Sold Down the River

by Barbara Hambly

  “No, Michie Cornwallis, sir,” said January, bowing his head and guessing that an attempt to use the return of Michie Robert’s note would just get it taken from his hand. “Of course not, sir. Would you ask Michie Fourchet, as soon as he’s able to talk to someone, if I could speak to him something about Quashie?”

  “What?” The valet tried to look impassive but his eyes glinted avidly.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” said January. “And you’re right, sir, I ought to be gettin’ back.” And he trotted down the gallery stairs, telling himself that free or not, he could be prosecuted for robbing Simon Fourchet of a valuable slave if he wrung Cornwallis’s skinny neck.

  He walked back between the laundry and the kitchen and watched the gallery until Cornwallis disappeared into Madame Fourchet’s sewing parlor behind the pantry. Then he slipped around the corner of the kitchen.

  Kiki should have been in the midst of laying out the lunch dishes for Baptiste to carry across to the big house on his tray, but she wasn’t. She sat at the table, small hands clasped before her mouth, staring at the tureens on their shelf across the room. She jerked her head around as January’s shadow darkened the doorway and got hastily to her feet; he said, “Is it true Madame’s asleep, or lying down after last night, up with Michie Fourchet?”

  She nodded, and drew a heavy breath. “Baptiste was just over. He told me she was out the minute her head touched the pillow.” Her voice was steady, but she wore the haggard look she’d had since the night of the abortion. “He had a bad night, Michie Fourchet, getting angry all over again at the Daubrays. She gave him medicine so often she near used up those two little bottles Doctor Laurette left, and he wouldn’t let her leave.”

  “Can you get her keys?” asked January bluntly. “I need to get into Thierry’s house and have a look at the body before too much more time passes—I take it Sheriff Duffy hasn’t arrived yet?”

  “I’d be surprised if he came today,” replied the cook. “His brother owns a small place on Bayou Va-L’Enfer and they’ll be harvesting. Lot of good it’ll do him anyway. You know Michie Fourchet won’t have an American in the house.”

  “All the more reason I need to get into the cottage.”

  “Wait here.” Kiki stepped to the door, looked out at the rear of the big house, glanced both ways, and then hastened across with the air of one doing her duty. If challenged, January imagined she’d claim to be looking for Baptiste, but the only person who came out onto the gallery when she climbed its steps and bustled along to Madame Fourchet’s room was Ariadne, to whom Kiki merely snapped, “You better not let M’am Fourchet see you wearing those beads,” as she walked past. Ariadne hurried away, presumably to remove the offending beads—which January had last seen gracing a peg in Harry’s cabin.

  Beyond the stables, the steady rustle of activity around the mill had ceased. Far off, January heard the whistle of a steamboat, and wondered if that was the boat that would bring the belated Hannibal back from town. Ti-Jeanne the laundress started across the yard toward the kitchen and January tried to think up a good reason why he’d be there, but halfway there the stooped, elderly woman was intercepted by a voice calling out, “Here I am, honey,” and Minta appeared from the candle-room in company with old Pennydip. The three women disappeared back through Pennydip’s door.

  “Got it.” Kiki was breathing hard as she sprang up the kitchen steps. She stopped, pressing a hand to her abdomen, and January rebuked himself for sending her. “What’d you need to see his body for?”

  “I won’t know,” said January, “till I’ve seen it. Maybe I won’t know then.”

  They took the long way around to Thierry’s cottage, skirting behind the laundry and the candle-room and the carpenter’s shop, behind the mule barn and the landward end of the mill and thence through the cane. As they pushed heavily through the suffocating rows January asked, “Which way were you going to go? North or south?” and Kiki stiffened, startled, and glanced up at him with fleet fear in her eyes.

  “That was your pillowcase I saw stashed with the food in the basket you gave Jeanette. What made you decide to go with them? Was it because of Gilles’s death?”

  She stammered, “I—no. Gilles …” Her face was ashy in the pale sun that fell so straight down through the tall rows, her eyes stricken.

  January said gently, “Or was it just that you were scared of what would happen if Fourchet were to die? What would happen to everybody on the place, if the hoodoo isn’t caught?”

  She turned her face away, catching hold of a nearby stalk of cane for support, and January stopped and put a big gentle hand under her plump elbow. Her breath came in a tearing sigh. “I just wanted to get out of here,” she said. “Yes, part of it’s because … on the night of the fire, seeing Michie Fourchet took sick like that, I thought, Anything could happen. They could blame anyone.” She shook her head. “They’ll do what they want, decide what they want to believe. And part of it …”

  She hesitated, as if unwilling to speak of what made no objective sense. “When those children burned, it did something to me, Ben. I don’t know what. What you said about—about whoever this is, not caring …” She fell silent.

  January said, “Nobody cares. Not Fourchet, not the hoodoo. Nobody.”

  “No.” Her voice was barely to be heard, though the day was still. “That’s why I want to go. A lot of evil comes when no one cares.”

  They came out of the cane and crossed the rough stretch of deep grass and scythed weeds unhurriedly, and went around to the front door. Kiki automatically started to head for the back, and January had to catch her arm and point—everyone at the mill would be grouped outside eating their lunch. The cook let out a little self-conscious chuckle, and shook her head at herself as they mounted the steps, and unlocked the door.

  “Did you know Thierry’d found the boat?” January asked.

  In Thierry’s bedroom, the body was beginning to smell a little. January thanked God it was winter. Flies hummed around the corpse, and three separate trails of ants stretched from the wall and up the legs of the bed, but it was nothing like it would have been in July.

  “I heard about it yesterday.” Kiki sighed. “Thierry—well, I knew what he’d do to Jeanette. She told me Quashie hadn’t had the first thing to do with that fire but that Thierry’d already made up his mind to put the blame on him for it. If they stayed here, she knew he’d die. And that’s when I thought, They could make up their mind like that about anyone. And nothing anybody could say would change it.”

  She shrugged. “I saw him leave here yesterday afternoon. When I didn’t see her come out I came over and found her still tied to the bed.” Blood marked the four corners of the sheets on which Thierry lay, where a woman’s hands and ankles would have been locked to the bed frame with the spancels that now hung on a peg on the wall. “She told me then about the boat.” In addition to Thierry’s big driving whip that he used in the field, there was a whalebone quirt in the corner. It was the type horse-trainers used to school recalcitrant mounts.

  “That’s right,” said January softly. Greenflies rose in a cloud when he pulled back the sheet, and he winced. There were a lot of ants. Kiki made a faint gagging noise, but said nothing. “So why would he have gone to Catbird Island? He knew he’d scuppered the boat. He knew she knew the boat was useless. So when he saw Jeanette was gone, why did he go there?”

  He crossed himself, and pulled the handkerchief from Thierry’s pocket, where he’d seen Esteban thrust it after taking it from the corpse’s mouth. The blood was still a little tacky, but it had mostly dried now. He had to strike it several times against the bed frame to clear the ants off it enough to unfold it for a better look.

  “Why would Quashie and Jeanette have gone there? They’d escape as soon as it started raining, yes, to cover their tracks, but Catbird Island was the last place they’d want to go. What do you make of this?”

  He held the handkerchief out to her. Kiki took it without undue squeamishn
ess and turned it in her hands. “It’s good linen,” she said. “No initials, but then a lot of men don’t have them embroidered—I know Michie Fourchet didn’t for years, til he married M’am Marie-Noël and she started doing it for him again. Michie Esteban fussed and fussed at Vanille and Doucette and Nancy and came near to swearing he’d have them whipped if they didn’t embroider as nice as he liked his done, and finally started sending them to some woman in town to do. I think Michie Robert had his embroidered in Paris, or maybe M’am Hélène did it on the ship coming home. I don’t remember seeing this kind in the laundry, though.”

  “Which doesn’t mean anything,” remarked January, engaged in turning out Thierry’s pockets. “Even if it had Esteban’s initials on it, or Robert’s or Andrew Jackson’s for that matter, all it might mean is that Agamemnon or Harry or Ti-Jeanne took one from the laundry to sell to False River Jones.”

  The overseer’s pockets contained, in addition to his keys, which January appropriated, a dozen pistol-balls, a powder-flask, and some wads, but no pistols. There were also two or three Mexican dollars—common currency up and down the river—a tangle of string, the stub of a tallow candle, lucifers in a tin box, a folding penknife, another box containing a fire-steel, flint, and tow. A larger and more serviceable blade was sheathed at his belt.

  When January tipped Thierry’s body up it came all of a piece, like a clumsy plank. Thierry must have died around midnight, then. The back of his coat was as wet as the front, which only meant that he’d been alive when the rain had begun. No dirt or clay clung to it. With some difficulty January tried to strip and wrangle the coat down the dead man’s back and arms, cursing Esteban for preventing him from making this examination when Thierry’s muscles were soft enough to maneuver. In the end he pulled the coat up from the bottom, and the waistcoat and shirt after it, examining the skin of the dead man’s back.

  “What are you looking for?” Kiki spoke from the doorway, where she was keeping a weather eye on the yard.

  “I was looking for bruises,” said January thoughtfully. “But what I expected to find—and didn’t—is lividity: blood pooled in the back once the heart stopped pumping. Get me a towel or a rag from the other room and douse it in the water bucket, if you would, please. I hate this part.” He took a deep breath, and pulled down Thierry’s trousers, revealing the nasty mess of caked waste that his body had voided on death.

  “Whoa, lord!” The cook put a wet shirt into his hand and fanned the air before her face. “When it comes time for me to die I think I’ll drown or something.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever seen anyone who had.” January sopped and wiped at Thierry’s buttocks and the backs of his thighs. “There. See? That’s blood that sinks down under the skin to the lowest point on the body, right after death.”

  “You mean he died sitting up?”

  “Looks like it. And someone laid him down later. The way his head’s bent forward would confirm that; the neck and the jaw are the first to harden up. Damn it.” Having pulled the trousers, shirt, and coat back into position, January laid the body down again and tried to lift the hands from where Ajax had laid them, folded, over the corpse’s groin. “The ankles are going to be like wood. We’d need a razor to get the boots off and I’m not sure they’d tell us much. Look at this.” He pushed up the coat sleeve, and the sleeve of the shirt beneath it, as far as he could, and twisted and pulled at the fingers, kneeling to peer underneath for a look at the palms. “Can you see the palms?”

  “Mostly.” Kiki knelt, and squinched herself around. “They look all right to me.”

  “Exactly,” said January. “No cuts. None on the coat sleeves or shirtsleeves either, or anywhere else on the clothing as far as I can tell.” Gingerly he probed and separated at the crawling horror of the opened belly, shaking from his fingers the roaches that crawled out.” This looks like it was done with a cane-knife. The intestines are cut through just about to the backbone, far too deep for even a river-rat’s fighting-knife. And it looks like a single cut, driven in underhand and pulling up.”

  “I’ll just take your word for that.” Kiki went back into the front room and returned with the water bucket, a little pot of Pennydip’s soft soap, and another shirt. “But it doesn’t take a man from the main gang to be able to do that, you know. Those knives are sharp. A woman could do it, if she was mad enough, or scared enough. You’d be surprised at what a really mad woman can do.”

  “My guess is,” said January, sitting back, “that maybe a woman could do it easier than a man from the main gang. Can you see Thierry letting a man he’d whipped get that close to him, even if he didn’t see the knife in the dark and the rain?”

  “Hmm.” Kiki thought about that. Then she said, “You say that to Sheriff Duffy and he’s going to think, Jeanette. And probably nobody else.” Her eyes met his and she added, “And that might be for the best.”

  “For everyone but Jeanette,” January said. He washed his hands again, then rose and stepped quickly into the back room, to the chest where Thierry would have kept his pistols. None were there now.

  That meant nothing, really, he thought, as he went back into the bedroom and wadded the two shirts together. Kiki followed him to the front door with the bloodied and filthy water, which after a cautious glance in both directions they poured out so that it ran under the house. Harry had been in the house, however briefly. He could easily have taken them while everyone else was occupied with the body. Very likely several spare knives and whetstones were missing, and probably Thierry’s Sunday stickpin, too.

  The shirts January stashed in the long weeds under the steps. The shadows were definitely on the eastward side of the oaks as he and Kiki walked, with inconspicuous swiftness, across to the wall of cane, and stepped inside as through a curtain.

  “It was pouring rain last night,” said January, as they waded along the rows toward the back of the mill, whence Kiki could cut unseen back around to the kitchen. “Why would Thierry have gone to Catbird Island in a storm like that, when he already knew the people he pursued knew that their boat had been destroyed?”

  “To meet someone else?”

  January nodded. “It was too much to hope there’d have been a note in his pocket, but that little bay at the south of the island where he was found is only about a hundred feet from False River Jones’s campsite. And it seems Jones is back in the area.”

  “Ben, Michie Jones wouldn’t hurt a fly!” Kiki caught his sleeve, looked up into his face with real distress in her eyes. “All right, he’ll buy anything that people bring him without asking where it comes from, but he’s a good man! Time and again, he’s put himself in trouble to bring folks letters and things, news of their families and friends.”

  “Maybe it explains what Thierry was looking for on the island.” January glanced at the shadows of the cane. “Damn it, Ajax is going to welt me for sure. Kiki, listen. I sent Hannibal to town to find out about Esteban’s friend Michie Molineaux. He should have been back yesterday, today at the latest. When he comes back, would you ask him to send for me from the fields, at once?”

  He paused, seeing the odd light in her eyes, and she said, “You sent Michie Hannibal to town?”

  January opened his mouth and then realized how foolish it would sound to say, That is, I meant of course that Michie Hannibal went to town and bade me stayhere.…

  He shut it, and looked down into the woman’s eyes. They mocked him, bemused, and she shook her head. “Maybe if Ajax welts you it’ll teach you to act like a proper nigger and not some uppity town-bred Ee-thee-opian who’s too proud for his own good. And that’s all to the best,” she added softly, “for everyone. I’ll pass your orders along, sir.”

  “Thank you,” said January, “Mamzelle Kiki.”

  And he loped off fast through the cane, turning over in his mind what he had learned from Thierry’s body, and what it could mean. The examination of the corpse would cost him his lunch, but on the whole, he thought, food wasn’t s
omething he was interested in, just at the moment.

  Through the afternoon, and into the evening, January strained his ears for the far-off wails of the boats on the river, trying to mold the sound into the longer, warping notes of a vessel coming in to the landing. He cursed the singing of the men when it obscured the sound. Yet he knew if a boat came in Bumper and Nero would be out at once with the news.

  None came. It’s the wrong time of year for the fever, thought January. Either consumption, or opium, had tangled Hannibal in its snare.

  Damn it, he thought. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

  I’ll have to speak to Fourchet tomorrow.

  He wondered what he would say.

  Hunger soon enough returned to sponge away his revulsion at the postmortem he’d performed and, more than hunger, exhaustion: He felt like a steamboat trying to paddle upriver without logs in its firebox. Ajax glanced at him once or twice, when the dizziness of sheer fatigue made him stagger, but said nothing. January was aware he was falling farther and farther behind the others—and slowing Gosport down as well—but feared to work faster. Don’t let me lose a finger, he prayed, aware that the priest who’d taught him his catechism at the age of eight would have pointed out that this was the probable Divine penalty for cutting cane on the Sabbath. And then, as the whetstone slipped from his sweaty, shaky grip, he added, Or a hand.

  Who had Thierry expected to see on Catbird Island?

  And who had he met instead?

  And who had come along later and laid him down, saying no word to anyone of his death? January had seen Trinette among the women in the mill but couldn’t recall exactly when. Harry had been absent but then Harry usually was. Lisbon and Yellow Austin …?

  The following day brought another flatboat, with two thousand more cords of wood. “Three dollars and fifty cents a cord!” Esteban raged, when he got the note from his brother concerning the payment. “My God, he’ll bankrupt us!”