Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (37 page)

“Oh, dear God,” Vivienne Avocet was gasping, “Oh, dear God...”

“Got him,” January heard Cut-Nose say from the roof. A moment later the pirate lowered Shaw through, unconscious and bedraggled, blood and water dripping down onto the floor. Once the storm was shut out, and the light steadied, Dominique came around the truss-beam that separated her from the newcomers, and extended her hand.

“Messires, thank you....”

“Stay back!” cried Serapis.

And the taller of the two shadows said, “No closer, Mamzelle, please.” His voice was mumbling and muffled. “It is a sickness that takes long to spread, but still it is best that a woman with child not see our faces.”

“If it makes you more comfortable, of course, M'sieu.”
Dominique stepped back, lowering the candle she held. “But I assure you the only faces I see are those of men who saved my life, and those of my dear friends, and of my child. Those faces are beautiful to me.”

“Madame, hush,” said Rose to Vivienne Avocet, who was having hysterics in her arms. “Hush! Minou is right. They saved our lives.”

But Vivienne Avocet would only sob, “Oh, dear God! Oh, dear God!”

From the shadows the gleaming eyes turned toward her. Wind leaking through the shutters flared the candle's light, showing up the hands of the man who had spoken.

The hand holding the pistol with which he'd shot Burke still had two fingers and a thumb, the nails hard and hooked like claws, the other, only part of the little finger.

All this January saw as his hands worked automatically, seeking the pulse first in Shaw's wrists and then in his throat. The Kaintuck was barely breathing, waxen and still as a dead man as January stripped the remains of his shirt off him, checked the roughly-bandaged wound in his side. As he'd guessed, the rifle-ball he'd taken on the levee at Avocet had broken three ribs; his whole bony torso was dark with bruises. Serapis, when Cut-Nose severed his bonds, silently brought blankets from a trunk; Chloe handed January a gourd of very strong rum with which to clean the wound.

“I assure you, M'sieu.. .” Joffrey Duquille's thick voice broke the grip of muteness that seemed to have settled on the attic, “. . . that nothing in this part of the attic-or in the main portion of the house-has been touched by either myself or my sons since our illness began.”

He wasn't looking at Madame Vivienne, who had pulled Laurene to her and perched on a trunk-lid with the appearance of a woman trying not to touch either it or the floor.

“I had no fear of that, M'sieu.” January looked up from the makeshift dressing he was binding in place. His own left arm throbbed and he felt lightheaded from the shock of the wound. The whole conversation had a dreamlike quality to him, as if he'd already had it once before, as if he'd known all along why neither Joffrey Duquille nor his sons had been seen in twenty years. “I am well aware the disease infects only slowly; that one exposure will not transmit it. I am a surgeon,” he added, “trained at the Hotel Dieu in Paris, but I have had some training in medicine as well. My name is Benjamin January. If I can be of assistance, to you or to your sons...”

“Thank you, my friend,” said the old man. “I doubt there is much that can be done for my younger boy, Philippe. He is blind now, but otherwise as well as can be expected. We are quite well cared for, here. Gontran's eyes have thickened, too...” he touched the arm of the man beside him, “. . . and my own, a little. But we can still shoot.”

January finished with Shaw-the rifle-ball was lodged in the broken ribs and January felt too shaky himself to try to extract it by the light of a couple of candles-and sat back as Rose bandaged his own arm. While she worked, Joffrey Duquille went on.

“When first we found the discolorations on the skin of one of the slaves, we burnt everything she might have touched, and confined ourselves to the part of the house where she had gone least. None of those who worked in the main part of the house since that time, until we closed it up, have shown symptoms. And we have been careful over the years.”

As surely as if Duquille had said it, January knew then why Felice Duquille had hanged herself. He only wondered whether she had found the darkening discolorations, the areas of numbness, the first nodules on her own skin, before her husband and her sons had found them on themselves.

Rose whispered, “It is leprosy, isn't it?”

January nodded. “I've heard of it-very rarely-among slaves.”

“I understand it's common in Africa. One finds mention of it in European histories, but it seems to have died out of there now. I suppose it was only a matter of time before a slave passed it along to his masters. Will he... is there anything that you can do?”

While she spoke her hands worked deftly, probing at both wounds-the bullet had passed through the meat of his left arm, missing the bone-and daubing on the stinging rum from the gourd. Chighizola went over to MuIm, and checked the back of his head with the matter-of-fact familiarity of one who's survived a hundred battles himself.

“Let him lie,” snapped Annette Avocet when Cut-Nose announced that the saloonkeeper was still breathing. The maid Melisse went to fetch a quilt for him, but hesitated in the face of her mistress' frown. Dominique took the quilt from the maid's arms and laid it over Mulm.

“He ain't gettin' up,” January heard Chighizola mutter to her. “Back of his head's like a smashed cantaloupe.”

Chloe's soft voice could be heard below the screaming wind, making introductions-The proper Creole matron, thought January. Even in the midst of chaos and flood and slave revolt and death, she had taken the earliest convenient opportunity to make known to her uncle the names and stations of those who had invaded his house.

“... I believe the first gentleman you shot is named Tyrone Burke. The bald gentleman whom Lucy and M'sieu Chighizola are hauling over into the corner, I have no idea of his name, not that it matters....”

“I'm sure we can think up one for him if we need to, darling,” said Dominique. “We're going to boil water, p'tit-should we put up enough for you to work on M'sieu Shaw?”

“Serapis informs me that the man Mulm was the one who killed your half-brother, Madame,” said that slow, muffled, mumbling voice to Chloe. “Is this true?”

“I believe so, yes.” Chloe glanced over at Mulm, whose breathing rasped stertorously in the shadows, without a flicker of emotion in her face. “Dominique tells me it was because Artois learned of the slave revolt they were planning, the revolt M'sieu Mulm was aiding with guns in the hope that it would force you to flee St. Roche. And if you didn't flee, the slaves could take the blame for it if M'sieu Mulm and his men simply killed you and burned this house. It was quite a good plan, actually. Artois just... just happened to stumble upon it.”

“You were fond of him.” Duquille said it gently.

“Everyone was, who knew him. He was... that kind of person. Are you all right, sir? Are you comfortable here?”

“We are as comfortable as Serapis and his tribe can make us,” said the planter. He and his son were seated on a trunk, nearly invisible in the darkness. Chloe had dragged up an old footstool, just before the threshold of the open door, a white shimmer in the gloom.

“Serapis-and his father Gende-have taken great care of us. It was Gende's sister, who was a housemaid here, who first showed signs of the sickness. Of course I had her quarantined-I had a house built for her, separate from the quarters, and made arrangements that she be cared for. And at the same time we... we went into a quarantine ourselves. Your aunt, my sons, and I.
And waited.”

And how many men would have done that? wondered January. Most other planters would merely have slapped a bandage over the first of the sores and told the next buyer, Oh, she burned herself on the lamp-oil-she's a likely wench, but clumsy. As, undoubtedly, the last seller had said to Duquille.

He'd heard of sales like that, and of much, much worse.

January leaned back against the wall after Rose finished bandaging his arm, sick and weak with reaction and blood loss, and knowing as soon as the wind slacked he'd have to dig the bullet out of Shaw. Now that the danger was done, he was grateful only to be warm and more or less dry. Lury brought him some water, dragged up in jars from the butler's pantry below, and knelt to sponge the blood from the unconscious Shaw's face. The house still swayed with the pounding of the wind, but the roof didn't leak, and the roar of the rain seemed almost soothing. Chloe's voice was a gentle murmur, telling over the account of how Sancho Sangre had probably identified Hesione LeGros to Mulm, and how Burke had bought from her some account of where Lafitte's twice-stolen treasure was hidden. Once when Dominique went over to say something to her, Vivienne Avocet caught her by the skirt and whispered, “My dear, do you think it's wise?”

“I'm afraid I don't know that, Madame. Perhaps I'm not very wise.” The graceful shape of the outdated gown she wore suited her condition like the robe of a fertile god dess, her sable hair, hanging in damp curls to her waist, like some Renaissance painting of Eve. She moved to the blackness of the inner charnel-house door, and said, “May I bring you anything to make you comfortable, Messires? Darling”-this to Chloe-“Lury tells me she brought up some biscuits from the pantry as well as the water jars, when we came up here in all that confusion. Would you like those with your tea?”

Of course Minou would make tea in the middle of a hurricane, thought January, closing his eyes. It would probably do everyone a lot of good.

A noise jolted him from sleep-from dreams of alligators and mad queens' necklaces, and of Artois St. Chinian eating Italian ice beneath the willow-trees on the lake's marshy shore, watching the hurricane from afar with delighted enthusiasm and making observations of the clouds. For an instant he lay breathless, trying to identify what it was.

Then he heard it again and thought, A bird. It was a bird singing in the silence.

Someone had laid a quilt over him. His arm throbbed as if it had been cut off. Dappled light filled the attic, with a great swampy smell of water. The festering smell of sores, the stink of camphor and medicines, had faded. A yellowthroat sat on the sill of the dormer through which January himself had fallen-he could see the bullet-scar in the wood now, by the soft, clear evening light. For a moment he thought, How beautiful. That that little bird could take refuge here from the storm; and now that it is over, can sing its happiness a message to us all from God.

The bird hopped to the rafter directly over January's head, dropped a generous dollop of guano onto his hair, and flew away.

January sighed, wondering if Noah had experienced similar indignities following the Flood. Then he laughed, thinking how much more preferable it was to be shat on by a bird than to be devoured by an alligator, drowned by a hurricane, or shot by a slimy piece of work like Franklin Mulm. Close beside him Shaw still slept. January wondered whether he himself looked that bad.

Neither Burke's body, nor Mulm's, was anywhere in sight.

January sat up.

The attic had been partitioned while he'd slept. Sheets had been tacked across the nearest rafter to form what was-judging by the three other heaps of quilts between the trunks-a general quarters for the men, both black and white. A strong smell of woodsmoke permeated the air, and wraiths of it drifted in the failing sunlight, accompanied by the scents of coffee and frying meat. Presumably, thought January, Dominique had, in fact, rigged up enough metal or potsherds to form the base for a fire.

From the other side of the sheet he heard Cut-Nose say, “Nah, you didn't want to bury it in the sand, see, 'cause the sea, she's always piling up more sand or carving it away. I seen whole forts that the Spanish built just collapse in the sea, 'cause the waves cut in under 'em. Even them places where they say they dug these pits, with boards over the top of the treasure, an' coconut-mats, an' that... Most the time they was dug for somethin' else, to found a gun onto or somethin'. 'Least, the Boss never did that. Sometimes you got the navy, or the Brits, right comin' down on top of your ass, you gotta get your stuff an' get outa there, you can't spend two days cuttin' around with logs an' coconut-mats an' that. . . .”

“Oh, thank goodness,” said Minou's voice from farther off: “Lucy, you're a darling-garlic and sausage as well as the rice. But what we'll do about boiling drinking-water after the wood runs out... .”

“Virgil's bringing charcoal across on the next boat, M'am,” said Serapis. “And herbs, to clean the wounds of those who're hurt. Those up in the mill, they say the flood went up nearly to Jesuit's Bend. They'll bring across what we need till the water goes down. That'll be tomorrow sometime, by the look of it.”

“Thank God!” moaned Madame Vivienne in shattered tones. “I will never, ever be the same after this; I don't think I will ever sleep again....”

“Mama, you slept three hours this afternoon before the storm stopped.”

“Hush, Laurene, I did not... and what effect this will have on my poor child...”

“While you were asleep M'sieu Serapis showed me how to make a block and tackle, Mama, to get the food in from Virgil's boat....”

“Don't say M'sieu, dearest, about a slave. . . .”         . The sheet was put aside, and Rose ducked through, shaking dust from her bedraggled skirts. “How do you feel?” she asked January.

“Thirsty. Hungry. My arm hurts like the devil. Not bad.”

“Well, I'm pleased to hear that, Maestro.” Shaw turned his head a little on the worn pillow; his voice was barely a whisper. “I hear right, Miss Vitrac, in that the waters of the earth are bein' called home an' we'll be able to get out'n here by morning?”

Kneeling between them, Rose handed January a gourd of weak and lukewarm tea. “It's what Serapis says. From the windows you can see the level of the flood has already sunk. We'll be here for the night, it looks like-hence the Walls of Jericho.” She gestured to the partitioning sheets. She had washed her face, and her hair was braided, smooth and neat. As she held the gourd for Shaw to drink in his turn she lowered her voice and went on, in English instead of French, “The Avocet ladies have insisted upon a separate section for themselves and Chloe-they'll share quarters with lepers if they have to, evidently, but God forbid they should do so with women of color.”