The Kingdom of Bones (29 page)

The envelope contained a sheet of heavy cream paper that bore a fancy crest and read,
The Governor of Louisiana requests the honor of Miss Mary D’Alroy’s presence at the Celebration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States.

It was a printed page in flowing script, with a space where her name had been added by a less-than-flowing hand. It would admit her to Sunday night’s historical ball at the French Opera House. The evening included a gala performance with a series of allegorical tableaux at its conclusion.

She fanned herself with the paper, thinking. A kindness from one of her new acquaintances. She had no fine dress that was suitable. But influential people might be there. Rich people. Bored people. People of all stripes, and of all inclinations. She had dealt out no pain to any living soul since the last earthly moments of Jules Patenotre.

The thought sickened her, but not as much as it once might have. Nowhere near as much. Her first time had caused her weeks of nightmares. But repetition had blunted the impact of the deed, until it held almost no spiritual horror for her. She brought these people what they wanted, and so did her best to satisfy the terms of the Wanderer’s unwritten contract. If she must do harm, she would do it only to those who sought it. When none offered themselves, she would wait.

And if the wait grew too long, what then?

She would accept the invitation, and she would go to the ball. There she would circulate, alone and anonymous. From among those who went out seeking pleasure in this strange, corrupt, and free-living city, she would find one whose needs matched her own. It would not be difficult. Like always seemed to know like. And in the event of an unlooked-for consequence, like the death of Jules Patenotre…well, on such nights there were always casualties, to be discovered and swept up in the morning with the fallen bunting and the beads.

Someone had laid out good money for this ticket. Her understanding was that they sold at a high price, to keep out the vulgar. Someone wished to see her there.

Like, perhaps, had spotted like.

On Saturday, she would sing. And on Sunday evening, join the dance.

FORTY-THREE

O
n Friday morning, there was a knock at her hotel room door and the bell-hopper called out, “There’s a carriage awaitin’ for you, ma’am.”

She opened the door. She disliked it when the staff yelled her business for everyone to hear.

“I’ll be right down,” she said.

It was the Mute Woman’s turn to shadow her. The street in front of the hotel was wide and paved, with rails for streetcars and a place for horses to stand. A victoria waited, just a few yards along. At the front, alongside the driver, sat her piano accompanist from earlier in the week. When he saw Louise, he climbed down and opened the carriage door for her. Louise stopped on the sidewalk, uncertain.

“Please, Miz D’Alroy,” Euday said. “Climb on in.”

Louise turned to the Mute Woman.

“It’s a two-seater,” she said. “And we’ve to pick up Mrs. Blanchard’s nephew.”

The Mute Woman did not move.

“It appears that you have the morning off,” Louise said. “Let us both make the most of it.”

She climbed into the victoria and settled on the buttoned leather, feeling self-conscious. The carriage had seen better days, but it was still transport that declared the importance of its passenger. Euday swung back up into his seat beside the driver. The whip cracked, and off they went.

Louise risked a glance back and saw the Mute Woman standing on the sidewalk, watching them go.

After a while, she began to relax. No one was paying any particular attention as they went by. They went through the Vieux Carré and within a few city squares they were passing along streets that she didn’t recognize. At first she’d expected that they’d be stopping to pick up her adviser along the way. But after shops and office buildings gave way to warehouses, and the warehouses gave way to row after row of ugly wooden shacks with sagging windows and rotten verandas, she realized that they’d soon be outside the city altogether.

“Euday,” she called forward. “Where’s the nephew?”

The young man half turned in his seat. “Miz Blanchard reckoned I could advise you better. Only it won’t do to announce that to the whole town. You understand what I’m saying.” He suddenly remembered something, and reached inside his coat. “Here,” he said, producing documents that she recognized. “You want to keep these safe. I’ve been looking them over for you.”

He held them out for her to take. They were the deeds to Jules Patenotre’s property. She’d had the Silent Man carry them over to the Blanchard house, effectively entrusting her stolen fortune to a stranger. But some risks had to be run. Of those in Louise’s life so far, this was nowhere near the greatest.

Stowing them safely in her bag, she said, “No offense intended, Euday, but how come a piano player can advise me better than a banker would?”

“Music’s not my living,” he said. “I make that as a bookkeeper. When a banker mislays your money, it’s the bookkeeper’s job to find out exactly where he put it. So if you think it through, with me you got a better deal. Only drawback for you is, it’s black folks and white folks. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I’m beginning to,” she said. “If you have a regular job, why are you here instead of working?”

“The office is closed,” he said. “For the celebrations.”

“Then you could be celebrating.”

“It’s nothing to me,” Euday said.

Throughout all of this, the carriage driver had sat hunched over his reins, playing no part in their conversation and paying it no attention. He was dressed in livery that would have looked handsome on some better-built and fitter man. As it was, he looked as if he was fleeing a famine by way of the dressing-up box. Euday leaned over and said a few words to him, and at the next fork in the road he tweaked at the reins and took a left, down a wide avenue of live oak trees hung with Spanish moss.

After another mile or two they saw the river, and a while later they saw it again—the road running more or less straight while the river snaked in and out of view. Patenotre had told her that his family’s plantation was on land by the Mississippi. It was land that was flat, fertile, and likely to flood.

All along the River Road, they passed antebellum homes in various states of repair. Most of the bigger ones were in a Greek Revival style, century-old wooden mansions fashioned to resemble millennia-old stone temples. Sugar planters had built them in the years before the war. Theirs was an immensely wealthy economy, but one that had depended entirely upon slave labor for its vitality.

After a particular milepost, they came to a long driveway. It had been a dirt road, and now it was choked with grass that came almost up to the hubs of their wheels. The horses waded ahead, pulling the carriage along like a barge on a canal of greenery, trailing a neatly cut line down the center of the road. At the end of the driveway stood the gates to a mansion house.

The house seemed largely undamaged. The roof had lost a few of its red tiles and the white paint was peeling off, but its lines were fairly straight and the gallery didn’t sag too much. It was two stories high and about eight rooms wide, with outbuildings beyond. As the victoria drew in before it, a stray dog on the porch scrambled to its feet and came down the steps, barking.

Euday said, “Don’t get down till I chase him away.”

“You can leave him be,” Louise said. “He’s doing no harm.”

“They carry all kinds of diseases.” He looked around for rocks, but found none. He found a stick and threw that. The animal dodged it, then turned around and picked it up and carried it a short distance to where it settled, gnawing at the stick to make it splinter. The dog was long-legged and rangy, some kind of a hound crossed with a spaniel.

Euday went to shoo it further, but it just moved a few feet, resettled, and carried on.

By this time, Louise had climbed down from the victoria and was approaching the house. The windows were all boarded up, giving the place a blinded look. The main entrance was secured with a chain, and the chain secured with a padlock.

She brought out the keys that she’d taken from Jules Patenotre. One had given her access to his strongbox. The other, larger one had been inside it.

The key from inside the strongbox fit the lock, but would not turn. She stepped back for Euday to try, and with a sound like old bones grinding together, he was able to get the lock to open. He unhooked it from the chain and drew the chain from the doors.

Then he opened the doors as wide as they would go.

Louise stopped on the threshold. The house was gloomy, but not dark. Although the windows were boarded, there was a skylight dome at the top of the main stairway. This created a perpetual twilight in the center of the house, falling away into shadow as one moved off into other parts.

She took a few steps forward. She’d been expecting a ruin. But this house was merely neglected, and compared to some of the places where she’d been forced to hide out—Richmond’s theater of varieties or that empty grocery store in Oregon, to name a couple—it was more than habitable. Some of the plaster had come down and there was an odor of sweetness and rot in the air, but there was nothing here that couldn’t be fixed, disguised, or ignored.

From behind her, Euday said, “A lot of these places got burned.”

She looked around. He was standing there squinting up at the dome. “In the war?” she said.

“People didn’t wait for the soldiers to come. They dragged all the cotton bales out of the warehouses and onto the levee so they could set light to them. Then they fired the ships at the wharves and cut them loose to float downstream. My granddaddy remembers steamboats burning on the river. Imagine that. You’d think it was the fleet of the devil himself sailing through.”

“Was your grandfather a slave?”

“No ma’am. My granddaddy was a free man.”

From the central hallway, she moved through a wide arch and into one of the reception rooms. It was big enough to dance in. There were thin stripes of sunlight across the floor and up the walls, streaming in through gaps in the planking. They picked out odd details: a plaster cornice, some hanging wallpaper black with mold, the pink marble of an elaborate fireplace whose full splendor would only be revealed when the boards came off the windows.

Euday didn’t follow her into the room, but from the archway said, “Looks like the furniture went.”

“It was sold,” she said, her voice echoing. “I’ve got all the receipts. I may see if I can buy it back. If it hasn’t already been sold on.”

She could do it, too. She had the money as well as the paperwork. The furniture had gone for a song. Let her servants object, with their subtle pressures and their poisonous looks. She’d have her way.

Louise continued through the rooms, and Euday went upstairs. She could hear him above her, knocking on walls and stamping on boards.

Toward the back of the building, she found signs that someone had managed to find a way in. There were cold embers from a long-dead fire, and scattered animal bones that had been barbecued over it and picked clean. But that was all. Someone had camped here and moved on. In a scullery, she found the broken window they’d got in by. She found birds’ mess and pigeon feathers in the room.

She couldn’t dislodge the picture that Euday had planted in her mind. As she moved back through the house, she kept imagining what it must have been like to stand on the riverbank and watch burning ships go by. Rudderless, unpiloted, fully alight as they came into view around the bend. One Flying Dutchman after another. Roaring bright and yellow from masthead to waterline, the wash of their heat blasting the watcher as they passed…and as the current bore them on downstream, still more of them coming into sight.

In their blazing majesty, they must have been like a glimpse of something greater. A devil’s fleet, indeed. A peek into the abyss.

Louise found no other signs of intrusion. Whoever had broken in here that one time, he’d found little reason to stay. It made for an intimidating squat, and there was nothing here to steal.

She went back to the hallway and out through the front door. Euday had found an exit onto the second-story gallery, and was descending some outdoor stairs with a hand on the rail.

“Doesn’t look as if the rain’s been getting in,” he said.

Louise backed off from the house a few steps and looked up at it. “I can imagine living here,” she said.

“Still needs some work.”

“I’ve got people.”

She sensed that he was probably in broad agreement, but in no rush to commit himself without seeing more.

He said, “Let me take a look at the cistern.”

While he went off to check on the water supply, she walked around the house and out into the land behind it. A broken fence showed the outline of a kitchen garden. A riot of bushes and weeds now grew within its boundary, so dense that it was impossible to enter. The outbuildings hadn’t weathered so well as the planter’s house. There was a privy and a pigeon tower, and beyond the garden a frame structure that might once have been guest quarters or an overseer’s cabin. The roof was off it now.

A hundred yards or more from the main house, screened from it by trees and with a wide dirt road running through, there stood two rows of slave cabins. These were wooden shacks with pitched roofs and overhanging porches, raised from the ground on brick pilings. Their unpainted woodwork had turned silver with age.

Something moved behind her, and she looked back. The dog had followed her out. He was keeping his distance but he seemed to be looking for a signal, some indication of welcome that would allow him to approach. But Euday was right. Stray animals carried all kinds of diseases. The dog would have to look elsewhere for the human company it craved.

“Shoo,” she said. “Go.”

But it didn’t obey.

Following the dirt road back to the mansion, she passed the slaves’ cemetery. At least, she guessed it was. It was a clearing in a ring of trees with recognizable grave mounds, set out in rows just like the slave houses and with stones to mark them. That was all they had: stones to mark them. Some had been roughly shaped, but none bore any inscription.

It was here that Euday caught up with her. He said, “You notice the graves all face to the east?”

She hadn’t, but they did. She said, “What’s the reason for that?”

“So their spirits could fly home to Africa.”

They started to walk back. The dog was keeping pace at its usual distance. It flinched a little when Euday tried to scare it away, but didn’t take him any more seriously than it had Louise.

Louise said, “You weren’t born in Africa. So where will
your
spirit fly home to?”

“Wherever my kinfolk happen to be,” Euday said. “Same as yours.”

“Mine are gone,” she said.

“Most of mine, too,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter. It’s all about those you love and the ones who love you. Dead or alive. That’s your country to me.”

Their driver was still waiting out front. He’d fed and watered his horse and was stowing the feed bag in a locker between the wheels of the carriage. If she came to settle this far out of the city, she’d need to invest in some transport of her own. And whatever the skills it might take to maintain a trap and look after a horse, the Silent Man and his wife would have to acquire them.

She said to Euday, “Well, what do you think? Would it be practical to open the house up again?”

“Take a lot of time and money to put it back the way it was.”

“I’m not talking about putting it back the way it was. Just opening it up to live in as it is.”

Euday looked toward the house, and reluctantly committed himself to an opinion. “Well,” he said, “I don’t see why not. First thing you want to do is have your people clear the dead birds out of your drinking water. Unless you want to catch the yellow fever and join those folks back there.” This was said with a nod in the direction of the cemetery.

He went in and secured the broken window, and then he closed up the house. As they descended the steps to the driveway, he promised to list his observations and send a note of them along to her hotel. These would include such repairs as were needed, and costs and taxes that would have to be taken into consideration.