Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Which they may not do,’ said Rose, ‘if they think I know something they’d rather I didn’t tell anyone else.’ She turned her face a little away from him, her spectacles opaque ovals of silver in the shadow. ‘And the plan has the virtue of leading them away from Aramis and his family – and from Baby John.’

  He put his hand over hers, her long fingers cold in his grip.

  Natchez Jim had promised to stop back at Chouteau the following morning, so as the afternoon darkened, January dug pen, ink, and paper from his slender luggage (none of these items being present in the house of Rose’s brother) and wrote a letter to Hannibal. He folded it tightly together – the Vitrac household also lacked anything in the way of sealing wax or wafers (thank God we didn’t decide to wait til Aramis wrote back with information about the family!) – and took two dollars from his slender hoard to make it worth Jim’s while to deliver to the fiddler without waiting for a cargo. Heaven only knew what had become of Rose’s second letter, warning Aramis of possible attack – given the way the post office operated on Grand Isle, it might arrive as late as Christmas. Around him, the house was deeply silent, save for the voices of the children on the back gallery and Aramis’ deep, regular breathing in the bedroom. January was just rising to fetch a candle when Rose and Alice came in from the gallery themselves.

  ‘Would you mind sleeping in the attic tonight?’ Alice inquired. ‘I’m thinking the cottage –’ she nodded in the direction of the small guest house that had sheltered January and Rose on their previous visit – ‘is a bit far from the house. I know Aramis would say I’ve been listening to too many of Mammy Zett’s stories,’ she added, with a self-conscious flush to her cheeks, ‘but somebody did kill Jeoffrey … and did stab you, Rose. And in spite of what Aramis says, I believe Jacque when he says that wasn’t just one of our neighbors he saw riding around in the woods.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The attic would be like a slow oven, January reflected, but at least he wouldn’t lie awake wondering if each creak of the little cottage, on its tall brick piers, was a footfall, creeping up the steps.

  For the next five days he made himself useful around the plantation, cutting kindling, going out with the shrimp boats, nursing Aramis and examining every one of the twenty slaves – men, women, children – for such ailments as could be rectified: hernias, sprains, inflamed tendons, female complaints. Old Dulcie doubled as midwife and herb doctor, and the condition of the children attested to her understanding of her craft. January found no signs of rickets or worms among the dozen children (counting Alice’s four) of the plantation. But adults and children alike, he could see, still suffered from the effects of last winter’s overwork, and he knew that when the time of summer vegetables and summer milk was over, they would quickly slide back into the borderline malnutrition suffered by all slaves, no matter how benevolent and well-intentioned their owners. Plantations on the island grew their own corn, but as Rose had said, there was always the drive to put more land into sugar and let the slaves make up the difference in what they might hunt and catch. With the price of sugar down, and expenses for salt and tools and taxes up, that temptation would redouble. For the first three days, Aramis himself was feverish, and January kept the wound cleaned and dosed him with borage and willow-bark tea.

  Several times a day he would take Rose’s spyglass up to the attic and sweep the horizon from each of its four windows, looking out over the cane fields, the marshy shore, the oak-grown ridge behind the house. All he saw were the thousand-and-one places where half the British Army might lurk unseen: cane fields; palmetto thickets; oak trees, all leaning weirdly in the direction of the bay, as if swept by invisible, perpetual wind. He would walk up the ridge and through the woods, looking for tracks, but he wasn’t the tracker Lieutenant Shaw was, and it made him deeply uneasy to get out of sight of the house, even armed with Aramis’ duck-gun. (‘Sure, go on, take it …’ So much for the laws against colored men laying hands on weapons … )

  Two or three times he found the tracks of narrow square-toed boots and those of wider, shorter feet. Once, he thought there was a third set of tracks as well. How many of them did our unknown enemy hire?

  During those five days, both he and Rose tried to fit together the half-remembered snippets of old rumor, old tales, hand-me-down gossip from the children and grandchildren of the few slaves that Absalon de Gericault had brought from Cuba, searching for names, for clues, for anything of use. There wasn’t a great deal. De Gericault had had to sell most of his slaves before leaving Cuba, and Mammy Pé had been the only one to live very long. De Gericault’s valet, Mem, had had two sons after coming to Louisiana, but both of these had become field-hands, and both were already dead. Even with the improvements that were beginning to lessen the hideous labor of making sugar, cane was a brutal crop.

  A whole cycle of tales revolved around the iniquities of old Belleange, Comte de Caillot’s perfidy in stealing Absalon de Gericault’s birthright – forged papers, swapped babies, murdered nurses, faithful shepherds, miraculous escapes, many blatantly reminiscent of the novels January’s youngest sister Dominique read, and impossible to sort into fiction or fact. Another cycle centered on the insidious Dr Maudit. ‘He can’t really have cut up children and made stew of them,’ protested Rose, on their way back from the quarters one evening. ‘Aside from what the neighbors would have said, that would have gotten awfully expensive …’

  ‘I’d say so,’ agreed January. ‘Except that you and I both know that Delphine Lalaurie made it a habit to imprison her slaves in the attic and torture them, and most of her neighbors still don’t admit that she did it. A woman in her position “doesn’t do things like that”.’

  He shivered at the memory of that stifling attic, of the agony in his shoulders and back, the terror of being helpless before those mad, self-justifying eyes. ‘My old master on Bellefleur Plantation had a barrel with nails driven through its sides,’ he went on slowly, ‘that he’d nail people up in and roll them down from the top of the levee. If a man disobeyed an order, he’d have him hung up head-down in the chimney of the smokehouse for a couple of hours with the fires going. One of our neighbors killed more than one of his slaves with what he called the Water Treatment, and nobody in the district said a thing about it. He still got invited to parties because he had fifty arpents of land along the river and two marriageable sons. There’s nothing to tell us that this Dr Maudit wasn’t stark, staring crazy – and no guarantee that Absalon de Gericault simply refused to see what was going on under his nose.’

  Rose looked unhappy, but made no reply. Her experience of servitude, January knew, had been at second-hand and relatively benign. On this, her father’s plantation, she’d probably seen no more than a whipping or two.

  Life on the island itself was incredibly primitive. There was no church closer than Crown Point – a priest was sent out from New Orleans once or twice a year to perform baptisms and marriages – and January missed the comfort of confession and the Mass. It was no wonder, he reflected, that townspeople looked upon the inhabitants of the Barataria as pagans.

  Twice that week Rose took Aramis’ skiff and sailed out beyond the rim of flottants into the Bay. Patiently, she taught January to trim sails and reef sheets, and to navigate by a hundred nearly-identical bumps and notches on the horizon: a bump here, an oak tree there, the gray blink of somebody’s gable above a sea of grass and sedge that might or might not have roots on actual land. She seemed to know every shoal and creek and islet in the bay, the way he himself had learned the invisible geography of the woods around Bellefleur as a child: the shape of tree limbs, the taste of the damp air, the lie of the ground underfoot. It was good to be in the countryside again.

  On Thursday she took them out through the Barataria Pass into the open Gulf, where dolphins swept along on both sides of the little craft and leaped from the water to regard January for a moment with wise, bright black eyes. Dressed in boys’ clothing, her hair jammed under a fisherman’s cap, Rose was in her e
lement on the sea, handling the wheel with neat speed and reading the barely visible alterations of surface and color of the water like a Mississippi riverboat pilot.

  ‘See how the waves get higher there? And their crests are closer together? That’s shoal water … Now look where the color of the water changes, meaning there’s a current …’

  January blinked. It all looked perfectly identical to him.

  ‘The Gulf is shallow for miles out. In close you’ll find sheepshead and sandtrouts; you don’t see things like bass unless you’re very far from land. I used to sail out of sight of land, looking for different sorts of fish. Aramis would never go, but Jeoffrey would. Once we got caught by a current, and I didn’t think we were ever going to make it back to shore …’

  January cast a queasy glance back in the direction of where he’d last seen land. The quiet and scholarly Rose, he had found early in their relationship, had a blithe fearlessness when in pursuit of knowledge that frequently terrified him, and she would investigate nearly anything: gunpowder, incendiaries, lightning, storms. And, he reflected, they looked like they’d have the chance to witness the latter close up: black sky was building up to the south, and blue-white flickers of electricity sprang between water and clouds.

  ‘If we were going to be here longer,’ mused Rose as she regretfully put about, ‘I’d like to try out the breathing tube I’ve been designing that would let a swimmer remain underwater. Even in a storm, I’ve heard, beneath the water it’s calm.’

  ‘Well, you’re not going to swim out in the open ocean, with or without a breathing tube, until Baby John is grown up,’ retorted January, only half in jest. ‘He needs his mother. I need his mother,’ he added, to Rose’s wince of regretful agreement.

  She hooked a bight of rope over the wheel, went to trim the sails. ‘I wouldn’t do it unless I’d made sure it was safe, first.’ The wind snatched her cap away, tumbled her hair about her shoulders in a torrent.

  January rolled his eyes. Rose considered making fireworks safe, also.

  As they skimmed back toward shore, Rose pointed at the low silhouette of the island – barely a bump above the angry-looking sea. ‘That’s where Hispaniola was – Granpère Louis-Charles’s plantation, where Great-Granpère settled when Papa married M’am Marguerite Chouteau. Aramis says Granmère Oliva was afraid of Great-Granpère—’

  ‘I thought he was the kindest man in the world?’ Only by narrowing his eyes could January make out the remains of the house, which – contrary to the custom of most of the small plantations of the island – faced the Gulf. ‘Until the Evil Dr Maudit put a curse on him,’ he added with a grin.

  ‘It’s what everyone says,’ agreed Rose. ‘And of course he was dead by the time I came to live at Chouteau, so I never met him. But I did know Granmère Oliva. And there was a note in her voice when she’d talk about him – which she almost never did – and she had a way of turning her head aside when Papa would speak of his kindness.’

  She frowned, holding on to the sail lines as she studied the shore. ‘I do remember her telling me, several times, that men thought girls were useless. And she was constantly apologizing to M’am Marguerite for being a trouble, and being a cripple, and not being able to do things, even though M’am Marguerite loved her very much and was sincerely happy about taking care of her. And now I wonder if her papa – Great-Granpère – scorned her because she was a girl and couldn’t inherit back the title from his cousin, or because her bones were weak.’

  January frowned as a thought snagged at the back of his mind – something he’d read? A name? Something he’d asked someone once, a long time ago, in France, maybe—?

  But Rose was already scrambling to the wheel as wind blew up sharply from behind them and lightning sprang from the black mountain of cloud that now stretched over most of the sky. ‘There! See the wharf? It’s mostly in ruins, but we can still tie up at it – which is probably what we’d better do.’

  January had at least acquired enough skill by that time to leap across from the gunwale to the few rickety beams that still united the pilings and haul the skiff inshore by the bowlines. Waves raced on to the shore, foam-fringed and angry, and spits of rain stung his face. Rose drew Aramis’ fowling gun from beneath the seat, wrapped in its scraps of oilcloth, and tossed the weapon to January, though the likelihood of anyone attacking them in this desolate place was small. Hand in hand they dashed up the path to the half-rotted carcass of the old house among its tangles of hackberry and palmetto.

  ‘The house is bigger than Chouteau, but the land wasn’t as good, and they kept losing the roof when hurricanes would hit this side of the island,’ Rose explained as they climbed the wrecked and splintery steps to the gallery. ‘That may be why … Good Heavens!’ she added as they ducked from the gallery into the house itself.

  After a long moment January walked over to the remains of the mantelpiece – which Rose had been looking at when she’d exclaimed – and lit a match, for the storm was rapidly darkening such daylight as came through the holed roof and closed shutters. ‘This is fresh,’ he said. ‘Within the last few days, I’d say.’ The wooden mantle looked as if someone had taken an ax to it. The interior of the wood was unweathered and yellow-bright.

  Rose moved quickly over to him. It was the gesture of a woman seeking protection, but in fact she bent and picked up a long shard of the oak (painted to look like marble) and held one end to January’s sputtering match. Only by its light did he see in her eyes that, yes, she had moved to his side in fear.

  The ruined house had been ransacked.

  All furniture had gone decades ago, but in each of the six rooms, January and Rose saw as they moved from one to another, the ornamental fireplace mantles had been chopped open to search for hiding places and the protective bricks of their hearths crowbarred out. Boards had been torn up from the floor, and in the two tiny cabinets at the back of the house, where steps ran up to the attic, each step of the stair had been ripped up.

  All the damage was fresh.

  In four of the rooms, rain pounded through the open holes in the roof above. ‘Only a few weeks of this would have weathered the wood,’ said January, ducking back to the relative (but only relative) shelter of the front room where they’d entered.

  ‘Looking for a treasure map?’ Half-wondering disbelief tinged Rose’s voice. The shutters had been unbolted on the French door through which they’d entered; they banged in the wind behind them. When January went to bolt them, he saw that the bolt had been chopped away as well.

  ‘Or for information about the plantation in Saint-Domingue.’ Though it was barely five in the afternoon, the storm was rapidly swallowing even the dim blue-gray light that came through the broken roof of the next room, and the old house creaked on its tall piers in the wind. This chamber, by its position, would have been Absalon de Gericault’s bedroom, at the front of the house on the side nearer the far-off river. The bed was gone, and so was the desk at which he would have written whatever business he had: protests to Spanish authorities, demanding compensation for the Cuban plantation he’d been forced to sell? Notes to the old men in the Café des Refugies, lamenting the world they had lost? Letters to his Congressman? But nobody in Congress paid much attention to Frenchmen who’d had the misfortune to survive the destruction of their world. Schemes to recover his treasure?

  Since 1789, as Jeoffrey Vitrac had pointed out, the issue of the de Gericault title had become moot.

  ‘I think we’d better get out of here.’

  Rain hammered down through the broken roof of the gallery. January pushed open the shutter, looked down the long path toward the wharf and the sea beyond it, trying to guess how long the storm would last and where they could shelter in the meantime … Surely the place had the ruins of a sugar mill …?

  Two men were walking up the path to the house.

  They carried what were clearly guns, wrapped in oilcloth but barrels protruding a little, to glint in the stormy light.

  And Arami
s’ skiff was drifting free of the wharf, already fifty or sixty yards out to sea.

  TEN

  Rose turned at once to go to the back of the house. January caught her arm. ‘There’ll be one more coming in from the back.’

  He’d kept the lock of Aramis’ duck gun dry in its wrapping, but guessed that the powder in the cartridges in his pockets was damp.

  ‘Boards in the dining room floor were pulled up,’ she replied. ‘We can drop through under the house.’

  There’d be snakes down there – it was the reason they hadn’t taken shelter in the thickets of palmetto that grew among the house piers in the first place – but now wasn’t the time to hesitate. January ducked through the splattering rain in the dining room to the hole that had been chopped in the floor, where presumably someone had seen something that made him think a hiding place was there.

  Only one board had been hacked completely free, but the opening gave January the leverage to wrench up the planks on either side. Rain rattled on the floor around him and thundered on the galleries, but he thought he heard, above the howling of the wind, steps cross the rear gallery as he caught Rose’s wrists and lowered her through the hole to the sinister jungle below. He dropped the gun down after her, then slithered through himself.

  The noise was less down there, and he could definitely hear the creak of weight on the floorboards above.

  Rose took his hand, pushed her way through the thicket (Virgin Mary, Mother of God, PLEASE send the snakes elsewhere … ) and, when they reached the edge of the house, dropped to her hands and knees to crawl through the scrubby growth beyond. January followed. He had a dim impression that the woods of laurel and hackberry that surrounded the house joined with the foliage higher on the ridge at some point, but between the stormy half-light and the violence of the rain, only Rose knew the direction for certain, and it was vital to put distance between themselves and the house immediately. It would take only moments for their hunters to see the enlarged hole in the floor.