by D. J. Butler
And what would the hex do?
* * *
The tent was full. Sarah lurked carefully behind a pair of burly wagoneers, keeping her face averted and her telltale eye tucked down toward her shoulder as she bled her finger into the water cask.
“He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.” She chanted the child’s mantra once with each drop, and she could feel energy flowing out of her and into the water, through the blood but also through the words. She could hex without words if she had to, was counted a talented hexer by the few people on Calhoun Mountain who knew enough to judge, but putting the hex into words got it out of her and into the world easier.
She felt tired when the hex was done. She’d have laid down and gone right to sleep, if she hadn’t had more important things to do.
A flap in the tent wall behind the platform opened and the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton, Martinite, stepped in. Around the wagoneers impeding her view Sarah could see that he was long and straight in limb and face, cold blue eyes fixed close beside a hawkish nose beneath a high forehead. The tonsure he must have cut out of the top of his long hair, Sarah reckoned, was hidden by a tall black steeple hat, Yankee-style. He wasn’t wearing the black tabard of his order (the Martinites had something of a history as a military society, since they had begun as the thugs who went around Wittenberg enforcing Martin Luther’s commands and stealing all the property of the German Eldritch), but a simple white shirt and brown breeches. The Hammer and Nail of St. Martin Luther—the Elector had made her learn the insignia of all the common orders, preaching and otherwise—were nowhere in evidence.
Well, damn him if he thought he could come down here and treat Sarah and her family like fools. She didn’t care one way or the other about St. Martin Luther and his followers’ grudge against the Firstborn, and who in hell cared whether they had a soul or not, she never could understand. Still, a Yankee preacher within a few miles of her home constituted a foreign invasion. What was he doing here, anyway? Nashville didn’t have an Eldritch population any more than it had beastkind—just townsfolk and hillfolk, and everybody more or less Appalachee but the traders passing through.
The Martinite’s disappointment and boredom shone from his face like twin beacons of gloom. He looked once around the gathered crowd and his face became even further crestfallen. In his hand he held a heavy Bible, and he opened it as he stepped to the barrel pulpit and looked down at the printed pages.
“As you all may have learned by now,” he began, in a pinched drone that Sarah knew would never excite this congregation, “the Empress Hannah has been gathered to the angels.” What was this fool preacher playing at? Had he traveled to Appalachee just to preach a funeral sermon? Did he not care about the crowd? Then why had he summoned them here?
He continued. “Yaas, all Pennsland grieves, and we of Appalachee must grieve with them.” Angleton delivered his words in a dull monotone with the nasal twang of the Covenant Tract man he was.
We of Appalachee…Sarah almost laughed. Ezekiel Angleton could scarcely have looked more out of place had he lacked a head and been speaking from a face in his belly.
“My text this morning is from Isaiah fifty-eight.” The priest mumbled now, face-down in the Bible. Mutters of dissatisfaction were beginning to be voiced in the crowd. “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?”
Here we go. Sarah would mock the sanctimonious Yankee a bit, and then bring down the house like Samson. Only she’d try not to get crushed. “I might could suggest a different text!” she yelled.
“Hush!” Angleton barked, peering at the crowd. Sarah crouched low behind the wagoneers.
“How about Psalm thirty-nine?” Sarah continued. This was not her first preacher-baiting, and she had verses to hand. “‘I was dumb, I opened not my mouth’?” The crowd broke into laughter, but she kept a straight, pious face for the benefit of those that could see her.
“Who’s that causing a disturbance?” the preacher demanded in his sour Yankee whistle.
Someone grabbed at her arm, but missed, and Sarah didn’t see who it had been before she pushed through the wagoneers to reveal herself. “Whoo-wee, you’re purty!” someone shouted, but other spectators gasped in alarm. Well, they could go to hell right alongside the Right Reverend Father. She hoped one of the tentpoles fell on top of them.
Angleton dropped his jaw and his Bible, the latter slithering off the corner of the barrel and thudding hard to the floor.
“Or maybe Numbers twenty-five?” Sarah continued coyly. “‘Am I not thine ass’?” The audience erupted into a fit of laughter that did not die down when the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton flapped his arms in an attempt to calm it.
Time to end the show and get out, before the preacher or his fat servant came after her. She raised her voice, though the tent walls were thin enough that Young Andy ought to be able to hear her already. “Mebbe Genesis nine: ‘he was uncovered within his tent’?” Sarah stood bold and proud, feet planted apart and hands on her hips as she faced the preacher. Just disrupting this foreigner’s show wouldn’t be satisfying; she wanted him to see who had done it. She only wished the fat Englishman could see too, serve him right for the pig-eyed stares he’d given her.
Angleton’s lip curled into a sneer. “What’s your name, girl? And what’s wrong with that eye?” He squinted. “Are you fey?”
Come on, Andy, she thought. You missed your call. “I said,” she yelled louder, “‘uncovered within his tent’!”
Still nothing.
“Come here, child,” Angleton said quietly. “I want to talk to you.”
Sarah started to back away.
The Martinite preacher put his hand onto the top of the improvised pulpit and picked up something that had been lying there, invisible to the crowd, all along. It was a fine flintlock pistol, matching the one the Englishman carried, and he leveled its deadly mouth at her.
“Child,” Angleton repeated. “I said come here.”
“You know, I expect, what His Grace will do, if he is not repaid tomorrow?”
CHAPTER TWO
Bad Bill glared at himself in the mirror shard he’d fixed to the crumbling yellow plaster with scavenged nails. “Hell’s Bells, suh, are you still alive?”
His green eyes, once lively and commanding and the fascination of many a fine-looking young woman, stared dully through bloodshot whites out of a face of hammered stone. The hair on his skull was short white stubble, cropped close to lie under his perruque; at least the long mustache still had some iron in it.
Was Charles shaving? He immediately clamped down on the oft-repeated thought, forcing it from his mind. Bill had never seen it, but of course his son had been shaving for a decade now. Bill hoped Charles wore a handsome, manly mustache.
He fumbled for his battered tin shaving basin and found it full of clean, warm water. Madame Beaulieu cared for him beyond her duty, and in return he was a bad lodger, frequently behind in the rent. He was behind in the rent today, though he couldn’t have named a figure.
He’d have to rectify that ignorance.
Fifteen years! Fifteen years he’d been out of the dragoons, fifteen years he’d been banished from Johnsland, fifteen years of this life worrying about rent and daily bread, and still he couldn’t bring himself to concentrate when it came to matters of accounting and numbers. He still felt that he was a gentleman and that money was beneath him. At least, keeping track of money was beneath him—he was acutely aware that he needed cash to live.
He took the boar bristle brush to the brown bar of soap and began to whip up lather for his face, enjoying the ritual of it and the pungent stink of the soap as it dissolved into foam. At least he was sober and awake enough to tell the washbasin from the chamberpot—that was a mistake he didn’t care to repeat.
What did he have to do today, besides
figure out how much rent he owed Madame Beaulieu? He searched his memory as it crept back to him through the fading smoky tendrils of whisky. A duel. Not in his own interest, of course; no one ever had occasion to challenge Bad Bill in an affaire d’honneur, and if anyone ever did, surely his reputation as dangerous bodyguard, bouncer, bounty hunter, ruffian for hire, and general violent man of the frontier would be enough to make all but the most deeply affronted think twice.
Bill sighed.
No, this was a duel for money. He was to act as champion for an offended client. A cuckolded hidalgo merchant, he remembered, without caring very much. The details didn’t matter. Only the time and place mattered, and that information he had stamped clearly in his memory: sunset, under the north side of the Bishop de Bienville Bridge. Some of his pay he’d had in advance, and he wondered as he finished scraping the little hairs off his jaw and chin how much, if any, still lurked in his pocket. The remainder, the lion’s share, he’d have after the duel.
He had challenged the doomed lover the night before, in a glittering salon on the edge of the Quarter. Light from a thousand genuine wax candles had sparkled in crystals hanging from the ceiling and in glass windows and in the polished brass buttons of all the servants. It had been a grand house and a very wealthy set of young people in attendance. Bill had gained admittance by handing the last of his gold coins over to a footman at the kitchen door.
In small, red-brick Richmond and the surrounding plantations a letter, delivered by a second, would have been traditional. If there were to be a personal confrontation, the blow would have been a symbolic one with an empty glove. Here in New Orleans, duels were commenced with rather less ceremony. Bill had spotted his man in a cluster of made-up dandies giggling around a sofa and chattering in French. He had tapped him on the shoulder, enjoyed the look of surprise on his face and then punched the young fop in the jaw. Standing over the stunned man in a sea of the rouged cheeks and grease-penciled facial hair of his gawking friends, he had then announced his errand.
“I’m William Johnston Lee, and you, suh, have offended me, for which I shall have satisfaction of your body tomorrow night at dusk.”
Bill’s client, Don Luis Maria Salvador Sandoval de Burgos—he thought that was the name, or at least close, though it didn’t seem right to him that the man should be named Maria—had insisted that Bill claim to be offended in his own right. He’d promised to pay extra for it. Bill needed the money badly enough that he hadn’t scrupled.
The young man had only stared.
“You are the challenged, suh,” Bill had reminded him. “Will it be swords or pistols?”
The lover, who apparently spoke no English, had taken advice in a flurry of monsieur-jabber from his witnessing friends, and then advised Bill he would prefer “le pistolet,” and no wonder, as Bill was at least a head taller and more heavily muscled. They had fixed time and place, Bill agreeing as a matter of course to the challenged’s suggestion of Smuggler’s Shelf. Exchange Alley, or the dirt square behind the cathedral, were more convenient sites as they involved much less walking and Bill was without a horse, but Bishopsbridge was not extraordinary. Perhaps the young fellow had some reason to wish to keep his duel as discreet as possible. Not that very much discretion was possible, after the highly public challenge.
Bill had tipped his hat and stalked from the salon.
He pulled the hat on now, over the black perruque tied neatly at the nape of his neck with a little black ribbon. It was the same hat he’d worn as captain of the Blues, broad-brimmed and black. He’d worn it with a peacock’s feather then, for elegance and dash; now, after years of sweat and rain, he just tried to keep it approximately in its original shape. The broad brim distinguished it from the tricorner hat that was the uniform of the Blues, almost to the point of making it resemble a Pennslander’s hat. Bill had worn it anyway, with permission from the Imperial Consort; it was Bill’s lucky hat. No star, no medallion, no rabbit’s foot, no lady’s kiss—not even Sally’s—had ever brought him as much luck as this hat, and he had no intention of ever buying another, fashion be damned.
He belted on his heavy cavalry saber, inlaid with gold and silver on the basket guard—that, at least, was as sharp and gleaming as ever, all along its forward edge and the tip sharp as well and good for thrusting.
Next the waistcoat; not his ornate Blues waistcoat, long ago pawned for cash, but a simpler red one, cut for his now-larger paunch. He buttoned it up and then shrugged into the long scarlet coat, torn and weatherbeaten but still serviceable. Its inner pocket jingled, but his brief hopes were shattered when he pulled the coins out and saw that they amounted to a few drinks at most. He didn’t remember spending the rest, but the dry roughness of his mouth and the fog receding from his brain corroborated the likely explanation that it had gone for liquor. And of course, the Louis he had paid the footman as a bribe to get into the salon.
After the coat, the accouterments of a gunman: powder horn, priming horn, and the leather pouch containing rags, mink oil, vent pick, brush, and bone powder measures.
Finally, he picked up his two long horse pistols, also painstakingly maintained. Bill checked that they were both loaded and primed (New Orleans was the sort of town where a man might meet enemies unexpectedly), then tucked one into his belt and the other into the long right-hand outside pocket of the red coat.
He looked at the long-barreled Kentucky rifle leaning in the corner. He couldn’t think of any reason he’d need it today, so he left it. No one ever broke into Madame Beaulieu’s boarding house—there were far too many rough men about, and far too little worth stealing—so it would be safe.
Bill locked the door and headed downstairs.
His room faced the interior of the building, opening onto the balcony running around the unroofed courtyard at the center of the boarding house. The air was no cooler here, but it smelled better and that refreshed Bill, if only a little bit. He was getting old and he was heavier than he’d ever been as a soldier, but he still moved easily as he padded down the hard steps into the jungle of ferns that his landlady made of the open space.
At the bottom of the creaking stairs, Madame Beaulieu herself waited in the greenery, smiling.
“Monsieur Bill,” she addressed him cheerfully. “Avez-vous le loyer? Le…rent?”
Bill winced, then shook his head. “I must again throw myself upon your much-infringed patience, ma’am. I have an expectation of coming into funds this evening. How many months do I owe you? Quant, er…” he fumbled, “months?”
“Trois,” she said, holding up fingers. “Three.”
Embarrassed, Bill realized that he had asked the wrong question. “Yes, ma’am, so I owe you…”
“Trois,” she said, holding up the same fingers. “Three Louis d’or.”
Ah, yes. “Thank you for your forbearance, Madame Beaulieu,” he tipped his hat to her and left the building, passing several fellow-lodgers smoking or just lounging on wrought iron chairs among the plants. They all looked away to avoid making eye contact with Bad Bill.
Three looeys, fine, he’d make that tonight and to spare.
The October afternoon was mild for New Orleans, but humid and warm as Bad Bill stepped out of the Pension de Madame Beaulieu and onto the creaking wood of the boardwalk.
A few steps away lay the tree-lined Esplanade Avenue and beyond that the cesspit of the Faubourg Marigny. The Faubourg was dirtier than the Quarter, smashed up against the eastern wall of the city, and more impoverished, but what mattered to Bill was that it afforded him little opportunity of employment, full as it was of poor drunk Creoles, Irishmen, Portugee, and Catalans. The Faubourg was dangerous. Its inhabitants fought all the time, maybe even more than the people of the Quarter, but they were poorer, so they did their own fighting, with knives and sticks and teeth.
Bill turned his back on the Faubourg’s stink and headed deeper into the Quarter. He stuck to the boardwalk for the shade it afforded. The packed-dirt streets weren’t empty, but afternoon
was a slow time for the Quarter, with only actual residents and local tradesman drifting about. The action would heat up when the sun went down and people came from elsewhere into the Quarter to drink, dance, sport, and generally live loud. Those were the people who provided Bill with his livelihood, either as clients or as targets.
What foot traffic there was in the warm afternoon saw Bad Bill coming and steered well clear, other than a wizened, coffee-colored crone, head tightly wrapped in bright silk and shawl bouncing wildly about her shoulders. She trotted up to Bill and pressed him with assorted objects.
“Luck, sir?” She shoved a pink string-doll into his face. “Love? Protection?” She fanned a handful of the little poppets in his direction, wound together of different-colored yarn but each with pins for eyes and tucked into a tiny shift of rough cotton fabric.
“No, ma’am.” Bill tried in vain to step around her. Vodun was not his brand of superstition.
“Beybey?” she changed propositions, scooping all the dolls into one gnarled hand and using the other to show a strand of leather on her shoulder bearing a series of brass medallions, like a thin belt threaded with multiple buckles. The medallions were elaborately cut with the loops and lines that Bill recognized as the holy symbols of various loa. “Legba, he bring you luck. Agwé for a sea journey, or if you a fisherman.”
“I am not a fisherman, ma’am,” Bill objected mildly, “and I try very hard to avoid ever setting foot on any ship.”
She looked him up and down, spying his pistols and his saber. “You a fighter, ah? A fightin’ man? Fine, you want Ogoun, he swing the big machete, he watch over fightin’ men!” She showed him the beybey of Ogoun, a web of triangles and asterisks framed by scrollwork. “You want? Ogoun, he a real bargain, big mojo loa!”
“Jesus is my loa.” Bill was vaguely Christian, but what he really meant was leave me alone.
“Read you a fortune?” the gypsy squeaked at him in a final effort. Bill saw the backs of the cards and recognized a cheap New Orleans printing of Franklin’s Tarock.