Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  In the old man’s set face he saw that nothing would persuade him to postpone the wedding now.

  Uncle Veryl’s arms tightened comfortingly around the girl’s trembling shoulders. Servants hanging great swags of ribbons and greenery on the front gallery did their best not to look like they were peeking through the French doors into the bedroom. Ellie had run all the way from the Casita in her chemise and dressing-gown, her blonde hair tumbled loose on her shoulders, and looked very fetching indeed. In the parlor next door, muffled voices whispered and babbled intently in the early-morning quiet, and January could hear even through several intervening rooms Madame Aurelié’s strident voice demanding what on earth was going on.

  ‘It’s all right.’ Veryl folded the shivering girl close against his narrow chest. ‘I swear to you, my beloved, nothing will harm you.’ His eyes went to January, and then past him as M’sieu Singletary – also in severe déshabillé – appeared behind him in the doorway. ‘Do you know what happened?’

  January shook his head. Knowing his patient Singletary to be an early riser, he had crossed to the big house as soon as it was full daylight: thank God for the custom that forbids the bridegroom to see the bride before the wedding. Early as it was, Missy – Madame Aurelié’s town cook – had been in the kitchen behind the house, bossing the plantation cook and working in a patient frenzy to prepare pigeons and partridges, compotes and custards, not only for the thirty-some white guests but for the other ‘members of the family’ as well.

  The quarters, too, had been in a bustle, the smoke of a pit-buried roast pig puffing white among the cabins, while the men tacked lesser garlands on everything in sight. January had seen Archie emerge from the laundry – beside the kitchen – with a fresh-ironed shirt, and had calculated there was enough time to beg a cup of coffee from Missy before going to Singletary.

  Then he’d seen Ellie emerge from the Casita – white gauze dressing-gown billowing around her like a cloud of angel-wings – and run toward the big house with every appearance of terror.

  He’d reached Uncle Veryl’s room only seconds after she had, in time to see her throw herself into her bridegroom’s arms.

  Now she raised her face – white with shock and fright – and looked from Uncle Veryl to January to Singletary, her beautiful eyes pleading. ‘They hate me,’ she gasped. ‘They don’t mean to let you marry me, and oh, Mr St-Chinian, please don’t leave me! I’m afraid …’

  ‘What happened?’ asked January.

  The girl’s face twisted. ‘They put something horrible in my dress.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘I don’t know! A pisesog – the Devil’s marks! I locked all the doors last night and they still got in!’

  ‘Now, lass,’ soothed Singletary, ‘you’re not believin’ in hocus-pocus an’ hags ridin’ broomsticks across t’sky, are you? ’Tis all granny-tales—’

  ‘It’s not!’ She clung tighter to Uncle Veryl’s nightshirt. ‘Not here. Not always. The Negroes …’

  ‘What was in your dress?’ January was fairly sure he knew.

  ‘A claw.’ She shuddered, and hid her face again. ‘A wrinkled-up, awful little claw, sewn into the waist where I wouldn’t see it. And there was dirt smeared on the inside of the skirt. It’s voodoo—’

  Unfortunately, January had to agree that it certainly sounded like it.

  Ellie refused to go back to the Casita, but January walked up the shell-path, turning over in his mind what he had seen last night. Valla had moved the elaborate wedding dress to a table on the back gallery and was making up her mistress’ bed, her beautiful mouth vexed and angry. ‘Bitches,’ she said, when January asked to see the dress. ‘I’ll bet you gold to goober-peas it was one of Mr Viellard’s stuck-up sisters! Whining and crying about how the old man marrying Miss Ellie’s gonna turn away every one of those worthless boys that’s out to marry them for their money. I never heard such belly-aching in my life!’

  ‘Was the Casita locked up last night?’ January followed the young woman out onto the rear gallery, turned up the skirts of rose-pink silk with their festoons of Belgian lace.

  The severed foot of a pigeon, tiny and pink and curled on itself like a wicked little clawed hand, had been sewed among the tight cartridge-pleating at the back of the waist.

  ‘I locked it up myself, sir.’ The maid’s dark-blue eyes narrowed in contempt. ‘Locked the doors and bolted the shutters. I knew those girls would likely be up to something.’

  Even though, like Singletary, January didn’t believe in hocus-pocus and witches, he still wrapped his handkerchief around his fingers before he took hold of the little gris-gris, and with a penknife gently cut the threads that held it. He told himself this was because the tiny thing may have been imbued with poison of some kind, like the wedding-robe the sorceress Medea had sent to her rival – although stitched where it was, it would have rested against not only the waistbands of seven petticoats, but the lower part of a stoutly-laced corset as well.

  The stitches were small and neat, executed in white silk thread.

  This hadn’t been done in a hurry.

  ‘What time did you lock up?’

  ‘When Miss Ellie went to bed.’ Valla’s lips tightened at the sight of the brownish smudges that marked the pale silk lining of the skirt. X’s, crudely-drawn serpents, the elaborate crosses of Marinette of the Dry Arms. ‘I don’t know what time that might have been, sir. There’s no clock in that house. Mr Veryl came back here with her from the big house, and it was just on eleven. I made coffee for him.’

  January hoped she’d had the decency to give Archie, James, and Jacques-Ange coffee while they waited on the porch, but didn’t ask.

  ‘I sat in my room, waitin’ for the men to leave so I could unlace Miss Ellie an’ brush out her hair. She walked around the house with me while I locked up. Then we both went to bed.’

  He followed Valla back into the house. There was a little pantry, though of course any real meals would be taken in the big house, and a stair leading from it up to the attics. To the left of the back door as he came in he noted that the shelf above the tin bathtub and tin coal-scuttle was stocked with three bottles of plum brandy and two of Hooper’s Female Elixir, a compound of laudanum and sherry whose very smell – he knew from experience – was enough to put a horse into a coma.

  The window that opened from the pantry into the rear gallery – and, he recalled, the window from the small back bedroom behind the stairs as well – were of the small sash type, and the back bedroom had no door out onto the gallery. The only egress from the rear of the house was the back door from the pantry.

  ‘Did you look around the rooms before you locked up?’ he asked. ‘Check to see that nobody had slipped in the back while you were opening the parlor doors for Mamzelle?’

  ‘Shit. Sir,’ she added, her beautiful eyes glinting dangerously. ‘Fucken … You mean whoever did this was hiding inside the house while we were locking up?’ No fear in her voice. Just rage.

  ‘I mean they could have been.’ January climbed to the attic, up a stair so steep it bore more than a little resemblance to a ladder. Under the high pitch of the roof he could almost stand up straight, even at his height, and the space beneath the rafters was thickly cluttered with wicker clothes-hampers of the kind women stored their dresses in, dessicated now and falling apart, though everything still smelled faintly of talcum powder and orris-root as well as rat-piss. The hampers had been pushed aside to make room for three new trunks – Madamoiselle Ellie’s, presumably – and four large hatboxes. ‘Anyone could have slipped in through the back door while you were opening the front for Mamzelle.’

  The long room was lit by four dormer windows and would have been an abyss of shadows last night. A smaller room – a servant’s at one time – had been partitioned at the attic’s upstream end.

  You could have hid Leonidas’ Three Hundred Spartans among the trunks and still had room for Macbeth’s witches and Snow White and her dwarfs.

  ‘You
sleep with your door open, don’t you?’ he asked, following Valla down the stairs again. ‘You’d have to,’ he added, with a glance at the small, shut door cattercorner across the parlor from that of Ellie’s spacious chamber.

  Valla didn’t reply immediately. Her eyes shifted: trying to read his face, January realized. Trying to determine what he wanted to hear.

  He knew the expression, the hurried guessing. He’d done the same, a thousand times, in his childhood: What can I say that the master will believe that’ll spare me a beating?

  ‘Yes,’ she said, as if she could see where this was going. Her bedroom door, if open, would have looked straight into the parlor where the wedding dress had lain. ‘Of course. But I sleep heavy,’ she added quickly. ‘And with all that rushing around getting this place ready, after the trip down-river …’

  She’s hiding something …

  Was it she who went out last night after Mamzelle was settled?

  ‘May I?’ He walked toward the narrow door to her chamber, and was aware of her intake of breath. As if she would have forbidden him to go in had she not been afraid that he’d wonder why she wouldn’t let him. ‘The stair to the attic goes right up over your room,’ he explained, watching her face as he said it. ‘Would you climb up to the attic, and then come back down again? It creaks pretty badly – I want to see how loud it is in your room.’

  This wasn’t entirely the truth at this point, but Valla couldn’t very well do anything but obey. In truth, once January was in the small, tidy rear bedroom he could easily hear the steps groan and squeak under the maidservant’s ascending – and then descending – weight. But he wasn’t sitting still to listen. He was swiftly checking the wicker laundry-hamper in the armoire, and the skirt and the sleeves of the yellow-and-white-striped frock he recalled Valla had worn yesterday evening, the yellow silk flowers from her tignon all piled in a heap.

  Skirt and sleeves were heavily spotted with dripped wax, as they would have been had the wearer been walking in the windy darkness last night. A badly-guttered candle-stub lay in the armoire’s bottom drawer.

  So she was outside.

  And the intruder would have departed later, after carefully sewing that nasty little curse in Mamzelle’s wedding dress.

  Where was she going? To meet whom?

  ‘To tell you the truth, sir …’

  Valla came to the door of her bedroom even as January, with the casual air of a man who has done nothing but listen to the stairs creak, reached it.

  ‘Mamzelle doesn’t often wake in the night. She’s a sound sleeper. And she keeps her door shut. Last night I was worn out with one thing and another, getting this place ready, though I’d have waked if she’d rung for me. She’s got a bell, beside her bed,’ she explained, nodding toward the larger door of her mistress’ bedroom.

  ‘May I see?’

  Valla stepped quickly in his way. ‘Why? They wouldn’t have gone in there, whoever they were.’

  January raised his brows. From the gallery outside came the voices of Visigoth and half a dozen other men, bearing baskets among them, pink silk ribbons fluttering in the breeze.

  He recognized the young house-man Antoine among them. Observed how his eyes went to Valla; how the maid averted her face from his glance.

  ‘Give us another minute,’ she called out, as Visigoth tapped at the side of the doorway. ‘Antoine, take those garlands around to the back.’ Then to January, in a lower voice, she murmured, ‘They wouldn’t have gone into her room, sir. If she’d waked, she would have seen them – she had a night-light burning. They’re trying to stop the wedding. Trying to scare Mamzelle away.’ Possessiveness tinged her voice. And why not? reflected January. Mamzelle was the reason she wasn’t still stuck down here on an isolated plantation cleaning chamberpots for the wife of the man who raped her every other night. ‘They wouldn’t have let her see them.’

  ‘Hmn.’ January crossed to the chair where the white silk petticoats were piled. Moving them to reveal – as he’d suspected – more curse-marks and crosses, spots of blood and black wax, he shook loose also a faint whispering patter of salt from their folds.

  ‘It’ll be all right, once she’s wed.’ Valla followed him, though she drew back a little from the salt. ‘Père Eugenius will be on the Vermillion coming down from New Orleans this morning, and they’ll be married, whatever those stuck-up Frenchies can say or do. They’ll have to quit pecking on her then.’

  But even as she said the words she shivered, and glanced around the parlor, as if seeing it as it had been last night, every window shuttered tight, black as the abysses of Hell.

  As if seeing, thought January, the glimmer of a single candle by which someone had sewn that nasty little clenched claw into the dress. By which someone had drawn those neat, vindictive signs of snakes and Xs with a finger ground in graveyard earth. By which someone could just as easily have walked through Ellie Trask’s door with a rag soaked in paste and held it over the young woman’s nose and mouth until she quit struggling, until she quit breathing.

  Leaving Valla to be handed back to Michie Molina, and the life she had known before.

  ‘Well, I know all that curse business is just silly.’ Hair dressed, cheeks rouged, clothed in a gown of blue-and-ivory print that made her look as neat and cool as a piece of Dresden china, Ellie sipped a cup of coffee in the corner of the big house’s front gallery. But her soft brown eyes were haunted as they traveled from January to Veryl to Rose. ‘There’s no such thing, for all what Ma told me when I was little. Ma believed in it – witches and piseogs and leaving out milk for the pookas. But that’s not what scares me, Mr J. Somebody really did get into the house last night, while I was sleeping – while Valla was sleeping. And neither of us heard a thing. And I know – well, wasn’t there some old tale, that Mr St-Chinian read me, about a wicked witch in the old times who killed the girl her sweetheart was fixing to marry by soaking the wedding dress in poison? And another who did something – poisoned a needle and broke off the tip of it in the seam of a glove or something? I know they hate me.’

  ‘Beloved, no one would—’

  She reached across the little table to take Veryl’s hand, and the old man gripped hers tight. ‘Mr St-Chinian, I’ve seen how they look at me. Your sister, and old M’am Janvier. Mr Aubin and Mr Miragouin and those lawyers they have with them. Like I’m – not even a cat. Can’t we leave tonight?’ She turned swimming eyes back to Veryl. ‘Right after the ceremony is over? Just go away, back to New Orleans, away from them all …’

  ‘Of course we can, mignonne …’

  ‘Not unless there’s a steamboat bound up-river on its way past this afternoon, Mamzelle,’ pointed out January, careful to keep his tone diffident. Behind them in the parlor furniture thumped and grumbled as it was moved into the bedrooms, and every chair in the house was arranged around a makeshift podium in the dining room, under a canopy of moss, cypress-boughs, and ribbons. On the lawn below, trestles were being set up, tabletops borne out of storage. Visigoth’s wife Hecuba came bustling around the corner of the house – even on so small a plantation the rule about slaves never cutting through the house was evidently as strict as it had been on Bellefleur in his childhood – with her arms full of Madame Aurelié’s second-best table linen.

  Hurrying to be ready, before the priest arrived.

  From behind the house the smell of smoke drifted from the barbeque pits and ten-year-old Gérard Miragouin’s voice asked in a clear treble, ‘Can I help you with that, m’am?’

  ‘Can’t we take the carriage?’ Ellie’s eyes widened in consternation. ‘I know it’s a long way up the river road to town, but …’

  ‘There’s no carriage here at Cold Bayou,’ explained Rose. ‘It isn’t as if any of the family lived here full-time, you know.’

  ‘We’ll have a flag out on the landing the moment the ceremony is over, ma mie,’ promised Uncle Veryl, patting the small, lace-mitted fingers. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Oh, I can just hear the upr
oar there’ll be over that!’ Rose shook her head as she and January descended the steps and made their way through the confusion of trestle tables beneath the trees in front of the house. ‘Say an up-river boat does come through just after the ceremony … or in the middle of it …’

  She sidestepped Old Madame Janvier’s lively little pug-dog Thisbe, chasing the kitchen cat.

  ‘Do you honestly think Madame Aurelié will permit her brother and his new bride to get on it and leave nearly sixty guests before they have so much as received a bridal toast? Or that she – or old M’am Janvier – won’t storm down to the levee and tell the pilot to take the steamboat off?’

  ‘Or tell him he can wait with his hold full of cargo and passengers until the wedding luncheon is over?’ speculated January, enchanted by the thought of the battle royal that would ensue.

  Rose’s quicksilver smile flashed into existence for a moment at that. ‘I can just hear your mother on the subject. And I can’t say I entirely blame her. With more people coming down for the wedding this morning the big house is going to be bursting at the seams, and if everybody is forced to spend another night – after the bride and groom have run off and left everyone …’

  The smile vanished as quickly as it had come, and she propped her spectacles onto the bridge of her nose. ‘It would be funnier,’ she added quietly, ‘if we hadn’t seen somebody slip into the Casita. Without wanting to insult anyone, Benjamin, I honestly wouldn’t … wouldn’t …’

  She couldn’t say the words, and January finished for her, ‘Wouldn’t put it past some members of the Viellard clan to slip “inheritance powder” into the nuptial champagne?’

  ‘It sounds so horrible—’

  ‘It is horrible,’ he agreed quietly. ‘But so – I’m sure any of Henri’s three unmarried sisters would assure you – is having all your suitors desert you because their parents doubt that control of the St-Chinian property is going to pass intact to the Viellard side of the family. I don’t know the girls well,’ he added, as Rose made a protesting noise in her throat. ‘As far as I know they’re perfectly innocent, well-bred Creole French damsels who would no more think of harming another person than they’d consider robbing the poor box in the church. But so, I expect, was that woman in Bremen about ten years ago who was beheaded for poisoning her relatives with arsenic for no apparent reason. Or that painter in Britain who was supposed to have poisoned his sister-in-law, uncle, mother-in-law, and a friend for their insurance money.’