Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘I’d have given a lot to see your face if they had,’ put in Rose.

  ‘We’d have fought our way out,’ retorted Hannibal, ‘in the best tradition of Dumas … But like Time’s Wingèd Chariot, I cannot help hearing their footfalls at our backs. ’T’were the better part of valor, as our friend Lieutenant Shaw would say, to absquatulate without loss of time. At least in the wilds of Santiago we’ll have a better chance of seeing them coming.’

  ‘If they’re not there before us,’ said January thoughtfully.

  ‘The helpful Mr Butler made no mention of anyone asking after the de Gericaults before me.’

  January grunted. Beautiful as Havana was – and much as he longed to explore those narrow streets with Rose – he heartily agreed with Hannibal. As the hunted, all they could do for the moment was to keep ahead of the hunters. Moreover, in the course of the evening, the valet William had told him of three separate occasions on which attempts had been made by rancheradores to corner him alone: ‘I swear it, Ben, sometimes I think they’re watching this house for me!’ One reason William – who seldom left the courtyard even when his master wasn’t expected back for hours – had been so glad to go to the Posada Caballero that evening was because the place had been vouched for by Ilario as relatively safe, and because he would be with another black man who spoke Spanish.

  Walking back, even the hundred yards or so from the district along the canal, January had been deeply conscious of the narrow blackness of the streets around them, and had been careful to keep to those ways where lights still fell from the windows above.

  THIRTEEN

  After forcing Hannibal – with equal applications of black coffee and threats of violence – from bed shortly before noon the following day, January took Rose, and a portion of the fiddler’s winnings of the previous evening, and went to the harbor to look for passage to Santiago while Hannibal paid a call on the colonial archives. Since giving up liquor and opium, Hannibal’s card-playing had improved, considerably aided by the fact that since giving up liquor and opium, the fiddler was frequently the only sober person at any given gaming table. Every social occasion in Cuba or anywhere else included a card room, with the exception of the house parties of the Americans in New Orleans (‘Why is it considered Christian not to have a good time?’), so Hannibal had spent the previous evening at the Marquesa’s putting a lifetime of dissipation to good use.

  At early Mass that morning, January had encountered a number of men he’d met at the Posada Caballero on the previous evening, and a number of them had recommended the small coastal trader Santana. Its captain, Serafin Castallanos, was honest, and plied these waters regularly, and when January booked passage ‘for my master and myself’ he was favorably impressed with the man. On the way back from the harbor, he and Rose stopped at a shop in the Calle San Pedro which dealt in second-hand clothing, and though most of the frocks there had been handed down from mistress to maidservants and worn to dilapidation, Rose found three that not only fit her, but that would also not contradict her claims to be the mistress of a reasonably well-off gentleman related (possibly) to the Comte de Caillot.

  ‘But I’ll continue to wear what I have until we set sail,’ she decided as the shop-boy raced away to find a hack for them. ‘The last thing I need is to be confronted in the street by that yellow silk shawl’s former owner.’

  Across the street, January mentally identified two men watching them, of the rough bully-boy type he guessed were rancheradores. At least, he reflected dourly, there was no law in Havana against black persons taking cabs.

  Back at the Calle San Ignacio they found Hannibal in the courtyard. ‘A brief entr’acte,’ the fiddler explained, ‘between making free among the colonial land records in the Palacio de Capitan-General, and paying for the privilege by having dinner with the Archivist, whom I understand to be one of the dullest men on the island. He was assistant to the head of the Spanish College of Heralds under King Charles back before the days of Napoleon, and the only way I could obtain assistance in tracking down the de Gericault family here in Cuba was to promise my fullest attention to him this evening, on the fascinating subject of the precise relationships between the Cordoba-Figueroa y Moncado family and the Perez de Barrada branch of the Condes de Empúries, and similar enthralling topics.’ He dropped a lump of muscovado sugar in a cup of Anazuela’s coffee. He was in shirtsleeves in the blistering heat, his long hair pinned up with a lady’s comb, and around them the courtyard was somnolent: the hour of siesta was at hand.

  January removed his hat and bowed low. ‘Such self-immolation on the altar of duty renders me speechless.’

  ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori bore,’ Hannibal punned. ‘An hour and a half of listening to the Conde de Montevierdo – the Archivist insists upon the title, though I think he was stripped of it by the Bonapartes, and no wonder – would render you not only speechless, but numb and blind as well. I was irresistibly reminded of those Roman nobles who faked their own deaths in order to be carried out of the Emperor Nero’s mandatory recitals upon the lyre. But no matter! To serve my friends is the whole of my aim in life, not counting the cost—’

  ‘Benjamin’s already said thank you,’ pointed out Rose heartlessly, and Hannibal grinned. ‘What did you learn for your trouble?’

  ‘Not a great deal beyond what gossip unearthed last night. No record of children by either mistress – neither of whom seem to have made the voyage from Saint-Domingue with Grandpa. A plaçée in Santiago – at least a woman in Santiago to whom he gave a small house and a hundred and twenty dollars a month. Two sons and a daughter: one son died in 1820, and the other, Alejandro, would be thirty-two now and the daughter thirty – Felicia is her name. God knows where they are now. But obviously de Gericault made no effort to bring any of them to the mainland with him, and in 1811 Felicia and Alejandro’s mama was given another house, also in Santiago, by a planter named Zapata, so she clearly wasn’t spending all her nights weeping into her pillow. She died in 1834.’

  He flipped a page in the much-battered shagreen notebook he’d pulled from his pocket. Torn-off fragments of notepaper and scented billets-doux fluttered like petals to the rough wooden table. ‘As that idiot Madame de Agramonte informed Rose last night, de Gericault and his son came seldom into Havana, but nothing is known against them. They were expelled strictly on the grounds of an unfashionable nationality when Napoleon foisted his older brother on to the throne of Spain.’

  January picked up one of the loose notes. Creased, as if it had been folded small, it contained only the words ‘Tonight, 1. Aphrodite statue in garden’ in Spanish, in a woman’s rather ill-formed hand. January rolled his eyes as he handed it back. ‘I hope you’ll remember that the tide turns at four and we need to be on the Santana by then?’

  Hannibal glanced at the note. ‘This was last night’s.’

  ‘What about the old blind man?’ asked Rose, to forestall January’s clearly-upcoming remark on his friend’s love life. ‘The evil Dr Maudit? Nobody I spoke to last night seemed to have heard of him.’

  ‘Opinion is divided,’ said Hannibal. ‘And no official dramatis personae of the de Gericault household exists in the records. A report dated March of 1809 mentions the departure of Absalon de Gericault, planter and widower, and Guibert de Gericault, his son, along with a number of slaves. A planter named de Herredia at the gambling table last night seemed to recall his own mother telling him about the family, and he rather thought she’d said Grandpa Absalon’s wicked cousin the Comte de Caillot lived with them for a time, corroborating Mammy Zett’s story. She seemed to think Grandpa Absalon murdered the Comte, but others contend the Evil Dr Maudit was in reality a harmless old man who had been Amalie de Gericault’s personal physician.’

  ‘A Frenchman?’ January frowned, with a momentary sensation of having his sleeve snagged by a rose thorn. A recollection …

  ‘Presumably, though his name might not actually have been Maudit. Accursed sounds a little melodramatic to ha
ve occurred naturally. I expect, if Madame’s health was poor, de Gericault was wealthy enough to attach a man to keep her going, particularly if he hoped to get his hooks into one of the family titles for his son. Cap Francais was by all accounts a fairly sophisticated place before the rebellion, where one could obtain the latest Paris fashions and the latest Paris politics.’

  ‘Except that, unlike the situation in Paris, one man in twenty literally held the power of life and death over the other nineteen.’ January spoke softly, anger over the myth of the tropical paradise drawing his mind aside from that tugging sense of something important, like a half-remembered dream …

  It had been in Paris, whatever it was.

  Something he’d heard? Something he’d said?

  To whom? Why?

  ‘One man in twenty could, with very little trouble, rape a woman – or a child, boy or girl – whenever or however he wanted to do so. Could have a man, or a woman, or a child for that matter, killed, just by saying, “That man struck me,” or, “That woman tried to put poison into my food …”’ Mammy Zett’s words came back to him, and the terrors of his own childhood. ‘The grands blancs – the rich whites – didn’t know what it was to open their own windows, to wash their own clothing or pick it up off the floor if they dropped it. Every slave in their households was desperate to be favored by them, pandered to them, tried to make himself or herself indispensable, to avoid being passed along to something worse.’

  But as he spoke he wondered what had brought back the memory of that stifling loft he’d lived in, before he’d met his beautiful Ayasha in Paris. Before he’d turned his face from the care of the sick and the injured …

  ‘And if you don’t think men of wealth and social position in Paris couldn’t do precisely the same thing to the perfectly white poor who live in the city – both before and after 1789 –’ the lift of Hannibal’s eyebrows carried a whole ladder of parallel wrinkles up his forehead – ‘you clearly never spent much time visiting the law courts there, or talking to people who’d been in its prisons.’

  Hannibal finished his coffee, and rose. The sun had past its zenith, but heat transformed the courtyard into a crucible of molten gold. Beyond the gate, the street was silent. ‘And so to bed, to ready myself for the unbearable jollities of the night. My beautiful one …’ He took Rose’s hand. ‘Can I by any means persuade you to accompany me to the palacio of the Conde de Montevierdo the Excruciating this evening, to keep me from running mad with boredom? He has assured me that his wife is a spritely young minx of sixty, given to washing the feet of the poor and investigating the morals of indigent women, and she would be most pleased to make the acquaintance of any companion I should choose to bring—’

  ‘Not a café-crème plaçée, I’ll wager,’ returned Rose primly.

  ‘I shall introduce you as an Italian widow whom I encountered at the consulate.’

  ‘You shall have no opportunity to do anything of the kind. We were at sea for a week and in Havana for two days, and I haven’t spent more than a few peaceful hours in the company of my husband since we left Louisiana … and part of that time we were hiding from assassins in a cane field.’ She put her hand over January’s, and her eyes met his with that quicksilver smile. ‘I must and will spend an evening as a wife.’

  ‘πάθει μάθος. It is by suffering that one learns.’ Hannibal handed January his notebook and disappeared into the cobalt shadows of his doorway. January thumbed the scraps of notepaper and the jotted memoranda. There were three more love-notes, besides the one from the previous evening; Hannibal re-emerged from his room like a dilapidated squirrel from its hole, plucked them from January’s fingers, sorted through them for the one that said ‘North-east corner of the square, midnight – M’, and thrust it in his pocket.

  ‘Just as well we’re sailing before dawn,’ sighed January as his friend disappeared once more into the gloom of his chamber. ‘The last thing we need is an irate husband demanding satisfaction. And I,’ he added as he led Rose to the servants’ stair that ascended to his own stifling cubbyhole, ‘will cease to be an irate husband once I have achieved satisfaction – and given it, I hope and trust.’

  They anchored in the shelter of Guadiana Bay the first night, after a day of sailing which began with Hannibal scampering down the wharves in the pre-dawn darkness with his boots in his hand and smudges of rouge on his shirt, to spring aboard as the tide turned. The second evening, with the sun like spilled treasure on the waters and the green mountains rising above the palm-fringed shore, they put in at the Isle of Pines; the third they spent in the small bay at Trinidad, the hub of the sugar plantations along the lush San Luis Valley. The fourth day they skimmed to the west of the long archipelago called the Gardens of the Queen, tiny islets separated from Cuba’s shore by twenty miles of shallow, sparkling water …

  ‘And crawling with smugglers,’ added Captain Castallanos, when Rose and January stood mid-afternoon by the rail of the little sloop to admire those low green benches scattered like floating carpets on the turquoise glitter of the waves. ‘All these islands give the rancheradores a perfect hiding-place from the British navy – they’re the ones who’re really trying to stamp out the trade – and give smugglers hideouts from the Spanish authorities in Havana.’

  Smoke from his brown cigarette trickled into the following wind.

  ‘Most of the American dealers come into Manzanillo rather than Havana, to arrange cargoes into the Barataria. In Havana the liquor’s better –’ he grinned with his white teeth – ‘but you never can tell whether the man you’re dealing with is actually working for the government. In Manzanillo you can be sure … and the liquor’s not that bad.’

  ‘Remind me,’ said January, ‘not to go ashore in Manzanillo. You’ve been around these islands,’ he added. ‘Have you ever heard of a woman named Salomé Saldaña?’

  ‘Salomé, sure.’ The brown eyes flicked to Olympe’s gris-gris that January wore around his neck. ‘You a friend of hers, my brother?’

  ‘I was a friend of her mother’s,’ said Rose. ‘Her mother came to Louisiana many years ago, looking for – I think – Salomé’s daughter—’

  Sadness and anger darkened the man’s eyes. ‘Siney,’ he said. ‘Mélusina.’

  ‘Did she ever find her?’

  He shook his head, a small gesture. ‘I had the privilege of slitting open the guts of the man who took her,’ he said quietly, ‘and leaving him to die in an alley in Trinidad … But no. Ginette never found her.’

  At the helm, the pilot called out something to one of the men in the rigging; sunlight flashed on the sea. The water here was so clear that January could see the pale forms of the sharks that followed the ship, dozens of them, sinister triangular dorsal-fins cutting the waves.

  ‘Would she be in these parts?’

  ‘Like you, my beautiful sister,’ Castallanos said, ‘she don’t go into Manzanillo. Only if she has business to transact with one of the smugglers, or …’ He hesitated. ‘Or with somebody else. Mostly she keeps to the mountains, and she keeps on the move.’

  ‘And did she ever speak to you,’ asked January, ‘about her mother making a journey to Haiti with an old blind white man? This would be just before or just after the French were expelled.’

  ‘Ah, I was just a gleam in my mama’s eye then.’ January could tell the man was lying, but he did it smoothly and well. ‘Mambo Ginette kept quiet in her home and didn’t travel much – except that one time, to Louisiana, to seek for her granddaughter. But when she came home, she dropped out of sight again.’

  ‘Hiding?’ It passed through January’s mind that whatever information Jeoffrey Vitrac had had in that yellow envelope about Salomé Saldana’s whereabouts, their pursuers now knew.

  The dark eyes cut sidelong to him. ‘In this country,’ returned Castallanos, ‘if you’re Negro, or close to it, you’re always hiding from someone.’

  Nevertheless, the Santana put in at Manzanillo on Thursday night, and January and Rose st
ayed on-board and out of sight, while Hannibal went ashore with the captain for a little discreet card-playing and hobnobbery with the Brotherhood of the Coasts. Castallanos traded goods he shouldn’t have been selling for things that were loaded in the corners of the hold and covered with tarpaulins: tobacco, coffee, and rum free of Spanish trade regulations or American or British duties. Both men came back full of news about who was bringing in Africans from Dahomey and selling them to Americans – in defiance of US law – to be resold at the big smuggler-depots in the swamps outside New Orleans, and who was running in weapons and gunpowder and the writings of the exiled Padre Varela to the Cuban Suns of Liberty.

  Running along the edge of the north-west winds, the Santana left the swampy coast and swung wide to avoid the treacherous shallows of the bay of Guacanayabo, the Sierra Maestra rising before them, straight out of the water like an emerald wall. ‘Will we be safe in Santiago?’ January asked, when they rounded the mountain tip of the island, set their course straight east into warm gray squalls and the smell of a hurricane somewhere at sea.

  ‘Compared to the French Town in New Orleans? No.’ The captain raised one mobile eyebrow at January’s livery of knee-breeches and tailed jacket. ‘Compared to Manzanillo or Havana?’ He shrugged. ‘You watch your back and you keep close to that “master” of yours … and you’re safe as any black man on this island. There’s no American consul in Santiago,’ he added, turning to Hannibal. ‘But you take rooms at the Fonda Velasquez on the Plaza des Armas, and you’ll meet pretty much everyone in town in the gambling rooms. Most of the planters from the Cauto Valley have town houses in Santiago rather than Manzanillo – there’s fewer mosquitoes, and the water’s better. You’ll be able to meet Don Demetrio there at this season of the year. Ask old Rosario the innkeeper to introduce you. It’s perfectly respectable. But watch out you don’t win too much off him at cards,’ he added, shaking his finger at the fiddler. ‘He’s a bad loser.’