Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Which means that he probably does.’ Hannibal dunked his pandolce into his coffee and coughed again, a dry rasp that January did not like. ‘If we’re going to argue in a circle. But it also means that he’s not going to give up. It’s too vital to his survival. Nor is he going to risk you and Rose going after the treasure that’s possibly hidden along with the proof – if there is proof – and finding what’s hidden with it.’

  ‘What it means,’ said January with grim simplicity, ‘is that I’m going to Haiti.’

  Captain Castallanos had taken the Santana on to Jamaica, but the local friends of Enrique Jivara in Havana vouched for the honesty of Captain Oldcastle of the Samothrace. Before departing Havana, January wrote a letter to Abishag Shaw, asking for information about a Gil or Gilbert Jericho, who had a son named Bryce and probably lived in or near Escambia County, Alabama. Either Gil or Bryce Jericho were probably to be found to be implicated in the murder of Jeoffrey Vitrac and the attempted murders of Jeoffrey’s brother and half-sister. Anything he could relate about the Jerichos, please send on to Hannibal care of the American ministry in Havana.

  ‘I suppose it would be safer for you, upon your return,’ mused Hannibal as the leaky and overladen Samothrace wallowed its way into harbor at the Isle of Pines, ‘if Rose and I should wait for you in Santiago, but quite honestly I’d feel safer with the length of the island between myself and Don Demetrio. Honi soit qui mal y pense and all that, even if I do convince him that I had no idea that “Pablo” was anything more than he seemed when we rode out of the stable yard two weeks ago …’

  ‘I’ll manage.’ January felt in his pocket for the jotted names Ilario had given him, of fishermen to contact in the vicinity of Santiago, who could be trusted to get him across to Haiti rather than dosing him with opium and selling him in São Paulo. Nevertheless, the sheer riskiness of the venture turned him queasy. Haiti was still too great a prize to European powers for its inhabitants to look upon outsiders as anything other than potential spies, and, conversely, its mountains and forests were overrun with Trinitarios from the other side of the island, which had been conquered by Haiti a decade and a half previously. Fighters for their own freedom, they were likely to kill anyone who looked like a Haitian.

  Moreover, Hannibal’s run of bad luck at the Marquesa’s gaming tables meant that January had only a few reales wherewith to pay the fishermen who’d take him to the island and, presumably, who could be bribed to bring him back. Hannibal had little more, to get himself and Rose back to Havana to wait.

  Hail Mary, Mother of God, the Lord is with thee— His fingers sought the comfort of the rosary in his pocket. The gris-gris of Ogun, swinging against his chest, seemed hot from the sun against his flesh.

  Keep them safe … Keep Baby John safe, whatever the hell is going on in New Orleans …

  Bring us together again.

  But out of the dark at the back of his mind he heard the Santeria incarnation Ogoun whisper, ‘Blood and gold … gold and blood.’

  Whatever help the Mother of God might be on hand to talk her Son into offering, he suspected the loa weren’t done with him yet.

  For a reale, Captain Oldcastle anchored at the Bahia de Cayuna, a shallow inlet hidden from Santiago by a point of land on the opposite side of the main bay. It was a walk of three miles along the bay into town – nearly five, if they didn’t pay one of the shrimp fishers in the lower bay to come across and ferry them to the eastern side – and the path, January had been warned, was haunted after dark by rancheradores out to pick up whatever people of color they could catch walking alone.

  Still, he was chary of going into town without reconnaissance about Don Demetrio’s feelings.

  On the night of their arrival, they left their slender luggage in one of the broken-down bohios of a deserted fishing camp among the palm trees on the bay’s western shore and paid a discreet visit to the Fonda Velasquez. Téo the stableman there was willing, for a reale, to take a note to Rose with the understanding (for an additional reale) that it wouldn’t be shown to Don Demetrio. January could ill spare the coins, but needed the man in good humor.

  ‘T’cha!’ said the young man good-naturedly, pocketing both the coins and the note. ‘You just lost me ten centavos – I bet the cook that your master run off for good …’

  ‘How is Mamzelle Rose?’

  ‘Oh, she’s well.’ Téo grinned. ‘Fia in the laundry says, you never heard such screaming and cursing, when Don Demetrio found out Doña Jacinta was gone. Mamzelle Rose, she called your master every kind of cabron, saying she didn’t believe a word of that “Pablo disappeared in the woods” tale, and if Señor Sefton had run off with that puta, when he came back she’d kill him. Then she clung to Don Demetrio’s neck and wept, and I think that’s the only reason Don Demetrio didn’t take and sell her off out of pure spite, because between you and me, brother, he’s got a nasty streak in him. They’re all waiting to see if your master comes back.’

  He leaned closer – though there was no one else in the inn’s stable yard at the moment – and whispered, ‘Did La Doña run off with your master?’

  ‘No!’ January was rather proud of the combination of exasperation and horror he managed to throw into his voice. ‘Good God, he knows as well as anybody else Mamzelle Rose would murder him! We only heard yesterday in Manzanillo that people were saying he did!’

  Téo shook his head. ‘You tell your master he better be careful when he go up to Don Demetrio’s, then. I hear from Fia that all the servants at la casa are saying, when Don Hannibal show up again, Don Demetrio’s going to poison him and blame old Nyssa, who’s a witch.’

  ‘Oh, excellent,’ grumbled Hannibal, when January gave him this piece of news in a quiet alleyway near the plaza. ‘Just what I always wanted. A lifetime of running off with other men’s wives and debauching maidens in hedgerows, and the one time I don’t seduce a woman, that’s when her husband makes trouble.’

  ‘The world is an unfair place.’

  They’d planned to take supper at the Fonda and listen to a more complete version of the local gossip, but given the possibility that someone would see Hannibal and get word to Don Demetrio – or simply oblige a friend by assassinating him on the spot – the two men chose the better part of valor and wound their way through Santiago’s waterfront alleys and thence to the wharves, where a fisherman waited to take them across to their campsite among the palms. The sun dipped behind the wooded hills; the salt-smelling air was tinged with woodsmoke.

  ‘I just hope she’s able to get out of there undetected,’ said Hannibal quietly as the fisherman set his sail to the gentle wind that flowed down from the mountains behind the town. Tropical night was falling swiftly; January groaned at the thought of locating their camp in the darkness.

  ‘And I just hope,’ he returned grimly as he shed his jacket to lend a hand with the ropes, ‘that she doesn’t run into rancheradores between Don Demetrio’s and our camp.’

  January guessed that Téo wouldn’t leave Santiago until morning, and it was a day’s ride across the mountains to Hispaniola Plantation; longer yet for Rose to return. On Wednesday, therefore, he walked westward, to a little bay hollowed into the shoulder of the Sierra Maestra where the mountains crowded down on to the coast. A little colony of fishermen – recommended by Ilario, and all named Vargas – agreed, for three reales, to carry him across to Haiti.

  ‘But it’s a bad place, señor,’ warned the gray-haired patriarch of the clan. ‘If you don’t get shot for a spy and the Trinitarios don’t kill you, the mulatto planters will see in you a man who has no family, no one to search for you if you vanish. They pay the bokors – the sorcerers – to find them such men, to kill them and make them zombis, and work them until their bodies rot and fall to pieces.’

  Nevertheless, for a consideration, they thought that Cousin Cristobal (who was a friend of smugglers) could be talked into carrying January across to a secluded beach on the Môle-Sant-Nicolas, the tip of the island’s north-western pe
ninsula. Cristobal would go back for him the following Sunday … ‘He will be here tomorrow,’ promised the patriarch. ‘He comes by to see his wife, on his way through to Manzanillo. Return in the afternoon to make arrangements.’

  January agreed, but, weary though he was when he returned to the deserted bohio, he collected the fiddler, and together they walked across the point of land to the main bay and got one of the shrimp fishers to take them up into Santiago again to make sure the Vargas clan could, in fact, be trusted.

  ‘They can,’ Rosario assured them. ‘That’s just old Abuelo Vargas’ way. If you’re worried that he’s just luring you out to their cove to be picked up by rancheradores—’

  ‘In fact,’ said Hannibal frankly, ‘we are. Although we were told –’ he cocked an eye at the innkeeper, who had, rather surprisingly, figured along with Téo the stableman on Enrique Jivara’s list of ‘Those Who Can be Trusted’ – ‘that he was not given to double-dealing, still I would rather not find out that we were misinformed. The cove is a very isolated one, and the road there runs very handily close to the sea.’

  January had, in fact, taken the road itself as little as possible and had a fine set of insect bites and scratches from scrambling along in the thickets of palmetto that flanked it. A few yards below him, for close to three miles, the waves had lapped lazily on the beaches, and he’d been vividly conscious of how easy it would be, for slave-stealers to bring a boat up and pick a lone man off the road.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the innkeeper decidedly. ‘The Vargas family deals with smugglers, but not slave-stealers … Well, of course I don’t know about the smugglers,’ he added quickly and smoothed his long-handled mustache. Through the back door of the common room someone called out his name, and he bowed apologetically. ‘I must go, señores.’ The stable yard where they’d met him – still cautious about encountering Don Demetrio’s friends – was lively with the horses and caretelas of men from the plantations round about, and the music of guitars started up inside.

  More seriously, Rosario went on, ‘But I do know about the rancheradores, my friends. The Vargas have lost more than one nephew to such scum, and I promise you, this isn’t a trap.’

  Nevertheless, on the following morning January armed himself with his pistol, a rifle that Rosario lent him, and a knife before setting off along the coast road once again. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asked Hannibal, before leaving the camp. The fiddler was stowing what remained of their food – they’d replenished supplies in town yesterday afternoon – preparatory to setting off himself to meet Rose on the road behind town.

  ‘Perfectly.’ Hannibal stifled a cough. ‘I think I can talk old Rosario into lending me a horse, and as I recall the jungle is thick enough, going up over the ridge, to keep me concealed while I await the Beautiful Athene. If she slipped away from Hispaniola as soon as it got light this morning, we should actually reach the top of the pass at about the same time, and there’s enough other traffic on the road that she shouldn’t be in too much danger before that time. Fortes fortuna adiuvat – don’t worry, amicus meus. We’ll be all right.’

  As he threaded the paths through the wooded country south-west of the bay, paths that he recognized as the secret trails used by the slaves of the cafeteles that dotted this rolling land, January tried to tell himself that Rosario was right, and all would in fact be well. At least with Hannibal and Rose, he added grimly, and he shivered at the thought of landing on the isolated northern peninsula of Haiti, of making his way down the barren coast to Port-au-Prince, and thence along the feet of the mountains to L’Ange Rouge. Salomé Saldaña had sketched a map of the plantation for him, which agreed with Rose’s recollection of the place old Ginette had created for her in play. House, sugar mill, quarters, woodsheds … ‘Of course, it’s pretty much the plan of every plantation I’ve ever been on,’ Rose had reminded him. ‘It could be Aramis’ plantation at Chouteau. Or La Châtaigneraie. I’m sure if we’d had time to grub around in the underbrush at Hispaniola-Grande-Isle we’d have found the remains of the mill and the quarters and the mule barns in pretty much the same place.’

  Rose.

  His heart seemed to squeeze tight in his chest: love, dread, fury at the men who’d stabbed her in the market. Panic at the thought of losing her.

  And losing her to what? To some ancient plot, to some idiot panic by a man who feared that someone might call him ‘nigger’ …

  A man who couldn’t let well alone. Who couldn’t let the past stay dead.

  Which brought the next thought as January came clear of the woods and the clean salt silk of the Caribbean wind flowed over his face from the sea. WHY can’t he let the past stay dead?

  A man doesn’t come to New Orleans with premeditated murder and the expense of tracking down all members of his family – solely on the news that someone has uncovered the location of the old family treasure – unless he’s driven by something.

  So what’s really going on?

  He scanned the sea: sails, big craft and small, coming and going from the harbor mouth where the old Castillo mounted guard, but nothing near the road along the rugged hill-feet. Scanned the road. Fortune helps the bold, Hannibal had said.

  The face of Bryce Jericho – long and firm-jawed, with a nose like Jeoffrey’s and Aramis’ honey-colored hair – remained in his mind as he turned his steps along the road, seagulls crying overhead.

  TWENTY-TWO

  He returned to the bohio – after successful negotiations with Cristobal Vargas and his grandfather – at the hour of siesta. It would be the act of a husband and a friend to set forth at once to meet Rose and Hannibal on the road.

  A husband and a friend who hasn’t just walked ten miles.

  He mixed himself some water with vinegar and ginger and lay down in one of the hammocks he and Hannibal had strung up in the little hut. By the time he’d signaled one of the shrimp fishers to carry him across to the Santiago side, his friends would in all probability be already walking along the eastern shore road in quest of shrimp fishers to carry them over to this side. Tired as he was, January couldn’t shut his eyes, listening to the rustle of the sea breeze in the banana groves and wondering if each flurry of bird calls was prompted by the stealthy approach of rancheradores who would tear him from Rose, from his child, from his friends and his life and his freedom, forever …

  He woke with a start, and the angle of light through the chinks in the wall and the flimsy door told him it was nearly sunset.

  Softly, the waves continued to wash on the beach nearby.

  Where the hell are Hannibal and Rose?

  He rolled out of the hammock, took bread and cheese from the crock on the table, walked out of the bohio and, after a moment’s hesitation, clear of the trees and up to the weed-grown track that led around the bay, the long way to town. From there he walked down to the waterside, a prickling uneasiness growing in him. After a little hesitation, he set off up the trail through the palmetto thickets that led across the point and looked out across the bay – half a mile wide here – to the road that led up its eastern side toward Santiago.

  A couple of women were walking along it towards town, carrying baskets. A fisherman had drawn up his boat on the shingle, about half a mile up from where January stood.

  His first, panicky thought was, Rose never reached the rendezvous.

  Don Demetrio intercepted my note to her …

  His stomach turned over.

  Then, Hannibal could have been taken ill. The fiddler hadn’t looked well. Though giving up drinking had seemed to rally his strength against the slow wasting of consumption, January had seen the toll that travel and exertion were taking on him. At any time the disease could return full force: fever, infections, lesions opening in his damaged lungs.

  But if that happened on his way up the pass to meet Rose, she’d have found him …

  He waved, whistled, and shouted, and eventually the shrimp fishers noticed him and in a leisurely fashion cleared up their nets and bask
ets, set their sails, crossed the bay.

  They only took him across the bay, not up to town, and he couldn’t spare the half-reale it would take to pay them for the extra distance.

  The sun went down as he walked. Tropical night closed in.

  ‘Dios, man!’ Young Téo emerged from the harness shed, ran across the stable yard as January came through the gateway. ‘I was praying you’d come—’

  The cold that had been growing like a poisoned seed in his heart all the way up the lonely road along the bay clenched tight in his chest, almost stopping his breath. In the light of the cressets burning around the yard, the groom’s face told its story.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Rancheradores. They got your master’s woman; your master gone after her—’

  ‘When?’ And then, as his mind sorted the words, ‘Where? How do you know this?’

  ‘Santos told me, one of the fishermen in the bay. He was taking your master across this morning, when your master points to the road and says, “There she is! Saves me the cost of the horse!” She was wearing a yellow shawl, Santos said, and a pink dress. Santos said your master said his lady friend must have started out walking in the night instead of waiting for morning. That must have been soon after I gave her your note, maybe the minute everybody at la casa was in bed.

  ‘Santos said she was walking fast, looking behind her, like she was afraid. And while Santos and your master was still about a half-mile off from her – the wind was offshore, so Santos wasn’t making much headway – a rider comes from town, and a boat comes from the same direction, a skiff with a black hull. Your master’s lady, she tries to run inland, but the rider overtakes her, grabs her by the waist and drags her to the boat. Your master’s yelling and cursing, and the men in the black boat shoot at him, so Santos won’t follow them—’

  ‘Damn it!’

  ‘Santos got a family.’ Compassion filled the young man’s eyes. ‘Santos told me he took your master up to the harbor where your master hired Lobo – that’s Santos’ cousin – to follow them in his boat, and the last he saw them, Lobo and your master were heading down the bay after these slave-stealers in their skiff. Santos said they were dark-skinned men, mulattos, he thought, so they’re probably El Chirlo’s men from Manzanillo. El Chirlo’s a mulatto. Lobo isn’t back yet, and his wife’s fit to kill somebody, ’cause he’s always getting into trouble …’