Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  Valla swung around upon her, her sapphire eyes narrowing. ‘You should talk about gettin’ above yourself, woman. First thing my lady’s gonna do, when she has a man to help her get her rights, is call in the mortgage money her father lent your master Simon Fourchet, that he never paid back. Mortgage on every slave on his property—’ she jabbed her finger viciously at Livia – ‘that couldn’t be sold nor freed nor turned over to somebody else, until that money was paid back. Then we’ll see who’s gettin’ above theirselves!’

  With that she flounced into the next room, to re-emerge an instant later, three oranges in her hands.

  Hoarse with shock, Livia gasped, ‘You’re lying, bitch!’ and Valla gave her a spiteful smile.

  ‘You’ll see if I am. Madame.’

  And with a swish of her green silk petticoats, she was down the gallery steps and striding back towards the Casita.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Rose, who had followed her mother-in-law and Minou (and half the other women on the gallery – the room could hold no more) into the chamber where January lay.

  Then she glanced from his still face to Livia’s, and around at the others – freeborn plaçeés, like herself and her own mother, who had never really had to think about the legal complexities of being owned. ‘Isn’t it?’

  January’s heart was pounding hard as his mind flicked back over the events of the day. About Uncle Mick and his ‘boys’ trooping down the gangplank of the Vermillion – had it only been six hours ago? – and of the heavy-shouldered Irishman spending a lunchtime quietly closeted with his niece in the Casita.

  About Hannibal’s casual description, yesterday on the deck of the Illinois, of old Fergus Trask: He owned the High Water Saloon but he was a moneylender and the worst screw on the river …

  His mouth felt dry and he felt as if he were shaking all over, and he could see the barely suppressed panic in his mother’s face.

  ‘The first thing we need to do,’ he said, ‘see whether Valla was lying.’

  ‘Of course she was,’ snapped his mother, ashen.

  January bit back the temptation to add, And I don’t blame her – a quarrel with his mother was the last thing anyone needed at this point – and said instead, ‘I think we need to send Hannibal back to town to check at the Cabildo, to see if any sort of paperwork was filed recording this supposed mortgage. Uncle Mick could be lying,’ he went on. ‘Mamzelle Ellie could be lying – or could be only repeating what Uncle Mick thinks he can get away with. Let’s see what we’re talking about, before we do anything.’

  ‘Marianne,’ said Isabelle to her daughter, ‘run to the big house and fetch Michie Hannibal—’

  ‘Wait,’ said January as the girl whirled to set off. ‘I’d like to request – I’d like to implore – that none of you speak of this to anyone at the big house until Hannibal gets back from New Orleans with that information. Gossip and guessing and putting ideas into peoples’ heads are only going to make the situation worse. Will you all give me your word – all of you – that you’ll keep this quiet?’

  Heads were nodded – Not that that’s going to be any guarantee, January reflected despairingly, as Marianne grabbed up her skirts and darted away down the high steps.

  (‘Walk, darling!’ called her mother after her. ‘Gentlemen do not wish to see a lady run …’)

  ‘Maman,’ he asked, ‘what year did you come to Bellefleur Plantation? You were freed in 1803 …’ He was careful not to say, St-Denis Janvier bought you in 1803, knowing that his mother generally presented herself to other plaçeés as a freeborn woman like themselves. Enough of a shock to her, to be revealed as slave-born, without rubbing it in. Even so, he was aware of Isabelle and Laetitia, Solange and Nicolette all glancing at her sidelong, with that curious change in the way they stood, the way they looked.

  They were freeborn.

  She had not been.

  And she had probably claimed the contrary to every one of them.

  His mother’s face was calm now, but still gray with rage, humiliation, and terror.

  Stiffly, as if the truth (if it was the truth) were being forced from her by hot irons, Livia said, ‘I don’t know. I was maybe Marianne’s age—’

  With every sang-melée member of the family in the room, he knew she wasn’t about to give her real age, nor would he have asked it of her. Even the oldest sugar plantations along the Mississippi hadn’t been established much before 1740, and it was conceivable that Simon Fourchet had borrowed against his slaves well prior to his mother being sold.

  ‘When Hannibal gets here,’ he continued, ‘I need you to talk to him about exactly what years you were at Bellefleur. Natchez is an old town and God only knows how long Ellie’s father was there, or when this loan – if there was a loan – was made. Rose,’ he added quietly, ‘I’d like you to go with him.’

  She nodded, not needing to be told.

  ‘But—’ stammered Dominique. ‘But even if – even if that horrible salope was right, and Mamzelle Ellie does have some kind of claim over … over Maman …’ She could barely get the words out, and their mother looked aside with an expression that twisted January’s heart in unaccustomed pity. ‘I’m sure – I know – Henri would simply pay her off. That’s all she’ll want, isn’t it? Just money—’

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ said January quietly. ‘If Ellie – and probably Uncle Mick is going to get into this – has a legal claim on Maman—’ he found himself, a little to his annoyance, avoiding the words, If our mother is this girl’s slave – ‘it means she legally owns all her children.’

  Minou’s mouth fell open, in shock and horror.

  ‘And all their children,’ he concluded quietly.

  And it was highly unlikely, he reflected, that the rest of the family was going to let Henri pull eight thousand dollars out of their joint holdings to purchase slaves whom he intended to simply set free.

  TEN

  As January suspected, Solange Aubin had two pint bottles of Godfrey’s Cordial in her luggage (‘Poor little Stanislas suffers so from the colic!’), so January had no trouble in mixing himself a drop of the powerful opiate in a large glass of water (‘Are you sure that’s going to be enough, M’sieu Janvier? I give Stanislas a teaspoon in half that amount of water every night, and sometimes he is still restless.’) (‘Which explains a great deal about Stanislas,’ sighed Rose, when the woman had left the room.)

  The remedy wasn’t nearly enough to make his ankle cease hurting, but it did let him, with Rose’s help, examine the injury, now grossly swollen, and determine that the lower end of the fibula – the lateral malleolus – was almost certainly cracked. During this procedure Madame Molina appeared, with more laudanum (‘Godfrey’s Cordial, tcha! You might as well drink lemonade’), which January declined with thanks, and her basket of splints, bandages, plasters, and pins. She was, by her own account, the plantation midwife and veterinarian, and seemed to know enough about the surgeon’s art for January to trust her and Rose to splint his foot, for by this time he was sweating and sick with pain. (‘You sure you don’t want some Hooper’s Female Elixir, Ben? I wish to God we had some Black Drop on the place – puts Hooper’s all to shame!’)

  Scarcely was she out of the room when Hannibal returned, with the news that both the Sarah Jane and the Phoenix had passed the landing earlier in the afternoon. In the uproar of Jules Mabillet’s challenge to Evard Aubin, and its disastrous sequel, no flag had been flown to signal a passenger to be picked up. There would, according to Mick Trask’s copy of the True American, be no more boats tonight. The Louisiana Belle was due sometime heading up-river tomorrow and, as Uncle Veryl had pointed out to Mamzelle Ellie (Was that only this morning?), the only saddle horses on the place were the elderly bay gelding on which Molina supervised the work-gangs in the field, and now Jules Mabillet’s tall black saddlebred.

  ‘There was apparently quite a nice saddle mule,’ added the fiddler, winding his long hair up like a lady’s chignon and fastening it into place with o
ne of Nicolette’s tortoiseshell combs. ‘But – also in the aforesaid uproar – it, and Uncle Mick’s valet St-Ives – both disappeared.’

  Rose’s eyebrows lifted as she folded up the surplus bandages. ‘Searching for Père Eugenius along the river?’

  ‘If he is, he didn’t notify Trask of his intentions – or so Trask says.’

  ‘On his way to town,’ grated Livia, her fists clenching.

  ‘Well,’ agreed the fiddler, ‘I can’t see where else one would be going, in this godforsaken country: una selva oscura,’ he added, quoting Dante with arms outflung.

  ‘Ché la diritta via era smarrita.

  Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

  esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte …

  ‘But whether he’s decided that now would be a good time to resign his position as Trask’s valet, or whether he intends to intercept me on the road – or forstall me somehow in my search of the Cabildo – remains, I expect, to be seen.’ Hannibal frowned. ‘I wonder how good a shot he is?’

  ‘I expect,’ said Livia grimly, ‘that, too, remains to be seen.’

  Damn it, thought January, his hand tightening on Rose’s fingers. Damn it, damn it, damn it!

  ‘And of course that topic is as nothing beside the duel tomorrow,’ Hannibal went on, as Livia went to the doors to answer Laetitia’s motherly enquiries about how January did. ‘Madamoiselle Charlotte weeps and flutters her handkerchief but has not yet retired to her room, no matter how frequently faintness overtakes her at the thought of two young gentlemen fighting over her – which I daresay is the case, with all due respect to His Majesty of France and Mr Bonaparte. Sisters Sophie and Ophélie wear expressions of sour dudgeon but have not yet retired to their room – since they are of course all three sharing a room with – it would now appear – Florrie Cowley: sorry, Fleurette née St-Chinian, and her daughter Gin.’

  ‘I expect,’ said Rose thoughtfully, ‘that every dormer in the attic is going to be crammed with spectators and spyglasses tomorrow morning when the duel takes place. I wonder if Visigoth and Hecuba are going to rent out the window in their room? I think it’s on that side of the house. One can’t get a decent view of the levee from the gallery because of the trees, you know. I expect Madame Chloë will lend you one of the plantation work-mules, Hannibal.’

  ‘Two,’ said January quietly. ‘I want you out of here, Rose.’ He lowered his voice, not that he thought that his mother had ears for anything but the diatribe she was currently delivering to Laetitia on the subject of the shortcomings of Louisiana laws concerning slaves, debt, and manumission. ‘And I want you out tonight.’

  Rose looked as if she would speak, then only nodded. The French law of Louisiana, under which she had been born free, specified that children inherited the legal condition of their mother, but there was no saying how an American judge would interpret the status of January’s sons. From the gallery, Minou’s voice drifted like the scent of roses, praising Charmian as they played bounce-ball in the sticky pallor of approaching twilight. The little chamber was like the inside of an oven.

  Equally softly, she said, ‘I’ll warn Olympe.’

  ‘I think it might be best,’ said January, ‘if I went across and spoke to Chloë about it now. I can’t imagine Uncle Mick doesn’t know … and I can’t imagine that a city-born, northern, free man—’ which they had ascertained by this time that St-Ives indeed was – ‘would choose to escape in the middle of country like this when he could just as easily slip away in New Orleans where he could get passage to the North.’ In fact, given the presence of slave-stealers in the ciprière, it was a wonder the man had risked leaving the plantation at all.

  He gazed at the ceiling-rafters for a time, trying to clear away some of the cobwebby sensation of being trapped in a nightmare. ‘If any of this does come out, Henri can almost certainly protect Minou and Charmian. The more people involved, however, the less likely anyone is going to be to start making allowances and exceptions to rules. I may be able to talk Chloë out of two mules but certainly not three, and with any luck Maman and I can get out tomorrow afternoon on the Louisiana Belle. My nightingale, is there any chance you can find me a pair of crutches? Madame Molina ought to have some.’

  ‘I think you underestimate the good-will of Henri and Chloë,’ said Hannibal quietly, as Rose hurried out into the brutal glare. ‘Between them, if worst came to worst and that meretrix Valla was speaking the truth, I can’t imagine they wouldn’t come up with whatever Ellie and Uncle Mick are going to demand in the way of payment.’

  ‘By my calculations—’ January sat up – extremely carefully – and took the wet flannel Hannibal fetched for him from the bedside wash-bowl – ‘that’s going to be about eight thousand dollars, for myself, Maman, Dominique, Charmian, Olympe, Olympe’s children, and possibly Rose’s as well, if Uncle Mick should happen to be feeling generous when he bribes the judge before the trial. But even if worst came to worst,’ he went on, over his friend’s exclamation of disgust, ‘if Uncle Mick doesn’t try to run up the prices beyond what Aurelié Viellard would agree to let her son pay – remember that freed slaves have to leave the state nowadays. Or else Henri – or whoever’s name is on the manumission papers – is going to be liable for another thousand dollars apiece as bond.’

  Hannibal made a comment which was fortunately – since both Charmian and Stanislas were on the gallery and in earshot – in classical Greek.

  ‘But first, and above all, let’s see what we’re talking about. It’s nearly twenty miles to town by the river road, but even if St-Ives is lurking along the way, that’s probably a safer way for you to take, than trying to cut across country. To go direct you’d have two river crossings and nearly ten miles of swamp, and most of that’s going to be by night. That’s supposing I can find a reason good enough to get Madame Chloë to lend me two mules after one has already been stolen. Thank God September is the slow time of year.’

  Madame Molina did indeed have crutches among her plantation store, though even the longest pair were slightly too short for comfortable use. Even so, crossing the weedy, uneven distance to the big house was an agonizing journey. As January had suspected, Chloë Viellard was closeted with Madame Aurelié and the assorted family lawyers, and had he simply sent word requesting her to visit him at the weaving house, he guessed she would not have done so until long after dark. Moreover, such a request – from a man of color to a white member of the family, and a woman at that – would have generated more speculation than he cared to deal with.

  It was going to be difficult enough as it was, to keep Valla’s words from going through the white family like a grassfire.

  He wasn’t even entirely certain she’d excuse herself from the meeting at the news – relayed by Archie – that he was waiting for her on the back gallery.

  ‘Veryl’s gone across to the Casita with his light o’ love and that preposterous Englishman,’ reported old Sidonie Janvier, seated by herself on the far end of the gallery on the women’s side – the downstream side – of the house, with Thisbe panting gently on her lap. ‘Poor old Visigoth’s being run off his feet, getting supper for everyone, and now looking over his shoulder every two minutes to make sure that pestilent Irish bandit isn’t trying to talk Aurelié into selling him.’

  ‘Selling him?’ The mere word put a chill up January’s spine.

  The old woman shrugged, and stroked her lapdog’s black ears. January had always liked this once-beautiful Frenchwoman; when as a child he’d accompany his mother’s cook to the market, Betsy would point her out as they passed through the Place des Armes: ‘There’s Michie Janvier’s Maman.’ He’d known even then that Madame Sidonie was friendly with his mother when they met by chance, not ignoring her (as Michie Janvier’s pale young wife did), nor treating her with scorn because her son had taken a former slave woman, rather than one of the fashionable librée demimonde, for his plaçeé. Later, when as a young man January had played the piano at the various festivities during
Carnival season, Madame Sidonie had chatted with him with friendly kindness, accepting him as a distant ‘family connection’ despite the fact that he was a) absolutely African-black and b) no relation to her own blood. Nearly every other French Creole mama in New Orleans would have berated her son for taking care of his plaçeé’s children by another man, and that man an African slave.

  When St-Denis Janvier had died, Madame Sidonie had written to January in Paris – a brief note, but asking in evident sincerity if there were anything she could do for him – and upon his return to New Orleans, he had received a similar short but friendly query. His mother, he knew, still took coffee with the old lady on Sunday afternoons.

  At any rate, though this was the longest conversation he’d ever had with Madame Sidonie, there was no sense of it being an exceptional event. He had, in his way, grown up knowing her.

  ‘Yes,’ the old lady affirmed now, her voice dry. ‘And were I Visigoth I’d be insulted at the price Trask offered. Eight hundred dollars! Less than the cost of a field hand! I understand he’s made offers on Hecuba and poor old James as well. I’ve warned Aurelié.’ A corner of her mouth curled down. ‘The man’s strolled twice down to Molina’s cottage – that’s where they’re putting Locoul and that disgusting brother-in-law of his – and I suspect he’s going to make some deal with Molina, to buy a few of the field hands as soon as everyone’s gone back to town. Molina can pocket the money, and tell Chloë and Aurelié that they ran away. And I don’t expect it’s the first time.

  ‘It’s not my business, of course,’ she continued, as January’s brows shot up. ‘But I shouldn’t be surprised if some of the mules they’ve lost to “snakebite” or “theft” over the past few years didn’t go the same way. You can’t trust those high-yellows.’