The Emerald Storm

Part II
Chapter 17

Yellow fever starts with sharp pain. Not just in stomach and loins but, oddly, in the feet and eye sockets. Eyeballs feel as if they might explode, the afflicted told me in Saint-Domingue. Then they become glazed and gush with tears.

Each case follows the same progression. Faces flush. Fever rages. The sick find it hard to breathe and fear suffocation, puffing in terror. A thick, white-yellow fluid coats the tongue and teeth, vomit yellow, feces red. The mouth blackens with a crust. Patients cannot drink. Wounds open spontaneously, inflamed and eerily deep. It’s as if the body is dissolving from within, and the inflicted’s weight drops by half.

A ghastlier disease can scarcely be imagined.

Cruelly, the patient recovers, or seems to. Usually this rally only signals the end. A few hours respite, and then there are agonizing cramps, nosebleeds, and a flagging pulse. Liquids gush from all orifices. The body is “already a corpse,” in the words of one doctor. Physicians can think of little to do but drain pints of blood in a vain attempt to balance the body’s humors. In the French hospitals, every bed was accompanied by a bowl of blood.

The bleeding never works. The only thing that can be said for this cure is that it hastens the end. Soldiers viewed confinement in a hospital as a death sentence. Of ten who contracted the disease, nine died.

Doctors were defeated. Then they died, too.

Such was the horror that had annihilated Napoleon’s Caribbean legions. Bonaparte recruited two regiments of Polish mercenaries, and half were dead within ten days of landing. A Swedish ship arrived with military munitions; every crew member expired but a cabin boy. Newly arrived French officers succumbed so quickly that those already on the island avoided befriending them, lest the new companion be in a shroud a week later. What the French called mal de Siam, named after similar fevers seen in the kingdoms of Asia, retreated in the cooler winter months. But it doomed every campaign and made a mockery of every march. The white race seemed cursed.

The remnants of French power had retreated to Cap-Francois on the north Haitian coast, a ring of fortifications keeping their former slaves at bay. Here they held, and withered. The grand avenue of trees that led into the city from the plantations was denuded, its palms chopped down to make breastworks. Between the stumps were crosses and the freshly heaped red dirt of graves, both filled and waiting. The few slaves who’d not escaped the city were made to dig dozens of new holes each day in anticipation that they would soon be filled by their masters.

The disease was worse in humid summer, and medical belief held that miasmas of air that rose from the swamps caused the malady. But as food grew scarcer and the siege continued, what the British called yellow jack persisted into the cooler months of October and November. Anxious celebrations were held by the French aristocracy to stave off despair. As wine cellars emptied, courage became more and more dependent on rum.

Here in this sunny death house we’d seek our son, Harry, and his kidnapper, Leon Martel. It was early November. We’d celebrated his third birthday of June 6 in his absence, and prayed he was well enough to see a fourth. Nothing was more commonplace in 1803 than the death of young children. For Astiza, separation had been agony. For me, it meant guilt and anger. I condemned myself for not better safeguarding our boy and chafed under my unaccustomed saddle, responsibility. I was a father, but so far mostly in name only.

From the sea, Cap-Francois still had the pleasing prospect of many a tropic town. A broad bay on Saint-Domingue’s north coast was fronted by a palm-lined boulevard at the water’s edge called the Quay Louis, a name left from royalist days. The city behind was like a stage set, its narrow flat platter of buildable land a porch in front of steep green mountains. It shimmered in the sun as if lit for effect.

Next to the quay was a row of sturdy brick and stone warehouses with red-tile roofs, such as one might find in a European port. In happier times this harbor area was thronged with wagons of rum and sugar, swank carriages, auctions of slaves, and quick commerce: island planters averaged higher annual incomes than French royalists had once boasted at home, and the nouveau-riche colonists spent their money as fast as it came in. Luxury furnishings would be hoisted from ferrying longboats. Trunks of dresses arrived from Paris shops, and tea and dinnerware came packed from China after transit in Europe. Trains of chained African captives would shuffle to be inspected, just as I had shuffled in chains in Tripoli. They were stripped naked and prodded like pieces of fruit.

But now the warehouses and factories were shuttered after a decade of war. The promenade looked tired and dirty, dotted with broken carts no one bothered to repair. There were drifts of refuse. Homeless blacks camped there in thatch shelters, their owners dead from massacre or fever. These Negroes didn’t flee because they feared being drafted by Dessalines and his rebels outside the fortifications. They weren’t claimed by anyone else because there was nothing for them to do, and no food left to feed them. They foraged, stole, and waited for the city to fall.

Beyond the quay were Catholic steeples and a grid of streets as neat as a Roman camp, leading to government houses, barracks, parks, and a parade ground. Backing all were tropical mountains so precipitous that they formed a natural wall, the height exaggerated by towers of cloud poised like opera curtains and colored by rainbows. The tangle of jungle and slippery mud was so steep that it made trying to attack from that direction a strategic impossibility for a large army. In a rain, muddy torrents ran down from the hills and through the city.

To the east, however, a river debouched from the Haitian plain that had once been a rich network of plantations. Between this river and the protective mountains, Cap-Francois was nearly flat and open toward the dawn. There the old sugar fields seemed to run forever, and there the rebel army prowled. French ramparts and redoubts built of piled dirt, logs, and stones snaked across from river to mountains to protect this last French capital, tricolor flags marking the position of cannon batteries. Beyond were columns of smoke and, Astiza and I assumed, the notoriously cruel general we had to seek if we were to learn more about the treasure of Montezuma. If Toussaint L’Ouverture had been the Black Spartacus, Jean-Jacques Dessalines was portrayed by his followers as the Black Caesar, and by his enemies as the Black Attila.

We were ferried ashore from the captured privateer that Lord Lovington had provided, an English crew flying the French flag from the ship until they could creep back out of the harbor.

We told authorities at the quay steps that the brig, the Toulon, was en route from Charleston to Martinique and had dropped my wife and me on a diplomatic mission. With Bonaparte’s permission, I was to judge if the French attempt to hold Saint-Domingue could ever succeed and, if not, make recommendations to the American and French governments on the disposition of Louisiana.

It was plausible enough. Yet sentries stared at us as if we were lost.

Why had we been put ashore in Hades?

What a wonder the Paris of the Antilles must once have been! Clear, warm water lapped at mossy stone steps that led from the boat landing to a stone plaza between town and sea. The bay was blue sapphire, the shallow sands golden. A stone balustrade worthy of Versailles marked the perimeter of the breakwater, but after years of war it was marred, chips knocked away by cannon and musket shot. Decorative pillars held up what once must have been a welcoming monument, but that statuary, too, had been blasted away like the nose of the Sphinx. Other royal statues in the parks were headless, a reminder of revolution a dozen years before.

To our right, or west, was a stone fort. Leclerc’s army had stormed it to recapture Cap-Francois from the rebels nearly two years before, and it showed fresh repairs from bombardment. Black cannon jutted from embrasures, but soldiers were invisible, artillerymen staying out of the sun. I was struck by the somnolent quiet of the place, a city waiting for the end.

A French lieutenant named Levine was summoned from the fort to study the forged documents I brought. Lord Lovington’s Antiguan office had helped make French and American papers testifying to my diplomatic status.

“Your mission is out of date, monsieur,” he said. He spoke to me but looked at my wife, his eyes a mix of appreciation and speculation. Maybe he expected me to expire of yellow fever within days, removing the annoyance of a husband. I wished the same plague upon him. “We’re told Louisiana was sold to America late this spring.”

News travels slowly, so my surprise was genuine. “If a sale of Louisiana has already been concluded, I couldn’t be happier,” I said grandly. “I had a hand in the early negotiations, and now can take some credit for success.”

“It’s not just that, monsieur. With renewal of war between England and France, our position here is even more precarious. A British blockade could force our defeat. I must counsel that you put your wife in grave jeopardy by bringing her here.”

I turned to scan the sea. “My wife has a mind of her own, and I see no British ships.” This was my little joke, since I was looking directly at the masquerading Toulon. “But I would like to bring the freshest assessment possible back to my American government. Is it possible to obtain an interview with the commanding general, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, Vicomte de Rochambeau?”

Levine glanced at Astiza again, as if thinking that was not the best of ideas. “I am sure something can be arranged,” he nonetheless said. “Do you require lodging?”

“If you could suggest a still-functioning guesthouse.”

“It functions. Just.”

The lieutenant called a carriage. Our wardrobe was modest, but we’d borrowed a large empty trunk from Lovington so we’d look the part of baggage-heavy diplomats. Our black hire gave us a quizzical look when he lifted the container into the vehicle. We should have stuffed it with extra blankets, but too late now. Then a crack of the whip and Astiza and I rode into town.

While the main boulevards were cobbled, most of the side streets were dirt or, when it rained (which was almost daily), mud. Some buildings were masonry as firmly rooted as a German burgher’s, but the majority were wooden island colonials, elevated on posts a few feet off the ground. Palm fronds, litter, and lumber hid underneath.

“The stilts let the breeze and water through,” our black teamster told us, in thickly accented French. “Hurricane, too.”

The buildings were mostly two stories high, with a continuous arcade along the bottom floor that ran above the ground like a floating sidewalk. From the bedrooms above jutted narrow French balconies with iron railings, just large enough for an occupant to step from a bedroom to survey the world, hang laundry, or empty a chamber pot. Flowers spilled from planting boxes-ragged looking in the stress of the siege-and paint flaked in the humidity.

Despite the humid decay and stress of war, the whites (some of them French born and some locally born Creoles, like Napoleon’s own wife, Josephine) dressed smartly, if illogically. Even in the heat there were plenty of splendid blue uniforms, tailed coats, and dresses that closed all the way to the throat, reflecting new fashion. At least the civilian hats were broad-brimmed, and often white or straw.

More eye-catching were the coloreds. Even besieged, the city was at least a third black and mulatto from house servants, field slaves, and freemen who hadn’t joined the rebellion. The worst were in rags, but the mixed-race population formed a secondary aristocracy at Cap-Francois that was more finely attired. There was a complicated gradation of color with the lightest skin conveying the highest status. Quadroons were the offspring of a mulatto and white, mustees of a quadroon and white, and mustefinos, the finest of all coloreds, were from white and mustee-seven-eighths European but still “colored” by custom and law. Relations between this palette of skin had once been as precisely regulated as court ritual, and now habits were breaking down. Even the loveliest tan had been caught up in an enormously complicated war.

When the revolt began in 1791, Lovington had explained, there were approximately thirty thousand whites, forty thousand mulattos, and more than half a million black slaves in Saint-Domingue. In the last dozen years all three racial groups had at times both allied or been at odds with each other, while forming temporary partnerships with invading Spanish, English, and French. Slaughter had been met with counter-slaughter, and victories with betrayal. Many of the rich had already fled, and I’d seen some of the refugees disembarking two years before in New York City.

Yet what glories of the human skin still mingled in this city! People moved slowly here, but with a floating, flowing gait enchanting in its gracefulness, the sway of the women accentuating hips and bust. Their smoothness made the white troops seem clumsy by comparison, and their beauty was striking with colors from cream through nut, cocoa, coffee, chocolate, and ebony. Teeth were bright, necks high, muscles smooth, carriages erect, and some colored men and women wore fabulous hats topped with plumage as bright as parrots. In gayer times, this would have been paradise.

Cap-Francois, however, showed the wear and tear of war. Paint was unobtainable. Gunfire pocked bricks from when the city was taken by blacks in 1793 and then back by the French in 1802, with numerous battles between. Several blocks were blackened shells. Even in sections still inhabited, broken windows were boarded rather than repaired, because there was little glazing and fewer glaziers. Garbage lay in heaps because it was too dangerous to cart it to the countryside, and the slaves who’d performed this job had fled. The entire town had a pungent odor of rot, sewage, and smoke, with the redeeming whiff of the sea.

“This place has the smell of disease,” Astiza murmured. “I fear for Horus if that monster brought him here. Martel is no nurse.”

“And Harry is a handful. I’m hoping he’s vexed his captor. Maybe by now the devil wants to give him back.” It was a poor attempt at humor, but we needed to lift our spirits.

My secret worry, however, was that my three-year-old had adapted to captivity and kidnapper quite well, and scarcely remembered his father at all.

Cap-Francois also had the scent of a farmyard. Some of the burned-out lots now held penned animals, presumably brought into town for food. There were cows, donkeys, sheep, and chickens. Goats and pigs wandered freely. Flies buzzed off deposits of manure.

The city’s squares were still geometrically planted with palms that shaded shaggy lawns and sculpted shrubbery. But instead of statuary there were gibbets from which rebels hung. We passed three decomposing black bodies while journeying from the port to guesthouse, the corpses turning in the breeze like weathercocks. No one but us gave them even a passing glance.

We took quarters on the Rue Espagnole, not far distant from Government House, where we’d find Rochambeau. The British had provided a little money for expenses since we were otherwise destitute; how I missed my emerald! It was just as well there was little to buy in this besieged city since our allowance was so modest: I’ve always felt pinched doing government work, better to stick with trade and gaming.

“Everyone seems to be waiting,” Astiza said as she sat on the bed.

The guesthouse was shabby from neglect, shutters broken and small green lizards clinging to its walls. The maids were sullen, the floors grimy. My dreams of joining the wealthy were once more in abeyance, while Aztec riches beyond imagination beckoned somewhere in the Caribbean.

It was time to spy.

I looked toward Rochambeau’s headquarters. A hundred yards from its door was a guillotine, blade bright in the sun.