In the café window, one of the candles that stood on the tables within moved back and forth, back and forth: Hannibal’s signal that it was indeed Stubbs. A few minutes later the candle was moved again: he’s coming out.
January wondered if the expected message from his employer had arrived, and if it had contained the funds requested.
Like the late Martin Quennell, “Montague Blessinghurst” had made his home as far as he could manage from the French Town – as if he had dwelled in New Orleans just long enough to understand how seldom the haughty French and Spanish Creoles deigned to cross Canal Street. From the muted ruckus of Camp Street, where theatergoers were packing wives and daughters into carriages with mendacious promises of, ‘Just going to have a chat and a smoke with Robinson here, won’t be half an hour . . .’ January trailed Stubbs across the tree-shrouded stillness of Lafayette Place and up Girod Street, which descended from the inexpensively modest to the baldly sordid in the space of two blocks. The remains of old cane fields were broken here and there by heaps of lumber and brick, or more frequently by slatternly constructions thrown together from dismembered flat boats. Dirty lantern-light smudged the night; men’s voices cursed or laughed. Like most whites, Stubbs stayed on the unpaved streets, visible for blocks by the lantern he carried. He was easier to follow thus, January reflected, than he would have been by daylight.
Autumn wind breathed from the river; the leathery leaves of the magnolias rattled, like the wings of Halloween bats. Rameses Ramilles, at least, would have no cause tomorrow night to walk abroad. He slept among his friends at last. On Tuesday, Liselle would go with the other ladies of the FTFCMBS – Rose among them – to serve out food and lemonade to the men and children whitewashing the Society’s tomb: renewing its plaster against another winter of frost, digging out the encroaching resurrection-fern from the cracks, polishing the brass till it glinted. January’s mother always went, to lay out her little picnic of meat pies and jambalaya and to pay her respects to the widow of St-Denis Janvier, to his white children, and to his brother’s family – with whom she was partner in a cotton press and two hotels – though she hadn’t a single relative of her own in the cemetery . . .
And yet, after ten days of panic, violence, flight, and the threat of hanging, January found himself looking forward to an afternoon of physical labor, visiting friends and family, and putting up with his mother’s sarcastic complaints.
And Dante probably thought the foot slopes of Mount Purgatory pretty handsome, once he crawled out of the Pit with brimstone in his hair.
The ‘residential hotel’ where Stubbs – or Eliot Preston, as he was apparently calling himself these days – had taken a room was one of those large, shabby dwellings in the quarter of the town that catered to the flood of Americans who came every year to New Orleans to make money from the booming markets in cotton, slaves, and gunrunning to the decaying Spanish Empire. It was considerably shabbier than McPhearson’s Hotel a few streets away, where Martin Quennell had boasted his residence; the owners lived off the premises and hired a ‘caretaker’ to sleep in the office there in case a tenant died, went insane, or was attacked by vengeful French Creoles in the night. January’s feet squished in the mud of the trash-strewn yard as he closed the distance between himself and Stubbs, and even the night’s hard chill did little to mitigate the stinks of uncleaned cowshed and chicken-run.
Stubbs whirled on the threshold, key in one hand and the lantern upraised in the other. ‘Who’s there?’ He was unshaven and unclean, and by the pong of liquor on his clothing as January got close, not entirely sober. ‘I warn you, I have a gun.’ He dropped his key and fumbled in a pocket.
January stepped from the darkness, caught his wrist in an iron grip, and said, ‘So do my friends out in the yard.’ He nodded behind him at the abyssal darkness. ‘I mean you no harm. Give me the gun, and you won’t be hurt.’
Stubbs hesitated, then reached resignedly for his pocket.
‘Left hand,’ January reminded him.
The Englishman complied, fishing forth by its business end a long-barreled dueling-pistol of which January promptly relieved him, putting the weapon into his own pocket and opening his hand to show it empty. ‘Shall we go inside?’
He turned briefly back to the darkness – which contained no one but, presumably, Hannibal, who had had instructions to follow Stubbs separately in case of evasion or accident – and made signs suggestive of telling an army of bravoes to rest upon their swords. For a man who made his living by fraud, Stubbs was a shockingly gullible subject. He gulped and stammered, ‘Listen, I have money, I can get you five hundred dollars tomorrow . . .’ as he tremblingly unlocked the door, and January followed him inside and up the narrow service-stair. ‘I swear I was only writing what I was told to write. It wasn’t my idea – they’re holding my wife and children hostage . . .’
The actor’s room was at the end of a hallway that reeked of greasy cooking, spit tobacco, and chamber pots. ‘I beg of you, tell Mr Verron I’m leaving New Orleans tomorrow, the arrangements are all made, he need never be troubled with me again . . .’ He fumbled the key in the door lock, pushed the door open, lantern held high . . .
‘You?!?’ he cried.
Oh, Christ. By his tone of voice, whoever was in there, it wasn’t good.
January stepped swiftly through the door at his heels, and in the lantern light – even at that moment added to by the yellowish gleam of a second dark-lantern uncovered – beheld the slender form of Marie-Venise, with the Countess’s Prussian needle-gun in her hand.
In almost a single move, January snatched Stubbs’s lantern from his hand and shoved the actor sideways into the darkness, setting the lantern down and dodging in the other direction. Marie-Venise wavered, caught by surprise. By the sound of it, Stubbs tripped over something – beyond the glimmer of the two yellow lantern beams the room was like a coal sack – and she swung the barrel in that direction, giving January the chance to lunge across the room, seize her wrist, twist the pistol from her hand, drop it, and put his hand over her mouth before she could scream ‘rape’ and really get him in trouble.
He said, ‘I’m here to help you, Vennie,’ thrust her aside, and dove for the door – tripping in the process over the chair that Stubbs had overset – and slammed it before Stubbs could collect himself to dive through it. ‘Don’t move, Stubbs,’ he added, yanking the duelling pistol from his pocket, though he only had the vaguest idea of where the Englishman was. ‘Mamzelle, if you would be so kind as to light some candles . . .’
He wouldn’t have bet much that the French girl would side with him against her lover, but she’d evidently made her decision, because her thin, small, boyish hands appeared in the lantern beam, poking a candle into the flame. She set an assortment of mostly-burned stumps into a cheap brass candelabra on the table by the window, and the increased glow showed Stubbs scrambling to his feet and trying to get to the window beside the rumpled bed. Marie-Venise bent to scoop up the needle gun and trained it on him, her wry young face hard in the tumbled frame of dark hair. ‘You stand still, cochon,’ she said. ‘You stand and tell me what you’ve done with my jewels.’
‘My little bird –’ Stubbs spread his hands, like Romeo stunned by his first sight of Juliet’s beauty in Act One, Scene Five – ‘you gave them to me that they might be liquidated for cash—’
‘For us,’ hissed the girl. ‘Not for you to run off and leave me. To carry us safely to England—’
‘What did this man promise you, Mamzelle?’ asked January quietly.
She didn’t take her eyes off Stubbs. She’d learned that much about him, anyway. ‘All things – the Moon! A settlement, and a house in London. He’s a rich man. Once he can get back safe to England and put his hand upon the family money there. They all have mistresses – why not me, enfin? But since he’s decided –’ she jerked her head at the portmanteau, half-packed, that lay now visible on the bed amid a tangle of folded shirts and gaudy waistcoats – ‘that he’d rat
her go back to whatever English slut he left, I’ll have back my jewels and the money I sent him—’
‘My dear girl,’ coaxed Stubbs. ‘Such an excitable little sparrow! Of course I was preparing to leave – my enemies are closing in! I was on my way to you and—’
‘How much did you lend him?’ asked January.
‘Fifty in cash. And all my jewels, and not just those he gave me.’
‘I’ll give you two hundred,’ said January. ‘Will you cover us, while I have a word with him?’
She moved her head just enough to glance at him, dark eyes narrowed, without taking the gun off Stubbs. ‘And where’s the likes of you going to get two hundred?’
‘From the family of another woman he wronged,’ replied January evenly. ‘A woman more fortunate than yourself. I only need a word.’
She considered the likelihood of this version of events, then nodded. ‘You tell him if I don’t get my money he is a dead man.’
January took Stubbs’s arm, led him to the corner of the room farthest from both door and window. The actor’s very sweat smelled of rum. ‘Who paid you?’ he asked softly.
‘Who paid me what?’
January’s hand tightened. He didn’t often exert the full strength of his grip, but he did now, and Stubbs whimpered. ‘Give me the name. The name you gave to Patrick Derryhick at Davis’s, the night he went back to the hotel and was killed. The name of the man who paid you to make sure Viscount Foxford would never marry Isobel Deschamps. Or, I swear to you, I will drag you straight downtown and throw you through Louis Verron’s parlor window.’
‘Droudge,’ gasped Stubbs. ‘It was Droudge.’
‘Why?’
‘He’d been speculating on the ’Change,’ Stubbs babbled, fingers picking ineffectually at January’s grip. ‘Borrowing against the estate. Shocking turn-up over a load of Chinese opium that came to smash. He claimed it was his only little flier, but me, I think he’d been dipped for years, long before the old gov’nor snuffed it.’
‘Where did he know you from?’
‘He’s my cousin. Well, he always thought Mama and I were beneath him, but he wrote to me almost a year ago in London, where I was playing Handsome Jack in The Storm – and being well spoken of, I might add! – and offered to pay off a few little debts of mine if I’d undertake work for him in Paris. I was to keep an eye on this American girl, intercept messages to young Foxford’s lodgings – easy enough, once I’d got that Stuart boy in debt to me at the tables – find whatever I could to her discredit – and Lord, didn’t I! – and generally do whatever I could to sully the prospect—’
‘Including raping the girl?’
‘Lord, she’s a negress! I daresay I wouldn’t have been—’ January forced himself not to strike the man, but the effort must have showed in his face and in his grip because Stubbs amended hastily, ‘That is, some quite nice people are Negroes—’
‘Here’s what you’re going to do,’ broke in January quietly. ‘You’re going to sit down at that table there, and you’re going to write all that you’ve told me and sign it. Then you’re coming with me to the Cabildo – my men and I will keep you safe on the way – and I’ll arrange with a friend of mine there for you to be hidden until the trial. The moment the trial is over, I’ll give you five hundred dollars – and don’t you even think of trying to get more from someone else—’
Stubbs shook his head frantically. ‘No, no . . .!’
‘And then you’ll leave the United States and never return. Not here, not to England. Understand?’
‘I say,’ protested Stubbs, ‘I have my career to consider.’
‘Shall I let Verron pay you what you asked for from him?’
‘There’s no need to be unkind about it. That was a miscalculation . . .’
January raised his voice a little: ‘Mamzelle? Might you bring those candles to the desk, if you please?’ When she’d done so and Stubbs had sat down, January dug in his jacket pocket, and handed Marie-Venise two hundred dollars in Bank of Louisiana notes. ‘Thank you, Mamzelle. And don’t grieve about not becoming Lord Montague’s mistress back in London. He’s an actor, and his name is Frank Stubbs. You’d probably have ended by supporting him.’
‘I say!’ Stubbs threw down his quill and turned in the chair. ‘Did you have to—?’
At which point the door slammed open, four men stepped through, and Louis Verron’s voice snapped, ‘Kill him.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
Blessinghurst screamed in terror. Marie-Venise smote the candle branch with a blow that sent the lights clattering to the floor; January scooped the tin lantern from the desk and flung it at Verron and his cousins, and he saw the girl’s slim silhouette against the window as she threw the casements open. Three shots simultaneously cracked, sounding like cannon fire in the enclosed room. January shoved Stubbs ahead of him to the window as Verron and his cousins plunged for them and tripped over the chair that had earlier felled both January and the actor. As he swung over the window sill, January heard the crack of another shot and the splintering of the window frame beside him. He dropped to the porch roof, rolled to its edge with the jumbled shapes of Marie-Venise and Blessinghurst scrambling ahead of him, and felt a burning sting as if someone had struck him on the outside of the right thigh with a red-hot metal rod.
The shock spun him around, and he fell from the edge of the porch roof, hitting the ground with stunning impact. In the pitch-black darkness of the house’s shadow, he couldn’t see who it was who rolled him over, pulled open his coat, and relieved him of the remainder of Cadmus Rablé’s money, but by the smell it was certainly Lord Montague Blessinghurst.
By the time two men dropped from the edge of the porch roof in pursuit, ‘His Lordship’ was across the yard like a panicked hare and disappearing into the inky wall of nearby trees. Consciousness reeling on the edge of darkness, January heard two more pursuers thunder downstairs within the house, and with a sensation like dreaming he saw them bolt across the moonlit ground in the same direction. Gold reflections on the trees and a sudden, gritty roil of smoke informed him that at least one of the fallen candles had ignited the bedroom curtains. He hoped Verron and his boys caught Stubbs and gave him the beating of his life before shooting him dead.
Shouts in the house: new-wakened, hung-over, stricken with panic. If, after all this, I spend the night in the Cabildo for arson . . .
‘Amicus meus?’ Long, thin hands, surprisingly strong, rolled him over. He managed to get an arm across Hannibal’s shoulder.
‘’Tis not so deep as a well, nor wide as a church door.’ He struggled to rise, knowing full well his friend would never get him to his feet unaided.
‘Quod di omen avertant,’ whispered Hannibal. ‘Look what happened to the fellow who said that in the play. Can you walk?’
January pressed his hand to his leg. The muscle between his hip and his knee flashed with agony, but the wound was like a burned gash, not a hole, and no artery had been hit. ‘Get me to the trees,’ he panted. ‘I owe you fifty cents.’
‘Don’t you understand?’ Germanicus Stuart, Viscount Foxford, regarded his two visitors from eyes circled in smudges of darkness, and his voice barely sounded a whisper. ‘Thank you – truly, thank you – for your efforts, and your concern . . . which I can’t imagine how I’ve earned . . . but God, I wish you had let well alone. Even if evidence existed, there’s no question of prosecuting Droudge. If by some miracle the jury were to accept that the sheets on the bed could have been switched by someone else – and all the rest of it – I would not even be able to discharge the man. He has a gun pointed at my heart – at the hearts of the one I love and those she loves.’
He made as if to reach for the tin cup of water that stood on the floor beside the makeshift cot that had replaced his hammock. Only the near certainty that the young man would be robbed, and possibly killed, while too weak to help himself had gained January’s consent to leave him in the so-called ‘infirmary’ cell rather than returning him to
the general lock-up; the Kaintuck who had been brought in with jail fever had shown no signs of either typhoid or cholera and lay propped, snoring softly, in the hammock that had previously belonged to the late Gator Jack. January, seated on the crude milking-stool that Shaw had produced from somewhere as a sort of bedside table, lifted the cup, but Foxford was able to take it from his hand and drink himself.
‘It’s bad enough that Patrick—’ He stopped himself and looked aside.
Softly, Hannibal said, ‘What happened to Patrick wasn’t your fault.’
‘It was, though.’ The boy’s hand began to shake, and the fiddler gently took the cup from him. ‘I thought – I shouldn’t have . . . All I knew in Paris was that she’d fled from me, gone back home. I didn’t know what I’d done, or why she’d run away – God, I was a fool! I thought if I could bring Patrick, and Uncle Diogenes, here to find her, to convince her . . .’
‘Amor vincet omnia,’ murmured Hannibal. ‘I know the feeling. A grand gesture didn’t work for me, either.’
‘Patrick suspected. I know that, now. But he was very good about pretending that we really were looking for a cotton plantation to invest in. But then when I saw Isobel with Blessinghurst – I remembered him from Paris, remembered how he’d taken her aside at a ball one night, just before she . . . she got sick and refused to see me. I thought I saw it all. The last thing I expected, when I finally spoke to her, was for her to tell me that she was being blackmailed. She said it was Blessinghurst, and that’s all I knew. I didn’t even tell Patrick his name – I was careful about that, for her sake, but, of course, after that party at Trulove’s he guessed . . .’
‘He would.’ Hannibal sighed. ‘He always outguessed me, anyway.’
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