Without change of expression, Hannibal followed suite.
It was now Droudge’s turn to explain at length. Gesturing with his long arms, pointing to the ledger on the table. Grave-faced, shaking his head. Hannibal nodded, put in an objection, which the business manager seemed perfectly willing to elaborate upon. Stalling for time, as Shaw had done when first he and January had encountered the traveling Englishmen in those very rooms. This Hannibal had also said he would do.
Droudge rose, walked to the window, and looked out, across at the dark coffin shop—
Calculating the location of Quennell’s handcart again? Making sure the windows of the little cottage were dark?
Droudge was still standing at the window when he shuddered, exactly as if someone had knifed him in the gut, though no one stood near. He caught at the window frame, half doubled-over . . .
And looked back over his shoulder in shock at Hannibal sitting quietly at the table, the empty wine glass in his hands and nothing in his eyes. Droudge staggered, groped for the bell on the table, which Hannibal moved unhurriedly out of the way. Droudge flung out his hands, moved his head drunkenly back and forth—
‘Fuck me!’ said Shaw and sprang to his feet.
‘Go,’ said January – and, indeed, the Lieutenant was halfway to the door. Davis, on his heels, turned back as January got to his feet and staggered, catching the back of his chair as a wave of renewed agony shot through his leg. ‘I’ll be there in—’
Davis came back to him, offered a shoulder to lean on. He whispered, ‘Dear God,’ shocked horror in his voice. ‘He must have been trying to poison Sefton – dear God! But why? And how did Sefton know?’
‘He didn’t,’ lied January, as Shaw’s boots clattered down the stairs. ‘He knew Droudge, and he had his suspicions—’
‘But for God’s sake, why? Sefton’s the most harmless man on the face of the earth.’
January only shook his head. As Davis was helping him toward the door, he glanced back over his shoulder, in time to see Hannibal open the desk drawer, remove an envelope, and read its contents. Then he went to the gas jet on the wall to touch a corner of that single sheet of paper to the flame, and he held it between thumb and forefinger to watch it burn.
Droudge was dead by the time January reached the hotel room.
THIRTY
Hannibal stayed sober long enough to swear an affidavit as to the events of the evening: that he’d gone to Caius Droudge’s room because he had been a friend of Patrick Derryhick, recently deceased; that he’d never trusted Droudge, who had hated him on account of words that had passed between them eighteen years ago when he’d accused the man of cheating on the account books of Viscount Foxford, the father of his friend, the Honorable Alexander Stuart, whose son – the current Viscount – had come down suspiciously ill in the Cabildo after receiving food there from Droudge two days before. No, he’d had no reason to suspect that the wine was poisoned. He simply hadn’t trusted anything the man had touched and had just been making sure.
Did ‘just making sure’ include arranging for observation by two witnesses? inquired Captain Tremouille of the City Guards, present at the questioning and not pleased at having been called from dinner with his wife’s cousins back to the Cabildo to hear the details of yet another foreigner perishing in the Blue Suite of the Iberville Hotel.
‘If the bastard poisoned me, I wanted to make sure he swung for it,’ Hannibal replied.
The affidavit given, he disappeared, presumably – reflected January – to get drunk and remain drunk until the Viscount Foxford was tried, acquitted, married, and had left town with his bride.
January feared that the bullet graze on his leg would turn feverish and prevent him, after all, from going with his family to the cemetery on the following day. But after ten or eleven hours’ sleep (‘Don’t expect me to fetch you your breakfast, M’sieu, since you seem perfectly willing to run about at all hours on your feet,’ had said Rose), he had woken feeling much better. After examining the wound and changing the dressing, he had taken up his stick and limped the three-quarters of a mile to the cemetery, assisted by various of his neighbors who had returned to their houses in quest of trowels or lemonade or napkins or parasols forgotten earlier in the day. With the change to autumn weather the ground had dried, and wherever there was a little clear space among the tombs, families had set up their picnic blankets and opened wicker baskets. Friends and neighbors greeted him with pleasure and pointed out where his mother and Dominique could be found, and where Rose was, over near the FTFCMBS tomb in the section of the cemetery reserved to the gens du couleur, presiding over a basket of ginger beer.
Men climbed ladders to daub whitewash on rain-faded plaster; women set out gourds of jambalaya and ‘dirty rice’. Older children dug industriously at the tufts of resurrection-fern that had sprouted between the soft bricks of the tombs; younger ones played hide-and-seek, their squeals of laughter a comfort to the dead – a reminder that life does go on. Old Auntie Zozo had brought her coffee urn; marchandes walked about selling flowers wrought of jet beads and wire – immortelles – to leave in the vases that decorated the tombs. Somewhere, someone was playing a guitar.
The summer heat was gone. With the sadness of autumn, the air held a cool freshness. It was generally around the time of this commemoration of the dead that New Orleans came back to life: the day when the different sides of families – French Creole, African Creole, Spanish Creole – met in their common task and remembered that blood is indeed thicker than the water of shed tears.
The day – as Hannibal had said – that those dead and buried were thought to come back and assist the ones they loved.
‘Benjamin, p’tit, are you sure you should be on your feet?’ Dominique rustled over to him in a delicious frou-frou of yellow batiste.
‘Of course he’s sure,’ retorted Rose, belying the dryness of her tone by bringing up a bench for him into the shade of the Society tomb. ‘He’s certain, if he falls over in a faint, someone can be found to drag him home.’
He mimed a kiss at her. Serious-faced young Alice Truxton, the only one of the schoolgirls who’d remained by the little trestle table set out nearby, brought him over callas, on a bit of newspaper, and a bottle of lemonade. Rose returned his kiss with her quicksilver smile. The girl Alice still looked like she was working to avoid touching anything Catholic, but January had to grin inwardly as she stared around her at the children playing tag among the tombs, at the bright-colored tignons of the women worked up into elaborate points, at old Aunt Titine the gumbo lady, at the men singing out calls and responses from tomb to tomb as they worked.
The libres occupied only a corner of the St Louis Cemetery, and throughout the rest of that maze of dead-houses, the Creole French and Creole Spanish – of pure blood, though sometimes six generations removed from European soil – set out picnics of their own. The hard chill had laid much of the graveyard stink to rest, and what was left of it was masked by the smell of charcoal braziers keeping warm pots of jambalaya and plates of meat pies, and by the odors of coffee and pralines and oysters. Rose and the Widow Levesque turned with exclamations of delight to greet the sisters and brother-in-law of St-Denis Janvier, and they brought them over to say hello to January where he sat in the shade. ‘All you need is a scepter and a crown, Ben,’ joked one of Rose’s white uncles, burlesquing a deep bow to him, and January drew himself up with kinglike mien.
‘Darling!’ he heard the voice of Chlöe Viellard – the white wife of Dominique’s protector – and shook his head as the two women embraced. ‘Please tell me you made your wonderful beignets, cher . . .’ Her husband’s tiny octoroon daughter toddled over to grip M’am Chlöe’s skirt. ‘Henri’s gone off to vote – for Daniel Webster of all people . . .’
It was Election Day. In-between their work of cleaning the tombs in their own section of the cemetery, the white men were coming and going, casting their votes at the Cabildo and coming back smelling of free Democratic Party rum.
‘White folks,’ sniffed January’s mother, cocking a disapproving eye at him. ‘He goes off and takes care of this white Lordship’s troubles, but after all this, does he find the man that snatched poor Rameses Ramilles’s body?’
‘In fact, I did, Maman,’ retorted January. ‘The man committed suicide last night, and good riddance to him. So there.’
‘Well,’ said his mother, ‘you didn’t bring the man to justice, now, did you?’
January sighed. ‘No, Maman.’ He knew better than to try to win any argument with his mother. ‘I fear you have raised a failure for a son.’
She patted his cheek and smiled, then went back to question the white side of the family about the safest investments in the upcoming year. In time, January got to his feet, and with the aid of his stick and his nephew Gabriel, limped to the tomb of Crowdie Passebon’s libre grandfather, where Liselle Ramilles’s children were playing and Madame Glasson – still draped in deepest mourning – was telling everyone how much she had suffered in the past month. ‘Far too much to even think about bringing my pralines, dearest, and besides I only have the strength to stay for just a moment . . .’ On her knee she held a plate piled with food sufficient to feed an army.
Across the way stood the FTFCMBS tomb, where Rameses Ramilles slept in his appointed narrow bed. Liselle herself, her skirt tucked up to her knees, was on a ladder, polishing the brass flower-holders before some other musician’s little resting place.
‘I don’t know how Liselle does it.’ Liselle’s mother shook her head. ‘She simply does not have my sensitivity . . .’
Down another aisle, among all those close-set brick houses of mortality, January glimpsed Beauvais Quennell, quietly painting whitewash on to a modest new bench of bricks, before which his mother – in mourning almost as profound as Madame Glasson’s – knelt in prayer.
Like it or not, Martin Quennell had come back to the French Town at last.
On Thursday, January’s leg was well enough to allow him to limp upstairs to the courtroom on the second floor of the old Presbytery building, and sit in the gallery – blacks not being permitted to testify – to watch Germanicus Stuart, Viscount Foxford, acquitted of the crime of murdering Patrick Derryhick. Judge Canonge – hook-nosed, grim-faced, and renowned through French Louisiana for his probity – admitted the evidence of Celestine Deschamps that her daughter Isobel, and her daughter’s maid, had been with His Lordship from eleven on the night of the sixth until almost two thirty in the morning.
January glanced across at Pierrette, seated a little apart from the other Deschamps house servants; at a guess, the judge had spoken to her in his office and had accepted her testimony. The state prosecutor did not inquire whether this meeting had taken place in the Deschamps parlor or in a doorway across the street, or whether Madame Deschamps had been awake at that hour. She was white, and that was what mattered.
Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard testified to the fact that evidence existed consistent with the murder having been done by Caius Droudge, the dead man’s traveling companion, who had poisoned himself in the Hotel Iberville on the night of the thirty-first . . . large quantities of arsenic, antimony, and powdered oleander having been found in the false bottom of his strongbox.
‘My God, I can’t believe it!’ gasped Foxford an hour later, breaking away from the congratulatory crowd outside the courtroom door to grasp January’s hand. He still looked ill, and shaky on his feet, and had visibly lost at least twenty pounds. His handsome face had been stripped of the beauty of being fortune’s favorite, but his eyes were radiant. An adult man’s, and not a god’s. ‘Madame –’ he bowed slightly toward Celestine Deschamps, who was deep in conversation with the British consul – ‘tells me she’s written Isobel . . . that Isobel will be here by the tenth . . .’
‘Got to marry her out of hand, m’boy,’ beamed Uncle Diogenes, clapping a hand on his nephew’s broad shoulder. ‘Have a dreadful journey home if you let it go till the end of the month. I’ll barely be able to swallow the wedding cake myself before rushing off to catch my ship.’
‘You’ll be returning to India, then, sir?’ inquired January politely, and the elderly diplomat nodded.
‘Lord, yes. Gets into your blood, the East – though, mind you,’ he added, with a glance across the hall at the slim young gentleman with oiled lovelocks who stood next to ‘Jones’, his stone-faced valet, ‘I would not have missed the journey for worlds. Not for worlds. Gerry, dear boy, I wanted to ask you if you might possibly advance me a little on my next quarter’s stipend, to ship some of the books I’ve bought . . .’
‘I can’t thank you enough, sir.’ Foxford pressed January’s hand again. ‘You’ll come to the wedding, surely? You and Mr Sefton – and, of course, your lovely wife.’
Pierrette came up then, in the company of a girl of fifteen or so, dark-haired and rather shy in fanciful billows of ribbon and ruffles, who had to be the younger sister, Marie-Amalie. Her sea-blue eyes, and the shape of her cheekbones, were an echo of Cadmus Rablé.
‘Going to be a bang-up affair,’ approved Uncle Diogenes, wicked dark eyes sparkling in pouches of fat. ‘Terrible shame about Derryhick, of course – and what a shocking affair that was, old Droudge popping off that way! – but, I must say, I’m glad Elodie’s money came back to the family in the end. Derryhick did the right thing there. Gerry’s taking him back home for burial, you know . . . as I suppose I’ll go home one day, what’s left of me, in a box . . . Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis . . . But damme, boy, you’re going to have to get a new rig if you’re to be wed before you’ve fattened up a trifle. Like a damned scarecrow. That poor girl won’t know you.’
‘I think, M’sieu,’ smiled Marie-Amalie, ‘that Isobel would know His Lordship anywhere.’ Foxford smiled too, and he brushed self-consciously at the fine-cut English coat that lay so baggy on his frame – in a way, January realized, that reminded him strongly of Hannibal.
The wedding was on the twelfth of November, with Louis Verron’s father giving the bride away, and Uncle Diogenes – accompanied by ‘Jones’ and his slender young new friend – sailed for India on the fourteenth. On the sixteenth, after the first rehearsal for The Elixir of Love, January went down to the now-teeming levee to see off the Viscount, the new Viscountess, her sister, the Viscount’s valet Mr Reeve, and Pierrette. Looking at that radiant young woman, standing by the rail, he wondered if Isobel, Lady Foxford, would dream of Louisiana. When the strong Mississippi current carried the York and Lancaster downriver, toward Balize and the sea, he turned his steps inland and made his way, through streets bustling with commerce and vice, back toward the Swamp.
Enquiries discreetly pursued at the back doors of various establishments – the Broadhorn, the Rough ‘n’ Ready, the Blackleg, the Turkey Buzzard – eventually brought him to Kate the Gouger’s bathhouse, where Kate greeted January with, ‘Thank God somebody finally come for him.’
January carried Hannibal back to the Broadhorn over his shoulder and put him to bed.
When he came back the following morning, Hannibal – greenish, haggard, unshaven and comprehensively sick – greeted him with, ‘Are they gone?’
‘You mean Gerry and Isobel?’
Hannibal nodded. His hand trembled a little as he reached for the black bottle on the floor next to his bed – by the smell of it, his favored concoction of opium and sherry – but he closed his fist on itself and let it be.
‘They’re gone.’ January set down Hannibal’s boots – which he’d collected from Kate’s on the way – and an earthenware jug of Auntie Zozo’s coffee, the steam of it drifting in the attic’s freezing dimness. ‘Gerry asked after you – asked if you would come to the wedding.’
Hannibal breathed out a short bitter laugh. ‘Wouldn’t that be a sight to behold? Enough to send the poor girl dashing back to Natchitoches—’
January said, ‘She wouldn’t have to know.’
Hannibal started to reply, then didn’t. Sat
for a time on the crumpled and sheetless mattress, meeting January’s gaze.
In time, he sighed and asked, ‘When did you guess?’
‘I think when you wouldn’t go to Natchitoches with me,’ said January. He found a couple of cups that were more or less clean, filled and handed one to his friend. ‘But it didn’t surprise me. I didn’t know for certain until Droudge tried to poison you – something he had no reason to do, if you were just one of Patrick’s old friends. The boy doesn’t look like you at all.’
‘No, thank God.’ Hannibal sipped from his cup, then held his hand over it to warm in the steam. ‘He takes after Philippa’s family – the lot of them must be descended from angels . . . God knows they act as if they’ve got pedigrees back to Eden. I couldn’t—’ He fell silent again. Then, ‘I’m glad Patrick looked after him.’ He passed his hand across his face, as if to wipe away the mold of years, and took another gingerly sip. ‘He said he would.’
‘Did he arrange to identify your “body”?’
The fiddler nodded. ‘As you’ve probably deduced, I wasn’t nearly as drunk as I seemed to be when I pitched off the Pont Neuf that night. Patrick went down earlier in the day and made sure there was a boat nearby. The current’s very strong there where it goes under the bridge.’
January said, ‘I know.’ That was where he’d thrown the trunk containing his wife’s clothing – his first wife, the beautiful Ayasha – after her death of the cholera. In dreams he often stood by that rail, looking down at the moonlit water sweeping past.
‘I wanted to leave her a note,’ said Hannibal. ‘To tell her I was sorry – to let her know how much I loved her. But, as she’d told me, my actions weren’t the acts of love. Nor, I suppose, would they have been, even if I’d known any way in God’s green world to stop. I knew before long she’d start hating me, and I didn’t – I couldn’t stand the thought of it. I don’t suppose Gerry spoke to you – mentioned to you – if she had remarried?’
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