Dead and Buried (25 page)

Instead, he got his mother talking about Celestine Deschamps, one of the most beautiful young ladies in New Orleans back in the days just after the great battle there that had repulsed the hated British, back when her name had been Celestine Verron and when January’s mother – nowadays the respectable widow of a
libre
upholsterer – had been among the loveliest of the ladies on ‘the shady side of the street’.

The subject was easy enough to raise. Dominique, kind-hearted as always, cried out in distress at the sight of January’s bruised and swollen face; their mother only sniffed with scorn at the mention of the culprits. ‘I daresay Louis Verron is trying to protect that father of his from word getting around that he pays a visit to the Countess’s now and again. Did you see him there, Benjamin? Making a fool of himself as usual . . .’

‘Was that it?’ said January innocently. ‘Verron said something about forgetting who I saw there.’

‘Well, and so you should. All the boys in that family are mad dogs. The New Orleans Verrons haven’t more than fifteen thousand a year from sugar – Mûrier Plantation has been mismanaged since before the Spanish left. Last year they barely cleared five hundred hogsheads: hardly enough for Charles Verron to keep his mistress, let alone pay the kind of prices the Countess asks.’

Livia Levesque – sixty-three years old and as beautiful as she had been even in January’s childhood – made a dismissive gesture at the mention. ‘Serves the little
ratatouille
right,’ she added, forgetting that local slang was beneath her these days. ‘Serves that entire side of the family right. They’ve turned up their noses at the Beaux Herbes side of the family for years.’

‘Why?’ Hannibal refilled her wine glass with an expression of suitable fascination. ‘Don’t tell me, Belle Madame, there was a scandal!’

Had the Widow Levesque been a pheasant she would have fluffed her plumage. ‘Which one of the old families in this town is without scandal? Old Granpere Verron tried to keep the peace between his sons – between the men who became grandfathers to that wolverine Louis and Isobel . . . She was a pupil of yours, wasn’t she, Ben?’ She turned toward January, velvety dark eyes avid for gossip. ‘I’ve heard she left town quite suddenly – almost as suddenly as she left Paris – and that her mama sold off that girl of hers . . . What was her name?’

‘I know nothing about it,’ said January blandly.

Dominique opened her mouth to protest – how could a mother have simply sold off a girl’s maidservant? – when Hannibal laid a deft hand on the widow’s wrist and urged, ‘Did one of the sons try to murder the other?’

‘Murder and more.’ Livia Levesque rolled the words on her tongue like a vintage cognac. ‘All the fault of that girl, Eliane Dubesc, Celestine’s mother. Using the youngest of the three brothers as a stepping stone to get herself close to the eldest, who was engaged already to Marie-Adelaïde Peralta. Eliane took him from his fiancée, leaving both Marie-Adelaïde and young Charlot Verron in the ditch, and ran off with Louis-Florizel – for all the good it did her. Charlot called his eldest brother to task and was shot dead for his trouble, and the middle brother – Louis Verron’s grandfather Nicholas – would have taken his own revenge, had not Grandpere sent Louis-Florizel and his bride off to his Natchitoches plantation at Beaux Herbes.

‘All an old tale,’ she added, with an indulgent smile at Hannibal’s expressions of indignation and horror. ‘Whoever it was who sold you this chicken, they cheated you, Rose – even putting all those peppers into it doesn’t mask the taste . . . Natchitoches Parish is where the great gentlemen of the town send the members of the family whom they don’t want to have anything to do with,
cher
Hannibal, white or colored. It’s up on the Red River, on the Spanish border – well, their so-called Republic of Texas now. A backwater.’ Her slender shoulders lifted in scorn, and she pushed her plate a pointed inch away from herself, untouched.

‘And Eliane Dubesc,’ January’s mother went on, ‘who thought herself so clever to be marrying the Verron son who stood to inherit control of old Grandpere’s sugar plantations and the house here in town, found herself wedded instead to a man in disgrace. All
he
got were the vacheries – the family cattle lands – and a few arpents of woods and swamp on the Red River, and not even a wife capable of bearing him living children. And you’ll never tell me she didn’t play him false, in the end.’

‘
Maman!
’ exclaimed Dominique, shocked.

‘Don’t be a schoolroom miss, Minou. That boy of theirs was nothing but a bundle of bones even before he contracted the consumption, and the other three died at once . . . and then all of a sudden, out of the blue, she produces a healthy, beautiful baby girl?’

‘And that would be Celestine?’ asked January softly. ‘Mademoiselle Isobel’s mother?’

‘It would. I’m told that prig Louis-Florizel said the deaths of the other three – and the fact that the boy was a walking textbook of illnesses – was the judgement of God on Eliane, though why God would have bothered I can’t imagine. But he took the boy away from her to New Orleans, leaving her alone at Beaux Herbes for all her trouble. Well, she had the last laugh on old Granpere after all. Those splendid sugar-plantations that went to the middle boy, Nicholas – Charles Verron’s father . . . He had so many sons that, once the management was chopped up between them, young Louis will be lucky if he’ll inherit part-interest in the house and a twentieth of what the place once brought in, provided the lawsuits of his uncles ever get settled enough to give him a sou. While the death of Eliane’s rickety boy put her lovely Celestine – and the Deschampses she married into, whom Grandpere Verron never could abide – in possession of the Red River lands that have turned into pure gold.’

‘Land that will go to Isobel and her sister,’ remarked Rose thoughtfully.

‘Hence the season in Paris – for all the good that did.’ The Widow Levesque sniffed again and pushed the leaves of the salad around on her plate without tasting them. ‘The land’s too good to waste on the fortune-hunters that have swarmed after the girls. I’m told Charles Verron tried to get up a match between Louis and Isobel – they’re only second-cousins, after all, and a French Creole would marry his own sister if it meant keeping the property in the family – and that was the reason Madame Celestine shipped her off to Deschamps’s brother and sister in Paris. You don’t happen to have found out, in all your enquiries, Benjamin,’ she added with assumed casualness, ‘why, exactly, the girl came back from Paris in such a hurry, do you?’

January shook his head, and Rose murmured, ‘She seems to have spent a good deal of her life lately in flight.’

Softly, Hannibal said, ‘Many people do.’

NINETEEN

T
he
Parnassus
departed upriver from New Orleans on Monday morning; January was part of the crew of stevedores who helped pole her from the wharf, then leaped across the widening gap of slow brown water to her deck. Even here on the water, the sun was a brass hammer, the air breathless and thick. As he coiled the ropes, set to with the other men – some of them free, some of them rented to the steamboat company by their owners – in shifting last-minute cargoes down to the holds, he was conscious of how low New Orleans looked, glimpsed above the top of the levee. No building in the French town was above three storeys in height; few in the American municipality upriver were that tall. He picked out the ostentatious brown brick and cream plaster façade of the Iberville. The pastel French and Spanish town-houses gave way entirely to the square brick structures favored by the Americans, which in their turn thinned to warehouses, cotton gins, and the reeking mazes of the Jefferson Parish cattle pens as they approached the Carrollton bend. Buzzards circled the slaughterhouses, dark on the glare of the sky. Small white cattle-egrets picked their way around the piled-up snags and mud of the batture below the levee.

Then the dark green monotony of the cane fields, as they had been in January’s childhood. For his first eight years, the only world that he had known.

The engineer yelled, ‘You lazy niggers get me some wood down here ’fore I comes up and asks what you all lookin’ at!’ and the deckhands laughed and cursed good-naturedly – Levi Sutton’s bark was known up and down the river to be worse than his bite. With that began the endless, back-breaking, blistering chore of feeding the engine’s fire.

As the new man on the crew, January had been put at the furnace end of the line: an inferno of shuddering darkness, suffocating heat, numbing noise – and safety. When the Preacher had introduced him to the deck boss yesterday, he’d explained, ‘M’ friend here goin’ to see family in Cloutierville,’ and Parnassus Sam had looked him over, matching up his stature and the quality of his clothing.

‘For a buck your size you got prissy hands,’ had been his only comment.

‘I puts glycerin an’ rose water on ’em, every night, to keep ’em soft.’

Sam’s mouth twitched, but he kept his countenance. ‘You know how to work, nigger?’

‘I ain’t cut cane lately, but I done it. I can sure load wood.’

‘Well, that’s good,’ said the deck boss. ‘’Cause you gonna.’

If one couldn’t go upriver with a white master, next best thing was to go as a member of a black crew. January knew he’d have to buy his place among them by doing his share and more of the hardest, hottest, stinkingest jobs. But he also knew it was only by showing himself willing that he’d have a chance to make it safely. Traveling deck passage – the only way a man of color could travel, on an American boat – he’d be lucky if he reached St Francisville still free.

Having worked as a slave, and grown up in the African village that was what slave quarters were, January understood the rhythms of the labor. Despite the stabbing pain in his ribs, he matched the speed of his work with that of the other men, steady-paced and unhurried. As a child he’d learned that if you got your job done quick, the master would just think up another one for you. Too spry and you’d make the other men look bad.
How come you ain’t quick like Ben, Sam?
Though excessive spryness, he reflected, gritting his teeth, wasn’t likely to be a problem on this voyage . . .

Too slow and you’d get a lick from the cowhide. Or, in this case, he’d just get put off the boat at the next landing.

The thought filled him with dread, but he knew at some point it would come to that. And as that first day went on – with the sticking plaster that braced his ribs beneath their bandages itching like the wrath of Satan, and every arm-load of wood like a dagger run into his side – he found himself calculating not how he could avoid being put ashore, but how long he could or should stay with the boat before striking out overland.

Louis Verron would follow him, as soon as he heard that Big J was no longer playing at the Countess’s.

Verron would guess where he was bound, and why.

And would be riding hard.

Six days up, maybe four days back.
It’s only days. I’ve lived through worse
.

There were few other boats on the river. In a week, January guessed, there’d be more. In the cotton country above Baton Rouge the first picking would be already going to the gins. Small sternwheelers like the
Parnassus,
which could navigate a low river, would be working their way up to bring it down, for those planters who considered the higher price early in the season sufficient trade-off for the more expensive transport costs. Snags, bars, tow-heads – and the occasional ruins of gutted boats – made the banks a navigational nightmare; every foot of water had to be patiently negotiated, with the voice of the pilot in his high lookout calling down warnings or shouting for the leads to be taken.

Along the banks, at almost every plantation landing, flags flew, hailing down the boat. Many places grew corn and pigs to feed their own labor force, but particularly as one got into cotton country, there were many who yielded to the temptation to put all their land into cotton. Why raise corn just to feed your field hands, when you could put the same acres under cotton at thirty-seven cents a pound and buy what came down from the prairies of Iowa and Illinois? And white folks didn’t live on pork and grits. In addition to hemp sacks and baling rope, ‘negro shoes’ from New England and ‘negro cloth’ from English mills, the
Parnassus
was stocked with white flour, wines and beer, English mustard, French soap, whale oil, vinegar, beeswax candles, and the sacks of salt indispensable for preserving the winter’s meat.

So the
Parnassus
hugged the banks, weaving and backing among endless, tedious snarls of submerged trees and sandbars, and January found himself listening, as if above the clatter and heave of the engines he could detect the hammer of following hooves.

Even with a day or two’s head start, Louis Verron could ride straight overland. Ride like a white man, unafraid to be seen, not obliged to keep to the woods.

Working barefoot like the other men, January kept the knife that usually resided in one of his boots wrapped under the sticking plaster that braced his ribs. On his other side he kept his freedom papers and his money wrapped up in oiled silk, and two dozen matches – also in oiled silk – stitched into the waistband of his trousers. In his pocket nestled Rose’s prized possession, a surveyor’s magnetic compass, and in the hidden parcel of emergency food – tucked behind a strut on the lower deck – were all the notes and sketch maps he’d been able to assemble at short notice, from other members of the Burial Society, of the countryside between New Orleans and Natchitoches Parish. These were neither complete nor accurate – map-making and map-reading being skills no white man would endure in any slave or in anyone who might befriend a slave – but there were men and women in the Burial Society whose families came from the thriving community of the free colored along the Cane and Red Rivers.