It was so early in the day that he, like Ti-Gall, must have been just coming from his night’s activities rather than just arising from his bed. January had never known his friend to waken of his own free will earlier than noon, even after he’d quit drinking. The fiddler carried a long loaf of bread – fresh, by the scent of it, God knew where he’d acquired it – a newspaper, and two peaches. ‘Are you all right? All things considered,’ he added, with an air of apology, and set his chimneypot hat on the table beside Olympe’s dish.
‘I am,’ said January. ‘All things considered. I think I’ve found where they’re holding Rose. And I think I know what’s going on.’ And as he fetched the coffee beans from the kitchen shelf and the roaster from its place on the wall, he delivered a brief but thorough outline of his interview with Oldmixton, and his morning’s expedition. ‘Taken together, it seems clear to me that Jared Ganch is gathering men for some illegal purpose that is being winked at by the local authorities, as long as they keep quiet about it.’
Hannibal paused in cutting and buttering the bread. ‘Sounds like mercenaries for some kind of filibustering excursion.’
‘Hand me the newspaper, would you? There’s two places I can think of,’ he went on, as he paged slowly through the True American, ‘that filibusters could make money right now – Chile, and New Grenada. Ten years ago filibusters could just raid Mexico, but since Santa Ana took over he’s strong enough to retaliate. Ganch might be putting together mercenaries to take to the fighting between Chile and Peru. He could hire out to one side or the other, or simply raid convents and town houses in Lima or Santiago. They must hold hundreds of thousands in gold, but that’s a long way to go. But a big raid in New Grenada, where anything can be blamed on the fighting … Cartagena and Carracas are just across the gulf . Even when you’ve paid for a ship and paid off your men, you’ll still net a fortune.’
Bags of coin, boxes of rubies, Our Lord with his body all made of pearl …
Convents. Churches. The government of New Grenada in the throes of civil war, its armies occupied in fighting one another …
‘But they need a bankroll,’ concluded Hannibal.
‘That they do.’
It’s the gold they’re after. Gold that M’am L’Araignée had whispered about, the dark spirit that lived in a black bottle on an altar in Olympe’s parlor. Gold that smelled of honeysuckle.
‘And an enterprising gentleman like Henry Brooke can be easily pardoned for thinking that a fifty percent share of the take might well be a better use for the Bank of England stock certificates that he’s carrying, than whatever use the British Foreign Office intended for them.’
‘He might indeed,’ Hannibal agreed.
January went on, ‘I’m pretty sure Rose and the others are being held in the old slave jail behind the indigo mill, out on the Pontchartrain Road. It actually takes a good deal of trouble to keep someone prisoner, you know, if you want them in good condition. It has to be someplace where there are your own men always around. Cassie Lovelace has been told to keep an eye on Rose—’
‘Then I—’ Hannibal rose from beside the fire, dumped the roasted coffee beans into the grinder and saluted with the empty pan as with a dueling saber – ‘shall take it upon myself to keep an eye – and perhaps more – on the beautiful Cassie. I don’t think we dare get closer to Rose than that at the moment … That’s what you were going to ask me, wasn’t it?’
January shook his head. ‘You’re right,’ he agreed quietly, ‘about not being able to get close to the indigo mill without risking one or more of them being killed – or mutilated – in retaliation if we’re seen. But it’s not something I would ask you or anyone to do.’
‘Then I’ll do it in spite of you,’ retorted Hannibal. He settled at the table with the coffee grinder before him. ‘I’ll do it because for eight years now I have nourished an unrequited passion for Rose in my secret heart, Da mi basia mille, Rosa, deinde centum . . grinding my love in the mills of our friendship as I now grind these coffee beans—’
January gave his friend’s shoulder a sharp shove, and his friend an unwilling grin. ‘That’s not what I was going to ask.’
‘Well, I won’t pull resurrection-fern out of your roof—’
‘Not that, either. I want you to come back out with me to Chitimacha – now, this morning. Right now,’ he added, ‘while it’s early – we can make coffee when we get back.’
‘Festina lente … I thought we ascertained on Friday there was nothing out there.’ He emptied the contents of the coffeemill into the pot – regretfully – for later boiling.
‘That,’ said January, ‘is because we didn’t know where to concentrate our search. Assiduus usus uni rei dedities ingenium et artem saepe vincit,’ he added. ‘And bring your picklocks.’
EIGHTEEN
January dug two dollars from the small horde that Sir John Oldmixton had given him the previous night, and sent Hannibal off to Maggie Valentine’s livery for Roux and Voltaire. It was an expense, and mounted men would be more conspicuous, but Hannibal didn’t look in shape for a four-mile walk out to Bayou des Avocats. While the fiddler was about this errand, January himself walked over to Rue Toulouse. For the past five days, since Jacquette Filoux’s arrest, in addition to taking the young woman food, clean linen and ginger water – for the food in the prison was worse than execrable – and her children to visit her, Olympe and her husband Paul had paid daily visits to the shabby cottage, to see that all was secure. Now January did the same, walking around the yard in a perfunctory fashion, checking the shutters, briefly rattling the handles of those that covered the French doors into the dining room and bedroom, checking likewise the locks on the kitchen door and the latches that were the only defense on the doors of the outhouse, and of the children’s rooms above the kitchen.
He returned to his house in a thoughtful mood, and by the time the shops were open, and the wastrels of the town were stirring, he and Hannibal had reached the stretch of the shell road where Tyrell Mulvaney had set Henry Brooke down on the late afternoon of the twenty-ninth of June.
‘There are thirteen houses on that side of the bayou, along this stretch of Bayou St John,’ he said. ‘Three more lie further back in the trees. There’s the Eagletons and the Almonasters, Pandely and Arrowsmith … maybe Arrowsmith is this side, I don’t recall. I’ve sent a note to Shaw, asking for a list.’
They were passing the Bayou Bridge as he spoke, and across the water January could glimpse the houses, set back in the trees. One or two of them were old, raised on stilts against the periodic floods. Even the newer, more American-looking dwellings stood high on foundations, their ‘main’ floors – like the piano nobile of European town houses – standing above storerooms or wastespace that functioned as above-ground basements. Even so, he reflected, the mosquitoes must still drive the householders crazy.
Servants of course had been about their business for hours. But now the owners themselves were visible, those of them that hadn’t abandoned the state entirely until cooler weather came. A young lady in pink paused on a gallery to have a word with the slaves who swept the steps. A black groom held the heads of a beautiful chestnut team while their owner – and his – climbed into a buggy. A young gentleman in a blue coat helped his crippled wife to walk among her roses, leaning on his arm and a stick.
Was Henry Brooke really Gerry O’Dwyer?
Who had he gone to Bayou St John to meet?
Not someone connected with Jared Ganch, January was willing to bet. Did one of Ganch’s wealthier competitors have a place out here? Or the spymaster for some other country?
Or did one of those houses shelter a discontented wife who’d taken the Irishman’s roving eye one day while he was on his way out to Chitimacha?
Fastidious, Oldmixton had described him.
Beyond Bayou Fortin – a desultory stream that would probably lose its identity in the next flood – the land grew marshier. Instead of houses along the banks January saw only the occasional flat houseboats,
and half-naked children, white or brown, digging vegetable gardens or herding cows in the woods. He glanced behind him a dozen times, but saw no sign of pursuit or surveillance. Catastrophe Watling and his ‘boys’ had evidently taken the same cursory look around Chitimacha that he and Hannibal had performed, seeking for obvious signs that something had been hidden there.
‘Maybe they just assume that we’d have found whatever there was to be found.’ Hannibal adjusted the veils of mosquito-bar that he’d pinned around the brim of his hat, so that they covered his face as they turned off along the edge of Bayou des Avocats, and fanned nevertheless at the mosquitoes that swarmed around them. ‘And maybe they just didn’t want to come back and look very hard. Are you sure it’ll be there?’
‘Not in the slightest.’ January lowered his voice, the heavy stillness of the deeper ciprière pressing around them. On the other side of the bayou, an alligator hauled herself up onto the remains of what looked like a stranded pirogue, decaying where it had long ago been beached. Waterstriders made tiny movement on the green-brown sheet of the stream, where the sun-dapple glinted like stolen gold. ‘But I trust that thing that lives in Olympe’s bottle. And it’s worth a look.’
January left Hannibal holding horse and mule some distance from the plantation itself, and went ahead to cautiously circle the house and grounds, to make sure that they were in fact deserted. He saw no sign of anyone (Not that that means anything, he told himself with a sigh, after it’s rained every afternoon for weeks). Nor was there evidence that anyone had been there since his former visit. Tying Voltaire and Roux in the canebrakes out of sight of the road, the two men stripped to their drawers, shirts, and veil-draped hats, and, armed with January’s cane knife and the stoutest snake-sticks January could cut, they returned to the vine-choked hulk of the steamboat.
The wreck lay heeled slightly to port. She had, January guessed, torn out her belly on a submerged snag trying to get back down Bayou des Avocats to the larger Bayou St John after a flood. ‘I wonder whether the owners cleared her out,’ he murmured, as they half-climbed, half-pulled themselves up the tilted stairway to the upper deck, ‘or whether the locals beat them to it?’
‘I keep expecting to see tigers.’ Hannibal surveyed the clumps and clusters of resurrection-fern which had taken root on every windowsill and bunk of the men’s cabin. Spanish moss hung from holes where the ceiling had decayed. A snake whipped down from a bunk and away into a hole in the floor.
‘Don’t worry about that one,’ January advised, as Hannibal drew back in alarm. ‘Black and yellow longways stripes are garter snakes, not poison. The ones you want to watch out for are the copper-colored ones with diamond markings, or the dark gray with bits of yellow—’
‘I shall watch out for all of them, thank you. I presume they’re … er … friends of your sister?’
‘In fact,’ said January with a smile, ‘they are. She – and I – learned from the time we were Baby John’s age to tell the poison snakes from the safe ones, but Mambo Jeanne, back on Bellefleur, would tan our hides for us if we disturbed any snake. Damballah Wedo – Li Grand Zombi – created the world, Mambo Jeanne would tell us, and his descendants share his wisdom.’
Hannibal made a noise usually written as Eeugh, and shivered.
‘And they do eat mice and cockroaches,’ added January, leading the way out onto the upper deck and around to the ladies’ cabin – much smaller, and with only a few bunks remaining. There was little to be seen there, nor in any of the other rooms of the upper deck, as January had seen during their first inspection of the steamboat. It was one of the older types, a stern-wheeler with a very shallow draft, as any boat would be that anyone would even consider taking, no matter how high the water, up Bayou St John. From the crazy ruin of the stairway to the top deck he could see into the pilot house, perched high above the river to give the pilot the best view of those small ripples and eddies that gave clues to sub-surface dangers. The state of the ceilings of both men’s cabin and women’s told him that trying to cross the upper deck would result in the rotting boards giving way.
‘All right,’ grumbled Hannibal. ‘I’ll give them that. Ave atque vale, amice, all is well … I don’t see where a strongbox full of stock certificates could be hidden up here. For one thing, I don’t think the floors would stand it.’
‘Just making sure,’ returned January. ‘Let’s have a look below.’
‘I was afraid you were going to say that.’
The forepart of the hold stuck up out of water, but was an even worse tangle of vines, resurrection-fern, elephant-ear and swamp-laurel, the broken hatches surrounded with clouds of mosquitoes as with plumes of brown smoke. Hannibal whispered, ‘Di nos protegat,’ as they edged past that sinister pit – God knows what else is down there, January thought – and they made their way to the engine room, submerged knee-deep at its forward end and shoulder-deep at the far end – the end which they had formerly explored by poking their snake-sticks into the murky green water before retreating in the face of the local serpent life.
The boat’s engine was of the older type, and much of it had been salvaged – or looted – years before. The great pivoting crossbeam had been taken down, and lay rusting under a mantle of waterplants and slime. The valves and gears were likewise gone, but the furnace remained, and the two boilers – probably, guessed January, because they were old and may have been too cheaply made to be worth salvage.
Nothing in the furnace. ‘Of course not,’ sighed Hannibal, ‘it’s in the dry end of the room.’
The small iron strongbox – roughly four inches square by a foot long – had been wedged into the flue of the first boiler, and when, wet and slimy and hot, January extracted it from its hiding place and got it out onto the deck, Hannibal made short work of its lock. The neat roll of Bank of England stock certificates had been wrapped for safekeeping in several layers of oiled silk, sealed with wax. Separately wrapped were ninety-six gold eagle five-dollar coins.
There was nothing else in the box.
Without a word, January returned to the boiler room and searched the second boiler, the furnace, and every cranny and nook he could probe beneath the water. Hannibal stood by with a snake-stick and they were both, in spite of liberal coatings of mud and Olympe’s bug-grease, bitten repeatedly by mosquitoes above the water and crawfish beneath it. They found nothing.
‘It has to be here somewhere,’ said January stubbornly, when they emerged at last, exhausted, filthy, and almost dizzy with thirst.
‘Does it?’ Hannibal retrieved the little strongbox from where they’d cached it under the stair during their second search, and followed January out through the curtain of honeysuckle to the deck. ‘If Brooke was going partners with Ganch, I can see him handing off the money and the stocks as seed money for the expedition. But he’d want to keep the more valuable commodity – the list of names – to himself. I presume he compiled the list from Oldmixton’s notes about people in New Grenada who’d assist filibusters in their little looting expedition, if that’s what they were planning …’
‘That’s what I figure,’ said January. From the little bundle of their clothes he fetched a corked jug of ginger water that he’d had the wits to bring from home – the taste of it brought Gabriel, its brewer, back to his mind, with painful and furious clarity. ‘People who know where the convents and churches around Cartagena, or wherever they’re planning to visit in the war zone, are hiding their gold. And I’m afraid,’ he went on wearily, ‘that you’re probably right.’
‘Were I dealing with Jared Ganch,’ said Hannibal, ‘I’d be sure to keep something that he needed up my sleeve – and make sure I knew where all the exits of the room were during any conversation. I suspect Brooke had it on him when he was shot, and that,’ he concluded, ‘unfortunately, brings us back to Uncle Juju.’
‘I fear – again – that you’re right.’ January passed the ginger water to his friend and tucked a corner of his bandana handkerchief under the lock of the strongbox
as he shut it, to keep the lock from catching again. ‘Let’s do what we can to conceal the fact that we were here,’ he went on, ‘in case one of Ganch’s myrmidons is clever enough to figure out why a man with something to hide would buy land with a wrecked steamboat on it—’
‘Could happen,’ agreed Hannibal, with a certain amount of regret but no evident belief in such an eventuality.
‘And then I think I’ll just conceal this in my cellar for the time being. Until I have everything Ganch is asking for. Or at least until I’ve talked to Juju, and seen what he has to say.’
Hannibal raised his eyebrows almost to his hairline in question.
‘I found Juju this morning. While you were getting the horses.’
The eyebrows went higher. For a moment January thought his friend would actually be at a loss for words, but Hannibal said, ‘Aurora Musis amica. Where was he?’
‘Exactly where L’Araignée told Olympe he’d be.’
Hannibal offered to go into the Flesh and Blood that evening to fetch forth Jared Ganch, if he was there, or Catastrophe Watling, who would almost certainly be among those present. January shook his head. ‘I don’t want them to know you,’ he said. They were in the yard of the crooked house on Rue Esplanade again, sponging off in a tub of tepid water after hiding the strongbox in one of the small, secret chambers beneath the house, where January often concealed the runaway slaves who would make their way in from the countryside, seeking passage to New York or Canada. ‘If things go wrong tonight – if we don’t manage to net Uncle Juju, or if he doesn’t have this list of names – I’m going to need you to fall in love with Cassie Lovelace, so that you’ll at least be hanging around her house if something happens with Rose. I don’t want them knowing that you’re likely to be spying for me.’
‘So the boy love is perjur’d everywhere … Your sister wouldn’t happen to have given you any remedy for mosquito bites, would she? I feel like I’m coming down with the smallpox …’
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