Dead and Buried (34 page)

‘We have a doctor to look in . . .’ The sergeant handed the note back with a touch of reproof in his voice.

‘And I’m sure he’s a very competent man,’ replied Hannibal. ‘But a very busy one, with so many to see to . . .’

‘Thank God, not so many as some years.’ The man crossed himself, made a sign to avert the Evil Eye, and fetched keys from his desk. ‘I was afraid the boy had the cholera . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Three took sick like that, all at once . . . I been up two or three times to the cell, and the Negro cell also, and all’s quiet for now. Still . . .’

He led the way across the yard.

The room where infirm or injured prisoners were consigned was a tiny one, set beneath the outside stair that ascended to the main cells, and was probably once used for storage. It was opposite the courtyard privies, and the reek almost stifled the stink of vomit as the sergeant unlocked the door. ‘Damn all,’ commented the officer as he held his torch into the room; a few of the smaller roaches scurried indignantly for the shadows, but the big ones clustered around the two puddles of watery puke on the floor paid no heed. There were two hammocks, and a third man lay on the floor beneath one of them on a straw mattress.

Two of the sick men were sleeping. The third – the man on the floor – twisted and muttered, clutching and rubbing at his twitching legs. Sweat glistened on his face, and when January knelt beside him – he was a brutal-looking Kentuckian with half of one ear bitten off in some long-ago fight – the skin of his hands and face was not hot with fever, but clammy and cold.

‘Are they voiding blood?’ he asked, rising to face the sergeant again. Hannibal had gone to the hammock on the other side of the little room, stood looking down at the young Viscount’s face with no expression in his own.

The sergeant nodded. ‘That one on the floor – Liver-Eatin’ Mike, I have heard he is called –’ he pronounced the English nickname with distaste – ‘said that he swallowed coals of fire. What is it, M’sieu? They have no fever. Is it catching?’

‘I’m inclined to think it is food poisoning,’ January said quietly. ‘When did it come on?’

‘Two, three o’clock this afternoon. And all three, almost at the same time. And you’re right.’ The man frowned, casting his mind back. ‘That Mike, he’s one of the worst when a man’s family brings him food. He’ll lie in wait and steal anything that’s brought.’ He shrugged, as if those who found themselves in the common cell asked for what they got.

‘Gator Jack is his pal,’ he added, with a nod at the man in the hammock above Liver-Eatin’ Mike. ‘They’ll gang up and split the take. Serve ’em right, wouldn’t it –’ he flashed a crooked, cheerful grin – ‘if the milk or the fish they brought poor M’sieu le Vicomte was bad—’

‘Who brought?’

The sergeant looked at January as if he hadn’t been paying attention to some earlier explanation. ‘The young man’s lawyer, and that sour-faced business manager, who seems to think we have servants to draw baths for every man here and maids to sweep the floor three times a day.’

Hannibal said softly, ‘Droudge.’

TWENTY-SIX

‘
I
t’s arsenic, isn’t it?’

January felt Foxford’s face, then his hands; then withdrew his stethoscope from his satchel and listened to the young man’s chest. ‘The symptoms are consistent, yes.’ Upon Hannibal’s argument that none of the three patients was in any shape to assault visitors, the sergeant had locked the cell door and gone to fetch water, encouraged by what January guessed was most of Hannibal’s tip money from the Countess’s that evening. He hoped the man would think to bring a lantern on his return trip as well. The torch gave shaky light at best, and it couldn’t be brought close enough to a man’s face to do any good.

‘Will he live?’

January glanced across at his friend’s dark eyes, but could read nothing in them. ‘I’ll know better when he comes around. The fact that Droudge brought the poison doesn’t mean Uncle Diogenes didn’t prepare it, you know.’

Hannibal opened his mouth, closed it, and stood for a moment in thought. Then: ‘Fifty cents says it’s Droudge.’

After studying him in silence for a few minutes more, January said, ‘You seem awfully sure of yourself.’

‘I’m awfully sure Uncle Diogenes wouldn’t take time out from visiting bookshops and whipping parlors to purchase arsenic and ginger beer. He’s not a greedy man. Send him his remittance – and occasional infusions of hush money to the parents of his
eromenae
– and he’s happy.’

‘And you think Foxford would have done that when he came into the property?’

‘He has raised no objections so far.’

The cell door creaked as it opened. The sergeant had not only brought a pitcher of water and a lantern, but also a wooden stool. ‘You men take care, now,’ he warned, hanging the lantern on a nail on the wall and taking the torch from Hannibal’s hand. ‘If one of those men gets hold of that stool . . .’

January looked down at the trembling, sweating Kaintuck on the floor, the silent man in the other hammock. Hannibal reassured the sergeant, ‘I believe Dr Janvier and I can handle them.’

When the door was closed again and locked, January recounted what Isobel had told him of the events of the sixth of October, without specifying in whose house his conversation with her had taken place, or what had been the secret Blessinghurst had learned. ‘The times fit,’ he finished. ‘Given how long it would have taken for Derryhick to find Blessinghurst.’

Hannibal whispered, ‘Young fool.’

‘Did he mention Gerry was staying with Theodoric Stuart in Paris when he met Mademoiselle Deschamps?’

‘At the town house?’

‘You know it?’

‘Gods, yes. The lot of us took it over like invading Goths and turned it into Liberty Hall. I hope to God somebody whitewashed the poem I chalked on to the wall of the back drawing room. Are you thinking Theo might have written something to his father about Gerry’s intention to wed?’

‘I’m not thinking anything right now.’ Gently, January slipped an arm under the Viscount’s shoulders, eased him into a sitting position while the fiddler held the hammock steady. ‘Nor do I have to, nor you either, if we can lay hands on Stubbs before Louis Verron gets to him.’ The torch had provided some warmth, but the cell was bitterly cold, and none of the three patients had a blanket. The Viscount began to shiver violently and muttered a name that might have been,
Isobel
. ‘My great fear is that even when we get Stubbs’s side of the story – if we find out who’s behind the blackmail attempt – it will do no good. Without concrete proof – proof enough to jail Diogenes . . . or Droudge, if he’s your favorite – I’m afraid Foxford will let himself be hanged, rather than risk Isobel’s secret becoming common knowledge.’

‘Good God, what did she
do
?’ Hannibal stared at him.

January returned the gaze across the Viscount’s shivering body, almost marveling at his friend’s obtuseness to something that had seemed so obvious to himself. And it
would
have been obvious, he realized, to anyone born and brought up in New Orleans. French and Spanish Creoles – some of the worst gossips in the known world – were forever surreptitiously studying one another’s fingernails, hair, and pedigrees, and it didn’t surprise January at all that Louis Verron had immediately believed Stubbs’s clumsy attempt at blackmail rather than simply saying, ‘It’s absurd.’

For over a hundred and fifty years, the French families who had settled in New Orleans had lived side by side with those shadow offspring, those ‘vulture eggs’, those half-caste and quarter-caste men and women who made up the
gens du couleur libre
: neither white nor black, but something else. Everyone had heard stories of people who quietly stepped over the line when no one was looking. And everyone worried that it might happen in
their
family.

A brief gust of rage passed through him that the blood of his mother, his sisters, his friends should be regarded as a sort of taint, poisoning by contact with the smallest droplet . . .

Then he forced his mind to release the thought.
If I’m going to be angry about that then I will live in anger forever
.

‘Nothing to the girl’s discredit,’ he said gently. ‘But it will ruin her family, destroy the lives of her mother and sister . . . and may well cost her her own life, if her cousin decides killing can scotch the story. For that matter,’ he added, as Hannibal’s eyes widened in disbelieving shock, ‘it wouldn’t hurt to ask, on our way out, if Louis Verron or any of his friends paid a call on the jail around dinner time. Just to make sure.’

First light stained the sky above the courtyard when the Viscount finally rested easily enough to be left. Hannibal tucked his own shabby coat around the young man’s body, despite the slim odds that he’d ever get the garment back once it was out of his sight. January did what he could for both the other men, though it was fairly clear to him that Liver-Eatin’ Mike, at least, had stolen his last food from a weaker man.

‘I’ll get a blanket from home,’ said January, when the sergeant came to let them out of the cell. His breath laid a faint mist on the dawn air. The watch room was only marginally warmer than the yard – and quiet, as public places are in the small hours of Sunday mornings. At the sergeant’s desk, Lieutenant Shaw looked around from conference with the men of the night watch; he spat and signed Hannibal and January to wait.

‘Boechter said as how you was here,’ he said when he finally came to them beside his desk. ‘The boy all right?’ When January nodded, he continued, ‘He sick? Or was it somethin’ he et?’ And the inflection in his light-timbred drawl told January that the clawing and twitching of Liver-Eatin’ Mike’s extremities – the burning of his throat – had not escaped him.

‘I suspect,’ said January grimly, ‘it’s something he ate. Can you keep him quarantined? Keep anyone from seeing him?’

‘Can you get him a blanket?’ asked Hannibal.

Shaw’s pale eyes narrowed. ‘He had one, beginnin’ of the night. I’ll see what I can do. As for keepin’ him in the sick cell, Tremouille –’ he nodded in the direction of the interior stair, which led up to the Captain of the Watch’s office on the upper floor – ‘just told me there’s one of the boatmen brought in yesterday, looks to be comin’ down with jail fever. I’d say your boy’s safer in the main cell.’

‘In spite of the fact that, if he starts refusing food, the next thing Uncle Diogenes – or Mr Droudge, as Hannibal would have it – is going to try is paying some bravo to start up a fight?’

Shaw spat again. ‘He better think twic’t about it. What the hell you do to your hair, Maestro? You look like my Uncle Sus after the Seminole got him.’

‘Tried to sneak into a monastery.’ January ran a self-conscious hand over the prickles of his makeshift tonsure. Rose would have to clip the whole head short to match. ‘You think you can keep anyone from seeing Foxford for the next few days, until we lay hands on Stubbs? Tell them he really
is
sick – dying would be better . . .’

‘Dyin’ was what he looked to be doin’ yesterday, near sundown. An’ he’ll need to see that lawyer of his’n, which’ll be about as useful as a hanky in an artillery barrage. Trial can’t be put back, neither – the whole docket’s jammed from the summer. Now, I am mightily curious,’ he added, turning his gaze on Hannibal, ‘as to why you think the boy’s business manager would be slippin’ inheritance powder into his ginger beer, an’ not the man who’s gonna come in for all Foxford’s money, an’ Derryhick’s, too, if’n the boy should cut his stick. What do you know about the man?’

‘I know I don’t like him,’ replied Hannibal shortly. ‘
Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere . . .
He looks like a vulture, and Philippa – Lady Foxford – was of the opinion, even eighteen years ago, that his bookkeeping needed looking into: something the old Viscount would never hear of. So long as Gerry was under age, his mother was powerless to even see the ledgers. Uncle Diogenes wasn’t the man to come back to County Mayo and straighten things out – not if it meant that he’d have to go through the whole tedious process of finding another man of business. I imagine he would say – as his brother the eleventh Viscount said before him – that letting Droudge “feather his nest a little” was part of the cost of doing business and cheap at the price of having a man so adept at racking the tenants out of their last shilling.’

Old anger glinted in his eyes, like a weapon drowned under decades of alcohol. Like the scorched anger that had been in his voice when he’d spoken of the man who’d broken Philippa Foxford’s heart.

‘An’ His Lordship committin’ Holy Matrimony would stick a spoke into his little wheel.’

‘Yes.’ Hannibal folded his shirtsleeved arms and shivered as the courtyard door was opened for the sergeant to carry up the usual slop of pulses and beans for the men in the cells. ‘It would be useful to subpoena the account books for Foxford Priory and make enquiries among members of the London ’Change to see if – like our friend Martin Quennell – Caius Droudge has been investing where he should not with what he has no legal right to use, but that doesn’t seem possible . . . A reason he may have included himself in the expedition to retrieve and approve of Foxford’s errant bride.’