Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  Jules Mabillet, like the others, had turned at the shout, and like the flick of a frog’s tongue ending the life of a fly, Evard Aubin drove his blade straight in through his rival’s body. The young man let out one despairing cry and collapsed as Aubin jerked his sword free, blood spouting out onto the trampled earth.

  ELEVEN

  Luc gasped again, ‘They killed her!’ and everyone, with the exception of January and Henri, set off in the direction of the Casita at a run.

  January yelled, ‘Get a torch!’ and Henri – nearly as tall as January but almost twice his weight – had to pursue them at a rolling trot.

  He called out, ‘Stop! We need a torch here! Stop!’ as January dragged and staggered to the fallen man’s side.

  There was enough light in the sky at least for him to see, and he tore open his surgeon’s bag as he fell to his knees. Mabillet twisted as he lay on the ground, sobbing in pain. The wound was low in his body, between hip and groin, and January, his own hands shaking with the pain in his ankle, ripped open the young man’s flies and pulled down trousers and drawers to expose the flesh. He’d wadded bandages and handfuls of lint over both entry and exit holes, and wrapped them tightly by the time Henri returned, gasping, a brand upraised in either hand.

  Immediately behind him clustered Visigoth, Antoine, and Madame Molina, appearing from two different directions. ‘What happened?’ Antoine demanded, dropping at once to his knees beside January and the injured man. ‘I saw everybody go runnin’ to the woods like somebody found treasure there.’

  ‘They did,’ retorted Visigoth grimly. ‘Luc come runnin’ past the house yellin’ “She’s dead, she’s dead by the Casita”, an’ every livin’ soul in the place lights out like the buildin’ is on fire, to see.’

  ‘Dead?’ Madame Molina crossed herself.

  ‘I don’t think half of ’em even saw Michie Evard run poor Michie Jules through, but I had the spyglass just at that minute.’

  In addition to his spyglass, the butler had brought the litter on which men injured in the fields could be carried to the infirmary – January guessed this was why it had taken him as long to reach the levee from the house as it had taken Antoine and Madame Molina to get there from the overseer’s cottage. The only white women to actually come to the levee – the slatternly Fleurette, her cowed-looking daughter and Locoul’s wife Madame Pepa with no rouge and curl-papers still danging from her hair – were now hastening toward them through the growing dawnlight, and all cried out in horror at the butler’s news. But none of them, obviously, could brand herself an incorrigible gossip by racing off to the Casita to look at a murdered corpse when there was an injured man to be seen to, no matter how much more interested they were in the one than in the other.

  ‘Was anyone left in the house?’ January asked Visigoth, and the butler shook his head disgustedly. ‘Then perhaps,’ he went on, with the tactful circumlocution necessary, even in an emergency, when a black man had to give orders to white ladies, ‘if one of these ladies might be so good as to run ahead of us to the kitchen, and fetch hot water to Michie Jules’ room …?’

  ‘I’ll do it.’ Fleurette gathered her skirts to her knees and pelted for the house like a hare.

  By this time all the women from the weaving house – family members and maidservants in a body – had reached them, exclaiming in shock over Visigoth’s news and most of them dashing off in the direction of the Casita at once. Solange, Minou, Laetitia and young Marianne remained, to lend Antoine a hand in helping January hobble slowly in the wake of the litter toward the big house. Sunrise had revealed a sky smeared from horizon to horizon with a sticky film of cloud, and the wind still came and went, came and went in a manner that whispered of a storm to come.

  Just what we need, thought January, who had been in the bayou parish during hurricane season.

  The dream he’d dreamed two nights before coming down here – the dream of flood, of rising waters, of the smell of smoke – had been filled with the smell of storm, with the tension in the air that heralded wind and downpour. More than ever he was glad he’d gotten Rose out of here. And when the Louisiana Belle came by that afternoon, he was going to do his utmost to make sure he and his mother were on it – and old Michie Singletary, for he knew he couldn’t abandon his patient.

  But he had another patient now. He looked ahead, a dozen yards now, where Visigoth and Henri bore the litter toward the house. Maybe two more patients. Veryl would be devastated with shock and grief, and he knew to the bottom of his heart that for all his occasional abstraction, Selwyn Singletary wouldn’t abandon his friend.

  Damn it, he thought, damn it.

  If blood’s shed – he could almost hear Olympe saying it – you know who’s going to get the blame. Though how anyone could blame him when he was laid up with a broken ankle …

  And he could almost hear his sister jeer, They’ll manage.

  Back behind the Casita, Luc had said. How far behind? How had it been done?

  He gritted his teeth despairingly, knowing that whoever had killed the girl must have left their marks on the ground, on the trees, somewhere … And with the entire population of the big house, the weaving house, and by this time half the quarters milling around to stare, any sign of the true culprit was going to be trampled away, leaving the field open for accusation to fall upon whoever was most convenient to the white folks involved.

  I hope Valla didn’t go slipping out again to meet her lover.

  If he is her lover …

  He glanced sidelong at Antoine as the slender young houseman steadied him up the gallery steps.

  Or if she did sneak out, I hope she stayed with him long enough that it can be proved she couldn’t have killed her mistress.

  Because as things stood, the one person over whom Ellie held actual power had been her maid. Every member of the St-Chinian and Viellard families had reason to kill Veryl’s disgraceful bride, but if they could point to a disgruntled servant and say, ‘She did it’, they would.

  And the Louisiana courts had proved over and over again, that they would far sooner hang a slave than a respectable French Creole.

  I need to get out there and look at the place, look at her body.

  No! They passed into the big house, threaded their way between the silent rows of chairs still assembled in the parlor and dining room – the ironclad rule about black folk cutting through the front of the house suspended in the face of grimmest necessity. Jules Mabillet had shared the room at the end of the upstream wing last night with the three French lawyers. They had already rolled up the pallets and made the room’s single bed ready to receive him.

  What you need to do is make sure that Jules Mabillet doesn’t die. Ellie Trask is dead. Valla has not yet been accused. You need to focus your mind on the man whose life hangs in the balance now, whose body-cavity may now be filling with blood and waste leaking from a pierced gut …

  Archie rushed past him with bottles of laudanum and spirits of wine in his hands.

  And you need not to take any more laudanum no matter how much your ankle hurts and it hurts like a million devils.

  You can’t make a mistake.

  The young man was laid on the bed, the French doors open though the room was designed to exclude sun rather than admit it. Visigoth had stripped him and brought in more bandages; Fleurette Cowley squeezed past January with a brass can of hot water. January took the spirits of wine – one of his instructors at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris had sworn by it for cleansing wounds – and rinsed his hands. Marianne held out his satchel to him, and from it he took scissors, ran the blades back and forth through the flame of one of the candles, waited a moment for the metal to cool and then carefully cut the makeshift bandages he’d bound on fifteen minutes before.

  And exhaled in relief. It was immediately apparent in the better light that Aubin’s sword had gone lower than he’d thought. It had missed the hip joint a scant inch below the pelvic girdle and pierced the inner thigh an inch or so to the left of
the testicles.

  No involvement in the gut.

  Had there not been a marked difference in height between the two men, the wound would have been higher, and mortal.

  And without a doubt, January reflected sourly as he cleansed and packed the puncture, the courts – if the matter came to court at all – would simply fine Evard Aubin for ‘disturbing the peace’ or ‘brawling’ rather than a calculated attempt at murder. He would argue that he hadn’t heard Luc’s call, hadn’t been aware that first blood had already been drawn … that as far as he was concerned, the duel was still in progress.

  But from the instant Luc had called out, ‘They killed her’, Evard had known that Jules Mabillet was the one who stood in the way of his marriage to a substantial percentage of the Viellard and St-Chinian lands.

  Behind him, January heard everybody returning. (Returning after trampling the whole scene of the murder. And if it rains this afternoon, which it’s going to – and if I don’t die of the pain in my ankle – there’ll be nothing left out there to see.)

  He wondered where they’d put Ellie’s body. The Casita? Veryl would surely ask him to look at her.

  Stop! Focus! Think of this man’s life …

  A wound that pierced straight through – particularly a narrow one like this – often turned feverish.

  Then he heard someone say in a sweet, unmistakable voice, ‘Oh, Mr St-Chinian, who would have wanted to hurt her?’ and he nearly dropped his swab.

  ???!!!???

  ELLIE???

  He didn’t hear Veryl’s reply, and had to shut his mind to the voices on the gallery, as much as he shut it against the pain in his foot. You cannot think of that right now …

  But it was Ellie’s voice. There was no mistaking that dove-like Celtic coo.

  He’d had to open the wound a little larger, to make sure it was properly cleansed; now he bandaged it tightly, and washed his hands again in the spirits of wine. By the sound of it, everyone in the house was coming and going from the Casita, and he was wondering if he’d really have to hobble out onto the gallery and grab someone by the arm in order to ask for a servant to help him, when shadow darkened the French door.

  ‘How is he?’ asked a voice that he barely recognized as Madame Aurelié’s, so changed and gentle it sounded.

  January turned – very carefully – on the bedside stool on which he’d sat to work. ‘It’s early to tell, m’am. The gut wasn’t pierced, thank God, nor the femoral artery severed, though there is severe bleeding. And of course with a puncture wound there’s always great danger of fever.’

  Aurelié Viellard crossed to the bed, and seated herself on the edge. She was fully dressed, even to her graying fair hair having been combed and pomaded into its usual thick knot at the back of her head. She must have risen early to watch the duel. Her face, in which her children’s slightly aquiline nose and receding chin were graced with the haughty hardness of absolute self-confidence, seemed fallen and tired as she looked down at the young man on the bed, and her blue St-Chinian eyes were filled with an unwonted sorrow.

  ‘I shall have to write to his mother,’ she said after a time. ‘Jules told me last night that his mother was delayed in town – she should have been here yesterday. We were at school together in France, you know. She’ll be devastated. He’s her only son. Her treasure.’

  Gently, the stout woman leaned down to brush the black swatch of hair from the young man’s eyes. January saw, almost unbelievably, a tear track down her pendulous cheek.

  ‘Oh, my poor boy.’

  The door opened behind her and Chloë stepped in, prim and neat as always but, January observed, with her eggshell-pale hair braided in a long plait down her back. Behind her thick spectacles her pale-blue eyes were grave.

  ‘Is there anything you need, Benjamin?’ she asked. ‘Anything I can send for? Zach has one of the mules ready to carry you back to the weaving house, any time you say.’

  ‘I kiss the soles of your shoes for that,’ replied January. ‘And if you can come up with some anodyne that isn’t going to make me sleepy or affect my judgement I will pledge myself to work for you for seven years in payment for it.’

  ‘I think if I could come up with that I should make a fortune patenting and bottling it.’ The young woman had a pitcher in one hand and in the other, the substantial bottle of Hooper’s Female Elixir that January had seen in the Casita pantry. She set both down on the bedside table, and mixed what looked like a well-calculated dose. ‘Hélène – my maid – will take over nursing. I’ve ordered Leopold to spell her on this, and to run and fetch you from the weaving house if there should be any sign of trouble.’ Leopold, a middle-aged German, was Henri’s personal valet, but it had been clear for four years who gave the orders in that household. She glanced at her mother-in-law and added, ‘I’ve made some enquiries about the state of people’s health in the quarters, Madame, and I am not satisfied that Madame Molina is competent to doctor so severe an injury as this. I hope you agree?’

  The older woman shook her head wearily. ‘Whatever you judge best, child. Odd …’ She passed a plump hand over her eyes. ‘One would hope that the son of one’s best friend has a tougher constitution than a field hand, yet when it comes to it …’

  ‘One would not wish to say,’ finished Chloë tactfully, ‘that one did not seek the best-trained and best-qualified help. Leopold!’ she called out, and the servant entered, his saggy-jowled face reminding January, as always, of a disapproving mastiff. ‘Please assist M’sieu Janvier down the gallery and escort him on the mule back to the weaving house,’ she instructed in the man’s native language, which January was thankful he also knew.

  ‘Very good, Madame.’

  ‘Have you had breakfast, Benjamin? Would you prefer to have some here on the gallery, or back at the guesthouse? I trust accommodations there have been re-arranged so you don’t have to go clambering up to the attic? Minou tells me you shared her room last night.’

  There was nothing, January reflected with an inner grin, that Henri’s wife didn’t forsee and arrange.

  ‘I did. Thank you. And with your permission, Madame, before I return there I should like to have a look at … was that Valla who was killed, then?’

  The girl made a gesture half of vexation, half of despair. ‘God help me – extraordinary how the mind doesn’t seem capable of maintaining full concentration on two catastrophes at once. Yes, please, in fact I had meant to ask you to do so, if you feel able for it.’ She closed January’s satchel neatly, and picked it up. ‘Shall I send Hélène in, Madame?’

  ‘If you would.’ Madame Aurelié rose, and in her voice January heard, for the first time, the sort of stunned confusion that can overcome the mind in shocked pain. Fleurette and her widowed daughter Gin passed along the gallery, and chattering excitedly about the dress the dead woman had been wearing, and how Madame Molina had said it served her right …

  Madame straightened her shoulders and took a deep breath, shaking off whatever distress she felt. ‘I should like to accompany you, if I may.’ And – to January’s utter surprise, for today was the first time Madame had so much as acknowledged his existence – she added, ‘I have heard so much of Benjamin’s acumen in the matter of corpses that I would be very interested in what he should make of it.’

  In the few moments it took Leopold to help January to his feet, the maid Hélène was summoned, a lanky fair Frenchwoman a few years younger than January himself. January gave her instructions for what to do should his patient awaken, and, sweating with pain himself, limped after the two Mesdames Viellard to the end of the gallery. At the foot of the steps, Keppy the Mule waited to carry him to the Casita and the grim scene that awaited him there.

  TWELVE

  A sort of tent made of pink mosquito-bar had been erected on the back gallery of the Casita. Through its gauzy walls January saw the maid’s naked body lying on that piece of furniture that every isolated plantation had and few mentioned: the ‘cooling bench’, where those who
died could be put until the fluids of their bodies had all leaked out through its open cane-work into pans set beneath, preparatory to washing and preparing for the funeral. Even through the cloudy netting he could see that Valla’s caramel-gold hair lay in a loose braid, as it would have been under a tignon. As he had seen Rose’s, thick on their pillow, thousands of times.

  Her breast, face, and hands had been slashed with a knife. Her throat had been cut.

  ‘Was she dressed when she was found?’

  ‘She was.’ Chloë nodded toward a rough willow-work chair that stood beside the pantry door. The yellow-and-white striped dress lay spread over it. A white linen chemise, a corset and the stiff satin petticoat whose rustling had marked all the maidservant’s steps. All had been soaked with blood and smeared with mud.

  Then she ducked ahead of January as he lifted aside one section of the curtain. Madame Aurelié followed them inside, and turned at once from looking at the poor ruined beauty of the girl, to watch January’s face.

  For a moment he stood, simply regarding the dead girl. He remembered the spiteful timbre of her voice, and the anger that had bristled around her like the quills of an invisible porcupine. Remembered what Luc had said about her, and how she’d ordered January to fetch charcoal for her mistress, and had demanded that those in the guesthouse surrender their oranges so that Mamzelle Ellie could enjoy them. So that she could present them to her, and get credit for cleverness and devotion.

  Recalled the silvery rustle of that expensive petticoat.

  And felt only pity for her anger, and grief that she’d come to this.

  Who wouldn’t be angry, he reflected, after being a lady’s maid in Virginia, to be stuck for a year or more in this sweltering, isolated world of monochrome green? Who wouldn’t be angry to be bulled by the overseer and, almost certainly, pushed and bullyragged by his wife, whose hair she’d been obliged to comb every morning and whose chamber-pots she’d been ordered to clean?

  Of course she’d done everything in her power to make herself indispensable to Ellie Trask, once the love-struck Uncle Veryl had plucked her from kitchen-work and brought her back to a decent-sized town and new, pretty dresses. Of course she’d been on edge, to encounter once more a former lover and a former rapist. ‘How old was she?’ he asked quietly, and neither of the Viellard women knew.