Dead and Buried (32 page)

She hesitated as she spoke her cousin’s name. Then she went on, ‘Sometimes –
often!
– they
do
go to Paris or London or Italy, and we hear that they’ve married some man in Europe, and Maman and my Verron aunts whisper about how they’d be willing to bet their best pearls that those gentlemen never knew . . . And what harm was in it?’

What harm indeed?
January reflected. Even the ladies like the Countess Mazzini got more respect in the eyes of white men in their guise as Italian whores than they would have if they had the name of black ones.

The girl concluded simply, ‘But I couldn’t not tell M’sieu le Vicomte. I couldn’t begin – what I hoped we were beginning – with a lie. Not a lie about that.’

Rablé sniffed, as if to say, ‘What he don’t know won’t hurt him nor anyone else,’ but January nodded and said, ‘In my opinion, you did rightly, Mamzelle.’

‘I am only sorry I did so in a letter, for that . . . that swine Blessinghurst to steal, and not face to face, as my heart first told me I ought.’ She blinked quickly and rubbed her eyes, as if at smoke. ‘May I come to New Orleans with you? To see him – to tell him . . .’

January shook his head. ‘It’s out of the question,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure Pierrette is purchased by Foxford and sent on here. But if, as I suspect, Foxford’s Uncle Diogenes is behind this effort to keep Foxford from marrying, your appearance will do nothing but trigger the disaster that Foxford is willing for your sake to go to the scaffold to prevent.’

She bit her lip and looked aside. ‘There isn’t – they really do not have so much of a case against him . . . Do they, M’sieu?’

‘I fear that they do, Mamzelle.’ He saw the tears spring to her eyes again, glimmering in the smoky light of the cressets. ‘Did Foxford ever speak of his uncle?’

‘Often,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘He never – he always found some reason to explain or mitigate his conduct. Gerry – M’sieu le Vicomte – has no belief in the evil of men. But the things his cousin Theo would tell me—’

‘
Theo
was in Paris with Foxford? Uncle Diogenes’s son?’

‘Oh, yes. That’s who Gerry was staying with. Theo’s mother – Grace, Lady Diogenes Stuart – lives in the family town house in Paris because she refuses to go to India with her husband, or – or to live under his roof at all. Theo was drunk most of the time – or under the influence of opiates, Gerry told me – and would do and say the most outrageous things. I remember once, at a ball at the St-Glaives’s, he hid in the conservatory, seized me around the waist, and said to me, “There’s tainted blood in the family, my dear. You’d do well to think twice about passing it on to your sons.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or weep, because there are so many here in America, who would say – like Louis – that
I
have tainted blood.’

‘What did he say about his father?’

The girl’s face flushed, even to the tips of her ears, and she looked steadily out into the darkness for a time and shook her head. After a moment she replied in a stifled voice, ‘Things no man should ever say about his own father, even if they are true. And things no man should say to a woman.’

‘I beg your pardon, Mamzelle,’ said January. ‘I didn’t mean about what Diogenes Stuart does in his – idle hours. That much I know. But did Theo say anything about what his father thought of Derryhick? Or of his cousin Foxford, for that matter?’

‘Well, one couldn’t really trust anything Theo said, you know.’ Isobel looked back at him, her lips quirked in a sad little smile. ‘Gerry – M’sieu le Vicomte – would say there was a period of about four hours, between eleven and three, when he could be relied on, sometimes . . .’ She shook her head again, and her mouth tightened suddenly, as if the memory of a double-handful of winter afternoons, sitting in Tante Cassandre’s parlor or riding in the park, with nothing to look forward to but happiness, had suddenly stirred to life, lacerating her inside. As she had before, Isobel took a deep breath and let it out, as if regaining her balance to go on.

‘Theo said his father hated M’sieu Derryhick, on account of some aunt leaving all her money to M’sieu Derryhick instead of to the family. And sometimes he spoke of his father hating the whole family, when Madame le Vicomtesse would not agree to send him money. But Gerry said that, in fact, his uncle was too lazy to care one way or the other and hadn’t been in Ireland for years. His outrage was . . . theoretical, I believe was the word Gerry used. “Uncle Diogenes is forever in a tumult over something,” he said to me, after Theo had hinted at dark plots on the part of his father. “He looks to blame Aunt Elodie and Patrick and Mother and me, whenever he has to write old Droudge for an advance on his quarter’s allowance, or for hush money to some pander, instead of blaming Great-Grandfather’s mistresses or Grandfather’s stock speculations or his own infernal laziness.” It was the same, he said, with his Uncle’s anger over Theo’s gambling-debts and . . . and drunken sprees with women. “He is angry at Patrick,” Gerry said, “because it is easier to be angry at another man than to actually come home and act the father himself.”’

Rablé raised his eyebrows a little at that, and January said, ‘It sounds like he is a wise young man, for his years.’

She half-smiled again at a memory. ‘I think that was M’sieu Derryhick,’ she said. ‘For a man who was always laughing, he had great wisdom about humankind. Gerry said he was going to get Theo to write his father a letter complaining that I was a milk-and-water Miss without a word to say for myself. That that would be the quickest way to obtain his permission to our match.’

‘Permission?’ Rablé tilted his head. ‘The boy is of age, surely?’

‘Not until he turns thirty.’ Isobel shook her head, her smooth forehead puckering. ‘Or weds, with his trustees’ consent.’

‘His trustees being Uncle Diogenes and Derryhick.’

‘If that’s the case,’ put in Rablé, ‘why would this Stuart go to the trouble of hiring a man to divide Mamzelle from his nephew, when he had only to forbid the banns?’

‘Probably because he could not come up with a convincing reason for wanting to retain control of the property,’ said January thoughtfully. ‘And again, I don’t think he’d want to offend the man who, in eight years, one way or the other, was going to be in charge of sending him his quarterly allowance.’

The smell of woodsmoke from a score of cook fires drifted through the darkness, and like jewels on indigo velvet, he could see the dim flare of them between the cabins of the quarters where the women – who had been picking cotton since it grew light enough to see – now stirred stews of salt-pork and potatoes, collards and corn, to be gulped down before they slept to wake to another day’s work.
Doesn’t Rablé understand that the world is changing?
he thought, seeing his host turn his head at the sound of voices from the quarters. A few hours in his company had taught January that the older man was, like himself, a Frenchman, rather than an African, in his heart.
Can’t he see that it’s only a matter of time before the American tide overwhelms even this slow and sleepy land where libres are safe? All those fine divisions between griffe and quadroon and musterfino, which Maman’s friends and the gens du couleur libre here spend so much of their time arguing about . . . Doesn’t he see – don’t THEY all see – that it’s only a matter of time before the Americans take over completely? The Americans, who don’t care how much African blood is in your veins when a single drop will allow them to sell you and make a profit, and that’s all that matters?

And his heart went out, unexpectedly, to Martin Quennell. Like Compair Lapin, doing whatever he had to do to survive in a world where no man with a provable drop of African blood in him would be allowed to vote, would be permitted to testify in court against a white man, would be considered a citizen of the country or the state he lived in.

How hard had it been to turn his back on his mother and his brother, on all his friends? To trade the comfort of the family that loved him for the rights of manhood?

To know that his home would always be the equivalent of McPhearson’s Rooming House, impersonal and secret? That when his family gathered in the cemetery for the Feast of All Saints, all he would be able to do would be to jest about it with American friends?

After a time he said, ‘But you’re right, sir. There’s something here I don’t understand, facts I need to know, before I can go into a court and say, “This was the man who struck down Patrick Derryhick, and this is why.” Because both of the other men who could have done the crime have stories of their whereabouts that cannot be proven false. And unless we can prove who was the true killer, and why he is so eager to prevent the Viscount’s wedding, there is nothing to keep him from striking again. It’s why I need to find Blessinghurst before Louis Verron does. What you’ve told me has helped me immeasurably, Mamzelle.’ He turned his eyes to Isobel, sitting with hands folded, in the flickering light looking tired and spent. ‘I haven’t uncovered a single piece of treasure yet – but you’ve given me the map to tell me where to dig.’

‘I shall pray for you, then, M’sieu Janvier,’ said the girl. ‘Since it seems that it is the only thing I’m able to do.’

‘No,’ corrected her grandfather, and a glint crossed those blue, African eyes. ‘While you’re waiting you can sew for your trousseau, Mamzelle –’ from his pocket he drew out a piece of paper and held it out to January – ‘and we’ll both of us see how much help this will buy.’

January unfolded it. It was a bank draft for five hundred dollars.

TWENTY-FIVE

J
anuary remained at Bayou Lente for another day, while Cadmus Rablé sent his overseer’s seventeen-year-old son over to the other side of Cloutierville, with a description of the cloven water-locust in which January’s free papers were hidden and instructions to retrieve Rose’s compass from the storekeeper. It was Wednesday before the
Parnassus
– laden to the top deck with the first bales of the cotton crop from the plantations upriver – was sighted, picking its way through the snags and shallows to the plantation dock.

‘Damn,’ said Sam, when January came aboard, ‘you just lost me seven dollars and fifty cents, brother!’ and they clasped hands in welcome. ‘You don’t look like a man gonna be haulin’ wood for his passage, neither.’

‘I have rented a stateroom on the upper deck,’ declared January loftily, ‘from which I will look down at you poor bastards laborin’ and think sad thoughts.’

The men of the deck crew laughed – mostly at the jest about
any
black man being rented
any
cabin on a steamboat – and slapped his back and shoulders, and cursed about the amount of money they’d bet against his survival.

A few miles downriver, the
Parnassus
stopped at the landing by Bayou Charette to take on Louis Verron. January stepped back among the cotton bales that piled every square foot of deck. He suspected that the young man glimpsed him at some point during the voyage, but in the ensuing four days, no word passed between them. On Friday night, as the boat steamed downriver in the center of the slow, heavy current around Manchac Point, the weather turned sharply cold. It was like a long fever breaking, and the following evening, when the
Parnassus
came to dock on the levee in New Orleans, it was like coming back to another world from the one January had left two weeks ago. There were still few boats – and wouldn’t be, until the December rise brought cargo prices down – but, as he crossed the Place d’Armes, January took note of well-dressed ladies on the arms of their gentlemen friends, taking the air beneath the pride-of-India trees that grew along the levee; of children dashing among the market arcades or rolling hoops across the Place’s dusty expanse, shouting with delight at being back in town with their friends. Along Rue Chartres and Rue Esplanade, cafés were open again, and the melismatic wailing of the charcoal man could be heard as he went his rounds:

‘
My donkey white, my coal is black
,

Buy my charcoal, ten-cent sack
 . . .’

Lights shone in the windows of town houses; candlelit windows stood open to the night-breeze. Voices called from carriageways and yards.

The air no longer sang with mosquitoes.

The summer heat was over at last.

January wished he had wings, so that he could spread them and fly the length of the street to where Rose would be drinking tea on the gallery, as she did at this hour of the evening . . .

And there she was, as he came up the street, rising from her chair and turning to look toward him through the descending blue twilight as if he’d shouted her name aloud, as he was shouting it in his heart.

Two of her students were with her – quiet, pretty Cosette Gardinier and a very young and very plain girl named Sabine – and January said, as he came up the steps and into Rose’s arms, ‘You young ladies might want to go indoors for a few minutes . . .’ and the girls giggled and nudged each other and peeked back over their shoulders as they darted through the French doors into the shadows of the house, and he kissed Rose and held her close.

I’m back, I’m back. I’m alive and I’m back
 . . .