‘She will,’ said January. (And well before Madame Aurelié opens her eyes this morning, if Henri has anything to say about it.) ‘But first they have to go over to the Casita and make sure Madame Chloë and Mamzelle Ellie are all right.’
‘I like Madame Chloë,’ confided Charmian. ‘She’s funny. She’s teaching me how to play cards. Were they afraid of the flood?’
‘Mamzelle Ellie might have been,’ said January. ‘I don’t think Madame Chloë is afraid of anything.’ The wind sharpened again, still smelling of the sea and of more storm to come, and a vast crescent of hurrying ripples smote the water as if with an invisible arm. In a confidential whisper, he added, ‘I suspect hurricanes and floods are afraid of her,’ and both girls giggled again.
‘Look …’ He pointed to the Casita’s gallery. ‘There’s Hélène.’ The queenly shape and formidable lace cap of Chloë’s French maid appeared, and the tall woman leaned on the rail of the gallery as the rowboat from the big house crept nearer. He guessed his little niece was watching for her formidable friend, and shook his head inwardly again over that unexpected mènage of husband, wife, husband’s mistress and mistress’s beautiful child.
And then frowned. Neither Chloë nor Ellie appeared on the gallery.
Ellie, it was true, from what he had learned about her yesterday, could very easily have begun drinking out of sheer funk and be at the moment incapacitated.
But he couldn’t imagine Chloë sleeping when there was the faintest trace of light in the sky. Nor could he picture her passing up the opportunity of observing a flood at first-hand, any more than Rose would let such a chance go by.
There’s something wrong …
He watched the little craft dock. Hélène, instead of turning back to the house to call out the obligatory, ‘Madame, the boat has arrived from the principal residence’, was at the gap in the railings before it touched the gallery edge, and in her posture January read no trace of her customary hauteur when dealing with any member of the African race. He saw Visigoth’s startle of alarm, and the glance that passed between the butler and the valet. Read, more clearly than anything else, the gravity of the disclosure in the way the haughty Frenchwoman snatched up her skirts to lead the two men into the house.
Isabelle’s glance crossed his, she reading, too, something amiss. January flipped open his watch and noted the time – five past six – and it was thirteen minutes before the three of them emerged.
Too much time to simply rush into a bedroom and cry, ‘Oh, my God!’ at some scene of horror …
Thirteen minutes meant they’d at least cursorily searched the house.
Only the three of them emerged. And Hélène got into the boat with the two servants.
January whispered, ‘Damn it,’ as the boat started its painful journey back toward the big house. He picked up his stick, limped agonizingly back into his room, stripped out of his nightshirt, and began to wash in the tepid water that remained in the ewer.
He knew Henri would be on his way.
SEVENTEEN
‘Heard anything, Monsieur?’ Hélène Fischart’s pale brows snapped together with indignant anger at January’s question. ‘And how does one contrive to hear anything, with such a din, in such a ramshackle house? As well ask it of one who has been nailed in a crate and pushed down a flight of steps.’
He saw she was trembling.
She led the way across the gallery and into the Casita, the parlor lit now by the stormy silver light of the morning that had broken above the tumult of cloud-cover.
Henri hurrying at his back, January went first to the little chamber where Valla had slept, its minute dressing-table now adorned with Chloë’s plain, neat toiletries: ivory-backed brushes, a tiny box of rice-powder, the rouge without which no Creole lady – French, Spanish, or African – felt completely dressed. A glass carafe of water and a tumbler, a larger ewer to wash in, with its bowl.
The bed had not been slept in. An evening frock of rose-colored silk, cut severely as that of a schoolmistress, lay over the room’s chair, with two modest petticoats – even a woman who dressed as simply as Chloë did customarily wore three in the daytime, five or six or seven in the evening. A pair of evening-slippers to match the dress had been neatly set outside the door to be cleaned from the walk back from the big house, and a glance inside the small armoire showed January a couple of clean chemises folded on one of the shelves, along with a plain nightgown, two pair of clean stockings, and a corset cut for evening wear. Another chemise – also neatly folded but clearly worn – lay on the armoire floor.
Of course Madame folds her dirty laundry …
‘When Madame changed for dinner,’ he asked Hélène, ‘did you carry her day-frock up to the attic? Is it still there?’
‘It was left here,’ reported the maid. ‘I helped Madame change her dress before dinner and then went in to assist Madamoiselle Trask. Madame instructed me to stay out of this room, as she did not wish anything to be disturbed. Madame had often made this request of me, when she is engaged in her studies.’
‘And I take it the dress she changed out of needed no assistance, to be resumed?’
‘No frock,’ returned Hélène in chilly accents, ‘can look its best when donned without professional assistance. But given her natural slightness of figure, Madame is well able to dress herself, should some pressing reason exist to do so. But I was upstairs all the evening, and there is a bell in the parlor which rings into the attic room where I slept. I can conceive of no circumstance which would have precluded Madame’s summoning me. She is always meticulous in her appearance, and would never venture forth in a … a slip-shod condition.’
‘What was she wearing before she changed for dinner?’ January turned back to Henri, who simply looked baffled by the question. Not, reflected January, having been married for nearly ten years to a dressmaker. ‘Still the green sprig-muslin?’
Henri could have distinguished a crow from a grackle on the wing, by the shape of the tail, or identified an orange butterfly as a checkerspot or a fritillary at a glance. He now said, ‘Uh …’ casting his mind back with an effort.
Hélène said, ‘With the white collar, yes, sir.’
‘And you didn’t see her after you helped her get ready for bed?’
‘I did not help Madame prepare for bed.’ Something – the first signs of distress to break the woman’s marble calm – flickered across her face. ‘Until I came downstairs this morning I thought that Madame had remained with Monsieur—’ she acknowledged Henri with an infinitesmal nod – ‘and had been constrained to remain there by the storm. The noise, you understand.’
Her lips tightened, and she seemed for a moment to struggle with how to organize the events of the previous night.
‘And you thought Madamoiselle Trask had remained at the big house after dinner as well?’
‘I thought so, yes, when no one rang.’
Together, the three of them passed from the small bedroom into the parlor again, and January couldn’t keep from glancing to the little covered loggia of the back gallery, where Valla’s body had lain twenty-four hours previously. He’d guessed it had been moved – even the cooling-bench was gone – when Minou had told him that Chloë was going to keep Ellie company at the Casita last night, and made a mental note to ask his mother or old Madame Janvier about it when he had the opportunity.
He stopped, holding to a corner of the secretaire for balance. Through the French door he could see, approximately where the cooling-bench had stood, a puddle of vomitus, half-diluted by rain and spreading in a watery mess almost to the edge of the step. At the same moment Henri said, ‘Good Lord!’ and January looked around him at the parlor itself, seeing it as he had not done when first the distraught Henri had hustled him to the room that had been Chloë’s last night.
Quickly January’s eyes went to Hélène’s. ‘Did you hear anything downstairs last night?’
The room had been searched. It hadn’t been ransacked, but he saw now that t
wo of the drawers of the little secretaire on which he was leaning were open, that a paper or two had been dropped on the floor. He picked them up: a menu for the wedding-breakfast in a scribbled hand (Madame Aurelié’s?), an inventory of the kitchen supplies, with a rough tally – labelled ‘B’ – in a different and uneducated-looking scrawl. Another scrap bore a tiny circle with what looked like a face scrawled in it, and a rude hieroglyphic that could have been a dress.
‘I did, sir,’ said the maidservant quietly. ‘As I said, it was difficult to distinguish sounds, up in the attic with the noise of the storm, but at about ten o’clock I heard – or I thought I heard – someone moving about downstairs. I expected momentarily for someone to ring the bell, but no one did. Then I realized that there were no voices, as there are when the gentlemen will escort a lady from the main house. A lady will always ask the gentleman in, at least for a moment.’
Not if she’s ill to the point of vomiting, she won’t.
Or, he thought, drunk …
He looked back at the disordered desk and saw a faint, dirty mark on the polished surface where something had been set. By the shape, he guessed it had been a lantern, and guessed also that it had been made last night. Visigoth’s wife Hecuba had charge of keeping the Casita clean, and whatever she might think of Uncle Veryl’s ill-bred bride, she had her standards. She’d have worn any housemaid out with a cane-stalk for leaving such a smudge unwiped.
A woman entering the parlor and feeling herself taken sick might well set her lantern down here as she rushed through to the back gallery. Though wouldn’t it make more sense to take the lantern with her?
And wouldn’t she have summoned the maid?
Unless of course, he thought, the maid had been looking down her cold French nose at her and visibly restraining her criticism from the moment she and her mistress entered the Casita.
His eyes went to the floor, criss-crossed with the faint, muddy smudges of footmarks.
I’ll have to compare them with Mamzelle’s shoes, and Chloë’s.
‘Does your attic door lock?’
‘It does not,’ said the woman. Her voice remained matter-of-fact, but January saw in her eyes what he himself saw: Valla’s slashed throat and blood-soaked dress. Still in that same calm tone, she went on, ‘I was afraid that if I moved about, my own footsteps would be heard by someone downstairs – if there was anyone downstairs, of which I … I could not be perfectly certain. I knew I would be able to hear it if someone ascended the attic steps, so I covered my bedroom candle with the ewer – the shape of the pitcher permitted sufficient oxygen so that the flame would not be extinguished – and I … I waited.’
In the darkness, thought January. In the storm, behind a door that did not lock. A hundred yards from the main house and as isolated as if she were in a tiger’s den a hundred miles from help. He understood why Chloë would appreciate this lanky, unglamorous woman as her handmaid.
‘At one point—’ Hélène brought the words out with stilted difficulty – ‘I did hear the stairs creak. But then there was nothing. No one came up, but you will understand, messires, that I did not like to go down. There was insufficient light to read my watch, but it felt like hours, and this building does creak a great deal. Only with first light did I finally descend, and found things—’ she gestured toward Ellie’s room – ‘as you see them.’
Ellie’s room had definitely been searched. Gesturing his companions to stay at the door – and out of the melange of scuffed tracks – January limped inside – carefully. There were at least two sets of tracks, maybe three, crossing and re-crossing between door and dressing-table and bed.
The drawers of the dressing-table gaped open and their contents – pots of rouge, switches of false hair, silk stockings, exquisite gloves – were stacked roughly on a corner of the bed. The three jewel boxes were open and their contents, glittering darkly in the silvery gloom, scattered the table’s surface in a sticky puddle of plum brandy whose reek filled the room. The decanter had been tipped over and only the dregs remained. The glass on the nightstand hadn’t been touched, a trenchant hint as to Mamzelle’s drinking habits when she felt herself unobserved.
There was no sign, in the chamberpot or anywhere else in the room, that its occupant had been sick before the apparently comprehensive convulsion on the back gallery. Yet the bedclothes were creased, as if she had lain down in them in her clothes. ‘Do you remember what Madamoiselle wore to dinner last night?’ asked January, looking around him.
‘Turquoise silk with cream-colored lace embroidered with gold. I do not see it here.’
‘Did you take her day dress up to the attic when she dressed for dinner?’
‘I did, sir. I will check that it is still there, but there was no occasion on which she could have come upstairs and fetched it. The dresses are all stored in the outer attic, outside my room. I would have heard if someone came up there, and I think I would have seen lantern-light beneath my door.’
‘I think you would have, too.’ Sitting in the blackness of her attic, her eyes must have been riveted on the crack beneath her door for terrifying hours.
Holding onto the tester for balance he studied the dented coverlet on the bed, the swatches of powder and rouge that stained the pillow. A little brandy had been spilled here, too, and he frowned at the smell of it. Not brandy only. He knelt with difficulty, and leaned until his nose was almost against the embroidered linen. There was another smell to it, bitter and half familiar …
‘Did no one escort the ladies back here?’ He straightened, and Henri helped him to his feet. By a heroic effort January did not add, And how drunk was Mamzelle?
If whatever she’d consumed at dinner – and God knew what she’d surreptitiously shared with Uncle Mick afterwards, if he’d had a flask on him – had hit her that hard, no wonder she was in a hurry to return here.
But from what Hannibal had told him of the young woman, he had formed the impression that she could drink like a hole and not be much the worse.
Henri blushed a bright pink at his question and stammered, ‘I … I don’t know. It was …’ He pressed a fist against his lips for a moment, brown eyes sick with guilt and grief, and January remembered suddenly what had been at least one result of Chloë spending the night here instead of at the big house. ‘That is, I had … I left the company early …’
Only his love for Dominique, thought January, would have taken this man from the joys of coffee and dessert.
Of course he wouldn’t have known when his wife left the assembly in the main house.
‘Of course,’ he said gently, and Hélène threw a glance at her mistress’ husband that could have stripped the paint from a door.
‘Because of the storm we all ate dinner indoors, you see.’ Henri took a deep breath, steadying himself, though his face was taut with misery. ‘The … the circumstances were extremely awkward.’
Even clearing all the chairs from the still-unachieved wedding from the dining-room and parlor, calculated January, there would still have remained the problem of where one would seat twenty-seven guests in the small space of a plantation-house designed more as a field-office than a regular dwelling. And that wasn’t even counting the American lawyer Loudermilk (Did they put him out on the back gallery?) and Uncle Mick’s boys.
It went without saying that those who had rooms in the big house would disappear into them with their coffee – and whoever they felt was congenial company – as soon as they could, rather than listen to yet another harangue by Locoul St-Chinian on the subject of his father’s injustice in disinheriting him, or a lecture from Gloyne Cowley about the lawsuit he was bringing against the family over his wife Fleurette’s inheritance. Not to speak of Madame Aurelié’s icy snubbing of Evard Aubin for harming the son of her dear friend, and Charlotte’s desperation to return to her beloved’s side.
He shuddered to think what Uncle Mick was like after dinner with a couple of whiskies in him.
Of course no one was keeping track of
who was in which room when.
And Uncle Veryl, January was well aware, was just as likely to sink into one of his long scientific discussions with Selwyn Singletary – his most congenial companion – only to surface two hours later with the vague assumption that had Mamzelle Ellie wished to return to the Casita, she had only to ask one of the gentlemen to escort her.
And Ellie, of course, would have been silent all evening among her intended’s disapproving relatives.
A piece of paper lay on the floor beside the bed, and he bent carefully to retrieve it. A page torn from a ledger, he thought, unfolding it.
Printed in pencil were the words: Dead-huts. Midnight.
‘What is it?’
Heedless of footprints, Henri rushed to his side, took the paper from his hand. ‘Dear God,’ he whispered. ‘What time did the flooding start?’
January shook his head. ‘Later than midnight,’ he said.
‘How much later?’ Henri gazed from the printed words into his face, his pendulous cheeks ashen. ‘If she started for the dead-huts, and Chloë heard her, and followed her …’
Behind them in the parlor the French door slammed open, and the thunder of feet – before January even turned – sufficiently announced the arrival of Uncle Mick and his boys.
‘Bastard!’ The Irishman stormed into the bedroom, grabbed January’s arm and swung him around, the torque and pressure on his ankle dropping him to the floor with a cry. Uncle Mick’s grip dragged him up, and with his other hand the Irishman struck January a brutal punch like a hammer. ‘Filthy nigger bastard—’
Even without the ‘boys’ present January knew better than to strike back, though the pain in his ankle made it hard to think. He brought his arms up to protect his face, and Mick’s fist drove twice more into his ribs, before he thrust him to the floor and began to kick him, shouting curses. It took Henri several moments to wade into the fray (Is he taking off his spectacles? January wondered in distracted exasperation) – above him, January heard the planter saying, ‘Here, now, stop this! Stop it, I say—’
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