He let the pearls trail from one hand to the other, gazing down reflectively at the satiny spheres. "Did this unfortunate girl express contrition for what she did? Or speak about the money she had stolen? That was a sad business."
January shook his head. His mind raced, time and events fitting together like the cogs of a gear. "I had the impression this was not the girl who took them, sir. She spoke of having received them 'from a friend,' though of course that might have been only a story to cover her own guilt. The girl who took them: what did she look like?"
"I never saw her-only heard Mrs. Redfern's description. A mulatress, she said, with a thin little face and a snub nose. Did the girl who gave you these look so?"
"No, sir. She was bright, quadroon or octoroon, with freckles on her nose."
"Hmn," rumbled Dunk, deep in thought. "Hmn. And this girl made no mention of the money her friend had taken?"
"None, sir."
The Reverend sighed, gave himself a little shake, and made a sketch of a bow. "Thank you very much for bringing me these," he said. "Mrs. Redfern will be most grateful to have them back. As for the girl, we seem to be obliged, as the Bard says, to `leave her to Heaven,' perhaps the best course in any case." He produced a clean handkerchief from his pocket, and wrapped the pearls carefully. "Thank you, Mr... ?"
"Dordogne," said January, bowing in his turn. He'd memorized the name on Hannibal's card before sending it in. "Marcus Dordogne. Thank you for your time, sir. And you've given me much to think about." More than you know, in fact. "I understand you'll be setting up a regular Church here in Milneburgh?"
"If God is good to me, yes." Dunk's voice had returned to normal tones; he extended a meaty hand to shake. "May I hope to see you there, when the dream of it becomes reality?"
"You may well, sir." January resumed his hat, straightened his black coat, and with a final bow, made his way down the steps of the galley; past windows where the white ladies of the congregation-and Dunk's two assistants-were regaling themselves on beef sandwiches and punch.
It was all he could do to keep from jumping up and clicking his heels.
No wonder Emily Redfern had been at such pains to imply that Cora had returned to the plantation Wednesday evening. No wonder the woman had been so eager to ruin Rose Vitrac, and drive her out of town. No wonder she was willing to sacrifice her pearls and a hundred and ninety dollars cash money, to avoid Rose remaining in custody where she might be questioned by others. Granville had brought the money out to Spanish Bayou Wednesday morning; the money had departed with Dunk "after breakfast"-and, therefore, far too early for Cora to have had the slightest thing to do with the administration of the poison-and Otis Redfern had come down sick Wednesday night.
It only remained to be seen what, if anything, Dunk would do now.
Since the Reverend almost certainly had an evening performance as well as a matinee, January made his way through the pine copses to Catherine Clisson's locked-up cottage on London Street. There, settling himself on the gallery, he produced a spyglass from his pocket. Through this he watched the hotel, especially the white shell path that ran between the main block and the stables, until it grew too dark to see.
More women arrived; those on the gallery returned inside for another session. Lights blossomed behind the curtains with the evening's approach. Now and then, when the wind set right, he could hear the faint echo of wailing, the only enjoyment, he reflected, that the majority of the American women allowed themselves.
The moon was in its first quarter, already westering; not a night, he thought, that would permit carriages to be abroad late. At the dinner hour the building disgorged women again, some of them to carriages drawn up before the steps, others onto the galleries, where they talked and ate sandwiches and eventually moved off in twos and threes into the thickening dark.
But if the Reverend Micajah Dunk were discomposed or startled by the return of the Redfern pearls, or the news that someone might have spoken to Cora Chouteau, he did not hasten to break the news to Emily Redfern.
January took the last steam rail-car into town. The only other occupant of the colored car was a single elderly woman who cradled a small dog in her arms, and crooned it lullabies all the way back:
Go to sleep, my son, crab is in the shell. Go to sleep, my son, crab is in the shell, Papa has gone to the river, Mama has gone to catch crab.
Go to sleep, my son, crab is in the shell. Go to sleep, my son, crab is in the shell.
It was one of the few lullabies January could recall his mother singing to him, her body silhouetted against the lighter darkness of the slave-cabin's door. He tried to recall whether his father had been there then, but had no memory one way or the other. Only the rocking of the steamtrain, and the creaking of the spring's first frogs, and the disembodied murmur of those nonsense words, like a voice from some other world speaking to him in the falling dusk.
Twenty
To the Editors of the New Orleans Bee, and to all concerned citizens of this town: To say that justice has been miscarried would be too feeble, too passive, too weak-kneed a description of the vile horror perpetrated yesterday on the bludgeoned sensibilities of a bereaved family and on the populace and good name of our fair city. Saturday night judge J. F. Canvnge permitted a murderer to walk free, a charlatan as black of heart as of hide. A week ago Wednesday, at the Orleans Ballroom, this self-styled doctor, Benjamin Janvier, in reality a voodoo practitioner and pander to the lusts of his fellow Ethiopes, prevented me by invective and threats of violence from bringing aid and succor to M. Jean Brinvilliers, who had been slightly wounded in an affair of honor in the lobby. When I attempted to remonstrate with Janvier he thrust me bodily back from his victim, and only after he had been forcibly removed from the scene by M. Froissart, the ballroom's manager, was I able to bring the light of medical science to bear. Alas, too late! As the result of the delay in treatment, M. Brinvilliers succumbed, not so much to his wounds, as to the rough and superstitious treatment meted out to him by this Janvier. It has come to my knowledge today, from the distraught Brinvilliers family, that this murderer was allowed to walk free.
Shame on you, Judge Canonge! This Janvier is a man well known for his libertinage, most recently and notoriously for the intolerable insult he has of fered to a lady of quality. Not content with making the most indecent possible remarks to her very face, he has shamelessly spread lies and calumny about her through the coarsest strata of society.
It has lately been remarked that everything that we, the inhabitants of this beautiful city, hold dear is in danger fiom the sewage of depravity being dumped in upon us from outside forces. How much more disgrace is there in those officials who, for their own profit, foster and coddle the degenerates against whom we look to them for protection. -Dr. Emil Barnard January set down the paper, his hand shaking, and met his mother's eyes.
Livia Levesque was an early riser. The Bee had been lying, folded open to Barnard's letter, beside his coffee cup when her son entered her small dining parlor.
Her deep, smoky voice was dry. "I'd like to know what that's about, Ben," she said.
Anger rose in him, a fever-scald of rage. He wasn't even sure for a moment whether it was directed at Barnard or at her. "So would I."
"Well, everyone's going to be asking me about it," she said. "I have to tell them something. Really, Ben, I knew you'd gotten too free in your speech when you went to Paris..."
"You really think I'm stupid enough to-to `offer intolerable insult to a lady of quality'? To make `indecent remarks' to her face? Excuse me, her very face, as he puts it."
"You changed in Paris." Livia's great, dark eyes were calmly cold.
"I didn't change that much! You raised me better than to do any such thing!" He saw her mouth soften, just a bit, and added, "I'm surprised you believe what a rag like this prints." In fact, the Bee's stories were as a rule accurate, if overheated; but his mother never could let pass a chance to attack anything.
"Well, you're certainly
right about that," she agreed. "They'll print any damn lie that's sent them, and that's for certain. Madame," she added, raising her voice without turning her head, "I hope you're not looking at the top of that table?"
The fatter of the two yellow cats sat down where she was and began to wash in an elaborate display of innocence.
"But Ben," Livia added, and there was now real concern in her eyes, "who was she?"
"I don't know!" He slapped the paper down on the table, feeling as if he were about to explode. "Aside from the stupidity of the thing, you know I'm not that rude. Have you ever heard me be rude to a lady?"
"Well." Her mouth primed tight again. "You certainly could watch your speech a little more around gentlemen. Especially those who stand in a position to do you good. I always told Monsieur Janvier that it was a mistake to send you to Paris."
As far as January remembered, she had told St. Denis Janvier nothing of the kind. In fact she'd been all for getting him away from New Orleans and out of the public view, if he was going to be something as low-class as a hired musician. But he wasn't about to be drawn into a discussion of his mother's version of the past. Instead he got to his feet, picked up the scarf of green silk Catherine Clisson had knitted him for Christmas-for the morning was bitterly cold-and shoved the folded sheets of the Bee into the pocket of his rough corduroy jacket.
"And you're not going out dressed like that," Livia added sharply, tonguing a chunk of brown sugar into her coffee. "You look like a street sweeper. People see you dressed like that, of course they'll think anything that paper says of you is true."
"All right, Mother," said January patiently. "I'll go change."
She nodded to herself and went back to her perusal of the Louisiana Gazette-January didn't even want to ask if Barnard's letter had been printed there as well. He stepped through the French doors back into the yard, turned immediately left, secure in the knowledge that she had ceased to notice him the moment he'd agreed with her, and made his way down the pass-through to Rue Burgundy, in quest of whatever Madame Redfern's servants had to tell.
Unlike the walled compounds of the old French town, the houses of the American faubourgs north of Canal Street were set, for the most part, in wide yards and scattered outbuildings and, in consequence, were easy to approach. Clothed in his shabby brown corduroy and a soft hat, January fell into step with Madame Redfern's housemaid-Claire, he had heard her called on the night of the ball-by the simple expedient of putting two or three reales in an old purse of Bella's, and calling out, "Miss Claire, Miss Claire, you drop this?"
They walked down Felicity Street and to the grocery stalls by the batture at the foot of Market Street, together. Miss Claire was probably in her late thirties and had three children, a calm and matter-of-fact woman without inclination to flirt, but January didn't try to flirt with her: only talked, of this and that, mostly of her children-whom Emily Redfern had refused to purchase along with her-and the places she'd been.
"I understand what that Mr. Fraikes of hers says, that she can't afford to buy nor raise no little ones," said the slave, shifting her market basket on her hip as she moved from stand to stand of winter fruit. There were blood oranges from Mexico, and early strawberries; new lettuces now, and asparagus from Jefferson Parish; a glory of greens and flame-bright colors against the gray of the morning: "But rice is only a couple reales a peck, and you can buy three oranges for an English shilling-how much would it have cost her, to feed two little boys and a girl? She's a mighty hard woman, Mr. Levesque..." She shook her head January had taken some care never to use the same name twice among these people. "A mighty hard woman."
So it did not take much to learn whether Rose Vitrac had come to the Redfern home making awkward enquiries as to the possible fate of Cora Chouteau.
If she had, Claire Brunet knew nothing of the matter. And what, precisely, he wondered, as he made his way back along Tchapitoulas Street toward the Cabildo once more, did he think had become of Cora?
What did he think Emily Redfern's reaction would have been, had Rose Vitrac appeared one morning on her doorstep saying, I have proof that you poisoned your husband for five thousand dollars, and cast the blame on his unwilling mistress?
What proof could Rose have had?
Emily Redfern had certainly murdered her husband. No matter who had stowed the monkshood up Emily Redfern's bedroom chimney, if the boat that had brought her-along with Reverend Dunk and Mr. Bailey's white horses-to New Orleans had departed from the landing at Spanish Bayou "after breakfast," there was no way Cora Chouteau could have placed so fast-acting a substance as monkshood in her master's food.
Emily Redfern had certainly tricked the Reverend Dunk-if Dunk had been tricked-into taking the five thousand dollars Hubert Granville had brought out to the house so it would not be found by her husband's creditors. She had tricked her creditors as well, selling her slaves to the Reverend Dunk at half their value with the proceeds of the Musicale, so that she could pay off her creditors at a fraction of the debt, while he resold them and invested the profit.
But all that being so, what did he think Madame Redfern had done to Rose? Struck her over the head with slung-shot?
When? Where? For all her slim gawkiness Rose Vitrac was strong, and it was unthinkable that a colored woman would have been seated in the presence of a white woman who was not. Given Emily Redfern's lack of inches, the physical logistics of a blow over the head-or any sort of violence-became laughable.
And where did that leave him?
With a perfectly worked-out case clearing a woman who had vanished into thin air. Clearing a woman who had only slavery to return to, acquitted or not. Whose life was forfeit, not to the hangman but to the auctioneer's gavel.
And Cora could have met anyone as she left Madame Lalaurie's house that night, from the enigmatic Mamzelle Marie to Hog-Nose Billy to the vindictive and slightly cracked Monsieur Montreuil to Bronze John himself.
The fact was that she was gone, as Rose was gone. January had the sense of having read down to the bottom of a sheet of paper, reaching the same conclusion, the same result, each time.
Cora was gone. Rose was gone.
Weaving his way among the traffic of whores and roustabouts, of cotton bales and hogsheads of sugar, of pigs and pianos and oysters and silk, it occurred to him that Madame Redfern, had she dealt with Rose at all, would have been far likelier to settle the matter financially. Having ruined her, La Redfern would not need any such melodramatic expedient of a blow over the head and unceremonious burial in the nearest well. A five-dollar ticket on the next New York packet would do the trick as well. Better, in fact.
She'd have taken her books.
A vision of hope, of Rose teaching at some comfortable girls' school in New York, somewhere that would properly value her erudition, crumbled like a sugar palace in rain. The image of Rose sharpening a quill in the bar of cold pale New York sunlight...
Monsieur Janvier, I take pen in hand at last... Nothing can come between true friends.
But according to Miss Claire, Rose never went to Redfern's at all.
She has no one in New York. No one anywhere. At least when my life fell to pieces in my hand I could come home. I could come here.
Even in defeat, Rose Vitrac had a kind of clear, cool courage that could go to an unfamiliar city and start anew.
But she had no money to get there. If she hadn't gotten passage-money from La Redfern...
Memory touched him as he walked on toward the brick-arcaded shadows of the market, the tall iron-crowned towers of the steamboat stacks: the memory of a dream, of shadows on a hallway wall. A tall man's and a tiny, slender girl's. You're her father, the girl was saying. You're her father...
Rose had never spoken of her home.
But once, on their first meeting, Cora had.
It was three days' voyage to Grand Isle in the Barataria country. Froissart having canceled January's engagement to play at the Orleans Ballroom's Mardi Gras Ball, January would have left that d
ay, had any boat been departing on the eve of the feast. As it was, he fumed and fretted and cursed the revelers who jammed every street and filled the endless night hours with riot. The moment "Ite missa est" was out of the priest's mouth at the first Ash Wednesday Mass, January was out the Cathedral door and on his way to the levee.
Natchez Jim followed the still, green reaches of Bayou Dauphine to Lake Catahouatehe, motionless in fringes of cypress and reed, rowing or poling where there wasn't wind to fill the lugger's sail. January, helping on the oars or leaning on the long oak poles, watched the few houses on the banks grow more primitive with distance from the city, until they were little more than a couple of post-and-daub rooms circled by a gallery, presiding over a few arpents of indigo or rice. Now and then they'd pass the shack of a trapper or fisherman, perched on sandbars and chenieres but even these grew far between. They both slept with knives and pistols beneath the wadded-up jackets that served them for pillows, and never at the same time, for the Barataria had been the sole province of slave smugglers and outlaws until very recently. There was no telling who or what might lurk in the spiderweb mazes of bayou and marsh. Still, the green-gray aisles of water hickory and tupelo, bald cypress and palmetto were hushed, save for the slap of the water on the lugger's sides. Wind murmured among the endless reeds, and once, somewhere far off, they heard the rattle of African drums.
From Catahouatehe they entered Lake Salvator, and after that the world known as the prairie tremblant, the quaking lands: salt marsh, reeds, birds, February sky. Natchez Jim pointed out the salt grass that would tell a man where solid ground lay, the cattails that spoke of mud too soft to carry weight: "Even those who are born in these lands sometimes make mistakes about the walking prairie and are never seen again." An alligator slid down the trunk of a dying cypress, gray as the fading roots left out in sun and wind.
They came ashore on Grand Isle in midmorning, at a sort of settlement of oyster fishers and trappers on the landward side of the island. The night's fog still hung on, cottony and tasting of salt. The silence that had seemed menacing in the bayou country was calming here. Though the world slept its winter sleep still, all was lush with green.
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