoe. “If I know him.”

“Who?” Vaublanc said.

“Toussaint.” Tocquet hung his hat on a pack saddle and lifted the sweaty mass of hair from the nape of his neck. Following his eye, the captain saw that indeed there were prints of hooves and human feet to either side of the rocky road, which was so firmly laid that there was no mark directly on its surface.

“He will be going to Dondon, I think,” Tocquet said. “That will be convenient for us.”

He called out crisply to the two blacks. Bazau began loosening the girths of the pack saddles, while Gros-jean took a
coutelas
and began chopping undergrowth above the trail to clear a space where they might camp. Tocquet held up his hands to Elise and took the child onto his hip, then helped the woman down from the mule. They were still hand-in-hand as they left the trail and walked toward the sound of rushing water. Tocquet looked back and beckoned to the Frenchmen.

“Come.”

So they followed him across the slope, among flat glossy elephant ears that grew against the larger trees, across a carpet of strange ferns. The rush of water became almost a roar. It was dim in the shade where they were going, but of a sudden they came into an open space where evening sunlight poured into a pool carved out of rock. A waterfall dropped sparkling from a stone lip fifteen feet above the pool, and Maillard wondered at how it steamed when the column met the smoother liquid surface.

“Hot springs,” Tocquet said, as if he’d asked the question. He kissed Elise’s cheek, then handed her down toward the water. “Just as I promised you.”

The woman smiled at him and took the child from his hip, then made her way surefooted down to the gravel shoal beside the pool. Tocquet crooked his finger at the other men and they began climbing around to the lip of the falls, clinging to saplings to make their way. The captain staggered and panted out a laugh; Tocquet looked back at him curiously.

“You know, the Normans claimed that a horse must go anywhere a man can go without using his hands,” the captain said. “I believe you have even exceeded that standard…”

Tocquet stepped out onto the rim above the falls, the two others in his train. From below came the delighted giggle of the child, Elise’s musical laughter chiming in. Sophie was naked, waist-deep in the steaming pool, and Elise had rolled up her trouser legs to wade after her. She looked up at the men and waved; Tocquet smiled back.

“Come, let us give them privacy,” he said. “I promised her this, at the day’s end.”

They went upstream, some hundred yards, clambering over boulders, then Maillart threw back his head and gasped. Above was a much higher fall; a sheer drop of sixty feet or more. Tocquet was already climbing toward it. The way grew steeper, vertical in spots, and the captain found himself climbing by notches in an ancient log. This rather unnerved him; he paused and called ahead.

“Will they be safe? Down there alone?”

“They’re not alone.” Tocquet was just reaching the foot of the larger fall. “Bazau and Gros-jean will look out for them. Besides, there’s no one here. Those steps were cut a hundred years ago.”

Maillart scrambled up beside Tocquet. The fall drove into a wider, shallower stone basin than the one below, and here too it was steaming. Tocquet shucked off his boots and stripped himself and stood directly beneath the tumbling stream with his legs set wide, gasping, his neck arched back so that the water blasted on his face and throat. In a moment he had moved away and was floating idly in the shallow water of the basin.

In his turn, Maillart undressed, then walked over, carefully on the slick underwater stone, and stood breathless under the weight of the warm falls. He dropped his head like a weary ox and let the stream pound the soreness out of his shoulders. Vaublanc joined him, laughing crazily. Water sluiced through the captain’s ears. He withdrew from the waterfall and lowered himself gingerly onto his back so he was floating on his elbows not far from Tocquet.

“It’s wonderful here,” the captain said. “Nature…never have I seen nature so powerful.”

“I agree with you.” Tocquet lay back with his eyes half-lidded, black hair snaking around his head in the water. “Nature is very strong here indeed. A man could come up with nothing but a
coutelas
and a fire-drill and live out the rest of his natural life in happiness.”

The captain stretched his toe in the warm water, thinking that Tocquet might already have put this notion to the test.

“The
caciques
might have held out forever here,” Tocquet said. “The Spanish would not have reached them with an army, in these mountains.”

“Why didn’t they?” Maillart said.

Tocquet sat up and tossed his hair back over his head. He propped his back against a boulder. “I think they died of grief,” he said. “Some say they were a gentle people. I believe it. Anyway, they would not be slaves. They threw themselves from the cliffs in droves—five hundred thousand of them.” He scratched his stomach idly and let his fingers trail off in the water. “You see, it’s not the first time this island has been washed in blood.”

The captain drifted, the warmth of the water rather stupefying him. Vaublanc was floating alongside them. “How did you ever find this place?” he said.

Tocquet twirled a finger in the air. “I belong here,” he said. “It may be that I have a touch of the brush, you know. Carib blood, not black.”

“Blood will out?” the captain said.

Tocquet stirred his legs in the water. “Then there were no other women here, but Indians,” he said. “My great-grandfather was a pirate. One of the faction that won Saint Domingue for France. But neither France nor Spain can hold it. It is mine and it is no one’s. Or yours too, as you find it.” Tocquet raised his dripping hand and spread it on a stone. Near his fingers, a small striped frog sat unalarmed, eyes protuberant and its loose gullet pulsing.

“I don’t follow,” Maillart said.

Tocquet gave his caiman smile. “I will tell you my great secret, then. I am the only one to know it. No man can own land
or
people, though a man may have their use. Those two down there, Gros-jean and Bazau—I paid a sum of money for them, but all three of us know that each belongs to himself alone. Do you understand me?”

“No,” the captain said, feeling himself strangely incapable of lying.

“My friend, you had better think a little harder,” Tocquet said. “Consider, who owns you? A week ago you were a Frenchman. What are you today?”

A
T FIRST THEY FOUND THE GOING MUCH EASIER
when they set out on the following day. But the Carib road did not run uninterrupted all the way to Dondon. It petered out, or was washed out altogether, and again they found themselves struggling through the untracked jungle, a day, a night, another day, and so until at last they struck the road again, near Ennery. They followed the road for four miles more and camped above it as they had done on other nights. On the afternoon of the next day they left the road again according to Tocquet’s estimation of their position and soon broke out of the jungle into the coffee plantings above Habitation Thibodet.

From the hilltop they could see at once that the crops were well tended and they could see the slaves at work in the cane, a white man in a tattered straw hat directing them. As yet the new arrivals had not been observed and the work went forward with no interruption. The slaves were singing as they swung their hoes and the sound came thin but clearly to Tocquet’s party on the crest of the hill.

“Look there,” Tocquet said, drawing his horse up beside Elise’s mule. “All in good order, just as I told you…” He reached across to ruffle Sophie’s hair. “What are you thinking, little one?”

The child rocked between her mother’s knees as the mule’s feet shifted. She looked down dazedly over the plantation.

“Of course she doesn’t remember,” Elise said. “When we left here she was a babe in arms.”

A shout went up from the
atelier
. They had been seen. There was a stir among the workers, but their foreman soon reorganized them—all save one, who was dispatched to run quickly back across the main compound and over to the provision grounds south of the
grand’case
. Another slave came out of the cane mill, paused to stare up the hill, and went for the
grand’case
at a trot.

Now the single runner had reached the new-cleared area above the provision grounds, which had been pitched with military tents. Some hundreds of black soldiers were there involved in a parade-ground exercise.

“So,” Tocquet said. “It isn’t Dondon.” He reached into his saddlebag and raised a small brass spyglass to his eye. In response to whatever message the runner had brought, a detachment of twenty men fell out and began marching back down toward the
grand’case
, guided by one officer.

Tocquet sniffed. “Well, we are to be received with military honors.”

“If we are not to be repulsed,” said Captain Maillart.

“No, it’s all right.” Tocquet passed the glass to the captain. In its ground glass circlet, Maillart saw that the officer commanding the twenty, a coal-black man with heavy, shelving brows and lips, wore the insignia of a Spanish major.

“Moise,” Tocquet said. “He’s Toussaint’s nephew—so they say. A capable fellow, I think you’ll find.”

He squeezed his horse with his heels and moved to the head of their small column. In a few minutes they were on the flat and leading the mules through the cane. As they came abreast of Delsart he recognized Elise, tore off his hat and burst out laughing in amazement. Elise gave him a weary smile; Tocquet saluted him half-mockingly as he turned toward her from the saddle.

“That scoundrel looks in better health than when I last laid eyes on him…”

Elise’s eyes, ringed by fatigue as if with kohl, were riveted on the house; she did not answer. The twenty black soldiers were drawn up in a double row at the yard’s edge. Tocquet greeted Moise with a sharp upward jerk of his fist, then turned to point at the pack train.

“Munitions for your general, major,” Tocquet said. “With your permission, we’ll go straight along. Only, I think we’ll leave the mistress to settle herself here.”

Maillart looked over the black soldiers, barefoot men. Irregularly dressed, they still stood stiffly to attention, each with a musket held at the present-arms position. He searched their inexpressive faces; their eyes stared through and through him blindly as the eyes of statues. Tocquet, meanwhile, dismounted and lifted the girl down from the mule saddle. Sophie kicked up her leg and ran in a merry half-circle, holding her skirt out in both hands and flouncing it about. Elise took both of Tocquet’s hands and swung lightly down to stand beside him.

“Come, Sophie.” She caught the little girl by the hand and led her toward the steps of the
grand’case
gallery. Tocquet touched her on the shoulder as she passed, then swung back up into his saddle. The pack train moved along; Moise’s soldiers faced left at his command and marched alongside of the mules. As they went by, Bazau reached out and caught the dangling reins of Elise’s white mule and led it on behind the others.

At the top of the gallery steps, Elise hesitated, looking toward the darkness of the door, and then went on.

Formerly, in those last months, she had endured a lowering of her spirits whenever she passed this doorsill. Now she felt nothing of the kind. The main room was much as she remembered it, warm and humid, dominated by the ticking of the clock. At once, Sophie let go her hand and went to stand below the chest where the clock was placed, rapt in the swinging movement of the pendulum.

“Yes, you may touch it,” Elise said, thinking how much Thibodet would have disliked her to do it. Tentatively, the child reached up her hand and arrested the swinging disk. The clock stopped. Elise began to laugh as Sophie turned to her, moonfaced with surprise. In the silence left where the tick had been, an insect whirred and thrummed behind a jalousie. Apart from that the house felt empty; there was no sign of Antoine.

“Come.” Elise led the girl into the bedroom of her husband.

It was brighter here, for the blind was rolled up, and the room’s window faced the sun. Thibodet’s effects had been removed, but otherwise all was much as it had been before. The sight of her marriage bed did not particularly affect her, except that she was glad to see that it looked freshly made. She pulled open the door of her wardrobe and saw that her dresses seemed mostly intact. Impulsively she gathered clusters of the fabrics to her cheek and closed her eyes. The odor of the cloth was only slightly musty. She had been able to take scarcely anything with her when she made off with Tocquet, and she detested what fashions were available in Spanish San Domingo. She sat on the bed and spread a striped silk skirt across her knees. The calico cat came into the room and jumped into her lap. Smiling, Elise lifted it from the silk and sniffed its fur.

Sophie had picked up a tiny porcelain vase and was closely examining the enameled pattern of flowers and vines. Just then Zabeth came into the room.