Dead and Buried (37 page)

Hannibal said, ‘
What?
’

For a moment he and the young man looked at one another, stunned disbelief confronting the quiet of resigned despair. Then he turned to stare at January, open-mouthed with shock. January looked aside.

‘That’s
it
?’ demanded the fiddler. ‘That’s what all of this is about? Because some ancestor turns out to have been on the wrong side of the wrong blanket?’

When, after a moment, he had commanded his own anger, January returned his gaze. ‘Do you doubt it?’

Hannibal drew in breath to protest, to remark, to quote some apt and cutting fragment of Latin, then closed his mouth, unable to speak. He had spent the past five years of his exile in New Orleans; January saw everything he had so casually heard passing in review behind those coffee-dark eyes. At length he said, very quietly, ‘Dear God.’

‘I don’t want to die,’ Foxford went on softly. ‘I don’t want—’ He struggled for a moment to keep his jaw set. January wondered if the young man had ever seen a hanging – seen a man swing, legs threshing, soiling himself, for the twenty minutes or so it took to suffocate after the hoist. ‘I’ve lain here thinking about it, thinking about what I can possibly do, and I can’t – I don’t know. I don’t see what I can do, short of murdering Droudge, and then they’d hang me – or someone – for that. And he’s . . . very careful of himself.’

‘Given the number of tenants in Foxford village back home who have good reason to want to kill him,’ murmured Hannibal, ‘he’s had plenty of practice. And he’s vindictive. There was a man in Sleigh Farm . . .’ He hesitated on the story, then shook his head. ‘Well.’

‘I remember that.’ Foxford frowned. ‘At least, if it’s old Mr Ghille you mean. The one whose daughter Droudge had hanged. If I brought any kind of charge against him – even if we
did
have evidence – he’d see to it that everything about M’am Celestine’s true parents came out.’

‘And sooner than let that happen,’ said January softly, ‘Isobel’s cousin will kill her. And probably her mother as well. And, I have no doubt, would go to the gallows in silence, even as you propose to do, Your Lordship.’

Foxford nodded, shortly: it was not something he hadn’t known before. ‘I tell myself, it’s as if she were – they all were – with me in a shipwreck . . . Of course, I would get them to safety, even at the cost of my own life. But then I think of Mother . . .’

January laid a hand on the wasted wrist. ‘We’ll think of something, Your Lordship.’

‘NO!’ Foxford turned his head sharply on the wad of rags that served him for a pillow. ‘Sir, I beg you, don’t think of anything. Don’t
do
anything.’ His hand closed over January’s, desperate even in its weakness. ‘Swear to me you won’t tell Mr Shaw! My hope is gone,’ he whispered. ‘She could never be happy with me, knowing I’d had the smallest hand in destroying her family. Nor would I expect her to be, nor want her to pretend. Now she’s safe. Her family is safe. She was only a pawn; he has no further interest in her or them. With me or without me, Droudge will go back to Britain, and if I’m lucky enough to survive that long I’ll find some way of . . . of living alongside him.’

‘Don’t be a fool! If he ever suspected you knew, do you think he’d stick at poisoning you again? Your heir is Diogenes – do you think
he’ll
care if Droudge is robbing Foxford Priory of everything but the lead in the roof tiles?’

Hannibal laid a hand on January’s shoulder; shook his head when January looked up to meet his eyes. Quietly, the fiddler said, ‘We won’t tell Shaw. I swear it. If worst comes to worst, we can put it about that you’ve died, in the hopes old Droudge will drink himself to death in celebration. As Iago says,
Good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well us’d
.’

Foxford’s breath whispered out in another laugh. ‘That sounds like something Patrick would say,’ he said. ‘With everything that’s happened . . . Sometimes I think that if I get out of here, he’ll be waiting for me . . . And then I remember that, whatever else happens, he won’t be. I can’t . . . It still doesn’t seem real. That he’s dead, I mean.’

Hannibal said softly, ‘I know.
When once we pass, the soul returns no more
 . . .’

‘Patrick used to quote that portion of the
Iliad
,’ said Foxford. ‘When he spoke about my father . . . Achilles and Patroclus, parting for the last time:

‘
Now give thy hand; for to the farther shore

When once we pass, the soul returns no more:

When once the last funereal flames ascend,

No more shall meet Achilles and his friend;

No more our thoughts to those we loved make known;

Or quit the dearest, to converse alone
.

‘He didn’t speak of him, but I don’t think he ever stopped missing him.’

Hannibal was silent for a long time, seeing – January knew this – his friend. Not dead in the mud of the cemetery, but – wherever, whenever it had been – the last time they’d been in the same room together.

‘But he went on,’ said Hannibal at last. ‘He lived his life regardless. Having known your father, I can say that had their positions been reversed, he would have said the same . . . and, I hope, had the strength to do the same. Though strength of spirit was, alas, not your father’s leading characteristic . . .’

‘No.’ The young man smiled at some memory. ‘Maybe not. But what I remember about him was the joy he brought to others – even to Mother; I could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice when she spoke of him – and the music that he made.’ He closed his eyes, and January thought for a time that he’d drifted off to sleep. But as he was disengaging his hand from those long, strengthless fingers they tightened, and Foxford whispered, ‘Swear you won’t do anything. Don’t make this harder for me.’

And January said, ‘I swear.’

‘Thank you,’ in a voice almost too faint to be heard. The boy was asleep before the guard came to let the visitors from the cell.

Hannibal was silent as they crossed the sharp noon brightness of the Cabildo yard, but when they reached the door to the watch room – and January halted to lean on the stick he’d cut, shillelagh-wise, from a hickory sapling – the fiddler asked conversationally, ‘What are you doing tonight?’

‘Sleeping,’ January answered, ‘I hope, since
someone
woke me up at two in the morning yesterday, and I haven’t been back to bed since. And putting my foot up.’ Under bandages and sticking plaster his leg throbbed damnably with every step, and just crossing the yard had made him feel feverish and faint. ‘Bad leg or no bad leg, my mother’s going to insist that I go down to the cemetery with her tomorrow for the Feast of All Saints.’

‘Will you come with me now? We won’t be long, and I’ll hire a cab—’

‘Which they won’t let me ride in.’

‘I’ll tell the jarvey you’re my servant.’

‘And you’ll pay for this with what?’

‘I’ll borrow the money from Shaw.’ Incredulous, January opened his mouth to demand what the hell gave him the idea that the policeman would lend him so much as a silver bit, then closed it, seeing the strange, still darkness in the fiddler’s eyes. ‘I need to speak to him – and to Augustus Mayerling – and to one other respectable white man . . . Do you know any respectable white men, Benjamin?
Responsare cupidinibus, contemnere honores fortis, et in se ipso totus
 . . . And then, if you would, will you come with me to speak to Beauvais Quennell and to your friend M’sieu Regnier at the Iberville?’

‘What are you going to do?’

Hannibal met his gaze, quite steadily, in silence for a time. Then he said, ‘The obvious.’

‘I swore—’

‘
You
swore,’ he reminded him. ‘I did nothing of the kind. It’s the Feast of All Saints, Benjamin,’ he added with a fleet smile. ‘The night when those dead and buried come back to help the living. Just convince Regnier and Quennell to help me, and locate two white witnesses, and then go home and rest: I swear I will ask nothing of you again, neither boon nor gift nor favor, for the remainder of my life. You don’t have to come.’

But January knew already that he would.

TWENTY-NINE

F
rom Martin Quennell’s small office above the back parlor of the coffin shop, where twenty-five nights ago Rameses Ramilles had first lain in his coffin, the gaslit windows of the Hotel Iberville’s Blue Suite had the appearance almost of the lighted proscenium arch of a stage. The night was edged with sufficient chill that the dormer window was closed; now and then a thin Halloween wind rattled the casement and breathed like a ghost on January’s neck.

‘How’d you manage to get ’em to take down the curtains?’ asked Shaw, leaning a bony elbow against one side of the dormer and stooping his skinny height a little, for there was room only for two chairs there, which were occupied by January and the impresario John Davis. ‘You’d think Uncle Diogenes would want as much coverin’ for his – uh –
cribbage games
as he could get.’

‘A clumsy hotel servant tripped while carrying a chamber pot,’ reported January gravely. ‘M’sieu Regnier denied responsibility, refused to have the alleged culprit whipped, and in general annoyed Droudge so much that the man insisted that both windows be stripped – and Uncle Diogenes has many, many places in town where he can find congenial friends and all the curtains they need.’

‘Good lord, is that the fellow?’ Davis leaned forward on the sill as Droudge came into the Blue Suite’s parlor. ‘I daresay I’d go anywhere in town, and engage in any activity whatsoever, rather than spend an evening cooped up in a hotel suite with him!’

Shaw raised his eyebrows. ‘Don’t tell me he been in your place?’

‘Him? Scarcely.’ Davis sniffed. ‘No, I had the pleasure of encountering Mr Droudge at the Exchange in the Hotel St Charles last week, buying the cheapest slaves he could find and then – I’m told by Isaiah Irvin – trying to resell them the next day for a profit to the dealers.’

On the other side of the partition that divided the attic, January heard Beauvais Quennell’s soft footstep on the floorboards, the voices of the undertaker and his wife, and caught the word ‘Maman’ . . .

They, too, were preparing for an afternoon in the cemetery tomorrow, to honor their family’s dead.

‘So he’s the fellow who’s supposed to have killed that Irishman, is he?’ inquired the impresario, as Droudge settled himself with his ledger-book at the parlor desk. In his greenish-black coat and crape cravat of mourning, his huge grizzled head bent short-sightedly down over his book, he could have been an undertaker himself. ‘You’d hardly think it to look at him.’

‘Oh, there ain’t much doubt. He’s near to my height or Benjamin’s, an’ for his age he ain’t no weakling. I don’t ’xpect Mr Derryhick thought the man was capable of murder, much less ready to do it. But that air he’s got’s deceptive, quiet an’ cringin’ . . .’

Quiet and cringing
, reflected January. And, like Compair Lapin, doing what he had to do to spare himself punishment for his thefts.

Looking at the man now, January didn’t wonder that the Irishman had been off his guard. He himself well knew how the contempt of others could be used as a mask . . . and a weapon in itself.

In the gaslit parlor, Droudge raised his head.

January was conscious of Shaw’s glance touching him, but didn’t return it. Between his own physical pain, which had grown to a heat that seemed to envelop the whole of his body, and the exhaustion of only an hour’s sleep snatched after he, Shaw, and Hannibal had finished their quest for a second witness of ancestry deemed appropriate to testify before the courts of Louisiana, he had entered a state of almost dreamlike exhaustion, detached as if witnessing a tragedy he was powerless to stop.

Hannibal had said, ‘The obvious,’ and had parted from them on the coffin shop doorstep, walking off in the direction of the Hotel Iberville alone.
Now give thy hand
 . . .

January suspected Shaw had a shrewd guess at what it was he would be called on to witness, but that he was reserving both judgement and action, having dealt with blackmailers before. One part of January’s tired mind knew he should stop the proceedings – should tell Shaw of the conversation in the cell and oblige the Lieutenant to take official notice. But he found himself incapable of doing so.

Droudge got to his feet and went to the door.

That he recognized Hannibal was beyond anyone’s doubt. Though his back was to his audience, the shocked jerk of his head, the lifting of his hand, was a soliloquy: his glance shot right, then left, as if searching for advice, then back at his visitor. Hannibal said something, a few words only. January reflected that the words could only have been, ‘Yes, it’s me.’

The two men stood for a long time in the doorway before Droudge stepped back, and with a bow so unctuous it was almost fawning, gestured him in.

Guided him to a chair and, behind his back, quietly turned the key in the lock.