Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘We have had no time to get ready for them, no time to build up proper supplies or send for what’s required from town! Do you know how many eggs alone are needed for a decent wedding-cake?’

  ‘I had never thought of that,’ exclaimed January – mendaciously, as it happened, but he knew how people enjoy relating such details and listened with genuine interest to the little woman’s outraged recital of the trials involved in putting on a wedding-feast for thirty-some guests, plus providing for their valets, maids, nursemaids. ‘And that parcel of stuck-up town servants that came with M’am Aurelié – and the musicians, though if you will permit me to say so, sir, I except you from among them.’

  ‘I assure you, we are perfectly decent folk, m’am,’ January said with a bow and a smile.

  Her lips stretched in a tight expression of reply, but her sapphire eyes still snapped as she climbed the plank steps of the storehouse, and unlocked its door.

  ‘And for why?’ She shook her head. ‘Why to this place, eh? It’s prepostrous! So far from town. We go from one year to the next here, and the family never comes near us, except maybe Michie Henri and that …’ She bit off an opinion about Henri’s bride that was clearly more authentic than tactful, and corrected herself. ‘And Madame Chloë, now. And that is as we like it, M’sieu. Guillaume does a good job. So long as they get their sugar crop every year, why should they care how things are done down here?’

  With a huge tin scoop she shoveled hunks of charcoal from the bin, as January held the lantern high.

  ‘And then that senile old detritus just walks in and takes my girl from me! Just like that, without a by-your-leave! Not that she isn’t stuck-up as the Devil and light-fingered, too.’ She turned to lock the door behind them again. ‘Well, at least I can go to bed each night without having to weigh the coffee, if you understand me. I never could catch her at it, but I swear she was selling anything she thought I wouldn’t miss. There’s a trader that comes along the bayou when the moon is bright – that wicked old False River Jones, encouraging niggers to steal.’

  As they came down the steps again Molina himself appeared from the direction of the Casita, still with his little work-gang of exhausted men. ‘I want you to get those barrels up to the house tonight, so we can make a good start in the morning,’ he rasped. Beneath the brim of his black high-crowned hat, January saw the dark glint of his eyes, soulless as beads, and the skirt of his mustard-colored coat half-covered the whip that hung coiled from his belt. When January glanced at Madame’s face, he saw there a tight expression, hatred deeper than pilfered coffee or petty theft.

  But she only whispered, ‘Well,’ and turned her eyes aside. Then she called out, ‘Antoine!’ and a slim young man emerged from the cottage, and jogged across to the storehouse steps. ‘You take this charcoal up to the Casita—’

  ‘It ain’t that heavy,’ said January, dividing the load with the young slave. ‘I been kicking my heels on that steamboat all afternoon. Lord, what a fuss!’ he added, looking back in the direction of the house where the work-gang was rolling the barrels of greenery.

  Antoine shook his head. ‘All them white folks gonna be sorry if the weather turns inland.’

  ‘You think it’s fixing to?’ Wind moaned sharply around the house-eaves, and the trees that surrounded the Casita hissed like an ocean of snakes.

  ‘That’s what the old aunties say in the quarters.’ By his speech – and his clothing, which was considerably less ragged than those who worked the fields – January guessed the young man was the ‘house nigger’ for the Molinas: the one who carried in the firewood and water, and did the heavy work. Now that Valla had gone on to bigger things, he was probably the only regular indoor servant on the place.

  This suspicion was confirmed when they climbed the steps to the Casita’s gallery. Madame Aurelié’s kingly butler Visigoth stood in the light of several large cressets, giving orders to a small party of footmen and maids who had been brought from the Viellard townhouse in New Orleans. Every French door in the little dwelling had been thrown open and its four rooms were redolent of wet flooring and damp straw mats. The footmen, aided by a couple of very tired field hands, were just carrying in the last of the furniture as January and Antoine ascended the gallery steps, with the basket of charcoal between them. Despite the cressets, and a multitude of candles inside, the rooms were thick with shadow, in which Valla’s pale dress gave her the look of a haughty ghost.

  ‘You unpack those boxes in the pantry,’ she commanded Alicia – one of Madame Aurelié’s housemaids from town – and got a murderous glare in response. ‘And wipe the bottles ’fore you put them on the shelves. Antoine …’ she said, startled, as she turned and found herself face to face with the young man.

  For a very long moment they stood, looking into one another’s eyes. Then she turned quickly away, and said, ‘Take that charcoal into the kitchen. There was no call for you to help with that, Michie Janvier,’ she added, a little stiffly. ‘And I’m sorry I spoke to you as I did.’

  ‘The sooner the work is done, the sooner to bed for everyone,’ he repeated, still in his most perfect English.

  Visigoth’s wife Hecuba emerged from the bedroom, the slave Luc trailing her with a couple of branches of candles, and Valla swung around. ‘Is that the only armoire there is in this place?’ She looked about her as if she expected to find an unnoticed wardrobe or two in the parlor where they stood. ‘I’ve seen bigger bathtubs! It won’t hold half of Madamoiselle’s things—’

  ‘It’s all we got here.’ Hecuba wheeled and set her fists on her hips. ‘How much clothes your Mamzelle need for a night or two, girl?’

  ‘You think that’s any affair of yours …’ began Valla, and beside January, big Luc shook his head with a shy half-grin.

  ‘We better clear out of here, sir. Valla been tryin’ to come over Hecky all afternoon, goin’ on about how they did things this way back in Virginia an’ that way back in Virginia. Couple hours ago I thought they was gonna kill each other! An’ for all that, ’fore Michie Molina give her to M’am Molina to help in the house, whatever she been back in Virginia she was just a field hand here like ever’body else.’

  ‘Was she indeed?’ said January, wondering what the girl had done in her former place that had gotten her sold as a field hand rather than a maid.

  A couch was brought in – simple local work with cushions that looked as if they’d once been the skirt of somebody’s Sunday dress – and Valla disappeared into the dim bedchamber behind her, re-emerging a moment later with one of the most extravagant dresses January had ever seen, draped over one arm, and a frothing snowstorm of petticoats over the other. ‘Well, I’m not going to have Madamoiselle’s wedding-clothes crushed in that miserable little coffin!’

  January was familiar from long acquaintance with Dominique with the logistics of petticoats, but even so, he was impressed at the sheer volume of those that Valla laid on the table. The wedding dress was draped across the couch, layer on layer of rose-pink silk ruffles, seven-inch festoons of lace on hem, sleeve, bosom. As he departed, he passed the other two Viellard housemaids – Lila and Reinette – in the door, grumbling and laden with wicker hampers of linen sheets: from Madame Aurelié’s private store, beyond a doubt. January’s mother – wise in the ways of small and isolated plantations – had brought her own, as had Minou and probably every other guest, white or colored, as well.

  ‘That dress contains a hundred dollars worth of silk alone,’ he remarked, later, to Rose, in the darkness of the weaving-house gallery. ‘Not to speak of the lace.’ He handed Rose’s spyglass back to her.

  The firefly lights around the Casita had at last retreated to the big house. The weaving house had settled into silence, its shut jalousies dark. Even the musicians and the servants up in the attic had gone to their pallets, all the bickering downstairs stilled as the common hand of sleep gathered the combatants in.

  Tar-black clouds had covered the white half-moon. With the wind rattling around the ea
ves, it was as if they stood alone on the deck of a ghost-ship, driven through night toward a darkness deeper still.

  ‘If, as Michie Singletary says, the girl was destitute when Uncle Veryl so touchingly found her in his carriage-way in July,’ he went on, ‘it must be he who paid for it. And the rest of her wardrobe, I daresay. I got glimpses of it as the maids hauled most of it up to the attic. She – or rather Veryl – must have spent thousands on it.’

  ‘Do you think she’s been sent in by family who want to lay hands on his share of the St-Chinian property?’ Rose lowered the spyglass, and pushed her disarrayed spectacles back into place. ‘Or that she just saw the chance of bettering her own situation, and took it?’

  January was silent, weighing his words and his thoughts. ‘It feels very planned,’ he said at length. ‘Completely aside from what Hannibal has told us, it’s a very striking co-incidence that a young woman left on her own that way would cross the path of an old man that vulnerable, and that wealthy, so promptly after the death of one of the main controllers of the family holdings. I think there has to be someone behind her.’

  ‘Hannibal was fairly certain Old Man Trask did die last year. He said he heard it from Mr Tavish of the minstrel-show you traveled with in June – a man who knew the river well.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean she doesn’t have uncles and cousins – maybe even a husband – who plan to use her.’

  ‘Can’t be a husband,’ said Rose judiciously. ‘If someone is behind it, they’ll know there’ll be legal trouble. And she seems a very sweet girl.’

  ‘So did Delphine Lalaurie.’ January grimly named the respectable New Orleans matron who had imprisoned, tortured, and murdered slaves in the attic of her town mansion on Rue Royale. ‘That’s the last of them,’ he added, as the lights of the cressets detached themselves from the Casita’s front gallery, and made their way toward the big house. ‘Late as it is, we’d best catch Uncle Veryl as soon as Mamzelle leaves him.’

  ‘I wonder if poor Michie Singletary will walk with them back to the Casita.’

  ‘It’ll save us waking him up, poor man.’

  He lit a stub of candle at the smudge-pot on the gallery rail, and she took his hand, and followed him down the steps of the weaving-house gallery, and along the rough shell-path that led in the direction of the big house.

  ‘There’s going to be real trouble if it rains tomorrow for the wedding,’ she remarked, as he released her fingers to shield the candle-flame.

  ‘There’s going to be real trouble before that,’ he amended wryly. ‘The cane comes to within yards of the trees around the Casita, and the ciprière’s barely a dozen yards behind it. Every rat in the Parish has to be living in the attic.’

  ‘I wonder if Madame Aurelié was aware of that possibility, when she assigned it as Mamzelle’s residence?’

  He laughed at that, the weariness of travel – the weariness of negotiating with squabbling hordes of wedding-guests – dissolving, in the joy of being with her in this blowing darkness.

  After nearly four years of marriage, there was nothing that gave him greater pleasure than the sound of her voice, the grip of her hand on his sleeve in the blackness. In three weeks, the first of the students would be arriving at Rose’s school. With the return of cooler weather he’d be teaching music again. That was what mattered. It had been a difficult and frightening summer, but the summer was over. Even if Madamoiselle Ellie murdered Uncle Veryl – though it would be grievous and terrible, of course – it didn’t really touch them. Touch himself and Rose. Touch Professor John and Baby Xander, tucked up in bed at home with Gabriel and Zizi-Marie watching over them, hearing this same wind stream over the shingles of the roof.

  Like a shard of those far-off storm-winds, Olympe’s words passed through his mind, and at the same moment he stopped in his tracks.

  Another tiny apple-seed of candle-flame showed near the back of the Casita.

  Rose whispered, ‘What …?’ and she pressed close against him.

  January shook his head, though he was well aware that even a shout would have been drowned in the rattling sea-surge of the canes.

  They were within a hundred feet of the Casita. The other candle showed up much closer to the building, coming swiftly from the concealment of the woods behind.

  Candles burned in the pantry and enough light seeped out when the pantry door was briefly opened to show a cloaked figure slipping through.

  He turned his head quickly, marked the retreat of the last of the servants and the swaying dots of lantern-light emerging from the long downstream wing of the big house. Ellie Trask – almost certainly accompanied by Uncle Veryl and his valet.

  ‘If you’re going to steal something,’ murmured Rose, ‘I suppose now’s the time to do it, when everything’s at sixes and sevens. Valla should be on the porch, meeting her mistress …’

  January shivered, remembering one of the maids on Bellefleur, whom Michie Fourchet had beaten to death for pilfering coffee beans. ‘Not something I’d want to do.’

  ‘Is there anyone lives in the woods?’ she asked. ‘The fields don’t go back more than a mile from the river, and it’s all overgrown where Cold Bayou itself cuts through upstream of the house. When I was little they’d talk about escaped slaves hiding out in the woods.’

  ‘There’s not as much of that as there was,’ said January. ‘There may be a maroon village back there still in the swamp, but it’s easier now to escape up-river, and harder now to remain undetected, even in the deep woods.’ He had returned his attention to the back gallery of the house, knowing that between the utter darkness and the threshing of the wind, the intruder could slip from the pantry door and vanish down the steps in an eye-blink. ‘More likely it’s someone from the house or the quarters. I’d be surprised if a trader like False River Jones didn’t come down here specially, knowing there’d be a wedding.’

  But no one emerged. Rose whispered at one point, ‘Someone can slip out one of the windows on that side and we wouldn’t see them. Should we …?’

  ‘Not our business,’ returned January. ‘Luc – one of the men here – mentioned they’ve seen bears in the woods, or cougar. I’m not going to risk you meeting one – or running into a slave dealer like Captain Chamoflet, who operates in these parts – just to get a look at who’s stealing Mamzelle Ellie’s hairbrushes.’

  They remained standing in the darkness until the lanterns from the big house mounted the tall steps of the Casita’s front gallery, and saw no sign of the intruder’s departure. Yet neither was there any trace of untoward excitement when the shadows of the bride and her escorts moved back and forth across the dull-gold slits of the jalousies. The light in the pantry went out (‘So they’re not in the pantry anymore.’ ‘Nonsense, Benjamin, with only a couple of candles in the room you could be sitting under the table and nobody would see you in the shadows, if you kept still.’)

  After a time, lanterns came back out onto the gallery, and down the steps, retreating along the shell-path to the big house.

  Rose had taken out her spyglass again, and trained it on the lights. ‘Uncle Veryl,’ she reported. ‘James. Archie. Madame Aurelié’s footman Jacques-Ange. No sign of Michie Singletary.’

  January took the glass from her, handed her his candle and walked a little ways – carefully – through the rough weeds and maiden-cane until he could see past the downstream wing of the big house to the windows of the upstream wing where the male guests slept. All its windows were dark.

  He folded up the polished brass tube, returned it to her and took his silver watch from his pocket, held it to the candle flame. ‘Eleven,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s go back. Tomorrow will be plenty of time to enlist Singletary’s help on this, and I don’t think we’d do the old man any favors by waking him for this.’

  She slid her arm through his, and handed him his candle again. ‘I agree. Although I’m dying to learn who that is, snooping about the Casita at this hour.’

  ‘Not our business,’ said January
again. The light in the little dwelling’s parlor dimmed with the snuffing of the candles there, one by one. The wind strengthened, the trees behind the weaving house hissing like the thunder of the sea. January guided Rose back along the lumpy, crooked path toward the weaving house: silent before them, all those people who weren’t supposed to exist – sons and daughters by women the white men couldn’t marry – the ‘crocodile eggs’.

  There’s someone still in the Casita …

  Is there someone still in the Casita?

  Do we tell someone?

  Wake them up at this hour, to admit we were spying on our betters?

  When he looked back he saw a smudge of light on the planks of the gallery, thrown by the window of Madamoiselle Ellie’s room. Another, on the other side of the house, shone in the little chamber where Valla would sleep.

  The one went out.

  Then the other.

  They were mounting the steps of the weaving house when he looked back and saw, somewhere in the blackness behind them, movement – another seed of light. They were too far away, and the night too dark, for him to identify positively whether it crossed the back gallery of the Casita.

  By the time he turned to Rose to get the spyglass from her again, whatever it was had disappeared into the dark.

  SIX

  ‘Someone is trying to kill me …’

  Ellie’s voice was barely a whisper, and she pressed her face to Uncle Veryl’s sleeve.

  January, who tried to live by his confessor’s dictum that God does not hold anyone accountable for their first thought in any unexpected situation, nevertheless felt a stab of guilt at thinking, Damn it, I should have come back here last night and talked to Veryl no matter how late it was.