Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 12

"I did lose that key!" protested Harry, with a nervous glance at January.

"Oh, like Harry ever loses anything!" joshed Syphax.

"And what do you think?" said Zuzu. "Just a little while later it turns out the liquor in that box was all poisoned, and a man there, a friend of ours"-and her face grew suddenly sad-"died of it."

January was very thoughtful as he and Harry walked the five miles back through the cipriere to Mon Triomphe.

Mon Triomphe Ascension Parish 19 Novembre 1834 My beloved, I am well. Monsieur Simon Fourchet, whose man I now am, is a stern man with a reputation for harshness, though I have myself seen him act with kindness and generosity towards those in need.

His young wife is gentle and just, and I am treated well, and am making friends among the other servants here. Please do not feel concerned for me.

Every day and every night I think of you, I pray for you, and hope that somehow we can be united again, even for a short while. I miss you more than I can say and hope that you are well and are happy.

Living in the country is strange and very different from town but I am learning how to go on here. Most unsettling is the absence of Ma.s.s, though every night Madame Fourchet leads the house-servants in prayers, which is a great comfort to me. Many of the field hands do not seem to be Christian at all.

There is great trouble here because one of the field hands, or maybe more, has been burning and breaking things mysteriously at night, and all here are in a state of fear. I pray that all matters will work out well.

Take care of yourself and tell Aurette and Leon that their papa loves them. And know too that I love you.

Your husband, Baptiste.

"Can you get that to her?" Hannibal was handing the stiff sheet of cream-colored paper back to the butler as January came up to the garconniere door. In the morning's brittle sunlight the fiddler looked greatly restored by four days of bed rest, though he was still in his nights.h.i.+rt and the green silk dressing gown he'd borrowed from Robert, his long hair tied back in a neat queue.

"I think so, sir." The butler glanced at the doorway to make sure who was standing there, and lowered his voice anyway. "One of the field hands let me know there was a-a chance he could get a letter to a trader, who'd take it to town." He folded the page and tucked it into the pocket of his dark livery. "Thank you, sir. If there's anything I can do for you, please let me know."

"Poor old duffer," remarked Hannibal, when the butler had gone. "I wrote as he asked me, but I didn't have the heart to tell him that if his master sold him off he'd almost certainly have sold off his wife as well. I wonder what he traded to Harry to get him to take the letter to False River Jones?" He returned to the bed, where a tray lay in a glint of silver and china in the bars of brightness from the door. "Help yourself," he said. "The lovely Kiki has clearly made it her mission in life to fatten me up." And indeed, there were enough m.u.f.fins, grits, b.u.t.ter, eggs, ham, and coffee on the tray to breakfast half the Achaean host before the walls of Troy.

"At a guess," said January, sitting on the floor by the bed and taking the fullest possible advantage of the offer, "he lent him the keys to the new cellaret-at any rate that's what Harry had the blacksmith at Voussaire copy for him last night. And apparently that wasn't the first time."

Hannibal whistled through his teeth. "So much for the notion that the field hands couldn't have had access to the liquor."

"I always knew there was the possibility," said January. "Harry isn't doing a thing that hasn't been done before, and by smarter men than he. But unless there's something else going on-something I haven't heard about between Harry and Fourchet--I doubt Harry would have done it. Harry's whole position depends on things remaining in status quo . . . for everyone except Harry. He might poison Fourchet if he felt threatened, but burning the barn and the mill, damaging the knives, calling all kinds of attention to the activities of the slaves-this has him terrified, and rightly so. I'm more interested, myself, in the fact that this False River Jones seems to be back in the area, if Harry's bargained to take a letter to him."

He fell silent as footfalls creaked along the gallery-the maid Henna's, by their light quick decisiveness-and faded as they turned the corner and pa.s.sed into the dining room. The sharp, cold wind that had sprung up last night whispered and rustled in the oak trees and made a constant roaring in the cane just downstream of the house, a warning of cold to come. After changing the bandanna on the oak from yellow to blue, he'd slipped up to the garconniere in the dead of last night and slid a note under Hannibal's door, asking that he be sent for that morning.

"If you'd like to sleep for a few hours on the floor I think I can contrive to keep Robert out of here," offered Hannibal, pouring him out a cup of coffee. "Keep your voice down, by the way- Leander sometimes listens on the gallery."

"Thank you. I might take you up on that later." January cradled the porcelain in his huge hands, grateful for the warmth of it, for the rich scent, for the stillness and rest. After four days his back and arms had quit aching every single minute and he could sleep through even the nibbling of the bedbugs in the unaired corn-shuck pallet, but the pain had settled into his wrists and hands. His fingers were stiff and raw with blisters-it would take weeks, he reflected bitterly, before he'd be able to play the piano again-and his bones hurt for sleep. In the few moments over the past four days when he wasn't sound asleep or wis.h.i.+ng he could be, he missed Rose desperately, and, though he felt childish for doing so, missed his piano nearly as much. Missed the G.o.dlike logic of Bach, and Vivaldi's wry grace. Missed the peace they brought to his mind and his heart.

Missed-he realized now--the person he was when he played, and the calm thoughtfulness of living without fear.

"And was the company of this charming nursemaid worth carrying twenty-five pounds of pig meat five miles on foot in the middle of the night?"

"Oh, yes," said January slowly. "Though I'd be very surprised if Zuzu turned out to be the hoodoo. What was even more valuable was Harry's gossip on the way down to Voussaire and back: where people were on the nights of the two fires; why Reuben chose Trinette to replace Kiki when Kiki was given to Gilles; any number of things about the Fourchet family that are none of my business . . ."

"And you're about to learn another," remarked Hannibal. "Are you aware that Esteban's a boy- lover?" January paused in the demolition of a fifth m.u.f.fin, startled, then nodded, as pieces fell into place in his mind. The awkward man's unmarried state, still at the age of forty-plus living in the garconniere. The sour flex of Simon Fourchet's mouth when he'd ordered his eldest son not to waste time in town, and Esteban's stifled reply. The smooth pomaded prettiness of the valet Agamemnon. "It doesn't surprise me. Who told you?"

"The long-eared and loquacious Leander," replied Hannibal. "And a few days' observation of the man and his valet together. There was a row last night when Madame Helene happened to mention to her father-in-law that when Esteban was in New Orleans to purchase the new grinder- and to meet the homecoming Robert and his family-Esteban visited a gentleman of the town named Claude Molineaux, according to Leander a dear friend of long standing. Fourchet had ordered Esteban some time ago to sever the relations.h.i.+p, which I gather dated back to the era when the family lived on Bellefleur. As usual when those whose lives he's planned refuse to go along with the program, Fourchet was furious. The word will was apparently uttered, and that deadly phrase, Continue the family."

He coughed, his educated French and small, delicate hands a reminder, like a reproach, of the family duties Hannibal himself had long abandoned, whatever they had been.

"So tell me what it was you learned from the lovely Mamzelle Zuzu."

"Not much," said January. "But while I was there one of her children misbehaved in a way that set me thinking, and when I came back here, instead of going to sleep like a sensible person I took a torch and searched through the trash piles on the downstream side of the mill, near the windows of the roundhouse where the mules walk. And I found this."

He held up a billet of maiden cane, a pale brown segmented stalk about thirty inches long. Putting it to his lips he blew at Hannibal's face, and the fiddler blinked at the stream of air.

"It's large for a child's," remarked Hannibal, immediately grasping the thing about it that January had first noted. He held out his thin hand. "I manufactured similar implements of destruction back at our place in County Mayo, of course. The favored missiles were dried peas from the kitchen, but our gamekeeper's son used squirrel-shot and could down a bird at thirty feet. He cut them long, too. This one's like a Kentucky rifle."

"Well, Aunt Zuzu's son Tom used thorns-darts. Like these." From his pocket January produced the ragwrapped sc.r.a.ps and fragments he'd collected from the floor of the kitchen at Refuge, and picked forth the two long splinters of cane. They were of a size to fit neatly into the cane blowpipe. Blowing with all his force, he drove one of them into the opposite wall so deeply that Hannibal had to work it loose.

"Arma virumque cano," murmured the fiddler, coming back to the bed with the missile.

"And by the arms you may know the man," said January somberly. "Or at least take a good guess at him."

"I'm surprised you found this at all." Hannibal perched on the bed, turning the blowpipe over in his hands. "It looks exactly like the rest of the cane-trash to me."

"Except that it's maiden cane, not sugar cane," said January. "It grows in the fields but n.o.body harvests it-hence the name. Sometimes it gets into the bundles, if it's growing too close with the sugar, but in that case the ends would have been cut on the diagonal, where a man cuts down with a knife, or upwards to top the bundle. You see both ends of this were severed straight across, it's shorter than cane so it wouldn't have been topped at all. Aunt Zuzu said her son had spooked Michie Voussaire's carriage team with a dart."

"Hmm." Hannibal dropped a little bolus of m.u.f.fin crumbs into the reed and puffed it at the bureau mirror; his damaged lungs barely generated the force to clear the long barrel, and afterward he coughed. "And considering the mule harness had been tampered with-and believe me, if I had to work all day with red pepper and turpentine rubbing my a.r.s.e I'd be ready to bolt-"

He twirled the stalk idly. "Could a white man remain unseen long enough to watch for when the rollers stuck?"

"If he wore rough clothes and a hat, maybe. If no one saw him close. There are some field hands who're fairly light-skinned, but not many. It's just possible, but only just. The cane stands within a few yards of the downstream wall of the mill, and with a spygla.s.s you could probably watch through the door to see when the rollers jammed. By the same token, the mule barn stands just beyond the mill. You can reach it in moments from the cane, going around the backside of the mill between it and the quarters. It wouldn't be difficult on a foggy evening, when everyone's in the cipriere or the fields."

"And the mule barn is where all the damage to the harness occurred. Shall I keep this?"

"If you would. And if you would," added January, as the fiddler rose and went to secrete the pipe- and January's little bundle of leaf fragments and darts-in the rear fastnesses of the armoire, "do you think you could contrive to send me with a message to a fict.i.tious relative in New River? I'd like to stop by the Daubray kitchen and ascertain first, whether Hippolyte Daubray actually did pursue False River Jones five miles down the river on the night the mill caught fire, and second, if Harry, or any other of Fourchet's servants, has any kind of close connection with the Daubrays."

"Consider it done." Hannibal settled himself at the desk, trimmed up a quill, and began to write in the looping, beautiful Italianate hand so different from a Frenchman's upright and rather pinched script. "Inceptis gravibus plerumque et magna professis/ Purpureus, late qui splendeat, unus et alter/ Adsuitur pannus. . . . Curse," he added, fis.h.i.+ng around in the drawer. "No wafers for our Robert. Such a SHOPGIRL embellishment for a work of literature." He mimed the dandy's finicking horror at the idea of those newfangled, brightly hued lozenges of flour and gum, and started to rise to get a spill from the embers of the fire.

"I think it might be best," said January, bending down to touch a fragment of kindling to the flame and carrying it back to the desk, s.h.i.+elded in his hand, "if you were to feel well enough to go back to town for a day. Or so ill you felt in need of a trusted family doctor."

He lit the candle on the desk and watched as Hannibal melted the sealing wax, touching drops neatly to the inside of the folded sheet, then pressing it down and adding several more drops on the edge and the in-turned ends. Wind whistling through the French doors on both sides of the room made the flame lean and flicker. "It shouldn't be too difficult to learn about M'sieu Claude, and about whether Fourchet expressed his disapproval of his son's choice of friends in his will."

"I'll speak to Fourchet about putting out a flag on the landing in the morning." Hannibal blew gently on the wax to harden it, and superscribed the letter to J. Capulet, verond Plantation, New River, Ascension Parish. "Will you stay for a nap, or is M'sieu Ajax likely to flog you for being late back to your office?"

January stepped to the French doors on the downstream side of the room that looked across the gallery toward Thierry's house and the cane beyond. The sun stood high above the oaks. "Since your note didn't specify how long you needed me for, I think I can push it another hour or so." It was a seven-foot drop to the ground from the gallery on that side; he crossed the room to the door looking into the piazza, mentally gauging whether Kiki would be preoccupied with getting the rice cart loaded up and preparing the noon dinner for the big house. "I'll be back . . . d.a.m.n," he added, as Cornwallis appeared from the dining room and strode out onto the gallery.

"Well, you're the one who's always going on about how he's practically a member of the family,"

Fourchet's valet was saying to Agamemnon. "Surely you'd be able to keep track of a small thing like that." The smaller man, in his neat black suit and dandified cravat, was nearly spitting with rage. "There is a difference," he said, "between keeping a master's things in good order, which some people in this household don't seem to be able to do, and knowing every receiver of stolen goods along the river. . . ."

"For G.o.d's sake, can't you quarrel someplace else?" January muttered. "If anyone asks," he added, over his shoulder to Hannibal, "come up with a really pressing reason why you're sending me over to Catbird Island for half an hour or so."

"Catbird Island?" Hannibal looked baffled. "There's nothing over there. Why would any man send his valet to an empty hunk of mud like that?"

"You heard False River Jones was camped there and might have a message for you from a beautiful widow on the other side of the river." January leaned on the doorjamb, angling his eye to the slats of the jalousie. "Get off the gallery, you lazy heretic," he added. "Don't you have any work to do at this time of the morning?"

"Why wouldn't this lovely lady just have written me?"

"Her sons," provided January, inventing freely. "They aren't eager for their mother to bring in an unknown stepfather, lest the fruits of that new union diminish their own inheritance. So she sends a winged messenger across the Father of the Waters. . . . Thank G.o.d, Cornwallis has gone in.

Ring that bell Kiki gave you if he comes out again before I'm under the house. I'll be back here to take that nap before I return to the fields."

?ELEVEN.

There were two sorts of islands in the Mississippi River: low ones, built up from sand or gravel bars in the channel as they acc.u.mulated silt and towheads brought down by the river's rise; and high ones, carved off the bank when in heavy storms the river cut new channels behind points of land. Catbird Island was of the latter type. Though the water in the chute was low now, it was very strong, and January felt the pull of it as he waded breast-deep through the muddy flood.

Were the river only a little higher a skillful pilot could probably take a small boat like the Belle Dame inside the island, between it and the bank, avoiding the ma.s.sive current mid-river.

Personally, January wouldn't have wanted to be on the boat.

Clearly the pilot of the Lancaster wasn't so sanguine about his skill; the long side-wheeler was just negotiating the bars on the outside of the island as January came around the little cove on the downstream side. He stayed in cover behind the inevitable snarl of snags that built up at the tops and bottoms of islands where the current veered, wondering which stoker or striker or deckhand on that boat had been paid off to go to Shaw and say, "Wednesday? Yeah, we pa.s.sed the point above Triomphe landing that day-that bandanna on the tree was blue."

All is well, King Aegeus. Thy son lives.

Catbird Point had originally been triangular, but once it became an island the action of the current against its outer side had built up a little bar there, with a sheltered cove behind. The belt of weathered gray deadfalls protected it from the sharp chill of the wind, but January still s.h.i.+vered as he pulled his clothes back on. If Harry had been telling poor Baptiste the truth about False River Jones being in the neighborhood, this is where the trader would camp.

The only thing January saw in the cove, however, as he emerged from the thickets of loblolly and cypress, was the scuffed dimple of an old campfire in the sand. Even before he reached it he could see it was weeks old, the earth tamped by subsequent rains. Presumably False River Jones had set up shop here on his last visit. But as January approached, he saw the fresh tracks of a woman's feet, crossing the damp earth.

She'd made no attempt to conceal them. Maybe her conscience was clear, or maybe she'd come here at night, her mind on other things. Her feet were narrow, her shoes the brogans that masters gave to slaves, newer than most but still patched, broken, and worn. The tracks led directly to the ma.s.ses of snags along the island's outer edge.

Drawn up under them was a boat, a shallow-bottomed pirogue little larger than a canoe. After a few experimental pokes with a stick, January reached in and drew forth a red-and-blue blanket of the kind that had been found in the smithy, dirty and worn. Two cane-knives were wrapped in it, not broken ones but the new ones Esteban had bought in New Orleans. There was also a cooking pot containing a couple of gourd cups, a dozen partially burned candles-both tallow and wax-and a bandanna wrapped around flint, steel, and tow.

January wrapped these things and replaced them. A few yards' search in the woods yielded a bundle hung from a tree. This contained a loaf of bread, two apples, a piece of salt pork the size of his fist, and a slightly smaller chunk of cheese. The bread was a day old. The apples were Ashford russets from Madame Camille's garden.

Stealing a little at a time, he thought, wrapping the food and hanging it once again. Waiting for a cloudy night, or rain, to get away. He wondered where the boat had been acquired.

But even if you had a boat, where would you go? Upstream, through Baton Rouge, Natchez, St.

Louis? He s.h.i.+vered at the thought of trying to row a pirogue through those vermin-nests of river pirates and slave-stealers, day or night. Across the river, and so on foot through the western parishes and on into Mexico? You'd have to be a powerful oarsman to keep from being swept away in the big current.

Or you could just go south to New Orleans, and hope to blend into the mangle of free colored and freedmen, and runaways that n.o.body bothered to look for. Get a laborer's job with somebody who wasn't going to ask. Try to get someone to forge papers for you. Maybe get a s.h.i.+p, to Philadelphia or New York.

The sun stood directly overhead. He stripped again and waded the channel, dressed in the thickets of the batture, and climbed the steep clay bank, to stand with the cold steady wind flapping and pulling at his clothing, looking down over the dark green acres of cane in the heatless light. The cane-rows churned like the ocean before a storm, and in the distance he could see the men, like ants in long gra.s.s, and, antlike, the coming and going around the doorway of the mill. Around the side of the house the rice cart appeared, the boys of the hogmeat gang leading the oldest of the mules out along the cart track into the field. Though it had been in January's mind to stop at the kitchen and speak to Kiki, he knew it was time and past time to return to work.

Quas.h.i.+e and Jeanette, at a guess. She'd have access to the knives. But as he descended the levee and walked toward the fields, he reflected that it might just as easily be someone else, someone who had another reason entirely to be arranging flight at a moment's notice.

Someone had lain in wait, thought January, making his circuitous way among the mule paddocks and sheds toward the kitchen after dinner. Had watched for the moment when the rollers would jam. Someone had prepared the blowpipe and the darts, had boiled both oleander to poison the master and some lesser poison to guarantee that the mill would be shorthanded, that the cane would be full of trash, rocks, roots.

Someone who'd written signs to summon the dark spirits to the poison's making.

A slave. Or someone who had been a slave.

He glanced around him uneasily, lest Ajax or Thierry or even one of his cabin-mates see him and demand where he was going when he was due back for the night work at the mill.

Maybe Harry had lost his spare key; maybe it had been stolen. But someone had to have gained access to the pots of grits and congris and sausage that the men ate before they went out to the fields. Kiki was just as likely to chase him off with a broom as to answer his questions. Still, it was worth a try.

But as he ducked around the back of the laundry January saw the unmistakably short, stout, black-clad figure of the woman he sought slip quietly from the kitchen door with a bundle beneath her arm. Still hidden in the shadows himself, January saw her look furtively around in the glimmer of the moon's rising light.

Meeting Harry? But on any number of occasions Kiki had expressed her contempt for all the field hands-including January-and her complete disdain for Harry.

Meeting False River Jones herself with coffee grounds or used tea leaves to sell?

Kiki set out at a swift walk, the night's chill wind jerking at her shawl, flapping her skirts.

January followed, through the velvet dark between stable and carriage house, past the rude huts of pigsties and chicken runs, until she disappeared into the cart track between two rows of the wind-thrashed cane. It was easy enough to follow her then, a row over and a little behind, the noise of his own body shoving through the thick leaves masked by the roar of the wind. A short ways into the fields, Kiki lit a lantern: The gold light bobbed between the clattering stalks. To their right the quarters lay, lightless houses and weedy plots of corn and yams, huddled against the thras.h.i.+ng wind.

When they reached the cipriere the wind was less, though the tops of the trees tossed and muttered, and even down below the air was achingly cold. A half-mile in, close by the place where the ring-shout had been, was a hut used sometimes by those Fourchet sent out to burn charcoal for use in the forge, and sometimes by the men who gathered Spanish moss. Its single window was shuttered, but most of the moss and mud that c.h.i.n.ked the walls had fallen out.

January could see the lantern's light inside like a pile of gold needles in the dark. The one knot- hole big enough to see through didn't give a very good view, but he saw a few rough bales of moss stacked along the opposite wall, and a black-skirted knee and foot.

Kiki was sitting on the moss. Waiting.

January knew, at this point, that the supper hour was well and truly over and he would be beaten by Ajax when he returned to the evening's work at the mill. For Hannibal to protest would mean the loss of his position in the work-gang, and with it the loss of any chance for further information.

Stealthily he backed into the shadows of a hackberry thicket and thought, This had better be worth it.

And waited, while the moon sailed high over the heaving trees, and the ghosts whispered in the darkness. Waited, to see who would come.

Frost on the way, January thought. His bones twinged with the reminder that he was no longer a young man. If not tonight, then soon. Maybe the attempts on Simon Fourchet were only anger, against his merciless drive to make the crop. Maybe the break January sought in the pattern was too small to see, a flaw in the mind of a man or woman pushed to personal extremity, like the hairline fracture in a steamboat's boiler that one night will bear the pressure of the steam no more.

It wasn't as though the planter hadn't pushed his slaves to murder and rebellion before.

His land, Fourchet had said. All that he had to show for his life, and everything that was precious to him. Devotion to it had cost him the life of the woman whose portrait still hung on the parlor wall, and the life of the daughter she'd borne him. Had cost him the love of Madame Camille, fleeing to New Orleans in the wake of her babies' deaths. Would they have lived, had they had the services of a doctor in town?

He thought about the piroque waiting in the darkness of the snag-piles on Catbird Island, and of the butler lying dead in the storeroom, a gla.s.s in his hand. Voodoo marks on the walls . . .

The smell of blood.

January's head came up as he scented it, sudden and raw as the wind momentarily slacked. Then he heard her moan.

He strode to the hut and hurled open the rickety door. Kiki raised her head from the floor where she'd fallen when the convulsions overtook her. Her skirts were hiked around her waist. The thick pad of moss and rags over which she'd been squatting, now drenched with blood and fetal matter, made clear to him why she had come. Mute eyes, huge and terrified, met his, then she doubled over again. An animal sound was wrung from her, hoa.r.s.e and dreadful.

"What did you take?" Without waiting for a reply January plucked aside the towel that covered her basket, unstopped the half-empty gourd of brownish liquid inside, and sniffed it, not even needing to taste. Quinine. Of course she'd have access to the plantation medicine chest, and there was never any telling how strong the bark was, when you boiled it.

There was a rain barrel behind the hut, at this season clear even of mosquitoes. The water was fairly fresh. Among the packets and boxes in her basket there was powdered tobacco, which he mixed-carefully-with gourdful after gourdful of water, forcing her to drink. She vomited twice, January holding her shoulders, the smell of the blood nauseating in his nostrils but familiar. How many times, during his six years at the hospital in Paris, had he dealt with women in similar case?

He'd known women to take anything, any sort of poison, to purge unwanted pregnancies: foxglove, ipecac, a.r.s.enic. He was preparing a third dose of tobacco water when Kiki raised her head-hair sweat-matted around her face, dark eyes huge and sunken in the candlelight-and gasped, "Paper. Herbs. The basket." And vomited again, and again, as if all her guts and soul would come up as well.