Dead and Buried (12 page)

‘According to witnesses,’ said January, ‘you quarreled – with sufficient violence as to alarm bystanders – over a young lady named Isobel Deschamps—’

‘Oh,’ said the Viscount quickly. ‘Oh, yes – was that her name? I saw this man – this Blessinghurst, you call him – trying to force his attentions on her and I . . . Well, one doesn’t simply stand by and let that sort of thing take place, does one? The man was clearly a scoundrel.’

January opened his mouth to point out that this directly contradicted his statement of three seconds previously; to ask why, since he had only been in New Orleans less than twenty-four hours at that point, the young lady had addressed him by his Christian name; to inquire what he, his uncle and their business manager were doing in a city known throughout the world as a pest hole in the summertime . . . and then closed it. The dogged wariness in the young man’s eyes informed him, if the foregoing conversation had not, that he would obtain nothing but more, and clumsier, lies. Instead he said, gently, ‘Your Lordship, I’m trying to help you. You say they can’t hang you because you didn’t do it. But if you go before a jury with the weak excuses you’ve given me today, I can promise you that they will.’

NINE

‘
D
o you believe him?’

Shaw stopped in the door of the watch room, his sparse brows twitching down over his gargoyle nose. ‘Do I believe him
what
? If’n I had a dollar for every lie that boy told us just now . . .’

Behind them in the courtyard came the leathery smack of a whip on meat, the girl’s frantic scream. January’s jaw hardened so much that he thought his teeth would break. He followed the Kentuckian into the dim rumbling confusion of the watch room again.

‘Do you believe he killed Derryhick?’

Shaw sighed, and in that sigh January heard the lies of sweet maiden aunts who had murdered their brothers for the family property, of respectable French Creole society matrons who tortured slaves in their attics, of charitable gentlemen who thought nothing of raping fourteen-year-old black girls. . . .

‘What is truth?’ Pontius Pilate had asked: the cry from the heart of judges and policemen down through the ages.

‘Believin’ ain’t my job,’ said Shaw, after they had picked their way through the crowded chamber in a silence that January had not had the temerity to break. ‘But whether or not Derryhick pulled a gun on this Blessin’hurst Lordship just before he hightailed it back to his hotel to meet his Maker, somethin’ about this-all sure don’t listen right to me. I’ll sure look this feller up. They’s only two or three hotels in town where a Lordship would put up. An’ I’ll look into where else Uncle Diogenes mighta been – an’ this Droudge feller as well, who ain’t got much better of a story than His Lordship, exceptin’ that his boots was clean Friday mornin’ an’ there weren’t no watch with blood on it under his bed . . . Any chance you can catch Quennell at the coffin shop an’ ask what it was His Other Lordship said to Derryhick that got his dander up?’

‘Unfortunately, not directly.’ They stepped through the Cabildo’s doors into the arcade again and stood looking out across the Place d’Armes in the queer, thickening light of coming storm. ‘The problem is that I’m supposed to be watching him at the Countess’s for another reason entirely . . .’

‘A reason that’s got to do with him spendin’ time at the most expensive whorehouse in town on a bank clerk’s salary?’

Of course, it was Shaw’s business to know who was doing what in New Orleans . . . ‘A reason that’s got to do with him keeping the books for the Burial Society,’ January said pointedly. ‘So it’s best I don’t draw his attention to me as a man who asks questions. I’ll have to speak to the other members of the board.’

‘Fair ’nuff. Consarn,’ Shaw added mildly, as two youths emerged from the mouth of Rue du Levee, where that seedy waterfront thoroughfare debouched into the Place d’Armes, and pelted in the direction of the Cabildo in arm-waving panic. ‘Don’t folks in this town never just sit an’ watch the flies?’

When Shaw strode off in the direction of the two winged Mercuries – who seized the policeman by the arms as soon as he came in grasping distance and poured out some frantic tale, pointing back in the direction from which they’d come – January considered seeking out Hannibal. But he judged that by the time he reached the Swamp – rain or no rain – the local desperadoes would be just drunk enough to be looking for trouble, and he had had, he considered, trouble sufficient unto the day.

So he returned to home, Rose, and Sunday dinner, and then an evening of sitting on the gallery of their house overlooking Rue Esplanade, watching the lightning and playing his guitar for the woman he most loved on earth.

At one point, listening to his account of the parallel events and discoveries of The Problem of the White Half-Brother and The Problem of the Deceased Irishman, Rose remarked, ‘Does it occur to you that Hannibal knows a great deal more about this than he should?’

It had, but January found himself as unwilling to look in that direction as Hannibal was to consider Foxford’s guilt. ‘He knows the family. And he was part of Derryhick’s “merry band” . . .’

‘There’s a difference between “knowing the family” and being as certain as he claims to be that a boy he last encountered as a child in dresses is innocent. If, in fact, he hasn’t seen the boy for seventeen years.’

January’s fingers stilled on the strings. ‘Did you see his face when he saw Derryhick’s body? That shock was genuine. I’ll take oath on it.’

‘You may have to.’

He glanced sidelong at her.

‘It won’t have escaped Lieutenant Shaw,’ she went on, ‘that, for a man who’s spent the past two nights making discreet enquiries in every gambling hell and brothel in town as to the whereabouts of Uncle Diogenes, Hannibal has taken good care not to come face-to-face with the Viscount himself . . . and did so even before anyone viewed the murder scene. He “absquatulated”, as Shaw would put it, before the City Guard even arrived. You don’t happen to know where
Hannibal
was on Thursday night, do you?’

‘I don’t,’ said January. ‘I imagine it could be found out readily enough . . . if Shaw hasn’t discovered it himself already. Hannibal didn’t know who the boy was on Monday night. I’ll take oath on that, too. When I spoke to him Friday, after the funeral, he was simply too hung-over to lie.’

Rose’s quick-flash smile disappeared as swiftly as it had come. ‘You may be right about that. Still,’ she said, ‘there’s something about his – his
certainty
– that doesn’t look well.’

‘I don’t know whether it’s certainty,’ said January, ‘or just wilful blindness. With luck, Lord Montague Blessinghurst will put in an appearance at the Countess’s tomorrow night, and things will become a little clearer.’

That Monday night Jacob Schurtz returned to the Countess’s, ebullient with champagne and eager to explain to the beautiful Sybilla, in rather fuddled detail, how Martin Van Buren’s aristocratic penchant for silk dressing-gowns and golden coffee-spoons was despoiling the pockets of honest Americans – to which the Irish girl listened with a fascination that January knew would lead to hair pulling and accusations of betrayal the next time Trinchen got drunk. Trinchen spent a good deal of effort trying to edge herself into the conversation and on to the wealthy Yankee’s knee, a spectacle that Martin Quennell – present also – seemed to take in good part. Quennell, January noted, had replaced his champagne-ruined attire: new-made coat, trousers, and three new waistcoats in the most stylish of embroidered silks.

Can’t look shabby when you’re on the town with your prospective brother-in-law
.

As before, the young man restricted himself to jest and innuendo with several of the girls, and he finally settled near an elderly Pennsylvania cotton broker, to explain whether the New Orleaneans really – as the Pennsylvanian had been told – worshipped the dead.

‘The Creoles don’t exactly worship them,’ said Quennell, his voice – and his slight accents of distaste – distancing himself from the entire French side of town. ‘It’s more like a work party, really . . . Only, of course, Creoles will make a picnic out of anything . . .’ He shrugged fastidiously, as if his parents, his aunts and uncles, and his cousins were some kind of quaintly primitive tribe who had stolen him away from his true family in childhood, and from whom he had had the good luck to escape. ‘Mostly, it’s because they can’t bury their dead properly here, the water-table being so high. They bury them in brick tombs, but local brick is soft and deteriorates quite quickly. You’ve surely seen the cemetery . . .?’

The planter shook his head, evidently as interested as he would have been about a funeral procession of gong-beating Chinese.

‘It’s devilish fascinating, if a trifle Gothic. They take a day to clean up the graves and make a picnic of it while they’re at it. That’s all.’

‘Good lord. Never heard of such a thing, have you, little flower?’ The cotton broker turned and stroked the knee of La Habañera, who was sitting on the arm of his chair.

‘Oh, but it isn’t all, señor.’ The girl – who was probably young enough to be the man’s granddaughter – gazed at him with doe-like brown eyes. ‘It is our custom too, you understand, in Cuba and in Mexico . . . The Feast of All Saints is the day when we honor our families. The feast in the cemeteries is not only for the living – uncles, cousins, aunts,
abuelos
– but also for those who have gone on to Heaven. It is the day when we remember that we must all look out for one another in this world . . . and in the next.’

‘A bit morbid, if you ask me.’ Quennell waved dismissively. ‘I’ve always preferred the American way of gathering with the family at Christmas time. More wholesome. You say you’re from Philadelphia, sir? Now,
there’s
a town that has some good American energy. Might I ask you what bank you deal with there? I’m in the banking business myself and looking to make a change . . .’

The two men settled into the fascinating business of discussing money, and La Habañera – completely outjockeyed – withdrew. January’s hands floated lightly over the keys:

Then fill the Goblet high,

Rich with rosy wine,

On pinions lightly fly,

Th’ ambrosial hours divine
.

January was still turning over in his mind the possibility that Beauvais Quennell might be in partnership with his half-brother to loot the Burial Society’s funds, against the greater likelihood that he had been the younger man’s ignorant tool, when he bade Auntie Saba a gallant goodnight and descended the kitchen steps into the outer darkness. He’d paused indoors long enough to slather his face and neck with a preparation of Olympe’s, of oil and aromatics, which helped some against the mosquitoes: big Hughie-Boy, in the kitchen to cadge a last bit of bread and pâté before locking up, asked, ‘Don’t it stink?’ and January grinned.

‘Would you bite somebody, smelled like this?’

Hughie-Boy was still trying to figure out if that was an actual question or not as January descended the backstairs and paused to let his eyes adjust to the moonless dark.

Some men carried lanterns when they walked abroad at this hour. January knew few free colored, and fewer ex-slaves, who troubled with them, except on the darkest nights. A lantern would only show you up: to the City Guards who upheld the ordinance that men of color must be indoors at sunset; to drunken gangs of keelboat ruffians who would occasionally wander this far from the waterfront looking for solitary walkers to rob; to the men who made a profession of kidnapping free blacks to sell to the new cotton lands opening in the territories. With English mills paying sky-high prices for cotton, a field hand was going for twelve hundred dollars, even in these worrisome times. And once a black man’s free-papers had been torn up, no one who did not know him would believe him when he protested, ‘But I’m free . . .!’

Not no more you ain’t, boy
.

Enough moon glimmered through the breaking clouds to show up the pattern of lights and darks that January recognized as the path around the upstream side of the house. Eight strides to the right, then fifteen straight through the muddy darkness would take him out to the skeletal blue whisper of Prytania Street. Above the roaring of the cicadas in the woods that crowded close on that side, he could still hear the voices of the girls in the house:

‘Who borrowed my green ribbon?’

‘You bitch, you told me that runty one wasn’t no back-door man . . .’

It was the shrill bickering of those who have been helpless all their short lives, quarrelsome with after-hours champagne. Most of them weren’t much older than the girls who would be returning to Rose’s school within a few weeks: two at least, January guessed, were younger. Sometimes the soprano chatter, the rustle of petticoats and accusations of petty thefts touched him with a terrible pity and sadness, so similar they were to the same rustle, the same demands about ribbons and trinkets – sometimes the same giggling over secrets – traded among those girls who would so shortly be sharing the neat little attic rooms beneath his roof. Placées’ daughters, or of men whose white fathers had given their mixed-race sons plantation land distant from New Orleans. Girls whose parents would rather see their daughters educated to be something other than placées in their turn.