Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  January lay flat on the top of the stone wall, crawled – carefully – to the edge of the heavy tree-cover, as Bryce Jericho yelled, ‘That’s a goddam lie!’

  Enough roof remained of the furnace room that January couldn’t see in; a makeshift barricade had been put up across its farther outside door as well. The starlight dimly outlined Bryce Jericho, recognizable by his military coat, and the pale glint of his hair. He stood next to a palm tree, sheltering from any shot from within the sugar house. The man next to him, short and squat as a bull, must be the bandit-leader Guerrero – a whore who will kill his own people for money …

  Because of the stony ground on which the building stood, the brush around this side of the sugar mill was short, but January could see the glint of gun barrels in the taller foliage between it and the ruins of the house. He counted eight. Muskets, probably. Cheaper to procure than rifles, and probably easier to come by on the island.

  And far, far less accurate.

  The Creek Blue Conyngham shouted back: ‘Why your father send you, if it’s a lie, eh? Why he try to kill M’am January, why he try to kill her brothers, if he didn’t know it’s true? You come on ahead, Jericho! You want to die ’cause your father tell you you should? So he don’t lose his nice government job and maybe have to work for his living like the rest of us? You just come ahead!’

  January worked his way back to the rear of the building, where the trees came up close to the rear door of the milling chamber. From there he could see movement in the thicker jungle, the flick of starlight on musket barrels. The only way in was through the milling chamber and under the gun of whoever was manning the furnace room’s barricaded door.

  The Spanish were watching that door, not the top of the wall. He crept to the branches of a huge ceiba tree that overhung them, slung his rifle over his shoulder and scrambled – carefully – through the foliage, with a whispered word of thanks for the stoutness of the tree’s branches under his weight. He felt cautiously for the branches of the surrounding trees where they mingled with the ceiba’s crown, found one that felt promising (please, God, no centipedes … ) and scrambled down, feeling with his bare toes for footholds. Listening to the voices on the other side of the sugar mill …

  Gunfire crackled. Some of the Spanish ran forward; January dropped to the ground, saw against the dim mix of lantern reflection and starlight the men who stayed put still crouched on the edge of the trees. Through the outer arch of the milling chamber he saw one Spaniard double over and fall, the other two ducking back to the shelter of the wall – the Creeks inside had rifles, not muskets. Slower to load but able to hit a chosen target.

  The Spanish who’d remained in the trees were watching, too.

  They’ll kill Rose, he reminded himself, sliding the largest of his knives from his belt. And that’s not the first thing they’ll do to her.

  It was nothing, to slip up behind one man, put a hand over his mouth – the man was nearly a foot shorter than January and half his weight – and slit his throat with a single hard jerk of his knife. Reflex spasmed the victim’s hands, and the crash of the musket was like thunder, but the firing in the sugar mill covered it. He dragged the body back into the dark of the jungle, helped himself – mostly by touch – to the man’s powder horn. Shucked off his shirt – the sleeves were wet with blood – and moved, silent as a shadow, to where he thought the next man would be.

  The men who’d tried to rush the milling chamber door fell back; one of them ran into the trees, virtually into January’s arms. He let out a yelp as January grabbed him by the throat, stabbed him up under the breastbone. A voice from a few yards further in the trees called softly, ‘Paco? You all right?’

  January roughened his voice into a hushed half-whisper. ‘Fucking spider!’

  He took the time to drag Paco’s body back before circling in behind the man who’d called out to him, killing him swiftly and neatly, the blood of his own heart hammering in his ears so that he could barely think. His only thought was, Three less on this side …

  He was only a few feet behind a fourth man when there was a flurry of shouting, a fury of gunfire from the other side of the mill. His chosen victim – and every other man in the trees still alive – rushed the archway; January put a rifle bullet into the back of one man, dashed back to where Paco had fallen, scooped up his musket and fired into the massed backs of the men as they crowded through. Saw a man go down, clutching his belly; reloaded – as his hands had done, automatically, unthinkingly, in the morning fog behind the cotton bales at the Battle of Chalmette – and fired again while the men were smashing through the barricade into the furnace room.

  No one was shooting at them – they must have rushed both doors …

  He loaded both his weapons, then ran for the rubble pile on the wall. He reached the wall’s top even as he heard Bryce Jericho yell, ‘Don’t kill her!’

  Shit …

  He ran along the narrow stones, dropped to his knees and squirmed through the tangle of burned rafters until he could look down into the furnace room.

  After the night outside, the feeble glow of two lanterns there seemed bright. Seth Maddox lay near the broken barricade that had closed the outer door of the furnace room, blood pooling under his head. One of the Creek men sprawled near him, groaning and clawing at a spurting wound in his chest. Blue Conyngham lay near the wall, his head in the lap of the woman Setta, as two of the Spaniards pulled Rose away from her side. Rose’s face was bruised and blood smeared the sleeve of her dress; her brown curls tumbled over her shoulder, and her chin was powder-burned, her eyes as coldly calm as ever behind their oval spectacle lenses.

  Bryce Jericho walked out from among his Spanish allies with a knife in his hand, dragged the Creek woman to her feet by her hair, and put the knifepoint against the outer corner of her left eye. He glanced over at Rose. ‘You going to show us where the old man hid his treasure?’

  Rose nodded. The men nudged each other and grinned – when Rose walked past them, Bryce now holding her arm with the knifepoint pressed to her side, one of them grabbed her skirt and made as if to pull it up. The others laughed and followed them outside. ‘Bring the wench, Guerrero,’ called Bryce over his shoulder.

  So they all walked out, leaving Three-Jacks Killwoman to bleed out where he lay, and Blue Conyngham to whisper, ‘Setta—’ and try to crawl after them.

  January slipped down from the wall, ran to where he’d left the macoute and pulled out the red pig-leather notebook that held the de Gericault pedigree, the notes Maurir had kept, that final, horrible dissection and Amalie’s despairing letter to her brother.

  The lanterns bobbed in the darkness, in the direction of the ruins of Maurir’s house. Guerrero’s men followed in a straggling line, joking among themselves and laughing. January heard Setta squeal and then curse. He followed, slipping from tree to tree among the fan palms and banana plants, pistol in one hand and notebook in the other, and he knew that even if he gave the notebook to this man – to that strong-built, fair-haired young man who in the lantern light did indeed have a little bit of the look of Jefferson Vitrack – it wouldn’t save either himself or Rose.

  Common sense told him that the only thing he could do – since any attempt to shoot Jericho, to get Rose away from them, to stop them from raping and killing her before his eyes would only end in his own death – the only thing he could do would be to flee. And to use the information in the notebooks to destroy Gil Jericho and his son Bryce.

  To prove them Negroes – members of a degraded caste – before the eyes of the voters of Alabama. To get the powerful Bryce family to cast Jericho out, to force his wife to disown him, to proclaim Jericho’s son Bryce a bastard. To pull down in flames everything they worked for and killed for …

  And Rose would still be dead.

  Dead horribly, in the ruins of what had begun as an accursed squabble over money and position, in a blood-soaked land.

  Blood will bring you gold … gold will bring you blood.
/>   And there was nothing he could do about that.

  When he’d wedged the square stone back into its place in the foundation, January had thought he’d done so firmly. But by lantern light now it was plainly visible, standing out a good inch from the rest of the wall. It was a matter of only moments for them to find the iron pry-bar, lying in the weeds along the wall.

  But I didn’t leave it there, thought January. I hid it …

  ‘What the hell is this?’ Jericho drew out a folded paper from the treasure hole. ‘Bring that lantern close, Guerrero.’

  ‘But the treasure is there?’ the bandit chief demanded, kneeling to look. ‘The diamonds—’

  ‘You’ll get your damn diamonds,’ snapped Jericho, and he thrust the paper at Rose. ‘What the hell is this?’

  ‘It’s in Greek.’ Rose took it. And, as calmly as if that had been part of the legend all along, went on, ‘Lucien Maurir used Greek as a secret language, because the slaves couldn’t read it.’

  January’s almost said, ‘What?’ This was the first he’d heard of that theory, and there had certainly been no Greek document in the safe when he’d pulled out the stone a few hours before.

  ‘Can you read it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He dragged her close to him, held the knife up for her to see. ‘And you’d better read it right, wench.’

  Rose bowed her head suddenly and cringed, and caught her breath in a sob that to January – who knew her – sounded so completely manufactured that he couldn’t believe Jericho wasn’t aware her sudden capitulation was fake. She whispered, ‘I swear to you … please don’t hurt me, sir. I’ll read it right. Bring the lantern close …’

  Jericho grinned, brandished the knife again and took the lantern from Guerrero, and held it up above the document in Rose’s hands. January held his breath.

  Without Jericho’s hand on her arm, Rose dropped like a stone to her knees, at the same moment that Hannibal – who had evidently been crouched on the other side of the foundation wall all along – stood up, put his pistol to Jericho’s temple, and blew out his brains.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Every man of the Spanish force was so frozen with shock that nobody made a move except Rose. She sprang to her feet and over the wall; Setta yelled, ‘RUN!’

  One of the men holding Setta struck her, others fumbled for their muskets, and Hannibal – who clearly hadn’t counted on the other woman being present – hesitated. Guerrero grabbed him by the dirty sling around his neck and brought up his own pistol, and January stepped out of the trees and fired. The rifle ball shattered rock splinters from the wall five feet away – the shot was almost impossible by lantern light – but the bandit-chief jerked around, and Hannibal dropped behind the shelter of the broken foundation wall as a half-dozen muskets roared. Guerrero lunged over the wall after him, and the muskets swung toward January, and with silent, whispering violence, a score of arrows sliced from the darkness and pinned the bandits through throat, temples, chests …

  Setta dropped, as Rose had done moments before, but the men around her were no longer paying her heed. They ran—

  And the trees around them seemed to produce men, silently, like sharks emerging glistening from dark water. The lantern light picked out the whites of eyes, the glint of teeth like leopards’ in the darkness. The flash of ax-blades and knives.

  Men passed on either side of January, naked save for the knife belts around their hips; passed him as if he were invisible. Some of the Spanish brought up muskets, and they were the ones lucky enough to be killed at once, with arrows.

  The others took longer to die. Some of them – to judge by the screaming – a lot longer.

  A hand took January’s arm and drew him back into the trees, away from the killing ground. The smell of cigar smoke and womanliness told him it was Mayanet.

  He was still shaking when he and Mayanet reached the sugar mill. Rose, Hannibal, and Setta clustered around the lantern in the milling chamber, near the stone plinth that had once held the rollers and tank. Blueford Conyngham lay next to Setta, his head on her thigh and his eyes closed, his breathing the shallow drag of a man unconscious. The Creek woman’s dark glance moved constantly from his face to the five or six naked men – the local chapter of the Egbo, January guessed – who squatted around the walls, arms folded around their knees. One of them stood when Mayanet and January entered, gestured toward Hannibal.

  ‘So this blan’ your p’tit-ami, eh?’

  She looked the Egbo up and down. ‘What if he is, Marande, eh? What’s it to you?’ She fished in the pocket of her dress, took out two cigars and offered him one. ‘The blan’ out there had these.’

  January ran across the room, fell to his knees beside Rose, caught her against him as if he would break all her bones. Now that the danger was over – or he sincerely hoped the danger was over, anyway – he was shaking, and he realized his arms were gummed with drying blood. ‘God, you’re all right,’ was the only thing he could say. ‘You’re all right—’

  ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t have any money on my chances,’ she managed to say, ‘because I’d have bet it all the other way.’

  She looked past him sharply when Mayanet said, ‘This was with them,’ and produced something small that twinkled, red and gold like suspended flame, from its golden chain.

  Rose stood and walked over to the other woman. ‘It was my brother’s,’ she said.

  January, following at her heels, saw that it was the Crimson Angel.

  But when Mayanet held it out to her, Rose shook her head. Mayanet regarded her for a moment with speculative dark eyes, then nodded and put the pendant back in her pocket. ‘You wise lady, M’aum Janvier. And you—’ She turned back to Hannibal, slumped in the lantern glow like a ravaged scarecrow, chalk-white under the remains of the dye.

  ‘You get him out of this country.’ The Egbo Marande jerked his lighted cigar at the fiddler. ‘You get him out fast.’

  ‘Point me in the direction of the nearest boat,’ said Hannibal, taking five or six sawing breaths to get the words out, ‘and I will run the length of the island to get on it.’ His good hand was pressed to his side, his left arm in its ragged sling tight against his chest, as if his shivering were from the cold.

  ‘Silly man.’ Mayanet pulled him to his feet and put her arm around his waist. ‘You put that Greek letter in with the treasure, silly man?’

  ‘Of course he did,’ said Rose. ‘It was one of the odes of Theocritus he copied back in Cuba, rather than steal the whole book. But at the top of the paper he’d written in big letters, Drop down.’

  Mayanet laughed and offered Rose another of Bryce Jericho’s cigars. Rose smiled and shook her head.

  ‘So you Benjamin’s wife, eh?’

  ‘Benjamin’s wife,’ agreed Rose. ‘And one of the last descendants of Absalon de Gericault.’

  ‘I don’t think much of your family.’ Mayanet shook her hand like a man. Then she smiled, not the wide sharp smile of the voodoo-god, but of the woman Maria, who remembered loss and love and pain. ‘But you got good friends.’

  The Egbo were gone in the morning. In the gray of dawn, Rose cooked rice and sausage from the supplies Seth Maddox had brought down with his party from Cap Francais. The Maddox horses and mules, and those belonging to Captain Guerrero and his men, were gone. ‘You think they could at least have left us a couple, eh?’ groused Mayanet as she walked with January to the spring that had at one time powered the waterwheel of the sugar mill. ‘But that Marande – all he think about is what the Egbo need.’

  January guessed that the muskets and gunpowder the Spanish guerrilleros had carried were gone as well.

  They stopped on the way back from the spring for January to replace the stone in the foundation wall. He couldn’t imagine how Hannibal had managed to lever it free long enough to thrust within it Theocritus’ ‘Thirteenth Idyll’, with a hasty instruction to Rose scribbled at the top. The fiddler had been very quiet through the night. January remembe
red how he himself had felt after the Battle of Chalmette, the shock and the sense of disorientation at having killed a man.

  From her pocket now Mayanet drew the thin gold chain, on which dangled the red-winged angel of enamel and gold. When she tossed it into the safe with Absalon de Gericault’s money and Amalie de Gericault’s diamonds, it made a satisfied little ting.

  ‘You want anything in there?’ She tilted an eyebrow at him.

  ‘Good God, no!’ He straightened up, looked over his shoulder at the ground between the mill and where they stood, on the site of Dr Maudit’s accursed house. Buzzards had already gathered over the bodies of Jericho and his men, grunting and hissing as they fought for the best bits. Columns of flies and every ant in Haiti swarmed, a dark glitter in the pre-dawn brightness. ‘I’ve been taught there’s no such thing as the voodoo, but I can smell a curse, and this place stinks of it. The man who spends that gold is going to be trying to wipe the stain of it off his hands for the rest of his life.’

  Together they levered the stone back into place and thrust it tight. But as they walked back to the sugar mill, January was aware of Mayanet looking at him sidelong under her lashes. As if the thing within her – god or demon or simply the flame of madness – understood that he hadn’t told all of the truth.

  Blood and gold … Gold and blood.

  Even though he hadn’t a penny and wasn’t sure how they were getting back to New Orleans, it wasn’t the gold that whispered to him as they readied for the journey back to Port-au-Prince.

  After breakfast, January put the bodies of Seth Maddox and Three-Jacks Killwoman into the chamber of the old furnace. There was nothing to dig with save the pry bar and their hands, so he and Setta carried rubble from around the outer wall to block up its entrances, in effect forming a sort of bench tomb of the masonry. While they did this, he asked Setta about the slave woman who first had told Maddox about Gil Jericho.