Armand wheeled to flee toward the kitchen steps and jolted to a halt to see January step from the darkness directly behind him. He gasped, ‘Benjamin!’ and Shaw’s hand fastened like a rat trap on his elbow, jerking his hand away from his pocket.
Hannibal got to his feet, brushing dust from his threadbare trousers. ‘You hear all that?’ he asked. Then he knelt, to gather up the papers that had scattered from his hands.
‘Every word.’ Shaw spat, the tobacco making a dark splat on the side of the nearest barrel. ‘Them the papers Ganch is askin’ you for, Maestro?’
He kept his grip on his prisoner’s arm – and his gun pointed at the young man’s side – so didn’t see when Hannibal flashed January a brief glimpse of a list of names before slipping it into his own pocket. January took the rest of the papers from the fiddler, pretended to look through them, and said, ‘Seems to be.’
He didn’t see any reason that Shaw would confiscate them, or feel that he had to return them to the British consul. But like Armand, January wasn’t about to take chances.
TWENTY-TWO
The meeting was set for Chitimacha Plantation at noon on the following day, the tenth of July. Accompanied by Hannibal, January returned the strongbox to the ruin of the steamboat just before midnight Monday night, concealing it behind a wall of honeysuckle creepers on the upper deck. Although he was fairly certain that the Bank of England stock certificates didn’t legally exist, he wasn’t at all sure that Abishag Shaw wouldn’t feel obliged to return them to the British consulate anyway. He got Shaw to follow him at a cautious distance to the rendezvous the next day, and rode up to the decaying shamble of the old house, ostensibly alone, to find Ganch, Chuy, and Rocky Watling waiting for him on the front step.
‘Cat tells me you’re pretty good at finding things,’ said the gambler. ‘Looks like I was right about a moderate degree of pressure.’
January said, in his meekest voice, ‘That you were, sir.’
The gambler held up the key they’d taken from the little pile of Juju’s effects. ‘I don’t see a strongbox, though.’
January shook his head, and tried to appear as if he weren’t thinking about what this man would look like with a red-hot crowbar shoved up his rectum. ‘You will, sir. It’s right here on the premises.’
Ganch tilted his head: Oh, yeah?
‘But we did have a deal, sir, begging your pardon. And I was hoping to see my wife.’
Without turning his head, Ganch called out, ‘Cat?’
Rose emerged from the house first, Gabriel walking at her side, as if ready to grab her elbow to steady her should she show signs of giving birth. Zizi-Marie followed them – cautious and scared, but one look at her face told January she hadn’t been harmed – and behind her, the woman Esmeralda, armed with pistol and rifle. Cat came behind them, carrying a rifle in one hand and Baby John on his hip. The only one whose hands were bound was Uncle Juju, who brought up the rear, not exactly cringing but keeping as close to Rose as he possibly could.
Baby John was minutely examining a fancy Mexican tobacco pouch and seemed the most at-ease of the entire party.
‘Are you all right?’
‘We’re fine,’ Rose called out immediately, and January felt as if he could fall on his knees and kiss the Virgin Mary’s feet.
Rose looked fine. Just very, very pregnant.
He turned to Ganch, said, ‘Thank you, sir. It’s not every white man who keeps his word to a man of my race, and I am grateful, beyond words.’ And I will tear your heart out and eat it, if you go back on me now …
For the first time in his life he was grateful that he was ebony-black, African-black, because he knew by the heat beneath his skin that his neck and ears would have been crimson with telltale rage.
From his pocket he drew the list of names that Hannibal had given him that morning – meticulously copied in an excellent forgery of the original handwriting, presumably Brooke’s – and handed it to the gambler. Ganch glanced over it, nodded in satisfaction, and tucked it into his own pocket. January wondered whether he had already met some of the men whose names were on it, the men who were his contacts in whatever scheme they would undertake of raiding and looting in South America. The names had been mostly Spanish, with one or two Frenchmen, and the list had included as well the names of half a dozen convents near Cartagena.
Bags of gold, boxes of rubies, Our Lord with his body made of pearl …
‘The strongbox has been under our noses, all this time, sir,’ said January, keeping his voice steady. ‘It’s over in that old steamboat, up on the boiler deck. Where you come off the stair, go forward to a big mass of honeysuckle. It’s just sitting right behind it.’
Still, his heart hammered – audible to everyone who stood before the old house, it felt like – as Cat and Rocky made their way down the path they’d cut in the snarls of cane around the house, and across to the vine-covered hulk. He was well aware that Rose, Gabriel, and Zizi-Marie would bring several thousand dollars altogether, if sold in Arkansas or Texas. Was well aware also that with his raid on New Granada imminent, Jared Ganch might well have had enough men at his command to make him willing to risk this kind of wholesale kidnapping.
Was three thousand dollars enough to offset the trouble there’d be with the US government if the raid in preparation came to light? January didn’t know.
As if he read his mind, Ganch said quietly, ‘Now, you wouldn’t have gone and told anyone about our dealings, Mr Janvier, would you?’
‘Only to ask my friends to watch the slave pens, sir, should something happen to me.’
The sandy man smiled. ‘Cat told me, you’re a clever nigger.’
The five minutes or so before Cat appeared on the boiler deck of the steamboat seemed to last an hour. But the Kaintuck was grinning broadly, and waved his hand to Ganch.
The gambler turned back to January and stood for a time, studying him with those dark eyes like onyx beads. Evaluating. Then his glance went back to the little group on the porch: Gabriel looking grim and very young; Zizi only tired, as if she had lain awake for most of four nights, listening to drunk white men cursing thirty feet away …
When Ganch looked at January again he wore a wide, gracious smile.
And January thought, He’s going to kill me later.
‘Looks like you came through in all respects, Mr January. Of course there’s no need for me to remind you, that nothing of this – not names, not places, not events – gets said to anyone, and that includes Mrs January and your children.’
‘I understand that, sir.’
‘I’ve already had a little talk with Mr Filoux,’ Ganch went on, ‘about what might happen to him – and to you – if any of this gets out.’
‘Yes, sir.’ No leverage there, January knew. Any revelation he could make would not be believed, and certainly no protection would be extended to him.
Ganch clapped him familiarly on the arm. ‘Mrs January will tell you – won’t you, m’am? – that no harm came to any of them while they were my guests.’
‘It’s quite true,’ said Rose, coming down the steps – exquisitely, absolutely matter-of-fact, completely herself. ‘And in fact on the one occasion that I felt ill a doctor was sent for. Whatever they wanted from you—’ She glanced in the direction of the steamboat with raised eyebrows – ‘they must have wanted it pretty badly. Truly,’ she added, her voice lowered to his ears alone, ‘we are well.’
‘Then let’s get out of here,’ he said softly.
‘And it will all be, I trust,’ smiled Ganch, ‘as if it had never been.’
Esmeralda produced a skinning knife from her belt and cut the ropes on Juju’s wrists, and without waiting for the others he fled like a shot from a gun. Ganch and his men roared with laughter, and that laughter followed January and his family, as he lifted Rose to Voltaire’s saddle, and they walked back along the trace towards Bayou St John.
‘It doesn’t seem fair,’ Rose said quietly, that night when the attorn
ey Vachel Corcet left the house.
The little lawyer had brought the news that charges against Jacquette Filoux were being dropped, on the strength of the testimonies of Abishag Shaw and the cab driver Tyrell Mulvaney. ‘Francheville – de la Roche-St-Ouen – is swearing he never said a word about Henry Brooke or about any of the events of the night of June twenty-ninth,’ he had said. ‘Between Shaw, Sefton and Mulvaney – not to mention the passport and documents being in his possession, and the bloodstain on his hall floor – I can’t imagine any judge in the parish is going to believe him. His wife’s down with him at the Cabildo.’
‘Has she family?’ January had asked, and Corcet’s plump face clouded with sadness as he shook his head.
‘She’s a German from Frankfort, who came to this country as a lady’s maid with a Frenchwoman who was visiting the Almonasters. Francheville – de la Roche-St-Ouen – was reasonably well-off when they married, but lost pretty much all of his savings in the bank crash two years ago, and the house is mortgaged to the eaves. If her husband is hanged, God knows what the poor lady is going to do.’
‘You’ve spoken of how you can’t step twice into the same river.’ Rose’s words now echoed January’s earlier thoughts, as he came into their bedroom now, with the house growing quiet around them. The voices of Gabriel and Zizi floated from the gallery, where they were bidding Ti-Gall good night.
‘Brooke – O’Dwyer – was after all trying to blackmail Armand, over events that happened nine years ago. Things done by another person, in another lifetime. This poor woman – and her children—’ her hand rested instinctively on her own swollen belly – ‘can have known nothing of them, or of the person who did them. Only that she and her children will be turned out of their home.’
Baby John’s staggering steps followed Gabriel’s back across the parlor to the dining room, punctuated by the occasional soft thump as the toddler lost his balance. From Shaw’s list, January knew that Armand’s youngest son – whose birth had cost his mother her health – was the same age.
‘He was just as ready to let someone else die for his crime on this occasion, though,’ he replied after a time. ‘He evidently felt perfectly justified in letting “one of the local whores”, as he put it, hang. And he apparently thought nothing of murdering Hannibal to cover his tracks. All with good reasons, of course. Maybe you can’t step twice into the same river … but sometimes you choose a river that’s awfully similar to the first.’
Rose acknowledged his point with a nod. She’d taken off her spectacles – she had, of course, remained in her room and in bed during January’s talk in the parlor with Corcet. Without them her hazel-gray eyes seemed softer, the eyes of the girl who hid behind her air of matter-of-fact briskness. The eyes of the girl who’d sometimes smile a quicksilver smile. ‘What you say is true. But his wife is the one who’ll suffer. Probably for the rest of her life.’
As Anne suffered, thought January, later, lying awake in the darkness at Rose’s side. Midnight, moonlight through the jalousies, stifling heat and the thin whine of a lone mosquito outside the tent of netting that swathed the bed.
As Daniel had suffered, in the days before and after Anne’s trial, and in the long nights following her death. Two years after the incidents of the Three Glorious Days – when January had left Paris – in many ways his friend had still not recovered that double loss.
He slipped from beneath the mosquito bar, his body striped with needles of moonlight as he padded from the room. In the parlor the furniture was still huddled together under canvas, and the air was fusty with the smell of plaster and paint. His heartbeat hard as he unlatched the French door that led out onto the gallery, unlocked the shutters.
Beyond the absolute blackness of the gallery he could make out the dim shapes of the neutral ground up the center of Rue Esplanade, the shabby trees and the glimmer of water, where once the town rampart had stood. Cicadas droned, a heavy, metallic rattle; a thousand frogs peeped in the ditch. Among the trees, just for an instant, he saw the minuscule red coal of a cigar, and a moment later, smelled the whispered echo of smoke.
One of Jared Ganch’s men.
Watching the house.
Behind his shoulder, Rose’s voice breathed, ‘So what do we do?’
‘Jared Ganch has friends on the municipal council. I can’t imagine that a complaint against him, even from a white man, would get him more than a night in jail and a slap on the wrist.’ He put his arm around her waist, subconsciously raised his other hand to stroke the jamb of the French door beside him.
His house. Her house.
The school they’d worked and waited and struggled to put together for four years now.
Do we run away? As Armand had fled Paris, left his title and what remained of his family estates? Close it down? Leave it?
Do we have a choice?
‘We watch our backs,’ he said at last. ‘Oldmixton may be able to help us. Right now Ganch’s focus will be getting a ship and getting his men down to New Granada before the hurricane months begin in September. He doesn’t want trouble just now. That gives us time to plan. That gives you time,’ he added, tightening his arm around her slim shoulders, resting his hand on her belly, ‘to unburden yourself.’
She gave him a little shove, like a schoolboy, and a breath of laughter.
When they looked back out into the darkness, the red coal of the cigar was gone.
‘I should write to Daniel,’ said January, as they closed and locked the doors, padded across the dark parlor to the bedroom. ‘Tell him what happened. Every letter I’ve had from him – and I haven’t had many – has been … superficial. Purple-trimmed persiflage about the opera or his latest boyfriends, but saying very little. Freytag answered my last letter, after half a year’s delay, explaining that his master “wasn’t well”. I’m not even certain, at this distance, that Daniel will care.’
‘Do you care?’
Do I care?
He didn’t reply at once. They opened the door of Baby John’s room, the tiny light of the china veilleuse just enough to show them his round little face, serious even in sleep, against the white of his pillow. According to Rose the boy had slept well and peacefully every night of their imprisonment, and had, in fact, seemed to treat the entire experience with his usual grave curiosity rather than fear.
When he held the mosquito bar aside, to let Rose climb into their bed, he said, ‘I do care. Do I think saving Jacquette Filoux from hanging is worth us losing our house, our school? The life we’ve worked for? Worth having to flee from New Orleans? I wish it were otherwise, but I can’t say that I don’t. Anne Ben-Gideon …’
‘And in exchange—’ Rose removed her spectacles, reached under the gauzy tent to lay them on the bedside table – ‘Armand de la Roche-St-Ouen is hanged, and his wife is the one who loses her house, her support. How is it that one man can spread such carnage – such grief – in all directions, down through the years? Except,’ she added, ‘that that’s what handsome scoundrels do.’
January saw nothing of a watcher the following day, though he found the fresh stubs of three cigars on the ground where the man had stood. According to Hannibal, who was still dealing faro and romancing Cassie Lovelace out in Faubourg Pontchartrain, there was a great deal of coming and going around the indigo mill. After checking the vicinity of his own house carefully, January risked a visit to the British consulate, to give Sir John Oldmixton the original copy of the list.
‘That’s New Grenada, all right,’ said the diplomat, glancing over the names. ‘I know only one of the men personally, and he’s always impressed me as the sort of blackguard who’d conspire to rob a convent while the government troops are busy elsewhere. Dear, dear! The others are men we’ve used now and again. Was Brooke this Mr O’Dwyer you spoke of?’
‘He was,’ said January. ‘And he was killed for reasons that had nothing to do with the list.’
‘I trust – I hope – that you passed a copy of this list along to this fellow Ganch
you spoke of? And that your family is … is in good health.’
January smiled grimly at the euphemism. ‘They are,’ he said. ‘Though someone was watching our house last night. When we arrested Brooke’s murderer, I got this list, and what looked like a strongbox key, from his desk, and Ganch accepted them. He may have had the strongbox itself already. Nothing more was said of it.’
‘Dear me.’ Oldmixton shook his head. ‘I’ve repeatedly told Lord Melbourne that more care needs to be taken in appointing couriers. There’s more fuss being made about ladies of the new queen’s bedchamber, evidently, than men who come from God knows where carrying thousands of pounds’ worth of negotiable paper. And on the subject of negotiable paper …’
He went to his desk, and brought out a small sack that clinked heavily when he put it in January’s hand.
A new start. A place to hide. Money for a hasty journey …
The money he’d turned down, knowing what entanglement with Oldmixton might mean.
January closed his eyes. Virgin Mary, guide me …
‘Would you give this instead,’ he said, ‘to a woman named Belle Francheville, whose husband murdered Henry Brooke? It was … a long story. I never wanted anything to do with the job – and she needs it more desperately than we.’
Returning home, he was met by Olympe on the gallery with the news that Rose had gone into labor an hour previously.
January had been away at the birth of his first son, returning from six months in the western mountains1 on the day Baby John had been born. When Rose was delivered of the child she asked to call Alexander – (‘Alec,’ she murmured, with a sleepy glance at Hannibal, later) – January helped in the birth, and afterwards brought in Baby John, and held his wife and his two sons in his arms, feeling deeply at peace and almost as if he could have slept. For all the fear and uncertainty of the summer, for all the darkness that lay ahead – for all his rage at the power of the whites that he knew would give him and his no protection from a man like Ganch – he had the curious sense that the core of the world was whole.
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