Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  The scrub ended. Twenty feet lay between them and the top of the ridge. Rose caught his hand again, gathered her feet under her to rise and make a dash; January withdrew his fingers, shook his head. Gestured: You go that way, I’ll go this way.

  Divide their fire.

  Rose nodded and wiped futilely at the rain that blurred her spectacles.

  They kissed, sprang to their feet, ran.

  Fifteen feet to the ridge line. Ten.

  A gun barked behind him, and he heard the soft phut of a bullet striking earth. Didn’t dare look back for Rose, just kept his head down. Another gunshot …

  On the other side of the ridge lay cane fields. Dark-green, elbow-high at this season and rank with undergrowth. (More snakes. More rats … )

  The corner of his eye gave him a glimpse of Rose as she flashed down the short hillslope and straight into the cane, like a thin teenaged boy in her pants and shirt. He darted in, instants later, fifty feet further along the field’s edge. Leaves cut his arms like razor blades. Ants swarmed in outrage, up his legs and over his hands. He crawled across the rows in Rose’s direction, splashing through the mud of the ditches between and wondering if the weight and size of his body were going to leave a visible trail. The men had to run down the gallery steps, climb the ridge …

  He rolled himself longways against the cane on one of the hillocks on which it grew, in the middle of the unweeded mess of cane leaves, goat weed, Spanish grass.

  A gun cracked, some distance to his left.

  Shooting to flush us out?

  The rain will wash our tracks …

  He stayed where he was. The noise of the rain on the leaves drowned out other sounds, but he guessed they were looking …

  How many of them? Two in the cane, one on the ridge, watching to see if we run? Have the Indians and Seth Maddox from New Orleans joined them yet?

  At least he’d washed off the ants.

  Rose …

  He lay in the cane, hugging his useless bird gun, with the rain soaking his back and hair as it passed in audible waves over the lake of cane. It lightened to a drizzle, and the afternoon around him slowly brightened again and grew hot. The puddles steamed. January stayed where he was. Once he heard – or thought he heard – someone pass through the cane rows near him, crashing and rustling through the thick barricades of the leaves. It might only have been one of the island’s wild pigs. The ant bites stung and throbbed. So did the wound he’d taken back in Washington, an aching pull deep in his side.

  He’d seen his childhood playmates try to hide in the cane and knew that, with the plants at this height, if he moved the hunters could follow him by the threshing of the leaves.

  Heat like steamed towels. Smoke rising eerily from the puddles in the ditches between the planted hillocks. Gnats like the wrath of a righteous God, and swallows like angels, gorging their fill.

  Swift-falling tropical twilight.

  Owls.

  January crawled to the end of the row, looked up at the ridge above him. No silhouetted shape watched over the field. Still he crawled to the other end of the row before he dared stand, and then followed the road that divided the fields on the bay side of the island from the marshy, mosquito-haunted mudflats, going west toward Chouteau. On the bay, the shrimp boats were coming in, and in the distance the sonorous bray of the conch shells that in these parts still served as trumpets announced the end of the working day.

  Enough light lingered in the sky for those who’d spent since cockcrow cutting wood or weeding Michie Aramis’ corn to put in a few more hours of labor on their own gardens – shell-blow grounds, they’d been called on Bellefleur. Long before he came in sight of Chouteau’s rooftops he smelled the smoke of the kitchen hearth and of the dozen open fire-pits that dotted the quarters. Then the cook fires came in sight in the warm dusk, and Chouteau’s dim-lighted windows, and he heard the voices of the children as they played among the flottants in the dark.

  Natchez Jim arrived the following noon, with Hannibal Sefton and – of all people – January’s sister Olympe. January and Rose strode down the path to the landing, Rose with her face scratched from the cane leaves but otherwise none the worse for their adventure of yesterday: she’d been sitting on the dark gallery last night, watching for him, when he’d climbed its steps.

  Olympe sprang over the gunwale and embraced January with fervor unlike her usual cool irony: ‘I seen you in the cane,’ she explained, looking up into his face. ‘Just before sunset. You were crouched down in the cane rows. You had a gun with you, but you couldn’t use it … You don’t think I been lookin’ in the ink for you, brother, since you went away?’ she added, with her slight, crooked-toothed smile. ‘You got bit by ants …’

  She turned his hand over in hers and looked at the crusty dots of drying salt-and-soda paste on his skin.

  ‘You don’t think I been burnin’ a white candle for you every night, and ask Ogun Badagris to watch your steps and see you safe?’ she asked more softly. ‘Every night I ask Mamzelle l’Araignée –’ she named the private deity who lived in a black-painted bottle on a shelf in her house – ‘for word of you.’

  ‘The effectual fervent prayer of the righteous availeth much,’ corroborated Hannibal, and he straightened up from kissing Rose’s hand. ‘And so, I am pleased to say, do some of the most ferocious mosquito-smudges I have encountered in my life. An enlivening journey. The bayous aren’t as crowded or noisy as the gutters of Bourbon Street, but on the whole I think I’ve been wise in swearing off roofless nights for the time being.’

  Olympe grinned and poked him with a sharp elbow. ‘This worthless child came telling me he was off in the morning to keep you out of trouble in Cuba, and that night Mamzelle l’Araignée came and whispered in my ear, whispered to come with him here. He gonna need brick dust on his shoes, she say to me. He gonna need iron in his pockets and the mark of Ogun on his brow, Ogun that watches over the strong.’ She spoke lightly, but her eyes, dark and somber as those of a prophetess, fixed on January’s face, as if fearing he would turn away with some pious remark.

  And as a good Christian, January knew he should do exactly that. Get thee behind me, Satan was universally recommended by the priests in New Orleans. Or at least, Thanks but no thanks.

  Instead he asked, ‘When did you see me?’ as he gathered up Hannibal’s two carpet bags (one of them was actually his sister Dominique’s) and Olympe’s satchel. ‘Jim, I hope you’re staying to dinner.’

  ‘It’s why I caught a couple of extra catfish.’ The boatman lifted a string of them from the back of the Black Goose.

  They travelled in a little procession up toward the house.

  ‘I saw you night before last,’ said Olympe quietly. ‘Them ant bites look fresher than that.’

  ‘You didn’t happen to see the men after us?’ inquired Rose, and Olympe shook her head.

  ‘So far as I can tell the house isn’t being watched any more,’ added Hannibal. ‘And the good lieutenant has heard nothing of the Mobilites. I have pursued enquiries of my own through the local dens of iniquity – an exhausting pursuit, considering how many of them there are in New Orleans – and have ascertained that though our friends were known by sight and by name, nobody recalled much about them. They certainly didn’t go about the town asking after the Crimson Angel or the Vitrac family. Belle Madame—’ He bowed deeply as Alice came smiling shyly down the gallery steps.

  Rose made introductions.

  ‘Please permit me to kiss your hands and feet in thanks for the shelter of your roof. This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself … I hope and trust your good husband’s health has recovered enough to share this with you?’ And he produced from the satchel at his side a bottle of very fine French wine which, January recognized, must have cost the fiddler a month’s earnings and an advance against his best waistcoat at the pawnshop.

  And he reflected briefly on his friend’s commitment to sobriety. Three years ago the fiddler would
n’t have been capable of transporting a bottle of French wine two blocks, let alone sixty miles.

  It served, needless to say, to elevate his welcome from ‘the friend who’s going to help Rose’ to a valued guest in his own right and smoothed the social awkwardness occasioned by the presence of a quadroon half-sister’s coal-black husband (who might eat with the family in private) and his equally coal-black sister (who couldn’t, not without raising the stigma of, ‘They eat with blacks …’), to say nothing of Natchez Jim.

  Rose and Olympe set a small table on the gallery of the ‘cottage’, fifty feet behind the ‘big house’ at the foot of the ridge. There they feasted on the excellent étouffée that Mammy Fanfan – Aramis’ cook – made of catfish and shrimp, while across the yard, in the minuscule ‘big house’, Hannibal dined in state on the same viands with the family, at a table presided over – for the first time since his shooting – by Aramis.

  Olympe, who – January was interested to note – appeared to be showing the beginnings of a pregnancy of her own, reassured Rose of Baby John’s health and safety. ‘I know you want to hear that he cries every night from missing you, but he’s quiet. He look around for you, every time somebody comes into the room, but he loves for Chou-Chou to hold him –’ she named her second son, Claud, aged eight – ‘and Paul. When I went down to the wharf, to make Jim bring me down to you here, I got Zizi-Marie to come and take care of him at my house, and he was happy to see her. Have no fear for him, Rose. He born with the sign of thunder on him, and thunder’s a strong sign.’

  Rose smiled – probably at the thought of their solemn and methodical son bearing so impressive a badge – but leaned across and grasped her sister-in-law’s hand. ‘Tell me about seeing Benjamin in the ink,’ she urged. ‘What did that look like? How is it done?’ She might be a scientist, January reflected, but her mind scouted out beyond the boundaries of the scientific, European education that both he and she had received. And he smiled at himself. I say, ‘That’s nonsense, we know people don’t see people in ink-bowls …’

  She says, ‘What if it’s not? What can I learn from it?’

  And though Olympe had brusquely excluded his skepticism from her practice of voodoo when they were in their teens, now she explained, in the matter-of-fact tones of a woman explaining how to make bread, the lighting of candles, the drawing of vèves, the prayers to Papa Legba, the Old Man of the Crossroad, and to Fa of the Iron Cane. ‘Most people ask a question, and for that I read the cards, or corn kernels on a tray. If I’ve prayed, I’ll see the roads that run between the cards, or between the kernels, and like as not I see then that the question they’re asking me isn’t what they really want to know.’

  ‘And I imagine,’ January added gently, ‘it helps that, as a voodoo, everyone in town tells you everything, so you know without your customer telling you that she’s in love with her neighbor’s husband or that her brother is soaking money off her …’

  ‘For a Christian man, you got a limited view of God, brother,’ returned Olympe with a smile, ‘if you think God don’t bring me all that information from one place and another for a reason. But sometimes –’ she turned back to Rose, in the dim glow of the candles on the table, the smudges set all around them on the gallery rail – ‘I don’t know enough. Then I’ll pray to Papa Legba, and to Fa of the Iron Cane, and look in a candle flame, or a bowl of ink, and my hoodoo, my spirit, will come on me and ride me. Then I’ll remember the things she sees in the ink with my eyes. Not often. I looked for sight of my brother’s face every night for a week and saw him only twice. Once, far off, I saw you on a little boat in the ocean, turning before a storm. Your hair was all undone –’ she reached out to touch Rose’s black tignon – ‘and you were laughing at him, for being an old hen about being on the sea.’

  ‘That,’ returned Rose with a grin, ‘would be any time we’ve gone sailing.’

  But January was silent.

  ‘The other time I saw him in the cane rows. It was just before sunset, and the smoke was rising off the puddles between the rows. Men were hunting him – hunting you both, I thought. I see these things as if they’re tiny as ants, but right up close to my eye; as if they’re reflected in the ink from someplace far off. These men that hunt you, these men that tried to kill you in the market, that killed your brother … I’ve tried to see them, too. Thought on them, went to the place where they stayed – the Verrandah – and got the maid to let me in their rooms, so’s I could touch the walls they’d touched and smell the pillows for the scent of their hair. When I looked in the ink for them, Mamzelle l’Araignée wouldn’t come. Wouldn’t show me anything. But for about a minute, the ink gave off the smell of blood.’

  The back doors of the main house opened then, and Hannibal and the family emerged, Aramis leaning painfully on the arms of his wife and guest. January and his party rose from their own little table and, smudges in hand, crossed through the soft twilight of the yard to join them on the back gallery, and Hannibal opened up his fiddle case. The smudges were set around the gallery rail, and Mammy Fanfan brought out coffee and pralines, white and pink and gold.

  Fiddle music of any kind was a rare treat on the island. January fetched his guitar, and the men and women in the quarters, gathered below the gallery, produced banjos, drums, whistles and spoons. Even the four cane-hands whom Alice had placed as a perimeter guard around the house – to the severe curtailment of the plantation’s labor force – came in close to listen, grinning and tapping their feet when the songs grew lively. Stories were told, not of Saint-Domingue or murder or family treasure, but absurd tales of men and women of the parish, or of Alice’s Uncle Dondon who claimed to have sailed with Lafitte.

  It was long after midnight when all the company – there were now far too many to shelter in the attic, and Aramis appointed a couple of night guards – returned to the guest house. ‘The Triton’s leaving New Orleans tomorrow, for Havana,’ said Natchez Jim as he helped Rose unroll clean pallets – stuffed with new moss – on the floor. ‘If we get ourselves out of here in the morning, we should catch them as they pass through La Balize.’

  ‘Your Uncle Veryl contributed thirty dollars toward our passage,’ added Hannibal, wrapping his violin in its usual cocoon of old silk scarves before stowing it in its case. He looked, January thought, better than he had in town, with his long hair braided into a tidy queue and some of the feverish exhaustion gone from his eyes. ‘And, hoping it would be all right with you, I solicited another fifty dollars from Monsieur and Madame Viellard. Nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecunia possit: I have not the faintest notion what awaits us in Cuba, but if one is being hunted it’s always better to have money in one’s pockets. Or even,’ he added wistfully, ‘if one is not.’

  ‘You are a scholar and a gentleman.’ Rose embraced him. ‘And if that wretched treasure isn’t run off with somebody before we get to it – or wasn’t looted years ago by the sinister Dr Maudit – you will surely be entitled to your share.’

  ‘Dr Maudit?’ Olympe frowned sharply.

  ‘The evil “friend of the family”, who might or might not have been the man Mammy Ginette was forced to guide back to Haiti in 1809,’ Rose explained. ‘Who might or might not have corrupted Great-Granpère into the ways of sin, according to Old Dulcie and Mammy Zett here. Though the old blind man Mammy Ginette guided could also have been the equally evil Comte de Caillot, Great-Granpère’s cousin, or in fact—’

  ‘He’s a spirit.’ Olympe sank back on to her pallet and unwrapped her tignon. Beneath it, her hair was ebony-dark and nappy as sheep’s wool, and braided tight into a thick mass of narrow plaits like a pickaninny’s, tied with kitchen string. It gave her face the wild aspect of a spirit herself. ‘A Guédé, the get of Baron Samedei, the children of night and wickedness. Dr Maudit, that cuts up little children alive—’

  ‘That’s him,’ agreed January.

  Rose objected, ‘Dulcie speaks of him as if he were a real person. Mammy Zett, too. He can’t be both, surely.
’

  ‘Of course he can. Many of the loa were living men and women—’ January glanced across at his sister for corroboration, and she nodded, dark eyes narrowed with thought. ‘Great kings, some of them, or ancestors who watch over their children.’

  ‘Yes, but this was only thirty years ago,’ pointed out Hannibal.

  ‘You ever see one of those silly pictures they paint back East,’ asked January, ‘of George Washington in a toga sitting amongst the Roman gods on a cloud, watching over Henry Clay or Daniel Webster or whoever? He’s only been dead for forty years.’ He turned again to Olympe. ‘What do they say about him? Dr Maudit, I mean, not George Washington.’

  ‘That he was an evil blankitte,’ she replied softly. ‘He walked the roads of Saint-Domingue in slavery times and would steal away children if they stayed out too late. Steal away women, too, and keep them locked in a stone house in the mountains guarded by zombis – by the walking dead. That he had a treasure in this house—’

  January and Rose traded a glance.

  ‘—and books, too, of evil magic that gave him his power.’

  ‘Sounds like somebody’s been reading The Tempest,’ remarked Hannibal.

  ‘Don’t laugh, fiddler. Nor you, brother. And don’t tell me there ain’t power in the world greater than the bodies of the men it wells up through, the way water wells up through rock. I never thought to cross his path.’

  ‘Who did you hear this from?’ asked January after a time.

  But Olympe had relapsed into thought and only shook her head. Her dark eyes seemed to gaze out past the barred shutters of the big, square chamber that constituted the whole of the guest house on its high piers. In time she gathered up her modest satchel and went outside.

  Hannibal produced two decks of cards from a pocket and laid out a three-handed game of bezique around the single candle, for himself, Jim, and Rose. January lay for a time on the wide bed, listening to the murmurs of the card players and the slow pulse of the sea. Once it seemed to him that he was dreaming – only, it wasn’t anything as definite as a dream – about the big, shadowy attic room he’d shared with two other medical students, when first he’d arrived in Paris: it had been like this, he thought. Nearly empty, save for a single table perennially littered with their pooled lecture notes, every corner of the room stacked with anatomy texts – Hunter, Browne, Vesalius – old medical journals, and assorted bones. In the darkness, around a single candle, they’d talk: Breyer from Nürnberg who lived across the hall, the thin bespectacled Indian Jogal, and January himself, the sounds of the Paris streets below whispering like the sea …