Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (31 page)

Rose, who had undoubtedly spent many nights listening to the chatter and tales of the girls under her care at the school-to say nothing of Chighizola's widely-varying tales about how the old pirate happened to lose his nose-nodded with the air of a connaisseuse and said, “That's a good one.”

“But I also liked my own tale of the ghost of Mad Juana of Spain. Mad Juana was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, you know, and the mother of the Emperor Charles V-which would make her the aunt of Bloody Mary of England.” Chloe folded her lace-mitted hands on her lap. January, who had come to think of her as some kind of matrimonial monster, smiled a little at this trade of schoolgirl confidences.

“When Juana's husband, Philip le Bel of Burgundy, died, she did the same thing Uncle Joffrey did-went insane and refused to leave his side. She traveled with his corpse in her baggage for years and years.... I suppose she paid her porters bonuses.”

“She would have to,” remarked Rose.

“In any case, I deduced that one of the necklaces she wore during all of this had ended up in a pirate treasure, buried on Uncle Joffrey's land-for there was a pirate land ing there, before Uncle Joffrey built the house and started to grow sugar there.... In fact, I believe he bought most of his original slaves from Jean Lafitte at a suspiciously low cost. They were friends, of course, Uncle Joffrey and Lafitte, and there was all sorts of contraband run across his land by various sinister gentlemen with names like RedHand and Turkish Jack and Cut-Nose. So of course one night while she was out walking, Aunt Felice happened to tread upon ground where a treasure was buried, and was possessed by the ghost of Mad Juana, and went mad and hanged herself. . . .”

“I think I've seen that opera. And Uncle Joffrey keeps her embalmed corpse-I assume M'sieu le Bel's corpse was embalmed?-in his parlor?”

“Either that or he buried it beside the treasure.”

“It has a certain neatness to it.” Rose's eyes sparkled appreciatively. “I'm sorry Madame,” she added. “This is your family we're speaking of....”

“My mother would remind me of that.” Chloe's own impish smile faded. “In the most tragic voice. And my nurse had her own ways of punishing me in the name of propriety of thought.” Her voice flexed a little, like a steel swordblade, at some recollection, and she rubbed half-unconsciously at the small triangular scar of a burn on her wrist. "Not that Father would ever hear a word against Nurse-who was quite young and pretty.

“But in any case I've never had much in common with my Picard or Viellard cousins, and most of my life has been lived with Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and the heroes of the Peloponnesian War. So it's very difficult not to ... to see one's own family legends in that same light. It is one of the few things,” she added, rising, “that I have in common with my husband.” Again that momentary flaw tightened her voice, as if at the memory of conversations aborted, of silent dinners and civil good-nights.

She laid a testing hand against the coffee-pot, and poured out a little more into Rose's cup. “I hope that we may ... you and I ... continue our acquaintance when we return to town. Or ... will you be returning? You said you were bound for Grand Isle ... ?”

“For a visit only.”

Something about those narrow, bird-fragile shoulders relaxed. “Mama never would let me meet my halfbrother-whom I liked very much, on the occasions when I did encounter him, at Uncle Veryl's. But she is forever telling me that a married lady may go where she pleases, and do as she wills. The only incentive I have seen so far for matrimony-that, and not having to deal with spiteful nurses. Perhaps you and I can meet at Uncle Veryl's? He spoke so well of you, and would grieve if... if the connection were to end now that Artois is gone.”

“In that case,” said Rose, “let us definitely meet there.”

When Chloe was gone, January stirred and rolled over, and Rose turned her face toward him, and groped for her spectacles. “I'm sorry. I hope we didn't wake you....”

“You couldn't have.” January slipped from beneath the makeshift mosquito-bar, and knotted it back, his shoulders and arms stabbing him at every move. “Not if you'd pounded me with a plank, which somebody appears to have done.” He limped to her bedside, and despite the redhot ramrod with which someone seemed to have replaced his backbone, knelt to kiss her. “God, I can't tell you how good it was to wake up hearing you laugh.”

“Ah, then you woke after Madame Sapphire came in to change the dressings; you would have heard some choice cursing if you'd opened your eyes then. There's coffee, if you don't mind using my cup. Madame Chloe was here....”

“I heard.” By the soft slur in her voice it sounded like Rose had been dosed with a small quantity of laudanum, something he usually mistrusted but was grateful for now. He sniffed the dregs of her coffee-cup to ascertain this wasn't where it had been administered, then sipped the unsugared brew gratefully. “Trading Gothic tales of pirate treasure and suicide...”

And he stopped, holding the cup suspended halfway to his lips. “Dear God,” he said, blinking, as if someone had suddenly opened a window into morning sun.

“Dear God,” he said again.

With a grimace of pain, Rose put her folded hands beneath her cheek. “You've had sudden inspiration for an opera about Jean Lafitte and Mad Juana's necklace?”

“No.” January set the cup down, still feeling dazzled, as if like Jesus he'd been taken up to a high place and seen all the world lying before his feet. “I know why Mulm wants a slave revolt-and what Tyrone Burke talked to Hesione LeGros about before she died. What he paid her to tell him ... and then missed one doubloon when he took the money off her body with the candle guttering in the near-dark.”

Their eyes met, and he saw Rose's comprehension, as complete and certain as his own.

They said, almost in unison, “Jean Lafitte's treasure is buried on Uncle Joffrey's land.”

“That's ridiculous,” said Rose a moment later. “Jean Lafitte didn't bury any treasure.”

“No,” said January. “But one of his captains did.”

“Gambi.
Of course. Cut-Nose said Lafitte never trusted him....”

“With good reason, I suspect. Now that I look back on it, I'm almost sure that it was Gambi who sunk the Independence... the American slave-ship that caused all the trouble on the night of that wretched birthday party. Gambi was there, and I remember he had fresh cuts on his face, the kind of splinter-wounds a man gets in a sea battle from shot hitting the gunwales. And Hesione was Gambi's mistress.”

“And Sancho Sangre-the fellow you said is running guns to New Grenada with Mulm's backing-knew Hesione then, and could have told Mulm that her tales of treasure and piracy could well be true. Those shovels we saw in the shed near the head of Bayou St. Roche, . .”

“They had to have been left by Mulm. All ready, when the slaves come through. I thought they looked awfully clean. It doesn't matter, really, whether the slaves themselves burn the house and kill Uncle Joffrey and his sons or not, though at a guess Mulm has told Jacinthe that the boats will be waiting for them at St. Roche. When the army finally reaches St. Roche and finds the house burned and Joffrey and his sons dead, it'll be Jacinthe and his rebels who'll take the blame.” January turned back to his makeshift bed to collect his boots.

“What are you going to do?”

“Exactly what you suggested we do,” returned January. “I'm going to go back to Avocet and fire the wood-sheds.”

January's first instinct-to return to Avocet immediatelywas tempered by second thoughts, and he did end up persuading Lucy to heat water for him to get a much-needed bath in the tin tub behind the kitchen. In return he fetched water and wood for her, not only for the bath but for the general use of the kitchen: he regarded the cook as much more his hostess at Bois d'Argent than Chloe Viellard was. It was Lury, after all, who did most of the work.

In doing all this, he gave the impression that he would remain at Bois d'Argent with Rose for as long as she lay in the hospital. This, according to the healer-woman Sapphire, who came in to help Lucy in the kitchen, would be at least another day or two. Rose had lost a good deal of blood, and was still weak and in a good deal of pain. When the young slave-boy--Samson was his name-went back to his parents' cabin that afternoon, his fever having broken in the night, Lury put fresh blankets on the cot for January, should he elect to spend another night at Rose's side.

“Acting as if your staying will come in handy,” remarked Rose when January fetched in luncheon for them both: rough fare, beans and rice and greens, “if anyone asks where you are at any given time. Will you go back to Avocet tonight?”

“I'll travel tonight, yes,” said January. “The moon doesn't rise until nearly ten, but I should have enough light after that. I'll lie hidden on the batture until the men go out to their work in the morning. If Burke is overworking everyone, there shouldn't be a guard kept on the sheds in the daytime. I've offered to help Lucy bring up firewood this afternoon for the kitchen, and that should give me time to wrap up and hide enough kindling to get a blaze properly started, once I find which shed the guns are actually in.”

“Be careful.” Rose held out her hand to him. She still looked ashy, and the drowsiness of laudanum slurred her voice. The nightgown she wore, though old, was of the lightest cotton lawn, far finer than any slave-woman would have worn. Too big for Chloe, it had undoubtedly come out of the stores of old clothing in the Big House's attics at Chloe's request. An interesting aspect of generosity, thought January, in a young woman who already had a reputation as a sharp and heartless trader.

January helped Sapphire change the dressings on Rose's back that night, and saw that the wounds seemed to be healing clean. “I'll sit with her awhile, before I go to bed,” he said, and the healer-woman nodded. With any luck, and with Rose to back up any story he told, he should be able to account for his whereabouts at the time the sheds at Avocet burned. Not that it would do him any good if Burke caught him anywhere in the vicinity-at his size he might well have been recognized in last night's jarring maelstrom of lantern-light and darkness. But if no one remarked on his absence, there was a better chance of getting out of the area unmolested.

He set out at moonrise, traveling along the batture with his two sacks of kindling. He kept close to the water, among the snags, prodding and testing the brush before him with a stick. Some god or saint must have been watching out for him and Rose the previous night, he reflected. Five times in the course of the journey his probings dislodged hissing and disgruntled serpents from the tangle of branches underfoot. Though it was hard to make out in the shadows and moonlight, at least one of them bore the black bars of a water-moccasin.

Rose, of course, ever the skeptic, would argue that it was only last night's rain that kept them deeper in shelter. He smiled.

There was more bad weather coming in. He could feel it in his skin, hear it in the dead silence of the air. The cicadas were hushed, the air indescribably eerie. Bars of cloud gathered before the moon, then fled, racing visibly, like the insects and birds-seeking to flee. Moving along the batture, January felt as if he were the last man living on a silent earth, left behind by some unimaginable catastrophe.

He saw a light or two on the river, where steamboats bound down for the Belize forts and village on the Gulf rode the current, hugging the banks as close as they dared, for below town the river was a monster of strength. Below Myrtle Landing the plantations were few. Other lights shone from the masts and prows of the ocean-going packets, the New England clippers, and the coastal steamers, working their way stolidly upstream to the New Orleans levee or heading down fast for the open sea. There had been a time, he thought, not terribly long ago, when he'd only counted the days, and his earnings, to take one of them, to go back to France, or to Italy, or even England. T'o go anywhere that men would address him as vous, like a man, instead of tu, like a dog or a child; to make his home in some land where Americans didn't look at him with calculation of price in their eyes.

To go to some country where the thought of a slave uprising had the arcane absurdity of something one only read about in novels of ancient Rome.

It's the nineteenth century, he thought. In Paris, and London, and Lisbon, the streets are lit by gas-lamps. Steamships cross the ocean in six weeks and men have made balloons to fly in through the sky. Slave uprisings?

But there was nothing of the nineteenth century-its gray stone cities, its up-to-date mills and factories, its railway trains and glass windows and pianos-in the dense, sweaty silence along the river, in the hot green stink of the cane-fields in the velvet night.

The wind was rising.

No lights shone at Boscage.

None at Soldorne-it must have been Chloe's bedroom light, as she sat up late reading Tacitus or Herodotus, that he had seen in the deeps of last night's stormy dark ness. Avocet, too, would be wrapped in darkness, though he dared not climb the batture at this point to see. Guifford's twice-widowed young widow and her daughter would be sleeping, so newly members of the family that the man she had married had not yet made provision for her in a will. What would become of her, if Bertrand were to hang? And on the other side of the house, Annette Avocet would likewise sleep: a woman Vivienne had hired a good-looking American to spite, a woman she had pushed into the position of mending her clothes. Yet with the well-worn enforced amity of isolation, the two of them had been sewing together at nine-thirty, when someone had stabbed Guifford in the side.

And Franklin Mulm, with his blackmailer's ear for gossip, had unerringly picked the situation as the one that could be most quickly escalated to a slave revolt, the mo ment Tyrone Burke had broken it to him that Lafitte's treasure lay buried on land they could not get to any other way. Maybe he'd had his eye on the place already, as a weak spot whose potential for chaos could be taken advantage of, the way a puma can tell by scent which deer in a herd will be slowest to flee.