Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  Like Olympe’s. And like his sister, her profession made her the mistress of too many secrets for her ever to be really young. When she stretched out her hand to give him the bottle he saw her bony wrists were marked with shackle galls.

  ‘I hid in the trees along the cliff foot for the rest of the day, well back from their camp, and occupied myself picking centipedes off my coat. They – the Indians – kept Rose tied in the shelter, but didn’t ill-treat her. I had about four pistol balls in one pocket and a penknife in the other, and enough powder to startle a spider if I took it unawares, so I knew if I fired they’d simply rush me. They left a man on guard when they went to sleep, and I waited until he went off into the bushes to piss – or maybe to recite the Act Three soliloquy from Hamlet, I don’t really know – then crept forward to untie Rose. God knows where we would have run to if I’d succeeded.’

  Mayanet’s dark eyes moved from Hannibal’s face to January’s as the fiddler spoke, and January guessed she’d spent enough time in one of the larger towns to understand French. Her clothing, too, though much faded, spoke of the towns.

  ‘Either the guard came back early, or someone else was awake, I didn’t see exactly. Somebody started shooting, anyway. I shoved Rose around behind the palm trunk and wasted my one shot on the two men who came charging at us from the direction of the fire, and I tried to finish cutting the ropes with the penknife. I got hit in the shoulder, which hurt like fire – a broken collarbone, I think – and I knew I wasn’t going to do much more in the way of rope-cutting. So I dashed about three feet – so they wouldn’t keep firing in Rose’s direction, palm tree or no palm tree – stumbled and nearly passed out, and dragged myself into the trees. I must have fainted in earnest then, because I came to in Mayanet’s hut, and the upshot was that she said she’d seen me attempt to save Rose and that she would help me, in spite of her brothers being in some sort of secret society that mistrusts gentlemen of my complexion on principle.’

  ‘The Egbo seek to kill evil,’ said Mayanet, with her sidelong smile, ‘as the gods direct them. But the gods know the difference between a man who comes to this land to do evil, and a man who comes only to save a woman who is bound and a prisoner among men.’

  ‘Are you acting for the Egbo in this?’ asked January curiously.

  ‘I act for myself, always.’ She blew another cloud of cigar smoke. ‘My brothers would tell me to kill you, if I ask them about it. And they tell the other Egbo of you, and of this white man –’ her glance flicked to Hannibal with fond amusement – ‘so it be best we be in Gonaïves by nightfall. My grandmother got a humfo there, she put us up the night. These Indians, this white man …’ She made a dismissive gesture with her long fingers. ‘They come seek the gold of the Crimson Angel. But it’s cursed gold, blood gold. If they take it out of where it’s been hid, it’ll spread more evil. Best it stay where it is.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s the gold they’re seeking,’ said January, when they made ready to take to the road again. Hannibal insisted that he could walk, and Mayanet gave January a significant look, as if they’d been friends for years.

  ‘You want me to tell your big friend to put you on that donkey? You do as you’re told, white man.’

  ‘If people see a white man riding while two blacks walk they’ll shoot me for an aristocrat.’

  ‘Not on that donkey, they won’t,’ retorted January, and Hannibal – wax-pale and shaky from blood loss – laughed and mounted the sorry little beast. While January had eaten, Mayanet had woven a hat for him from fronds of the fan palms that had grown nearby; the relief from the sun was a blessing.

  He went on, ‘They may want the gold, yes. But I think Dr Maudit hid something at L’Ange Rouge, proof of some evil or crime that will threaten the son of Absalon de Gericault if it’s found. That son – Guibert de Gericault – has sent his son to kill my wife – his cousin – and her brothers. He guessed they’d seek the treasure, once it was known that somebody knew its whereabouts – as the old woman Salomé Saldaña knows. He fears that in seeking it, they’ll find the thing that’s hidden with it, whatever that is. I don’t know whether Rose convinced the Indians to go after the treasure as a way of keeping them from killing her – she’s perfectly capable of it – hoping that would give me a chance to follow and rescue her, or whether the Indians decided on their own to double-cross their employer, or whether this is part of the original scheme. But I do know that unless I get to L’Ange Rouge first, and find that secret thing – that thing that was so important to Dr Maudit that he got himself killed looking for it – they’ll kill Rose. And they’ll kill me when they catch me, leaving our child—’

  He broke off, the memory of Baby John coming back like broken metal grinding against bone. Like the clang of an iron gate, locked across a road that his heart cried to take. His son raised by Olympe and Paul, never to know his parents or what had become of them. His son – Rose’s son – taking his first steps, speaking his first words …

  ‘I left him in a safe place,’ he said at length, seeing Mayanet’s dark eyes intent on his face. As if her gaze compelled an explanation – or as if Baby-John-in-the-Future, young John January who’d grown up an orphan, asked him for an accounting of his stewardship of the life that had been in his keeping – he said, ‘We had to go. We had to flee for our lives, and we left him safe with my sister. But it’s not the same.’

  For a moment something changed in her eyes. The confident hardness softened, as if someone else, for a brief moment, looked out from behind that gleaming strength. She whispered, ‘No,’ and her eyes shone with tears. ‘Nothing is the same, as your own child.’ She flung away her cigar, closed her hand around the donkey’s sorry bridle, and walked for a time in silence.

  The road between Red Beach village and the town of Gonaïves dwindled to barely a track, though January saw small boats skimming the turquoise gulf. ‘Anyone wants to come and go, they do it by boat,’ said Mayanet, when January remarked on this. Her brisk confidence had returned, and she dug around in her pockets for something – another cigar? ‘The roads are in a bad state, where they go through the mountains, and if you don’t run into bandits, you run into men from the Army, looking to draft men. Spanish, too, that come over from the Spanish side of the island. We won our freedom, all those years ago,’ she added, shaking her head. ‘There not a man on the island nor a woman neither, nor the littlest baby at breast, that wouldn’t do it all over again, to be free. But since we been free, it’s all been fighting … You know for awhile there was two Haitis on the island, Christophe as Emperor here in the north and Pétion ruling a republic in the south, after Dessalines’ own men killed him?’

  ‘Didn’t anyone conquer you?’ inquired Hannibal. His right hand clung tight to the donkey’s bristly mane, and under the brim of his old-fashioned hat his eyebrows stood out dark against a face white with fatigue and pain. ‘Divide et impera – surely whilst you were fighting amongst yourselves it would have been child’s play for the French or the British or the Spanish to come in and retake the Pearl of the Antilles?’

  ‘Napoleon tried it,’ January replied. ‘He failed, and after that France, Britain, and Spain were having their own problems – and I sincerely doubt the American Congress was willing to annex an island full of slaves who’d successfully murdered their masters.’

  ‘They cursed his men.’ Mayanet’s white teeth showed in the thin line of her smile. ‘The voodoos in the hills. When the French ships drop anchor in Cap Francais, all the voodoos of the country make a dance, wherever they are. They call on Ogou and on the Baron Samedei, they call on the gods of this island. They call on the gods that were the only things we bring with us from Africa, the Guédé and the gods and the spirits that live in the trees and the rain. They killed the wild goats and the bulls, and drank their blood, and the gods came down and promised us the whites would not make us slaves again. Then the Guédé sent the bad air, the stinking cloud of their breath, and breathed on the whites in their ships. And all o
f them died.’ Her smile widened. Pleased.

  ‘It’s a bad death,’ said January quietly. ‘Yellow fever.’

  ‘You call on the gods for help,’ reasoned Mayanet, ‘you take what they send. The death they die in their ships wasn’t so bad as being buried up to your neck in dirt near an anthill and honey poured on your head, the way they killed my grandpa when he hit an overseer.’

  Hannibal sighed. ‘And people asked me why I drank.’

  Gonaïves, spread between the curve of its bay and hills sprinkled with pine woods, was the largest town January had seen in Haiti and bore the marks of both French prosperity and the decades of chaos and poverty that had followed. A sprinkling of large houses remained on its deeply rutted streets, galleried like those of New Orleans and concealing most of their life behind high courtyard walls. A few seemed to have been kept up after a fashion, the French doors on their upper galleries open to the muggy afternoon breeze, but even these had clearly not been painted in decades. Still, as the travelers made their way down Rue Egalité, an aged, but well-maintained, carriage passed them, drawn by two black horses that were more or less matched: the coachman, January observed, was far lighter than anyone he’d yet seen in Haiti, as were the occupants, two women in gowns that informed him that somebody was still importing both silk and the latest magazines of fashion from Paris.

  ‘Les filles Peuvrets,’ commented Mayanet as the ladies in the carriage put their heads out its window to stare at Hannibal. ‘Their papa brokers sugar from the whole of the Artibonite Valley. They go driving every afternoon, my grannie says, just to show everyone in town they have a carriage.’

  ‘If anyone asks,’ replied Hannibal, ‘you will tell them I’m your servant, won’t you?’

  They weren’t the only ones to stare. From the broken-down buildings, the shacks of mud-daubed wattle, the narrow alleyways that stank of piss and garbage, hosts of children emerged to gaze in astonishment at the first white person they’d ever seen, though undoubtedly, January reflected, they’d heard stories. Market women – mulattos and quadroons, mostly, and a few fairer yet, with baskets balanced firmly on tignons the size of watermelons – followed, with perfect politeness yet unabashed curiosity. Men came out of the doors of tiny shops, in the aprons of artisans. January heard the buzz of Creole so thick that it defeated even his childhood recollections, and someone called out a question to Mayanet.

  ‘The gods send him to me,’ she replied, with her sparkling grin, waving back at Hannibal. ‘He mine like a parrot.’

  The market women laughed.

  They had almost reached the end of the town when a voice behind them called out, ‘Halt, if you please!’ in sing-song French. With a clatter of hooves a man in uniform caught up with them, mounted on a starved and broken-down bay horse. His uniform was elaborate, though January’s eye, trained by years of marriage to a dressmaker, picked out the age of the gold braid on sleeves and epaulets: cut off and transferred from garment to garment, possibly dating back to the coat of a French officer. Like the Peuvret carriage, it was flotsam from another world, which could not be replaced.

  Haiti was an island. They had won their freedom, but the price of their victory had been the loss of all those things that the world of their masters could provide: paint for houses and gold braid for uniforms, and men of education to teach their children that something existed beyond the world they knew.

  The sword the official drew was reasonably new, like the ladies’ dresses had been. Some trade still came in, for the little bit of sugar that still went out. ‘Who is this man?’ He spoke to January and Mayanet equally. ‘What is his business here?’

  Hannibal removed his hat, produced a visiting card, and bowed. ‘Jefferson Vitrack, at your service, sir. A representative of the American Colonization Society.’

  ‘American, eh?’ The official frowned and dismounted, snatched the card from Hannibal’s fingers and studied it with narrowed eyes. January found himself remembering one of his aunties back at Bellefleur Plantation when he was a child, saying, ‘Put a mulatto on a horse and he thinks he’s white.’

  ‘And what you know about those other Americans, eh?’ demanded the official. ‘They land outside the town here, with their guns and their money; they buy horses from Milo Maribal the smuggler, they sneak off north like spies—’

  January’s heart turned over in his chest, but he kept his face and body still, as he’d learned to do as a child. You never, ever, let anyone in authority know you knew what they were talking about until you knew which way the wind blew … And Hannibal, whose experience with authority had been gleaned in completely different circles, managed to look shocked at the very idea that he’d know anything about such evil-doers.

  Mayanet merely sniffed. ‘Maybe they sneak off so you don’t put ’em in jail, eh, Linfour?’

  ‘I assure you, Colonel,’ said Hannibal earnestly, giving the man the highest rank he could, ‘I was cast ashore here while on business from the Society—’ He drew Jefferson Vitrack’s letter of introduction from the Society from his breast pocket – he must have gotten it, and the card, from Rose – but Mayanet plucked it away as the official reached to take it.

  ‘I speak for these men,’ she said in her honey-dark voice. ‘I and my granmère. You want their papers, you come out to the humfo, where I got to make dinner for my grannie now. We prove to you they’re not spies.’

  Linfour – Sergeant? Major? Captain? – looked uncomfortable at that idea, and Mayanet took that moment to turn and lead the donkey toward the clusters of trees and huts that lay beyond the buildings of the town. The officer took a step after them, hesitated, then called in commanding tones, ‘You be sure to bring these men to my office tomorrow, without fail.’

  Mayanet kept walking, as if she owned the entire valley.

  The man did not follow. Beyond the bounds of the town, January observed that most of the people working in the fields – corn, tobacco, and rice for the most part, spread around the walled compounds of lakou – were African.

  Hannibal sighed. ‘Legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus …’

  ‘Res eo magis,’ replied January, ‘mutant quo manent. But they came through here. And it sounds like they’re headed for La Châtaigneraie.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When they reached Mambo Danto’s humfo, out past the cemetery, the old woman confirmed what Linfour had said. ‘These blan’s, they had it all set up with Milo Maribal, that runs sugar and rum out to sell in Trinidad. He got a little compound on the headland west of town. He buy horses, food, lot of things – the Egbo say that boat come in Sunday night.’

  ‘And they went north?’

  The tiny priestess, like a little black ant, regarded January for a moment, then glanced at the gris-gris around his neck. ‘They went north,’ she affirmed.

  Two days would take them to Cap Haïtien. Then they’d have to come back south …

  If they were lucky.

  ‘Will the Egbo attack them?’ he asked urgently, but the old woman’s attention had been drawn to Mayanet, who was helping Hannibal down off their sorry donkey.

  ‘And what’s that, eh?’ Exasperation edged her voice, but she went to help, and January turned to take most of Hannibal’s slight weight as his friend slipped from the saddle. The old mambo caught Mayanet’s wrist in her hand, and for a moment she studied the shackle welts, something like sadness in her eyes.

  With gruff kindliness, she added, ‘Every time you go out, caye, you come home with stray dogs!’ Her Creole was barely comprehensible, like the poor who’d swarmed the streets in Gonaïves. ‘Now here you got a stray white man!’ She jerked her head toward one of the huts. ‘You lay him down in there an’ I see to him – Mano!’ she called out to one of the young boys, who’d come crowding in from the fields to stare. ‘You go tell your mama, kill a couple pigeons for the pot for these guests, eh?’

  The hut was simple, but as clean as any building could be whose walls and roof were thatch and palm fronds. The front
room contained little more than a table and an altar elaborately decorated to honor the loa; the rear chamber held a simple bed and what looked like a child’s cradle, long disused, covered over with scraps of mosquito-bar. Hannibal whispered, ‘I’m fine, I’m all right,’ and crumpled on to the bed unconscious.

  To Mambo Danto, January said, ‘I can look to him, M’aum. I’m a surgeon.’

  She said, ‘Are you, then?’ and went out, returning shortly with bundles of dried yarrow and juniper, and other cleansing herbs, and a tin of water steaming from the fire. Out in the yard, January could see Mayanet talking with others in the compound: there seemed to be six or seven families in the lakou, all related, who worked their plot of land in common. They treated the younger priestess as January had sometimes seen people behave toward his sister Olympe, the genuine affection in their embraces and kisses colored with awe and a touch of fear. This was someone who had the Knowing, they would say. Someone who had the Power. Even Gabriel and Zizi-Marie walked carefully around their mother.

  As January gently braced the broken collarbone, the children crowded into the doorway. ‘You a hougan?’ asked one of the boys. ‘A root doctor? A bokor?’

  January glanced over his shoulder. The children were gazing at Hannibal in open fascination, wanting a look at the source of so much of the evil that they’d heard of.

  ‘No, I’m a surgeon,’ he said, speaking slowly so they could understand his unfamiliar dialect of Afro-French. ‘Like the doctors in Port-au-Prince. But I went to school in Paris, over in France.’

  Their eyes got saucer wide at the mention of this place.

  ‘The blan’ taught me medicine, the same as they learn.’

  The boys – and some of them were the young men, come in from the fields with the ending of the day – crowded closer as January changed the makeshift dressings. As he worked he said, ‘My friend was shot by bad men, trying to save my wife when the bad men kidnapped her.’