Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘A built-in library.’ Rose’s voice was filled with scholarly delight, and Hannibal – a student of human nature in all its forms – brightened with an enthusiasm that he had once reserved for cocktails of laudanum and sherry.

  ‘We went after them like rats in a cheese room. Well, Jogal and I did – Jogal was from Pondicherry, and few enough Frenchmen would share a room with either of us. God knows what he finally ended up doing for his living – probably went back to the Coromandel Coast to practice among his own people. Boissière – our room-mate – spent all his days either in the taverns around the Jardins du Luxembourg or at his uncle’s, trying to talk the old man into giving him more money. Jogal and I – and a German student who lived in the other attic – combed through every one of those journals, looking for material on the structure of the body, the operation of the heart and lungs, the progress and cure of disease …’

  His face clouded. ‘And we found Lucien Maurir’s articles on poisons, on the function of organs, and most especially on diseases of the bones.’

  In his silence, Rose sat beside him. ‘And you could tell, couldn’t you,’ she said quietly, ‘if a drawing was done from a dissection.’

  ‘I can tell.’ He tried to keep his voice normal, but heard in it a deadly flatness as he tried to turn his thoughts aside. Even as it had come into his mind – he could not have learned this except by observing a living body, its flesh opened before him on the table as the organs reacted – he had been unable to stop reading the information gleaned. Had been unable not to take in and profit from what had been learned. ‘I wondered at the time if Maurir were writing in America. In someplace where he could buy a human being, take him to some isolated plantation, drug him – or her, as the case occasionally was – and nobody would ask when he or she dropped out of sight.’

  After a long time, Hannibal whispered, ‘Nobody would—’ and January only looked at him.

  ‘We’re talking about people who discouraged insubordination by packing the culprit’s anus with gunpowder and lighting a fuse,’ he said eventually.

  The fiddler looked aside.

  ‘Mammy Zett was right,’ January added, after another long silence. ‘None of us – including myself, who grew up under the complete domination of a drunkard with the power of life and death – have any idea of what it was like in Saint-Domingue, during the days of slavery. Can I prove it happened? No. Do I think it happened? I don’t think he could have made some of those observations any other way.’

  Rose sighed, pushed up her spectacles and brought up a corner of the sheet to wipe the sweat from her face. ‘You think he was doing that at this second plantation of Don Absalon’s? L’Ange Rouge, hidden away in the Cul de Sac?’

  ‘Even in Saint-Domingue,’ remarked Hannibal, ‘surely the neighbors would have talked if it had been close to town. At least I hope they would have, for the sake of our common humanity. The question is, if Don Absalon were the kind and generous gentleman everyone recalls – other than his idée fixe about being the rightful Vicomte de Gericault – wouldn’t he have had something to say about his wife’s physician periodically chopping up the help? Even if cane hands were half the going price they are these days in New Orleans, six or seven hundred dollars is still a lot to pay for a look at somebody’s duodenum in action, not to speak of the effect this is going to have on morale in the quarters.’

  ‘He probably didn’t operate on cane hands,’ replied January quietly. ‘Planters – or traders – are always happy to get rid of weak or ageing or sick stock for a fraction of what they’d ask for someone who’s fit. And I can only surmise that if de Gericault gave Dr Maurir license to perform experiments of this kind, it might pay us to ask if Dr Maurir – Dr Maudit – had something on his employer. Something for which he was trading de Gericault’s silence and acquiescence.’

  ‘Blackmailing him, in other words?’

  ‘Unless the man was a total monster himself,’ Hannibal ventured. ‘Maybe he did murder his wife, or have Dr Maudit murder her, or whatever it was.’

  ‘In any event,’ January went on, ‘it leads me to wonder if what we’re looking for, what someone is trying to keep anyone in Rose’s family from finding, is a treasure at all … or, instead, a secret.’

  ‘What kind of secret?’ demanded Hannibal. ‘Given that the gentry of Saint-Domingue didn’t blink at explosion or, apparently, vivisection, what sort of behavior would they take pains to conceal?’

  ‘Satan worship?’ Rose cocked her head. ‘Black masses? It’s been almost fifty years since the family fled Saint-Domingue.’

  ‘And yet they still consider it a threat – if it is a secret we’re pursuing, and not simply a whacking great pile of diamonds hidden someplace for the taking.’ January leaned his back against the wall, the cot ropes creaking at his movement, and laid his hand over Rose’s. ‘If it’s a treasure, hidden at La Châtaigneraie before they fled, all we have to do is get sight of our pursuers when they cross to get it, or when they come back. If they come back … Which they may not, if they’re going to set foot on Haiti. Either ambush them, or notify the Haitian authorities of where they’re headed, or simply stay out of their way. They may lose interest in us once they see they’re going to win the race. But if it’s a secret, it’s one they think we already know. So we’re going to have to learn what it is and use it against them if we can. Else you and I, my nightingale –’ his hand tightened over hers – ‘will never again know a moment’s peace.’

  ‘Not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep, which thou ow’dst yesterday. Which causes me to reflect,’ added Hannibal, pausing in the doorway into his own large chamber, ‘upon the fact that Mamzelle Ginette – and her daughter, apparently – have stayed hiding in the mountains for all these years, long after Maudit has been gone.’

  After that, January and Rose lay for what remained of the siesta in the shuttered gloom of the little servants’ chamber, crowded together on the cot, their bodies curved together even in the stifling heat. When he finally slept, January dreamed of those yellowed journals, resurrected from the dust of the Paris attic: saw with the vividness of reality the neat, workmanlike drawings of hearts and lungs, of crooked pelvises and spinal columns split or splayed or butterflied open in grotesque horrors of nerve and bone.

  Dreamed that these had somehow all been transported to the attic of his own house on Rue Esplanade, and that there was one article in particular that contained the answer. That contained the secret, like a toxin which remains deadly for centuries buried in a tomb. But he didn’t know which it was, or where. He could only hunt through the familiar chambers – office, parlor, dining room, the bedroom where Baby John slept, the pantry that looked out on to the crooked little backyard, the attic where Rose’s students had slept – peering under mattresses and behind chairs, until he woke with Don Demetrio’s casa de vivienda still as death around him and burning slits of afternoon sunlight traced in the gloom.

  Somewhere, in that unearthly silence, he heard far off the muffled sobs of a woman weeping in terror or grief.

  The following morning, Don Demetrio rode out with Hannibal and Rose to show them the plantation of Hispaniola, an ingenio of some three hundred acres at the feet of the Sierra Maestra mountains. He treated Rose with the courtesy an American would only have extended to a legitimate white wife, though he had not, of course, introduced her to the women of his own family nor asked her to sup with them on the previous evening.

  Before setting forth on the tour of inspection, the planter had Claudio bring down from the attic the four trunks of family papers left behind by the de Gericaults when the orders had come from Spain that all Frenchmen on the island must sell their goods and depart within the month.

  ‘I recall no woman named Reina among Don Absalon’s servants,’ he said as the trunks were piled in January’s tiny cubicle. (God forbid he should inconvenience his white guest, reflected January as he moved his own few eff
ects under the bed to make room for these records). ‘Nor Ginette … His wife’s servant, you say, Señor Sefton? There must be a ledger of his slaves in there somewhere, as well as the plantation daybooks. I fear they’re all in French – Don Absalon spoke Spanish perfectly, and Guibert of course was more Spanish than French, coming to the island as he did so young. Claudio speaks French and reads it a little—’

  ‘—and has his own work to do,’ finished Hannibal politely. ‘Benjamin will be able to assist me, and Rose also …’

  Don Demetrio bowed to Rose. ‘Surely you would never ask so lovely a lady to perform so dismal a task?’

  Rose widened her nearsighted hazel eyes at him. ‘My mother instructed me in all matters concerning business and finance, sir,’ she said, which January knew was no more than the truth. ‘A lady must always remain a lady, she would say, but in this world a girl must look out for herself.’

  The planter laughed and flourished an arm toward the gallery which led to the main house, beyond the doors of which grooms would be waiting with the horses.

  ‘A moment, by your leave,’ said Hannibal, and he turned toward January as if about to give him detailed instructions, and with another bow Don Demetrio made his exit, footfalls dying away along the wooden planks.

  ‘I’ll bet his poor wife is tearing her own skin off with boredom in this place,’ commented Rose. ‘I haven’t seen a book anywhere yet – have you? When the ladies retired to the back gallery after supper –’ she nodded in the direction of the main house, the rear gallery of which, like those in New Orleans, was fitted up almost as an auxiliary room – ‘I didn’t hear the girl so much as open her mouth.’

  ‘I doubt she could,’ agreed Hannibal, ‘with Don Demetrio’s two sisters squawking like parrots.’

  Young Doña Jacinta, January had observed last night, had retired early to her rooms, which were in the other wing of the house opposite those assigned Hannibal and Rose. Though he hadn’t shared the excellent supper that Rose had been brought in her room, for fear of the servants talking, afterwards he’d sat on the gallery outside it with her, until Don Demetrio’s mother and two sisters had likewise retired, and Rose had gone to help Hannibal regale the planter with the gossip of New Orleans and Havana. The casa de vivienda was furnished with both piano and harp, but he had yet to hear anyone play them. They were, Hannibal had reported, lamentably out of tune.

  ‘We’ll come back and help you with these as soon as we can,’ said the fiddler, opening the first of the chests. ‘Though I suspect we’re going to be required to sing for our supper most of the time we’re here. I can burn a good deal of midnight oil in a good cause. I’m not sure which was worse,’ he added, offering Rose his arm. ‘Old Madame Gonzago’s minute account of her last twenty card-games with her daughters, or having Doña Jacinta looking through everyone at the table as if we were window glass. Dirty window-glass,’ he added plaintively. ‘Nature never framed a heart of prouder stuff … Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes … A terrible waste of doe-like eyes and raven hair.’

  ‘She’s seventeen,’ pointed out January. ‘Girls are intolerant at that age, and someone probably told her that her husband’s guest had brought his mistress with him. Depending on how high in the instep her family is – and I understand they’re one of the oldest in Cuba – she may have taken it as an insult that he’d even have Rose in the house.’

  Was that, he wondered, the meaning of the weeping he’d heard yesterday afternoon? It had been stifled, not loud, as women often wept from anger and pride. And he’d heard no shouted accusations to go along with it.

  Or was it one of the sisters who’d wept? Stout, stolid women in their forties, without even the dowers to get them into a good convent, much less a suitable marriage. How did they like living as their brother’s pensioners on an isolated sugar plantation?

  ‘She can’t be too intolerant, surely,’ said Hannibal, ‘if what Captain Castallanos said is true. I wonder what sort of trouble she got into back in Havana?’

  ‘That,’ said January, ‘is not your business – and had better remain not your business for the rest of our stay here.’

  The fiddler gave him a look of such startled surprise that January almost laughed. Though Hannibal did not, like many so-called ‘ladies’ men’, regard every woman he saw as a challenge to his manhood, he did regard every woman he saw as a potential inamorata, not from lust but from a genuine friendliness and enjoyment of mutual enjoyment. In most situations January could only shake his head over his friend’s philandering. But at the moment, he reflected as Hannibal and Rose retreated along the gallery, the last thing they needed was a blood feud with Don Demetrio Gonzago.

  At least until he’d had a look at the contents of Absalon de Gericault’s trunks.

  SIXTEEN

  As January suspected, Don Demetrio was right. The four trunks left in the attics of Hispaniola plantation, when the government of Spain ordered the French to leave Cuba in the spring of 1809, were filled mostly with plantation records, and searching through them was like eating dust with a spoon.

  The purchase of slaves (‘I thought Don Demetrio said that Cubans in 1791 wanted there to be fewer slaves, because of what had happened in Haiti …?’ ‘You ever cut sugar cane, Hannibal? They just couldn’t get whites to do it.’). The installation of the newest types of grinding and boiling equipment, including steam boilers when they became available, which was very different (again according to Don Demetrio’s recollections) from the lackadaisical business methods employed by the Spanish Cubans.

  ‘In truth, Don Absalon – and all the French who came here from Haiti, many thousands of them – went about making money like a Frenchman.’ Don Demetrio’s brows knit in a little frown as he surveyed the stacks of daybooks, ledgers, receipts, letters, and bills of lading that covered the table which Hannibal had requested be brought into his chamber, as if this fact about his friend’s father were to be infinitely regretted.

  ‘My uncle the Vizconde, and my grandfather before him, were good Spaniards. They farmed their coffee like gentlemen, they visited their friends, they opened their hands and hearts and houses to all … and the French made three times as much money on half the land they did, and then bought their land out from under them. This land that is now Hispaniola …’ His gesture took in the dark, flat cane-fields along the river, visible through the French windows, beyond the trees. ‘It used to be one of my grandfather’s cattle ranches. Don Absalon bought it for next to nothing, and my grandfather was horrified when he started building a sugar ingenio and bringing in slaves. For two hundred years the Gonzagos had ruled this land like the noblemen of olden times. Then, poof! Here are the businessmen, saying, “It is the modern world, after all, and we must do this and this to make money.”’ He shook his head. ‘All over Cuba it was the same tale.’

  Then he smiled and offered Rose his arm: they were to sail downriver to Deliciana Plantation to visit Don Demetrio’s cousin Silvestro, leaving the plantation yet again to the management of the overseer and Don Demetrio’s mother.

  Even two days at Hispaniola had served to show January that no improvements had been made on the place for thirty years. When, after another hour’s sorting, he went walking for some air, he observed that the sugar mill still had the steam boilers installed in 1806, but had not converted over to the vacuum system now in use even in such isolated spots as Grand Isle. Coming back toward the house in the growing heat, he saw how many of the fields had gone back to weeds and maiden cane.

  ‘It’s a shame, good land gone to waste like that,’ he observed, stopping at the corner of a woven-reed fence where a woman was weeding a garden, and the woman straightened up, glad as anyone would be for a few minutes’ rest and someone to talk to.

  ‘Ah, Don Demetrio like his father,’ opined the woman, whose wrinkles and fallen lips proclaimed the age that her bright-colored headscarf hid. Her Spanish was extremely African, but no worse than Mammy Zett’s French had been. ‘Always here, there, and
everywhere … You should hear the way the Vizconde scold him! And what would you have, with your good master come to visit him, eh? Of course, he’ll want to meet others of the family.’

  ‘Were you here when Don Absalon had the place?’ asked January, in a tone of interested curiosity. ‘My master says the French were very different …’

  The French were indeed very different. Old Nyssa – who fetched January a hospitable gourd of sugar water and was pleased when he asked her to share it with him – had been only a little girl on the Vizconde’s plantation when Don Absalon was here on Hispaniola. Her uncle was one of those the Vizconde sold to Don Absalon when he started growing sugar, though, so she’d heard all about how the Frenchman had run his ingenio, and another of her uncles had been Don Demetrio’s personal groom back then, when there was a great deal of coming and going between the Vizconde’s plantation at Soledad and Hispaniola. She remembered those days well.

  ‘Ginette?’ The old woman frowned when January asked after the name. ‘No one by that name lived here then, not that I ever heard. And my mama and my aunts, they knew everyone up and down the valley. Yana was the midwife on our place, the best between Santiago and Manzanillo; there wasn’t a woman she hadn’t helped in her time. She knew everybody’s business.’

  ‘Maybe a friend of Don Absalon’s in town …?’ The little red angel gleamed in his memory, crimson enamel feathers catching the stormy daylight back on Rue Esplanade, in Jeoffrey Vitrac’s palm.

  The old woman shook her head decisively. ‘No, Dolores Moreno was his plaçée, and a haughty girl she was, my aunt told me … And well it served her, when the King threw the French out, and poor Don Absalon had to sell the land and the house and all his slaves for whatever he could get for them to get himself a new start in America. That should have taught her not to go looking down her nose at honest women, but of course it didn’t. But that’s not what your master’s after learning about his family, after all, is it?’