Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  Who had their parents been? How many grandparents had they in common? Had their mothers miscarried before or after their births? The blocks of scribbled notes were interspersed with diagrams of a family tree which even to January’s eye looked unwholesomely entangled.

  In the jungle blackness all around them, the buzzing of insects mingled with the distant beating of drums.

  The second half of the notebook meticulously detailed the purchase of the two footmen Champagne and Grasset, accompanied by sketches and descriptions that the scientific physiognomist Johann Lavater would have approved of for detail and specificity. The angle of the nose, the placement of the eyes, the shape of the ears and set of the cheekbones … along with a description in similar terms of Absalon de Gericault. The descriptions almost matched.

  One of the last pages of the book contained anatomical drawings and notes, of what looked like the dissection of a newborn baby girl.

  Heat went through January: rage, shock, disgust.

  Of course. The man was a scientist. He wasn’t going to pass up the chance to study so inbred a specimen …

  By the look of it, the infant had been healthy and normally formed, save for her tiny size, barely five pounds.

  His hands shook as he closed the notebook, turned to the next. More notes on the purchases of slaves, covering the years from 1779 up to 1791. The early years he’d buy – presumably with Absalon de Gericault’s money – one or two a year, noting the physical condition and tribe. Sometimes, but not always, a name. African names: Bassy, Kigoa, Mongo. Nearly all had some defect: curved spine, bad hips, withered limbs or feet. Some were simply ‘old.’

  These men, these women … January was queasily aware that he’d probably seen their pictures, in Maurir’s articles about dissected hearts and spines.

  After 1782, the names became French or Spanish, and in the pinched, spidery handwriting was noted the percentage of European heritage. Five pages were devoted to the obsessive catalog of French Creole terminology:

  A white and a negress produce: A mulatto

  A white and a mulatto produce: A quadroon

  A white and a quadroon produce: A métif [an octoroon, in New Orleans terminology]

  A white and a métif produce: A mameloque [in New Orleans, a musterfino]

  A white and a mameloque produce: A quadroonee

  A white and a quadronee produce: A sang-melée

  A white and a marabou – the outcome of a union between a full-blood African and a quadroon – produce: A quadroon

  But:

  A quadroon and a marabou produce: A quadroon

  A quadroon and a griffe – the child of a black and a quadroon – produce: Another quadroon

  A black and a griffe produce: A sacatera …

  ‘It always seemed to me a fearful waste of energy,’ remarked Hannibal, looking over his shoulder at the lists. ‘How many white grandparents you have … Does it really make a difference, when even one black ancestor is enough to make you a slave and rob you of your rights?’ He sat back on his heels, the sheets of Amalie’s letter between his skinny fingers, the light of their tiny fire flickering in his dark eyes. Behind him, the long, low bench of the furnace rose like some monstrous tomb, where the heat from the single fire had rushed to boil the five great kettles set in a line.

  ‘I know your mother claims to be a quadroon, and half her girlfriends say they’re musterfines, and they spend half their days whispering about who’s lying on the subject.’

  ‘It matters if you’re trying to convince some white protector that your daughter is an octoroon instead of a quadroon,’ said January gently. ‘Octoroons are more fashionable – God forbid he should tell his friends he’s taken on some girl who’s merely a mulatto.’

  Hannibal winced.

  ‘They give all kinds of names to each other as well,’ pointed out January. ‘Chacas and catchoupines and bitacaux … Would your family have stood for it, if you or one of your cousins had announced they were marrying an Irish girl? Africans were cheaper than “Creole” slaves,’ he added. ‘Those born on Saint-Domingue were generally healthier and were usually used as house servants, the same as they are in Louisiana. The traders brought in Africans by the boatload.’

  ‘But their children couldn’t pass for white.’ Hannibal read for a time past January’s shoulder, then said, ‘After 1785 he’s buying more. Look at all those—’ The long, thin finger reached around his arm, touched the open page. ‘Fifteen in 1786, seventeen in ’eighty-seven …’

  ‘But he’s gone back to Africans.’

  There was another silence, in which the beating of the drums had quickened, the tireless, maddening skreek of the insects seemed very loud.

  ‘He must have intercepted Amalie’s letter.’ Hannibal gestured with the pages in his hand. ‘One wonders what became of Miss Reina.’

  ‘I suspect Ginette wondered,’ replied January grimly, ‘when her sister didn’t come back from Port-au-Prince. And I suspect that when the hurricane hit that fall, and everyone took refuge in the sugar mill, she took the opportunity to search Maudit’s laboratory … It’s what I’d have done. What Rose would have done. Whatever she found there, she fled into the jungle and spent the rest of her life in hiding.’

  ‘Whatever it was she found in Maudit’s laboratory,’ January said, ‘Ginette must have known she’d never be allowed to leave the plantation. You notice that nothing more is heard of Emmanuelle and Calanthe, Champagne and Grasset … It was too easy,’ he went on softly. ‘Too easy for slaves to simply disappear. They were dying like flies anyway, of overwork, or malnutrition. No one would ask. And no one on the plantation who missed them would dare breathe a word. Maurir was absolutely safe to—’ He broke off as Mayanet sat up, head cocked, like a dog that smells fire.

  The drums had ceased.

  So had any sound of the insects.

  January dumped the water pail over the fire. The smoke was like a shout in the rank darkness, but in any case, he thought, attackers would know they’d be in the sugar mill. He thrust the notebooks into one of the straw macoutes, led the way at a silent run through the old grinding-room – a great roofless circle – to the wide doorway that opened into what had been the shed area, where the field gangs had in times past piled the cut cane. In his heart, the place was as familiar to him as his house on Rue Esplanade: he and his little friends had played in the Bellefleur sugar mill nine months of the year – risking a beating from their mothers and worse from Michie Fourchet. His father had cut cane and carried it on his shoulder to the mill, and every man January had known as a child had done so as well.

  Only three years ago, to hunt down a murderer and a machine-wrecker, he had himself worked the roulaison season, and the smell of sweat, the smell of blood, the smell of weeping despair and an exhaustion fathoms beyond any white man’s experience seemed to whisper to him from the walls, mingling with the echoes of woodsmoke and burned sugar.

  The sheds were long gone. In forty years the jungle had grown up to the mill’s stone walls. January halted in the arched doorway, listening. Footfalls crunched, light and swift, in the long furnace-room where they’d left the ashes of the fire. Through the connecting arch he saw a shadow pass across the starlight of the outer doorway at the building’s other end.

  A moment later an amber square of lantern-light, and a man’s voice said in English, ‘Someone was here. The ashes are warm.’

  Another man said, ‘Shit.’

  Then Rose’s voice, and the glint of starlight on the oval lenses of her spectacles. ‘If it’s my husband, he won’t have gone far. I didn’t see any sign of Maudit’s stone house, but in all this underbrush it has to be there—’

  ‘It’s there.’ January’s voice echoed eerily in the dark of the mill. ‘And I have the notebooks – and the proof you’re looking for. So let Rose go, and we’ll talk.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  ‘Those proofs are useless to you!’ called out the first man’s voice quickly, the one who had come in
to check the ashes.

  And Rose: ‘It’s all right, Benjamin. These aren’t the men who killed Jeoffrey.’

  Against the lantern light he saw her silhouetted as she walked to the archway that separated the milling chamber from the furnace room and stood looking into the darkness. The man who must be Seth Maddox came with her, holding her arm in a grip that looked firm but not violent, and Rose (Thank God! Thank God! Virgin Mother of God I’ll never talk to a voodoo god again … ) did not look like a woman who has been abused or hurt.

  The shock of relief was so powerful that January felt almost dizzy, as if he’d been braced against physical pain which had been suddenly lifted.

  She was well. She was unharmed.

  The lantern light caught the ends of Maddox’s fair, curly hair: definitely the same man January had seen on Rue Esplanade outside his house. Three other men and the woman moved up behind him, barely more than silhouettes. The Muskogee Creeks.

  Hannibal and Mayanet had already stepped away from the outer doorway in the shadow of which January stood, invisible even to Rose. He could see her looking around her in the velvet blackness. Prickling with caution, he flipped a rock into the shadows of the circular milling chamber, and then, while Rose and the Indians whirled sharply in the direction of the sound, ducked out of the doorway and scrambled up the rubble that heaped the outside of the mill house wall. Trees hid the wall’s broken top, and from their concealment he called down to Rose, ‘Did they tell you that?’

  The Indians spun again, rifles at the ready, searching for the sound of his voice. He was above their eye level now, and though he guessed they were fair trackers, he could see that the blackness and the close-crowding trees confused them. To him, they were dimly gold-lit fish in a pond below him. He could have killed any one of them with a rifle shot – another with the pistol if he were very lucky … and if willing to take the consequences.

  ‘Mr January—’ Maddox’s tone was conciliating. ‘I promise you, we’re not working for Gil Jericho. We watched your house – and we, uh, induced Mrs January to come with us – because we need whatever proofs those are, that were hidden in Maudit’s house … Notebooks, you said?’

  ‘Notebooks and a letter.’ Hannibal’s light, hoarse voice came from the lightless abysses somewhere to their left. It took January a moment to figure out that the fiddler was just outside one of the windows on that side of the ruin, pressed close to the wall.

  It had its effect. The Creeks swung their rifle barrels back and forth in the lantern light, trying to aim in all directions at foes they could not see.

  ‘They prove that Gil Jericho isn’t the son of Absalon de Gericault,’ said January, drawing their attention again. ‘That he was, in fact, switched into the family by the doctor hired to make sure that his mother bore a healthy child – the doctor who knew that neither parent was capable of producing healthy offspring. The child baptized Guibert de Gericault in Port-au-Prince in 1785 was, in fact, the son of an octoroon house-slave named Grasset and a free woman of color named Calanthe Delamare—’

  ‘I knew it!’ Maddox literally hopped up and down with triumph. ‘Listen, Mr January. We need that proof.’ He gazed all around him in the darkness. ‘We need it bad. You can take half the gold – you sure as hell have earned it! But we need that notebook.’

  ‘What they’re saying is true,’ Rose added. ‘I haven’t been harmed. Hannibal, are you all right? Illi desperatis, non sunt inimici nostri.’

  Her captors looked at her warily, and January could see Maddox’s lips move as he laboriously tried to summon enough schoolboy Latin to decipher what she’d said – they are desperate men, but not our enemies …

  ‘I am grateful to learn that I have had my collarbone broken by a friend,’ retorted Hannibal in the same language.

  ‘This Jericho,’ said the Indian woman, stepping forward, ‘is in the Alabama legislature, in the land office. The family of his wife – the Bryces – are powerful in the state government. They’re running him for governor next year, with the understanding that he’ll turn my people from our lands, as the government of your country turned the Cherokee out, when gold was discovered on their land. Last year, gold was found on ours. The tribe’s elders tried to keep it hidden, but Jericho and the Bryces got hold of it. Now they’re trying to secure our land for themselves. We seek to stop him, I and my kinsmen – Three-Jacks, Blueford—’

  Her gesture took in the other men. ‘Also Yonah Chickenroost, who was killed when someone tried to take your wife from us.’

  ‘That was us,’ said January imperturbably. ‘Her being tied up fooled us into thinking your intentions were suspect – that and the fact that you dragged her, struggling, off the beach in Santiago …’

  ‘We need those proofs,’ repeated the woman. ‘If she escapes us here in Haiti, she can take refuge. We read about the Red Angel, came to New Orleans, only to find that Vitrack had it and was seeking the treasure. We followed him to your house—’

  ‘How did you know about it in the first place?’ asked January. ‘And where do you come into this, Maddox?’

  ‘You don’t got to be a Creek, to not want to see Jericho and old Tancred Bryce running the state. How I know about the Red Angel – well, years ago my friend Clint Cranch told me—’

  January recognized the name of another of the men who’d stayed at the Verrandah Hotel.

  ‘—that a nigger woman on his place claimed her grandma worked for Jericho’s father back on the Red Angel plantation, before the blacks took over Haiti. She said Jericho’s mama switched a high-yella baby in, because she couldn’t have a child of her own. Said that a doctor helped her do it, and that doctor later got himself killed, goin’ back to the place to get the proofs of what he done. Setta here –’ he nodded toward the Indian woman – ‘and her kin is old friends of mine. We knew somebody in the family would go lookin’ for it. And we knew if there was proof, it’d be with the treasure.’

  ‘It is a gamble, you might say,’ spoke up Setta, watching, listening all around her. ‘But it is our lives – the lives of our people – on the table, and this is our only chance.’

  ‘And you can’t say we’ve done a speck of harm to your lady here.’

  ‘Nor would we have harmed her brothers,’ added Setta. ‘We thought Jericho’s son Bryce headed to New Orleans after the Red Angel as well, and when we heard of Vitrack’s murder we knew he’d be after you, too. We heard he sent men to get the other brother, on Grand Isle, but when you came on to Cuba all of them came after you, and we had to do what we could, to lay hands on your lady before they did.’

  ‘You can’t think putting Jericho out of running for governor is going to keep the whites from your lands.’ January had moved along the top of the wall while Maddox was speaking, groping his way as soundlessly as he could and praying he wouldn’t put his hand down on a tarantula. ‘You know there will be others.’

  ‘We don’t seek to ruin him,’ the Creek woman said calmly. ‘If Governor Bagby wins the election, well and good. If Jericho wins, we’ll go to him. Those notebooks, that letter that you found – proofs that he would do literally anything to keep from his wife’s family – will be the blade that we will hold over his head, the spiked bit in his mouth, the ring through his nose by which we shall lead him. But these we must have.’

  January said, ‘Release Mrs January.’

  ‘Throw down those papers first,’ returned one of the Creeks, whom Setta had named Blueford. Conyngham, January identified the name – the other would be Three-Jacks Killwoman … ‘We didn’t go through tracking down Vitrack, and following you three to Cuba, with Jericho’s son and his hired men on our heels as well as on yours, only to have you sell those proofs back to Jericho and his wife’s bastard of a father.’

  ‘Or keep ’em for yourselves,’ added Maddox, ‘and get your own little cut of the Creek lands.’

  January started to say, ‘And what’s to keep you from—?’ when Mayanet shouted from the darkness:

  ‘Ge
t down!’

  The next instant, below him and to his right, January saw a man appear in the outer archway of the milling-chamber, rough-clothed, dark-faced, like the mulatto Spanish of Cuba, a musket in his hands. The man shouted, ‘Tira el arma!’ and instead of dropping his rifle Three-Jacks Killwoman swung around and fired it at the intruder.

  In the darkness, two more shots cracked, and Maddox grabbed Rose by the arm, the Creeks retreating through the doorway into the old furnace-room. A moment later two more Spanish – Guerrero’s bandits, January guessed – charged into the mill chamber from the darkness and tried to rush the door. But the Creeks had already wrestled a huge section of broken roof across the opening as a barricade, and they fired across it. One Spaniard fell; Rose called out, ‘Benjamin!’ and there was another spattering of shots from somewhere close.

  January crouched on the top of the wall, conscious of movement, now, in the trees and underbrush all around the mill.

  A man’s voice yelled from the darkness, ‘Send the woman out, Maddox!’

  ‘That you, Bry?’

  ‘I have twenty men around you,’ called out Bryce Jericho. ‘Now, I can just come in and shoot all of you, and that’s the end of my father’s problem, or you can send the Vitrack woman out and have her show us where that old man hid his treasure. Then we can see if there’s any kind of thing there with it or not. If there’s not, we can all go home.’

  ‘If there’s not, you can shoot the six of us and you can go home, you mean,’ retorted Maddox. ‘You think I don’t know your daddy told you to kill all of us, to shut up that rumor about his bein’ a high-yella nigger?’