Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

‘Would there be any way of getting in touch with her?’ asked Veryl softly. ‘Of hearing if she’s … she’s all right?’

  ‘Would that help you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  He glanced after the last of the retreating boys. ‘Then I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘When Uncle Mick calms down a little and isn’t ready to blow the man’s head off.’

  It was in his heart to say, ‘This has probably saved her life’, but he didn’t. He’s lost his beloved. Why take from him his family as well?

  Taking up his stick, he limped out onto the dark gallery.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  There was just enough water, January calculated, for him to paddle back to the weaving house, whose gallery blazed with candles and cressets in the last of the twilight. The pain in his ankle wasn’t less than it had been, but the joint itself felt stronger. He supposed the water was too shallow for gators or garfish now, but nevertheless he had no desire to wade.

  As his oar dipped into the opaque gray water, he glanced again toward the Casita, and the dark line of the ciprière behind it. ‘Anybody we know?’ Trask had asked, mildly curious and no more than that.

  ‘Probably not well,’ he had replied.

  And who DOES know them? They’re a part of the plantation, like the sugar mill and the mules. The Family comes and goes. Stays in the big house sometimes at roulaison, to make sure things are being done properly. But on an isolated plantation like this, it’s a penance, or an exile, for men like César St-Chinian whom nobody in the Family wants to deal with any more than they have to. Beyond that … You stay down here in the swelter and the cane-rats, you whip as much work as you can out of the slaves, you get the crop in and you send us the money, and let us know when one of the slaves dies so we can replace him as cheap as we can.

  Why not cheat them?

  And if you’re a good-looking young woman who’s been used and traded like a piece of meat all your life, who can blame you for—

  The crack of a rifle tore the hot stillness, and splinters from the pirogue’s gunwale ripped January’s right hand. He flung himself sidelong off the boat and into the water as a second shot (he’s got two rifles …) smacked the water just beside him. The bullet, he guessed, would have gone through his head. His arm flung over the pirogue’s side to keep it close enough for protection, he tried to guess where the shots had come from. If I swim towards the weaving house he’ll get me in the water … If something in the water doesn’t get me first. He felt – or thought he felt – something pass beneath his feet, and kicked against the water, driving toward the distant weaving house.

  The new-risen moon was three nights from full, bright in the nearly cloudless sky. Another gunshot drove a bullet into the side of the pirogue and he realized there were two of them – one on the offside of the pirogue and one, now, somewhere behind him and to his right. A bullet grazed his elbow like the stroke of a red-hot rod and he flung himself back from the little boat. Of course, he thought, they’re both in it …

  Cameo. Silk dress. Not placatory gifts for bulling the housemaid. Her share of the proceeds. Is Madame Molina as good a shot as her husband’s supposed to be?

  He floundered, feet touching the bottom, and saw the match-light flicker of a muzzle-flash against the dark silhouette of the Casita. If I can turn the pirogue over I can use it as a shield …

  But right now they know I’m close to it. They can see it, if they can’t see me.

  From the corner of his eye he saw a dark shape slide out onto the darkening water from the big house, and there was movement on the roof of one of the half-drowned slave cabins. Another gunshot, and he ducked aside from the pirogue as a bullet struck it; stumbled with the shock of pain through his ankle again, fatigue as much as pain dragging at him.

  Then the crack of a rifle from the oncoming boat, and the form standing on the slave cabin spun half-around and fell.

  A moment later the boat came up to him and the Black Duke’s voice came out of the gloom, ‘Gimme your hand, Ben.’

  And Trask said, ‘Get him in the pirogue and take him to the weaving house.’

  The Duke obeyed, stepped across to the smaller vessel and with a certain amount of inevitable difficulty, dragged January up into it.

  ‘Didn’ I tell yez, the Gopher can shoot the eye outten a rabbit by moonlight? Fair drove the landlord’s gamekeepers mad, back home.’

  As the Irishman paddled for the weaving house January watched the larger rowboat surge steadily toward the Casita, dark on the darkening water. ‘She’s got to have a boat of her own,’ said January. ‘They’ll never catch her.’

  ‘Her?’ The Duke sounded startled and a little offended.

  ‘At a guess,’ said January, lying back in the pirogue and trying to keep his voice steady against the agony in his ankle. ‘Madame Molina. It’s the only person it could be.’

  ‘Molina the nigger overseer? He killed Valla?’

  ‘Who else would have reason to fear a black girl’s testimony? Or a black man’s.’

  When January woke the following morning it was to the smell of coffee, and the sound of Hannibal Sefton’s voice. ‘And is that the card you picked?’

  ‘How’d you do that?’ asked Isabelle Valverde disbelievingly.

  Marianne added in a worried tone, ‘Sister St-Anthony at the convent says there’s no such thing as magic.’

  ‘The good Father Clooney back home always said the same thing. Now, pick a card …’

  January groped painfully for his trousers, which lay across the foot of his bed, and his stick, but the creak of the pallet’s mattress-ropes must have alerted those on the gallery outside to his movements. A moment later Hannibal, Dominique, and Cochon Gardinier all appeared in the open French door, Hannibal tucking a deck of cards into the pocket of his threadbare coat.

  ‘Good to see you alive, Ben,’ said Cochon, and Minou rustled to his side and knelt in a sursurrance of petticoats.

  ‘Don’t get up, P’tit. I’ll have Bergette fetch hot water – thank Heaven there was wood that stayed dry in the sugarhouse! Oh, Benjamin, what happened? Bergette tells me Chloë is back at the house, and that Mamzelle Ellie has run off with one of those horrid Irish boys, which one can’t but be thankful for, and they’ve locked up M’sieu Molina in the sugar house and Madame Aurelié is just fit to scream with vexation and is swearing he had nothing to do with the wood store burning—’

  ‘Who locked him up?’ asked January. ‘He’s alive, then?’

  Minou looked startled at the suggestion that it could be otherwise, but Hannibal said, ‘Badly wounded with a rifle-ball in his side. Madame Aurelié expressed her severe annoyance, when I arrived this morning, that you were still asleep, and told me to inform you that you were expected to extract the ball at the earliest possible moment. Medice, cura te ipsum …’

  ‘Who shot him?’ Minou’s eyes were round. ‘That wasn’t him last night, shooting at Benjamin—?’

  ‘Hannibal,’ said January, and squeezed his sister’s hand to quiet her – not that anything had ever succeeded in quieting Minou for long. ‘Two things, before anything else. First: did you find any record of Simon Fourchet’s debts to Fergus Trask?’

  ‘Plenty,’ said the fiddler. ‘Fifteen hundred dollars borrowed in April of 1807, paid back in December of the same year at twenty percent interest; three thousand dollars borrowed in July of 1813, paid back in two installments in January of 1814, and December of the same year. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan loseth both itself and friend” – not that Simon Fourchet had any friends, so far as I’ve heard … Evidently Fergus Trask,’ he added, ‘came to the United States in 1805 – two years after your mother acquired her freedom and moved to New Orleans.’

  He coughed, holding his hand to his side. Though his long hair was braided in a neat queue down his back and his old-fashioned chimney-pot hat sat at a jaunty angle, he still bore every mark of a tiring journey and a couple of very long days of searching through papers at the Cabildo.r />
  ‘Well, you can’t blame a man for trying.’ January had heard the clump of boots on the gallery while his sister had been speaking, and now Mick Trask stood framed in the doorway, waxed cotton gaiters buckled on over his calves and dripping with muddy water, a stout stick in hand. ‘How are you feeling, my friend? ’Tis good to see you well.’

  January suppressed the urge to fling his own walking stick at the Irishman – who would cheerfully have sold him as a slave had he been able to manage it, not to mention two beatings and an attempt to throw him into six feet of gator-infested floodwater tied to a chair – and replied, ‘I’m well, sir. Did you come to this country with your brother?’

  ‘No, I came in ’99 – shortly after the French made such a sorry batch of their invasion. Fergus stayed on with Emmett until his uprising was crushed, then got out on a smuggler-run to Brittany, and so to New York, and couldn’t have done that had I not been toilin’ for five years in Five Points to raise the ready for him. Greedy parcel of cut-throats, the French.’ He shook his head in deep regret. ‘Incompetent, too.’

  January refrained from any observation on the subject of greedy cut-throats, and asked instead, ‘So that was indeed Guillaume Molina who was shooting at me last night? And presumably who tried to fire the wood store while I was chained there.’

  ‘He swears ’tis all a lie – an’ swears that as a white man your testimony can’t be held against him …’

  ‘A white man?’

  Trask grinned. ‘His complexion, he claims, comes from Portuguese ancestry, an’ a Chickasaw grandmother, an’ that he’s no more African than Madame Aurelié. He doesn’t mention who he inherited that hair from.’

  ‘Personally,’ remarked Hannibal, as Minou fetched in a tray from the gallery with the remains of the morning’s coffee, ‘I should give much to see him put that argument up in court.’

  ‘You’ll have the chance,’ promised January drily. ‘M’sieu Trask, if you and your men care to take a pirogue out to the old Froide house on Cold Bayou, you’ll find a parcel up the main chimney: Molina’s yellow-brown tweed coat, which anyone on the plantation can identify as his, with blood on the breast and right sleeve, from where he cut poor Valla’s throat. With it will be two of the plantation’s account books, containing the accurate records of income and expenditure for the past five years. More accurate, I believe, than the ones to be found in the plantation office in the big house and in the overseer’s house.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Trask. ‘So that’s the …’ He visibly bit off a remark about who might be hiding in a mythological woodpile, coughed, and finished, ‘I think I sense an Irishman concealed in the fuel supply, as it were,’ and January grinned.

  ‘How Valla knew where the real books were hidden I don’t know. But since she worked in Molina’s household for two years – and since she was far from stupid, as well as literate and burdened with a sense of grievance – it’s no surprise at all that she guessed what was going on. Even your niece, with no background of plantation economics, figured out that Madame Molina had dresses and jewelry that her husband couldn’t have afforded on his pay, and Molina had given Valla trinkets that she recognized as expensive.’

  ‘So when they came back here,’ finished Trask, ‘she thought she’d ask for her cut of it, did she?’

  ‘You can’t blame a girl for trying.’ January quietly handed his words back to him. ‘She knew where the books were hidden, and she knew where to hide them after she stole them in her turn: in the thatch of the dead-huts, up at the top, where flood or animals couldn’t get them. Luc searched the thatch for me, but only as high as he could reach. I was in such pain at the time that all I wanted was to get back to the weaving house – which was probably just as well. Molina sent Valla a note on Tuesday, arranging a meeting at the dead-huts at midnight. I knew perfectly well that note couldn’t have been to your niece—’

  ‘She’s a dear girl,’ sighed the Irishman, ‘and a damn sight smarter than you’d think, but her own name was the extent of her book learnin’, an’ that’s the truth.’

  ‘Maybe Molina guessed Valla would hide the ledgers somewhere near the dead-huts – they seem to be a locus of contraband goods. Maybe it was just a convenient place for a rendezvous. He almost certainly planned to dump her body in the bayou – probably with her belly slit to keep her from floating—’ Trask nodded, evidently long familiar with this post-mortem disposal procedure – ‘but the presence of slaves lurking around to meet with False River Jones meant that he couldn’t risk being seen, not even for a moment.’

  ‘How horrible!’ cried Dominique. ‘It could be that he heard someone coming, you know – Bergette tells me that simply everyone in the quarters goes out to trade things with that awful peddler – and he must just have dropped the body and fled.’

  ‘Did he mean to come back for her?’ Cochon, seated next to her on the nurse’s pallet bed, helped himself to several brown lumps of sugar from the platter on the tray, blinking his little round eyes as if listening to a tale of derring-do.

  ‘He certainly meant to come back for his jacket. He hid it in the thatch of one of the huts, along with the gloves he had on at the time. They got bloodstained as well, by the way, and had welts scratched into them by Valla’s nails. Valla’s gold cross, and gold bracelet, are in the jacket’s pocket. It’s likely he searched the thatch while he was at it, but since he didn’t know there was a ladder over near another of the huts – there was a storm coming Tuesday night, and the sky was nearly pitch-black – he only searched as high as he could reach. And maybe he feared he’d be discovered there as well.’

  ‘Why did he kill her before she’d gotten the books for him?’ asked Dominique, like Cochon enrapt, as if at an adventure by Scott or Cooper. ‘I mean, if that’s why he lured her there …’

  ‘Perhaps they quarrelled,’ theorized Hannibal.

  ‘Were I a lass,’ remarked Trask, lighting a cigar, ‘and I’d somethin’ a man wanted, who’d treated me as he had her, I can’t say I wouldn’t have quarrelled with the man meself. Who knows what a girl’ll say?’ He shrugged. ‘But that old nigger wench findin’ the body must have put paid to his comin’ back to dump her in the bayou, and with the storm comin’ in Wednesday and gangs goin’ out to the field an’ comin’ back in again, he couldn’t well get out to the huts to fetch his coat. How’d you know it was there, boy-o?’

  His blue glance slid sidelong to January. ‘If ’twas stuck low down in the thatch, the flood would have taken it before you got there to find it—’

  ‘I knew it was there,’ said January, side-stepping the question, ‘because I knew Molina didn’t mistake Valla for anybody. Completely aside from the fact that Molina was waiting there for her, I found her tignon there. He would have known her for a woman of color even if he couldn’t clearly see her face. So I knew I was dealing with someone who set out deliberately to kill Valla, not your niece. Kill her, and conceal the body, so that everyone would assume she had simply run away. Your niece found the note the following day, in Valla’s room, probably. If you look at one of the “official” ledgers that Molina kept for inspection by the family, you’ll find a page torn from the back. The paper’s the same. Most likely you’ll find the ink matches that in the overseer’s house.’

  ‘What I’ll be more interested to see,’ put in Hannibal, cutting neatly past Trask’s indrawn breath to follow up on this discursive side-track, ‘is whether the “official” ledgers were all written at one time – whether the ink is consistent – or whether the ink differs slightly from line to line, as it normally does on accounts that are kept daily.’

  The Irishman – whose eyes had narrowed in suspicion as he’d sensed the discrepancy in January’s explanation – dropped the thought and turned to regard the fiddler with interest.

  ‘You sound like a man who knows something about the noble art of screevery yourself, sir.’

  Hannibal widened coffee-dark eyes at him. ‘Only what I learned at Oxford.’

  Trask
laughed, then leaned down to clap January on the shoulder, and dug in his pocket to produce January’s silver watch, which he dropped onto the bedclothes. ‘No hard feelin’s?’ he said.

  ‘None in the least.’ Sometimes it’s either lie or starve, Ellie Trask had said. January hoped he sounded at least as convincing as she had.

  Hannibal, quite sensibly, had packed a pair of waxed-leather gaiters for his return to the flooded parish. He set forth with Uncle Mick and his myrmidons just after ten, through the knee-deep water, to retrieve the account books, gloves, and coat that January and Chloë had secreted in the chimney on their way back from setting Ellie and Tommy on their way. Hot water was brought for January to wash himself and shave. Dominique fetched him breakfast (‘Chloë tells me that they were asking five cents for eggs from that horrid keel-boat!’), along with the news that the Louisiana Belle had been spotted down-river and that Antoine and Luc were already ferrying Isabelle, Nicolette, and Solange, with children and baggage, to wait on the levee. ‘Of course the Aubins, and the lawyers – well, the real lawyers—’ by which January knew she meant Brinvilliers, Gravier, and DuPage, not the American Loudermilk – ‘are all going across just when the Belle is coming in, so they won’t have to wait long on the levee. The sun is absolutely ferocious. Euphémie and her sisters, and Madame Janvier, are going to wait for the Illinois, which will be along after lunch, they say, now that the river is going down a little.’

  ‘The levee looks just like a snake,’ provided Charmian, standing on the other side of the bed with a glass of lemonade for her Uncle Benjamin. With her immense brown eyes, and her soft brown curls immaculately glazed with sugar water, she looked not a whit the worse for having been trapped in the weaving house for two days: every inch Dominique’s daughter. ‘The water in the river is up almost to the top, and on this side it’s way down. But Papa says nobody should walk in it because of snakes.’

  Henri, January gathered from the froth of his sister’s discourse, would remain for another night at Cold Bayou, with his mother and her dear friend Madame Mabillet. ‘Poor Jules is less feverish, but his maman insists he should be taken back to town to what she calls a “real doctor” – the nerve of the woman! And Charlotte begged with tears to be allowed to go with him, and will remain at his side … if Madame Mabillet had a tail she would wag it, she’s so pleased, now that Ellie’s out of the way. Uncle Mick is looking just thunderclouds, but honestly, P’tit, I think there’s something very beautiful about Ellie deciding, at the very last minute, that she loved this whatever-his-name-is … Tommy? Loved him enough to run away with him, after she’s had silk dresses and jewels and they’re going to practically starve, but she doesn’t care …’