The night before, de L’Écart had abruptly ordered Carmel to prepare his emergency trunks. As per his orders, she filled them with freshly scrubbed and sun-bleached ticking; sheets and pillowcases; towels; several cotton nightshirts; a month’s change of gentleman’s wear, including scarves, cravats, city shoes with brass buckles, as the gold and silver ones had already been stolen; an oilcloth cape; an overcoat of boiled wool; two horsehair wigs with sanitary powder; several boxes of French lavender soap; a writing set (without embossed stationery); a cube of wax with the de L’Écart seal; several shell combs; two straight razors, a strop and a whetstone; fragrant honey soap; a square of lye; a mother-of-pearl-edged mirror; a deck of playing cards; several bags of gunpowder; the engraved, amber-handled pistol and leather holster; a box of lead roundballs; a briar pipe with a tin of Santiago tobacco; a tinderbox and wrapped wicks; Alexis’s favorite toy, a palm-sized Mexican rubber ball; another large carved and polished rosewood implement, like an arm-length squash, that smelled vaguely of the outhouse; and the Latin Bible de L’Écart had purchased during his year in the Roman seminary.
About her own fate, he said nothing.
While taking a break to begin supper for her master, Carmel felt a strange and powerful force, unlike anything she had experienced before, seize her. As if she were in a trance, she rose and staggered down to the cellar where she found a small stub of coal, and then as if pulled back up by an invisible cord, rushed to de L’Écart’s second-floor bedroom. She had the sensation of wanting to cry out, as if someone were twisting the sounds out of her throat, though she knew no sound would issue. On the buttercream-and-buttercup covered wall facing his bed, whose chief additional adornment beyond a crucifix was waterstains, her hand took over.
What Carmel draws
A road winding along the Grand’Anse through the hills above Jérémie, which she covers with such dense and darkened foliage that she gouges the surface of her father’s mural. A white horse, astride which sits a tall, gaunt black man, wearing a field cap, a workshirt, and breeches. He carries a musketoon slung over his back. Alongside this rider and horse, another horse, black, its teeth bared and its reins swooping upwards but unheld, forming an arch. It bears no rider. Instead, high above it, a saint — no, a Frenchman, short and lean in the hips hangs upside down, a cocked hat still on his head and his hands extended as if he were diving. A pair of pince-nez hover before him. She adds clouds, a moon, and beneath the respective white and black steeds the block-lettered names LXI and MONS, before crossing out the second one:
When she finally drops the black nub, Carmel is too drained to wash the wall or hide. She returns downstairs and falls dead asleep beneath the kitchen table.
Nicolas de L’Écart did not have an opportunity, however, to view her creation. As he and Alexis returned via a road that descended through a hilly pass above the Rivière Chaineau, a band of rebels shot up out of the ground before him. He reached for his flintlock, which he always kept loaded, and cocked it to fire, but before he could, his horse reared, hurling him into a deep and jagged crevasse. An insistent bachelor with no issue, his estate by will and law passed into the hands of his younger brother, Olivier.
From 1780, Olivier de L’Écart had practiced law in the kingdom’s colonial centers. In his private hours, he conducted studies on boundary and treaty disputes, producing a monograph entitled On the Legal Matters Pertaining to the Royal Survey of the Antillean Islands in 1785, as well as various pamphlets on related topics. In the autumn of 1789, as the revolutionary clouds massed in Paris, he went to New York to advise the French delegation on its negotiations with the new American republic. By the coup d’état of 1792, he was in Philadelphia, where he successfully sat for the bar. By the 11th Germinal, he was again assisting French diplomats, this time in Santo Domingo, with the civil ramifications of the Consulate’s proclamations; when he learned of his brother’s death, he had lived there for exactly two years. His American wife, Grace, came from an old Anglo-Catholic family that owned extensive tobacco plantations in the Maryland Tidewater. Their only child, a daughter, Eugénie, was nearly fourteen.
Olivier de L’Écart, like his brother, had been raised in the provincial milieu of southwestern Saint-Domingue, and educated in Paris. He had supported the King’s laws and penal codes across the new world colonies through his advocacy, and now his late brother’s slaves were his own. He nevertheless was a man of feeling; he had always maintained a strong inner revulsion towards absolutism and the dominance of the aristocratic estate over the others. In the tome-lined safety of his library in Philadelphia he had even cheered those who had forced the royal hand on the tennis courts of Versailles, and later seized the state outright. He aimed at some future stage in his life to resolve this contradiction, though he had grasped at an early age that law presented the best compromise. That the cause of equality, or liberty, seen in another way, had culminated in brutality and the militarism of Napoleon, however, just as Sainte-Domingue also had degenerated into its own terror, did not surprise him. The rhetoric of the Enlightenment was a more powerful stimulant than that which had enriched his family, because equality, he had more than once penned in his journal, was the proper guiding principle, though in practice it required severe restraint: “As distant as heaven is from the earth, so is the true spirit of equality from that of extreme equality…” (Montesquieu).
Upon learning of his brother’s death, de L’Écart planned to dispose of the estate as quickly as possible. He was not unamenable to selling it to one of the local propertied mulattoes, since he had known several of them since childhood and foresaw that ultimately much of the island would end up as scraps in dark palms. His wife, however, pushed him to identify a buyer first from his own station, or at least from any Frenchman who could post a bond. It would, in any event, be sold. The capture just months before and the subsequent death of L’Ouverture, who had cooperated repeatedly with French aims only to see his loyalty betrayed convinced de L’Écart that quite soon, the blacks, now awakened to their fate, would hereafter consent to be betrayed only by blacks. As his parting act and as a gesture of his magnanimity, a virtue in which he took considerable pride, he also planned to emancipate whatever slaves were still at Valdoré.
Before departing for Jérémie, Olivier de L’Écart shipped most of his personal effects forward to the home he had purchased in Georgetown, as he intended to resume his law practice in the new capital of the United States. He had also thought of sending his daughter on to the United States, but his wife insisted, despite the perilous situation in major portions of the colony, that the family not be separated, as the sapling flourishes best in the forest. He did not bring the few servants who also belonged to his ménage, despite his wife’s request that he do so. From what he recalled during his last visit several years before, there was still a small but loyal cohort on the plantation, which would suffice for the purposes of his scheme.