Thirteen-year-old Germaine Barras had told Rose – when Selina’s note was discovered, announcing her elopement – that Javel had bought Selina diamond ear-bobs, and a lace-trimmed hat such as women of color were not supposed to wear. He had met her secretly, when she’d slipped out at night after lights-out. Had taken her to masked balls and cafés. Natchitoches Parish lay five days up-river – January had borrowed as much money as he could raise that day, without jeopardizing the house and the school, had bought maps of Texas and fetched Hannibal from the Turkey Buzzard Saloon where he was dealing faro for the house. (Nobody in that part of town gave a tinker’s damn about Lent.) They’d found Abishag Shaw at the Cabildo – where there was less demand for Lieutenants of the City Guard now that Mardi Gras season was over – and the three men had set forth for Galveston less than forty-eight hours after the fugitives.
The stevedores on the wharves, who knew January through the Underground Railroad and because of the work he’d done to help the blacks of New Orleans, slave or free, obtain what justice they could, had told him that Javel and Selina had taken the Whitby, bound for Galveston. One of them had spoken of Javel’s earlier departures, with other girls.
On his bunk on L’Alouette, half-nauseated by the stink of the bilges and listening to the incessant creak of planking in the pitch-dark of the minuscule cabin, January had shivered at the thought of the Republic of Texas even as he’d gone over every inch of the map in his mind. He’d guessed already that they’d arrive too late to keep Selina from being sold.
Across the Exchange he could see Neumann shaking his head, and Hannibal jotting down in his notebook all the various places the dealer was suggesting the vanished ‘slave-girl’ might have been sold, though he, Andreas Neumann, had nothing to do with any of it. January wasn’t surprised. He’d only been able to raise seven hundred and fifty dollars, and probably couldn’t have gotten much more if he had been willing to mortgage the house. The effects of the country’s financial collapse three years previously still reverberated. Field hands went for twelve hundred and light-skinned fancies could bring over twice that.
A rancher, the woman had said.
San Antonio. Deep inland, he recalled, on the map.
At least the man wasn’t a professional pimp.
But he knew that what Shaw had said, outside the burning shack on Offat’s Bayou last night, had been true. He shut his eyes, thinking about that exquisite, willful girl who’d rolled her eyes at Rose’s headscarf – the tignon which had once been mandated by law for all women of color in Louisiana – and had begged her father not to leave her in the governance of an old-fashioned blue-stocking.
Part of him wished Shaw had left Javel to burn. He wondered if there were such a thing as a Catholic church in this very American town, where he could go to confession for the thought that wouldn’t leave his heart.
THREE
Houston lay a day’s sailing across Galveston Bay, through Trinity Bay and up into the bayou country beyond. Knots of oak, and marshland thick with reeds, alternated with flat prairies of head-high grass along its shores, like the vacheries of the Sabine country, west and south of New Orleans. As the small trading-schooner Rosabel worked its way up Buffalo Bayou, January could see the cattle here, too, the long-horned Mexican breed, peering like grotesque deer from among the oak trees along the banks. Sometimes, where the creeks widened into fertile bottomlands, he saw cotton fields, and slaves chopping the first of the weeds in the dense spring sun. The Constitution of Mexico had forbidden slavery but the Americans who’d come in the twenties had brought their bondsmen anyway: Mexico City was a long way off. The terms of their settlement had stipulated they must become Catholics, too, and January guessed there wasn’t a Catholic church in a hundred miles.
The Americans who had flooded into the country, who had pledged loyalty to Mexico and obedience to its laws – who had four years ago risen in revolt and declared their freedom – had been concerned with one thing and one thing only: land. Cotton land.
‘Mr Mitchum, now …’ A stringy man named Jack Ray, who spoke with the accents of Virginia, nodded toward his master up at the front of the boat, smoking and talking with Shaw, the captain, and a pear-shaped little clerk with barely a fringe of gray hair around the edges of a scalp as smooth as an ostrich egg. ‘He took up four leagues of land along Greens Bayou when first he come to Texas in 1825 – that’s near twenty thousand acres. Got another ten thousand by marryin’ a Mexican wife.’ Jack sipped thankfully at the bottle of ginger-water January offered him, then – at January’s gesture of invitation and permission – passed it to the other slaves who occupied the narrow strip of shade on the port side of the little deck-house. These men were chained – Mr Mitchum had purchased them the day before in Galveston – but Jack and his fourteen-year-old son Jule had, January guessed, been Mr Mitchum’s property for enough time to be trusted. At least trusted not to fling themselves into the flat shallow waters of Buffalo Bayou and paddle for the shore.
And where the hell would they go? Free black men were not tolerated in the republic. In New Orleans, at least, there was some hope for a runaway, of disappearing into the libré community, of finding work and going unnoticed, though that was not as easy as once it had been.
‘Many men do that?’ January shaded his eyes against the glare of the sun on the water beyond the sails’ shadow. A flight of pelicans skimmed across the path of the boat, brown wing-tips nearly touching. Sky and silence seemed to fill the world.
‘Fewer now than ten years back. In the twenties, the government was desperate to get these lands settled up. They wanted men who’d fight the Comanche, and they’d grant you a league of range-land an’ a labor – near two hundred acres – of farm-land, just to hold it as a Mexican citizen, though why they thought Americans was to be trusted beats me. I guess they believed what they wanted to believe.’
‘Mostly, Mr Mitchum buys up land now from them that had it from the government.’ Young Jule Ray handed January back his nearly-empty bottle with a shy nod of thanks. Their fellow-passenger on the schooner hadn’t bothered to provide his new possessions with water or food for the journey, figuring probably that they’d be in Houston by dark. January knew Hannibal would re-fill the bottle for him, from the supply in the tiny common cabin. Aside from considerations of sheer humanity, it was an easy way to buy information.
‘Or them that claims they had it.’ Jack’s mouth bent down at a corner, wry and amused. ‘Between land that was granted to the church, an’ then take away from them an’ granted to the big hacendados, an’ men claimin’ squatter’s rights by farmin’ it for ten years, or signin’ over this piece or that piece to a son or a brother, it’s turnin’ into a lawyer’s holiday here an’ that’s a fact. Mr Mitchum’s brother’s a lawyer in Austin, an’ he says tryin’ to figure out land-holdin’ along the bayous an’ around San Antonio where the soil is good, is like playin’ in a crooked poker-game where everybody speaks Chinese. God knows what’s gonna happen if they ever do get the United States to take Texas in.’
‘If?’ January raised his brows. ‘My impression is the Southern Congressmen are climbing all over each other trying to convince President Van Buren – and the Northern voters – that annexing Texas is worth going to war with Mexico. Whoever the Democrats get to run in November—’
‘My, you ain’t been in Texas long, have you?’ Jack shook his head. ‘Mr Houston – that used to be president – he was all for joinin’ the United States, mostly because the gov’ment of this so-called republic can’t afford to buy itself a pot to piss in, much less pay an army or build a navy to keep pirates off the shippin’. They claim the US could lick Mexico in a week if they squawked about it. But the new president, Mr Lamar, he say we don’t need a bunch of Massachuser abolitionists tellin’ the white men they can’t have slaves. He say we should go on as we are, wipe out all them Injun tribes – by throwin’ Texas paper money at ’em, I guess – an’ claim all the land west of here clear to the Pacific Ocean.
It’s Lamar what moved the capital out to Austin last October – you shoulda heard how Mr Mitchum went on about it!’ He glanced toward his master and grinned, again wry, hatred for the man as well as amusement in his tired eyes.
‘I guess Mr Lamar been workin’ to borrow money from the Queen of England an’ the King of France, so’s he can fight the Comanche. The Mexicans, too, if they attack. He’s tryin’ to pretend he didn’t really say as how Texas is a “Republic of slaveholders” …’
‘If he says that,’ mused January, ‘he’s going to have a hell of a time getting England to give him as much as ten cents. They’ve started to campaign to abolish slavery altogether. I knew that Congress was just about ready to go to war about it,’ he added, as both Jack and young Jule cocked their heads. ‘When we were in Washington City – my master and I,’ he added quickly, and glanced toward the front of the boat again.
And where, he wondered, was Hannibal? The fiddler had come on board with the confident aplomb which one presumably acquired at Balliol College, presented his card to the captain, and had looked down his nose at Lieutenant Shaw – whom he wasn’t supposed to know, for purposes of the search for Selina Bellinger. He’d traded remarks with Mr Mitchum – a planter on Sims Bayou – and (inevitably) Mr Mitchum had tried to talk him into selling January (‘Good Lord, no! You might not think it to look at him, but his way of starching my neckcloths is genius and it would take me years to train someone else …’)
And then, just as the last passenger had hastened up the gangplank clutching his satchel to his bosom like a child, Hannibal had simply disappeared.
Presumably he was in the deck-house. But January couldn’t imagine why anyone would sit in the cramped and smelly quarters with the cargo – which, consisting as it did of pineapples, sugar, and tobacco would be alive with roaches.
Unless of course—
January returned his attention to the bald clerk with the satchel. Middle-aged and bespectacled, in his gray frock coat and checked trousers he had an air of meek respectability that was almost too pronounced to be true. January guessed that he might be an habitué of one of the back-of-town whorehouses where the fiddler worked in the summer times.
One never knew, he reflected resignedly. For all his own great height and breadth of shoulder, it was surprising how few white men noticed him. He’d heard visitors to New Orleans, at the Blue Ribbon balls, remark that they never could tell black people apart: they all looked alike. Meaning that slaves – and those who in their opinion should have been slaves – were equally beneath their notice: nobody that you’d ever have to recognize again.
But even playing violin at the Countess Mazzini’s House (as it was politely called), the beauty of Hannibal’s music would have drawn attention to him. An educated man would have taken note of it, the first time the fiddler expressed himself with a Greek or a Latin tag. The more so, January was sure, if his friend had been dealing poker for the house.
And in their pursuit of Gideon Pollack, the last thing either he or Hannibal needed was some chance-met acquaintance of their quarry remarking that a down-at-heels musician from a New Orleans den of iniquity was claiming to be a gentleman with an address on Bourbon Street.
Sure enough, once they put in at the wharf in Houston at twilight and the clerk disembarked, still clutching his satchel to his blue-and-yellow waistcoat, Hannibal re-appeared, to shake hands and bid farewell to the captain and Mr Mitchum (and Shaw, for good measure) with apologies for his attack of dizziness. ‘I’d thought I was done with these turns – No, no, my doctor tells me it has very little to do with actual mal de mer, though my wife teases me unmercifully about it … Multam ille et terris iactatus … Come along, Danny …’
‘Yes, sir.’ January picked up their two satchels and followed him meekly ashore.
‘I do beg your pardon,’ said Hannibal quietly, as they made their way along Main Street in quest of the Commercial Hotel, which the schooner’s captain had recommended. ‘I thought it best—’
‘Our depilated friend with the satchel?’
‘As you say,’ the fiddler agreed. ‘Ascende, calve.’ He checked his steps, as two men burst from the door of a rough-built saloon and slammed into the ground at his feet. Both were armed with knives and both were bloodied. As others – presumably friends of the combatants – boiled forth from the doorway, one of the fighters slashed the other across the belly.
‘I’m killed!’ yelled the man. ‘Oh, God, I’m killed—’
January considered for one moment offering his services – at least to ascertain whether the wounded man was correct – and then stepped back as Hannibal touched his arm, and edged away from the affray. In New Orleans, even the American flat-boatmen and river rats knew that such things as free surgeons and physicians of color existed. Here, even the offer would probably get him beaten up – always supposing the spectators could take time away from savaging one another. The wielder of the blow had scrambled to his feet but had been surrounded and knocked down again by three others. The wounded man, curled in a fetal position in a growing puddle of his own blood, was gasping and screaming while his friends hammered the supporters of his enemy …
A shot was fired down the dark street. In the glow of the lanterns from the two other barrooms on the block, January saw a smallish dark man in the frock coat of a townsman running toward the fight, a long-barreled pistol brandished above his head and another in his left hand. Though he hadn’t the faintest idea what the fight was about, January couldn’t keep himself from looking over his shoulder as he followed Hannibal quickly away into the darkness. The wounded man – still ignored by his friends in favor of the battle – was sobbing, again and again, ‘Dear God I’m killed – I’m killed …’
January wondered if he was.
‘This is no world/ to play with mammets and to tilt with lips,’ quoted Hannibal, his voice a little shaky. ‘We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns. In New Orleans one can avoid trouble by staying out of the wrong districts of town, but apparently the entire town comprises a wrong district.’ He stepped aside again, this time to avoid a long train of horses, packed as if for a journey and surrounded by vaqueros – the equivalent of the mounted slaves in the vacheries of western Louisiana – trotting by in a jerking flare of torch-light. Some were clearly meztisos – descendants of the Spanish conquerors and the Indians they had subjugated three centuries before. Their long black hair was bound with silk scarves beneath wide-brimmed hats, and rawhide breeches, worn over under-drawers, protected their legs from bottomland thorns. Others were white men, in coarse shabby trousers and calico shirts, with bandanas instead of the scarves beneath their hats. Still others were black – almost certainly slaves.
January wondered what relations sere between bondsmen and masters were on the hill-country ranchos, where a slave could so easily escape to the native tribes that held the whole north of the republic as their own.
Or would the Comanche torture and butcher an escaping black man with the enthusiasm they turned upon whites?
He found himself wondering, as he followed Hannibal along the rutted dirt of the street, how near this Gideon Pollack’s land lay to Comanche territory, and whether they’d be obliged to follow the man all the way there before overtaking him. ‘With any luck,’ he remarked, ‘Pollack will be at the Commercial Hotel. He may even believe your tale of your wife’s absconding maidservant, at least to the degree of accepting seven hundred and fifty dollars for her. Always providing,’ he added gloomily, ‘we can stay clear of our slick-pated friend … What is his name, by the way?’
‘Gervase Hookwire.’ Hannibal turned from flourishing his hat in greeting to a couple of young women in a second-floor window, clad – as far as January could see – in rather ill-fitting chemises and not a lot else. ‘At least that’s what the Countess Mazzini called him, though it’s anybody’s guess whether even that was a fabrication. That which we call a rose … We can but hope that he’s taken lodgings at some lesser hostelry –’ he looked
about him as they crossed Commerce Street – the few, dim squares of lamplight that patched the darkness beyond the glow of Main Street’s establishments didn’t speak well for the size of the town – ‘if there is such a thing in Houston. And pray he leaves town in the morning.’
‘And that we don’t run into any others of your acquaintance.’
Hannibal began to say, ‘Surely—’ when a female voice called delightedly from the porch of a building opposite.
‘Hannibal! Mi amor!’
The streets in Houston were wide – enormously so, clearly laid out with wheeled commerce rather than foot-traffic in mind. Under other circumstances, and given sufficient warning, Hannibal could have ducked nimbly into any of the wide black gaps of darkness that yawned between the shabby buildings.
But even at this hour of the evening, there was wheeled commerce aplenty, and the woman who’d called out to him had been already three-quarters of the way across Main, hidden from the two men by a couple of drays piled high with sacks of flour. She came around the wagons with her hands outstretched, and Hannibal – though he’d flinched as if he’d been shot at – seemed to realize, in the next second, that flight would only draw more attention to himself.
And, January understood in that first instant, the fiddler would have realized from the woman’s clothing that she was no street-corner tart whose comments would be ignored.
With no more than a split-second’s delay as he calculated his chances for a clean escape – January suspected his friend had a great deal of experience in that kind of quick decision – Hannibal swept his chimney-pot hat from his head and bowed deeply. ‘Mrs Dillard,’ he said, and the woman’s face beamed that he’d remembered.
Straightening, he kissed her hand.
Lady of Perdition Page 3
