"Can you ask your Toledano to lift anchor, move his ship a few miles out to sea, and marry them? Fleur Hirondelle and I will be witnesses."
And so, four hours later, aboard a deplorable schooner flying a Cuban flag, Captain Romeiro Toledano, a small man only a little over a meter and a half tall, who compensated for the indignity of his stature with a black beard that barely left his eyes in view, married Rosette Sedella and Maurice Solar, as the young man had called himself since he broke with his father. Witnesses to the wedding were Zacharie in his gala trappings, but still with dirty fingernails, and Fleur Hirondelle, who for the occasion had put on a long bearskin coat and a necklace of the teeth of the same animal. While Zarite dried her tears, Maurice took off his mother's gold medal he always wore and put it around Rosette's neck. Fleur Hirondelle handed out goblets of champagne, and Zacharie made a toast: "To this symbolic couple of the future, when races will be mixed and all human beings will be free and equal under the law." Maurice, who had often heard the same words from his teacher Cobb, and who had become very sentimental during his typhus attack, let out a long, deep sob.
Two Nights of Love
For lack of a more conventional place, the newlyweds spent their one day and two nights of love in the tight little cabin of Romeiro Toledano's schooner, never suspecting that in a secret compartment below the floor there was a crouched slave who could hear them. This ship was the first step in that fugitive's journey to freedom. Toledano, Zacharie, and Fleur Hirondelle believed that slavery was going to end soon, and in the meantime they helped the most desperate, who could not wait until that time.
That night, Maurice and Rosette made love on a narrow bunk of planks, rocked by the sea in light filtered through the worn red felt that covered the little porthole. At first they touched tentatively, timidly, even though they had grown up exploring one another, and not a single nook of their souls was closed to the other. They had changed, and now they had to learn to know each other again. Before the marvel of having Rosette in his arms, Maurice forgot the little he had learned in his prancing with Giselle, the lying seductress of Savannah. He trembled. "It's from the typhus," he said by way of apology. Moved by that sweet clumsiness, Rosette took the initiative and began slowly to take off her clothes, as Violette Boisier had taught her privately. Thinking about that sent her into such a fit of laughing that Maurice thought she was making fun of him.
"Don't be silly, Maurice, how can I be making fun of you?" she told him, drying the tears of her laughter. "I am remembering the classes on making love that Madame Violette offered to the students of placage."
"Don't tell me she gave you classes!"
"Of course-did you think that seduction is improvised?"
"Maman knows this?"
"Not the details."
"What was that woman teaching you girls?"
"Not much, because soon madame had to stop the practical classes. Loula convinced her that the mothers would not tolerate it, and the ball would go to the devil. But she got in lessons for me. She used bananas and cucumbers to explain."
"Explain what!" Maurice exclaimed. He was beginning to find it amusing.
"How you men are, and how easy it is to manipulate you because you have everything outside. She had to teach me somehow, don't you see? I have never seen a naked man, Maurice. Well, just you, but you were a little boy then."
"Let's suppose that something has changed since then." He smiled. "But don't be expecting bananas or cucumbers. You'd be committing the sin of optimism."
"Oh? Let me see."
In his hiding place, the slave lamented that there wasn't a hole between the planks of the deck that he could look through. After the laughing followed a silence that seemed too long to him. What could those two be doing, and be so quiet? He couldn't imagine; in his experience love was much noisier. When the bearded captain opened the trapdoor to let him out to eat and stretch his bones, taking advantage of the noise from all the people gambling and drinking and the darkness of night, the runaway was at the point of telling him not to bother, he could wait.
Romeiro Toledano foresaw that the newly married pair, in accord with reigning custom, would not come out of their retreat. And following instuctions given by Zacharie, he took them coffee and pastries and set them discreetly at the door of the cabin. In normal circumstances Maurice and Rosette would have spent at least three days closed in the room, but they did not have that much time. Later the good captain left them a tray with delicious food from the Marche Francais Tete had sent: shellfish, cheese, warm bread, fruit, sweets, and a bottle of wine that hands quickly pulled inside.
In the too short hours of the one day and two nights that Rosette and Maurice had together, they made love with the tenderness they had shared in childhood and the passion that now inflamed them, improvising one thing and then another to please each other. They were very young, they had been in love forever, and there was the terrible incentive of parting: they did not need instructions from Violette Boisier. During some intervals they took time to talk, never breaking their embrace, of things unfinished and of their immediate future. The only thing that made it possible for them to endure the separation was the certainty that they would be together as soon as Maurice found work and a place where Rosette would be comfortable.
At dawn on the second day they dressed, kissed for the last time, and cautiously went out to face the world. The schooner was again anchored, and in the port Zacharie and Tete and Sancho were waiting with Maurice's trunk. The uncle also handed his nephew four hundred dollars, which he boasted he had won in a single night of playing cards. The youth had bought his passage using his new name, Maurice Solar, the abbreviated surname of his mother, which he pronounced "Soler" in English. That bothered Sancho a little, who was proud of the sonorous Garcia del Solar, pronounced as it should be, So-lar.
Rosette was left behind on land, brokenhearted inside but feigning the serene attitude of someone who has everything she could want in this world, while Maurice waved to her from the deck of the clipper that would take him to Boston.
Purgatory
Valmorain lost his son and his health at a single blow. At the same moment that Maurice left the paternal house, never to return, something broke inside him. When Sancho and the others were able to get him up from the floor, they found that one side of his body was dead. Dr. Parmentier determined that his heart was not damaged, as Valmorain had always feared, but that he had suffered a stroke. He was nearly paralyzed, he was drooling, and he had lost control of his sphincter. "With time and a little luck you can improve a lot, mon ami, although you will never be the same as you were," Parmentier told him. He added that he knew patients who had lived many years after a similar attack. By signs, Valmorain indicated that he wanted to talk to him alone, and Hortense Guizot, who was watching him like an owl, had to leave the room and close the door. His sputterings were nearly incomprehensible, but Parmentier was able to understand that he feared his wife more than his illness. There was no doubt that Hortense would rather be left a widow than take care of an invalid who peed on himself, and she might be tempted to precipitate his death. "Do not worry, I will take care of that with only a few words," Parmentier assured him.
The doctor gave Hortense Guizot the medications and necessary instructions for the ill man, and advised her to find a good nurse; the recovery of her husband depended very much on the care he received. They should not contradict him or worry him: calm was fundamental. As they said good-bye, he held the woman's hand in an attitude of paternal consolation. "I want your husband to come out of this difficulty well, madame, because I do not believe that Maurice is prepared to take his place," he said. And he reminded her that Valmorain had not had an opportunity to change his will, and legally Maurice was still the family's single heir.