Manzanillo. A long day’s sail around the western arm of the island, if that was where they’d taken her …
The world seemed to collapse, burying him in darkness.
‘You love her, don’t you, brother?’ asked Téo softly. ‘For all she’s your master’s—’
‘I love her.’ His mind felt blank. There had to be something he could do, but nothing came to him. ‘Where is Lobo’s house?’ he asked at last.
‘They won’t hear nothing till Saturday night at the earliest, depending on the wind. More like Sunday. Believe me, you’ll be first to hear.’
January opened his mouth to protest, but asked himself, What do you want to do? Sit on Mrs Lobo’s doorstep? He felt as if he’d been struck by lightning, or had taken a stunning blow to the head. Walking back to the bohio on the other side of the bay seemed unthinkable—
Walk there and do what? WAIT? All night tonight, all day tomorrow … ‘More like Sunday … ’
He pressed his fist to his lips, trembling as if smitten with deadly chills. Holy Mary, Mother of God …
The words circled on themselves, going nowhere.
Holy Mary, Mother of God …
Thank you. Thank you that Hannibal saw it. Thank you that he’s in pursuit.
Dear God, where do I even start?
I brought her here.
Endless pacing, miles, like trying to outwalk the Devil. Back and forth across the rickety little hut. Back and forth across the point of land between the bay and the cove behind the point. Around and around the thickets of palmetto and banana plants, stealing out fifty times during the course of Friday to watch the road, or stare at the passers-by on the path along the bay. Cursing himself, cursing Don Demetrio, cursing the slave-stealer El Chirlo – if that was indeed the man who’d taken her – through the endless sweltering hours of Thursday night, Friday night, and all over again Saturday as he listened to the grasshoppers creak, the frogs peep and grunt and glak their never-ending hellish chorus.
I brought her here.
He knew well enough that if they’d remained in New Orleans they’d both have been killed: possibly Baby John as well.
He knew if they’d stayed on Grand Isle, Bryce Jericho’s men would have overtaken them and killed them there.
It made no difference. The pain in his heart did not lessen by the weight of a single hair.
Rain on the thatch.
The slow surge of wavelets in the cove.
She can’t be gone.
Old Ginette, who had voyaged from this island to Grand Isle when Rose was ten, must have said the same thing of her granddaughter, when rancheradores carried her away. Salomé Saldaña had never seen her child again.
It can’t be true.
Follow her? Seek her? For how long?
Months? Years?
Or go back to New Orleans and be the best father I can be to Baby John?
Or will Jericho and his men still come after me there?
He wanted to weep and couldn’t. It wasn’t yet time for tears.
There was bread and cheese and oranges in the bohio, but he ate none of it. Had Rose simply vanished, had Hannibal not been there to set out in pursuit, he, Benjamin, would have already departed for Manzanillo – that hive of slave-traders – alone …
Though he told himself there was no certainty that this El Chirlo of whom Téo spoke was in fact the slave-stealer who’d taken her. It was only a guess.
Manzanillo was only a guess.
It could have been anyone. Going anywhere.
Sometimes he found himself cursing Hannibal, though the fiddler hadn’t been aware that Doña Jacinta was with them when they’d left Hispaniola Plantation. Even had she not fled, would Don Demetrio have assisted in finding a stolen slave-woman?
He didn’t know.
Other times he knew, with the clarity of a man on the scaffold, that the whole of his life, of his heart, lay in the shaky hands of a consumptive fiddler to whom he had been kind.
His faith told him that it was impossible that Rose had been taken because he, Benjamin, had gone seeking the orishas, had listened to Lazaro Ximo, though he had no doubt that any number of his acquaintances – both white and black – would tell him that this was so. In the deeps of the second night, he wondered if they were right.
Late on Sunday afternoon, on his tenth or eleventh aimless prowl to the shore, he saw one of the shrimp boats crossing the bay toward him with three men in it, one of whom wore a red shirt such as Téo wore. January had, through these endless days, taken care never to show himself on the beach when he walked there, keeping instead to the fringe of banana plants just above the tideline. Now he waited until they were halfway across, and, yes, that was Téo in the boat, with a smaller man, stout and gnarled like a wind-bitten tree-stump, in a faded guayabera and a raggedy straw hat.
He stepped clear of the trees.
The only other man in the boat was the shrimp fisher. No sign of Hannibal.
Heart pounding, he walked down to the pebbly shore with a sense of dreadful vertigo.
Téo sprang from the boat as the other two men beached it and called out to him before they even came close, ‘She is in Haiti.’
January stopped in his tracks. ‘What?’
The short man finished helping to pull the boat up on to the beach, came to join them; Téo’s gesture indicated him before he came near enough to speak himself. ‘Lobo here followed them out to sea. He thought at first they were going to Jamaica – there are slave-dealers who operate there in spite of the British. When he started to turn, to come back here – for Mariana his wife would surely strike him with a stick of firewood, if he was away overnight – your master held the pistol on him and told him he would shoot him if he gave up the chase.’
‘And I should have let him do it,’ added Lobo with a single-toothed grin. ‘We were right out in the ocean, and Don Hannibal had no more idea of how to steer a boat and set his sails than my baby daughter.’
‘Thank you.’ HAITI? He felt breathless with shock. ‘I have no money, but I promise you, I will give you some, as much as you ask, when I get some … I swear to you …’
‘Yes, yes.’ The fisherman waved his hand. ‘I’ll tell my banker to get in touch with your banker, brother. He fell asleep, your master, in the deep of the night, lying on the bench with his pistol under his hand, and I had not the heart to waken him, seeing as it was clear then to me where this black-hulled skiff was headed. We had lost sight of them – they could spread more sail than we and keep on course to the south-east when the winds turned in the night. I did take his pistol away from him. It was clear to me that Haiti was the only place they could be going.’
Dear God. His mind felt blank.
Dear God.
Slave-stealers would have gone up the coast to Manzanillo, or crossed the Windward Channel to Jamaica.
Bryce Jericho was back in Havana, or had been when he and Hannibal had left there over a week ago. There was no way he could have reached Santiago before them.
He had to forcibly bring his mind back to the voices of Téo and Lobo: not slave-stealers.
Treasure-hunters.
Bryce’s men …
But why not kill her, as they’d killed her brother?
They could have easily done so on the shore.
They would certainly do so when they’d found what they sought.
They’re going to one of de Gericault’s plantations: La Châtaigneraie, or L’Ange Rouge.
‘… put him ashore at a cove right at the end of the Môle,’ Lobo was saying. ‘The wind was hard from the north-east; I don’t think they’d have gone around that way to Le Cap. Not if they’d had to pass the fort of Saint-Nicolas. I tried to talk your master into coming back with me – he’s a dead man the minute anyone sees him. But he wasn’t having any of it.’
Téo’s eyes slid sidelong to January. ‘He must love her a good deal, this woman.’
‘He was like a man distracted.’ Lobo shrugged. ‘You see so ma
ny men, they are jealous of their mistress if she look at another man, but if that other man offer them money for her? She’d be gone.’ He made a motion, as if flicking muddy water from his hands. ‘She is a free woman, your master’s mistress?’
January nodded. ‘And he is more like a brother to me than a master. I owe him my life – and more else than I could ever say. The men who took her think she knows where a treasure is hid, a treasure from the old days before the rebellion.’
‘They were mulattos,’ said Téo. ‘There was a white man with them, Santos said, tall and plump and fair-haired …’
Seth Maddox. Michie Curly, who’d watched his house in New Orleans. ‘I don’t know the whole of the tale.’
Lobo sucked at his lip where he’d lost teeth. ‘And you’re about to ask me to sail you over there for nothing, eh? And lose me another three days’ catch on top of the two that your master just cost me, making me go across to that devil-cursed island at pistol point with nothing to feed my family on but the two reales he had in his pocket. Ow,’ he added as Téo punched him in the arm.
‘Let me take your boat, then,’ said Téo.
‘Oh, yes, so I can feed my family fishing for shrimp with a hook and a line from the shore … and you know no more of sailing than this zambo here—’ He nodded at January.
‘For the love of God, man!’
‘Why doesn’t God ever tell us to help the rich who’ll pay us money, eh?’ Lobo shook one calloused finger at January. ‘You tell me that. And you –’ he turned in disgust back to Téo – ‘you go tell my Mariana that you talked me into taking this crazy zambo back across to the Môle, where he’s gonna get shot for a spy, or worse, before he’s even off the beach, and I have his death on my conscience the same way I have his crazy patrón’s. And it’s only ’cause I been such a sinner I’m doing this, and God better forgive me one or two or three of the worst ones … Go get your things.’ He glared at January. ‘We got to wait for the evening tide.’
HAITI
TWENTY-THREE
They veered along on the edge of north-westerly winds that kept the deep passage between Cuba and Hispaniola perpetually choppy and rough. Twenty-one years previously, January recalled, he had clung to the rail of the French merchantman Fleur-de-Lys, outbound through this Windward Passage from New Orleans to Bordeaux, and had watched the turquoise waters of the Caribbean transform into the heavy gray-green swells of the Atlantic.
And his heart had sung to him: Never going back. Never going back. In America the shadow of slavery will lie over me always. In France I will be truly free.
It amazed him that he’d been young enough to believe that.
The winds backed hard to the north-east just before dawn, and rain swept them. Lobo and his nephew Tómas fought the tiller against the driving darkness, and when full light came Lobo curled up in his blankets and slept. January knew he should do the same, and couldn’t. ‘Your indios could have been running for Baie-de-Henne,’ Lobo said when he woke up, and the westering sun showed them the pine-shrouded mountains of Hispaniola in the distance. ‘Maybe Red Beach, or run clear into Gonaïves. Smugglers run in and out of Gonaïves all the time—’
And is that how YOU know so much about it, old man? January wondered.
‘—so a couple of indios maybe won’t be noticed. But the troops on the Môle-Sant-Nicolas, they watch for deep-water sail, and I knew if they caught me bringing a white man ashore, they sure weren’t going to believe no story about a friend of his having his wife kidnapped by a bunch of indios. I put you ashore where I put him ashore. This whole coast got few real harbors, but there’s a beach about ten miles from Baie-de-Henne.’
January said, ‘I understand.’
‘More than President Boyar’s troops, you got to watch out for the Egbo, the Leopard Society. Every little village, there’s men that belong to it, men that know there’s nothing Spain or France or maybe even the United States would like better than to take Haiti back again and make them all slaves again, and make the country pour out money like it used to. To them, all strangers are spies – or else Spanish Trinitarios raiding from the east of the island, who hate the rule of Boyar. They eat the flesh of the men they catch and drink their blood.’
Through Rose’s spyglass, January watched the land draw near. The northern peninsula seemed to be mostly scrubland, with patches of forest which grew thicker as it ascended the low mountains that protected the island’s central gulf from the Atlantic winds. Trails of smoke rose from a village. What looked like fishing boats were putting out, and he wondered if the villagers had reported – either to the military or to the local Leopard Society – Lobo’s earlier visit. He also wondered if this was anywhere near where Dr Maudit had come ashore some thirty years previously.
He thought of Hannibal alone ashore – he’d been here three days already – and shivered.
But scanning the beach as they approached – a long, shallow crescent of sand a couple of miles east of the village – he saw no column of vultures in the air that would mark a corpse on the beach.
Now let’s make sure I don’t end up a corpse on the beach myself.
‘You got to wade in from here,’ Lobo told him, when they were about a hundred feet from the sand. ‘Any farther in, we couldn’t get the wind to get ourselves out of here.’
January dropped overside and found himself breast deep in water, warmer and calmer than he’d seen all day. This was the Caribbean side of the island, and though the evening was drawing on, heat seemed to radiate from the land.
The boy Tómas handed him a straw gunnysack containing bread, cheese, oranges and two water-bottles. January balanced it on his head, like the women who carried baskets of tomatoes and strawberries around the streets of New Orleans.
‘Good luck finding your lady and your master.’ Lobo hooked the sheets free, sail canvas snapping as it filled with the wind. ‘You surely going to need it.’
It was nearly fifty miles, Lobo had told him in the course of that afternoon, to the little port of Gonaïves, and almost twenty to the fishing village of Red Beach. Between those harbors the coast was mostly deserted, lacking anyplace where a vessel of any size might put in. The lakou – the family compounds – of the mountainous country behind were primitive and hostile to strangers. Only in the towns, he had said, would January find anyone who spoke French.
As January waded ashore, he reflected that Rose’s captors would almost certainly be making for Cap Haïtien – Le Cap, Lobo had called it – the old capital at Cap Francais. La Châtaigneraie – Absalon de Gericault’s primary plantation – lay only a few hours’ walk from it, and to anyone who had not spoken with Salomé Saldaña it would make sense that old Maurir had hidden his treasure – and his secret – there.
From old Lobo’s description, Jean Thiot at the Café des Refugies would probably barely recognize the place. It had been burned by Dessalines and his men, and close to 20,000 whites had been slaughtered there. Mulatto brokers and traders still ran the town, said Lobo, the way they ran all the towns in Haiti – it was their money that kept the government afloat. But the ‘Paris of the Caribbean’, with its three theaters, its newspapers and its dozens of graceful little houses where the planters’ quadroon mistresses dwelled, was long gone.
And when they don’t find what they’re seeking at La Châtaigneraie, January thought, his feet pressing the underwater sand, they’ll head for L’Ange Rouge.
And I need to reach it before them.
The thought of leaving Rose in their hands for that long made him nearly sick.
The thought of moving on at once, without looking for Hannibal – who had come to this place only to help him, who had set out alone for Haiti to rescue Rose with one bullet in his gun and barely the price of dinner in his pockets – tore his heart like broken glass. But the surgeon in him – the man who could, and had, look at a woman sobbing in a blocked labor and say, ‘The baby must be killed for the mother to live’ – heard in his mind Abishag Shaw’s light-timbre
d drawl: ‘The hunter has all the advantage … The only way to make sure he don’t come at you again, is to lead him into a trap …’
The trap could only be set if he reached L’Ange Rouge first.
Where Guibert de Gericault had been born.
Whatever happened, happened there.
How can I leave Hannibal?
How can I hesitate, when hesitation will mean Rose’s life?
A thousand lesser questions pricked his mind, as if he’d thrust his hand in a jar of pins – what had become of Calanthe and Emmanuelle? Why were they at L’Ange Rouge in the first place? What sent Ginette fleeing into the night in the wildness of a hurricane after Amalie de Gericault died giving birth to a healthy son? But, like a greater torment driving out a lesser, he saw a thousand memories as well: Rose with her long cloak fluttering in the storm winds, that first day he’d walked her from her school on Rue St-Claude to his mother’s house where he’d been living then … Rose with her brown curls tumbled about her shoulders, smiling up at him with Baby John nestled against her shoulder. Rose rising from her chair on the gallery of their house, spectacles flashing in the lights from the parlor window.
Rose crouched beside him in the cellar of the old house at Hispaniola, listening to the creak of boots overhead.
I’d better be right about them needing her to find the treasure …
The thought that he might be wrong turned him sick with panic.
And whatever we find there, he reflected as Lobo’s boat was swallowed by the sun glare, as if sailing into a gate of fire, there’d better be at least SOME treasure left at L’Ange Rouge, if the three of us – Holy Mother, please let it be the three of us! – plan to get off the island alive.
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