‘I was not, sir. I couldn’t have made it there before the flood, and afterward, there were only the two boats that didn’t get taken out until first light.’
‘Your Mama was.’
‘My Maman,’ returned January, ‘did a very stupid thing, but I can understand why she did it. Yes, she went in and searched the place, thinking Mamzelle might have had whatever notes her daddy had got from our old master, Michie Fourchet, about that loan that might or might not even have taken place. She says someone else came while she was there, so maybe Michie Fourchet wasn’t the only person Daddy Trask had the goods on. Who cleaned up that house?’
‘Savoy.’ He named Florentin Miragouin’s valet. ‘And Reinette.’ Reinette, January recalled, was the prettiest of the housemaids Madame Aurelié had brought from town.
‘Who told them to do it?’
‘Nobody. Savoy says, he just saw what a mess the place was, with vomit on the back gallery and mud tracked all over the floors—’
‘And a valet – who probably cost Michie Miragouin nearly two thousand dollars and who’s done nothing for the past eight years but polish Michie Miragouin’s boots and iron his cravats – just sort of spontaneously looked at a puddle of puke and muddy boot-tracks and thought, “Oh, gracious, I gotta go find me a mop!”’
Visigoth said nothing, but paused in his rowing. His gaze, dry and skeptical, held January’s.
‘And a little gal who’ll be the first to yell for a houseboy, if somebody should suggest she mop up where the dog pee’d,’ continued January softly, ‘rushes to fill up a bucket an’ lend a hand. Like my aunties always said, that sort of doesn’t listen right to me.’
‘Not to me, neither. But that’s what both of ’em say.’
‘They afraid?’
‘Who ain’t?’ The butler’s voice was quiet. ‘I worked in the house all my days – yeah, moppin’ dog pee an’ clearin’ up where somebody couldn’t hold their liquor sometimes, but polishin’ silver, an’ keepin’ track of wine, an’ makin’ sure sheets get washed, by somebody who’s not me, thank God. I’m sixty-two, an’ I know damn well I could end my days in the cane-fields, if I get some bukra pissed off at me for somethin’ I maybe didn’t even do. I kept secrets in my time. I got a wife, an’ I got two daughters, an’ for the thirty years I worked for M’am Aurelié I been lookin’ for word of the daughter an’ son I had when I worked for Michie Picard before her, sold when I was sold, an’ I never heard one word of ’em yet. So you bet I keep secrets. An’ you bet I’m afraid.’
January nodded, as Visigoth bent his back once more to the oars.
‘You happen to know when it got cleaned up?’ he asked, as the rowboat nosed against the Casita’s front gallery and the butler climbed out to make the painter-line fast. ‘You, Michie Henri, James, and I were here just after first light. Uncle Mick and his boys came in about half an hour later in the other boat – somebody must have told him Mamzelle was gone, just after you and James brought the boat back to the big house. After they took me and Maman to the wood store, do you remember who all came across to the Casita, before it was cleaned?’
‘Just about everybody in the big house.’ Visigoth unlocked the shutters of the Casita’s front parlor, led the way inside, and lit the lamp. ‘For a while there it was like Antoine and Archie was runnin’ a ferry. Only ones I didn’t see go across were Old M’am Janvier – who said she was too old to go scramblin’ in and out of a rowboat – an’ Mamzelle Charlotte, who wouldn’t have moved from Michie Jules’ side if the house caught fire.’
As he spoke he picked his way through the deep gloom of the parlor, unbolting French doors, opening them to unbolt the shutters. Even so, with the lateness of the afternoon and the grayness of the day, the light added little to the weak glow of the oil lamp, and January, leaning on the secretaire, felt a kind of despairing exasperation. It crossed his mind, too, to wonder if this was the proper moment to dart back across the gallery, leap into the rowboat, and make his escape.
Leaving Maman behind to face a charge of murder?
Do you think either of you is going to stand a chance in a court whose only alternate choices are influential white French Creoles? He could almost see the mocking glint in Olympe’s dark eyes.
All right, then … supposing my ankle gives out on me before I even get to the French door, I go down screaming and don’t have a chance to even look for whatever Savoy and Reinette might have missed?
And after I leap into the rowboat and paddle away … In which direction? Toward that plume of smoke, which is far more likely to be slave smugglers out looking for runaways than it is to be members of the Underground Railroad waiting to whisk me to safety? And after I’ve rowed around in the woods for a couple of days and the water goes down, where am I going to walk to? New Orleans?
Hannibal will be coming downriver on the first boat.
Or the second.
(Along with Père Eugenius? Olympe’s voice jeered in his mind.)
He turned back to the room as the tall butler came back to him.
‘For a couple of people who don’t mop floors as a rule,’ he said bitterly, surveying the rucked-back straw mats by the wan light, ‘Savoy and Reinette seem to have done a peach of a job.’
The only tracks that remained in the parlor were indeterminate crusts and crumbles of mud, and a few fragments of shell, caught in the folds of the braided straw. The room’s sparse furnishings, like everything else in the Casita, were at the end of their lives. January recalled quite clearly, from his childhood on Bellefleur and his subsequent visits to plantations around New Orleans, that chairs, carpet, silverware, dishes, even the very pots in the pantry, had all been purchased new for use in the family townhouse in New Orleans, and relegated to one or the other of the family plantations when they wore out or grew too old-fashioned to be endured. From the big house they’d migrated, like poor relations, to the overseer’s cottage, and only when too dilapidated for even the overseer, had they gone on to the Casita.
He could tell at a glance that it would be impossible to measure any of the tracks, even had Uncle Mick’s boys not added their own marks to those of his mother and …
And who?
Leaning heavily on his stick, he limped into the larger bedroom.
Someone who is in a position to threaten Savoy and Reinette.
That additional piece of information still left pretty much everyone in the Viellard/St-Chinian clan. Even Locoul, despised by the rest of the family, could almost certainly find some way of talking Michie Florentin, or M’am Aurelié, into thinking they needed to get rid of the valet and the maid. Even a minor lie could go a long way against a slave, as witnessed by the Biblical tale of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.
Someone white.
I don’t have to prove they did it, January reminded himself. I just need enough proof to establish that Maman didn’t.
But what that proof would be, particularly under the scrutiny of a white jury, he had not the smallest idea.
The brandy decanter was gone from the nightstand – in fact he established that it was nowhere in the house. Dropped off the gallery rail into the flood …
The nightstand itself had been wiped. Not the faintest whiff of that slight, acrid, vegetable smell, that he thought he’d detected, remained in the wood.
The jewel box was gone, too. At a guess, M’am Aurelié had secured that.
Someone who didn’t want the jewels. Who would that be?
It was in any case the best argument he’d seen so far that Ellie Trask hadn’t intended to simply run.
All Mamzelle’s clothes – even her night-things and her overnight-case – were gone, probably bundled up and removed to the attic. By the sound of it she’d come back to the Casita after escaping from a nightmarish dinner, lain down for enough time to have a number of drinks, then risen once more and staggered out to the rear gallery, where she – or someone – had been very sick.
Maman left the Casita at the sight of an approaching lan
tern. The waters had begun to spill from the bayou and ciprière not long after that; Mamzelle may have had to hike up her turquoise-and-gold skirts when she descended the back gallery stair. Anyone who entered the Casita after her would have left a sodden trail of dribbled water, not scuffs from the shell-path’s mud.
Maman saw no vomit on the back gallery.
Drunkenness?
If the girl had been poisoned – if the intruder his mother had heard had entered with the intention of putting something like hemlock or oleander in the brandy decanter – Ellie could have staggered, or fallen, down the back gallery steps after she’d vomited. Then she’d lain at the bottom until the floodwaters rose over her, drowning her while Chloë’s maid huddled in perfectly understandable terror in the dark of her tiny attic.
But she didn’t ring the bell. If she went out simply because she was sick, why not ring the bell for the maid?
Fear of Hélène’s scorn?
Understandable. Ellie was far from insensetive to the contempt of those around her.
And as for the note …
While these thoughts passed through his mind he opened and closed every drawer of the nightstand, the dressing table, and the armoire, held the lantern up and down so that he could peer beneath the bed (Reinette had been very thorough in her sweeping) and into the darkest corners of the room. Visigoth followed him, looking also.
Someone put poison in the brandy. Of that he was nearly certain. Unfortunately, the only people on Cold Bayou who wouldn’t have done so would be Uncle Veryl and Selwyn Singletary, Uncle Mick and his boys. Even Mick’s lawyer Loudermilk, who had originally been in the pay of Locoul St-Chinian, might turn his coat yet again if given sufficient incentive.
Someone, clearly, had spoken to Mamzelle Trask through the French doors of the parlor, to get her to return to the Casita.
It was difficult to picture Sidonie Janvier hobbling all the way out here in the storm to set a trap, though the old lady was, January knew, tougher than she looked. Between the musicians and Visigoth, he could probably put together at least some general idea of who’d stayed longest in the parlor last night, who’d been gone an hour or two before the rising of the floodwaters; whether Euphémie Viellard Miragouin had been with her sisters in their room, and what time Evard Aubin had retired with his hopes that a) something would happen to prevent the wedding and b) that Jules Mabillet would die in the night.
Chloë …
She came out here before anyone. Had changing her dress – and ostentatiously leaving her dinner frock on her bed – and going out into the storm been some way to establish that she was alibi? A foolish one, if so, and one that had backfired with the rising of the floodwaters. Was it Henri himself, for that matter, who’d ordered his brother-in-law’s valet, and his mother’s maid, to wipe away all evidence of who’d been in the little dwelling? Had he found some bit of irrefutable evidence against someone he would endanger even Chloë to screen?
In the little bedroom which had been first Valla’s, then Chloë’s, all trace of occupancy had been smoothed away. Chloë’s rose-silk dress no longer lay on the bed, probably bundled up in one of the trunks in the attic, along with Mamzelle Ellie’s things, and goodness knew what besides.
Chloë herself could have poisoned the brandy at any time. He limped into the pantry. She was staying here. Rats darted to safety; an affronted corn snake retreated under the table.
Why sneak in on a night when she’d have left tracks for Henri to force a couple of servants to tidy up?
As Visigoth had said, every bottle of medication had been removed from the Casita to the big house. But anyone, he reflected, could have acquired poison from the girls’ maid Gayla.
And if Chloë were not herself the poisoner, why had she slipped away from the big house early, changed her dress, disappeared into the darkness?
Dead-huts. Midnight.
Had the note been for her?
In his mind he saw again the coarse yellowish paper, faintly lined with blue.
Saw Valla’s body, riddled with knife-wounds, lying on the cooling-bench, her corn-gold braid trailing to the floor.
Saw Mamzelle Ellie’s wide brown terrified eyes as she whispered, ‘Will I?’ when Uncle Veryl assured her she’d be safe in town.
Why would she have left the Casita at all? At midnight, in the dark, in the storm? When she first felt the grip of sickness clutch at her belly?
Knowing that the man who killed Valla was out there somewhere in the night?
No sign of the note.
‘I need to have a look through all the things that were taken from here up to the attic,’ said January.
Visigoth’s mouth twisted. ‘An’ leave you downstairs here with the boat?’
‘And where am I gonna row to?’ retorted January.
‘Old Alexandre Froide’s broke-down house up the bayou.’
‘And from there I’m going to walk to New Orleans?’
‘Many men would crawl to town,’ said the butler quietly, ‘rather than find themselves sold as a slave. Or burned alive, or their balls cut off, for killin’ a white woman who was – or might have been for all they knew – their master. And you might not be all as lame as you’re lettin’ on. I’m sorry, Ben. Mamzelle Charlotte’s a good girl, an’ I know she’s grateful to you for comin’ to see Michie Jules, but if I come back without you she’s bound to tell M’am Aurelié, an’ word’ll get to that Irish animal Trask, an’ then I’ll be the only one around to catch hell.’
‘And my Maman.’
‘I met your Maman,’ retorted Visigoth. ‘Aside from the fact that Old M’am Janvier won’t let nuthin’ happen to her, for all I know you’d be happy to leave her standin’ in a little mud. I sure would.’
Dammit …
And the longer he stood arguing with Visigoth, the greater were his chances that, if someone had seen their boat crossing to the little house, word would get to Uncle Mick. Loath as he might be to the idea of tamely returning to the wood store loft, January was well aware that this could be the lesser of several evils.
Thus he suffered the butler to tie his hands behind him with a strand of clothesline rope, as he sat in one of the bent-willow parlor chairs, and bind his feet to the chair’s legs. Thus he waited while Visigoth climbed the attic stairs, taking the lamp with him and dropping the parlor into gloom. Waited, and sorted through names in his mind, circumstances and possible circumstances. Poison is a woman’s weapon – a knife, a man’s. Or did he only use poison because Mamzelle Ellie had been warned of a knife? But if the knife had been his first choice, had he brought poison as a second line of attack? Why hadn’t he used it as a first line? He thought he knew where the poison had come from, but there were several pieces of this puzzle-map that were missing still.
Yet he could almost see them, as if they’d been scattered to some dark corner of his brain.
The moment Visigoth went upstairs, rats emerged with gleaming eyes from their hiding places, sniffed the air warily. Only a silvery dimness came through the windows now, and the wind, finally, seemed to be dying down.
And thus he was sitting, listening to the butler’s firm tread on the floor of the attic above, when he saw the flash of a lantern in the windows and heard the creak of oar-locks …
Damn it, damn it, damn it …
And Uncle Mick’s dark shape silhouetted against the last of the failing light.
‘Black bastard!’ The Irishman crossed the parlor in two strides and struck January with such violence that his head swam. ‘And here’s where you come after all your pleas about what an innocent lamb y’are!’
Another sickening backhand swat. January tasted blood in his mouth and nose.
‘Bastard – bastard to kill my girl!’ Mick reached behind him and one of his boys handed him a club, such as the soap-locked toughs carried ostensibly as walking sticks. January ducked his head and hunched his shoulders, as two more blows smoke his neck and back. He knew that at this moment nothing he could say would be
heeded or possibly even heard, except as further provocation. He had learned as a child to take beatings in silence, until whatever buckra was dealing them out had worn out his first rage.
Take them and just hope you live through them.
Mick kicked the chair over, struck him twice more, then grabbed the top rung of the chairback and dragged him toward the French door to the gallery, screaming curses at the top of his lungs. January was peripherally aware that Visigoth stood in the doorway that led through to the pantry and the attic stairs, a great bundle of fabric in his arms, his eyes stretched in horror but saying nothing. Not the first time, January guessed, the butler had watched a man killed, knowing there was nothing he could say or do …
‘Look in the bundle!’ January yelled in English, as the infuriated Irishman hauled the chair out onto the gallery and across it to its edge. ‘The bundle Visigoth found in the attic!’
Those words got through, and Mick stopped, and flung the chair from him, so that the jar of impact with the gallery planks was like the blow of a sledgehammer, felt through every bone of January’s body.
Gasping, January said, ‘There was a note – there might have been more. Somebody cleared it all away—’
Trask kicked him, but the first incandescent blaze of his rage was spent. He turned and stalked back into the parlor, where the light of Visigoth’s lantern, and the lanterns borne by two of the boys, flung monster shadows around the walls. Black Duke and the Gopher, who’d followed their boss out onto the gallery to watch him heave January, chair and all, into the floodwaters, started to follow, but January called softly, still in English, ‘Who got off the steamboat at English turn?’
The two men stopped. Looked at one another, then came back to him.
‘Nobody,’ said Gopher M’Gurk.
‘Couple o’ French biddies,’ said the Duke.
January looked up at them, faces invisible in shadow, enlightened and aware of the lie. More pieces fell into place. ‘Rich or poor?’ he asked. ‘The French biddies.’
‘What’s it to yez, chimney-chops?’ demanded the Gopher.
‘Rich,’ said the Duke. ‘La-di-dah hats an’ their own niggers carryin’ their carpet bags.’
Cold Bayou Page 24