Fever Season (27 page)

People would be here Monday, to look over the house before buying it. Maybe sooner.

Among the slave cabins he took candle and lucifers from his grip and made enough of a light to look into one
or two, to make sure they weren’t inhabited by anything or anyone else. The sight of them jabbed something inside him, as if he’d closed his hand on cloth with a needle still in it: the single big pine-pole bed each family shared—two beds if it was a large cabin and two families shared it. Pegs where clothing had hung, where pots had been removed. In one cabin someone had left a banjo, a five-stringed instrument of a skin stretched over a gourd.

January went back up to the big house, and drew himself water from the well. Returning to the cabin where the banjo was, he shook up the straw tick and tightened the bed-ropes, then for the first time since childhood lay down under a slave-cabin roof. He thought the place would trouble him, or the fear of discovery, of being kidnapped as Cora had been kidnapped. At least the ghosts who’d died there, of pneumonia or overwork, would whisper in the corners.

But he prayed for them, those nameless ones, with his battered blue rosary, asking God’s rest for their souls. The deep silence of the country, the whirring of the cicadas and the peeping of the frogs in the swamp, was a sound of comfort to him, a song from his childhood. He realized that this was the first night since July that he had not worked among the sick, the dying, and the dead.

He slept, and no one visited him in his dreams.

The Redfern house at Spanish Bayou was fairly new, built in the American style probably not more than a decade before. Square, brick, it had a pillared porch and galleries front and back instead of all around, as was the French or Spanish way. It was painted blue instead of whitewashed or stuccoed, the shutters of the windows painted yellow, an astonishing piece of ostentation, considering the price of coloring agents in paint. Instead of all the rooms opening onto the gallery they opened inward, into a central hall.
They’ll never believe I’m not here to rob the place
, January thought, as he flipped loose the catch of a ground-floor window.

His mother would disown him.

Inside there was the same elaboration, the same display, that he recognized from the Lalaurie house, though without Madame Lalaurie’s exquisite taste. Where Madame Lalaurie’s parlor might boast a marble-topped bureau touched up with gilt handles and hinges, here were tables of black marble crusted with ormolu, jewelers’ work rather than cabinetmakers’, and a bad jeweler at that. Thick-stuffed brocade furniture in the German style instead of the spare, cool French; four sets of china laden
with curlicues and scrollwork instead of the single, elegant Limoges.

It was the house of a woman frantic to have the best.

And it would all be sold.

No wonder Emily Redfern was angry enough to do murder.

Twilight, Shaw had said. Presumably just before the windows—American casements, far less easy to trip from the outside—were closed up for the night. If Cora had come here Tuesday it would have been simpler: into the study, take the pearls and the money, then out the same way. And there was the chance that if another servant saw her, they wouldn’t realize yet that she’d run away.

If it had been Wednesday—how soon before the arrival of the boat at the Spanish Bayou wharf? How fast could a slim young girl run, when she heard the hoot of the boat whistle?—it would be more difficult by far, if she’d slipped from the study, down the central hall to the warming-pantry where she’d have had access to supper. If it had been earlier yet, before supper was finished cooking, it became more complicated. She’d have had to cross the open yard to the kitchen, where the cook would certainly have seen her. Would she have risked that, twenty-four hours after she’d gone missing, with no possibility of a shrug and a lie?
Oh, I was just off in the woods for a little, I wasn’t going to run away. Sir
.

It grated on January’s nerves to go upstairs. Should anyone come in, he’d be cut off from escape, but he knew he had no choice. The Redferns had slept in separate rooms: his plainly furnished, the pieces new but not extravagant, hers a fantasia of ruffles, lace, silk, carving, and gilt. It was hers that he searched. She’d put the red-and-gold candy tin up inside the fireplace, in a sort of ledge on
the inside of the mantel. It was the fourth place January checked.

Foolish, he thought, opening the tin. At least she’d had the sense to dump out the rest of the monkshood, leaving only fragments and powder in the seams of the tin itself. But then, the slaves’ children probably checked the rubbish heap regularly for broken china and bits of scraps, and if she was supposed to be so sick from the poisoning that she couldn’t leave her bed she’d hardly have been able to throw it down the outhouse.

He wrapped the tin carefully in two handkerchiefs, so as not to confuse whatever marks might still be on it, and stowed it in his grip.

In the warming-pantry at the back of the house he searched drawers until he found what he guessed would be there: Emily Redfern’s menu for the week of the fifteenth. Of course Bernard Marigny’s stuck-up yellow fussbudget cook would do things the French way. He’d consult his mistress over a written menu, which would be amended in her hand.

And there it was. On the eighteenth of September the fare had consisted of turtle soup, sautéed shrimp and mushrooms, grilled tournedos of beef, roasted guinea hen, rice and gravy, fresh green beans, with jam crêpes and berry cobbler for dessert. Breakfast, he was interested to note, had originally been omelettes and creamed gizzards with waffles and jam, but had been augmented—apparently at the last minute—with apple tarts, ham, and crêpes.

Company for breakfast? Michie Otis returning in a foul mood after being threatened by Roarke and his bravos in full view of Monsieur Davis’s gambling hall?

It was still early morning, barely eight by the sun. The
Lancaster
would not be coming down the reach above
Twelve-Mile Point until three at the earliest. Cora Chouteau had spoken of Black Oak, as lying next to Spanish Bayou. Coming along the top of the levee last night he had seen that on the upriver side of the Redfern property there was only cultivated land. Downstream, however, lay a long tangle of woodlot and swamp, through which the bayou meandered in a couple of lazy curves.

January drew another pail of well water and ate some of the bread and cheese he’d packed and added to this apples from the small orchard behind the house, or what passed in Louisiana for apples anyway. It was a walk of about two miles, on the narrow paths between the canes, to the silent woods of black oak and ash, the suffocating green gloom of the slip of property that had been Madame Redfern’s own.

The house here was much older than her husband’s, and smaller, an old Creole dwelling from a time when Black Oak had been a proper, if minor, plantation. Like Mademoiselle Vitrac’s school, the building was three rooms raised above three low storage chambers, with a couple of
cabinets
tacked onto the back for good measure. The kitchen and the quarters beyond had long ago crumbled to nothing, swallowed up in thickets of hackberry and elder when the fields had been bought up by the bigger planters on either side. Stripped of its whitewash by the weather, the house itself bore signs within of leakage, storm damage, and vermin.

January found the candle cupboard in the side of the fireplace where Cora had discovered the tin of poison. The small, square hollow had a lock, but had been opened, and was empty. In another room a pile of old leaves and branches was spread with a couple of blankets. Here Cora and Gervase had shared the only privacy, the only happiness,
permitted those whose bodies and lives and service belong to other people.

He looked through the rest of the house, opening cupboards, looking in fireplaces, not sure what he was seeking or what he thought he might find. People had been in and out, that much was clear from the way the dirt on the floor was scuffed up, but who they might have been he could not tell. He went out on the gallery, where Cora said she had seen Mamzelle Marie waiting in the twilight. But beyond ascertaining that the path back to Spanish Bayou did emerge from the oleander bushes at a point where someone on the porch
could
easily see someone approaching the old house unawares, he found nothing.

There was a well between the house and where the kitchen had been, and the water in it was still good. He drank, and washed himself, and changed back into his white shirt, bettermost trousers, sober waistcoat, and black coat and hat; and so attired, made his way the three-quarters of a mile or so through a frog-peeping hush of red oak, hickory, palmetto, and vine to the levee once again, and so upstream to the plantation called Skylark Hill.

From the top of the levee he saw that there was, in fact, an old landing sheltered behind a tree-grown bar at Black Oak, as well as the one at Spanish Bayou. Easy to come there, to walk up to the house, to wait … or simply to leave a small red-and-gold candy tin, and walk down to the landing again. And later, easy for a small, stout woman to walk down from the Big House—for instance, on the day when her husband had gone into town to advertise for his runaway mistress—to collect the tin. Particularly when the hours stretched out into a familiar absence that meant the gambling tables yet again.

If that was in fact what had happened.

January was very interested to see what the actual
death certificate—and the parish magistrate-cum-coroner—would have to say.

He settled his official-looking beaver hat more firmly on his head, and turned his steps inland once again at the tidy, oyster-shell road that bore the sign
SKYLARK HILL
.

“Mr. Bailey, sir?” The butler at Skylark Hill spoke the English of one raised among the Americans. There were more and more in Louisiana who spoke no French at all.

He handed January his card back and made his bow, but not as much of a bow as if the caller had been white. “Mr. Bailey’s gone to Milneburgh, sir. He should be back on Monday, if you’d care to come then.”

January thanked the man, but something of his thoughts must have showed in his eyes, for the butler added, “If you wish to go on back to the kitchen, I’m sure Polly can get you something to eat, to set you on your way.”

It was slaves’ fare, but not bad for all that: black-eyed peas with a little ham, rice and ginger-water, for the day was hot. After a little thought January changed clothes again in the back room of the Skylark Hill kitchens—the old Creole-style house had been pulled down and replaced by a moderate American dwelling, but the original Marmillon kitchen survived—and set off walking, first along the top of the levee as far as Carrollton, then inland till he reached Bayou Metairie, and so along the shell road through the dense green shade of the swamps toward the lake.

Where the McCarty lands ran into those of the Allard and Judge Martin plantations, the bayou joined the greater Bayou St. John. January crossed at Judge Martin’s stone bridge there and continued along the Bayou Road. He felt
a little safer, this close to New Orleans, but never ceased to listen before him and behind. Each time he heard the crunch of hooves approaching from either direction he quickly left the oyster-shell pathway and waited in the woods until whoever was passing him had vanished from sight.

Stopping to rest frequently, for the day’s heat was savage, he reached Milneburgh shortly after three in the afternoon. The first place he sought was Catherine Clisson’s little house, on London Avenue near the lake. As he expected, he found his mother on the porch with her cronies, fanning herself with a painted silk fan and systematically destroying every reputation they could lay tongue to. While still some distance away, hidden by the scattering of pines, he heard Agnes Pellicot’s voice: “…  heartless as a cat. And positively helping herself to the funds …”

“Well, you could tell
that
just to look at her.” The sweet, throbbing tones belonged to Euphrasie Dreuze, who fancied herself the victim of the world. “If you ask me, Agnes, you really were too trusting to let your daughter …”

“Is that you, Ben?” Catherine Clisson rose from her chair and shaded her eyes, slim and straight and lovely as the night in her gown of simple white lawn. “Nothing’s happened, has it? To Olympe? Or the children?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” January replied. “I’ve been out of town since yesterday afternoon. I’m looking for a man named Bailey, a white man, magistrate of St. Charles Parish. He’s supposed to be in town.”

The women looked at one another, frowning and shaking their heads. Even January’s mother was stumped, but she raised her nose loftily and said, “What would you want with some white magistrate, Ben? An American, too,
he sounds like. They all are, these days.” She had a way of pronouncing the word
American
that implied a world of lice and tobacco stains.

“Binta!” Madame Clisson rose, and called back into the house. When her maid appeared—considerably lighter-skinned than she, January noted—she asked, “Have you heard of a magistrate from St. Charles Parish in town? A M’sieu Bailey?”