‘Gator Jack is his pal,’ he added, with a nod at the man in the hammock above Liver-Eatin’ Mike. ‘They’ll gang up and split the take. Serve ’em right, wouldn’t it –’ he flashed a crooked, cheerful grin – ‘if the milk or the fish they brought poor M’sieu le Vicomte was bad—’
‘Who brought?’
The sergeant looked at January as if he hadn’t been paying attention to some earlier explanation. ‘The young man’s lawyer, and that sour-faced business manager, who seems to think we have servants to draw baths for every man here and maids to sweep the floor three times a day.’
Hannibal said softly, ‘Droudge.’
TWENTY-SIX
‘It’s arsenic, isn’t it?’
January felt Foxford’s face, then his hands; then withdrew his stethoscope from his satchel and listened to the young man’s chest. ‘The symptoms are consistent, yes.’ Upon Hannibal’s argument that none of the three patients was in any shape to assault visitors, the sergeant had locked the cell door and gone to fetch water, encouraged by what January guessed was most of Hannibal’s tip money from the Countess’s that evening. He hoped the man would think to bring a lantern on his return trip as well. The torch gave shaky light at best, and it couldn’t be brought close enough to a man’s face to do any good.
‘Will he live?’
January glanced across at his friend’s dark eyes, but could read nothing in them. ‘I’ll know better when he comes around. The fact that Droudge brought the poison doesn’t mean Uncle Diogenes didn’t prepare it, you know.’
Hannibal opened his mouth, closed it, and stood for a moment in thought. Then: ‘Fifty cents says it’s Droudge.’
After studying him in silence for a few minutes more, January said, ‘You seem awfully sure of yourself.’
‘I’m awfully sure Uncle Diogenes wouldn’t take time out from visiting bookshops and whipping parlors to purchase arsenic and ginger beer. He’s not a greedy man. Send him his remittance – and occasional infusions of hush money to the parents of his eromenae – and he’s happy.’
‘And you think Foxford would have done that when he came into the property?’
‘He has raised no objections so far.’
The cell door creaked as it opened. The sergeant had not only brought a pitcher of water and a lantern, but also a wooden stool. ‘You men take care, now,’ he warned, hanging the lantern on a nail on the wall and taking the torch from Hannibal’s hand. ‘If one of those men gets hold of that stool . . .’
January looked down at the trembling, sweating Kaintuck on the floor, the silent man in the other hammock. Hannibal reassured the sergeant, ‘I believe Dr Janvier and I can handle them.’
When the door was closed again and locked, January recounted what Isobel had told him of the events of the sixth of October, without specifying in whose house his conversation with her had taken place, or what had been the secret Blessinghurst had learned. ‘The times fit,’ he finished. ‘Given how long it would have taken for Derryhick to find Blessinghurst.’
Hannibal whispered, ‘Young fool.’
‘Did he mention Gerry was staying with Theodoric Stuart in Paris when he met Mademoiselle Deschamps?’
‘At the town house?’
‘You know it?’
‘Gods, yes. The lot of us took it over like invading Goths and turned it into Liberty Hall. I hope to God somebody whitewashed the poem I chalked on to the wall of the back drawing room. Are you thinking Theo might have written something to his father about Gerry’s intention to wed?’
‘I’m not thinking anything right now.’ Gently, January slipped an arm under the Viscount’s shoulders, eased him into a sitting position while the fiddler held the hammock steady. ‘Nor do I have to, nor you either, if we can lay hands on Stubbs before Louis Verron gets to him.’ The torch had provided some warmth, but the cell was bitterly cold, and none of the three patients had a blanket. The Viscount began to shiver violently and muttered a name that might have been, Isobel. ‘My great fear is that even when we get Stubbs’s side of the story – if we find out who’s behind the blackmail attempt – it will do no good. Without concrete proof – proof enough to jail Diogenes . . . or Droudge, if he’s your favorite – I’m afraid Foxford will let himself be hanged, rather than risk Isobel’s secret becoming common knowledge.’
‘Good God, what did she do?’ Hannibal stared at him.
January returned the gaze across the Viscount’s shivering body, almost marveling at his friend’s obtuseness to something that had seemed so obvious to himself. And it would have been obvious, he realized, to anyone born and brought up in New Orleans. French and Spanish Creoles – some of the worst gossips in the known world – were forever surreptitiously studying one another’s fingernails, hair, and pedigrees, and it didn’t surprise January at all that Louis Verron had immediately believed Stubbs’s clumsy attempt at blackmail rather than simply saying, ‘It’s absurd.’
For over a hundred and fifty years, the French families who had settled in New Orleans had lived side by side with those shadow offspring, those ‘vulture eggs’, those half-caste and quarter-caste men and women who made up the gens du couleur libre: neither white nor black, but something else. Everyone had heard stories of people who quietly stepped over the line when no one was looking. And everyone worried that it might happen in their family.
A brief gust of rage passed through him that the blood of his mother, his sisters, his friends should be regarded as a sort of taint, poisoning by contact with the smallest droplet . . .
Then he forced his mind to release the thought. If I’m going to be angry about that then I will live in anger forever.
‘Nothing to the girl’s discredit,’ he said gently. ‘But it will ruin her family, destroy the lives of her mother and sister . . . and may well cost her her own life, if her cousin decides killing can scotch the story. For that matter,’ he added, as Hannibal’s eyes widened in disbelieving shock, ‘it wouldn’t hurt to ask, on our way out, if Louis Verron or any of his friends paid a call on the jail around dinner time. Just to make sure.’
First light stained the sky above the courtyard when the Viscount finally rested easily enough to be left. Hannibal tucked his own shabby coat around the young man’s body, despite the slim odds that he’d ever get the garment back once it was out of his sight. January did what he could for both the other men, though it was fairly clear to him that Liver-Eatin’ Mike, at least, had stolen his last food from a weaker man.
‘I’ll get a blanket from home,’ said January, when the sergeant came to let them out of the cell. His breath laid a faint mist on the dawn air. The watch room was only marginally warmer than the yard – and quiet, as public places are in the small hours of Sunday mornings. At the sergeant’s desk, Lieutenant Shaw looked around from conference with the men of the night watch; he spat and signed Hannibal and January to wait.
‘Boechter said as how you was here,’ he said when he finally came to them beside his desk. ‘The boy all right?’ When January nodded, he continued, ‘He sick? Or was it somethin’ he et?’ And the inflection in his light-timbred drawl told January that the clawing and twitching of Liver-Eatin’ Mike’s extremities – the burning of his throat – had not escaped him.
‘I suspect,’ said January grimly, ‘it’s something he ate. Can you keep him quarantined? Keep anyone from seeing him?’
‘Can you get him a blanket?’ asked Hannibal.
Shaw’s pale eyes narrowed. ‘He had one, beginnin’ of the night. I’ll see what I can do. As for keepin’ him in the sick cell, Tremouille –’ he nodded in the direction of the interior stair, which led up to the Captain of the Watch’s office on the upper floor – ‘just told me there’s one of the boatmen brought in yesterday, looks to be comin’ down with jail fever. I’d say your boy’s safer in the main cell.’
‘In spite of the fact that, if he starts refusing food, the next thing Uncle Diogenes – or Mr Droudge, as Hannibal would have it – is going to try is pa
ying some bravo to start up a fight?’
Shaw spat again. ‘He better think twic’t about it. What the hell you do to your hair, Maestro? You look like my Uncle Sus after the Seminole got him.’
‘Tried to sneak into a monastery.’ January ran a self-conscious hand over the prickles of his makeshift tonsure. Rose would have to clip the whole head short to match. ‘You think you can keep anyone from seeing Foxford for the next few days, until we lay hands on Stubbs? Tell them he really is sick – dying would be better . . .’
‘Dyin’ was what he looked to be doin’ yesterday, near sundown. An’ he’ll need to see that lawyer of his’n, which’ll be about as useful as a hanky in an artillery barrage. Trial can’t be put back, neither – the whole docket’s jammed from the summer. Now, I am mightily curious,’ he added, turning his gaze on Hannibal, ‘as to why you think the boy’s business manager would be slippin’ inheritance powder into his ginger beer, an’ not the man who’s gonna come in for all Foxford’s money, an’ Derryhick’s, too, if’n the boy should cut his stick. What do you know about the man?’
‘I know I don’t like him,’ replied Hannibal shortly. ‘Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere . . . He looks like a vulture, and Philippa – Lady Foxford – was of the opinion, even eighteen years ago, that his bookkeeping needed looking into: something the old Viscount would never hear of. So long as Gerry was under age, his mother was powerless to even see the ledgers. Uncle Diogenes wasn’t the man to come back to County Mayo and straighten things out – not if it meant that he’d have to go through the whole tedious process of finding another man of business. I imagine he would say – as his brother the eleventh Viscount said before him – that letting Droudge “feather his nest a little” was part of the cost of doing business and cheap at the price of having a man so adept at racking the tenants out of their last shilling.’
Old anger glinted in his eyes, like a weapon drowned under decades of alcohol. Like the scorched anger that had been in his voice when he’d spoken of the man who’d broken Philippa Foxford’s heart.
‘An’ His Lordship committin’ Holy Matrimony would stick a spoke into his little wheel.’
‘Yes.’ Hannibal folded his shirtsleeved arms and shivered as the courtyard door was opened for the sergeant to carry up the usual slop of pulses and beans for the men in the cells. ‘It would be useful to subpoena the account books for Foxford Priory and make enquiries among members of the London ’Change to see if – like our friend Martin Quennell – Caius Droudge has been investing where he should not with what he has no legal right to use, but that doesn’t seem possible . . . A reason he may have included himself in the expedition to retrieve and approve of Foxford’s errant bride.’
Shaw’s gray glance passed from one to the other of them, as if weighing up what he suspected against what could actually be taken into court. ‘You know damn-all about it,’ he observed mildly at last. ‘An’ what you say could go just as well for Uncle Diogenes.’
‘It could, yes.’
‘You happen to got even one teeny-tiny spit of evidence of any of this?’
‘Not one teeny-tiny spit,’ said Hannibal. ‘But give us time.’
‘If’n I could give time,’ returned Shaw with a sigh, ‘to all them as needed it in this world, I’d never have no rest, for people beggin’ a day here, an’ a year there, to get done what they shoulda, myself included. Trial’s on the fifth. That enough?’
‘It’s enough if we’re lucky,’ said January. ‘But if we don’t find Stubbs tonight, I suspect Louis Verron will have by Thursday.’
Rose and the girls were readying themselves for Mass when January and Hannibal returned to the house. Rose, a pagan or the next thing to it, regarded regular church attendance as part of what the parents of her pupils paid her for, and she dressed for it as if it mattered to God what worshippers wore. ‘Our newest pupil, Mademoiselle Alice Truxton, is upstairs,’ Rose informed him. ‘She is from Mobile, and she is a Protestant. She assured us she will pray for our souls to be delivered from Papism and Hell. There should be hot water in the kitchen boiler, if you want a bath. Is the Foxford boy all right?’
‘So far,’ said January. ‘However, the man who stole most of the food sent to him by his uncle and his business manager is dying of arsenic poison. Hannibal and I have a bet on whose idea that was,’ he added, as Rose’s eyes widened. ‘Do you know the Fatted Calf, across from the Camp Street Theater? Do they keep open on Sundays?’
Rose frowned, but Cosette Gardinier, tucking a late bronze chrysanthemum into the folds of her simple tignon, said, ‘They do, M’sieu. At least they did last winter, when Granmere told me we couldn’t get ices there because it was a café for les blankittes.’
‘When next we play for the opera at the Theater,’ promised Hannibal, ‘I shall go in and obtain ices for the lot of you, and I’ll bring them out to the street for you to consume, to the envy of all your friends. Will you wager on the murderer, Owl-Eyed Athene?’
‘Oh, Droudge,’ said Rose promptly. Evidently, in her mind a man who spent half his income on manuscripts in antique Persian couldn’t be all bad.
Bathed, shaved, freshly clothed, and comforted as he always was by the Mass, January made his way late that afternoon across Canal Street and down to the American Theater. He stood on the brick sidewalk for a time, looking about him as if seeking an address while he watched the shuttered front of the café.
In time the owner unlocked the street door, went back inside; a black youth of fourteen or fifteen emerged and unfolded the shutters of the French windows that formed most of the front of the building, went back inside, and came out again with a broom and a bucket of water to wash down the mud from the sidewalk. The owner came back out, demanded, ‘You deaf or just stupid, boy?’ and cuffed the youth on the ear.
‘Reckon I’s just stupid, sir.’
This got him another cuff and a shove inside. A woman emerged and took up the youth’s chore of rinsing and sweeping down the bricks. When she’d finished, she retreated within, and January gave her a few minutes then crossed the street and went down the narrow passway at the side of the building and through to the yard.
As he’d hoped, she was pumping another bucket full of water. January said, ‘Here, let me help you with that, m’am,’ and hurried across to her; she barely came up to his shoulder and couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds soaking wet.
To her smile of tired thanks, he said, ‘Fact is, m’am, you can help me out, if you would.’ And he produced two Spanish silver dollars from his pocket, showed them to her in his palm. ‘I’m lookin’ for an English feller, comes in here to pick up messages? Bit shorter than me . . .’
The smile was replaced by an odd look: a stillness, like a very angry cat getting ready to slash. ‘Preston,’ she said.
January slipped the coins into her hand. ‘One whose whore brings him in money? Skinny girl? French?’
‘That’s him.’ She nodded for him to follow her into the passway, where they couldn’t be seen from the back door. ‘You the man who’s lookin’ for him?’ She sounded like she really hoped he was. He remembered Stubbs’s attempt to kiss Elspie. ‘He said the man after him was white, a Frenchman.’
January wondered if someone had told the actor, or if Louis Verron had already made an attempt and failed. ‘I’m one of the men lookin’ for him. He be in tonight?’
She nodded. ‘He sent off a letter to that hotel yesterday – whining for money again, I’ll bet, as if that gal of his wasn’t sendin’ it to him every other day.’
‘The Iberville?’
‘That’s it.’
‘You wouldn’t know the name of the man who sends the messages to him, would you?’ He handed her another dollar.
‘It’s D something,’ she said. ‘I know that much.’ Of course, she wouldn’t read. ‘Somebody gonna kill him, is that why he’s hidin’ out?’
‘Less you know,’ responded January, with a finger to his lips, ‘less you can tell. He got a letter fr
om them tonight?’
She shook her head. ‘But he’ll be in. He’s always, “Why ain’t nobody send me what I need?” an’, “How long they expect me to stay hangin’ around this town?” Yesterday, somebody told him that Frenchman was after him, an’ you’d think he was Jesus Christ about to go up on the Cross with the whole world pickin’ on him an’ him innocent as a newborn baby lamb. Huh.’ She sniffed. ‘Anythin’ I can do to help you? Keep him here longer, get him out quicker? Mr Newman –’ she threw a glance back at the yard behind them – ‘says I got to let him ease his griefs, but I can pretend I’m sick if you need him out of here.’
From the yard, a man bellowed, ‘Nina! Nina you lazy bitch—’
‘Don’t get yourself in trouble,’ said January. ‘We’ll be outside.’
She smiled again, different than before. She said, ‘Good,’ and fleeted back around the corner of the passway to the yard.
As a man sows, reflected January, so shall he also reap.
Now let’s just hope it isn’t Louis Verron who’ll be in on the harvest before tonight.
TWENTY-SEVEN
January had played at the American Theater often enough to be welcome backstage, and the information that he was there to keep an unobtrusive eye on the Fatted Calf across the street because one of its habitués had injured a young lady friend of his didn’t hurt his cause. As was his habit, when a hand was needed with ropes or props for the matinee in progress, January lent a hand, and nobody blinked when Preacher or Four-Eyes or one of their many friends came to the stage door and signed to him: nuthin’ yet.
With five hundred dollars at his disposal, January had found, invisible observation became a simple matter.
It wasn’t until the bells were sounding nine o’clock in the Cathedral tower, an hour after he’d taken up the observation post himself in the alleyway between the Theater and Parnell’s cotton press, that he saw a man tall enough and broad enough in the shoulder to be his quarry hurry along the brick sidewalk and duck into the doorway.
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