Lady of Perdition

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Ecce cor meum quid gaudet. Whatever she’s looking for, let’s hope it’ll be of some use to us before Quigley and his Merrie Men turn up with a warrant. Incidentally,’ the fiddler added, ‘do you think – before Quigley and his Merrie Men do turn up – you and I could make enough of a diversion to permit the lovely Valentina to search the rooms of her mother-in-law and her aunt? I could have another go at Francis’s study – for all we know, there’s a letter there from the President of Mexico, offering a thousand gold pieces for Taggart’s murder, with nothing said about forged wills or lost mines or stealing shawls and pistols from Valentina’s room to make it look as if … What kind of horse was our quarry riding?’

  The two men were making the turn of the path to the back of the house and the corrals. Hannibal half-rose in his stirrups to get a better look.

  And January said, ‘Damn.’ He didn’t have to answer, though he recognized the big, sleek buckskin tied outside the courtyard gate.

  The men put their horses to a trot, and reached the gate in time to hear the shrill clamor of speech through the open doors of the house.

  ‘Oway! Oway!’ sobbed a beautiful contralto voice. ‘Mi oorpay arimay! Edday, anish’dvay – avhay ittypay, adylay, egopray, egopray!’

  Entering at Hannibal’s heels, January saw the gray-haired woman on her knees before a confused but concerned-looking Valentina, and a deeply disapproving Madrecita Taggart. Since the visitor was crying at the top of her lungs, Francis had been brought, limping, down the stairs, and Enoch stood in the doorway that led to the back gallery of the house.

  ‘What on earth is she saying?’ demanded Amelia Taggart. ‘Here, you, speak English!’ She reached down and shook the woman by her shoulder.

  ‘Oway!’ sobbed the woman, and clutched, first Madame Taggart’s wrist, then Valentina’s skirts. ‘Ittypay sur ovrepay iddoway! Egopray!’ She began to weep, tears running down the handsome bones of her too-strongly-featured face. ‘Egopray!’

  Helplessly, Valentina turned to Hannibal. ‘Do you know what language she speaks?’

  ‘I do,’ said the fiddler, and walking over, put a gentle hand on the woman’s back.

  And in pristinely clear pig-Latin – the encrypted English mixed in with a word or two of encrypted French – he asked, ‘What the hell are you doing here, Cornelia?’

  EIGHTEEN

  Cornelia Passmore – confidence trickster, thief, gambler and sometime madam – gazed at Hannibal with wide, violet-blue eyes filled with bogus tears that barely hid the surprise she must have felt – almost as much as January felt at seeing the woman.

  She made a swift recovery, clutched the fiddler’s wrist, and said – still in pig-Latin based in English, French, and the smattering of Italian that all well-educated girls were expected to learn – ‘Bugger me, Hannibal, are you still pretending that Benjamin here is your slave?’2

  Gently, Hannibal assisted her to her feet. To the two ladies – and Francis, who by this time had reached the bottom of the stair – he said, in English, ‘The lady Fatima here is Turkish, a language which I learned while working for the Foreign Office in Constantinople. If you would be so good as to permit me, I think I had best speak to her in private.’

  January half-expected Aunt Alicia to emerge from the library and accuse the fiddler of plotting to ravish ‘Fatima’ – possibly with January’s assistance – but no such interruption occurred. Hannibal guided the lady – who had commenced to weep again, softly – into the parlor across the hall, saying over his shoulder, ‘Benjamin, if you would assist me …?’

  January followed him in, and closed the door.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ asked Hannibal again, in plain English, and stepped back from Mrs Passmore’s attempt at a welcoming kiss.

  The woman, brushing the shawl from her hair – which January saw had been whitened up with flour from her usual lush (and not entirely genuine) brunette – pouted at the rejection. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still holding a grudge over me trying to sell Ben?’

  Hannibal opened his mouth – probably to ask her if she’d accept a friendly kiss from someone who’d attempted to kidnap and sell one of her children – then clearly recalled to whom he was speaking, and closed it again.

  January asked, ‘Who was your friend down on the road?’

  ‘Joe?’ She shrugged artlessly. ‘Just a friend.’

  ‘Who’s working for Gideon Pollack? Who met him – when were we in Austin, Hannibal? – in the Empire of the West saloon on Congress Avenue, a week ago Saturday night. And was lurking in the corridors of the Capital City Hotel a day or two later, if I’m not mistaken.’ He folded his arms and regarded her: a handsome woman rather than a pretty one, and, he guessed, older than she looked.

  ‘We may have another few hours before Sheriff Quigley turns up with a posse and a warrant,’ he went on. ‘After Brother Francis’s obvious jiggery-pokery I’m guessing it’ll be sooner rather than later, so if you have anything you’re trying to accomplish here before the law takes charge, I suggest you speak up and let us pool our knowledge. What the hell is going on?’

  Mrs Passmore sank into a chair and cocked her head. ‘Aren’t you even going to offer a lady a drink?’

  ‘I would if one were here. M’am.’

  Hannibal crossed to the cabinet, attempted to open it, said, ‘Just a minute,’ knelt and picked the lock.

  ‘You want me to get that, dear?’ asked Mrs Passmore, digging in the pocket beneath her voluminous skirt.

  ‘Rum or brandy?’

  ‘Oh, the brandy,’ she said. ‘Vincent told me it was smuggled in from France.’

  Hannibal removed the stopper from the bottle and sniffed it. ‘Vin was cheated.’

  ‘I knew I should have gone with him to the pick-up.’

  Hannibal brought her back a glass. ‘Will you have any, amicus meus?’

  January shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t by any chance be the mistress Vin Taggart swore he’d dismiss?’

  ‘Well, he did dismiss me.’ Mrs Passmore arranged her gray-and-white rebozo more becomingly around her splendid shoulders. ‘When he married Miss de Castellón – or Mrs Dillard, I suppose I should call her. That’s when I went back to the States in ’38. I had no idea she was so pretty – and such a sweet girl, she seems. Did she really shoot Vin?’

  ‘So far as I know, no. But she’s going to be hanged for doing so unless we find what really happened – and what’s really going on.’

  ‘My money’s on the old bitch in black. You’re quite right, Hannibal, Vincent was cheated – the man had no palate.’ She frowned, thinking it over – or perhaps, reflected January, merely deploring her former lover’s taste in liquor.

  ‘And “Joe” is …?’ January prompted.

  The woman sighed, and took another sip – palate or no. ‘Silver Joe Fleam. As far as I knew, he was doing a job of work for Gideon Pollack – have you met Pollack? Voice like poisoned cream, and would sell his sister to the Comancheros – after seducing her first, I daresay. And he’s the good brother of the pair.’

  ‘We’ve met. What kind of work?’

  Mrs Passmore shook her head. ‘It could have been almost anything. He smuggled slaves in from Cuba, until the British Navy started making things tight in the Caribbean. Later I heard he and his men were kidnapping Mexicans from villages west of San Antonio and selling them to the Comancheros. Not a nice man.’ She smiled as she said it.

  ‘The thing is, he told me Vincent had also hired him and his men – ten of them, altogether – for some kind of job, which completely precluded their collecting the second half of Pollack’s money. Then Vincent died and they never got paid for his job.’

  She might have been speaking of the man who drove the grocery-van. You’d think the purchase of a house on Franklin Street would warrant at least a sniffle, or a little break in that lovely contralto voice.

  As Valentina’s voice had broken, when she’d spoken of the man whose blows had marked her face. He was a good h
usband, she had said. A good man at heart.

  ‘When they brought Vincent’s body into town Monday night,’ Mrs Passmore continued casually, ‘Joe rode out here to try to put in his claim, but that lemon-puss Creed turned him back. Joe came to me because he was pretty sure Vincent had the money. It was a thousand dollars in gold, and it took him awhile to put it together.’

  ‘How long of a while?’ asked January thoughtfully.

  She thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Christmas at least. Anyway, at Christmas he was already working at this little thing and that little thing – mostly with the smugglers – to get gold together without anybody knowing about it. Christmas was when I came back to town, you know. He gave me the house on Franklin Street the first of January – and believe me, I’ve had better. But if Lamar stays president I can sell the place for a fortune.’

  Hannibal looked puzzled at that, and January provided, ‘If Lamar stays president, Austin will stay the capital. If the capital’s moved elsewhere – Houston, or Galveston – land values in Austin will collapse, since there’s really no reason to have a town here at all. I suspect that may be behind some of the … impassioned … nature of the Nationalists’ quarrel with the Houstonites. Did Taggart own other land in Austin?’

  ‘Oh, a dozen lots, at least.’ Mrs Passmore sounded a little surprised that January had to ask. ‘Vincent kept the gold at my place – and counted it like a Scotch Jew, damn him. Then he’d give me a little and take the rest away. He said he didn’t dare keep it here at the hacienda because his crazy aunt searches the house. Usually in the middle of the night, he said, but he thought she’d do it in the daytime, too, when he was away.’

  Hannibal said, ‘Ah! This explains many things, including the locks Francis put on his study door.’

  She shrugged again. ‘I’d put locks on my door if I shared a house with her, that’s for certain.’

  And January remembered the pale face, the pale hands in the darkness. Moonlight gleaming on round spectacles, like an insect’s eyes.

  ‘Looking for money?’ he asked, remembering, too, what Jalisco had said about the aborted expedition to search for the lost mine.

  ‘Oh, God yes. That’s what all three of them are after, really. Vincent was pretty sure Aunt Alicia has a cache of money someplace that he never found. And his mother – was that the old bitch in black? His mother was always trying to keep the books on this place, to make it earn more. She did that with his father, too, he said – and bought the old man as much liquor as he wanted, to keep him out of her hair while she did it. But Auntie just wants money.’

  She spoke of wanting a share of the ‘treasure’, so that she could hire a companion and go back to live in the United States …

  And who could blame her?

  I am nothing! I would have nothing! Valentina had cried. Amelia Taggart and her sister – and her youngest son, a youth of eighteen without physical strength or formal education – had already lost one home. Without doubt they knew themselves to be unwelcome in this one, and nothing beyond its walls but the turbulent wilds of an alien land. Silver mine or no silver mine, if Texas became a part of the United States, the value of land would rocket sky-high. (As if President Van Buren is going to be stupid enough to risk war with Mexico and a revolt in Congress by adding an enormous slave-state to the Union …)

  With land, they would be safe.

  And the hacienda was so isolated, so far from town. The crime could indeed have been done by anyone. Even if that sandy, broken-nosed man with the cold blue eyes had been murdered by, as the lawyers said, ‘person or persons unknown,’ it would still be much to Francis’s advantage – or Madrecita’s – to run up to the house for a quick rummage in Valentina’s wardrobe for shawls and pistols.

  But he knew it wasn’t that simple. Valentina was targeted. Valentina was followed to Arroyo Sauceito, dismounted, and delayed.

  ‘Did you know a man named Gervase Hookwire?’ he asked.

  ‘Gerry the Hook?’ Mrs Passmore looked surprised. ‘Little fat party with a head like a billiard-ball? Best forger in Washington City. Made a fortune drawing up – er—’ She had the grace to look embarrassed – or the grace to pretend to it, anyway. ‘Drawing up fake sales papers, for the kidnapping rings that stole slaves. With a side-line in fake toll-road shares, and bogus identity papers that he sold to Irish just off the boat.’

  January closed his mouth hard. Was that who you would have used when you tried to sell me? Such a question would not have advanced the conversation. He suddenly felt less sorry for the little man he’d buried last night.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘You didn’t know he was in Texas?’

  She shook her head, genuinely ignorant – or looking genuinely ignorant, anyway.

  ‘We found his body yesterday.’

  Her eyes filled with tears, which in her case might or might not have meant anything. ‘Dear lord,’ she whispered. ‘Poor Gerry.’

  ‘He’d been dead four days. His throat had been cut – here on this property, a few miles from the house. You didn’t know of any job he had going here in Texas?’

  ‘I thought he was still in New Orleans.’ Then her strong black brows tugged down over her nose. ‘What the hell was Vincent up to? Hiring Joe Fleam – hiring Gerry the Hook—’

  ‘We don’t know it was Taggart who hired him,’ said January, though the gold pieces in Hookwire’s saddlebag offered a trenchant hint. Unless Hookwire had … What? Found Taggart’s cache? Been paid by someone in the household who’d been pinching gold from Taggart’s cache?

  ‘Joe says it was Vincent who hired him,’ returned Mrs Passmore. ‘Well, Pollack hired him first, and then Vincent got this second job that would take him away from Pollack’s. What did either of them have in mind, that they’d need ten men for, for God’s sake? The Pollack boys have thirty of their own on Los Lobos; Vincent had – what, twenty-six? Twenty-seven? – on Perdition, even if you didn’t count Creed and Maddox. They were working for Pollack,’ she added, seeing Hannibal’s look of surprise. ‘Or anyway were awfully thick with Pollack when they’d come into town. Creed for sure always spent more money at Theodora Fischer’s saloon and knocking-shop than he would if he was just making twenty-five Texas dollars a month.’

  ‘And he didn’t say—’ January began.

  In the hallway someone – Enoch, it sounded like – exclaimed, ‘My God!’

  Hannibal turned, quickly, and opened the parlor door, in time to see Francis standing at the bottom of the stairs, a document in his hands and a look of smug, blazing triumph on his thin face. Enoch had gone to the door of the front parlor across the hall, and knocked imperatively on it. Francis, limping behind him, called out, ‘Mama, I’ve found it! I’ve found Vin’s will!’

  Very quietly, Hannibal said to Mrs Passmore, ‘Get a look at it if you can. I think it’s forged. Ben, watch the stairs …’

  January followed Hannibal through the discreet door of the backstairs, and up to Valentina’s boudoir above. Leaving January at the top of the main stair, the fiddler strode quickly across the hall, slipped through the open bedroom door – open for the first time since January had been in the house. With one eye on the stairs, January noted the monastic severity of Francis’s room, the neat stacks of books on the small table, and the door open into the study beyond. Hannibal stepped into the study and returned a moment later bearing a thick stack of what looked like letters and invoices.

  These the fiddler shoved into January’s hands. ‘Hide these. There’s pens and paper all over the desk in there. These are samples of Taggart’s handwriting – and of Francis’s. And about six half-finished drafts of the will. Enough to get it thrown out of court.’

  They’d passed through the upstairs rear gallery even as Hannibal was speaking, and into the guest room. One glance told January there was noplace in the sparsely-furnished chamber that wouldn’t be obvious to a searcher – the shaving-stand contained one drawer, and instead of an armoire there were onl
y a few wall pegs and a chest. January pulled one of Hannibal’s spare neckcloths from his saddlebag, tied the bundle of papers up firmly in the long band of linen, and led the way through Valentina’s boudoir again – she had long ago unlocked the door between it and the guest room – and thence into the backstairs. One of the steps, he knew from coming and going, was loose …

  Yes, the fourth from the top. It had been repaired not long ago where the wood had cracked, and the new wood was already warping. He wedged the blade of his knife into the crack, pried it up just enough to admit the bundle of papers – the gap opened easily – then punched it back down with the hammer of his fist.

  They went up the backstairs, through the gallery and the upstairs hall, and listened at the top of the main staircase to make sure there was no one in the hall below to see them descending the stair. Voices echoed, muffled – outdoors?

  January and Hannibal traded a look. A lot of voices …

  ‘Of course,’ Francis was saying, ‘you are correct insofar as the principles of English law go, but your warrant is a moot point because I have discovered my brother’s will …’

  ‘Quigley,’ Hannibal mouthed. They came downstairs swiftly, and saw through the open front door that yes, Sheriff Quigley stood on the front gallery, along with Francis, Valentina, Madame Taggart, Enoch, Noah, and a group of rather grim-faced men in town coats. At the foot of the steps, near the horses of the posse, stood Jalisco and several of his cowhands.

  Mrs Passmore was nowhere in sight.

  No surprise, reflected January. Even with her hair grayed and got up in Tejano garb, men from Austin would recognize her.

  Valentina looked around a little desperately, and caught sight of January and Hannibal in the hallway behind her. Hannibal touched his finger to his lips, turned and strode down the hallway to the house’s rear gallery, and so out and around the side of the house, to come to the group from outside, rather than inside, the house.