January – who had been about to lead the way across the ‘neutral zone’ that bordered Canal Street on both sides – stopped and made a sweeping bow to permit his white ‘master’ to step off the curb first. Even at this period of the year, there was a fair amount of cart traffic from the wharves at one end of the street back toward the Basin, where the canal from the lake ended. The proposal to extend the canal to the river had never materialized, but its echo remained in the huge width of the street itself – almost two hundred feet at this point – with the remains of an old drainage ditch down its center, now neatly fenced in iron chains in an attempt to appear park-like.
‘What’s the sister’s name?’
‘Marie-Amalie.’ January tried to recall the younger girl, whom he knew he’d seen once or twice but could remember nothing of – except that her hair was dark, and that their mother had a tendency to dress Isobel in blue and her sister in pink. ‘The mother of Isobel and Marie-Amalie Deschamps – Madame Celestine – was born Celestine Verron, her mother – Eliane Dubesc, from Sainte Domingue – having married Louis-Florizel Verron, brother to the grandfather of the gentlemen who cracked two of my ribs last night. According to my mother, Louis-Florizel was given the almost-worthless family cattle-lands up on the Red River – all of which went to Celestine when her only brother died at the age of sixteen – while the New Orleans side of the Verrons had the sugar plantations. Louis’s father and uncles mismanaged and mortgaged those to the rafters. . . . I think that’s how it went.’
‘Trust your mother to know everything about any family downstream of Canal Street.’
‘Believe me, the relationship was secondary to Maman’s analysis of how the Verron and Dubesc family money was divided, with regard to Madame Celestine’s ability to pay me for Isobel’s piano lessons. This was just before the Red River was cleared for navigation, which reversed the original positions: the Natchitoches lands became the valuable ones, and the New Orleans Verrons the poor relations.’
‘It still won’t help poor Marie-Amalie get a husband,’ mused Hannibal as they turned down the street that continued on the same side of the ‘neutral ground’ under the name of Baronne. ‘Not if the suitors’ families think they’ll be in danger of having to meet an actor or his family anytime they visit someone connected with the Deschampses or the Verrons. But even if Patrick returned to the Iberville and informed our young friend that Isobel had become Stubbs’s wife – or, worse yet, his mistress – I still can’t see that as being grounds for murder.’
‘Can’t you?’ said January quietly, and Hannibal stopped in his tracks.
‘No,’ said the fiddler, his voice equally soft. ‘I can’t.’
‘If Foxford wasn’t sober?’ said January. ‘If Patrick wasn’t sober? If Stubbs’s information was that he had made Isobel his mistress and then discarded her – possibly pregnant – and Foxford said, as young men have been known to, “I don’t care, I’ll marry her anyway.”?’
‘And if Stubbs’s information was that Isobel was secretly the Queen of the Cannibal Islands then I suppose Foxford could have murdered Patrick out of sheer chagrin,’ retorted Hannibal.
‘We’re not going to get very far if you won’t look at the truth.’
Hannibal faced him, suddenly very angry. ‘The truth is that we don’t know the truth,’ he said. ‘There is another explanation that we’re not seeing.’
January folded his arms. ‘The truth is that your love for the boy’s mother is keeping you from looking at the evidence we do have,’ he said gently. ‘Foxford is twenty-two. He’s been under the hand of an older man all his life, with who knows what feelings buried below the surface so far that he may not be aware of them. He’s obviously so besotted with this girl that he follows her to America and drags along his trustees in the hopes he can get her to change her mind. Then that mentor, that guide, that controller comes storming into his hotel room and throws the information at him that he has proof that the girl is not only not what Foxford thought she was, but also that he, Patrick Derryhick, will never countenance the match—’
‘You have no proof of any of this.’
‘No,’ said January. ‘But you’re the one who’s going to talk to Martin Quennell and find out what was actually said. So I hope you understand that you need to ask him everything you can think of and tell me everything that he says.’
Hannibal turned without speaking and strode off along the board sidewalk, January at his heels, like a good, obedient slave.
Like every other person of African blood in New Orleans – slave or free – January avoided walking along Baronne Street when he could. It was here that most of the town’s dealers in human cattle had their offices – neat square buildings of brick or wood for the most part, like any other stores in the American section, with awnings built over the plank sidewalks to protect potential customers from the brutal sun and the afternoon rains. It was here, in the fenced yards and rough-built sheds behind them, that slaves were brought in from Virginia and Maryland – where the exhaustion of the old tobacco-lands rendered so many plantations overpopulated – to be sold. With the expansion of cotton into Mississippi, Missouri, and the north of Louisiana, everyone needed slaves, and men who could be bought for three hundred dollars in the east were going for three and four times as much in New Orleans. The cane-planters were always in the market, too. Cane killed men fast.
It was early in the season for anyone to be selling, and mostly the men just sat on the benches outside the offices, sometimes talking quietly among themselves about wives, children, friends they’d grown up with – all left behind, everyone they knew – and sometimes just watching the thin traffic in the street. For the most part they were neatly dressed, in blue coats, bright with cheap dye, and shoes that probably would have been agony to walk in for more than a dozen feet. Above the shoes and below the hems of the trousers, January could see the ankle irons.
Something old – some part of him that he’d never forgotten – curled tight behind his sternum, and he felt the prickle of mingled rage and terror sweep through him like fever. Thin and jaunty, Hannibal strode ahead of him: a man who’d saved his life, a man he loved like a brother. A man who in that moment he could have struck – maybe killed – because he was white.
A girl of fourteen sprang up from one of the slave benches, darted over to Hannibal in a jingling of ankle chains. ‘You buy me, Mister? I’m right smart; I can cook, and sew, and wash clothes—’
‘I’m sure that you can, acushla.’ Hannibal doffed his hat. ‘But I very much fear my good wife would beat me with a broom handle, should I bring into the house a young lady as beautiful as yourself – terribly jealous, my wife, and ugly as Satan’s bulldog – so I must decline.’
‘I can be ugly,’ she offered, and she made a horrific scowl to prove it.
Hannibal mimed terror. ‘Alas, it’s not to be,’ he said and handed her a nickel. ‘She can see through ruses like that, you see.’ He moved on.
Behind them, January heard the girl’s voice, addressing another passer-by. ‘You buy me, Mister?’
Close your eyes, he told himself, as he had to tell himself sometimes when he worked at the Countess’s and listened over his shoulder, through the music, to one of the girls chatting up a gentleman caller. Nuthin’ I love better than a Greek, Mister . . .
Close your heart. Don’t think about who those girls, those boys along this street, those men in chains would be if they could actually do even the tiniest bit of what they wanted to in this world.
You can’t even vote in this country.
He took a deep breath and looked up, in time to see Hannibal stop. ‘Irvin and Frye’s’, said the sign in the window. ‘Prime Hands, Fancies.’ Three men and a boy sat on the bench on one side of the door, three women – one of them great with child – on the other. Their eyes all flickered to Hannibal as he consulted the advertisement in the Bee, pulled Thos. Dawes’s card from his waistcoat pocket, and went inside. January felt their eyes on his ba
ck as he followed.
‘Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr Irvin,’ inquired Hannibal of the man who rose from behind the desk in the stifling front room, ‘or Mr Frye?’
No other customer. Thank God.
January folded his hands and stood to one side while Hannibal and Mr Irvin (or Mr Frye) discussed the price of slaves, the profits from Hannibal’s putative cotton press in Mobile, Hannibal’s equally putative wife in Mobile and her need for a smart young maid . . . Yes, Mrs Dawes preferred them bright, and in fact was looking for a girl who could read. No, Mr Dawes couldn’t understand it either, wasting time teaching wenches to read, but Mrs Dawes had been to a Young Ladies Seminary in Washington and had a few notions . . .
Mr Frye (or Mr Irvin) yelled for a young man named Samson – probably a slave himself – to fetch in Estelle, Jewel, and Pierrette. ‘Too old,’ Hannibal said, dismissing at once the only one whose years put her out of the running to be Pierrette. ‘And this one is . . .’
‘Jewel, sir.’
Jewel was sixteen, thin, and fighting with everything that was in her to remain expressionless.
‘Lovely,’ purred Hannibal, in a startling imitation of Uncle Diogenes at his most debased. ‘Lovely. Might I have the opportunity to take a more private viewing?’
‘Of course, of course . . .’
Irvin (or Frye) led Hannibal and the girl to the stairs. In the stairwell, Hannibal asked about the election – was it true Daniel Webster had challenged Mr Van Buren to a fist-fight in the Capitol? Mr Irvin hadn’t heard about this? Dear Lord, it was all over Mobile . . .
January stepped over to the girl left standing by the desk. ‘Pierrette?’
She turned as if he’d fired a gun.
‘My name is Lou. I’ve been asked to bring you a message.’ He spoke French, though Samson – loitering just outside the rear door where a feeble breeze whispered through from the yard – probably couldn’t hear them from where he stood. ‘Michie Tom and I are bound up the river tomorrow; the lady who spoke to me says as how you might want a letter taken.’
The girl’s eyes grew round, and January almost had to look away from the shocked hope that flooded her face. ‘Who . . .?’
‘I don’t know her name. Feller named Ti-Jon put us together.’ He named the slave – known throughout New Orleans to the enslaved – who could usually be counted on to know everybody who needed anything done. ‘But she said you been sold off without your young Miss knowin’ about it.’
Pierrette pressed her hands to her mouth; they were shaking. ‘She didn’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I swear she didn’t know. M’am Deschamps only did it because of what happened in Paris . . .’
January cast a quick glance toward the back door, but Samson had retreated into the yard and was nowhere to be seen. Two steps took both him and the girl to the desk; she had to wipe her palms, suddenly damp with panic sweat, on her skirt before she took up Mr Irvin’s pen and a sheet of paper. January stepped back, not speaking until she had done.
Miss Isobel – her handwriting staggered with her nervous trembling – your mother has sold me off, because of what happened in Paris. Please, please help me. I was sold to traders named Irvin and Frye, on Baronne Street. The others here say we will be bound for Nashville on November 1. I think they want $700, but I will do whatever you ask, anything, scrub floors or pick cotton or anything, if you’ll get Granpere Rablé to buy me. Pierrette.
‘Mamzelle’ll be with her aunts in St Francisville,’ said the girl, folding the letter swiftly and handing it to January. ‘Ma’m Nienie Deschamps and Ma’m Heloise Grounard. It’s the first house up the River Road from the landing, ’bout a mile from the town. Rosetree, it’s called. There’s an archway of roses out in front.’
She pressed her hands to her mouth again, struggling to gather her thoughts. The ashy pallor of her golden complexion told January that she’d probably neither eaten nor slept since the mother of her ‘young Miss’ had informed her that she was going to be taken to the dealer’s and sold; her eyes had the bruised look of tears beyond what white girls her age had any comprehension of. She wore a pretty frock of blue-and-white print lawn, more expensive than any dealer would give to make his ‘fancy’ look ‘smart’. She must have been taken straight out of the house in what she stood up in.
‘If she’s not there,’ she went on after a moment, ‘can you maybe get someone to take this up to Beaux Herbes plantation, outside Cloutierville, up on the Red River? Or Bayou Lente plantation, on t’other side of Cloutierville, about two miles? She sometimes goes and visits the old man there, M’sieu Rablé – Granpere Rablé, he’s called all over the parish. Please,’ she whispered, with another glance from the back door to the stairwell, from which Hannibal’s laughter, and Mr Irvin’s (or Mr Frye’s), drifted unhurriedly down. ‘Please. I know Granpere Rablé will buy me, if Mamzelle asks him. Mamzelle was his poor wife’s little pet, and old Granpere loves her like she was his own granddaughter.’
‘I’ll do what I can.’ January slid the note into his pocket. The thought of journeying all the way to Nachitoches Parish – six days’ travel on the low summer rivers – in pursuit of Isobel Deschamps appalled him, but he knew that, whatever else happened, its delivery was the price of what Pierrette could tell him. He made his voice indignant rather than urgent, as if the matter didn’t concern him directly, when he said, ‘What happened in Paris, that Mamzelle’s maman would want to sell you off?’
Once the note was handed over, some of the girl’s panic seemed to subside. As if, fighting to stay afloat in horizonless ocean, she’d glimpsed a plank that might be bobbing her way.
She drew a deep breath, tucked a stray curl of light mahogany-red hair back under her tignon, shook her head. ‘I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘That Irish boy she fell in love with, that Vicomte . . . her Tante Cassandre in Paris, she asked about him and looked him up in her books, and she said, “Well, he’s not so rich as some, but he’ll surely do for a husband.” And there was no question, he loved her like St Roche and his dog, and she him. That other Lord, that Lord Blessinghurst, she never had a glance for him, for all his roses and poetry that he sent . . . and, Mamzelle said, he’d copied the poetry out of a book.’
‘Did he, now?’ January murmured. ‘Was he rich?’
‘Lord, yes. He once gave me ten francs and promised me there was more where that came from –’ she grimaced with distaste – ‘if I’d tell her what a good man he was and how desperate in love with her. I gave him his ten francs back,’ she added and wiped her hand on her skirt again as if at the memory. ‘He tried to kiss me, too.’
‘Why did you come back?’ asked January. ‘You didn’t have to . . .’
‘I wish I hadn’t,’ Pierrette whispered. ‘If I’d known . . . But something went wrong ’twixt her and Michie Gerry – Vicomte Foxford,’ she corrected herself quickly. ‘Bad wrong. I don’t know what it was. This was February – Mamzelle and me, we’d got there at the start of December. One evening Mamzelle came home early, before midnight, from a ball she’d been at, claiming she had a headache. But when she got up to her room she broke down crying like her heart would break. Michie Gerry came the next day, and she said how she had a headache. He begged me to take her a note, and she tore it up without reading it – that one, and the others he sent. It scared me how she’d cry. That day she told Tante Cassandre she wanted to go home, she didn’t care how bad the voyage was going to be. I asked Michie Gerry what happened, and he said she’d told him she couldn’t see him anymore, just like that, out of a blue sky. He asked me if she’d said anything to me!
‘I been with other young misses,’ she went on, her dark eyes filled with distress, ‘and I’ve never seen anythin’ like this. She quit eating, she didn’t sleep – I know she didn’t sleep because I’d sit up most of the night. She—’ She broke off, twisting her hands. ‘I was afraid for her,’ she said softly. ‘I shouldn’t say this, but one night I went downstairs, and comin’ back up, I found she’d got a r
azor from Oncl’ Deschamps’s room. She was just sittin’ in the dark, holdin’ it in her hand. I took it away from her, gentle as I could, but she was . . . strange. She got over it, a little, once we’d got on the ship, but . . .’
The girl shook her head again. ‘All she’d say, when I spoke his name, was, “Don’t talk about him. Don’t talk about him again ever.” And after all that—’ Pierrette shook her head again, pressed her hand to her mouth, as if to hide from him the trembling of her lips. ‘After all that, she tells her maman she has to leave New Orleans now. She had that look in her eye again, that empty look. It was her maman who said I was to stay here. I didn’t think a thing of it at the time, but now I see—’
The street door opened. A man came in – his boots and coat and the set of his shoulders shouting cotton planter, of the kind just starting in the territories – and Irvin’s (or Frye’s) descent clattered in the stairwell. ‘Good day, sir, good day – hot as blazes, ain’t it? What can I do for you this fine morning . . .’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Pierrette whispered to January in French, and she pressed his huge hand between both of hers. ‘God bless you. Get my Mamzelle that note, somehow – I know she’ll get old Granpere Rablé to buy me.’
Questions unasked fought on January’s lips – did she see ‘Blessinghurst’ the day before this ball when she’d told Foxford goodbye? Was there a time when Isobel was alone with him? Did he send her letters? But pity silenced them. He was on the track of a puzzle with a young man’s life at stake, but this girl stood in terror on the brink of a precipice, waiting for the shove that would send her over. It was no time for tales of who might have said what to whom last February in Paris.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ he promised – and meant it. Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, give me the strength to do what is needed.
Hannibal came downstairs a few moments later, the girl Jewel in his wake. Pierrette went to her at once, took her hands – January heard her ask, ‘You all right, cher?’
Dead and Buried Page 15
