“If I speak to her,” said January, “I’ll tell her.”
Saverne stepped closer, pleading in his pale eyes. “Tell her not to worry about her father. I’ll keep him away from her, no matter what he tries or says. In Mobile he can’t get to her.”
It wasn’t a black man’s place to ask whether Saverne had considered what Louis Rochier might do to the rest of the family, and he doubted whether the man would consider it if reminded how completely in Rochier’s power Casmalia and Lucie and the several brothers were.
“I love her,” Saverne repeated softly. “Make her understand.”
*
The sun had risen, turning the fog to milk, by the time January reached Rue Marigny. He loitered outside Number 53, smelling the smoke of kitchen fires all up and down that quiet street of tiny wooden cottages, until he saw the white-haired Alois Vouziers emerge, resplendant in a rusty black coat, and totter off down the street, a satchel of books on his back. Not long after that a stout young woman came out the same door, ushering four blonde boys of stair-step ages, from about thirteen by the look of him down to about eight, dressed as boys would be who are apprenticed to craftsmen or clerks. Not so very different, thought January, from Marie-Zulieka’s brothers, except that these boys didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped on their way to and from work, and sold up to the newly-opening cotton territories in Missouri. Though the neighborhood was one of poor French and poor Germans, the refugees from the continuing turmoils in Europe that had followed Napoleon’s downfall, the woman called after the boys in the pure French of the educated Parisians, not to be late for their Grandpere’s lessons that night.
When the younger children came out to play January crossed to the oldest of them, a little girl of six or so, and said, “Would you take in a note for me, to the young lady who is staying with your Grandpere?”
“Senorita Maria?” asked the girl, and January nodded.
“Senorita Maria would be her name.”
*
“She’s passing herself off as a Spaniard, then?” inquired Hannibal, when January met him later in the day, at one of the coffee-stands at the downstream end of the market. From the rickety table where they sat between the market’s square brick pillars, January could see the wharves, piled with cargo and milling with stevedores, sailors, and whores. Down at this end of the market where the river turned around Algiers Point, they were crowded with the ocean-going ships: the Constellation and the Tribune, the Waccamaw and the Martha, bound for Baltimore, Vera Cruz, Liverpool, New York.
Paris, thought January, feeling the stabbing pinch of regret. As if he’d inadvertantly put weight on an unhealed break in his leg, he drew back from the thought that he one day might return to the city where he had truly been free.
He lived in New Orleans now, despite all things, because it was the home of the only family he had. But he remembered what it had been like, to know that one’s family wasn’t enough.
“I thought she would be,” he continued. “I knew from what Casmalia said – and from the color of her dresses and her jewels – that Marie-Zulieka was fair enough to pass. And she’d clearly planned her escape. The only reason she would have wornevening jewels to the market was because she planned to sell them and flee.”
“The rubies were worth more,” pointed out the fiddler.
“If she was the kind of girl who’d take jewels from one suitor to hand to another, she might have.” January picked apart the little screw of newspaper the coffee-woman had sold him for a penny, fished forth a broken lump of strong-tasting muscavado sugar. “She could have stuffed them into her marketing-basket, along with the worming-medicine that she used to poison Marie-Therese.”
Behind and around them, market-women, porters, slaves with shopping-baskets came and went among the stalls with their bright heaps of vegetables, their silver cascades of fish; a thousand elbows and basket-rims brushed his shoulders from behind, like the leaves of a gently-moving tree. “But their disappearance would announce her intentions more quickly. It’s just possible that Nicholas Saverne would know the voodoos in town, and where to find poison like that to slip into Marie-Therese’s coffee: if he was disguised he could probably have done it undetected. But if Zozo didn’t expect to disappear, why would she have worn any jewels? No,” he said softly. “She planned it herself. And she wanted no fortune to hand to an indebted lover; nothing that came from her family, or the protector she was leaving behind. That much was clear. She took only what her grandmother had given her – and her gris-gris. Even if she were fleeing New Orleans, taking another life and another name, she would not leave that behind.”
“Is that what she did? What she’s doing?”
January nodded. Behind Hannibal’s shoulder, he caught a brief glimpse of a thin, stooped, scholarly old man in a rusty black coat, leading a young woman along the wharves toward the gangplank of the Mary, bound for Boston, according to the chalked board outside the shipping office. A lovely eighteen-year-old with dark curls escaping from beneath her bonnet, and the gray eyes that told nothing of her heritage.
I will not be what my mother was, he heard her voice again in his mind, the words she had spoken to him that morning in old M’sieu Vouziers’s little house. I will not take a kind protector, only to save me from an unkind one. It is the world that I must flee, and not only one man.
The crowd closed around them and they were gone.
“I knew she spoke Spanish from the copy of Don Quixote I saw in her room – well, half the people in New Orleans do. And since the only family she has are under the thumb of her father, I guessed she’d go to her tutor, for advice at least. If old M’sieu Vouziers trusted her enough to lend her books that he’d owned for years – books he’d brought with him from Paris – that argued a bond beyond what her family would comprehend or even be aware of. I’ll have to get the books back from her mother, by the way, and return them to the old man. I’ll do that sometime after I slip this under the door, early tomorrow morning.”
He held up the note she’d given him. A single pale spot on one edge of the wafer marked where her tear had fallen as she’d sealed it up.
Hannibal coughed, the racking wheeze of a consumptive that shook his whole thin frame. “You’ll have to be quick about it, before she sells them.” He fished in his pocket for his laudanum-bottle as January tucked the note back into his jacket. “She won’t have an easy time, you know.”
“She knows that. It’s infinitely harder for a woman to leave a man, not for another man, but for herself,” he went on softly. “And harder for a woman of color than for a white woman; a woman of color moreover whose family can conceive of no other position for a woman, if she’s fair-skinned and pretty, than the plaçee of a white. Not only her family, but her friends – literally every other person she knows.”
“I suppose King Solomon’s family thought him insane when he chose wisdom over riches – not that, as King of Israel, Solomon was ever in a position of having to wonder whether he’d eat on any given day. At least in Boston she’ll be allowed to hold a position in a girls’ school somewhere. Louis Rochier won’t really cast the whole family off because Zozo put a spoke in his wheel with his business partner, will he?”
“I hope not. I don’t think so, since she’s disappearing from town. She meant to literally disappear, you know, without a trace, for that very reason. I convinced her to write to her mother, at least. Casmalia can let Rochier know, or not.”
“Care to take a small wager on what she’ll decide to do?”
January sniffed with bitter laughter. “Not a chance.”
“I didn’t think you would.” Hannibal poured another dollop of laudanum into his coffee, raised the cup in a toast. “To Marie-Zulieka then – or whatever name she’ll take in her new life. Macte nova virtute, puella, sic itur ad astra, as Virgil said.. Blessings on your young courage; that’s the way to the stars. Though we had best pray she succeeds. I doubt Casmalia will welcome her, if she ever comes back.”
About the Author
Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.
Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.
Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.
She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.
The Further Adventures
by Barbara Hambly
The concept of “happily ever after” has always fascinated me.
Just exactly what happens after, “happily ever after”?
The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold. (It’s a very strong horse.)
So what happens then? Where do they live? Who does the cooking?
This was one of the reasons I started writing The Further Adventures.
The other was that so many of the people who loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the 1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those characters too, and I missed writing about them.
Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website and started selling stories about what happened to these characters after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each series.
The Darwath series centers on the Keep of Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a mage.
The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers. With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil, too.
In the Winterlands tales, scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do their best to protect the people of their remote villages from whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.
Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior - meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the 1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might come through.
Though out of print, all four of these series are available digitally on-line.
To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color, Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.
I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I added these four stories to my collection.
Quest For Glory is a stand-alone, a short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction convention at which I was Guest of Honor.
Sunrise on Running Water is tenuously connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie Titanic - and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that vampires lose their powers over running water - I just had to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than about the characters.
The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me - and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.
Life goes on.
Love goes on.
Everyone continues to have Further Adventures for the rest of their lives.
*
Novels in the Benjamin January Series (some are available in print, earlier books are out of print but commercially available digitally)
A Free Man of Color
Fever Season
Graveyard Dust
Sold Down the River
Die Upon a Kiss
Wet Grave
Days of the Dead
Dead Water
Dead and Buried
The Shirt On His Back
Ran Away
Good Man Friday
Crimson Angel
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