Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘And which did she choose?’

  ‘She had made no choice when we left town,’ said the old man. ‘But she spoke as if she meant to stay. She was very attached to my beautiful mamzelle.’ He tightened his hold on Ellie’s waist, adoration in his eyes.

  ‘Did you tell her not to wait up for you?’

  Ellie’s glance flickered back across the parlor to the open door of her bedroom. ‘I don’t … Sometimes I’d … I’d rather not be fussed over …’ She stammered the words, and stopped herself. Looked again toward the bedroom, and January recognized her glance as the tug of longing for a desperately-needed drink.

  Rather not be fussed over when you come back late and exhausted from being looked at as if you were a cockroach by all your prospective husband’s family? When you really want a couple of drinks before bed, and are willing to forego the services of a maid in order to have them in peace?

  ‘Could you – could you please pour me out a little more lemonade, Mr St-Chinian?’ While Uncle Veryl leaped to obey her the girl dabbed quickly at her eyes.

  Tears for Valla? Tears of fright at the knowledge that they were coming for her, sometime, somewhere? Of sheer weariness with this struggle to secure safe haven for herself that wouldn’t involve bedding a dozen men a night?

  More gently, January said, ‘Whyever she slipped out – and whenever that was – Valla met someone in the woods. Someone who thought she was you, in the darkness, with only the moonlight on her hair. Was there any reason you might have left the house after you returned here?’

  ‘Of course not!’ said Veryl, in genuine surprise.

  For a long time, Ellie made no reply of her own. Only looked down and to the side, as if avoiding the sight of some recollection, pushing aside some thought. At last she said, ‘No.’

  THIRTEEN

  Luc showed January where Valla’s body had been found, the field hands having been summoned in as the weather showed signs of worsening. Chloë offered to accompany them, but January took her quietly aside and murmured, ‘If you’ll forgive me, m’am, and meaning no disrespect, but I suspect I’ll be able to question him more freely about anything that might have been going on in the woods or the quarters last night, if a white woman isn’t around.’

  Particularly, he didn’t need to say, a white woman whose family owned not only the plantation, but Luc himself.

  To this Chloë agreed, and remained at the Casita playing backgammon with Uncle Veryl and M’sieu Singletary in the parlor while Mamzelle retreated to her room and, it was to be assumed, her bottle of plum brandy. In other circumstances January would have welcomed the incisive little lady’s observations, but like a thorn snagging at his sleeve, he recalled that Chloë herself had strong reasons to wish Uncle Veryl’s ill-bred bride in her grave. In spite of Madame Aurelié’s jeers that Chloë had not and would not give her a grandson, January was far from certain that Henri had not consummated his union with that cold-blooded damsel. It would be just like Chloë to request coitus with her husband for legal reasons, and in any case after the arrival of Uncle Mick, she would probably be capable of murder simply to keep anyone from interfering with the efficient management of the property, whoever was ultimately going to inherit.

  Chloë wouldn’t be physically capable of overpowering Valla – who stood a good six inches taller and considerably outweighed her – and the maid had almost certainly been killed by a man. So there was no use asking whether the younger Madame Viellard had presided over supper at the big house, though it would be interesting to hear about her comings and goings during that meal.

  More surprising, he reflected, as he and Luc descended the Casita’s rear steps, would have been to learn that, if Henri’s cold-hearted bride had indeed been behind the killing, she’d put herself in the power of a confederate. He knew Chloë almost certainly wouldn’t stick at murder if she thought it called for – but letting another person hold that knowledge over her would be very unlike her indeed.

  In departing, he had remarked on St-Ives’s re-appearance, and Chloë had replied, ‘Well, if I had a clandestine errand of any sort to arrange, I should entrust it to St-Ives rather than any of Uncle Mick’s Hibernian baboons.’

  Which was a comfort, in its way, given his concerns about the possible fate of Hannibal and Rose.

  And speculation was about all he could do, surveying the muddle of torn-up pickerel-weed and sawgrass that lay just at the verge of the ciprière’s swaying gloom. Pretty much everyone on the plantation, slave and free, had been through the scene. If murder had been done here it would have to have been before False River Jones set up shop among the sedges and cypress-knees of Cold Bayou, a hundred feet to the northwest. Any later, and half the slaves on the property would have walked smack into the rendezvous, or at least heard her screams.

  No bloodstains were visible. The ground which stretched behind the higher, cultivated land along the river was perpetually muddy and sloppy, and had been churned to a slithery muck for twenty feet on either side of where Luc said Valla’s body had lain. Sedge and leaves had been squished into the ooze. Water was already collecting in a thousand little pockmarks where boot-heels, or particularly vigorous bare feet, had stepped.

  ‘Where would she have been going?’ he asked Luc, sliding from Keppy the Mule’s back at the edge of the rucked ground and staggering on his crutch among the trampled foliage. From the satchel hanging over the little mule’s withers – Keppy wore no saddle – January took a stone jar of ginger water that Luc had begged from the kitchen, took a grateful drink. ‘What would she have been doing out here? Going to meet False River Jones?’

  Two hundred dollars wouldn’t go far in New York, even augmented by the sale of a gold cross and a gold bracelet – And where had Valla acquired those? Would inspection of whatever jewelry Ellie had left back in New Orleans reveal missing baubles? Or would pieces of the random and outdated silverware of Uncle Veryl’s townhouse be found to be absent? (And how would you tell?)

  ‘Prob’ly on her way to the dead-huts,’ returned the young man. ‘That old maroon village, back into the swamp. If she was goin’ to sell stuff, she’d go that way—’ he pointed – ‘toward the bayou.’

  January considered, calculating distances. ‘What time did False River Jones show up?’

  ‘Pretty near moon-set.’

  Two a.m. There had been a shard of late moonlight, he recalled, when he’d been waked last night: he’d angled the face of Rose’s silver compass to it. The musicians had still been at the big house, playing the Lancer’s Quadrille – not that that meant much. Creoles, either French or African, would stay up all night to dance.

  Somewhere between midnight and two?

  That fit with the state of rigor on a hot night.

  ‘Why would she go to these dead-huts?’

  ‘Ever’body goes there.’ Luc shrugged at his ignorance. ‘Sometimes to trade, if word’s out the pattyrollers is watchin’ for traders on the bayou or the river. Mostly to make jass.’ He used an African patois term for sexual congress. ‘Sometimes just to get away.’

  He put one foot on the trailing end of the rein to make a stirrup of his hands, and boosted January back onto the saddle-cloth, then handed his stick back up to him.

  ‘Back ’fore Old Michie Froide cleared the land here for sugar, Auntie Zare tell me when I was little – Auntie Zare used to birth the babies down at St-Roche where the family had its first plantation. She said when this was all woods, and there wasn’t enough white men in the county to patrol like there is now, they was half a dozen maroon villages in the swamp. A lot of ’em was where the Indians had villages before.’

  He led Keppy around the trampled section of weed, and into the restlessly whispering woods.

  ‘Ol’ Michie Alexandre Froide had a house on a chenier back there, ’fore the bayou changed course. The dead-huts is supposed to be haunted, but me, I don’t believe it. Mose – our main-gang boss – got a broad-wife over from Malsherbes plantation an’ they sneaks out an’
meets there all the time. Shanny, too, ’cept Shanny got a new sweetheart pretty much every week. She really does believe all old Nana’s stories about the platt-eye devil an gettin’ rid by witches, an’ she says she ain’t never seen anything out there.’

  ‘You think Valla might have been going to meet Antoine?’

  ‘She’d have to,’ returned Luc with a grin, ‘after she went around all day Monday sayin’ as how she wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.’

  The narrow trace that wound along the highest ground into the deeper swamp informed January that the dead-huts were visited with at least some frequency. A mile and a half didn’t sound far when Luc said it, but he knew from experience that forty years ago, in his childhood, even a few hundred yards, in the woods, constituted another world. A world in which les blankittes were foreigners, a world in which a fugitive could hide …

  And had.

  He bent from the makeshift saddle-pad, said, ‘Whoa,’ and Luc halted again.

  ‘Step off the path,’ instructed January, ‘and help me down.’

  Luc started to protest that they were nowhere near the dead-huts, then saw the direction of January’s eyes and said, ‘Well, shit.’ And did as he was told.

  There was too much leaf-mold, too much decaying vegetation, mixed with the muck underfoot to provide a clear impression, but it was obvious that the shod man who’d walked this way last night had done so outbound – headed toward the dead-huts – bearing no burden, and inbound – back again – laden. The deeper tracks overlay the shallower. January judged his burden was about a hundred pounds. The weight of a woman.

  Luc said, ‘Well, shit,’ again, and straightened up. ‘Why carry her back to the Casita?’

  ‘I’m guessing,’ said January, ‘he meant to dump her in the bayou. Once he discovered this wasn’t the woman he meant to kill …’

  He paused, frowning, his mind snagged on a question, but Luc asked, ‘You sayin’ he’d want people to find Mamzelle Trask?’

  ‘Of course.’ January paused in his mental tally of the men in the big house … and the weaving house, he made himself add. Sylvestre St-Chinian and his two sons stood to lose as much from Ellie’s interference as did Evard and Basile Aubin, Henri Viellard, Florentin Miragouin or even possibly Locoul St-Chinian and his American brother-in-law.

  Not to speak of their lawyers, he mentally added, though he personally had difficulty picturing either stout Henri Viellard or willowy Aristide DuPage carrying a dead woman a mile and a half through the blackness of swampy woods.

  ‘The last thing any murderer would want is for poor Michie Veryl to spend the next ten years seeking for his vanished sweetheart.’

  The younger man shook his head. ‘If it was me,’ he said, ‘I’d have just wrote a note sayin’, “Dear Veryl, I have runned off with another man”.’

  ‘Mamzelle Ellie can’t read,’ pointed out January. ‘Can’t write. And people would search if a white woman went missing. A slave girl, everybody would figure she’d just run away. Once the killer pulled back his lantern-slide and says, “Oh, shit, I done killed the wrong girl!” he’s got to hide her body. Because now he’s shown his hand. Now Mamzelle Trask knows that someone’s coming for her. Help me back up, if you would – I sure can’t make it a mile and a half on foot – but lead Keppy from the side, so I can watch the tracks.’

  He didn’t expect to see much – and didn’t, for the tangled undergrowth made the tracks themselves intermittent. But at least he could look.

  ‘So you think he’s waitin’ for her out in the dead-huts?’

  ‘He could have got word to Mamzelle at dinner, told her something that he thought would get her out there.’ January swiped at a mosquito that whined in his ear; the hot shadows beneath the trees droned with them. ‘She obviously didn’t go, and it doesn’t sound to me, talking with her, that she deliberately sent Valla in her place – not unless she’s a more skillful liar than I think she is. She may not have got the message at all, if a servant was supposed to deliver it. Or it may have been something she wasn’t about to admit to me, at least not with Madame Chloë and Michie Veryl standing there. But why Valla would have gone …?’

  ‘Hell, no secret about that.’ The young man sniffed bitterly. ‘You don’t think them lawyers, an’ Michie Flo an’ Michie Basile an’ that son of his, ain’t all been screwin’ Shanny an’ Ima an’ Zandrine here since they got off the boat? That’s one place they’d do it, with all their relatives all fallin’ over each other back at the big house. An’ Michie Locoul an’ all them Irish trash? Hell,’ he said, and turned his face aside, his mouth suddenly hard with anger. ‘Valla couldn’t’a gone ten feet outside after ten o’clock, an’ not tripped over some white man out here.’

  January said nothing. But she’d already made love … to somebody.

  Didn’t mean she couldn’t have arranged another assignation, of course, but why would she need to? She was under Mamzelle Ellie’s protection.

  Unless she was being blackmailed herself …

  Luc walked in silence by Keppy’s head, visibly struggling to retrieve his usual air of carefree cheer in the face of this aspect of his life. The girls that he’d named – field hand girls, illiterate as birds and without the slightest hope of ever doing anything but cutting cane and digging in their gardens in the hope of keeping their families fed – would be friends he’d known since his childhood. Cousins, sisters, maybe sweethearts.

  Girls he had to watch when Molina, or some member of the family, or one of the family’s guests perhaps, would squeeze their breasts or slap their flanks or bull them – whether they wanted it or not – against the wall of the laundry or the mill-house.

  ‘Whoever he was,’ said January after a time, to break the silence, ‘he may not have intended murder at all. He may have seen Valla, and thought it was Ellie headed for the woods, and thought, “She’s meetin’ somebody and if I can catch her with her sweetheart, that’ll scupper the marriage right there”. Then he might have thought,’ he went on, ‘about how blind Uncle Veryl is about Mamzelle, and decided, Oh, the hell with it, let’s make sure … But if you’ve never killed a man – not just shot him in the arm from a distance in a duel, but held him against you and stabbed him with a knife – it can be damned unsettling.’

  Luc looked up at him, wide dark eyes troubled. In a very soft voice he asked, ‘You ever done that, Ben?’

  He remembered a dying bandit in Mexico that he’d shot; and the British soldier he’d bayonetted on the cotton-bale barricades in the fog at Chalmette. The way that man’s blue eyes had stared into his in despairing disbelief. ‘I have. It’s not … anything that anyone should ever have to do. Sometimes it’s hard to keep your head afterwards.’

  The young field hand walked in silence for a while, carefully keeping to the longer grass at the edge of the trail, and watching the ground before the mule’s plodding hooves. At length he said, ‘You ever killed a woman?’

  ‘No.’ All the women January had known – like individual flowers in some marvelous garden, each with her own music, her own scent, the bright delight of her eyes – went through his mind and among them the dark eyes, the quiet calm face of Delphine Lalaurie, beaded with sweat and slightly smiling. ‘There’s one at least that I would have, if I could. But not for money.’ The shudder that went through him at the memory of that beautiful lunatic was complex and painful, and his smile was wry when he added, ‘Maybe that’s why I’m not rich.’

  They moved on, the monochrome green of cypress and palmetto closing them in. Down among the trees the hot air was stifling, but looking up, January saw the curtains of Spanish moss flare and twist. Now and then movement threshed in the thick beds of wild honeysuckle and pickerel-weed: otter, rabbits, alligator.

  He remembered the little maroon villages that had dotted the swamplands closer to New Orleans as late as a few years ago. Remembered how the men of Bellefleur Plantation, where he’d been born, would disappear into the ciprière, risking savage punishment if t
hey were caught. How they’d sometimes come sneaking back, to visit wives and children still in the quarters. He remembered at least two, who had been caught – one had been beaten to death, and his master had cut the foot off another. In those days it was harder to flee north, and much easier to live as the Indians had lived. Then the country had settled up, the owners of the plantations had hired the poorer whites of the district to ride patrol. Those maroon villages had first moved farther back into the swamps, then vanished. When Cut-Arm, the last of the defiant maroons, had been hanged in ’37, the last of those villages had blinked out of existence, like a candle going out.

  You couldn’t fight The Man.

  Sedge and wild grape had long since taken over the garden-plots in the clearing where escaped families had clung for a time to the old ways of distant Africa. Indians had probably lived there before them. January could still make out the broad leaves of squash and pumpkin, the trailing green serpents of beans, among the wilder growth beyond the huts. Four dwellings still stood, round, windowless, surrounded by the broken detritus of those hidden lives: fragments of barrels and boxes, rusted cook-pans, a bleached and rickety ladder. Enormous roofs of thatched sedge and palmetto, now tattered with years of hurricane seasons, overhung the mud-and-wattle walls to protect them from the bayou country’s endless rains. Leaning on Luc’s shoulder and stabbing the ground ahead of him with his crutch as a snake-stick, January dragged himself painfully to the largest and most complete. The tracks had long since disappeared in the springier morass of grass and weeds, but the humming of flies, everywhere thick in the swamp, was like the sickening drone of some low-voiced instrument.

  Ducking through the door-hole, he knew already what he’d see.

  ‘I guess Antoine wasn’t waiting for her here after all,’ said Luc quietly. By the sound of his voice, he spoke to keep himself from retching. The boy had seen blood before, of course – you couldn’t machete cane, or live in the quarters, without witnessing injuries, childbirth, savage whippings, the occasional fight. But this was different.