Die Upon a Kiss (23 page)

“White men?”

“The bearded men, yes,” replied the Sicilian. “Americans, I think. They dressed like Americans. The third one I did not see because I was across the street and the cab blocked my view.”

“And he must have been white,” said January, “because men of color are forbidden to ride in cabs. And this man came out . . . ?”

“I didn’t see him come out, Signor. The outcry started. I ran to fetch Silvio. . . .”

“Whoever it was,” said January, “he might have slipped past us in the melee. But I think it likelier he went down the alley and got out through the gate of the Promenade Hotel. I heard it open and slam.”

“But there was someone,” said Ponte. “To that I can swear.”

“And you changed your clothes once you got there . . . ?”

“We saw all the world in the alley,” said Cavallo. “That we did not expect. Our hotel is only across the street, but we had told La Montero that we were going back to our rooms, and she at least would guess we hadn’t returned there if she saw us still dressed as we were at rehearsal. Madame Scie also, and perhaps Belaggio as well.”

“You think this unlikely,” added Ponte, tilting his head a little to regard January in the leaping yellow light. “But under the Austrians, men have been hanged on lesser suspicion.”

The wood of the door was old, but it was close-grained cypress, and burned slowly. Twice more the three men soaked their shirts and wet down the wood around the blaze. There was nothing to use as kindling to re-start a second blaze were this one quenched. If the men d’Isola had seen were still around, the smoke would draw them.

So at least they won’t be lying in wait for us when we
emerge.

Odd.

Did they just lock us in here like children locking play-mates in an armoire?

He retreated again, coughing. He’d already guessed they’d miss the dress rehearsal. It was surely well after four. One thin needle of searing light sliced between the massive planks of the floorboards in the third room, its angle marking the lateness of the hour. When another forty minutes or so had passed, he signed to the others, and they raked away the remains of the kindling-fire and beat out the flames. It took the three of them several exhausting minutes, but they finally battered their way through the weakened timbers, twisted the lower hinge free, and crawled forth.

As January had suspected, the hasp and padlock on the door were new. The screws that held it, new, too.

They’d been expected.

This was no spur-of-the-moment lockup, but a deliberate trap, set up well in advance.

For d’Isola? For Cavallo?

For me?

For Belaggio, maybe?

“She should have reached a house long ago, surely?” Cavallo gazed like a young eagle around the wasted fields, the dark line of cypress and the bayou beyond. “We passed several on our way here. She had but to follow the water. She could not have gotten lost.”

January kept to himself his reflection on what might have happened to a dusky-skinned young woman, alone in this wilderness of swamp and woodland, and almost certainly on foot. The empty yard, scattered with charred beams, with broken bits of boxes and oil-jars in the sick-lied light, seemed filled with sinister silence save for the leathery creak of a tree-branch, like a hinge in the wind.

He said only, “Let’s see if we can find her tracks.”

All the horses were gone, including the stocking-footed bay gelding January had ridden. The scuff-marks in the dust and weeds of the yard were too unclear, in the failing light, to make out whether d’Isola had taken one of them. Certainly someone had unharnessed the gig. Though there were marks of some kind in the direction of the bayou, it was impossible, in the carpet of elephant-ear and last year’s brown oak-leaves, to make out the shape of the foot or whether it was a man’s or a woman’s, or which way they led.

January cursed. Leatherstocking never had this problem. But then, judging by what he’d read of Cooper’s continuing epic, Leatherstocking could evidently see in the dark as well. January wondered if Abishag Shaw had the same abilities.

“I think the best thing we can do,” he said, rising from the soft muck of shell and mud at the water’s brim, “is to start back to town. I told half a dozen people where I was going this morning. When all four of us fail to appear at rehearsal, they’ll send out a search party. With luck we’ll meet them on the way to Point Algiers, and we’ll be in a better position to look for Drusilla then. Agreed?”

Ponte nodded, but Cavallo strenuously resisted the idea of abandoning their friend in an unknown countryside and growing darkness—darkness that was considerably further advanced by the time January convinced him that the three of them would have far less hope of success if they simply started wandering the
cipriere,
looking for her. With Cavallo’s objections, Ponte reversed himself and refused to leave; and when they finally set off, it was nearly full night, and all three were ravenously hungry and thirsty. Both of the house’s great wooden cisterns had burned at the time of the original fire.

“According to my mother, the Doughertys and the Burtons are still fighting over the land in the courts,” said January, leading the way along the verge of the bayou. “Not that it’s worth a great deal—not like land along the river.” He glanced back at the blackened ruin disappearing between the trees. “If the families don’t get their differences settled soon, it won’t be worth the labor it’ll cost to bring the place back at all.”

“How came they to build it all in the first place,” asked Cavallo, “if it was not worth the labor?” He waved irritably at the cloud of gnats that rose around them, ample evidence that the modest levee along the bayou had crevassed in half a dozen places during the years of neglect. January breathed a silent prayer of thanks that it was winter and mosquitoes were few. In summer the place would be unendurable.

“This was all built in the nineties.” January skirted a soggy pot-hole, boots crunching on shell—an Indian mound, where once a campsite had stood. Oaks crowned it, and crumbling platforms of brick marked the tombs of the Dougherty family, eroding as this wet land eroded everything in time.

“You could still bring slaves in from Africa then. You could buy a man for three hundred dollars and you didn’t care if he died of overwork in two years. You can’t do that now.” As always, leaving New Orleans and going into the countryside brought him back to his childhood, to the smell of dew-soaked earth and the stink of the cabins, the wailing songs of the men in the fields and the moan of the conch-shell in the dusk. Pain and a deep, sad beauty beyond any words he’d ever known.

“There are men in my village,” said Bruno Ponte quietly, “who would sell themselves gladly for three hundred dollars, if they could but find a buyer. This is good land here.”

Thin as a nail-paring, the day-moon had slipped away below the trees; as if night had crouched waiting under the trees, the shadows crept forth across the bayou’s velvet green waters. A few early frogs peeped, then were still.

Hannibal would surely go to Shaw with word that none of them had been at rehearsal. Or, if Hannibal were unable to leave the battered mattress where he slept in the attic of Kentucky Williams’s place, Belaggio would. And Shaw had his note.

It would only be a matter of time.

But what had happened to Drusilla, wandering alone about this countryside in darkness. . . .

“Who-all’s that?”

Torchflame and lanterns. Cavallo strode forward, arms outflung, crying
“Molte bene!”
even as January yelled, “Wait . . . !”

“You hold still there!” rasped a nasal American voice, and, when Cavallo didn’t stop, added, “Hold up or I’ll shoot!” And above the jangle of bridle-bits, the creak of leather in the shadows, January heard the clack of a gun-lock.

“Alt!”
he shouted, heart sinking like a stone.
“Silvio,
no!”
And, in English, “Don’t shoot, sirs!” He had to brace himself, first against his impulse to plunge off the road and into the shelter of the swamp, and second against the overwhelming urge to slap Cavallo for pushing ahead so blithely.
Please, God, not Captain Chamoflet and his slave-stealers . . .
“We’ve had our horses stolen. . . .”

“Well, have you just?” Torches were raised. The silhouettes of slouch hats and horses’ ears changed into a gold-and-black mosaic of faces and beasts. The hot light winked on bridle-buckles, on round, shining equine eyes; made dull red slivers along rifle-barrels. The lead rider spit, and nudged his mount forward, the tobacco-stink sweetish-foul on the damp dirt. A tangle of black beard showed under a decrepit hat-brim, and a long, dirty coat hung down over the horse’s rump like a rude caparison. “Let’s just see some papers on you boys.”

January fished one set of his papers from his jacket pocket, watching as he did so the rider’s face in the inverted light.
Patrol.
There were a few fat, fair Celtic countenances in the band, which never belonged to swampmen. That didn’t mean some of the men weren’t smugglers on their nights off, he reminded himself, glancing inconspicuously at the trees and calculating his chances of headlong and immediate flight.

These weren’t promising. Three riders moved their horses around to circle them, rifles cradled with careless deftness in the crooks of their arms. The captain bent from the saddle to hand the papers back, and held out his hand to Cavallo.

“We are at Cornouiller,” explained Cavallo in his careful English. “My friends and I, and a young lady name Drusilla d’Isola—”

“I don’t care if you was picnickin’ on Andrew Jackson’s front lawn with the Queen of Spain,” said the captain. “Let’s see some papers, boy.”

January thought,
Shit.
“Sir,” he said, “please allow me to introduce Signor Silvio Cavallo of Milan, and Bruno Ponte of Naples. They are Italians, engaged to meet Mr. Burton at Cornouiller to—”

“Eye-talians, hunh?” The captain stepped down from his horse, flipping a pistol into his hand as he did so like a magician producing an egg from thin air, and reached to take the lantern from the rider beside him. He held the beam on Cavallo’s face, then shifted it to Ponte, who had sprung to his friend’s side at the first hint of danger. January saw the mud-streaked, soot-grimed clothing, the swart complexions and close-curled dark hair, and felt his heart plummet. “That’s one I ain’t heard before, anyways. And I do got to say, you boys sure look like high-yellas to me.”

“Ol’ Man Ulloa over to Bayou Go-to-Hell had a high-yella boy who’d do that, Mr. Pickney,” provided the beardless—and chinless—stripling who’d handed the captain his lantern. “Go on into town tellin’ ever’one he’s a Eye-talian, and not no nigger at all.”

“That so?” Captain Pickney cocked a speculative brown eye back at Cavallo.

“What is it?” demanded the tenor, disconcerted at the lack of response. He fell back a step to January. “What is happening? Who are these men?”

Ponte flung a quick glance toward the woods, and January guessed that had he been alone—or had he been only with January—he’d have run for it. As it was, he moved protectively to his friend’s side. Not understanding, maybe, what was going on, but knowing that something was.

“They think you’re a slave, an octoroon.” January berated himself for not having gone to the Swamp to look for Hannibal before leaving town. Annoyed as he’d been at Madame Montero’s rescue the night before last, he knew if an indisputably white man were with them now, they would not be having this trouble.

The custom of the country.

“Perché?”
Cavallo turned back to Pickney, horrified bafflement on his face. “Do I look like a Negro? Look-a me . . . do I . . . uh . . .” He fished in his subjunctiveless English vocabulary.

“Silvio, leave it,” cautioned Ponte softly.

“Any you boys speak French?” Pickney turned to canvass the posse at large. Though most of the wealthy planters in any given parish were likely to be French, or at least to have learned to speak the language enough to communicate with those who held the majority of wealth and land in the district, once you got away from the choice land on the river, it was a matter of chance who you’d be able to talk to. The men who rode patrol were largely drawn from the smaller farmers, the crackers who tilled—or had a slave or two till—the marshy and less-valuable acres of cotton and corn. Forty miles to the southwest, on the other side of the Bayou des Allemands, there would have been no question—in fact they’d have been hard-put to find a member of the posse who spoke English. But in this part of Jefferson Parish there were as many crackers descended from Welsh and Scots-Irish as there were from the old Acadian stock.

“Vigaud’s daughter gettin’ married,” provided another rider, a heavy-featured man with a dirty red waistcoat under his trailing surtout coat. “That’s where him and Clopard and the Nain brothers went. Prob’ly most of the rest of the Frenchies around here, too.”

“Well, shit.” Pickney chewed for a moment in silence. “And Marsan’s up in town.”

“His wife might still be at Roseaux.” The fat man pronounced it
“Rose-
oh.” “He got a li’l gal up in town, so he don’t take her nor Miss Jocelyn up more’n he has to.”

Pickney sniffed. “You’d think those gals’d have more sense, given what he done to the last one. Well, if’n they ain’t there, somebody’ll have to ride on up to town, find out what’s happenin’. Meantime”—he turned back to January, hefted the pistol that had never at any time been pointed anywhere but at his heart—“looks like the three of you is gonna spend the night in my barn.”

THIRTEEN

“This is an outrage!” Cavallo stormed as No Chin and Red Waistcoat thrust him and his companions at gun-point into the farthest stall of Mr. Pickney’s barn. “A barbarity!”

“So it is,” said January. He wondered if the young man meant the fact that he, a white man, had been mistaken for and treated like a black one, or that anyone had the legal right to treat anyone like this at all.

“This is the United States!” the Milanese went on passionately, falling into French, since none of the Americans was listening anyway. “The land of Washington, of Jefferson! The land that showed all the world the upward road to freedom!”

“Get your boots off, boys.” Pickney tossed a length of chain up over one of the low rafters and held out the stout curved shackles attached to either end.

At least, thought January, the stall they were being put into had been mucked out after its last tenancy. That was something. And if the barn was ramshackle in the extreme, like most buildings erected by that semi-indigent, semi-barbaric class of small farmers known as crackers, at least there
was
a barn. Many crackers let their horses and mules make do with rude pens and, at most, unwalled shelters, like the cattle and swine that lived at large in the woods. Pickney’s house, dimly glimpsed across the gloom of a dung-littered dooryard, differed from the average slave-cabin only in size, and that not by much. The whole place reeked of woodsmoke and pigs.

Under cover of Cavallo’s indignation
(“. . . inspiration
for the world of free men, debased by such as you. . . .”)
January promptly sat on the dirt floor with his back to the single lantern’s dim light, slipped the skinning-knife from his boot, and thrust it under the stacks of dirty hay stored in the stall. His skin prickled at the thought of surrendering his last possibility of flight, but to resist, he knew, would have gotten him anything from a beating to a bullet in the back.

Patience,
Don Quixote had said,
and shuffle the cards.

“Rufe!” Pickney shoved the cross-bar of the shackle into place and locked it, thrust a finger in the space behind January’s tendon to make sure there was no way he could slip his foot clear. At his call, a small, middle-aged man in the worn osnaburg clothing of a slave appeared from the shadows. “Get these boys a couple blankets and some pone. You.” He looked back at Cavallo. “Boots off.”

“You go to hell!”

The pistol came up. Ponte moved to throw himself between them and January said in Italian, “Do it, Silvio.”

“I will not be chained like a dog. . . .”

“Do it!”

Red Waistcoat started forward and Pickney got to his feet, flipping his pistol around in his hand, club-wise. Neither seemed angry, only resigned to a tedious annoyance.

“What are they going to do?” demanded Cavallo, falling back a step. “Shoot me? Eh?”

“They’re going to beat the tar out of you for being uppity,” January told him. “Now get your boots off.”

Cavallo sat. “This place stinks,” he said, pulling his boots off. “You tell this farmer that his barn stinks like a sewer.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell him that.” January watched as Cavallo’s ankles were chained. “Mr. Pickney, sir,” he said as the farmer stood again. When he spoke, January could see his breath in the lantern-light. “Would you be riding out on patrol again after you leave us here? I ask because there was another member of our party, a young Italian woman, who became separated from us, and who is almost certainly lost in the woods.” He spoke his best English—far better than Pickney’s, in fact—well aware that for both the French and the Americans, educated speech often proved more telling than freedom papers in establishing one as a free man.

“She speaks no English,” he went on, “and very little French. Like Signor Cavallo, she might very easily be taken for a woman of color.”

Pickney regarded him steadily for a moment, almost visibly checking behind the words themselves for a plan or ploy, as he would have checked behind a curtain at the sight of a suspicious movement. Then he nodded. “I’ll keep a eye out.” And spit into the hay. Bruno, whom the chinless youth had chained to the upright at the end of the stall, had said hardly a word through the whole encounter, only watched the guns, and the faces of the men, with the same animal readiness in his dark eyes as he’d had when he watched Shaw.

A peasant, when all was said and done, thought January, taking the word as a definition rather than an insult. A
paysan.
Raised in a world that was far closer to the twelfth century than to the nineteenth. And ready to die, with casual ferocity, for the sake of his friend.

Yellow light lurched drunkenly over the rafters as Red Waistcoat picked up the lantern, shadows bellying forward to swallow all in blackness. The barn door shut. Cold mist flowed between the warped and shrunken boards of the walls.

“Why the hell did you tell him that?” Cavallo’s comprehension of English wasn’t good, but he evidently understood “a young Italian woman,” and “woods.” Hay scrunched and the chain between January’s feet jerked as the tenor shifted his seat. “Now they’ll be looking for her as well.”

“She’ll be safer, believe me, if the men think there’s a chance she’s a European lady instead of a runaway octoroon girl.” A mule stamped and snuffled in the darkness. Near-by a savage rustle sounded in the straw, and a rat squeaked in pain. “I only hope if she runs into someone, it will be the patrols and not smugglers from the Barataria.”

“And this—this barbarity! To mistake us for Negroes— to treat us in this fashion! Is this a commonplace in this fine country of yours?”

“For black men it is.”

“And do you think,” said Bruno’s soft voice, “that the treatment a
contadino
receives in Sicily at the hands of the
padroni
is any different? There is a great deal of injustice in the world, Signor Janvier. My father was killed when I was fifteen, for striking the man who raped my sister— not just shaming her once, but upon a dozen occasions, whenever he would meet her in the fields or the woods. He was the son of the local lord. His father had my father shot by one of his shepherds. There were no charges brought.”

Metal clinked in the raw blackness. “One day I will go back to Sicily and kill Don Remigio, and his son, but then I will die as well. The law lies in the hands of such as they. This is what the
risorgimento
is, Signor. This is what Young Italy is. Not just to cast out the stupid German-heads. Not just to avenge ourselves on the rich. When Italy is one country, and not a dozen little lands, then the lords of those little lands will have someone big who can say to them,
These things you will not do.
Until that time, the wretched of the earth will wear chains as surely as you and I and Silvio wear them tonight.”

Slits of yellow light bobbed in the darkness. January heard a man whistling an old song his father used to sing, about the rabbit in the brier, and then the stable-door creaked. “Hello the shop!” called out a husky voice, marred with the telltale roughness of the early stages of consumption, and the slave Rufe appeared around the end of the stall. He had a couple of ragged blankets thrown over one shoulder and a basket in his hand.

“Mr. Pickney really going to get M’am Marsan to come over in the morning?” asked January as the slave hung his lantern on a nail and dropped the blankets to the hay.

“Oh, sure. Don’t you worry about that.” Actually, a certain number of January’s apprehensions had abated with just a look at Rufe in better light. Though a little thin, the man had clearly not been starved or beaten. Nor did he have the hangdog look of one who lives in fear, something that told January at least a few reassuring things about his captor’s honesty and intentions. “Last month the patrol catched a woman said she was bound south to meet her husband in New Iberia; said a man up by Big Temple Mound took her freedom papers. Mr. Pickney, he rode all the way up to town, made sure she was who she said she was and that she was free. Though she had to get new papers in town, of course. But he honest, Mr. Pickney.”

He set down the basket in front of Cavallo, and with it a big gourd of water. January noticed the man never got within arm-reach of any of the three prisoners. It wasn’t the first time by a long chalk, January reflected, that Pickney’s Rufe had played jailer.

“Your friends really Eye-talians?” He regarded them curiously. Covered with filth and soot, they could have been anything from bedouins to Chickasaws.

“That they are,” said January. “As is the young lady I spoke of to Mr. Pickney—”

“Cacchio!”
Cavallo, who had drawn the basket to him, sat back with a pone of ash-bread in one hand, a handful of ground-nuts in the other, and a look of disgust on his handsome face. “This is what they give their slaves to live on in this country? Unrisen bread and—what? Pig-food?”

“Ground-nuts.” January hunkered beside him, showed him how to break the thin husk and shake out the kernels of meat. “Pea-nuts
—Arachis hypogaea,
and yes, they are used as fodder for pigs, which means they’re perfectly edible for human beings. They don’t take much looking after, and you can live on them for weeks if you have to—one bush will yield pounds of the things.” He popped two into his mouth and Cavallo bit cautiously on one. Rufe laughed at his expression.

“All right,” he said, throwing up his hands. “You got me convinced. I never met a nigger yet, no matter how bright, that didn’t know what a goober was. They’s Italians all right.

“Which is a good thing,” he added, “considerin’ some of the folk that come to see Mr. Marsan when the moon’s dark like tonight, an’ the tide’s in.”

January’s glance cut sharply to him, hearing in his voice the stealthy echo of rowlocks in the bayou that led back to the heart of the Barataria country, and the mutter of bargains struck in darkness for human cargo run in from Africa or Cuba in defiance of the law. Shaw had spoken truly when he’d said that as long as the sale of slaves was legal, and the ownership of one man by another was countenanced in any form in the United States, there would be men who’d buy human cattle cheap and bring them in, to charge what the hungry market would bear.

Belaggio had made this delightful discovery: the men, and woman, he’d purchased for three hundred dollars apiece in Havana were salable in New Orleans for four or five times that much. How great a percentage of Belaggio’s profit had Marsan charged, January wondered, to act as go-between?

“You mean Captain Chamoflet?” he asked, and Rufe shook his head.

“Ask me no questions an’ I tells you no lies. An’ believe me, friend, in this part of the country, that’s the best advice you’ll ever hear.”

“You might tell Mr. Pickney,” said January carefully, “and anyone else who might need to know it, that in case Madame Marsan isn’t at Roseaux, my family in town— and Mr. Belaggio that’s the head of the opera company these two gentlemen are in—know we were in this part of the country today and will be looking for us. Or in case Madame Marsan turns out not to speak Italian after all.” He stood up as he spoke, his gaze meeting that of the slave, and he saw in those bright, intelligent eyes the understanding of what wasn’t asked:

Am I safe?

Is your master to be trusted, with every man in the
parish in on smuggling slaves or blood-related to folks who
kidnap those they find roving free?

Are YOU to be trusted? Or do you get a percentage for
easing captives’ fears with promises that everything will be all
right?

Ask me no questions. . . .

Rufe’s smile broadened a little, rueful and bemused. “Well, I don’t know about M’am Marsan herself,” he said, ducking his head. “But Dinah that’s housemaid over to Roseaux is the daughter of the cook at Mr. Clopard’s place down the bayou, an’
she
says they got a white governess to teach Miss Jocelyn Italian, a little bit anyway, like ladies are supposed to know. So you should be all right.”

January spent the remainder of the night trying to plot an escape without knowing how many smugglers he’d have to fight in total blackness, how well they’d be armed, and where exactly Pickney’s shabby farm lay in relation to Bayou des Familles. It was a futile exercise and he knew it, but it kept his mind off the lice in the blankets and Cavallo’s indignant harangue about leaving La d’Isola to her own devices
—Does he think we’d have stumbled across her by plunging into the woods at random instead
of following the bayou back to the river?—
and about what they would or could do to return to New Orleans in time for
La Muette de Portici
the following night.

“This whole affair might well be that whore Montero’s doing!” stormed the tenor at one point, yanking on the chain that snaked up over the rafter so that it jerked on January’s ankles. “I would not put it past her! It makes more sense than the Austrians locking us up and then doing nothing to us. It is no difficult thing for
her
to hire men to wait here for us, to slip a paper under Belaggio’s door for poor Drusilla to find. Montero would do anything to return to center stage—and to that Austrian lickspittle’s bed!”

Except, thought January, for the fact that Montero wouldn’t have put the blood in the desk-drawer if she was making arrangements with old Queen Régine to have La d’Isola puking her guts out two hours before the performance.

In his mind he saw again Olympe’s strong black hands sorting through the withered little bunches of pennyroyal and St. John’s wort, tobacco and mouse-bones, and heard her voice, deep and smoky like their mother’s:
Had she enemies of her own? Just ’cause you keep soap in the
kitchen doesn’t make it food.

And there was something, he thought suddenly, that didn’t fit. That wasn’t right. His mind grasped at the mists of half-perceived connections. . . . Something about the poisoning . . .

Something Cavallo had said? Pickney? Someone . . .