The Boiling Season by Christopher Hebert

life at Habitation Louvois, the world I had become acquainted with through Senator Marcus quickly disappeared from view. I was able to go days and weeks at a time with no other preoccupation than exploring my new home—its endless paths and vast, empty rooms and disguised, secret cupboards. I had been left alone to discover the relics of a lost civilization, the island trapped in time. As far as I was concerned, the entire world was contained within the borders of our stone walls and iron gate.
    Yet, however separate I was from the latest upsetting incidents in the capital, there was nothing I could do to entirely shut out the rumors. They slipped in like stowaways whenever I received an occasional visitor, sent by Mme Freeman to perform one or another task. In this way, I learned that a few days after I arrived here two journalists foolish enough to attach bylines to work criticizing certain allies of the president had been beaten nearly to death.
    A week later, the interior minister—a vocal opponent of M. Mailodet and a friend of Senator Marcus—was gravely wounded in a mysterious bombing.
    Still, however awful the news, it was easy to believe these things were happening somewhere far away. Here we received no visits from ambassadors and government ministers. Here no bodies were deposited along the road. In fact, the road went almost entirely untraveled. Politics were not only irrelevant, they would have been an unwelcome distraction from the work at hand.
    In addition to the violence and terror, I was also finally free of the nagging reminders of the place I was from, the most hopeless place I had ever known. And behind me now were the hours I had wasted in the lobby of the Hotel Erdrich, content to listen to the buzz of important men with engagements to keep.
    In my own way I had become one of those important men myself.
    On those rare occasions I cared to look, the capital existed only as distant lights sparkling through the trees beyond the balcony.
    O ne morning about a month after I took up residence at the estate, I awoke to discover legions of laborers waiting at the gate. They had been dispatched by Mme Freeman’s architects to begin the renovations. There were masons and carpenters and plasterers and steel workers and gardeners armed with scythes and machetes. Madame’s architects were there too, a pair of light-skinned mulattoes who zipped down the drive in a sleek white convertible with a brown leather top folded in the back. One was directing the restoration of the manor house, the other the recovery of the landscape. In a circle around those two gathered the foremen of the different trades.
    That first morning, standing on the balcony, I watched the men disperse from their separate camps and converge on the manor house, and I felt as though I were watching colonies of ants descend upon a fallen crumb.
    In the coming weeks and months, work on the manor house progressed slowly. Electricity was no less erratic here than everywhere else; if anything, our remoteness made it even worse. Sometimes we went days without power. The telephones were dead, too. President Mailodet had recently introduced a special tax levy to pay for modernizing the phone lines. The money had been collected in full, but not a penny had been spent.
    Much of the manor house’s foundation needed to be rebuilt. After nearly two hundred years of exposure to the elements, significant portions of the mortar holding together the stone had turned to dust. Matching the original construction without the original materials proved an unending challenge. For many of the crumbling columns and balustrades we had to make new molds before we could recast them.
    The weather also slowed us down. Generally it was dry—too dry—but when it rained it rained enough to unbury the dead, and we often lost several days of work at a time. One afternoon a storm unexpectedly tore through, reducing the masons’ scaffolding to a pile of