Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘If he was bound for Washington lookin’ for a new life,’ returned Shaw, ‘he was goin’ about it the right way. Seems to have worked, if’fn he married some Congressman’s daughter.’

  Rose laughed softly. ‘I’m sure when he talked about “my father’s plantation” he made certain his in-laws thought it was one of those big white houses with the pillars on it, and not three post-and-daub rooms in the middle of nowhere. Poor Jeoffrey.’

  Jeoffrey’s pockets, when he’d been found in the brickyard next to the hotel an hour after his murder, had contained a Morocco-leather wallet (empty), a seal and some wax, an octavo-sized volume of The Last of the Mohicans, and an ivory miniature of (presumably) his wife.

  ‘No yellow envelope,’ said January. ‘No Crimson Angel. No article snipped from the Washington Intelligencer. And no notes – if he had any – about where he might have hoped to encounter Captain Loup de la Mer, or when. Or, for that matter, where to find this “Sally” in Cuba. They’re after the treasure, all right.’

  ‘Then what I’ll need from you, m’am,’ said Shaw as he led January and Rose across the Cabildo’s courtyard – the tall walls of which trapped the twilight’s suffocating heat – ‘is a list of whoever you can remember is related to your grandma’s family, an’ where they might be. You say her daddy was one of the richest planters on Saint-Domingue, what married his French cousin … They have any other children ’sides granny?’

  ‘I think a son. I have no idea what became of him. My brother Aramis might know … or rather my sister-in-law Alice,’ Rose added with her quick-flash grin. ‘All Aramis really knows about is what birds are flying over Grand Isle on any given day so he can shoot them, and when the tides are best for fishing. I’ll write to him this evening – he always reads my letters to Alice – and with luck, if I tell Alice it’s important, she’ll make him write back within two weeks …’

  ‘Sounds like my pa,’ sighed Shaw. ‘’Ceptin’ he couldn’t read. Find out what you can, m’am, if you’d be so kind.’

  ‘Of course.’ Rose touched his hand as they halted in the wide-open doors of the Cabildo, with the strange wild stirrings of the river wind brushing at her skirt hems like a pack of invisible mice. ‘And I’ll write Jeoffrey’s wife as well and ask what he might have told her.’

  ‘I ’preciate it, m’am.’ Shaw spat in the general direction of the gutter that ran before the Cabildo – in the gathering dusk it was alive with frogs – and missed it by feet. ‘Either way, the feller what done it’ll be long gone out of town ’fore you get an answer, but we’ll see what we’ll see. You didn’t see none of your own little friends this mornin’, did you, Maestro?’ He glanced at January, who shook his head.

  ‘Doesn’t mean they weren’t there.’

  ‘No. But if’fn they was watchin’ your place for Vitrack, they likely won’t be back. So I’d appreciate hearin’ if they is still around.’

  Zizi-Marie had seen nothing of the watchers during the day, though she’d spent much of it playing backgammon on the rear gallery with her father and Rose, once the chores were done. Gabriel, returning from his work at the Hotel Iberville, had likewise glimpsed no one suspicious. But then, January wondered, how could one tell? ‘There are at least two of them,’ he said, exasperated, when supper was done. ‘Nothing guarantees there aren’t more.’

  ‘Well, Mama says, if you need Papa to switch places with you again, you can do it by coming over to her house instead of them both going to Granmère’s.’ Zizi-Marie brought the basin of hot washing-up water up the steps from the kitchen across the yard, laid it on the towel Gabriel spread on the end of the back gallery’s table. ‘There’s a dance out at the bayou next Saturday, and she says everybody in town is coming to her asking for gris-gris.’

  Dusk was falling. Rose had moved her chair to the gallery rail so that she could see to stitch the mourning dress Olympe had lent her, mosquito-smudges flickering on the rail like smoky jewels.

  ‘Will you go out to the bayou with her?’ January asked the question quietly, and his niece hesitated before replying. At seventeen and a half, Zizi-Marie was considered a woman, old enough to go to the voodoo dances held in the woods along Bayou St. John. Her mother Olympe, January recalled, had started running away from their mother’s house at fourteen, and going not only to the great dance, but the smaller, more frequent assemblies held in brickyards and in the vacant spaces at the back of town: dances that generally ended with the couples sneaking away to fornicate in the bushes.

  Completely aside from the issue of the girl’s immortal soul – if anything could be considered ‘aside’ from idolatry (and January didn’t care how many people assured him that Papa Legba was actually St Peter, he knew full well that this wasn’t the case) – and the possibility of pregnancy, the danger of being caught by slave-stealers was many times greater now than it had been in 1812 when Olympe was doing it. He knew Paul Corbier struggled daily with the conundrum of how to urge his children to be good Catholics without repudiating the tough, wise voodooienne whom he loved to distraction.

  It was one reason, January knew, besides the desperately hard times that lay on the nation, that Paul had been relieved when January had offered to house the older two of his four children.

  At length the girl asked, ‘Is it a sin to go … Just to go? If I don’t dance or anything?’

  ‘If you want to go,’ reasoned Gabriel, ‘you can go to confession after, can’t you? Then Père Eugenius will give you a couple of rosaries—’

  ‘You really think God will think it’s all right,’ asked January, ‘if you go in thinking, Oh, God’s GOT to forgive me if I say a couple of rosaries, so I’ll do it anyway? What does your mother say about it?’

  ‘She hasn’t said anything,’ replied Zizi-Marie in a subdued voice. ‘I think if she saw me there she wouldn’t send me home. Have you been to one of the dances, Uncle Ben? Do people really … Have you seen somebody get ridden by the loa?’

  ‘I have. Their power is real, Zizi. There’s something really there. Whether it’s demons working for the Devil, or spirits working for God to speak to African men and women in the language they’ll understand, I don’t know.’

  He looked at the two of them in the soft silver of the evening light. Olympe’s children. He saw Zizi-Marie the way she’d been four years ago when first he’d come home from France: thin and gawky as a half-grown colt, chasing around with her friends, her mind divided between devising the biggest and most fantastically-tied tignon within her little group and the lessons her father was teaching her of the upholsterer’s trade. He saw Gabriel at eleven, scheming to acquire more marbles, or better-looking lead soldiers …

  And now here they were, a young woman budding into beauty, a young man figuring out what he wanted from life. And looking at him as if they thought he knew the answer to the most fundamental of questions: what is God? Who is God? Which of the versions of God we’re told about is right?

  ‘And because I don’t know,’ he went on quietly, ‘I play it safe and do what Père Eugenius tells me. I stay away from the voodoos, the same way I’d stay away from deep water when I don’t know what’s down there.’

  Hesitantly, Gabriel asked, ‘Can you really lose your soul?’ And in his tone January knew he was thinking of his mother, and the altar in their house to Damballah Wedo, with its decorations of cut paper and its little dishes of tobacco and candy and rum.

  ‘I don’t know that either.’ He took the cup Zizi had just washed, dried it and set it on another towel. ‘Your mother does great good. She heals the sick, as I do. More than that, she gives people hope. Maybe she does give people good luck as well, and there’s not nearly enough of that in the world. I don’t think healing and happiness come from anyone but God. I don’t know what shape God takes, to speak to her or through her. But I know it’s dangerous territory.’

  However, whether Zizi-Marie followed her mother to Bayou St. John on the following Saturday or not, January didn’t learn until years later. />
  Long before then, he had other things to think about.

  The following morning he slipped from the house early and made his way to the wharves.

  Americans professed horror that the markets of New Orleans remained open and in full swing on Sundays as on any other day; that, after Mass, you could go to a café or a perfume shop or a gambling parlor if you chose – or a bordello, for that matter, or you could purchase a slave – but January noticed that Americans were perfectly willing to unload their cargoes or dicker for bargains along the levee on the Sabbath. He found Ti-Jon and his gang offloading corn from a flatboat, and the slave reported that, as far as he and his gang could tell, January’s house had been watched at least part of the time by two Indians who were registered at the Verrandah under the names Three-Jacks Killwoman and Blueford Conyngham. Michie Curly – likewise at the Verrandah – was a man named Seth Maddox. All three listed their home city as Mobile. Both Killwoman and Conyngham had been seen near the house yesterday.

  January added this information to the diagram Rose had drawn last night of her father’s family, as far as she knew it: old Great-Granpère Absalon de Gericault; his cousin-wife and her perfidious father, who had cheated Great-Granpère out of his birthright back in France; his daughter Oliva, who had married Louis-Charles Vitrac; and a possible son who might or might not have escaped from Saint-Domingue with Absalon himself … Other sons? Other daughters?

  Along with these notes, he had in his pocket Rose’s letter to her sister-in-law Alice, asking further details. When the bells tolled for early Mass he walked across the Place des Armes, to take the Host and, with a clean soul, and in the grace of God, to pray for the soul of Jeoffrey Vitrac and for guidance in the murky and perilous darkness in which he now felt himself to be moving. He then left his notes with the desk sergeant at the Cabildo, for delivery to Shaw on the morrow, and, since the Post Office on Exchange Alley was just about the only place in the French Town that did close on Sunday, he directed his steps to the market.

  There he found Hannibal at a table near the coffee stand, having what amounted to supper (it was eight in the morning) after a night playing in a gambling room somewhere. Two crème-café filles de joie shared one of the rickety little tables with him among the brick pillars, dipping bread in their coffee and blushing and blooming under his borrowed snippets of Catullus and Byron. As January approached, the girls took their departure, to greet with simulated ecstasy a gaggle of sailors. ‘Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike,’ Hannibal quoted thoughtfully as January took one of the vacated chairs. ‘And, like the sun, they shine on all alike. Those brave mariners just got in this morning, so they’ve still got most of their pay.’

  ‘And have you still got most of your pay?’

  ‘It depends on one’s definition of most. I weep for the decline of the arts in this country – one would think the clientele of Davis’s would show greater appreciation for Mr Mozart’s genius. In the end I had to take Elbows Marrouguin’s place dealing faro to make enough for groceries. Are you still playing host to Indian braves?’

  Over another cup of La Violette’s coffee, January related the most recent developments, and the fiddler’s dark eyes grew grave. ‘None but the family, the old woman said,’ January finished. ‘I need to find someone to take Rose’s letter –’ he patted his pocket – ‘to her brother’s wife in Grand Isle: her older brother, the one who stayed on the plantation.’

  ‘Try Jeannot Chigazola.’ Hannibal got to his feet and drew a string shopping-bag from one pocket and, violin case under his arm, led the way among the market stalls. ‘He’s heading back there tonight.’

  ‘Good. I’d rather not lose a day on this, though God knows how long it’ll take her to answer.’ He paused to let a couple of marchandes pass before him, with yokes of fresh milk on their shoulders and baskets of flowers balanced on their enormous and elaborate tignons. ‘Ti-Jon tells me the watchers are still there, though I haven’t seen them. I’d have thought they’d be on their way to Haiti by this time.’

  ‘One can hope they will be soon,’ murmured Hannibal. ‘I understand that a white man’s chances of survival on the island haven’t improved in the slightest since August of 1791 … Good heavens, is that what eels look like when they’re dead and I’m sober? Thou deboshed fish, thou … Beautiful Madame –’ he took the hand of the stout Cajun lady among the baskets – ‘like unto a mermaid among the dwellers of the sea, how much for a cooked specimen?’

  On the other side of the aisle, January caught a glimpse of Rose, her own shopping basket on her arm, bending over a barrow of Natchitoches tomatoes. In the indigo gloom beneath the market’s huge tiled roof, her black dress made her half-invisible among the gaudy calicos of the marchandes and the bright cotton gowns of good Creole housewives. With these workaday ladies, too, strolled gentlemen in evening dress, like Hannibal, just wrapping up an evening in the gambling parlors, now in quest of coffee and pralines for themselves and their mistresses before going to Sunday dinner with families and wives.

  ‘Did you find Ti-Jon?’ Rose turned to edge her way through the crowd around the tomato barrow. ‘I forgot to ask—’

  A cloaked man stumbled against her, and such was Rose’s uneasiness over the events of the past several days that she sprang back from his touch with a cry.

  Instead of regaining his feet, the cloaked man seemed to trip again and plunged at her, and at the last second January saw he had a knife in his hand.

  ‘ROSE—!!!’

  She cried out, twisted aside. January yelled, ‘Stop him!’ and as the housewives and market women stared in shock, the cloaked gentleman sprang to his feet and sprinted away through the crowd. January had a confused vision of Rose sitting on the brick pavement, staring at the blood that dyed her hand, Hannibal bending over her—

  ‘After him!’ yelled Hannibal, catching Rose as she slumped back, and January turned and plunged in pursuit.

  SIX

  Shopkeepers, market women, fishermen sprang out of the way. The gentleman shoved among the stalls, caught a farm woman with a yoke of milk pails on her shoulders and heaved her at January, sprang past a barrow of lettuces and cucumbers and overturned it. January yelled, ‘Stop him! Murderer!’ but no slave was going to tangle with a white man and precious few free colored would either. January tripped over the milk pails, scrambled around the trace poles of the barrow, slipping in lettuce leaves. He stumbled, blinking, out of the market’s shadow on to the levee, among barrels of corn and crates of chickens off the flatboats that clustered the wharves. A pistol cracked from somewhere close, taking a chip out of the brick pillar just beside him.

  January ducked back, panting. Knowing that in losing sight of the man, he’d lost him.

  Rose.

  He turned, strode back through the milling crowd of marchandes, bonnes femmes, nymphes du pavé amid trampled eggplants and spilled milk.

  ‘She’s at the Refugies.’ The dark-eyed Cajun fishmonger caught his arm as he halted, staring at the blood-spattered bricks in front of the tomato stand. ‘She crossed the street on her own two feet—’

  January ran. And was enough a child of New Orleans (if the wound went into her stomach or her gut she’ll bleed out in hours … ) to stride around to the café’s yard-gate, so as to enter the place through the back, shaking all over now as if he, and not Rose, had been knifed.

  Rose had been carried upstairs to one of the family’s bedrooms above the café. A sturdy little woman whom January recognized as Madame Thiot was shoving men out of the chamber and toward the outside stairway even as he ascended. ‘Away with you! She’s fine, I tell you—’

  He looked around for Hannibal and didn’t see him, thrust past old M’sieu Thierry, the deaf old Marquis d’Evreux, Thiot himself. ‘I’m her husband,’ he panted when Madame Thiot planted herself in the doorway, arms akimbo, to ward off the curious. ‘And a surgeon.’

  She squinted up at him as if it would have pleased her to deny him entrance, but stepped asi
de. Straw pallets had been laid down on the bed and the quilts of pink-and-white country-work stripped away and bundled in a corner. Rose lay propped on pillows, her eyebrows standing out black against a face gone ashen. Olympe’s black mourning jacket, a dark blouse, and Rose’s corset lay on the floor beside her, daubed – but not soaked – in blood. She’d taken her arms out of her chemise and pushed it down around her waist, and a bandage had been applied only moments ago, it appeared, from the bundle of lint and torn sheeting that lay on a corner of the naked mattress.

  She turned her head as January came into the room, held out one hand. ‘I’m all right.’

  He crossed the room to her in two strides, checked the bandage – which had been competently applied and tied – and, because the knots that held it were tight, took the scissors that lay nearby and cut it, to have a look at the wound itself.

  ‘Did you wash this, M’am?’ He turned his head toward the innkeeper’s wife.

  ‘What kind of a question is that?’ Madame Thiot puffed up like a pigeon. ‘Of course I wiped the blood away. How else was I going to see what I was doing?’

  ‘She didn’t use soap or spirits of wine or anything,’ said Rose, her voice tight with pain.

  ‘Do you have any hot water in the kitchen, m’am?’ January threw his most diffident respect into his tone. ‘My masters in Paris always insisted on washing a wound in either hot water or spirits of wine before dressing it.’

  ‘Your masters in Paris are imbeciles. My father had a precious French doctor look after his scratched arm and he bled him to death—’

  ‘Flavia –’ Thiot appeared in the doorway from the outside stair – ‘do as the man says and fetch up the rest of the tea water.’

  ‘I have raised five children,’ retorted Flavia Thiot, up in arms at once, ‘and they managed to cut themselves, mangle their fingers, slice one another …’ Her husband took her firmly by the elbow and dragged her out the door. January heard her voice retreating down the stair and across the yard to the kitchen. ‘What about the time Marie-Jeanne cut her foot on the glass, eh? No foolishness about hot water or spirits of wine then, and she was dancing at the St Genevieve’s Ball the following night …’