Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  Uncle Mick smelled of whiskey and January curled himself tighter, praying the boys wouldn’t all wade into him and weirdly, in a tiny corner of his mind, wanting to yell at them, ‘Don’t tread on the footprints!’

  ‘Stop this at once!’ Hélène didn’t raise her voice, but her words were like the lash of a whip.

  The kicking stopped.

  ‘Explain yourself, sir! How this man can have had anything to do with your niece’s disappearance—’

  ‘How?’ Mick Trask was nearly spitting with rage. ‘He was goddam well on his goddam feet a minute ago, now, wasn’t he? Him and that bitch mother o’ his. Just waitin’ for the chance to get my poor girl, sneakin’ Nubians! An’ her wid her dress wet from the storm an’ soaked to the knees with the flood. Didn’t think o’ that, did yez, boy-o?’ This to January, who had cautiously, agonizingly sat up again. ‘’Tis the first thing I did, when I’d heard my poor girl had been done for – went through the rooms of every one o’ them that’d wish her ill, lookin’ for who’d been out in the rain! Lurin’ her out of this place, like you lured that poor wench o’ hers. Sneakin’ witch! I’ll live to see the pair of yez hanged!’

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘It’s ridiculous!’ Livia Levesque jerked on the chain padlocked around her wrist. ‘It’s a lie, and this is an outrage, an obscenity, to keep me imprisoned in this way!’

  ‘I hope by that you mean us, Maman,’ said January wearily. His ribs ached sickeningly and the whole left side of his face had swollen from Mick Trask’s blows, to say nothing of the blinding throbbing in his foot. He wanted nothing more than to lie down on the floor, stack chunks of wood high enough to elevate his ankle – the only room above water available as a prison was the loft over the wood store – and go to sleep, something he knew he must not do.

  He wondered if, as suspected murderers as well as potential runaways, anyone was going to feed them, particularly given the issue of rationing in the flood-locked plantation.

  Somebody has to come, who can take a message …

  ‘When did you go over there?’

  ‘Really, Benjamin—’

  ‘Maman,’ said January patiently, ‘we have very little time to figure out what actually happened in the Casita last night and according to Uncle Mick—’

  ‘You would believe that lying Irish swine over your own mother?’

  ‘Was your dress wet from the storm? And soaked to the knees?’

  ‘The fact that a – a swindling, camphorated bog-jumper should have the temerity to search the rooms of the other guests in the house …’

  ‘That was very quick thinking on his part, actually. Did you search Mamzelle’s rooms for papers about Fourchet’s debts?’

  ‘I think I was very well justified in doing so, given that brassy-haired hussy’s lies.’

  ‘When? While she was still at dinner?’

  His mother emerged from behind the stack of logs that separated them. Each had been chained to one of the several kingposts that held up the roof; stacked billets of wood lined the walls and here and there piles were heaped where exhausted work-gangs had dropped them. Neither January nor his mother had a chain long enough to reach to the open trap in the middle of the room, through which January could see brown floodwater, bobbing with more wood, almost to the level of the loft floor. Just what we need. A copperhead or an alligator coming to take refuge …

  At the end of the long room an opening in the wall, shaded under the ten-foot eaves, let in the dappled reflection of gray morning light.

  For a long time his mother only regarded him, her fine-boned face – of whose nearly-European features and mild cocoa-colored complexion she was ferociously proud – closed like a pair of shutters, admitting nothing.

  She’s afraid, he thought, returning her gaze. She knew the life she faced, even were she not executed for the heinous crime of killing any white person, let alone one legally deemed her master. She had spent thirty-six years as a free woman – a woman of a certain amount of wealth and property. She owned her own house, had slaves of her own (whom she had, in the past, taken down to the Cabildo to be whipped by the City Guard for allegedly padding the household bills). In her early sixties now, she had not the stamina to survive in the fields, nor the temperament that anyone in their right mind would take into their household.

  She would fight, with words or lies or whatever weapon came to hand, to the last. But he saw the terror in her eyes.

  At length she said, ‘Did that other hussy steal the jewels?’

  ‘What other hussy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She turned the shackle on her wrist: the light, small sort that dealers used on ‘fancy goods’. The links tinkled in the wet stillness. ‘Whoever it was must have seen the light in the attic and knew the maid was up there, and would be too afraid after that brass-haired bitch’s murder to come down if she heard any noises. Cold-faced hag. I daresay she helped herself to the jewels—’

  ‘The jewels were still on the dressing-table,’ said January.

  For one second his mother’s face relaxed in relief; then she frowned sharply, as if at a housemaid’s neglect of some task. ‘Well, really!’

  He knew the only reason they hadn’t gone into her pockets was because she knew they’d be recognized when she tried to sell them.

  ‘So you went over there while everyone was at dinner,’ he went on, ‘knowing the storm would cover whatever sounds you might make. You searched the Casita … and someone else came in while you were there?’ He thought there had been at least two noticeable sizes of track on the straw-matting of the bedroom floor. Possibly, he thought, three …

  ‘I’d searched the bedroom,’ admitted his mother grudgingly. ‘I found nothing – not in her dressing-table, not in her trunk, nowhere. I’d glanced in that small room – though even that cocotte wouldn’t have been so stupid as to conceal anything where Valla could have laid her thieving hands on it – and was about to start on the pantry when I heard someone open the French door into the parlor. I covered my lantern at once and stepped into the attic stair, and pulled the door to behind me. I listened for the sound of the bell up in the maid’s room – it was dark enough that I could have slipped out onto the back gallery if I had to – but there was no sound, only someone moving about the house for an unconscionably long time. I thought it might have been that cold little witch of a wife Henri’s got, trying to find some evidence against the girl, though God knows what it would take to pry that senile fool Veryl away from her. If it were her, it would make sense she wouldn’t touch the jewelry I’d left on the table. Nasty, gaudy stuff – I’d have blushed, if poor St-Denis gave me stones like those.’

  Her eyes narrowed, piecing together recollections of events, and January hid a smile at the lie.

  You wouldn’t have blushed, you’d have worn them for him with a dazzling smile and sold them before his body was cold.

  ‘Was there a dress on the bed in Madame Chloë’s room?’

  ‘Rose-colored silk. And I must say I was a bit shocked at that maid of hers, for not putting it away. For all her airs …’

  ‘Rose-colored silk.’ January turned the meaning of that over in his mind. Trying again to picture the faint, shadowy tracks on the scrubbed cypress of the parlor floor, of the straw matting in the bedroom; cursing Uncle Mick and his boys.

  ‘And you left … When?’

  ‘Good heavens, Benjamin, I didn’t look at my watch! After that sly little hussy left I went through the parlor and the pantry pretty thoroughly – though I doubt the girl even knows what a pantry is for. Except to hide liquor in. Three bottles of plum brandy – nasty, stinky stuff – and enough Hooper’s Elixir to put an army to sleep, I daresay. No woman gets the cramps that bad! By that time it was late. I was in the parlor when I saw a lantern on the path from the big house, and guessed it was Little Mamzelle Virginity on her way. I slipped out the back and kept within the woods where my lantern wouldn’t show. The wind was frightful by that time and it was hard to get alon
g, and the water started coming up before I reached the weaving house. And as for that Irish scoundrel searching the rooms of his fellow-guests—’

  ‘Where did you hide your wet clothes?’

  ‘Under the top mattress of the bed, Benjamin.’ She went on, her voice changing, ‘What are we to do? I hated that vile ninny but you know I’d never have raised my hand against her.’

  January didn’t know anything of the sort, if his mother thought she could have gotten away with a murder, but was reasonably certain that it was not, in fact, the case now.

  ‘Do you have your notebook on you? If I can get a message to Old Madame Janvier, I know she’ll stand my friend. Surely she won’t believe I had anything to do with what happened. Of course nobody will believe that ice-faced galette Chloë was in the house—’

  He recalled what Olympe had said about who would get the blame if Ellie Trask was murdered before the wedding, and shivered. We already have blood, death and water …

  ‘I have a hundred dollars in gold,’ his mother went on, and extended her hand. The kingposts were far enough separated, and the chains that held them short enough, that they could not touch, but sure enough, the cindery daylight showed him a small stack of ten-dollar gold pieces nested in her palm, and on top of them, a half-dozen silver dollars. Seeing his expression of surprise, she added tartly, ‘A fine thing it would be, if I didn’t think to have a bank sewn into my corset. Ever since that stripe-eyed pichouette sounded off her mouth about us I’ve kept it full. I daresay that sneak of an overseer would sell us five minutes alone with the key: I saw that silk dress his wife was wearing when she came down to the levee Tuesday, thinking to meet Père Eugenius! Thirty dollars it must have cost, with that lace – and that cameo was Italian work, twenty-five dollars at the least! She can’t have things like that on an overseer’s—’

  ‘Don’t,’ said January quietly. ‘Don’t even think it, Maman. You think the man isn’t going through your luggage even as we’re speaking here, looking for whatever he can find? You think, if you even hinted that you had money on you, that he wouldn’t search you to the skin for it?’

  She fell silent. He could see the glint of irritation in her eyes as she rebuked herself for even thinking that an overseer could be trusted.

  ‘Someone will come,’ said January.

  He knew this was likely, but in his heart he didn’t believe it.

  It was in fact Henri who arrived about an hour later, pasty with shock and accompanied by the aenemic-looking lawyer DuPage. The men who rowed them up to the outer window were, January knew by their voices (‘Mind yer step, sorr … Not that way, yer bletherin’ Frenchy gobshite, you’ll have us over …’) to be some of the boys.

  ‘I refuse to believe, absolutely refuse, that you had anything to do with … with whatever happened.’ Henri knelt at January’s side and began pulling pads of linen and bottles of things like spirits of wine and basilicum powder out of a willow basket he’d brought. His hands shook so badly he kept dropping them, and – perhaps surprisingly for a man whose devotion to meals was amply attested by his fifty-four-inch waist – of course he hadn’t remembered to bring anything to eat or drink. He kept his voice low and glanced repeatedly back at the wide square of yellow-gray water and daylight, against which the heads of the Black Duke and Gopher were silhouetted, though at a guess they spoke no French.

  ‘You have to do something,’ the planter begged, as January took over the process of making a compress for his eye. ‘What can have happened to them? We’ve had … I’ve sent parties into the woods, but we’ve only two boats, and the water is six feet deep, nearly as far as town, I think. Poor Uncle Veryl is almost ill with grief and anxiety, and Maman is … I’ve never seen her like this! Chloë …’ He pressed his fist to his mouth again, unable to go on.

  Beyond the piled wood January heard the clink of chain-links, and his mother’s incisive voice: ‘I trust you’re not going to lock me into an attic somewhere? Or does that pox-raddled Irish pirate propose to hang me out of hand?’

  She, and DuPage, emerged from around the woodpile, Livia Levesque liberated from her bonds and stiff as an outraged queen, and be damned to breaking and entering the Casita in the middle of last night.

  ‘You’re to remain at the weaving house, Madame,’ said DuPage, escorting her tenderly toward the wide window. ‘It is part of Madame Janvier’s agreement with Trask that this gentleman – M’sieu M’Gurk—’ he gestured to the weasel-faced Gopher – ‘remain with you there for the time being, until the floodwaters recede sufficiently to permit the arrival of the Plaquemines Parish sheriff—’

  ‘That estragot? Stupid as a basket with a hole in it. If he’s in charge of finding what became of that good-for-nothing strumpet we might as well call Père Eugenius now for last rites, not that he’d come.’

  She barely glanced at January as the Black Duke clambered into the loft, and DuPage assisted the widow Levesque into the rowboat, then climbed in himself.

  ‘I’d advise yez don’t try nuttin’,’ growled the Duke as he settled himself just inside the window, drawn pistol on his knee. ‘Gopher M’Gurk can plug the eye outten a rabbit at a hundred yards by moonlight, so he can, drunk or sober.’

  ‘How ever did you arrive at the information about the latter state?’ replied Livia, glancing him up and down before averting her face in contempt.

  ‘Madame Janvier posted a bond of eight hundred dollars with M’sieu Trask,’ explained Henri, as the boat was rowed away. ‘Trask is demanding fifteen hundred for you, and Maman …’ He stammered, and flustered again with his plump hands. ‘I’ll see she puts it up,’ he went on after a moment. ‘I swear it. And of course he won’t listen when I tell him that even if you had plotted to murder Mamzelle Trask you couldn’t have walked the distance from the weaving house to the Casita! “He looked to be walkin’ just fine when I seen him there” …’

  ‘I was “walkin’ just fine”,’ responded January drily, ‘because I’d gotten there in a boat. Listen,’ he went on. ‘I need you to do several things for me, sir, and I need them very quickly, as soon as … who’s going to bring that boat back here, if Michie M’Gurk is going to stay at the weaving house and keep an eye on Maman?’

  ‘DuPage – though I believe he considers it beneath his dignity to act as a waterman.’

  ‘As soon as you have the boat at your disposal, it is imperative that the Casita be locked up and kept locked, until I can look at it. Can you do that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘No one is to enter for any reason. That paper we were looking at when we were interrupted – you don’t have it with you now, do you, sir?’

  Henri looked baffled for a moment, as if the incident had entirely vanished from his mind, then said, ‘Oh, the paper! Dead-huts, midnight … No, I … I must have dropped it in the scuffle.’

  ‘Bring it to me here, if you would be so good.’

  ‘I’d forgotten all about it,’ admitted the planter, straightening his spectacles. ‘But of course the dead-huts are the first place the … the search-parties will make for. According to James, everyone in the Parish uses them as a rendez-vous for everything from love-trysts to receiving-offices to the commercial exchange of stolen goods. You don’t think …’ His brow crumpled again. ‘You don’t think Mamzelle Trask was lured to the place, do you? And Chloë set off after her and … well … encountered whoever it was who … who sent that note …’

  January opened his mouth to reply, thought about it for a moment, then changed his answer to, ‘I’m reasonably certain that Madame Chloë returned to the Casita, changed her dress, and left again before Mamzelle Trask left the big house.’

  A look of guilty pain returned to Henri’s eyes. ‘But why?’ Clearly he saw himself slipping away from the candle-lit dining-room to his own room, where Minou waited for him.

  At the window, the Irishman belched, and spit into the water below. Past him, January could see the overseer’s larger rowboat, Molina in his shabby blue coat
with patches to its elbows, crossing toward the sugar mill. Provisions for those trapped there were piled in the boat’s stern.

  ‘I don’t know. Bring that note to me, and then, if you’ll forgive me, sir, I’m going to have to ask you to do something so disgusting that I wouldn’t request it of anyone, if there were any way that I could perform the task myself. But I can’t. I’m sorry. The lives of Madame Chloë and Mamzelle Ellie may depend on it and my life certainly does. I need to know as much as I can about what happened in the Casita last night if I’m going to have even a guess about what became of Madame and Mamzelle Trask.’

  ‘Of course.’ Henri propped his spectacles on his sweating nose. ‘Anything.’

  ‘Last night someone was very sick on the back gallery,’ January said. ‘The vomitus has been diluted by the rain that splattered in past the abat-vent but … I’m going to have to ask you to sniff it.’

  ‘Oh!’ Henri’s unexpected expression of pleased enlightenment reminded January of his own days of learning medicine at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris. No disgust (Well, the man does collect and classify cockroaches), but the startled realization that information could be derived from cast-up stomach contents. ‘Of course!’

  ‘You’re looking for the smell of liquor. Madame Chloë isn’t a heavy drinker – I believe Mamzelle Trask is.’

  ‘Oh, yes, like a stung pig.’

  ‘I also have reason to believe she was lying on her bed drinking when she came in last night, before she went out – for whatever reason she went. I just need to know. And if you can, take one of these bandages—’ he shook free a small pad of linen from the basket – ‘and soak it in whatever is left in the decanter by the bed. Bring that back to me, too.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And don’t let anyone know what you’re about. It’s remotely possible that Mamzelle went out to meet someone who isn’t staying here at Cold Bayou, but the odds are very strong that if she was lured out, it was by one of the guests here – either white or colored. Or, just possibly, by one of the slaves.’