Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 24

The door was opened.

"Ben!" cried Hope, the first one through, with her boys at her sides and her youngest baby tucked in the fold of her shawl. Washed-out dawnlight flooded in around her. "Ben, what . . . ?" "Don't mind him," said Jules Ney's nephew who'd guarded Jeanette. "Get over there. You-next to her. You . . . "

They were pushed into line. Chained, neck and wrists. Even Marquis, gasping with the pain of his burns, and Boaz, carried by his wife and his friend Philippe. The other sick men, Java and Dumaka, staggering. January counted, tallied in his mind, as each slave was herded through the door by men with rifles and pistols in hand, men who locked them into their manacles, shoved and thrust them as if they had been sheep.

All of them were there. Cornwallis speechless with outrage, Agamemnon trembling with silent fury at this second betrayal. Eve shrinking fearfully from the men who pawed and fingered her.

Ancilla holding close to her surviving son Ti-Rod and trying to catch her husband's eye. Ajax and Rodney and Herc doing their best to keep everyone in order, knowing that to do so was often the only way of averting wholesale, unpredictable retaliation.

Mohammed and Parson, half-carrying old Pennydip. Jeanette stumbling in chains, her face and half-bared b.r.e.a.s.t.s marked with burns. Mohammed and Baptiste went immediately to move January out of the way of the crowding feet, the shuffling bodies that filled the hold more and more tightly. "Get away from him!" snarled the mate. "You leave him gagged, you hear?"

"Yes, sir," said Mohammed, stepping back. His face was swollen and caked with blood and his nose had been broken. "Yes, sir."

"Can we take a couple, sir?" one of the deckhands asked discreetly, running a hand over the back of Eve's neck. "Just for an hour or so?"

"I'll ask." He might have been speaking of books in a lending library. "Let's get under way first."

"You trust that Napoleoniste's brat?" Old Jules Ney paused outside the door with his son, watching someone outside the range of January's sight.

"Shouldn't I?" retorted the younger man. "All Fourchet wants is to be out of this country. A man may live comfortably enough in Paris on fifty thousand dollars, if he invests it wisely. And if he doesn't . . ." Captain Ney shrugged. "They're all healthy and strong, except for a few old crocks.

Those we can just drop off the back of the boat. Where else would we get prime blacks for three hundred dollars apiece? Revenge is a wonderful thing, mon pere."

And old Ney sniffed, as Robert's voice said, "Jac," and both the captain and the old man stepped away. January strained his ears to listen, but the noise in the hold was too great, children crying, men muttering and whispering.

"This is ridiculous!" Agamemnon sobbed, "Absurd! I don't care how much damage has been done by this-this hoodoo! Michie Esteban wouldn't sell all of us! I tell you that woman is forcing him to do it!"

"How would she do that?" demanded Ajax, exasperated. "I suppose she's forcing Michie Robert to do it, too. . . ."

"He wouldn't sell his own children's mammy!" raged the valet. "His wife's maid!"

"You shut up in there!"

There was quiet, through which January heard Robert say, ". . . found her in Paris. In a garret in a street in the Saint-Antoine district, near the Halles, the worst of the worst. She was so sodden with gin she barely knew me! I was with her when she died. I swore then . . ."

"I'd have heard something of it, if they were planning this!" hissed Agamemnon.

"Like they tell you everything?" demanded Cornwallis scornfully.

"What's gonna happen?" pleaded Yellow Austin's daughter Tanisha, clinging to Baptiste's hand.

"We all gonna get sold?" Boaz coughed desperately, and those around him propped him gently so he could breathe. Boots clunked on the deck; the stateroom door creaked again. Two deckhands carried Hannibal past the cargo-hold door, and those standing nearest the door looked back fast at where January lay in his corner, eyes asking, scared. Ney, Old Jules, and the engineer walked over and gave some low-voiced instructions, then followed them out of sight, and a voice called, "Get ready to cast off. Let's get out of here." From the engine room came a sharp clanging, the hiss of steam immediately cut off, and through the wall January heard the engine room door open and a deckhand say, "We're ready to cast off, M'sieu Fourchet."

"I'll be along," yelled Robert, over the dense rattle that shook the engine, and another hiss of steam. The deckhand's boots retreated. More steam, thinning away to a frail piercing whisper.

What's Robert doing in the engine room?

" 'Sieu Robert, the Captain's gone ash.o.r.e," said the engineer's voice, and January saw him outside the cargo-hold door, looking back toward the stern as Robert, evidently, emerged from the engine room. "You want to help him finish at the house?"

"Good Lord, why should I do that?" The young man's voice was thick with revulsion. "The place was a purgatory to me. I was married to the silly b.i.t.c.h against my will; her brats were spoilt little grubs, and the world will be well rid of the lot. Let them all roast together."

There was silence, or as much silence as there could be with everyone in the cargo hold whispering among themselves, murmuring fear and apprehension under the deckhand's eye.

Outside, evidently speaking to the look on the engineer's face, Robert added, "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime, my dear Theo. Surely you know that."

And Ney's voice: "Done." The gangplank creaked. "You coming with us?"

"I think not. I have tickets on the Anne Louise Sat.u.r.day, for Bordeaux. Adieu, my dear Jac, and thank you for everything. You have truly been the agent of my liberation. Given my overwhelming grief at the loss of my family, I think I'm not going to be able to bear to return to this benighted province anytime soon."

Cries on deck. Men running past with poles, and then the soft jostling as before, as the boat was thrust away from the landing. Ajax, standing nearest the door, gasped, and at the same moment the deckhand shoved him deeper into the room and went out past him, closing and bolting the door.

"What is it?" asked someone softly.

The driver whispered, "My G.o.d. That white man shut the door quick so I couldn't see for sure . . .

but it looked to me like they set fire to the house."

?TWENTY-ONE.

"Ben, what the h.e.l.l's going on?" Kiki knelt beside him, wrenching and picking at the knots of the bandanna they'd gagged him with. "Michie Robert and M'am Fourchet drove up in the gig early this morning. . . ."

"M'am Fourchet come to me late last night and told me to take it out." Jacko crowded as close as his chains-fastened to the opposite wall-would allow. "We drove over to Refuge and Michie Robert was there. . . ."

"Old Michie Jules had us all out and waiting," put in Gosport. "He knew that boat was coming.

He had to, the way he wouldn't bring out the cane-knives, and wouldn't have the second gang go into the mill, nor let the night gang go back to their cabins."

The knots were tough and had been tied by experts. January, whose mouth had been stuffed with another rancid and sweat-stained bandanna before the gag was tied on, wanted to scream with frustration.

"I swear Michie Esteban didn't know what was going on." Baptiste knelt beside Kiki, gently working at the knots in the thong around January's wrists, so that the two servants' elbows got in each other's way and January felt like everyone in the hold was standing on top of him. "He asked me what was going on out there, when he looked out and saw the men still standing."

"Michie Robert and M'am Fourchet came up to the door and spoke with him alone," offered Ariadne, almost invisible in the dense gloom of the hold. Her chains clinked as she tried to get nearer. "They had us all leave the dining room, and when we came back in, Michie Esteban said we was to get all the houseservants down to the mill. I don't understand . . ."

"You little imbecile, he had a gun on her," snapped Cornwallis.

Everyone fell silent in momentary shock. The valet's chains jangled with his gesture of annoyance.

"He has to have," Cornwallis went on. He was barely to be seen in the dimness, but his neat cravat had come awry and his sleek hair was mussed. "You saw the way he stood next to her, the way he never let her away from him. You saw the cloak he had over his arm. He had a gun under the cloak and I think he told her-and Mr. Esteban-he'd shoot her if they didn't cooperate. She wasn't herself, you could tell that. I'd say he gave her opium last night to keep her quiet, if as you say she went to meet him at Refuge. You've seen how he's been making up to her, making love to her. . . ."

"Tcha!" said Hope, and Henna said, "I thought it was sad. That he loved her-"

"He no more loved her than he loves his wife," said the valet disgustedly.

"He came in the nursery himself." Marthe's voice sounded shakily from another part of the dark room. "He had M'am Fourchet with him then, too, and yes, like you said, he held onto her close so that cloak he carried was right up against her side. The children were sleeping and I said, did he really want me to leave them? Their mama's mighty particular about that. But he said yes, he'd see to their mama. You don't think he'd harm his own children? I know what Ajax says he saw, but he wouldn't-"

"You know as well as I do how he hates those children," said Vanille's sullen voice. "You watch him with them sometime. He doesn't even want to touch them."

"I know," said the nurse, grieved that it had been so. "Poor things. I know Jean-Luc can be a trial, but..."

"Jean-Luc is a nasty little beast." That was Agamemnon. "And Fantine . . ."

"Fantine's just timid." "We can't argue about that now." Ajax's deep voice cut through the rising tones of frightened anger. "They're burning the house, I tell you! I saw one of those white deckhands throw a lighted lamp in through the window of the parlor. I saw the smoke rising."

"But not with the children in it!" Marthe's voice was pleading. "He wouldn't. . . ."

"He would and he did." January gasped as Kiki dragged the bandannas out of his mouth. "He came back from Paris wanting revenge on his father for his mother's death-Who here knew his mother? Did she really die in New Orleans, or did she go to France?"

"She went to France." Old Pennydip's voice came shakily over the stirring and the din around Marthe and the handful of others-Mundan the gardener, Musenda the groom, Henna and Ti- Jeanne-who had begun to cry out, trying to come up with a way to go back and save the women, the children, the men who had been left behind in the burning house.

"We've got to do something! We can't let them die!" they kept saying, though January was grimly aware that, chained in the hold of the fast-moving steamboat, already several miles upriver, there was in fact nothing any of them could do. That the Fourchets-and Hannibal-would die. Were probably dead already. There remained only retribution.

And he, January, was the only person in the entire room who would have even a chance of testifying in court as to the sequence of events.

"After that summer when her two babies died, her two little sons, M'am Camille wouldn't live on Triomphe no more, and she went with her daughters to New Orleans," Pennydip went on in her soft slow voice. She was probably as old as Mambo Hera and had seen too much of death to be drawn into the clamor around her. "She lived in the town house there for a year or two or three, until Michie Robert was married-and my, what a to-do there was about that!"

"Michie Fourchet made some kind of deal with Michie Prideaux, M'am Helene's daddy." With one eye swollen shut and blood caked on his nose and mouth Mohammed looked like a nightmare, but his voice was still steady and calm. "They were going to buy out Lescelles and divide the land between them, or some such plan, only it never came off."

January gritted his teeth, trying to listen, trying to focus his mind on the pieces of the puzzle, instead of thinking of his friend lying like a pagan sacrifice on Fourchet's pyre. They'd drugged him-probably forced everyone in the house to drink opium before they fired the place. . . . There was nothing I could have done, he repeated to himself, over and over, above the creaky run of old Pennydip's voice. Nothing.

Except check the house first instead of the kitchen.

Even then, he thought, that would only have meant Ney and his men would have killed him the moment they caught him, instead of keeping him to sell.

It crossed his mind that, opiated as Hannibal was when they'd carried him ash.o.r.e, he had probably not suffered.

But his whole body hurt with it, with sorrow and fury. I will kill him, he thought. Somehow, I will destroy Robert Fourchet. For all that he has done.

"Well, just after the weddin' M'am Camille took all the jewelry old Michie gave her and sold it, and ran off to Paris," continued the candle-maker. "I never heard such a yellin' and cussin' and carryin' on in my life. He say, 'She dead to me. I have no wife.'"

"Easy enough to say," put in Mohammed, "until you want to have a wife again. When he was courting the young Madame-if you can term it courting-he asked his lawyers to find out whether Madame Camille was alive or dead."

"For a long time they couldn't, I remember that." Kiki remained squatting beside January's head.

"Gilles told me it drove Michie Fourchet just about crazy, that he couldn't marry the girl he wanted. 'What's it to me, if the other b.i.t.c.h is alive or dead?' he'd yell. I'd hear him, clear across the yard. Then all of a sudden everybody was saying, Oh, yes, M'am Camille's really dead, it's all all right. Myself, I think Michie Fourchet might have just made that up."

"He did, or his lawyer," said January grimly. "Because Robert found his mother in Paris in September. Dying."

"Oh, my lord, was that M'am Camille?" gasped Vanille. "That nasty old wh.o.r.e he went to see?"

"I think so, yes."

In the darkness Marthe's sobbing sounded very loud, and Henna cried out, to no one in particular, "Is that all you can think of?"

"They took the horses," said Musenda, his voice shaking with hurt, for the carriage team and the riding horses were like his children. "Just led them away like cattle. That Jac Ney, he has no care for a good horse, he'll sell them for what he can get, to Americans. . . ."

"Then you're saying it was Mr. Robert who poisoned his father?" Cornwallis looked down at January, his long arms folded over his black-coated chest. "Out of revenge?"

"Yes. Knowing that there was already unrest on Mon Triomphe. Everyone in the parish can testify about the voodoo marks, the destruction, maybe a rebellion brewing. When the house is found burned, and the family dead-all except Michie Robert, who as everyone knows was away in Baton Rouge-and every slave on the place missing, what do you think Sheriff Duffy's going to say? Thank you!" January added, pulling his newly freed arms around from behind him and rubbing the deep welts on his wrists.

"That's why he's selling us?" asked Ajax, squatting beside January. He moved his hand, to reach out to where Hope and Eve stood, but could not stretch his arm so far. "Just to make us all sort of disappear so he can say it was a slave revolt?"

"But what are we going to do?" pleaded Marthe, twisting her hands. "What about the children?

About poor Madame? Poor Michie Hannibal? We have to do something!"

"Like what?" demanded Jeanette roughly.

"If Ney sells you off far enough," said January, "who's going to hear? Who's going to come around and ask?"

They looked at one another. Held one another close: husbands and wives, mothers and children.

A man's footsteps creaked past the door. Eve flinched, as if at the memory of a man's hand on her neck.

"You know a lot about it," remarked Cornwallis. January nodded, wishing it were possible to stand and confront the man's sardonic eyes, rather than remain, perforce, on the floor with his feet chained in the air. He'd never liked the valet. "That's why we were there," he said. "Michie Hannibal and me." And his voice stuck over the name. "Tell me one more thing, Mamzelle Pennydip. Was Robert on Mon Triomphe, the summer those two babies died?"

"Robert was there, yes," mumbled the old woman promptly. "He'd been left in school in town but he came up on the boat, summers. He spent most of his time there runnin' with Jac Ney, no matter what his daddy said of them Neys bein' no good."

There was silence, as men and women mutely pieced together the evil details of the whirlwind they'd seen only from the outside.

"And did you ever find who else was causing the trouble before Michie Robert came home?"

Cornwallis tilted his head, managing to look superior in spite of the chains on his wrists and neck.

"Who caused the fire in the mill? And poor old Reuben to die?"

"I think a lot of people wanted revenge," January replied. "But that's not the problem now. The problem is: Michie Robert is too smart to think he's going to get away with this, if any of us survives."

In the shocked hush that followed, the clatter and jerk of the engines was horribly loud. "Is there any water in here? Any food?"

But the cargo hold was bare, save for the two latrine buckets--chained into the corners where they stood-and the wall-rings and chains themselves.

Gosport volunteered, "I saw barrels of water and what looked like food-pots of beans and rice and that-when we come past the galley doors. You think he'd put poison in that?"

"I wouldn't put it past him." But as the words came out of January's mouth he didn't believe them.

Poisoning one man was one thing. Poisoning a hundred and fifty-or, if Robert planned to deal with the crew as well, nearly two hundred-was chancy, uncertain, and would probably take more time and certainly more poison than Fourchet had at his disposal. Robert would need to be sure, if he were doing anything at all. It would be better to "f.u.c.k d.a.m.n!" said a voice on the other side of the wall. Metal clanged harshly in the engine room. "Roger? Roger . . . Let Jac know we've got a problem with the pump, and with the steam cutoff to the boilers."

Quick-striding feet. The recollection of the sound of steam venting in the engine room not long ago, of rattling pipes . . .

Robert's voice on the other side of the wall. January turned absolutely cold inside.

At the same moment the footfalls, coming from the engine room door and heading for the steps, checked, scuffled, and there was a thump, as if someone had kicked the wall near the door. Then the slap of the bolt shooting back, and the door opened to frame Abis.h.a.g Shaw's gawky figure against the light-soaked fog of morning.