Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (8 page)

Livia Levesque was her own woman now, well-off and beholden to none.

“If Henri Viellard thinks that marriage is going to give him one pennyworth more say in the ordering of the family plantations, all I can say is he doesn't know that mother of his particularly well. She ruled old Jean-Charles Viellard like the Empress of Russia, and you can see what she's made of her son: a bag-pudding good for nothing beyond reading books by heathens and deists and picking out waistcoats for himself. Minou will be well shut of him. Drink your tea, Benjamin. It's first-rate China green at a dollar and seventy-five cents a pound and it'll be completely useless if it gets cold.”

January drank his tea. The gallery of the Louisiana House overlooked a small garden that ran down to the lake; on the lawn two bluejays tormented a stout gray cat, one of them hopping about in front of it exactly a quarter-inch beyond the maximum strike of its forepaws, the other stationed behind, pulling tufts of fur from the end of the cat's thrashing tail. January could almost see steam coming from the exhausted and exasperated toms ears.

The Widow Levesque dropped a chunk of white sugar into her tea with the silver sugar-tongs, and did not offer the plate to her son. “I went to the trouble of finding a woman in St. John Parish who'll take that baby and nurse it for a dollar a month-when every slut in town is charging two dollars and some of them more-and all I got from your sister was a lot of eyewash about Henri Viellard's child, as if he won't be getting a dozen like it onto the St. Chinian chit. Well, I wash my hands of her.”

She shook her hands illustratively. Well-kept hands, thought January. Smooth as a girl's and the color of walnut-hull dye, the nails kept like jeweler's work. Only a scar just below the little finger of the right one marked where a sugar-cane had gouged, in the days when she'd dragged bundles of cut cane to the mill like any other slave-gang girl. Once she'd become St.-Denis Janvier's plaçee she'd never spoken of those days. When January or Olympe mentioned them, she would turn away from them in cold silence, as if they had ceased to exist.

On the night of General Humbert's birthday dinner, the topaz set Hesione LeGros had worn could have bought Livia's cottage and everything in it-Livia and her children as well, had they still been on the open market. January had seen what became of freebooters' women when they ceased to be young and fiery and gay, when childbearing and drink began to mark their faces and their bodies. It was the clever women like his mother who spent their money not on Italian silks but on creams and paints and Olympian Dew to prolong their youth, investing not only in their own beauty, but in property, slaves, mules, shares of cotton-presses and steamship companies.

For those who loved, and who gambled on a man's love, the damage and the pain were perhaps the worst. Livia had little enough to say about Hesione LeGros. “Of course I remember her! Who could forget those hideous old-fashioned topazes-which I'll go bail were paste-and feathers like she'd bought out a hatmaker's shop?” She selected a beignet from the plate Bella brought out to her and considered the question. Bella had been the slave who had, twenty-three years ago, helped her on with her delicate kid gloves. These days she looked ten years older than her mistress, though in fact they were both fifty-nine.

“I think she came to one or two of the Blue Ribbon Balls, got up in the most antiquated crimson taffeta polonaise and jeweled like a shop window, but I don't recall any one giving her a regular place or so much as thinking of it. She looked haggard even then and she spoke the most awful French, blast this and blast that and blast your eyes out.... Men laugh at that sort of thing but they don't buy cottages for it. I think she whored for a little while on Tchoupitoulas Street.” She sounded pleased about that, and brushed powdered sugar from her fingers.

“Did she have family, or particular friends?”

“Good heavens, Ben, I don't know! This was years ago. And any man with silver in his pocket-or copper, later on-was Hesione's particular friend, I daresay.”

She shrugged impatiently, the curious features of Hesione's death meaning as little to her as they apparently meant to the City Guards.

But when January mentioned, in frustration and in passing, that Bertrand Avocet was supposed to have murdered his brother Guifford, and this case was taking up the whole attention of the City Guards, his mother was avid with attention.

“Absolutely common tradesmen,” she sniffed, which was a little high in the instep, January thought, from a former field-hand. “The father came from France with a ship ful of shoes and married old Tileul's daughter-the bossy one-and got her father to give them the place down in Plaquemines for their own rather than any share of the family holdings. . . .”

Olympe was right, thought January again, even more annoyed than he had been in the Cabildo the previous day. His mother wouldn't have gotten her skirts dirty to cross the road to look at Hesione's corpse, but produce the smallest shred of gossip concerning the lives of the white and wealthy and she would let herself be trampled by wild horses in her rush to demonstrate how much she knew about them.

“...barely a hogshead of sugar per acre, and the swamp so far off across the open marshes that the woodgangs spend half their day dragging fuel. What with the one brother spending every cent that came in on this and that newfangled scheme to get rich, and marrying Claud Houx's widow earlier this month into the bargain-a flighty piece of work if ever I saw one-and the other brother undercutting him and trying to force him to hold household and carrying on an affair with his brother's new wife. . . .”

“I ought to introduce you to Lieutenant Shaw,” remarked January bitterly, after his mother displayed-as he had predicted-an exact knowledge of every clue sur rounding Guifford Avocet's death in the marshy clearing behind the Avocet sugar-mill: the bloody shirt, the broken watch in his pocket whose hands marked half-past nine, the parlor clock likewise inexplicably stopped, the discrepancy in Bertrand's tale of a runaway slave when no slave had been missing from the quarters. “He'd appreciate your information.”

“Don't be silly, Benjamin.” She didn't even speak sharply, and the indulgent chuckle in her voice told him just how much she regarded the thought of her conversing with Shaw as simply a jest in doubtful taste. It was as if he'd suggested that she go into real estate partnership with one of Dominique's pet finches: something unthinkably foolish, not even considered.

As if he'd suggested that the City Guards actually investigate the death of a drunken black woman who owned nothing.

“Mind you,” she added, as January prepared to depart, “I expect you to let me know more about the Avocet murder, as soon as you hear anything from that flea-bitten American animal you consort with ... Not that he'll speak a word of the truth.”

Exasperated, January returned to town by the steamtrain, to find “that flea-bitten American animal”-his mother's favorite term for Lieutenant Shaw-still absent from the Cabildo.

The rainy afternoon streets were quiet as he walked back to Rue des Ursulines-too light for a real storm, and afterward the steaming dampness would render the heat ten times worse. Shuttered shops and shuttered houses, except for the gambling-halls on Rue Royale, which Death on a Pale Horse itself couldn't have closed. As he climbed the garçonniere steps he could hear Madame Bontemps talking with her protector as she swept the back gallery, in the flat, queer accents of the almost-deaf. The fact that M'sieu Bontemps had been dead for a number of years did not seem to bother the stooped little woman any more than did the rain that spattered in under the gallery's wide roof. When he'd come to board here, after one too many of his mother's acts of emotional blackmail, January had negotiated the use of Madame Bontemps' parlor in which to teach his piano students, and even in their summer absence he kept up his payments to her, so that he could have an hour or two a day uninterrupted of playing his piano for the sheer joy of it.

In many ways he felt most himself-most real-at such times. His enormous hands floated lightly over the keys, his mind and heart engaged, both producing the music and listening. Playing the cotillions and mazurkas, the quadrilles and waltzes, that were his livelihood: arias from Rossini and Meyerbeer, overtures and ballet interludes. Playing, too, the old-fashioned pieces that were no longer in demand, but whose clockwork precision rejoiced his heart: Mozart marches, concertos of Bach and Vivaldi. Playing, too, the songs he'd heard the stevedores sing on the levee, with strange strong rhythms like the surge of the moon-called sea, and African words that no one any longer understood.

Songs his father had whistled, walking out to the fields in the black dark of winter mornings during the harvest, swinging his long cane-knife in his hand.

The stuffy heat of the little house seemed to dissipate when he played. The parlor had a ghostly feeling, with its chandeliers and mirrors shrouded in tattered gauze to keep the flies away, a sense of floating between times or worlds. Dominique had spoken of the music he used to write, and he played now the tunes he'd made in Paris, marveling a little that they could have come from his own mind.

They weren't at all bad.

He finished one of them-a Kyrie he'd made with the intention of writing an entire Mass-and turning, saw Rose standing in the parlor's long window.

He got to his feet. As a tenant he couldn't go to greet her through the bedroom, as was considered proper, and it was bad manners to come through the tall French windows straight into the parlor-like most Creole housewives, Madame Bontemps put chairs in front of them. Rose vanished, going through the narrow passway by the house around to the back, and January crossed the back parlor in three strides to meet her as she came up the gallery steps.

“Are you all right?” Her fingers closed around his offered hands, and did not withdraw as she looked up into his face.

“Yes.” He hadn't asked in the polite tone of common-places, nor did she answer so. The fear that had caused her to thrust him away last night and flee had receded to its lair in the darkness of her inner heart. “I never said thank you last night for whisking me away so quickly. In fact, I was so shaken up-so frightened-I know I behaved like an absolute toad. . . .”

“You behaved like a woman who'd been attacked,” said January, and gently took her into his arms. His words of last night-You can't go on living there, let me help you find some where else, I can contribute something-these jammed against his teeth so hard, he had to clench his jaw. In his silence she relaxed against him, her cheek to his chest, and he thought, Minou was right. Patience. For however long it takes.

And if it takes longer than my life?

Then I will still have this knowledge-that she has came to trust even a little at all. That will have to be enough.

Shaw came after Rose had left. If Madame Bontemps had glared at Rose when she saw her sitting beside January on the piano bench, she flatly refused to have the Kentuckian in the house at all. “M'sieu Bontemps does not like Americans,” she declared, peering malignantly up at Shaw from beneath the fantastically-twisted monstrosity of her green-and-orange tignon. Marie-Claire Bontemps was a tiny woman, well under five feet tall, and her stout body had an air of crookedness, as if the floor she stood on partook of a geometry and a gravity alien to that used by other folk. Like most women, she sewed her own garments, choosing cheap, garish calicoes and styles anywhere from two decades to four centuries out of date. This one was purple, with red trim and sleeves that trailed the floor. “He fought against the Americans when they invaded, and drove them out. They're all spies, he says.”

Shaw had encountered January's landlady before, and had heard all about the delusional American invasion and its various and ever-altering repercussions. “That we are, m'am,” he agreed, placing his verminous hat over his heart. “But I was captured, an' am here on parole to deliver a message for Mr. January.” He looked tired, as if last night had been a sleepless one. His gargoyle face, and his wrists where they dangled from his ill-fitting sleeves like rope and bones, were spotted red with mosquito-bites, and January remembered his mother informing him that Guifford Avocet's body had been found in marshy, low-lying ground behind the plantation sugar-mill.

Madame Bontemps regarded Shaw for a long time with her brown, slightly bulging eyes, as if she didn't quite understand his French-no surprise, reflected January, given the Kaintuck's idiosyncratic non-command of that language. “You can't come inside. He can't come inside,” she added, to January. “He'll put a mark on the house.”

January didn't even want to inquire what kind of mark she meant.

At the end of Rue des UrsuIines the river glared with molten gold behind scattered groves of masts. Blue shadow already filled the street, and mosquitoes hung above the gutters in whining brown clouds. Shaw and January had to walk down toward the market to be free of them. Had they halted, the insects would have settled on Shaw and devoured him alive.

“I come to ask if'n you'd be game to help me out,” said Shaw as they walked. “I just got back from Avocet”-indeed, January had already observed that Shaw wore the same sorry yellow shirt he'd had on yesterday morning, though given the Kaintuck's sartorial habits, that didn't necessarily mean he hadn't been home-“an' the whole setup there stinks like a basket of last week's oysters.”

He slouched, his hands in his pockets, spit a line of tobacco-juice in the direction of the gutter, and rubbed his unshaven jaw. “That shirt they found-it's Bertrand's, all right, an' it's bloody, I got no argument there. Soaked all over in blood, like somethin' out of a Gothic novel. Trouble is, the wound that killed Guifford was made by a thin-bladed knife: it's deep, but it's small, and there'd a' been a lot of blood in a small area, not sort of enthusiastical like that. An' then again, how'd he get his shirt bloody an' not the coat an' waistcoat on top of it? They wasn't even lines down the breast where a man's braces woulda stopped the blood.”

January glanced sidelong at him, his mind darting over the lies and planning that Shaw's observations implied, but he said nothing. They were close enough to Gallatin Street that occasional drunken cries and shrieks of female laughter could be heard; two men staggered by on the opposite banquette, arguing loudly in English-“... damn you, the fuck you callin' me, hunh? The fuck you callin'. .. .” He felt more than saw the change in Shaw's stance, the way the backwoodsman's gray eyes seemed to triangulate the situation, aligning the anger in the voice with the probable results of alcohol on their potential attack-speed and the distance across the street. Was aware of Shaw's awareness of the diminishing threat as they walked away.