Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  “You’re not going to give me brandy and that’s final,” snarled Fourchet, silencing his son. “Or stinking opium, like your mother. Marie-Noël … Marie-Noël …”He sank back against the wall again as Baptiste came dashing back from the house with blankets and—thank God for the man’s good sense—a glass of bromide diluted in water. January applied this to Fourchet’s lips.

  “Michie Georges—Michie Hannibal’s father-in-law, sir”—January dipped a nervous little bow to Robert and reminded himself to say li instead of il—“he gets took like this. I’m sorry if I done give myself big dewlaps over it, sir, and spoke as I didn’t ought to, but the doctor back in town, he tell me what-all to do and he say, ‘Don’t you take no back-chat from nobody or your master a dead fish.’ ”

  “No, it’s quite all right.” Still looking put out at having his advice refused, Robert screwed shut his brandy flask and pocketed it. He’d pulled on trousers under his nightshirt and was barefoot, his hair rumpled and his face now blackened with smoke and soot. Madame Fourchet came up, flaxen hair hanging in confusion down her back and her arm wrapped around her swollen belly as if in pain; January got quickly to his feet and offered her his arm, and she shook her head and waved both him and Robert away.

  “I’m well,” she said. “Thank you.” In the firelight, she looked alarmingly white about the mouth. “What about the children in the quarters? Was anyone badly hurt?” She’d lost her shawl in the confusion and January saw that she wore no corset under her dress, not even the shaped stays of maternity. Only a thin shift, and the dress itself had been merely caught together at the waist and nape with its buttons, the laces pulled any old how, as if she’d dragged them tight herself.

  “I want to see, I want to see!” Jean-Luc came dashing from the direction of the house in his nightshirt, pursued by Madame Hélène’s maid Vanille. Now that things were a little quieter, January could hear Fantine screaming like a steam whistle from the gallery outside the nursery. “Is Grandpère going to die? Did all the slaves get roasted? I want to see!”

  The blaze was dying down as the wood was scattered and doused. The reek of burned cane was thick among the gritty stink of smoke. In the confusion the bagasse shed nearby had taken fire, too, and being too far away to further ignite anything was blazing unchecked and unregarded. Women and children drifted through the mirk from the direction of the levee, buckets in hand, like the damned stumbling out of Hell. From among them Rodney ran to his wife, stood like a man stunned above the silent body of their son. Ajax and Hope clung together, Hope weeping as she held their many children close. Thierry cursed and struck a man.

  Ajax took a deep breath, and called out, “Let’s take a count,” as January and Harry between them lifted Fourchet to carry him back to the house. “Make sure there’s no one missin’. Soon as it gets light let’s get cuttin’ saplings, make a shed for what’s left of the wood so it won’t get wet next time it rains.…”

  It occurred to January that he’d just saved the life of one of the few men whom he had actually ever dreamed about killing.

  When he’d seen Fourchet safely put to bed, with Robert and Madame and Cornwallis in attendance, January returned to the plantation hospital. Kiki—duly limping on a bandaged foot—was there already, mixing poultices and applying dressings to burns.

  Rodney’s Bo and Juno’s Claire were dead. The young man Marquis had some bad burns but was already talking sensibly and trying to make a joke or two with his friends through the pain; Emerald had broken her wrist getting Chevalier’s daughter Princesse out through the cabin window after the door caught fire behind her. Dumaka, sick with pneumonia in his cabin, had been overcome with smoke and dragged out by his wife Fayola.

  In all, ten men and two women had suffered various degrees of blisters, burns, and scorches. After making sure all were cared for and sending Kiki to bed, January collected a shovel from the storeroom beneath the house, and walked out through the cane-rows to the moss-gatherers’ hut, where he buried all evidence that a woman had aborted her child there. Then he climbed the levee and changed the blue bandanna to green. By that time it was dawn.

  “When we catch the nigger that did this,” Thierry was saying, as he and Esteban surveyed the wet heaps of cordwood, the charred ruin of the sheds, “I’m personally going to skin him—or her—and make a tobacco pouch out of the pelt.”

  An acre of cane, ground and boiled, consumed nearly twenty cords of wood. Throughout the year, once the cane was in the ground and the corn planted, cutting wood in the ciprière was a constant, getting ready for the next roulaison.

  Approximately four hundred of the plantation’s six hundred acres of cane still stood uncut, and at a guess—surveying the long wet row of scorched logs, half-charred salvage, debris collected from the ruins—January estimated there were about a thousand cords of usable wood. Or would be, once they dried out.

  In the quarters, the slaves sifted through the smoking remains of the six burned cabins in quest of cook-pots, cups, shoes, blankets. The younger children had already been parceled out among the women, bundled in borrowed blankets wherever beds could be found. Juno and Ancilla slept, broken with weeping.

  The wind had died down. The morning was cold.

  Nobody was keeping track of anybody. January climbed the back steps, and scratched gently on the door of the garçonnière.

  “Inire, amicus meus! As the lady said in the play, All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise!”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Tolerable.” Hannibal had washed the soot and filth from his face and hands but his nightshirt was still black with them, and he looked beaten with exhaustion. He was propped on the bed-pillows with a tray across his thin knees, sipping cocoa and contemplating a French porcelain plate of untouched rolls. “God bless Baptiste. He brought these—he tells me the beautiful Kiki was injured in fighting the fire. Did you take note of who was dressed and who wasn’t?”

  “As if our friend wouldn’t be clever enough to strip before the alarm sounded?” January listened for wheezing or gasping in the fiddler’s speech, but other than the rough huskiness characteristic of consumptives he sounded well. In himself he could feel the rage like a low-grade fever, a small steady pulse that nevertheless let him speak quietly and evenly. “What time did it start, do you know?”

  “About midnight. And I’m pleased to announce definite proof that neither Esteban nor the beautiful Agamemnon is the hoodoo, as they were together—discreetly quiet, I’m grateful to say—in Esteban’s room next door at the time the fire started, and for at least an hour and a half before.”

  “Good, said January. “I didn’t look forward to explaining it to Fourchet if his son turned out to be the culprit. To say nothing of the fact that I’m almost certain our culprit is a slave, or was one at one time. It saves you the trouble of getting details of the will out of Fourchet’s lawyer, too.”

  “Well, I’d still be curious about that. Where there’s a will, there’s a relative, and it doesn’t do to discount that fact. Robert was in here after supper explaining political economy and the shortcomings of the factory system to me—knowing how desperately I crave enlightenment on the subject of workers’ housing in Paris—and went to bed at about ten. I heard Esteban turn in shortly after that, I assume when the night men took over at the mill. About five minutes later Agamemnon scratched on Esteban’s door, presumably to help him off with his socks, and remained until people started shrieking ‘Fire!’ ”

  “Cornwallis was dressed,” remembered January, casting his mind back to the confused images of blackness and flame. “Baptiste was dressed.…”

  “Baptiste has barely had time to change his linen and wash his face,” said Hannibal. “Fourchet doesn’t hold with half-dressed servitors trotting out to the mill to give him his coffee halfway between midnight and morn. And Cornwallis has been sleeping fully clothed, in a chair in his master’s room these past several nights, and catnapping during the day—an
excellent way to remain unaccountable for your exact whereabouts at any given time. If all the field hands were supposed to be in their cabins except those actually working in the mill, you might be able to inquire among them.…”

  “And I’d get lies,” said January. “Nobody in the quarters is going to mention it, if someone was absent. And if Harry’s behavior, and Quashie’s, and mine for that matter, are anything to go by, there’s a world of clandestine coming and going. God knows what it’s like when everyone isn’t dead tired.”

  He passed a blistered hand across his face. “Not that any of the field hands could provide a word of evidence if they wanted to about whether their cabin-mates were awake or asleep, present or absent, thirty seconds after they themselves lay down. I didn’t see Quashie, I didn’t see Trinette, but that means nothing—I didn’t arrive on the scene until well after the fire had taken hold, and if I’d started the fire the first thing I’d do is take off my britches, rumple my shirt, and mix in with the crowd, doing my best to—”

  “My dearest cousine, I was horrified to hear,” a man’s rich voice broke in, muffled by the garçonnière walls but still audible from the direction of the dining room. January’s eyebrows rocketed into his hairline and he got soundlessly to his feet, crossed to the French doors, and pushed them open in time to see, through the dining room door, a glimpse of the malt-brown coat Hippolyte Daubray had worn two days previously in the cane-fields of Refuge. “And now the good Cornwallis informs me that your husband is ill? How dreadful for you!”

  The voice retreated deeper into the house. January slipped through the French door and drifted down the gallery, positioning himself at the corner of Esteban’s room where he could look through the door of Fourchet’s office, through the office, and through the open door into the old man’s bedroom beyond. He couldn’t see Fourchet himself, but had a good view of Daubray, looming in all his refulgent splendor with Marie-Noël standing, abashed and silent and with an expression of unexpressed pain on her face, at his side.

  “My dear Simon, I am appalled!” Hippolyte leaned forward, presumably to clasp his erstwhile foe by the hand. “Pray forgive me, and give no further thought to our little contretemps of Tuesday. I wouldn’t dream of pressing a duel on a man—”

  “Since it was my challenge, I’ll be the best judge of that,” snapped Fourchet. “I daresay—”

  “Father, said Esteban’s voice. “M’sieu—uh—Daubray—uh—hasn’t come to discuss the duel.”

  “Of course not,” cut in Daubray. “I came merely to offer whatever assistance it is in my power to extend. We are, after all, in a sense family.

  “Then as family,” said Fourchet, “you can help my men bring over the cut wood from the sheds at Refuge.”

  “At the least possible computation it is half ours,” added Madame Fourchet, straightening up and regarding her cousin with those calm gray eyes.

  “The hell it is, woman, it’s all ours!” bellowed Fourchet. “Every stick and scrap of it! Of all the puling, mealymouthed—”

  “My dear cousine!” Hippolyte threw up his buff-gloved hands in mimed dismay. “Had we but known! But of course, it was the first that we used for the sugaring. We had such a very large crop this year, you know, and the sheds at Refuge were closest to our mill. Not that there was much there, of course, only a few dozen cords—”

  “There was a shed fifty feet long and twelve wide, chock full of it!” roared Fourchet. “I went over myself and saw it!”

  “Then sell us an equal amount of what is in your own sheds,” cut in Marie-Noël steadily. “If you admit to having taken what was mine, it is the least that you owe.”

  “Of course!” Daubray clasped his hands before his breast. “Of course. We can certainly spare you a thousand cords to get you started—until your men can get more cut—but since we’re also going to have to pay our men to cut extra, the lowest possible price we could ask is five dollars a cord—”

  “Five dollars!” Fourchet’s blankets—all January could see of the man—jerked as if yanked by a string. Both Marie-Noël and Esteban leaped forward, hands held out to restrain him from leaping at his enemy’s throat. “You scoundrel, I could pay my own Negroes fifty cents a cord!”

  “Dear heavens, fifty cents! As little as that?” Hippolyte rounded his piggy pale eyes as Esteban hastily poured his father a glassful of bromide-and-water from the carafe beside the bed. “Well, you’re known throughout the countryside as a man who gets the most work out of his hands. Why, we have to pay ours at least two dollars a cord during the year—”

  “That’s a lie,” said Marie-Noël. “You pay your men fifty cents as well.”

  “My dear cousine, I had hoped that a man’s attentions would have schooled your manners a trifle,” sighed her cousin, with the air of a man teasing a chained dog and hugely enjoying the sport. “Of course I was talking about the extra men we’ll have to hire to cut wood to make up the difference. Though it seems to me …”

  At that point Baptiste mounted the back steps with a big kitchen tray in his hands, filled with ham and eggs, cakes and pancakes, compotes and pitchers of cream. As he entered the pantry door he glanced in January’s direction and January, conscious again of his soot-grimed and filthy clothing, knew the gallery was no place for a field hand to be loitering. The butler said nothing, but January knew he’d better not be there when Baptiste came out. He descended the steps, turning over in his mind the distance from Daubray to Mon Triomphe across the contested acres of Refuge, and how a man might come up from the river through the cane-fields south of the house to within a dozen yards of the woodsheds, unseen.

  There was, of course, no question of looking for tracks anywhere near the sheds themselves. The ground was a vast gumbo of mud, slopped water, trampled ash, and burned wood. On the sides of the sheds that faced the mule paddock, the quarters, and the cane-fields, however, January found the scorched fragments of three or four oil jars, and in a weed-grown ditch by the first row of the cane a whole jar, the oil film still slick on its cool clay inner curve.

  He straightened, considering the black charred heaps of the burned sheds and the intact, half-empty shed closest to the mill. In the dead of night it would be easy enough to move the jars from the storeroom under the house. Probably rolled, he thought—they contained about forty liters each and would have to come around the back of the kitchen, laundry, hospital, and barns. But they could be concealed in either of the two farther sheds, probably for a couple of days if hidden deeply enough behind the wood. Even a woman, or a man as slight as Agamemnon, could have managed easily given sufficient time.

  Easier still, of course, if the jars had originated elsewhere.

  As he’d earlier ascertained, when inspected by daylight the paths between the cane-rows downstream of the house bore the scuffed tramplings of dozens of passages. The weeds and cane-trash, and the closeness of the rows, prevented him from distinguishing anything that resembled the print of a man bearing a heavy weight, or of a woman rolling one; moreover, he wasn’t sure how long such a mark would have lasted in the rough weeds. All of the prints he was able to make out were the brogans and quantiers of slaves.

  He emerged from the cane into the bright morning sunlight in time to see Quashie limp stiffly from the burned ruins of the quarters and intercept Jeanette. The girl, who was helping Hope poke through what remained of Ajax’s house, straightened and reached to embrace him, then drew back—his back was still a mass of bandages and crude dressings, smutted and filthy with soot.

  He took her in his arms.

  Would they have fled together, wondered January, had they been able to find each other in the confusion? He saw how the girl’s hands gripped the young man’s muscular arms, how Quashie’s head bent down over hers. Clearly, neither had been prepared.

  Kiki was in bed when January knocked at her door. She called out, “Come!” and he ducked under the lintel; it was low, less than six feet, like most of those in the quarters. The single room, seen by daylight, w
as swept and neat. Pegs in the wall supported clean aprons, and a dozen white tignons lay folded on a shelf. Beside them gay dresses of red and blue calico had been put aside, in favor of mourning black. On the inside of the door a circled cross was chalked in red, to keep witches away, and in a corner three strands of blue beads and one of shells hung before a stoppered calabash gourd. Herbs hung drying from the rafters. The blanket on the bed was red German wool, worn and faded but infinitely warmer and cleaner than those of January and his four cabin-mates. The faint scent of the turpentine used to discourage bedbugs ghosted on the air. There were sheets on the bed as well, the perquisite of house-servants the world over, and a pillow in a pillowcase—very worn but neatly mended with yellow thread—behind her back.

  “You have no idea,” said the cook with a tired smile, “how good it is to just lie here.” She held out her hand to him. “Thank you, Ben.”

  “You feeling all right, Mamzelle Kiki?” He checked the small kettle that hung half-filled over the hearth, the tin cup on the table whose dregs breathed faintly of willow and briory. “Can I get you anything? Do anything for you?”

  “You can make us a little tea.” She pointed to the dented canister on the mantel. Used tea leaves from the house, another perquisite. But during his years in Paris, before January had forsaken the ill-paid surgery of the Hôtel Dieu for a musician’s life, he’d routinely bought used tea leaves from the cooks of the rich.

  “What’ll happen now?”

  “They got a flag out on the landin’, for Michie Robert to go upriver lookin’ for cut wood. They don’t get wood, Michie Fourchet is ruined.”