Crimson Angel
Page 30
‘Siney, her name is. One of the sewing women on Clint Cranch’s place in Covington County.’
‘Would Siney be short for Mélusina?’
‘I never heard her called that.’ The Creek woman frowned a little. ‘Jericho tried to buy her from Cranch, and later slave-stealers tried to kidnap her. No proof who’d sent them, if anybody, but Cranch sent her to Maddox, who has a place down in Limestone County. She’d be about Rose’s age. She took her daughter with her to Maddox’s place. A slave’s word’s no good in court of law, but once we let Jericho know we’ve got that notebook of Maurir’s, he’ll have more to worry about than going after Siney. Cranch’ll stand our friend and back our play.’
‘Will you do one thing for me?’ said January, when he handed her the red-backed notebook that contained the history of the de Gericault family’s almost obsessive inbreeding and bone disease. ‘Ask Cranch what he’ll take to free Siney, and write to me. I owe her mother – and I owe her. Without Salomé Saldaña’s help I’d never have found that notebook, nor Amalie de Gericault’s letter. I expect you know,’ he added as the tall, brown-skinned girl opened the back cover and touched the stained and faded sheets, ‘that Jericho will deny it.’
‘We expect that.’ Her strong chin came up, and her glance strayed through the milling chamber door, to where Hannibal limped with tea from the breakfast fire, to where Blue Conyngham sat, weak but clear-eyed in the makeshift dressings January had put on him last night. ‘But he ain’t going to say, “Publish and be damned.” He’ll scream, “Fake,” but he won’t let so much as a whisper of it get out. We got him by the balls.’ Her strong hand – weathering already with hard work, though he guessed she was barely twenty-five – made a satisfied fist on the notebook’s cover. ‘I’ll see to it Cranch frees Siney.’
And indeed, a year later January received a letter from Captain Castallanos of the Santana, letting him know that Mélusina Saldaña and her daughter had reached Jamaica in safety and had been reunited at long last with her mother Salomé. The work of the goddess Mayanet, who protected women? The hand of the Crimson Angel, whose tiny image – sold to a smuggler to save frightened and innocent people from death – had started the train of events?
Or just – as Rose would have it – events tumbling at random in the shaken jar of Fate?
As it was, after speaking to Setta, January walked back to the fire and put his arms around Rose. Though the jungle that filled the narrow valley where the plantation had stood seemed deserted now of human life, it was silent, save for the constant, ghoulish clatter of the buzzards behind the mill. January saw no foxes, or field rats, no four-legged vermin of any kind, and guessed that the Egbo had left guards to make sure the unwanted strangers got on their way. Mayanet had departed for the nearest lakou after the treasure had been closed up again, since it was clear that neither Hannibal nor Blue Conyngham were fit to journey on foot the eighteen miles back to Port-au-Prince.
‘What do you bet me that what she brings back is one of Maddox’s mules?’ said Rose.
January returned her half-grin. ‘Even if I had a sou in my pocket,’ he returned, ‘I wouldn’t fling it away on such a wager.’
‘They did treat me well, under the circumstances.’ Rose glanced through the doorway at the stones piled in the opening of the furnace. ‘They’d watched our house to find out what Jeoffrey meant to do – and they were fairly certain neither he nor his father-in-law would countenance the plan to blackmail Jericho. They were as shocked as I, when Jeoffrey was killed, and weren’t entirely certain what you and I would do with the information, if we got it. Once its existence was known, they had to control it.’
‘What was left of La Châtaigneraie?’ asked January curiously, and Rose shook her head.
‘Nothing. The foundation of the mill house, and of what I think has to have been a slave jail. None of it looked anything like the plan that Ginette made for me, all those years ago. I knew at once we had to come here.’
They returned to the fire, and January poured out two cups of rather molasses-flavored tea. Rose hadn’t had much appetite for breakfast – the smell of the corpses behind the mill was growing stronger with the rising of the day – but January had eaten in worse places. Among the supplies the Egbo had left were two bottles of rum – a generous allotment. Though Hannibal still huddled, quietly shivering, against the old mill chamber’s central plinth, January observed that the liquor hadn’t been touched.
They talked for awhile, quietly, of the journey back to New Orleans: there were enough foreign ships in Port-au-Prince that it should be no trouble finding safe transportation. ‘We may have to work our passage,’ said January. ‘Or go as far as Kingston or Santiago and have to work there for money to get farther—’
‘Kingston.’ Rose blew on her spectacles and polished the lenses on her torn and dirty cuff. ‘I’m told the British are fairly firm about enforcing penalties on slave-traders. And nothing will induce me to touch the de Gericault gold.’
‘I thought you were a skeptic, my nightingale, and didn’t believe in curses.’
‘I don’t,’ she returned. ‘It’s a matter of good taste.’ More quietly, she added, ‘I’m not going to take even a penny of money my so-called cousin murdered Jeoffrey for. Let it lie here and rot.’
Setta Goback had a simpler view of the matter, when she came over to join them. ‘There’s enough ill-luck in that compartment to sink this island, let alone a ship,’ she said. ‘Blue wanted to take some – he says we’ve earned it, which I think we have, as have you and Mrs January. I only hope –’ she touched the folded macoute that contained Dr Maudit’s genealogical notebook – ‘that God will guard us from this one, since it’s for the cause of saving our ancestors’ lands. Otherwise, I’d put it on the fire.’
Her words echoed in January’s mind as he packed up their few belongings, and Rose and Setta climbed to the top of the wall, to look out for Mayanet’s return.
The blood will bring you gold, but the gold will bring you blood.
From his own straw gunnysack, January unwrapped the other objects that had lain so long in the stone foundation of Dr Maudit’s house.
Where thy treasure is, there shall your heart be also.
But what, he wondered, constituted treasure?
January felt only a passing pang at walking away from diamonds wrought from sugar and soaked in dead men’s blood. It would be pleasant to have enough money to feel secure, but he knew that hard times would pass.
Knowledge, once given to the flame, is gone.
And he was physician enough to know that however knowledge had been acquired, it was precious. A treasure that would save the lives of other men, the tears of women over the birth of children to come.
Did Lucien Maurir, he wondered, risk his life – lose his life – to retrieve proof of Guibert de Gericault’s true parentage?
Or was he seeking this?
January’s fingers, sensitive and skilled – and yes, he knew, hungry for the touch of his true trade, the skill God had given him – turned the pages of the other notebooks. Seven of them, and each filled with the records of processes, experiments, observations. All those articles he had read with such guilty avidity in the garret in Paris: they were here, in their primitive and far more complete form.
Oh, that I might see Hell, Faustus had cried, and return again safe – how happy were I then!
The structure of the brain. Minute observations of the workings of the muscles around the eye. Pages of notes about the beat-by-beat reactions of the heart to various types of stimulus: drugs, heat, cold, pressure. The functions of the gut, not dead and half-decomposed as he’d been forced to study that amazing labyrinth of digestive tissue, but recorded live and in action.
On every other page, January thought, that’s what I needed to know the time I took care of old M’am Passebon … That was EXACTLY the way poor Allys Berté’s baby was tangled up in her womb …
And it wasn’t – he told himself it wasn’t, and k
new it for mostly the truth – that this knowledge, the extra skill that these notebooks would help him develop, would in time bring him white clients, clients with enough money to lift him and Rose and Baby John beyond the vagaries of bank failures and ‘tight-money times’. That this would give him the edge he needed, to compete with surgeons in Philadelphia or New York.
In his heart he knew these notes were precious in themselves. That they would save lives. That the information he could learn would let HIM save lives.
One life saved for every life these cost? He wasn’t sure whose voice whispered that to him. Olympe’s, maybe. Maybe Mayanet’s … maybe that of the maid Ginette, fleeing into the jungle in a hurricane because of what she had found in Maurir’s house, what she had seen. Maybe Reina’s, or those others whose names he’d read in Maurir’s list of purchases: Bassey, Kigoa, Mongo. Having caught Reina, January guessed, Lucien Maurir wasn’t a man to waste a subject. He wondered if Ginette’s sister had been alive or dead when the maidservant had seen her body.
He turned the pages. He saw the mention in passing of the two mameloque footmen – the next thing to white – and for a moment had a vision of the son of one of them, Guibert de Gericault, Gil Jericho, pacing the floor of his big house in Mobile. Praying, waiting, wondering how long it was going to be before his own son would return …
How horrible, Rose had said of the men in the New Orleans morgue, when they’d gone to see Jeoffrey Vitrac’s body, to be waiting and never to know.
He would only know when Setta Goback and Blue Conyngham appeared on his doorstep, with proofs that would render him their slave for life …
And what further blood, what further retaliation, would come of that?
Maurir had made the notes at the time of his experiments. His fingerprints remained on the corners of the pages, brown smudges of old blood.
January didn’t exactly believe in curses – not even here, in the land dark and soaked with them. He didn’t really think that the dead men and women whose neatly-sketched hands and bellies, spinal cords and dissected genitals, beckoned his eye from those pages, were going to reach out from the other world and poke holes in the hull of the ship that carried him home.
Could I REALLY touch Baby John’s face, with hands that had turned these pages and not burned them afterwards? Could I really look at Rose, if I turned down the path that said: sometimes you have to get information wherever you can …?
The fact that he hadn’t himself opened those bellies, sawed off the tops of those skulls, made no difference.
He looked up and saw Hannibal watching him with those quiet dark eyes, bruised with fatigue and blacker than any coffee he’d ever seen. ‘Why does it bother me?’ he asked softly.
‘Because it should,’ the fiddler replied. ‘It’s not that I have apprehensions about riding in a ship with those things in it … and it’s entirely up to you. But if you’d looted Seth Maddox’s pockets after the fighting was done – always supposing you’d gotten to them before the lovely Mayanet did – it would be much the same.’
January grinned without mirth. ‘Don’t tell me you played honestly at all those card tables in Havana, collecting passage money for us.’
‘Benjamin!’ Hannibal pressed a hand to his heart. ‘Your suspicions cut me to the quick! We needed the money,’ he went on, with a quirk of his eyebrow. ‘Pecunia non olet, as the Emperor Vespasian observed – and I’m sure Rose’s esteemed great-grandfather would have claimed that he needed his birthright just as badly. The law proclaims that it is wrong to keep the profits of a crime, not out of spite toward the guilty, but because keeping the proceeds is an incentive – a permission – for others to commit crimes for the sake of the rewards. And it is perilously easy to commit crimes against the helpless. This island was built on them. And there,’ he added, and struggled to his feet, ‘I see by their excitement, the ladies have sighted Mayanet coming up the trail. I for one am ready to go home.’
He put on his hat and limped toward the wall where Rose and Setta stood, waving their headscarves. January turned back to Dr Maudit’s notebooks.
Blood and gold, he heard the god Ogoun whisper to him in the insect-creaking darkness of the Cuban jungle. Gold and blood. For a moment he thought he glimpsed the Crimson Angel, holding out to him a hand filled with cleansing fire.
In the archway that led to the hot forenoon outside, Hannibal and the three women were embracing, admiring the two stout mules that had almost certainly been part of the Egbo’s loot last night. Black, quadroon, Indian, and white …
It was time to start the journey home.
He put the notebooks on the fire, poked them up until all the pages had caught, then walked away from them, unable to watch them burn.