She went on, ‘As the wake was to be at my house – and all the food is there already – I’m sure poor Liselle would be much more comfortable out of this sun. If you, Madame –’ she nodded to Nannette Ramilles – ‘and you, Madame –’ to La Glasson – ‘would let it be known that is where you’re going, you know everyone will follow.’
She gave Liselle a gentle hug and said in a quieter voice – but not so quiet that the two mothers couldn’t hear, ‘You must be suffocating under that veil, darling. And there’s nothing you or I can accomplish here . . .’
Liselle whispered, ‘Rameses,’ but allowed herself to be led away among the tombs. They were joined by Olympe, whose husband had been left behind at the January residence to look after the children and greet returning guests. For a moment it was touch and go whether anyone would follow. Everybody present seemed determined to present their version of events to the Watch and to be in on the drama first-hand.
But in truth, the cemetery was blisteringly hot and smelled as only a New Orleans cemetery can smell on a blisteringly hot October day. The promise of shade, chairs, and lemonade won out. Uncle Bichet – tiny, bespectacled, and, like January, marching with a guitar instead of his usual bull fiddle – began to play a Rossini march with an odd little African twist to it, and the other musicians took it up. With luck, reflected January, they’d get all the people out of there before the Lieutenant of the City Guard appeared.
By the time he himself returned to his house – the largest of those owned by the members of the Board – the place would be, as Hannibal had predicted, crammed to the rafters, not only with those who had been to the funeral, but also with every other member of the free colored community as well.
And all of them talking at the top of their lungs, oh joy.
He moved through the crowd, picking out those he knew the Watch would want to speak to: Beauvais Quennell, the undertaker; Medard Regnier, who was the manager of the hotel that backed on to Quennell’s yard. He sent one of the older children after his sister; as a voodooienne, she knew secrets that even the insatiable gossip of the French Town couldn’t fathom, but he guessed she would be of more use at the house.
Then he went out to the hearse and fetched the sheet that Quennell used to cover the coffin, to keep the expensive velvet pall clean from funeral to funeral. This he carried back to the low bench-tomb where Hannibal sat beside the body of his friend.
‘Are you all right?’
The fiddler considered the question for a long moment, as if translating it from a language half-forgotten. ‘I’d thought . . .’ he began, then fell silent.
‘Help me with this.’ January spread out the sheet. Hannibal took two corners. Together they covered the corpse.
‘They’re going to want to know what you can tell them about him.’
Hannibal drew a deep breath, a hoarse wheeze in his scarred lungs, and let it out. ‘They can jolly well write to his family for the information.’ He glanced up at January, the pain in his eyes almost physical, like a man who has been beaten. ‘The address is Princeton Row in Dublin.’ He picked up his violin, tucked it under his arm, and followed the moving mass of mourners away toward the cemetery gate, the long crape veil on his hat floating behind him like Death’s shadow in the sickly light.
‘I seen folks squoze theirselves into weddins,’ drawled a voice from behind the nearest tomb. ‘An’ I won’t say I didn’t invite myself to the inauguration of Andrew Jackson and sleep that night on the floor of the White House – leastwise that’s where I woke up –’ Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Watch stepped into sight and spat a line of tobacco at a cockroach the size of a mouse, which was climbing up the broken remains of the casket – ‘but this’s the first time I seen a man stow away for a ride in somebody else’s coffin. This our friend?’
With surprising gentleness he turned back the sheet, stood looking down at the square face with its pug nose and round chin.
‘According to Hannibal, his name is Patrick Derryhick.’ January moved the sable linen further back, to let Shaw take the dead man’s wrist and try to move the folded arms. Having raised the body like a dropped plank from the ruined coffin to the low top of the bench-tomb, he knew already Shaw wouldn’t be able to do it. ‘There’s still a little flex in his ankles,’ he added, as Shaw reached down to feel the rigid thighs and calves.
The Lieutenant of the City Guard, an unshaven, straggly-haired back-hills Kentuckian, didn’t look capable of understanding the average newspaper, but he nodded and pushed back one of the dead man’s eyelids. ‘Can’t have been put to bed much after midnight, then. I’m assumin’ the feller who paid for the box was sleepin’ at the overcoat-maker’s last night, rather ’n in his own parlor?’
January nodded. ‘Rameses Ramilles and his wife had a single room in Marigny, behind LaForge’s Grocery on Rue Burgundy. His mother lives out of town. They have two sons. M’sieu Quennell—’ He bowed as the undertaker approached, and Shaw held out his hand.
‘M’sieu Shaw, is it not?’ The undertaker’s tinted spectacles glinted like demon eyes as he inclined his head. He spoke hesitant English; the Americans who dwelled on the other side of Canal Street generally took their dead to American undertakers, and in any case they wouldn’t have used the services of a black man, no matter how fair his complexion. ‘We have met, sir.’
‘Over that feller whose son claimed he’d been poisoned an’ wanted him resurrected an’ looked at, yeah.’ Shaw shook Quennell’s hand. ‘Can’t say it’s a pleasure, sir, but I will say it’s damn unexpected.’ He turned to consider the body. ‘As I recollect it, you got a little room at the back of your shop, fixed up for them as slings their hooks whilst away from home.’ His rather hard gray eyes narrowed. ‘Left side as you goes in through the shop—’
‘You are observant, sir. That’s quite true. Yes, in a port city it is often that a man will die away from his home. For that reason I keep a supply of coffins ready-made and have fitted up the room at the back with chairs and a bier draped in velvet. This I placed at the disposal of the young Madame Ramilles. There are doors behind the draperies which open into the yard, where the coffin might be put easily into the hearse.’
‘Any sign them doors was broke into?’
‘En effet, M’sieu, I did not check, though it is true that the latch is a simple one. Had I had the smallest idea—’
‘Oh, Lord, yes.’ Shaw spat at a crawdad that had emerged from a puddle, missing it by feet. The arthropod continued its investigatory way toward the corpse. January had already covered the body against what seemed like every fly in the state of Louisiana, but he knew it would be only minutes before ants discovered the place as well. ‘That your hearse out front? There a chance we can take the dear departed back to your establishment so’s the maestro here an’ I –’ he nodded at January – ‘can have a better look at him?’
‘We will not pay for it.’ One of the FTFCMBS Board of Directors – a stout little coffee-seller named Gérard – bustled over, like a man who fears he is about to be swindled. ‘Nor can Madame Glasson or the Ramilles family be asked to do so. I had no objection, none, when Madame Glasson insisted that poor Ramilles should have four horses, and the extra plumes, but at ten dollars—’
‘And I will not pay for the gloves,’ thrust in Madame Glasson, who had evidently doubled back on her tracks. ‘Nor the scarves for the mourners! They were for Rameses’s funeral, and now, if his body can be found –’ she glared at Shaw as if she suspected he had stuffed Rameses’s corpse into one of his pockets to spite her – ‘they will be all to purchase again. How can we make the gloves, and the scarves, and the plumes, and the mourning-rings given out for this . . . this interloper! – how can we make those do a second time? It is ridiculous! No more could a woman wear a white gown to her second wedding.’
‘If’n there’s a problem with the expense of four horses,’ said Shaw patiently – in English, but he’d clearly followed Madame Glasson’s Gallic tirade, ‘can
we maybe unhitch two of ’em, to drag the poor feller back to the shop? We purely can’t leave him here.’
To judge by her expression, Madame Glasson saw no reason why not, but Medard Regnier – the manager of the Hotel d’Iberville – just then broke in with, ‘But I know this man.’
All heads turned. Regnier rather self-consciously lowered the sheet back into place.
‘He is at the Iberville, with a party of English travelers. It is he who came in late last night in so great a rage; who ascended the stair crying, I will kill him, the bastard. The servants all say that the shouting could be heard everywhere, coming from their suite.’
‘What suite?’ January asked.
‘The Blue Suite at the back, M’sieu, which overlooks M’sieu Quennell’s yard. The whole suite is rented by the young Irish Lordship, the Vicomte Foxford. But it is – was – M’sieu Derryhick –’ he nodded respectfully down to the covered form on the tomb – ‘who pays the bills.’
‘Will he keep?’ Shaw asked, when he and January followed Regnier out of the Quennell establishment on to Rue Douane some thirty minutes later.
January glanced at the glaring noon sky. ‘Long enough.’
Only minutes had served for the chairs, candlesticks, crucifix, and plume-bedecked corner-posts to be swept away from the plain trestle-table bier in the shop’s back room and for Patrick Derryhick’s body to be laid out and covered with clean sheets. In this task they were assisted by old Madame Quennell – the undertaker’s placée mother, who had taken her white protector’s name many years ago – and Young Madame, the undertaker’s stout, gentle wife. Even Martin Quennell, the young white clerk, had been called down from his tiny office upstairs to lend a grudging hand.
As the son of that long-dead white protector by, presumably, his legal wife, Martin had borne himself with an air of martyred noblesse oblige, and had vanished upstairs again the moment he could.
Understandable, reflected January, as he, Shaw, and Regnier turned the corner on to Rue Royale. Young Martin’s position was a complete reversal of the usual French Town pattern wherein the white protector used his connections to assist his second family ‘on the shady side of the street’. When the private bank of Quennell and Larouche had collapsed, it was Martin – who could have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps – who’d had to become a clerk in some other man’s bank, while Beauvais, whom their father had apprenticed out to a trade, had a thriving business of his own.
If the young clerk was aware that January’s gaze followed him back up the stairs he didn’t show it, and January was careful to conceal his interest.
You don’t even recognize me, do you?
Now Shaw’s voice called January’s thoughts back from the ramifications of the Quennell family’s history. ‘You got a look at his hands . . .’
Two nails had been broken, as if the man had clawed futilely at something – a pillow, a cushion, a sleeved arm – in his last moments on earth.
January nodded. ‘He put up a fight, all right.’
Shaw left January and Regnier at the side door of the Iberville Hotel and went around to the main entrance on Canal Street. As he followed the manager into the Iberville’s service quarters, January tried to push from his heart the anger that always grated on him in situations like this. Push it away, or at least turn it into something smaller and less corrosive: vexation or bemusement. As a surgeon at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris – and later, as a musician who played for the Paris Opera and at innumerable balls in the days of the restored Bourbon kings – January had been able to walk in through the front door of any hotel in France. People might look at him twice – powerfully proportioned at six foot three, he was used to that – but certainly no one would go over to him and say, ‘This’s an establishment for white folks, boy.’
An establishment for white folks where all the servants were black.
‘Tell me about Foxford and Derryhick,’ he asked, as he and the manager wound past offices and linen-rooms toward the lobby.
‘Not a great deal to tell,’ replied Regnier. ‘There are four in the party: the young Lord Foxford, Germanicus Stuart; Foxford’s uncle, M’sieu Diogenes Stuart, who I understand is in the British Foreign Service in India; the late M’sieu Derryhick, a relation of the Stuarts, who held the purse strings; and M’sieu Droudge, the Stuart family’s business manager. He it was, who would have had the entire party lodged less expensively on the fourth floor, but M’sieu Derryhick insisted on the Blue Suite, the quietest and most handsome in the hotel.’
‘Servants?’
‘His Lordship’s valet, M’sieu Reeve, and M’sieu Diogenes Stuart’s foreign manservant.’ The distaste in the manager’s voice would have chilled wine at ten paces. The Regniers had owned a small sugar-plantation on San Domingue, from which they’d been driven by the great slave-revolt of ’91. Medard Regnier’s complexion might be the identical hue of a Hindu manservant’s, but the gulf between civilized and savage echoed in his voice.
They emerged into the lobby, an immense cavern decorated in the garish American style. A yellow-painted arch opened into the gambling room, which was operating full-cock even in the dead of a hot afternoon: January had yet to encounter a situation, including a double epidemic of yellow fever and cholera, that would slow down the gambling-rooms of New Orleans. An elderly clerk was extricating himself from an irate customer’s harangue about the quality of food in the dining room at one end of the counter while Shaw waited, chewing contentedly as an ox, at the other. Before the clerk could address him, however, the god Apollo entered from the street, strode to the counter, and said, ‘I’m frightfully sorry to keep on at you this way, Mr Klein – it is Mr Klein, isn’t it? – but has there yet been no word of Mr Derryhick?’
Not the god Apollo, January amended, regarding that straight, short nose, those beautifully shaped lips, and the shining mane of hair. A god is never that young.
‘My dear Gerry.’ An older man sidled in at his heels: tall, obese, grizzled. Deep lines gouged a face both sun-darkened and slightly yellow with the chronic jaundice of white men who have lived too long in the tropics. Sunk in puffy pillows of flesh, the black-coffee eyes had an expression both wicked and weary, a sinner grown bored of sin. ‘We’re in the Babylon of the Western Hemisphere, for Heaven’s sake. Let the man wallow a bit in its fleshpots and spend your Aunt Elodie’s money. It’s what he’s good at, God knows.’
His Dear Gerry opened his mouth to retort, but Lieutenant Shaw loafed over to them, spat at, and missed, the cuspidor, and pushed his sorry hat back on his straggly mane of greasy ditchwater hair. ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir,’ he addressed the young man. ‘You wouldn’t be Viscount Foxford, now, would you?’
The fat man produced a quizzing-glass from the pocket of the outermost of his several stylish waistcoats and held it up, blinking at Shaw through it with feigned amazement. ‘Good Lord, it’s an actual keelboatman! A bona fide Salt River Roarer . . . You must permit me to shake your hand, sir. I have seen your spiritual brethren in a dozen saloons since our arrival in this astonishing town and I confess I have been far too fearful of violence to beg the favor—’
The young man stepped quickly forward. ‘Please, sir, don’t pay any heed to my uncle. He doesn’t mean to give offense.’
‘None taken.’ Shaw extended his hand. ‘’T’ain’t often a feller can gratify the honest wishes of a fellow-creature with so little trouble. Though I do doubt,’ he added, catching the older man’s dark eyes with his pale ones, ‘when it comes down to it, there’s much you’re too fearful of violence to go after. My name is Abishag Shaw, sir, of the New Orleans City Guard. I trust I have the pleasure of shakin’ the hand of Mr Diogenes Stuart, of His Majesty’s Foreign Service?’
Stuart widened his eyes in a comical double-take, but the young man Gerry said quickly, ‘The City Guard? Have you heard from our friend Mr Derryhick?’
‘I have,’ said Shaw. ‘Maybe we best go sit someplace less public? The news ain’t good.’
>
THREE
Every window in the Blue Suite had been thrown open in a vain – and ill-advised – attempt to mitigate the tropical heat. It was a mistake Europeans generally only made once. Lord Foxford said, ‘Faugh!’ as he opened the door of the parlor, closely followed by Diogenes Stuart, and strode across the room to close them; the lean man hunched over papers at the parlor’s desk warned peevishly, ‘You’ll find the heat beyond endurance if you do that, My Lord.’
‘I find the stench beyond endurance.’ Foxford tried to thrust aside the long, gauzy shams and became entangled in them; his struggles liberated a couple of enormous horseflies, which the lightweight veils had so far blocked from the parlor, and the insects roared in, banging noisily at the ceiling.
‘Now see what you’ve done!’ The man rose from the desk, long-limbed, stooped and elderly in a rusty black cutaway and a neck-cloth that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a portrait of America’s Founding Fathers. ‘I’ve spoken to the management and sent a note complaining to the owner of that pestilential establishment.’ He jerked a hand toward the window. ‘No wonder people die in this city . . . Well, don’t just stand there, boy,’ he added, catching sight of January. ‘Do something about those damnable flies! And you, Regnier –’ he pronounced the Assistant Manager’s name Reg-ner, as if the French invented their pronunciations out of a malicious desire to trip up English tongues – ‘did I not request that we weren’t to be troubled by employees of the hotel? As long as we’re paying first-class prices—’
‘Mr Droudge –’ the Viscount extricated himself from the curtain – ‘this is Lieutenant Shaw, of the New Orleans City Guard, and Mr January. They say they have news of Patrick.’
January remained in the parlor doorway when Shaw broke the news of Patrick Derryhick’s death. He kept his eyes on the elder Stuart’s face, and noted the flattening of the lips, the way the chin came forward and the eyes narrowed for one instant before the man put on a more appropriate expression of shock to match Lord Foxford’s anguished cry of ‘Good God!’. Foxford pressed a hand to his mouth.
Dead and Buried Page 2