Crimson Angel

by Barbara Hambly

  Hannibal raised his brows in shocked dismay. ‘I? I have no control over the fall of the cards.’

  Castallanos sniffed. ‘And if Don Demetrio invites you to his ingenio,’ he added, ‘which he doubtless will, since Santiago is about as interesting as stale bread without oil, stay away from his wife. Her parents married her to him to keep her out of trouble, and he’s like an insane Turk if any man so much as looks at her. Other than that, he’s a good host and he’s got a good cook. But if you even get to see her, don’t kiss her hand.’

  Dressed in his best waistcoat (courtesy of the second-hand shop in Havana) and with his long hair tied back in an old-fashioned queue, Hannibal stepped ashore in the velvety torchlit blackness with the stylishly-gowned Rose clinging to his arm: she’d put off her spectacles again and couldn’t see a thing. January arranged for the luggage to be transported to the Fonda Velasquez before following them up the hill – Santiago seemed to be all hills – to the Plaza des Armas. Entirely ringed in a wall of mountains, the long bay seemed to trap the heat of the day, but even so, the place was, as Castallanos had said, drier and more comfortable than Manzanillo.

  This being Cuba, of course, even at eleven at night – which it was by the time January reached the Plaza – candlelight streamed from every door and window, guitars and fiddles wove their music to the clacking of heels on tiled floors, and market women in bright colors still strolled the steep ways with baskets of fruit, shrimp, or pralines on their heads. Both the cathedral and the Fonda were illuminated like ballrooms, as were, indeed, half a dozen other houses around the square. When January entered from the long colonnade, the downstairs salon was filled with the rattle of dominoes, the smoke of cigars, and the leisured music of voices, and Hannibal was already deep in conversation with the innkeeper.

  Yes, of course there was room for the gracious señor and his servants, immediately, right away. ‘Téo! Fetch in the luggage of the gracious señor! This is your manservant? Excellent! By the gracious señor’s speech he is English?’

  ‘My father was English,’ said Hannibal. ‘My mother was French – and it is in quest of my mother’s family that I have come to Cuba, in fact. My mother’s name was de Gericault – you know it?’

  The man’s whole face brightened with recognition. ‘Naturalmente, my dear brother! At one time my uncle was tailor to Don Absalon!’

  ‘I know very little of the family,’ explained the fiddler, with an extremely convincing air of diffidence, ‘my mother having been a sort of poor relation in France who became estranged from the Comte de Caillot … But chance has brought me to this part of the world, and chance has provided me with word that this was in fact their home.’

  ‘Por supuesto! Think of that! Don Demetrio—!’ The innkeeper put an arm around Hannibal’s shoulder and tugged him across to a table near the open French doors where a small group of men sat. Well-dressed men, January observed, following with quiet respect in their wake. Linen suits in the close-fitting Spanish style, short jackets, many of them as fair-haired as Frenchmen or Germans. Criollos, Spanish Creoles, like the Spanish Creoles still to be found in the French Town or in Mexico. Tributes to the Spanish tradition of limpieza de sangre, with the blood of the conquistadores still pure in their veins though their families hadn’t lived in Spain for fifteen generations.

  ‘Don Demetrio!’ cried the innkeeper again, and a man looked up. Big-shouldered, sturdy and square-faced, the lines around his eyes proclaiming him to be a dozen years older than January, but his hair still the crisp brown of a younger man’s. ‘Here is Señor Sefton of England, that is related to old Don Absalon de Gericault!’

  ‘Don Absalon?’ Don Demetrio Gonzago leaped to his feet and caught Hannibal in a breathtaking embrace. ‘In truth? But I knew Don Absalon well, señor! His son Guibert and I were raised together. Guibert was my dearest friend.’

  FOURTEEN

  What is it that I remember?

  January looked around him at the forest on both sides of the road, the shabby little bohios that surrounded the outskirts of Santiago, rough walls and roofs of thatch. Women in faded skirts cooked over open fires like the women in the quarters back home. The morning’s heat was already brutal, trapped by the thick foliage. Ahead of him, Don Demetrio – who had remained in town last night, in order to conduct his guests personally back to the ingenio called Hispaniola – gestured as he spoke; January touched his borrowed horse’s flank, moved closer to listen.

  But that sense of recalling something – something he’d heard or said or thought in France – returned, stronger than before.

  Something about Saint-Domingue.

  Something about Haiti.

  Something that had almost surfaced when Hannibal had spoken of Amalie de Gericault and her tame physician whom the slaves called Dr Maudit.

  Something that at the time had turned him almost sick with rage and shock.

  I’d never heard of these people then …

  Had I?

  ‘Amalie’s brother, Neron de Gericault – yes, Neron was her brother – did indeed come to live with his cousin at Hispaniola, the year after old Absalon settled there,’ the planter was saying, dividing his warm smile between Hannibal and Rose. ‘He was half-mad by then and a complete nuisance. He insisted on being addressed as the Comte de Caillot, and in his final illness, indeed, he thought he was back in France, with servants to do his every wish and peasants to step out of the road and pull off their caps as he and his family rode by. Poor man, and no wonder: he was in England when the troubles started in France, and his wife and his young sons were arrested. He spent three years in London trying to get them out, and in the end word came to him that they were in the prison of La Force when the mob broke its doors and massacred the prisoners in the courtyard. He was destitute by then, and came to Cuba because he had nowhere else to go. I remember he would fly into rages and accuse Don Absalon of murdering his sister. It upset Guibert very much.’

  ‘I understand Madame Amalie died in childbed?’

  Don Demetrio sighed. ‘She was always … brittle. This is what Guibert told me. That whole side of the family was. Such a contrast with a man like Don Absalon, a lion who never tired. Her megrims and crotchets drove him mad, his valet told my uncle’s coachman …’

  ‘Could her brother have meant that?’ asked Rose diffidently. ‘That Guibert’s birth was too much for her frame to bear?’

  ‘Perhaps. Guibert was a big boy, handsome and strong as a hero, even at six. Often when a woman dies in childbirth, the father will take against the child, but Guibert was absolutely the apple of his father’s eye. But he had a loathing of the deformed and the weak, and had nothing but contempt for his daughter Oliva, who like her mother suffered from a weak back and a deformed pelvis and could not perform the duties of a plantation wife.’

  Rose looked as if she would protest that her granmère had made a home for her husband – and borne him children – in Louisiana, weak back or not, but closed her mouth, as if remembering that she was no more than Hannibal’s concubine. She shifted the angle of her pink-and-white parasol and tried to look bored.

  ‘If Don Absalon hated weakness,’ inquired Hannibal, ‘what possessed him to marry a woman who spent all her time on a chaise longue with a personal physician in attendance?’

  ‘Well, Don Absalon originally hired old Dr Maurir to cure her, you see.’ Don Demetrio nudged his horse to the edge of the trail to let a line of charcoal-burners pass, leading laden donkeys and black with the soot of their trade. They raised cheerful hands in greeting to the planter, who bowed a little in his saddle and called out, asking after his uncle and cousins: ‘My uncle’s men, you understand,’ he explained. ‘The Vizconde. My family has planted coffee in the valley since 1720, though my uncle, like most of our neighbors nowadays, is turning to sugar-planting. When Don Absalon first came there was a good deal of talk that sugar-planting was not the province of a gentleman, as a cafetele is, not to speak of requiring a far greater number of slaves. People were v
ery nervous about blacks, in 1791 … as, indeed, still they are. Don Absalon made his fortune, and had the last laugh, on them and on Cousin Neron. But even with all his money, to the end of poor Neron’s life, Don Absalon tried to force him to sign over to him the de Gericault title and the lands – lands that had been confiscated by the revolutionary government and a title that no longer existed! – in return for a roof over his head. He was absolutely mad on the subject of his “birthright”.’

  ‘And did he sign?’ Rose leaned a little from her saddle as the horses continued up the pass. ‘His sons, I believe you said, were dead? An infamous thing to have done to the poor old man!’

  ‘He never lost hope that one of his boys survived.’ The planter sighed, distressed at the tale of those two old men, squabbling viciously over words in the ruin of their world. ‘He would not disinherit him, he said. Poor Guibert went to his father when Neron was dying – Guibert and I must have been eight or nine at the time – and said to him, “I will have Hispaniola when I’m a man. Why do I need some land in France that I’m never going to see?” It was the only time I ever saw Don Absalon strike his son; he must have lectured him for an hour after that, at the top of his lungs, about the honor of the family and the wrong that the Comtes de Caillot had done him. Poor soul, to be so obsessed.’

  His brow furrowed for a moment at the memory, of the child he had been – a square-faced, sturdy little Spanish boy, January reflected, fair among the dark Cubaño and African faces all around him – and of his grief at these ugly corners of his friend’s family. ‘Poor Neron begged Don Absalon to send his body back to France for burial in Caillot, and for spite he laid him to rest instead at Hispaniola. I’ll show you the stone. Neron Thoyomènes, it says – Thoyomènes was the family name of the Comtes de Caillot. Not even his title. A very sad business.’

  ‘And Dr Maurir …?’

  The planter turned in his saddle and stared January with much the same expression as if one of the horses had spoken.

  January – remembering that he was Hannibal’s valet – immediately ducked his head and said, a little shyly, ‘Forgive me speaking out, señor. But back in Louisiana, I heard tell around the quarters bogey-tales about a Dr Maudit, from back in Saint-Domingue, that used to make zombies and eat little children.’

  ‘Good Lord, yes,’ said Hannibal promptly. ‘A couple of the old mammies whose mothers used to belong to the de Gericault family went on about that old doctor in a way that would give you nightmares!’

  ‘Which I’m sure was their intention.’ Rose looked loftily down her nose.

  Don Demetrio let out a crack of laughter. ‘Lord, yes, I’d almost forgotten that! Fancy that poor old man’s fame crossing to America.’

  ‘I take it he was nothing of the kind?’

  ‘Oh, heavens, no! He was a dust-dry old stick, cold-blooded as a fish. Don Absalon originally hired Maurir to cure Madame Amalie of her back problems. He couldn’t stand to be around physical weakness. Lucien Maurir was some kind of specialist in diseases of the bones back in France, but he hadn’t the money to pursue his researches properly, Guibert said. I know he delivered Guibert – and the two other babies before him who didn’t survive – and nursed Amalie …’

  ‘And then murdered her?’ Hannibal’s eyebrows quirked.

  ‘I thought Don Absalon murdered Amalie,’ put in Rose, and their host laughed again.

  ‘Supposedly – though Neron’s story changed from one day to the next. Don Absalon eventually sent poor Amalie to a distant plantation so she could rest – she was always running off to Cap Francais, and she may have been a bit of a flirt. So what is a man to do, eh? She must have been driven mad with boredom on Saint-Domingue, and I shouldn’t wonder if her husband sent her to L’Ange Rouge Plantation to keep her out of trouble.’

  ‘L’Ange Rouge?’ asked Hannibal. ‘The Crimson Angel?’

  ‘Don Absalon’s other plantation in what was called the “Cul de Sac”, the plain beside Lake Azuei. The Crimson Angel was supposedly the guardian of the Comtes de Caillot. Guibert was born at L’Ange Rouge, and it was Dr Maurir who brought him back to La Châtaigneraie Plantation after his mother died. Cousin Neron may have blamed Don Absalon for keeping Amalie in that isolated place, though with a medical specialist there he can hardly have thought that contributed to her death. Guibert was very fond of old Dr Maurir, though I admit he was a formidable old man and the slaves absolutely hated him.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Rose. ‘Did he eat babies?’

  ‘I never saw him do so,’ returned the planter, with a chuckle. ‘I suspect the Negroes who cleaned his quarters had a peek at his medical books. Guibert and I used to sneak looks at them, when we wanted to scare one another – you know how boys are. Some of the color plates in them were pretty horrifying, and what they must have looked like to the Negroes you can only imagine.’ He grinned again, at the foolish superstitions of savages incapable of understanding.

  ‘He was a small man, I recall, and thin as a monkey. But the biggest bucks from the cane field would walk all the way around the other side of the quarters to keep from crossing his path. Don Absalon was always whipping one or another of the maids for not keeping old Maurir’s room as clean as she should have, for fear of being in the same four walls with him. Even after we were grown, Guibert used to go into Dr Maurir’s rooms every morning and afternoon, to check that the maids had actually cleaned the place and hadn’t just gone in and rattled the washbasin a little, and he would never fail to ask Dr Maurir if he needed anything done, after he began to go blind.’

  ‘Dr Maurir was blind?’ Hannibal’s glance flickered back to January, but January barely saw it.

  Looking out over the dark acres of sugar cane revealed by the turn of the trail as it began to descend, January already knew that it was Lucien Maurir – Dr Maudit – who had forced Mammy Ginette to take him back to Haiti.

  Lucien Maurir. That was the name.

  Dark acres of sugar cane: the riches of Saint-Domingue, rebuilt here … The neat French-style house surrounded by a moat, the bohios of the quarters fenced in by a stout wall of mamposterìa – rubble, stone, and mortar – and a spiked iron gate, legacy of the fear kindled by the fire that had swept over Haiti. A tall gray tower rose above the wall; another marked the sugar mill.

  Yet the sight brought back to him not the sticky heat and constant fear of his childhood, but rather the drum of cold French rain on an attic roof in Paris, and the smell of dusty papers. The very weight and texture of the pages in his hand, and the taste in his mouth of the coffee he’d lived on in those days to stay awake.

  The smell of tallow candles.

  The eyes of the other two medical students who shared the attic with him all those years ago, staring at him in surprise as he had cursed, quietly and from the bottom of his soul, the name of that unknown physician Lucien Maurir.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘He practiced vivisection.’

  Hannibal and Rose merely looked at him, momentarily too shocked to respond.

  The little cavalcade of Don Demetrio’s horses and servants had reached Hispaniola just before the hour of siesta, having taken a leisurely halt for bread, cheese, and wine at a small cafetele on the footslopes of the mountains, where the road from the pass went down into the valley of the Cauto. Upon their arrival Don Demetrio had ordered Claudio, his major-domo, to show them at once to their rooms, built in the French fashion in two long wings behind the main house, which funneled the evening breeze. January was given a tiny chamber beside Hannibal’s – in much of Cuba, he knew, as in Mexico, many masters clung to the old habit of having their servant sleep in the same room with them, on a pallet on the floor, rather than in some other part of the house.

  The day’s heat was at its height. The gallery outside the room and the courtyard, under its vertical golden hammer of heat, were as still as Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. No sound came from the fields outside save the occasional rattle of beetle wings against the side of the house, or the cry of a parr
ot in the trees.

  As he’d laid his saddlebags on the narrow cot – Don Demetrio had sent a runner ahead to tell Claudio to have rooms made up – January had thought, I’m under Absalon de Gericault’s roof.

  I’m under the same roof where Lucien Maurir slept, for eighteen years.

  The wave of anger that swept through him at the thought of the man made the hair rise up on his scalp.

  When Rose and Hannibal had come in, and Rose had said cheerfully, ‘Well, it sounds like Dr Maudit was the one Ginette went back to Haiti with,’ January turned upon them, as if she had jested about the dead.

  ‘He practiced vivisection,’ he said.

  After a startled moment, Hannibal said, ‘Can you be sure? How do you—?’

  ‘I read his articles. When I was a medical student in Paris. I didn’t remember his name, but I knew there was something about a physician who I was certain had worked in Saint-Domingue …’

  ‘Where no one would care,’ said Rose softly, ‘what a master did with his slaves?’ She dropped the train of her riding dress and took her spectacles from her reticule and put them on.

  Hannibal’s eyebrows were halfway up his forehead. ‘You were in Paris … When? Just after the war? And Maurir – or Maudit, and no wonder they called him Accursed – can’t have written them after ’ninety-one …’

  ‘The attic I lived in was crammed with them,’ said January. He sat down on the bed; the ropes beneath the mattress creaked softly with his weight. ‘With scientific journals, I mean – English, French, German, Swedish, going back fifty years, some of them. The house belonged to a physician named Des Essarts. His father had been a physician before him – before the revolution – and had been a member of just about every scientific society in Europe. He’d collected journals on everything: minerals, frogs, wedding customs of the Chinese. Two-thirds of them, the pages hadn’t even been cut. Des Essarts fils had simply packed them away in the attic, and then rented out the space that was left to students.’