Virgin Mary, get me out of this
.
Heat consumed January, smoke rising through the floor to suffocate his lungs. The building was on fire, plunging down like an avalanche to Hell.
The building was on fire.
He woke and knew it.
There was a little light, coming in through the cracks in the barred shutters that led out onto the gallery, enough to let him know that it was day. Smoke was pouring up through the cracks in the floor.
The woman on the floor, skeletal with prolonged starvation, began to writhe in her shackles, her breath coming in little puffs of pain. One of the men on the beds—there were two beds in the room, he now saw, the manacles dangling from the ceiling pulley between them—stirred and groaned, then lay still again. The man wore an iron collar around his neck, and some kind of iron contraption on one or maybe both of his legs. January’s own shoulders were lost in a maze of pain. Agony shot up through his leg muscles, his back, from every welted, bloody inch of his skin.
In the smoke that filtered up through the room the flies were humming wildly around the ceiling, their drone a frantic bass note to Cora’s voice—it had to be Cora’s—making inarticulate shrill grunts beyond the thin wall. January
tried to move and was instantly sorry, his head throbbing, so dizzy he nearly fainted again.
But he had to get out. He had to get out. They’d all burn.…
Somewhere he heard shouting, a yammer of voices below. “Sir, I’ll thank you to mind your own business,” came the yapping tenor of Nicolas Lalaurie’s voice, and a deeper voice, harsh but familiar—Judge Canonge’s?—replied.
“It’s a grave allegation and I think it needs to be looked into.”
“Do you call me a liar? I’ll have my friends call on you in the morning, sir.”
“You have your friends do whatever you want, sir, but I’m going to have a look upstairs.”
“This man would say or do anything to discredit me and my wife, sir. For years he’s spread rumors.…”
“You can’t tell me that child didn’t fall off the roof, two months after you moved into this place!” That was Montreuil’s voice. Behind it there was a clashing, a distant thump of feet. January squirmed, gasping in an ocean of heat. If he cried out—maybe if he cried out they’d hear him.…
“Judge!” called someone else. “Here, sir! Here’s where it started!”
Inarticulate sounds, a woman’s voice; then, louder, “I couldn’t bear more, sir. I couldn’t bear more. After last night …”
“She’s been beaten, sir. Severely, it looks like.”
“And you’re going to punish
me,”
demanded Dr. Lalaurie furiously, “because this slut tried to avenge herself after correction—well deserved, I might add—by firing my house?”
“They’re in the attic,” persisted Montreuil’s voice.
“They’re in the attic, sir, chained up and tortured. Sometimes at night I hear them scream!”
Shut up
, thought January dully.
Shut up, you whining little toad! They’re never going to believe you!
“The woman is a fiend incarnate, I tell you! A devil! A female Nero! She …”
January recalled the little man’s bulging eyes, his rank breath and nervous hands, and his heart sank. A fanatic with a grudge, and a well-known grudge. And, if Dominique’s casual remarks were anything to go by, Madame Lalaurie had evidently taken pains to discredit him by gossip as well. Whispers of opium addiction and Montreuil’s half-crazy hatred were Madame’s best defense: that, and the people who would never admit that their sons and cousins had married into the family of a madwoman. Who did not have the imagination to completely comprehend the word
façade
.
“I think maybe you’d better hand over those keys.”
January felt the swaying weight of many men ascending the outside stairs. He gritted his teeth in rage, tried desperately to cry out again—his tongue so swollen with thirst he could barely make a sound—when they went through the long, obligatory delay of searching the second floor:
The attic, you idiots! Didn’t you hear Montreuil say “attic”?
Axes crashed on the outer door. Evidently Dr. Lalaurie hadn’t handed over the keys after all. Then the stunned silence, the appalled whispers, as even through the choke of the smoke the stench of the place came to them.
More crashing, purposeful as they cut through the second door. The smoke was already lessening, though the heat remained unbearable. The fire brigade must have come swiftly. Where was Madame Lalaurie this morning?
Then men were in the room, white men and colored,
kneeling beside him, unlocking the manacles from his ankles and wrists. Murmuring in shock and horror at what they saw on the beds, on the floor, on the wall, on the table. In the background Montreuil hopped up and down, shrieking, “I told you so! I told you so! I told you so!”
January wanted to slap him.
The courtyard was jammed with people. Black and white and colored, French and American. All fell back, silent with shock, as the first of the men were brought down the stairs, carried by Canonge and Montreuil and a handful of others. January stumbled, not able to walk, supported by a couple of hairy Kaintucks from Gallatin Street and blind in the mid-morning glare. He had a jumbled awareness of the others being brought down behind him, but the wound in his head was making him dizzy and sick, and it wasn’t until many days later that he was able to put his recollection of images, voices, events into anything like order. One of the emaciated slaves kept gasping “Food! Food!” and he saw a number of the market-women press forward to give it to them, the bony hands grasping and snatching.
He reeled and staggered, and someone caught him, lifted him up. As he was carried through the gate he saw Nicolas Lalaurie, small and dapper, standing by the second-floor parlor window of the house, looking expressionlessly out. Beside him, for a moment, Madame Lalaurie appeared, clothed as she had been at the Ursulines’ during the plague, in a plain but devastatingly fashionable dark dress. Calm as always. Perfect as always, as if none of this had anything to do with her. Then she turned away. He saw her through a window, directing the maids in replacing the furniture that the firemen had overturned.
His mind didn’t fully clear until sometime later, when he and the others were sitting or lying in the courtyard of
the Cabildo, and people were filing past. Now and then officials would emerge; January guessed from the mutter of their voices that they didn’t know exactly where to take the victims or what should be done with them. Market-women, brokers, and dealers from the businesses on Rue Chartres and Canal Street came by, stevedores from the levee, planters, dressmakers, artisans. Their faces formed a blur in January’s mind as they stared disbelieving at the mutilated bodies of the men and women on the cots and chairs set in the court, and at the implements that covered the whole of a long table set near the brass fountain in the courtyard’s center. How many of them were having second thoughts about the power a master could have over a slave, January wondered. How many were simply taking mental notes of things to be used should they need a little more domestic discipline at some time in the future?
A splotch of black caught his eye. Emily Redfern, leaning on the arm of the Reverend Micajah Dunk, in front of the makeshift cot where Cora Chouteau lay. The bulging blue eyes widened with recognition, and Madame’s lace-mitted hand went to her throat, where lay a double-line of moon-gold pearls.
January said to a man near him, “Help me up.”
He’d guessed Mamzelle Marie would be in the crowded courtyard somewhere, and so she was. It was easy to find her, once he was standing, by the seven points of her orange-and-red tignon. He made his way unsteadily through the press, and when she saw him coming toward her she stood up—she was washing the wounds of the woman who’d been in the iron spancel—and swiftly closed the distance between them.
“You should sit. I’ll get to you.”
“I don’t need to be got to,” said January. But he allowed her to lead him to the stairs that went up to the
galleries where the cells were, and by the time they reached them he was out of breath and trembling, his head still pounding from the daylight. “I need to talk to you.”
She folded her hands before her and stood looking down at him, bronze face calm.
“I know you gave Madame Redfern the poison she used to murder her husband.” He spoke softly. There was so much noise around them that there was little danger of being overheard. “I have what’s left of the poison, and the tin. I found them in her room at Spanish Bayou. And you were seen, by her house at Black Oak, where the tin was hidden.”
“Only by a slave girl.” She didn’t seem in the least surprised or discomposed. “Her word is no good in a court of law.”
“A slave girl who’s just come back from death and Purgatory,” he said. “Who’s going to be a nine days’ wonder with the newspapers. And who’s now going to be arrested for a crime you know and I know she didn’t commit. She couldn’t have, she was gone from Spanish Bayou hours before the poison could have been administered; gone by the same boat that took Reverend Dunk away with the five thousand dollars on him that Madame Redfern wanted to keep, out of all the wreckage of her life.”
Mamzelle Marie said nothing, nor did the dark serpent eyes shift.
Somehow, after having seen Madame Lalaurie standing in the doorway in her turquoise gown, the sight of this tall bronze-hued woman before him—poisoner and witch and worshiper of the Damballah serpent—could no longer frighten him. He’d seen worse.
For the rest of his life, he would always know in his heart that whatever happened, he’d seen worse.
“What I’d like you to do,” January said, “if you would, is speak to her. Tell her that unless she writes out a paper of manumission for Cora Chouteau—unless she comes up with some alternate explanation about what happened to that five thousand dollars that disappeared, and it better be a good one—you’re going to tell the police what she did. The police and her husband’s creditors.”
Mamzelle Marie started to speak, then closed her lips again. Her eyes were a world of black salt and graveyard dust.
Then she smiled.
“You know why Emily poisoned that man?”
January nodded.
“Tell me.”
“Because he’d bankrupted himself and her. Because he kept her from being what she wanted to be. Because he was carrying on an affair, in her house and under her nose as if she were no more than another wench on the property. Because he told her it would go the worse for her, if she dared get rid of the girl—who never wanted to share his bed in the first place. Cora only fled because she found the poison and feared for her life.”
“Ah,” said Mamzelle softly. She reached down her long-fingered hand, and touched—very gently—the swollen, hurting mess of his shoulder. “I’ll do as you ask, Michie Janvier. Certain things are bought with pain, God’s favor among them. But you should know it wasn’t me that sold the poison; and it wasn’t her that bought it.”
“You were there,” said January. “Cora saw you.”
“I was there,” she said. “Otis Redfern brought me up there. He offered me the place at Black Oak, to be mine after his wife was dead. Her father tied the place up in trust. It wouldn’t be Redfern’s to sell, until her death. He had a key, you know.”
“So did she.”
“As well for her.” She folded her arms. “He didn’t know that. He told me he’d taken the only one she had.
He
bought the poison, from a man name Dr. Chickasaw, not a good man, but he have the knowledge; he’s out by the end of the Esplanade. It’s like her, to have made a copy of that key.”
And watching her, as she made her leisurely way through the crowd to Madame Redfern’s side, January thought that it was, in fact, very like Emily Redfern to have a spare key. In like circumstances his mother would have had one, too.
“Ben!” It was Rose. She caught his hand, then put her arms carefully around his shoulders—It wasn’t fit, he thought dimly, although someone had lent him a pair of rough osnaburg trousers. He pressed his head to her arm, tried to hold her.
She was, he saw, dressed neatly in yellow sprigged with blue, as if for a day’s work translating Catullus. His blood and the sweaty filth from the attic floor left great blotches on the crisp cloth.
“I thought you’d gone there,” he said. “I saw your book, and your gloves. I thought you saw Cora’s shoes.”
“I went early in the day, when I knew she was out, to leave a note about Dr. Barnard’s letters,” Rose said. “It was stupid of me, to leave the book. Later I had an appointment with a Dr. Groeller in Carrollton—he operates a boys’ school—and I was nearly late, trying to find you. I left word with Olympe, and with Dominique, and your mother, to tell you that Cora’s shoes had turned up at the Ursulines’. Her dress was there, too.”
A few feet away one of the men who’d been brought out of the attic was groaning, writhing on his makeshift cot. His belly was hugely swollen, from gorging himself on
the market-womens’ berries and fritters, the rest of his body a handful of sticks. Dr. Ker knelt beside him, daubing with alcohol at the galls on his wrists and waist, at the jagged wounds left by a spiked collar in his neck. Past them, Hannibal knelt by Cora, talking gently while she clung to the hand of one of the exhausted skeletons—it had to be Gervase—as if she would never release it.
“They didn’t know who had brought the shoes in, or how long they’d been there,” Rose said. “I thought I should find you, and ask what should be done.”
“I was afraid you’d gone to Lalaurie first.”
Rose shook her head. “I knew she’d only lie.”
His eyes went to the two dark forms, of the Reverend Dunk and Madame Redfern, standing now in a corner of the courtyard talking very quietly, very earnestly, with Mamzelle Marie. Mamzelle Marie shook her head and said something with an air of patient repetition. Dunk retorted, eyes blazing, and Emily Redfern pulled hard on his sleeve and told him to hush. Dunk looked as astonished as if a pet cat had given him an order. But he hushed.
From there January’s gaze traveled up to the third-floor gallery of the prison: the womens’ cells. Rose had been locked up there, he thought. Locked up with the drunkards, the prostitutes, with madwomen and women like Kentucky Williams. Lying on dirty straw and sick with grief over the death of her girls, over the collapse of everything she had worked for so hard.