Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘You slander an honest woman, and I shall be forced to call you out!’

  ‘—or is counting on the opiate to permit her to get the key away from her sleeping guardian.’

  ‘Benjamin, will you act as my second?’

  ‘He can’t,’ retorted Rose. ‘He’s going to be my second, and as the challenged party I name home-made cannons, with home-made gunpowder, at two hundred paces.’

  ‘Hmf,’ said Hannibal. ‘In that case I shall take the matter under advisement and shall send a second to you as soon as I find one suitable.’

  ‘Which won’t be until 1870,’ finished January, a little wearily. ‘Hannibal, I ask you to remember—’

  ‘I’m not making love to her.’ The fiddler’s face grew suddenly grave. ‘She’s a young girl, she’s alone, and she’s frightened. She’s doing everything she can to keep from conceiving by her husband, because she says – quite rightly – that if she’s with child she won’t be able to flee. Opiates wasn’t the only thing I obtained for her in Santiago. But she’s running out of strategies, and she’s running out of time.’

  ‘And do you think your meddling – and her cousin’s meddling, if he’ll even reply to her message – is going to do anything but make matters worse for her in the long run?’

  ‘I can’t not try.’ Hannibal sat on the bed. Though there wasn’t a clock in the house, January guessed it must be long past midnight, and owing to the hour of the outgoing tide, the stablemen had been alerted to have horses ready for them at the first whisper of light. ‘Besides,’ he added as January and Rose began to replace the plantation records in the trunk, ‘you remember Guibert’s letter to his friend Demetrio? How he compared himself to a slave that his father had tortured repeatedly for disobedience and eventually killed because he wouldn’t knuckle under and be good?’

  He regarded January steadily, and it was January who looked away.

  There was long silence, broken only by the rattle of the wings of a huge brown moth, fluttering around the candle on the table.

  Rose said, ‘Even if Don Demetrio should learn of Jacinta’s letter while you’re away, Benjamin, I’ll come up with some story. And I’ll do what I can to protect her as well.’

  NINETEEN

  Ever the perfect host, Don Demetrio rose in the blackness of pre-dawn to bid his guests Godspeed, with the light of the candles in the hands of sleepy servants gleaming gold in the eyes of the horses. A very small stable-boy held a lantern that illuminated nothing, as January and Hannibal mounted, and followed them on a scrawny old nag into the dripping gloom of the morning, to lead the horses home from Santiago. For a long time they rode in silence, surrounded by the croaking of the frogs that filled Cuba’s forests. As he’d done as a child, January made names for them: that tiny peep, like a silver bead dropped on to marble, was Monsieur L’Argent, the deeper, slow-paced glug was Old Madame Gonzago …

  They pressed on over the mountain ridge and reached Santiago late in the afternoon. Just before the scattered bohios and gardens of the town’s outskirts gave way to the more substantial houses of stucco and tile, January drew rein. ‘I think here might be a good place to send the horses back,’ he said. ‘Hannibal, would you be able to walk from here to the harbor? It would be less conspicuous than riding – and just because Gericault and his minions hadn’t arrived as of the day before yesterday, it doesn’t mean they aren’t waiting for us now. Particularly,’ he added, ‘if someone around the wharves mentions to him that the Americans have taken passage on the Santana.’

  He was already starting to dismount when the stable lad said, ‘No,’ in a small and rather frightened voice.

  January turned, startled – the boy had stayed well behind them for the whole of the day, and this was the first time he had heard his voice.

  Her voice, January realized.

  Jacinta Gonzago’s voice.

  The small, raggedy figure reined over to them and, yes, under the brim of the battered straw hat he recognized the oval face, the doe-like brown eyes.

  He glanced immediately at Hannibal and saw the fiddler was as startled as he was himself.

  ‘Don’t send me back.’

  She sat straight on her sorry old gelding; he’d mentally registered that their ‘stable lad’s’ bare wrists and feet were nearly as fair as Hannibal’s, but long acquaintance with the congress of masters and enslaved women had taught him that many slaves were in fact as light as their owners.

  ‘He’ll know by this time that I’m gone. He can only be a few hours behind us.’ She swallowed hard, but kept her eyes and her voice steady. ‘Please, please, señores, help me. Take me on the ship with you. If I can get to my cousin Enrique’s …’

  ‘You really think he won’t just hand you back to your husband?’ January exploded.

  She answered his thoughts instead of his words. ‘He won’t harm Señorita Rose.’ When January reached for her horse’s bridle, she tried to retreat, but the old nag was tired and probably had a mouth like iron: it didn’t budge. In a flash she was down from its back and out of the range of his grasp, looking quickly from his face to Hannibal’s. ‘He’ll know you wouldn’t have left her there if you were planning to run away with me.’

  ‘Oh, will he?’ demanded January.

  ‘He’ll at least wait till you return – you and Señor Sefton.’ Her moth-fine eyebrows pinched a little, as if adding up the fact that it was the so-called slave who expressed angry concern, not the so-called master. The supposed slave who, the minute they were out of Don Demetrio’s sight, was clearly in charge of the expedition.

  ‘Please,’ she said again. ‘You can tell him when you return that you saw nothing of me. That you thought I was Pablo all the while, that I never spoke, and why would you look at a servant? Just the fact that you’ll go back will tell him that I didn’t flee with Señor Sefton—’

  ‘You’re making a lot of assumptions about what he’ll think.’

  She glanced again at Hannibal, standing now beside the head of his horse, still without having said a word.

  ‘I swear I won’t go back,’ she said. ‘If you send me back I’ll go into the forest and try to reach Enrique’s men that way. He isn’t in Havana,’ she added quietly. ‘He’s in the mountains, with the mambises, the rebels against the King. The ones who want Cuba to be free, as I do.’

  ‘Is that why your parents forced you to marry?’ inquired Hannibal gently. ‘Because you’re a revolutionista?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You’d never make it.’ January spoke more quietly now. ‘From what I heard in Havana, the rebels could be anywhere, and the hills are crawling with bandits, with rancheradores who’d see a girl of your complexion and sell you as a musterfino in Kingston or Rio or—’

  ‘Do you think I’m anything but a slave now?’ The dappled light showed tears in her eyes. ‘Out here, away from everyone except that family of his, who want a son from him as much as he does, he can do anything to me. Anything. They believe whatever he tells them because he has told them I’m a liar. They’re right outside the door when he comes into my room and takes me by force – even a whore has a pimp to turn to! Señores, I have no one. Even the priest tells me that I must submit with good grace – good grace! He wants me with child, and he wants a son, and he knows that the moment I’m with child I won’t be able to flee.’

  No, reflected January. Every slave-owner in Louisiana knew that, too. Most of the runaways he concealed for a night, or two, or three, in the secret room beneath his house were men, who had left their womenfolk – burdened with babies – behind. I’ll send for you later …

  Only, later, the woman had been given by her master to another man and was with child again.

  ‘If we’re going to catch the tide,’ said Hannibal in his mild, scratchy whisper, ‘we’d probably better get to the harbor.’

  ‘I’ll take the horses to the inn,’ said January after a little time. ‘With loud complaints about how the boy ran off in the forest, the first time we tur
ned our backs.’

  ‘Good man!’ Hannibal slapped him on the shoulder. ‘As for you, Pablo,’ he added, snapping his fingers at Jacinta, ‘you can demonstrate what a good stable boy you are by carrying our saddlebags down to the harbor.’

  And Jacinta, for the first time that January had ever seen, smiled, a mischievous girl’s smile, though a tear of relief leaked from the corner of her eye. ‘Of course, señor,’ she said, forcing her voice to a boy’s roughness. She jammed her hat more tightly down over her piled-up hair. ‘As you command.’

  If Captain Castallanos had any suspicions about the gender of the ‘boy’ that Hannibal had added to his party, he didn’t voice them, and he greeted her as ‘Pablo’ on those few occasions when Jacinta came up on deck. His crew – two nephews and a plump little Yoruba named Sammy with ‘country marks’ carved into his face – simply ignored her, and Jacinta took care to stay below for most of the five-day voyage. ‘Seasick,’ Hannibal explained.

  This was a shame, partly because the cabins were penitential coffins, stinking of raw cow hides and bilge water, and partly because the waters among the tiny islets of the Gardens of the Queen were a turquoise paradise under the glare of the sun. They put in at Manzanillo the first night, at Trinidad the second, and towards sunset of the fifth afternoon glided gently past the bristling stone fortifications that guarded the harbor mouth and down the long canal into Havana harbor itself.

  From the coachman Ilario, January had earlier learned where to find far less costly accommodations in Havana than the Casa Orrente on Calle San Ignacio, and that evening, leaving Hannibal and Jacinta in the modest little rooms they’d rented by the harbor, he made his way to the Posada Caballero. There he renewed acquaintance with Ilario and others he’d met there, and he asked to whom one would give a message for Enrique Jivara … and felt the glances that passed among them.

  ‘We know nothing of the man,’ said Ilario carefully, ‘save that he is wanted by the police.’

  ‘I know nothing of him either,’ returned January. ‘I only found a piece of paper lying in the highway, addressed to him from a member of his family, whose name I could not make out.’

  The coachman smiled. ‘Well, I’ll ask around, dear brother. Maybe someone knows something.’

  It was the last the matter was mentioned that evening. But the following afternoon, when January and Hannibal returned from the shipping offices of the harbor, they found Jacinta in the shabby yard behind their rooms, radiant, with a scruffy, bearded man whose peasant guayabera accorded ill with the upper-class perfection of his Spanish. ‘I thank you both,’ he said, shaking January’s hand and then Hannibal’s, ‘for bringing my cousin here. For treating her with honor and kindness, as she assures me you have. Maybe I was a fool to believe my parents when they told me –’ his dark brows drew down over piercing dark eyes – ‘when I returned from my schooling last year, that she was content to marry this Gonzago. I am ashamed to say that there were other matters occupying my mind.’

  ‘We all of us make errors of judgement,’ said January. ‘I certainly have. I am only glad that this was one that could be rectified. So many cannot.’

  Under the shaggy beard, the man’s mouth hardened, and the thoughts that fleeted across the back of his eyes made January realize suddenly that he was younger than he seemed, not even thirty.

  ‘No, let my father seek another heir,’ Hannibal quoted the absconding princesses of As You Like It, and took Jacinta’s hand. ‘Therefore devise with me how we may fly … I take it you’re planning to do something rash, like run away with the mambises …?’

  Enrique put a protective arm around the girl’s shoulders. ‘Where would you have her run, señor? Back to the family who sold her like a whore to a man who abuses her, for five thousand pesetas and ten caballerías of land? To Jamaica, maybe, to seek work as a sewing woman or a governess? In the mountains I can protect her.’

  ‘Until you’re killed,’ said Hannibal, and he looked, with quiet sadness, into Jacinta’s eyes.

  Another runaway, thought January. As Hannibal himself had bidden his own father seek another heir and fled from a world whose expectations he could neither tolerate nor fulfill.

  ‘I’m an outcast already,’ reasoned the girl. ‘Maybe being shot by the King’s soldiers will be better than dying in childbed with the son of a man I despise.’

  ‘I don’t want you to find out that, in fact, that isn’t the case.’

  She smiled, put her hands on his shoulders, and tiptoed to kiss him. ‘Soldiers do it every day, dear brother,’ she said.

  ‘She won’t be the only woman in our band,’ said Enrique. ‘Nor the only one in the mountains. We will protect her, to the best of our ability, that I promise.’

  ‘Vaya con Dios, then,’ said Hannibal, and kissed Jacinta again, on the forehead this time. ‘Si finis bonus est, totum bonum erit.’

  ‘Saepe ne utile quidem est scire quid futurum sit,’ returned the rebel. ‘Nor should we seek to know what lies ahead … How can I thank you?’

  Hannibal shook his head, and January was about to deny thanks also – they had, in fact, found what they were looking for, on the incoming passenger-list of the Laurel Glen from New Orleans on the fourteenth of September: Bryce Jericho, of Mobile, Alabama, and party.

  Then he thought about it and said, ‘Yes. In fact, there is something you can do for me.’

  TWENTY

  ‘The treasure of the Crimson Angel.’ Salomé Saldaña glanced from the narrow circle of the pierced lantern’s light toward the door of the hut. Like the walls, it was a patchwork of cane, scrap wood, and banana leaves, insufficient even to keep out the wind, let alone the incessant creaking of cicadas in the jungle night. The gold gleam of the candle showed the whites all around the dark of her pupils. She was straining to listen.

  Bracing herself to flee.

  January estimated her age at fifty. She looked closer to seventy, mouth fallen in over missing teeth, a battered face that had once been beautiful. C’est d’umaine beaulté l’yssue! Villon had mourned, in the words of the helmet-maker’s wife. So this is the end of beauty.

  Ainsi emprent à mains et maintes …

  So it goes for all of us …

  She closed her eyes, and for a long while the thatched shed to which Ilario had led January was silent, save for the quiet voices among the other huts in the clearing. But in the tension of the woman’s body, January could almost hear the swift hammering of her heart.

  Who the hut belonged to, January had not the least idea. It lay somewhere beyond the last of the handsome houses of Havana, where the trees began to get thick. The simple bed with its banana-leaf mattress, the bright skirts and scarves hung on pegs, the straw hat on the table, the cradle and the water jars – portraits of an absent family.

  It had taken two days of nerve-racking waiting, for Enrique Jivara to send word to him that Salomé Saldaña would meet him, days during which it had taken all January’s resolve not to go down to the harbor to look for a ship back to Santiago.

  Whatever Don Demetrio is going to do when he finds out his wife has run off, he’s already done …

  And Rose will brain me with a Greek lexicon if I walk away from the chance to speak to this woman.

  Even at the cost of her own safety.

  Two sleepless nights gave an air of unreality to the hot dimness of the hut, to the night bird cries and the murmur of a woman’s voice asking Ilario something outside the rickety door. January had gone to Mass daily since his arrival in Havana, sometimes twice a day, seeking both comfort and distraction and finding neither. He had lighted half a dozen candles, watched light and smoke ascend with his prayers, and had tried to keep at bay the superstition of a child – hammered into him when he was a child – that God would punish him for his conversation with the orisha by harming Rose.

  She’ll be all right …

  We now know who it is who pursues us. And tonight we will find out why.

  ‘Yes,’ Salomé Saldaña said at
length. ‘Maudit came to my mother’s house. It was the year the French were expelled. She was to go with him back to Saint-Domingue, to Michie Absalon’s plantation, or else he’d go to the police and accuse her of poisoning white men. After he left her house she came to me at midnight, not weeping but trembling all over, for she had lived twenty-three years in fear that he would find her.’

  January counted back in his mind. ‘They weren’t on the island twenty-three years.’

  ‘She fled Saint-Domingue for fear of him, señor. My mother was born in Saint-Domingue and sold together with her sister to Don Absalon de Gericault when she was fifteen. He gave my mama to his mistress, Mamzelle Calanthe; her sister Reina to his wife. Calanthe was mean, Mama said, and spiteful. But Reina loved M’aum Amalie. When Reina married Don Absalon’s coachman, it was M’aum Amalie that gave her a dress and shoes, and had the wedding held in the Church at Cap Francais.’

  ‘Did your mama go to the wedding?’ January recalled a dozen friends – boys who’d been like brothers to him – whom he’d never seen again after he and his mother were sold away from Bellefleur.

  ‘Oh, yes, señor. The Cap wasn’t but an hour’s ride from the plantation, and M’aum Amalie would go there often. She’d never have spoke a word to Mamzelle Calanthe if she saw her in the street, but my mother and her sister loved each other. They never let that love go cold.’

  A sound outside made Salomé turn with a gasp, but it was only the rising wind, stirring in the banana leaves. January recalled again that this woman’s name and whereabouts had been in the envelope in Jeoffrey Vitrac’s pocket.

  ‘I’ve heard that Reina died in Saint-Domingue,’ he said quietly. ‘That Dr Maudit poisoned her.’

  ‘He’d buy people in the market,’ whispered Salomé, ‘just on purpose to cut them up alive. He had a house with a stone jail behind it, on stone foundation so nobody could dig their way out. Sometimes instead of cutting them up he’d turn them into zombi – he knew how to make the coup de poudre, the powder-strike that brings back the dead to be his slaves. Or he’d use other drugs to keep them alive while he cut them up, alive but not able to move …’