Dead and Buried (31 page)

‘Do you think that makes a difference?’

‘No,’ said Isobel defiantly. ‘It doesn’t. Not to Gerry. He said, “My darling, it wouldn’t matter to me if you were from Africa yourself, or from China or Siberia or the South Sea Islands.” The English – Europeans – look at these matters differently, Louis—’

‘Not that differently.’ If he could have physically gashed her with the words, he would have.

‘Maybe not
that
differently,’ temporized January, ‘were Mademoiselle
in fact
from Africa or China or somewhere more exotic. But as matters stand, having lived in France myself, I can attest that it would be her appearance rather than her ancestry that would cause comment, if such were the case.’

Louis sniffed.

‘And you better thank God that’s how they look at things in England –’ Rablé jabbed a finger at the young man – ‘as that’s where your cousin’s going to go wed –
and
Marie-Amalie – if I have anything to do with it. Was it you, told Isobel’s Maman to get rid of Pierrette?’

‘Of course it was.’ Louis waved aside his cousin’s cry of outrage. ‘That’s the first thing a blackmailer thinks of, is getting at the servants.’

‘And I suppose that’s why you got rid of that poor valet of yours, what was his name – André – the year before last?’

‘May I ask, Mademoiselle Deschamps,’ put in January, ‘when you told Viscount Foxford of your relationship with M’sieu Rablé? In Paris, or that Thursday night in New Orleans?’

‘Oh, in Paris!’ said the girl. ‘I would never have kept such a thing from him for so long!’

‘In a letter, or face to face?’

The girl looked aside again, and color came up under the delicate pink of her complexion. ‘In a letter,’ she said, her voice stifled, and Louis flung up his hands in disgust. He seemed, January reflected privately, to have both knowledge and considerable sensitivity around the subject of blackmail.

Isobel winced at his gesture, but went on. ‘That’s how Blessinghurst knew of it. I know, because he . . . he showed me the letter. I already knew Gerry – M’sieu le Vicomte – had not received it, but I didn’t think anything of it, when we realized it had gone astray.’

She pressed her hands to her mouth again, then to her cheeks, as if trying to force back the flush of shame. ‘At first – when Milord Blessinghurst took me aside at a ball and told me he knew – I thought he was threatening me because he wanted to marry me himself. But no. He said I was to leave Paris, or he would see to it that everyone in Louisiana knew about what poor Grandmama had done. I asked him why – I begged him to tell me – and he only laughed and said, “Don’t trouble your pretty head about it, my dear.” Hateful!’ She shook her head. ‘Hateful. But I didn’t dare tell Gerry, because there was Maman to think of, and Marie-Amalie. I thought I had put it all behind me, that I could live again . . . Then at the Truloves’s ball, to see Gerry – and Blessinghurst . . .’

‘Yes,’ said January thoughtfully. ‘Gerry and Blessinghurst.’

‘I didn’t know what to think. Only that I had to get out of there.’ Isobel shook her head. ‘It was like a nightmare. Two days – the Thursday – after the ball, Gerry waited for me outside my house in the morning. He leaped up on to the step of my carriage as it came out, said he would cling there to the window until I told him what Blessinghurst was to me. I said, he is the man who will destroy my family, if you are seen speaking with me this way.’

She folded her hands, staring out through the French doors toward the levee, struggling to keep her countenance. No boats passed on the river in this isolated season – Bayou Lente might have been the only civilization on the planet. Its limits, the boundaries of the world.

‘Gerry came to the house that night. He knew Maman goes early to bed; I’d told him that in Paris. He sent up a note, and when Marie-Amalie went upstairs, I – I went across the street to talk to him, standing in a doorway. He asked what was it, that Blessinghurst had threatened? At first he didn’t believe me, didn’t understand how completely such talk would ruin us, for in truth one great-great-grandmother meant nothing to him! But I made him understand. We talked – hours; it was after two when at last I came in. I still had some idea that Blessinghurst wanted to marry me, for some reason – that he was playing some kind of game with me . . . But looking at what you’ve said, M’sieu Janvier, about him being an actor, and where would he have gotten the money to come here, of all places, and at the same time Gerry did . . .? It’s someone who doesn’t want me to marry Gerry, isn’t it? But
why
?’

From the window, Louis growled, ‘I think
that
answer’s obvious.’

Don’t be an ass
, January was careful not to say. ‘Myself, I would hesitate to proclaim any answer obvious, sir. Foxford’s mail was clearly being watched
before
Blessinghurst got hold of Mademoiselle Deschamps’s letter about her ancestry. We’ve already established that the man didn’t arrive in Paris until after Viscount Foxford began trying to fix his interest with your cousin. Doesn’t that sound as if someone heard that Foxford was firmly on a path that would lead to matrimony and took what steps he thought he needed to keep him off of it? Including hiring another suitor, first to turn the girl aside – which didn’t work – and then to render her ineligible.

‘Foxford had a friend – the Irishman Derryhick—’

‘Yes,’ said Isobel swiftly, ‘Patrick. He was in Paris with Gerry. That Thursday night, Gerry said he’d been out with him that evening, that M’sieu Derryhick had seen how distracted he was and had asked him what was wrong. Had he spoken to me, he asked . . .’

‘And Foxford told him what he knew?’

‘That I was being blackmailed, yes.’

‘So after Gerry left to see you,’ said January softly, ‘Derryhick went out to find Blessinghurst. He ran him to earth in a gambling parlor on Rue Orleans, spoke to him . . . and returned in haste and rage to the hotel where they were staying and had a violent quarrel with . . . someone. Someone who stabbed him, hid his body, and then took steps to make sure that, if the body were found, it would look as if the murder took place in Foxford’s room. Swapped the sheets on Foxford’s bed for new sheets unused, and put the worn ones on his own. Got rid of the bloodied rug in his own room and replaced it with the rug from Gerry’s room – and, for good measure, threw his victim’s blood-smeared watch under Gerry’s bed.’

Rablé said quietly, ‘A clever villain.’

‘Clever and careful,’ replied January. He glanced at Isobel, who sat rigid, taking this information in, sorting it and seeing its implications.

‘And Gerry?’

‘He is in the Cabildo,’ said January. ‘Because of the watch, and the fact that he was Derryhick’s heir for a great deal of money – and because he will not say where he was. He said he would have his business manager purchase Pierrette . . .’

‘To hell with M’sieu le Vicomte,’ snapped Louis. ‘Where’s Blessinghurst? That Irish bitch I’m paying at the Countess’s says he hasn’t been in there in a week.’

Sybilla. The Countess would snatch her bald-headed . . .

‘You can’t kill him!’ cried Isobel. ‘Don’t you understand, Louis? Whoever is behind this, whoever it is who doesn’t want Gerry to marry me – is it the uncle he spoke of, M’sieu? The evil one? – Gerry is still in danger. If you kill Blessinghurst—’

‘
When
I kill Blessinghurst,’ returned Louis, ‘he will keep his fat mouth shut, and that is all that concerns me. And you, M’sieu—’ He turned savagely upon January, and Cadmus Rablé said in his quiet voice:

‘M’sieu Janvier is going to return to New Orleans in perfect safety on the next steamboat, Louis. And he will remain safe. Or you will find out that there are other ways for families to be ruined. Is that understood?’

The young man stared at the old, eyes blazing, like a splendid high-couraged stallion – and about as intelligent as the average stallion, January reflected: a beautiful beast who would run himself to death in terror of flowers flickering in the wind, without asking why. But in time Louis moved his head a little, and the tension in his body changed to something else. ‘I understand,’ he said quietly. ‘Now you understand something, M’sieu Rablé.’

He stabbed his finger at January. ‘If one word, one
breath
, of this leaks to the world, about my cousin or about my family, there will be many people to suffer. But I swear to you on my father’s heart, the first one will be him. And the next, his wife, and every other member of his family. And from that, M’sieu Rablé –’ he turned to his host with a stiff, furious bow – ‘I will not be put aside by you, or anyone.’

Turning, he stalked from the house.

They heard hooves hammer away in the direction of the levee; die into the thrumming of the cicadas in the trees.

‘Well, now,’ said Cadmus Rablé. ‘Janvier, let’s talk about what can actually be done.’

TWENTY-FOUR

T
rue to the strict codes of conduct that governed the relationships between the light-complected
libre
planters and men of darker hue and questionable social provenance, January was given an excellent dinner on the kitchen’s wide gallery, where the table was laid in summer for the house servants. January was able to steer the talk to Mamzelle Isobel and her mother without trouble, and it became clear immediately, from the talk around the table, that there wasn’t the slightest suspicion anywhere in Natchitoches Parish that Isobel Deschamps was anything but the granddaughter of old M’am Noisette’s white half-sister. ‘And like true sisters they were, M’sieu,’ the housekeeper assured January. ‘They’d escaped from Sainte Domingue together, you know, at the revolution there in ’91, and their poor Papa killed and M’am Noisette’s mama, too.’

The sisters must have arranged things between themselves, January reflected, as soon as Noisette knew herself to be with child.

The older of the maids – a slow-moving and rather fragile woman in her fifties – handed January a bowl of greens and said, ‘M’am Celestine – Mamzelle Isobel’s mama – practically grew up here, with Michie Robert and Mamzelle Toucoutou and all Michie Rablé’s other children. And a good thing, too, for Beaux Herbes was a sorry house in those days, and a lonely one. M’am Eliane would come here in the mornings with her little girl – how she doted on that little girl! – and not leave till dark was falling, as if this was her true home, with M’am Noisette. I felt bad for her,’ she added sadly, ‘for M’am Eliane had such fire in her, when first she wed.’

‘It was losing her babies,’ said the housekeeper. ‘Poor unformed little things, not even able to live, except the boy. And once Michie Louis-Florizel got religion like he did, he kept that boy to himself.’

‘Easier to blame his wife, that he shot his own brother,’ said the butler quietly, ‘than admit it was him that pulled the trigger.’

After supper, when January walked back across the yard in the cooling twilight, he paused to listen to the stillness, the deep silence of the countryside, that for seven nights now he had heard chiefly as the background to imagined sounds of pursuit. Three and a half decades ago, this land of marshes and bayous that lay between the two arms of what had been, at various times, the Red River – the Old River, the Cane River, the Red’s current stream – must have been a backwater indeed, and this sense of being alone on the planet a thousand times worse. For a woman used to the friends and activity of New Orleans, to be left by her husband there would have truly been exile.

‘Granmere told Maman what she’d done, when she lay dying,’ admitted Isobel, as she poured out coffee for herself, January, and Rablé on the big house gallery, after the servants had lit the mosquito smudges and departed. ‘How Granmere Noisette had hidden her condition and went to bear the baby at Beaux Herbes. Then when Granmere Noisette died, Maman told me. I think now it would probably have been better if she hadn’t,’ she added, a small frown pulling at her brows.

‘I’d have ridden over and put my hand over her mouth for her, if I’d known,’ put in Rablé. But for his African features, he could have been any well-off cotton planter in the state. At the servants’ table, January had learned that though Cadmus Rablé treated his hands well, he and his numerous progeny regarded the more African-blooded men and women they bought from neighbors or from the dealers in New Orleans as simply that: hands. You had to have slaves to run a place, and so you got them and treated them as everyone else did.

‘Forgive my asking, Mamzelle,’ said January, ‘but were you shocked?’

Isobel nodded. The transformation of lively prettiness into true beauty appeared to extend below the skin: true and terrible sacrifice had made her thoughtful.‘I was shocked, yes. But you know how it is in New Orleans, M’sieu – and here even more. One sees ladies in church, with their hair done up in tignons, and that’s the only way you know that they’re not French. And all my life I’ve grown up seeing girls – Dupres and Metoyers and Rachals, and even Granpere Rablé’s granddaughters – his other granddaughters, I mean,’ she added, with a slight flush – ‘wearing gowns just as pretty as mine, and riding in carriages, and looking not one whit different from myself and Marie-Amalie and our Verron cousins, and being told, “Oh, no, you can’t go to the same parties with them, they’re gens du couleur . . .” And they looked
exactly
the same as us. Louis—’