Dead and Buried (3 page)

‘You are observant, sir. That’s quite true. Yes, in a port city it is often that a man will die away from his home. For that reason I keep a supply of coffins ready-made and have fitted up the room at the back with chairs and a bier draped in velvet. This I placed at the disposal of the young Madame Ramilles. There are doors behind the draperies which open into the yard, where the coffin might be put easily into the hearse.’

‘Any sign them doors was broke into?’

‘
En effet
, M’sieu, I did not check, though it is true that the latch is a simple one. Had I had the smallest idea—’

‘Oh, Lord, yes.’ Shaw spat at a crawdad that had emerged from a puddle, missing it by feet. The arthropod continued its investigatory way toward the corpse. January had already covered the body against what seemed like every fly in the state of Louisiana, but he knew it would be only minutes before ants discovered the place as well. ‘That your hearse out front? There a chance we can take the dear departed back to your establishment so’s the maestro here an’ I –’ he nodded at January – ‘can have a better look at him?’

‘We will not pay for it.’ One of the FTFCMBS Board of Directors – a stout little coffee-seller named Gérard – bustled over, like a man who fears he is about to be swindled. ‘Nor can Madame Glasson or the Ramilles family be asked to do so. I had no objection, none, when Madame Glasson insisted that poor Ramilles should have four horses, and the extra plumes, but at
ten dollars
—’

‘
And
I will not pay for the gloves,’ thrust in Madame Glasson, who had evidently doubled back on her tracks. ‘Nor the scarves for the mourners! They were for Rameses’s funeral, and now,
if
his body can be found –’ she glared at Shaw as if she suspected he had stuffed Rameses’s corpse into one of his pockets to spite her – ‘they will be all to purchase again. How can we make the gloves, and the scarves, and the plumes, and the mourning-rings given out for this . . . this
interloper
! – how can we make those do a second time? It is ridiculous! No more could a woman wear a white gown to her second wedding.’

‘If’n there’s a problem with the expense of four horses,’ said Shaw patiently – in English, but he’d clearly followed Madame Glasson’s Gallic tirade, ‘can we maybe unhitch two of ’em, to drag the poor feller back to the shop? We purely can’t leave him here.’

To judge by her expression, Madame Glasson saw no reason why not, but Medard Regnier – the manager of the Hotel d’Iberville – just then broke in with, ‘But I know this man.’

All heads turned. Regnier rather self-consciously lowered the sheet back into place.

‘He is at the Iberville, with a party of English travelers. It is he who came in late last night in so great a rage; who ascended the stair crying,
I will kill him, the bastard
. The servants all say that the shouting could be heard everywhere, coming from their suite.’

‘What suite?’ January asked.

‘The Blue Suite at the back, M’sieu, which overlooks M’sieu Quennell’s yard. The whole suite is rented by the young Irish Lordship, the Vicomte Foxford. But it is –
was
– M’sieu Derryhick –’ he nodded respectfully down to the covered form on the tomb – ‘who pays the bills.’

‘Will he keep?’ Shaw asked, when he and January followed Regnier out of the Quennell establishment on to Rue Douane some thirty minutes later.

January glanced at the glaring noon sky. ‘Long enough.’

Only minutes had served for the chairs, candlesticks, crucifix, and plume-bedecked corner-posts to be swept away from the plain trestle-table bier in the shop’s back room and for Patrick Derryhick’s body to be laid out and covered with clean sheets. In this task they were assisted by old Madame Quennell – the undertaker’s placée mother, who had taken her white protector’s name many years ago – and Young Madame, the undertaker’s stout, gentle wife. Even Martin Quennell, the young white clerk, had been called down from his tiny office upstairs to lend a grudging hand.

As the son of that long-dead white protector by, presumably, his legal wife, Martin had borne himself with an air of martyred noblesse oblige, and had vanished upstairs again the moment he could.

Understandable
, reflected January, as he, Shaw, and Regnier turned the corner on to Rue Royale. Young Martin’s position was a complete reversal of the usual French Town pattern wherein the white protector used his connections to assist his second family ‘on the shady side of the street’. When the private bank of Quennell and Larouche had collapsed, it was Martin – who could have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps – who’d had to become a clerk in some other man’s bank, while Beauvais, whom their father had apprenticed out to a trade, had a thriving business of his own.

If the young clerk was aware that January’s gaze followed him back up the stairs he didn’t show it, and January was careful to conceal his interest.

You don’t even recognize me, do you?

Now Shaw’s voice called January’s thoughts back from the ramifications of the Quennell family’s history. ‘You got a look at his hands . . .’

Two nails had been broken, as if the man had clawed futilely at something – a pillow, a cushion, a sleeved arm – in his last moments on earth.

January nodded. ‘He put up a fight, all right.’

Shaw left January and Regnier at the side door of the Iberville Hotel and went around to the main entrance on Canal Street. As he followed the manager into the Iberville’s service quarters, January tried to push from his heart the anger that always grated on him in situations like this. Push it away, or at least turn it into something smaller and less corrosive: vexation or bemusement. As a surgeon at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris – and later, as a musician who played for the Paris Opera and at innumerable balls in the days of the restored Bourbon kings – January had been able to walk in through the front door of any hotel in France. People might look at him twice – powerfully proportioned at six foot three, he was used to that – but certainly no one would go over to him and say, ‘This’s an establishment for white folks, boy.’

An establishment for white folks where all the servants were black.

‘Tell me about Foxford and Derryhick,’ he asked, as he and the manager wound past offices and linen-rooms toward the lobby.

‘Not a great deal to tell,’ replied Regnier. ‘There are four in the party: the young Lord Foxford, Germanicus Stuart; Foxford’s uncle, M’sieu Diogenes Stuart, who I understand is in the British Foreign Service in India; the late M’sieu Derryhick, a relation of the Stuarts, who held the purse strings; and M’sieu Droudge, the Stuart family’s business manager. He it was, who would have had the entire party lodged less expensively on the fourth floor, but M’sieu Derryhick insisted on the Blue Suite, the quietest and most handsome in the hotel.’

‘Servants?’

‘His Lordship’s valet, M’sieu Reeve, and M’sieu Diogenes Stuart’s foreign manservant.’ The distaste in the manager’s voice would have chilled wine at ten paces. The Regniers had owned a small sugar-plantation on San Domingue, from which they’d been driven by the great slave-revolt of ’91. Medard Regnier’s complexion might be the identical hue of a Hindu manservant’s, but the gulf between civilized and savage echoed in his voice.

They emerged into the lobby, an immense cavern decorated in the garish American style. A yellow-painted arch opened into the gambling room, which was operating full-cock even in the dead of a hot afternoon: January had yet to encounter a situation, including a double epidemic of yellow fever and cholera, that would slow down the gambling-rooms of New Orleans. An elderly clerk was extricating himself from an irate customer’s harangue about the quality of food in the dining room at one end of the counter while Shaw waited, chewing contentedly as an ox, at the other. Before the clerk could address him, however, the god Apollo entered from the street, strode to the counter, and said, ‘I’m frightfully sorry to keep on at you this way, Mr Klein – it is Mr Klein, isn’t it? – but has there yet been no word of Mr Derryhick?’

Not the god Apollo
, January amended, regarding that straight, short nose, those beautifully shaped lips, and the shining mane of hair.
A god is never that young
.

‘My dear Gerry.’ An older man sidled in at his heels: tall, obese, grizzled. Deep lines gouged a face both sun-darkened and slightly yellow with the chronic jaundice of white men who have lived too long in the tropics. Sunk in puffy pillows of flesh, the black-coffee eyes had an expression both wicked and weary, a sinner grown bored of sin. ‘We’re in the Babylon of the Western Hemisphere, for Heaven’s sake. Let the man wallow a bit in its fleshpots and spend your Aunt Elodie’s money. It’s what he’s good at, God knows.’

His Dear Gerry opened his mouth to retort, but Lieutenant Shaw loafed over to them, spat at, and missed, the cuspidor, and pushed his sorry hat back on his straggly mane of greasy ditchwater hair. ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir,’ he addressed the young man. ‘You wouldn’t be Viscount Foxford, now, would you?’

The fat man produced a quizzing-glass from the pocket of the outermost of his several stylish waistcoats and held it up, blinking at Shaw through it with feigned amazement. ‘Good Lord, it’s an actual keelboatman! A bona fide Salt River Roarer . . . You must permit me to shake your hand, sir. I have seen your spiritual brethren in a dozen saloons since our arrival in this astonishing town and I confess I have been far too fearful of violence to beg the favor—’

The young man stepped quickly forward. ‘Please, sir, don’t pay any heed to my uncle. He doesn’t mean to give offense.’

‘None taken.’ Shaw extended his hand. ‘’T’ain’t often a feller can gratify the honest wishes of a fellow-creature with so little trouble. Though I do doubt,’ he added, catching the older man’s dark eyes with his pale ones, ‘when it comes down to it, there’s much
you’re
too fearful of violence to go after. My name is Abishag Shaw, sir, of the New Orleans City Guard. I trust I have the pleasure of shakin’ the hand of Mr Diogenes Stuart, of His Majesty’s Foreign Service?’

Stuart widened his eyes in a comical double-take, but the young man Gerry said quickly, ‘The City Guard? Have you heard from our friend Mr Derryhick?’

‘I have,’ said Shaw. ‘Maybe we best go sit someplace less public? The news ain’t good.’

THREE

E
very window in the Blue Suite had been thrown open in a vain – and ill-advised – attempt to mitigate the tropical heat. It was a mistake Europeans generally only made once. Lord Foxford said, ‘Faugh!’ as he opened the door of the parlor, closely followed by Diogenes Stuart, and strode across the room to close them; the lean man hunched over papers at the parlor’s desk warned peevishly, ‘You’ll find the heat beyond endurance if you do that, My Lord.’

‘I find the stench beyond endurance.’ Foxford tried to thrust aside the long, gauzy shams and became entangled in them; his struggles liberated a couple of enormous horseflies, which the lightweight veils had so far blocked from the parlor, and the insects roared in, banging noisily at the ceiling.

‘Now see what you’ve done!’ The man rose from the desk, long-limbed, stooped and elderly in a rusty black cutaway and a neck-cloth that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a portrait of America’s Founding Fathers. ‘I’ve spoken to the management and sent a note complaining to the owner of that pestilential establishment.’ He jerked a hand toward the window. ‘No wonder people die in this city . . . Well, don’t just stand there, boy,’ he added, catching sight of January. ‘Do something about those damnable flies! And you, Regnier –’ he pronounced the Assistant Manager’s name Reg-ner, as if the French invented their pronunciations out of a malicious desire to trip up English tongues – ‘did I not request that we weren’t to be troubled by employees of the hotel? As long as we’re paying first-class prices—’

‘Mr Droudge –’ the Viscount extricated himself from the curtain – ‘this is Lieutenant Shaw, of the New Orleans City Guard, and Mr January. They say they have news of Patrick.’

January remained in the parlor doorway when Shaw broke the news of Patrick Derryhick’s death. He kept his eyes on the elder Stuart’s face, and noted the flattening of the lips, the way the chin came forward and the eyes narrowed for one instant before the man put on a more appropriate expression of shock to match Lord Foxford’s anguished cry of ‘Good God!’. Foxford pressed a hand to his mouth.

Stuart tilted his head, asked, ‘Are you sure it’s he?’

‘Fairly.’ Shaw brought from the pockets of his frayed and greasy coat the things they’d removed from the body: silver card-case, hip flask, penknife. A duelling pistol – Manton’s, the best in England, and loaded. A woman’s pink silk garter. A memorandum-book bound in expensive Morocco-leather, and a handful of gambling vowels. These he laid on the gold-mounted black marble of the parlor tabletop, and with a repetitive deliberation very unlike him, he began to take all three men through discursive explanations and queries, while January and the hotel manager stepped very quietly back through the parlor door and into the hall.

‘Which room first?’ Regnier held out his keys. All four chambers communicated not only within the suite, but with the corridor alongside.