Dead and Buried (24 page)

The Countess regarded her with pity in her eyes but said only, ‘I understand.’

And as she called for Hughie – this woman who passed herself as Italian among American men who would hold a woman of color in contempt – January, standing in the kitchen doorway, was suddenly, and without warning, overwhelmed by the precise mental sensation of comprehension, as if he had been trying to decipher the images of a painting seen within a shuttered room, and someone had opened the window, letting in light.

Not Isobel and Stubbs – no melodramatic history of seduction and jealousy, no secret marriage or blows struck in frustrated rage – but Isobel and Foxford.
She was with him that night
. He knew it, as if he had stood, invisible, beside them and heard what the girl had told that ardent young man . . . The secret that Foxford was willing to risk death on the gallows, rather than reveal.

And he knew where the proof of his theory – of that secret – would be found.

And the thought of going there to seek it turned the blood to water in his veins.

EIGHTEEN

H
annibal said, ‘I can’t.’

Only the agony of two cracked ribs kept January from grabbing the fiddler by the arms and shaking him till his teeth rattled. Head throbbing with sleeplessness, body and bones a mass of pain from the events of the past thirty-six hours, he opened his mouth to shout, ‘For the love of God, why not?’ at him.

And closed it, the words unsaid. Understanding, from the cornered stillness in Hannibal’s ashen face, that there was probably only one thing in the world that would keep his friend from undertaking the journey upriver with him to keep him – by his impersonation of a white master – from being kidnapped by slave-stealers on the way . . .

And that this was it. Whatever this was.

That he would not – and could not – abandon the son of a woman he had not seen in seventeen years.

Through the open door of the Broadhorn’s attic, shouting drifted up from the yard. ‘Kill ’im, you fucken buzzard! Get after him! Get after him!’

A sudden roar of voices – and, above them, the frantic, furious skrakking of enraged roosters.

Sunday in the Swamp. Had January dragged Andrew Jackson’s daughter into one of the crib sheds with carnal intent, not a man would have taken his attention from the cockfight long enough to comment.

‘You’re sure Mademoiselle Deschamps isn’t in St Francisville?’ Hannibal asked, after he had waited in silence for words of anger that did not come. Under the threadbare linen of his shirt, his shoulders relaxed, and he tried to make his voice sound normal. ‘That’s only two days—’

‘Even if she is, I still have to go to Cloutierville,’ said January. ‘If I don’t find her, either at Beaux Herbes or Bayou Lente, I’ll visit the Deschamps aunts on the way back. But I’d bet money against it, if I had any.’

‘What?’ Hannibal folded shut Wolff’s
Prologmenum ad Homerum
and tucked it under the pillow of his bed. He’d been sitting, half-dressed, reading it when January had climbed the ladder to his attic, and he looked like he’d actually slept some, for the first time since the funeral. ‘The Countess doesn’t pay you?’

‘The Countess,’ said January drily, ‘is going to have to be forcibly restrained when she gets my note telling her I’m leaving New Orleans tomorrow morning and will be gone for twelve days. I shouldn’t be much longer than that.’

Hannibal started to speak, then didn’t. And what, after all, January reflected, could he say, after ‘I can’t’? Without a white ‘master’ to make a fuss if his ‘slave’ disappeared, there was every chance that he, January, might not come back at all from a journey into cotton country.

In New Orleans, Benjamin January was known to hundreds of men and women, white and black. Should he disappear one day – and many free black men did – he would be quickly sought, and the first place his friends would look would be in places like Irvin and Frye’s. Should anyone find him there – perhaps semi-conscious and stupefied by opium – Lieutenant Shaw, or January’s banker Mr Granville, or the fencing master Augustus Mayerling, or Hannibal himself, or any of a number of other white male friends, stood ready to testify in the local court that yes, Benjamin January was a free man.

In the new cotton plantations of Missouri and Mississippi, a black man who might happen to be struck over the head while walking down the street – and wake up in a slave-jail with his freedom papers missing – would learn very quickly why only white men served on juries.

The thought of leaving the French Town these days made him nervous. The thought of travel upriver – as he had traveled at the beginning of that summer, under Hannibal’s protective aegis – turned him cold with dread.

Unprotected, it was unthinkable.

But understanding, as he now understood, what secret it was that Viscount Foxford was willing to let himself be hanged to protect, he knew he could not do otherwise.

At last Hannibal said again, ‘I’m sorry.’

January put a hand on his thin shoulder. ‘It’s all right. I’ll manage. Come to dinner.’

‘Rose will poison me.’

‘She isn’t a good enough cook,’ January reassured him, and Hannibal laughed shakily. ‘And we won’t tell her until afterwards that you’re staying in town.’

Down in the yard, the shouting changed its note; the cries of, ‘Gouge him!’ and the shrill screams of whores – who in general took little interest in cockfights – told him that combat had progressed from the roosters to their owners.

‘Two things I want you to do while I’m gone,’ he went on as Hannibal got to his feet and ambled around the attic in his shirtsleeves finding his razor and shaving mug, his comb and the least threadbare of his cravats. ‘Three things,’ January amended. ‘First: you’re going to take my place at the Countess’s.’

‘She’ll kill me,’ protested Hannibal.

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing! Well, nothing to speak of . . .’

‘I’ll write you a letter of introduction,’ said January patiently, ‘going bond that you will neither drink, nor engage in card games with customers, nor lay so much as a fingertip upon any of the girls. You owe me that – and I can’t leave her with no one to play tomorrow night.’

‘My salvation, I suppose,’ sighed Hannibal. ‘Though I
never
played cards with the customers. But, considerations of my safety aside, I’m not sure it will be such a good idea, as I told Martin Quennell yesterday in the lobby of the Mississippi and Balize Bank that I was Thomas Dawes of Mobile.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said January. ‘In that conversation, you didn’t manage to bring up the subject of Stubbs’s quarrel with Derryhick, did you?’

The fiddler shook his head. ‘I’m to meet him tomorrow evening at Davis’s. Given Trinchen’s illness, I can’t imagine the man would be cad enough visit the Countess’s establishment—’

‘Unless Jacob Schurtz took it into his head to go there,’ said January, as he descended behind Hannibal down the rickety stairs. ‘In which case Martin would follow – and run the risk of being gutted by Nenchen, the minute everyone’s back was turned because of a fight. Which is,’ he went on, as Hannibal turned, appalled, at the bottom, ‘precisely what happened last night. He’s dying.’

‘Dear God—’ By the look on Hannibal’s face, January could tell that, in the course of his checkered career, the fiddler had seen men die of lacerated gut-wounds before.

‘That’s the second thing I want you to do. I’m going to take you to Beauvais Quennell’s, and you’re going to introduce yourself to Madame as a lawyer and get her to sign a letter authorizing you to go in and search Martin’s rooms at McPhearson’s Residential Hotel for the actual account books of the Burial Society.’

They crossed the yard, skirting the dirty knot of men, which had reassembled itself around the makeshift cockpit. It was noon, and it felt like the heat would continue forever, to the death of the world. There was a sort of makeshift kitchen behind the Broadhorn’s gambling room, stuck into a lean-to at the end of the short side of the building’s ‘L’. Within, Kentucky Williams – the sleeve of her Mother Hubbard rolled up past her meaty biceps – was fishing around in a barrel of what smelled like raw alcohol mixed with tobacco. A half-empty jar of cayenne pepper, a scattering of gunpowder, and three severed and liquor-logged rattlesnake heads on the table beside her hinted trenchantly as to the composition of what she served her customers out front. She looked up with a smile like a friendly bulldog, took the cigar out of her mouth with her free hand, said, ‘Hey, Hannibal; hey, Ben. Water’s hot on the stove,’ and went back to fishing.

While Hannibal shaved in a corner of the kitchen, January watched the proprietress of the Broadhorn add a handful of soap flakes to her wares (‘If’n they don’t get sick, they don’t think they’ve had a real drink.’) and reflected on the fact that, even in his worst days of illness, liquor, and opium-taking, January had never known Hannibal to be anything but as clean as it was possible to be, given the circumstances. Kate the Gouger, who ran the bathhouse in the next street, was always willing to let him use her facilities on credit, and women like Kentucky and Fat Mary, who washed their Mother Hubbards once in a summer, if that, were perfectly happy to do his laundry.

‘Isn’t it carrying secrecy a little far?’ Hannibal asked when January had explained to him – in French – about Madame Quennell’s frantic insistence on secrecy, should her younger son live. ‘What will it hurt if a man or a woman of color is seen going into his rooms?’

‘Everything,’ said January somberly, ‘if it’s guessed – even
whispered
– that he’s
passe blanc
. It’s what you said about a girl of respectable family marrying an actor, only trebled – quadrupled. Not only would Martin lose any chance of marrying this Schurtz woman and her dowry. Schurtz – and every friend Martin made uptown – would repudiate him, because these men have their own reputations to think of. If they don’t, what would
their
friends think of
them
, should it get about that one might meet a black man under their roofs without knowing it? Whatever Miss Schurtz thought of Martin, she wouldn’t dare wed him if word got out, because that would put her in the position of having black in-laws. Intolerable, if you can’t invite your in-laws to your house – ever – because that would oblige your other friends to associate with them . . . to recognize them socially. And with the
passe blancs
it’s worse, because people you meet in their house
might
be black, only you
can’t tell
 . . .’

‘For God’s sake, Benjamin.’ Hannibal straightened up from the basin, wiped his face with a clean flour sack. ‘It isn’t as if blacks were lepers—’

‘That is exactly what we are.’ January stepped over to Hannibal, wiped the back of his hand down the white sleeve of the fiddler’s shirt. ‘And that is exactly what they fear. To touch us, to associate with us, because doing so would result in some of our social odium smirching them.’ He pointed to the place where his hand had touched. ‘If you were a Southerner,’ he said quietly, ‘you’d be able to see the stain.’

Hannibal said nothing.

‘The French are like the Spanish – they’ll associate with us socially because to them it’s all money and power. But the Americans have declared us to be an inferior species fit only for slavery – and so they must look for reasons to prove it’s true. The
passe blancs
scare them because one cannot tell where the line should be drawn. That’s why they make the women wear tignons, so even a fair-skinned woman with blue eyes can be identified as “really black”, as if she’d put on light skin in a deliberate effort to defraud. They forbid the men from carrying walking sticks or smoking cigars or owning dogs – they’d forbid us to dress like white people, if they could.

‘If Martin Quennell were exposed as
passe blanc
, he would lose his job with the bank – and it’s nearly impossible, these days, to get a bank job, either here or in the north. In all probability, Beauvais Quennell would lose most or all of his white customers, for being “party” to his brother’s deception—’ He broke off and let the anger that had risen in him as he spoke simmer away for a moment. Then he said, ‘All that – and in the end it doesn’t matter, because the man is dying.’

‘κεiτo με´ γας μεγαλωστi λελασμε´νς iππoσυνα´ων,’ Hannibal quoted softly, speaking of the Trojan warrior who had been suddenly called upon to leave his earthly concerns behind. He wiped his razor on the flour sack, folded and pocketed it. ‘A situation in which we all will find ourselves one day,
amicus meus
.’ They stepped outside again, no difference between the muggy heat of the yard, with its dust and stinks, and that within the building. ‘And what is the third thing you need me to do?’

‘Find the so-called Lord Montague Blessinghurst. I suspect that, by the time I get back, he’ll be the only witness left alive who can tell us what it was he told your friend Derryhick that sent him running back to his hotel. And don’t let him know he’s been found.’

January made no mention of his projected journey to Natchitoches at dinner, though after he and Hannibal visited the coffin shop – where old Madame, in addition to signing the permission letter, swore them both to eternal secrecy concerning her younger son and rambled obsessively about how she would continue to guard his secret once he was safely married to Milla Schurtz and out of New Orleans – they located the Preacher at Django’s grocery and arranged deck passage for January on the steamboat
Parnassus
. True to his earlier assertion, he said nothing to Rose, knowing her concern would show on her face and elicit questions from his mother and Dominique at the Sunday dinner-table.