by D. J. Butler
But the Spaniard might not realize he hadn’t.
Bill jerked the empty pistol from his pocket and pointed it at his antagonist. “Entrénase!” he barked. Didn’t that mean surrender in Castilian?
The man blinked and swayed on his feet. Bill noted that he was losing a lot of blood out his mouth and down the front of his chest. Bill’s own shoulder felt as if a drill was chewing its way through it and he bit back a powerful urge to vomit.
“Give up, you dago bastard!” Bill repeated himself. “You’ve nothing worth dying for here! Entrénase, dog on you!” The man made no move to attack, but also didn’t raise his hands, drop his knife, or otherwise indicate surrender. He just stood where he was, shifting back and forth a bit on the balls of his feet as if he were a green tree swaying in a strong breeze. In the darkness Bill couldn’t see the man’s eyes.
Bill looked over his shoulder again. Don Sandoval had risen to his feet and was limping in a meandering line across the Shelf toward the bluff.
No more time for fooling around.
Bill took a step forward, raising his saber…and the hidalgo ruffian collapsed, falling sideways without bending, like a felled tree trunk.
Bill shoved his pistol back into his pocket, his sword into its scabbard, and his victorious hat onto his head. Taking a deep breath, he scanned the mud and sand and quickly found the only unfired pistol on Smuggler’s Shelf, the one that had been dropped to the ground when Bill had blasted the first man to oblivion. He blew off the sand and checked its firing pan, then stomped across the Shelf toward his former employer.
Don Luis Maria Salvador Sandoval de Burgos was beginning to clamber on all fours up the scrub grass, still groggy and whimpering, when Bill grabbed his black coat by the shoulders and pulled the merchant down, throwing him into the mud with a soggy splash.
“Twenty looeys!” Bill raged.
Don Sandoval looked up trembling and Bill shoved the borrowed pistol into his cheek, just below one eye, irreparably smearing the Don’s rouge. Should he be demanding more? Something held him back. Bill shook his head to clear it, and for a moment he thought he saw, out of the corner of his eye, the dead young frog.
He shuddered.
“I-I d-do not have it, Señor.” Tears furrowed the wrecked make-up on the merchant’s cheeks.
“Show me your purse,” Bill snarled. Don Sandoval fumbled at his waist and then handed over a black silk purse that was, to Bill’s disappointment and mounting sense of fury, empty. Bill had more than half a mind to shoot the dago, regardless of his observation by dead Frenchmen.
“D-d-do not kill me! I have treated you ill, it is true, but please, do not kill me! Please, I…I have a son!”
Damn the man! “Just because you’re named Maria, suh, doesn’t mean you have to cry.”
“I am s-sorry, and you are right. Please, I d-do not have the money.”
“Twenty looeys—how soon can you get it?” These fat merchants lived off the poor planting Cavaliers, and Don Sandoval must have chests of cash. Bill tried to remember what the Don traded in. Sugar? Wheat? Bantu cotton? He glanced discreetly to his side to make sure the chevalier’s son was not looking over his shoulder.
“Soon!” the Spaniard’s eyes brightened and he clasped his hands together as if in prayer. “Ten days, maybe she is a week only!”
“What!?” Bill yelled. “You’re rich as Croesus, suh, rich as William Penn, rich as John Hancock and just as much a thief! Don’t lie to me!” He was furious at the betrayal, at the lancing pain in his shoulder, and at the thought that if the Bishop of New Orleans didn’t kill him tomorrow, the chevalier surely would.
“I am no smuggler,” the merchant protested. “My money, she is in bales of cotton, and notes, and bills of exchange. I have no cash, I would have to borrow from my partners, and she will take time. I am sorry, my cotton is all stamped by the chevalier’s customs men, and my cash, she is all spent.”
“Spent on what?” Bill asked.
“Some of it you have already had,” Don Sandoval told him. “The remainder is all gone…on Miss Lefevre, mostly.” His eyes teared up and he looked away.
Bill snorted. “Don’t weep on Miss Lefevre’s account. She’s had other affections before yours, and she’ll have others after.”
“I weep for myself,” the Spaniard said. “And for the young Frenchman. And maybe for you, too. Please, Señor D-Dollar Bill, do not kill me.”
Bill pulled back the hammer on the gun and carefully considered his future. There was nothing Don Sandoval could do to save him from the chevalier—Bill had publicly called out the nobleman’s son, and killed him, and now Bill would pay the price. Apparently, the merchant couldn’t help him with the bishop, either, at least not tomorrow. Should he hold Don Sandoval for ransom? How much would the hidalgo’s partners or his family pay to free the fellow?
On the other hand, Bill was tempted by the idea of justice. One squeeze of his finger and at least the Spaniard would never trouble him again. Bill’s finger twitched, but in his mind’s eye he saw the chevalier’s son, bravely and uselessly waving his pistol at Bill, and above the young man’s shoulders he saw the face of his own son Charles.
The Frenchman would not have approved of this vindictive killing, and that thought strangely shamed Bill. The frog would have disapproved, Charles would have been ashamed, and once, he acknowledged to himself, feeling sick to his stomach, such a murder would have been anathema to Sir William Lee as well.
The Spaniard was beaten. It was enough.
“My name, suh,” he squeezed out through clenched teeth, “is not Dollar Bill. My name is Captain Sir William Johnston Lee.” With an effort of will, he eased the hammer back into place and then tossed the gun aside. “You owe me twenty looeys, suh. You should anticipate that I shall come collecting soon, and thank God that I am no great friend of the concept of interest.”
Bill marched up the bluff without looking back. He tried to take dignified steps, imagining that at least one, and maybe two hidalgos were watching his departure, but between the pain of his shoulder and the weight of his gut he found it impossible to do better than a rolling uphill lurch. He hoped he’d find one of the Spaniards’ horses at the top of the hill—he didn’t feel up to hobbling all the way back to New Orleans.
Bill stumbled onto the highway groaning. Every heartbeat pounded in his shoulder and a fair amount of blood ran through his sleeve and his shirt, puddling sticky at his belt and dripping down his fingers to the ground.
At least the air got a little easier to breathe as he rose up away from the river.
On the highway waited two figures, standing like puppets against a curtain of Spanish moss, dark and gloomy and silvery-green in the moonlight. They were robed and hooded in dark cloth, so he could not see their faces or tell whether they were armed. They seemed dimly familiar, and then he realized where he’d seen them before—standing in front of Grissot’s that afternoon.
“This is becoming an eventful evening.” He stopped in his tracks.
“We are messengers,” creaked one of the figures in a dry, slow voice.
“Just tell me that you monks aren’t servants of the chevalier.”
“No,” the same figure said. It peeled back its hood to reveal the forward-curling, leathery head of a tortoise, gray in the moonlight, bullet-shaped eyes glittering black and silver.
“We are not servants of the chevalier.”
The other figure pulled back its hood—her hood—as well, revealing a woman’s face that was strikingly beautiful in all respects but one. She had a waterfall of golden hair, slender eyebrows, fair skin, high cheekbones, shimmering blue eyes…and where her nose and mouth should have been, there protruded from her face the long yellow beak of a duck.
“Moreover, we are not monks,” she said. “We serve the Heron King.” Her voice tinkled like tiny silver bells. As he looked at it, Bill began to think that her beak wasn’t ugly, after all. It was strangely feminine and alluring.
“Beastkind,” Bill muttered.
That he found the duck-billed woman beautiful only made him mistrust her more. He kicked himself for not reloading the pistols. He rested his hand on the hilt of his saber, but left it in its scabbard. “If you are road-agents, you have chosen the wrong man. I’m penniless.”
“We are not outlaws.” The woman’s duck-smile troubled Bill.
“If you’re hungry, I’m armed.” Bill felt his strength ebbing with his blood loss.
“We are not here to hurt thee, Captain Sir William Johnston Lee,” the tortoise-headed man croaked, twisting its beak into something approaching a smile. The night had already been so strange that Court Speech coming out of the mouth of this turtle-headed man barely struck Bill as incongruous. “Thou art not an enemy and we are not feral.”
“If you truly wish me no harm, suh,” Bill quipped, refusing to be drawn into the Jacobean thees and thous that had once been second nature to him, “that fact may make you unique in the entire territory of Louisiana.”
“We have come looking for thee, Sir William,” fluted the beautiful duck.
Bill wondered whether her body was feathered underneath the robe she wore. He wondered…he snapped his mind back from pointless speculation. “I don’t suppose I’m so fortunate that you might be moneylenders, anxious to lend me twenty gold looeys? Preferably not subject to the terrible Adamic curse of interest? If not, and if you’re not offering me a ride back to New Orleans in your invisible carriage, then I must be on my way.”
They ignored his jokes. Blasted beastkind—no sense of humor. Bill felt faint.
“We are emissaries of the Heron King,” the duck-bill tinkled again. “We bear thee a message.”
Bill snorted. He’d heard stories of the Heron King, growing up in Johnsland, but they weren’t stories of the sort you took very seriously once you were out of short pants. “I only regret that you are not emissaries of Father Christmas instead, ma’am,” he rejoined, “bearing me gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and twenty gold looeys.”
It must be the blood loss. Bill was lightheaded; he must be hallucinating. This whole encounter was all in his head. There was no Turtle Head, no Duck-Faced Woman. He was probably lying unconscious on the Shelf while Don Sandoval hacked him to pieces with a dagger and put rouge on his cheeks.
At least he couldn’t feel it.
“Thou shalt see the queen soon,” Tortoise-head told him. “Tell her Peter Plowshare is dead. The Heron King conveys his congratulations upon the occasion of her return, he supports her in her claims to her thrones, and he hopes she will entertain his suit for a close alliance between his kingdom and hers…a close alliance, and also marriage.”
Bill sucked in cool air through his teeth. Peter Plowshare? The queen? This hallucination got odder as it was prolonged. He could just manage to keep the beastfolk’s faces in view, but the world around them spun in crazy smears of silvery-moonlit color.
“The difficulty you face, suh,” he tried to tell the tortoise-headed man, “isn’t my memory, which is passing adequate to the herald’s task, but the fact that I don’t expect in the proximate future to be seeing any queens…or any other gentlefolk at all…unless, you understand, they happen to reside in the bottom of potter’s field.”
He wasn’t sure how much of his message he got out coherently.
He began losing consciousness in the middle of it, and when he reached the end, Bill passed out and fell.
* * *
“Someone on the boardwalk wants to talk to you,” Petit Jacques the stable boy told Cathy, speaking French, the only language he knew.
Petit Jacques was out of place in the smoke-clouded common room of Grissot’s, where he was not generally allowed at night. His breeches and shapeless cap were battered and dirty, but the horse smell wasn’t strong enough to cut through the odors of woodsmoke, tobacco, and sweat, and he wasn’t trailing straw or manure behind him, so Cathy didn’t mind, whatever Grand Jacques said.
Over the bum-ditty of the banjo picker in the corner and the click-and-roll of the man beside him, shuffling his hard-soled shoes and snapping a pair of rib bones in each hand to keep time, no one but Cathy could hear Petit Jacques, anyway. The musicians were dark-skinned Igbo men in long, embroidered tunics, and while the banjo-picker hummed a wordless basso drone, the bones player sang a folk tune. Cathy knew it well, though it was not a song she’d ever heard in her native Virginia; she’d been catching snatches of it on and off for over fifteen years, since she’d first come to the Mississippi.
Peter Plowshare’s a farming man
King of maize and bean and gourd
Who takes your crop whene’er he can?
The rascal, Simon Sword!
“I don’t entertain gentlemen in the street,” she told the boy softly in his tongue, and smiled at him. Charm everyone. “That simply wouldn’t do.” Maintain your standards. Let people come to you.
“I don’t think they’re gentlemen, and I don’t think they want to be entertained,” Petit Jacques insisted. “They might be priests.”
“How very interesting,” Cathy said. “Well, I do hope they decide to come in and see me, then.” Patience in all things. She scanned the room, disappointed that the potential clientele was so scarce and poor tonight. She prided herself on giving men more than some of her fellow entertainers did: class and sophistication. She could converse, she had read widely, she could sing, and some men came to her for those things. They paid more for it, and that was important, as it almost made up for the fact that many men found her simply over-priced.
Petit Jacques fished something from his pocket. “This was their tip to me.”
Peter Plowshare’s a builder fair
Log and chink and stone and board
Who tears down buildings everywhere?
The villain, Simon Sword!
It was a gold coin, one that Cathy did not recognize, stamped simply with a plow on one side and a sword on the other, no letters or numbers at all. Her eyebrows arched involuntarily, and she beat them down with a will of iron. Grace at all times. She smiled. “How fortunate, Jacky. Be careful how you spend it, now.” Restraint.
Cultivate an impression of mastery and mystery.
Petit Jacques shook his head. “Very well, Madame, you do whatever you want to. I told them you would not come out, but they asked me to try. It has something to do with Monsieur Bad Bill, they said. I think he may be in danger.” He eyed Grand Jacques at the bar, then skipped out.
Peter Plowshare shapes the land
Road and fence and bridge and ford
Who smashes all with a hateful hand?
The reaver, Simon Sword!
Cathy mastered her surprise. Bad Bill! Captain Sir William Johnston Lee, once an Imperial officer of some renown. He didn’t know it, but she owed Bill a great debt—two debts, really.
In the first place, his daily visits to her and his reputation as a dangerous man had freed her of the need to work for a procurer, since most of the Quarter assumed she worked for Bill, and they feared him too much to harm Cathy. It helped that Bill had more than once intervened when a client of hers had become troublesome, throwing men into horse troughs or frightening them away simply by resting his hand on a pistol grip. Having no pander and working out of a tavern rather than a true bawdy house meant Cathy kept all her earnings, which was an enormous gain. Some working women she knew gave up more than half their take for the ‘protection’ of a gold-toothed cutthroat who beat them, or worse.
In the second place, and on a less mercenary plane, Sir William’s visits kept her sane. She thought they might serve the same function for him—a daily moment of deliberate refinement and gentility to keep the stinking, fleshy, oil-lit barbarism of New Orleans at bay—and she loved him for it. She flirted with him knowing it was in vain, on account of William’s dogged faithfulness to a wife whom he believed might still be true to him.
Paradoxically, his insistent loyalty to the family—and wife—he hadn’t seen for years made him more attractive to Cathy. She admired his st
ubborn attachment, she found it reassuring. The fact that that family included children, that Sir William was a father, made her think of her own child, the child she had never told Sir William about, and in her fancy she liked to imagine that Sir William was the child’s father.
In some secret chamber of her inner heart into which even she could not see clearly, Cathy Filmer suspected, she was in love with Bill. She loved him almost enough to be completely honest with him.
Almost, but not quite.
She rose to her feet gracefully. The clients, the diners and the drinkers in the room didn’t notice, but as she headed to the door she looked to the bar and saw Grand Jacques’s tiny-eyed, heavy-jowled face staring at her. He knew Cathy did not leave her position while she was at work—she let the men come to her—and he knew she was too professional to quit work early. He said nothing, though, and went back to refilling tumblers.
Peter Plowshare’s an even judge
Fair to farmer, and mighty lord
Who hates us all with an even grudge?
The waster, Simon Sword!
The street outside roiled, fumed, and belched with the midnight traffic of the Quarter, all sins bought and sold in the cool night air, which at least had the virtue of reeking less of tobacco smoke than did the air inside. Among the loungers on the walk stood a solitary robed and hooded figure, rather than the two Petit Jacques had described. This was not an atmosphere that attracted many clerics, so the figure must be one of the priests in question.
“Good evening,” she said, “bon soir.” This commonplace New Orleans maneuver gave the other party the choice of language in which to proceed.
“Good even,” the figure replied, and pulled back its hood slightly. Cathy nearly jumped at finding that beneath the hood was a woman’s face with long yellow hair and a duck’s beak. Grace.
“I am Mrs. Catherine Filmer.” Cathy nodded slightly.