by D. J. Butler
“No, thank you, ma’am.” He pushed definitively past her. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe she could read his future in the cards—rather, he didn’t want to know what the future held. He gripped his hat and pulled it securely down over his ears, trying to block out the sound of her spitting and cursing him.
Bill squinted against the sun at the lattice-railed balconies and the hanging green jasmine, not yet blooming as the weather had just begun to turn cool. He had the afternoon ahead of him and nothing in his schedule, so he went where he always did when he had no plan.
Grissot’s—which Bill could not bring himself to pronounce other than as GRISS-uts, though the proprietor said his name grease-OH—was a public house that at night featured musical entertainments, frequently including Igbo banjo-pickers and Bantu fiddlers from east and north of the city, and girls calling invitations from the iron-railed balconies above to passersby in the street.
In the afternoon, Grissot’s featured strong drink and Long Cathy.
At the door, Bill bumped into two plain-robed people, faces so deeply shrouded in hoods that he could see no features. They held their fingers steepled before them, and the sight made Bill sigh. Priests. The empire was lousy with them. They seemed to exist just to disagree with each other; these priests liked the Eldritch, those ones didn’t; these priests ordained women, those objected; these ones over here in red robes taught wizards, and their rivals in green burned witches; some printed books, some preached to the Indians, some fought the Turk. Bill had a hard time caring—he just wanted someone to baptize and marry his children and say the occasional Mass when he was in the mood. Too much priest-talk, and Bill started to wish he burned a Yule log and sang at the solstice with his pagan neighbors in Johnsland.
The priests bobbled slightly, as if anxious about something. Bill wasn’t interested, so he tipped his hat, smiled politely and turned inside.
Cathy was at the bar. She didn’t sit on the stools, she wasn’t leaning, and she didn’t seem to Bill to be floating…she just was. Bill knew very well the worn, smoke-stained, and knife-scarred wood that made up the interior of Grissot’s, but somehow, around Cathy, it became something else, something fine. Something like…a ballroom, maybe, or a salon, though it felt more like Cavalier Richmond to him than French New Orleans. He bowed and swept his hat to her, careful not to dislodge the perruque—nothing was less impressive than a fat old man who was also bald.
“My knight,” she smiled at him, “Sir William.”
More than once, he had taken it upon himself to rid her of some unpleasant client. “Mrs. Filmer,” returned Captain Sir William Johnston Lee. “It’s an unspeakable pleasure to see you again. Might I be permitted the honor of buying you a drink?”
Catherine Filmer was tall and graceful, with dark brown hair to her shoulders and dancing blue eyes. She was born Catherine Howard (like King Henry’s wife, a rose without a thorn), a Virginian, from a small town not far over the border from William’s own ancestral lands. She had grown up a gentleman farmer’s daughter, had been educated by the Sisters of St. William Harvey, had married a bright young schoolteacher with no prospects, had moved west with her husband to allow him to teach at an academy in the Memphis of Menelik V, and had buried him upon arrival, flat dead of the pox.
Trash floats downstream, the Memphites sniffed and the residents of New Orleans agreed in cheerful self-mockery, but in this case, after a stint with a cloister of beguines that Bill vaguely thought had ended in scandal, the mighty Mississippi had brought tumbling down a diamond. Long Cathy had arrived shortly before William and had been brightening his dark days since the first.
“Why, Sir William, you always have my permission to buy me a drink, and I live in hope that you will avail yourself of it.” She smiled and the back of William’s neck tingled.
“I hope you know that if ever you are in need of companionship for a libation, I am most certainly at your service.”
“Would that it were not merely a libation.” She smiled again, and William shivered. He was hopeless before Mrs. Catherine Filmer, he was her votary.
“Two whiskies!” Sir William Lee called to the hunchbacked Irishman behind the bar. He kissed Long Cathy’s knuckles and sat, elbow on the dark wood. “I cannot regret, ma’am, my inability to pay you more personal attentions, as I remain a faithfully married man. In another life, however…” The whisky had arrived, prompt because the public house was otherwise empty, and he raised his glass. “Honor,” he began the toast.
“In defense of innocence,” she finished it, then joined him, sipping like a lady. “In another life, Sir William,” she agreed, “and perhaps yet in this one.”
“Have you heard, ma’am?” he chatted breezily. “The chevalier has promised a stronger gendarmerie to police the Quarter. Apparently some citizens are concerned that there are low characters to be found in this part of New Orleans.”
“No!”
He nodded ruefully. “Ruffians, they say.”
She smiled bells and sunshine at him, dazzling him with her white teeth, shining eyes, and glittering Harvite locket. St. William Harvey had been an English medical doctor. Now his Sisters, sometimes called the Harvites or the Circulators, were physicians and apothecaries, with a special mission to help the needy.
“The poor honest gentlefolk must be trembling in their beds.” She sighed. “Perhaps they could consider hiring protection when they come to the Quarter, if the chevalier cannot provide an adequate number of gendarmes.”
“Perhaps they could at that, ma’am,” he agreed. “Perhaps some enterprising person will undertake to offer them the service of watching their bodies.”
“I fear I am somewhat a-quiver, myself,” Long Cathy said. “Might you do me the service of watching my body?”
“I’m your humble servant,” William replied. “Until the day they row me out into the Pontchartrain Sea and throw me into the Hulks.”
A second whisky came for each, a few more precious minutes of ironic civilized pleasantries passed and then William guessed he was likely out of money and should leave. He thought she would have allowed him to stay and talk longer even without a drink, but he knew that his bearlike presence on the stool could only frighten away potential customers, and he wished her too well to cause her such harm.
“I must bid you a good evening, Mrs. Filmer,” he saluted her, rising to his feet and executing another bow-and-sweep. He emptied his coins onto the counter, relieved to find he had enough to pay for the drinks and also leave a small gratuity for the Irishman. “I fear that I have business to attend to.”
“A good evening to you, too, Sir William,” she replied, “but surely it is your business that fears you.”
Another kiss to her unscarred hand and Bad Bill was out the door again, warmed inside by the two whiskies and by the few priceless minutes of having been permitted to be Sir William.
Fifteen years. He sighed.
For fifteen years it had been only the shared polite moments like this with Long Cathy that had kept him still wishing to live.
The genteel company of Long Cathy and the thought of home, of course, he corrected himself. Sally and the children. The children…Heaven’s beard, they’d be grown now. Images flashed into his mind of stick-fencing with young Charles, and playing at battle with toy soldiers, and he wondered whether the boy was now grown into a military man. He must be; Bill’s family had always produced military men.
Whump!
The club took him by surprise, thumping hard into his belly as he stepped around the corner of Grissot’s. Bill went down, losing his hat. A second blow of the cudgel hit him across the back of the head and turned his vision starry and spinning. Tumbling on the hard boardwalk, Bill groped for his sword hilt but froze when he felt a pistol shoved against his nose.
He eased over slowly, hands held away from his weapons, breath creeping back while his head still swam. His attackers let him roll, and when he lay on his back Bill saw that there were five of them, two ar
med with clubs, one with a brace of pistols, and one with a bell-mouthed blunderbuss, all scrutinizing him closely.
The four armed men were the usual New Orleans mongrels, killers of any race and country, all with desperation blazing in hungry eye sockets and all wearing simple black waistcoats. Bill ignored them and looked at the fifth man, their leader, whose broad, brown face was smiling in an incongruously kindly way. He wore an expensive coat, polished riding boots and fistfuls of gold rings. He was not visibly armed, and he held a smoldering cigarette. His waistcoat was black like his followers’, but was elaborately stitched with silver thread, a web of triangles and asterisks framed by scrollwork. Beneath it his waist was wrapped in a red silk sash, knotted on his right hip.
“Etienne,” Bill acknowledged the smiling man. “Ubosi oma.” He meant it as a friendly greeting—it was the only Igbo he knew. Or was it Amharic? His head hurt.
“Shut your mouth, you ignorant piece of filth.” Etienne still smiled.
“May I sit up?” Bill asked in his most polite tones.
“I prefer you to lie where you are, you fat old man. It might help you remember this meeting better.”
Bill acquiesced, but did at least reach out and pick his hat up off the boardwalk. His head had stopped spinning and he assessed his chances. They were not good. Even if he managed to distract the thugs’ attention and knock out one of the shooters in a surprise attack, the other would surely get him, and that didn’t take into account the toughs with cudgels. Nor could Bill expect any help from the city’s blue-and-gold-coated gendarmes or any passersby; this was the Quarter, and an attack by one set of thugs on another would raise not a single eyebrow.
He hoped this meeting would prove just to be a reminder. He would try to hasten the conversation to its climax.
“I will be able to repay your father tomorrow, Etienne.” Bill tried to look as trustworthy as he could. He meant it—he would duel the frog lover of his dago employer’s mistress tonight, and then he’d be able to pay back the loan. Even the interest, he hoped, though he had no idea how much that would be.
How interest really worked he had never understood very well, and it struck Bill as likely being somehow part of the curse brought on by Original Sin. Sums of money become larger if you wait was the only summary he could have given of the principle. That was a fine thing if you owned the money or you were a lending banker and a significant inconvenience, Bill had found, when you owed it.
“His Grace,” Etienne corrected him.
“I will be able to repay His Grace tomorrow,” Bill hastily agreed.
Etienne took a long drag. “I am very glad to hear it.”
“I have some work arranged for tonight, and I’ll make good money.” Bill was talking too much. Shut up now.
“Repayment tomorrow would be completely acceptable.” Etienne’s continued happy smiling was beginning to take on an insane cast. “This conversation is a peaceful one, in the nature of a reminder to a friend. An urgent reminder, to a friend who might be about to make a terrible mistake.”
“Thank you,” Bill said.
“With interest, your debt is now a large one, at eight Louis d’or. You know, I expect, what His Grace will do if he is not repaid tomorrow?”
“Excommunication?” Bill tried to squeeze all the charm he had into a roguish grin.
“Last rites.” Etienne stepped back and his two toughs with cudgels closed in. They beat Bill half a dozen strokes each while the bishop’s son laughed heartily at his appropriation of Bill’s jest.
They left him on the boardwalk, battered but conscious and still clutching his lucky hat. Bill let himself lie still and recover, but only for a few moments—his reputation as a man of arms would suffer if any potential client saw him lying there. When he stood he stood tall, for the same reason, willing himself to straighten his aching back and not hunch over or fuss at the bruises he knew were forming on his arms and thighs. He blocked his hat into the best shape he could with his fists and perched it atop his perruque.
If only he weren’t a drinking man. If he’d saved his cash for fifteen years instead of throwing it away on various kinds of rotgut (whisky, whenever possible, but there was a surprising variety of distilled substances that would do in a pinch), he’d own his own house in the Garden District by now. And a business—maybe a stage coach, with drivers and guards in his employ. And he’d never have had to borrow money from that bloodthirsty usurer, the Bishop of New Orleans.
His head hurt, and he almost stepped back into Grissot’s to buy another drink. Abrupt recollection of his completely empty purse, together with a sudden wave of shame at the thought that Long Cathy might see him in this defeated state, stopped him at the door.
He staggered down the street, collecting his thoughts. He would win his duel tonight—he always won, and this hapless frenchie looked more likely to grab the wrong end of the pistol and shoot himself than to be any danger to Bill—and that would let him pay his rent and repay his loan. What had Madame Beaulieu said about the size of his debt? Three looeys? And another eight to the bishop? That should work out just fine. He had ten looeys coming to him from Don Sandoval, and the hidalgo had promised Bill a bonus if the offending Frenchman actually died.
And if he had to owe Madame Beaulieu just one Louis d’or for a few more days, she’d still have to see that as an improvement.
Bill realized he was passing Hackett’s, the pawnbroker, and he stopped to look in the window at the glorious jumble that was the treasure of other people’s lives, sold cheap. Behind iron bars, among jewelry, tools, books, furniture, and even pairs of boots, he saw weapons that other desperate men had pawned, none as nice as Bill’s. He had borrowed money on his guns before—he’d gotten into debt with the bishop the last time he’d needed his pistols out of hock for a job. He hadn’t borrowed eight looeys, either—he wasn’t sure, but it seemed to him he might have borrowed four. Or even three. Someday he would master this concept of interest.
In any case, he wasn’t going to pawn his weapons now; he needed them. His own lengthening shadow reminded him he had an appointment at the river, and he turned and let himself drift out of the French Quarter west, toward the city walls and beyond them the bridge named after Bishop Chinwe Philippe Ukwu’s famous predecessor, Bishop Henri de Bienville.
* * *
Bill arrived at the bridge first, as he’d intended, and breathing through his mouth to keep out the stink.
He took extra care, moving outside of the city after dark. Close as it was to the wild no man’s lands of Texia and the Great Green Wood, New Orleans saw plenty of beastkind even within city limits. Outside city limits, and across the river, they were even more common, and some of them were feral. Not that Louisiana needed wild beastkind to be dangerous—bandits, pirates, robbers, drunk Texians, war bands of the free horse people, and alligators were all possible, even likely, encounters. Bill walked with his hands always on his pistols and his eyes never resting, darting from one Spanish moss-draped oak to the next.
Bishop Henri de Bienville Bridge, or Bishopsbridge, was only a couple of miles west of the city, and crossed the low end of the Mississippi River to connect the highway out of New Orleans with the large Westwego sugar plantations on the south bank of the river. One of the plantations belonged to the bishopric, so it was not pure public-spiritedness alone that had driven Bishop de Bienville to construct his famous crossing.
The Bishops of New Orleans had always been men of wealth and power, from the very beginning. The first Bishop de Bienville was a younger son of the Le Moyne family, and brother to the Chevalier Le Moyne in his day, whenever exactly that was. Perhaps as long as two hundred years. Bishops had owned businesses and land and farms and had servants throughout New Orleans’s history, and Henri de Bienville had been the richest of them all, a major landowner and benefactor in the city and the surrounding country. Bill knew this about the bishopric and about St. Henri because everyone in New Orleans knew it.
But not until the bish
opric had passed into the hands of the Igbo Bishop Ukwu had the Bishop of New Orleans ever before been a crime lord and a moneylender. Bill looked at the Bridge and wondered whether he ought to think about actually attending church some time. It might convince the bishop to give him better interest rates.
The bridge was enormous, a span of seven great stone arches shooting across the wide river and creating a passage that could accommodate four large wagons abreast. Local oral history was emphatic that Bishop de Bienville had engaged a team of thaumaturgical engineers to build the bridge, and the sheer size of the thing made Bill believe the tale. The same oral history was also convinced that the effort of constructing the bridge had been so huge that it had actually killed the engineers, and de Bienville had buried their bodies inside the bridge’s foundations.
Around Bishopsbridge, the Mississippi River created shallow muddy stinking wetlands that provided good pickings for fishing birds but fouled the air. The bridge’s first arch began back from the river’s edge and at a low bluff, to keep the bridge above the swamp and the river itself, even during high flood. This created a plain of sand under the stone that was surrounded by mud and water but was itself exposed and firm, if not exactly dry, most of the year. It was also hidden from casual observation. This concealed sandbar, known as Smuggler’s Shelf, saw a steady stream of traffic for a variety of purposes, none of them completely innocent and many of them downright nefarious.
Croaking frogs and wharoooping river birds cheered Bill on as he scrambled down the slope onto the shelf.
Bang!
Bill drove the inevitable clutch of lovers too poor to afford a room from the sandbar with the unanswerable argument of a single pistol shot, fired out over the river. That stopped the birds and frogs, too. He reloaded and checked his other pistol as well while the couples scattered and the river creatures regained the courage to begin singing to him again—loaded and primed. He didn’t fear being reported—even if any of the lovers felt confident enough to do so, he’d be gone by the time any gendarme could get here from the city.