Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  He sipped at his bottle of laudanum-laced sherry—it was the first occasion since departing from Mexico City that he hadn’t been drowsy with opium as well. The agony of six days in a jolting coach was marked in the thinness of his face, the near-transparency of his fingers as he picked up his violin. Even this far from the engine-room the constant, bone-jarring jolt of the engines, the shuddering thunder of the sloshing screws nearly drowned the sweet music. Above the rim of the sea the stars leaned down, darkness luminous to the horizon’s edge.

  Sweet William is dead, Pretty Peggy-o,

  Sweet William is dead, Pretty Peggy-o,

  Sweet William is dead, and he died for a maid,

  The prettiest little maiden in the area-o.

  The hurricane season was well over, and though the air was as balmy as a New Orleans April, the northern wind had a chill to it.

  Still, the thought of going belowdecks to the reeking little cubicles assigned to travelers was more than any of them could bear at the moment. Every time I take a steam packet, reflected January resignedly, I swear the next voyage will be under sail. And then while we beat back and forth within sight of port for two weeks, waiting for a favorable puff of wind to take us in, I remember why I don’t.

  “I didn’t intend to try,” he said. “Since I thought it was Don Prospero who had made the offrenda in the temple, I simply intended to tell him—through the mouth of the idol—that you were innocent and that he should let you go. God knows what I’d have done if he didn’t believe me.”

  “Don Anastasio must have planned something of the kind from the start, you know,” said Rose thoughtfully. “If he secured the tea-set as soon as Werther was driven off the hacienda. Your being accused of the crime was a godsend, of course. . . .”

  “All my life,” said Hannibal with a little riffle of notes, “I have waited to hear someone cry, ‘You’re a godsend!’ And now I have. Somehow I do not experience the soaring elation I once expected to feel.”

  “It makes me wonder,” Rose went on, “how many men have been hanged for precisely that reason. Not because of this particular circumstance—for, as you said, Ben, a sensitivity like that is something that usually kills in childhood, like your poor Madame Valory’s children—but because of some condition of medicine that we simply don’t understand. The way the Indians didn’t understand, when Cortés and his men came here, that what they were dying of by the hundreds of thousands were smallpox and measles, things they’d never heard of. They didn’t know any more than Fernando and his mother knew.”

  “Don Anastasio knew,” said January grimly. “Growing up in New Spain, he would have been aware of how things commonplace to those in the Old World might be inimical to the inhabitants of the New . . . and vice versa. All he needed was a victim to prove Don Prospero’s madness. He may even have intended it to be Werther, before Werther fled. After that he may have set El Moro to make sure you weren’t dragged away to Mexico City prematurely.”

  “I cannot tell you how lowering it is,” sighed Hannibal, setting his fiddle aside, “to reflect that I was the one adjudged to be the most useless out of all available candidates—including the local sheep, which were good enough for Homer when he wanted to display to his readers how mad Ajax was. . . .”

  “Never trust a man who doesn’t know the Iliad.” Rose laid a comforting hand on Hannibal’s wrist.

  And January, hearing real bitterness beneath his friend’s jesting tone, added, “At least you were picked because someone would make a fuss over your death. Unlike Rose and myself, who didn’t even rank that high.”

  Hannibal shook his head, and fingered his naked upper lip, where his mustache had been sacrificed to his personation of Consuela’s duenna. He’d resumed masculine dress—including Don Anastasio’s coat, which was better than his own—and his long hair lay braided back over his shoulders in a neat, old-fashioned queue. “The reflection is almost as depressing as the realization that I have, literally, no thanks to offer the two of you but . . . my thanks. Worthless and ephemeral as wind.”

  “Or music.” January smiled. “We rabbits, sheep, and sacrificial dogs have to stick together.”

  “You know, I never expected you to come,” Hannibal went on. “When you walked into Don Prospero’s sala that day and kept Ylario from haling me off to Mexico City to be hanged, even more intense and enormous than my gratitude was my surprise. Because I truly thought that I was going to die in Mexico. And it seemed a very obvious conclusion to the problems I have all my life been faced with, including such questions as what the hell I was going to do when Consuela found someone else and turned me out into the street. And now that I understand that I’m free, and going to live, I find myself filled with terror. I feel as if I have been delivered from drowning, only to be set ashore in some completely unfamiliar land, like the heroine of Twelfth Night, to make my way as an impostor: What country, friends, is this?”

  “Illyria?” asked January softly. “Or only Louisiana?”

  “The land of the living. God help me.”

  And with a flick of his wrist he threw his opium-bottle far out into the starry following sea.

  SANTA ANNA

  Antonio López de Santa Anna marched north in January 1836 to crush the American colonists who sought to make Texas a separate nation. Though his Army of Operations suffered staggering losses due to blizzards and attacks by Comanche and Apache in the eight hundred miles of open plain, they still vastly outnumbered the 186 defenders of the Alamo, and after thirteen days of siege, on 6 March 1836, the Mexicans overwhelmed the makeshift fortress and massacred even those few who were finally taken alive.

  As careless of his own men’s lives as he was savage with his prisoner’s, Santa Anna also executed the four hundred American prisoners taken shortly thereafter at the Battle of Goliad. On 21 April—six weeks after the Alamo—Santa Anna’s forces were defeated by Sam Houston in eighteen minutes at the Battle of San Jacinto, mostly because Santa Anna neither posted camp guards nor set any kind of watch. Santa Anna fled the battle and was captured, alone, the following day.

  Santa Anna’s post-Alamo career surpasses most fiction. Astonishingly, he fast-talked Sam Houston into letting him go north to Washington, D.C., as a “goodwill ambassador” for Mexico (the Texans wanted to shoot him, and no wonder); ten years later, having been re-elected President of Mexico following the so-called Pastry War against the French, he attempted to regain the territory he felt the Americans had stolen from him and managed to lose California, Arizona, and New Mexico as well. He lost a leg in the Pastry War—a fact he never subsequently let anyone forget—and had it buried with full military honors in a cenotaph in the Santa Paula cemetery in Mexico City. The leg was dug up and destroyed by an enraged mob on one of the later occasions on which Santa Anna was out of favor, but Santa Anna had several interchangeable wooden legs which he carried with him in a leather case: one for dress, one for every day, one for battle, etc.

  In and out of exile, in and out of jail, in and out of the presidency, womanizing, gambling, switching sides at the drop of a hat, and displaying a brutal flare for generalship, Santa Anna ranks as one of the most colorful figures of the nineteenth century; his career would be hugely entertaining if not for the cruelty and unnecessary savagery that cost so many their lives. Despite pocketing for himself most of the ten million dollars paid by the United States to Mexico for the Gadsden Purchase in 1853 (during his fifth go-round as President of Mexico), he died broke, blind, and forgotten in Mexico City in 1876.

  The American chargé d’affaires, Anthony Butler, was recalled by President Jackson in December 1835 for untoward interference in Mexican affairs in favor of the Texas dissidents. One can only speculate what this consisted of.

  MEXICO CITY

  The economic and social chaos and corruption rampant in Mexico during the 1830s and ’40s are amply documented. Those who wish to read further about that amazing country during Santa Anna’s heyday should locate a copy of Life in Mexico, the collec
ted letters of the Scottish-born, American-raised wife of the first minister sent by Spain to independent Mexico, Frances Calderón de la Barca.

  Frances Calderón de la Barca consistently refers to the capital city of Mexico as simply “Mexico”—I have departed from this aspect of authenticity simply to avoid confusion. Prior to its independence from Spain, the country, of course, was generally referred to as “New Spain.” In the 1830s, Mexico City covered only a tiny percentage of its modern mega-sprawl, occupying the area of the “historic district” downtown, the site of the original Aztec city of Tenochtitlan on its island in the midst of Lake Texcoco. An eighteenth-century drainage project had begun to lower the level of the shallow lake, but it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that the land beyond the city’s ancient boundaries was dry enough to support those appalling slums that now cloak the dry lake-bed to the horizon.

  Within Mexico City itself, street names changed every block or so, and nearly all streets were re-named—some of them several times—during subsequent revolutions. The area northwest of the Cathedral square and west of the Plaza Santo Domingo (where the Calle Jaral of my story is located) is now part of the jaw-dropping excavation of the Templo Mayor, the great Aztec temple complex leveled, buried, and built over by the Conquistadores. The Cathedral square—known also as the Plaza Mayor and, after the 1840s, as the Zocalo—was at the time of the story as it is described, surrounded by trees like a rather larger version of the average Mexican town square.

  Now, of course, the Zocalo is paved wall to wall and is one of the most awesome public squares in the world, dominated by the baroque towers of the Cathedral, by the broken shapes of the excavated pyramids, and by the enormous red, white, and green flag of Mexico flying in its center. Though the streets of the old city—and the floors of its ancient churches and mansions—are a rippled roller-coaster due to subsoil subsidence from the draining of the aquifer beneath, Mexico City is an extremely beautiful city, both gracious and awe-inspiring.

  ANAPHYLACTIC SHOCK

  The system-wide autoimmune reaction to proteins that the body mistakes for invading microorganisms—known as anaphylactic shock—is poorly understood even today. Symptoms can range from mild to fatal, and sensitivities can develop in adulthood, though the usual pattern is for symptoms to become evident in childhood. There are between 150 and 200 deaths a year from food-induced anaphylaxis, and many thousands of emergency-room visits for episodes that would certainly have proven fatal before the development of epinephrine. Those at highest risk nowadays are teenagers eating out with their friends away from home.

  In the nineteenth century, such deaths would mostly have passed unrecognized amid the staggering incidence of infant and childhood mortality. (Looking back at old records, it’s still sometimes difficult to determine exactly what illness any given child died of.) Before the development of modern medications, there was almost nothing that could be done about an attack.

  Food allergies frequently run in families but are just as likely to occur spontaneously. Fish, shellfish, peanuts, milk, and eggs are the most common culprits, sometimes in quite minuscule amounts.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BARBARA HAMBLY attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master’s degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Barbara Hambly is the author of A Free Man of Color, Fever Season, Graveyard Dust, Wet Grave, Sold Down the River, and Die Upon a Kiss. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln, The Emancipator’s Wife.

  Also by Barbara Hambly

  A Free Man of Color

  Fever Season

  Graveyard Dust

  Sold Down the River

  Die Upon a Kiss

  Wet Grave

  DAYS OF THE DEAD

  A Bantam Book / July 2003

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2003 by Barbara Hambly

  Maps and genealogy chart copyright © 2003 by Jeffrey L. Ward

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Hambly, Barbara.

  Days of the dead / Barbara Hambly.

  p. cm.

  1. January, Benjamin (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Free African Americans—Fiction. 3. African American men—Fiction. 4. Americans— Mexico—Fiction. 5. Mexico—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A4215 D39 2003

  813'.54—dc21 2002038571

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  eISBN: 978-0-553-89770-8

  v3.0