Dead and Buried (19 page)

‘It’s perfectly possible he was up all night – er – playing cribbage with someone else, you know,’ Hannibal remarked as they emerged from the iron-strapped doors of the Cabildo. ‘Another patron of La Sirène’s, whose family would be horrified at his tastes and friendships. In which case we’ll probably never know who—’

In the banded shadows of the arcade, January caught sight of the disreputable Mr Chaffinch – glorious in a mustard-colored coat and houndstooth trousers – approaching, with Mr Droudge shambling behind. At least this time he bore a basket of food for the prisoner in his hand; the slender rations dished up to the prisoners in the cells were beyond execrable. ‘Let’s hope they’ll have more luck,’ he muttered, turning back to Hannibal, but his friend had disappeared. Droudge didn’t even glance at January as he passed.

Exasperatingly, that night at the Countess’s produced no sign of either ‘Sir Montague Blessinghurst’ or Martin Quennell, and January had to remind himself that only a satyr would go visiting whorehouses every night of the week, and that the Countess’s was far from the only such establishment in town. He found Trinchen slightly better. She had eaten a little that day, and drunk water, according to Nenchen, who was with her. A brief examination satisfied January that the girl’s kidneys did not appear to be damaged, which was always the great danger with iodine poisoning.

‘Has anyone sent word to Quennell?’ he asked, tucking his long wooden stethoscope back into his satchel, and Nenchen’s round face seemed to darken and congeal.

‘I should,’ she said grimly, in the German in which he’d addressed her. ‘Then when he comes here, I will take my knife and gut him so! Like a fish.’ Her gesture – particularly from an Amazon close to six-foot tall – was graphic and disconcerting.

‘What do you expect?’ inquired the Countess, when January returned downstairs and begged the favor of leaving his medical satchel in her office for the night. ‘He is a man who leaves behind him what no longer serves him, that one, like a pair of outworn gloves.’

‘Many people do that, Countess,’ said January. And when she glanced sharply at him across her ebony desk, to see if he’d laid any untoward emphasis on her title, he added, ‘If I had not done so myself, I think I would have gone mad with grief when my wife died in Paris of the cholera.’

She sniffed. ‘Bah. It is one thing, Big J, between picking yourself up and wiping the blood off your face and walking on, and another, not to speak to your mother or your cousins or your grandparents because you’re afraid the Americans will say, “Weren’t you the son of that banker who lost all my money for me?” Since that man was twelve years old, he has not been across Canal Street where his family lives – those who are still in this town. Not for Sunday dinner, not for the funeral of old Gran’mere Quennell, not even to be among his family in the cemetery for the Feast of All Saints.’

From the drawer of her desk she took a little flask of perfume, drew forth the stopper and touched it to her throat, her wrists, her breasts like satin mountains. Past her shoulder, among the handkerchiefs and stationery in the drawer, January saw at least a hundred dollars in gold, and a deadly-looking Prussian needle-gun. ‘Only when times grew hard and he needed money, did he sink his pride to go creeping to the son of his father’s mistress, that undertaker, to ask for work.’

‘It seems to have served him.’ January held the door for her to pass before him into the parlor. ‘It sounds as if he’ll have his wish and marry a woman of wealth.’

The madame stopped in the doorway, glanced up at him with wise dark eyes. ‘It isn’t so much that he wishes a woman of wealth, Big J,’ she said. ‘There are other men in this town who have sisters, who are looking to invest in town lots. He wants the Schurtz girl because she and that brother of hers will be going back to New England. Quennell wants what he’s always wanted: to get as far away from New Orleans and his family, as it is possible for him to get.’

Of January’s bodyguards, only Four-Eyes appeared that night, long after the house had closed up. ‘They’s a hell of a fight, over to the Blackleg,’ said the boy apologetically, as January stepped out of the shadows of the rear porch where he had been waiting. ‘Bill got cut. Nobody knows where Preacher is or what happened to him.’

January muttered, ‘
Ibn al-harîm
,’ which had been one of Ayasha’s favorite oaths, but there wasn’t much else to say. One reason why he’d never taken a job playing the saloons or bordellos before this had been precisely because of the prevalence of violence: Hannibal had more than once been beaten and robbed by patrons of the various dives he played along the levee. More frequently, January had patched up his friend’s minor injuries sustained in the course of inelegant exits through windows – it was a wonder both he and his fiddle had survived this long.

Not that the Countess permitted the kind of rough and tumble in her house that lowlier proprietors permitted in theirs, of course. Hughie-Boy – and the pistol in her desk drawer – took care of that. But, as they descended the back porch steps and moved into the darkness, he reflected that with three weeks till the election, and both sides paying for as much free rum as prospective voters could drink, a major battle of some kind was probably only a matter of time.

Each night that week, the Preacher had guided them by a different route from the Countess’s back door to January’s own house on Rue Esplanade, sometimes by way of Django’s grocery – which January still wasn’t entirely certain he could find unassisted – and sometimes not. There was a sort of invisible geography to the territory beyond the town’s limits that was learned by slaves and free blacks alike – whether downtown
libres
who had been free for generations or the freed slaves uptown. The oak with the crooked limb halfway along Bayou St John, the clearing, out past the turning basin, where they used to have dogfights but didn’t anymore – these meant exactly the same to January as the signposts on Rue St Pierre did to the Creole French. If he was less familiar with the undeveloped lots at the back of the American section, these cautious home-goings were remedying the situation. Already, he recognized landmarks passed from different directions: a half-built house near the crossing of what he guessed to be Poydras and Jackson streets, a burned-down shack somewhere north of the Basin.

The attack didn’t come until they were on Rue Esplanade itself.

They must have followed us some other night
.

He heard footsteps behind them the minute he and Four-Eyes turned from Rue St Claud on to Esplanade. The moon had barely waxed from a fingernail to an orange slice; the low-built stucco houses of the back of town were uniformly dark. January glanced behind him but all he could see, even with eyes thoroughly accustomed to the darkness, were uncertain zones of black and indigo.

Maybe he hadn’t really heard the strike of boots on the packed earth that was all that verged the gutters here.

But he knew he had.

He breathed, ‘Shh,’ and touched Four-Eyes’s skinny arm. The boy stopped in his tracks, a single glint of moonlight outlining the frame of his spectacles as he turned his head.

Listening.

Nothing.

Crap
.

They walked on quicker, and January thought – he wasn’t sure at first – something might (or might not) have moved ahead of them. When he stopped just short of the corner of Rue Rampart he was sure of it – and it was too late. Someone was coming across the Esplanade to his left and coming fast.

Four-Eyes bolted; he was only seventeen and, January had sometimes suspected, not really officially free. January made a run for the dark passway between two houses but didn’t make it. The men were on him, seeming to appear by magic out of the blackness, grabbing him by the arms, the body, the neck. He thrashed, struggled, but didn’t strike out with his fists; he knew already he was outnumbered and that they were probably armed.

He clenched his thighs, brought up his hands to cover his head, braced every muscle of his belly.

Not a gun
, he prayed,
Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin don’t let one of them have a gun
 . . .

Blows rained on his arms, his back, his thighs. He was thrown down, smashed into the corner of the nearby house, and kicked. More than one of them had canes: the crack of their weighted handles went through his bones.
If you fight back it’ll only be worse
 . . . He’d learned that as an adolescent, the first time a gang of white boys had cornered him.

It was something every black man learned.

He was stunned, half-conscious, when they stopped – he didn’t know how long it had gone on and prayed – he couldn’t tell – that there were no bones broken and that they wouldn’t start again. The pain above his kidneys made him feel faint.

A man said, ‘You hear me, boy?’

A kick, to make sure he was awake. The whole world smelled like blood and the sewage in which he lay.

‘I hear.’ French, not English. And not the voice of ‘Lord Blessinghurst’.

‘You mind your own business, you hear? You ask too many questions. You leave things alone.’

He whispered, ‘Yes, sir.’

The sound he’d dreaded, the whispered hiss of a steel sword-cane unsheathed. He didn’t dare move and wasn’t sure he could have done even if he’d tried. The point dug into the side of his face. ‘I didn’t hear?’

Louder. ‘Yes, sir.’

A gouging slash, into flesh already torn open by fists and boots.

Someone kicked him again, and then their footsteps retreated up the beaten earth of the path.

After a long time, when he was sure they were truly gone, January uncurled his body. Even lying on the ground hurt, as his flesh gorged up with blood from broken capillaries. Trying to get up was so bad that he collapsed again to his hands and knees, vomited in the gory mud. It was all he could do not to pass out in the puddles and drown.

Somehow he got to his feet, clinging to the wall beside him. Somehow he found his satchel, kicked to the side into the blackness of the passway between the houses.

Somehow he moved across Rue Rampart, reeling like a drunkard, and fell in the open gutter – and fell twice more in the block or so remaining till his home.

He called out hoarsely, ‘Rose!’ as he stumbled through the door into his study and collapsed, bleeding, on the floor.

He thought he might have fainted then; he wasn’t sure. Pain brought him back. He lay in the darkness, hearing the muffled drone of the cicadas in the trees across the Esplanade, the scuffle of a mouse in another room and the scurrying leap of Caligula’s pursuing paws. Voice thick with pain, he called, ‘Rose!’ again.

After a long, long time it came to him. Rose was not in the house.

Cold shock, like a cane knife slicing his flesh.

Some of them came from this direction
.

No! Dear God, no!

And the door from the front gallery into his study had not been locked.

He got to his feet and to hell with the pain. Found the study table, the candle, the lucifers; staggered to the parlor where he fell to his knees. No sign of struggle, but
Rob Roy
lay face down beside the chair where she usually sat to read, and her fan lay beside it. The candles were burned far down.

NO!

The bedroom was empty, the bed untouched. The mosquito bar hung knotted back above the tester.

He lurched back toward the parlor and almost fell again. Another wave of nausea swamped him, and then panic, as he realized he hadn’t the slightest idea who his attackers had been, nor where they would have taken her.

Shaw
, he thought.
He’ll know where to start
.

The thought of moving again made him dizzy with pain. Taking a deep breath informed him that at least one rib was cracked, maybe more.

Light. You can’t catch them now. Wait till it’s light
. Four-Eyes had been late getting to the Countess’s. Dawn wouldn’t be more than an hour off.

If they wanted to kill her she’ll be dead already. If they wanted to do anything else
– his mind turned away in horror from specifics –
they’ll have done it already
.

Whatever you can do, you can do better when it’s light
.

He lay down on the bed: mud, blood, and all. And passed out as if he’d been shot.

FIFTEEN

‘
B
en!’

Rose’s voice. The sting of alcohol on his swollen face made him cry out, and he grabbed her wrist and tried to get his blood-crusted eyelids open. The smell of her soap and her hair told him it was really her.

It was daylight in the bedroom, early dawn.

Whatever you want, Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin, it’s yours. I swear it. For the rest of my life
.

‘Rose . . .’ Making his mouth move was almost as bad as being hit again.

‘How badly did they hurt you?’ She was already at work with her scissors, snipping off the remains of his shirt.