Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  Thanks to the falsified ledger, the bloodied coat, the gold cross in its pocket and the note – which did indeed prove to have been torn from the back page of one of the faked ledgers taken from the overseer’s house – Guillaume Molina was tried that fall for the murder of Valla Tyler, of Plaquemines Parish and Virginia. Molina’s protests that he was half-Indian – and therefore actually white as opposed to black and not subject to a black man’s testimony – were easily disproved by the records of Jefferson Parish, where he had been born in 1798. Testimony against him by another free man of color being perfectly acceptable in the Louisiana courts, he was hanged early in 1840.

  Olympe said, ‘I told you so.’

  Antoine Froide, for whose freedom Valla had put her life at risk, remained a slave on Cold Bayou Plantation until his death from pneumonia four years later.

  Charlotte Viellard and Jules-Napoleon Mabillet were married at Christmastime of 1839, and returned to Cold Bayou, at Charlotte’s insistence, as overseers, as a means of getting away from Jules-Napoleon’s mother.

  Rose Janvier, who had emerged from hiding with her two children the moment Hannibal ascertained that no danger to the childrens’ liberty existed, opened her boarding school on Rue Esplanade that fall. Both Hannibal and January taught there, and as his health improved, Selwyn Singletary also began to instruct the girls in mathematics, a subject offering for which the school was almost universally criticized as being useless to young females of color.

  In addition to teaching music – and playing, as always, for the various festivities of Christmas and carnival, including for Mamzelle Charlotte’s wedding – January was increasingly employed as a personal physician not only to Selwyn Singletary, but to Veryl St-Chinian, who never really recovered from the events at Cold Bayou. The old man deeded all his interests in the family business over to his niece Chloë, retreated into his crumbling townhouse on Rue Bourbon, and was seldom, after that, seen on the streets of New Orleans.

  Though January inquired diligently as to the whereabouts and fortunes of the beautiful Ellie Trask and her lover, nothing more of them was ever heard.

  Footnote

  Chapter Two

  fn1 See Good Man Friday