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as far away as Europe—a place which he could only construct from their reports, since he had never left the island of his birth. Even as their enemy, he maintained certain contacts among the French Republican whites; it was no accident that his proclamation at Camp Turel had been issued on the same day that Commissioner Sonthonax had announced the abolition of slavery in all Saint Domingue. Yet Sonthonax had made his statement from a position of great weakness, as events now seemed to prove.
    As for Toussaint himself, his name was not yet known to many—as he had, up to now, preferred. With the proclamation from Camp Turel he had committed himself to step out of the shadows which had hidden and comforted him throughout the first years of the slave rebellion. In which direction ought he to go from here? The English invaders certainly meant to uphold and restore slavery, along with the interests of the white and colored landowners who were their allies in the west. And for all their support of the black rebels, the Spanish also maintained slavery in their own territory, though with considerably less fervor—yet there was no thought of abolition there. The beleaguered French Republicans in the colony were currently declared for general liberty, for the little their actual force was worth, but whether that declaration would be confirmed in Europe was unknown. Toussaint understood the colony to be tossed among the European powers like a precious bauble, a stake or a pawn in their games of war. As yet he did not know enough to reason his way to an outcome. The bits of information he possessed lay quietly in his mind, like seeds.
    He narrowed his vision now as he closed his eyes almost completely, his mental map contracting toward its center: his own men camped in concentric rings around the grand’case and the cane mill of Habitation Thibodet. Somewhere among them would be the new man who had come today, bearing the useful story about André Rigaud, the mulatto general who was fighting the English in the south. Guiaou. The scars made him memorable, the story more so. He would be resting now, after that long wandering. This thought itself was restful to Toussaint, who spread his hands on his knees and slept, still sitting upright in the chair, until the rain had altogether stopped.
    Sometime after full dark the rain broke off with a shock of sudden silence, soon filled with rising voices of insects in the trees. The shift in sound was sufficient to rouse Doctor Hébert from the heavy sleep into which he had fallen. Nanon had gone out, leaving him a lit candle. He washed himself quickly, dressed, and went onto the gallery, where he found his sister Elise and her husband Xavier Tocquet already gathered with the Frenchman who had somewhat mysteriously turned up that morning. Tocquet was drinking a glass of rum and rolling an unlit Spanish cigar in his fingers. He had not troubled to put on shoes, and for that the doctor rather envied him.
    “Ah,” said Bruno Pinchon, turning to greet the doctor. “Voilà le propriétaire!”
    “What?” the doctor said, bemused. In point of fact, Habitation Thibodet had passed to Elise on the death of her first husband, and so the plantation now technically belonged to Xavier Tocquet if it could be said to belong to anyone in the current state of affairs. But Pinchon carried on, excitedly, before the doctor could correct him.
    “But it’s marvelous here!” the guest declared. He was a smallish man, about the doctor’s height but thinner, with disheveled wings of black hair and small, dark, moist eyes. He had also been drinking rum, perhaps to excess, the doctor thought.
    “The men at work, the fields in good order—practically everything is well in hand,” Pinchon enthused. “It’s a miracle, you would not believe the disorders I’ve seen.”
    “Indeed,” said the doctor, who had himself been borne along by several different torrents of fire and blood since the slaves of Saint