Master of the Crossroads by Madison Smartt Bell Read Free Book Online Page A

execution. But Maillart was either the more skillful or more fortunate player, and by this time he had to his credit almost half of the six hundred slaves which Vaublanc, nephew of a wealthy planter of Acul, could claim as his eventual inheritance. Of course the Acul plantation had been burned to the ground in the first insurrection of 1791 (like everything else on the northern plain), its buildings razed, and its slaves scattered who knew where? The officers might as well have been playing for beans or buttons; the doctor thought that Maillart understood this principle well enough, though he could not have said as much for Vaublanc, with whom he was less intimate. It was probable that at least some of the slaves of that Acul plantation were now serving as foot soldiers right here in Toussaint’s army.
    Tocquet emptied the last swallow from his glass and rose. Without taking leave, he walked barefoot down from the gallery into the yard. Starlight silvered his loose white shirt, and his cigar head glowed and shrank in the darkness.
    Pinchon pulled at the doctor’s elbow and steered him away from the table. “Un homme un peu farouche, celui-là,” he said, looking toward the diminishing glow of Tocquet’s cigar. A wild man, that one.
    “If he gambles he prefers to choose games he can win,” the doctor said.
    “I don’t mean that,” Pinchon said, drawing the doctor along toward the farthest end of the gallery. “All very well to acknowledge one’s half-breed bastard—if one must—but to seat one’s mulatto whore at table? and with white ladies . . . Well, and the man didn’t even have on shoes.”
    “You’re saying that—” the doctor broke off with his mouth still open. He was beginning to grasp the nature of Pinchon’s confusions: if the newcomer assumed that he were married to Elise, that would explain he’d been taken for the proprietor of the plantation. A casual observer might well be inclined to pair Nanon with Tocquet, who was certainly the more obviously unconventional of the two white men presently occupying the grand’case.
    “Nothing serious,” Pinchon was going on. He had turned to face the card players again, but spoke to the doctor in a half-whisper, partially shielding his mouth with his hand. “Such conduct might gratify the egalitarianism of our so-called Commissioner Sonthonax, but I tell you that an English protectorate will soon put an end to all such fantasies. I myself, sir, am just come from Saint Marc, with an offer from General Whitelocke for the submission of this rabble here. Of course your Toussaint Whatever-he-calls-himself and the other principal niggers can be paid off . . . but to bring the matter forward I must know who really is in charge of them.”
    Pinchon closed his mouth and looked at the doctor cannily. The doctor watched the card players, halfway down the gallery, enclosed in a moist nimbus of light. A large green moth swirled toward their candle. Maillart flipped it away with his fingers but it soon returned. Vaublanc cursed the moth and batted it away with his hat.
    “Your discretion is admirable,” Pinchon said. “Perhaps it’s better so. In any case the old buffoon has engaged me to write his letters for him”—he winked—“which should make the affair much easier to conclude.”
    Still the doctor said nothing. Retracing his way through Pinchon’s first remarks, he struck against the phrases half-breed bastard and mulatto whore. He had been on the verge of explaining to Pinchon the extent of his misapprehensions, but now he decided he had just as well let the man work it out for himself.
    At first light Guiaou’s eyes opened to greet a small striped lizard poised on the matting of damp leaves just beyond the shelter he had erected. The lizard’s tail had been broken off and it was just beginning to sprout a new one from the stump. He made no attempt to catch it; he was not half so hungry as before.
    Also he still had his cassava bread, which he