The younger girl whispered, ‘It weren’t bad. He didn’t make me undress or nuthin’.’
There were planters, January knew well, who would strip women, squeeze breasts, paw genitals and – if the dealer thought it would clinch the sale – copulate with their prospective property in the name of seein’ how she’ll breed. If you didn’t buy the girl it was certainly cheaper than a visit to the Countess.
The slave-dealer was still chatting cheerfully with his new customer when Hannibal moved to the door, tipping his hat as he passed.
‘Not to your taste, sir? You can take Pierrette upstairs—’
‘Another time.’
‘Sure thing, Mr Dawes. And you think about what I said, about that boy of yours . . .’ He nodded to January.
‘I will indeed give the matter thought,’ promised Hannibal, his hand on the doorknob. ‘Until then, as the poet says, ficossissimus esto, Mr Frye!’
As they stepped outside, the slaves seated on either side of the door glanced at them, and January had to close his hands into fists, as if doing so would hold in the rage that swept him. If he did not, he thought, he was in danger of forgetting all about Compair Lapin, in danger of losing his temper, as Jesus had in the Temple, and storming from end to end of this street with a whip in his hand . . .
And we all know what happened to Jesus.
SIXTEEN
It would make him late to the Countess’s that night – and his whole bruised body ached to lie down for the remainder of the evening – but January made it his business to visit the Cabildo. Shaw wasn’t there, but the sergeant at the desk – mellowed by a tip that January couldn’t well afford – led him across the back courtyard and up the brick steps to the men’s cell. The white men’s cell it was, these days, though January had occupied it himself a few years previously, before the Americans had complained about their drunkards and scum being obliged to share quarters with some lesser race. With any luck, within a year the new Parish Prison being built on Rue d’Orleans would be ready to receive visitors; as it was, the stink of the place made him cringe before he was halfway up the steps. At the moment the place was quiet, save for an inebriated voice extolling the necessity for a higher protective tariff and an independent national treasury. ‘Somebody shut that damn Whig up,’ urged a tired voice.
Foxford came to the barred judas in the door. ‘Mr January! Good lord, what happened to you?’
January touched the cut flesh and sticking plaster on the side of his face. ‘Isobel Deschamps’s relatives cornered me on my way home last night,’ he said quietly. And then, as Foxford began to stammer out some reason why this could not possibly have had anything to do with him since he had never met Isobel Deschamps, he went on, ‘That isn’t important now, sir. What’s important is that Mademoiselle Deschamps’s maid, Pierrette, has been sold to slave-dealers.’
The young man’s mouth dropped open in shock, aghast: naïvety that would have been comical under any other circumstances. Don’t you understand that’s one of the great virtues of slaves? That if they trouble their masters – by growing old, by standing up for better food or better treatment, by speaking for themselves – they can simply be made to disappear?
He went on, ‘Her mother did it, the moment Mademoiselle left town. They’ll be taking her to Nashville to sell in cotton country, if she doesn’t find a buyer here before—’
‘What do they want for her?’ Foxford’s long-fingered hands gripped the bars, and all trace of unconcern about Isobel Deschamps was gone from his face. ‘Do you know?’
‘Seven or eight hundred dollars.’
‘What’s the dealer’s name?’
‘Irvin and Frye. On Baronne Street.’
‘Thank you.’ The grim set of the young man’s jaw told January everything about his love for Mademoiselle Deschamps, which had extended to friendly affection for her maid. ‘Droudge should be here in an hour with my lawyer. I’ll tell him to buy her . . . That is,’ Foxford stammered, suddenly recalling his former assertions, ‘I’m horrified that such things should happen to the innocent—’
January held up his hand against further protestations. ‘Just get her out of there,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t need to know anything else.’
He was starting to turn away when Foxford asked, ‘Did you speak with her?’
He turned back. ‘Yes, I did.’
The young man looked aside, trying to piece together something to say.
‘I can’t stay,’ said January. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow, and I’ll want to talk to you then.’
Foxford raised his chin. His hardened eyes, and the grim set of his mouth, told January that all he’d get for his trouble would be more lies.
‘In the meantime,’ said January, ‘for God’s sake, get that poor girl out of the dealers’ hands. I don’t know what’s going on here, but you at least have chosen – for whatever reason – to be where you are. Pierrette’s only choice was to come back to this country with her mistress from France, where Pierrette was a free woman. Don’t make her suffer for that.’
He turned, and all but ran down the stairs.
The Countess’s ire at January’s tardiness on the busiest night of the week was mitigated somewhat when she saw the cuts on his face, the agonized stiffness with which he seated himself at the piano. ‘You be all right?’ she asked as he flexed his shoulders in a vain attempt to make them feel like anything other than slabs of raw pain affixed to his skeleton with red-hot nails. ‘What happened?’
‘Little disagreement with some of the downtown boys.’ He now understood some facts about the Countess that he had not before, but those facts provided him no clue about whether she’d continue to employ him if it was known he’d angered white men who might later turn into paying customers. He removed his gloves, flexed his hands, thrummed out a long elaborate trill:
There was a country blade,
And he wooed a little maid,
Safely he conducted her home, home, home.
She was neat in ev’ry part,
And she stole away his heart,
But this pretty little deary, she was dumb, dumb, dumb.
As he played he wondered which of his bodyguards would put in an appearance that night. Or would any of them turn up at all? And if they didn’t, would Louis Verron be satisfied with his promise to stop asking questions? Or would a few drinks over cards with his friends move that young man to a repeat of last night’s violence, with an inevitable escalation of results?
‘Hey, Mr Barton, been awhile since we’ve had the pleasure! Why, the girls were saying only yesterday, “Where’s that big Ned Barton gone?” . . .’
The pain in his cracked ribs was like a sword driven into his side.
New York! New York!
Oh! What a charming city.
New York! New York!
Oh! What a charming city.
A razor, Pierrette had said. There were girls who’d turn to thoughts of ending their lives over a romance gone wrong, or even over a seduction, but the maidservant had seemed to be a sensible girl, and he felt inclined to trust her judgement. Whatever had passed between ‘Blessinghurst’ and Isobel Deschamps, it was something neither the actor nor Isobel’s family wanted aired in public.
He glanced across at Marie-Venise, like a lost schoolgirl in her childish dress, whom he knew to be – in addition to an avid student of what were generally known as the Greek arts – an expert in the application and receipt of erotic pain. A necklace of matched pearls shimmered against the white blades of her collarbone; another gift from Stubbs, in his role as Blessinghurst? Was his absence from the Countess’s lately a coincidence, or had he gone into hiding from Louis Verron?
And what steps would he be willing to take to keep January from further inquiries?
Michie Gerry . . . said she’d told him she couldn’t see him any more, just like that, out of a blue sky. He asked me if she’d said anything to me . . .
Don’t talk about him. Don’t talk about him ever ag
ain.
‘Why, Mr Switters, you wicked old thing! How’s the General’s friends doing for votes? Yes, I read that article – what a scandal! Your Mr Webster and Mr Clay and I don’t know who-all everybody else on their side had better be thankful women do not vote, because me, I would vote against every one of them! The Chair? Ah, Signor –’ a tap on the pudgy arm with a black-and-crimson fan – ‘I’ve had the girls keep it warm for you, turn and turn about, all the night . . .’
I went down to the river,
I didn’t mean to stay,
But there I saw so many girls,
I couldn’t get away . . .
Jacob Schurtz came in around ten, drunk and boisterous, with Martin Quennell tagging behind: new gaudy waistcoats, at least five gold fobs, stylish new hat of black silk. Champagne was ordered; Martin paid for it, laughed uproariously at Schurtz’s jokes. Sybilla – the tall and supple Irish Amazon – seated herself on Schurtz’s knee, self-contained and confident as a cat. You could almost see her wrap her tail around her feet.
‘Captain Ryberg! Don’t tell me the river’s come up at last? And who’s this? Well, I never – my cousin married to a man who comes from Chillicothe, Ohio . . .’
A giddy snatch of Beethoven, altered the way January had heard Four-Eyes alter popular songs, with a syncopated African rhythm – nobody was listening, after all – then blending back into ‘Jump Jim Crow’:
An’ then I got to Orleans,
An’ feel so full of fight.
They put me in the Calaboose
An’ keep me there all night . . .
The reek of the incense that kept the whorehouse smells of sweat, spilled booze, and spunk at bay – oppressive at the best of times – seemed tonight to be a poison specifically brewed to kill piano players. Mary, Mother of God, if you can hear anything that comes from within these walls, get me home tonight in one piece . . .
‘You whining New England dog, you’d destroy this country for your goddam tariffs if it’d put money in your pocket!’
And golden-haired Fanny screamed.
His mind chasing questions about Isobel Deschamps and how best to get to St Francisville without ending up bound for Nashville in a slave-coffle himself, January whirled on the piano stool, looking for the trouble that any other night he’d have spotted before it began. A greasy-haired cotton planter lunged at the steamboat captain’s Ohio friend, grabbed Fanny from off the man’s lap – January suspected that Fanny, not politics, was the actual cause of the animosity – and lunged at the Northerner. The captain leaped to his friend’s defense; the planter’s two friends piled into the fray, and January – who knew what was expected of the house maestro on such occasions – crashed into a rousing chorus of ‘Anacreon in Heaven’ at the top of the instrument’s iron-braced voice.
‘Here, now, gentlemen, let’s have none of that—’ boomed Hughie’s voice as the big man appeared from the kitchen, and then the ear-splitting crash of a pistol cut the din like an ax. Every man turned as the Countess tossed aside the smoking needle-gun that she’d fired into the air and produced – from God knew what hiding place – a shotgun. The ensuing silence in the room was almost deafening.
January let the piano fall silent as well. For a moment, the only sound was the clink of plaster falling from the new-made bullet hole in the ceiling.
In the stillness a man moaned in horror and agony, ‘Oh, God! Oh God . . .!’
It was Martin Quennell, clutching his belly, dark blood soaking his fancy waistcoat and running out over his hands.
They carried him back to Hughie’s room. Hughie strode ahead, pulling aside the rugs so that Martin’s blood, and the fluid from his slashed intestines, wouldn’t dribble on them. Marie-Venise found a pearl-handled penknife tossed in a corner of the parlor with a couple of handkerchiefs wadded around its hilt to keep blood off the wielder’s hand, and every man in the parlor swore the knife was someone else’s and produced his own knife – in several cases, two or three extras – to prove it. As January stripped Martin’s shirt aside and opened his trousers, Elspie came in with two oil lamps – none of the bedrooms had gas laid on – and asked breathlessly, ‘Will he live?’ Raising his eyes, for a moment he met, through the doorway, Nenchen’s cold green gaze. Then the big girl smiled, very slightly, with satisfaction and went up the stairs.
A little later, January heard Shaw’s voice in the parlor. The Lieutenant ambled in, took one look at the wound that January was attempting to stitch shut by the light of nearly every lamp and candle in the house, and knelt beside the head of the bed. ‘Who did it?’ he whispered, almost in the wounded man’s ear.
January had thought Quennell long past understanding anything, but the young man shook his head. ‘Didn’t see. Oh, God—’
Shaw glanced across at January.
‘I was playing piano,’ said January quietly. ‘Like a good nigger, for once – and the room was pretty full.’
‘He gonna live?’
Aware that Quennell could understand, though his eyes had slipped shut again, January only slightly shook his head.
The house grew quiet after that. When January went out to the kitchen to wash his hands, he saw Nenchen halfway up the stairs, sitting on a step smoking a Mexican cigarette. Their eyes met again, and she did not look away. The Countess set Elspie and Auntie Saba to cleaning up the blood. La Habañera carried in more water from the kitchen and brought up a chair beside Quennell, mopping his forehead as his fever began to climb. Philosophical, Hughie fetched pillows and blankets from the storeroom and went to sleep on the parlor floor. The rest of the girls went to bed.
At three in the morning, January heard the back door open and the murmur of the Countess’s voice, speaking French. Another woman’s replied, ‘Ah, Didi, thank you – thank you . . .’ and a moment later a woman came in, her face lined with middle age in the glow of the single lamp left burning in the parlor, but handsome still. For a moment January wondered why she was familiar, then recognized her. It was Corette Quennell, Beauvais Quennell’s mother.
She went to the side of the low bed, took Martin’s hand, and whispered, ‘Oh, Martin. Oh, my son.’
SEVENTEEN
Beauvais Quennell was standing in the hall. When January stepped out of Hughie’s room, the undertaker’s eyes widened at the sight of him, and for a moment they regarded one another in silence. January started to say, ‘How could he be—?’ and stopped, remembering things his mother had told him when first he’d returned from France, almost four years ago. ‘Was he the brother my mama said had died away at school all those years ago?’
The undertaker nodded. Looking back down the hall to the dim rectangle of the candlelit door, January saw Corette Quennell rocking to and fro, holding the hand of the young man who twitched and muttered on the bed.
In that low orange light no skin-tone looked normal, but with the mother’s face bent so close above the unconscious man’s, January fancied he could see, now, the traces of generations-distant Africa in Martin’s features: the lie of the cheekbone, the shape of the brow. Was that why the young man had sought his pleasure at the Countess’s, where there was not the slightest chance that anyone would see him next to even the fairest-skinned woman of color and note similarities?
Or had he only been desperate to put distance between himself and the blood that condemned him to a lifetime of powerlessness?
‘He was her baby boy,’ Quennell whispered, through a throat so tight the sound squeaked out, as if pulled through metal pincers. ‘Mama’s little white lamb, she called him. He was ten years old, and he wrote her that she should tell everyone he’d died. That he wasn’t coming back.’
‘And she did that?’
He nodded, took off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes. ‘She always did what he asked.’
Half-forgotten fragments of his mother’s gossip returned to him. Most of the white side of the Quennell family had left New Orleans years ago, with the death of Beauvais’s father, gone upriver to Ascension Parish. He
recalled vaguely his mother saying there had been white sons of the household, of whom he – and everyone else – had assumed Martin was one.
But mostly he recalled the softness in his mother’s face, when she’d cuddle and sing to Dominique, the daughter of her own white protector, born when he – Benjamin – was sixteen years of age. He didn’t ask, or need to, how a mother could let her child go that way. Every placée in New Orleans knew what a gift from God it was, to any child born able to pass for white.
The undertaker extended his hands, turned them over beneath the single gas-jet left burning in the hall, as if studying their color as he must have studied it countless times as a child, wondering why it mattered. Why it mattered so much. ‘You’re a doctor, Ben. How can it be, with the same mama, same daddy, he looks like a white man? I ain’t that much darker.’
January looked from Quennell’s face into the room to Martin’s, and with the difference of the lighting between gas and flame there was no difference in color at all. The older brother’s hair was a half-shade more brown than golden; the younger’s eyes – shut now and bruised-looking in an ashy face – that peculiar grayish turquoise-green so common among the octoroons and musterfinos. He shook his head. ‘If anybody knew that—’ He hesitated. ‘If anybody knew the why of it, you can be sure somebody would turn that knowledge to evil somehow.’
Quennell’s eyes slid to him, caught by the thought.
Martin Quennell – only January couldn’t recall whether anyone had ever said what that almost-forgotten ‘dead’ brother’s name had been – had been sent to school in Nashville when he was very small. Most people at the back of town didn’t even remember that Corette Quennell had borne her protector two sons instead of one.
He looks like a white man . . . January’s mind snagged on the phrase.
LOOKS like a white man . . . He IS a white man.
He is a man, and he’s white! What else do you want?
Only, of course, in Louisiana he was not. Even in Boston, were it known that one of his great-great grandmothers came from Africa, he would be barred from ‘the best’ white society . . .
Dead and Buried Page 16
