Cold Bayou

by Barbara Hambly

  January wondered whether Dominique, who as far as he could ascertain loved Henri Viellard truly and deeply, would love the young planter as much were he suddenly bereft of the family whose fortune and influence provided her with silk dresses and jewels, not to speak of an annuity of twelve hundred dollars and a comfortable cottage on Rue Dumaine.

  His mother, he gathered, was also leaving on the Illinois. Later that afternoon he was to witness her tender farewells to her daughter and granddaughter, but she forgot or neglected to take her leave of him.

  Now he asked Minou, ‘What about Uncle Veryl?’

  Her delicate brows pulled together. ‘Oh, P’tit! I can’t but be glad that Ellie chose to run off with someone she loves, but it’s so terrible to see him this way! He just sits there looking at the jewelry she left, and the gloves he gave her, and her wedding dress. The poor old man! He doesn’t even weep! M’sieu Singletary is there with him, but he won’t speak – Uncle Veryl won’t – and James says he’s afraid he’ll … he’ll do himself a mischief. He won’t, will he? You don’t think?’

  January sighed, and set the breakfast tray off his lap. ‘Would you hand me my clothes over there, Minou? And get one of the boys—’ he gestured towards the gallery, where the musicians were gossipping with Sylvestre St-Chinian about further up-river boats – ‘in here to help me dress? I’m not sure he’ll do anything foolish … but it doesn’t sound like he should be alone.’

  He didn’t reach the big house until after lunch, owing to the fact that his mother had commandeered the small pirogue of his escape (Old Nana’s, as it turned out) to take herself and her luggage to the levee, and had paid Antoine fifty cents to pole her to the landing. ‘I’m sorry ’bout that, sir,’ said Antoine, as he navigated the little craft – at long last – toward the big house, through a sloppy landscape of sodden trees, half-submerged chicken coops, and deadfalls occupied by copperheads and gators. ‘But you know I can’t turn down any chance to get … well … something. ’Specially now that things’ll be upset for awhile, ’fore they gets a new overseer.’

  ‘I understand.’ January handed him the small sack of coin that he’d found in the wood store with the file, and the knife. ‘Will you see these get back to their original owners?’

  ‘I will, sir.’ He turned his face quickly away, and the tension in his naked bronze shoulders prompted January to ask, ‘Did you know Valla was blackmailing Molina?’

  The stiffness left the young man’s body with a sigh. He still would not look back.

  Nor, for a time, did he reply.

  At last he said, ‘I told her not to do it.’ His voice was a barely audible croak. ‘I told her it was a fool idea. No man gonna let a girl get away with somethin’ like that.’

  A shudder went through him, and January realized he wept. Crazy about her, Luc had said.

  In a voice wrenched with sorrow, he went on, ‘I told her I had a little money hid away. I been savin’ …’ He struggled to control his voice. ‘He a bad man to cross, Molina. You ain’t the first man he’s tried to put out of the way, sir. When they lock you up in the wood store, Luc an’ me an’ the boys, we knew he’d get you. It’s why we left the file an’ things, even ’fore your friends paid Old Nana for this boat. Valla …’

  He paused in his poling, and the little craft glided of its own momentum between the island formed by the overseer’s kitchen, and the charred, soggy ruin of the wood store.

  ‘Valla said, Mamzelle gonna free her. You know with her looks, she could pass for white in the north. But without money, she said, she’d end up like all them white girls in the north, that hang around the taverns where the sailors go …’

  He remembered the yellow-and-white striped dress, the neat leather shoes. ‘Wasn’t Mamzelle going to give her money as well?’

  ‘Two hunnert dollars.’ Antoine looked back at him then, tears running from his eyes. ‘Enough to set up a little business on her own. Not enough to buy me free.’

  ‘Buy you …’ January stared. Remembered the way Antoine had caught Valla’s arm. How he’d waited for her, followed her steps …

  ‘I told her to leave me behind. Told her I’d get out some way, an’ come to her in the north.’ He turned back to his poling, sun glinting on the glaze of his sweat. ‘When she left, back in July, she said she’d come back for me. Then when she did, she said she knew stuff about Molina, stuff to make him let me go. She said, Molina “lost” so many “runaways” from this place, sellin’ ’em to smugglers like Chamoflet, he could just as easy “lose” one who really did get away. I couldn’t make her see different. I tried – I begged an’ I swore. She said, he hadn’t no power over her now.’

  He fell silent for a time, guiding his little vessel, like Charon’s barque, through murky waters in which a thousand secrets were drowned. ‘I try not to think of it, sir. I was with her that night. If I’d had any idea – any thought that that’s what she was up to – I’d have kept her by me, somehow. Held onto her. Kept her from goin’.’ He shook his head again, like a tethered horse tormented by flies, and steered the pirogue around a sodden grove and into the long U between the wings of the house, toward the weed-draped steps of the upstream wing.

  ‘You think you could have?’ asked January softly. ‘My sister called her a pichouette: headstrong. Fierce. A bobcat. She didn’t mean it kindly, but I think it was true.’

  Something like a smile of memory flicked the corner of the young man’s mouth and he poled the pirogue to a stop at the steps. ‘That it was, sir. Valla …’

  He shook his head, reached with his pole to brush a coiled cottonmouth off the lowest step, so that January could disembark.

  Quietly, he finished, ‘It was our only chance, she said. I begged her to let it go. She wasn’t ’fraid o’ nuthin’, Valla.’

  Marie-Honorine Mabillet emerged from her son’s chamber as January, assisted by Antoine, dragged himself up the steps to the gallery. ‘It was kind of you to come, sir,’ said that beautiful, dark-haired woman, surveying January condescendingly. ‘But Jules’s fever seems much improved now. We’ll be taking him to town tomorrow, to see our own physician.’

  She had assumed, January realized, that he had come to see Jules. Not to comfort a man half out of his mind with grief.

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it, Madame.’

  Through the French door he glimpsed the young man lying still as death on the bed, the mosquito-bar draped up to reveal Charlotte, plump and plain and devoted as a spaniel, at his side. A horrifying array of bottles on the bedside table testified to the depth of young Mabillet’s rest – and to the range of the lady’s portable pharmacopia. It would be, January assumed, no great task to prove that Madame had disembarked at Carmichael’s woodlot at English Turn, rented a horse from Thierry Chiasson’s livery, and ridden down to Cold Bayou on the night of the storm, though she’d probably gotten rid of her riding-clothes by this time.

  No serious effort either would be needed to prove that she’d had poisons in her satchel, as well as enough opiates to stupefy a rhinoceros. Or that the silver spoon he’d found in Jules’ room on Thursday morning came from her house. Any jury in the country could put together the sequence of events: that she had urged her son to press his suit with Charlotte, and had followed him down-river – almost certainly without his knowledge – with the intention of making sure that the Viellard/St-Chinian holdings remained intact and unsullied by Hibernian interference. Hearing, probably at the livery stable at English Turn, that her son had been injured in the duel, she had gone to him after putting hemlock or fools-parsley into the bedside brandy bottle in the Casita.

  It was only good luck – born of Tommy Kildare’s devotion, and Ellie Trask’s heart – that the lovely blonde girl hadn’t been found dead on the Casita’s back gallery, or in her bed after that.

  But what, reflected January, would be the point of proof?

  No jury in Louisiana would convict a respected French Creole matron, on a black man’s testimony.

&nb
sp; Pressing the issue would probably cause her – or her family – to seek another culprit from among those in the Cold Bayou weaving house that night.

  Death in the water, Olympe had said. Death in the fire.

  Death waiting at Cold Bayou like the smell of smoke.

  He watched as Aurelié St-Chinian Viellard emerged from one of the back doors of the big house. Never a handsome woman, her sandy hair nearly all gray now, still there was the confidence of power in her heavy-featured face. Her friend Marie-Honorine hurried to meet her, and in the clasping of their hands January saw the devotion of which Old Madame Janvier had spoken; the kindness of an older girl who had looked after a younger one. The affection of an intrepid child toward one who has been like a wise elder sister.

  He heard Madame Mabillet exclaim, ‘Well, it really is for the best, you know! Doesn’t he see that?’

  ‘Honestly!’ Madame Viellard shook her head. ‘He just sits there, and stares without a word. I always knew Veryl wasn’t quite right in the head – I said from the start that the match should never have been permitted. But no, nobody would listen to me when I so much as mentioned that he should be confined for his own protection. At least it’s over.’

  And she cast, January thought, a probing, sidelong glance at her friend.

  ‘And there’s no trace of the girl?’

  ‘Well, apparently the story is that she’s run off with one of those horrible Irishmen.’ Madame Aurelié shrugged. ‘So I suppose we can be doubly thankful that she couldn’t wait til she was married to start kicking up larks. I found this.’

  And from the pocket of her puce foulard frock she drew a folded piece of paper – what appeared to January, at that distance, to be the folded page torn from the back of a ledger.

  Madame Mabillet unfolded it and held it at the length of her arm, while her friend, still with a look of queer intensity, studied her expression. ‘From this Irishman of hers?’

  ‘I presume so.’

  ‘So it looks as if she planned to betray Veryl all along.’ Marie-Honorine dropped it over the gallery rail, and taking Aurelié’s arm, walked slowly with her toward the house. ‘Dearest, I must congratulate you – or felicitate you, I’m not sure which it is – on having raised such a loving, loyal-hearted girl as your Charlotte. It was quite wrong of Jules to have run off from town as he did to propose to her, but seeing them together, one cannot but be struck by the passion of their love …’

  Through the French doors January could see Jules, still profoundly unconscious beneath the weight of his mama’s medications. But Charlotte’s face, half turned towards him, radiated the ecstatic glow of martyrdom.

  Which she’ll certainly experience, he reflected sadly, once she starts living under the same roof with a drug-dependent mama’s boy and his beloved parent.

  ‘Will you help me here?’ he asked Antoine quietly, and with the slave’s assistance, lay flat on the gallery the moment the two older women were out of sight, and leaned down to the fullest stretch of his arm, to pick the floating paper from the water.

  It was, as he’d suspected, the pencilled note from Molina to Valla, which he’d last seen in Ellie’s bedroom in the Casita.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘Did I do right?’ Chloë was waiting for January just outside the French door of Veryl’s room, on the front gallery. The floodwaters were sinking. Barely enough remained to float the flat-bottomed boats that were being loaded with baggage and passengers bound for the landing, where the summons-flag whipped in the Gulf breeze. Chattering, three of Chloë’s sisters-in-law descended the front gallery steps – January caught a series of catty remarks about the absent Charlotte’s ‘romance’ with her unconscious swain – followed by Gayla, swishing her skirt self-importantly, Euphémie’s maid Etta, and Visigoth laden with baggage. Against a cloud-swept sky, a line of ‘family’ dotted the levee. The bell of the Illinois, on its return journey up the river, chimed faintly in the air.

  The bedraggled fragment of a wedding-garland swung from a corner of the gallery roof. From the fields, the voice of one of the gang-bosses – standing in as overseer – echoed faintly on the heavy air.

  January glanced back into the gloom of the bedroom he had just left. Singletary, white head bent, had gone back to his book. The chessboard on the little table before him stood, its ivory ranks untouched.

  Veryl, sitting on the bed, had disclaimed any desire to play chess, or backgammon, or fox-and-geese. No, he did not want to read, or to talk, he had said. No, he did not wish to bid his family goodbye, as they took their leave.

  Nor did he wish to leave Cold Bayou himself. Not just now.

  He didn’t know what he wanted to do.

  Would they all just leave him alone, please?

  ‘In helping Ellie run off with Tommy Kildare? If you hadn’t, I doubt either Mamzelle’s life – or, possibly, your uncle’s – would have been worth an hour’s purchase.’

  And January outlined to Chloë his near-certainty concerning Madame Mabillet’s scheme to marry her son into a family whose wealth was uncompromised.

  ‘I could probably prove it, in a court in any country but this one,’ he finished. ‘When you get back to town, I’d appreciate it – Rose would appreciate it – if you’d keep an eye on both him and them. I apologize for eavesdropping, but I overheard your mother-in-law speak of having Veryl confined, to keep him out of the hands of any further encroaching females. In the state he’s in now it probably wouldn’t be difficult to establish grounds for it. And you might,’ he added, as Madame Aurelié and Madame Mabillet appeared on the gallery to bid the young ladies goodbye, ‘speak to Mr Singletary, and to James, about … about keeping an eye on who has access to his food.’

  Chloë glanced at him sidelong, with those cold unsurprised insectile eyes.

  ‘If they can’t lock him up,’ she opined after a moment, ‘that would be the logical step, wouldn’t it? I took this from Madame’s medicine satchel.’ She held up a phial. Sniffing it, January recognized the smell of one of Olympe’s more deadly concoctions – water-hemlock or cowbane. ‘All the other bottles and phials in her satchel were full. This was as you see it.’ An inch or so of the greenish distillation had been poured out … somewhere.

  ‘I’m fairly certain it was my mother-in-law who had the place cleaned up,’ she continued quietly. ‘From things she’s said, I think she realized almost at once that it was her friend Marie-Honorine who had been in the Casita that night. Do you think Uncle Veryl will be safe?’

  January thought for a time before he replied. ‘If someone keeps an eye on him,’ he said slowly. ‘Particularly now, when he … doesn’t seem to want very much to live. I’ll visit daily, when I get back to town.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Chloë pocketed the phial.

  ‘It might be well if he left New Orleans for a time.’

  Henri emerged from the French doors of his own room, and seeing his wife, made a move to join them. She raised one little white hand, and he disappeared like a jack-in-the-box. ‘I’m staying on here, for a time,’ she added. ‘Until we find another overseer. Euphémie flatly refuses to let Florentin bring their family down here – and of course Florentin has his own importing business in town to run – and nobody in their senses would put Locoul or that worthless husband of Fleurette’s in charge of that much sugar and this many slaves. We’re looking into employing one of Laetitia’s sons. Or possibly Sylvestre St-Chinian’s younger boy.’

  She frowned again, behind her thick spectacles, and glanced again toward her uncle’s darkened room. ‘I meant it for the best,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think he would be so … so devastated.’

  January shook his head. ‘I’m only surprised that she did it,’ he said. ‘Mamzelle Ellie was frightened by Valla’s death – frightened and angered. But she never impressed me as a woman who would let her heart rule her head. She was ready to go through with it, and with Uncle Mick in the background I can hardly blame her. I could see her eloping with a lover – and I’m afraid t
hat your mother-in-law was right, when she spoke of her concerns about Mamzelle’s later faithfulness to poor Veryl – but not with a penniless man. I stand rebuked for my opinion of her.’

  ‘Well …’ Chloë looked up at him. ‘Not entirely. He wasn’t penniless, you see. As I’m sure he told her, once they were well and truly on the road to town. That’s where I was Thursday night after dinner – why I walked out to the dead-huts to meet M’sieu Kildare before his rendezvous with Mamzelle.’ She shrugged. ‘I did what everyone in the family should have had the wits to do in the first place. Once I heard from St-Ives that Mamzelle Ellie had a suitor of long standing among her uncle’s entourage, I sent St-Ives to him at English Turn, with word that I’d give him a draft for a thousand dollars if he’d elope with her.’

  She frowned, and propped her spectacles on her short little nose, watching the rowboat being towed by a half-dozen slaves towards the levee. Watching the tall red smokestacks of the Illinois, that seemed to float against the sky.

  ‘I must say I was a little surprised that she actually did start out to meet him, after I told her he was waiting for her there. That’s why he and I started back to the Casita … and had she not started to walk to the dead-huts, I think we would have found her dead in her bed. So loving this young man – going to him the way she did, without knowing he had that draft – did in fact save her life. I’m only sorry that it seems to have broken my uncle’s heart.’