Chapter Three
CREAKILY BAYON DE LIBERTAT GOT DOWN from the coach and paused to look up at Arnaud, who stood on the gallery of the grand’case, caressing the pommel of the cane he held across his legs. A harness bell clacked as one of the grays tossed its head to shake off a fly. Toussaint closed the carriage door behind his master and moved to the horse’s head and stroked the line of its jaw to quiet it.
“I hadn’t looked for you so early,” Arnaud said. “The Sieur Maltrot has not yet come.”
Bayon de Libertat sneezed, drew out a cambric handkerchief from his coat pocket and blew his nose. Toussaint had turned to face him, stooped in a sort of frozen bow, eyes raised and querying. Bayon de Libertat nodded as he folded the handkerchief away, and Toussaint led the coach and horses around the rear of the grand’case toward the stable.
“You’re well, I take it?” Bayon de Libertat said, a trifle testily. “Et madame?”
“—is still abed.” Arnaud smiled suddenly and skipped down the plank steps, reaching for the other’s hand. “Welcome, then. You’ll inspect the fields with me? Come, I’ll order a horse for you.”
Bayon de Libertat, who would have preferred coffee or a glass of water, and a chance to limber his rickety legs and back, began to open his mouth, but the voice which emerged from behind Arnaud’s fixed smile kept rushing over him.
“Come,” Arnaud repeated. “You’re only stiff from jouncing over these bad roads. An hour in the saddle will do you good.”
But when they once were mounted, Arnaud again was silent and morose. Bayon de Libertat asked such polite questions as occurred to him, his voice brittle with annoyance. His stomach was uneasy, his knees sore, his left hand cramped arthritically on the reins. Age told on him, though he would not think of himself as old, but blamed his discomfort on his host’s discourtesy. He was too irked to show his fatigue now. It was already very hot.
“You’ve had another guest,” he forced himself to say.
“Eh?” Arnaud said, raising his head from a muttered conversation with his commandeur. “Pardon?”
“A visitor? I met him on the road as I came in. He stopped the coach to ask his way…”
“Oh, that fellow.” Arnaud gouged a heel into his horse’s flank and they trotted toward the next cane piece. “Some freethinker, I suppose, just out from France. He called himself a doctor.”
“No close connection then?” Bayon de Libertat said, and added mockingly, “A relative, perhaps?”
Arnaud glanced over his shoulder. “He was lost.” Again he faced toward the cane piece ahead, where the rise and fall of knives set up a painful intermittent flashing in the sun.
“You’re cutting early,” said Bayon de Libertat.
Arnaud grunted. “It’s twelve-month cane…fourteen, maybe.” He pulled up his horse and got down and went through a gap in the hedge to the first cane row. The horse lowered its head into a swirl of dangling reins, which Bayon de Libertat eyed disapprovingly. Arnaud said something curt to the slave nearest him, who chopped a six-inch section from a stalk of cane already felled and presented it to the master with his face turned away. Then he moved on down the row, raising his knife and swinging it down to cut each stalk as near the ground as possible.
Arnaud walked back toward the horses, peeling the section of cane with his penknife. He split off a wedge and offered it to Bayon de Libertat, who chewed it reflectively, looking wise and saying nothing. He thought this cane would only do for rum or very low grade sugar—then again, Arnaud did have his own distillery, he knew that.
“It’s been too dry, as everyone knows,” Arnaud said. He gathered the reins and swung back in the saddle; the horse stirred restively as his weight returned. Arnaud spoke defensively, as if he’d read the other’s mind. “Why, I’ve hardly been able to replant this year.” He waved his arm to the adjoining cane pieces. “Half this land is only in ratoons.”
“Faut arroser,” said Bayon de Libertat, shifting the bit of cane to the left side of his jaw where his good teeth matched each other.
“Of course,” Arnaud snapped. “But with what? When there’s no water in the stream itself, or next to none…”
Bayon de Libertat withdrew the splintered cane from his mouth and flicked it into the dirt beside the citron hedge. He kept his silence, looking away. Arnaud swung his horse’s head back toward the central buildings.
THEY FOUND THE SIEUR MALTROT sitting on the gallery with his legs stuck out before him and a damp cloth laid over his eyes. Bayon de Libertat took note of the white cockade on the bicorne hat he’d laid aside. The taste of sugar had brightened him slightly, never mind the quality. Arnaud clapped his hands and when his mulattress house servant appeared he ordered coffee. The Sieur Maltrot pulled the compress from his forehead and sat up to track the taut lifting of her hindquarters under the shift as she withdrew. He shot Arnaud a knowing glance, but the host’s expression gave him no encouragement. The pleasantries which followed were accordingly rather stiff.
Shortly the yellow woman came back with a coffee service and a dish of sliced papaya, overripe and almost deliquescent, interrupting the Sieur Maltrot’s string of observations on the weather. As she handed round the cups, his eyes stroked her from head to toe, lingering on the high arches of her feet and her long toes spreading on the plank floor. Bayon de Libertat also looked down. He rubbed the knuckles of the arthritic hand that lay in his lap like a broken-winged bird, and pulled on the fingers to ease their stiffness.
“Bien,” Arnaud said, as the woman left. “What news, gentlemen?” His eyes were on the Sieur Maltrot.
“Mostly bad,” Maltrot said cheerfully, stirring spoon after spoon of sugar into his cup. “Mostly bad. Why, Paris is a madhouse, as you’ve surely heard. They’ve made Ogé a hero in the theater, among other things, but let a colonial planter show himself in the streets and likely as not he’ll be stoned or hung.”
Arnaud drew in his plummy lips and tightened them to a white line. Unhurriedly, the Sieur Maltrot tilted some of the viscous coffee syrup into his mouth.
“In the west, the news is a touch more interesting,” he said. “A touch more hopeful, I’ll declare. Despite the late catastrophes at Port-au-Prince…”
Bayon de Libertat shifted in his chair; one corner of his mouth drew down like a cramp. “I can scarce credit how the Chevalier Mauduit was used there…”
“You may believe it,” said the Sieur Maltrot. His tongue flicked in and out with snakelike speed. “I have it from a witness in the town. They tore him limb from limb like Furies in the street and Madame Martin, a white woman, if you please, cut off his balls herself with a knife and carried them to her house for a trophy.”
In the ensuing speechlessness, an insect thrummed loudly under the porch boards. From the cane fields came a dispirited chorus of song measured out by whip cracks. Maltrot sipped from his syrupy cup.
“I hear but I cannot believe,” said Bayon de Libertat eventually. “What sort of creature must she be?”
“A harpy,” said the Sieur Maltrot. “Think no more of her—she is a mere beast. What is encouraging is that the colored men are negotiating with Hanus de Jumecourt at Croix les Bouquets.”
“I’m charmed,” said Arnaud, acidly. “To what end?”
“They’re royalists, essentially,” said Maltrot. “We have that much in common. They share our interests—to a point. And the point is to turn the Pompons Rouges back out of Port-au-Prince.”
“But at what price?” Arnaud reached for his cane where it balanced against the railing and laid it sideways across his lap.
“Naturally,” said the Sieur Maltrot, “enforcement of the May fifteenth decree.”
“But that’s disgusting,” Arnaud shouted, leaning forward across the cane. “I won’t have the law dictated to me by sons of our slaves. No decent white man will.”
The Sieur Maltrot snapped erect in his chair, gathering his feet below. “Calm yourself,” he said, and stared Arnaud down till he seemed to have subsided. Bayon de Libertat was startled at how quickly his foppish mannerisms had fallen from him. “You must understand,” he continued, “it’s not the decent white men you have to consider, but the indecent ones. Praloto and his renegade troops, the Port-au-Prince canaille. Recall that since Mauduit’s unlucky end, that town is lost to us entirely. At least the mulattoes are willing to wear the white cockade, and why? Because, whatever else, they’re men of property.”
“Mauduit would not permit them to wear the pompon blanc,” said Arnaud. “‘Let them wear yellow,’ he said, ‘as they are yellow men,’ and he was right.”
“The course of events has discovered defects in the judgment of our late friend Mauduit,” the Sieur Maltrot said. “Do you not think so? These mistakes we would be well advised to amend.”
Arnaud crossed and uncrossed his legs. “The May fifteenth decree,” he pronounced, “is a work of anarchy, abominable. And unenforceable as well, may God be thanked.”
“Of course,” said the Sieur Maltrot. “You and Governor Blanchelande are of one mind, to be sure. So far. But what will Blanchelande say if the Pompons Rouges chase him out of Le Cap too? You won’t even be able to reach a harbor if that happens. Where will you sell your sugar then?” Maltrot picked up his cup again and began to eat his own coffee-stained sugar with a tiny spoon.
“That’s most unlikely,” Arnaud said. “There’s been no trouble in Le Cap, not of that kind. There’ll be none till the Colonial Assembly meets.”
“Yes, and then there’ll be trouble enough for all,” said the Sieur Maltrot. “I prophesy. Are you not weary of these idiotic legislators yet?”
“Exhausted,” Arnaud said, rocking back in his chair, “absolument.” He rolled the cane on his upper thighs, like a baker rolling out yeasty dough.
“The Colonial Assembly will accomplish nothing,” Maltrot said. “More wrangling about the May fifteenth decree, and they may stir up the mob to some foolishness into the bargain. Meanwhile Port-au-Prince is just as bad as Paris. Worse, it’s a state of open war. And it could easily happen at Le Cap, you know it could—the Colonial Assembly will furnish a handsome occasion.”
“The May fifteenth decree is completely intolerable,” Arnaud said.
“So you say.” Maltrot touched the rim of the fruit plate, rotated it with a whisper over the woven cane table the mulattress had brought out to support it. “I would suggest you choose your evils carefully. After all, the decree applies only to four hundred people, even Blanchelande admits that much. Four hundred colored men whose parents were born in freedom and can prove it, and out of how many thousands? Let them have their political rights, they couldn’t throw a shadow on our governance. The decree is a token and that is all.”
“It is a token,” Arnaud said. “But that’s not all.”
“He’s right,” Bayon de Libertat said, and cleared his throat. “Thus far. It’s a matter of principle.”
The two men looked at him, turning their heads in unison. Bayon de Libertat’s breath went heavily in the soggy heat; sweat ran from his temples and down the leathery creases in his neck. He reached for his handkerchief and dabbed his forehead and his sweat-stringy hair. Arnaud clapped his hands and called into the house. A sixteen-year-old Negress, stomach rounded by an early pregnancy, came out and began to haul on the rope that turned the fan over the gallery.
“Liberté,” Arnaud said grindingly. “Egalité. Fraternité. You’d have me claim brotherhood with the yellow niggers, would you?”
“Oh no,” said the Sieur Maltrot. He lifted a slice of papaya an inch or so above the plate and held it while the juice dripped down, letting his wandering eye graze over the black girl’s rising belly. “Oh no, nothing so near as that.”
“You’ll give them notions,” Arnaud said. “Ideas.” He bit down on the word with the same contempt. “Let one yellow cur have the rights of a white man and they’ll all be howling for the same. I know you haven’t forgotten Ogé since you talked of him yourself.”
“By no means.” The Sieur Maltrot snapped the fruit into his jaws and swallowed. He stretched his legs out comfortably again. “Ogé has done us all a great service,” he said. “I know you don’t believe it but he did. And remember, he was a Creole in name only, really just another troublemaker from Paris, no different from that white trash that plagues us on the coast. He came here and called for mulatto rights and armed his band and even tried to raise the blacks, and what came next? We crushed him.” Maltrot licked fruit juice from his fingers, smacked his palm down on his knee. “Easily as that. Ogé proved that it cannot be done.”
“However interesting that may be,” Arnaud said, “you’ve a long way to go to convince me to claim kin with him, or any of the yellow rats.”
“Don’t think of it as a love match,” said Maltrot. “It’s a marriage of convenience. Temporary. So long as our interests coincide, however long it takes to dispose of that mob of petit blancs at Port-au-Prince. Afterward,” he waved his sticky fingers airily, “everything will return to the way it was before.”
“As easily as that?” said Arnaud.
“Why not?” said Maltrot. “You’ve commanded mulattoes in the maréchaussée. They do their job excellently, do they not? And afterward they lay down their arms and go home peaceably? They haven’t terrorized the countryside.”
“The point is well taken,” said Arnaud, “but—”
“In any case,” Maltrot said, “it’s not our territory, nor yet our affair. Let Hanus de Jumecourt make his own arrangements. There’s a very small part that you might play, but afterward we’ll come to that—it’s not what brought me here.”
The Sieur Maltrot sat straight again and withdrew a tiny silver snuffbox, embossed with a fleur-de-lis, from his vest pocket. He sniffed a pinch, sneezed hugely into a lace-trimmed handkerchief, and put away his apparatus.
“Never mind les gens de couleur,” he said. “The mulattoes are not the problem. It’s the Pompons Rouges…the petit blancs in general.”
“But the petit blancs hate the mulattoes more than anyone,” Arnaud said.
“Of course they do,” Maltrot said. “Well that they should. Those parties will have their chance to undo each other, cela s’arrange. But at the moment they seem to hate us just as much, the petit blancs. And that must stop. Our towns have become a breeding ground for Jacobinism and freethinking. Ideas are like diseases, Arnaud, you understand that perfectly.”
“You confuse me,” said Bayon de Libertat.
“My apologies,” said the Sieur Maltrot. “It’s entirely simple. At the finish of it, everyone must cleave to his own skin. Must and will. It’s natural law. The petit blancs have forgotten this, however. They need a demonstration.”
“Of what character?” said Arnaud.
“Imagine,” said the Sieur Maltrot, “an insurrection on the northern plain.”
“The worst catastrophe anyone ever dreamed of.”
“Exactly,” said the Sieur Maltrot. “Exactly. Everyone would have to pull together then. No more squabbling with the Pompons Rouges when they understand their skins are only safe with us. No more troop mutinies, the soldiers fall back into line, and even the mulattoes would line up behind us where they belong, because after all they own slaves too.”
Arnaud passed a hand over his eyes; the cane rolled off his knees and clattered on the floor. He bent to pick it up, and straightened with a shaky laugh. “It’s bold,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”
“You mean—” said Bayon de Libertat. “You can’t mean that.”
“Oh, but I do,” said the Sieur Maltrot. “It wouldn’t be a dangerous insurrection but, between ourselves, a nice imposture. The secret is good commandeurs, the strong and loyal ones—I think that you know such a one.” He nodded at Bayon de Libertat. “Let them lead the ateliers into the mountains for a few weeks, no more. Possibly burn a couple of cane fields.” Maltrot smiled in the direction of the rows of ratoons that lay beyond Arnaud’s compound. “The ones that aren’t producing well, those only. And there you have it in your hand. Let the Pompons Rouges have a glimpse of the black face of freedom and you’ll see the end of politics.”
“That’s throwing a coal in the powder keg,” said Bayon de Libertat.
“We’ll damp it out,” said Maltrot. “Remember Ogé. And nothing venture, nothing gain. The situation is precarious and our party is small. If we do not use our power while we have it, we may indeed lose everything.”
“And Blanchelande?” said Arnaud.
“Well, he could hardly show his hand in this,” Maltrot said. “But tacitly?” He waved his hand. “It will go forward, you must know. Someone’s already visited most of the habitations here about. The only question is whether or not you’re for us.”
Arnaud swung his head and gazed over the gallery railing, clicking his tongue softly. Above them, the fan creaked on its wooden axle, flogging slow, sodden air. The little Negress pumped the rope mechanically, her face turned toward the house wall.
“Bien,” said Arnaud. “Pourquoi pas.”
Maltrot turned his eyes toward Bayon de Libertat.
“I’m for king and country,” said the older man.
“For the king, to be sure,” Maltrot said in a near whisper. “But at the end, what country will it be?”
Again it was silent but for the fan, which had found an excruciating friction point, squealing painfully with every revolution now. Arnaud had dropped his head and cocked it to one side, as though listening. A gigantic leopard-spotted mosquito hovered over Maltrot’s knee; he waited till it had just lit, then pinched it dead and cleaned his fingers with a snap. Arnaud got up rather suddenly, letting his cane fall, and stood with his fingertips on the railing, staring out and biting his lips.
Indeed there seemed to be a distant tumult from the fields and coming nearer. Then someone came running into the compound, staggering and shouting in a hoarse voice; evidently it was Arnaud’s commandeur. He wore shoes as a mark of his rank, but the buckles were broken and they hindered him as he tried to run. Arnaud snatched up his cane and went to meet him. Bayon de Libertat watched him jerk back angrily from what the slave had said, then lash him across the face with the cane’s point. The commandeur spun away and dropped on all fours, tucking his head in. Arnaud made to strike him across the shoulders, but stopped himself and came back onto the gallery, beating the cane’s pommel against his palm.
“Damn that little Jacobin rogue of a doctor to the last circle of hell,” Arnaud hissed, “for shooting my best dog this morning…”
“What?” said Bayon de Libertat.
“Oh, I apologize,” said Arnaud, coming to. He turned about, flicking his cane against his boot tops. “A maroon raid on the provision grounds. And there’s a runaway. Un petit marron.”
“Of course they usually come back,” Maltrot said.
“Oh, he won’t go far,” Arnaud said. “He’s already wearing a headstall. But all the same I’d better go after him. It’s the look of the thing, you know.”
He dashed down the steps, then paused to look back. “Excuse me please, I trust you will—my house is yours.” He strode around the corner of the house.
The Sieur Maltrot cocked an eyebrow, then rose and went into the grand’case with no remark. In the yard, the commandeur scrambled to his feet. His cheek was bleeding where the cane had struck it, but he trudged off toward the fields without even raising a hand to examine the wound. Bayon de Libertat pushed out of his seat and also went indoors.
The interior seemed dim and muzzy—despite checks of searing light which came through the woven shades and broke and scattered on the floor. Bayon de Libertat saw Madame Arnaud lift herself in a cloud of white muslin from a chair at the end of the room.
“Messieurs,” she said, and trying a curtsy, she almost lost her balance and fell. She caught herself on the wall, gave a birdlike nod of her head, and turned to withdraw. Bayon de Libertat’s eyes had adjusted enough to see that her hair had come undone behind.
“His house is ours,” said the Sieur Maltrot when she had gone. “Quel bonheur! My stars, I believe that woman was drunk.”
“Ill, possibly,” said Bayon de Libertat.
The Sieur Maltrot sniffed. “Where did he find her? I’d almost take her for one of the Paris prostitutes they sent out here when the first colonists asked for women.”
“Really,” said Bayon de Libertat. “After all, we are her guests.”
Like Arnaud, the Sieur Maltrot carried a foppish little cane. Now he began to stroll about the room, indicating articles of the sparse furniture to himself with the cane’s point.
“Besides,” said Bayon de Libertat. “She’d be a hundred years old at the least if she were one of those.”
The Sieur Maltrot, who’d stopped before the mirror, chuckled softly along with his reflection.
“She was a girl of good family in France,” said Bayon de Libertat.
“Ah,” said the Sieur Maltrot to his image. “So many of them fare poorly here. A pity, I think it.” He turned from the mirror and paced along the wall, dandling the cane lightly from two fingers. In a corner a fat toad hulked, large as a brick, his sides inflating and deflating softly, otherwise completely still.
“What a fellow, our Arnaud,” said the Sieur Maltrot. “Vain, self-indulgent, not a little stupid probably, concupiscent, impulsive, cruel, reckless, selfish and irresponsible—a typical Creole, in short.”
“He’s quite a good horseman,” Bayon de Libertat said temperingly.
“No doubt,” said Maltrot. “He could ride a good horse to death in no more than two hours, I’ll wager.”
“The brutality does trouble me,” said Bayon de Libertat. “There’s things go on here that could stop your heart, you couldn’t bear to name them.”
“Yes, and it’s impractical too,” Maltrot said. “It’s not as if there were profit in it—too many die, or run away, they kill themselves and kill their children.” Clasping the cane under one arm, he dipped more snuff, then blew his nose. “All the same, terror can be a useful instrument,” he said. “So long as it’s used judiciously.”
“And this charade of an insurrection?” said Bayon de Libertat. “It’s judicious, you’re convinced.”
“All in choosing the right leaders,” Maltrot said. “Give us a few good commandeurs and we’ll only be sending our crews to a different task. Toussaint serves as your coachman, does he not?”
“You know him, then?”
“Why he’s famous, you must know. Well traveled as he is, with his liberté de savane—I’ll warrant he’s happier than a freeman. You trust him absolutely, don’t you?”
“With my life,” said Bayon de Libertat. “And with my family.”
“Have someone call him, won’t you? I’d like to see this prodigy with my own eyes.”
Bayon de Libertat stepped to the doorway and called an order—the little Negress jumped from her seat by the fan’s pulley and ran around to the rear of the house. For a moment he remained in the doorway. A small brown hen and a rooster with a red plumed tail were scratching in the dirt, near the scuffed area where the commandeur had been knocked down.
“What business do you have for Arnaud in the west?” he said, drawing his head back inside.
“De Jumecourt will be needing guns.” The Sieur Maltrot observed the toad and prodded it with the tip of his cane. “He can hardly get them through Port-au-Prince as things stand now—they’ll have to come from the Spanish side.”
“That’s a dangerous undertaking.”
“One which requires an expendable person.” The Sieur Maltrot poked the toad again; it made a lumbering, bearlike step forward. “Do you not agree? Look at this monster, big as a cat. Too fat even to hop…”
He glanced at Bayon de Libertat, who said nothing. From the rear of the house came the sound of a door closing. In a flash the Sieur Maltrot whipped the wood from his sword stick and skewered the toad on the rapier blade. Held high and framed in the light of the doorway, the toad wriggled its legs and moved its mouth in a gasping silence, the thin blade flexing slightly under its weight. The Sieur Maltrot flipped it out the door and over the gallery rail into the dirt.
“What a country,” he said, and slapped the sword back into the cane. “Oh. There you are.”
Toussaint had come silently into the back of the room and stopped. He had removed his coachman’s hat—a kerchief bound at the nape of his neck covered most of his grizzled hair. His head was lowered and he smiled politely, watching the Sieur Maltrot with his eyes only, keeping his face turned toward the floor.
“There you are,” the Sieur Maltrot repeated as he walked near. “A credit to our system, to your master and the Comte de Noé…Well, then, what do you say?”
“Doucement allée loin,” Toussaint said. The docile way goes furthest. His smile finished with his words.
“Both eloquent and suitable,” said the Sieur Maltrot. “Yes, and the meek shall inherit the earth one day. We’ve all been waiting for that, haven’t we?” He clapped Toussaint on the shoulder and made a half turn to include Bayon de Libertat in his remarks to the slave. “You’re a good nigger, I know you are. If they were all like you, we’d never have a difficulty.”