Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  “I was endeavoring, sir, to—” Robert broke off as a tall shape appeared against the luminous rectangle of what January knew—since nearly all Creole plantation houses were built on the same plan—to be the bedroom of the lady of the house. He had an impression of pale hair pulled tight into an unfashionable knot at her nape. Of a small white hand resting protectively over a belly swollen with child. Then she passed into the shadow of the gallery as she descended the steps six feet to ground level, and stepped out into the torchlight once more as January sprang from the back of the carriage.

  “M’sieu Fourchet,” she greeted her husband in a gruff shy voice.

  Madame.” He bowed over her hand.

  Over his bent head, his wife’s gaze crossed Robert’s, questioning and uneasy, and held for a moment before it fled away.

  A servant with a branch of candles had come out behind Madame Fourchet, slim and boyish and, like Cornwallis, pin-neat; only when he came closer to take in his free hand the torch January held did January see the wrinkles around eyes and lips that marked him as a man in his forties. Like Cornwallis, the servant wore a small slip of black mustache, and like Cornwallis he was light-skinned, quadroon or octoroon, with some white forebear’s blue-gray eyes.

  January lifted Hannibal gently from the carriage as Fourchet made introductions and produced again the story of investments averted and money saved. “Welcome to Mon Triomphe, M’sieu Sefton,” said Madame, in the hesitant voice of one who has never been sure of her position, and Hannibal extended his hand.

  “How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter,” he quoted, and kissed the lace-mitted knuckles. “Forgive me my trifling infirmity. Tomorrow I will prostrate myself to the ground as befits a kind hostess and a lovely woman.”

  She pulled her hand from his and muttered, “Thank you. It’s nothing,” and hurried before them up the steps. “Agamemnon, stay and help the men in with the luggage.” In the multiple luminance of torch and candles January saw the speculative glance Robert darted from Hannibal to his stepmother, and the burning, bitter glare directed at the fiddler by Fourchet, an undisguised anger that made January’s chest clench inside with reactive fear.

  The overseer Thierry touched his hat brim and made off in the direction of the mill, his duty to his employer accomplished. He moved, not with a swagger, but with a sidelong swiftness, watching everything around him.

  Fourchet led them into the house through his own bedroom, meeting his wife once more in the parlor. This room was small compared to a town house’s, as in most Creole plantation houses: sparsely furnished, neat and plain. Over a mantelpiece of cypresswood painted to resemble marble hung the portrait of a young woman clad in the caraco jacket popular in the nineties. A square-faced, dark-eyed boy clung frantically to her striped skirts; a baby in a white christening gown perched on her knee. Next to the mantel a miniature of the same woman was framed in the glittering jet circlet of an immortelle wreath.

  Through the parlor’s inner sliding doors a child could be heard piping angrily, “But I want to see! Henna says there’s company and they may have something for me!”

  A hushed female voice interposed, cut off furiously. “I want to see! I want to see! I’ll have you whipped if you don’t let me see!” and a second, younger child screamed, “Me, too! Me, too!”

  By the rather fixed smile that widened onto the face of the other woman who waited for them in the parlor—dark-haired, ripely pretty, and clothed in a gown of figured lilac muslin with gauze bows and enormous “imbecile” sleeves—January guessed that this was the children’s mother. “Pardon me,” said Robert hastily. He stepped through the sliding doors, closing them behind him.

  “M’sieu Sefton,” introduced Madame. “My daughter-in-law, Madame Hélène Fourchet.”

  “If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

  And with fresh numbers, number all your graces,

  The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies;

  Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’ ”

  Hannibal’s lips brushed her hand, and Hélène Fourchet tapped his cheek playfully with her fan.

  “Oh, I just adore poetry! Is it Lord Byron? I am most passionately devoted to ‘The Corsair.’ And ‘The Bride of Abydos,’ of course. Such a thrill goes through my heart …”

  “English pap,” snapped Fourchet. “Will you shut those brats of yours up?” For the noise in the next room continued unabated, despite whatever efforts the children’s father was putting up.

  “Do I understand from what you said in the carriage that you’re behind in your harvest?” Hannibal turned to Fourchet and coughed again, with every evidence of great agony valiantly concealed. “I beg that you will let me repay a little of your kindness by lending you Ben here while I’m laid by the heels. You don’t mind a day or two in the fields, do you, Ben?”

  “To help the good folks who take you in when you’re sick?” January did his best to sound like a character in a Chateaubriand novel. “Why, Michie Hannibal, I worked the cotton-fields before this. Won’t do me no harm to cut sugar for a while.”

  “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

  “M’sieu Sefton, no,” protested the young Madame. In the warm amber dimness of the parlor she didn’t look much over sixteen, a big-boned, flat-chested girl with a plain triangular face and the sandy coloring that makes a woman appear lashless and washed-out. “Our hospitality—”

  “Don’t be an ass,” snapped Fourchet, and looked January up and down with the same coldness that had been in Esteban’s eyes when he’d surveyed Baptiste. “We lost Reuben and it’ll be days before Boaz is over his fever. Thank you, sir.” He spoke to Hannibal as if the words were being extracted from him with forceps. “I appreciate it. Cornwallis!” He raised his voice like the thwack of a board striking pavement.

  The valet, who had evidently finished bestowing the luggage in his master’s chamber and the guest room, stepped through the parlor’s inner doors.

  “Take Ben here out to the quarters and find him a place to stay for a night or two. Tell Thierry he’s to be put to work while he’s here. And get that Baptiste in here, so Madame Fourchet can teach him his duties.”

  It was close to nine already, but if the young Madame Fourchet would sooner have had a night’s sleep before inducting a complete stranger to a complex set of responsibilities and tasks, she knew better than to say so. Robert, stepping back through the parlor doors in time to hear this, began to protest, “Sir, it’s quite late for her to be—”

  Shut up.” Fourchet lashed the words at him. “Better tonight than she waste half the day tomorrow when he could be of some use. We need to get this place back into order. Cornwallis, take Monsieur Sefton here to the garçonnière. Good night to you, sir. Esteban …” With a peremptory wave at his elder son, Fourchet stalked through the door that led into his bedroom and thence, probably, to his office behind it. Esteban followed, and closed the door with the care of one who fears that a sound will bring the house crashing about everyone’s ears.

  “I do apologize, Madame.” Robert hastened to his stepmother’s side as the young Madame led the way through the dining room—cypresswood table, the gleam of glass and flowers in the uplifted shudder of Cornwallis’s branch of candles—and she gave her head a quick little shake and hastened her step. “I beg you to forgive my father, and apologize on his behalf.”

  “Really—” Madame Hélène’s strident voice floated behind them, “Robert, you might at least have the goodness to—”

  The closing door cut her off.

  It was a peculiarity of Creole households that the young men of the family, from the age of thirteen or so, were given quarters separate from the family. In town these usually consisted of a wing behind the main town house, or, in the case of the cottages wealthy men bought for their mistresses along Rue Rampart, Rue Burgundy, and the other small streets at the back of the old French town, a room or two above the kitchen, lest a white man find himself slee
ping under the same roof as a young man—however nearly related to him—of color. On plantations the garçonnière was usually a separate building connected to the main house by the galleries that surrounded the whole, forming a U that drew the cooling river breezes through. In the case of Mon Triomphe, it was one wing on the downstream, or men’s, side of the house. The corresponding wing on the upstream side was, mercifully, given over to nurseries.

  “I’ll clear this away.” Robert followed Madame Fourchet into the second of the garçonnière’s two rooms ahead of January and gathered, from the small desk there, a quantity of Parisian journals and newspapers, stationery, wafers, and ink. “I use this room as a study when we’re here. And indeed, M’sieu Sefton,” he added, setting down the books he’d begun to pick up, “you’re quite welcome to peruse any of my library. I rather pride myself on it.”

  He nervously stroked the neat Vandyke that framed red lips whose pliant poutiness spoke of what his mother must have looked like. “I’ve been collecting scientific volumes since I was quite a little boy. By the time I was six, I and a friend had made a little steam engine and fitted it to one of the pirogues we had here. A boy’s toy merely, but it worked. My mother always said …”

  Through the French doors, the petulant shrieks of the children floated across the open piazza between the arms of the house.

  “Thank you,” Hannibal murmured, as January laid him on the tall half-tester bed. Either Cornwallis or Agamemnon had already been in and unpacked the portmanteau and placed Hannibal’s violin carefully on the bureau. Four of Hannibal’s half-dozen bottles of opium were arranged tidily beside it.

  Robert turned again to his stepmother. “I do apologize for my father. He was drunk, to have spoken to you thus—”

  He was not drunk.” Madame Fourchet’s voice was low and stammering, like an ill-at-ease boy’s.

  “And I suppose that sober—” began Robert, and stopped himself. Turning back to Hannibal, he finished, “Whatever the case, I do apologize, and bid you welcome to Mon Triomphe. Should you require anything, M’sieu, please feel free to ask any of the servants. And thank you again for the loan of your boy. His help will be invaluable in getting the cane in.”

  “I’ll just get him settled, if you don’t mind, M’am,” said January diffidently, and Madame Fourchet inclined her head.

  Cornwallis lit the candles on the bureau from those on the girandole he bore, then led Robert and Madame out onto the gallery again. “Go on ahead and find Baptiste,” January heard Robert say, as they closed the doors. Then, voice low but still audible, “You can’t let him talk to you like that, Marie-Noël.” The candlelight had departed, and they would be standing, January guessed, in the velvet shadows of the gallery, away from the leaked glow of Fourchet’s office window. “He treats you like a servant. Like a dog.”

  If the young woman replied she did so in a voice too low for January to hear. But he guessed that she only stood with her head bowed and turned a little away. Lips folded close, as they had been when her husband’s voice had cut at her before strangers and servants. Pale-lashed eyelids lowered. Heretofore Robert—whose French was irreproachably Parisian—had addressed her with the formal vous of a man speaking to his father’s wife. Now he called her tu, as one would speak to a sister or a friend.

  “I’ve been beneath this roof with you for a few days only, my child, but already I see how it is for you here. It fills me with rage to see him treat you so.”

  “I have lived with worse.” January had to strain to hear, but could not go closer because the candlelight in the garçonnière would show him up through the French door’s glass panes. “Your father isn’t so bad as you think.” She said, Vôtre père, speaking as to a stranger.

  Then he heard her footfalls retreat along the gallery. Robert stood where he was for a long time, while Madame Hélène’s voice rose from the women’s side of the house: “I realize that you’re now the mistress here, Madame, but it has always been the custom of this house to offer a visitor tea and sweet cakes. I was most mortified when you whisked M’sieu Sefton away as you did without so much as a sociable word. Of course I’m sure you had your reasons …” And in the nursery wing the older child screamed over and over, “I’ll have you whipped! I’ll have you whipped! I’ll tell Grandpère and he’ll sell you down the river!”

  “Ben, this is Mohammed.” Cornwallis held up his branch of candles and with his free hand gestured to the spare gray-haired man who stood beside him. January, coming down the back gallery steps with the usual slave’s luggage of a clean shirt and shaving things done up in a bandanna, had to remind himself forcibly that a youth of twenty will look pretty much the same when he’s fifty-three; a boy of seven will be unrecognizable. Besides, why would Mohammed remember one child from the Bellefleur hogmeat gang?

  “He’ll get you settled.” Evidently Cornwallis was not a man to sully his dignity by association with field hands. The valet turned without another word and strode back toward the house, the lights of his candles blurring to golden willy-wisp in the fog.

  “You eaten?” Mohammed looked up at him, bright dark eyes as January remembered. The image of the young man he’d carried all those years settled in against the gentle erosion of sunken flesh, wrinkled skin, missing teeth; long years lived in hell while January had eaten good food, learned surgery and music, earned his bread in Paris and New Orleans, and married the woman he loved.

  “Yessir. On the Belle Dame they had pone and greens.”

  “Michie Ney’s boat.” The flex in the older man’s voice made January wonder whether he’d at some time had a run-in with that arrogant captain in the scarlet coat. “If you care to stay up a little there’ll be some food at Ajax’s—Ajax the driver,” Mohammed added. “If you’re tired I’ll take you on to the cabin—I thought I’d put you in with the bachelors, Gosport, Quashie, Parson, and Kadar—and you can sleep if you want. But they’re havin’ a shout for Reuben, that was sugar-boss here. He died yesterday. Would you care to come?”

  “I’ll come, thanks,” said January.

  “What happened?” he asked, as they passed the dark still shapes of the kitchen and laundry, and the ground grew rough and weedy underfoot. Mohammed, who was dressed in a coarse clean calico shirt, wool trousers, and the “quantier” shoes of a yard hand, doused his pine-knot torch in the rain barrel behind one of the plantation workshops—carpentry, pottery, cobbler, cooper—and picked up another stick of pitch-smeared wood from the little stack nearby, to use later if needed. The mill rose ahead of them, fire-lit and seething with life, but January’s guide led him around behind a stable and a barn, and past the long sheds where the wood was stored, and so into the dense whispery forest of the cane.

  “You got to understand, it started in the dark of the moon.” Mohammed’s voice came soft out of the pitchy blackness as they trod the narrow rough cart-path between the cane-rows. “And the moon’s dark is the time when ill will lies strongest on the land.” Mohammed was, January remembered, a storyteller, a griot. His earliest recollections of the man were of a young animated face transforming itself from expression to expression, of a quick-frailed banjo and a voice that skipped effortlessly from Compair Lapin’s cocky tenor to Bouki Hyena’s deep, self-pitying drawl.

  “There was a hoodoo marked the mill in anger, and the mill caught fire in the dark of the moon. Reuben was the man put the fire out before it could spread. He was a most careful man, unless he’d been drinking. He thought a lot of himself and was prideful and strong, careful even about where and how he drank lest any should carry back tales to Michie Fourchet. He said he’d checked over the grinders, and the gears beneath them, and the sweeps down below them in the roundhouse where the mules walk. He brought me in to see if the iron had been hurt, and I found no damage. But we did find marks.”

  January had nearly forgotten how completely the eight-foot walls of the cane shut out air, sound, light, reducing everything to dense narrow slots of rustling gloom. What little moonlight struggled
between the razor-edged leaves showed Mohammed’s breath, and his own. It was only the walls themselves, and the puddled ditches at the walls’ feet, that guided them on toward the woods.

  The house, and the mill, and the kitchen and barns and shops—those were the white man’s kingdom. Squared and neat, comely as January had been taught to understand beauty. A world where Mozart and Shakespeare had lived, where the surgeons of the Hôtel Dieu had taught him how to set bone and relieve suffering.

  But beyond that small neat realm lay the cane. And beyond the cane, the woods, the ciprière. That world was measured differently. It was a network of interlacing paths, which led to places identified only by the presence of certain trees or certain water: old Michie Lays-Along-the-Ground, they’d called a big oak in the ciprière behind Bellefleur plantation where the slaves had met for dancing in January’s childhood, or the Big Slough where the men had sneaked away from their work to catch fish and swim. It was a world of inference and small signs, a world where snakes could be made to talk if you addressed them right and eyes you couldn’t see watched you from the shadows. It was a world where les blankittes didn’t often come.

  This was the world toward which Mohammed led him, and as they walked, January was aware, over the murmuring of the cane, of the mutter of other voices, the soft stealthy passage of other shadows on this narrow track.

  “Now Reuben was an angry man,” the griot went on. “He thought that every morning when Allah woke up His first thought was, How can I make this day harder for Reuben? And that He set about it before He even had breakfast. Reuben knew all about the marks. But Reuben had his reason for wantin’ to stay on Michie Fourchet’s good side. If he worked fast and saved the whole of the roulaison, he knew he could get Michie Fourchet to give him back a woman he wanted, a proud strong woman Michie Fourchet had took away from him and give to the butler Gilles. So Reuben checked the mill once, and didn’t call up Mambo Hera to come from Daubray, or Mambo Cassie from Prideaux, or even Jeanette here that was daughter of old Mambo Jeanne. He didn’t put store in marks. But he forgot how marks sometimes have a way of puttin’ store in you.”