And she had not.
TWELVE
The uproar within the Countess’s house as he reached the back steps drove all thought of Isobel Deschamps from his mind. ‘Iodine,’ Belgian Louise wailed when he strode into the parlor. ‘She drank iodine—’
‘Trinchen,’ said Auntie Saba, coming down the stairs.
January bolted for the stair, and so strong was his upbringing – even after years in Paris of being able to go up any flight of stairs that he pleased – that for an instant he hesitated, wondering if he should take the backstairs . . .
To hell with it! He pounded up the hallowed treads reserved for white gentleman and found the upstairs hall crowded with girls in various stages of undress. The Countess was kneeling in shift and corset beside Trinchen’s bed, forcing egg and water down the girl’s throat for what was – by the look of the slop bucket – the fourth or fifth time.
‘Does it hurt?’ La Habañera touched January’s sleeve as he pushed through the door. ‘To die so – does it hurt?’
The sounds coming from the bed were horrible, but he paused long enough to say gently, ‘Yes. Yes, it hurts. Even if no one finds you and tries to stop you.’
The girl swallowed and spoke in a whisper, so the Countess wouldn’t hear. ‘Hurt worse than to live so?’
In Carnival season January knew the girls were bulled by five and six men a night – all of them drunk. He could hear her thoughts in her voice. She was fifteen, pure Creole Spanish with a complexion like alabaster, but he knew also that when that doe-like beauty faded she’d be working places like the shacks behind the Broadhorn.
What do I say? You’ll go to hell? Well, so what. She’s there already – looking over the edge into the next pit down.
In one of the other rooms, two girls were howling with grief. January heard Sybilla yell, ‘Mother o’ God, will the lot o’ ye’s shut yer cake holes? Christ bleedin’ Jesus, somebody get in here and lace me up!’
‘Does hope hurt worse?’ he asked softly in Spanish, and La Habañera nodded. ‘Do you still have that?’
‘Si.’
‘Good girl.’ He nodded into the room before him. ‘Pray for her.’
‘Si.’
‘Damn the lot of ’em.’ The Countess looked up from her task as January came in. ‘If she dies it’ll set the rest of ’em off.’
Nenchen was huddled up in the chair on the other side of the bed, weeping without a sound. Fanny, ever efficient with her golden hair still in curl papers, came in with another pitcher of clean water.
‘How long ago did she do this?’ January observed that Trinchen wore a clean shift – or one that had been clean at some recent point in the afternoon – and the laces of the corset that lay on the floor had been cut. She’d been getting ready for the evening then. Not long ago.
He knelt by the bed, laid his ear to the girl’s back, listening for the wild thready hammering of her heart.
The Countess waited till he straightened up before replying. ‘Nenchen thinks, not more than half an hour before she found her.’
‘Do you have charcoal? Clean charcoal powder.’ Fanny was sent darting off down the stairs to fetch the Countess’s medicine box. ‘Convulsions?’
The Countess shook her head, regarded him with a considering look in her velvet-brown eyes. ‘You know a good bit about this.’
‘I was trained with Gomez, the surgeon who used to practice over on Rue St Pierre. Fräulein –’ he beckoned Nenchen, who raised a tear-bloated face to stare at him as if she’d never seen him before – ‘can you stay by her?’ Then: ‘Thank you, Mamzelle,’ as Fanny held out the small packet of charcoal to him. ‘Would you mix that with the water, please – about three-quarters of that pitcher. Can you stay by your sister, Fräulein, and give her this water, a little at a time, all the night?’ He switched back from German to French to say to the Countess, ‘Sometimes we have to change what we are to get a living in this world.’
Their eyes met; she raised one plucked and painted brow. ‘Is that what you think I have done . . . Signor?’
He paused in the act of undraping the mosquito bar from above the bed, to spread its gauzy, tent-like folds to cover both Nenchen and her unconscious sister, and laid a hand on his heart. ‘I spoke only of myself . . . Countess. But I assume that, at some time in your life, you changed yourself from what you were – a girl like this one here, who could not fight back against what life did to her – into what you are now. I’m going to open the window, if I may, and close the door to clear some of the smell—’
‘Dear God, yes!’ The gaudy room reeked of iodine and vomit. ‘Fanny,’ she ordered – of the girls who weren’t in hysterics, the English girl seemed to be the only one who wasn’t getting dressed as if it were a night like other nights – ‘get some pastilles burning in the hall . . .’
‘Fräulein,’ asked January in German, ‘what happened? Did Fräulein Trinchen get word of her friend Quennell?’
Nenchen blinked up at him; she was a big buxom girl of perhaps nineteen, her blonde hair lying in a pulled ruin over her sloping white shoulders. She answered in the same language – January had never heard her use any other. ‘She knew he wants to marry that American cow, Professor. It stands to reason no rich American is going to want a whore like one of us, when he can marry the sister of his business partner and have money and a house. I told her he would be back . . .’ She gently stroked a sweat-matted tangle of hair away from that white, pinched face on the pillow. ‘She said then, “God, yes! He’ll have his fill of that whining American bitch soon.” But last night she cried, when she thought I was asleep. And the night before, also.’
In the next room he could hear the Countess cursing, and then the sudden smack of a palm on flesh; the weeping ceased abruptly. ‘Now you little sluts get yourselves presentable, and if I see a one of you sniveling in front of the gentlemen tonight . . .’
The short New Orleans twilight had already gone from the window when January opened it. Elspie appeared in the doorway: ‘Professor? Countess says, you need to be downstairs . . .’
Of course he did. As he descended – properly via the service stair, as befitted his station – he heard the parlormaid say, in the chamber behind him, ‘M’am say you can stay here with Trinchen, Fräulein.’
‘Did she get the push from Quennell?’ he asked the Countess as he shrugged into his fancy waistcoat and long-tailed coat.
The woman shrugged, her mouth full of hairpins as she twisted up her curls. ‘She may have. She may have only guessed he isn’t really going to take her with him when he marries the Schurtz bitch – have you seen her, by the way? Same height as that brother of hers – taller than little Martin by the span of my hand! He’ll have to stand on a box to get it in her. Same horse-face.’ She selected a red rose from the vase on the table – rather surprisingly, she grew them in a little garden behind the kitchen – and pinned it into her hair. ‘Same exquisite manners. He’ll be served if Schurtz does consent to the match. Who knows why whores want to end it all?’
She turned to face him, her eyes defiant, wise, and bitterly sad. ‘They’re always doing it. I’m just glad it wasn’t on a Saturday night. Hughie!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘You get the gas lit . . .’
January straightened his neckcloth, glanced in the parlor mirror as Elspie moved to unlock the front door. Aside from the heavier than usual reek of incense, the parlor looked normal, Sybilla already ensconced in her usual place on the sofa where the light was best and Clemence and Marie-Venise straightening the combs in each other’s hair. ‘It was kind of you,’ he said, ‘to let her sister stay up there with her tonight.’
‘Kind?’ The Countess snorted. ‘If she weren’t up there she’d be blubbering every time anyone said a word to her. You wouldn’t think it, would you? She’s got herself shut of three babies that I know about, and she nearly killed another girl in her last place for stealing her stockings. As long as she’s up there, I won’t have to worry about the girls trying to sneak
in and get at Trinchen’s jewelry and money drawer. Now, for God’s sake, play something. We’re late opening already.’
‘I am at your command, m’am.’
I am de sassy niggar, as dey call me Jim Brown.
I plays upon de Bonjo all about de town,
I hate de common niggar, I no shake dem by de ham,
O shaw, I am de leader ob de famus niggar ban,
I plays upon de fife, an I plays upon de drum,
I am de bes musian dat now or eber swum.
Lalle doodle, lalle doodle, lalle doodle laddle la,
Lalle doodle, lalle doodle, lalle doodle daddle da.
January wondered, as he played, whether the Countess would even mention Trinchen’s illness to Quennell, but the matter did not arise. Neither Quennell, nor Schurtz, put in an appearance that evening, though Dominic Lloyd came in late. He didn’t seem to realize that neither Nenchen nor Trinchen was present. And why should he?
January also wondered, with considerably more trepidation, whether Frank ‘Lord Montague’ Stubbs would arrive, and what would happen if he did. But the actor, too, seemed to have other fish to fry that night. Between choruses of ‘Ching a Ching Chaw’ and ‘Our Old Tom Cat’, January slipped periodically upstairs to check on his patient and, each time, found the German girl resting quietly. He wondered if he had done her a kindness by saving her life, or the reverse.
It was not, his confessor would tell him, for him to decide. Only do what the laws of God direct, and leave the results to the One who sees forward and backward in time. Still, where did one go who, at twenty, has seen the ruin of her life with a clarity that left nothing but the desire to be dead and buried with the secrets of the past?
When he descended the backstairs for the final time that night it was to find the parlor dark, Auntie Saba washing up the last of the glasses, and his three bodyguards gathered around the back-door, listening to an account of the night’s excitement from Elspie and Little J. ‘You downtown niggers drink American beer, Big J?’ inquired the Preacher as they set off through the blackness of the woods behind the Countess’s.
‘I have been known to try it.’ Rose, he knew, would be long asleep.
‘If that Englishman waitin’ for you,’ pointed out the solemn Four-Eyes, ‘he can just sit out a lil’ longer an’ get mosquito-bit a lil’ more,’ which made them all laugh. So January followed the others to the back room of an exceedingly shabby grocery, somewhere in the trees beyond the limits of the town proper, where the musicians who played in the seedier dives of the Swamp foregathered after hours for a final beer or glass of rum before going home.
The music at Django’s was less trained than what got played after hours downtown, its rhythms far more African, reminiscent of the music at the slave dances on Congo Square on Sundays. He bought a round for his bodyguards, another for the skinny young men improvising long syncopated variations on the out of tune piano, and listened to all the gossip from the American side of town: about the Preacher’s girlfriend, about Bill’s mother and younger brothers, and about what the election looked like from the other side of Canal Street.
By the smell, a number of country-bred blacks, new come into town, were smoking home-grown hemp as well as highly illegal cigars in the corners, but the beer was far from bad.
He returned to his house at close to dawn and let himself quietly in to find the oil-lamp in his study burned out. Lighting a candle, he saw, tucked beneath the lamp, a note in Rose’s neat, elegant handwriting:
Per your instruction, I attended Mass this afternoon, with the intention of corrupting the Deschamps family servants. By dint of untruths concerning a non-existent but Paris-bound niece, I scraped acquaintance with Lolotte, Mme Celestine Deschamps’s housekeeper. Lolotte informs me that Mlle Isobel’s maid – a good, sweet girl, she says, who never caused anyone any harm – was sold earlier in the week to a dealer bound for Natchez, two days after her mistress’s departure. It certainly sounds like she learned something in Paris, doesn’t it?
Pining for your love,
R.
THIRTEEN
‘My way of thinkin’,’ said the Preacher, when January asked him about the matter on the following night, ‘is that just ’cause a dealer say he bound for Natchez, don’t mean he bound for Natchez that day. This good maid – she bright or dark?’
‘Bright, probably.’ The back room of Django’s was slowly emptying out; only a few candles were left on the barrels that served as tables. Up at the piano, Four-Eyes was jangling out an extremely Congo version of ‘Dame Durden’, while a squat, sturdy Bill circled the tune in a far-ranging improvisation, plucking rather than bowing his bull fiddle, using the deep notes almost like a lazy drum. ‘We’re talkin’ ’bout a rich family. Creole French.’ It was nearly four in the morning, but in spite of Rose’s mimed horror when he’d come downstairs at close to noon the day before (‘Oh, Mon Dieu! Who is this stranger whom I do not recognize, in my house?’), January’s instincts told him that time with the uptown musicians, time getting to know the network of American Protestant freedmen, was time well spent.
‘Bright, then.’ The Preacher’s long fingers ticked off points on the barrel top among the damp beer-rings. ‘Trained maid, high yella, speaks French, she fetch eleven, twelve hundred dollars in Natchez. But for a fact, nobody in Natchez got that kind of money ’fore cotton harvest done in December. That girl still in town.’
‘You heard anything of it? Her name’s Pierrette.’
The Preacher thought, then shook his head. ‘Not a private sale, I ain’t. You gonna have to do this the hard way and look for her down Baronne Street.’
January had suspected as much, but the thought of searching through the dealers’ offices along that thoroughfare made his flesh creep.
Going down Baronne Street – feeling the fear he knew would whisper at him as he walked along the board sidewalk past those lines of chained men and women in their stiff new calico clothing – would not, of course, be nearly as bad as being one of them. His mind turned over the scraps of information Rose had given him about her talk with the housekeeper Lolotte, while the music gyred in the smoky gloom. When his friends downtown played for themselves after hours – Mozart or Vivaldi or the popular glees and catches that came out of New York – there was often an African flavor to the rhythm. It was a way of making the music their own, like a beautiful toy. But the uptown music, far more primitive, took him back to his plantation childhood; it was not nearly as graceful, nor as technically skilled, yet there was an intensity to it that quickened the heartbeat. It was a music from a deeper part of the soul.
‘Why you lookin’ to find this girl?’ asked the Preacher softly, and January glanced over at him, aware that he’d been silent too long.
‘She knows something,’ he replied. ‘Saw something, heard something, that’ll get a friend of mine out of trouble.’
Would I call the Viscount Foxford my friend? But Hannibal was his friend.
The Preacher picked an infinitesimally tiny speck of cigar ash from his elegant silk hat. ‘Given what Madame gonna have to pay to replace Miss Pierrette, musta been a helluva somethin’, to sell her off on account of it.’
The following morning, waiting for Hannibal at the coffee-stand, January found the advertisement he sought:
Irvin and Frye
TO SELL
A well-made negress: twenty-five years old, ladies’ maid, seamstress, and hairdresser, named PIERRETTE.
Speaks French and English,
reads and writes both languages, and is warranted free
of vices and diseases provided for by law. She
may be seen at our offices on Baronne Street.
January folded the thin summer newspaper, drew it through his fingers. Musta been a helluva somethin’.
A lovely girl of an old French family, raised poor but suddenly rich. Her widowed mother sends her to Paris with this new-found wealth . . . and with her, her trusted maid. And she meets a man.
She meets two men.
The clock on the Cathedral tower sounded one. Yesterday, at this very table, Hannibal had agreed to visit the Cabildo at noon and speak to the Viscount. Now January paid up Auntie Zozo and, resignedly, turned his steps toward the Swamp. He wasn’t surprised by Hannibal’s absence. Hannibal might have been aghast at Mr Droudge’s decision that a cheap defense would be as good as an expensive one – ‘I can’t tell you how many gutters in this town I’ve fallen into drunk and landed on top of Harold Chaffinch!’ – but at the suggestion that he go to the Cabildo himself, to try to talk Foxford into demanding someone more competent, he had balked. ‘Why would he want to see me?’
‘Because he knows you were Patrick’s friend, as well as his father’s.’
‘God help the both of them.’
January had been raggedly tired then – it had been full daylight when he’d returned home after seeing Trinchen still lived, and he’d had to force himself out to seek Hannibal before returning to the Countess’s once more. He’d said, ‘No. God help him. You may be able to talk some sense into him, and that may very well save his life.’
In the end, Hannibal had promised . . . and January had deliberately set the meeting for noon, to allow himself time to go down to the Swamp and fetch him.
Why do I care? he asked himself for the hundredth time, as he circled cautiously through the murky ground near the turning basin of the canal. The boy is nothing to me. And so far I’ve seen nothing to tell me that he DIDN’T actually murder the man who held on to the family money that should have been his.
He left the shabby wooden houses behind him, the rough lots where gardens and chicken-coops straggled, and entered the fringes of the genuine swamp, which lay where the land – high along the river – sloped gradually down to the distant lake. The stink of the town grew less intense. As he walked – to keep his mind from his irritation at Hannibal – he reflected upon Isobel Deschamps.
Dead and Buried Page 12
