Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (39 page)

“I bow to his expertise.” January put his foot on what appeared to him to be the exact same place where Rose had put hers, and sank to his crotch in muck.

The flood had renewed the marshlands behind St. Roche Plantation. Bayou St. Roche now extended far up between what was left of a line of tupelo trees, those that survived the winds, stripped of most of their branches; the chenier on which the little hut had once stood was again an island in a reed-prickled lake. A few white egrets had returned, and regarded the party of explorers with disapproval, as if they knew perfectly well that the bespectacled boy in rough breeches was actually a young woman, and that Serapis and his two black village-mates were secret partners of their master back at St. Roche rather than subservient chattels.

No sign had been found in this wet wasteland of Jacinthe or any of his rebels. In not very many days, January guessed, the army would come, to be dealt with by Chloe, who had already sent Viellard Plantation word that she was well. She would remain on St. Roche, she said, living in the overseer's house, until the Big House was made livable again, the shops and quarters rebuilt, and “things were straightened out.” January had seen her that morning already marshaling the St. Roche African villagers with a terrifying degree of efficiency that had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that she was a slaveowner or white. Had she been African herself, she would still have been ruthlessly running the lives of everyone around her.

The plantation, January gathered from the bemused Serapis, was going to be financially as well as physically reorganized and renewed, the better to protect both Chloe's relatives and the villagers who had taken them into their care.

The body of Franklin Mulm had been found in the woods a short distance from the house. He had drowned, January guessed, without regaining consciousness, al though Joffrey Duquille and both his sons assured him that they'd seen the man get up and sneak out through a dormer window (With a deep concussion? January wondered, glancing at the little smear of blood and hair on the rafter). All three-including the blind Philippe-signed a deposition to that effect, which they'd given Shaw.

At a guess, the police would make no more inquiry about Mulm's death than they had about that of Artois St. Chinian or Hesione LeGros. January didn't know whether that made the whole situation more just or less just in the abstract sense, and wasn't about to argue the point with himself or anyone else.

“The best way to dispose of treasure in this kind of country”-Rose held out her staff for January to flounder to marginally drier ground-“was in water itself.” She moved along to the higher ridge of the old bayou, prodding carefully among the cypress-knees and uprooted tupelos. A turtle paddled indignantly from the hollow among the roots. Dragonflies filled the bright air. January kept wanting to turn and look over his shoulder, to see if Artois was keeping up with them. To see that laughing young face, the blue eyes drinking in the whole treasure-hunt with unalloyed delight. He felt the boy's presence keenly, like a cheerful ghost.

Or maybe that was only his wish, born of lightheadedness from his wound.

“No telltale hole,” Rose went on. “No drag-marks for your inquiring colleagues to find. No sweaty lifting...”

“I'll go along with that,” said Serapis. Hands clasped behind his back, he looked like some minor voodoo deity in his blue calico loincloth, bare feet, and top-hat.

“And no transporting who knows how many hundredweight of metal and pretty ornamental rocks on your back over rough country. This looks promising.”

Rose poked a little more around the roots of a huge old oak, then knelt in the long alligator-grass and brushed aside the matted mud and leaves. January saw a chain passed clear around the trunk. With the stick he poked for snakes as Rose followed it with her hands to the edge of the bayou itself.

“A tree to anchor the loot from sinking indefinitely into the muck-and any number of limbs overhead to which a block and pulleys can be affixed.”

“Which you just happened to bring along.”
They were in the bundle of things-along with rope, chisels, a blacksmith's saw, and a couple of carrying-poles-that Rose had assembled from the tools salvaged by Igba, the plantation blacksmith, in the mill.

The oak itself didn't look capable of supporting much weight, but Igba, Serapis, and January rigged the pulleys to what remained of its stoutest bough, which coincidentally overhung the water at exactly the point where the chain went in. Awkward with his injured arm, January waded into the bayou, following the chain down with his good hand as far as it would go. It lost itself in the mud, but a little careful digging brought his fingers to where it wrapped something cylindrical. The other men brought shovels to scrape and clear as much as they could. The bottom was treacherous, the more so from having been stirred up, and January guessed that Rose was right. Had the cylinder not been held by a chain, it would have sunk irretrievably into the mud and been lost.

Even with their digging, which clouded the murky water still further, it took all their strength to haul the cylinder clear. When tugging on the pulleys served only to bring the damaged tree down into the bayou with a splash, Rose waded out around it and drove the stout carrying-poles down under the cylinder, straining on them like levers and getting herself covered with water and mud. At last, with a horrible squishy lurch, the thing shifted, the suction unbalancing Rose and dumping her backward into the water. She scrambled to her feet and up the bank, and slowly, slowly, the coffin-shaped lump of mud and weeds emerged dripping from the marsh.

It was a ship's cannon, plugged with what turned out to be about eight inches of tar, rope, and fiber, hardened by time almost to the consistency of stone. Igba worked at it by turns with chisels, hooks, and a scroll-saw over a low fire built on the bayou's edge, which softened the tar slightly, while Rose sat on the bank and talked to Serapis about hurricanes, African tales told him by his father, and Chloe's suggestions for financial and legal arrangements to better utilize the land.

“Michie Joffrey, he said to me many a time how he doesn't want to leave. I heard from my cousin, that's on Les Plaquemines, how there's priests in France that make it their gift to their god to look after lepers. But Michie Joffrey said no, he'd rather live as he is, where he knows those around him. Which is fair,” Serapis went on, nodding, “there being no cure. Can she be trusted, this Madame Chloe?”

Rose frowned, chin in hands, brows drawn together over her eyes. Possibly putting together the tale of selling her own nurse with the burn-scars on the girl's arm: Father never would hear a word against her... It had been a long time, January realized, since she'd completely trusted anyone. “As much as anyone can be trusted in this world,” said Rose slowly at last, “I rather think she can. The arrangements she's proposed for selling the sugar, and for keeping any St. Roche slave from being disposed of by the family corporation, certainly don't sound to me like something that can be casually violated, not even by herself. And you understand,” she went on, “that in any case, Chloe is Michie Joffrey's ultimate heir.”

Afternoon light streamed long and golden over them when the last of the tarred plug was finally scraped and wrenched from the old cannon's mouth. The clouds that had sailed in from the Gulf dispersed without rainfall-Thank you, Virgin Mary-and the late sun mingled water and grass and sky into a huge blended shimmer of birdstitched glory. Igba and January rolled the cannon off the fire, and going around to its butt-end, tipped it up, so that its contents spilled out onto the grass.

“Well, the gods do watch out for their children after all,” Serapis said into the silence that followed. He held up one of the coins to the light. “This is Spanish, I think. I have seen some like it, in Michie Joffrey's strongbox.”

“Mexican,” said Rose, kneeling amid the gold and wet grass. Small heaps of coins all jumbled together-six or seven gallons all told-spilling out of the cannon's mouth and flashing from her fingers as she scooped them up, let them fall just to hear the jingling they made. Mingled with Spanish gold and Mexican silver and golden American eagles and half-eagles, there glinted necklaces, rings, gold chains, bracelets; loose jewels pried out of former settings; strings of pearls like dusky moons. There were gold buttons, intricate with filigree and set with gems; an embroidered scarf, blackened and rotting, held pieces of carved Chinese jade.

Rose picked out a coin. “They don't make small halfeagles like this anymore, but they did in 1812-it may well have come off the Independence. Of course, Gambi would have wanted to hide it from Lafitte. Oh, how beautiful!”

She held up the necklace of sparkling topaz, the necklace January had last seen around Hesione LeGros' neck in the dining-room of the Marine Hotel.

January dug his hands into the pile. Coins slithered and clinked in the weeds, a sound like music.

Music that said You are no longer poor. Music that said You no longer need to fear.

Music that lifted his heart like a bird, like the long lines of pelicans sweeping the golden sky.

He closed his eyes and prayed, Guide me. Show me the best way to use this, far the highest good of everyone concerned.

“. . . half to Michie Joffrey,” Rose was saying. “It's been on his land all these years. Goodness knows if Mulm and his brutes hadn't been attacking the house during the storm, so much more could have been salvaged. Just the gold and silver here alone, not even counting the jewels, should be enough to restore the house and the quarters. There will be plenty left over for him to invest.”

“And the rest is yours, Mamzelle Rose.”

January opened his eyes, to see Rose wearing Hesione's flame-bright necklace over her old red calico shirt, the dirtied jewels catching the light. Kneeling amid the marsh grass and the coins, she'd put another chain of jewels around her sorry old straw hat, and bracelets on her wrists, heavy bracelets of pearls and gold and emeralds.

“Yours and Michie Ben's.”
Serapis was smiling, the other two men looking at the coins with a kind of detached curiosity: happy, but without greediness, knowing their needs were going to be met anyway. Free of the metal that was life and death to those who lived in towns.

Rose's eyes were sparkling, delighted and at rest. January thought, Her days of poverty are over, too. Her days of fear.

We are both free.

“What will you do with your share, Ben?” she asked. There was a gold ring among the coins and his hand went to it as if drawn there, as if he'd always known it was there, waiting for him. He picked it up, a plain pure circle, and said, “Give it all to you if you will take this as well.” And he held out the ring to her.

Rose's eyes met his, now filled with a calm, sweet joy. “Keep it,” she told him. She reached out and took the ring, kissed it, and slipped it onto her forefinger, where ladies in France wore the rings that marked their betrothal. “This is all I want. And this I will be honored, and very pleased, to wear for all the days of my life.”

Benjamin January married Rose Vitrac in the St. Louis Cathedral on the twenty-sixth of September, five hours after he assisted at the birth of his sister Dominique's child. Dominique and Henri Viellard, who was also present at the birth-his wife being still downriver at St. Roche-named their daughter Charmian. After that time Dominique took the name Viellard for herself.

The hurricane had caused considerable damage in New Orleans, though the main force of the storm had passed the city by. Many of the pride-of-India trees along the levee had been felled; three steamboats were wrecked at the wharves. The Nantucket Saloon-and many other ramshackle buildings in the Swamp-were completely carried away, and others de-roofed or flooded several feet deep. Most people felt that the town had gotten off easy.

Bertrand Avocet was tried the week before the wedding for the murder of his brother Guifford, and acquitted. Shaw-barely a day on his feet and with his rib cage still in plaster-made his case well, pointing out the discrepancy between the size of the wound and the extent of the bloodstains. It was likelier, he argued, that the incriminating garment had been soaked with the blood of a chicken, and placed where it would be found so that the one brother would be hanged for the murder of the other, leaving their sister Annette in possession of the fortune left to the three of them by their French uncle Marius Motier-a fortune of which, by her cousin's letter, only she was aware.

However, when he made the nearly identical case at Annette Avocet's trial-which took place on the twenty-fifth, the day before January's wedding-the jury simply looked at him. Painstakingly, Shaw reconstructed how the despised and neglected sister had decoyed Bertrand from the house with a forged love-note purporting to be from Vivienne, and had lured Guifford to what he thought would be the illicit lovers' assignation: how she had worn her sister-in-law's dress so that the enraged Guifford would believe her to be Vivienne in the darkness behind the sugar-mill, and come close enough for her to strike. By setting back the parlor clock-the only clock in the countrified house-she had convinced Vivienne and Laurene that the three of them were together from nine until ten, when in fact they were together from eight until nine, giving her plenty of time to accomplish the murder; later she had burned the bloodstained portions of the dress, easier than burning the entire voluminous garment.

January and Cut-Nose Chighizola both testified that Annette Avocet had attempted to murder Abishag Shaw rather than let him return to New Orleans with the fragments of the forged love-note that he'd found.

Altogether, January thought, it was a convincing case. Freed of the resentment which had blinded him to its details-he realized he couldn't very well be angry at the police for not bothering to track down Hesione's murderer when they weren't going to bother to track down Mulm's killer either-he had to admire Shaw's attention to anomalous detail, down to the half-dozen mosquito-bites Annette Avocet had acquired waiting for Guifford in the wet darkness behind the sugar-mill, which had first drawn Shaw's attention to her as a suspect.