by D. J. Butler
“What are the other possibilities?” Sarah asked.
Thalanes looked worried.
“Death is the next most common. Execution on the spot, or in a convenient dark alley, or in some cold basement of a gendarme station, or in a bayou. If you’re lucky—if we are lucky—then perhaps the gendarmes simply ran Bill out of town on a rail, though if that is the case, again, I’m surprised and disappointed not to have seen him return.”
“Is there any possibility he might simply be detained?” Thalanes pressed.
“It isn’t likely.” Cathy shook her head. “He’s not the sort of man to whom the chevalier would grant such niceties as a trial. The gendarmes would only hold him if the chevalier wished to torture William. Or, perhaps, if he had some use for him.”
“If he were in prison, would you know where?” Sarah might be able to use her Second Sight or her gramarye to better advantage if she had some idea where to start the search.
Cathy shrugged, a gesture that on her shoulders was refined and feminine. “The basement of any gendarme station,” she said, “or the Palais du Chevalier, or on the Pontchartrain, in the hulks.”
That limited the search, though Sarah didn’t know how to find any of those places. “Thank you. Do you have anything of William’s? Any…personal pledges, any clothing?”
Cathy shook her head. “I have nothing of his, I regret to say.” She paused in thought. “But I know where you can find something.”
* * *
St. Joan of Arc presided over the Perdido Street station, smiling benignly down from her image with a long sword in one hand and a fleur-de-lis in the other. Obadiah felt no particular warmth in his heart for members of the constabulary, not even now when the gendarmes of New Orleans were giving him his room and board, their boxy-headed hounds padding about among the cots looking for scraps.
St. Joan, though, was no constable. She was a woman, which was soothing, and, like Obadiah, she was from the Old World and a bit out of place. If the Maid of Orleans could be at home here, so could he.
Sitting in the corner of the spacious cot-furnished barracks, Obadiah ate the fish stew and brown bread given him by his gendarme hosts in slow, mechanical silence, ignoring the cigarette smoke and the plink! of brown spit hitting the bottoms of brass spittoons and the soldierly chatter. He gazed up at St. Joan and tried to think.
He had felt uncertain for a couple of weeks. He had been floating, he had been in love. Another reason he was pleased to look at the painting of St. Joan was that she reminded him of Sarah, a dangerous young woman. Obadiah knew very well that his feelings for Sarah had started in a magic spell.
His hexed love for her had disappeared when the spell had ended.
But then the real enchantment had taken place. To his astonishment, Obadiah had longed to be ensorcelled again. Being hexed had revealed to him a new world, an existence in which he could care about truth and beauty and love, and not just the satisfaction of his belly and his loins. Not a new world, but a world he had once lived in.
Obadiah wanted to feel that way again.
He clung stubbornly to the hope that Sarah might bring him to that world. He knew he was idealizing her, but he needed that ideal. He had tried to get closer to his employer, the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton, in the hope that some combination of theology, commitment, service, and sanctification would give him the life he craved. But the Right Reverend Father was hell-bent on distancing Obadiah.
St. Joan of Arc gazed down on Obadiah. Come home, the saint said to him.
Come home to what? To England? There was nothing for him there. His father was dead, the cooperage long converted into cash money and spent—much of it, and he felt for the first time a small twinge of guilt, wasted on getting him into the academy, where he’d failed at the cannon and then run away from the pike. He had no siblings, and no affection for any of his cousins or, for that matter, for King George I of England.
There was Queen Caroline, of course.
And Peg.
Obadiah’s appetite was gone. He set his bowl on the floor for a snuffling hound.
England was the land of his youth, and Obadiah remembered it fondly as a green and innocent place, despite the ruins scattered across its landscape and the blood of lambs poured regularly across its standing stones. Innocent, that is, until Obadiah had come trudging up to Peg’s father’s door on leave from the Royal Military Academy, resplendent and proud in the polished boots and buttons of his uniform, to ask her father for permission to court Peg. He’d already had an understanding, he thought, with the cheerful young tailor’s daughter, but Obadiah had wanted to do things properly, and had told Peg so in one of the many letters he had written from the academy.
He remembered the doorstep clearly, the worn brown bricks of the building’s face, the warm spring air, and her father’s surprised eyes. “Why, sure, an’ I’d ’ave give it you,” the droop-faced old man had said, “you beink such a grand lad, even if your old dad be one of them Christ-chasers. Only she’s run off just the other day wiff another fellow. Still, I fink she’d ’ave you, if only you’d go an’ fight ’im for ’er.”
Obadiah had not chased Peg and fought for her. Instead, he’d gone to a brothel, a narrow, windowless building in the shadow of St. Mary-le-Bow, the first such visit of his life. He’d gone expecting to feel pain and guilt, wanting to feel them, wanting to make Peg feel them, too. Instead, he’d felt numb, but vaguely satisfied, as if he’d scratched an itch.
He’d stayed in the brothel three days, drunk the entire time.
Two weeks later he’d boarded a ship for the New World.
Maybe the time had arrived for him to come home. Not to Peg, of course. He hadn’t fought for Peg, and now she was long gone. If she was still alive, she was married somewhere in the Midlands, and had grandchildren by now.
But he could come home to Sarah. Obadiah looked up, met St. Joan’s gaze, and nodded solemnly.
He could still fight for Sarah.
* * *
The halls were lined with saints, depicted in paintings and sculptures and tile mosaics and even charcoal drawings. Ezekiel was a theologian and he recognized many of them, but there had always been too many saints to keep track of, and every time a council of bishops was convened to try to pare down the list, the princes of the church came away instead having added more.
At the brisk clip at which he followed du Plessis through the Palais, Ezekiel barely had enough time to register each image. He could only identify a few of the holy people, but he knew from their icons they were all saints, whether he even would have recognized each saint’s claim to beatification.
Du Plessis took them up wide marble stairs tropical with ferns and orchids and down a narrow side passage, ushering them into a salon furnished with sofas, a wide, gold-painted harpsichord, and a small counter in the corner with tumblers, a pitcher of ice, a bowl of cubed sugar, and multiple bottles of liquor.
“Please wait here,” du Plessis urged the Imperials, and then bowed his way back out the door, shutting it behind him.
Berkeley made a beeline for the alcohol. “Are you drinking, Parson?” he asked belligerently.
Ezekiel waved the question away with a distracted hand; he was examining the images on the walls. In the salon, too, the chevalier had decorated his walls with saints, and as Ezekiel perused the paintings with a little more leisure, he realized why he had failed to recognize so many of the images in the outer halls.
These weren’t just any saints, they were all French—the chevalier had turned the Palais into a home for the many and varied saints of New Orleans.
There was St. Samuel de Champlain, with his compass and his globe and his beaverskin hat. The first Governor of Acadia was more properly native to the northeast of the New World, but he had been a great explorer and ruler, and Ezekiel wasn’t surprised to see his painting here. St. Henri de Bienville, once the Bishop of New Orleans, held an allegorical crowned catfish in his lap. He was a truly indigenous sain
t, born in New Orleans after the founders of the city had split into the Le Moyne and de Bienville branches, one providing Louisiana with its chevaliers and the other furnishing its bishops. The theologian and ideologue St. Jean-Jacques Rousseau smiled out of his painting with the unblinking eyes of a fanatic, a short-barreled musket and his two most famous theological tracts, On Education and The Confessions, held out before him.
“The chevalier has an obsession.” Berkeley clinked the ice in his glass.
“He’s haunted,” Ezekiel said. “Haunted by God and all His saints.”
“It’s unnatural,” Berkeley objected, “and effeminate. A man takes what fate deals him, good or bad, and doesn’t whine to the dead for favors.”
“It’s beautiful,” Ezekiel disagreed, “even if all the saints he likes are Frenchmen.”
Ezekiel had spent time in New Orleans as a younger man, but he remembered this spot as exhausted, empty old plantation land, burned over by the Spanish under the command of Count Galvéz. In the opulent, unforgetting, spiritual, and obsessive quality of these chambers, the chevalier had captured the soul of the great city, never moving forward without one eye over its shoulder for the grandeur and travails of the past.
It was so different from his own upbringing, where the past was nothing, the doings of man still less, and what counted was the ineluctable will of God, as expressed in His world and in His word.
There was another aspect of this wall of the sanctified that struck a chord in Ezekiel’s heart. The many images of the saints were not only a memory of past godliness, they were a standing rebuke to death. In his icon, in his continuing blessing, each saint lived eternally.
As he turned from picture to picture to the other saints’ icons in the room, Ezekiel tried to imagine whose image he would find next. Each time, he more than half hoped to discover a painting of Lucy Winthrop, beautiful in a russet and orange dress, auburn hair crowned with a white lace cap over warm, lively blue eyes.
He never did.
At least he hadn’t found any portraits of St. Cetes, or of any other heretical Unsouled ‘saints,’ such as Richelieu the Crypto-Elf, serial traitor and machinator of the Serpentwars, or the hag Adela Podebradas, who had brought so much death to the children of Eve in Bohemia and the Palatinate with her obstinate rebellion against the combined wills of God and her husband.
“Blazes.” Berkeley drained his glass.
The door opened and Gaspard le Moyne, the Chevalier of New Orleans, strode through it. He was alone and armed, with a dueling sword in a glittering sheath and a brace of pistols in well-worn leather holsters. He recognized the chevalier from having seen him at the Imperial Court in Philadelphia, where most Electors of the empire made periodic appearances, but he doubted the chevalier would know him—he and Berkeley were both mere servants in the Emperor Thomas’s retinue, and his sole previous personal contact with the chevalier had been to bow deeply as the man walked past across the audience chamber of Horse Hall.
“My Lord Chevalier,” the emperor’s men said together. They doffed hats and bowed deeply.
The chevalier returned their greeting with a nod, closing the door. The chevalier was tall and thin. His hair, trimmed short and neat above his ears, was dark but beginning to go gray.
“You’re well-armed for a man at home, My Lord,” Captain Berkeley observed.
“My home is New Orleans,” the chevalier said with a hint of a French accent, and crossed the room to the countertop bar. He laid his pistols on the countertop where, Ezekiel couldn’t help noticing, they pointed at the chevalier’s guests. “Does that make you feel better?” He poured himself a drink.
Berkeley laughed. “I’m perfectly at ease, My Lord.” He deliberately sat down directly in the line of fire of the guns.
Ezekiel wasn’t sure where this mutual baiting was going, but he thought he should head it off. “Thank you for seeing us, My Lord.”
Slowly, deliberately, the chevalier pulled a long cigar from his pocket, bit off the ends and lit it with a Lucifer match struck on a button of his waistcoat. “What does Thomas want?”
In other circumstances, Ezekiel might have thought the question admirably or refreshingly direct, but with the pistols pointed at him he did not feel either refreshed or inclined to admire. The chevalier’s familiarity toward his lord, Thomas Penn, also annoyed Ezekiel. “We’re on His Imperial Majesty’s errand, My Lord. However, the emperor didn’t send us to see you, or even specifically to New Orleans. We’re tracking a fugitive.”
The chevalier puffed contemplatively on his cigar. Had the chevalier relaxed at the information that Ezekiel had not specifically come to see him?
“Thank you for quartering my men,” Berkeley said to the chevalier. “I don’t know how long it will take us to search New Orleans.”
“It may take you some time.” The chevalier’s voice was cool. “New Orleans is a large, grand old lady, and she doesn’t always appreciate being searched.”
Berkeley laughed. “Then I hope we may rely upon your hospitality for a few days, while we find out what she has tucked underneath her petticoats.”
“Of course,” the chevalier agreed.
“Perhaps you might also be able to lend us some of your men to assist in our search,” Ezekiel suggested modestly.
The chevalier arched an eyebrow. “Tell me about your fugitive.”
Ezekiel and Captain Berkeley shared a glance, and Ezekiel floundered. He had come expecting basic assistance as a matter of courtesy extended from one Power to another, or from an Elector to his emperor, but he hadn’t anticipated being questioned.
What could he tell this man? How much could he trust him?
“She’s a girl. A young woman,” he finally said. Simple, true and innocuous.
The chevalier looked at him with amused eyes, nursing his cigar. “Thomas sent the House Light Dragoons to New Orleans to capture a little girl,” he said, drawing out the words for emphasis.
Ezekiel nodded.
“She must be quite a girl,” the chevalier said. “A Sufi assassin, perhaps. Or a troublesome reforming cleric. Some Philadelphian Queen Adela Podebradas, anxious to serve the emperor with a sanguinary Writ of Divorce.”
“She’s a pretender.” Captain Berkeley stood and Ezekiel was grateful. “Nothing more, and nothing of interest. We had other business in the Cotton League, so the emperor has tasked us with picking her up as well. It’s a minor matter, My Lord Chevalier, hardly worth raising to your attention, other than out of an abundance of courtesy and our need for a few more men.”
“We have a Warrant,” Ezekiel said. Penn’s warrant was irrelevant if the chevalier was already willing to cooperate, and powerless if the chevalier wasn’t.
The chevalier opened his mouth to speak but stopped as there was a knock at the door. René du Plessis pushed the door open and inserted his harsh face. “My Lord, His Grace is here to see you.”
The chevalier grabbed one of his pistols. An involuntary reaction? He stood impassive for long seconds, breathing through his flared nostrils, before answering.
“Please have His Grace escorted to this room.”
Du Plessis nodded and disappeared.
“Have you met the Bishop of New Orleans?” The chevalier released his grip on the pistol; Ezekiel couldn’t help noticing that he left the guns on the countertop.
They shook their heads that they had not.
“There is nothing so generous, so giving, and so full of grace as a dead saint,” the chevalier told them, “and nothing so inconvenient, so obstreperous, and so irritating as a live one.”
Berkeley laughed and downed his drink. Ezekiel held his tongue. After all, Bishop Ukwu was a secular priest, not a Martinite, and Ezekiel was hardly tasked with defending the dignity of all priests everywhere—indeed, there were more than a few priests that he would like to see hanged for heresy or insurrection…or both.
“Indeed, Bishop Ukwu is so obstinately righteous, I’ve taken the liberty of spreading rumors about
him.” The chevalier chewed a deep puff of cigar smoke with a thoughtful expression.
“Rumors?” Ezekiel asked.
“That the bishop is a moneylender and a criminal. Easy enough to do, since former bishops plied those trades. And his son makes my task easier, by taking up the businesses his father won’t. It wouldn’t do to have people take the bishop too seriously, you see. And yet many of them do.”
The bishop entered with a strong stride. He was short and thin, with a lined brown face and shocking white hair, but authority radiated from his black robe, red sash, and skullcap.
“Your Grace.” The chevalier bowed as deeply as the bar permitted him. He and Berkeley joined their host in his bow, and Ezekiel tried to feel and express sincere respect for the episcopal office and its holder. “How may I serve the diocese this evening? Would Your Grace enjoy a cigar?”
Bishop Ukwu looked pointedly at the two Imperial officers and then back to the chevalier. “I have come to discuss a matter with you, Gaspard. It is personal to you and you may prefer to dismiss your guests before we enter into the subject.”
Ezekiel felt stung by the omitted honorific and the offensive presumption of intimacy, but the chevalier smiled. “Why, Your Grace,” he said unctuously, “I can’t believe you could have a matter to discuss with me so arcane that it couldn’t be shared with these two servants of the Emperor Thomas.”
The bishop hesitated, looking a little surprised. “You would have me call you to repentance before these men?”
The chevalier nodded slowly, and leaned forward with his elbows on the countertop…putting his hands, Ezekiel noticed, very close to the pistols. “I would, Your Grace.”
He gulped a mouthful out of his cigar and blew an indistinct ring of blue smoke into the center of the room.
“As you wish.” The bishop’s hesitation fell away. He raised one hand with an admonishing finger and, to Ezekiel’s utter astonishment, began to yell. “Sinner! Wretch! Vile and corrupt man!” The intrinsically happy sound of his Igbo accent clashed strongly with the strident tones of his remonstrance.