Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘As well as anyone can who’s translating St Ignatius for the Ursuline nuns for two cents a page.’ This was the means by which Rose was extending the slender funds hidden in the attic joists. ‘Come to dinner and see for yourself.’

  ‘I shall, thank you. Oh, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem, by that sweet ornament that truth doth give! The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem … I should like to write a poem on your wife’s perfections for her birthday, but my facility in that department seems to be returning only slowly – who started that rumor that one had to be a drunkard to produce great poetry? In my drinking days I never managed so much as a line.’

  He coughed, turning aside and pressing a hand to his ribs, face chalky with sudden agony. In putting aside alcohol, January knew, his friend had perforce given up laudanum as well, and with its swoony oblivion went its undoubted powers to soothe. He waited in silence, and in time Hannibal collected himself and embarked on a cheerful account of a crooked poker-game in the back room of the Blackleg Saloon the previous night, which lasted them through the remainder of the brief downpour and the length of the walk back to January’s house. By the time they turned on to Rue Esplanade, the sun had grown strong enough to burn away the brief freshness that the rain had brought. Steam rose from the wet bricks of the banquette, as if like Virgil and Dante they trod the murky floors of Hell.

  ‘—at which point the Reverend produces from beneath his coat – God knows how he kept it concealed during the game – the shortest, biggest blunderbuss it has ever been my privilege to look down the barrel of … It made me wonder what sort of birds they had in Scotland. So taking as my motto, Vir prudens non contra ventum mingit …’

  ‘Will you do me a favor?’ asked January suddenly.

  ‘Anything,’ said Hannibal simply. ‘Of course.’

  ‘When we reach my house,’ said January, ‘I’m going to shake hands with you and go inside. You keep walking and turn on to Rue Burgundy. Do you see the man in the plug-hat, there by the tree?’

  Hannibal looked. When the old city wall had been torn down thirty years previously, the area across the Esplanade had been developed, its neat wooden cottages housing either the mistresses of the French and Spanish Creoles who didn’t own property in the old French town, or Europeans who didn’t care for the idea of living among the Americans upriver of Canal Street. But Rue Esplanade remained wide enough to accommodate the wagon traffic to the bayou, and its drainage ditch was now lined with trees, beneath which stevedores and drovers would slouch for lunch or a smoke.

  The man in the plug-hat was obviously doing just that. His shirt was coarse red calico, and beneath the brim of the hat January could observe that his hair was black and straight, his face dusky. Quadroon or octoroon, perhaps, though January was more inclined to think he was an Indian, descended from the Creek or Houmas tribes that had once hunted in the Louisiana forests before the French came and made their sugar-plantations …

  ‘Don’t stare. Don’t let him see you’ve noticed him.’

  ‘He someone you know?’ They’d reached the steps that ascended from the banquette to January’s gallery. The house was the oldest in the street and built high in the Spanish style, to preserve its inhabitants against the floods which had periodically inundated the town in earlier days, and set slightly crookedly, to catch the river breeze.

  ‘Never saw him before yesterday.’ January turned and clasped Hannibal’s hand in the sort of friendly dismissal one reserves for casual encounters. The fiddler bowed in instant response, as offhandedly as if January hadn’t saved his life on several occasions. A gentleman’s upbringing and several years at Oxford had given him an exquisite sense of how to look condescending. ‘But he was there yesterday – well, he’s changed trees, actually – and again this morning. Loitering like that. And, I think, watching the house.’

  FOUR

  ‘There’s at least one other,’ Hannibal reported, when he returned an hour after the swift-falling tropical nightfall had doused the city in ink. ‘A white man, fleshy rather than muscled, fair, curly hair and a yellow sack-coat. Plug-Hat’s staying at the Verrandah, which means that no matter how he’s dressed he has money, or the man who hired him has—’

  ‘You never followed him all the way to St. Charles Avenue?’ Rose passed him the bowl of Gabriel’s gumbo and the dish of rice. Despite the sticky heat, at this hour it was a better strategy to eat in the dining room, with smudges burning in each of the open windows, than to brave the wildlife of the open night on the back gallery where the family dinner had been conducted at twilight.

  ‘He was so obliging – and so well-heeled – as to take a cab once he reached Rue Bourbon.’ Hannibal accepted the glass of lemonade Zizi-Marie brought him, cool from the buried jars in the yard. His long fingers shook so much that he had to use both hands to steady the glass. ‘Which made it a relatively simple matter to climb on the back for most of the distance. I wasn’t able to do so when he returned a few hours later to relieve Curly, but I knew where he was going and could take my time in pursuit. Sure enough, when I got here he was stationed across the street in the alley beside the Metoyer house, like Iago and Roderigo observing the dwelling of Brabantio. I don’t think I was seen. I take it you have no – er – guests at present?’

  January shook his head, Tommy, Boston and Nell having departed the evening after Vitrack’s visit. But the fact that his house was being watched made him wonder how safe any of his fellow ‘conductors’ of escapees were.

  As if she read his thoughts, Rose said, ‘Surely if the police suspected us of harboring runaways they’d have taken out a warrant to search the house, rather than pay two men to watch us? And pay them enough to stay at the Verrandah and ride cabs down Rue Bourbon, at that.’

  ‘Sheer wastefulness on the part of City Hall,’ complained the fiddler, and coughed again. ‘I shall write my Congressman …’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like the police.’ January frowned through the dark parlor door to the line of shuttered front windows that closed off the view of the street. ‘Even the secret police in France would mostly use neighborhood informers, not hire men specially. Not for anything less than politics.’

  ‘But isn’t sheltering runaways politics, Uncle Ben?’ asked his niece quietly. She took the chair beside Hannibal, a slim, pretty girl of seventeen, with her hair bound up in a woman’s elaborate tignon. ‘Isn’t that the whole point behind arresting people for doing it? Because Congress won’t do anything about slavery?’

  ‘And just because they haven’t come up with something like the secret police so far,’ added Rose, ‘doesn’t mean they haven’t just started to use them.’

  ‘If that’s what’s happening,’ said January, ‘it’s an awfully expensive way to go about it.’

  ‘Slaves cost upwards of a thousand dollars apiece,’ pointed out Hannibal. ‘There’s a lot at stake.’

  When the fiddler left – he was occupying the house of January’s mother for the summer months while that lady stayed in much more bearable quarters by the Lake – January put on his darkest shirt and ghosted through the narrower of the two gates that led from the yard on either side of the house itself. This one – on the south-eastern or riverward side of the house – entered a damp little passway that January could have spanned with one arm and his back to the house wall, always supposing he wanted to put his back against whatever might be crawling on that wall on a sweltering night in July. The thin-waxing moon had vanished early behind murky overcast, and the night was like pitch. January waited for his eyes to accustom themselves to the blackness, but when he reached the street he could see little besides dimly-flickering rectangles on the far side of the trees where Virginie Metoyer still had her parlor shutters open. The elfin sound of her piano floated above the metallic throb of cicadas, the multifarious chorus of the frogs. The trees themselves were barely suggestions in darkness. Whether a man stood in their shadow was impossible to tell.

  As a child on Bellefleur Plantation,
January had grown up watchful. You never knew when some white person would mention something you were doing – something that might have been perfectly permissible two days previously – to Michie Fourchet, which would set off his alcoholic temper and earn you a beating, or worse. In Paris, years later, the constant presence of the Secret Police had served to keep a familiar set of reactions sharp. The members of the revolutionary reading-group down at the Chatte Blanche had used to send January out to sniff around the alleyways before they went down to their meetings in the cellar.

  January knew the smell of watchers. Felt their presence through his skin.

  These weren’t police.

  He had no idea who they were, or why they were watching his house. But they weren’t the police.

  Would the slaveholders who dominated Louisiana’s government – and the governments of every state south of Mason’s and Dixon’s Line – form a shadow organization devoted to tracking down the people who helped their slaves get away to the north? Had it become that important to them?

  He knew it was going to, one day.

  He glided along the walls of the buildings towards the river, then stepped out across the street, recalling uneasily that he’d sighted a four-foot alligator making its leisurely way along the drainage ditch last week. Groping blind, listening all the while for the sound of an approaching wagon – drivers often didn’t bother to light up their lanterns, especially if they’d been drinking – he knew he could pass Michie Plug-Hat or Michie Curly within feet and not see them.

  The fact that he saw no one didn’t mean there was no one there.

  In time he returned to the house, but slept little for what remained of the night.

  As soon as it was light he ascended to the half-story attic that ran the length of the house and, from its two long, narrow dormers, scanned the wide waste-space of the Esplanade with Rose’s good Swiss spyglass, not that he had much hope of seeing anyone in particular there. Even at this early hour, wagons and foot-traffic moved along beside the drainage ditch toward the Lake. January picked out the forms of two or three men who could have been Michie Plug-Hat or Michie Curly, but it was too far off to be sure.

  ‘You want me to go out and watch, Uncle Ben?’ Gabriel came into the hallway-like dormer behind him. ‘I can get out of the yard over M’am Gardette’s stable roof.’ Like nearly every property in the French town, the old Spanish house had no back way in or out. Slaves, who in a more affluent regime would have lived above the laundry and kitchen in the rooms Rose used as a laboratory, would have had to pass beneath the eyes of their owners to get to the street. ‘Or stay up here with the glass?’

  ‘I want you to go to work.’ January folded up the glass. ‘You’re late as it is. And not a word to anybody, mind you.’

  The boy clattered away down the stairs – he was dressed already, the white linen coat he wore as an apprentice in the kitchens of the Hotel Iberville folded neatly over his arm. January followed and, after a little thought, sent a note via Zizi-Marie to her mother, Olympe, the older of his two younger sisters. He then dressed in the dark, formal coat he wore for his professional engagements, donned his tall beaver hat, and proceeded to their mother’s house on Rue Dauphine where Hannibal made him coffee: ‘Anyone following you?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ January unwrapped a couple of chunks of brown muscovado from a scrap of newspaper – naturally, his mother had left not a morsel in the house when she’d gone to the Lake – and looked down into the yard. The stucco cottage itself, given to Livia Levesque by the lover who had bought her and her children free of slavery, was shuttered tight, and the fiddler occupied January’s old room in the garçonnière above the locked-up kitchen. ‘But if it does have something to do with the runaways, I can’t take chances.’

  The previous day, immediately after sending off Gabriel with a warning to the other shelterers of runaways – the Underground Railway, people were beginning to call them – January had dismantled and hidden the false wall that partitioned off a section of the storage space beneath the house, in case someone did come in with a search-warrant.

  ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum,’ agreed Hannibal, whom death itself would not have found without an apt quotation. ‘It must be difficult to shake off pursuit, at your height.’

  ‘Watch and see.’ January gave his hat, which sat beside him on the rail of the narrow gallery where they sat, an affectionate pat. ‘In the Bible it says one can’t add a cubit to one’s stature by taking thought, but behold how with a little thought one can take at least a few inches away.’

  Ten minutes later Olympe came into the yard, a slim tallish woman whose red-and-orange headscarf was tied in the style of the voodoos, its five points proclaiming her a priestess. She walked arm in arm with her husband, Paul Corbier the upholsterer, whose face and hands – January was pleased to note – had been blacked with charcoal and brick dust so that, at a distance, his skin had January’s inky African darkness rather than his own natural cocoa hue. Since Paul was only a few inches shorter than January’s massive six-foot-three, and not a great deal thicker through the chest and shoulders, it was the work of moments to swap coats and trade January’s high-crowned hat for his brother-in-law’s soft cap.

  ‘We didn’t see anyone like you described on the street.’ Olympe folded her arms and leaned one shoulder in the doorway of the small garçonnière room – crammed now with Hannibal’s books – to which they’d retreated to effect the transformation. ‘But men of that stamp are a dime a dozen in this town.’ As January had suspected, the request for such a subterfuge first thing in the morning hadn’t discomposed his sister in the slightest. ‘Any idea who they are?’

  ‘Not a guess.’ January settled Paul’s coarse blue linen jacket over his shoulders. ‘That’s what I’m going to ask around about, once I’m sure I won’t be leading my friend to anyone I’d rather he didn’t know of.’

  ‘You owe me,’ said Paul Corbier, with a grin and a glance at his black-dyed face in Hannibal’s broken shaving-mirror. ‘I’m gonna be days scrubbin’ this off, and my mama won’t let me in her house tomorrow for Sunday dinner.’ Like many former plaçées, Mère Corbier looked down her nose at those darker than herself (‘Slaves are black. I am colored …’) and had raised considerable objections to her son marrying Olympe, who shared January’s beau noir lustre, as the slave-dealers described it. Their own mother had been known, in company, to deny any relationship to her two older children who had so obviously been fathered by one of the Bellefleur field-hands, and to claim that her only surviving offspring was Dominique, the lovely quadroon daughter she had borne St-Denis Janvier.

  ‘Try butter.’

  ‘You know what butter costs in the market?’

  January left the house on Olympe’s arm, and after escorting her home he made his way to the wharves. The man he sought out there was nearly of his height, and nearly of his complexion, but slender as a whip. Officially, Ti-Jon belonged to a man named Wachespaag, but Wachespaag – part-owner of a steamboat, a cotton-press, and the Louisiana Hotel on Rue Chartres – generally only saw his human possession on Friday afternoons, when Ti-Jon would go to his office and hand him five dollars. The rest of the money Ti-Jon earned was nobody’s business, and January calculated that the arrangement – not an uncommon one, though city politicians, and Americans especially, tended to go into hysterics at the thought of it – had paid Ti-Jon’s purchase-price two or three times over in the course of the years.

  Ti-Jon, however – who bossed a stevedore gang on the deep-water wharves downriver of Rue Esplanade – knew everything that went on along the New Orleans waterfront: who was in trouble, which gangs worked at thieving which wharves, who was conning rubes and what their lays were, which hells (or churches) were simply skinning-houses, and whose games were crooked, and who was humping whose wife. He listened to January’s account of the past twenty-four hours, and the descriptions – so far as January could give them – of Michie Plug-Hat and Michie Curly, presumably domici
led at the Verrandah Hotel, and shook his head.

  ‘Don’t sound like a police lay to me,’ he opined. ‘And I sure ain’t heard of anyone shakin’ around after runaways, beyond the usual cracker boneheads paying off the law to cherry-pick the jails. I take it your sister’s heard nothing.’

  ‘Not a word.’ What gossip Ti-Jon didn’t pick up on the wharves, Olympe heard through the multifarious whispers that came to the voodoos through their customers: this man done me wrong; here’s money to lay a curse on this man’s crooked lottery game … ‘If they’re after runaways, why not come up to the house with a warrant? And if they’re not, what are they after?’

  ‘How much of that silver you got left in the house? Not a lot have heard of it,’ the slave added, when January hesitated. ‘But you was gone all spring with your sister Dominique and that white planter of hers – and his wife – and when you came back, you paid down your bill at the grocery—’

  January tried not to look annoyed. He’d deliberately let a portion of the tab stand, precisely so the desperate and the nosy wouldn’t come to the conclusion that there was money in the house.

  ‘And you gave Lala du Coudreau a dollar last week when her little boy was sick,’ concluded Ti-Jon. ‘People know things like that, Ben. And there’s people who just figure, I’m hungry an’ he’s not. You got enough to make it worth somebody’s while?’

  ‘Not somebody who’s staying at the Verrandah and riding in cabs up an’ down Rue Bourbon, I don’t.’

  It was still early, and knowing that his house might still be watched – Paul was going to go there, dressed as Benjamin January in the black coat and the high hat that did in fact, at a distance, add nearly a cubit to his allotted span – January made his way to Rue St-Pierre where his friend Mohammed LePas had a blacksmith’s shop. He’d known the old man from childhood, and LePas was another one who knew everyone in town … and who had been known to conceal runaways in the attic of his shop.