‘I am, Mamzelle.’
‘Do you go to school yet, pretty girl? So big a girl as you are?’
‘I don’t go to school,’ replied Charmian in her soft, precise voice. ‘But Maman is teaching me my letters. Would you like to hear them?’
‘Oh, above all things, acushla!’
‘Mamzelle, if you will excuse us,’ January said, knowing his social duty. He held out his elbows, one to Rose, one to Dominique. ‘I fear we must take our leave. It was truly a pleasure to meet you. Ladies …?’
Visitors of color did not linger when white guests put in an appearance.
Judging by the expression on Henri’s plump face, he guessed that the son of Veryl’s co-heir in the family property wouldn’t remain for the refreshments that he heard Veryl calling for, even as he guided his lady-folk down the carriageway to the street.
September was hurricane season in New Orleans, fair and hot, but with quick gusts that spoke of clouds above the far-off Gulf. The cathedral bells chimed mellowly for the noon Mass, and in hundreds of low stucco cottages, ladies – white or les femmes du couleur librées – set out plates of creamy Queensware or exquisite blue and white porcelain. In the sweltering kitchens in hundreds of yards, servants checked étouffeés, gumbos, grillades in preparation for their owners’ Sunday dinner. Rose propped her spectacles more firmly on her nose, and said, ‘I hope she treats Uncle Veryl decently.’
Minou sniffed. ‘For the money she’ll be coming into when she weds him, she’d better.’ The pink-and-celery silk of her skirts rustled as she drew them aside from an old Indian woman and her dog, peddling packets of filé from a basket. ‘I hope she isn’t expecting any single one of the family to have one word to say to her, or that she’ll be invited anywhere … Not that poor Uncle Veryl’s going to fight very hard for invitations. I daresay he won’t notice whether he gets them or not. “Sprained her ankle” in his very doorway, indeed!’
‘Mamzelle didn’t look like a bad lady,’ ventured Charmian, glancing from her mother to her aunt.
‘Of course she didn’t, dearest,’ said Minou. ‘If she looked like a bad lady Uncle Veryl wouldn’t want to marry her.’
The child’s brow puckered with distress. ‘Will she be mean to Uncle Veryl?’
Minou relented, as January picked up Charmian and held her, as lightly as a kitten, on one massive shoulder. ‘Of course not, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘She just wants someone to take care of her without her having to work, that’s all. I expect once Uncle Veryl gives her money, she won’t see much of him at all.’
‘One hopes that will be the case,’ remarked Rose. ‘Because Veryl really cares for the girl – and she’ll be in a position to make his life very miserable indeed. If, in fact,’ she added as an afterthought, ‘his family lets him marry her at all.’
Like Mr Singletary, January observed, ‘They can’t very well forbid the banns.’
‘If you think,’ said Rose, ‘that Aurelié Viellard and old Basile Aubin aren’t perfectly capable of stopping the wedding between them, I suggest you go back and review everything you know about French Creole families, Benjamin. Personally, I’ll bet you twenty-five cents that the wedding doesn’t take place at all.’
‘Done,’ said Minou at once. ‘Men can be so silly when it comes to beautiful young chickens. Benjamin?’
He thought for a long moment about the look that had come into Veryl St-Chinian’s eyes when Ellie Trask had glanced at him across the green tangle of the garden. About what it felt like to be in love after one thought one was done with such things.
About Olympe’s dark glance as she’d looked up from her ink-bowl.
He said quietly, ‘Done.’
THREE
‘Ellie Trask?’ Hannibal Sefton let out a hoot of laughter. ‘Old Uncle Veryl is going to marry Ellie Trask?’
‘I take it,’ said January, ‘you know her.’ He handed his friend the sole shirt that occupied one of the broken shelves at the back of what had originally been either a toolshed or a prostitute’s ‘crib’ behind a bathhouse on Perdidio Street – Hannibal’s current residence.
‘Every man in Natchez,’ returned the fiddler, ‘knows her,’ and there was a world of Biblical implication in his coffee-black eyes.
‘Yourself included?’
‘A backstage acquaintance only.’ Hannibal tucked the shirt into his much-worn music-satchel, along with other items of linen equally threadbare, and three waistcoats of faded silk nearly as outdated as Singletary’s. ‘I dealt poker at the High Water tavern owned by her father for three weeks in the summer of ’34, when I’d managed to annoy that fellow Roarke that used to own the Jolly Boatman on Gallatin Street and needed to be out of town. Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit …’ In his drinking days the fiddler had slept in any of a dozen hideouts in the Swamp – that insalubrious district at the back of town where sailors, flatboat-men, and river rats went to get drunk, laid, and systematically stripped of their pay. More recently the proprietors of several of these dens continued to offer him shelter in return for his not-inconsiderable talents as a house musician: these days, a young lady known locally as Kate the Gouger, who ran the bathhouse and its gamier subsidaries. Besides his few items of clothing, always kept scrupulously clean, the fiddler had only a dozen books. Those, January knew, he would leave on the shelf until his return from playing at the wedding at Cold Bayou Plantation.
Nobody in the Swamp would steal books.
‘Ellie worked at the bar and sang for the customers,’ continued Hannibal, wrapping his shaving-things in an old-style, foot-wide linen cravat, ‘to my accompaniment, and a very pretty voice she has, too. I hadn’t the price that her father asked for a night with her, not that I’ve ever had the desire to sleep with a thirteen-year-old girl. She passed for anything from eleven on up to sixteen, depending on the customer’s proclivities, and I have no doubt she’ll surrender her virginity on her wedding-night as convincingly as she did on about a hundred occasions that summer. By all accounts she does it very well. A sweet girl,’ he added, with a slight reminiscent frown at some memory. ‘She was always very kind to me, even when she could see no profit in it.’
‘So I take it—’ January moved his feet out of the way as Hannibal took down his violin from the shelf – ‘that her poor old father didn’t work himself to death and his landlady stole his small savings?’
Hannibal drew himself up in theatrical indignation. ‘There’s nothing to say a whoremaster and moneylender doesn’t work as hard as other men! Well, almost as hard.’ He checked his fiddle, re-wrapped it tenderly in its nest of faded silk scarves and replaced it in its battered case. ‘Absque sudore et labore nullum opus perfectum est. He did die – back in ’37, I think – but if anybody got his small savings I expect it was Ellie herself, along with his boots and the gold fillings from his teeth. Would you like me to speak to Uncle Veryl on the subject?’
‘If you would.’ It wasn’t that Veryl St-Chinian himself would take personal offense at a black man – or a woman of color like Rose – bringing him the news that his intended was, to put it mildly, unchaste. But most of the St-Chinian and Viellard families, while rejoicing in the news itself, would have had January arrested and whipped for saying such things about a white woman.
The two men stepped out of the crib – its door had no lock – and into the harsh sunlight of the bathhouse yard, where a slave was filling a wheeled water-butt from the cistern behind the bathhouse itself. Three other shacks stood among the rough clumps of palmetto and tupelo at the edge of the open mud of the yard, doors agape to the muggy forenoon. The girls who worked the place sat together on the doorsill of one of them, drinking coffee, and called out lazy greetings to both Hannibal and January. It was shortly after eleven, on Monday morning, and the stale heat was already suffocating. The steamboat Illinois was leaving – supposedly – for Plaquemines Parish at three: January had long ago learned to allow plenty of time to get the fiddler out of bed. The Swamp wouldn’t really come alive until al
most dark, when the queer, sultry heat of the early autumn abated and it got too dark to work on the river wharves or those of the Basin canal. The back of town was quiet at this hour, the girls still waking up, snaggle-haired and tousled. The gamblers and grifters and shills, if they were out of bed at all, slumped over grillades and grits at whichever taverns served food as well as liquor, or negotiated with mulatto laundresses about the clean, starched linen that marked them as gentlemen in those parts.
It was the time of day, January had found, that was safest for a black man to walk about the Swamp without risk of being robbed, beaten up by an aggressive drunk, kidnapped by the slave stealers who haunted the district, or killed for the contents of his pockets. He’d approached the Swamp through the actual swamp – the ciprière of marshy puddles, crotch-high weeds, small bayous and moss-draped cypress and oak that lay behind and between the makeshift tents and saloons. But once Hannibal was with him – a white man, no matter how shabby – he was at least not likely to find himself up against a couple of up-river ruffians demanding to know, ‘What you think you’re doin’ around here, boy?’
‘I hate to do it to him,’ said January, as they made their way down Common Avenue toward the river. ‘I saw his eyes, when he looked at her yesterday afternoon. According to Rose, he’s always been the “queer old duck” of the St-Chinian family: scholarly, shy, disregarded by his brothers and sisters because it was obvious he was never going to be of any use in the family business. He was generally low on the list of eligible bachelors because every mother in town could see that he was going to let his siblings control his interest in the family property rather than listen to the family of a wife.’
‘We had those at Oxford.’ Hannibal hopped neatly over the brimming gutter of Rampart Street – the ‘improvements’ by the Council of the Second Municipality didn’t extend to the back of town and the ‘islands’, as they were sometimes called, of buildings were still surrounded by yard-wide ditches rank with weeds and creeping with small wildlife. ‘Sometimes for a rag the choicer spirits would take them out, get them drunk, and couple them up with the local white-aprons, which I should imagine would be enough to put one off the female sex for good. Brilliant scholars, many of them – there was a fellow on our staircase who could translate from Greek to Arabic in his head – but they learned pretty early to stick with their books.’
‘Old Aimé St-Chinian arranged for his son to get a mistress at some point,’ said January. He paused, frowned, and made a move toward the body of a man lying in the gutter in front of the Turkey Buzzard saloon, then stopped when a second glance told him the man was dead. Old Swipes, the barkeep, emerged on the saloon’s doorsill at that moment and looked at the corpse in exasperation, then proceeded to sweep the step.
‘If he doesn’t care,’ pointed out Hannibal quietly, ‘I’m sure you needn’t,’ and January knew he was right. It was a common enough sight in the Swamp. But something pinched him inside, at the reflection that this was the world in which he was raising his sons.
In time he went on, ‘I gather from Minou – who had it from Henri, but my mother corroborates it – that the girl took a lover out of sheer exasperation with Veryl’s awkwardness and neglect. Eventually the pair of them sold everything in the house he’d given her and ran off to Europe together. There was a terrific scandal and Veryl was the laughing-stock of the town for years – this was when I was in Paris myself – and I daresay that was the last time he looked seriously at a woman.’
‘And I daresay,’ concluded Hannibal regretfully, ‘that Miss Ellie learned all about that – particularly after César St-Chinian’s death left Uncle Veryl with substantial interest in twenty-eight sugar plantations.’
They walked in silence for a time, dodging from one side of the street to the other depending on whether the scattered buildings had sidewalks or abat-vents to offer some shade from the sun. Common Avenue fed into Canal Street, rattling with drays and goods-wagons coming and going from the levee, despite the blistering sun. The air began to be gritty with the soot of the boats, whose tall stacks loomed above the ten-foot rise of the ground.
Beyond the levee, most of the boats drawn up to the wharves were the small stern-wheelers, that could hug the banks on a low river and chug their way up the maze of bayous of Jefferson and Plaquemines Parish. The river was low, and the wide stretch of muddy gravel exposed between the wharves was scattered with crates and bales, barrels and boxes, and sacks of mail for the overseers of the downriver plantations: communication and instruction from the owners who were, for the most part, still taking refuge along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain or in the milder climates of Vermont or Paris. At a distance January descried the gaudy red trim of the Illinois’ pilot house. A moment later he identified the other musicians who’d been hired to play at the wedding, clustered on the stern-deck with their instrument-cases: Jacques Bichet with his flute and his white-haired old uncle with his bass fiddle, enormous Cochon Gardinier and dandified Philippe duCoudreau. With them was Rose, shading her eyes as she scanned the levee for sight of January.
And at the sight of her, his heart lifted.
Slender, gawky, scholarly, with her spectacles flashing in the sun and her close-wrapped white tignon and plain pink dress the antithesis of the gaudy market-women moving around her, the sight of her still moved the bones of his body with delight.
‘I’m sure we’ll have the whole family behind us,’ sighed Hannibal, as he followed January down the steps of the levee, and they threaded their way through the piles of boxes, makeshift pens of hogs, the groups of stevedores and deckhands. ‘But I’ll bet you ten cents that at least one member of the family complains because stopping the wedding will cancel the wedding-breakfast.’
‘No takers,’ said January, with a grin. Then he sobered, and said quietly, ‘But telling him the truth about her will break the old man’s heart.’
‘Yes.’ Uncle Veryl folded white, long-fingered hands around one bony knee. ‘Yes, Ellie – Madamoiselle Trask – told me of her … her terrible past.’
January, Hannibal, and Rose exchanged a startled glance. Outside, in the thickening twilight, the plantation bell clanged in the quarters, calling the work-gangs in from the fields. From the top of the levee, as he and the other musicians had disembarked from the Illinois, January had seen one field downstream being dug up and re-planted, back-breaking work. The upstream fields were being rattooned – a second or third crop grown from a planting a year or two ago – and were, as usual for this time of year, shoulder-deep in weeds that had to be patiently chopped and cleared by the ‘second gang’ of youngsters, older men, and those women who weren’t in the final months of pregnancy.
Cold Bayou – named for its original owner, a man named Alexandre Froide – for all its isolation and small size, still paid its share of the family expenses.
The footsteps of the servants, who Madame Viellard had brought from town, creaked in the parlor and the pantry of the ‘big house’, and in the smaller chamber next door which had been assigned to Henri Viellard: making beds with linen also brought from town, laying down fresh straw matting over bleached, scrubbed plank floors. Like most French and Spanish Creole plantations, Cold Bayou had been strictly a place of business, one of a score of plantations in Alexandre Froide’s original French landgrant. The ‘big house’ was little more than a field-office, simply furnished and inhabited by its owners for barely a fortnight out of the year. For families like the St-Chinians and Viellards, one’s ‘home’ was the townhouse in New Orleans. To hold a family wedding at so obscure a place was considered profoundly eccentric, and entailed horrendous efforts at cleaning, fixing, and providing sleeping-quarters for far more guests than it could easily hold.
Cautiously, Rose asked, ‘What did she tell you, sir?’
‘That her father was a brute, who forced her to work in a low tavern. That she had been … dishonored … against her will.’ The old man’s dark eyes travelled gravely from Hannibal’s face – it was Hannibal wh
o had told the sorry tale – to that of Rose, and then to January’s. ‘Do you honestly believe that I, or any gentleman, would hold such things against an innocent girl?’
Hannibal drew breath – probably, January guessed, to take issue with the adjective – but said nothing. The set of Uncle Veryl’s mouth – stubborn, angry, struggling with emotional pain – was the only answer he’d give to any further argument. I love her and I believe her story over anything you will say.
And why not? January recalled the three sluts in the doorway at Kate the Gouger’s bathhouse that afternoon, the dead man in the gutter. The stink of the Swamp. To the marrow of his bones, he knew that no girl raised in such a place had the choice to be anything but a whore. In the Swamp, choice was not even a word.
Of course she’d use any wits or wiles she possessed, to secure herself a wealthy protector. Including, if necessary, targeting the most vulnerable prospect in advance and telling him whatever pitiful tale she thought he’d fall for. Before the Blue Ribbon balls, where the librée girls sought protectors of their own, he’d heard plaçée mothers coach their daughters in much the same techniques.
What to say. How to present themselves as brave but well-bred heroines in need of a strong man’s rescue.
‘You’re probably going to ask me,’ continued Uncle Veryl, ‘why I don’t simply take the girl as my – er – pallaca.’ He glanced apologetically at Rose, covering the word mistress with a veneer of Latin which he knew Rose knew perfectly well. ‘I won’t do that,’ he went on, with a sort of humble dignity. ‘I won’t further debase a girl who has been debased sufficiently in her life. I seek to raise her up. “Wedded love, mysterious law”, as Milton says – what God declares pure … I want to show our love to the world.’
There was silence, in which voices echoed from the house’s front gallery, outside the long French windows of the old man’s bedroom: ‘Well, where do you propose to put her?’ demanded a woman whose crystal-pure French identified her, to January’s ear, as Madame Sidonie Janvier, the mother of his own mother’s late ‘protector’.
Cold Bayou Page 3
