Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “Hands?” asked January, and one of Shaw’s pale brows tilted.

  “No,” he said. “No, he didn’t fight. He took one deep stab straight under the left shoulder-blade from behind, then all the rest in the front, like as if he’d fallen down an’ the man what did it knelt on top of him an’ cut. Somebody wanted to make damn sure Belaggio was dead this time.”

  “Or somebody was damn mad.”

  “If somebody was damn mad, he was damn careless, too.” Shaw turned his head aside and spit. “If’n you’re gonna kill somebody like that, you should at least take the trouble to make sure of your man.”

  In his mind, January saw the two men together, framed in the lion-gold curtains of the Trulove ballroom. Saw how both towered over the cowering girl, almost obscuring her from sight. Of course an attacker would mistake the one for the other.

  “Maybe he thought he had.” January remembered also the note that drew La d’Isola to this half-deserted countryside, d’Isola, who would naturally have been with Belaggio at that hour. After her unexplained absence from the dress rehearsal that afternoon, her name might have been enough to ensure Belaggio’s appearance at the theater after midnight. “What does Belaggio say?”

  “Not much,” said the policeman. “Looked sick as a cat when I talked to him this mornin’, jumpin’ whenever one of them fireworks went off in the back. Say, they really gonna have a volcano erupt on-stage?”

  “Such is the intention,” said January. “I feel certain that even if Mademoiselle d’Isola isn’t found—or isn’t well enough to perform when she is found—Madame Montero will be more than ready to step into the role.” And he outlined to Shaw the tale of the “opera lesson” and its sequel, continuing with La d’Isola’s discovery of the “note” that had brought her to Bayou des Familles. “As Signor Cavallo said yesterday, it would make a good deal more sense to have set the trap today—the night of the performance itself—if the intention was to disrupt the opera, or substitute Madame Montero for d’Isola on-stage. Obviously,” he added grimly, “it wasn’t. I take it this isn’t a simple case of robbery.”

  “Marsan had a hundred and fifty dollars in the inside pocket of his coat, not to mention his watch an’ a ring an’ a stickpin with a topaz in it the size of your fingernail. Caldwell says the dress rehearsal finished at six—barely time for Mr. Russell’s stage crew to set up for that night’s performance of The Forty Thieves—an’ when he mentioned Belaggio came back to the theater after it was done, Belaggio remembered as how yes, he’d come back to fetch a couple of them liber-ettos he’d left in his office. He didn’t stay, though, he says.”

  “He does, does he?” The house at Roseaux came into view around the cluster of bayou oaks, and on the steps stood Mr. Knight, looking even more prim and disapproving than usual, his hand on the shoulder of the young Mademoiselle Jocelyn Marsan.

  “My dear Madame . . .” The business manager hastened down the steps.

  “Is it true, Mama?” Mademoiselle Marsan’s voice had a dead quality to it, all emotion boned tight as her straight-fronted schoolgirl corset. Her frock had been cut down from a woman’s, with too little fabric in the skirt, and telltale lines where seams had been picked out and pieces skillfully joined. Her black hair hung in braids, fine as silk.

  “This gentleman says that it is.” Isabella Marsan drew a deep breath, steadying herself on Mr. Knight’s arm as she descended. “If you’ll go around to the back gallery, Messires, one of the men will take your horse and bring you . . . bring you coffee and sandwiches.” Her glance encompassed Cavallo and Ponte, settling instinctively the conundrum of the logistics of Creole hospitality by which Europeans—even Europeans in muddied boots with soot crusted on their shirts—rated an invitation to the parlor while Kaintucks would be relegated to the back gallery, if that. “Monsieur Knight, if you would be so good . . .”

  “Of course, Madame.” The factor led her up the steps to the house, where a tall, thin man in a butler’s livery waited just within the French door that led to the women’s side of the house.

  By the time Rufe had let Cavallo and Ponte off by the brick piazza at the rear of the house, and a servant came to take Shaw’s horse, most of the housemaids, the plantation laundress and carpenter, the sawmill boss, Big Lou’s trainer, and the cook were clustered behind the kitchen, just out of the line of sight from the back gallery. Rufe drew rein and January sprang down as the butler came down the gallery steps and crossed the yard—

  “It true?” asked the sawmill boss, glancing from Rufe to January to the butler as all three came around the corner of the little building, with that instinctive sense of where those places were that the white folks couldn’t see. “Jules?”

  In English, Rufe replied, “It’s what the man say,” and Jules the butler nodded. January felt the ripple of exhaled breath among the assembled men and women. Saw how shoulders relaxed, bodies loosened. Eyes shut in brief prayers of thanks. Given the near-certainty of sale that would result in the death of the Master, the breaking of communities and families—given the fact that the devil one knew was nearly always less terrifying than the unknown darkness of the future—it was a devastating indictment of the man as a master.

  He’s gone. He’s dead.

  Whatever’s going to happen now, it surely can’t be worse.

  Since Rufe didn’t speak more than a few words of French, January filled in what details he knew: that Marsan had been stabbed to death, his body found in an alley in town; that he had not been robbed. “Was it the family of that girl?” asked Jules, speaking better French than January commonly heard even among house servants. Speaking, too, as if even here he feared to be overheard. “That girl he killed?”

  “They don’t know who it was.” January stepped aside from the servants around Rufe. He was about to say, He was killed by accident, in mistake for someone else, but instead, he asked, thinking of Dominique, “What was the girl’s name?”

  “Sidonie Lalage.” The butler was a few years younger than January, though his hair was grayer and he’d lost quite a few teeth. Two small fresh scabs marked the left side of his face: riding-whip, January identified them at once. Similar, slightly older marks welted the cheekbones of one laundress and the cook. “I always said no good would come of that, for all that white jury let him off. No proof he done it, they said. Of course there was proof. An’ it wasn’t the first time he beat her for speakin’ to another man.” He shook his head. “I always knew there’d be trouble from the girl.”

  “Could this have been the smugglers?” asked January even more softly. Ask me no questions . . .

  Maybe Belaggio had asked more questions than he should have. Maybe Captain Chamoflet had simply resented someone moving in on the illicit importing of slaves.

  “I don’t know anything about that.” The butler lowered his dark eyes. “It’s better, hereabouts, not to know.”

  January glanced toward the house. Shaw and the two Italians sat on wicker chairs on the rear gallery, talking to Mr. Knight, who sat as far from the Kaintuck as was possible within the same group. The plump cook emerged from the kitchen, bearing a tray that contained sandwiches and lemonade. As she handed this to Jules, she looked up at January and said, “As if everyone in this countryside doesn’t know about Captain Chamoflet. Don’t you listen to Jules, sir. But if you’re thinking it was the captain, or any of his boys, that’s ridiculous. Michie Vincent always kept on the good side of the captain when they dealt together, and how not? He wasn’t stupid, Michie Vincent, except about that temper of his.”

  “And even there,” said the trainer in a quiet voice, “I did notice that he never gets real mad, killin’ mad, at anyone who can fight back, or hurt him later.”

  “Besides,” the cook went on, “Captain Chamoflet, he doesn’t go up to town much. Why kill a man there with the police all around, when you know he’ll have to come riding down here some night?”

  January watched Jules cross the yard with the tray, mount the steps of the rear gal
lery. Shaw was sketching out directions with his big, lumpy-knuckled hands, gesturing toward the bayou, toward the town. A search party for d’Isola, almost certainly. By the shadow of the kitchen’s sagging roof on the dirt of the yard, it was nearly two. January’s silver watch had stopped—he’d forgotten to wind it last night, sitting awake listening for the tread of slave-stealers in the damp dark of the barn.

  The curtain would go up on La Muette de Portici at seven, d’Isola or no d’Isola.

  Did that make a difference? he wondered. Had someone sent a note to Belaggio last night, telling him to be at the theater?

  Or had he gone there to meet Marsan? Marsan, who had acted as go-between for his slave-dealing? Who less than a week ago had challenged him to a duel? Marsan, who had a furious temper, and the devil of jealousy in his heart?

  Conversely, had Marsan gone there, arriving after Belaggio’s departure, and seen something—or someone— at the theater? Tinkering, maybe, with Mount Vesuvius in order to guarantee a disaster at the performance tonight?

  The blood in the drawer. The milky sunlight on the burned house at La Cornouiller. A voice whispering “nigger” in the alley’s darkness, and Marguerite lying in Olympe’s house, sinking deeper and deeper into cold and silence. . . .

  Where did that nagging sensation come from in his mind, the feeling that he’d heard something recently that didn’t fit?

  “. . . duels over the damnedest stupid things!” The cook’s voice brought him back to the present. “He killed a fellow named Brouillard ’cause of the color of his necktie— his necktie! ’Cause Brouillard said it didn’t match his waistcoat or some fool thing like that. Poor M’am Marsan lost a night’s sleep weeping till she was near sick over it with fear, for, of course, if Michie Vincent were to die, she’d never keep this place, and her with a young daughter and no son, and the whole crop borrowed against before the cane stood three feet tall.”

  January looked back toward the house. The coachman was leading out the carriage again with a new team—as mismatched and sorry as the former—preparatory to taking the widow to town to claim her husband’s body at the Charity Hospital morgue. One of the maids emerged from the cabinet that housed the attic stairs, her arms full of mourning dresses, and with the girl Jocelyn at her heels crossed to the door into Madame Marsan’s bedroom.

  Absurd to think that even with the money from smuggling slaves, Marsan hadn’t been in debt. Having been married for ten years to a dressmaker, January had a good idea of what it cost to be a dandy: to indulge the obsession with clothing to that meticulous degree.

  Shaw’s horse was hitched to the footman’s dickey, the scar-kneed roan saddled beside it on a lead. More logistics of hospitality, thought January wryly. Cavallo and Ponte would of course be invited to ride in the landaulet. They were, after all, Europeans, and civilized men. The Kaintuck would ride behind. Under ordinary circumstances January would be left to walk, but his inclusion in the party with those Madame Marsan considered his betters required some means of transportation be found for him as well.

  “Did he fight?”

  “That he did, sir, and was brought back here three-quarters dead on a plank. Michie Knight was fit to split his corset-lacings, he was so mad, and you could hear M’am Marsan weeping clear out to the quarters.”

  On the gallery Cavallo sprang to his feet, hammered one fist into his palm. L’Italiana in Algeri. January remembered ironically the opera of that name, and tried to imagine the lovely soprano tricking her way out of a lustful Pasha’s harem and escaping to a convenient ship with her own true love.

  But her own true love was dead, he thought, in the place of the lover she’d sought to escape. And d’Isola herself . . .

  If worse came to worst, he supposed Captain Chamoflet could be traced through one of Hannibal’s disreputable connections in the Swamp, and the girl ransomed. If Belaggio’s jealousy—or avarice—proved unequal to the task, they could probably apply to the Sicilian consul, whose jurisdiction also covered Neapolitans.

  That was always assuming that Drusilla hadn’t met the man who’d smashed Marguerite’s skull. The man who’d doused the contents of that drawer with blood.

  As the other slaves dispersed to spread the news to the stables, the laundry, the quarters, January looked around him at the run-down kitchen, the unpainted stucco of the shabby house. Only a few men moved around the sawmill, and there was little evidence of industry there.

  In the other direction, past the kitchen, he could just glimpse a long, low brick building set behind a line of trees. Though it lay close to the bayou, the trees would screen it from either the water or the road: it was the only building in all of the dilapidated plantation that looked new and well-maintained. And even more curiously—on a plantation whose depth back from the bayou was severely limited by the narrowness of the high ground—the ground for a hundred feet around it was open, cleared not only of the chicken-runs and pig-yards that January vaguely recalled occupying that space in the spring of 1814, but of weeds, sapling pines, and trash.

  The cook had gone to trade speculations with Rufe, leaving January momentarily alone. Quietly, he moved off, around the corner of the kitchen and thence behind the plantation shops, working his way toward that low, stout structure. He paused to glance around him to confirm his suspicions about the relationship of that building to the trees, to the bayou, to the quarters.

  Long before he reached it, he knew exactly what that building was.

  There were sixteen cells, tiny as the nuns’ cells in a convent. January counted eight low doors on each side, the judas-hole in each providing the only light or ventilation the occupant of each cell would have. Every door had two bolts, with hasps and staples for padlocks. All were shut, though only one was locked. January peered through the judas in that locked door: he saw only a cell a little cleaner than the others, with a shelf set high above the floor. He wondered if he might find somewhere the store of padlocks, to compare them to that which had fastened the door on Cornouiller’s store-room. Opening one of the other doors, he found rings set into the brick of the wall, strung through with shackles and chains.

  Sixteen. He drew back in sickened anger. No slave-jail on any plantation he’d ever encountered had sixteen cells. Most had only one or two.

  Sixteen cells wasn’t a jail. It was a baracoon.

  No wonder Vincent Marsan had stepped so easily into the role of Belaggio’s go-between. No wonder he had so easily found clandestine buyers for his slaves.

  Clearer still was the rescue of the plantation from debt and ruin, a resurrection that had nothing to do with the sawmill, or with Mr. Knight’s financial expertise, and everything to do with the position of Les Roseaux on Bayou des Familles, gateway to the marshes of the Barataria, and through them to the sea.

  Bastard, he thought. You dirty, slave-smuggling bastard.

  He walked around the rear of the building, observing anew how close it lay to the water. A plank wharf poked out among the cypress-knees, almost hidden by reeds. The trace that led to it twisted sharply between the thick grove of cypress and tupelo that utterly masked the building from passers-by. Once smuggled past the Navy ships in the Gulf, slaves could be brought up through the marshes in Captain Chamoflet’s pirogues: Cubans, or Africans brought in from Cuba. The very men, in fact, whom Shaw had been looking for last week at the New Exchange.

  This was where they were being brought in.

  Or one of the places, anyway. The smell of human waste in the cells told him they’d been used within the past month, though it was hard to be sure those one or two hadn’t held plantation hands whom Marsan wanted to punish. That was the point of working through a planter. To have a point of origin in the United States.

  Standing in the open doorway of one of the cells, looking in at the chains on the wall, January wondered if it was Big Lou who Marsan got to help him in all this, as it was Big Lou who controlled Marsan’s wife.

  If it hadn’t been for Marguerite—and for the half-glimps
ed shape on the banquette the other night—January didn’t think he’d have heard the whisper of a naked foot on the packed earth behind him. He whirled without thinking, flung himself aside from the open cell door just as an immense hand closed around the back of his neck. The strength that hurled his two-hundred-plus pounds forward smashed him into the wall rather than pitching him into the tiny prison. By instinct, he brought up his shoulder, tucked his head, taking the stunning impact on the meat of his biceps rather than on his skull, and turned with both forearms up and both hands locked in a double fist before he even identified Big Lou.

  He hunched, whipped his head to one side past a punch like a hammer, and turned his hip: the crippling wallop of Lou’s kick was like being struck on the thigh by a steel beam, and he didn’t even want to think about what it would have done to his balls. He lunged down and in, using the wall to lever his shoulder into the bigger man’s solar plexus, fighting to get clear. Lou slammed him back, elbowed him brutally: trained jabbing blows. It was like fighting a steamboat. January had never been a fighter— for most of his life his size alone had been protection—he felt like a flailing child as he tried to defend himself and get clear.

  Keep moving, he told himself, whatever you do. But it was hard to even think. January tried to thrust himself off the wall—he knew he was trapped there—and was shoved back into it, twice and thrice, dizzy and unable to breathe. The blows he did manage to land seemed like punches thrown in a dream, though he felt his knuckles crunch on the iron skull, the shoulders like leather-shod rock. He felt himself going over and tried to twist out from under on the way down and didn’t manage it, caught a smashing blow on the face, and then heard a girl’s voice shouting “Lou! Lou! Stop it! Stop it right now!”

  A knee ground in January’s belly and a fist caught the side of his head like a mule’s kick and he thought, You heard the lady, Lou. You stop it right now. . . .