Dead and Buried (5 page)

‘Uncle, that isn’t tr—’

‘Don’t you contradict me, Gerry, you know it is. And furthermore, you know it’s he who spoiled my poor son’s temper with drink and God knows what else, until he’d react to the smallest provocation in the same way.’

‘That’s as may be,’ remarked Shaw. ‘’Ceptin’ that wouldn’t explain why he went dashin’ up the stairs yelling “I’m gonna kill that bastard”.’

‘Good Lord, I assume he’d just learned about another of old Droudge’s damned “economies,” like his attempt to sell my poor valet—!’

‘Really, sir!’ protested the business manager. ‘A good Negro brings fifteen hundred dollars in this town, and I resent your implication that Mr Derryhick would use such language to me.’

‘So he comes up here half-drunk, in a deuce of a temper, finds old Droudge asleep and some total stranger in his room . . .’

‘Then if’n that stranger left his callin’ card on the floor, accidental like, now’s the time to find it.’

Droudge led Shaw to the connecting door of the Viscount’s room, glancing at him sidelong as if he fully expected him to scoop up any loose money or stray gold stickpins in the process. As they passed through into Derryhick’s room, January heard him say, ‘I trust you will give me a proper receipt . . .’

Behind him in the parlor, January heard the almost soundless rustle of Mr Stuart stepping back – light-moving for all his bulk – to catch the Viscount by the arm. Droudge’s exclamation, ‘Good Lord! What on earth—?’ covered whatever soft-voiced words passed between uncle and nephew, but the Viscount cried, ‘Stop it, for God’s sake! Is that all you can think about?’

‘It’s what you should be thinking about, my dear boy. And it’s no more than justice. He killed your father, and he killed my son, not to speak of robbing you into the bargain for all these years. So I think he owed us something.’

The young man said quietly, ‘You are despicable,’ and the next moment the corridor door slammed.

FOUR

R
ose asked, ‘What are they doing in New Orleans in the first place?’

January handed her a cup of tafia – cheap rum cut with lemonade – and perched on the gallery railing of what had once been cook’s quarters above the kitchen. The two rooms that opened off the gallery behind them – one of them Rose’s chemical laboratory, the other scoured and fitted with makeshift chairs and school desks – were the only two in the house not currently crowded with neighbors, friends, and semi-strangers, talking quietly, uneasily, angrily.

Hannibal had been quite right to wonder if two women who detested each other as did January’s mother and sister Olympe could manage to avoid one another at the wake until morning.

At least the food was plentiful and good.

‘It’s a thought that’s crossed my mind as well, my nightingale. Why would anyone in their right mind come to New Orleans at this time of year?’

After the burial, under ordinary circumstances the procession would return – joyful, dancing, waving handkerchiefs and scarves like flags – to the home of the dead man’s family, or in this case to the home of the friend best able to host the night-long wake. Death was not invited to the party. January frequently suspected that his recent election as the newest member of the FTFCMBS board had as much to do with the size of the ramshackle Spanish house he and Rose had bought on the Rue Esplanade as with his willingness to be of service.

The house had sprung from Rose’s ambition – realized last winter – to re-establish her school, which had been destroyed a few years previously by a combination of the cholera epidemic and the enmity of a socially prominent French Creole matron.
^*
But in this slack infernal tail-end of the hot season, before the heat broke and the wealthy returned to town, January was glad he could open his doors for those who lived in rooms, for those whose families had been destroyed in the cholera or had left the town for good . . . for friends who otherwise might have had no one to give, on their behalf, a final party whose guest of honor could not attend.

There had been a time – not long ago – when he had numbered himself among them. In those days it had been good to know that he could count on his friends to see him remembered and wept for, one last time.

His mother certainly wouldn’t have invited that many people into
her
house.

‘According to Shaw,’ January went on, his eyes on the crowded house gallery opposite, ‘Patrick Derryhick intended to invest in cotton plantations upriver, in partnership with the young Viscount Foxford. Derryhick was a second-cousin of the family, completely impoverished until the wealthy aunt, whose private fortune the Stuarts had been counting on to retrieve the family acres from mortgage, left her money
not
to Germanicus Stuart, the twelfth Viscount Foxford, but to Derryhick instead.’

‘Ouch.’

‘I’m sure that’s what the entire senior branch of the family said after the reading of Aunt Elodie’s will. The Foxford lands in County Mayo cannot be sold because of the entail, but for three generations there has been virtually nothing to support them with.’

In the yard below them, children chased each other wildly in sticky-handed excitement. Thunder grumbled, and wind pushed a breath of gray coolness down on them from sullenly gathering clouds.

‘And
had
Derryhick in fact murdered Foxford’s father? Not to mention Uncle Diogenes’s son?’

‘There are two schools of thought on that.’

Bernadette Metoyer – a handsome woman in her forties whose tignon flashed with a sable firestorm of jet fringe – interrupted them, climbing the stair halfway and demanding, ‘What have the City Guards found out about Rameses’s body? Not that they will inquire, of course, the corrupt, lazy,
blankitte
pigs.’

It was a question January had answered twenty times between the time he’d entered the house and the time he’d located Rose in the crowd, but he replied, again, that it looked to be one of three men, but the Guards needed more proof before they made an accusation, and he descended to take the handsome chocolatiere’s arm.

‘And what proof do they need, to start searching the swamp?’ Madame Metoyer sniffed. ‘That’s where they’ll have thrown him.’

‘Probably,’ January agreed. In a week, in this weather, the body of an unidentifiable black man would raise no great fuss, unlike that of a white man traveling with those who seemed to have good reason to wish him dead.

He guided her up the back steps, across the crowded gallery, and into the dimness of the house. Under ordinary circumstances, the wake for a member of the FTFCMBS – or indeed for anyone in the tight-knit community of the
libres
at the back of town – would have involved wailing grief in one room, and lively music, jokes, dancing, and great quantities of food and tafia in the other, as people came to pay their respects and offer the family their support. But the circumstances were not ordinary. So there was neither the gay music nor the howling lamentation that the
blankittes
– the whites – found so disconcerting at such events.

Men and women gathered in the long central dining-room and parlor, in bedrooms and dressing-rooms and
cabinets
, hashing over the unfinished, and consuming the food that everyone had brought for the wake. In the parlor, Mohammed LePas, the blacksmith, was quietly organizing where the men would meet in the morning, to search the swamps that lay at the back of town. In the swamp-side bedroom – as such things were reckoned in Creole houses – the buzz of gossip among the women was like the throb of a bee tree. January picked out his sisters in the group: Olympe in her best dark Sunday Church-dress, like a market-woman save for the shape of her tignon, which announced to anyone who didn’t already know it that she was one of the town’s voodoo-queens; and the lovely Dominique, in sober spinach-green silk with touches of black where they wouldn’t wash out her café-crème complexion. ‘Liselle is in the
cabinet.
’ Dominique nodded toward the smaller chamber, set up as Rose’s office. ‘Claire and Iphigènie are with her.’ She named the girl’s closest friends.

‘Good,’ said January. ‘Best she’s not alone right now.’ Half a dozen infants were laid down on the bed, tiny faces like a box of bonbons. Dominique’s year-old daughter Charmian slept among them, perfect as a furled rosebud. The French doors were open on to the front gallery that overlooked Rue Esplanade, and the older children dashed in and out, while mothers gauged the day’s clouded darkness against how quickly they could get home before rain began.

Rain was beginning to patter as January returned to Rose. ‘You were about to tell me how Patrick Derryhick had murdered the previous Viscount Foxford,’ she said.

‘Actually, the eleventh Viscount succumbed to perfectly natural causes at the age of threescore and two.’ January divided with her the piece of Hèlaine Passebon’s excellent peach tart that he’d picked up in the dining room and settled in the chair she’d brought out for him. ‘Patrick Derryhick, in addition to being extremely charming where wealthy old aunts were concerned, was apparently what the English call a complete bad hat. He drank and whored his way through Trinity College, Dublin, and then Oxford, gambled his modest patrimony to perdition, and – at least according to Uncle Diogenes – had the unpleasant trick of drawing others, less resilient than he, into his way of life. His “merry band”, as they called themselves, included the son of the eleventh Viscount Foxford, who drank himself to death on a bet in Paris at the age of thirty, leaving behind a much-relieved wife and a five-year-old son.’

‘The current twelfth Viscount.’

‘Germanicus Stuart.’

‘Who suddenly decides to go into the cotton-growing business with Derryhick and crosses the ocean in his company? A thing possible and yet improbable, as Aristotle says. How
impossible
would it have been for that young man to have murdered Derryhick and sneaked his body into someone else’s coffin?’

‘Not impossible at all.’ January edged his chair back from the gallery rail as the rain poured down in earnest. ‘Beauvais Quennell, his wife, and his mother all sleep in upstairs rooms looking over Rue Douane – not surprisingly, nobody wants to sleep over that back-parlor. With a large hotel behind them, they must be used to noises in the night. Any man of normal strength could have lowered Derryhick’s body on to the stable roof and thence to the ground, to be switched into the coffin, and from there it’s only a few hundred yards to the river, with poor Rameses in the handcart.’

‘The Swamp would be safer.’

‘If you were familiar with New Orleans you’d know that. I doubt a foreigner would even be sure exactly where it lies, though Uncle Diogenes at least appears to have heard of it. There’s a little more danger of being seen on the waterfront, but not a great deal at three in the morning at this time of year.’

‘Hmph.’ Her mouth took on the expression it did when one of her pupils was explaining that she hadn’t the slightest idea who might have taken another girl’s coral ring. ‘And where do Uncle Diogenes and M’sieu le Vicomte claim they were while all this was going on?’

‘Uncle Diogenes was gambling somewhere on Rue Royale – he says. You know how many gaming establishments there are within a two-minute walk of the Iberville. He returned to the hotel at three in the morning and found Droudge and Foxford both asleep. Foxford’s key was gone from the desk, as if he were in his room all evening, but one of the porters saw him come in through the side entrance at a little after two thirty. He claims he had gone out for a walk and forgot to turn it in.’

‘People do, of course.’

‘He claims he left the hotel at nine thirty – he had been out earlier with Derryhick – but no one saw him go. The man who cleans the patrons’ boots says that his were only barely splashed.’

‘And is M’sieu Quennell’s yard paved?’

January grinned. Rose never missed a trick. ‘Bricked.’

‘Hmm. Like the banquettes of the French Town between Rue Douane and the levee.’

‘As you say. The sheets on his bed had been changed for fresh – only slept on for part of one night, by the look of them – and there were marks on the roof of Quennell’s stable beneath the windows of the Viscount’s room. Derryhick’s watch, with blood smeared on its case, was found beneath his bed.’

Rose’s eyes narrowed behind her spectacle lenses; January could almost hear the clicking of her thoughts. ‘It would have been fobbed, surely? It’s not that easy for a watch to come out of a vest-pocket.’

‘He struggled with his killer.’

‘I suppose.’ She frowned into the distance, picturing it. ‘Was the chain broken? Or the buttonhole of his vest torn?’

January shook his head. It was an old game they played, inventing possibilities and impossibilities – sometimes purely for each other’s entertainment, the same way they would tell each other tales about strangers seen in the audience at the opera:
that one looks as if she has a secret lover; that one surely must have a collection of fifty thousand waistcoats
 . . .

After a time, she asked, ‘Would either of the traveling companions – Uncle Diogenes or Mr Droudge – have a reason for wanting poor Mr Derryhick dead?’