Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (6 page)

It would never do, reflected January wryly, to have the white gentleman's guests encounter a mere tutor-and that tutor's still-more-mere sweetheart-on their way in to the obligatory prenuptial dinner.

Thin, fair, and small of stature, January had heard Chloe St. Chinian likened to a mermaid-not the sweet ones sailors dream about but the other kind, the ones who have no hearts. In her white gown and pale-blue ribbons, she seemed chill, self-possessed, and distant, far older than her barely-seventeen years, like a little creature of glass and diamonds. Uncle Veryl bent and kissed her hand, firelight brightening his long white hair, and escorted her inside, followed by her lumbering fiance, a tall, fat, bespectacled planter named Henri Viellard.

It was to Henri Viellard that January's sister Dominique was plaçee.

“How is Dominique?” asked Rose after several minutes of quiet while they walked together down Rue Bourbon. It was dark by now and the night air was like warm glue. Palmetto-bugs the length of Rose's fingers lumbered aside from their feet. Blue-uniformed lamplighters at the intersection of Rue Toulouse were refilling the iron lantern there with oil, the crossed chains that supported it hanging slack from the corners of the buildings. Rose and January ducked as they crossed the plank over the brimming brown gutter, the iron pattens on Rose's shoes scraping and clattering on the muddy brick of the banquette. As the lamplighters hoisted the lantern to its place again, gold flecks of brightness caught in the lenses of Rose's spectacles, on the freckles that dotted her nose, and on the white tignon that framed her long, rather narrow face.

She looked tired, but the harried look she'd had in the springtime had disappeared. January blessed Veryl St. Chinian for hiring a woman to teach his grand-nephew and at the same time cursed the poverty that dogged them both. Between playing for the Opera and for balls-white and free colored, private and subscription-and teaching piano lessons, he had saved enough the previous winter to live on through the slow times when the town lay half-dead in summer's heat. But it was not enough to support two people. Nor would Rose allow him to pay her shot at the cafes or the gumbo-stands.

Since Veryl St. Chinian had hired her, Rose had been able to allow herself one night a week at the Buttonhole Cafe, and an occasional Italian ice.

“My sister's well,” said January. “As well as she can be. Henri gave her that cottage by the lake, you know; it's hers, as well as the house here in town. According to her, he still goes to see her whenever he can.”

“With the wedding in a week,” remarked Rose, “I don't imagine that can be often. Do you think he'll be able to go on seeing her-let alone supporting her-once he's married? Many men do, you know.”

“Many men aren't married to Chloe St. Chinian.” January put a hand under Rose's elbow to help her across a plank that bridged a gutter and nearly dumped her into the brimming ooze when a mosquito tried to fly up his ear into his brain. The insects swarmed like dust-motes in the lamplight; January swatted at them ineffectually, and they both hastened their steps. “By every account she has a cashbox for a soul-according to not only my mother, but to Olympe as well, she sold her own nurse to the dealers the minute her father was dead, and the woman's child with her. Not a wife to take kindly to her husband lavishing money on a mistress, or on that mistress' child.”

Neither spoke of the possibility of Henri simply continuing to keep Dominique in the face of his new bride's objections, as so many men did. They both knew the lazy and malleable Henri too well.

Over the past two years, January had reflected a great deal upon the nature of love. There had been a time when he did not think he would ever open his eyes from sleep again without the stab of renewed pain in his heart, without realizing-each time like the first time-that Ayasha wasn't beside him. That she never would be beside him again, ever. The first time he'd dreamed of Rose, of the scent of her flesh and the silky texture of her hair beneath his fingers, he'd waked up shocked, as if he'd betrayed his wife in her lifetime, turned from her fiery sweetness to another's arms.

But he knew, each time he was with Rose, each time his whole body kindled at the lightest brush of her hand on his, that he could not go on loving a ghost. And as his love for Rose-gentle and quirky and so different from Ayasha's passionate sensuality-deepened, he ceased to compare the two women.

Not long ago he'd dreamed of Ayasha. Dreamed of fog beside the Seine, and of the great dark stone buildings of Paris dripping in the early-morning silence; dreamed of the smell of moss and vapor and stone. They stood together on the bridge at the head of the island, at the place where January had pitched into the river the trunk holding all Ayashas clothing, lest, in giving it to the poor, he might be surprised one day by the sight of some beggar-woman wearing her dress.

“And what do you think, Malik?” Ayasha smiled up at him sidelong with those dark, slanting eyes. “That I'm going to pitch you into the river so I don't have to see some other woman holding your hand?” Her black hair hung down over her shoulders, as it used to when she'd comb it out by the window, and gold earrings flashed in it, hidden treasure in an ocean of night.

And to January's own surprise he laughed in the dream, like one caught out in a foible of no great moment, though at the time he'd thrown away the trunk his world had been a bleeding wound whose pain filled earth and sky. “I did what I had to, my nightingale,” he'd replied, and kissed her. Her lips tasted as they always had, salt and sweet together. It was, as if she had never been gone. “I do love you. And will, forever.”

“Ah, Malik,” she murmured, “of course. Of course. It is only marriage that there is none of, in this dull Christian Heaven of yours. Marriage and being given in marriage. Of course there is and always will be love.”

He'd waked in the darkness, smelling the sandalwood in her hair. Then the scent was gone, leaving behind it not desolation as before, but-finally-peace.

“When is she due?” Rose's sweet alto broke the memory of the dream. January returned to the present, looked down at the woman walking at his side.

“Early September.”

By which time, January thought, Dominique might very well be alone.

Not as badly-off as Rose, of course. Dominique would at least have the house and the cottage, and, in a pinch, the jewelry Henri had given her. She might even seek another protector, returning to the Blue Ribbon Balls that were given nearly every week in the wintertime for the benefit of the wealthy white men of the town and their free colored mistresses. But it would be a rare gentleman, reflected January, who would take on another man's child.

And it would all be easier, of course, if Dominique didn't love Henri.

Over supper at the Buttonhole Cafe, he and Rose spoke of Dominique and Henri, and of the law under which the Viellard family holdings were a business, oper ated by Madame Viellard, to which Henri had and would have no access until he had done his family duty by marrying and producing an heir. Even then, there was nothing that said he would be chosen over one of his sisters to have control of the family corporation when his mother died.

His bride was an heiress, but January knew Chloe had control of her own property. Her father had died suddenly, leaving her half-brother, Artois, at the mercy of his mother's vagaries, as Chloe had been left to her guardian aunts. “Not that Uncle Veryl grudges taking him in, of course,” smiled Rose. “I gather Veryl St. Chinian has acted as a schoolmaster-general to the boys of the family for years. But I think he's a little nonplussed that, having found at last a true scholar to help, Artois prefers optics and electricity to Thucydides and Livy.” She spooned rice into the aromatic mixture of chicken, shrimp, and vegetables, and gently poked a bay-leaf out of the way. “That's a cup of coffee you owe me.”

“That's the third time this month. I'll have to talk to Cora about that.” Their eyes met, laughing: it was a game between them that whoever got a bay-leaf also got a cup of coffee the next time they were at one of the coffee-stands that clustered beneath the market arcades. Cora Chouteau, owner of the Buttonhole, had grown up with Rose on Grand Isle, south in the Barataria marshes, where Rose's father had had a small sugar plantation, after Rose's plaçee mother had died.

Perhaps, he reflected, that was why Rose and Artois had recognized each other as kindred souls. The children of plaçees might be educated by their white fathers, but it was generally expected that they would be educated to fulfill some useful and subservient role: a clerk or a craftsman if a boy, or, like himself, a musician. Generally the girls went on to become another generation of plaçee.

No one appreciated the quest for knowledge for its own sweet sake if the seeker happened to be of African descent. Even January's own training in surgery, excellent as it had been, had not been able to surmount the barrier of his appearance.

What would happen to Dominique's child if he or she happened to be charged with that wondrous, deadly Promethean fire? Particularly if by that time Dominique was struggling only to keep a roof over their heads.

For that matter, he wondered suddenly, what had happened to the children that the pirates' bejeweled women had borne twenty years ago in Lafitte's palmetto-thatched village by the Gulf? What could become of them, being what they were?

Certainly they wouldn't have the education a “respectable” man of property usually bestowed on his plaçee's children.

And what might they think-or know-of their mother's death?

“Would your brother, or your sister-in-law, down on Grand Isle, know anything about the remains of Lafitte's crew?” he asked Rose, startling her from scribbling notes about the properties of heated metals on the margin of a piece of newspaper. “Or did you ever hear anything about them while you were there?”

“Oh, half the islanders claimed descent from them.” The dim candle-light warmed the reminiscent smile in Rose's eyes. “They were Portuguese and Cubans and Spaniards, and a lot of English as well. Buccaneers have been putting up at the Barataria islands pretty much since Blackbeard's day. There's still a tremendous amount of smuggling going on through there-you didn't think all those fishermen actually made their living from fishing, did you? And after the British finished dealing with Napoleon and started really turning their attention to pirates, a number of Lafitte's crew went into running guns. All the rebellions in New Spain were just starting up right about the time the Americans burned Lafitte out of his camp on the Texas coast. They had the ships, and the connections in Havana and Cartagena and here.”

January smiled, seeing her growing up in those flat, endless marshes, like Artois, with her nose in a book. “Would you write to your sister-in-law, Alice?”

“I could,” replied Rose judiciously. “But I doubt that it would do any good. My brother's father-in-law was a good French Creole, him”-her voice dropped into an imitation of the archaic French spoken in the Barataria-“and he didn't believe in reading and writing for his daughters. Just makes women discontent, that book-learning, and of what use is a discontented woman? Who you could talk to, though,” she added, returning to normal speech, “would be Cut-Nose Chighizola.”

“Cut-Nose?
Lafitte's captain? Is he still on Grand Terre?”

“He's on Grand Isle. He and his sons have orchards and gardens there; they bring the produce up to town every few days. He'd know about Hesione LeGros if anyone would.”

The Cathedral clock was striking nine when they finished their coffee. Cora and her husband were already clearing up, for the cafe was frequented mostly by free artisans and craftsmen of color, and curfew was at ten for anyone of African descent. Despite the screens of pink mosquito-bar tacked over the windows, the little room was both stuffy and humming with insects around the few sconces and oil-lamps, and the night outside was nearly as airless. January and Rose made their way roundabout through the quieter streets of the French town, seeking to avoid the infamous gauntlet of Gallatin Street, which ran behind the downstream wharves. Even so, nowhere near the waterfront was particularly safe for men and women of color walking abroad after dark. Even in this slow season, sailors of all nationalities came ashore from the deep-water ships docked below the Place d'Armes, and the deadly currents of the river's bend. Above the Place, steamboats and keelboats disgorged their crews in quest of drink, whores, and trouble.

Cressets and flambeaux cast a hectic light against the masts visible down the cross-streets, but the young moon was setting behind patchy cloud and even a few streets back it was pitchy dark. Moths and roaches swarmed around the lights, where geckos waited on the walls to snap at them. A pair of fair-haired English sailors staggered by, faces burned red as brick. In the abyssal shadows, January heard a male voice ranting incomprehensibly as he pounded the shutters of a small house: “My name is Garfield J. Maverick and I eats broken glass an' Indian babies for breakfast! I can take on a steamboat in a fair fight an' I killed more men than the cholera! Come outa there, you French sons a hoors! Come out an' meet a real man!”

Rose drew closer to January's side.

“Hey, Peaches.” A man blocked the banquette in front of them, no more than a faceless shape. “What's Sambo there got that I ain't, hah?”

The building behind him was a tavern, and January saw smoky light inside, the color of raw amber. Tobaccostink, smoked and spit; the vast reek of stale whiskey. He tried to draw Rose away and cross the street, which was without gutters here and almost without banquettes, just a mire of clayey mud. Two other men jostled out of the tavern behind the first.

One of them caught Rose by the arm, tugged her toward him. January's fist bunched and even as he thought, Here's where I get killed for being uppity and striking a white man, he was stepping forward....

Rose flung back her head and screamed.

It wasn't a woman's shriek of protest or alarm, half-stifled with shock. It was a full-throated scream like a steam-whistle, and it so startled the Kaintuck that he dropped her arm and stepped back. Rose sprang clear the instant she felt herself free, and January swept her across the mud street and into darkness. Behind him he heard the three men laughing....