Dead and Buried (20 page)

‘I’ve had worse.’ He had, too, before he’d reached his seventh birthday. Old Michie Fouchet on Bellefleur Plantation didn’t care who he hammered when he was drunk.

It hurt like blue blazes, but he ascertained that all his teeth were still in place, and his nose hadn’t been broken. On the whole he’d done a good job at protecting his head. When she helped him sit up and use the chamber-pot he saw no blood in the urine. The pain was terrible, but some of the fear retreated. ‘They were waiting—’

‘I know,’ said Rose, with her usual cheerful calm. ‘I saw one of them around midnight, across the street. This is going to sting.’

It certainly did.

‘They spoke French,’ said January, when he got his breath back. He took the rag, and the bowl of alcohol, from her hand, gasping as he cleaned the caked blood from the side of his face.

‘I heard.’ Rose shook back her hair – soft medium-brown and silky like a white woman’s – which was braided down her back like a country girl’s. He saw now by the silvery dawn-light – by the lamp still burning – that she wore her plainest calico skirt, the one she put on when helping with the laundry, with a sleeveless canvas bodice over her chemise, such as the market-women wore. ‘The man with the sword-cane went into the Verron town house on Rue Bourbon, so I’m guessing it was Louis Verron. It looked too tall to be his father. Two of the others went into the Ulloa town house on Rue St Ann—’

‘You followed them!’

Bird-wing eyebrows lifted behind the oval lenses of her spectacles. ‘I wouldn’t have been much use joining in the fight.’

She was perfectly correct about that, and it was certainly what he’d have ordered her to do, had he known anything beyond the immediate events. Still . . .

After a moment, she went on thoughtfully, ‘The Ulloas are cousins of the Verrons – I think both families have plantations near the Mexican border, in Natchitoches Parish. And Louis Verron’s father—’

‘Is the cousin of Celestine Deschamps.’

‘You don’t think the girl actually
married
Stubbs in Paris, do you?’ asked Hannibal, after some minutes of silence broken only by the rattle of occasional traffic along Rue Dauphine beside them as they walked.

‘I think it’s possible, yes.’ January reached up, very gingerly, to touch the sticking plaster that held shut the gash on the side of his face. ‘I can’t think of another reason why members of her family – and the might-be groom himself – would all seek me out and tell me this isn’t any of my business.’

‘They do seem to be taking it very seriously.
Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem
 . . .’

‘Nor can I think of another reason,’ he went on, ‘that this girl we’re looking for – Pierrette – would have returned to America with her mistress to be re-enslaved. She was free in France. Yet she came back.’

Hannibal’s words broke off at that, as he took in what it meant.

‘That argues a more desperate need than just a broken heart over a soured romance.’

After a time, Hannibal said, ‘I don’t know what it would take for me to give up my freedom . . . except, of course, I see people do it all the time. My Aunt Lavinnia’s maid was devoted to her – never married, lived through Aunt Lavinnia and her family . . . She’d have given up her first-born child if Aunt Lavinnia had asked for it. And it would explain why Uncle Diogenes was invited along on the picnic.’

January nodded. ‘As a trustee of the estate, he has to approve of Foxford’s choice of a bride.’

‘Well, he does if the boy wants to get control of his own affairs before he’s thirty,’ said Hannibal. ‘The old Viscount tried to put a similar tether on Foxford’s father – hence the hasty nuptials with Philippa, who at sixteen hadn’t the experience to recognize an incipient drunkard when she saw one.’ The hatred in his voice was like the sudden slash of a rusted razor. ‘The business about buying a cotton plantation was obviously all my hat. Diogenes would sign whatever Droudge puts in front of him – or sends out to Bengal. You don’t think that was what Blessinghurst told Patrick at Davis’s, do you? That he and the girl had deceived Foxford?’

‘He could have,’ said January slowly. ‘It would explain the family’s . . . eagerness –’ he gingerly touched his swollen jaw – ‘to hush things up.’

‘Well, an actor as a prospective brother-in-law would certainly scupper any chance the younger sister has of marrying into anything approaching respectable society – at least it would in Ireland.
Et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum
 . . . Still, why murder you? Why not kill Stubbs?’

‘That may be precisely what Verron means to do. I’m a side issue – I doubt there’s a court in Louisiana that would even consider it murder, had Verron and his cousins beaten me to death and nailed my flayed hide to the Cabildo door.’

When he’d lived in Paris, he recalled, he’d spoken of such things lightly to his musician friends: something to make their grisette girlfriends squeak and shake their heads, as if he’d returned from the South Seas with accounts of native cosmetic practices.

They paused where Rue Dauphine crossed Canal Street, and like the grisettes, Hannibal inquired, ‘They wouldn’t even ask for an explanation?’ In his best Spanish jacket and a startling ruby-red waistcoat, the fiddler looked surprisingly respectable.

‘If they did, they’d get one,’ replied January grimly. ‘Something along the lines of “the nigger was uppity”.’

‘Oh, well.’ Hannibal threw up his hands in a gesture of comprehending the obvious. ‘I understand everything now. Shame on you, Benjamin.
Take but degree away, untune that string; and hark, what discord follows!
Uppity – well!’

January – who had been about to lead the way across the ‘neutral zone’ that bordered Canal Street on both sides – stopped and made a sweeping bow to permit his white ‘master’ to step off the curb first. Even at this period of the year, there was a fair amount of cart traffic from the wharves at one end of the street back toward the Basin, where the canal from the lake ended. The proposal to extend the canal to the river had never materialized, but its echo remained in the huge width of the street itself – almost two hundred feet at this point – with the remains of an old drainage ditch down its center, now neatly fenced in iron chains in an attempt to appear park-like.

‘What’s the sister’s name?’

‘Marie-Amalie.’ January tried to recall the younger girl, whom he knew he’d seen once or twice but could remember nothing of – except that her hair was dark, and that their mother had a tendency to dress Isobel in blue and her sister in pink. ‘The mother of Isobel and Marie-Amalie Deschamps – Madame Celestine – was born Celestine Verron, her mother – Eliane Dubesc, from Sainte Domingue – having married Louis-Florizel Verron, brother to the grandfather of the gentlemen who cracked two of my ribs last night. According to my mother, Louis-Florizel was given the almost-worthless family cattle-lands up on the Red River – all of which went to Celestine when her only brother died at the age of sixteen – while the New Orleans side of the Verrons had the sugar plantations. Louis’s father and uncles mismanaged and mortgaged those to the rafters. . . . I think that’s how it went.’

‘Trust your mother to know everything about any family downstream of Canal Street.’

‘Believe me, the relationship was secondary to Maman’s analysis of how the Verron and Dubesc family money was divided, with regard to Madame Celestine’s ability to pay me for Isobel’s piano lessons. This was just before the Red River was cleared for navigation, which reversed the original positions: the Natchitoches lands became the valuable ones, and the New Orleans Verrons the poor relations.’

‘It still won’t help poor Marie-Amalie get a husband,’ mused Hannibal as they turned down the street that continued on the same side of the ‘neutral ground’ under the name of Baronne. ‘Not if the suitors’ families think they’ll be in danger of having to meet an actor or his family anytime they visit someone connected with the Deschampses or the Verrons. But even if Patrick returned to the Iberville and informed our young friend that Isobel had become Stubbs’s wife – or, worse yet, his mistress – I still can’t see that as being grounds for murder.’

‘Can’t you?’ said January quietly, and Hannibal stopped in his tracks.

‘No,’ said the fiddler, his voice equally soft. ‘I can’t.’

‘If Foxford wasn’t sober?’ said January. ‘If Patrick wasn’t sober? If Stubbs’s information was that he had made Isobel his mistress and then discarded her – possibly pregnant – and Foxford said, as young men have been known to, “I don’t care, I’ll marry her anyway.”?’

‘And if Stubbs’s information was that Isobel was secretly the Queen of the Cannibal Islands then I suppose Foxford could have murdered Patrick out of sheer chagrin,’ retorted Hannibal.

‘We’re not going to get very far if you won’t look at the truth.’

Hannibal faced him, suddenly very angry. ‘The truth is that we don’t know the truth,’ he said. ‘There is another explanation that we’re not seeing.’

January folded his arms. ‘The truth is that your love for the boy’s mother is keeping you from looking at the evidence we
do
have,’ he said gently. ‘Foxford is twenty-two. He’s been under the hand of an older man all his life, with who knows what feelings buried below the surface so far that he may not be aware of them. He’s obviously so besotted with this girl that he follows her to America and drags along his trustees in the hopes he can get her to change her mind. Then that mentor, that guide, that controller comes storming into his hotel room and throws the information at him that he has proof that the girl is not only
not
what Foxford thought she was, but also that he, Patrick Derryhick, will never countenance the match—’

‘You have no proof of any of this.’

‘No,’ said January. ‘But you’re the one who’s going to talk to Martin Quennell and find out what was actually said. So I hope you understand that you need to ask him everything you can think of and tell me everything that he says.’

Hannibal turned without speaking and strode off along the board sidewalk, January at his heels, like a good, obedient slave.

Like every other person of African blood in New Orleans – slave or free – January avoided walking along Baronne Street when he could. It was here that most of the town’s dealers in human cattle had their offices – neat square buildings of brick or wood for the most part, like any other stores in the American section, with awnings built over the plank sidewalks to protect potential customers from the brutal sun and the afternoon rains. It was here, in the fenced yards and rough-built sheds behind them, that slaves were brought in from Virginia and Maryland – where the exhaustion of the old tobacco-lands rendered so many plantations overpopulated – to be sold. With the expansion of cotton into Mississippi, Missouri, and the north of Louisiana, everyone needed slaves, and men who could be bought for three hundred dollars in the east were going for three and four times as much in New Orleans. The cane-planters were always in the market, too. Cane killed men fast.

It was early in the season for anyone to be selling, and mostly the men just sat on the benches outside the offices, sometimes talking quietly among themselves about wives, children, friends they’d grown up with – all left behind, everyone they knew – and sometimes just watching the thin traffic in the street. For the most part they were neatly dressed, in blue coats, bright with cheap dye, and shoes that probably would have been agony to walk in for more than a dozen feet. Above the shoes and below the hems of the trousers, January could see the ankle irons.

Something old – some part of him that he’d never forgotten – curled tight behind his sternum, and he felt the prickle of mingled rage and terror sweep through him like fever. Thin and jaunty, Hannibal strode ahead of him: a man who’d saved his life, a man he loved like a brother. A man who in that moment he could have struck – maybe killed – because he was white.

A girl of fourteen sprang up from one of the slave benches, darted over to Hannibal in a jingling of ankle chains. ‘You buy me, Mister? I’m right smart; I can cook, and sew, and wash clothes—’

‘I’m sure that you can,
acushla
.’ Hannibal doffed his hat. ‘But I very much fear my good wife would beat me with a broom handle, should I bring into the house a young lady as beautiful as yourself – terribly jealous, my wife, and ugly as Satan’s bulldog – so I must decline.’

‘I can be ugly,’ she offered, and she made a horrific scowl to prove it.

Hannibal mimed terror. ‘Alas, it’s not to be,’ he said and handed her a nickel. ‘She can see through ruses like that, you see.’ He moved on.

Behind them, January heard the girl’s voice, addressing another passer-by. ‘You buy me, Mister?’

Close your eyes
, he told himself, as he had to tell himself sometimes when he worked at the Countess’s and listened over his shoulder, through the music, to one of the girls chatting up a gentleman caller.
Nuthin’ I love better than a Greek, Mister
 . . .

Close your heart. Don’t think about who those girls, those boys along this street, those men in chains would be if they could actually do even the tiniest bit of what they wanted to in this world
.