And Quennell, and every other libre in town, thought the same.
So he only said, ‘And he came back to town when your father’s bank went under?’
‘Father had set me up in business already,’ the undertaker remembered. ‘Got me apprenticed; paid for my education, same as he’d paid to send Martin to school in Nashville. Father had a stroke when the bank failed; he died soon after. It was understood that I’d take care of Martin. Only, when Martin came back, he didn’t come to us. Wouldn’t write, wouldn’t visit. Not even on the Feast of All Saints would he come down to the cemetery and help clean up our grandpa’s grave.’
Silence had settled on the house, that deep abyss between midnight and the turn of the tide. Above their heads the gas jet hissed softly, and somewhere upstairs in the darkness a girl cried out softly in her sleep. In another two hours the Cathedral bells would ring for early Mass, and the long night would be done.
‘He found a family uptown – a white family, Americans – to board with; he told them he was white. He even turned Protestant.’ Quennell’s face twitched at the mention of that heretical faith. ‘They didn’t have to do with the downtown folks of course. Not many Americans do even now. He only came to us, finally, when he needed more money. I can take care of the books myself, but Maman begged me to give him something, and he wouldn’t just take help for free. Please believe that,’ added the undertaker. ‘Please believe that, Janvier. He never stole from me.’
That you know of.
‘I’d never have let Maman talk me into putting him up to look after the Society’s books if I’d had the slightest doubt of him.’
January searched his face for a moment, meeting in his eyes the question: was it the Burial Society Board of Directors that asked you to take a job here? To watch him, learn where he was getting the money he was spending? January was afraid Quennell would ask him this out loud – and that he’d be obliged to reply – but, in the end, the undertaker did not, and the silence returned. From the tiny bedroom Corette’s voice could be heard, whispering the broken thread of a lullaby:
‘By an’ by, by an’ by, gonna lay down easy by an’ by . . .’
Candlelight and sorrow erased the hue of her skin, and that of the young man on the bed, leaving only the terrible pietà of every woman who finds herself called suddenly to bury her son.
‘How long?’ asked Quennell at last, and January shook his head.
‘Could be hours. Might be days.’ He glanced along the hall to the parlor, where the Countess could be heard moving about, her skirts a silver taffeta rustle against Hughie’s snores. ‘She’ll want him moved.’
‘Of course.’ Everyone had their living to make. In Quennell’s voice was the echo of a thousand other madames, saloon-keepers, boarding-house owners, hotel managers: I don’t want to sound heartless, but you’ll need to get him – or her – out of here . . .
The first school Rose had run had not survived the death of four of her students in the yellow fever epidemic of ’34.
Still neither man made a move. My business partner, Schurtz had called Martin, and had treated him like a dog.
Yet he had offered what Martin had always wanted. To get as far away from New Orleans, and his family, as it is possible to get. To outrun the slightest whisper of rumor, about what and who he was.
Wonderingly, he said, ‘I can see why I never knew – I was gone for nearly sixteen years – but your brother’s scheme was good, if it fooled my mother.’
Quennell laughed, a single bitter sniff. ‘Not so hard. Nobody uptown knew the Quennells, so there was no chance anyone would learn Father’s sons by his true wife weren’t the right ages to be Martin. The white Madame wasn’t about to mention it to anyone: had Noah been an American, she would have been proud to drown. The only thing anyone knew of us uptown was that Father had been a banker . . . and white. The Americans didn’t find it hard to believe Martin when he said, “I want to be American and not French,” instead of, “I want to be white and not black.” It’s done all the time.’
A sound in the parlor – a shadow against the light – drew January’s eyes in that direction again, where the Countess sat beside the lamp in the parlor, her black curls taken down, a newspaper in her hands but her eyes lost in distance.
Softly, January said, ‘That’s true.’
At four, January returned to the tiny bedroom and found Martin Quennell’s heartbeat a little stronger, his breathing the deeper rhythm of normal sleep. As he listened with a stethoscope, felt those slender wrists, he heard the Countess enter behind him and help Madame Quennell to stand. ‘I think he can be moved, Madame,’ he said, rising. ‘Gently and carefully. As soon as it grows light—’
‘No,’ said Madame Quennell urgently. ‘No, now. Before anyone can see.’
‘Corette,’ murmured the Countess. ‘It’s Sunday. There is time.’
The mother shook her head, impatient with this stupidity, and in her beautiful hazel eyes January saw the unreasoning single-mindedness that the grieving sometimes adopt to defend against the unthinkable. ‘Not you, Didi,’ she said. ‘But the people at his lodging house! McPhearson’s is a respectable place, a residential hotel! What are they going to think, if they see me, and Beau here, take him in—’
‘Maman,’ protested Quennell, ‘we’re taking him to the house—’
‘Never!’ She swung around on her son. ‘What will M’sieu Schurtz say when it gets around that we took Martin in? They’ll guess—’
‘Maman, they won’t guess—’
‘They will!’ she insisted. ‘Beau, Beau, we cannot spoil Martin’s chances! Not after all he has worked, all he has tried . . .’ She gripped her elder son’s lapels, almost shook him, as if the physical jolt would illuminate his mind to see things as she did. ‘We have the money; we must send him a nurse, an American. Beau, please!’
He opened his mouth to snap at her – Maman, he’s DYING! – and could not. With the look on his face that the Good Son must have worn during the feast for the Prodigal’s return, he turned on his heel and strode down the hall and out through the kitchen to re-harness his horse.
After a few minutes, January followed, skirting the parlor and pausing there only long enough to collect ink and paper from the little secretaire in the corner, then going on to the kitchen. The smell of coffee barely masked the fug of stale smoke, incense, blood, and spilled liquor. Auntie Saba and her children wouldn’t arrive until after church. He lit two or three kitchen candles and sat down to write out instructions, in English, for the American nurse, listening as he did so to the voices of the two women behind him in the hall outside the downstairs bedroom door, the soft blur of Creole French.
In time, Quennell came back in. January held up a finger, staying him on his way through; beckoned him over. ‘Will you do something for me?’
The undertaker stood for a moment, looking down at him, guessing what it was going to be. But there was nothing to be said. If the other members of the board had gone so far as to place a spy in the Countess’s house because Martin had been spending money he should not have had, it was clear where he had to be getting it. Quennell was an honest man. He might have looked aside from his brother’s doings, rather than upset their mother, when he merely suspected that Martin dipped from time to time into the bank account of his own business.
The funds of the FTFCMBS were another matter.
‘Tomorrow I’m going to bring a friend to your house,’ said January. ‘A white man, a lawyer.’ Or a white man who happened to have a lawyer’s business card in his pocket, anyway. ‘I want you to write out an authorization for him to go through your brother’s papers and effects. I’m pretty certain your mother won’t allow me to care for Martin – she may not even permit you to visit him, or visit him herself, for fear of having someone “suspect”. And we need the contents of his desk.’
‘All right.’
‘Get Martin to sign the authorization if you can, but I doubt he’ll be able to.’
&nb
sp; ‘No,’ said Quennell. ‘I know the look, and I see it in his face. And you’re right.’ He pushed up his spectacles again to rub his eyes. ‘Even she won’t go to him once he’s back at McPhearson’s.’ January recognized the name of the small residential hotel on Dryades Street, almost to the city limits – as far uptown as one could get and still be able to walk to work at the Mississippi and Balize. Expensive, but of course a man who was presenting himself as an up-and-coming speculator in city lots couldn’t be seen, by the wealthy, to be living in a boarding house. ‘Nothing must “spoil his chances”. Even now.’
‘Let her have her comfort,’ said January. ‘In a week it will be as much a part of the past as George Washington.’
Quennell nodded. He had comforted half the bereaved of the libres in the French Town: husbands who had lost wives untimely, women left suddenly without the spouses of forty years. Children who had closed their parents’ eyes, parents who had closed their children’s. Not all of those partings had been free of bitterness. It was now his turn.
Madame Quennell was saying softly, ‘Thank you, Didi. Beyond what I can say—’
‘It’s nothing, Corette. Truly.’ The two women embraced in the cloying dark. ‘I may be in the business of sin, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a Christian woman. I’ll send Auntie Saba to McPhearson’s, as soon as it’s light, to look after Martin until a regular nurse can be found. You may not find one until Monday. She’s dark enough,’ the Countess added, when the other woman drew in breath to protest. ‘Nobody’s going to think she’s family. Not like if they saw you, or Beau, there. And I’ll send Hughie for Pere Eugenius—’
‘No!’ Corette Quennell caught her hand. ‘No, you can’t. Martin was always . . . He says that the Protestants uptown, they know that we here are Catholics. That even that may cause someone to suspect.’
‘Corette, you’d let him risk dying in sin, rather than—’
‘He’s not going to die!’ insisted Madame Quennell. ‘Don’t say that! And he – Didi, you know how people are. You know how the blankittes are in this town. They all know – they all watch – for who might be passe blanc . . . You’ve seen how they study each other’s hair and fingernails and the shapes of their noses. You’ve heard how they whisper, “Well, maybe this one is,” and, “Maybe that one’s been lying all along.” Didi, think. My son has a chance to escape, this one chance. Even a whisper, and of course M’sieu Schurtz would shout it all over town rather than have the other blankittes saying that he knew all along and didn’t speak . . . I can’t let anything spoil all he has worked for.’
The Countess regarded her with pity in her eyes but said only, ‘I understand.’
And as she called for Hughie – this woman who passed herself as Italian among American men who would hold a woman of color in contempt – January, standing in the kitchen doorway, was suddenly, and without warning, overwhelmed by the precise mental sensation of comprehension, as if he had been trying to decipher the images of a painting seen within a shuttered room, and someone had opened the window, letting in light.
Not Isobel and Stubbs – no melodramatic history of seduction and jealousy, no secret marriage or blows struck in frustrated rage – but Isobel and Foxford. She was with him that night. He knew it, as if he had stood, invisible, beside them and heard what the girl had told that ardent young man . . . The secret that Foxford was willing to risk death on the gallows, rather than reveal.
And he knew where the proof of his theory – of that secret – would be found.
And the thought of going there to seek it turned the blood to water in his veins.
EIGHTEEN
Hannibal said, ‘I can’t.’
Only the agony of two cracked ribs kept January from grabbing the fiddler by the arms and shaking him till his teeth rattled. Head throbbing with sleeplessness, body and bones a mass of pain from the events of the past thirty-six hours, he opened his mouth to shout, ‘For the love of God, why not?’ at him.
And closed it, the words unsaid. Understanding, from the cornered stillness in Hannibal’s ashen face, that there was probably only one thing in the world that would keep his friend from undertaking the journey upriver with him to keep him – by his impersonation of a white master – from being kidnapped by slave-stealers on the way . . .
And that this was it. Whatever this was.
That he would not – and could not – abandon the son of a woman he had not seen in seventeen years.
Through the open door of the Broadhorn’s attic, shouting drifted up from the yard. ‘Kill ’im, you fucken buzzard! Get after him! Get after him!’
A sudden roar of voices – and, above them, the frantic, furious skrakking of enraged roosters.
Sunday in the Swamp. Had January dragged Andrew Jackson’s daughter into one of the crib sheds with carnal intent, not a man would have taken his attention from the cockfight long enough to comment.
‘You’re sure Mademoiselle Deschamps isn’t in St Francisville?’ Hannibal asked, after he had waited in silence for words of anger that did not come. Under the threadbare linen of his shirt, his shoulders relaxed, and he tried to make his voice sound normal. ‘That’s only two days—’
‘Even if she is, I still have to go to Cloutierville,’ said January. ‘If I don’t find her, either at Beaux Herbes or Bayou Lente, I’ll visit the Deschamps aunts on the way back. But I’d bet money against it, if I had any.’
‘What?’ Hannibal folded shut Wolff’s Prologmenum ad Homerum and tucked it under the pillow of his bed. He’d been sitting, half-dressed, reading it when January had climbed the ladder to his attic, and he looked like he’d actually slept some, for the first time since the funeral. ‘The Countess doesn’t pay you?’
‘The Countess,’ said January drily, ‘is going to have to be forcibly restrained when she gets my note telling her I’m leaving New Orleans tomorrow morning and will be gone for twelve days. I shouldn’t be much longer than that.’
Hannibal started to speak, then didn’t. And what, after all, January reflected, could he say, after ‘I can’t’? Without a white ‘master’ to make a fuss if his ‘slave’ disappeared, there was every chance that he, January, might not come back at all from a journey into cotton country.
In New Orleans, Benjamin January was known to hundreds of men and women, white and black. Should he disappear one day – and many free black men did – he would be quickly sought, and the first place his friends would look would be in places like Irvin and Frye’s. Should anyone find him there – perhaps semi-conscious and stupefied by opium – Lieutenant Shaw, or January’s banker Mr Granville, or the fencing master Augustus Mayerling, or Hannibal himself, or any of a number of other white male friends, stood ready to testify in the local court that yes, Benjamin January was a free man.
In the new cotton plantations of Missouri and Mississippi, a black man who might happen to be struck over the head while walking down the street – and wake up in a slave-jail with his freedom papers missing – would learn very quickly why only white men served on juries.
The thought of leaving the French Town these days made him nervous. The thought of travel upriver – as he had traveled at the beginning of that summer, under Hannibal’s protective aegis – turned him cold with dread.
Unprotected, it was unthinkable.
But understanding, as he now understood, what secret it was that Viscount Foxford was willing to let himself be hanged to protect, he knew he could not do otherwise.
At last Hannibal said again, ‘I’m sorry.’
January put a hand on his thin shoulder. ‘It’s all right. I’ll manage. Come to dinner.’
‘Rose will poison me.’
‘She isn’t a good enough cook,’ January reassured him, and Hannibal laughed shakily. ‘And we won’t tell her until afterwards that you’re staying in town.’
Down in the yard, the shouting changed its note; the cries of, ‘Gouge him!’ and the shrill screams of whores – who in general took little interest in cock
fights – told him that combat had progressed from the roosters to their owners.
‘Two things I want you to do while I’m gone,’ he went on as Hannibal got to his feet and ambled around the attic in his shirtsleeves finding his razor and shaving mug, his comb and the least threadbare of his cravats. ‘Three things,’ January amended. ‘First: you’re going to take my place at the Countess’s.’
‘She’ll kill me,’ protested Hannibal.
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing! Well, nothing to speak of . . .’
‘I’ll write you a letter of introduction,’ said January patiently, ‘going bond that you will neither drink, nor engage in card games with customers, nor lay so much as a fingertip upon any of the girls. You owe me that – and I can’t leave her with no one to play tomorrow night.’
‘My salvation, I suppose,’ sighed Hannibal. ‘Though I never played cards with the customers. But, considerations of my safety aside, I’m not sure it will be such a good idea, as I told Martin Quennell yesterday in the lobby of the Mississippi and Balize Bank that I was Thomas Dawes of Mobile.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said January. ‘In that conversation, you didn’t manage to bring up the subject of Stubbs’s quarrel with Derryhick, did you?’
The fiddler shook his head. ‘I’m to meet him tomorrow evening at Davis’s. Given Trinchen’s illness, I can’t imagine the man would be cad enough visit the Countess’s establishment—’
‘Unless Jacob Schurtz took it into his head to go there,’ said January, as he descended behind Hannibal down the rickety stairs. ‘In which case Martin would follow – and run the risk of being gutted by Nenchen, the minute everyone’s back was turned because of a fight. Which is,’ he went on, as Hannibal turned, appalled, at the bottom, ‘precisely what happened last night. He’s dying.’
‘Dear God—’ By the look on Hannibal’s face, January could tell that, in the course of his checkered career, the fiddler had seen men die of lacerated gut-wounds before.
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