Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (27 page)

Their eyes met. She turned quickly to go back inside, but Robert reached her in a stride and caught her hands. There was desperate urgency in every line of his slim shoulders and straight back as he bent his head toward hers.

“    . fear that something terrible may happen in my absence,” he told Marie-Noel, as January stepped neatly under the shadows of the gallery and circled the house so that he stood almost beneath them. “You saw the marks on the walls, beneath the house, in the very room where you sleep. My darling, my darling, I fear for you. . . .”

“You have not the right to call me that.”

“I know. Yet though you were only a child when first I knew you, I feel as though we have known each other for years. Can't you feel it? Don't turn away, my darling! Deny that you feel it if you can!”

“I deny it.” Her voice was unshaken but so soft that January could only guess at what she said.

He heard the boards creak as Robert stepped back. “Then I can only beg you, take care.”

“I will take care of him,” she replied. And her footfalls retreated swiftly along the gallery, to the doors of her husband's office and so through to the room where Simon lay.

January slipped quickly through the door that led into the storerooms beneath the house. It was cold there, a long shadowy earth-smelling chamber whose low ceiling made him stoop his great height. The Senegalese builders who'd put the house together had founded it on piers of brick, each pier widening into a pyramid underground, so that the bricks drew up the groundwater and the storeroom was always slightly damp and cool. Long wooden wine racks stood at the upstream end, the bottles held in place by boards pierced and hinged and locked like stocks. Presumably Harry had copies of those keys, too.

The oil jars stood next to the wine rack. There were a half-dozen of the larger ones, three feet tall, standing in another corner, full of drinking water for the household. All over the quarters, in addition to everything else, women and children were patiently stirring blocks of alum in similar jars of rain water to purify it, to replace what had so casually been hurled on the flames.

Of the smaller jars, still sealed, only six remained. The earth floor around them was much trampled, but he saw where the jars had been tipped on their sides and rolled to the door.

“And I suppose,” snapped Madame Helene's voice, so close to the storeroom door that January nearly brained himself on a ceiling-beam, straightening up in shock, “that it never occurred to you to bid good-bye to your wife?”

“Madame, the boat awaits me.” Robert's voice was toneless. “I could not stay to seek you.”

“You stayed long enough to have a little tete-a-tete with that snivelly child.”

“You are speaking of my stepmother, Madame, and your mother-in-law.”

“I am speaking of a sly, encroaching hussy who entrapped your father-”

“Madame,” said Robert, “we've spoken of this before. I see nothing to be gained by hashing it through again.”

“You mean you're so enamored of that pious mealymouthed hypocrite that you won't hear a word against her! Well, good luck in getting any farther than that glove of hers you have secreted in your desk drawer! You'll have your work cut out to add her to your tally of mistresses! And good luck with your father if he ever finds one of the love-notes you've been sending. . . .”

“Madame. . . .”

January had edged his way, silent as a huge black cat, to the door of the storeroom. Even standing far enough back that he could not be visible, he could see Robert and his wife clearly, in that narrow ribbon of brightness: the lively green of that wasp-waisted frockcoat, the woman lush as a peony in her lappets and swags and curls. Robert had taken her wrist in a crushing grip, twisting her arm to one side; his own countenance, icy with fury, almost a stranger's.

“I have sent nothing to my stepmother,” he said, very quietly. “And you'll find if you go to my father with such a lie it will go the worse for you, and for me, and for our children. Do you understand?”

Helene said nothing, but her red mouth worked a little, between the desire to have the last word and the inability to formulate any reply sufficiently witty and cutting to hurt that cold and erudite front. Into that silence children's voices broke, Jean-Luc screeching, “Papa, bring me something! Bring me something from Baton Rouge!” and little Fantine adding her shrill whistling screams to the din. Tiny feet clattered furiously on the gallery, followed by Marthe's heavy tread.

Robert's face twisted in revulsion. He shifted his grip on his wife's wrist, and bent to kiss her hand. Jean-Luc swarmed down the stairs, grabbing his father's coat. “Can I go? Can I go? I want to go!”

“Is there anything you'd like me to send you from Baton Rouge?” Robert asked Helene.

Helene snatched her hand back. “I hate you!” January heard her feet creak on the boards of the steps, and then of the gallery, as she ran away back to the nursery. The children continued to clutch their father's coattails and scream until Marthe dragged them away. “Shush now! Your grandpere's sick! Shush!”

Neither shushed.
His own mother, January reflected, would have taken a cane-stalk to him if he'd displayed manners like that.

Robert climbed into the carriage, on whose neat perch Leander stood elaborately admiring the wainscot of shadow on the whitewashed brick of the kitchen, laundry room, and candle shop. Musenda's voice called out “Away, girls!” to the carriage team, and there was a scrunch of wheels and hooves, a gay retreating jingle of harness. January crossed the damp uneven earth of the storeroom floor to the front entrance, which looked out beneath the gallery stairs, and saw the brightpainted green-and-black vehicle come around the side of the house and head down to the levee, where the Belle Dame steamed impatiently at the plantation wharf.

On the point above, the green bandanna flickered in the wind.

The short winter daylight was beginning to wester when little Obo, the smallest of the hogmeat gang, came running out to the field with the message that Michie Hannibal wanted January back at the house.

“Man, he got to know somethin' about Michie Hannibal that Michie Hannibal don't want known,” jeered Kadar good-naturedly, as January straightened his aching back.

“Yeah, he say to him, `Hey, you send for me about sunset, so it'll be too late for me to go back out,' ” amplified Taswell with a grin.

“ `
Oh, and have some chicken ready for me, too,' ” added Laertes, and January swiped his hand dismissively at them.

“Chicken?” he said disbelievingly. “Aw, if I knowed anythin' to blackmail Michie Hannibal with, I'd ask him to set me up with Ariadne,” and that got a general laugh, for the housemaid was as haughty as she was pretty. In point of fact January guessed why Hannibal was sending for him. Across the cut acres, the smokestacks of a downriver steamboat could be seen gliding along the levee, and January guessed the flag had been put out again, and Hannibal was bound away for New Orleans.

This indeed proved to be the case. When January reached the garçonniere, Cornwallis was just finishing strapping up Hannibal's valise; the valet looked out through the French doors and said in a dry voice, “We're doing fine, Ben,” accompanied by a glance that brought a hot flush to January's face with his consciousness of the field dust in his clothing, the stink of sweat that, in spite of a wash in the stable trough, still permeated his flesh, the muck on his coarse shoes.

“Ben, thank you for coming.”
Hannibal rose from the chair, where he'd been doing a good imitation of a man too exhausted by the effort of dressing himself to continue to pack, and staggered artistically to the door. January caught his arm to steady him and, with the neatness of a gentleman turning a lady in the waltz, guided him out onto the gallery. “You be good, and mind what Michie Fourchet and Madame Marie-Noel tell you,” admonished Hannibal. “I should be back tomorrow evening, or the day after at the most. It shouldn't take me very long to see Dr. Aude-clay.” His eyes flicked back toward the room and Cornwallis, as he twisted the name of Esteban's lover into childish pig-Latin.

January inclined his head to show he understood. A hush hung over the house and grounds-on his way in from the fields January had heard the crack of the whip, and coming past the jail had seen Ajax just untying his own daughter Eve from the whipping frame. The girl was still on her feet, though she held tight to Ajax's arm. January guessed she'd had only a few strokes. Thierry was already walking toward his house. Tired from a day's hard work.

“I wish you would take my excuses to Michie Capulet in New River about coming to see his sister. I've spoken already to Madame Fourchet about letting you go tomorrow.” January yanked his mind back with an effort as Hannibal handed him the letter he'd written, and a pass. The packet of papers felt thick and January thumbed them apart. There were three passes. Two were dated simply November, the numerals left blank.

January nodded again. “I surely will do that, Michie Hannibal. Now, you take care of yourself on that boat, and when you get to town you go straight back to Michie Georges's and lie down. You still look mighty peaked.”

“I assure you, amicus meus, I'll be fine. As the great Homer says: Quid plus me oportet Shavum quaero.” The fiddler spoke the Latin phrase as though it were a quote, but in fact it was a query: Is there anything further I need to ask of Shaw?

January manufactured a hearty chuckle. “Lordy, Michie Hannibal, you're as bad as Michie Georges, with all them foreign tongues. What's he say, that business about jurisconsultum consulere and findin' condicionem testamentum domino?”

Hannibal laughed, as at a quaint mispronunciation of words-which were in fact seeing a lawyer and provisions of the master's will. “We'll make a scholar of you yet, Ben. Testamentum locumquae actz?”
The will and the status of the lawsuit?

January nodded. “And-what's he say?” He furrowed his brow. “Oh, Quid scire Shavus de Fluvius Fictus.”

The steamboat groaned at the landing: the Heroine, a far larger boat than the Belle Dame. The steam was more than a signal, for the water pumps on most boats were operated by the engines, and a vessel that lay too long at wharf had to damp its fires or risk a boiler explosion. Hannibal clapped January fraternally on the bicep and said, “Solus pro virili parte ago. Mind yourself while you're here.” He turned to take his leave of Madame Fourchet, who had emerged from the dining room looking tired and worried. She smiled shyly as he bent over her hand.

'Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled

Thy beauty's form in table of my heart."

He even managed a creditable translation of Shakespeare into French.

Marie-Noel drew her hand back, uncertain-probably, thought January, she'd had enough poetic flirtation from Robert-but something about the bright twinkle in Hannibal's eye informed her that this tribute to her moderate prettiness was tendered in gratitude and friendship, not in entreaty for response.

She smiled, and blushed, and looked aside, and didn't know what to say.

“Until I return, oh beautiful lady. Thank M'sieu Fourchet for his hospitality for me, and please convey my best wishes for his swift recovery.”

He descended the steps to the waiting carriage, as Robert had done earlier in the day, Cornwallis following with the portmanteau behind. From the back step January watched the carriage swing around the end of the garçonniere wing, and so past Thierry's house and out to the levee in the long gold slant of the westering sun, leaving him alone.

Alone on Mon Triomphe, he thought.

Behind him he heard Fourchet hoarsely cursing Cornwallis for not bringing him his cigars, and distantly, the sound of Eve weeping as her father led her back to the shelter of a friend's cabin.

Alone and, for all anyone there knew, a slave.

He put the thought from his mind as well as he could. The address Hannibal had given as his own was, in fact, Shaw's. Given the fiddler's fragile health, should anything adverse occur, January would simply be “returned” to the “family.”

He was safe, he reminded himself. He was in no peril. All he could do now was trust.

Trust that Hannibal would reach New Orleans more or less sober, and remain sober for as long as it took to locate Shaw and find out who Claude Molineaux was and whether his dealings with his dear and lifelong friend Esteban Fourchet went any farther than dear and lifelong friendship. Trust that Shaw would know something about Fourchet's lawsuit against the Daubrays, or something concerning the elusive False River Jones.

Trust that he himself wasn't so exhausted, so numbed by work and lack of sleep-even shirking a few hours a day as he was-that he wasn't missing something vital, something that he should be seeing.

Trust, he thought, turning away and walking back toward the fields, that some disaster wouldn't befall his hapless friend and leave him stranded here, sold down the river into this small domain ruled by death.

When he looked back later on that chilly glittering afternoon by the river, he reflected that not only was his trust betrayed on all four counts-a good round average, for a black man relying on Fate's good will in Louisiana-but he missed even considering the biggest catastrophe of all, lying hidden under the calm surface of the next forty-eight hours like a snag in the river that rips the heart out of a boat, and slaughters all on board.

The worst was that it was one he should have foreseen.

“Ben.” Kiki must have been watching the back of the house, for she stepped from the kitchen as he made his way through the yard and toward the field path once more. The shadows were slanting over but January guessed there was another hour and a half of work in the full daylight, plus whatever twilight, torch-lit labor Thierry would decree.

The scents of new biscuits, of long-roasting pork, of chicken and garlic surged over him like bathwater as he crossed the yard to the brick loggia under the kitchen gallery. His stomach flinched and he hated Fourchet anew. “What is it?” Kiki's foot, he saw, was still swathed in bandages. She even remembered to limp on it until they got away from the house.