‘I’ve never seen coyotes dig down this deep,’ January agreed. He scrambled up out of the grave, holding down his hand for the shovels, and then to drag the smaller man up. The waning moon had passed its zenith. In another three or four hours, he calculated, it would be dawn. His back and shoulders felt as if he’d been beaten with a hoe-handle, and the thought of getting up before sunrise to investigate Witch Cave Canyon made him want to scream and bury his head in a cotton-sack.
But he made himself lay lengths of rope around the wrapped form of Mr Hookwire (may he rot in Hell) and pray over him, translating what he knew of the Mass for the Dead. ‘Our help is in the name of the Lord who made Heaven and Earth … May Almighty God be merciful to thee, and forgiving thee thy sins, bring thee to life everlasting … Thou, O God, will turn again, and bring us to life, and Thy people will rejoice with Thee …’
‘Them’s Catholic prayers?’ asked Noah, when they had lowered Mr Hookwire – whoever the hell he was, whatever the hell he’d been doing in Texas, however the hell he’d actually died – into his nameless grave. January had placed the detached hand in the folds of the old saddle blanket, leaving it wrapped in his bandana. I’ll buy another bandana …
‘That’s them.’
‘They don’t sound so bad.’
‘They’re not.’
Putting the dirt back into the hole took less time than taking it out, but each shovelful, now, was like a red-hot knitting-needle jabbed into January’s back.
Noah went on thoughtfully, ‘Anybody can steal a shawl an’ a pistol, you know. M’am Valentina had about four pistols – Ortega was teachin’ her how to handle a wheel-gun. She kept ’em all on the top shelf of her armoire. An’ anybody coulda made an appointment with Marse Vincent, to meet him in the orchard.’
He shrugged. ‘She have reason to kill him? Depends on how you feel about gettin’ hit by your husband, or havin’ him turn off your servants, or buy a house for another woman in town. M’am Valentina’s a proud woman, a ranchero’s daughter from Mexico – you say your master’s a friend of her daddy? Most of this land by rights is hers. Depends on how you feel about the promises a man makes to his wife.
‘Anybody else have reason to kill him?’ Noah cocked an eyebrow at January, and stomped the mound of loose earth above the grave. ‘Hell, white folks kill each other in Texas all the time.’
Returning at last to the house, January washed himself first in the courtyard pump, then, more thoroughly, in the laundry-room (where it was warmer and where lukewarm water could be dipped from the copper). Barefoot and damp, he stole through the kitchen, the dining-room, and the big central hall, and thence up the backstairs (tripping again on the loose step) and into the long rear gallery – unheated and with its barred windows open into the night – where his pallet lay unrolled, just outside the guest-room where Hannibal lay.
Softly he opened that door, and saw his friend, barely a suggestion of a skeleton form beneath a pile of striped trade-blankets, in the thin slats of moonlight that leaked through the shutters. Closing the door, January stripped to his shirt, then paused to look out the gallery windows to the dim shape of the orchard, visible as a dark tangle in the moonlight. He could see the burying-ground, the final embers burning to extinction in the cressets. The dark rectangle of Gervase Hookwire’s grave.
A middle-aged, chubby, bald man in a gray frock coat and spectacles, clinging to the rail of the schooner Rosabel with one hand and clutching his satchel to his bosom with the other. January had not spoken a word to him, had barely noticed him, save to wonder why his appearance on the deck had caused Hannibal to vanish so precipitously below. The Countess Mazzini always called him Gerry …
Buried by strangers, in a foreign land.
Virgin Mary, Mother of us all, bless him in his stranger’s grave. Whoever he was, whyever he came into this country. Give him rest.
He lay down on his pallet, which was no more than a tick stuffed with cotton flocking and covered with two trade blankets. It was warmer and more comfortable than the bedrolls he’d occupied on the ride from Houston to Austin. He knew that many planters still, in this day and age, had their valets unroll such pallets in their bedrooms, as a matter of course, and sleep beside their beds on the floor like dogs.
I suppose it beats getting out of your blankets on a cold night to look for the chamber pot …
His back and shoulders had begun to stiffen and he knew he’d be in agony when he woke in the morning – far too soon, now …
Movement at the door which led into the main hall, from the gallery where he lay. For a moment he saw her, standing in the half-open French doors, the gleam of her spectacles catching the moonlight as she gazed at him.
Though he couldn’t see her expression, January felt the hair on his scalp creep. In her black dress, the only things visible were her thin face with its shiny round lenses, the fingers of her lace-mitted hands.
Watching him.
Trying to understand something of an alien species, a creature she feared? Trying to figure out how to negotiate with some strange and terrible creature, as she saw her sister and other women negotiate, manipulate, control?
Or … What?
She stood there in the doorway for perhaps five minutes, silent as a ghost not yet dead, nearly invisible in the darkness. Just looking.
Then she turned away. He didn’t even hear her footsteps as she left.
After what seemed like a long time, he heard the rattle of the well-chains near the corrals, and the muffled hoof-beats of the night-riders coming in. Birds in the orchards cried their territories, answering the crowing of Juana’s chickens. Someone was singing a corrido about a desolate lover and a crow. The smell of pre-dawn kitchen fires gritted in the air.
FIFTEEN
Getting Hannibal Sefton out of bed, upon those occasions on their travels when it became necessary to do so, was not, January reflected, markedly more difficult now that he was sober than it had been in the days when the fiddler had lived on a steady diet of laudanum and sherry. Rose said it was the Irish in him, and wisely scheduled his lessons to her scholars in music and Greek for late in the afternoons.
January took the precaution of stealing down to the kitchen and trading gossip with the cook for a cup of coffee. TA – a man almost as tall as himself and vastly heavier – had heard all about the dead stranger and was gratified to get the details of his discovery (‘You remember to toss that hand into the grave ’fore you filled it up?’ ‘That I did …’), and generously offered the shards of two broken jars, to bury in the loose earth around the stranger’s grave to keep the witches away.
(‘What’s TA for?’ ‘Titus Andronicus. Used to be just Titus, but my old marse, he stuck on the other. Said it was a guy famous for his cookin’.’)
Hannibal groaned and struggled when January woke him, and, sitting up in bed, coughed like a dying horse for about five minutes, his long hair draggling in his eyes. January listened with the ears of a physician and a friend, torn between genuine concern for a man who was dear to him and genuine concern for his own safety. Though Hannibal’s health was better these days, he knew that no one ever really recovered from consumption of the lungs.
Pneumonia would finish him. January knew that, as surely as he knew his name.
And were Valentina in fact arrested for her husband’s murder, no matter how temporarily, it would be a long way to Galveston for a black man on the run.
First things first. Hookwire’s murder may have nothing to do with the person who killed Vin Taggart …
And pigs may fly.
Gamely, Hannibal downed the coffee and dressed, in his threadbare coat and long, elaborately-wrapped cravat, such as dandies had worn in Beau Brummell’s day, his graying hair queued in a tail down his back. He followed January down the stairs and out into the cindery gray of a cold pre-dawn. In fact, as Valentina had said, it was an easy matter to get their horses from the corral, their saddles from the tack-shed, and ride out without anyone being much t
he wiser, with the exception of Valentina, who came hurrying from the house wrapped in a long cloak and a manga – an embroidered rain-cape, rather like a large and heavy shawl. Her soft, fair curls were hastily pinned up and January guessed that she wore little more than a night-rail and dressing-gown beneath the cloak. Enough to give Aunt Alicia a seizure.
‘Where are you going?’ Her eyes had a wildness to them, like a hunted deer.
‘Witch Cave Canyon,’ returned January soothingly. ‘The man we found wasn’t killed by the Comanche – I’ll explain to you when we get back – and I want to find his things.’
He saw her eyes go to the back of his saddle, and then to Hannibal’s. Noting the lanterns, the coil of rope quietly pilfered from a tack-shed. Looking, he guessed, for saddlebags, which would have told her they were running away and deserting her. As others had, he thought, leaving her alone …
Gently, he removed the hand she’d laid on his sleeve. ‘We’ll be back,’ he promised. ‘Within a few hours, I hope. Don’t tell anyone you’ve seen us, or where we’ve gone. I don’t trust your brother-in-law and I don’t trust his men.’
She stepped back, trying to put a brave front on herself, but he could see the fear in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry—’
He shook his head. ‘We’ll get you out of this, madame. But let everyone go on thinking the man we buried last night was killed by the Comanche. Let everyone think we think so, too. See if you can get word to your Father Monastario, that we’d like to meet with him, and hear what he may know of all this.’ (And have a look at him, to see if he is young and handsome …) ‘Now don’t hold us up.’ He stepped up into the saddle, and Hannibal, too, mounted with a light sureness that belied his bedraggled appearance.
‘He feels each limb with wonted vigor light,’ proclaimed the fiddler, with an extravagant salute. ‘His beating bosom claimed the promis’d fight!’
They headed off, at a hand-gallop, for the hills.
At least, thought January, we won’t have to be worried about the Comanche ourselves.
Yet he kept glancing over his shoulders, and around him, at the stands of oak, and the long grasses of the prairies through which they rode. In the pocket of his jacket he carried the list Valentina had written out for Hannibal, of who could be trusted, and under Eli Creed she had written, Came to work in October when Mdre Taggart insisted white vaqueros. Obeys Francis rather than me.
Does Francis trust him? he wondered. Enough to make him accomplice to murder?
Somehow he couldn’t see it. Or was it in fact the other way around? Was Francis Creed’s minion?
And as he rode – trying to make sense of landmarks he’d only seen once, going the other direction, with night coming on – his mind counted and shuffled dates and times.
Sixty miles to San Antonio. If Sheriff Quigley started riding Wednesday night when he left here, he’d reach the old Spanish town this morning. How long to find his nationalist judge? What if the man had left town? How long do we have then?
How long before Francis finishes forging Vin Taggart’s will, if that’s what he’s doing? How good a forger is Francis? Surely Valentina has samples of her husband’s handwriting. Is there anyone in Austin who knows enough about handwriting to credibly dispute it?
Cattle raised their heads from the shoulder-high prairie grass, horns like the bizarre limbs of trees. A rabbit bolted in panic from the approach of the hooves.
A list of people he needed to talk to: Father Monastario, Ortega, Vin Taggart’s banker (would that be Stanway? A job for Hannibal …)
Taggart’s mistress, if possible.
No time, he thought. No time.
Vin Taggart’s family arrives from Virginia in October. In October also, Taggart turns his back on his long-professed hopes for Texas as a free nation and joins forces with Pollack, a man he formerly hated. Likewise in October, Taggart forbids his Catholic wife to ride into Austin on Sundays to hear Mass, but turns a blind eye on her Monday-morning rendezvous with the priest until April. How are these things related?
Was Valentina in fact Ortega’s mistress?
Was she Father Monastario’s?
Where is Ortega now?
He remembered the shape of the oak, where the coyote had first appeared. Found the original cave without trouble. Hannibal remained down on the canyon floor with the horses, where the remains of an old road made the ground level by the stream. January didn’t like the way the fiddler’s dark brows stood out on a face still chalky with exhaustion, and in any case his chief job, really, was to make sure January didn’t encounter anyone who thought he could get away with kidnapping a black man to sell.
He thought again of what he’d said yesterday, about the size of Perdition, and the fewness of the men tasked with keeping ‘outsiders’ away. Surely Comancheros, bandits, and slave-stealers would know this. Would guess that one only had to ride north through Comanche country, or come up stealthily, one at a time, through the cotton lands along the river.
Gideon Pollack would know this, too.
Yet Gervase Hookwire – last seen alive on the deck of the Rosabel, clutching his satchel to his chest on the eighth of April – had died, probably in this canyon, eleven days later – Easter Day. Eight days after Vin Taggart had ordered his men to keep all outsiders off his land. He had trouble picturing that tubby, soft-handed little man, blinking behind his spectacles, riding north through Comanche country to come down into Perdition land from the north-west.
What the hell was in his satchel?
Did Taggart know he was here?
Is this a part of Taggart’s murder? Am I looking at two crimes, or one?
Enough time had passed between Hookwire’s death and the discovery of his body, that January couldn’t find tracks or traces in the talus-slope beneath the cave. From his satchel he took Rose’s spyglass, and from the cave’s mouth, scanned the eastern wall of the canyon opposite him. Then he scrambled down a little distance to get a view of the western canyon to the left, upstream of where he stood. Even for a man of his own great strength, he wouldn’t have welcomed the chore of bearing a dead man’s body any great distance through the thick growth of oak and juniper that choked the stream-bed.
Not Francis. Or either of the women.
Well, he reconsidered, Madrecita, maybe. Or maybe if Hookwire had been a smaller man.
Creed would certainly know the canyon well enough to get a man from one cave to another. Following whose orders?
There was a sort of a trail along the top of the talus slope, above the thickness of the trees. January worked his way upstream for a distance, and he thought he could have carried a body along it if he had to. Down below, he could glimpse the rusty green of Hannibal’s coat, as the fiddler followed with the horses along the old track. The cliff bulged, and the slope descended; he saw a small cave some eight feet above him. Though he was fairly sure nobody could have got a body down from there (And what would Hookwire be doing up there to begin with?), he scrambled up to check.
Nothing.
What would Hookwire be doing up here? The thought re-phrased itself again: what would he be doing on Perdition in the first place?
Two crimes or one?
Slithering down to the top of the talus was ten times more difficult than climbing up, and the rock debris clattered and slipped beneath his boots. Somewhere close by he heard the dry, deadly buzz of a rattlesnake, but couldn’t see where it hid. Above the canyon rim, full light had come into the sky. Everybody on Perdition would know by this time that he and Hannibal had ridden out someplace.
He knew the second cave he saw was the one he wanted, by the green glitter of flies that still hummed around its mouth. Not nearly as bad as the swarms that had attended Hookwire’s mutilated corpse, but enough to be noticed. This cave-mouth was larger, and lower down, tucked behind another shoulder of cliff. The cave, when January stepped into it, was higher than the others, and deep in its dark throat he could see the gray shapes of stalagmites and stalactites, such as he had en
countered in the south of France.
The flies were thicker there.
He scrambled down the slope to where Hannibal waited. ‘This is the place. Want to come up? I’d welcome a second pair of eyes.’
The fiddler tied the horses (‘I’m going to be very cross if someone comes along and steals them …’), removed the lantern, torches, and the coil of rope from behind his saddle, and scrambled up after January, panting like a bellows but shaking his head at the offer of assistance. In the opening of the cave January scratched a Lucifer-match from the tin tube of them that he always carried, and kindled both lantern and brands.
The green-black bodies of the flies glittered eerily against the dark. As they walked toward the cluster of gray, melted-looking columns that half-screened the black interior from the cave’s outer chamber, January heard the scratch and scramble of small vermin – foxes? Weasels? – deeper in, and wrinkled his nose against the whiff of old garbage and stale human waste.
Gold eyes winked in the dark, close to the ground and resentful at the intrusion.
‘Here.’ The dark stain lay a few feet beyond the stalagmites. Flies hovered around it, drawn by the smell of it, soaked into the pebbles of the cave floor.
Several days old. Nearly black.
January lowered his torch, to better illuminate the stain. Hannibal stayed behind him, aware at first sight – as was January – of the cryptic tangle of scratches, gouges, and scuffs on the gravel and sand.
‘Table there, it looks like,’ said January after a moment, studying the marks. ‘Those four little dints. He must have been sitting in a camp-chair. See where the legs scraped.’
The fiddler murmured, ‘Must have turned over when he was – um – interrupted. Look there near that crack in the wall …’
January looked, and then, very carefully, stepped to pick up the object Hannibal had seen.
There were two of them, actually …
‘Brings back my schoolroom days,’ mused Hannibal. ‘My tutor was an absolute fanatic about cutting them. He’d only use – and would only permit me to use – swan-feathers, and only the first three on the wing.’
Lady of Perdition Page 17