All Souls' Rising Read Free Page B

hand she held a glass half full of a cool-appearing liquid with a greenish tint. “Oh,” she said. “You have come.”
    The doctor stepped onto the planks of the gallery, removed his hat and inclined his head. “I have a terrible thirst,” he said. “I beg you.”
    “ Bien sûr ,” she said, and clapped her hands sharply together. The doctor waited. His horse, waiting in the yard with the reins on its neck, lowered its head and snorted at the dust and raised it. There were steps from within and the doctor turned. A mulatto woman in a madras turban came scurrying out of the central door, carrying another glass which she presented to the doctor with a sort of crouch. He took a long rash gulp which made him gasp, and held the glass a little away from him to look at it. The concoction was raw cane rum with lime juice and a cloying amount of sugar. He finished the drink in several more cautious sips, while the white woman spoke to the mulattress in Creole.
    “It is arranged,” she finally said, turning back to the doctor, who now noticed that her eyes seemed a little bloodshot. “My husband…” Her head swung away as her voice trailed off. She looked out across the compound toward the pole.
    “ Je vous remercie ,” Doctor Hébert said. There seemed no place to leave the glass; he stooped and set it on the floor. The horse shook its head as he approached. He took the reins and led it around the back of the grand’case and wandered among the outbuildings until he discovered the stable. At the rear of the roofed hall was a water trough made from an enormous dugout log. The horse drank and snuffled and blew onto the water and drank deeply again. The doctor watched its big throat working, then knelt and put two fingers into the trough. The water was cool and clear and he thought that it must often be replenished or changed. He cupped his hands and drank and ran his wet palms back over his hair. With a forefinger he detached a long soggy splinter from the side of the trough and watched it drift logily to the bottom.
    A groom of some sort had appeared at his back, but Doctor Hébert waved him away and led the horse to a stall himself, where he unsaddled it and gave it a bit of cane sugar from a cake he carried in the pocket of his duster. Slinging his saddlebags over his shoulder, he left the stable and walked back toward the grand’case .
    The barking had taken up again and the doctor approached the shed it seemed to come from. When he put his eye to the crack in the door a big brindled mastiff smashed against it, backed off and lunged again, striking head-on into the wood with all its weight and force. The doctor withdrew abruptly and continued his path to the house.
    A dark-haired man of middle height stood on the gallery. He wore a white shirt and breeches bloused into riding boots, and he held a gold-pommeled cane in both hands across his thighs.
    “ Bienvenu ,” he said, “to Habitation Arnaud. I myself am Michel Arnaud. You will dine here. You will pass the night.”
    “ Heureux ,” the doctor said, and bowed. “I am Antoine Hébert.”
    “Please to enter,” Arnaud said, indicating the open door with his cane. As the doctor passed through, another domestic relieved him of his saddlebags and carried them away through another doorway at the rear of the large central room. It was dim within, the oilpaper over the windows admitting little of the fading light.
    “In perhaps one hour we will go to table,” Arnaud said. Standing at the outer doorway, he swatted his thigh with the cane. “You will wish to rest, perhaps.”
    “Yes,” said Doctor Hébert. “Your people, they will feed my horse?”
    “Immediately,” Arnaud said, slapping himself once more with the cane as he turned farther out onto the gallery.
    In the small room at the rear the slave had hung the doctor’s saddlebags on a peg on the wall and stood waiting beside it, bobbing his head. He was barefoot and wore short pants and a loose shirt of