Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “Why me?” From the doorway where he leaned— there wasn’t space for two of them in the room—January picked out with his eye the clay water-jar that stood in the corner, mentally estimating how long it would take him to reach it and dump it over Rose and the contents of the mortar before the whole theater shot up in flames. “If I knew that . . .” He frowned. “I was going to say, If I knew that, I’d be closer to knowing who’s doing this, but I’m not sure that’s true. I suspect—I assume—that whoever followed us to Jacques’s house Saturday night was following Marguerite. He was hiding in the woods when he heard me say she wasn’t dead; he believes she regained consciousness at some point and told me who attacked her, or believes that she will regain consciousness and tell me.”

  “In other words,” said Rose, “Signor Belaggio’s decision not to produce Othello after all doesn’t end the possibility of an attack on you. Or on Madame Scie.”

  “No,” said January quietly. “If in fact the production of Othello is the target at all. It might not be, you know. Or if it was, I’m not sure that Incantobelli—if it is he behind these acts—will know of Belaggio’s decision that Othello is ‘unsuitable’ ”—his voice twisted sardonically on the word—“for presentation before chaste American widows.”

  “And if he does,” remarked Rose, turning back to empty the mortar of fine-ground powder onto a sheet of white paper, “I’m not sure he wouldn’t feel even more mortally dishonored in the withdrawal than in the presentation. And I can’t say that I blame him.” She began to scoop the powder into the coarser of two sieves, shaking it gently onto a second sheet of paper, working matter-offactly, like January’s nephew Gabriel making a roux.

  “It’s a thought.” January folded his big arms, watching her with a sensation of his hair standing on end, wondering if she’d ever seen the victims of gunpowder burns. He wanted to pull her from the room, wrest the bone knife, the sieve, and the scoop from her hand, shout at her never to tinker with such deadly things again. . . .

  As if she were a child. As if she were his child, and not a woman grown and free, who had trained in the handling of such deadly chemicals. Who gained what joy she had in life in making experiments of this kind, in seeing how fire and air and earth related to one another.

  He took a deep breath, and let the impulse dissolve. Pushed aside the pain of Ayasha’s death, and the fear of losing this second treasure. That’s my Rose, he thought. Or the woman he hoped would one day be his Rose.

  “In a way,” he said, “I hope the attacker does strike again, and soon. Because unless he does, we won’t be able to catch him. Yet he’ll still be there, waiting for me. Waiting for Marguerite, if she lives. And if she does not live,” he finished quietly, thinking about the wasted hands lying on the coverlet, the bruised eyelids closed and already beginning to grow hollow with hunger and dehydration, “I will see that man hanged.”

  Marguerite was still unconscious when January reached Olympe’s house later in the morning. “I tried most of the night to get her to drink,” said his sister, haggard-looking herself as she poured him out some of Gabriel’s semi-ambrosial coffee. “I kept her lips moist, a drop at a time; maybe she drank a little of it, I can’t tell.” Like Rose, Olympe, too, sat at a table with pestle and mortar before her, with clean newspaper spread and little jars and gourds and dishes of ingredients to mix. But instead of alum and stearine, sulfuret of antimony and nitrate of soda, dried herbs were heaped on pottery dishes: jessamine and jack honeysuckle, willow bark and sassafras. There was a little pile of brick-dust in a saucer, and another of salt. A bright tin box such as candies were shipped in from England contained mouse-bones; on a piece of clean white paper lay the dried and wrinkled skins of two toads and a ground-puppy.

  Juju. Gris-gris. Ouanga. The smell of the honeysuckle, of the gunpowder that she mixed with some of them and the dried dog-shit she mixed with others, came to January like a whisper out of the past, a breath of darkness. The side of his life he’d forsaken when he took ship for Paris to learn about medicine and music and reason and light. I do confess the vices of my blood, Othello says. The past from which no man can flee. The soil that nurtures whatever fruit will grow.

  “I asked around the market this morning,” said Olympe. Through the open rear doors the smell of the rain blew through, soft and gray and like no other, and from the kitchen, Gabriel’s cheery song. “And yes, they say a woman bought Indian tobacco of Queen Régine. They say she was a dark-haired woman with red jewels, that spoke like a foreigner, and she asked specially that it be not enough to kill, but only to lay out that other woman good.”

  “I thought as much.”

  Olympe’s long fingers sifted together the gunpowder and sulfur, the salt and the fragments of bone. As she bound them up in a scrap of red flannel, he saw her lips move, invoking the spirits of power, of malice or love. Then she glanced up at him again. “Might this be the same? This woman—had she enemies of her own back in France? Those who’d want her dead, and have nothing to do with these Italians, with their operas and their money and all their ja over who gonna run things? Just ’cause you keep soap in the kitchen doesn’t make it food, you know.”

  “No,” agreed January thoughtfully. “But Marguerite is a poor woman. Her family was noble before the Revolution, but she’s the only one of them who survived the killing. She’s danced all her life, and cares for nothing else. And I never yet met one of her old lovers—and they are legion, believe me—who did not speak well of her, and remain her friend.”

  “Then she’s a special woman indeed.” Olympe set aside her little gris-gris bundle and folded her strong, callused hands. “I’ve prayed for her to Loco, who puts the strength of healing into medicines, and hung tobacco for him in a straw basket on a tree in the square. If the gods listen, she’ll come back to us.”

  January drew his breath to protest this piece of superstition, then reflected that hanging tobacco in a straw basket for the loa of the trees wasn’t so very different from burning a candle in front of a statue in a church. God’s Mother wasn’t a statue and didn’t have any actual use for a penny’s worth of wax. So he merely laid a hand on his sister’s shoulder and said, “Thank you. That’s good of you.” Five years ago he wouldn’t have said it—he’d burned candles for Olympe’s soul for years—but five years ago his sister would never have petitioned Loco for a white woman’s life. “I’ll be back tonight. And I’ll be at the theater most of the day, should there be any change.”

  For the remainder of the day he concentrated on Monsieur Auber’s impassioned tale of the brave Neapolitan fisherman’s revolt against his country’s oppressors, groaning inwardly every time La d’Isola sang, wincing at Oona Flaherty’s efforts to toe-dance even with the assistance of wires and counterweights, and flinching whenever a whoosh and flash of flame backstage reminded him that Tiberio and his Hibernian myrmidons were still experimenting with Vesuvius’s fiery bowels. Cavallo sang a fine impassioned Masaniello, but between the volcano’s misfiring and Fenella’s laboriously-expressed emotions (“Triumph is denoted with the hand open and raised above the head,” instructed Herr Smith from among the dangling sandbags at stage right. “To express Entreaty you must stretch out the hands downward toward the knees. . . .”) January’s hopes for the opera were not high.

  And, of course, whether it was bad or good, no one would want to see John Davis’s production of it the following night.

  Dance rehearsal continued in the rehearsal-room during the evening performance of Brutus, or, Democracy Betray’d, and did not end until past midnight. Cochon, Jacques, and the Valada brothers escorted January home through the rain, and if an invisible devil lurked with a knife anywhere on Rue des Ursulines—getting soaked, he hoped—he saw no sign of it.

  Waking late the following morning, he found a note thrust under his door.

  Signor Janvier,

  I knocked but could not wake you. I cannot stay. Yet I learned the truth about the plot. I go now to find who Lorenzo’s conspira
tor is. I beg you, follow me to the place called La Cornouiller. I need your help.

  D’Isola

  The house called La Cornouiller had been built forty years previously, when more efficient refining and hardier strains of cane had suddenly made it easier to get rich as a sugar planter. Unable to afford the already prohibitive price of land along the river, many English, Irish, and Germans had tried their hand at planting sugar on the banks of those few bayous large enough to support watercraft, wherever the high ground was sufficiently wide to lay out fields before it sloped into palmetto thickets, cypress swamp, and finally the flat, reedy wilderness of open marsh.

  In general these small plantations had not prospered. When January had come through that part of the west bank with the militia just prior to the Battle of Chalmette in 1814, his impression of the little plantations along Bayou des Familles had been one of shabby houses little better than the cabins of slaves. Lately, he had heard that many of these places had gone over to lumbering, cutting the huge cypresses of the swamp and floating them down to sawmills. Those that hadn’t had largely sunk back into being small poor farms, their cracker owners raising a little cotton and corn, or vegetables for the city market, with a slave or two; living like patriarchs of old on the increase of their herds of cattle and swine.

  It was slave-stealer country. Captain Chamoflet, whose thin, dark face January recalled from the New Exchange, had connections even this far north of the great swampy maze of the Barataria marshes, as had Jean Lafitte before him. Trotting his rented horse from the ferry-landing at Point Algiers, January felt pricklingly conscious of the hush of those dark-green monotonous woods. He kept glancing around him, as if among the oaks and loblolly pines, the palmettos where the riverbank’s cane-fields faded into the cipriere, invisible eyes watched him. Jean Lafitte had had a regular route up Bayou des Familles in the old days, transporting whole cargoes of pirated goods and selling them openly in town. When the Navy—and the British Royal Navy’s anti-slave-trade crusade—had run Lafitte out of the Gulf in 1821, a constant small traffic in roguery persisted, slaves being stolen and sold to dealers who sold them in turn to the new territories to the north and west, or travelers robbed when the swift-falling tropical nights dropped on the marshlands. January had a spare copy of his freedom papers stuck in his boot—one of Hannibal’s best forgeries, since the originals never left January’s room—besides the usual copy he carried in his jacket pocket, and a completely illegal knife in his other boot, plus a pistol in his saddlebag. He’d sent messages to Hannibal, Olympe, and Rose, telling them where he was going and when he expected to be back, and had tried to find Shaw at the Cabildo, leaving a message for him when he could not.

  And none of it would do him a particle of good, he thought, if Chamoflet and his gang should catch him.

  And d’Isola had come out here alone.

  Idiot! he thought for the hundredth time, leaning from the saddle to look at the sharp prints of the gig’s wheels in the fresh mud. The man who ran the ferry remembered her well, had described her hesitant French and her yellow sprig-muslin dress. A rented gig— “Pinçon’s livery, I seen that gig come acrost and back on this ferry of mine a hundred times,”—and a dapple horse: “Thunderbolt, old Pinçon call that horse, and anything less like a thunderbolt you’d have to go far to find. Why, three weeks ago this Boston feller—had one of them silly beards they wear, with no mustache, looked like an ape, he did—had German Sally with him, you know German Sally? Runs the Green Lizard saloon on Gallatin Street, but she’ll get herself dressed up and her hair slicked and you couldn’t tell Sally from a lady at two paces, till you get her likkered up. . . .”

  I will box that silly girl’s ears. Where had she been raised, that she would drive out into the countryside alone? And dress rehearsal this evening, too, he thought, trying to see more than a few yards into the dappled, silvery stillness of the cipriere. Ahead of him he could glimpse the too-bright-green of the upper end of Bayou des Familles, like potage St.-Germain with duckweed; the glint of sunlight on the open tangle of second-growth where a plantation or farm had once lain. The clamshell road from Point Algiers back to Bayou des Familles was in fairly good repair, and the wet shells crunched under his gelding’s hooves as he nudged the animal to a trot again.

  I learned the truth about the plot.

  A note found in Belaggio’s room? A conversation overheard? In what language and with whom?

  La Cornouiller. Named for the tree the locals called Bois-de-Flèches. The old plantation’s site on Bayou des Familles, that link with the bandits of the Barataria, was telling. It was hard to imagine even a rage-maddened operatic castrato trying to murder Marguerite to disrupt a performance: what operatic castrato wouldn’t know how easily dancing-mistresses were replaced? But from everything January had heard about Captain Chamoflet, it was all too easy to believe that an order to dispose of someone had been given and executed without a moment’s thought.

  DAMN the girl. Would she have the sense to hide the gig?

  Creole plantations were built pretty much to a plan. As narrow as the high ground was along this part of Bayou des Familles, there was really only one logical way to lay out buildings and fields. January came into view of the overgrown fields, the crumbling and dilapidated sugar-house, an hour or so past noon, and approached the place with caution, circling back through the fields and the cipriere. The house had been burned some ten years back—he remembered his mother telling him about the noisy and entangled lawsuit that still bound Jed Burton to the contending branches of his first wife’s family—and he saw the tall brick foundation before him as he worked his way through the trees. Like most Creole houses, La Cornouiller had been built on a six-foot brick foundation, the ground-floor area used in some houses as storage, in others as dining-room and offices. January left the horse tied in the ruin of a slave-cabin, and hoped he’d find it when he returned.

  The pistol and powder-flask he slipped into the pocket of his jacket.

  He heard their voices, careless as the play-songs of children in the breathless silence.

  “Niente,” proclaimed the clear, strong tenor of Silvio Cavallo. “No tracks, no marks—nothing.”

  Damn it, thought January in irritation. You might have told me you got Young Italy to accompany you, instead of bringing me out here into slave-stealer heaven.

  “But the note said this was to be their meeting-place,” argued La d’Isola. “It said, ‘Beneath the old house at La Cornouiller.’ ” She pronounced the French with difficulty, and gestured helplessly toward the ruin as January emerged around the corner of the old kitchen. The lovely soprano looked impossibly stylish, knee-deep in weeds among the puddles in the yard. Her straw-colored ruffles were the last thing anyone would choose to wear while hunting potentially murderous conspirators; her lace-trimmed bonnet was more in keeping with tea in the Ladies Parlor of the City Hotel. Silvio—and his inseparable companion Bruno Ponte—were likewise dressed for town, in checkered trousers, wasp-waisted coats, and a glory of varicolored waistcoats, as if just out for coffee at the Fatted Calf. They swung around as January came into sight, but La d’Isola cried “Signor Janvier!” and gathered up her skirts to run to him through the charred bricks and black timbers, stumbling in her thin satin slippers. “So good of you! I feared you would not come!” She smiled happily up at him. “On my way out of town I met with Silvio and Bruno, you understand, and they made it so much easier. . . .”

  “You came horseback?”

  Both young men nodded. “We were out riding ourselves upon the levee,” explained Cavallo, which accounted for the dandified turnout.

  “And I told them about the note,” said d’Isola breathlessly. “The note I found slipped beneath Lorenzo’s hotel-room door. It said, ‘Thursday, beneath the house at La Cornouiller.’ It is the plot, you see—the people he intends to meet! It must be they who tried to beat Lorenzo up! I asked the man at the hotel what the place was, and where. And here is the house. . . .”

&n
bsp; The door into the brick ground floor stood open, a pitch-black maw like an idiot’s yawn. A reasonable place to meet, thought January, studying the stout charred walls. To meet, or to hide something. He knelt to brush with a finger the long, fresh furrow that marked the threshold. The inner wood dry, against the gray damp of that around it. “You saw no one here? This is fresh.”

  They shook their heads. “We looked around in there for only a moment,” said Ponte. “We had just two matches, you understand. . . .”

  Of course d’Isola wouldn’t have thought to pack candles. January fished in his jacket pockets for the candle-ends he habitually carried, and wondered if there was a lantern in the gig, and if it was worthwhile going to fetch it. He lit candles for himself and the men—La d’Isola had run a few steps to investigate the yellow blossoms of a late-blooming Christmas rose and was trying inexpertly to pluck one—and knelt again to study the gouge that continued from the threshold across the soft local brick of the floor and on into darkness. Something had been dragged inside. Something heavy with corners. The space beneath the house had been partitioned into several rooms, with black damp doorways gaping to the right and the left. The overwhelming, musty smell of moss and wet bricks enfolded January as he stepped inside.

  A second tiny room had contained wine-racks, the wood charred and crumbled among the puddles of the floor. A third held a couple of broken oil-jars—everyone in Louisiana emptied the oil out of these and stored water in them—and one or two rat-chewed baskets.

  The heavy box that had left the long twin scratches on the floor bricks stood in the middle of the third room, a rude crate weathered by long exposure, filled with bricks and dirt.

  Even as Cavallo stepped forward and knelt to toss the debris out of the crate, January thought, The wood of the crate is damp. And there were no wheel-ruts in the yard. No tracks pressed deep, as there would have been if someone had carried something this heavy. Which means . . .