Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  “He didn’t speak much to anyone. He was clumsy. You expected him to fall over any minute. You know how there are people that it makes you uncomfortable to talk to? They stand wrong, or they stand too close; it takes them forever to say anything and when they do it’s never quite what they mean. That’s Esteban. Or it was,” he amended, “a quarter century ago.”

  “Well, Maestro—” Shaw uncoiled his slow height from his chair, dumped the papers on the desk, and glanced across at the wall clock someone had affixed behind the sergeant’s high desk. “People don’t change that much, boy to man. Oh, you might not recognize who they are, exactly, but unless he works to do somethin’ about it, a awkward boy’s gonna grow to a awkward man. Same as a girl who’s cruel to her pets ain’t anyone I’d want to be the mother of my children later on down the road. I don’t know how much use any of this’ll be to you.…”

  “All of it’s of use.” January followed him across the big dim stone-flagged room to the outer door. “Any of it’s of use. You have to understand what the pattern is, before you can see where it breaks.”

  From the Cabildo’s front doors they looked out past the cobalt shadows of the arcade and across the gutter to the bustling Place d’Armes. Mid-morning in autumn, and all the world was out enjoying the mild sunshine. The carriages of the wealthy jostled axles with carts of cabbages. A tall old man walked past with a basket of pink roses on his head, and a beggar-woman at her ease on the cathedral steps, her hair a white aurora of chaos, slowly devoured an orange and spit the seeds in great joyful leaping arcs into the gutter. January remembered the rainy gray of Paris in the winter and wanted to fling out his arms and laugh.

  Whatever else could be said about it, New Orleans was New Orleans. There was no place like it in the world.

  “If it had been clear who’s doing the actual poisoning—making the actual voodoo-marks, cutting harnesses and sawing axles—Fourchet wouldn’t have come to you. This isn’t like coming into a tavern and seeing a weeping woman and a dead lover and a husband with a smoking pistol in his hand. With a hundred and fifty people involved it’s not even likely that I’m going to find just one, or two, unaccounted for at any given time.”

  Shaw’s eyebrows lifted. “I figured with slaves in the field you’d at least be able to keep track of where they was.”

  “That’s because you’ve never tried to do it.” There was wry pride in January’s voice. “That’s what scares the hell out of the whites, you know. Especially out on the plantations. You’ve got sixty, seventy, eighty grown men, fifty or sixty women—What are you going to do? Keep them in chains all the time? The drivers keep an eye on things and the overseer keeps an eye on things and you know damn well that if somebody wants to sneak away badly enough—if they don’t care about getting a beating if they get caught—they’ll sneak away. That’s what makes them crazy.

  “It’s a war,” he added softly. “Whether or not some of them plan organized rebellion, it’s war. And you have to fight for every inch, a hundred times a day. That’s why you have to look for a pattern.”

  “Waffle man, waffle man,” sang a strolling vendor. “Wash his face in the fryin’ pan …”

  January felt for his watch again. “I can work with the men, live among them enough to hear rumors, at least so that I can find out who was where when. If there is a conspiracy, a revolt being planned, I think it’ll be pretty clear. But if it’s just one man, I’m not sure I’ll find our killer—almost certainly not before he kills Fourchet. So I need to know the pattern. Why is this happening now? Why not last month or last year? What made the bearable unbearable? That’s why you told Fourchet to speak to me, wasn’t it?”

  Shaw spit in the general direction of the gutter. His aim, as usual, was abysmal. “That’s why.”

  Beyond the levee, the smokestacks of the steamboats poured sullen columns of soot into the dirty sky. At this season they lined the wharves three and four deep, and more tacked around out in the open river, keeping up their head of steam and their boiler-pumps working while waiting for a berth. January felt for his watch yet again, muttered an oath, and looked back over his shoulder at the watchroom clock, then turned back to scan the faces of the crowd.

  “Boat ain’t due to leave til ten,” Shaw remarked, as if he weren’t following January’s thoughts. “And you know as well as I do they never do.”

  “Wherever he is,” January responded gloomily, “I’m going to strangle Hannibal Sefton.”

  Fourchet’s voice, braying out curses, caught his attention. Looking across the crowd to the levee, January saw the man on the deck of the small stern-wheeler on which January himself and his friend Hannibal Sefton had purchased tickets last night. One of the porters had dropped his valise; the boat’s master lashed out with the whip he still held and caught the man a cut across the back. After the brutality he’d witnessed yesterday January had raised an objection to traveling on the Belle Dame, but Fourchet would have nothing to do with American boats, and Captain Ney was the only Creole master in town at the moment.

  Fourchet’s two servants hastily took up the luggage and carried it to the cargo hold. The taller servant took the bags inside. The shorter, given a moment’s leisure, turned at the deck railing and gazed back across the square at the cathedral, like a man drinking in the sight.

  Something in the way he stood made January remember the field hands yesterday evening on the Bonnets o’ Blue.

  Of course he thought. Fourchet’s butler had just been poisoned. In addition to finding a spy, Fourchet had come into town to look for a new butler.

  Fourchet yelled, “Baptiste, damn you!” His voice carried like a crow’s caw through the din. The new servant fled after his companion.

  January’s hand curled into a fist.

  “You familiar with Mon Triomphe, Maestro?” Shaw asked. “Ever been there?”

  January shook his head. “I was only seven when St.-Denis Janvier bought my mother. I’d never been off Bellefleur. Mon Triomphe was very isolated in those days, but of course now the whole of the riverbank on both sides is in sugar as far as Baton Rouge.”

  “Well, I got to jawin’ some last night with this an’ that pilot, after Mr. Fourchet told me as how you’d agreed to go.” Shaw spit again toward the cypress-lined gutter that divided the arcade from the open Place; the brown wad of expectorant missed its target by feet. “It did kinda float through my mind as how we’s askin’ a lot of you, to go up there pretendin’ as how you’re a slave, and the only ones knowin’ you’re not is your pal Sefton and Fourchet himself. Now, we know somebody’s out to kill Fourchet. And much as I like Sefton you do got to admit reliable ain’t the word that springs most skeedaciously to mind when his name is mentioned. So I tell you what.”

  He pointed across the square, to a woman selling bandannas among the fruit stands that clustered beneath the trees. The bright-colored wares were tacked to a crosspole and fluttered like some kind of exotic tree themselves.

  “You go buy yourself seven bandannas: red, yellow, blue, green, purple, black, an’ white. Accordin’ to the pilots, see, the riverbank at the north end of the plantation caved in ’bout three years ago, openin’ a chute between it an’ Catbird Point. Catbird Island, they calls it now. That changed the current, an’ built up a bar just above the plantation landin’—blamed if that river ain’t like a housewife with new furniture, always movin’ things around. When Fourchet cleared an’ cut for a new landin’ they left an oak tree on the bank above it, that’s big enough that the pilots all sight by it comin’ down that stretch of the river.”

  A woman darted through the levee crowds, a flash of cheap bright calicos between stacks of orange pumpkins and dusty cotton bales, skirts gathered up in her hands. On the deck of the Belle Dame Fourchet’s new butler pushed his way between the laden porters to the gangway, to seize the woman’s hands, to kiss her with a fervent desperation that told its own tale. She was a tall woman, plump and awkward in her ill-fitting simple dress, and as they clung to one a
nother her face bent down to his.

  “You be like that old Greek fella,” Shaw said, “that was supposed to change the sail of his boat from black to white if’n the news he brung was good. You tie a different bandanna to that oak tree every day, just in the order I said ’em. Red, yellow, blue, green, purple, black, an’ white, white bein’ for Sunday so’s you can remember.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve convinced riverboat pilots to remember the order as well.” Anger twisted again in January’s heart as he watched the couple on the gangway. There was nothing he could do about their pain; Shaw’s calm arrangements and placid voice grated at him. “I never met a pilot who could take his mind off the river long enough to remember what color necktie he has on.”

  “Pilots, hell,” said Shaw. “They just told me the tree was there. I paid off the stokers on the Lancaster, that makes the Baton Rouge run, and the Missourian and the New Brunswick, that’ll be bound on back from St. Louis a week or ten days from now, and cabin stewards on the Vermillion, the Boonslick, and the Belle Dame, to come here and tell me what color the bandanna is and what day they seen it. It ain’t much, Maestro,” he added apologetically. “But at least it’ll let me know yore still there.”

  January felt sudden shame at his anger: Shaw was doing what he could to keep him safe. In last night’s dreams of childhood he’d been hiding in the barn at Bellefleur, and a monster was after him: a monster that shouted in a hoarse drunken voice, a reeling shadow with a whip in his hand. Come out, you little bastard. Come out or I’ll sell you down the river.

  He’d waked in freezing sweat, as similar dreams had waked him, many nights across the years.

  On the gangway the butler and the woman clung together, not speaking. It was the threat every master held over the head of every slave, up and down the eastern coast of the American states and in the new cotton lands of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. I’ll sell you down the river. To the cane plantations of Louisiana.

  To Hell.

  It occurred to him as he crossed the square toward the bandanna woman that his mother had sold him down the river by the act of giving him birth.

  To hell with Fourchet, he thought. To hell with Olympe, and Mother, and these god-rotted colored kerchiefs and wondering if I’m going to be found as a spy and beaten to death by the other slaves, or poisoned, or kidnapped and sold—or just break the hands that are my livelihood and my joy.

  His fingers trembled with anger as he counted out fourteen cents into the woman’s palm. Stowed seven bright squares of cloth in his jacket pockets.

  Let Fourchet die and rot, Olympe had said to him last night, as he and she had walked from the market back to their mother’s house, to tell her of his change of mind. You’re doing this to save every man and woman on the place who didn’t try to kill him.

  So he crossed the square to the arcade again, to the thin lanky figure awaiting him in the shadows. Though it was probably impossible over the competing din of the waffle man, the fruit vendors, the stevedores singing a chant as they loaded up the clay jars of olive oil that plantations bought in such quantities, and a German sailor having a shouting match with a woman in blue hair-ribbons, January imagined he could still hear Fourchet’s voice, like a carrion-bird’s as he rasped out instructions on the hurricane deck to the red-coated, hard-faced master of the Belle Dame.

  Rose was right about one thing, January thought. With Fourchet’s money he would find somewhere else to live. Then he would never be in a position like this again.

  Who am I fooling? As long as I’m her son she’ll feel she has the right to ask of me what she will.

  “A captain bold in Halifax,

  Who dwelt in country quarters,

  Seduced a maid who hanged herself

  One Monday in her garters …”

  January winced at the light, hoarse voice scraping over the English ballad, slurred and stammering and yet perfectly true.

  Shaw muttered, “Oh, Lordy.”

  Hannibal Sefton was making his way along the arcade in front of the Cabildo to its doors. He did this with great care, caroming off the square brick pillars, one hand outstretched to catch himself against the building’s plastered wall, then retrieving his balance only to loop away toward the pillars again. The portmanteau he carried—his violin case strapped to its side—nearly overbalanced him. One of the chained prisoners engaged in cleaning out the gutter caught the fiddler by the arm and rescued the luggage moments before it went into the brimming muck. Hannibal bowed profoundly.

  “Bene facis, famulo probo.” The fiddler removed his hat and placed it over his heart, then spoiled the effect by coughing desperately. The prisoner supported him, apparently not much put out at the thin ragged form of the white man clinging to his filthy sleeve. “Medio tutissimus ibis.” Hannibal gestured grandly back at the arcade, took one step in the direction of Shaw and January standing in the doorway, then collapsed in a laudanum-smelling heap.

  Across the Place d’Armes the Belle Dame’s whistle brayed. Above the square, the cathedral’s clock spoke its ten slow chimes.

  “Good luck,” said Shaw, without irony, and shook January’s hand.

  January glanced from the unconscious Hannibal across to Fourchet, bellowing down at his new butler, and his stomach tightened. He shoved the last folded bandanna into his pocket, pulled on his gloves, and went to hoist Hannibal bodily to one shoulder, as if he were a sack of meal. Bending his knees he picked up the portmanteau—his own, in fact, for whatever luggage the consumptive Hannibal had once possessed had been sold years ago to purchase opium or medicine—and, thus burdened, crossed the square to the gangplank. A number of the gentlemen on the canopied hurricane-deck pointed at January and laughed, assuming not unreasonably that this was his assigned job in life: to carry his master’s luggage and, when necessary, his master. But glancing up he saw Fourchet gazing down at him with contempt in his eyes.

  THREE

  It was long past dark when they reached Mon Triomphe, and January would have given much—if not quite everything he possessed—to go back to yesterday afternoon and refuse to undertake the journey. Last night’s dream returned to him again and again: the staggering shadow that stank of liquor, the sweat of terror at the sound of the whip. Always before he’d waked from this dream to reassure himself, It can’t happen to me now. I’m free.

  He’d installed Hannibal in his bunk in the men’s cabin, drawn the curtain, and gone out in quest of the galley, praying that when the fiddler came to he’d be in possession of enough of his senses to recall the story they’d concocted the night before.

  The Belle Dame, like many of the newer boats on the river, was long and narrow. The galley, situated between the men’s cabin and the women’s, was barely more than a hall. The saloon up front, which doubled as a dining room, was like the lobby of a modest hotel: worn Turkey carpets on the floor, tables of dark oak, men playing short whist or vingt-et-un. By the murmuring voices, January gathered there were few Americans on board. Thank God for small favors, anyway, he thought. The last thing he needed in his current frame of mind was to have his fellow passengers bidding on him all afternoon.

  “Will you need help with him?” Fourchet’s new butler was already in the galley, fitting out a tray to take around to one of the vessel’s two minuscule staterooms. His neatly gloved hands trembled as he arranged the simple china cup and saucer, the small coffeepot and dish of sugar lumps, the napkin and spoon and the plate of buttered pastries; the flesh around his eyes was swollen with tears. Where had she gone, that tall plump woman in her bright dress, after the boat was poled and pushed from the wharf? How would she get through the remainder of her day?

  “Thank you, sir, no.” January remembered to slur his words and drop the endings, like the field hands did, a mode of speech that had been thrashed out of him by his teachers when he was eight. He had a clear mental picture of the man he was supposed to be, a field hand taken from the quarters and put in charge of the feckless scion of a wealthy family,
simply because he was big and loyal and not terribly bright. The kind of slave it would be natural to offer to one’s host to help with the harvest, and the kind of man who would accept the change of status without fuss.

  “Least I knows where his medicine is,” he added, and accepted the coffeepot, the cup and saucer, the horn spoon that the Belle Dame’s cook gave him, and set them on the tray carelessly, any old how, as he’d seen scullery maids do in the big Paris households where he’d played at balls or taught piano to children.

  And like the upper cooks in those Parisian kitchens, the butler Baptiste corrected and tidied the layout, though unlike the French cooks he asked politely, “May I?” and then, “This your regular job, sir?”

  January threw a note of helplessness into his voice. “No, sir. Abraham—that’s Michie Georges’s cook—does trays and such mostly.” And let’s remember, he told himself grimly, that Michie Georges is Hannibal’s imaginary wealthy father-in-law and Abraham’s the cook, next time you have to produce names of the household you come from.

  “Line up the spoon with the side of the tray like this.” The round, neat little hands made their adjustments without impatience or condescension. “Bowl goes down, not up, so everyone can see the monogram if there is one. Cup right in the center, pot here. They like things to look nice.”

  “They blessed well better look nice for Michie Fourchet.” The doorway darkened with the tall slim form of Fourchet’s valet. The man’s livery was foppishly neat, dark cravat tied in a severe little bow and thin black curls pomaded smooth. The valet ran a critical eye over both trays and nodded, just a tiny motion, to himself, as if sorry there was nothing to correct.” Any little thing sets him off: forks and knives not aligned, one curtain shut an inch more than the other. Anything. He beat your predecessor unconscious once for having dirty sleeves, when he’d told him himself to dust the ledgers in his office. So keep your buttons polished and your linen spotless.”