Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Benjamin?’

  He woke with a gasp. The dark-lantern’s thready glow showed him Hannibal’s thin features.

  ‘It’s four thirty.’

  January washed and shaved in the pantry, moved with infinite care through his dark house, as if the watchers in the absolute blackness of the night could hear his tread. Once he ghosted up the ladder to the attic, felt his way along the narrow slot of the dormer to look out over Rue Esplanade: on the main floor, and on street level below it, solid shutters were fastened over the French doors every night, making the house a little fortress.

  Lanterns bobbed and swung on the road out to the bayou, the first wagons on the road in the relative coolness of pre-dawn.

  He glanced at his watch. Five.

  The night before, he’d put together a bundle of what he’d need: clean linen, shaving things, a change of clothes. Copies of his freedom papers, the documents that supposedly – unless some white man decided to tear them up while he held him at gunpoint – would prove him a free man and not eligible to be taken up to the Territories and sold for twelve hundred dollars. He hated to leave the bird gun behind – it packed a hideous wallop and nobody in his right mind would go up against such a weapon’s wide-flung pattern – but he could be jailed for carrying it. Could be jailed for carrying his knife, too, which stayed in his boot and never left him. Since 1791, slaveholders all over America had flinched at the sight of any black man with a weapon in his hands, and had told themselves they did so from righteous indignation, not fear.

  Last of all, as he and Hannibal descended the stairs from the back gallery and from there entered the ground story of the house, he took his guitar. He knew he’d miss his piano – and a ridiculous corner of him felt, guiltily, that his piano would miss him, too – but at least he’d have music of a sort during the day or two they’d be in hiding at his mother’s house, and on the three-day voyage via Natchez Jim’s wood-boat down to Grand Isle …

  Five after five.

  Yesterday afternoon, he and Abishag Shaw had compared their watches. Though his was a silver Breguet that he’d bought in Paris and the American’s looked like the product of some Yankee factory, they’d seemed to keep sufficiently close time. And, indeed, at precisely nine minutes after five he heard, through the heavy wooden shutter that opened into Rue Esplanade, the creak of wheels and the slow pat of hooves. There was a little Judas-window in the shutter. Through it, January glimpsed the lantern on the front of a wagon, the glint of harness brass, passing within feet of the door.

  Hannibal whispered, ‘O θεός να σας προστατεύσει,’ and January opened the door, stepped out into the darkness, seized the ropes that secured the canvas-covered load and swung himself aboard. Hannibal had the door shut again before anyone in the dark of Rue Esplanade – always supposing they’re not home in bed like sane people – could have seen the front of the house again.

  The god protect us, indeed …

  Rose and January remained in hiding at his mother’s house for two days, before setting forth for Grand Isle.

  Jeoffrey Vitrac was buried on Tuesday, Shaw and Hannibal his only mourners. In her bed in the garçonnière that January had occupied first as a child, and then again after he’d returned from his years in Paris, Rose wept for the brother who’d turned his back on his Creole French heritage and had sought the promise of money and power and a chance to do good for his children and the world at large under the American name of Jefferson Vitrack.

  According to Gabriel, the house on Rue Esplanade was still being watched.

  By Wednesday afternoon, Rose was on her feet again, in visible discomfort but no distress. The wound in her side was healing neatly, without complications and without (thank you, dear God!) infection. The worst of her suffering – as was the worst of January’s own – was separation from Baby John and the fear that without her he suffered, too. Yet she was adamant, on the one occasion on which January tried to evolve some scheme by which Olympe might bring the baby to them undetected, that their son be kept hidden where he was. ‘Olympe can take care of him,’ she said quietly. ‘I’d rather shed twenty times this many tears –’ for he had come up from the kitchen to find her weeping – ‘over whether he’s lonely without me, than have even the slightest, even the tiniest chance that those people figure out where he is.’ Her voice flawed, like a hairline crack in glass, but her gaze was unwavering into his. ‘My fears are only in my mind.’ She put her spectacles back on. ‘I’ll see him when we come back and it’s safe to do so.’

  Olympe was blunter, when she came to them that evening. ‘Don’t be a damn fool, Ben. Your boy’s fine. And so long as he stays hid, he’s gonna stay fine.’

  Shaw came also, bringing the news that Killwoman, Conyngham, and Maddox had all now checked out of the Hotel Verrandah, along with two other Alabamans who’d been staying there also, Clint Cranch and Scenanki Goback: ‘So now we knows their names, anyways.’

  ‘They may just be hired troops.’ Rose made a move to rise from the table – in the kitchen behind them, which January had crowbarred open the previous morning, the kettle on the hearth bubbled – and Olympe put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her back into her chair. ‘But I’ll ask Aramis – or more likely Alice – if any of those names is familiar.’

  Like most cottages at the back of the French town, the one that St-Denis Janvier had long ago given to January’s mother consisted of several buildings, and the height of the front house served to conceal any glimpse of the rear kitchen, which included the garçonnière, the small laundry, and the room which had housed the workshop of a briefly-tenured husband whom the beautiful Livia had married after Janvier’s death. Upon January’s return from Paris, Livia Levesque had permitted her son to rent from her (at five dollars a month) the room he’d grown up in, a chamber she generally rented out (at seven dollars a month) to various young clerks at banks or law firms or cotton presses, (board not included). Only when these gentlemen fled the stifling heat, during the fever season of summer, did she allow Hannibal Sefton to stay there and watch the property while she herself retreated to a comfortable residential hotel by the Lake.

  This being the first of August, however, most of their forty-eight hours of residence were spent in the little brick-floored loggia outside the kitchen’s three wide doors. Hannibal had moved his few effects down to the old workshop – now used as a sort of lumber room – and it was understood that nobody was going to mention to the Widow Levesque that her son and his wife had had two days of free residence on the premises, much less that they’d permitted an American animal like Shaw into the yard and offered him coffee.

  ‘If this de Gericault cousin of yours –’ Shaw flourished at Rose’s chart – ‘or any of his brothers or sisters – has gone to the trouble of hirin’ five people to kill your brother an’ try to kill yourself, that says money to me. Not just the money that’s hid in Haiti, but money on hand. Your great-grandpa bring any across from Cuba with him?’

  ‘That I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘I’ll have to ask Aramis. But if he had to take refuge in 1809 with his daughter and her husband on Grand Isle, and died there four years later, it doesn’t sound like he brought much money with him. When the Spanish authorities in Cuba evicted the French planters, they gave them very little time to sell up their plantations.’

  Shaw spat – aiming for the packed dirt beyond the edge of the bricks of the loggia, but as usual failing in the attempt. ‘Money would make de Gericault easier to track, anyways,’ he said. ‘I tried yesterday to catch our Injun friends out there on the neutral ground, but couldn’t get close: an’ I got three men down with fever now an’ the whole of the French Town to cover. So you watch your backs on your way south.’

  Natchez Jim was a medium-sized man who could have been thirty-five or seventy, his graying hair and beard braided into ribbons like a pickaninny’s, his eyes like the river at night. He ran his wood-boat, the Black Goose, from New Orleans down to La Balize, the half-ruined Fr
ench fort on the East Pass where the river ran into the Gulf, trading not only in wood but also in calico, needles, salt and iron pans. Trading in information and gossip too, and, it was rumored, not above giving a man a ride who wanted to make the trip buried unseen under a stack of parcels and sticks. He went upriver as far as Baton Rouge sometimes, or down Bayou Segnette or Lake Salvador through the tortuous labyrinth of marshlands down to Barataria Bay, picking his way among the cheniers to pick up cargoes of game birds and oranges.

  January and Rose had traveled with him before.

  It was three days’ journey down the bayous, a timeless world of water and sky where nothing was quite what it seemed. The trembling lands, the locals called them – green islands that turned out to be nothing more than vast masses of floating vegetation, and what looked like little hills were on closer inspection the shell dumps where Indian villages once had stood. Weathered gray houses of bousillage – mud mixed with Spanish moss – half hid among the trees, all roof, like mushrooms. In the warm evenings, after it rained, January glimpsed the black-haired children of Spanish and Indians swimming cattle across from the islets where they’d pastured to the islets where they’d be penned.

  Despite daily rains the waters were low, treacherous with half-submerged logs and drowned trees, the branches of which scraped at the bottom of the boat. Basking turtles lay like mottled stones where the sun was warm; deer and wild pigs moved through stillness and fog in the early mornings. Brown flights of pelicans streamed low across the water, holding formation as if they’d rehearsed it like an opera chorus. Mosquitoes made the nights hideous despite the herbed grease Olympe had given them, and even Rose took to smoking cigars in the evenings, so that the tobacco fumes would drive the insects away.

  Here and there they’d come across small sugar-plantations, the cane poor and the houses raised eight or ten feet high to avoid the floods. Small gangs of slaves worked waist-deep in water cutting wood to sell for the grinding season. ‘Most of them don’t have their own mills,’ Rose remarked as the Black Goose skimmed past one such laboring crew along Bayou Dos Gris. ‘My brother grinds cane for half his neighbors, and his equipment is so old, the wood costs him a fortune.’ She put a hitch in the sheet she’d helped Jim adjust – they were teaching January to set the sails, but Rose had spent five years of her life in these waters and handled a boat like other women handled crochet hooks – and went back to the stern where January sat as the open water ended and the murky tangle of flottants and deadfalls closed in around them again.

  ‘I hear Americans in town talk about “rich sugar planters” and I don’t know whether to laugh or walk over and slap them. Just because my brother owns slaves doesn’t mean he doesn’t wake up every morning of his life wondering how he can keep from having his land foreclosed on.’ She was dressed as a boy for the journey, her walnut-hued complexion darkened and freckled a little by the sun. Here, away from the city and its laws, she’d braided her hair and coiled it on her head; it was a few shades browner than her skin and curly, like a white woman’s.

  ‘I’ve often wondered why the smaller planters don’t give up sugar altogether,’ said January. ‘Why they don’t just support themselves and grow corn and vegetables for the town market.’

  ‘Because they can’t.’ Rose turned her eyes toward a little huddle of cottages – barely huts – among the cypresses a few feet back from the bayou edge. A woman in a faded dress came down the path with a child on her hip and a bucket in her hand. ‘Farming, you don’t make a living. Unless you have something to sell, you slide into debt very quickly: for salt, for tools, for taxes. I’ve seen how the trappers live in the marsh, and even then the women have to tend the vegetables while Papa goes out and hunts muskrats for their skins. Here, if you don’t raise sugar, you become a dirt-farmer until one of your neighbors buys your land out from under you.’

  Her words returned to January on the following morning as the wood-boat – freed of the wet mazes of the trembling lands now and winging like her namesake across the shallow open waters – came in sight of the lift of land that marked Chouteau Plantation, the straggly tangle of laurel and oleander surrounding the house on its high stilts and the unkempt gardens beside it, and the wooded ridge behind it that hid the sea. January, who played the cornet in the Opera orchestras when he wasn’t playing harpsichord, blew a couple of long blasts on Natchez Jim’s old tin trumpet, and by the time they made the weathered wharf, Alice Vitrac and a swarm of shock-haired children came piling down the steps from the three-room ‘big house’ and dashed down the path.

  ‘Rose, sweetheart, you should have said in your letter you were coming!’ Madame Vitrac hugged her, a rabbity-looking little woman who was probably five years younger than Rose and looked ten years older, particularly in her home-dyed mourning.

  ‘You didn’t get my second note?’ Rose had written on Monday, warning her brother that there might be an attempt on his life and that she and January were fleeing town.

  Alice Vitrac shook her head. ‘Aramis was going to write you, thanking you … Benjamin!’ She clasped January’s hands. ‘Thank you for seeing Jeoffrey laid to rest properly! We’ll pay you back as soon as—’

  ‘You will not.’ January jabbed an admonishing finger at his sister-in-law’s nose. ‘Not ever, or Rose and I will take it personally amiss, Miss Alice. He was our brother, too.’

  Alice flung her arms around him, pressed her face to his chest – the top of her head didn’t reach his shoulder – and stepped back, half-laughing, as January bent to scoop up six-year-old Hilaire, who with his brothers and sisters was clamoring for their uncle’s attention. ‘And where is M’sieu Vitrac?’ he asked, looking around him. ‘We passed a wood gang this morning, but—’

  Alice flung up her hands. ‘Oh, everything is at sixes and sevens!’ she exclaimed. ‘Yes, he did go out with the wood gang this morning, but there was an accident. Some hunters—’

  ‘It wasn’t hunters,’ protested Hilaire, turning from his perch on January’s broad shoulder. ‘It was pirates!’

  ‘It was smugglers!’ added four-year-old Pierrot, face ablaze with enthusiasm.

  Alice rolled her eyes. ‘It was nothing of the kind! There are no pirates hereabouts any more—’

  And Marie-Rose, forgetting the dignity of her nine years, exclaimed, ‘Papa was shot!’

  EIGHT

  ‘Of course I didn’t see them.’ Rose’s brother made a move as if he would have propped himself more firmly on the moss-stuffed bolsters behind his shoulders, but turned suddenly very white under his tan and thought better of it. ‘If they’d known there was anybody about they wouldn’t have gone blazing away like they were at the Battle of Goddam Waterloo, or at least I hope they wouldn’t. Likely it was that idiot DuPratz from L’Isle Dernier. There was no harm done. The bullet went right through—’

  ‘May I have a look at it?’

  ‘You turn your eyes away, Rose.’ Aramis threw back the sheet draped over his lower body, to reveal a mass of bandages wrapped tightly around his right thigh.

  ‘Like I’ve never seen your bottom,’ she retorted, but obediently scootched her chair around so that she faced the wall. Aramis, though shorter than Jeoffrey and of stockier build, had the same long, rather rectangular face they both shared with Rose, the same straight nose and well-shaped lips. ‘So you didn’t send anyone to see—?’

  ‘What good would that have done? Alice is as good a surgeon as a man could ask for,’ he added proudly as January snipped away the wrappings. ‘Last roulaison, when our sugar-boss Hercule got his hand caught in the mill gears …’

  ‘Miss Alice,’ said January diffidently, ‘might you have one of your people fetch some boiling water from the kitchen? And if you have such a thing as spirits of wine in the house—’

  ‘We do,’ said Alice. ‘Though myself, I didn’t think it looked like it needed it.’ But she got up good-naturedly and made for the door, Rose following, partly to reduce the impression that Alice – a white woman and th
e lady of the house – was fetching anything at the request of a black man, be he never so much her brother-in-law. Mostly, January suspected, Rose went to make sure that the rags they’d bring back for bandages would be clean. The ones wrapping the wound, while not precisely foul, had certainly been used to mop up a food spill and subsequently slept on by the household cats.

  It was ten or fifteen minutes before they came back, with Lallie the maidservant in tow carrying the basket of medical impedimenta, and Rose bearing a tray of lemonade and cow-horn tumblers.

  ‘The problem is,’ said January as he examined the wound – which, as Aramis had said, was perfectly straightforward and had missed both the tibia and the femoral artery – and then washed the area carefully in hot water and spirits of wine, ‘this almost certainly wasn’t an accident. Were you alone when it happened?’

  ‘I was riding out to the woods, but I was by myself, yes. Of course, Buck threw me – he’s lucky he didn’t take the bullet in his withers, poor old fellow! – but Hercule and the boys heard the shot and came running from the woods at once.’

  ‘You were lucky,’ said January quietly. ‘A week ago the men who killed your brother attacked Rose, stabbed her in the market and fled. They’re after your great-granpère Absalon’s treasure, and when they killed Jeoffrey they got whatever notes he had about tracing it. They followed him to our house—’

  ‘Tcha! That’s grass-biting crazy!’

  ‘Not if the treasure is large enough. These days, men will do just about anything to get money. They know enough about the family to have recognized the Crimson Angel from the newspaper description—’

  ‘Newspaper?’

  In a few sentences January described the role this last remnant of the de Gericault treasure had played in the spectacular salvation of a gang of white folks. ‘So someone knows that Mammy Ginette’s daughter is in Cuba,’ he concluded. ‘And that someone is either related to you, or connected with your great-granpère’s plantation in Saint-Domingue. They think Rose knows something about it, and they may think you know something … or they may just think that when Rose was attacked I wrote to warn you, and they sent someone down here to put you out of the way as well. Did your great-granpère have any other children, besides your grandmother? Rose said she thought he had a son.’