Dead and Buried (9 page)

The Countess lit a cigarette off the lamp. ‘They’re trying to show Schurtz how respectfully they’ll treat his little sister. So they can’t be seen, either of them, slavering over one of these
popottes
.’ She gestured toward Sybilla and La Habañera, who were braiding each other’s hair in the corner.

‘He thinks they’re visiting here just for the pleasure of
his
company?’

‘You know
blankittes
.’ All trace of Italian disappeared from the Countess’s voice, and her full lips looked suddenly very African in the glimmer of the lamp prisms. ‘They know, all right, but they don’t want to be reminded. Like those New Englanders who talk about how much they hate slavery but don’t mind running factories to make “nigger-shoes” to sell down here, which is what makes Schurtz’s family so rich.’

January turned back to the keys. Though his hands ached and his mind had the stretched, slightly fuzzy distortion of perception that comes at four in the morning, he played a little Creole lullaby his sister Dominique’s nurse had sung to Minou when she was a baby: ‘
By an’ by, by an’ by, gonna lay down easy by an’ by
 . . .’

On his way out, he went around the back of the house and helped Elspie and Auntie Saba carry out and empty the heavy dish pan from the kitchen into the darkness at the far end of the yard, and brought them in water for the morning. It never hurt to make friends, and there was a good chance, now, that any information he could get about Martin Quennell’s finances and behavior wasn’t going to come from Trinchen.

In the morning – although it was in fact close to noon when he finally woke, emerging from one of the unused attic bedrooms to find the last guests from the wake helping Rose clean up downstairs – he was greeted by the information that the City Guards had arrested Viscount Foxford for murder.

SEVEN

‘
T
hat’s ridiculous,’ said Hannibal. He looked terrible – no surprise, considering the amount of liquor he’d imbibed the previous day – but there was nothing in his person, or his hollowed dark eyes, that pointed to a resumption of drinking after January had left the Broadhorn’s attic. He had shaved, bathed, and wore a clean shirt, and if his hand shook as he raised the cheap tin coffee-cup to his lips, January guessed that this was because the fiddler had been up all night. It was two o’clock now, the suffocating glare of the morning giving way to the onset of the day’s inevitable thunderstorm.

‘You haven’t laid eyes on the boy since he was five.’

Hannibal avoided his look. ‘They have nothing against him . . .’

‘Aside from Derryhick’s watch under his bed with blood on it?’

‘Which could have been put there by anyone.’

Around them, in the dense shade of the market hall, women in bright-colored tignons stacked baskets of unsold vegetables on to handcarts, to be taken home and tossed into stews for their families. Rich voices called jests to Old Aunt Zozo at her coffee stand. A fisherman shouted with laughter at a friendly insult.

‘There’s something askew about this whole affair,’ Hannibal said after a long silence. ‘Diogenes Stuart could have signed papers to buy a cotton plantation before getting on the boat for Bengal. He’d let his own mother hang rather than get up out of his chair and cross the room to sign her pardon. The man’s never had the slightest interest in the family lands – at least, from everything Patrick ever said of him – or how the Foxford money was invested, so long as he had enough to spend on Oriental manuscripts, kif and nautch-boys. Yet here he is crossing three thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean, with old Droudge harping on him day and night about how much his way of life costs—’

‘Not to mention traveling with the man he believes murdered his son.’ January rose from the rickety little table beneath the market arcade. Everyone in New Orleans, at one time or another in the day, came to this place to get some of Aunt Zozo’s coffee; walking down here at the proper time for Hannibal was a good deal safer than another expedition to the Swamp.

‘Good God, Uncle Diogenes wouldn’t care about that. Not really. Patrick was good company, and that’s what the old boy wants most: someone to play cards with him and keep him amused. But I’ll tell you another thing: he wasn’t at La Sirène’s Thursday night, and neither, so far as I can tell, was Foxford.’

January raised his eyebrows. The Siren was well known for discretion regarding customers.

‘After spending a good portion of last night going from gambling den to gambling den along Rue Royale, attempting to account for Uncle Diogenes’s movements, I fetched up at La Sirène’s in the small hours, far less intoxicated than I seemed to be – at least, I hope that was the impression that I gave – and claiming that the man owed me part of the money he’d won at cards at that establishment Thursday night. This immediately elicited the information that he hadn’t even been on the premises Thursday, though he had been there – and apparently made quite an impression – the night before. I apologized and fell artistically down the steps on my way out . . .’

He absently rubbed a bruised shoulder. ‘Someone at Lafrènniére’s remembered seeing a man who looked like Patrick come in, sometime after ten. Came in, looked around, and left . . .’

‘That’s a good deal of trouble,’ January observed gently, ‘on behalf of a boy you knew as a child, and a man you haven’t seen for seventeen years.’

‘The boy’s mother was . . . very good to me.’ Hannibal turned the empty cup in his hands. ‘They both were. Patrick . . .’ He sighed, a sound like the rasp of a saw. ‘Foxford wouldn’t have done it.’

January took the cup from him and walked to the coffee stand where Aunt Zozo, in her red-striped yellow tignon, stood like a benign witch in the clouds of charcoal smoke from the fire beneath her pot. ‘Has there been word, anything, of Rameses?’ the
marchande
asked, and her eyes filled with pity when January shook his head. As he turned back toward the table she handed him a couple of pralines –
lagniappe
. Like Railspike, she had a soft spot for Hannibal.

‘The Consul will surely have something to say—’ Hannibal began, when January sat down again.

‘Obviously,’ January replied. ‘But since he hasn’t, I assume that Shaw turned up something damning.’

‘Have you seen Shaw?’ Hannibal glanced across the Place d’Armes, where the Cabildo’s white stucco shimmered palely through the rain.

‘I tried on my way here; he was out. I shall try again –’ he drew from his pocket the folded note that had arrived at his house an hour ago, which was quick work considering it was the answer to one he’d penned in the small hours to be taken out to Milneburgh by his nephew on the first steam-train – ‘when I’ve made inquiries about the part played in all this business by Lord Montague Blessinghurst.’

‘Who?’

‘The gentleman – I believe – who came so close to being called out by young Foxford at Trulove’s ball, Monday night. And the man I suspect your friend was looking for, Thursday night.’

Hannibal looked up sharply.

‘He found him, and they quarrelled – violently, according to Trinchen at the Countess’s. I’m hoping that Madeleine Mayerling –’ he named a former pupil, of impeccable French Creole family – ‘can tell us what it was about. She was at Trulove’s on Monday night, and if she didn’t actually witness Blessinghurst’s original altercation with Foxford, she’s had almost a week to hear the details from everyone who did.’

‘Trust the Creole ladies to maintain an intelligence system that the French Foreign Service would envy. Can you get to Milneburgh and back before the Countess opens her doors? The lady is strict about employees who show up late.’

For answer, January handed his friend the note:

Saturday 8 October, 1836

My dear Mr J,

You must not think of trying to come out here, and perhaps missing the last train back. As Augustus informs me that you are working this summer for the notorious Countess Mazzini, in return for later information about EVERYONE of my acquaintance who has passed through her doors, and the disgraceful details of all that transpires in her house, I will be at home on Rue Royale this afternoon at three. I trust the summer finds you and your family well?

Yours,

M.M.

The downpour had lightened to fleeting squalls by the time January and Hannibal reached what had been the town-house of the Trepagier family, at the quiet end of Rue Royale. In an hour the rocks would be burning, as the saying was: the sun drawing up as steam those silver-gray lakes that lay in the streets; the air unbreathable, and ten times worse than before. The two men walked in silence, having called briefly at the Cabildo and been informed by the desk sergeant that firstly, Lieutenant Shaw was still out dealing with a bar-fight of near-riot proportions on Tchapitoulas Street near the wharves, and secondly – in irritated tones – that the British consul had no business interfering with American justice in a case when the murderer had been found to have inherited his victim’s entire fortune, by the terms of the victim’s will.

‘I suppose I should be pleased that Aunt Elodie’s fortune has returned to the family at last,’ sighed Hannibal, after silently digesting this information as they walked. ‘And I’m sure Patrick meant it for the best. Yet there is a time to every season under heaven, and this donation does seem to be rather unfortunately timed.’

‘I wonder if the boy knew of the will.’

‘I wonder if any jury will believe him if he says he didn’t. Somebody in the party obviously did.’

January said, ‘Hmm.’

The tall stucco town-house, dilapidated after the death of the spendthrift and abusive Arnaud Trepagier, had been recently repainted, January noted approvingly, and every window sparkled. The sale of the Trepagier plantation lands to a spur of the Milneburgh steam-train line had clearly been profitable. It had, among other things, enabled the young widow Trepagier to marry her husband’s fencing master, to the gratification of everyone except the widow’s disapproving aunts.

‘Why this interest in the murder of a traveling Irishman?’ inquired Augustus Mayerling, emerging from the rear of the house as January and Hannibal made their way into the courtyard, past the small carriage that stood in the porte cochère. ‘If there were a question of how your friend Ramilles died—’

‘M’sieu Derryhick was a friend of Hannibal.’ January glanced at the fiddler, who, behind a mask of persiflage, had managed to say very little about either Viscount Foxford or Patrick Derryhick on the walk from the market. ‘As was the Viscount’s father. The boy was arrested this morning, I understand—’

‘And I understand the uncle promptly went to Mayor Prieur’s office and made a complete fool of himself, demanding his nephew’s release.’ Mayerling paused on his way through the shaded loggia at the back of the house, raised colorless brows. ‘On the grounds that he is a member of the British aristocracy – not an argument calculated to impress either a French judge, or an American one who wishes his political friends to be re-elected next month.’

They ascended the outside stairway in silence. On the upstairs gallery, Madeleine Mayerling rose to greet them, her dark beauty and ivory complexion a warm contrast to her husband’s slim Teutonic pallor.

‘M’sieu Janvier.’ Madame Mayerling clasped January’s hand, which despite the heat was properly gloved for a visit to a white lady. ‘M’sieu Sefton. This concerns the quarrel at Madame Trulove’s ball, you said?’

‘So I believe.’ At her gesture, January took one of the wooden gallery chairs. A servant emerged from the house, bearing a tray of lemonade. Another of those intricate unspoken rules, reflected January: second nature to a man of color in America, but – once he had turned back to look behind him from the freer air of Paris – a source of fascination. Just who could sit down and drink with whom? The rules shifted like a cat’s cradle depending on whether he, a black man, had arrived in company with the white Hannibal; where the meeting and drinking took place; how he was dressed and whether it was winter – the social season, during which it might be
seen
that the Mayerlings would sit down and drink with a black man – or the summer, when it would be a matter of mere servant rumor. Had his skin been the lovely bronze of his mulatto mother’s, instead of his slave father’s
beau noir lustré
, as the dealers said, the rules would have been different still, as they would have had he not been attired in coat, vest, and gloves, or had he been a woman (dark or bright?) rather than a man.

It was not something you
could
understand, January suspected, unless you’d grown up free colored – and the son of slaves – in New Orleans.

‘It might be happenstance,’ he went on, his big hand wrapped lightly around the stem of his glass. ‘But I don’t think it is. Patrick Derryhick was last seen alive when he stormed back into the Hotel Iberville at ten thirty, Thursday evening, after a violent quarrel – I am told – with another Englishman named Lord Montague Blessinghurst.’