Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (33 page)

He yelled, “Shaw, damn it!” but the wind yanked the words from his mouth and flung them upriver, and whacked him over the head with a torn-off tree-branch for good measure. He groped a little farther along the batture, and nearly put his hand on a four-foot snake that went whipping from beneath a downed tree. “Shaw!”

Nothing.
And the longer he remained, the greater the chances of someone either coming over the top of the levee again, or coming down the batture from upriver, drawn by rumor of the rebellion. He had called Jacinthe's attention to himself once already, to his face and voice and mostly his size. The rebel leader was intelligent, he was suspicious, and January knew better than to think that he, January, wouldn't be watched if he crossed Jacinthe's path again.

Even if, reflected January Jacinthe didn't join up with Mulm at some point between there and St. Roche. And if he did, there was no chance of talking his way around that.

They'd be heading out soon, and moving fast. And between Avocet and St. Roche lay Bois d'Argent.

Bois d'Argent, and Rose.

Any advantage the pirogue might have gained from running downstream was nullified by the brute force of the wind. At least, thought January when he got to the little boat, he was poling in the same direction as the snags, treelimbs, and other flotsam that heaved all around him in the blackness. There was a lantern in the prow, and he even managed to light it: it did absolutely nothing for him.

Only the tangles of flooded brush to his right kept him oriented, he couldn't even see the levee, and the rising millrace of the water roared among the snags. It would be far too easy to drift into the main current and find himself swept away to the sea.

There'd be a landing at Soldorne. He strained his eyes for the flagstaff that would signal it, rising above the levee-waited for the ghostly blue flash of the lightning that more and more often lit up the sky. Strained his arms and his back, too, fighting that hell-bent current, and keeping to shallower water. Once he delivered a warning to the people on Soldorne, he knew, the warning would spread downriver. If the whites weren't able to hold against the rebelling slaves, at least they would have plenty of time to flee, or to make enough resistance that Jacinthe would simply abandon the straight track down the river road, and move inland. January had almost concluded, despairingly, that he'd missed the flagstaff and landing in the dark, when he saw it, silhouetted against a lightening, a reddening in the storm-black sky.

Firelight that caught the flying rain like burning jewels.

The house at Soldorne was in flames.

He tied the pirogue at the wharf and ran up the plank steps, head bowed against the slashing rain. At the top of the levee the wind nearly took him off his feet, screaming around him as if it would skin the clothes off him, nearly blinding him as he looked down. The rain kept the Big House roof from catching, but every French door that opened onto the encircling gallery was a furnace-mouth, scarlet light showing the gallery planks themselves scattered with the debris of flight. January descended the levee, disbelieving-they couldn't have gotten on the road that quickly! and thought, The slaves here saw the flames at Avocet and knew what they meant. They rose up, without waiting forJacinthe to arrive.

Had the owner and his family had time to flee? Leaning against the wind, driven aside from the path again and again, he climbed the gallery steps. He had to shield his eyes against the glare from those broken doors. Furniture within had been tossed and tumbled, drawers yawned in the parlor secretaire. A woman's jewel-case lay at his feet, a single ruby earring catching the flame-light. Then a gust caught it, and the case, and batted them away into the darkness.

Though he walked all around the burning house, he could see no bodies. The rain was too heavy now, and the wind-jerked crimson fire-glare too uncertain, for him to tell whether there had earlier been blood. Stable and mulebarn both showed flames within, but the shrieking wind and deafening rattle of trees and cane drowned any sound. Beyond the holocaust glare was only tumbling blackness-whether anyone remained in the quarters or even in which direction they lay was impossible to discern. If they were smart, they'd flee whether they had anything to do with the rebels or not, thought January. Once the army heard of Jacinthe's rising, few distinctions would be made between slaves who rebelled and slaves who concealed their suspicions about what their friends and family members might be up to.

Which was exactly what Franklin Mulm would be counting on.

But it was curious, he reflected, recalling the jewelcase, that the fleeing Madame Soldorne would have removed the jewels from the case. That was much more the action of a man, to take the jewels and cram them in his pockets.

There was no question of taking to the pirogue again.

He set off along the shell road along the levee's top, leaning against the wind and staggering when it veered, the force of it almost twisting his nearly-useless lantern from his hand. Branches, leaves, and uprooted cane-stalks smashed him as he walked-once a bird, dead and soaked and very solid, crashed into his temple out of the darkness and below the road, the threshing of the cane-fields had the note of a sea in storm. Midnight? One o'clock? Only the wind existed, bludgeoning him like a flail and bellowing in the trees.

Rose was at Bois d'Argent. He remembered Ti-Jon's scornful words about the free colored; remembered, too, how the free colored had been massacred by the slaves of Saint-Domingue in the great uprisings of the 1790's, who had seen in them only the lackeys of the whites. Vivienne Avocet's light-skinned servant had stayed with her mistress rather than flee or throw in her lot with the slaves. She would very likely be killed without compunction, a fate that would almost certainly befall Rose if she fell into Jacinthe's hands. And if she fell to Mulm and his filibusters-wherever they were in this maelstrom-she would likely be passed along to an unscrupulous dealer, taken out of the state, and sold, freedom papers or no freedom papers.

Unless Mulm recognized her as January's friend, of course.

The house at Boscage was burning. A fool's action, January thought, with the certainty of the army's arrival ... He recalled the moss-gatherers, Griff and Nate, and tried to recall what they'd said of their master and his family. He would not have thought there was sufficient anger there to fuel this kind of reaction, but knew from his own days in the quarters how such anger underlay every aspect of the fabric of life.

That was the great fear the whites lived with, day in and day out. The thing they would deny, and lie about to others and to themselves: that their slaves were angry. That their slaves actually did not like to be treated like animals. That the people whom they bought and sold, whom they told who to marry and who they had to let into their beds, the people who ate congris and salt-pork while they-the whites-consumed chicken and jellies and coffee with dessert ... that these people had their own opinions about what was done to them. About the life that they were forced to live by threats of physical punishment or of separation from their families and friends.

Speak of rebellion, thought January, standing on the levee with the wind hammering him, and nine whites out of ten would become instantly irrational. Angry, blaming everyone from Quaker bleeding-hearts to ungrateful slaves.
Terrified of this. Of the gold flames streaming in the stormy darkness.

The next house down the river road was Bois d'Argent. The wind grew worse. The rain grew worse. January heard Rose saying This is only a storm, and tried to remember, tried to imagine, a time when he thought water was a soft thing, or gentle. This was like being peppered continuously with small shot, hammered and drowned and driven again and again to his knees until sometimes he simply crawled, groping with his hands like a blind beast. When the wind veered the rain into his face, he felt he was drowning, unable even to tell up from down. His body ached from the effort of fighting to stay upright, never mind move forward. The roaring of the wind in the cane-fields below the road passed beyond the sea-boom of ordinary storms and rose to a constant bellowing roar, like a live thing uncaged and ravening; the river level was rising, and when January was able to see anything at all in the dark, he could glimpse only surging chaos.

Dante, he thought, must have gone like this into Cocytus, the frozen Hell where Satan's wings churned the air to storm. Jacinthe and his troops couldn't be far behind him. They were obviously gaining strength by the hour, if even a few of the slaves from the other plantations joined them in their flight. He thought of Vivienne Avocet and her stoic sister-in-law, of the quadroon maid and the young girl clinging to the back of a horse in this shrieking inferno of waters, wondering how this could possibly have happened to them. Thought of Shaw, somewhere in the wet, churning woods on their flanks, wounded and watching for his chance ...

Or, likelier, dying of shock and exposure when he could no longer continue with a bullet-wound in his side and whatever damage January's kick might have inflicted. Or stumbling off the batture in the blackness, to be swept away in the river's flood.

The wind eased, like Jupiter taking a breath. The rain poured straight down like an upended ocean. Firelight through the trees again, glaring from every door and win dow of the house at Bois d'Argent and transforming to blood the water sheeted among the oaks. The overseer's house was burning, too January could see it-and the stable beyond. A body lay on the gallery: a man's, it looked like, when January fumbled Rose's telescope from his pocket.

And on the shell road of the levee itself, where the path ran up to cross over to the landing, lay the red bandanna Rose had used as a signal that all was not safe to go into camp. That all was not as it seemed.

It was fixed to the road-bed with a horn-handled kitchen knife.

January stood for a long time, looking down at that bandanna, by the glare of the burning house.

There was no way the slaves here could have seen Boscage burning. Not unless someone had come and told them. Conceivably Jacinthe could have arranged with slaves in every plantation along his proposed route of flight to all rise on the same night-the night of the first storm heavy enough to delay the whites' communication with the army-but the Doctor's comment seemed to indicate that that had not been the case. On every plantation there were men willing to risk their lives-and the lives of everyone around them-for freedom. But equally, on every plantation one could find men and women both so eager to curry favor for themselves, or so malicious about their neighbors, that they'd betray their fellow-slaves. And Jacinthe, he thought, did not seem to be a trusting man.

More movement in the dark.
January's lantern-light briefly spangled what was almost certainly pale cloth, snagged in the branches of the batture. He struggled down to it, knee-deep in rising water that dragged at him like a riptide. He wrenched it loose: a thick silk shawl, flapping like a sail. Chloe's, without a doubt. She had fled this way, then, down the road, instead of inland across the fields to the small farms that would be located somewhere in the cipriere. Just as well, with escaped slaves-probably armed with cane-knives-wandering that roaring darkness, not to mention Mulm ...

He reached the top of the levee, held the shawl where the firelight would fall on it, and drew breath as if he had been punched in the gut.

The wet yellow silk, the embroidered butterflies, blue and red ... it was definitely Dominique's.

It can't be. January staggered, the wind nearly taking him off his feet. Below the levee, trees were not only bending, but rocking, cracking under the rage of the storm. Huge boughs and young trees flashed past like spirits, appearing out of nothing, violent and deadly. For a moment he wondered if Henri, in a sudden attack of poor taste, had bought identical shawls for his wife and mistress, but remembered that Dominique generally bought her own clothing with money her protector gave her-often bought Henri's gloves and waistcoats, and chose his presents to his sisters as well.

What the HELL is she doing here? At Bois d'Argent ... Had she truly come there herself? Thinking Henri was there, thinking to warn him ... Olympe, or someone, must have sent him January-word at Grand Isle, word that Dominique intercepted.

He tied the shawl around his waist, stumbled in the wind, and went on.

The house at Autreuil was burning. From the levee, through the telescope, January could see shadows moving against the flame. Water lay three and four inches deep be low the gallery, and the men clung to the stair-rails and the trees to keep on their feet. They led horses out of the stables, as the slaves had at Avocet, but these figures wore coats like white men, and slouch hats tied on their heads with bandannas. January recalled the jewel-box on the gallery at Soldorne-had it only been a few hours ago? Mulm was looting and burning the houses himself, he realized, in addition to picking up escaped or straying slaves. After warning the inhabitants to flee, of course.

And Jacinthe and his people would take the blame for it all.

January staggered on, feeling as if the storm had lasted for days. As if he'd been condemned to struggle through it forever, punishment for some sin that had seemed right at the time. His confessor, without doubt, would have told him that his duty lay in remaining with Jacinthe's band to protect the four Avocet women-one of whom, he was almost certain, Shaw strongly suspected of murdering Guifford Avocet. And indeed, there was every chance that none of those women would come out of this alive.

But he knew, too, that to try to rescue them-to show himself too willing to stick by them-would have been the quickest route to a cut throat, and no good either to them or to Rose and, now, to Dominique. He could only push on, in the hope of catching them at St. Roche, or of organizing some kind of resistance strong enough to bargain.

But the house at Les Plaquemines was shuttered fast and locked, and no amount of pounding could rouse response from within. He felt his way along the wall from door to door, hammering with his fist and calling out. Near the doors of what would have been the parlor, he felt fresh bullet-holes in the wood. They'll see my lantern, he thought, but didn't dare put it out, knowing he'd never get it lit again and would be lost indeed without it. Something crashed into the other side of the house-an oak-tree uprooted in its entirety. A second crash, and the whole house shuddered while buckets of rain sluiced onto the gallery, and he felt like a lone mariner on the deck of a derelict ship, abandoned and sinking in the night-wracked abyss of the sea.