Then he woke from this half-dream and went outside. Wind had started up, but by the patchy light of a waning moon January could just make out the two guards Aramis had set still standing, one on either side of the guest house, halfway up the ridge.
And somewhere in the darkness an orange spot of fire burned, and when the wind shifted it brought him Olympe’s voice, crooning to Mamzelle l’Araignée in her black-painted bottle, and with it, the whiff of blood.
CUBA
ELEVEN
They left Chouteau at first light, the Black Goose skimming through Caminada Pass and along the Gulf side of the islands, making for La Balize.
January had fallen asleep before Olympe returned to the guest house. When he woke in the stillness before first light, she gave him a circle of iron the size of a ten-dollar gold piece, strung on a leather thong. On it had been patiently scratched the diagonal checker-work and stars of Ogun, the blacksmith god. ‘Wear it, brother,’ said Olympe as they walked down to the wharf in the tepid dawn. ‘For the sake of Rose, and of your son.’
Here, where there were no waves, the stillness seemed oceans deep, and the whisper of the surf on the other side of the island came like the breath of some sleeping thing. January turned the gris-gris over in his fingers. The Church was very clear on the wearing of such things, or of juju-balls tied into the armpit with string (all the way down to Grand Isle January had watched Natchez Jim, every night, take his off and dribble whiskey on it before saying his evening prayers).
Half the people he knew in New Orleans simply neglected to mention their gris-gris at confession (though they generally took them off before entering the church). A devout man and an educated one, January knew that to wear Ogun’s mark with the prior intention of tossing it into the sea upon his return from Cuba and then going to confession and asking for absolution was exactly what he’d told Zizi-Marie and Gabriel not to do.
But he didn’t cast the gris-gris away.
I don’t understand Your ways, he prayed as the flat green line of the island dwindled to the north above the shallow waves. And I know not if Ogun is one of Your names, or that of a spirit who does Your bidding – like St James, that loa’s other name – or if this piece of iron is just a piece of iron. Protect us, if it is YOUR will, for nothing takes place but by Your command. If You tell me to throw this thing away, I will.
Which meant, he supposed – turning to watch Rose as she hauled on one of the braces to bring the sail into the wind – that a part of him actually did believe in the power of amulets and spirits, and to hell with what he’d been taught in the St Louis Academy for Boys. Hannibal, in the prow, spread his arms to the wind and declaimed passages from the Odyssey in Greek. He was as thoroughgoing a pagan as Rose was: and one could make a fairly good argument that God (or Zeus) had looked after him.
‘Any sign we’re being followed?’ asked Rose, and Hannibal broke off mid-metaphor, fished in the pocket of his old-fashioned swallowtail coat for Rose’s spyglass, and with it swept the wine-dark sea.
‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean – roll! Ten thousand fleets … Nary a thing.’ He held out the glass to her. ‘There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore …’
‘They might be watching us from the trees,’ pointed out Rose.
‘Unromantic woman. I trust you’ll display greater delicacy of soul once we reach Havana.’
It had been agreed that upon arrival in Havana, Rose would take on the character of Hannibal’s concubine – a slave about whose disappearance any man would raise a great fuss with the Spanish authorities – and January, that of his valet. For this purpose the fiddler had brought with him from town a pink gown belonging to January’s sister Dominique – now safely packed in their single trunk – and enough money over and above their passage, donated by Dominique’s protector Henri Viellard, to purchase in Havana such additional raiment as would further this illusion. He’d also brought along January’s second-best jacket and the knee-breeches that January wore to play at the Opera, a costume that was also the mark of a servant’s livery.
Thus attired, on Monday, the thirteenth of August, Rose and January followed their new ‘master’ ashore at the low-lying cluster of post-and-bousillage huts of La Balize at the mouth of the Mississippi – ‘ashore’ being a relative term, since the buildings were constructed on wooden piers and the so-called ground between them was a squishy mush barely distinguishable from the flottants and cattail beds that surrounded it. Duckboards defined a path from the wharves to a tavern, where an unshaven proprietor in shirtsleeves – the day was suffocatingly hot and steaming from recent rain – assured Hannibal that, yes, the Triton was due today …
‘Or maybe tomorrow,’ reported the fiddler, re-emerging on to the gallery where Rose and January waited with their slender luggage. ‘Or possibly the day after. Though he assures me that he can put us all up for a dollar a head, or fifty cents if you and Benjamin don’t mind sleeping on the gallery.’
‘Does he charge extra for mosquito smudges?’ January fanned ineffectually at the gnats that swarmed around his face.
‘I suspect he does. We can but pray for a southerly wind.’
Hannibal retreated into the tavern again, to join a poker game that appeared to have been in session for decades. La Balize, within rock-throwing distance of a crumbling French fort, was the headquarters of the little colony of pilots that made their living bringing ocean-going vessels through the shifting mazes of the river’s mouth. From the tavern’s gallery, January could see half a dozen grounded hulks in various stages of decomposition, wrecked on the shoals and snags that stretched north and south of the cluster of oak trees and huts. South-east lay open water; north-east, sheets of what looked like clear sailing mixed treacherously with submerged trees and half-drowned islets. Some distance in that direction lay what appeared to be two long, parallel white sand-spits, with a chalky-looking yellow-brown aisle between: the currently most usable mouth of the Mississippi.
God knew where it would be in three years’ time.
Snaggly-haired women and children moved about among the huts on the (marginally) higher ground, feeding chickens, tending vegetables, hanging clothes out to dry. Gulls circled, crying, over kitchen garbage; along the wharves, fishing boats, pirogues, and snub-nosed pilot boats rocked. It could have been the seventeenth century rather than the nineteenth. The marshes that bordered the Styx would not have seemed as desolate.
‘I wouldn’t like to be here in a hurricane,’ Rose remarked.
January grinned and shook his head, but the smile was forced. The desolation of the place was a reminder that their lifeline was now as slender as that of the runaway slaves he periodically housed in the cellar of the house on Rue Esplanade. It wasn’t simply a matter of dodging danger for a time. If they didn’t solve this riddle of murderous pursuit, they would lose first that house and all they had – if they didn’t lose their lives – and then the community that made life possible, as the combined strength of the slave-villages made it possible for each man, each woman, to go on.
If we have to flee New Orleans, what have we to offer that will let us survive in some other place?
What have I to sell that a thousand others aren’t offering as well?
He was an excellent musician, he knew – but he knew also that New Yorkers or Philadelphians were as unlikely to be lavishing money on balls and music lessons as New Orleanians were, in these hard times.
He was a competent surgeon. But without some extraordinary technique or specialty that others did not have, what chance had a black man (who looked like a cotton-hand) in a white market?
This has to work.
We have to find who these people are, what their weakness is, and either treat with them … or destroy them.
Across the waters of the open bay to the south, sails appeared. Russian flags flew at a merchantman’s three masts; a pilot and a couple of boatmen emerged from the tavern and made their way briskly down to the
tow boats. Not long after that, a schooner appeared, seeming to float over the marshlands to the north, and another pilot went down, and January understood that this horrible, shabby, bug-ridden place was in fact the center of a good deal of activity, a good deal of the time.
Just after noon the Triton came into view, a sloop-rigged brig laden with furs, sacks of corn, and bales of sacking from Kentucky mills. January shook hands with Natchez Jim, who’d helped carry the carpet bags down to the pilot’s boat. By the size of the tip Hannibal gave Jim, January guessed he’d put in a profitable few hours unobtrusively fleecing the pilots in the tavern.
‘We can but trust that our friends Maddox, Killwoman and Conyngham from New Orleans aren’t on-board,’ remarked Hannibal – in Latin – as the boatmen set the sail toward the brig.
‘In a way, I hope they are,’ returned January, in the same tongue. ‘At least then I wouldn’t worry about them being back on Grand Isle, murdering Aramis and his family.’ The Jefferson Parish sheriff had been alerted to guard the little plantation and scour the island for the killers, but January had met the man and had his doubts.
Rose put up a hand, to hold her tignon in place, the ribbons fluttering on her sleeves. It vexed her that she couldn’t observe the actions of the crew in the rigging, but Hannibal was adamant that lovely and valuable concubines did not wear their spectacles in public. ‘I was keeping an eye out behind us and didn’t see them,’ she agreed softly. ‘But if they’re not already ahead of us, you know they’re following fast.’
Still, it was a relief to spend three days at sea – if one had to do so on a ship where slaves dossed down among the crew – secure in the knowledge that one didn’t have to be looking constantly over one’s shoulder. Rose, at least, got to share Hannibal’s minuscule cabin and bunk. (‘I’d put a sword blade between us, amicus meus, only, believe me, there isn’t room for such a thing …’) January grew tired – and bored – of the sailors’ talk in the fo’c’s’le, which centered almost exclusively on women, drink, and the shortcomings of the ship’s officers, but he’d long ago learned to let casual jests about niggers slide off his shoulders, and at least there was nobody in the crew who took it on himself to grudge him hammock room. It angered him to hear Rose discussed in lustful detail, but he reminded himself it was only to be expected. She was supposed to be Hannibal’s concubine, and to spring to her defense would only have announced that there was something else going on. He certainly had not the smallest flicker of suspicion that the fiddler was anything but a perfect gentleman, lying side-by-side in an extremely narrow bunk with her, and that, he supposed, was the definition of both friendship and love.
He was nevertheless very glad when the Triton glided between the low headlands, and past the twin white fortresses that guarded the walled city, and came at last – just before sunset on Friday – to the long line of wharves beneath the walls of Havana’s artillery barracks.
The flag of the Queen Isabella the Second fluttered above the ramparts.
They were on Spanish soil.
The day’s heat had broken. Wind soughed across the bay and swayed the palm trees that grew between the stucco houses, reminiscent of New Orleans when January first had seen that low-lying pastel town as a child of eight: a smell of drains and fish and flowers and the sea. Rose put on her spectacles and looked around her, her hazel-green eyes very bright. ‘It’s beautiful.’
She loved their son, January knew. There was no greater happiness, for either of them, than to hold him, to steady his tottering steps, to meet that solemn, worried gaze.
But he knew she missed her freedom. Not every day, but many days.
The brother she loved had been killed. Her son – and January himself, and Rose as well – were in danger of their lives: her surviving brother and his family also, for all they knew, despite the assurances from the sheriff of Jefferson Parish.
But he saw how her cheeks colored in the salt-spanked air, and the way her gaze devoured the dark-skinned market women selling mangoes, the beggar boys lounging on the steps that led up toward the cathedral square, the bright flocks of parrots in the trees.
The captain of the Triton – who over the past three days had contributed substantially to the exchequer of the expedition, by way of Hannibal’s adeptness at the card table – had recommended lodgings for them in the Calle San Ignacio: ground-floor chambers around the courtyard of a well-off planter’s town house, an arrangement January was familiar with from his visit to Mexico two years before. Since their position as servants was their sole defense against the slave-stealers who abounded in the old town, Rose was given a tiny chamber adjacent to Hannibal’s, and January a cubbyhole in the building’s attic, three flights up, above the grand rooms of the householders themselves. The valets of two other gentlemen staying on the premises were up there as well. A third gentleman, a coffee-broker from Virginia, had his valet sleep on a pallet across the doorway of his own room, the arrangement many old-fashioned Americans still preferred.
After bringing Hannibal his breakfast the following morning, shaving him and helping him dress (‘Honestly, Benjamin, you show a real genius for this sort of thing …’), when the fiddler went off to call on the American consul, January made the acquaintance of the other valets, and of the servants of the Orrente household. Señor Villaregal, the Orrentes’ butler, was Peninsular Spanish and considered everybody but his master’s Peninsular Spanish valet and the German butler of the house next door beneath him – including his own master, who was Cuban-born Spanish Creole and clearly not of the limpieza de sangre required, in Señor Villaregal’s opinion, for Good Society. But the houseboys and the men who worked in the stables were native Cubans, of varying permutations of African and Spanish descent, and had heard all about the slave revolt in Pinar del Río last April.
‘That was bad business, brother.’ Ilario the head groom accepted the cigarette January offered him and set down the brush he’d been wielding to knock street mud from the wheels of the household volanta. ‘Bad business. And stupid, you know, because if you just run away into the mountains, you hook up with the other cimarrones up there, and most of the time they don’t catch you.’ He took a long, considering drag of smoke, as if judging the quality of the Virginia tobacco and finding it wanting – but tobacco is tobacco, when all was said and done. ‘Burning out the Big Folks’ house and killing them – what does that get you, eh? The soldiers come in, and everybody suffers.’
‘It’s the sugar planting.’ Bernardino – the boy who fetched water for the horses and mucked out the stalls – leaned on his pitchfork. ‘On a cafetele, you work all day, but it’s gentle, you know? It’s not savage. The coffee trees need shade, so they plant them among fruit trees, and you go about picking the beans with everybody in the village – women, children, friends – and everybody helps between their chores. But sugar, there’s a time you have to get the crop in or else, and you go out and chop canes and drag fuel to the ingenio –’ it took January a moment to identify the word as meaning both a sugar plantation and the sugar mill itself – ‘and the work is ten times harder, in the heat of the sun, with a machete in your hand and ants and cane rats around your feet, until after dark by torchlight. And men get angry.’ He spread his hands. ‘Then the jefe beats you because you got to get finished before the cane rots, and the patrón says, “We got to get more cane because the price this year isn’t so good as last.” Anywhere you hear about slaves rising up, it’s an ingenio, not a cafetele.’
‘And did they kill the patrón?’ January asked, though he knew from the National Intelligencer article that he and his family had escaped.
‘No, but they got the jefe – the overseer. He was the real problem, everyone says.’ The groom carefully crushed out the cigarette stub on the brick pavement of the traspatio – the rear courtyard – and returned to his wheel cleaning. ‘The patrón got away, as did the Americans that were staying with him. Which is a good thing, because if Americans had been killed there would have been trouble w
ith the American government.’
‘Do you know the woman who got them away? Ginette, I think she was called …’
Ilario shook his head. ‘Ginette’s her mother,’ he said simply. ‘She only came into our barrio a couple of times, when I was little, selling knives and scissors and things: things we have to buy from Spain, and they’re no good and cost a fortune, and the British ones and the Americans ones are better and cheaper, you understand. Salomé – the daughter, the one who got the Americans away – comes in every couple of months, you never know when.’
January raised his brows. ‘That’s how she knew this Captain Loup de la Mare, then?’
The head groom grinned. ‘Ah, ask me no questions, dear heart, and you’ll hear no lies. Sal knows all of them.’ He wet a clean rag in his bucket, gave the little carriage’s brass lantern a brisk rub. ‘And the marones in the mountains. Why else you think nobody sees her, unless she wants to be seen?’
January assisted man and boy in wheeling the volanta back into the passageway – the zagún was the local word for it – that lay like a vestibule behind the massive main doors of the house. Like the town houses of New Orleans – which were in fact far more Spanish than French – the stairway to the private quarters of the family ascended from the zagún, and there were houses in Havana – as there were in Mexico City – in which the family carriage occupied one side of the downstairs salon, an arrangement preferable to permitting even the slightest possibility that a well-born lady would ever be put into the position of stepping down out of the carriage into the actual street.
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