Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  Valla had quite clearly been knifed here. Had fought for her life, and had lost.

  ‘She may have been waiting for someone.’ Signing his companion to stay by the door, January leaned on his stick, propped his other hand on the wall, and dragged himself painfully around the edge of the room to the one place that might, at the outer edges of the definition, have been deemed furniture: a deep, crushed-down pile of moss and boughs, still fresh enough to be fairly green in the dimness.

  Clearly, everybody in the quarters came here to ‘make jass’, as they said. Even with hot daylight outside the windowless room was a foxhole of stink and shadow. At night it must have been pitch-dark. With her lantern-slide closed, Valla wouldn’t have known whose bulk had blackened the doorway. Had she whispered, ‘Antoine?’ Had she lain here with him – or with someone else – and when that lover departed, dozed here still for a time, to wake at the sound of another man’s step? Maybe she hadn’t even been aware of the killer’s real identity. As he had not realized hers, until after she was dead.

  He leaned down and picked up the tangled mass of white-and-yellow muslin. Valla’s tignon, still folded in its elaborate pattern with yellow silk flowers pinned among the folds. Droplets of blood had sprayed on it.

  She’d fought for her life in darkness, knowing only the hard handgrip on her body and in her hair, the cold cut of the knife.

  If she’d screamed, would Antoine have come?

  In his childhood in the quarters at Bellefleur, the protesting screams of women or girls hadn’t been so unusual a sound. Like them lawyers an’ them Irish, Luc had said. And if a slave heard what was most probably some white man raping the girl he himself loved – a stuck-up girl who treated him like dirt, by all accounts – would he really dash to her rescue and risk the beating of his life?

  Pain washed over him suddenly, like a rising tide of sickness. He felt his face and hands turn chalky and cold, and very carefully sank down onto the pile of foliage. From the door, clearly torn between concern and the strictest orders to stay outside, Luc called out, ‘You okay, Ben?’

  ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’ His voice was muffled by the fact that he’d lowered his head down between his drawn-up knees. ‘If you’d fetch me that ginger water I’ll be much obliged – come carefully, around the wall of the room.’ His eyes were shut but he felt the edges of his mind graying. Do not faint …

  The ginger-water jar – warm now – was pressed into his hands, and after a couple of swallows he corked it, and, very carefully, lay down.

  ‘If you would,’ he said after a moment, ‘could you work your way around the room and check the thatch of the roof, to see if anything’s hidden in it?’ The walls were barely five feet high, though the poles which rose, teepee-like, from them made the inside of the house into a thatched cone an additional fifteen feet in height, blackened all over the inside with decades-old soot. ‘And if you could check the other huts as well,’ he added, when the younger man had turned up nothing but a small bag of coffee beans, and – to his combined amusement and irritation – a pair of gloves that he recognized as belonging to Nicolette Charpentier.

  Was that what Valla had come here for, on the night when everyone knew False River Jones would be down by the bayou? Not love, but just some salable trinket stashed away?

  Whites and librés alike indignantly claimed that all slaves were thieves: What the hell do they expect, of people who could find themselves torn from their homes and families at two minutes’ notice?

  But why would Valla indulge in petty theft nowadays? She had no more need of it than she had need to prostitute herself. And False River Jones – whom January knew slightly – was far too canny a trader to accept anything really valuable, like jewels, even had he the money to pay for such a thing.

  In any case, January guessed, by the alacrity of Luc’s agreement with this program (‘You just lay here, Ben, an’ I’ll be back in a tick’) that the young man, and probably his friends, had contraband of their own tucked away here – gunpowder and quite possibly a gun or two, wrapped in greased paper, bought from Jones or others of his ilk.

  Lying on the prickly mass of Spanish moss and dried creepers, in spite of the throbbing in his foot January smiled a little at his own memories. Guns hidden in a place like this almost certainly had nothing to do with the slave revolt or dark revenge that white slaveholders dreaded, much less with murder. On a sugar plantation, with every usable acre devoted to the cash crop, penny-wise owners, like Madame Aurelié and Chloë, bought parched corn by the ton off the Illinois flatboats to feed their ‘people’. Most field hands received that, plus a little hog meat and molasses, to keep body and soul together – nothing more.

  One of his earliest memories was of his father coming into the family cabin on moonlit nights with a couple of rabbits or possum; of the exquisite savor of fresh meat. The master had searched the quarters regularly for guns and had never found a one.

  ‘You know where Antoine was last night?’ he asked, when Luc returned to report that he’d found nothing. ‘Does he sleep in the quarters?’

  ‘That he does, sir. In the men’s cabin, with Cuffee an’ Mander an’ York an’ me. But he go over to Michie Molina’s awful early, to get a fire started in the kitchen there an’ draw up water. But you not thinkin’ Antoine …’

  ‘If Valla was coming here to meet him—’ January sat up – carefully – and scratched the shards of moss out of his hair – ‘he might have seen or heard something. Walking among the huts, you didn’t smell anything, like as if a man who’d been waiting here had taken a piss against a wall someplace?’

  Luc thought about it, calling small details back to mind, then shook his head.

  ‘When we get back,’ said January, ‘do you need to get out to the field right away? Or could you maybe do a couple of things for me?’

  Luc grinned. ‘I’m yours, boss, long as I can keep clear of Michie Molina.’

  ‘Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it?’ replied January grimly. ‘Could you at least let Antoine know I’d like to see him, as soon as he’s able? Was there anyone else Valla might be sneaking out to meet?’ Bracing himself against the wall, he held onto Luc’s arm as the young man got him to his feet: at nearly January’s own great height, he was twenty years younger and nearly solid muscle. ‘Molina, maybe?’

  ‘She hated Michie Molina.’ The young man shook his head decisively. ‘I can tell you that. Once she got clear of him, she’d never go back.’

  ‘What did Molina feel about her?’

  ‘What does any overseer feel ’bout a woman he can have for the takin’?’ Luc’s mouth twisted again. ‘He used to hold it over her – rag on her – ’cause she was lighter than him, musterfino, an’ stuck-up because of it. “You think you so white, with your straight hair an’ your prissy airs an’ your holdin’ up your nose ’cause you can read an’ figure. But you gotta do what I say.” Sure, she played up to him, an’ he give her presents. He coulda given her to any of the field hands, you see, if she said no. Shammy tells me, an’ Zandrine—’

  He made a face as if he’d found dog turd in his porridge. ‘He does nasty stuff, Michie Molina. Stuff you couldn’t pay a whore to let you do to her, I bet. That’s why his wife won’t let him touch her. More’n once I seen her – or the other girls – come outta his house with their mouths bleedin’, or blood all on their skirts. Or, he coulda had her sold for a field hand. She wouldn’t’a been goin’ to meet him at the dead-huts, that much I can tell you, sure.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Luc helped January up onto Keppy’s back, took the halter and led the mule back toward the Casita. ‘Pretty as she was, an’ used to be a lady’s maid back in Virginia – all the men in the quarters was after her. York for one – that shares the men’s cabin with us – an’ Rufe in the main gang, even though he’s married to Lina …’

  ‘She ever say why she’d been sold as a field hand?’

  Luc shook his head. ‘Her
master back in Virginia died, an’ his wife had to sell most of the hands, to pay his debts. Least that’s what Shanny told me. Myself, I think Valla was a troublemaker. She could read an’ write, an’ ran away once after writin’ herself a pass – I think maybe she stole things to sell as well. Comin’ here, I think she took up with Antoine ’cause she didn’t want Michie Molina passin’ her on to some field hand, just for spite. But Antoine, he was crazy about her. They all was.’

  ‘You, too?’

  Luc laughed, his bitterness vanishing in the recollection of that evanescent passion. ‘The minute I saw her – an’ it lasted all of about a minute.’ He made a wry face. ‘She was always lookin’ out for things to find out, to hold over people. When she learned about Bubba – that’s my brother – stealin’ nails to sell, she tells him to go on stealin’, but he’s got to give her half the money he gets for ’em, or she’ll tell, she says. Things like that. Anything that’ll get her money, or get people to do what she says – or hurt ’em if they won’t.’

  Things like my mother having been put up as collateral for a loan to Mamzelle Ellie’s father?

  It crossed his mind to wonder how Valla had found it out – if it was true. Was it the sort of thing that Ellie would have told her? Particularly if, as it now appeared, Ellie had a habit of drinking a glass or two of brandy in the evenings?

  Or was there some kind of paper that Ellie had – if Valla could in fact read? A paper that perhaps Ellie herself knew nothing of. And was that paper somewhere in the Casita?

  And if so, should he use the last few ounces of his energy in figuring out how to search for it, or in searching for the other thing that needed to be sought?

  Pain from his ankle surged again through the whole of his body, and he found himself wishing for nothing but to return to the weaving house and to his bed. Maybe if I rigged a sling and elevated it, the pain would ease?

  Or maybe if I mixed myself a nice cocktail of Hooper’s Female Elixir …

  Just as they came clear of the trees it began to rain, not heavily, but with huge, scattered drops, the sort of rain that came and went half a dozen times before a storm. He felt giddy and increasingly sick to his stomach, but he could see, beyond the Casita, Veryl’s valet James hurrying along the shell-path. The elderly servant straightened up with relief at the sight of him, and left the path to hasten towards him over the uneven ground.

  Damn it.

  Some development with Jules Mabillet, January reflected bitterly, that I’m supposed to have a look at. Uncharitably he wished the young man dead.

  ‘Michie Ben …’ James panted a little as he caught the mule’s halter, squinting up at January against the rain. ‘Michie Ben, you got to come. They’re gonna kill that poor man.’

  FOURTEEN

  Too-ample experience with the quack medical theory that ranged abroad – like a Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse – in America, made January ready for almost anything as James and Luc helped him up the steps, across the gallery, and into Jules Mabillet’s room. Completely aside from medicines which consisted chiefly of poisons like lead and mercury, he had encountered practitioners – well-paid and greatly in demand – who claimed to cure cholera with decoctions of camphor and gunpowder, to banish yellow fever by placing sliced onions under the patient’s bed, to restore male ‘vigor’ by means of warm ale and mesmerism, and to dispell madness by shaving the patient’s head and raising blisters on the flesh with Spanish fly. One of the problems he encountered regularly in America was the nearly-unshakable belief, held by most Americans, that any man was qualified to be his own physician. In his somewhat sketchy career as part-time healer among the librés of the French Town he spent a good deal of his time trying to convince people that just because a medicine was advertised on its label to cure rheumatism, kidney-stones, rabies, fever, and indigestion didn’t mean it would actually do so.

  As they crossed the gallery January smelled sulfur, and heard from within the room the frightened mewing of a kitten.

  Damn it!

  He thrust the French door open without knocking, pretty sure what he’d find.

  Madamoiselle Charlotte Viellard sprang to her feet from beside the bed, brown eyes flared with guilt, and in doing so knocked against the shoulder of the young woman who sat beside her: Gayla, the maid who looked after all three of the younger Viellard girls. Gayla lost her hold on the struggling black kitten she held, and the little animal turned nimbly in her grip, raked her hand with her claws, and bolted past January and out the door.

  ‘Don’t you friggin’ knock, nigger?’ demanded Gayla furiously.

  Shaking free of his two supporters, January limped to the bedside and looked down at Charlotte. The tisane in the water glass she held smelled of honey and sulfur and something else.

  ‘I apologize for breaking in on you like this, Mamzelle Charlotte,’ he said, with as much respect as he could manage considering the amount of pain he was in, and the degree of his disgust. ‘I hope you didn’t give any of that to M’sieu Mabillet?’

  The girl looked quickly from him to Gayla, who had likewise risen to her feet.

  ‘And what you know about it?’ the maid demanded, clutching her bleeding hand.

  Keeping his voice gentle, January replied, ‘If it’s what Queen Regine makes up to cure all ills, I’d advise you against giving him any, Mamzelle. It’s moonflower, isn’t it? Zombie cucumber? Mix it with honey and sulfur, and rub it against a black cat?’

  ‘Queen Regine give me this miracle herself—’

  ‘And my sister Olympia Snakebones taught me,’ returned January quietly. ‘And moonflower – datura – has to be used very carefully.’ Tactfully, he added, ‘Have you ever used this remedy before? It takes a touch—’

  ‘I used it.’ Gayla’s eyes smouldered. ‘An’ I knows more ’bout it than you do, sister or no sister.’

  ‘If you mix it too strong,’ said January, ‘moonflower is a deadly poison.’ He saw Charlotte’s eyes widen with shocked horror, and Gayla’s face freeze.

  ‘That’s a damn lie—’

  ‘It’s a risk I’d rather not see Michie Jules put to.’ His voice reasonable, he spoke mostly to the girl, but kept an eye on Gayla, who wore now the angry look of a woman thrown on the defensive. ‘If he were to take an’ go into convulsions – which is one of the things moonflower does, Mamzelle – I wouldn’t like to have to explain to M’am Aurelié what I found here.’

  The stout girl sank back onto the bedside chair, clutching the water glass to the pink ruffles of her bosom.

  ‘An’ if he dies,’ retorted Gayla, ‘you don’t got nuthin’ to worry about, do you? ’Cause no blankitte gonna believe the Queen’s Royal Blessin’ could have cured him. Oh, no! On your hand be his blood, nigger doctor. An’ on your head be the Queen’s curse, if you breathe a word of this to any. On the head of any—’ she turned, and stared hard at the terrified Charlotte – ‘that speak of what passed within these walls: the tongue that wags will dry an’ split, the eyeballs that peeked will scorch up an’ run out as blood.’

  She spit on the floor at January’s feet, shoved James aside from the doorway, and swept from the room.

  Charlotte sobbed, ‘No …’ and made as if to go after her.

  January murmured, ‘I had crosses worse than that put on me, Mamzelle, and taken off by my sister. You have nothing to fear.’

  The girl began to cry, and very, very gently – the last thing he needed was an accusation that he’d laid a hand on a seventeen-year-old white girl – January removed the water glass from her fingers.

  ‘Michie Jules gonna be all right,’ he promised, though a glance at the young man on the bed made his heart sink: his handsome face was flushed, his eyes a hectic glimmer beneath lids three-quarters closed. ‘James,’ he added, ‘would you be so good as to fetch back my bag, that I left at the Casita? Is there water still in that can? Thank you, good. I think a saline draft will help him, and some barley water when Missy has time to make some up. Mamzelle,’ he went
on, as the elderly valet hurried across the gallery and away, ‘it’s early to tell anything, but I promise you, voodoo remedies probably won’t help him and may make matters a great deal worse.’

  ‘But she’s a great voodoo,’ whispered Charlotte miserably. ‘A powerful queen.’

  ‘I don’t know that one way or the other,’ said January tactfully. ‘Though I understand it isn’t usual for a voodooienne to be a slave woman.’

  Charlotte frowned, digesting that bit of information.

  ‘I know Queen Regine,’ he added, ‘and she’s said to be very powerful herself. I respect her powers. But I’m not sure that she’d teach a woman she knew to be a slave.’ Père Eugenius, he reflected, would be horrified at this entire conversation, and he had every intention of confessing himself of the sin of conversing about witchcraft the minute he was back in town. But at the moment it was most important to reassure the girl. Aside from dispelling her fright, it was vital to make sure she didn’t come slipping back in here with God only knew what kind of Heavenly Root Juice or Conjure Angel Medicine the moment no one was looking.

  ‘She said she’d curse me,’ said Charlotte hesitantly. ‘If I told. And she’s – I’m afraid now she’s going to dig up and throw away the … the charms she made …’

  ‘To get Michie Jules to fall in love with you?’

  She flushed scarlet to the roots of her hair.

  ‘You tell Mamzelle Gayla,’ said January, ‘that I won’t go telling on her to M’am Aurelié – or on you, either – as long as neither you nor she tries to give Michie Jules any other kind of medicine. I know your mama would give you all kinds of trouble, and Mamzelle Gayla, too, and I wouldn’t do that to either of you. Michie Jules’ life is in God’s hand, Mamzelle. I think Queen Regine would be the first person to tell you that God is stronger than M’am Erzulie or Papa Legba. Put your trust in Him, Mamzelle. And when Père Eugenius gets here—’ a gust of wind hurled another splatter of rain on the gallery outside, as if reminding him of the unlikelihood of any steamboat putting out from the New Orleans wharves in this kind of weather – ‘you might think about confessing your doubts to him, and asking for his intercession in prayer. Now I’m going to have to ask you to leave me alone with Michie Jules—’ James’ shadow had darkened the French door behind her – ‘for me to have a look at him.’