By the end of the evening he knew that the man who’d knifed Delly – and who’d been cut in return by Kentucky Williams – was Matthew Porter, of St. Louis. St. Louis, January recalled, being the city from which Major-General Wilkinson had governed the Louisiana Territory in 1806.
Since January was a law-abiding soul, even when the laws included Black Codes that forbade him among other things to smoke cigars in public, the following morning he consulted the City Guard, in the person of his friend Lieutenant Abishag Shaw. He suspected it would do him no good and his suspicion was rapidly confirmed.
“Iff’n you want me to I’ll speak to Captain Tremouille about it,” offered Lieutenant Shaw, scratching his verminous hair. “But I’ll tell you right now what he’ll say: that we got too few men – ‘specially now in Carnival season – to go chasin’ after a white man who’ll just say he never knifed no nigger gal in his life. No jury in town’s gonna convict him of it on the word of a Salt River man-eater like Kentucky Williams anyways.”
His due to law and order paid, January then took a long walk into the genuine swamp beyond the Swamp, the ciprière: the maze of small bayous, impenetrable tangles of palmetto and hackberry, tall silent groves of cypress and magnolia that lay between New Orleans and the lake. Few white men came here. Even now, in the winter with the ground mostly dry, it was easy to become lost, even for January who’d been raised with a slave-child’s awareness of the invisible geography of landmarks, paths, rendezvous-points. In the summer it was a nightmarish jungle of standing water, gators, snakes and mosquitoes that would swarm a man like a living brown blanket.
He wasn’t sure if there was still a runaway slave-village somewhere west of Bayou St. John, but as he quartered the squishy ground he would occasionally see fish-lines in the bayous, or red flannel juju-bags hanging from the trees. He was just beginning to wonder if he’d have to abandon his quest and return to town – he would be playing at a subscription ball at the Théâtre d’Orleans that night – when he turned his head and saw, standing in the deep oyster-grass across a murky little bayou, the one man in New Orleans taller than his own six-foot, three-inch height: massive, African-black like himself, clothed in rags with only a muscular stump where his left arm had been.
Cut-Arm, King of the runaways of the ciprière.
“You not wanderin’ around out here lookin’ for anybody, Music-Master, are you?”
“It just so happens,” said January, “that I am.”
*
Cut-Arm’s dark eyes narrowed with fury when January spoke of what had happened to Delly, who like most freed slaves in town had some passing acquaintance with the runaways in the ciprière. When January spoke of how he intended to get his revenge, the big runaway’s teeth showed white in a savage grin. “That’s good,” he rumbled. “Maybe not so good as seein’ his blood, but it’ll take a lot longer, and I think he’ll suffer more.”
Thus it was that January was loitering on the brick banquette of Rue Chartres opposite the Strangers Hotel at ten the next morning when a man who fit the description of Matthew Porter emerged from its doors: tallish, well-dressed, his brown Vandyke beard newly barbered and his right arm in a sling. January’s guess was confirmed a few minutes later when, as Cut-Arm had promised, one of the hotel’s maids came across the street to him and whispered, “He just left. It’s all clear.”
January had taken the precaution of dressing that morning in the simple but respectable dark clothing that could have passed him as either a free workman or an upper servant. Nobody gave him a glance as the woman brought him up to one of the smaller guest-rooms on the second floor. He’d gambled that Porter would be too cautious of pickpockets to take the coded message – whatever it was – with him when he went out, and a few minutes’ search of the trunk yielded it, tucked between pages 102 and 103 of an almanac that was in turn nestled among Porter’s shirts.
It was, as January had suspected, the end-leaf torn out of the back of Kentucky Williams’s Bible, covered with neatly-inscribed numbers. In his own memorandum-book he made a note of the number of lines (32) the approximate number of characters per line (between 47 and 54), and the width of all margins. “Meet me tomorrow,” he said to the maid, handing her a dollar, “at the same place, at the same time as today, bringing me this paper.” He slipped it back into the almanac. “You make a note of what two pages it’s between when you take it out – he may move it, and I don’t want him to guess it’s been messed with. I’ll give you another piece of paper, just like it, to put back in its place. You think you can do that?”
“Shoot.” She grinned. “For two dollars I’d swap out the whole damn almanac one page at a time. Cheap bastard didn’t give me no tip, not even a dime, when I brought him up a bath last night, and pinched my tit into the bargain. You know how heavy it is, luggin’ all that hot water? What it is?” she asked hopefully. “You put a juju on the new piece of paper?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said January.
Returning to the room his rented from his widowed mother on Rue Dauphine, he carefully tore one of the front blank pages from Kentucky Williams’s Bible, meticulously matching the irregularities of the ragged remains of the torn page in the back. It took him a little experimentation with watering ink, to achieve the faded hue of the original. While his various samples were drying, he set to work with the Bible to code a new message, using for good measure as many of the letters as had been in the original’s first three lines, which he’d taken the precaution of copying.
“My guess is, those are all that Porter read, if he read that far,” he said to Hannibal that night, when he walked out to the Broadhorn to check on his two patients. “If anything sticks in a man’s mind out of a mass of numbers like that, it’ll only be the first few. Which is the reason, of course, for a code in the first place.”
“Did you figure out what them first lines said?” Delly asked, her brown eyes round in the grimy lamplight of her attic cubicle. “Does it say where the treasure’s hid?”
“It does.” January tied up the clean dressing, gently tugged the girl’s ragged night-dress back into place. “The first three lines – and I suspect, the rest of the coded text – were names, clearly invented. Jack Falstaff was one; Montague Capulet was another. Beside each name was the name of a bank.”
Delly frowned at this prosaic anticlimax – she’d clearly expected paces counted from Death-Head Oak and Skull Rock. But a slow grin spread over Hannibal’s thin face. “Where Uncle Water Buling cached whatever he could make off with under Wilkinson’s nose, in the confusion of Burr’s projected invasion. How many of those banks are still in operation, do you suppose? Private banks come and go like waterfront cafés.”
“Which would be why Uncle Walter spread the funds out among so many. The first on the list was the Bank of New York, and that’s still in operation. So Kentucky will get at least a little money out of it.”
“Which she’ll probably drink up within a week,” sighed Hannibal. “I would, anyway. It does seem a waste.” Screams resounded from the yard below, followed by shots and the crash of a body being heaved out the Broadhorn’s back door. Both men and Delly tilted their heads a little toward the window, to ascertain that it was only a fight between six or seven customers, clawing and gouging in the mud of the yard while Kentucky Williams roared curses at them from the porch.
“It does,” January agreed. “But if we do more than take a reasonable sum for services rendered, on the grounds that as upstanding citizens we deserve the money more than she does, how does that make us different from the man who slashed up Delly with a knife?”
*
The next morning January took delivery of the code-paper, and spent until early afternoon closeted up with the Bible, deciphering names. “I’d like to get this back to the saloon before it opens,” he said to Hannibal, who had put in an appearance – at a far earlier hour than was usual for him to be about – to assist. “The doctor I talked to said Porter’s wounds weren’t deep. He should
be able to use his arm by this evening. It would be a shame if the book isn’t there when he makes his next attempt.”
Right on schedule, that evening, while January was again changing Delly’s dressings, a tumult of shouting and two shots resounded from the saloon below, followed a moment later by Hannibal’s appearance at the top of the ladder. “He’s downstairs,” gasped the fiddler, panting from even the climb. “Done up as a preacher in the most ridiculous wig and false whiskers you’ve ever seen—”
“Who got shot?” January scrambled down the ladder after him, crossed to the porch at a run.
“Nobody – but Porter went down with what I assume to be chicken-blood all over him like an Indian massacre.” They sprang up the porch steps and peered through the Broadhorn’s back door, in time to see a tallish, thin man in the shabby black suit of an impoverished minister lying, gasping theatrically, on the floor among a half-dozen kneeling ruffians. His hands and gray-whiskered face were covered with gore in the saloon’s uncertain lamplight.
“I’m dying! Oh, I’m dying! For the love of God, is there a Bible in this house?”
As Williams promptly fetched the Holy Writ from where January had stowed it earlier under the bar, Hannibal and January traded a disbelieving glance. “I’ve seen better acting at Christmas pantomimes,” Hannibal whispered.
The allegedly dying alleged preacher clutched the volume to his insanguined chest and sobbed, “Bless you, my daughter...”
And with a crash, the lights went out.
“Two accomplices,” reported Hannibal softly, as he and January stepped aside to let three blundering forms spring through the door between them and sprint away across the yard.
Inside the saloon, men were crashing around and cursing; a moment later a match flared, and someone exclaimed, “Fuck me, where’d that preacher go?”
“Not badly done, though,” added the fiddler, as he and January strolled back to the ladder. “Kentucky’s promised us each ten percent of whatever we can retrieve from those bank accounts, and twenty percent for Delly, which is very generous of her. I’ll write to the Bank of New York tomorrow. I suspect that our friend Mr. Porter’s in for a very frustrating few months, writing to banks that no longer exist about accounts whose names he doesn’t have right.”
“Oh, I didn’t substitute names,” said January. “A man who considered it his right to carve up a saloonkeeper and a completely innocent black girl – who’s going to be scarred for the rest of her life – deserves more than a little frustration. No, I wrote up a very elaborate treasure-map leading to an island in the middle of the swamps below Villahermosa in the south of Mexico: a friend of mine in Paris who’d been a doctor in the French Navy under Napoleon told me about it. He said nine-tenths of their men came down with fever there and most of them died. A land wrought by Satan, he said, to punish sinners.”
Hannibal’s eyes widened. “Do you think he’ll go?”
“He will if he wants the four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Spanish gold I said was buried there.”
“Considering the amount of money he’ll have to borrow to finance an expedition,” mused Hannibal, “and the time it will take, and the gnawing anxiety of knowing there’s a treasure just waiting for him—”
“If he’s willing to seek it,” said January gently. “Which we know, from his actions, that he is. Where your treasure is – wholley imaginary, in this case -- there will your heart be also... and for Mr. Porter, almost certainly his fever-ridden bones as well.”
Hannibal paused, his hand on the rungs of the ladder. “For such a thoroughly nice man, Ben,” he said, “you can be a complete son of a bitch.”
“Thank you,” said January. “I have my moments. Now let’s start writing those letters to the banks, and see how much of the real treasure is left to collect.”
About the Author
Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.
Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.
Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.
She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.
The Further Adventures
by Barbara Hambly
The concept of “happily ever after” has always fascinated me.
Just exactly what happens after, “happily ever after”?
The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold. (It’s a very strong horse.)
So what happens then? Where do they live? Who does the cooking?
This was one of the reasons I started writing The Further Adventures.
The other was that so many of the people who loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the 1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those characters too, and I missed writing about them.
Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website and started selling stories about what happened to these characters after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each series.
The Darwath series centers on the Keep of Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a mage.
The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers. With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil, too.
In the Winterlands tales, scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do their best to protect the people of their remote villages from whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.
Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior - meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the 1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might come through.
Though out of print, all four of these series are available digitally on-line.
To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color, Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.
I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I have been asked to contribute stories to var
ious Sherlock Holmes anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I added these four stories to my collection.
Quest For Glory is a stand-alone, a short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction convention at which I was Guest of Honor.
Sunrise on Running Water is tenuously connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie Titanic - and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that vampires lose their powers over running water - I just had to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than about the characters.
The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me - and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.
There Shall Your Heart Be Also Page 2
