Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (14 page)

“Maybe.”
Artois didn't sound satisfied, and walked on, hands in pockets, frowning.

A frog hopped from the gutter and bobbled across the banquette, fat and glistening. Other frogs croaked and peeped in the courtyards of the deserted town houses behind their shut iron gates.

“Will you ask Mademoiselle Vitrac to marry you?” January checked his stride, startled at the question. Artois looked up at him with worry in his eyes.

He answered slowly, “In time.”

“Why `in time'?” asked Artois. “Why not now? She cares for you. I can see it in her face, whenever she looks at you. When she took your hand on the road yesterday...”

“ ...
she ... in six months I'm going to be leaving, you see. Going to school in Lyons.” And his eyes brightened at the prospect, the joy of leaving this land, this place. Of finding his own place in the world. January remembered, so clearly, how that joy had felt. “She does need someone to care for her, you know. I know it isn't easy for her.”

“No,” said January, deeply touched. He wondered if Rose had spoken to this boy about the attack on her in Gallatin Street. “And believe me, Artois, it's something I've wanted to do for...” For how long? Since first he'd seen her, in the dark inferno of the Charity Hospital, when she'd come in the midst of the yellow fever and cholera, seeking a doctor for her students?

The black weight of Ayashas death had been heavy on him then. He'd seen that tall, awkward, bespectacled young woman only as someone who didn't deserve to be fobbed off with one of the bloodletting lunatics who worked in the yellow-fever wards, doctors who didn't think they'd given a patient enough salts of mercury until their teeth were loosened, their lips blue, their gums bleeding. A schoolmistress, struggling to nurse the girls who, from being her pupils, had become her friends.

It hadn't been love at first sight, he thought, remembering the wet wind that had rolled through the city that night, flapping her cloak as he'd walked her back to her school on Rue St. Claud. But it hadn't taken long.

“I've wanted to ask her for a long time,” he finished. “But you heard her yesterday afternoon in the woods. Every man who's ever said to her `I want you to be happy' has meant `I want you to give up what you are.”'

“You wouldn't do that,” said Artois, “would you?” And he looked up into January's face searchingly as they passed beneath the flare of the lantern over the intersection of Rue Dauphine, like a child who understands for the first time just how much he doesn't comprehend about the way adults think and act.

“No,” said January, hoping that in fact he'd have the wits to catch himself if he started to.

“It's just that ... you're my friends.” Artois hopped across the brimming gutter and resumed walking, the child's tone gone, a careful manliness returning, a little forced, to his voice. “Sometimes it feels like you and she are my family, the only ones who understand.” Of his mother, who had disencumbered herself of her son at her earliest opportunity so that she could get on with her own life, he did not speak. “I wish there was something I could do to ... to help her.”

“So do I,” said January quietly. “But trust is something each person has to come to on his own-or her own.” He thought about taking the knife from Rose's hand, to stab Mathieu with. About Rose walking from the room weeping, to be pursued by Mathieu for the rest of her life. I'm glad to know you know. “Some people's roads are just longer than others. They can't take any fewer steps than they have to, just to make me feel better or you feel better.”

Artois nodded, digesting this, and they walked in silence for a time through the hot darkness. When they stopped at the corner of Rue Bourbon, he spoke again. “Please let me know if there's anything I can do. Or I'll tell you if I think of anything.... Anything that would help.”

January smiled, remembering his own days of youthful optimism, and said, “Thank you, Artois.”

“Maybe I could go to the Nantucket?” added the boy. “Mulm wouldn't recognize me. I could ask around, find out if there was in fact any word of Jean Lafitte returning....”

“I think we'd better keep to Mamzelle Marie's word on that,” interjected January firmly.

Artois looked crestfallen.

“Jean Lafitte has been missing for fourteen years,” January said. “I suspect that if he'd changed his name and identity, he'd still have been heard of either smuggling or slave-trading or leading a band of freebooters or running some huge confidence-trick: he was that kind of man. The fact that in fourteen years nothing has been heard of himor of someone like him-leads me to believe that he died while he was in temporary hiding, planning how to come hack. Probably of fever. It happens,” he added, seeing the unwilling wriggle of the young man's shoulders.

The unspoken protest: Not to Jean Lafitte!

“You know what they say of white men in Louisiana,” January told the boy. “That they come here seeking their fortunes, but all they find is a wet grave.”

Rose's note said Come as quickly as you can.

“She isn't hurt.” Old James spoke in the hesitant tone of one who knows it isn't his place to offer advice, but the valet had clearly seen how January's eyes widened at the scribbled words. “Nor is Michie Veryl, nor Michie Artois. Mamzelle Rose came into the pantry in great haste and handed me this, and asked me to bring it on to you.”

January glanced back through his landlady's diningroom to the shuttered gloom of the front parlor. There, one of his two remaining pupils was going through a simplified version of “Catch Fleeting Pleasures” with slow care, while the other-a tiny seven-year-old named Narcisse-followed along, mute and silent, on the edge of the marbletopped sideboard. The clock on the sideboard informed January that there were fifteen minutes to run on the lesson. “Tell Mamzelle Rose I'll be on my way the moment I'm done.”

The note hadn't said Come at once. And whatever Rose said or wrote was exactly what she meant.

That was one of the things January treasured about Rose.

“You didn't tell me people would be coming.” Madame Bontemps popped through the doorway of the back gallery, where James and January stood, like the Demon King in pantomime. “You need to tell me when people are coming. Michie Bontemps doesn't like it.”

James opened his mouth, probably to inform her that Michie Bontemps was dead, but caught January's eye. Instead, he bowed himself down the back gallery steps and away.

“I can't have this kind of thing,” Madame Bontemps informed January. She had made herself a new dress, acid green with yellow fantasias of appliqué-work and tatted red flowers. Her sewing would have fetched high prices had it been any style remotely wearable in civilized society. Besides her penchant for bizarre colors and complete disregard of current mode, the little woman tended to decorate her quilted, puffed, and padded coats and bodices with designs elaborately worked out in dried chicken-bones or dead and desiccated insects. This afternoon she had an enormous hornet carefully stitched onto the front of her tignon, just above her left eye. It was dead, of course, but January suspected that even so, it wasn't an ornament for which there would be much of a market. “You should have known he was coming.”

She retreated to her room to fetch broom and dustpan, with which she proceeded to sweep the gallery and steps where the valet's feet had trod.

January shook his head, and returned to the front parlor, aware that the moment the children departed, Madame Bontemps would take up the straw-matting and scrub the parlor floor-even in the corners and under the chairs, where they couldn't possibly have walked-and meticulously sponge each piano-key with diluted vinegar.

Come as quickly as you can. It wasn't like Rose to panic, to send for him or anyone when they'd be meeting-as they usually did-for supper, when her lesson with Artois was done.

The lesson would run late this afternoon, he knew. Rose and her pupil were setting up a vacuum-bottle for some variety of arcane experiments with spectrums of light.

Uncle Veryl, a Classicist to his fingers' ends, had shaken his head over the direction of his nephew's studies, but had arranged to have the air-pump purchased from a supplyhouse in Edinburgh: No wonder nobody ever knew what to do with the boy, January thought.

In six months I'm going to be leaving. . . . Which would leave Rose out of a job again.

January turned the matter over in his mind as he corrected his little pupils and took them through the pieces they had to learn for next week. Marie-Zange, whose mother was a plaçee, was quite clearly able to wheedle her way out of practice most days and quite clearly did; Narcisse, the child of a free colored grocer, showed real promise. And his parents, thought January, were probably as baffled about what to do with him as Uncle Veryl was about Artois. He could almost see them writing to God: But we ordered a boy who'll take over the family business!

It wasn't likely Rose would find a pupil like Artois again.

He knew already she would never accept monetary help, from him or anyone. He'd found that out last summer, when one of the booksellers for whom she did translations died, and for a time it had looked as if she'd lose the room she rented. January himself had had little he could have shared with her, and Olympe's offer of a place to live had been politely turned down: “You have no idea what a bad guest I am,” Rose had told his sister. “I'd much rather take in washing and keep you as a friend.” And in fact she had scrubbed the floor and fetched wood and water at the Cafe Venise for three weeks until she'd been able to find work for a professor of Greek.

During those three weeks January had forced himself a hundred times not to say lf you lived with me, at least you'd have a place to live. . . .

Rose's hesitancy about men aside-if it could ever be put aside-he knew that confined to one room, he and Rose would quickly come to hate one another, and there was no way they could afford more.

Had we world enough and time, he thought, as he walked along Rue Bourbon toward the St. Chinian town house.

And Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. . . .

Neither Marvell nor Shakespeare had ever, apparently, considered love in the light of the money that gave man and woman the independence to choose freely. One's father might lock one in a nunnery for the rest of one's life, but at least one wouldn't end up doing other people's laundry in order to keep a roof over one's head.

After the brazen heat of the streets, the dim gloom of the St. Chinian carriageway was like tepid water. January picked his way around the jumble of old chairs and dismantled carriage-traces to the jungly riot of the courtyard, where Rose, Artois, Uncle Veryl, and James were gathered in front of the open French doors of the laundry-room-cum-laboratory. A wooden crate labeled RENNIE AND SONS-EDINBURGH rested on the courtyard bricks, and great quantities of packing-straw lay strewn about. Space had been made on the laboratory worktable for a stack of china plates, rich cobalt blue rimmed with gold and bIurred with straw-dust. A couple of cups, a saucer, and a handsome tureen with a gold fish for a handle rested on the edge of the fountain.

“If you're planning to pump all the air out of that, it looks a little fragile.” Facetiously, January picked up the lid of the tureen and peered inside.

The tureen was full of packing-straw. Nestled in the straw was a gun-lock.

He looked back, fast and shocked, at the crate. A dozen gun-barrels glinted wickedly amid the packing beneath the gold-rimmed dishes. Like a nest of savage eggs, six or eight little bundles of greased cloth were visible, one picked open to reveal another lock.

He thought, The stocks and barrels will be down at the bottom of the crate.

The hair lifted on the back of his neck. This was definitely something he didn't want to know about.

The label said RENNIE AND SONS, the Scots firm from which Uncle Veryl had ordered the vacuum-pump. It was clearly marked also M. Artois St. Chinian, 21 Rue Bourbon.

“I think the label must have gotten wet and come off in the hold of the packet from England.” Hands clasped behind his back, Artois sounded more interested than upset, as he had been about the prospect of being electrocuted on Dominique's gallery.

Of course, he had never encountered some of the men who hung about in the Swamp, either.

“You can see the paper's wrinkled and stained. This box, and the pump, must have been the only two things in the hold with FRAGILE painted on the ends of the crates. There isn't another address.”

No, thought January. No, there wouldn't be.

“My first thought was to pitch it in the river,” said Rose.

Uncle Veryl lowered his quizzing glass and regarded her with pained astonishment. “It's quite good china,” he protested. He was a small man whose thin arms and legs and scrawny neck combined with a plump little paunch to make him look like a spider. He wore a nip-waisted fiddleback coat so old the dye was turning green, and an immense linen neck-cloth dressed in the elaborate pattern of creases and knotting known as the Mailcoach. “Bow scaleblue if I'm not mistaken, and quite expensive, although of course not up to Wedgwood quality. Personally, I don't think the Bow standards of taste have been what they were....”

“The shipping company will be able to trace the crate here through the carters,” said January to Rose, speaking past the old man's perusal of the goods. “It came by carrier from the levee?”

“Yesterday evening. I'd promised M'sieu Songet I'd have the translation of Helen in Egypt checked by this morning, or I would have stayed to open it then.”

“I believe a letter of complaint is in order,” declared old Veryl. “I paid three hundred dollars for that pump, and where is it? It's a delicate piece of scientific equipment.”

“We should tell the City Guards, surely,” said Artois. “Or-is it illegal to import guns?”

“Not in the slightest,” replied January. “But if you're arming and equipping people in secret-as Youx did when he traded with the Mexican guerrilleros, or Long when he tried to invade Texas-you're touchy about how many people know you're bringing arms in by the boxload. If you take them to the Guards, you'll almost certainly have to testily in court at some point in time. And the people who did order these-and paid for them-know that.”