Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  TWENTY-NINE

  Azo drew them a map, filled a macoute with provisions for them, and dug into the slender coffers of the humfo to rent them a donkey. Hannibal protested that he was much better – he’d slept for most of the voyage across the Gulf, and under his camouflage he seemed less ashen – but January was glad of a beast to carry provisions as well as to keep ‘Monsieur Vitrac’ from slowing them down. Mayanet had acquired a machete back at her grandmother’s lakou; in addition to his rifle and pistol, January borrowed an iron pry-bar from among the furnishings of the altar of Ogou, the blacksmith god.

  They passed through the wooded hills that rose behind the so-called ‘Government’ district of Port-au-Prince, and through Pétionville, where the mulatto sugar-brokers and planters had their homes, the first new dwellings January had seen on the island. Few were awake at this early hour – in fact, one carriage-load of well-dressed ladies passed them, who appeared to be just on their way home to bed – and January mostly saw servants, noticeably darker than the mulattos he’d glimpsed on the streets of Port-au-Prince. In the hills beyond, he saw orchards of fruit trees planted to shade coffee bushes, and an occasional large house like the casa de vivienda back at Hispaniola Plantation, where the owner of the land dwelled in comfort while tenant-farmers sweated tending the crop.

  Through breaks in the trees, he could look down from the high ground on the dark-green sea of sugar fields along the river, the island’s fortune and curse. When they crossed the river, and came down out of the hills, they passed a rather ramshackle Big House and a sugar mill that still bore charring on its stone. It had been rebuilt, but to January’s eye looked truncated, smaller than it had once been. The fields had been ratooned too many times, choked with weeds and maiden cane.

  They walked further, into the valley called the Cul de Sac. In wet years, Mayanet told him, the rivers from the surrounding mountains would pour into the saline lakes of Azuei and Enriquillo, and they would drown the low-lying valley, merging into a single body of water. The land here was marsh and brush, thick with young palm trees and bananas, palmetto and bougainvillea. Where there were sugar fields, January saw the work gangs were smaller than those of Louisiana, laboring stoically in the heat.

  ‘Damn planters.’ Mayanet took the cigar from her mouth to spit.

  ‘Without plantations you have no Army,’ returned January reasonably. ‘Then you have the French back, or the Spanish—’

  She spat again. ‘That for the French, and the Spanish. Why can’t they leave us alone, eh? Leave us to work our fields and grow our food …’

  ‘Why didn’t they leave our parents and our grandparents alone to work their fields and grow their food in Guinea?’ He used the word for Africa that they’d used in the quarters – that magic Africa that had probably never really existed, that world of peace and plenty to which the souls of black folk would return when they died.

  If his father had ever told him how he’d come to be captured, whether in war or by raiding tribesmen from the other side of some nameless river, January could not recall. He’d been seven when last he’d seen that tall coal-black man with the tribal marks carved on his face. He couldn’t even recall their final hour together, because he and his mother and his sister had been informed very suddenly in the middle of the morning that they’d been sold. His father had been out in the fields already.

  When he’d come home, his family had been gone. And that was that.

  And that, he supposed, was as much explanation as anyone would ever need, for the rebellion in Haiti. He concluded softly, ‘Because that’s not what they do.’

  Late in the afternoon, when they had left all sugar fields far behind them and pushed on through the jungles above the road, January heard a man’s voice down on the road below them – barely a track, now, as it threaded deeper into the lowlands of the Cul de Sac. A wordless groaning bray, like a goat, though he knew it was a man. Mayanet caught his arm as he thrust his way back downhill.

  ‘Best you don’t,’ she said.

  He hesitated, and the man moaned again, a bleak sound, dying. He scrambled down the sloping ground, through foliage thick with every sort of insect life in the world: centipedes, tarantulas, Haiti’s myriad varieties of ants; gnats and flies without count. He saw the man at once, crawling on hands and knees along the track, reeling back and forth like a drunkard. His hands were raw and bloody and swarmed with ants and flies, his eyes and mouth were clotted around with them, like the orifices of the dead. A huge, infected machete-slash in his arm crawled likewise with insects; the smell of rotting flesh almost choked January as he ran up to the man.

  When he brushed the flies from the sufferer’s face, the eyes that stared at him were blank, comprehending nothing.

  Mayanet’s voice behind him said, ‘Leave him, Ben. He knows nothing. He’ll be dead by dark.’

  The man made that horrible bleating noise again. January gave him a drink from his water bottle, and the water only splashed from chapped and swollen lips. His flesh was scorched with fever.

  ‘He knows nothing,’ she repeated, and January turned on his heels to look up at her, standing over him with her eyes like iron. ‘He’s zombi. His brain is gone. The bokors got him, poisoned him, and when he died, brought him back and dug him up and sold him to one of the planters to work.’ She shrugged. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’

  Behind her in the trees, Hannibal’s face was blank with shock. Around them twilight was just beginning to slant the light through the coco palms and the hibiscus, the steady, creaking cry of a million, million insects joined by the rising peep of frogs. The man on his hands and knees before January was either white – Spanish or Portuguese – or else a mulatto of the kind that Hannibal had impersonated last night in town. A stranger … who got no business here, as Papa Grillo had said.

  ‘There’s no way back for him,’ said Mayanet. ‘He’s zombi. He’s gone. They only turned him loose out of the work gang ’cause he’d slipped with his machete, ’cause the cut went bad. There’s nothing we can do.’

  January said quietly, ‘There is.’ He knelt and gave the man water again – he managed to gulp a little of it, that time. Then he straightened up, took Mayanet’s machete from her hand, and brought the blade down with the full force of his arm on the man’s crawling neck. He’d cut cane, and he knew how much strength was needed to sever the tough stems; it surprised him that beheading someone wasn’t harder than that. Hannibal turned away, chalky under the remains of his crude make-up, and staggered. January wiped the blade on the dead man’s clothing, went to catch his friend by the arm.

  ‘I’m all right.’ Hannibal tried to pull away, his voice hoarse.

  January handed the blade back to Mayanet and almost carried his friend back up into the jungle off the road, where he’d left the donkey. He had to lift him bodily to the animal’s back.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  They reached L’Ange Rouge about two hours before dark. The Big House was set – as Salomé Saldaña had described it – on a rise of ground a mile up a little valley, where a spring came down out of the mountains. A mile and a quarter of thickly wooded ground lay between the mountains’ footslopes and the lake itself, jungle growth mixed with the wild tangle of canes, so thick that January doubted either man or beast could have pushed through to the brackish water.

  January circled the shoulder of high ground, to make sure no one was camped there, before moving cautiously in.

  There wasn’t much left of the house. Like the planters in Louisiana, those in Saint-Domingue had tended to regard the ‘Big House’ of a plantation as little more than a sleeping space and business office. The real home, the place where they brought up their children, was in town – in Paris, if they could manage it. They’d generally been built of wood, and the conflagration that had swept the island in 1791 had left little behind.

  He easily found the stone piers that had supported the house, overgrown with oleander and fern. There was a well not far away, exactly
where Salomé had described it from her mother’s account. Its cover had long rotted, and the smell of decay in the water drifted up to him when he bent over the open pit. While Hannibal and Mayanet made a sort of camp in the ruins of the sugar mill – its stone walls still solid, built to withstand hurricanes, though the roof was gone – January scouted through the thickets of palmetto and found the stone foundations of Dr Maudit’s accursed house, and of the two stone cells that had been attached to it, also as Salomé Saldaña had described.

  Standing in that place, he could see her sketch of the plantation’s layout, scratched in the dirt floor of that Havana bohio by firelight. He’d copied it into his notebook, as soon as he’d returned to his lodgings, even as, hating himself, nearly twenty years ago he’d copied the horrifying engravings in Les Procédées de la Société des Sciences Francaise.

  The originals had been drawn here, on this spot.

  And he’d used the information they’d given him, about malformations of the spine and bones, about the effects of certain drugs, about what sorts of conditions were likely to arise from cousins marrying cousins: used them to save lives, to plan surgeries, to guide those who came to him for help, to guide his own hands in cases of difficult pregnancies and births.

  How could the means of salvation for so many come from this place? From that man? From those deeds?

  For, by this time, he was pretty certain what it was that Lucien Maurir had done.

  And he’d done it, January knew – as he moved systematically along the thick stone foundation wall that had separated Maudit’s house from the cells of his subjects – in order to get access to that knowledge. In order to find human beings whom he could skin and dissect alive without fear or compunction, and a man wealthy enough, and sufficiently beholden to him, to support him in his researches.

  It was knowledge for which he’d been more than happy to pay the asking price.

  Be a physician, Faustus, heap up gold, Marlowe had written of another doctor who had been willing to pay that price.

  And be eterniz’d for some wondrous cure …

  Are not thy bills hung up as monuments,

  Whereby whole cities have escaped the plague,

  And thousand desperate maladies been cured?

  As January had guessed, there was a safe built into the stone foundation of the cells. It was blocked with a stone, wedged in tight; the largest stone in the wall, and the only one that had been shaped. Probably ship’s ballast originally, of the sort that was used for paving New Orleans streets. A hole had been drilled in one side of it, and that hole was aligned with a substantial crevice between two neighboring stones. With the last light fading from the tropical sky, January wedged his iron pry-bar in and pushed.

  The space behind the stone was about a cubic foot.

  He left Amalie de Gericault’s diamonds – getaway money? The price of a modest home in Paris? – where they lay. There was gold there, too, as Salomé had said, and a few pearls and earrings and pins. What remained of Calanthe’s jewelry, and Emmanuelle’s, after Ginette had seized what she could carry. There was even a little Dutch-gold collar-pin with a painted porcelain miniature on it, the sort of thing a servant girl would wear.

  Reina’s. Mammy Ginette’s sister – Madame Amalie’s maid.

  He carried the notebooks back to the sugar house, where Mayanet had built up a little fire.

  THIRTY

  Amalie de Thoyomène de Caillot de Gericault

  L’Ange Rouge Plantation

  Saint-Domingue

  July 21, 1785

  To: Neron de Gericault

  Chateau Vieux-St-Michel, auprès d’Angouleme

  Hôtel de Caillot, Rue des Italiens, Angouleme

  Brother,

  I pray God this reaches you. I have given every sou I possess to my maid Reina to carry it to Port-au-Prince, and to render it into the hands of a sea-captain who will, I pray, get it to you. Please, please, I beg you, come and get me out of this nightmare.

  Absalon will have written you that I have at last borne him a healthy son, christened Guibert in the Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. My recollections of his birth are confused. I have reason to believe that I was drugged when my pains began, I know not for how long. But the child they brought to me, and placed in my arms, was, I will swear it, not a newborn child. He was of a size and a countenance at least a month old, and though they tell me I was ill for many weeks, I know – by the growth of the young birds in the nest outside my window, and the kittens of the gardener’s cat – that it was nothing like that long.

  In my dreams I birthed a girl, a tiny mite of a thing but living, and whole.

  I saw her face.

  The child I see in the arms of the wet-nurse is not mine.

  You know Absalon’s determination – his obsession – to have an heir to the de Gericault title. I have written you before how he has employed the man Maurir, to determine some way to alter the will of God, to strengthen me through magnetism and electricity and the consumption of everything from sheep’s whey to ground bones so that I can bear healthy children. I thought I was rid of the man – the tales the Negroes tell of him are frightful! But in February, when my baby quickened within me, my husband sent me here, to L’Ange Rouge, his plantation in the Western Province, where Maurir has been for nearly a year. On this plantation, my dear Reina tells me, are also the women Emmanuelle and Calanthe, Absalon’s two mistresses. Both were with child when I came here, Reina says, but neither in such condition by Absalon, but by the two young footmen, Champagne and Grasset.

  Neron, I very much fear that Maurir – promised the Good God only knows what reward by Absalon! – has substituted the child of one of these women for my baby, for the poor little girl I saw – I know I saw! – cry and flail in Maurir’s hands when he delivered her of me. Both women are what they call in the islands mameloque – women of color whose only taint of African blood comes mixed with five generations of white. Both footmen, who seem to have no duties in the plantation house here whatsoever, are of the same extraction, like Absalon fair-haired and blue-eyed. They are like Absalon as well in height and build, and, it sometimes seems to me, like him also in cast of countenance, as if Maurir bought them solely for that purpose (one of them, Reina tells me, is widely known as a thief and a troublemaker, whom no one would take as a servant).

  LATER – Brother, I know not what to do, but I am afraid! Someone – I think it is Maurir – searched my room last night; thank Heaven I carried this letter hidden on my person! But the ink and the pens were taken away, and I had to get poor faithful Reina to steal some from Mssr Gautier’s office. Gautier has reassigned Reina to the kitchen, and has given me a new maid, a sly creature named Nana, one of his several slave mistresses. She sleeps in my room: there are few moments when I am not watched. Maurir has written to Absalon that I am ill, and has told the Negroes that I am mad. Twice he has tried to drug me, and I fear to eat or drink anything that I have not myself prepared – further evidence of madness, he says piously. But he is a man who understands drugs, has experimented with them hundreds of times on the poor Negroes here. I see the creatures whose minds he has destroyed, numbly obeying his commands and knowing neither where they are nor what they do, and I wonder, is this what he plans for me?

  Would Absalon care, so long as he has his healthy son of the de Gericault heritage?

  I begin to fear not!

  I feel trapped in a spiderweb of shadows, knowing nothing, able to believe nothing, to prove nothing! Reina tells me that both of the mameloque mistresses bore girls, one of them stout and healthy (and indistinguishable, she tells me, from a white baby), the other a poor little scrap who died within hours.

  Yet I hear these women laughing with each other, see them playing with the baby – at a distance, for I am not allowed to leave the house, ‘For my own good,’ Maurir insists – and neither weeps, nor bears the appearance of a woman who has lost a child.

  Does this mean anything? I don’t know! Does it prove tha
t I am sane and not mad? Absalon would say, ‘Negroes do not feel such a loss as we would.’

  If Maurir would do this – kill my baby, substitute the healthy boy that Absalon would pay almost anything to achieve – what would he not do? I don’t know that, either.

  I pretend that I love Guibert. I pretend that I believe what Maurir has told me happened: that I bore a boy, and was ill for some weeks, while the cook’s gray kittens remained kittens and did not grow long of leg and foolishly daring of spirit …

  Can I base all of this on some lies and some cats? I don’t know!

  I swear to you I am not mad! These are not the sick fancies of a woman after birthing a child! Neron, Neron, if you cannot come yourself, send a man whom you trust, a man who will not be taken in by Maurir’s lies – by the lies that Absalon wants to believe, if indeed Absalon is himself not behind this terrible scheme!

  Save me, I beg you! Come – or send someone who can be trusted, someone who will not believe the lies of plausible madmen! – and take me out of this place, this nightmare, this hell. Truly, you are my last and only hope.

  Your sister,

  Amalie

  January turned the sheets over in his hands. The first one had been the flyleaf of a book – Volume Seven of Madame de Scudery’s Clélie – and the second, a blank page of what looked like a ledger. They had at one time been creased and folded together very small, as if for concealment inside a woman’s corset or shoe. Broken fragments of red sealing-wax dotted the blank side of the second.

  It had clearly never been delivered.

  And Neron, Comte de Caillot and holder of the title of Vicomte that should have been his cousin’s, a broken man, and homeless, had come at last to shelter under Absalon’s roof for the remainder of his life, never knowing his sister’s fate.

  Wordlessly, he passed the letter to Hannibal, turned his attention to the notebook into the back cover of which it had been tucked.

  It was reddish pigskin leather, furred with mold. The edges of the pages were stained dark with it and clung stiffly together as he turned them. The first half was devoted to everything Lucien Maurir could glean about the de Gericault family, from Absalon – who had studied his family’s history with a maniac’s single-minded attention to every fragmentary detail – and from Amalie. Aunt Serafine back in Angoulême who miscarried eleven times and was never able to carry a child to term. Uncle Clovis who walked with two sticks. Cousin Raymond in his wheeled chair, pushed about the paths of Vieux-St-Michel by a manservant all his short days.