Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  The same reasoning applied, of course, to Jules Mabillet.

  Both were young men, and handsome. Surely handsome enough to feel they had a chance of enticing a pretty young woman, who was about to wed a man old enough to be her grandfather, into meeting them at the dead-huts.

  He remembered the rider bursting from the woods, black hair whipped by the wind of his speed, sliding from the saddle to swoop Charlotte in his arms. Yesterday. He shook his head, and closed his eyes. Time seemed queerly telescoped with his exhaustion. As if he were sorting cards in his hand, he tried to put together the events of yesterday and today: the limping, agonized quest for mounts for Hannibal and Rose, his conversation on the gallery with Sidonie Janvier.

  On a plantation this isolated, you need someone you can trust …

  The yellow-and-white tignon on the floor of the dead-hut.

  Trask’s schemes with Molina to steal Cold Bayou slaves.

  The way Antoine had caught Valla’s wrist, and the smell of plum brandy in Ellie Trask’s room …

  Thunder woke him, hard on the heels of lightning whose flash left the room dark in its wake.

  Dark?

  He turned his head toward the French door.

  It really was twilight – or else this was the worst storm-overcast he’d ever seen.

  Rain pounded the walls, and the violence of the wind made the weaving house shake. The slap and smash of torn-off branches and leaves was like the rushing of the sea.

  He fumbled for his silver watch, but found he’d completely forgotten to wind it the night before. His leg throbbed diabolically.

  How long was I asleep?

  ‘How long was I asleep?’ he asked Minou, about thirty minutes later when, wrapped in an oiled-silk cloak, she finally slipped quickly through the French door. Like many plantation buildings in the French and Spanish Caribbean, the weaving house – when it had been partitioned to be a guest residence – consisted of entirely separate chambers, each entered from the gallery that ran along the front of the building and not from each other.

  ‘Hours, darling!’ She bore a candle, her hand curved protectively around its flame. This she carried to the little table that she used as a dressing-stand, where a small porcelain vielleuse stood. ‘It’s nearly seven o’clock and poor Visigoth’s just in despair between taking the wedding decorations down again and trying to come up with dinner for everybody!’

  ‘Did the Louisiana Belle ever turn up? Or the City of Nashville?’

  ‘Not a sign of either one, P’tit.’ She touched the candle-flame to the wick beneath the night light’s little teapot, and a thread of sweetness from the scented oil drifted on the gloom. ‘I suppose that’s just as well because one wouldn’t want Père Eugenius coming all the way down here in this awful weather. Poor Henri was in conference with M’sieu Brinvilliers for just hours, and had Leopold watching the river like that poor girl in the fairytale, whoever it was, who ended up getting murdered … determined to get us away the minute the boat appeared, in spite of everything Uncle Mick and those horrid hooligans of his can do.’

  She rustled to the door and peered out into the lashing twilight. She’d removed her tignon in the heat, and her long, curly dark hair lay half-unravelled from its braid over her slim shoulders. Bronze silk over dark ivory.

  ‘And I hope those awful Irishmen are still standing on the landing getting soaked, and that dreadful man he had at the bottom of the gallery steps also, not that I think that any of them can stand up to a little rain! Uncle Veryl and Mamzelle Ellie, too, and Maman and I don’t know how many others, just waiting to get out of this horrible place. Is it true that even if Henri pays Uncle Mick what he wants, then he can’t … can’t set me and Charmian free?’ She came to the side of his pallet bed, sank to her knees beside it and took his hand. ‘You don’t think that awful man would … would sell me to somebody else?’ Her voice fell to nearly a whisper.

  ‘Nobody would buy you,’ pointed out January in his most matter-of-fact voice. ‘They’d be buying a lawsuit with the Viellard family. And we don’t, any of us, know if what we’re talking about is real or not.’

  ‘And we can’t even ask that miserable girl if she was telling the truth!’ Minou’s fist clenched, then relaxed almost at once. ‘I’m sorry – I know I shouldn’t speak so of the dead. And I am sorry … It was a dreadful thing. Chloë says she was cut up just frightfully … Chloë’s offered to go spend the night with Mamzelle Ellie in the Casita, so she won’t be alone. I know I’d be frightened to death! Because whoever did it – whoever killed Valla – is still out there, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s out there,’ said January quietly. ‘And I’m pretty sure he’s going to try again.’

  SIXTEEN

  Something was hidden in the dead-huts.

  In his dream, January searched them patiently, probing his hand into the half-rotted thatch: It’s got to be here somewhere …

  He found three of his mother’s napkins (She’s going to be furious!), Nicolette Charpentier’s lavender gloves, the packet of colored chalks that his Paris friend Aristide Carnot had lost back in 1829 (So that’s where they were!), and the Holy Grail (Wonder what that’s doing here?). He ducked through the low door of the hut, walked briskly to the next hut, grateful that he seemed to have gotten over his broken ankle, and noted that this wasn’t the dead-huts at all, but the maroon village which had existed out in the ciprière behind Bellefleur Plantation in his childhood. Runaways from all over Orleans Parish would come there to hide. The huts were much the same, a hasty version of wattle-and-daub – not much mud and just bare sticks and branches on the inside – but all with the tall African roofs that made the huts look like enormous mushrooms and rendered the interiors cooler in the sweltering heat. He couldn’t find the thing he sought (What the hell is it, anyway?), so he fetched the broken ladder from the rubbish-heap outside and propped it up against the eave of the largest hut.

  I should have remembered to tell Luc to do this. As a tiny child, Olympe always hid things in the thatch at the top of the huts, where it was less likely to be found.

  He was halfway up the ladder when he heard children crying wildly in one of the huts, and looking down, saw that the river had risen in flood.

  Steel-gray and silent, the waters had rushed among the broken-down little dwellings, rising, inexorably rising. Trees floated in it, ripped from their moorings by the current. Whole lengths of fence; chicken-coops and the roofs of houses.

  Valla’s white-and-yellow tignon floated past, like an unravelling serpent. Yellow silk flowers dotted the water, like vagrant stars.

  Somewhere he smelled the smoke of a fire …

  Heard Olympe say, ‘Blood …’

  He woke, to find the roaring howl of the wind had eased. But by the way the old weaving house rocked and shifted on its tall piers, he could tell that yes, the river had surged from its bed. The waters had risen in the swamps, inundating the cane-fields. The night light’s tiny gleam barely outlined the shape of Dominique’s empty bed – with Chloë spending the night in the Casita, Minou had taken the opportunity to slip across to the big house for a few hours with Henri. At the bed’s foot, Charmian slumbered in her low cot, and beyond that, cramped into a corner, a dark braid on the pillow of a still-lower pallet (and a soft but pronounced snore) announced the presence of the nurse Musette.

  January guessed it was Stanislas screaming in the next room. A second wail rose – Isabelle’s daughter Marianne. The girl cried out in terror, ‘Maman! Maman!’ and though January was pretty sure that it was just the fear of a girl who’d never been caught in a flood before – the levees in town having been raised and strengthened since January’s childhood – January carefully extricated his leg from its sling, found his crutch, and limped to the French door.

  Outside was black as pitch. When he opened the door he could smell the water as well as feel it, surging and pushing gently at the pilings of the house. So clear was the recollection of his dream that for a few minutes he sto
od inhaling deeply, trying to smell the smoke. Strained his eyes to probe the darkness, to locate that wild speck of orange flame.

  But no sign of conflagration showed anywhere. Isabelle and Solange rushed past him along the gallery like unseeing ghosts, and the candles in their hands showed him the water, tiny glints flickering momentarily on a world of black silk, still a yard below the gallery. Now and then a branch or a broken length of fence would knock hollowly against the pilings or the stair.

  The slaves in the quarters would be on their roofs. Well January recalled such nights – and days, too, sometimes – spent waiting for the water to go down. If Michie Fourchet had any warning whatsoever of a levee breach he would lock everyone in the sugar mill, lest any take advantage of the confusion, and of the rising waters that would obliterate their tracks. Since nobody in the quarters owned much in the way of possessions, it was little loss if their cabins were engulfed. The drowning of the garden-patches was a far worse calamity. Depending on the damage, it could mean no relief from grits and molasses for months. His father, he recalled, hid his rifle in the cabin’s rafters for that reason, as well as because les blankittes seldom thought to look above their own eye-level.

  A heavy storm further down-river, he thought. The wind brought him no whiff of smoke, but rather the smell of the far-off Gulf. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered …

  For a moment his thought went to Noah, and the shudder in the timbers of the Ark as it lifted from its stocks. Did the old man hold his breath, wondering if the overladen vessel would hold together? Did his sons’ children cry out in terror in the darkness?

  In the next room Solange whispered, ‘It’s all right, my sweetheart! Maman’s here. Here, darling, go back to sleep, it can’t hurt you … Look, Maman’s got something to make you sleep …’

  And Isabelle’s candle appeared in the doorway, and her soft voice said, ‘Here, ma chou, come and see …’

  The stout plaçeé and her daughter emerged onto the gallery, and after a moment, came and sat on the bench beside January, who said comfortingly, ‘The only time I’ve known this parish to flood deeper than six feet was during that hurricane four years ago, and this doesn’t look nearly that bad.’

  ‘Lord, no.’ Old Laetitia emerged from her room, white braids hanging over her shoulder and a candle, shielded, in her hand. ‘When I was a little girl, it would flood in town something dreadful, before they got the levees raised.’

  ‘I remember that!’ said January, laughing.

  She chuckled in reply. ‘You could paddle down Rue Royale in a boat. I remember how, in a bad flood one year, all the coffins washed up out of the cemetery, and went floating down the street to bang on windows—’

  ‘Gave a new meaning,’ grinned January, ‘to the phrase, “Grandma’s coming to visit”,’ and beside him on the bench, the little girl clapped her hands over her mouth and giggled.

  ‘Oh, be still!’ hissed Solange from within. ‘Oh, my poor little boy …’

  Lowering his voice, January said to Marianne, ‘I was here when the hurricane hit this parish in ’35. The only place I could climb onto was the roof of a shed, and when I looked around, this alligator the size of a dragon—’ he stretched out his arms to illustrate – ‘had climbed up on the other side of that roof with me.’

  The girl laughed again, and for a time in the darkness he and the two women traded flood stories, diminishing the child’s fear. And incidentally, keeping an eye on the level of the waters. With the sky like ink it was difficult to estimate the time. He held his watch close to Isabelle’s lantern, and saw that it was three thirty, an hour at least before first light. There would be a mighty to-do, he reflected, if Henri didn’t either get Minou out of the big house, or find some way of accounting for her presence there – Conceal her in the attic, perhaps? Smuggle her food until the waters went down? This fanciful thought amused him, but he guessed that if she did put in an appearance, though Madame Viellard and her daughter Euphémie would undoubtedly make poor Henri’s life – and Minou’s – miserable for as long as the waters stood high around the house, nobody would be very much surprised. And Minou, like Hannibal, could turn pretty much anybody up sweet.

  It was of course out of the question for anyone to try wading through the floodwaters, even if they crested at lower than chin-height. All those creatures about whom January had always wondered, when the good fathers at the St Louis Academy for Young Gentlemen of Color would relate the story of Noah – poisonous snakes and coldly-grinning alligators – would have been flushed from their holes and be swimming at large in the swirling waters, along with the great nine-foot gar-fish, which would attack pretty much anything they thought they could swallow. Once daylight came, it was a good bet that poor Antoine would be given the task of dragging a raft of foodstuffs – gators or no gators – out to the weaving house, and another one to the Casita. January recalled the flood during which one of the Bellefleur housemen had been killed at such a task, when he’d run onto a copperhead swimming in the brown waters. There had been a small rowboat among the brick piers of the big house, he recalled, and wondered if anybody had thought to get it out in time.

  First light showed him they hadn’t.

  He pointed out to Marianne – and to Charmian, who had joined them, like the older girl angelic in a white nightgown – the dark shapes of Visigoth and Archie on the big house gallery, looking down at the water. Like spectators at the theater, he, Isabelle, and the little girls sat on the bench and watched Archie – under the dumb-show of Visigoth’s objurgations – strip to his drawers and gingerly slip into the water, which had stopped rising at about four and seemed to be holding steady a few inches below the level of the galleries. ‘Didn’t you say there’s snakes in the water, Uncle Ben?’ inquired Marianne worriedly.

  ‘There are,’ returned January grimly. ‘That’s why no white men wants to go in.’

  ‘The poison ones are copperheads and cottonmouths,’ reported Charmian, in her precise little voice. ‘Can they come up here, too?’

  ‘They can,’ said January. ‘That’s why everybody’s going to have to be very careful where they step.’

  Thisbe ran out onto the big house’s front gallery and barked excitedly at the flood.

  The big house, the Casita, the weaving house and the overseer’s cottage sat upon the waters as if they floated there; the glassy yellow-gray surface stretched westward as far as the eye could see. January called the children’s attention to where the top of the levee would be, now no more than a long patch of uneasily stirring water over the submerged ridge. Beyond it, far off under the wind-ragged gray sky, a few dollhouse islets like their own marked the plantation of Malsherbes, on the other side of the river, and three-quarters of a mile beyond that, dark, tiny trees dotted the glossy surface of the flood, even as they marked the ciprière to the east. Charmian and Marianne surveyed the desolation with round eyes, caught between fear and the amazement of the first major adventure of their young lives.

  The quarters was an archipelago of roofs, on which dark shapes moved. A little further off, the stone mill-house rose, like an island cliff, crowned with an uneasy frieze of chickens. Narrowing his eyes January could make out movement in its upper windows.

  ‘What happened to the mules and M’sieu Mabillet’s horse?’ asked Marianne. Three of the barn cats had slipped indoors already past January’s feet and those of the children as they’d come out onto the gallery; it was a good guess their brothers and sisters had taken refuge in the rafters of the barn itself.

  January replied, ‘Zach will have turned them loose when the waters started to rise. At least that’s what the mule-boy on our place always did. Animals know where to find dry land and shelter. When the waters went down, everybody would spend days rounding them up again.’

  ‘Antoine says,’ reported Charmian – and January wondered what the nurse Musette had had to say about her charge trading words wi
th the overseer’s house-man – ‘that in floods the animals always run away to this old house in the ciprière that Old M’sieu Froide built. How do they know?’

  ‘God tells them,’ said January. ‘God looks out for animals, because they can’t think like people can.’

  ‘Oh, look!’ cried Marianne. ‘M’sieu Molina has a boat, too!’

  Indeed, a larger rowboat was setting out from the overseer’s cottage, heading for the sugar mill. January made out the overseer’s stocky form, massive in his threadbare blue coat, bending to the oars. Antoine manned the other set, and like the overseer – January smiled to observe it – kept on the short jacket that marked him as a house servant and not one of the ragged field hands.

  ‘Are they going to bring the people in the sugar mill to where it’s safe?’ asked Marianne.

  ‘More probably count them,’ returned January, ‘to make sure nobody ran off. They’ll take the people off the roofs in the quarters, and take them over there. The sugar mill’s probably the safest place to go in a flood.’ And when he recounted how – and why – his master had locked the slaves up in the mill during floods, they turned those wondering eyes upon him, as if such a predicament could never come their way in their lives. Considerably later Solange took him to task for telling the two girls about slavery. ‘Thank goodness little Stanislas was asleep when you spoke of it! It’s not something children need to know about.’

  Pray it won’t ever be, January thought.

  But at the moment it was simply a part of this strange adventure, and the girls watched with January as Archie emerged – evidently un-masticated by gators or snakes – from beneath the house, towing the recalcitrant boat, which he tied to the balustrade. Charmian asked softly, ‘Will Maman come back here in that boat, Uncle Ben?’