Dead and Buried (16 page)

‘Mr Shaw tells me your friend Mr Sefton was a friend of my father’s.’

January nodded.

‘Do you think – is there a chance that he might come here to see me? Mother never spoke of him,’ he added. ‘But then, Mother hates all Patrick’s “merry band” like poison.’

‘I’ll ask him,’ said January. ‘He was badly shaken,’ he added carefully, ‘seeing Mr Derryhick’s body that way—’

‘You mean he’s spent the past week getting drunk?’ The boy cocked a tourmaline-blue eye at him, knowing and sad. ‘Patrick . . . He understood his friends. Even poor Cousin Theo, whom I loathed, by the way . . . Well, not loathed, really. I found him pathetic and maddening. Once I beat him up, when we were both at Eton, for what he did to Mother and to Aunt Grace. But Patrick would say, “’Tis not they can’t carry their liquor, Gerry. ’Tis that they can’t carry the world
without
their liquor.” I didn’t understand at the time . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I should like to see Mr Sefton, if he’ll come.’

‘I’ll ask him. I can’t promise. In the meantime,’ he went on gently, ‘if your mother is still alive . . .’

‘I don’t want her worried.’ The boy’s face altered, grew hard. ‘I’ll be well.’

‘You will not be well.’

Foxford turned stubbornly away.

‘It would help if you would at least tell me what passed between yourself and this Blessinghurst man – whose name isn’t Blessinghurst at all, by the way. He’s an actor, named Stubbs.’

The boy’s fair skin flushed pink, and his lips pressed tight, but he kept his face resolutely averted.

‘Is he, now?’ Shaw paused in his ruminative chewing. ‘No wonder I couldn’t find the man at any of the class hotels.’ He spat at a horsefly on the wall and missed by feet.

‘It doesn’t matter who he is,’ insisted the Viscount. ‘I don’t know him. I never met him before Monday night.’

‘Nor Isobel Deschamps?’

‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’

January tilted his head a little to one side. ‘Not someone you met in Paris last winter?’

The muscles hardened in the young man’s jaw. ‘No.’ He turned to look at Shaw. ‘Are we done here, Lieutenant? I should like to go back to my cell.’

And when a man prefers to be locked into an adobe hot-box with two dozen other men – unwashed, lousy, some of them lying in their own vomit in the crawling straw of the floor – over continuing a conversation
, January reflected, watching Shaw lead the young man up the steps to the cells,
that doesn’t augur well for future confidences
.

As he walked toward the Countess’s house a few hours later his mind returned to Isobel Deschamps. Recalled the look in her gray-turquoise eyes as she concentrated on a Mozart
bourrée
, striving to be perfect not solely to please her beautiful mother, but because the music itself demanded the best she could give it. On several occasions she had asked him about Paris, and France, and what the world was like beyond the low pastel walls of New Orleans; she was the first person to whom he had spoken of Paris in those first awful months after his return. ‘It sounds so beautiful,’ she had said. And – because he had told her that he had left Paris only because Ayasha’s death had rendered it a place of horror for him – ‘It must have broken your soul to pieces to leave.’

‘It did,’ he had said, a little surprised to hear himself speak the words. ‘But souls heal, Mamzelle.’

She’d be almost nineteen now. A startling beauty, if she’d kept the promise of her youth. Starting her third season here in New Orleans, when she could have – should have – married someone in Paris.

And she had not.

TWELVE

T
he uproar within the Countess’s house as he reached the back steps drove all thought of Isobel Deschamps from his mind. ‘Iodine,’ Belgian Louise wailed when he strode into the parlor. ‘She drank iodine—’

‘Trinchen,’ said Auntie Saba, coming down the stairs.

January bolted for the stair, and so strong was his upbringing – even after years in Paris of being able to go up any flight of stairs that he pleased – that for an instant he hesitated, wondering if he should take the backstairs . . .

To hell with it!
He pounded up the hallowed treads reserved for white gentleman and found the upstairs hall crowded with girls in various stages of undress. The Countess was kneeling in shift and corset beside Trinchen’s bed, forcing egg and water down the girl’s throat for what was – by the look of the slop bucket – the fourth or fifth time.

‘Does it hurt?’ La Habañera touched January’s sleeve as he pushed through the door. ‘To die so – does it hurt?’

The sounds coming from the bed were horrible, but he paused long enough to say gently, ‘Yes. Yes, it hurts. Even if no one finds you and tries to stop you.’

The girl swallowed and spoke in a whisper, so the Countess wouldn’t hear. ‘Hurt worse than to live so?’

In Carnival season January knew the girls were bulled by five and six men a night – all of them drunk. He could hear her thoughts in her voice. She was fifteen, pure Creole Spanish with a complexion like alabaster, but he knew also that when that doe-like beauty faded she’d be working places like the shacks behind the Broadhorn.

What do I say?
You’ll go to hell? Well, so what. She’s there already – looking over the edge into the next pit down
.

In one of the other rooms, two girls were howling with grief. January heard Sybilla yell, ‘Mother o’ God, will the lot o’ ye’s shut yer cake holes? Christ bleedin’ Jesus, somebody get in here and lace me up!’

‘Does hope hurt worse?’ he asked softly in Spanish, and La Habañera nodded. ‘Do you still have that?’

‘
Si
.’

‘Good girl.’ He nodded into the room before him. ‘Pray for her.’

‘
Si
.’

‘Damn the lot of ’em.’ The Countess looked up from her task as January came in. ‘If she dies it’ll set the rest of ’em off.’

Nenchen was huddled up in the chair on the other side of the bed, weeping without a sound. Fanny, ever efficient with her golden hair still in curl papers, came in with another pitcher of clean water.

‘How long ago did she do this?’ January observed that Trinchen wore a clean shift – or one that had been clean at some recent point in the afternoon – and the laces of the corset that lay on the floor had been cut. She’d been getting ready for the evening then. Not long ago.

He knelt by the bed, laid his ear to the girl’s back, listening for the wild thready hammering of her heart.

The Countess waited till he straightened up before replying. ‘Nenchen thinks, not more than half an hour before she found her.’

‘Do you have charcoal? Clean charcoal powder.’ Fanny was sent darting off down the stairs to fetch the Countess’s medicine box. ‘Convulsions?’

The Countess shook her head, regarded him with a considering look in her velvet-brown eyes. ‘You know a good bit about this.’

‘I was trained with Gomez, the surgeon who used to practice over on Rue St Pierre. Fräulein –’ he beckoned Nenchen, who raised a tear-bloated face to stare at him as if she’d never seen him before – ‘can you stay by her?’ Then: ‘Thank you, Mamzelle,’ as Fanny held out the small packet of charcoal to him. ‘Would you mix that with the water, please – about three-quarters of that pitcher. Can you stay by your sister, Fräulein, and give her this water, a little at a time, all the night?’ He switched back from German to French to say to the Countess, ‘Sometimes we have to change what we are to get a living in this world.’

Their eyes met; she raised one plucked and painted brow. ‘Is that what you think I have done . . .
Signor
?’

He paused in the act of undraping the mosquito bar from above the bed, to spread its gauzy, tent-like folds to cover both Nenchen and her unconscious sister, and laid a hand on his heart. ‘I spoke only of myself . . .
Countess
. But I assume that, at some time in your life, you changed yourself from what you were – a girl like this one here, who could not fight back against what life did to her – into what you are now. I’m going to open the window, if I may, and close the door to clear some of the smell—’

‘Dear God, yes!’ The gaudy room reeked of iodine and vomit. ‘Fanny,’ she ordered – of the girls who weren’t in hysterics, the English girl seemed to be the only one who wasn’t getting dressed as if it were a night like other nights – ‘get some pastilles burning in the hall . . .’

‘Fräulein,’ asked January in German, ‘what happened? Did Fräulein Trinchen get word of her friend Quennell?’

Nenchen blinked up at him; she was a big buxom girl of perhaps nineteen, her blonde hair lying in a pulled ruin over her sloping white shoulders. She answered in the same language – January had never heard her use any other. ‘She knew he wants to marry that American cow, Professor. It stands to reason no rich American is going to want a whore like one of us, when he can marry the sister of his business partner and have money and a house. I told her he would be back . . .’ She gently stroked a sweat-matted tangle of hair away from that white, pinched face on the pillow. ‘She said then, “God, yes! He’ll have his fill of that whining American bitch soon.” But last night she cried, when she thought I was asleep. And the night before, also.’

In the next room he could hear the Countess cursing, and then the sudden smack of a palm on flesh; the weeping ceased abruptly. ‘Now you little sluts get yourselves presentable, and if I see a one of you sniveling in front of the gentlemen tonight . . .’

The short New Orleans twilight had already gone from the window when January opened it. Elspie appeared in the doorway: ‘Professor? Countess says, you need to be downstairs . . .’

Of course he did. As he descended – properly via the service stair, as befitted his station – he heard the parlormaid say, in the chamber behind him, ‘M’am say you can stay here with Trinchen, Fräulein.’

‘
Did
she get the push from Quennell?’ he asked the Countess as he shrugged into his fancy waistcoat and long-tailed coat.

The woman shrugged, her mouth full of hairpins as she twisted up her curls. ‘She may have. She may have only guessed he isn’t really going to take her with him when he marries the Schurtz bitch – have you seen her, by the way? Same height as that brother of hers – taller than little Martin by the span of my hand! He’ll have to stand on a box to get it in her. Same horse-face.’ She selected a red rose from the vase on the table – rather surprisingly, she grew them in a little garden behind the kitchen – and pinned it into her hair. ‘Same
exquisite
manners. He’ll be served if Schurtz does consent to the match. Who knows why whores want to end it all?’

She turned to face him, her eyes defiant, wise, and bitterly sad. ‘They’re always doing it. I’m just glad it wasn’t on a Saturday night. Hughie!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘You get the gas lit . . .’

January straightened his neckcloth, glanced in the parlor mirror as Elspie moved to unlock the front door. Aside from the heavier than usual reek of incense, the parlor looked normal, Sybilla already ensconced in her usual place on the sofa where the light was best and Clemence and Marie-Venise straightening the combs in each other’s hair. ‘It was kind of you,’ he said, ‘to let her sister stay up there with her tonight.’

‘Kind?’ The Countess snorted. ‘If she weren’t up there she’d be blubbering every time anyone said a word to her. You wouldn’t think it, would you? She’s got herself shut of three babies that I know about, and she nearly killed another girl in her last place for stealing her stockings. As long as she’s up there, I won’t have to worry about the girls trying to sneak in and get at Trinchen’s jewelry and money drawer. Now, for God’s sake, play something. We’re late opening already.’

‘I am at your command, m’am.’

I am de sassy niggar, as dey call me Jim Brown
.

I plays upon de Bonjo all about de town
,

I hate de common niggar, I no shake dem by de ham
,

O shaw, I am de leader ob de famus niggar ban
,

I plays upon de fife, an I plays upon de drum
,

I am de bes musian dat now or eber swum
.

Lalle doodle, lalle doodle, lalle doodle laddle la
,

Lalle doodle, lalle doodle, lalle doodle daddle da
.

January wondered, as he played, whether the Countess would even mention Trinchen’s illness to Quennell, but the matter did not arise. Neither Quennell, nor Schurtz, put in an appearance that evening, though Dominic Lloyd came in late. He didn’t seem to realize that neither Nenchen nor Trinchen was present. And why should he?

January also wondered, with considerably more trepidation, whether Frank ‘Lord Montague’ Stubbs would arrive, and what would happen if he did. But the actor, too, seemed to have other fish to fry that night. Between choruses of ‘Ching a Ching Chaw’ and ‘Our Old Tom Cat’, January slipped periodically upstairs to check on his patient and, each time, found the German girl resting quietly. He wondered if he had done her a kindness by saving her life, or the reverse.