Dead and Buried (36 page)

He said, ‘I’m here to help you, Vennie,’ thrust her aside, and dove for the door – tripping in the process over the chair that Stubbs had overset – and slammed it before Stubbs could collect himself to dive through it. ‘Don’t move, Stubbs,’ he added, yanking the duelling pistol from his pocket, though he only had the vaguest idea of where the Englishman was. ‘Mamzelle, if you would be so kind as to light some candles . . .’

He wouldn’t have bet much that the French girl would side with him against her lover, but she’d evidently made her decision, because her thin, small, boyish hands appeared in the lantern beam, poking a candle into the flame. She set an assortment of mostly-burned stumps into a cheap brass candelabra on the table by the window, and the increased glow showed Stubbs scrambling to his feet and trying to get to the window beside the rumpled bed. Marie-Venise bent to scoop up the needle gun and trained it on him, her wry young face hard in the tumbled frame of dark hair. ‘You stand still,
cochon
,’ she said. ‘You stand and tell me what you’ve done with my jewels.’

‘My little bird –’ Stubbs spread his hands, like Romeo stunned by his first sight of Juliet’s beauty in Act One, Scene Five – ‘you gave them to me that they might be liquidated for cash—’

‘For
us
,’ hissed the girl. ‘Not for you to run off and leave me. To carry
us
safely to England—’

‘What did this man promise you, Mamzelle?’ asked January quietly.

She didn’t take her eyes off Stubbs. She’d learned that much about him, anyway. ‘All things – the Moon! A settlement, and a house in London. He’s a rich man. Once he can get back safe to England and put his hand upon the family money there. They all have mistresses – why not me,
enfin
? But since he’s decided –’ she jerked her head at the portmanteau, half-packed, that lay now visible on the bed amid a tangle of folded shirts and gaudy waistcoats – ‘that he’d rather go back to whatever English slut he left, I’ll have back my jewels and the money I sent him—’

‘My dear girl,’ coaxed Stubbs. ‘Such an excitable little sparrow! Of course I was preparing to leave – my enemies are closing in! I was on my way to you and—’

‘How much did you lend him?’ asked January.

‘Fifty in cash. And all my jewels, and not just those he gave me.’

‘I’ll give you two hundred,’ said January. ‘Will you cover us, while I have a word with him?’

She moved her head just enough to glance at him, dark eyes narrowed, without taking the gun off Stubbs. ‘And where’s the likes of you going to get two hundred?’

‘From the family of another woman he wronged,’ replied January evenly. ‘A woman more fortunate than yourself. I only need a word.’

She considered the likelihood of this version of events, then nodded. ‘You tell him if I don’t get my money he is a dead man.’

January took Stubbs’s arm, led him to the corner of the room farthest from both door and window. The actor’s very sweat smelled of rum. ‘Who paid you?’ he asked softly.

‘Who paid me what?’

January’s hand tightened. He didn’t often exert the full strength of his grip, but he did now, and Stubbs whimpered. ‘Give me the name. The name you gave to Patrick Derryhick at Davis’s, the night he went back to the hotel and was killed. The name of the man who paid you to make sure Viscount Foxford would never marry Isobel Deschamps. Or, I swear to you, I will drag you straight downtown and throw you through Louis Verron’s parlor window.’

‘Droudge,’ gasped Stubbs. ‘It was Droudge.’

‘Why?’

‘He’d been speculating on the ’Change,’ Stubbs babbled, fingers picking ineffectually at January’s grip. ‘Borrowing against the estate. Shocking turn-up over a load of Chinese opium that came to smash. He claimed it was his only little flier, but me, I think he’d been dipped for years, long before the old gov’nor snuffed it.’

‘Where did he know you from?’

‘He’s my cousin. Well, he always thought Mama and I were beneath him, but he wrote to me almost a year ago in London, where I was playing Handsome Jack in
The Storm
– and being well spoken of, I might add! – and offered to pay off a few little debts of mine if I’d undertake work for him in Paris. I was to keep an eye on this American girl, intercept messages to young Foxford’s lodgings – easy enough, once I’d got that Stuart boy in debt to me at the tables – find whatever I could to her discredit – and Lord, didn’t I! – and generally do whatever I could to sully the prospect—’

‘Including raping the girl?’

‘Lord, she’s a negress! I daresay I wouldn’t have been—’ January forced himself not to strike the man, but the effort must have showed in his face and in his grip because Stubbs amended hastily, ‘That is, some quite nice people are Negroes—’

‘Here’s what you’re going to do,’ broke in January quietly. ‘You’re going to sit down at that table there, and you’re going to write all that you’ve told me and sign it. Then you’re coming with me to the Cabildo – my men and I will keep you safe on the way – and I’ll arrange with a friend of mine there for you to be hidden until the trial. The moment the trial is over, I’ll give you five hundred dollars – and don’t you even
think
of trying to get more from someone else—’

Stubbs shook his head frantically. ‘No, no . . .!’

‘And then you’ll leave the United States and never return. Not here, not to England. Understand?’

‘I say,’ protested Stubbs, ‘I have my career to consider.’

‘Shall I let Verron pay you what you asked for from him?’

‘There’s no need to be unkind about it. That was a miscalculation . . .’

January raised his voice a little: ‘Mamzelle? Might you bring those candles to the desk, if you please?’ When she’d done so and Stubbs had sat down, January dug in his jacket pocket, and handed Marie-Venise two hundred dollars in Bank of Louisiana notes. ‘Thank you, Mamzelle. And don’t grieve about not becoming Lord Montague’s mistress back in London. He’s an actor, and his name is Frank Stubbs. You’d probably have ended by supporting him.’

‘I say!’ Stubbs threw down his quill and turned in the chair. ‘Did you have to—?’

At which point the door slammed open, four men stepped through, and Louis Verron’s voice snapped, ‘Kill him.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

B
lessinghurst screamed in terror. Marie-Venise smote the candle branch with a blow that sent the lights clattering to the floor; January scooped the tin lantern from the desk and flung it at Verron and his cousins, and he saw the girl’s slim silhouette against the window as she threw the casements open. Three shots simultaneously cracked, sounding like cannon fire in the enclosed room. January shoved Stubbs ahead of him to the window as Verron and his cousins plunged for them and tripped over the chair that had earlier felled both January and the actor. As he swung over the window sill, January heard the crack of another shot and the splintering of the window frame beside him. He dropped to the porch roof, rolled to its edge with the jumbled shapes of Marie-Venise and Blessinghurst scrambling ahead of him, and felt a burning sting as if someone had struck him on the outside of the right thigh with a red-hot metal rod.

The shock spun him around, and he fell from the edge of the porch roof, hitting the ground with stunning impact. In the pitch-black darkness of the house’s shadow, he couldn’t see who it was who rolled him over, pulled open his coat, and relieved him of the remainder of Cadmus Rablé’s money, but by the smell it was certainly Lord Montague Blessinghurst.

By the time two men dropped from the edge of the porch roof in pursuit, ‘His Lordship’ was across the yard like a panicked hare and disappearing into the inky wall of nearby trees. Consciousness reeling on the edge of darkness, January heard two more pursuers thunder downstairs within the house, and with a sensation like dreaming he saw them bolt across the moonlit ground in the same direction. Gold reflections on the trees and a sudden, gritty roil of smoke informed him that at least one of the fallen candles had ignited the bedroom curtains. He hoped Verron and his boys caught Stubbs and gave him the beating of his life before shooting him dead.

Shouts in the house: new-wakened, hung-over, stricken with panic.
If, after all this, I spend the night in the Cabildo for arson . . .

‘
Amicus meus?
’ Long, thin hands, surprisingly strong, rolled him over. He managed to get an arm across Hannibal’s shoulder.

‘
’Tis not so deep as a well, nor wide as a church door.
’ He struggled to rise, knowing full well his friend would never get him to his feet unaided.

‘
Quod di omen avertant
,’ whispered Hannibal. ‘Look what happened to the fellow who said that in the play. Can you walk?’

January pressed his hand to his leg. The muscle between his hip and his knee flashed with agony, but the wound was like a burned gash, not a hole, and no artery had been hit. ‘Get me to the trees,’ he panted. ‘I owe you fifty cents.’

‘Don’t you understand?’ Germanicus Stuart, Viscount Foxford, regarded his two visitors from eyes circled in smudges of darkness, and his voice barely sounded a whisper. ‘Thank you – truly, thank you – for your efforts, and your concern . . . which I can’t imagine how I’ve earned . . . but God, I wish you had let well alone. Even if evidence existed, there’s no question of prosecuting Droudge. If by some miracle the jury were to accept that the sheets on the bed could have been switched by someone else – and all the rest of it – I would not even be able to discharge the man. He has a gun pointed at my heart – at the hearts of the one I love and those
she
loves.’

He made as if to reach for the tin cup of water that stood on the floor beside the makeshift cot that had replaced his hammock. Only the near certainty that the young man would be robbed, and possibly killed, while too weak to help himself had gained January’s consent to leave him in the so-called ‘infirmary’ cell rather than returning him to the general lock-up; the Kaintuck who had been brought in with jail fever had shown no signs of either typhoid or cholera and lay propped, snoring softly, in the hammock that had previously belonged to the late Gator Jack. January, seated on the crude milking-stool that Shaw had produced from somewhere as a sort of bedside table, lifted the cup, but Foxford was able to take it from his hand and drink himself.

‘It’s bad enough that Patrick—’ He stopped himself and looked aside.

Softly, Hannibal said, ‘What happened to Patrick wasn’t your fault.’

‘It was, though.’ The boy’s hand began to shake, and the fiddler gently took the cup from him. ‘I thought – I shouldn’t have . . . All I knew in Paris was that she’d fled from me, gone back home. I didn’t know what I’d done, or why she’d run away – God, I was a fool! I thought if I could bring Patrick, and Uncle Diogenes, here to find her, to convince her . . .’

‘
Amor vincet omnia
,’ murmured Hannibal. ‘I know the feeling. A grand gesture didn’t work for me, either.’

‘Patrick suspected. I know that, now. But he was very good about pretending that we really were looking for a cotton plantation to invest in. But then when I saw Isobel with Blessinghurst – I remembered him from Paris, remembered how he’d taken her aside at a ball one night, just before she . . . she got sick and refused to see me. I thought I saw it all. The last thing I expected, when I finally spoke to her, was for her to tell me that she was being blackmailed. She said it was Blessinghurst, and that’s all I knew. I didn’t even tell Patrick his name – I was careful about that, for her sake, but, of course, after that party at Trulove’s he guessed . . .’

‘He would.’ Hannibal sighed. ‘He always outguessed me, anyway.’

Foxford shut his eyes, as if even the memory were a weight beyond his strength to bear. ‘He got it out of me,’ he whispered after a time. ‘I didn’t know . . . If I’d known what it was really about, I would have lied. Later that night, when she told me, I – I didn’t know what to do. Because he’d tell, she said Blessinghurst would tell if anyone did anything. I think Patrick must have guessed all along that it wasn’t really Blessinghurst, but someone using him as a pawn.’

‘Well,’ opined Hannibal, ‘anyone who’d met “His Lordship” would guess after five minutes that he doesn’t have the brains to conceive of anything more complicated than matching his cravat with his socks,’ and the young man’s face relaxed in a whispered chuckle. On the wall behind his head a line of ants crept steadily, from a crack near the floor and up to the ceiling and the cell above, glittering darkly in the thin slice of autumn light that fell through the judas. Across the tiny chamber, the boatman thrashed weakly in his hammock and called out, ‘Mary . . .!’ in his sleep.

After a little silence the young man went on, ‘But it isn’t just Marie-Amalie and their poor mother who’ll be cast out, branded – exiled from everyone who has ever been their friends. That’s the horror of it. It’s cousins, aunts, people I’ve never met . . . But they’re the people Isobel loves. People she was raised with, people who are a part of her life. I can’t do that. Not to them, not to her. Can’t . . . can’t just transform them, in the eyes of everyone they know, into Africans overnight, if they must live in a world where the children of Africa are despised—’