There had been a time – not long ago – when he had numbered himself among them. In those days it had been good to know that he could count on his friends to see him remembered and wept for, one last time.
His mother certainly wouldn’t have invited that many people into her house.
‘According to Shaw,’ January went on, his eyes on the crowded house gallery opposite, ‘Patrick Derryhick intended to invest in cotton plantations upriver, in partnership with the young Viscount Foxford. Derryhick was a second-cousin of the family, completely impoverished until the wealthy aunt, whose private fortune the Stuarts had been counting on to retrieve the family acres from mortgage, left her money not to Germanicus Stuart, the twelfth Viscount Foxford, but to Derryhick instead.’
‘Ouch.’
‘I’m sure that’s what the entire senior branch of the family said after the reading of Aunt Elodie’s will. The Foxford lands in County Mayo cannot be sold because of the entail, but for three generations there has been virtually nothing to support them with.’
In the yard below them, children chased each other wildly in sticky-handed excitement. Thunder grumbled, and wind pushed a breath of gray coolness down on them from sullenly gathering clouds.
‘And had Derryhick in fact murdered Foxford’s father? Not to mention Uncle Diogenes’s son?’
‘There are two schools of thought on that.’
Bernadette Metoyer – a handsome woman in her forties whose tignon flashed with a sable firestorm of jet fringe – interrupted them, climbing the stair halfway and demanding, ‘What have the City Guards found out about Rameses’s body? Not that they will inquire, of course, the corrupt, lazy, blankitte pigs.’
It was a question January had answered twenty times between the time he’d entered the house and the time he’d located Rose in the crowd, but he replied, again, that it looked to be one of three men, but the Guards needed more proof before they made an accusation, and he descended to take the handsome chocolatiere’s arm.
‘And what proof do they need, to start searching the swamp?’ Madame Metoyer sniffed. ‘That’s where they’ll have thrown him.’
‘Probably,’ January agreed. In a week, in this weather, the body of an unidentifiable black man would raise no great fuss, unlike that of a white man traveling with those who seemed to have good reason to wish him dead.
He guided her up the back steps, across the crowded gallery, and into the dimness of the house. Under ordinary circumstances, the wake for a member of the FTFCMBS – or indeed for anyone in the tight-knit community of the libres at the back of town – would have involved wailing grief in one room, and lively music, jokes, dancing, and great quantities of food and tafia in the other, as people came to pay their respects and offer the family their support. But the circumstances were not ordinary. So there was neither the gay music nor the howling lamentation that the blankittes – the whites – found so disconcerting at such events.
Men and women gathered in the long central dining-room and parlor, in bedrooms and dressing-rooms and cabinets, hashing over the unfinished, and consuming the food that everyone had brought for the wake. In the parlor, Mohammed LePas, the blacksmith, was quietly organizing where the men would meet in the morning, to search the swamps that lay at the back of town. In the swamp-side bedroom – as such things were reckoned in Creole houses – the buzz of gossip among the women was like the throb of a bee tree. January picked out his sisters in the group: Olympe in her best dark Sunday Church-dress, like a market-woman save for the shape of her tignon, which announced to anyone who didn’t already know it that she was one of the town’s voodoo-queens; and the lovely Dominique, in sober spinach-green silk with touches of black where they wouldn’t wash out her café-crème complexion. ‘Liselle is in the cabinet.’ Dominique nodded toward the smaller chamber, set up as Rose’s office. ‘Claire and Iphigènie are with her.’ She named the girl’s closest friends.
‘Good,’ said January. ‘Best she’s not alone right now.’ Half a dozen infants were laid down on the bed, tiny faces like a box of bonbons. Dominique’s year-old daughter Charmian slept among them, perfect as a furled rosebud. The French doors were open on to the front gallery that overlooked Rue Esplanade, and the older children dashed in and out, while mothers gauged the day’s clouded darkness against how quickly they could get home before rain began.
Rain was beginning to patter as January returned to Rose. ‘You were about to tell me how Patrick Derryhick had murdered the previous Viscount Foxford,’ she said.
‘Actually, the eleventh Viscount succumbed to perfectly natural causes at the age of threescore and two.’ January divided with her the piece of Hèlaine Passebon’s excellent peach tart that he’d picked up in the dining room and settled in the chair she’d brought out for him. ‘Patrick Derryhick, in addition to being extremely charming where wealthy old aunts were concerned, was apparently what the English call a complete bad hat. He drank and whored his way through Trinity College, Dublin, and then Oxford, gambled his modest patrimony to perdition, and – at least according to Uncle Diogenes – had the unpleasant trick of drawing others, less resilient than he, into his way of life. His “merry band”, as they called themselves, included the son of the eleventh Viscount Foxford, who drank himself to death on a bet in Paris at the age of thirty, leaving behind a much-relieved wife and a five-year-old son.’
‘The current twelfth Viscount.’
‘Germanicus Stuart.’
‘Who suddenly decides to go into the cotton-growing business with Derryhick and crosses the ocean in his company? A thing possible and yet improbable, as Aristotle says. How impossible would it have been for that young man to have murdered Derryhick and sneaked his body into someone else’s coffin?’
‘Not impossible at all.’ January edged his chair back from the gallery rail as the rain poured down in earnest. ‘Beauvais Quennell, his wife, and his mother all sleep in upstairs rooms looking over Rue Douane – not surprisingly, nobody wants to sleep over that back-parlor. With a large hotel behind them, they must be used to noises in the night. Any man of normal strength could have lowered Derryhick’s body on to the stable roof and thence to the ground, to be switched into the coffin, and from there it’s only a few hundred yards to the river, with poor Rameses in the handcart.’
‘The Swamp would be safer.’
‘If you were familiar with New Orleans you’d know that. I doubt a foreigner would even be sure exactly where it lies, though Uncle Diogenes at least appears to have heard of it. There’s a little more danger of being seen on the waterfront, but not a great deal at three in the morning at this time of year.’
‘Hmph.’ Her mouth took on the expression it did when one of her pupils was explaining that she hadn’t the slightest idea who might have taken another girl’s coral ring. ‘And where do Uncle Diogenes and M’sieu le Vicomte claim they were while all this was going on?’
‘Uncle Diogenes was gambling somewhere on Rue Royale – he says. You know how many gaming establishments there are within a two-minute walk of the Iberville. He returned to the hotel at three in the morning and found Droudge and Foxford both asleep. Foxford’s key was gone from the desk, as if he were in his room all evening, but one of the porters saw him come in through the side entrance at a little after two thirty. He claims he had gone out for a walk and forgot to turn it in.’
‘People do, of course.’
‘He claims he left the hotel at nine thirty – he had been out earlier with Derryhick – but no one saw him go. The man who cleans the patrons’ boots says that his were only barely splashed.’
‘And is M’sieu Quennell’s yard paved?’
January grinned. Rose never missed a trick. ‘Bricked.’
‘Hmm. Like the banquettes of the French Town between Rue Douane and the levee.’
‘As you say. The sheets on his bed had been changed for fresh – only slept on for part of one night, by the look of them – and there were marks on the roof of Quennell’s stable bene
ath the windows of the Viscount’s room. Derryhick’s watch, with blood smeared on its case, was found beneath his bed.’
Rose’s eyes narrowed behind her spectacle lenses; January could almost hear the clicking of her thoughts. ‘It would have been fobbed, surely? It’s not that easy for a watch to come out of a vest-pocket.’
‘He struggled with his killer.’
‘I suppose.’ She frowned into the distance, picturing it. ‘Was the chain broken? Or the buttonhole of his vest torn?’
January shook his head. It was an old game they played, inventing possibilities and impossibilities – sometimes purely for each other’s entertainment, the same way they would tell each other tales about strangers seen in the audience at the opera: that one looks as if she has a secret lover; that one surely must have a collection of fifty thousand waistcoats . . .
After a time, she asked, ‘Would either of the traveling companions – Uncle Diogenes or Mr Droudge – have a reason for wanting poor Mr Derryhick dead?’
‘Not to hear them tell it,’ said January. ‘I won’t know until I’ve talked to Hannibal.’ He got to his feet and stood for a moment, only breathing the cool benediction of the rain. On the back gallery of the house he could see his mother, still as slim and stylish as the young placées who made their appearance at the Blue Ribbon balls, deep in talk with her friends, most of them former placées like herself. Among them, Denise Glasson stood out like Mozart’s Queen of the Night, veiled to her heels and topped, like the hearse, with a funereal confection of black ostrich-plumes, an advertisement for the depth of her sorrow.
Hannibal will lose his two cents. Not once had he seen his mother and Olympe in the same room.
In time, Rose said, ‘I should go in. M’sieu Passebon –’ she named the President of the FTFCMBS – ‘has offered to see poor Liselle back to her room: I think Iphigènie is staying with her tonight, to look after the boys. What a – what a horror. And yet . . . how much worse it would have been for her, if when the coffin fell and split open, it had been Rameses inside. Someone should thrash that brother of hers.’
‘Good heavens!’ January widened his eyes in dazzled enlightenment. ‘I didn’t realize a drunkard’s ways could be mended by thrashing,’ and Rose thwacked him on the biceps with the back of her hand. But her sigh acknowledged his truth, and she stood.
‘In any case, I’ll need to be on hand when the crowd thins out, to keep Madame Glasson from murdering, or being murdered by, Madame Ramilles . . .’
‘Olympe promised me she’d keep them apart,’ said January. ‘On the subject of drunkards, I think I need to see Hannibal before I’m due at the Countess Mazzini’s tonight. I suspect Liselle isn’t the only one who shouldn’t be alone this afternoon.’
Five more people asked January, as he edged through the dining room and parlor, what progress he and ‘that American animal’ (as the free colored community universally referred to Shaw) had made that morning toward finding poor Rameses’s body. After he’d thanked Olympe’s husband Paul for acting as host for the remainder of the night, clasped hands with Crowdie Passebon and Mohammed LePas in promise to join the morrow’s search, and located his umbrella, he encountered two more queries as he stepped out through the French door of his study and descended to Rue Esplanade.
But as he paced the brick banquette under the steady torrent of the rain, his mind returned not to that squirming infant he’d held in his arms thirty-four years ago, but to the blunt-featured Irish face lying slack in the cemetery mud, and to Hannibal’s hoarse light whisper: ‘We were at Oxford together.’ Sitting on the tomb at the dead man’s side, he’d begun to say, ‘I’d thought—’ and had stopped himself.
Thought what?
Thought we’d all live forever, when we were young?
He knew what he’d find when he reached the Swamp.
Born a slave, raised first on a sugar plantation and then – free – in New Orleans, January had adapted himself to the almost-unthinking habit of making constant small adjustments in his behavior depending on where he was and who he was with: sniffing for danger, listening for sounds. Even the strongest black men took, perforce, their example from Compair Lapin, that wise and wily trickster rabbit of childhood tales, rather than from the defiant warrior heroes of the whites. For a slave, defiance was suicide, and suicide was the desertion of your friends and family to their unprotected fate.
You did what you must – paid whatever it cost – to survive. He’d learned early that there were places that were never safe to tread – like his former master’s bedroom at Bellefleur Plantation. That was good for a beating whatever the circumstances. Then there were places that were usually safe, and places that were likelier to be safer at certain times or under certain conditions.
The case in point today was the Swamp, that nebulous district that lay where Girod and Perdidio Streets petered out into muddy trails among the elephant-ear and stagnant pools upriver of the cemetery. Saloons patched together from tent canvas and broken-up flat-boats strung along unpaved hog-wallow streets, offering games of chance, inexpensive coition and forty-rod whiskey for the benefit of ruffians, filibusters, and river-rats of all descriptions. At three o’clock in the afternoon, January knew most of the Swamp’s inhabitants would be awake and stirring, but the rain would keep them indoors for awhile yet.
He also knew – although the knowledge operated at the wordless level of instinct – that he’d be safer approaching the Broadhorn Saloon across the wooded lots from behind, rather than by the more direct route up Perdidio Street itself, always provided he didn’t trip over some drunk Kaintuck sleeping it off under a snaggle of hackberry bushes. If encountered singly, the worst a man of color usually got was threats and petty humiliation: piss stains and cigar burns. In groups, the encounter could be fatal. January moved with care.
The Broadhorn was a wooden house, a story and a half tall, L-shaped, unpainted, leaky, and squalid. Four dilapidated sheds at the edge of the trees behind it housed a collection of the most hardbitten women January had ever encountered in his life. It was a mystery to him how these two-legged she-wolves ever got customers, but they did. Two men were waiting, in the thinning rain, outside these ‘cribs’ when he emerged cautiously from the woods, and he stood out of sight for the five minutes it took for Fat Mary and the Glutton to finish previous bookings and admit them.
Once the yard was clear of possible observers, January climbed the rickety outside stair to the attic above the short end of the L.
The door at the top hung open in the spongy heat. Hannibal Sefton lay on the floor a foot or so back from the threshold, a square, brown whiskey-bottle empty on its side near his hand. A tin pitcher – the usual transport receptacle for the contents of the liquor barrel under the bar downstairs – lay empty, likewise, in a reeking pool of spilled brownish alcohol.
January checked his friend’s breathing, more out of habit than anything else. He’d had plenty of experience over the past three and a half years of Hannibal’s sprees. He’d brought a little powdered lobelia-root wrapped in a twist of clean paper, and this he mixed with water from one of the dozen tin catch-pans that stood about the attic beneath the ceiling leaks. He dragged his friend to a sitting position by the door and poured the mixture down his throat. Then he held Hannibal by the back of his coat and by his long hair while he vomited, and when he was finished, carried him to the bed.
Hannibal didn’t open his eyes. ‘You had to do that?’ he whispered.
‘I need you.’ January walked back to the door – there was a sort of porch rail across the bottom half of the opening, but no actual porch – and looked out, in time to see one of the whores emerge from her shed and cross the yard toward the saloon proper, barefoot, scratching under her uncorseted breasts. ‘Miss Margaret.’ January called out her real name, though every man from Vicksburg to the mouths of the Mississippi knew her as Railspike. She stopped, stood in the faint final patters of occasional rain as he descended the ladder-like steps and crossed to h
er with the air of apologetic subservience that was the only thing that would lower the chances of his getting the tar beat out of him should any of the Broadhorn’s customers emerge just then.
The honor of white womanhood must be protected at all costs.
‘Miss Margaret, would you know if there’s coffee in the kitchen?’ He spoke English. This wasn’t the part of town where whites spoke French. ‘I’m afraid Hannibal’s poorly.’
‘What the hell happened?’ Genuine concern shone in Railspike’s usually hard eyes. January had seen her eviscerate a drunk sailor with a Bowie-knife and kick the dying man as she’d walked away, but she had a soft spot for Hannibal in whatever was left of her heart. ‘He ain’t got pukin’ drunk in the daytime since I known him. An’ he ain’t never got so drunk he’d ask for liquor outa the bar barrel.’
‘Friend of his died.’
‘Oh, Jesus, Ben, I am sorry,’ she said with complete sincerity and distress. ‘You go on up, stay with him. I’ll bring you up some coffee.’
‘Miss Margaret, you are an angel.’
Coming back into the slant-roofed chamber, January thought Hannibal had passed out again, but when he sat on the end of the cot, the fiddler murmured, ‘Wine is as good as life to a man . . . What life is then to a man that is without wine?’
‘But a walking shadow,’ replied January gravely. ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But I need you sober.’
‘God’s teeth and toenails, Benjamin—’ Hannibal pulled himself gingerly up so that his back might rest against the wall behind him, then suddenly turned a ghastly color and reached for the slop jar. After an agonizing time, his head and one long-fingered hand hanging over the edge of the bed, he whispered, ‘Heaven pity the man who needs me sober.’
Dead and Buried Page 4
