by D. J. Butler
“Take this,” Thalanes offered, unpinning his moon-shaped brooch from the front of his habit and handing it to her. Unable to think of any reason not to, she glumly took the offered bauble and was impressed that at the slightest touch, merely holding the jewelry in her palm, she could feel it throb with energy.
“It will work as well for you as for me,” Thalanes predicted. “I fill it with a little of my own energy every day, and then I have a reservoir to draw on when I need it. You should be able to use it, too, since you can draw from the leys. You’ll have to touch it during casting, but otherwise it works just the same.”
Sarah pinned the brooch to the shawl, somewhat mollified. “Facies muto,” she said, touching the brooch, and she shaped her own face into the likeness of a craggy old woman, turning Cathy into a similar crone. She could feel power coming out of the brooch. It made her tingle to have the energy flow through her, but it didn’t leave her exhausted.
Thalanes smiled. “Grand old ladies. You both sort of resemble the Elector Calhoun.”
“After a terrible drunk, the fall-down kind where you wake up and best no questions asked why you’re wearin’ what you’re wearin’,” Cal agreed. “Honestly, you look more like Granny Clay.”
Then Cal was off, struggling with the bucking dowsing rod-guns. Thalanes followed close behind him, walking fast.
Cathy offered an elbow to Sarah. “Shall we go?”
Sarah cheerfully locked arms with the older woman. “You’re always so calm. Please tell me how you do it.”
“It isn’t terribly complicated,” Cathy said. “But it requires a lot of practice, Sarah Carpenter. Or should I say, Your Majesty?”
* * *
Obadiah was looking for an opportunity to leave. His employer hated him. All the things he had formerly seen as the great benefits of his job as the chaplain’s factotum—travel, food, women—had become tiresome and empty. He would have preferred to hole up and read his Bible, or look for a good puppet show. He wanted to go home.
He wanted to see Sarah.
Duty had gotten him out of his cot that morning, and had kept him working with the gendarme lieutenant to arrange the gendarmes and Blues into paired teams he jokingly referred to as “yokes,” to their blank incomprehension. The chevalier’s man du Plessis had observed at his shoulder, and du Plessis followed him through the enormous Palais du Chevalier as well, when Obadiah went to report.
Angleton had dismissed him curtly, angrily, indifferently.
There was a higher life, and it would not come from Ezekiel Angleton.
Obadiah believed Sarah could show it to him. Even if she couldn’t love him, and of course she would never love him, not the way he loved her, he could be in love with her. He would follow her home.
He would have left the Blues already, except that sticking with the Blues was his best chance of finding Sarah.
Captain Berkeley still hadn’t appeared by the time they all mustered in the large courtyard of the Perdido Street gendarme station, and Obadiah was a little surprised that the Blues still formed in ranks in the rain and took orders not only from Father Angleton, but also from Obadiah.
Under his watchful eye the Blues matched up each with his assigned gendarme, and took a printed city map with their assigned patrol area indicated on it with pinpricks. Then the Blues and gendarmes assigned to the first watch exited the station’s courtyard and those assigned to the second watch returned to their bunks or to the predictable leisure activities of soldiers and constables everywhere: gambling, eating, drinking, and thinking about, talking about, and looking for available women.
Obadiah turned his back on them with a great sense of relief.
Ezekiel Angleton said nothing to Obadiah and assigned himself to a search yoke ad hoc, simply joining the first pair of men to leave the yard. Obadiah joined another by the same expedient, and found himself trotting toward the Quarter behind two grim men in nonmatching blue uniforms.
He was on patrol, and he had a plan.
“En cette direction ici,” the gendarme said to the dragoon. He led and the dragoon followed, Obadiah bringing up the rear.
He almost missed Sarah when they passed her.
He had been dreaming of Sarah Calhoun for weeks, replaying in his mind’s eye every moment he’d spent with her and lovingly revisiting every detail of her dress and manner. So he might have missed the fact that one of the pair of crones stumping down the boardwalk by his side had the walk and bearing of his beloved, but even deep in emotional turmoil, he didn’t miss the fact that the crone was wearing Sarah’s purple shawl with golden suns.
His mind processed the shawl over a couple of seconds’ time, so that he realized he had seen it only after he had passed the old women. A mighty impulse washed over him and he fought back the urge to turn his horse, jump down, and plead his case to her. Instead, he discreetly drew a pistol from his belt and thumbed back the hammer.
Did he really want to throw away his position with the Philadelphia Blues for this girl? Sarah didn’t love him, and he was being treated with respect by the dragoons.
But the respect he was getting now was surely temporary, and would vanish with Berkeley’s return. And Father Angleton was still treating Obadiah like a bad dog, to be snapped at and whipped. Once, that had been an acceptable burden to bear for a decent wage. Now, Obadiah longed for a life of meaning and love.
Whichever it was to be, he had to get Sarah.
He wheeled his horse, barking to his search yoke. “She be ’ere!”
But she wasn’t there. The only person on the boardwalk was a little boy, sweeping the detritus of the prior night’s carousing from the boardwalk with a rough straw broom.
“Lad!” barked Obadiah. “’Ave you seen a girl wiff a caitiff eye this mornink, all red and swole up?” Pushing a thumb into his purse, he threw a copper bit at the boy.
The boy caught the copper, but only stared back at him. “Je ne comprend pas.”
Obadiah sighed and looked at the building. Grissot’s, its signboard said. There was nowhere else they could have gone. “Keep the bit,” he told the boy, and dropped from his horse. The search yoke stopped and looked puzzled, but Obadiah didn’t wait—beckoning them to follow, he entered the tavern.
A hunchback vigorously working the bar raised his polishing rags above his head as he saw Obadiah enter. “Look ye,” he said, “we’ve no desire for trouble on us.” Obadiah ignored him and stepped across the disarrayed common room, toes only onto the stairs on the other side, at the top of which he’d seen a flash of purple and gold.
What would Obadiah do once he had her? Could he go through with his plan? Would he submit again to Father Angleton, and his life of safe satisfaction of bodily lusts, safe but grown stale?
He didn’t know.
He turned just long enough to shush the search yoke, following a few steps behind him, with a finger over his lips—and how he would love to feel Sarah’s finger on his lips—and then crept up the stairs, gun first.
He heard two women’s voices talking and recognized one of them as Sarah’s. He couldn’t make them out on the staircase, but as he reached the hall of the upper floor, he caught a few words: “Penn,” “Lee,” and “Mad Hannah” were among them. Whoever the other woman was, Sarah was recruiting her.
Obadiah peered down the hall and saw the two crones shut a door behind them. Perfect. He walked slowly, not wanting to alarm them, and when he reached the door they had entered, he threw his shoulder into it, smashing it open.
Inside sat the two old women, one on a small bed and the other on a chair beside, their hands clasped together in intimate woman-talk. They pulled apart and jumped to their feet as Obadiah drew his second pistol, leveling both guns at the women.
“Sarah Calhoun.” He locked eyes with the crone in the purple shawl.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she insisted in a creaky imitation of an old woman’s voice.
Obadiah shook his head. “Nay, you’ll not fo
ol me wiff that old phiz, poppet.” He swiveled one pistol to point at the other crone’s face. “An’ if you try again, I’ll ’ave to blast your friend ’ere to kingdom come.”
The crone Sarah blinked, and then the illusion disappeared, and Obadiah saw his love, Sarah Calhoun, with her eye covered by a patch made of a long strip of cloth, and a tall, brown-haired woman he didn’t know.
“Fank you, love.” He tucked his guns back into his belt and turned, just in time to meet his search yoke in the door and block their view. “Gents,” he said, digging discreetly into his purse as he talked, “it ben’t ’er, but I definitely ’ave somefink ’ere. Stand watch whilst I palaver wiff these ’ere informants.” He shut the door in their faces and turned back to the ladies.
“Sarah, my poppet.” He opened his arms wide to show his harmless, affectionate intentions. “Can we ’ave a wee chat?”
Suddenly, Sarah yelled, and Obadiah leaped back. She slapped at her own face, scratching her cheek in her eagerness to tear the patch away, and then she was digging her fingers into her eye, and scooping something out of it, something that might be…mud?
“No, no, no!” she gasped.
“Poppet, what is it?” He felt genuine concern.
She looked up at him. Her eye, though it seemed to be smeared with mud, was no longer inflamed. Nor was it shut—it was open, and it stared at him with an iris as white as snow and full of horror.
“They’re here,” Sarah whispered. “They’re here!”
“I was unaware that we had differences, Lieutenant Berkeley.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Down in the crypt beneath the St. Louis Cathedral, surrounded by the shelved bones of hundreds of priests and other grandees, Bill realized he didn’t want to kill the bishop.
He tightened his grip on the hidalgo’s pistols.
Just because the bishop had a son and hadn’t personally wronged Bill, he shouldn’t get off the hook. The bishop’s death wasn’t a matter of merit, it was a matter of Bill’s duty to his new master, the Chevalier of New Orleans. After years in exile, Bill had a lord again, a position, a master who was a gentleman.
But was he? Was this all it was to be a gentleman? Or to be a soldier? Merely taking orders? Bill remembered something more, facing Spanish lances on the walls of Mobile and riding with the Lion of Missouri. Honor in defense of innocence.
Bill’s mouth tasted sour.
But he could regain all that. He had agreed with the chevalier to kill the bishop in exchange for his freedom, and the honorable man kept his bargains. Bill could kill the bishop, take his place in the chevalier’s service, and from then on live a higher law, fight with all his honor as a gentleman to protect the innocent, as he once had.
He only had to do this one dirty deed first.
And it wasn’t all that dirty. The bishop was a moneylender and a gangster. Those who live by the sword die by it, though he couldn’t remember whether that was in the Good Book or the sermons of old Ben Franklin.
He wished he had a bottle of whisky.
“Bill,” Jacob Hop asked, pausing from a minute inspection of a complete human skeleton, folded neatly into a mass of cobwebs within a cubbyhole six inches wide and tall, “do your people do this with their own bones?”
“Do you mean in the Chesapeake, Jake?” Bill asked.
Hop shrugged.
“We bury our dead. Those who are wealthy enough have a family mausoleum.”
“Do you have a family mausoleum?” Hop asked.
“Yes.” In his mind’s eye Bill saw the stone building in the cemetery on the hill, there in northern Johnsland. He hadn’t been to his family’s cemetery in…twenty years? Twenty-five? “We Christians, I mean. My pagan neighbors burn their dead. I don’t know how they treat their dead in the Cherokee towns. How do the Dutch do it?”
“I don’t know how the Dutch do it,” Hop said. “One moment.” He paused. “They bury their dead in the earth. Singly. In little plots of land, with stones to mark the location. Stones with writing on them.”
My deaf-mute protégé is a madman. “That’s common enough. It’s we mausoleum people, and the crypt folk, that are unusual. Though we’re not as odd as those who expose their dead to wild animals, or throw them into the sea, or shrink their heads, or eat them.”
“We burned my father.” Jacob Hop’s voice was unemotional. “I shall be burned someday by my son.”
“What, no headstone for the good old Dutchman? What was your father’s name?”
“Peter,” Hop said.
“Dearly beloved,” Bill intoned, “we are gathered here to pay our respects to that good old meneer, Peter Hop. Shall we give your father the ceremony he deserves, Jake?”
“Go ahead,” Hop said. His facial expression looked curious and amused, but not mocking.
Bill stood up and shuffled over to a bone-filled niche. He selected a skull, blowing the dust off it and propping it up in the opening of the cubby, where it glared into the greater crypt.
“Dearly beloved,” Bill began again. “I give you Peter Hop, nation: Dutch, homeland: Hudson River Republic, profession…what was your father’s profession, Jake?”
“King,” Hop said.
Bill laughed. “Profession: king. Jake, will you give the eulogy?”
Hop looked perplexed. “What is a eulogy?”
“Tell us—” Bill gestured at the walls full of bones to indicate who the audience was, “about your old father.”
Jacob Hop considered. “As always, he was a man of peace, law, stasis, and prosperity. His subjects were fat and happy.”
“Hear, hear!”
“I despise him and his works,” the deaf-mute continued, “as my son in turn shall despise me. I seek to overthrow his peace with war, his law with chaos, and his stasis with the colossal wheel of change.”
Bill snorted. “That’s the funniest eulogy I ever heard, Jake.”
The Dutchman considered. “Ought a eulogy to be funny?”
“The best ones always are.” Bill crossed himself sloppily in the direction of the skull, then shoved it back into the cubby. “Requiescat in pace.”
They waited awhile, the dark lantern shuttered. Bill drifted into a light sleep. In his dreams he ran back and forth between two giant specters, the bishop and the chevalier. The two Electors of New Orleans were puppets swinging enormous stick clubs at each other, and in his dream Bill threw himself flat to the ground or cringed behind gnarled oak trees. Dream-Bill feared both combatants, and loved neither, and couldn’t choose between them, sprinting to and fro in a space that continuously narrowed as the giants charged each other. The chevalier swung his club one final time—
Bill couldn’t evade, he was doomed—
tantara-tantara-tantaraaaa!
Horns blew, and a choir of angels burst from the heavens with voices and instruments ringing—
Bill awoke.
The choir was singing, and he fumbled to find and open the shutter of the lantern, stinging his fingers on the hot metal. The light snapped open on Jacob Hop, sitting quietly.
“Has Mass begun?” Bill nearly choked in consternation.
Hop shrugged. “I was waiting for you to wake up.”
“Dammit, Jake, I know you’re the apprentice in this relationship, but you’ve got to show a little more initiative!” Bill took a pistol in his hand and scrambled up the staircase.
If it was the bishop officiating, he could simply wait until afterward and kill the man. Or, if attendance was low enough, he might take the open shot when the man was defenseless and count on his ability to get away in the confusion. This was New Orleans; the bishop wouldn’t be the first priest assassinated in the middle of Mass.
The staircase door (the staircase went both down by spirals into the crypt and up by spirals, Bill presumed to the roof) was well behind the rood screen, hidden from the congregation and giving Bill an easy route to slip behind the choir’s high wooden benches. From there he could watch the bishop’s movements at and aro
und the altar.
Hop stuck close behind Bill in the shadow.
The priest had finished at the altar and was climbing the short stairs to the pulpit, his movements followed closely by the choir as well as by the attendees sitting on the other side of the rood. This must be the homily; Bill focused on the back of the priest’s head. The man had short, tight, curly white hair, and the nape of his neck was dark brown.
It was the bishop.
Bill cocked his pistol slowly, muffling its click inside his long red coat. One dirty task.
Just one.
Bill stepped to his side, gaining a clear line of sight at the bishop’s back. He didn’t like shooting the man from behind. It stank.
The bishop was a usurer and a gangster.
Bill raised Don Sandoval’s large-bored pistol and sighted along it at the bishop’s curly white hair. At this range, he couldn’t miss.
“My children,” the bishop began in a loud voice, “my text today is from the twentieth chapter of the book of Exodus. The Ten Commandments.” The crowd was large; the cathedral was nearly full to capacity.
Bill felt a knot in his stomach.
He owed this act to his lord, the chevalier. He had promised. To be a man of honor again, he had to keep his promise.
“Thou shalt not steal!” the bishop shouted.
Bill touched the trigger with his finger…but he couldn’t pull it.
He lowered the gun again, feeling both shame and relief. He would serve the chevalier if he could. If not, he might have to leave New Orleans.
But he would be again the man who had ridden with the Lion of Missouri.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor!”
Bill eased his hammer back into place. Would he see Cathy again? What about Sally? What would the chevalier do?
He slipped the pistol into his coat pocket and enjoyed a long, deep breath.
“My children, there is a liar and a thief in New Orleans today.” This seemed like a strange thing for the bishop, of all people, to say, and the congregation laughed. Oddly, though, they seemed to be laughing with the bishop, rather than at him.