January stepped back as silently as a cat while they were all still staring at the evidence, slipped into the hallway, and scooped his satchel from the side-table. Knowing they’d all go running out to the orchard via the dining-room and the back of the house, he went out through the front door, walked down the steps – the posse, as Quigley had hinted, being gathered in the courtyard where it was shady around the well – selected the largest of the horses tied to the porch-rail, and headed at a gallop for the hills.
TWENTY
From the oaks on the high ground, January looked down with Rose’s spyglass at the house. The images were tiny, but clear. He saw, as he’d expected, the sheriff in his black frock coat, Hannibal like a dilapidated scarecrow, Valentina and her mother-in-law – like a birch-tree and an oak, both painted black – and the wizened sable shrub that was Francis limping ahead of them, shaking off Enoch’s efforts to help. A few moments later the rear door of the hacienda opened again and spurted forth Noah, and then the seven men of the sheriff’s posse, the square, squat bulk of Doc Meredith striding in the lead.
Clothed in the light, preliminary foliage of spring, the gray jackstraws of the orchard’s branches couldn’t quite hide the tiny wink of black that had to be Aunt Alicia’s body.
Why Alicia?
January remembered the intent blue eyes behind the thick lenses. The desperate unhappiness in the hunched shoulders, the wary turn of the head, like a nervous hare.
Noah saying, He was no good, Marse Jack. You couldn’t keep him off the girls … he even bulled poor Miss Alicia when she was young … an’ pushed Marse Vincent into joinin’ him …
He wondered how long she’d been dead.
And how long it was going to be before Francis or Madame Taggart shoved Hannibal’s old-fashioned linen neckcloth under Quigley’s nose again and pointed out that Valentina’s ‘lawyer’ and his ‘valet’ had been absent all morning. Madame Taggart’s statement, and Valentina’s – and the bitter argument between them – had occupied over an hour, plenty of time (to put the most generous interpretation on events) for Francis to find the body, go back to Hannibal’s room, steal a neckcloth from his saddlebag and …
He wouldn’t even have to go back and put it in her hand. Just say that he’d found it there.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
Is this heavenly retribution for assisting in Seth Javel’s death?
The wet scent of last night’s rain seeped from the earth beneath his elbows. Clammy wind swept down from the hills, smelling of more rain in the canyons.
Who would kill her?
What had she seen? What did she know?
A pang of grief went through him, for that poor, scared, half-crazed woman, bound by insolvency and loyalty to – or fear of – her sister to stay in that poisoned household.
No wonder she wandered the place at night, seeking for money to flee.
And what the hell do I do now?
Just east of the orchard he could see the yellow-gray grass of the burying-ground, the brown rectangle of the grave he’d dug.
Was that only last night?
It felt like months ago.
He still hadn’t had anything to eat.
The sun was just touching the rampart of cloud in the west when the little procession emerged from the orchard again. Two men carried a makeshift litter – saplings run through the sleeves of three coats, the men’s white shirtsleeves bright against the dimming light. Another coat covered the face and upper body of the woman they bore, her black skirts trailing the ground. January wondered if there were any chance at all of seeing the body. By the time they left the premises it would be too dark to investigate the orchard itself.
I can do that in the morning.
He was thirsty, as well as desperately hungry, and knew he wasn’t thinking as clearly as he should have been. Men were riding in from several directions to the hacienda, coming in off the cattle ranges: January recognized Maddox and Creed, Lope and an elderly vaquero named Téo. No sign of Jalisco’s faded red shirt and scrubby pinto mare. Yet he was certain the vaquero had been part of the group that had escorted the posse back to the house, to ask for orders …
If anyone could figure out who was giving orders now, on Rancho Perdition.
Two men ran ahead of the cortège, one to the house, one to the corrals. Even before Alicia Marryat’s body reached the place where she’d lived her final six months – still under the shadow of the sister who had dominated her life – January saw Malojo drag the wagon from its shed, then go into one of the corrals to catch and harness a couple of horses.
Alicia’s body was placed in the wagon. This was led around to the front of the house – which January couldn’t see – while everyone went into the back door. Lanterns were lit. Malojo went back to the stables – accompanied by one of the posse – to saddle more horses.
January counted. He couldn’t see, at this distance, whether the saddles were the Mexican stock-saddles or the sidesaddles of ladies, but ten mounts were readied: they must be taking in all the house servants as well as Madame, Hannibal, Valentina, and Francis. No surprise, if Quigley were smart enough – as January was certain he was – to guess that nobody in the household was telling the truth. In Louisiana – or anywhere in the southern United States – the servants would have walked into town under guard, linked by a chain. But night was drawing on, and Austin was a good twelve miles away. The moon would rise late, and if the wind turned the clouds would come over …
Better to make the servants ride – their hands, if necessary, tied to the saddle-horns – than to risk an escape. There’d already been one ambush and escape on that road recently, though at the moment Selina’s rescue felt like the memory of another lifetime.
No lights came up in the house. After a time, January saw a thread of glowing dots wind away from the front of the house towards the road.
In his mind he heard Hannibal’s scratchy voice: And leaves the world to darkness, and to me.
And though his body ached with hunger, he waited another hour, long after the torches had disappeared, watching. Once he saw, near the corner of the house, the flare of a match, the movement of something in the shadows. They’d left a guard.
As far as he could tell, after long observation, only one.
With infinite caution he returned to his stolen horse, mounted, and rode down to the dark hacienda.
His first stop was the kitchen. Enough moonlight leaked through its windows to show him the water-jar, and the covered bowl where the leftover tortillas were kept, almost the only food in the place that was already cooked and available to eat. He had observed, during his conversation that morning (this morning?!?!) with Titus Andronicus, where the butter and cheese were kept, in a jar buried in the floor, and a little cautious searching yielded it. Another bowl held dried apples and peaches, wrapped in paper. These he stuffed into his satchel.
So far, so good.
Feeling much better, January slipped from the back door again, and cautiously circled the house. He ascertained that yes, there was only one guard he could see, sitting in the blackness of the front terrace, smoking, his horse tied at the foot of the steps.
Good. The likelihood of anything being hidden in the front parlors, or the little ‘cabinets’ that flanked the terrace like miniature towers, was negligible. In the lamp-room next to the kitchen, the household lamps had been cleaned and filled but not set out yet. From several pieces of writing-paper in the library he made a shade for one of these, giving the effect of a dark-lantern. With this to guide him he crept up the stairs to Hannibal’s little chamber, and slung the fiddler’s saddlebags over his shoulder – after ascertaining that either Hannibal or someone else had taken every penny of the money that had been in them (as well as Hannibal’s deck of marked cards).
Aunt Alicia’s room was next. It contained a small writing-desk, whose surface bore ample evidence of an extensive correspondence in the form of ink-blots and old stains of sealing-wax. Three pens and at
least a dozen steel nibs. The stubs of five sticks of sealing-wax. Seven pink ribbons, of the sort that January’s wife Rose – and the girls at the school – used to tie up correspondence in.
But the only letters he found were three short notes – barely two lines apiece – from Francis, carefully bound in ribbon.
Dearest, thanks so much for the book. You must have searched for weeks to find it! Your beloved, Fr.
Auntie, many thanks for helping me out! Your beloved, Fr.
Dearest Aunt, many thanks again. I knew I could count on you. Love, Fr.
Old – the paper yellowed, the ink faded. On two, the handwriting was the careful script of a child. Yet she’d kept them. Because he called her, ‘Dearest’?
And where were other letters received?
He searched, and found more newspapers – mostly the Southern Patriot – tied up in another of the pink ribbons and mostly folded open to articles and letters relating to the admission of Texas to the Union, and the vicious battle in Congress over the issue of slavery.
Three books of sermons. More tellingly, a stack of novels, hidden under the mattress of her bed: Pamela. Thaddeus of Warsaw. The Old English Baron. The Monk. A scientific work of comparative anatomy that classified the races: Asian, African, white, Indian.
She used to saddle up her horse and sneak off to watch the men at work …
Who was this, who’d been so casually killed?
Wretched, intelligent, struggling to achieve her own life and taking refuge in political questions. Disregarded and scorned as mad. Drowning her fears in laudanum and dreaming of freedom. Hiding the memory of rape and living in the household of one of her assailants.
He found a bottle of liquor – comprised, by the smell, small quantities of rum, brandy, and bourbon all poured together into the same container – hidden on top of the armoire. Another was cached behind a false back in the drawer which held her chemises. The false back was made of cardboard and held in place with sealing-wax; in addition to the liquor, the narrow space was filled with empty and half-empty bottles of Female Elixir and Kendal Black Drop.
No letters.
Even more curious, given what Mrs Passmore had said, no money.
Francis’s room, on the other hand, was crammed with correspondence, all neatly bundled in red ribbons, not pink. More than could possibly be explored, particularly by the shaded gleam of a candle-lamp. January’s nerves fizzled with the knowledge that if anyone came up the stair – if the guard set on the terrace had instructions to walk the house, for instance – he was trapped. He was now legally a runaway slave, and his very flight would be considered a suspicious circumstance, in the eyes of whites who were one and all outraged by the fact that slaves didn’t trust them or their laws.
Hannibal had clearly judged aright about Francis forging the will. The desk was littered with quills as well as more modern steel-nibbed pens, and he found one sheet (which he stuffed into Hannibal’s saddlebag) of practice letters and words, trying to adjust the shape of the letters to match those of another hand, presumably that of his brother.
He also found a small kit of geologist’s tools, presumably assembled during the phase of preparation for an expedition to the lost San Diablo Mine. One of the thick packets of papers on the desk seemed to be maps of varying ages. January took a hammer and chisel from the kit (and the pistol and bullet-pouch that lay in the drawer beside it) and pried off the top of the fourth stair from the top of the backstairs, where he’d hidden the papers that Hannibal had judged would prove Francis’s attempt at forgery.
The papers were still there.
Beside them – January recalled that he’d only pried up the board enough to slip the packet of papers inside – lay another packet of what looked like letters, and a carved ebony music-box which, when opened, proved to contain a hundred and seventy-seven dollars in gold and silver coin.
Vincent was pretty sure Aunt Alicia has a cache of money someplace …
Auntie just wants money …
No, he reflected. Auntie wants her freedom.
As do we all, Mrs Passmore. As do we all.
And, he reflected, I thought that board came up rather easily this afternoon …
The letters bore no address or superscription. The top one began, Beloved Alicia, and was signed, Ever yours, Gideon.
And the line immediately above that signature was: As you love me, burn this letter.
Being Alicia, of course she hadn’t.
January shoved them into his saddlebags, along with the money and the papers collected by Hannibal.
Pollack …
A voice like poisoned cream … He can talk anyone into anything …
He even got Aunt Alicia all in a flutter …
M’am Amelia chewin’ into her sister, that Aunt Alicia had a lover …
The only man of whom poor Doña Alicia is not afraid.
The way the woman’s voice had cracked when she’d gasped, He kissed me!
Aunt Alicia and Pollack. Aunt Alicia who was desperate for some way out of her sister’s household, the household of the nephew she had never ceased to fear.
She used to stare at the men while they worked …
He would have seen the terrified fascination that interlaced her dread. Would have known how to use it.
Run. Run now, before that guard comes in …
Instead he went into the room that Taggart had shared with Valentina.
On the top shelf of the larger of the room’s two armoires he found, shoved roughly behind some clean shirts, a calico shirt fouled with dust and sweat whose right sleeve bore crusts of dried blood. More blood had dribbled on the back – where blood would leak from the cut throat of a man carried from one cave half a mile to another. A pair of wool trousers was there also, shoved in carelessly, as if the man who’d stripped out of them had done so with his furious wife pounding on the bedroom door.
And behind these, yet another bundle of papers. It was larger and thicker than the others: some parchment, some vellum, some old brown paper, cracked with age. Pot-hooked and abbreviated legal Latin and antique Spanish. Land deeds, January realized. Definitions of grants. Locations of boundaries. From the King of Spain, from the Mission San Saba, from the Viceroy of Mexico and the Emperor Iturbe and Anastasio Bustamante.
‘Oh,’ said January, as he understood. ‘October,’ he said. ‘Ortega.’
Everything seemed to drop into place, with the disconcerting suddenness of a dream.
Some frightful thing …
Quietly and rather thoughtfully, he uttered the most scatological curse he could think of, because the whole thing would have been funny, had three people not died and had he not been frightened almost out of his wits and in near-immediate danger of enslavement.
No time for that now. He shoved shirt, trousers, and papers into the now-bulging saddlebags and turned his attention to the little ‘cabinet’, a sort of dressing-room in one of the stumpy towers that flanked the house’s upstairs front gallery. It was the twin of Aunt Alicia’s room on the other side of the house and the gallery would shield its window from the eyes of the guard on the front terrace – if he remained on the terrace.
The little room was locked and, at a guess, Taggart had had the key on him when he’d been killed. Unless the killer took it, in which case it’s on its way to Austin by this time …
The adobe walls were thick. How well would sound carry?
He took a pillow from the bed, inserted the thin end of Francis’s geological chisel into the lock, muffled the thick end, and dealt it a smart blow with the hammer. The sound rang – to his ears – like doomsday in the silent darkness. With a feeling of stepping into a trap he entered the little dressing-room. Another armoire in there, and a shaving-stand. He pulled open the bottom drawer of the armoire, yanked it all the way out and yes, there was a false back on it and yes, there was an iron strongbox in the hidden rear compartment.
He caught it up – it was heavy enough to contain a thousand dollars
in gold, but iron strongboxes weighed like stones even empty – started to turn …
‘Get your hands up,’ said Mrs Passmore’s voice. ‘Or I’ll blow your head off.’
TWENTY-ONE
January dropped the box, hammer, and chisel, and flung himself sidelong at the door which led to the front gallery. This was bolted rather than locked, and he had a good idea of what Mrs Passmore would do before she’d fire at him – not with a guard downstairs, she wouldn’t.
But on the gallery, he saw torches below and flattened at once against the wall.
Peering down, he saw them: men with torches dismounting in front of the house.
The guard stepped from the porch and flicked away his cigaretto. January thought he recognized the man’s blue flannel shirt and the next minute his voice, with its drawling Mississippi inflection, confirmed it.
‘Not a soul stirrin’, Mr Pollack,’ Creed said.
‘Good.’ Gideon Pollack allowed his brother Rance to help him from the saddle, but afterwards shook off his supporting hand. His voice sounded as strong – as beautiful – as ever. ‘Rance, you take four men and search the barns. He’s got to put those wagons someplace.’
January slithered back through the door to the dressing-room, where Cornelia Passmore, who’d been bent over the strongbox, had just risen to her knees in alarm.
‘Pollack’s men,’ said January in an undervoice. ‘Searching the house.’
Mrs Passmore uttered an expression that would have made the Devil blush in Hell.
January shoved the drawer back into the bottom of the armoire, caught Mrs Passmore’s hand – the last thing he needed was her sending them after him as a diversion – and darted through the bedroom (leaving the dressing-room door open in the hopes that, in the darkness, these new searchers wouldn’t see the lock had been forced), through Valentina’s boudoir, through the guest-room where Hannibal’s plundered luggage still lay on the narrow bed.
The window above the bed looked down onto the roof of the work-room, which in its turn backed up against the kitchens: the escape route, in fact, that Valentina had taken on Tuesday morning. Since the men – assured by Creed that not a creature had come near the place since Quigley had hauled away the family and servants – had simply entered the house through the front and hadn’t surrounded the place, nobody remarked their egress, though flickering orange reflections fell through the windows of the downstairs rear rooms almost at once. Mrs Passmore was clearly of two minds whether she should reveal herself to Pollack’s men – surely most of them would recognize her from Austin, where she’d been pointed out as Taggart’s mistress. She followed January with quiet agility, out the window and across the roofs, still clutching the heavy strongbox to her side, to the dark mass of the kitchen chimneys.
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