Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  Missed—he realized now—the person he was when he played, and the calm thoughtfulness of living without fear.

  “And was the company of this charming nursemaid worth carrying twenty-five pounds of pig meat five miles on foot in the middle of the night?

  “Oh, yes,” said January slowly. “Though I’d be very surprised if Zuzu turned out to be the hoodoo. What was even more valuable was Harry’s gossip on the way down to Voussaire and back: where people were on the nights of the two fires; why Reuben chose Trinette to replace Kiki when Kiki was given to Gilles; any number of things about the Fourchet family that are none of my business …”

  “And you’re about to learn another,” remarked Hannibal. “Are you aware that Esteban’s a boy-lover?”

  January paused in the demolition of a fifth muffin, startled, then nodded, as pieces fell into place in his mind. The awkward man’s unmarried state, still at the age of forty-plus living in the garçonnière. The sour flex of Simon Fourchet’s mouth when he’d ordered his eldest son not to waste time in town, and Esteban’s stifled reply. The smooth pomaded prettiness of the valet Agamemnon. “It doesn’t surprise me. Who told you?”

  “The long-eared and loquacious Leander,” replied Hannibal. “And a few days’ observation of the man and his valet together. There was a row last night when Madame Hélène happened to mention to her father-in-law that when Esteban was in New Orleans to purchase the new grinder—and to meet the homecoming Robert and his family—Esteban visited a gentleman of the town named Claude Molineaux, according to Leander a dear friend of long standing. Fourchet had ordered Esteban some time ago to sever the relationship, which I gather dated back to the era when the family lived on Bellefleur. As usual when those whose lives he’s planned refuse to go along with the program, Fourchet was furious. The word will was apparently uttered, and that deadly phrase, Continue the family.”

  He coughed, his educated French and small, delicate hands a reminder, like a reproach, of the family duties Hannibal himself had long abandoned, whatever they had been.

  “So tell me what it was you learned from the lovely Mamzelle Zuzu.”

  “Not much,” said January. “But while I was there one of her children misbehaved in a way that set me thinking, and when I came back here, instead of going to sleep like a sensible person I took a torch and searched through the trash piles on the downstream side of the mill, near the windows of the roundhouse where the mules walk. And I found this.”

  He held up a billet of maiden cane, a pale brown segmented stalk about thirty inches long. Putting it to his lips he blew at Hannibal’s face, and the fiddler blinked at the stream of air.

  “It’s large for a child’s, remarked Hannibal, immediately grasping the thing about it that January had first noted. He held out his thin hand. “I manufactured similar implements of destruction back at our place in County Mayo, of course. The favored missiles were dried peas from the kitchen, but our gamekeeper’s son used squirrel-shot and could down a bird at thirty feet. He cut them long, too. This one’s like a Kentucky rifle.”

  “Well, Aunt Zuzu’s son Tom used thorns—darts. Like these.” From his pocket January produced the rag-wrapped scraps and fragments he’d collected from the floor of the kitchen at Refuge, and picked forth the two long splinters of cane. They were of a size to fit neatly into the cane blowpipe: Blowing with all his force, he drove one of them into the opposite wall so deeply that Hannibal had to work it loose.

  “Arma virumque cano,” murmured the fiddler, coming back to the bed with the missile.

  “And by the arms you may know the man,” said January somberly. “Or at least take a good guess at him.”

  “I’m surprised you found this at all.” Hannibal perched on the bed, turning the blowpipe over in his hands. “It looks exactly like the rest of the cane-trash to me.”

  “Except that it’s maiden cane, not sugar cane,” said January. “It grows in the fields but nobody harvests it—hence the name. Sometimes it gets into the bundles, if it’s growing too close with the sugar, but in that case the ends would have been cut on the diagonal, where a man cuts down with a knife, or upwards to top the bundle. You see both ends of this were severed straight across—it’s shorter than cane so it wouldn’t have been topped at all. Aunt Zuzu said her son had spooked Michie Voussaire’s carriage team with a dart.”

  “Hmm.” Hannibal dropped a little bolus of muffin crumbs into the reed and puffed it at the bureau mirror; his damaged lungs barely generated the force to clear the long barrel, and afterward he coughed. “And considering the mule harness had been tampered with—and believe me, if I had to work all day with red pepper and turpentine rubbing my arse I’d be ready to bolt—” He twirled the stalk idly. “Could a white man remain unseen long enough to watch for when the rollers stuck?”

  “If he wore rough clothes and a hat, maybe. If no one saw him close. There are some field hands who’re fairly light-skinned, but not many. It’s just possible, but only just. The cane stands within a few yards of the downstream wall of the mill, and with a spyglass you could probably watch through the door to see when the rollers jammed. By the same token, the mule barn stands just beyond the mill. You can reach it in moments from the cane, going around the backside of the mill between it and the quarters. It wouldn’t be difficult on a foggy evening, when everyone’s in the ciprière or the fields.”

  “And the mule barn is where all the damage to the harness occurred. Shall I keep this?”

  “If you would. And if you would,” added January, as the fiddler rose and went to secrete the pipe—and January’s little bundle of leaf fragments and darts—in the rear fastnesses of the armoire, “do you think you could contrive to send me with a message to a fictitious relative in New River? I’d like to stop by the Daubray kitchen and ascertain first, whether Hippolyte Daubray actually did pursue False River Jones five miles down the river on the night the mill caught fire, and second, if Harry, or any other of Fourchet’s servants, has any kind of close connection with the Daubrays.”

  “Consider it done.” Hannibal settled himself at the desk, trimmed up a quill, and began to write in the looping, beautiful Italianate hand so different from a Frenchman’s upright and rather pinched script. “Inceptis gravibus plerumque et magna professis/Purpureus, late qui splendeat, unus et alter/Adsuitur pannus.… Curse,” he added, fishing around in the drawer. “No wafers for our Robert. Such a SHOPGIRL embellishment for a work of literature.” He mimed the dandy’s finicking horror at the idea of those newfangled, brightly hued lozenges of flour and gum, and started to rise to get a spill from the embers of the fire.

  “I think it might be best,” said January, bending down to touch a fragment of kindling to the flame and carrying it back to the desk, shielded in his hand, “if you were to feel well enough to go back to town for a day. Or so ill you felt in need of a trusted family doctor.”

  He lit the candle on the desk and watched as Hannibal melted the sealing wax, touching drops neatly to the inside of the folded sheet, then pressing it down and adding several more drops on the edge and the in-turned ends. Wind whistling through the French doors on both sides of the room made the flame lean and flicker. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to learn about M’sieu Claude, and about whether Fourchet expressed his disapproval of his son’s choice of friends in his will.”

  “I’ll speak to Fourchet about putting out a flag on the landing in the morning.” Hannibal blew gently on the wax to harden it, and superscribed the letter to J. Capulet, Verona Plantation, New River, Ascension Parish. “Will you stay for a nap, or is M’sieu Ajax likely to flog you for being late back to your office?”

  January stepped to the French doors on the downstream side of the room that looked across the gallery toward Thierry’s house and the cane beyond. The sun stood high above the oaks. “Since your note didn’t specify how long you needed me for, I think I can push it another hour or so.” It was a seven-foot drop to the ground from the gallery on that side; he cros
sed the room to the door looking into the piazza, mentally gauging whether Kiki would be preoccupied with getting the rice cart loaded up and preparing the noon dinner for the big house. “I’ll be back … Damn,” he added, as Cornwallis appeared from the dining room and strode out onto the gallery.

  “Well, you’re the one who’s always going on about how he’s practically a member of the family,” Fourchet’s valet was saying to Agamemnon. “Surely you’d be able to keep track of a small thing like that.”

  The smaller man, in his neat black suit and dandified cravat, was nearly spitting with rage. “There is a difference,” he said, “between keeping a master’s things in good order, which some people in this household don’t seem to be able to do, and knowing every receiver of stolen goods along the river.…”

  “For God’s sake, can’t you quarrel someplace else?” January muttered. “If anyone asks,” he added, over his shoulder to Hannibal, “come up with a really pressing reason why you’re sending me over to Catbird Island for half an hour or so.”

  “Catbird Island?” Hannibal looked baffled. “There’s nothing over there. Why would any man send his valet to an empty hunk of mud like that?”

  “You heard False River Jones was camped there and might have a message for you from a beautiful widow on the other side of the river.” January leaned on the doorjamb, angling his eye to the slats of the jalousie. “Get off the gallery, you lazy heretic,” he added.” Don’t you have any work to do at this time of the morning?”

  “Why wouldn’t this lovely lady just have written me?”

  “Her sons,” provided January, inventing freely. “They aren’t eager for their mother to bring in an unknown stepfather, lest the fruits of that new union diminish their own inheritance. So she sends a winged messenger across the Father of the Waters.… Thank God, Cornwallis has gone in. Ring that bell Kiki gave you if he comes out again before I’m under the house. I’ll be back here to take that nap before I return to the fields.”

  ELEVEN

  There were two sorts of islands in the Mississippi River: low ones, built up from sand or gravel bars in the channel as they accumulated silt and towheads brought down by the river’s rise; and high ones, carved off the bank when in heavy storms the river cut new channels behind points of land. Catbird Island was of the latter type. Though the water in the chute was low now, it was very strong, and January felt the pull of it as he waded breast-deep through the muddy flood. Were the river only a little higher a skillful pilot could probably take a small boat like the Belle Dame inside the island, between it and the bank, avoiding the massive current mid-river. Personally, January wouldn’t have wanted to be on the boat.

  Clearly the pilot of the Lancaster wasn’t so sanguine about his skill; the long side-wheeler was just negotiating the bars on the outside of the island as January came around the little cove on the downstream side. He stayed in cover behind the inevitable snarl of snags that built up at the tops and bottoms of islands where the current veered, wondering which stoker or striker or deckhand on that boat had been paid off to go to Shaw and say, “Wednesday? Yeah, we passed the point above Triomphe landing that day—that bandanna on the tree was blue.”

  All is well, King Aegeus. Thy son lives.

  Catbird Point had originally been triangular, but once it became an island the action of the current against its outer side had built up a little bar there, with a sheltered cove behind. The belt of weathered gray deadfalls protected it from the sharp chill of the wind, but January still shivered as he pulled his clothes back on. If Harry had been telling poor Baptiste the truth about False River Jones being in the neighborhood, this is where the trader would camp.

  The only thing January saw in the cove, however, as he emerged from the thickets of loblolly and cypress, was the scuffed dimple of an old campfire in the sand. Even before he reached it he could see it was weeks old, the earth tamped by subsequent rains. Presumably False River Jones had set up shop here on his last visit. But as January approached, he saw the fresh tracks of a woman’s feet, crossing the damp earth.

  She’d made no attempt to conceal them. Maybe her conscience was clear, or maybe she’d come here at night, her mind on other things. Her feet were narrow, her shoes the brogans that masters gave to slaves, newer than most but still patched, broken, and worn. The tracks led directly to the masses of snags along the island’s outer edge.

  Drawn up under them was a boat, a shallow-bottomed pirogue little larger than a canoe. After a few experimental pokes with a stick, January reached in and drew forth a red-and-blue blanket of the kind that had been found in the smithy, dirty and worn. Two cane-knives were wrapped in it, not broken ones but the new ones Esteban had bought in New Orleans. There was also a cooking pot containing a couple of gourd cups, a dozen partially burned candles—both tallow and wax—and a bandanna wrapped around flint, steel, and tow.

  January wrapped these things and replaced them. A few yards’ search in the woods yielded a bundle hung from a tree. This contained a loaf of bread, two apples, a piece of salt pork the size of his fist, and a slightly smaller chunk of cheese. The bread was a day old. The apples were Ashford russets from Madame Camille’s garden.

  Stealing a little at a time, he thought, wrapping the food and hanging it once again. Waiting for a cloudy night, or rain, to get away. He wondered where the boat had been acquired.

  But even if you had a boat, where would you go? Upstream, through Baton Rouge, Natchez, St. Louis? He shivered at the thought of trying to row a pirogue through those vermin-nests of river pirates and slave-stealers, day or night. Across the river, and so on foot through the western parishes and on into Mexico? You’d have to be a powerful oarsman to keep from being swept away in the big current.

  Or you could just go south to New Orleans, and hope to blend into the mangle of free colored and freedmen, and runaways that nobody bothered to look for. Get a laborer’s job with somebody who wasn’t going to ask. Try to get someone to forge papers for you. Maybe get a ship, to Philadelphia or New York.

  The sun stood directly overhead. He stripped again and waded the channel, dressed in the thickets of the batture, and climbed the steep clay bank, to stand with the cold steady wind flapping and pulling at his clothing, looking down over the dark green acres of cane in the heatless light. The cane-rows churned like the ocean before a storm, and in the distance he could see the men, like ants in long grass, and, antlike, the coming and going around the doorway of the mill. Around the side of the house the rice cart appeared, the boys of the hogmeat gang leading the oldest of the mules out along the cart track into the field. Though it had been in January’s mind to stop at the kitchen and speak to Kiki, he knew it was time and past time to return to work.

  Quashie and Jeanette, at a guess. She’d have access to the knives. But as he descended the levee and walked toward the fields, he reflected that it might just as easily be someone else, someone who had another reason entirely to be arranging flight at a moment’s notice.

  Someone had lain in wait, thought January, making his circuitous way among the mule paddocks and sheds toward the kitchen after dinner. Had watched for the moment when the rollers would jam. Someone had prepared the blowpipe and the darts, had boiled both oleander to poison the master and some lesser poison to guarantee that the mill would be shorthanded, that the cane would be full of trash, rocks, roots.

  Someone who’d written signs to summon the dark spirits to the poison’s making.

  A slave. Or someone who had been a slave.

  He glanced around him uneasily, lest Ajax or Thierry or even one of his cabin-mates see him and demand where he was going when he was due back for the night work at the mill.

  Maybe Harry had lost his spare key; maybe it had been stolen. But someone had to have gained access to the pots of grits and congris and sausage that the men ate before they went out to the fields. Kiki was just as likely to chase him off with a broom as to answer his questions. Still, it was worth a try.

  B
ut as he ducked around the back of the laundry January saw the unmistakably short, stout, black-clad figure of the woman he sought slip quietly from the kitchen door with a bundle beneath her arm. Still hidden in the shadows himself, January saw her look furtively around in the glimmer of the moon’s rising light.

  Meeting Harry? But on any number of occasions Kiki had expressed her contempt for all the field hands—including January—and her complete disdain for Harry.

  Meeting False River Jones herself with coffee grounds or used tea leaves to sell?

  Kiki set out at a swift walk, the night’s chill wind jerking at her shawl, flapping her skirts. January followed, through the velvet dark between stable and carriage house, past the rude huts of pigsties and chicken runs, until she disappeared into the cart track between two rows of the wind-thrashed cane. It was easy enough to follow her then, a row over and a little behind, the noise of his own body shoving through the thick leaves masked by the roar of the wind. A short ways into the fields, Kiki lit a lantern: The gold light bobbed between the clattering stalks. To their right the quarters lay, lightless houses and weedy plots of corn and yams, huddled against the thrashing wind.