Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘In a way it is, though.’ January looked from the bench where they sat toward the gate of the walled village, with its steep African-style roofs and the chickens pecking in the dust in quest of bugs. Thunder rumbled softly, and the wind had a wildness to it that whispered of a storm to come. ‘Michie Hannibal is trying to find his family – or find out something about his family, whether he can ever prove himself to be the Vicomte de Gericault back in France or not. So all those papers in the trunks, and anything anyone can remember, are indeed what he seeks to learn. Some names, some hints, somewhere to start.’

  Some way to find out who they are, and where they are, before they find US …

  ‘Don Demetrio says he was great friends with the boy Guibert, but he hasn’t spoken of what happened to him when he went with his father to America.’

  ‘It’s because he doesn’t know.’ A younger woman came down the path between the shell-blow grounds, a basket of damp clothing on her hip. A quick smile passed between her and old Nyssa, then she nodded greeting to January: ‘You’re Señor Sefton’s man? I’m Fia … My mama did the laundry for the Vizconde, back in those days.’

  ‘He doesn’t know?’ January’s brows drew together. ‘He said they were like brothers.’

  ‘And so they were. And Don Demetrio – I will say that for him –’ and there was a trace of something, like an obsidian glint, in her voice as she said his name – ‘tried to get his uncle to get the governor to let Don Absalon stay. But, of course, there were too many people – and the Vizconde the first among them – who wanted to buy this land, after Don Absalon had made such a success of it. So they went to America, to stay with Don Absalon’s daughter and her husband, poor girl.’

  ‘I thought Don Absalon was so kind and thoughtful a man as to be welcome anywhere?’ Tell me differently …

  ‘Not if you were a cripple.’ The brittleness in her voice was like dry wood splintering into a wound. ‘The way he used to speak of that poor woman – when he’d speak of her at all – my mother says, it was no wonder she ran away and married the first man who’d have her. Don Demetrio’s cousin Lucio had a club foot – and a kinder and brighter boy, and young man, you’d never meet in the whole eastern end of the island, Mama said – and Don Absalon couldn’t bear the sight of him. Mama said she’d overhear him say at dinner that those born like that should just be put out on the mountain, like the people in old times used to do their babies, and let the wild dogs and buzzards eat them. She said Guibert picked this up from him, and when he’d be with other people – not Don Demetrio – he’d call Lucio things like Gimpy and Stump-Along, pretending it was in jest, but it wasn’t.’

  When her dark brows pulled together under the red-and-yellow line of her tignon, her square-faced resemblance to Don Demetrio was strong enough that January could guess at the closeness of her ‘mama’ to the family.

  ‘But Don Demetrio never got over Guibert leaving.’ Old Nyssa’s dark eyes narrowed as she looked across to the house, among its groves of banana and orange trees. ‘He wrote him there in America, but Don Guibert never wrote him back.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  Both women shook their heads.

  ‘Will you stay to eat with us?’ asked the younger woman, Fia, giving the clothes basket a little hitch. ‘It’s only beans and rice, but that’s all you’d get up at the casa de vivienda, with the master away. Old Madame and her daughters make a hearty meal, but they keep a sharp eye on what goes to the servants when Don Demetrio’s gone, and of course poor little Madame stays to her rooms and eats hardly a thing.’

  ‘I’d be delighted.’

  When Fia went down the path to the drying ground by the river, and January extended a hand to help Nyssa to her feet, the old woman paused and glanced at Olympe’s gris-gris around his neck. ‘There’s a man across the river,’ she said quietly, ‘who it might be can help you find what happened to Guibert Gericault. A babaaláwo who reads the shells. They not coming back tonight – the master, and your good master. The way Don Silvestro talks, they lucky if they get back by Sunday. You be inside the walls here –’ she nodded toward the enclosed village – ‘when the overseer locks the gate tonight. Lazaro Ximo can come down off the mountain and be here too.’

  January glanced uneasily in the direction of the house. In the days he’d been there, he’d become very well aware of which servants carried tales to Old Madame. He’d taken care to flatter them, and given them small pickings of money, but even so he had no surety that they wouldn’t take it on themselves to mention it to her, if Don Hannibal’s valet went missing for an evening. Old Madame, though fat and indolent, had a reputation for petty sadism, and might consider herself justified in locking up a guest’s errant servant in the plantation jail.

  Or possibly getting the white overseer to administer a whipping ‘for his own good’.

  As he watched, young Doña Jacinta emerged on to the gallery, petite as a child in white gauze that flickered around her in the restless wind. Both sisters – Doña Terecita and Doña Griselda – bustled out of another French door almost immediately, tugging at her and coaxing; the girl stamped her foot, jerked her arm away from their touch. At that Old Madame appeared, pounded her cane on the gallery planks, and said something that made her daughter-in-law flinch and retreat into the dimness of the house.

  ‘You want me to ask,’ said Nyssa behind him, ‘can he throw the shells for you tonight?’

  Olympe’s power, reflected January, fingering the iron gris-gris of Ogun around his neck, lay in information. In secrets.

  All secrets came to the voodoos.

  And it was secrets, he sensed, that would save them all. That would let them lead their enemies into destruction.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll come.’

  SEVENTEEN

  This is the legacy of the rebellion in Saint-Domingue.

  Through the door of Nyssa’s bohio, January could see the little plot of open ground among the huts and the wall with its iron-barred gate.

  This is how badly the whites were scared by Toussaint, and Dessalines, and Christophe.

  In Louisiana, and elsewhere in the United States, slave-owners paid county sheriffs to mount nightly patrols of the roads, to pick up straying bondsmen. In Cuba, they dealt with the problem closer to home, locking the slaves in at night.

  There was a tower on the wall, where one of the overseers – there were four, on Hispaniola Plantation – would watch: for slaves going over the wall, or for runaways from other plantations or from the nearby mountains sneaking in to ‘make trouble’ by whispering to those in bondage that there was another way to live.

  Halfway between the village wall and the overseer’s house stood the barracones, the stone building where the single men were locked up each night. Only the families dwelled in the village, which was slightly more than half of the slaves. Of the twenty bohios, with their huge African roofs thatched in palm leaves, four stood vacant and broken down. Even with the British government trying to close down the slave trade entirely, on a sugar ingenio it still made better economic sense to buy only young men from Africa, work them to death and replace them, rather than go to the expense of raising stock from babyhood as the Americans were supposed to be doing. (‘Although they don’t,’ January had said earlier in the day, when sharing a light merienda with the major-domo Claudio in the loggia outside the kitchen. ‘They buy them from smugglers when they can, or from dealers who get them from the old worked-out tobacco plantations in the East. There isn’t a blankitte in the country who wants to feed black children till they’re old enough to work.’)

  The women of the village were herded in just before sunset, along with the older children who’d been helping them at their vegetable patches outside the wall or with picking coffee in the few acres of high ground behind the house. The gates were locked, and Old Nyssa came in and set about making supper for her husband and children, and for January. ‘You can go out and walk around now,’ she said with her wry-mouthed
smile. ‘They don’t have a guard up on the tower till the men come in.’ The married men came in by torchlight, long past dark, dirty and wearied from cutting wood in the forest beyond the cane fields. Nyssa’s husband Kimo greeted January a little shyly, but her children gathered around him right away.

  ‘You not ara-ni like Claudio an’ Cellie.’ The youngest daughter, Losa, named Doña Jacinta’s maid. ‘It’s like they think they’re doin’ you a favor, lettin’ their shadow fall on you.’

  On other nights, when the still heat pressed like black velvet on the cane fields, January had heard the far-off beat of drums in the mountains. But tonight, either there was none, or the changeable, humid winds carried the sound away. Rain splattered briefly on the thatch, and the banana plants among the huts rustled like a thousand ladies in silk dresses fleeing for their lives; lightning flared across the sky to the east. Between flashes, the overcast night was tar black, and after the cook fires had died down, outside the huts, men and women began to come into Nyssa’s hut, sitting on the bed, the table, the bench.

  And it wasn’t, January observed, so very different from the voodoo gatherings in New Orleans. The presence of an overseer on the tower outside precluded dancing or drumming, but everyone brought food – fried plantains, Moros y Cristianos, vianda thick with mojo. Someone brought a jar of herbed rainwater, put into a corner of the hut. Someone else brought rum – enough to earn a whipping, if they were caught. The talk, he guessed, would go on for most of the night, as it did at parties at ‘the back of town’, after the whites had all gone to bed.

  Lazaro Ximo himself was a slender young man of medium height, with a quiet air of modesty. He had an ilé in the mountains, Nyssa said, a couple of miles into the forest; January guessed that, like himself, the santero had slipped into the village sometime in the afternoon and lain hidden in one of the empty huts. Thick necklaces of beads gleamed on his chest; dark eyes sparkled under a long mass of curly black hair. He greeted January with a smile and clearly knew everyone in the village: he talked to everyone, asked after babies and husbands and crops.

  Nyssa explained to him that January sought information about where Don Guibert had gone when he’d left Hispaniola, but after that, for a long time the santero occupied himself with everyone else. Five or six of the men and women present retreated one by one with the santero to the corner, for him to wash their heads with the rainwater, the same way that the mambos in Congo Square would bless celebrants with dripping branches of gladiolus flowers. He’d brought a carved opun – a tray with a shallow rim around it – and a little gourd of red dust, and others besides January crouched at the table with him near a couple of stubs of household candles, to have him scatter the dust into the tray and read the shells.

  When Ximo finally came back to him through the crowd in the little hut, he recognized that the young man was about half drunk … and that he was being ‘ridden’ by whatever it was – orisha, spirit, African god or demon, as the priests would insist – that came upon the dancers in the voodoo ceremonies. Even his voice was different, deep and hoarse, and his dark eyes had a mocking glitter.

  ‘So you come lookin’ for Absalon’s boy, that went off to America?’

  January bent his head. ‘I do, lord.’

  The beautiful eyes, black with the dilation of the darkness, measured him. ‘Nyssa say your patwon chasin’ gold, but I see fear in you. Hidin’ in the cane field, waitin’ to see his face.’

  January said, ‘That’s true.’

  The orisha grinned, took January by the elbow and steered him back to the rainwater jar. January knelt and let Ximo wash his head, then followed him to the table. Olympe would cast dried beans; Ximo threw cowrie shells, scattering them a few at a time from his big hand. ‘God damn, you run a long way, brother.’

  ‘That I have.’

  ‘He scared you good. He wrote a letter – Gilbert did. I see it there—’ His long finger traced a line between the shells. ‘From America, from New Orleans. Wrote a letter to his friend, sayin’, I’m not having it no more. Doors slam on us, people turnin’ away their faces. Tell us, “Move on.”’

  His eyes narrowed to slits, and he rocked a little on the corner of the bench, repeating words as if from rote. ‘I’m goin’ into the country, not be French no more, not be Spanish. I’m American now. I’m a-turn my coat, I’m a-turn my name, I’m a-turn myself, ’cause that’s where there’s money. With money come power can’t nobody take away. And I never write you no more ’cause you’re what I used to be. That’s where he gone.’ His eyes opened, but his gaze remained unfocused. ‘America.’

  ‘You know his name?’

  ‘Gericault.’

  ‘His name now?’

  ‘Gericault.’

  January gave that one up. Even without the presence of an African god in his brain, Ximo smelled like he’d been drinking steadily all evening. ‘You know why he’s coming after us?’

  ‘Hell.’ The santero swept his shells into his hand again. ‘Don’t need no reason for an American to go after a black man, a black woman. If it ain’t gold, it’s blood; if it ain’t blood, it’s gold. Blood’ll bring you gold, doctor, but that gold’ll bring you blood.’

  ‘Why do you call me a doctor?’

  ‘Ain’t you?’

  For a moment his gaze changed, went beyond January to focus on the darkness, and his brows knit as if listening. Then he shook his head. ‘I see him—’

  ‘Gericault?’

  ‘The angel,’ said Ximo. ‘The angel behind you with blood on his golden wings. He holdin’ out his hands at you, and his hands full of flame.’ He stretched out his fingers, hesitantly, like a drugged man grasping at fire because it’s pretty.

  Then he shook his head and turned back to January with a smile. ‘He gone now. He come back maybe when it’s quieter and speak to you. Meantime you walk ahead careful, brother, till it’s time to close the trap. And you say hello for me, next time you see your pretty sister. You tell her Lord Ogoun he say hey.’

  ‘Did he never write to you from America?’ Hannibal’s light, rather scratchy voice drifted from the rear gallery, and January paused in his patient perusal of daybooks and accounts, of slaves’ and mistresses’ names. The planter had returned with his guests just before dinner time, and through his own discreet supper with Rose behind the closed doors of the guest room, January had related what had passed in the walled village the night before.

  Now, on the gallery outside the guest room again with the plantation records around them, they pretended to be friendly acquaintances, listening to the after-dinner chat and smelling the drift of Don Demetrio’s cigar. ‘Guibert? You said he was a friend—’

  ‘Never.’ The planter’s reply was like a dry stick quietly snapping. ‘It was the worst of it, you know? Yes, I understand that he would be angry. They had less than thirty days, to sell up all they owned, and of course they got no kind of decent price for any of it. And, yes, he spoke with great anger of … of having thought that our neighbors would have held forth their hands to help. We were driven out like dogs by blood-maddened savages, he said. It was only to be expected of Negroes. We did not expect such treatment from civilized men who claimed to be our friends.’

  ‘What could you have done?’ asked Hannibal reasonably. ‘You were, what, twenty-three? Just one of the young men living in your uncle’s house.’

  Servants brought coffee and sweets to the back gallery and lighted mosquito smudges as the twilight turned with tropical suddenness to night. The shorter of the two sisters, Terecita, bawled for the card table, and she and her sister Griselda began pestering stridently for Hannibal to join them. Little Doña Jacinta sat back in her wicker throne, watching them with contempt in her narrowed gaze, as still as a child who fears a beating.

  After listening to the talk in the bohio last night, January now understood that her disdain was the only fortress her spirit had.

  He want her to have child, the slave woman Fia had said. She had two babies slip on her alre
ady – she take the malaria bark, like the women in the quarters. So Don Demetrio, he get his mama to watch her all day, and his sisters to sleep in her bed with her at night, to make sure she don’t do it again.

  The laundry woman had spoken, too, of the welts that all the slaves had seen on the girl’s arms, particularly after her husband had had guests in the house. Last time that young cousin of his, Gracio, come here and talk a little too much with Young Madame, Don Demetrio kept her locked up for five–six weeks. When she gave him back answers about it, he took and burned her books. She loved them books. The woman had shaken her head wonderingly. He won’t let her have any now. Says they’re bad for women, they give them bad thoughts.

  In the cricket-creaking stillness, Don Demetrio might have shaken his head. ‘His father was very bitter. When I rode up to the house – to this house, where now I live – the day after the news came, Don Absalon sent word to his butler that I was to be turned away. I lingered in the woods on the edges of the cane fields all day, hoping Guibert would come out to me, but he didn’t. I never saw him, never heard from him again.’

  ‘’Metrio!’ shouted Old Madame. ‘’Metrio, come take this bad man’s place! He’s flirting with Terecita—’

  Both sisters hooted with laughter.

  ‘—so she can’t play properly, and if I don’t got my play, I can’t sleep!’

  ‘What, that lazy girl I gave you to rub your feet is not doing her job?’

  ‘She’s a fool, and she steals from me. And that lazy wife of yours thinks she’s too good to chat with me—’

  Doña Jacinta turned her face aside, haughty and completely alone.

  ‘All she wants to do is read those old newspapers she got,’ jibed Griselda. ‘Nothing jolly or good—’

  ‘T’cha!’ scolded Old Madame. ‘You know what Father Alonzo says about books.’