‘I have rented a stateroom on the upper deck,’ declared January loftily, ‘from which I will look down at you poor bastards laborin’ and think sad thoughts.’
The men of the deck crew laughed – mostly at the jest about any black man being rented any cabin on a steamboat – and slapped his back and shoulders, and cursed about the amount of money they’d bet against his survival.
A few miles downriver, the Parnassus stopped at the landing by Bayou Charette to take on Louis Verron. January stepped back among the cotton bales that piled every square foot of deck. He suspected that the young man glimpsed him at some point during the voyage, but in the ensuing four days, no word passed between them. On Friday night, as the boat steamed downriver in the center of the slow, heavy current around Manchac Point, the weather turned sharply cold. It was like a long fever breaking, and the following evening, when the Parnassus came to dock on the levee in New Orleans, it was like coming back to another world from the one January had left two weeks ago. There were still few boats – and wouldn’t be, until the December rise brought cargo prices down – but, as he crossed the Place d’Armes, January took note of well-dressed ladies on the arms of their gentlemen friends, taking the air beneath the pride-of-India trees that grew along the levee; of children dashing among the market arcades or rolling hoops across the Place’s dusty expanse, shouting with delight at being back in town with their friends. Along Rue Chartres and Rue Esplanade, cafés were open again, and the melismatic wailing of the charcoal man could be heard as he went his rounds:
‘My donkey white, my coal is black,
Buy my charcoal, ten-cent sack . . .’
Lights shone in the windows of town houses; candlelit windows stood open to the night-breeze. Voices called from carriageways and yards.
The air no longer sang with mosquitoes.
The summer heat was over at last.
January wished he had wings, so that he could spread them and fly the length of the street to where Rose would be drinking tea on the gallery, as she did at this hour of the evening . . .
And there she was, as he came up the street, rising from her chair and turning to look toward him through the descending blue twilight as if he’d shouted her name aloud, as he was shouting it in his heart.
Two of her students were with her – quiet, pretty Cosette Gardinier and a very young and very plain girl named Sabine – and January said, as he came up the steps and into Rose’s arms, ‘You young ladies might want to go indoors for a few minutes . . .’ and the girls giggled and nudged each other and peeked back over their shoulders as they darted through the French doors into the shadows of the house, and he kissed Rose and held her close.
I’m back, I’m back. I’m alive and I’m back . . .
He barely felt the pain in his ribs, under the hard clinch of her arms around him. Didn’t care when her stroking hand brushed the raw wounds on his face. So what? Who cares? I didn’t get hanged, and I didn’t get shot . . . The whole world seemed to collapse in on to those words I’m back – that thought – and then blossom out from them again like a world-spanning incandescent flower.
‘Where’s Hannibal?’ he asked, after about ten minutes.
‘Hannibal?’
‘I want to strangle him,’ explained January, ‘for making me do that journey alone.’
But instead of replying she put her arms around his neck again, and for some minutes they clung together like the survivors of a shipwreck, washed up on a beach.
Then Rose said, ‘He’ll be at the funeral in the morning.’
‘Funeral?’ January paused in the act of settling into one of the wooden chairs.
Rose perched on his knee. ‘They found Rameses’s body yesterday, tangled in the snags that washed up on the batture below Chalmette. The girls and I –’ she nodded back toward the house, where Cosette’s soft voice could be heard, helping the younger student with a simple passage in Latin – ‘were at Crowdie Passebon’s earlier, where Liselle and the children are staying . . . Hannibal came by, on his way from the Cabildo to the Countess’s.’
‘The Cabildo?’
‘Shaw tells me he goes there almost daily.’
‘That’s a change,’ said January thoughtfully. ‘The week before last I had to drag him—’
‘He doesn’t always see Gerry – Foxford,’ she corrected herself with her quick smile. ‘I’ve seen him there twice, I think – I’ve been taking the boy things like ginger beer, since the water they give the prisoners there comes straight out of the river . . . if not straight out of the gutter. And the food is worse. But Hannibal always asks after him.’
‘He hasn’t said what he’s afraid is going to happen?’
Rose looked briefly surprised, then shook her head. ‘You mean, other than the fact that the jail’s an overcrowded pest-hole and that every good Frenchman and good American and good Irishman who gets thrown in there feels it’s his right to beat up an Orangeman English landlord?’
‘Yes,’ said January quietly. ‘Other than that. Do they have a date for the trial?’
‘The fifth. Right at the start of the docket.’
‘Damn.’
‘Hannibal made arrangements for the girl Pierrette to stay at Mayerling’s until the trial, rather than going upriver to Natchitoches Parish. Just because her testimony isn’t acceptable in a court doesn’t mean the judge won’t hear it privately and take it into his consideration in his summing-up – Hannibal’s idea, by the way, not that appalling lawyer Droudge hired.’
‘So Droudge did buy the girl?’
‘After being threatened with a caning from Uncle Diogenes, yes. I gather he tried to talk the dealer down, and then backed out because the price was too steep, on the grounds that they don’t need testimony of any kind because the court can’t condemn a man for not being able to say where he was—’
‘On the night the man who left him a fortune was stabbed in the culprit’s hotel room, yes.’ January sighed. ‘I take it nothing has been discovered that would point to either Diogenes or Droudge?’
‘Well, according to Lieutenant Shaw, Captain Tremouille isn’t looking. As far as he’s concerned, they have the culprit. Uncle Diogenes – who has been making a complete pest of himself with the Mayor and City Council – is paying Mayerling the cost of the girl’s board, mostly in IOUs. But, apparently, while Pierrette was staying in the servants’ quarters at the Iberville, it came to light that Droudge was making arrangements to resell her at a twenty percent profit . . . Are you hungry?’
‘Ravenous.’
‘I’ve saved some table scraps for you. And there’s hot water in the kitchen left over from the washing-up. The girls and I were going to walk over to Passebon’s this evening. Liselle is taking it all well, I understand. I think she’s glad, just to . . . to not wonder anymore. And, of course, that awful mother of hers is refusing to pay for a second funeral, which is not what poor Beauvais needs right now. He buried his brother yesterday.’
They descended the backstairs, crossed the small and crookedly-placed yard to the kitchen, where Abigail – a tiny buck-toothed woman of January’s age who did daywork for half a dozen families on Rue Esplanade – dished up a bowl of leftover beans and rice, with a sausage dropped on top. The lemonade wasn’t cold, but January didn’t care. It was good only to be on something other than a steamboat deck and not to be worrying about who might be after him.
‘So tell me,’ said Rose, ‘about Isobel Deschamps’s shameful secret? Does she turn into a wolf at the full of the moon? Give herself to the Devil in Black Masses? Seek votes for women? Did she poison her father so she could run off with that appalling actor . . .?’
‘All of them,’ replied January grandly, gesturing with the sausage on a fork. ‘She is a loup-garou, and a Satan worshipper, and a poisoner . . . and as such,’ he added in a quieter voice, ‘I am pledged to speak to no one of what she told me. Not even to you, my nightingale. It is nothing shameful –’ Rose had turned from the boiler, frowning in
concern, all jest gone from her eyes – ‘but it is a secret I cannot share. She isn’t married to Frank Subbs, at any rate. But there are others involved, who would suffer grievously.’
She came to him, set down the basin of hot water on the corner of the table, and he put a palm to her cheek. Looking up into her face – a face he seldom saw in terms of its color – he thought how the light milky brown of her complexion was simply a part of her beauty, like her gray-green, short-sighted eyes or the dusting of freckles over her nose. But he saw her color now, identifying her with his mother’s merciless exactitude as a quadroon – a precise rung on a ladder that was of such frantic importance to every libre in the French Town, but that meant utterly nothing to the Americans, who saw only white or black: can I sell her, or can I not?
But if I start to wonder why the world is constituted as it is, it will only drive me mad.
‘Now tell me about your days and the girls,’ he said, ‘and of all that’s happened, while I’ve been away.’
As matters turned out, January was destined to confer with Hannibal on the subject of the son of Philippa Stuart, the Viscountess Foxford, much sooner than the following morning.
At Crowdie Passebon’s modest cottage, he was told that Liselle had gone – with Rameses’s mother, who had come up with her from Crown Point and was staying with Fortune Gérard the coffee seller and his wife, who was her cousin – to sit vigil beside her husband’s sealed coffin in the small back parlor at Quennell’s. After paying his quiet respects to her there, and expressing his sorrow to Beauvais Quennell and his wife, he returned to the Passebon’s small green house on Rue Burgundy, where the wake would be held after the funeral. He had to endure the chaffing and joking and expressions of alarmed non-recognition (‘Whoa, that a billiard ball I see? Looks a little like Ben January, but January had him a full head of hair . . .’) from the other members of the FTFCMBS assembled there, but Crowdie Passebon and Mohammed LePas offered him subdued thanks for arranging the delivery of the undoctored account books.
‘It’s bad,’ admitted LePas. ‘We took what funds we have left out of the Mississippi and Balize and put them into the Bank of Louisiana –’ he shook his head – ‘for all the good that’s likely to do. Thank you, Ben.’
It was late by the time he returned home, and later still – after a more comprehensive reunion with Rose than had been possible on the front gallery earlier in the evening – before he slept, only to be wakened after an hour’s sleep by the sharp rapping of knuckles on the jalousie of the French door. ‘Rose!’ a voice whispered outside. ‘Rose, for God’s sake.’
She turned over, sat up sleepily. ‘What on earth . . .?’
‘I have found you out at last, you wicked woman,’ said January to Rose, recognizing the voice. And, padding to the French door: ‘Come in through my study, Hannibal.’ He scooped his shirt from the end of the bed and slithered into it as he crossed the parlor by instinct in the dark; behind him, candlelight flared briefly in the bedroom as Rose caught up her shift and wrapper. ‘What is it?’ he asked as he shot open the bolt of the jalousies in the study to reveal the thin black silhouette of the fiddler against the dimmest of blue starlight beyond the gallery outside. ‘What’s happened?’
‘It’s Gerry. He’s ill. The note said, dying.’
‘Thank God you’re back,’ Hannibal added as the two of them slipped from shadow to shadow along Rue Dauphine. ‘And thank God you’re safe—’
‘No thanks to you,’ returned January, with a little shove to make it clear that he didn’t mean it. ‘No, truly,’ he added, ‘I doubt you could have helped – and, in fact, I suspect Isobel would not have confided her secret in me, had anyone else been there.’
‘And her secret is?’
Voices sounded on Rue des Ursulines, and the two men faded into the deeper shadows of a barred carriageway. Two weeks ago the city would have been deathly silent at this hour, but now, even at three a.m., candles burned behind the French doors of the little cottages that opened straight on to the banquette, or in the upper windows of town houses. Laughter and faint music. Shadows passed back and forth.
It was Sunday – in two hours the bells would ring for early Mass. Tomorrow night would be Halloween night, and Tuesday, the Feast of All Saints, when not only the living but the dead would gather, to say, as families were saying to one another all over town, ‘I’ve missed you, it’s good to see you again . . .’
Last year, January, Rose, and Hannibal had been in Mexico, only weeks after January and Rose had wed. Tuesday would be the first of the family feasts at which January would present his bride, when they picnicked at the cemetery. The first feast at which Rose’s family – both libre and white – would come to find them as they cleaned the tombs, would welcome him as Rose’s husband . . .
Then the whites would all go off and vote for a new President for the United States. And those with African blood in their veins would have only their families to be citizens of . . .
And some, he reflected sadly, thinking of Martin Quennell, and the beautiful Countess Mazzini, not even that.
Voices laughed, and the rougher jostle of talk drifted from the cafés on Rue Bourbon. The waterfront would be lively with sailors no longer worried about coming ashore to the threat of fever. January guessed that there would now be more City Guards patrolling Rue Bourbon and Rue Royale to demand of a black man what the hell he was doing, walking abroad after curfew.
Since at this hour of the morning whatever constables they might meet were just as likely to be drunk, January preferred to have the ensuing explanation take place at the Cabildo.
‘Her secret,’ replied January softly, ‘is still a secret. It hardly seems fair that hers should be the only secret, of all of those surrounding Derryhick’s death, to be turned out into the light.’
After a moment of silence, Hannibal said, ‘Touché, amicus meus.’ They walked on, turned down Rue St Ann, toward the smoky lights and the dingy gambling parlors whose doors never seemed to close.
‘I see you got the account books all right.’
‘For all the good it’s likely to do the Society,’ sighed Hannibal. ‘Quennell has been talking about making the money good, but by my estimate there’s close to ten thousand dollars missing, and you know Schurtz won’t care anything beyond the fact that the lots were turned over to him. I found Stubbs.’
‘Did you?’ January raised his brows.
‘At least, Marie-Venise has taken to slipping away from the Countess’s in the early hours of the morning – not now, I mean, but seven or eight o’clock – to arrange private appointments at a house of assignation on Terpsichore Street.’
‘Who on earth would want her services – or anything along those lines – at eight in the morning?’
Hannibal spread his hands. ‘Benjamin, your innocence in the ways of the world is absolutely touching. Vivere si recte nescis, decede peritis. She is also, according to Elspie, selling her jewelry and paying Little J to carry letters for her to the Fatted Calf Tavern on Camp Street across from the theater.’
‘An accommodation address?’
‘So I believe. I’ve taken to getting coffee there – discreetly – and have seen no evidence of the man himself.’
‘I wonder if he replies.’
They crossed before the shut doors of the Cathedral and entered the Cabildo’s watch room, smoky and stuffy despite the doors flung open to the chill of predawn. The night sergeant looked up in surprise and opened his mouth to protest January’s presence, but Hannibal dipped in the pocket of his shabby waistcoat and handed the man a folded note. ‘I only received this an hour ago,’ he said, ‘and it enjoins me to bring a physician as quickly as I can. Viscount Foxford is a relative of mine,’ he added as the man studied the scribbled missive. ‘Is he all right?’
‘We have a doctor to look in . . .’ The sergeant handed the note back with a touch of reproof in his voice.
‘And I’m sure he’s a very competent man,’ replied Hannibal. ‘
But a very busy one, with so many to see to . . .’
‘Thank God, not so many as some years.’ The man crossed himself, made a sign to avert the Evil Eye, and fetched keys from his desk. ‘I was afraid the boy had the cholera . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Three took sick like that, all at once . . . I been up two or three times to the cell, and the Negro cell also, and all’s quiet for now. Still . . .’
He led the way across the yard.
The room where infirm or injured prisoners were consigned was a tiny one, set beneath the outside stair that ascended to the main cells, and was probably once used for storage. It was opposite the courtyard privies, and the reek almost stifled the stink of vomit as the sergeant unlocked the door. ‘Damn all,’ commented the officer as he held his torch into the room; a few of the smaller roaches scurried indignantly for the shadows, but the big ones clustered around the two puddles of watery puke on the floor paid no heed. There were two hammocks, and a third man lay on the floor beneath one of them on a straw mattress.
Two of the sick men were sleeping. The third – the man on the floor – twisted and muttered, clutching and rubbing at his twitching legs. Sweat glistened on his face, and when January knelt beside him – he was a brutal-looking Kentuckian with half of one ear bitten off in some long-ago fight – the skin of his hands and face was not hot with fever, but clammy and cold.
‘Are they voiding blood?’ he asked, rising to face the sergeant again. Hannibal had gone to the hammock on the other side of the little room, stood looking down at the young Viscount’s face with no expression in his own.
The sergeant nodded. ‘That one on the floor – Liver-Eatin’ Mike, I have heard he is called –’ he pronounced the English nickname with distaste – ‘said that he swallowed coals of fire. What is it, M’sieu? They have no fever. Is it catching?’
‘I’m inclined to think it is food poisoning,’ January said quietly. ‘When did it come on?’
‘Two, three o’clock this afternoon. And all three, almost at the same time. And you’re right.’ The man frowned, casting his mind back. ‘That Mike, he’s one of the worst when a man’s family brings him food. He’ll lie in wait and steal anything that’s brought.’ He shrugged, as if those who found themselves in the common cell asked for what they got.
Dead and Buried Page 24
