Foxford shut his eyes, as if even the memory were a weight beyond his strength to bear. ‘He got it out of me,’ he whispered after a time. ‘I didn’t know . . . If I’d known what it was really about, I would have lied. Later that night, when she told me, I – I didn’t know what to do. Because he’d tell, she said Blessinghurst would tell if anyone did anything. I think Patrick must have guessed all along that it wasn’t really Blessinghurst, but someone using him as a pawn.’
‘Well,’ opined Hannibal, ‘anyone who’d met “His Lordship” would guess after five minutes that he doesn’t have the brains to conceive of anything more complicated than matching his cravat with his socks,’ and the young man’s face relaxed in a whispered chuckle. On the wall behind his head a line of ants crept steadily, from a crack near the floor and up to the ceiling and the cell above, glittering darkly in the thin slice of autumn light that fell through the judas. Across the tiny chamber, the boatman thrashed weakly in his hammock and called out, ‘Mary . . .!’ in his sleep.
After a little silence the young man went on, ‘But it isn’t just Marie-Amalie and their poor mother who’ll be cast out, branded – exiled from everyone who has ever been their friends. That’s the horror of it. It’s cousins, aunts, people I’ve never met . . . But they’re the people Isobel loves. People she was raised with, people who are a part of her life. I can’t do that. Not to them, not to her. Can’t . . . can’t just transform them, in the eyes of everyone they know, into Africans overnight, if they must live in a world where the children of Africa are despised—’
Hannibal said, ‘What?’
For a moment he and the young man looked at one another, stunned disbelief confronting the quiet of resigned despair. Then he turned to stare at January, open-mouthed with shock. January looked aside.
‘That’s it?’ demanded the fiddler. ‘That’s what all of this is about? Because some ancestor turns out to have been on the wrong side of the wrong blanket?’
When, after a moment, he had commanded his own anger, January returned his gaze. ‘Do you doubt it?’
Hannibal drew in breath to protest, to remark, to quote some apt and cutting fragment of Latin, then closed his mouth, unable to speak. He had spent the past five years of his exile in New Orleans; January saw everything he had so casually heard passing in review behind those coffee-dark eyes. At length he said, very quietly, ‘Dear God.’
‘I don’t want to die,’ Foxford went on softly. ‘I don’t want—’ He struggled for a moment to keep his jaw set. January wondered if the young man had ever seen a hanging – seen a man swing, legs threshing, soiling himself, for the twenty minutes or so it took to suffocate after the hoist. ‘I’ve lain here thinking about it, thinking about what I can possibly do, and I can’t – I don’t know. I don’t see what I can do, short of murdering Droudge, and then they’d hang me – or someone – for that. And he’s . . . very careful of himself.’
‘Given the number of tenants in Foxford village back home who have good reason to want to kill him,’ murmured Hannibal, ‘he’s had plenty of practice. And he’s vindictive. There was a man in Sleigh Farm . . .’ He hesitated on the story, then shook his head. ‘Well.’
‘I remember that.’ Foxford frowned. ‘At least, if it’s old Mr Ghille you mean. The one whose daughter Droudge had hanged. If I brought any kind of charge against him – even if we did have evidence – he’d see to it that everything about M’am Celestine’s true parents came out.’
‘And sooner than let that happen,’ said January softly, ‘Isobel’s cousin will kill her. And probably her mother as well. And, I have no doubt, would go to the gallows in silence, even as you propose to do, Your Lordship.’
Foxford nodded, shortly: it was not something he hadn’t known before. ‘I tell myself, it’s as if she were – they all were – with me in a shipwreck . . . Of course, I would get them to safety, even at the cost of my own life. But then I think of Mother . . .’
January laid a hand on the wasted wrist. ‘We’ll think of something, Your Lordship.’
‘NO!’ Foxford turned his head sharply on the wad of rags that served him for a pillow. ‘Sir, I beg you, don’t think of anything. Don’t do anything.’ His hand closed over January’s, desperate even in its weakness. ‘Swear to me you won’t tell Mr Shaw! My hope is gone,’ he whispered. ‘She could never be happy with me, knowing I’d had the smallest hand in destroying her family. Nor would I expect her to be, nor want her to pretend. Now she’s safe. Her family is safe. She was only a pawn; he has no further interest in her or them. With me or without me, Droudge will go back to Britain, and if I’m lucky enough to survive that long I’ll find some way of . . . of living alongside him.’
‘Don’t be a fool! If he ever suspected you knew, do you think he’d stick at poisoning you again? Your heir is Diogenes – do you think he’ll care if Droudge is robbing Foxford Priory of everything but the lead in the roof tiles?’
Hannibal laid a hand on January’s shoulder; shook his head when January looked up to meet his eyes. Quietly, the fiddler said, ‘We won’t tell Shaw. I swear it. If worst comes to worst, we can put it about that you’ve died, in the hopes old Droudge will drink himself to death in celebration. As Iago says, Good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well us’d.’
Foxford’s breath whispered out in another laugh. ‘That sounds like something Patrick would say,’ he said. ‘With everything that’s happened . . . Sometimes I think that if I get out of here, he’ll be waiting for me . . . And then I remember that, whatever else happens, he won’t be. I can’t . . . It still doesn’t seem real. That he’s dead, I mean.’
Hannibal said softly, ‘I know. When once we pass, the soul returns no more . . .’
‘Patrick used to quote that portion of the Iliad,’ said Foxford. ‘When he spoke about my father . . . Achilles and Patroclus, parting for the last time:
‘Now give thy hand; for to the farther shore
When once we pass, the soul returns no more:
When once the last funereal flames ascend,
No more shall meet Achilles and his friend;
No more our thoughts to those we loved make known;
Or quit the dearest, to converse alone.
‘He didn’t speak of him, but I don’t think he ever stopped missing him.’
Hannibal was silent for a long time, seeing – January knew this – his friend. Not dead in the mud of the cemetery, but – wherever, whenever it had been – the last time they’d been in the same room together.
‘But he went on,’ said Hannibal at last. ‘He lived his life regardless. Having known your father, I can say that had their positions been reversed, he would have said the same . . . and, I hope, had the strength to do the same. Though strength of spirit was, alas, not your father’s leading characteristic . . .’
‘No.’ The young man smiled at some memory. ‘Maybe not. But what I remember about him was the joy he brought to others – even to Mother; I could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice when she spoke of him – and the music that he made.’ He closed his eyes, and January thought for a time that he’d drifted off to sleep. But as he was disengaging his hand from those long, strengthless fingers they tightened, and Foxford whispered, ‘Swear you won’t do anything. Don’t make this harder for me.’
And January said, ‘I swear.’
‘Thank you,’ in a voice almost too faint to be heard. The boy was asleep before the guard came to let the visitors from the cell.
Hannibal was silent as they crossed the sharp noon brightness of the Cabildo yard, but when they reached the door to the watch room – and January halted to lean on the stick he’d cut, shillelagh-wise, from a hickory sapling – the fiddler asked conversationally, ‘What are you doing tonight?’
‘Sleeping,’ January answered, ‘I hope, since someone woke me up at two in the morning yesterday, and I haven’t been back to bed since. And putting my foot up.’ Under bandages and sticking plaster his leg throbbed damnably with
every step, and just crossing the yard had made him feel feverish and faint. ‘Bad leg or no bad leg, my mother’s going to insist that I go down to the cemetery with her tomorrow for the Feast of All Saints.’
‘Will you come with me now? We won’t be long, and I’ll hire a cab—’
‘Which they won’t let me ride in.’
‘I’ll tell the jarvey you’re my servant.’
‘And you’ll pay for this with what?’
‘I’ll borrow the money from Shaw.’ Incredulous, January opened his mouth to demand what the hell gave him the idea that the policeman would lend him so much as a silver bit, then closed it, seeing the strange, still darkness in the fiddler’s eyes. ‘I need to speak to him – and to Augustus Mayerling – and to one other respectable white man . . . Do you know any respectable white men, Benjamin? Responsare cupidinibus, contemnere honores fortis, et in se ipso totus . . . And then, if you would, will you come with me to speak to Beauvais Quennell and to your friend M’sieu Regnier at the Iberville?’
‘What are you going to do?’
Hannibal met his gaze, quite steadily, in silence for a time. Then he said, ‘The obvious.’
‘I swore—’
‘You swore,’ he reminded him. ‘I did nothing of the kind. It’s the Feast of All Saints, Benjamin,’ he added with a fleet smile. ‘The night when those dead and buried come back to help the living. Just convince Regnier and Quennell to help me, and locate two white witnesses, and then go home and rest: I swear I will ask nothing of you again, neither boon nor gift nor favor, for the remainder of my life. You don’t have to come.’
But January knew already that he would.
TWENTY-NINE
From Martin Quennell’s small office above the back parlor of the coffin shop, where twenty-five nights ago Rameses Ramilles had first lain in his coffin, the gaslit windows of the Hotel Iberville’s Blue Suite had the appearance almost of the lighted proscenium arch of a stage. The night was edged with sufficient chill that the dormer window was closed; now and then a thin Halloween wind rattled the casement and breathed like a ghost on January’s neck.
‘How’d you manage to get ’em to take down the curtains?’ asked Shaw, leaning a bony elbow against one side of the dormer and stooping his skinny height a little, for there was room only for two chairs there, which were occupied by January and the impresario John Davis. ‘You’d think Uncle Diogenes would want as much coverin’ for his – uh – cribbage games as he could get.’
‘A clumsy hotel servant tripped while carrying a chamber pot,’ reported January gravely. ‘M’sieu Regnier denied responsibility, refused to have the alleged culprit whipped, and in general annoyed Droudge so much that the man insisted that both windows be stripped – and Uncle Diogenes has many, many places in town where he can find congenial friends and all the curtains they need.’
‘Good lord, is that the fellow?’ Davis leaned forward on the sill as Droudge came into the Blue Suite’s parlor. ‘I daresay I’d go anywhere in town, and engage in any activity whatsoever, rather than spend an evening cooped up in a hotel suite with him!’
Shaw raised his eyebrows. ‘Don’t tell me he been in your place?’
‘Him? Scarcely.’ Davis sniffed. ‘No, I had the pleasure of encountering Mr Droudge at the Exchange in the Hotel St Charles last week, buying the cheapest slaves he could find and then – I’m told by Isaiah Irvin – trying to resell them the next day for a profit to the dealers.’
On the other side of the partition that divided the attic, January heard Beauvais Quennell’s soft footstep on the floorboards, the voices of the undertaker and his wife, and caught the word ‘Maman’ . . .
They, too, were preparing for an afternoon in the cemetery tomorrow, to honor their family’s dead.
‘So he’s the fellow who’s supposed to have killed that Irishman, is he?’ inquired the impresario, as Droudge settled himself with his ledger-book at the parlor desk. In his greenish-black coat and crape cravat of mourning, his huge grizzled head bent short-sightedly down over his book, he could have been an undertaker himself. ‘You’d hardly think it to look at him.’
‘Oh, there ain’t much doubt. He’s near to my height or Benjamin’s, an’ for his age he ain’t no weakling. I don’t ’xpect Mr Derryhick thought the man was capable of murder, much less ready to do it. But that air he’s got’s deceptive, quiet an’ cringin’ . . .’
Quiet and cringing, reflected January. And, like Compair Lapin, doing what he had to do to spare himself punishment for his thefts.
Looking at the man now, January didn’t wonder that the Irishman had been off his guard. He himself well knew how the contempt of others could be used as a mask . . . and a weapon in itself.
In the gaslit parlor, Droudge raised his head.
January was conscious of Shaw’s glance touching him, but didn’t return it. Between his own physical pain, which had grown to a heat that seemed to envelop the whole of his body, and the exhaustion of only an hour’s sleep snatched after he, Shaw, and Hannibal had finished their quest for a second witness of ancestry deemed appropriate to testify before the courts of Louisiana, he had entered a state of almost dreamlike exhaustion, detached as if witnessing a tragedy he was powerless to stop.
Hannibal had said, ‘The obvious,’ and had parted from them on the coffin shop doorstep, walking off in the direction of the Hotel Iberville alone. Now give thy hand . . .
January suspected Shaw had a shrewd guess at what it was he would be called on to witness, but that he was reserving both judgement and action, having dealt with blackmailers before. One part of January’s tired mind knew he should stop the proceedings – should tell Shaw of the conversation in the cell and oblige the Lieutenant to take official notice. But he found himself incapable of doing so.
Droudge got to his feet and went to the door.
That he recognized Hannibal was beyond anyone’s doubt. Though his back was to his audience, the shocked jerk of his head, the lifting of his hand, was a soliloquy: his glance shot right, then left, as if searching for advice, then back at his visitor. Hannibal said something, a few words only. January reflected that the words could only have been, ‘Yes, it’s me.’
The two men stood for a long time in the doorway before Droudge stepped back, and with a bow so unctuous it was almost fawning, gestured him in.
Guided him to a chair and, behind his back, quietly turned the key in the lock.
Saying what?
And hearing what story from Hannibal? – who was now explaining something, earnestly and urgently gesturing with his shabbily kid-gloved hands. He’d gotten another coat from somewhere – New Orleans abounded in pawnshops – and had braided his long hair back in a neat queue, tied with Nenchen’s pink striped hair-ribbon. In his old-fashioned gaudy waistcoat, January could almost see in him the worthless young sprig he’d been seventeen years ago, carousing through Restoration Paris with Patrick Derryhick’s ‘merry band’. January remembered Paris in those days: he had been there himself, a young assistant surgeon in the night clinic at the Hôtel Dieu. Like them, he’d come to Paris to escape the world in which he’d grown up, this flat green humid land of mosquitoes and lynch ropes. Like them – like Martin Quennell and the Countess Mazzini – he’d turned his back on his mother and his sisters and the people he’d grown up with. Odd that his path had never crossed that of those young men. But in his heart he recognized them, as if he’d heard their laughing voices – and the music of a wild violin playing down the alleyways of that ancient city. Wenchers, drunkards, spendthrifts, who’d left their responsibilities behind with their families and followed their errant hearts.
Droudge bowed several times, then raised his hand, excusing himself; disappeared through a door. Hannibal folded his hands, glanced at the bare windows, through which only darkness would be visible; idly leafed through a newspaper on the desk. While Droudge had been in the room, he’d been very much his usual self, gesturing, chatting – quoting God knew what reams of classi
cal persiflage. Alone, the stillness returned that had been on him since he’d spoken to the Viscount at noon, in that stuffy, stinking infirmary cell beneath the stairs at the Cabildo; a stillness, in a sense, that January had seen growing in him since the day of Rameses Ramilles’s funeral, when he’d seen his friend’s body flung before him in the cemetery mud. Stillness, and a shadow in his eyes, as if he’d known, from that instant, that it would come to this.
Droudge came back with a decanter and two glasses on a tray. He handed one to Hannibal, raised the other as if in a toast.
Exactly as Hannibal had predicted that he would.
January lit a match, moved the flame back and forth across the dark window: back and forth, back and forth. Quietly, Shaw asked, ‘Where’s Mayerling’s room?’
‘Directly above. It’s the one that woman – the maid; what was her name? – was sitting in when she heard the shouting down below on the night of the murder.’
Shaw moved his head a little to glance up at that dark window, but returned his attention at once to the Blue Suite, where Hannibal, still holding his glass as if he’d forgotten it, was explaining something else, at great length, to Droudge.
‘You sure about this, Maestro? Even given that Droudge tommyhawked that Irishman – an’ given he knows Sefton was Derryhick’s pal – that still don’t mean he’d put hisself in a false position with the trial next week. If he’s the man what switched out them sheets an’ set the room to look like the boy done the murder, he’s smarter than that. What could Sefton know that’s worth the risk?’
Droudge and Hannibal both turned their heads – Augustus Mayerling must have run down the service stair the moment he saw the signal. Like Davis and Shaw, the swordsmaster had asked no questions about the part he’d been asked to play that night: in times past, Hannibal had assisted him with keeping a secret of his own.
Droudge answered the door. The moment his back was turned, Hannibal switched the wine glasses, then settled himself back in the chair as Mayerling asked whatever question he had invented for the occasion. Droudge kept his body in the aperture of the door so that the swordsmaster was unable to see that there was another man in the parlor; snapped an irritated reply; shut the door in Mayerling’s face. Then he came back to the table, raised the wine glass, and drank.
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