Dead and Buried (13 page)

He frowned as he moved toward the corner of the house. Something was wrong.

Frogs . . . were they not as loud as they usually were?

And no nightbirds.

He stood still. The voices of the girls dimmed from the house behind him, as the last of them sought their much-used beds. To his right, where the trees came close to the house, a
grosbec
squawked once, then fell silent.

It was foolish, and he knew that the way around the upstream side of the house was muddier and pitch-black because of the angle of what moonlight there was . . . Still, he took that way, walking softly as he’d learned to do in tiniest childhood, feeling the deep rain-puddles from the afternoon squish under his boots.

Moonlight showed him the edge of the house ahead of him. He moved into the open, to cross over Prytania Street, wondering if he was being ridiculous.

He wasn’t. A shadow detached from the shadows on the downstream side of the house, and a vaguely familiar baritone called out softly, ‘Is that you, Professor?’

Englishman. Customer.
Professor
or
Maestro
was the usual title Americans gave the whorehouse piano-player. The white V of a shirt front gleamed briefly against the man’s moving shadow.

‘It is.’ At the same moment his mind registered that the man was walking toward him too fast, almost running.

Why wait in the trees?

An Englishman . . . .

January stepped back, and the man broke into a run at him. He dodged, veered, every instinct he possessed shouting at him even before the gunshot bellowed in the inky night. His attacker cursed, lunged, seized his arm – of course the bullet had gone nowhere near him – and, by his movement, January knew he had another gun in his pocket and was fumbling for it.

Does he think because I’m black I’m not going to hit a white man who just shot at me, when nobody is looking?

Evidently the Englishman did, and found out in the next split-second – probably to his astonished chagrin – how wrong he was. At six feet three inches, January had grown up used to not being challenged to fight by men his own color – and, of course, had never been permitted to lay a finger on
les blankittes
– but in Paris he had enrolled in a very popular boxing-school and had learned what was generally called ‘good science’. The Englishman was only a few inches shorter than he, but bulky-strong. January hit him with sufficient force that both the man’s feet left the ground, to judge by the sound his body made when it crashed down into the wet grass. It was too dark to tell whether his assailant was unconscious or merely stunned, and January didn’t wait to find out.

In addition to being very strong, he was also very fast.

It wasn’t by getting into fights that Compair Lapin survived his adventures.

He reached Canal Street in minutes, and only after he crossed it, to the denser shadows and street lamps of the French Town, did he slow down long enough to wonder what secret it was that Lord Montague Blessinghurst was willing to kill him in cold blood to protect.

He woke Rose and warned her of what he’d done. Some states punished a black man with death if he struck a white one, and like an idiot, he’d given Blessinghurst his name.

‘Are you sure it was Blessinghurst?’ She blinked short-sightedly at him in the candlelight, propped among the pillows with her brown braids tumbled over her shoulders as she groped for her spectacles. ‘Both Uncle Diogenes and Mr Droudge are almost your height and—’

‘Everything Diogenes Stuart owns is saturated with the smell of kif and frankincense,’ he said. ‘And Droudge has a nasal voice, almost shrill. And how do you know? Have you seen them?’

‘
Some
of us,’ said Rose pointedly, ‘have classes to prepare for while certain members of the household are wallowing in sleep until noon.’

‘Certain members of the household put in long hours at the bordello,’ retorted January, kissing her.

‘Hmm. As for Uncle Diogenes, he and I had a fascinating discussion about translating manuscripts at Landreaux’s bookshop on Canal Street – not that M’sieu Stuart had the slightest idea who I was, but he was there looking at a truly astonishing Persian manuscript Landreaux had gotten. If the man wasn’t boasting, he’s a formidable scholar . . . even if he does smell of frankincense at thirty paces. Will the Countess back your version of the story? The man’s a customer, and a wealthy one . . .’

‘I know her guilty secret,’ explained January, and Rose rolled her eyes. ‘All I need for you to do, my nightingale, is to tell the City Guards when they come that I told you, when I got home, that I’d seen what looked like a fight and a shooting from the front porch of the Countess’s late last night—’

‘Your mother warned me there’d be nothing but trouble if you went to work at that place.’

‘My mother has never forgiven me for refusing to pass along gossip about the customers.’ He drew her to him and kissed her again, and she took off her spectacles.

Later, they descended together to the damp little storeroom beneath the house, where – behind a false wall – January had earlier in the summer made a little chamber wide enough to conceal two narrow bunks and a commode. This secret niche had been the result of several conversations back in July with a man who was organizing the New Orleans end of a network, known as the Underground Railway, to hide and assist runaway slaves. ‘I didn’t think,’ he murmured, as Rose lay down beside him in the lower bunk, ‘that I’d be the first person to try this out.’

Rose must have risen without waking him, for she was gone when he did wake, in the full hammering heat of the morning. In the kitchen, along with bread-and-butter and a cup of her excellent coffee, she provided him with the information that the City Guards had not turned up to arrest him yet. ‘You couldn’t have hit the man hard enough to kill him, could you?’

She sounded worried. Knowing Rose, January guessed that her concern was more that the crime might somehow be traced to him, rather than for any danger towards his immortal soul entailed in killing a man. Self-defense was self-defense, in the eyes of the Clockmaker who ran Rose’s universe, but she knew January’s strength.

‘They’ll know at the Countess’s.’ He’d brought to the kitchen with him a parcel made up of clean shirt and neckcloth, his good pumps, and the well-cut black suit and soberly embroidered waistcoat that comprised his professional wear. ‘They should be awake by the time I get there.’

She sipped her own coffee. ‘It would solve the problem if you did, of course—’

‘I need to talk to him.’

‘Then, since he knows it was you who hit him, we must hope he has a forgiving nature.’

January made no reply. As he wolfed down grits and eggs he was aware of her eyes on his face, yet she didn’t ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ They both knew why. Rose had known Hannibal for at least a year longer than January had, yet, when he’d asked her about the fiddler, she had confirmed his impression of an essential and desolate aloneness.

Patrick Derryhick, and the twelfth Viscount Foxford’s father, were the only men he had ever spoken of as his friends.

As he set his empty plate and cup in the dish pan, she said, ‘Be careful.’

He laid his hand to her cheek. ‘I will.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

He was about to shake his head, then reconsidered. ‘There is,’ he said. ‘Would you learn what you can about the household of Madame Celestine Deschamps? Especially, find out who her maid is, and the maid who looks after her daughter Isobel. Learn what time they go to church, and make their acquaintance.’

‘If you’re going to corrupt the Deschamps servants, would not some handsome young man better answer the case?’ She considered the matter as she gathered the remaining dishes. ‘Your nephew Gabriel is still a little young . . . Perhaps Helaine Passbon’s younger brother? He’s sufficiently Adonis-like . . . Or Pylade Vassage, who plays the flute so badly.’

‘Too obvious. If they’re young and flighty, I’ll set Dominique on them.’

‘First murder, now – what? Blackmail? Housebreaking?’

‘I don’t know.’ January picked up his parcel from the table, slipped into the jacket of lightweight linen that he habitually wore, even in the hottest point of the summer, as a way of distinguishing himself from the rough-clothed working-class blacks who unloaded the steamboats at the wharves. ‘But it seems to me there are an awful lot of people not telling the truth about what happened last Thursday night. And if you’re looking for the way things really happened, you’re more likely to get the truth from servants than from their masters.’

TEN

‘
N
ow, what would a respectable downtown Free Gentleman of Color like yourself be doin’ to get on the wrong side of the City Guard?’ Auntie Saba cocked her good eye at January. In the ten days he’d worked for the Countess, January had taken care never to let his English sound too polished, and had shown himself willing to help with the clean-up at the end of the night. Yet he’d been aware that the cook and her children still regarded him very much as a ‘downtown nigger’ – or, in the more usual parlance of the American-born, Protestant, and on the whole more African-blooded slaves owned by the Americans, a ‘stuck-up downtown nigger’. The only reason the phrase hadn’t been expanded to include the word ‘yeller’ was because, despite one white grandparent, he looked pure Wolof.

The style of his piano playing – several cuts above the general run of what was usually found in the town’s bordellos – and the wide classical end of his repertoire, were a dead giveaway. He might lie with his language, but was incapable of doing so with his music.

‘I didn’t do nuthin’,’ said January gravely, and Auntie Saba grinned. ‘Musta been some other Free Gentleman of Color.’

‘Well, you got nuthin’ to worry about, Big J. City Guards ain’t come knockin’. An’ if they was to do so, you was in the kitchen with us, wasn’t he, babies –’ her glance took in both her children as they came back with pails from the tall copper cistern in the corner of the yard – ‘when the shootin’ started. I’ll make sure Hughie knows it, too.’

January – chopping kindling in his shirtsleeves beside the kitchen door – raised his eyebrows. ‘You heard that shot, then?’

‘Lordy, yes. Only reason Her Ladyship didn’t was she sleeps at the back of the house.’ The cook resumed her steady turning of the coffee grinder. Despite the late hour of the morning, the pink-brick house loomed silent behind them, heat radiating from the open kitchen door as if from an oven. Sensibly, Auntie Saba had built up her kitchen fire in the wide brick hearth as soon as it was light, to get the day’s meals started before the heat set in, and she had moved her coffee making out under the tree in the yard where some coolness still lingered. ‘After a minute or three, we went out on the gallery, but we didn’t see nuthin’.’

‘Not even no body,’ added Little J, disappointed.

‘Thank you, m’am.’ January whacked another billet from the chunk in front of him. As a child he’d learned to handle an ax easily, and he’d also learned that cutting kindling was a task that would buy him favors from almost anyone. ‘I appreciate it.’

Elspie’s great hazel eyes widened, and Little J demanded, ‘Who was it?’

January whacked another long split of wood off the billet on the chopping block. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Since I wasn’t out there. But if Lord Montague comes in tonight, take a look at his jaw, see if he’s got a bruise.’

‘Oh dear God—’ Elspie put a swift hand to her lips.

‘Don’t tell me you’re gettin’ a soft place for that cake-mouth Englishman after all,’ the older woman sniffed.

‘What? Nasty beast!’ Elspie made a face. ‘I’m just afraid I’m the one set him on you! Just talking too free . . .’

‘Did you, now?’ January cocked his head, spoke in his mildest voice. ‘Talking to who?’

‘Marie-Venise. Just talking, you know.’ The girl’s face showed real distress. ‘Oh, I knew I shouldn’t say anything about anything . . .! I just said you asked about Lord Montague, Saturday night, when I told you he kissed me like he did. He come to see her Sunday. I helped her sneak out, ’cause she don’t charge him money an’ she hides most of the gifts he gives her. The Countess’d snatch her bald-headed if she knew.’ Elspie shook her head. ‘She musta told him. I am so sorry—’

‘I’ve had worse happen.’ January straightened up. ‘But if you will – all of you . . .’ He looked from Auntie Saba to her children. ‘Best if we don’t speak of this again – not to anyone.’

Heads were shaken, and Little J crossed his heart and his fingers in mute avowal.

‘I never thought he’d come after you with a gun!’

‘Course you didn’t,’ said January. ‘Why would you? I’ll just have to keep one eye out behind me for awhile, that’s all.’ He turned the conversation to other things as he finished the kindling and stacked it by the laundry-room door. But he watched the back of the house as he worked, wondering which tightly-curtained bedroom window was that of Marie-Venise, and whether that skinny, boy-shaped French girl was watching him from it. When he donned his waistcoat and jacket to leave – depositing the little parcel of his evening clothes on a shelf in the laundry room – he was careful to depart through the woods, rather than proceed back to the French Town by way of Prytania Street.