Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  After a moment’s startled silence, January said, ‘You have enlarged my knowledge of Creole business practices, m’am,’ which made her laugh.

  ‘Well, they all steal, you know. I’ve lost two pillowslips since I’ve been here – “mislaid”, my maid swears! Chloë’s had her own suspicions about the number of mules that have died on this place, or been “stolen”.’ She glanced along the gallery toward the main house, the open French doors shadowed with expostulating forms.

  ‘You need someone you can trust, on a place this isolated. Walking about the place today, I couldn’t help noticing the number of hogsheads they’ve got in the cooperage shop. Aurelié was telling me that Cold Bayou doesn’t produce more than thirty-eight hogsheads per season. By the look of the fields it should be at least forty-three. That sugar has to be going someplace. Dear,’ she added, setting Thisbe aside and stretching out her long, thin white hands to Chloë as the girl came hurrying along the gallery. ‘Is Locoul making a nuisance of himself again? What a voice that man has!’

  With a serpentine smile – and graceful tact – Madame Sidonie rose, snapped her fingers to the dog, and retreated to her room, admonishing January to ‘Tell your mother to walk over tonight for a hand of picquet,’ leaving January and Chloë alone.

  ‘M’sieu Janvier, you shouldn’t have walked over here!’ protested the girl, catching up the bent-willow chair in which the old lady had been sitting and carrying it down the steps for him. ‘Please, sit—’

  ‘I won’t keep you but a moment.’ He didn’t sit, but rested his knee on the chair seat, which helped. ‘And I beg your pardon, for having called you out of your conference.’

  ‘Anything that called me out of the presence of Cousin Locoul,’ returned Chloë, ‘is both a relief and a joy, but yes, I do have to get back …’

  ‘I realize it is a monstrous imposition on you,’ said January. ‘And on Michie Molina, at this time of the year. Particularly now that one mule has been stolen – I assume the sheriff has been notified? But is there any possibility that Rose and Hannibal might borrow two of the mules, to ride back to town tonight? When we left,’ he went on, ‘Xander – our baby—’ Chloë nodded, having already met that lively, sunshiny child – ‘was a little feverish, and had thrown out a rash on his stomach and thighs. I didn’t think it was serious – I still don’t – but Rose thought she’d be able to return this afternoon to look after him. Even before Madamoiselle Ellie asked me to return to town, Rose had spoken to me about putting out a flag on the landing. Apparently Isabelle Valverde told her about a friend’s child who put out just such a rash as Xander had, and went on to become extremely ill. Rose …’ He frowned, with what he hoped was a look of genuine concern. ‘It isn’t like Rose to become upset like this, but I can’t say that I’m easy in my mind, either. Hannibal has offered to escort her back to town tonight, and can bring the mules back tomorrow – and possibly Rose as well, since I know she’s very fond of Uncle Veryl, and would hate to miss his wedding. But I just … I don’t want to risk it.’

  ‘Nor should you.’ Chloë laid a small white hand on his, where it rested on the curved back of the chair. ‘Thank goodness it’s not harvest time. Tell Zach at the barn that I said it was all right for him to saddle the two best mules for them to take, and tell them in the kitchens that they can have whatever food they’ll need. If you don’t mind – if Hannibal won’t mind,’ she added, with a slight frown, ‘could you ask him to make a note of what they’re given? Not that I don’t trust him, or Rose, but—’

  ‘But more might disappear than was authorized?’

  ‘Something of the sort.’ The girl’s pale lips quirked. ‘Will Hannibal be armed? I haven’t heard of trouble here since that uprising in ’35, but there are runaways in the woods, Madame Molina tells me. And there are white men who live by thieving. Captain Chamoflet – who deals in smuggling slaves in through the Barataria – wouldn’t pass up a chance to rob a traveler. There used to be a maroon village a mile back into the woods, where it starts to become a genuine swamp; thieves will sometimes hide out in the old huts. I’m told, too, that the river-trader False River Jones is supposed to be somewhere on the bayou tonight, to buy whatever everybody’s been stealing here for the past two days … So it would pay to be careful.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’ January wondered how good a shot St-Ives was. For all the man’s dandified appearance, there was never any telling. Are there shooting-galleries in New York or Philadelphia that permit black men to practice?

  ‘Tell him to speak to M’sieu Molina. The man has a truly fearsome arsenal in his cottage – he’s said to be a murderously accurate marksman. Or possibly one of M’sieu Trask’s boys has something to spare. They all seem to be armed to the teeth. Now I must get back.’ She threw a glance back toward the main house as one of the French doors opened and M’sieu Brinvilliers, stout and white-haired, stepped forth and looked around, presumably for her. January wondered if Henri had been asked to be part of the conference or not.

  ‘James!’ Chloë called as, almost at the same moment, the valet emerged from Singletary’s room in the men’s wing. ‘James, can you find Archie and the two of you help Ben back to the weaving house? You honestly shouldn’t have come, Ben …’

  She gathered her pale, plain skirts in hand and hurried up the steps again and along the gallery, like a self-important schoolgirl in the hazy shadow. ‘She’s right, sir,’ agreed James, crossing the yard to January, his white brows lowering. ‘You could have sent a message.’

  ‘Ben!’ A deep voice called out from another of the doors on the upstream wing. Basile Aubin – the father, by different mothers, of both Solange and of the golden-haired Evard – emerged onto the gallery opposite. ‘Just the man I want to see!’

  The wine-merchant hastened down the steps, followed a moment later by Evard himself, punctiliously stylish as any Parisian in a nip-waisted coat of dark blue and three silk waistcoats that must, January reflected, be unspeakably uncomfortable in the late-afternoon heat.

  ‘How is the ankle?’ The older man offered a hand to January, and shook it briskly. ‘I must say I’m astonished to see you on your feet.’

  So am I, reflected January, though he knew better than to interrupt a white man. The laudanum had worn off quite some time ago.

  ‘But at the same time I’m grateful for it. To be honest,’ Aubin lowered his voice and glanced around him, as if fearing to be overheard, ‘Urbain – that’s my valet – tells me that Madame Molina, though I’m sure she’s a perfectly capable woman when it comes to birthing pickaninnies and giving enemas to mules, isn’t … Well, I’d feel safer if someone with better qualifications were to act as surgeon at this duel tomorrow morning.’

  He put an arm around his son’s shoulders. ‘Not that I think my boy’s in any danger – I could see the way that simpering Bonapartiste cringed when he heard the weapons were to be cold steel! But I just don’t want to take any chances with a wound turning dirty. Viellard tells me you trained at the Hôtel Dieu.’

  ‘I did, sir.’

  ‘Good man! St-Denis was always one to deal fairly with his family. And since I see you’re on your feet and well able to get about …’

  Had he been speaking to any of the folks in the weaving house, January would have protested that he was not ‘well able to get about’ – he later regretted not saying this, from the bottom of his heart. But the assertion that this was not so would have required an explanation, completely aside from whatever complications would have ensued from contradicting a white man, and January had no thought at the moment beyond getting Rose and Hannibal on their way as speedily as possible.

  So he said, ‘Of course, sir,’ gritted his teeth against the smart thump on his bicep Aubin gave him by way of thanks – which he could feel all the way down to his swollen foot – and taking James’ arm, hobbled gingerly to the mule-barn. Hannibal met them halfway, having been flirting mildly with Sophie and Ophèlie Viellard under the oak trees downstream of the house (�
��Both of them are ready to kill Charlotte – three of Ophèlie’s suitors having backed off in an undignified hurry the moment Uncle Veryl’s engagement was announced’).

  ‘I’ll take care of the kitchen portion of the program,’ offered the fiddler, when January had turned down his suggestion that he – Hannibal – assist January back to the weaving house and then make arrangements at the mule-barn. ‘By the time provisions are packed, the mules will be saddled and ready to start.’

  ‘And it will be almost sunset.’ Leaning heavily on James’ shoulder, January scanned the cloud-scrimmed sky. ‘Damn that wretched girl,’ he added, in Latin, since James understood some English as well as French. ‘And bringing up the subject to Mamzelle Ellie will only risk triggering some kind of action from her or that miserable uncle of hers.’

  ‘Veryl would never permit—’

  ‘I don’t know that,’ said January quietly. ‘I think you’re right. But I don’t want to find out that Ellie is capable of being pushed into action by her uncle, or that Veryl is capable of being pushed into doing something he doesn’t feel is right, for the sake of the girl he loves. I can’t risk it.’ Leaning on both valet and fiddler, he dragged himself along the broken shells of the path to the barn, as if the very air, the very smell of the river and the whirring of the cicadas in the trees, were a wall he had to climb, over and over again.

  ‘Olympe will know where to hide Rose and the children,’ he went on, struggling for balance. ‘All of them, hers and mine. After that, we can all do and say whatever we want. But right now, we can’t risk even a minute’s delay.’

  St-Ives – if his intent was to reach the Cabildo records before Hannibal did – already had most of a day’s start on them.

  Zach, the forty-year-old mule-boy, raised no objection to January’s assertion that Madame Chloë had authorized the loan of two mules for overnight, and when January turned to go, backed one of the four remaining animals from its stall and haltered it. ‘If Michie Hannibal don’t mind the imposition, sir,’ he said, ‘maybe you can ride Keppy here back to the guesthouse, save yourself a walk? I’ll have Abi and Oni here saddled up by time you bring him back, sir.’

  ‘I would kiss your feet,’ said January, taking a fifty-cent piece from his pocket and slapping it into Zach’s hand, ‘if I thought there was any chance I’d be able to get up again once I got down.’

  ‘You-all can kneel next time,’ agreed the hostler, gravely magnanimous.

  January thought he’d be able to bid Rose goodbye before she left. When he’d lain down on her pallet bed, in the room she shared with Dominique, she put a compress on his ankle and re-splinted it, then pressed into his hand the round silver disk of the compass she generally carried. ‘You may need this,’ she said, and kissed him in a way that made him wonder how much she believed of Olympe’s prophecies after all. But though he mixed his own glass of water and Godfrey’s Cordial, and was careful about the amount of the latter, pain, exhaustion, and the stress of the day hit him hard. He was dimly conscious – it felt like only seconds after he’d shut his eyes – of Hannibal’s voice somewhere in the room, and when next he opened his eyes it was pitch-dark, and the house silent.

  Far off, on the other side of the mosquito-bar around the bed, he heard music – the Lancer’s quadrille – from the direction of the big house, beneath the metallic roar of the cicadas. Heat-lightning, far off, briefly illuminated the room.

  He wondered if that was what had waked him.

  No, he thought. It had been a sound. A night bird’s distant scream.

  Or a sound from the bayou, where False River Jones the trader was trading for stolen goods with the contraband of survival: fish-hooks, gunpowder, the liquor that sometimes made the difference between death from despair and carrying on another day.

  Rose and Hannibal must have slipped quietly away hours ago.

  Good, he thought. Good.

  From beneath his pillow he slid the compass, held it to the shard of moonlight that barely managed to gleam through the French door, and it was as if he heard her whisper his name.

  He pressed the metal to his lips, closed his eyes again. And though the Devil appeared to be attempting to chew his foot off he slept again almost at once.

  Basile Aubin’s valet Urbain – a trim little man who retained Ibo facial structure despite generations of admixture with whites – tapped at the door of his room while darkness still lay on the land. He gallantly turned his eyes aside from the still-sleeping Minou and Charmian, to help January dress, and even offered to shave him, out on the gallery by torchlight. ‘I’ll take you up on it later,’ January said, ‘if you’d be so kind.’ He mixed himself the least amount of Cordial-and-water he thought he could get away with, and with the help of his crutches managed, with the valet’s help, to limp to where torchlight burned on the levee.

  Any white woman who exhibited the slightest curiosity about such violent matters as dueling would have been branded at once as an unmarriageable trollop, and every slave and servant on the place was already at work. But every white male guest was assembled in a loose ring on the flat ground at the foot of the levee, and January was well aware that his fellow musicians, and old Sylvestre St-Chinian and his sons, followed him and Urbain, and stood just far enough away from the yard-high embankment so as not to offend white sensibilities. (‘Get them damn darkies outta here!’ snarled Uncle Mick to his boys, but the musicians simply scattered like cats into the pre-dawn blackness, to return when the attention of the Irishmen reverted to the duel.)

  Jules-Napoleon Mabillet stood several inches taller than his opponent, and his sensitive features contracted in a frown of concentration as he warmed up with practice passes in the torchlight. Clouds had moved in. Shifty fragments of warm breeze flattened the linen of the young combatants’ shirtsleeves to the muscle of their arms, and rattled the cane in the fields nearby. The torch-flames streamed out in orange ribbons against the darkness, then would seem to fall and contract abruptly as the wind drew breath. Once, while the young men’s seconds – Florentin Miragouin and Basile Aubin himself – were conferring, a few drops of rain spattered January’s cheek.

  Evard Aubin, his square-chinned face set in an expression of calm contempt, stretched into lunges also, flexible, light, and very strong.

  Henri Viellard came over to January, whispered, ‘Are you all right, Benjamin?’ The orange light made two neat rectangles of his spectacle-lenses as he glanced toward the seconds, and his plump face creased with distress. ‘I’ve always hated these affairs – barbaric! Evard was gloating all evening about it. Yes, he’s my cousin, but Jules’ mother is Mama’s closest friend! Should anything happen to Jules, I’ll be very surprised if Mama will countenance Evard’s suit in any case!’

  ‘Which of them would Madamoiselle Charlotte choose, had she completely her own will of it, sir?’ asked January quietly. In a way, Henri Viellard was almost a brother-in-law: he had traveled with him, had delivered the daughter he adored. Among all the whites at the big house, January realized he did consider Henri almost a member of his own family. ‘Or do you know?’

  The fat man shook his head. ‘Who among us has his own will?’ His voice was wistful. Thin, fair strands of his hair flickered across his brow. ‘Both of them acted like absolute cads when Uncle’s frightful … when all this uproar began,’ he corrected himself, with a glance across the torch-lit circle at Uncle Veryl. ‘Charlotte – and Sophie and Ophèlie, indeed – were very much hurt. The more so because Ophèlie found the note that the Picard family lawyer sent Mama, informing her that Ophèlie’s fiancé would be obliged to withdraw his suit if the conditions for property settlement could not be guaranteed. Oh, this entire business is medieval!’

  Medieval, reflected January, was exactly the word for it. From the meticulous hair-splitting of the family holdings to the two young men now poised in the firelight, the steel catching long slips of burning gold, it all smacked far more of the fourteenth century than of the nineteenth. Atavistic, if not
downright primitive … except of course for the presence of four lawyers, eager as spectators at a cockfight.

  And though the fight was supposedly only until first blood, if the Mabillet boy managed to wound young Aubin fatally, would Basile Aubin really permit his cousin Madame Aurelié to bestow the hand of her daughter on his only son’s killer?

  Jules Mabillet’s face still wore that nearly-studious frown, as if he were trying to remember some half-forgotten lesson. Evard Aubin’s narrow mouth framed a tight, cold smile.

  There was a quick pass: Mabillet fell back. His parry was uncertain, and it appeared that only his longer legs saved him. A shifting for position, Evard beating a time or two on the foible of his opponent’s blade, Mabillet clumsily retreating. The Black Duke – the tallest and most powerful of the Irishmen – called out, ‘Run in an’ spit the feller, why don’t yez?’ – fortunately in English – and another – lean and runty and pock-marked – muttered more quietly, ‘What you bet Blondie kills ’im, an’ to hell with this first blood tripe?’ ‘Here’s hopin’ anyways, Gopher,’ opined a third.

  Then with a spring and a lunge Evard drove in, and with blinding and wholly unexpected speed Mabillet parried to fifth and riposted, blood bright the length of Evard’s sleeve as the taller man’s point ripped his arm from wrist to shoulder. There was a whoop of delight from the Black Duke and a thunder of Gaelic curses from the others – presumably the Duke had bet against the general impression that Mabillet didn’t know what he was doing with a blade in his hand – and at the same moment a voice yelled from the growing dawnlight behind them,

  ‘Michie Veryl! Michie Veryl!’

  And such was the note in it that everyone turned.

  It was Luc, panting and gray-faced with shock.

  ‘Michie Veryl, you gotta come! In the woods – back of the Casita! They killed her—’