Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘One of the slaves?’ Henri drew back with an expression of puzzled disgust. ‘Why on earth would she—?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ repeated January. ‘We don’t know what she was told, or by whom, or what she thought was going on. But whatever happened – whatever is happening – we don’t know who’s responsible. And we don’t know what that person or persons would do to keep from being found out. Please, sir – don’t tell anyone. Not even Minou.’

  ‘Oh, Minou can keep secrets …’

  ‘I know she can.’ He smiled gently. ‘But I also know that my sister is impulsive – and I think you’ll agree with me there, sir.’

  The younger man’s smile trembled into being, at the recollection of some of Dominique’s more impulsive acts.

  ‘She wouldn’t tell secrets,’ went on January, ‘but neither you nor I has the slightest idea what she might take it into her head to do with any given piece of information.’

  By Henri’s smile he, too, was recalling some of the courses of action which had made sense to Dominique over the years. ‘She’ll never forgive me.’

  ‘Oh, I think she will. And if you can, sir,’ he finished, as the rowboat knocked gently at the wall beneath the window and the Duke yelled, ‘About fookin’ time!’ – ‘even before you set about trying to get me out of here so I can examine the Casita myself, could you manage to get me something to eat?’

  NINETEEN

  Fifteen minutes after Henri’s departure January heard the knock of another boat against the wall below the window, and Archie’s voice saying, in English, ‘Now, you step careful there, sir …’

  Selwyn Singletary climbed carefully into the loft, and to January’s almost tearful delight, leaned back out through the aperture with the incomprehensible Yorkshire admonition, ‘’Ug yon skep careful nor like,’ and lifted in a substantial basket of food. ‘If I ever knowed one like our Henri,’ the old man added, shaking his head as he crossed to January. ‘Rowed straight off for yon bitty oyl, an’ poor Veryl nigh rigwelted wi’ not knowin’ what’s come of two that he loves wi’ the whole of his heart—’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s my fault,’ said January. ‘And I beg Michie Veryl’s pardon. But it’s imperative – I cannot overstate how imperative – that the Casita be locked up until I can get free to see it.’

  ‘Bait yoursel’, for God’s sake.’ Singletary pushed the basket at January, who unwrapped the little bundle of hoecakes and head-cheese and fell on them like a starving wolf.

  ‘What hast found?’ the old man asked, when the meal was done – which it was, January estimated, in record time.

  ‘Nowt,’ January replied solemnly, in the mathematician’s own dialect, which made Singletary smile. ‘Precious little, anyway. At least two other people were in the Casita last night, besides the young ladies: searching it, I think.’ Since Singletary spoke to almost no one except Uncle Veryl there was little chance that he’d blab secrets, but he’d certainly pass along whatever he heard to his friend … and there was no telling who Veryl would tell, in his grief. Best keep the name of Livia Levesque out of it.

  ‘None of the doors or windows looked as if they’d been forced – I’ll know better when I’ve had a chance to go over it carefully. And someone – either one of the young ladies, or one of the intruders – or just possibly someone else – was sick on the back gallery. How did Miss Trask seem last night at dinner?’

  ‘Fashed, poor little phummock.’ Singletary shook his head. ‘O’ course, wi’ that poor lass o’ her’n kilt in mistake for her an’ knowin’ t’ killer’s yet out yon someplace – if he wa’nt i’ t’ very room wi’ her. Quiet as a mouse she was but goin’ fra one window t’next lookin’ out into storm. So fashed was she, an’ so noisy t’ room, wi’ that scoundrel nuncle goin’ on about t’ heathan Chinese beatin’ sailors that’s tryin’ to sell opium in their country, an’ how dare they, that I tried to get up a chess game in t’office. I won twice – Veryl’s a fair player, but he’s that careless wi’ movin’ his queen, an’ in t’fourth game caught me fair an’ square atween his queen’s pawn an’ t’bishop …’

  ‘And where was Miss Trask during all this?’

  Singletary frowned, his mind clearly far more occupied – as it had undoubtedly been the previous night – with the logistics of queen-side castling than the whereabouts of a young woman whose life was threatened by a murderer who had already killed once.

  As Veryl had been, thought January, angry but at the same time exasperated. Veryl – and Singletary – were what they were: two eccentric old men whose wide-ranging interests were generally incompatible with the role of knight-errant.

  It would have been funny, he thought, were it not for the ransacked Casita, for the dead girl who now lay (he had found out from his mother) in the tiny attic-loft of the kitchen behind the overseer’s house. In the clammy heat, he could not keep from wondering about what sort of insect life – if nothing larger – was making a feast of poor Valla’s body.

  ‘Ah recollect that nuncle o’ her’n called her to t’office door,’ said Singletary at length. ‘Happen he told off a couple o’ them wild Irish, to see her safe back.’

  ‘Happen,’ agreed January glumly.

  Questioned further, Singletary had no clear idea of what time this conference with Uncle Mick had been, or whether Ellie had returned to the office after it or not.

  Archie, at least – called in after tying the rowboat to a rake-handle wedged in the open window – provided him with information about the fifteen slave families who had been trapped on their cabin roofs by the rising waters: they had indeed taken refuge in the sugar mill after freeing the mules and horses. ‘Most folks in the quarters don’t keep no pigs nor goats, sir. Antoine tells me, Michie Molina taken more’n one pig, so now nobody keeps ’em. Leastwise not here they don’t. Zandrine says, some folks keeps pigs out in the ciprière, on the mound where old Michie Froide’s house was, up Cold Bayou. It stands through most floods, she say, an’ the beasts know to flee there.’

  But of the movements of any particular slave during the previous night the young man knew nothing. Purchased the previous year, Archie was a native of coastal Georgia and knew only what French he had gleaned in town since his arrival; certainly nothing of the three-quarters-African cane-patch patois spoken by the country slaves. He promised to get word to Luc, to come to January as soon as he could – just as soon as he, Archie, could get access to a rowboat to get him to the sugar mill.

  ‘It look like it stormin’ again later,’ he apologized. ‘Lightnin’ over the woods. Water’s still high, an’ there ain’t but the two boats, ’cept for a couple pirogues some of the men got hid in the woods, they says. An’ ’fore God, I wouldn’t want to try swimmin’ in that water. There’s things in it!’

  Having seen at least two alligators pass silently beneath the trap in the floor, January couldn’t argue with him there.

  Did Noah have these problems, in his forty days and forty nights when the waters stood upon the earth?

  Some half-hour after Singletary took his leave, January heard the splash and creak of many oars, and Antoine’s voice – ‘We come get you when we loaded up’ – as the prow of the bigger rowboat knocked against the wall. Then, ‘Whoa, nigger, watch your step there!’ as Uncle Bichet, the oldest and, in January’s opinion, wisest of his fellow musicians scrambled over the sill.

  He, too, bore a split-willow basket of food – ‘Anybody think to feed you, Ben?’ – and several stone bottles of ginger water. ‘You all right? M’am Levesque said as how Old M’am Janvier put up bail money for her, but Lordy, that Irishman they sent to keep an eye on her! Thinks he’s too good to use the same pisspot as black folk.’

  ‘He can have the leaky bucket they left for me, and welcome,’ grumbled January.

  ‘So they figured out how you had a hand in killin’ that poor l’il gal?’ The old man drew up a chunk of wood to sit on, his thick spectacles flashing softly in the rainy daylight. ‘Every member of the f
amily wantin’ her dead an’ you laid up with a broken leg. ‘Course it was you that done it!’

  ‘They found anything? Or anything of M’am Chloë?’

  ‘Not a pig’s whisker. But I think it’s clear what happened, don’t you, Ben? Somebody did for the girl, an’ maybe M’am Chloë as well?’

  January nodded, but added, ‘I’ll know more when I can look over the Casita myself. That—’ He bit off a description of Uncle Mick that he’d probably have to confess next Wednesday – ‘if I live til next Wednesday!

  ‘Uncle Mick and his boys came storming into the Casita like pirates sacking a town and hauled me off here before I could take a look at the tracks, but there were tracks all over the place. It had been searched, and I think – I’m not sure – that somebody put something in Mamzelle Ellie’s brandy.’

  ‘I heard tell there was a note,’ said the old African. ‘Lurin’ her out to them old huts out on the bayou. Why poison her, if you was goin’ to kill her out there?’

  January hesitated again, then said, ‘Maybe get her out of the house. She was a strong girl, and it could be someone wanted to slow her down.’

  ‘It would account,’ agreed Uncle with a slow nod, ‘for her leavin’ the dinner the way she did, if she planned to get herself out to them dead-huts by midnight. She was mighty twitchy, all through that little soiree they had us up for, after dinner. That uncle of hers was all over her sweet as honey, holdin’ her hand an’ tellin’ us to play all her favorite songs, “Greensleeves” an’ “Cuckoo in the Grove”. An’ small blame to the poor girl,’ he added. ‘With her maid killed that way only that mornin’, an’ knowin’ every person in the room, just about, wanted her dead.’

  ‘How did she leave?’

  The old musician frowned, the deep V’s of the ‘country marks’ that had been cut into his face in boyhood pulling deeper with his thought. He was in fact the flautist Jacques Bichet’s great-uncle, rather than his uncle, and had been a man of full years when he’d been brought to America, and a scholar of some repute. Pretty much everyone of African blood in the French Town turned to him for advice, for he was observant, and – in common with the voodoos – expert at piecing together bits of information that others regarded merely as chaff.

  ‘She was watchin’ for her chance to go,’ said Uncle after a time. ‘They split up after dinner, the way white folks do, the men sittin’ at the table drinkin an’ arguin’ politics, but there was really no place for the ladies to go to but M’am Viellard’s room – M’am Aurelié – an’ there was too many of ’em for comfort, even if every one of ’em hadn’t been cuttin’ poor Mamzelle Ellie dead as if she didn’t exist. Cuttin’ that M’am Fleurette – old César’s daughter – an’ that daughter of hers, an’ Michie Locoul St-Chinian’s trashy wife. But for all that, those three hadn’t a word to say to Mamzelle neither.’

  January grimaced, knowing how, even without the impetus of family struggles over power and control of money, any gathering of white folks in New Orleans would split along social and political lines. The Legitimistes ignored the Orleannistes, the Orleannistes turned up their noses at the Bonapartistes and all of them cold-shouldered those whose families had favored the Revolution. White French folks, he corrected himself. None of those groups would have anything to do with an American animal.

  ‘They came on back into the parlor whilst we were still setting up,’ the old man continued. ‘M’am Aurelié shut the men up pretty sharp. While everybody was takin’ seats an’ talkin’, Mamzelle Ellie kept walkin’ over to the French doors out onto the front gallery, which stood open on account of the heat. Someone – I think it must have been one of them wild Irish, but I didn’t rightly see – came up to her there, and it looked as if she’d have gone out onto the gallery. But M’am Aurelié an’ her oldest daughter, an’ Old M’am Janvier, an Pepa St-Chinian, all looked at her like she’d piddled on the floor, an’ her uncle went over to her an’ pulled her away.’

  ‘And where was M’am Chloë during all this?’

  ‘She’d left already,’ returned Uncle. ‘Slipped out quiet. Came out of M’am Aurelié’s room with the other ladies an’ went straight on out onto the gallery. Didn’t even look around for Michie Henri, which was a good thing,’ he added, ‘seein’ as how Michie Henri disappeared ’fore we even come in with our instruments. I seen him tip-toein’ along the back gallery an’ in through Michie Singletary’s room, that connects on through to his own.’ His cocked eyebrow did horrific things with the cicatrized flesh above it.

  ‘I can’t say I blame the poor girl for wanting someone to talk to. And M’am Chloë didn’t take anyone to escort her when she left?’

  Uncle Bichet’s eyes narrowed as he called the scene back to mind. He had, of course, been playing the bull fiddle while all this small-scale drama had been taking place in the parlor, but January knew that all of the musicians – himself included – derived considerable entertainment from watching such drama, and were past masters at following events. It was, Hannibal said, better than the bill at most theaters – And in any case we’re completely invisible to them, you know.

  ‘Unless it was James or Archie – who I saw later playin’ cards in the pantry. Visigoth an’ Jacques-Ange, an’ Michie Aubin’s Urbain, was all helpin’ with the coffee an’ sweets. Mamzelle mighta gone with some of the Irish, but I doubt M’am Chloë would do such a thing. It might so be she minds it more than she lets on,’ he added in a lower voice, ‘’bout Michie Henri an’ Mamzelle Minou.’

  ‘It might.’ January thought of the long, dilapidated shell-path, that led from behind the big house, a hundred yards over broken ground past the house’s kitchen-garden and chicken-runs, to the Casita, isolated on the edge of the woods. Chloë St-Chinian Viellard was a girl of diamond pride. The haughtiness that held most of the world – probably including her husband – in such unthinking contempt that his keeping a mistress didn’t really bother her. She was honest enough to admit that she was incapable of making any man happy, and was genuinely delighted that Dominique could do so.

  But that was not the same, January knew, as the awareness that Henri was absent from a family gathering because he was meeting his mistress that night. That hour. Under her own roof.

  And part of the cauldron of power and anger was fuelled, January knew well, by the fact that after four years of marriage, Chloë still had produced no heir to the Viellard/St-Chinian fortunes. Henri’s mother was not the only one in the family to have commented on the matter.

  Whether this troubled that coldly diminutive lady or not, it was difficult to tell. And Uncle Mick’s presence alone – bellowing his opinions about how unfair the representation in Congress was against the Southern states – would be enough to drive anyone from a room.

  Personally, he would have fled the parish to avoid it.

  ‘So whatever the case,’ he said at length, ‘Mamzelle Ellie was on her own.’

  ‘She was. An’ she looked like she’d got the worst of it, among the women.’ Uncle shook his head, pity in his dark eyes. ‘Her uncle, an’ Michie Veryl, kept close by her, while we was settin’ up. But Uncle Mick got to slangin’ with Michie Locoul St-Chinian an’ that good-for-nuthin’ brother-in-law of his, an’ Uncle Veryl an’ Michie Singletary took her away with ’em into the office – playin’ chess, I think, which got to be like watchin’ paint dry, unless you’re crazy for the game yourself.’ The old man shook his head again.

  ‘Pretty soon Mamzelle come slippin’ out, an’ through the dinin’ room an’ out onto the back gallery an’ into the dark. I doubt Michie Veryl even seen her go. I only saw her ’cause I happened to be lookin’ that way.’

  ‘And she asked no one to walk with her?’

  ‘Not ’less she had one of them wild Irish out back waitin’ on her, or maybe that stuck-up pussyfoot valet of her uncle’s.’

  She could have, thought January. Certainly, aside from Uncle Veryl and Singletary – and Henri, who had been otherwise occupied – he could think of no gentle
man in the house with whom Ellie Trask would have felt comfortable walking a hundred yards in darkness.

  Not after Valla’s murder.

  And perhaps, he thought, that was what she’d been doing in the French door earlier, exchanging whispered words with someone on the dark gallery. Asking one of her uncle’s boys to escort her, despite the inevitable gossip this would stir among the ladies of her betrothed’s family.

  As for St-Ives …

  A thought came to him and he frowned.

  A question to be asked …

  But he wasn’t certain, at this point, of whom it would be safe to ask it.

  Maybe no one. Maybe the answer would lie in the Casita, among those scuffed and smudged tracks, or somewhere in Mamzelle Ellie’s luggage.

  So he asked after the inhabitants of the weaving house, and how Michie M’Gurk was faring on guard duty (‘He does play the fiddle very fine, and for all his finicking ’bout the washing arrangements he’s gettin’ Cochon an’ Philippe to teach him the airs from St-Domingue.’), and whether Isabelle and Solange had killed each other yet.

  The loaded rowboat arrived from the kitchen store-loft, with much grumbling about the quality and quantity of food available for the slaves trapped in the sugar mill (‘Least we gonna get sugar with our hoe-cakes.’), Michie Molina sweating, and glaring at January with sharp suspicion in his eyes. At the same time January heard the men call out greetings to Archie, and to ‘Michie Henri,’ and three of them good-naturedly helped the fat man over the windowsill and into the loft, before the supplies boat – and Uncle Bichet – took their leave.

  ‘Did you find the note?’ he asked, as Henri turned from the aperture.

  ‘No. It’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Everything’s gone.’ Henri wiped his sweating face. ‘The floor’s been washed. The jewelry you said was on the night table has been washed off and put back in the jewelry box – still wet, the water collected on the bottom of the case. The decanter by the bed is gone, the back gallery has been mopped, things inside have been tidied back into the drawers—’