Dead and Buried (17 page)

It was not, his confessor would tell him, for him to decide.
Only do what the laws of God direct, and leave the results to the One who sees forward and backward in time
. Still, where did one go who, at twenty, has seen the ruin of her life with a clarity that left nothing but the desire to be dead and buried with the secrets of the past?

When he descended the backstairs for the final time that night it was to find the parlor dark, Auntie Saba washing up the last of the glasses, and his three bodyguards gathered around the back-door, listening to an account of the night’s excitement from Elspie and Little J. ‘You downtown niggers drink American beer, Big J?’ inquired the Preacher as they set off through the blackness of the woods behind the Countess’s.

‘I have been known to try it.’ Rose, he knew, would be long asleep.

‘If that Englishman waitin’ for you,’ pointed out the solemn Four-Eyes, ‘he can just sit out a lil’ longer an’ get mosquito-bit a lil’ more,’ which made them all laugh. So January followed the others to the back room of an exceedingly shabby grocery, somewhere in the trees beyond the limits of the town proper, where the musicians who played in the seedier dives of the Swamp foregathered after hours for a final beer or glass of rum before going home.

The music at Django’s was less trained than what got played after hours downtown, its rhythms far more African, reminiscent of the music at the slave dances on Congo Square on Sundays. He bought a round for his bodyguards, another for the skinny young men improvising long syncopated variations on the out of tune piano, and listened to all the gossip from the American side of town: about the Preacher’s girlfriend, about Bill’s mother and younger brothers, and about what the election looked like from the other side of Canal Street.

By the smell, a number of country-bred blacks, new come into town, were smoking home-grown hemp as well as highly illegal cigars in the corners, but the beer was far from bad.

He returned to his house at close to dawn and let himself quietly in to find the oil-lamp in his study burned out. Lighting a candle, he saw, tucked beneath the lamp, a note in Rose’s neat, elegant handwriting:

Per your instruction, I attended Mass this afternoon, with the intention of corrupting the Deschamps family servants. By dint of untruths concerning a non-existent but Paris-bound niece, I scraped acquaintance with Lolotte, Mme Celestine Deschamps’s housekeeper. Lolotte informs me that Mlle Isobel’s maid – a good, sweet girl, she says, who never caused anyone any harm – was sold earlier in the week to a dealer bound for Natchez, two days after her mistress’s departure. It certainly sounds like she learned something in Paris, doesn’t it?

Pining for your love,

R.

THIRTEEN

‘
M
y way of thinkin’,’ said the Preacher, when January asked him about the matter on the following night, ‘is that just ’cause a dealer say he bound for Natchez, don’t mean he bound for Natchez
that day
. This good maid – she bright or dark?’

‘Bright, probably.’ The back room of Django’s was slowly emptying out; only a few candles were left on the barrels that served as tables. Up at the piano, Four-Eyes was jangling out an extremely Congo version of ‘Dame Durden’, while a squat, sturdy Bill circled the tune in a far-ranging improvisation, plucking rather than bowing his bull fiddle, using the deep notes almost like a lazy drum. ‘We’re talkin’ ’bout a rich family. Creole French.’ It was nearly four in the morning, but in spite of Rose’s mimed horror when he’d come downstairs at close to noon the day before (‘Oh, Mon Dieu! Who is this stranger whom I do not recognize, in my house?’), January’s instincts told him that time with the uptown musicians, time getting to know the network of American Protestant freedmen, was time well spent.

‘Bright, then.’ The Preacher’s long fingers ticked off points on the barrel top among the damp beer-rings. ‘Trained maid, high yella, speaks French, she fetch eleven, twelve hundred dollars in Natchez. But for a fact, nobody in Natchez got that kind of money ’fore cotton harvest done in December. That girl still in town.’

‘You heard anything of it? Her name’s Pierrette.’

The Preacher thought, then shook his head. ‘Not a private sale, I ain’t. You gonna have to do this the hard way and look for her down Baronne Street.’

January had suspected as much, but the thought of searching through the dealers’ offices along that thoroughfare made his flesh creep.

Going down Baronne Street – feeling the fear he knew would whisper at him as he walked along the board sidewalk past those lines of chained men and women in their stiff new calico clothing – would not, of course, be nearly as bad as being one of them. His mind turned over the scraps of information Rose had given him about her talk with the housekeeper Lolotte, while the music gyred in the smoky gloom. When his friends downtown played for themselves after hours – Mozart or Vivaldi or the popular glees and catches that came out of New York – there was often an African flavor to the rhythm. It was a way of making the music their own, like a beautiful toy. But the uptown music, far more primitive, took him back to his plantation childhood; it was not nearly as graceful, nor as technically skilled, yet there was an intensity to it that quickened the heartbeat. It was a music from a deeper part of the soul.

‘Why you lookin’ to find this girl?’ asked the Preacher softly, and January glanced over at him, aware that he’d been silent too long.

‘She knows something,’ he replied. ‘Saw something, heard something, that’ll get a friend of mine out of trouble.’

Would I call the Viscount Foxford my friend?
But Hannibal was his friend.

The Preacher picked an infinitesimally tiny speck of cigar ash from his elegant silk hat. ‘Given what Madame gonna have to pay to replace Miss Pierrette, musta been a helluva somethin’, to sell her off on account of it.’

The following morning, waiting for Hannibal at the coffee-stand, January found the advertisement he sought:

Irvin and Frye

TO SELL

A well-made negress: twenty-five years old, ladies’ maid, seamstress, and hairdresser, named PIERRETTE.

Speaks French and English,

reads and writes both languages, and is warranted free

of vices and diseases provided for by law. She

may be seen at our offices on Baronne Street.

January folded the thin summer newspaper, drew it through his fingers.
Musta been a helluva somethin’.

A lovely girl of an old French family, raised poor but suddenly rich. Her widowed mother sends her to Paris with this new-found wealth . . . and with her, her trusted maid. And she meets a man.

She meets two men.

The clock on the Cathedral tower sounded one. Yesterday, at this very table, Hannibal had agreed to visit the Cabildo at noon and speak to the Viscount. Now January paid up Auntie Zozo and, resignedly, turned his steps toward the Swamp. He wasn’t surprised by Hannibal’s absence. Hannibal might have been aghast at Mr Droudge’s decision that a cheap defense would be as good as an expensive one – ‘I can’t tell you how many gutters in this town I’ve fallen into drunk and landed on top of Harold Chaffinch!’ – but at the suggestion that he go to the Cabildo himself, to try to talk Foxford into demanding someone more competent, he had balked. ‘Why would he want to see me?’

‘Because he knows you were Patrick’s friend, as well as his father’s.’

‘God help the both of them.’

January had been raggedly tired then – it had been full daylight when he’d returned home after seeing Trinchen still lived, and he’d had to force himself out to seek Hannibal before returning to the Countess’s once more. He’d said, ‘No. God help
him
. You may be able to talk some sense into him, and that may very well save his life.’

In the end, Hannibal had promised . . . and January had deliberately set the meeting for noon, to allow himself time to go down to the Swamp and fetch him.

Why do I care?
he asked himself for the hundredth time, as he circled cautiously through the murky ground near the turning basin of the canal.
The boy is nothing to me. And so far I’ve seen nothing to tell me that he DIDN’T actually murder the man who held on to the family money that should have been his
.

He left the shabby wooden houses behind him, the rough lots where gardens and chicken-coops straggled, and entered the fringes of the genuine swamp, which lay where the land – high along the river – sloped gradually down to the distant lake. The stink of the town grew less intense. As he walked – to keep his mind from his irritation at Hannibal – he reflected upon Isobel Deschamps.

Had she, as Laertes cautions Ophelia not to do, ‘surrendered her maiden patent’ to the more charming – or more insistent – of her suitors? Did she learn he was an actor before or after this happened, if it had happened at all?

She comes home – damaged in body, or only in heart?

Her maid would know.

Maids always knew something.

All the well-bred young French and Spanish Creole ladies had them. Many families – both Creole and Americans – gave their eldest daughter her first slave at the age of six or seven. Usually, a girl the same age, or a few years older: taught to fix hair, mend hems when they came down, lace corsets, scrub spots of dirt from stockings and gloves. Without them, many of those narrow-waisted, tidy-haired, spotlessly-groomed little ladies would be hard put to maintain themselves presentably.

He remembered the ladies of the Big House at Bellefleur when he was a child: his master’s Spanish Creole wife, and then his master’s sister, when she and her husband came to run the plantation after the wife’s early death. M’am Clarice’s maid had been an octoroon woman, as fair-skinned as her mistress but with African features and the curious gray-green eyes one often found among the
sang mêlées
– Serena, her name had been. January wondered what had become of her in the end.

Serena’s whole life had been entwined with M’am Clarice’s. As protective and caring as a sister, Serena would stay up all night waiting for her Miss to return from a ball so that she could lock away her jewelry, would get up while the sky was still black, to light the kitchen fire and roast the coffee beans so that her Miss would have a cup when
she
rose at first blush of light in the sky. She wore her mistress’s cast-off clothing, combed her hair with her mistress’s hand me down combs.

Ran her mistress’s errands, got the curse on the same day, knew her secrets as only a sister does.

Isobel Deschamps goes to Paris
.

Isobel Deschamps returns to New Orleans and flees the city within a few days of the arrival of two Englishmen who may or may not have known her in Paris
 . . .

Isobel Deschamps’s mother sells her maid
. Which was the chief difference between an actual sister and a slave.

It musta been a helluva somethin’.

He expected to find Hannibal drunk again. The fiddler had, in the past, displayed a fiendish ability to wander away and get himself fogbound at exactly those times when he was needed most. But, while still among the trees, January heard the sound of the fiddle, like an exiled angel’s, weaving blithe fantasias around an Irish planxty – the kind of thing no one in New Orleans was interested in hearing. He climbed the rickety stair and found his friend sitting cross-legged on the bed in threadbare shirt and trousers, his thin body moving to the music and his eyes half shut, as if that were the one thing sufficient to keep corked the nearly-full bottle of sherry on the floor at his side.

There was no smell of liquor in the room. Hannibal had even tidied up the attic and dumped the water buckets that sat beneath the assorted leaks. Quietly, January entered, found a pair of clean socks in one goods box and, in another, a faded waistcoat of a pattern that had been the last cry of fashion in Paris seventeen years before. He threw both on the bed as the song circled to its finish, and Hannibal sat for a time in silence, as a man rests in the arms of a lover. Savoring the echo of freedom before he must return to the real world.

January wondered if he had slept at all since he’d dragged him back to consciousness here last Friday afternoon.

After a time, he asked, ‘Do you fear he’ll look like his father?’

Hannibal raised dark eyes, darker in circles of sleepless bruise. Head shake – slight, as if he had gone beyond the ability or desire for movement. Then he looked away. ‘He was the mirror of his mother when he was five. I expect he still is.’

‘Did you love her?’

‘With the whole of my heart.’ His gaze remained on the trees beyond the door.

A flat monotony of dull green: no mountains, no hills, no seasons to speak of. Tropical heat or tropical rain. A world where earth and water mixed, entangled in the wet heavy vegetation of the swamp.