Benjamin January - Sold Down The River Part 6

The conversation had turned to the merits and shortcomings of fruit pies, but January had kept the information in his mind, and now in the darkness pushed and wriggled his way like a huge cat through the cane that grew close up on that side of the house.

Lights still burned in Fourchet's office, and in the corner chamber on the nearer side of the house that the women of the household used as a sewing room. The dim flush of candle glow flecked the weed-choked beds and neglected paths. Lying on his belly in the hedge's black shelter, January could just make out the intricate pattern of quatrefoil and circle formed by the curved brick walkways. A statue, indistinguishable in a garment of lichen and resurrection fern, presided over a sc.u.mmed and stagnant fountain. In summer it would stink, January guessed, and be h.e.l.lish with mosquitoes. Low box hedges had once outlined each minute, fussy bed, and these, too, had been suffered to run wild in neglect, except in one corner where they'd been pulled out, the pattern of the paths simplified, and beds of earth tilled, presumably to sprout herbs in spring.

What had Shaw said about Camille Ba.s.sancourt? A Parisian lady who'd come to Louisiana with an aunt. After bearing five children she herself had died-six years ago?-to be replaced by a girl of fifteen or sixteen. January wondered how old Camille herself had been at the time of her marriage, and at her death.

She'd put in this garden, with its impractical Asian lilies, its hedges of Italian oleander, to look at during the eight months of the year when planters' families were required to be on their land. A work of art? January wondered. Or an act of defiance? Clearly Robert's wife Helene hadn't kept it up. Helene's French, like her gown, was very Parisian, but with a Creole intonation, speaking of education there rather than birth.

Fourchet's voice rose from the direction of the house. "G.o.d d.a.m.n it, when I say I want-"

Followed by a crash.

Cornwallis? January wondered, remembering the valet's cynical aloofness. The maddeningly slow-spoken Esteban? Madame Helene, whose grating voice and whiny petulance would be almost certain to set off the old man's temper in short order? The young Madame? He treats you like a servant, like a dog. . . .

You. Tu.

Belly to the ground, he crawled slowly around the whole of the hedge, peering under the dark skirts of the oleanders and turning the leaves carefully-very carefully, with one of his colored bandannas protecting his fingers-until he found what he had been almost certain he would find.

In the rear corner of the garden a small brick shed had been built, clogged now with trash, old pots and wheelbarrows and broken sugar-molds. Behind it, where the shadows were most dense, twelve or fourteen branches had been stripped of their leaves, and a dozen more cut off and barked, to get the milky sap.

Last night Mohammed had spoken the name of Mambo Jeanne.

In his mind January saw the old woman again. He and Olympe used to go gathering herbs with her in the Bellefleur woods. Under her blue-and-white striped tignon, her narrow, wrinkled face had borne two small scars on each temple-most of the Congo women had them. Now that one she's a bad one, he heard her deep, surprising voice, and saw the glossy dark of spear-shaped leaves in her callused fingers. She didn't handle the leaves directly, but wrapped a rag from her collection of rags around her hands, before she'd pluck leaves or flowers or twigs from Simon Fourchet's oleander bushes.

You boil this one, boil it thick, make obe-but you throw away the pot you make it in, and you throw away the mortar and the pestle both. You burn the rag you pick them with and you don't inhale the smoke.

Four-year-old Olympe had nodded gravely, and wrapped a rag around her own stubby little fingers to handle the sprig.

In Italy, January remembered, the pink blossoms were used to decorate the caskets of the dead.

He followed the hedge back to the house's foundations, and kept to the wall under the gallery where he wouldn't be seen in the shadows. Earlier he'd heard Hannibal playing his violin in the garconniere, a graceful glancing Mozart waltz that was a favorite at the b.a.l.l.s they'd play in town.

When January pa.s.sed among the brick piers beneath the house now, however, he could hear Robert's voice, fretful with self-pity: "But he will not listen. I'm sure that, as an educated man, M'sieu Sefton, you've had the same problem. Cotton can't be that different from sugar-cane. Mother made sure I had a very good education-well, as good as one can get in this country. By the time I was twelve I was giving my tutors lessons, though of course none of them would ever admit it. But all these planters will persist in their outmoded empiricism. You know how they are."

The jalousies of the French door stood open, and the light that fell through onto the oaks wavered and glittered as Robert made a gesture of resignation and despair. "They 'know sugar' or can 'feel' when the juice is ready to crystallize-like old women prophesying weather through their bones!"

Hannibal may or may not have made a sympathetic noise. There was movement in the shadows beneath one of the large water-cisterns and January froze, flattening himself back under the piers.

He was on the downstream side of the house, within full view of the window of Thierry's three- room cottage, and he could imagine what the overseer would have to say about a slave out spying on his betters. Then he heard a woman's giggle, and Harry's voice: "I knew I could count on you, beautiful. . . ."

Robert Fourchet continued with barely a pause, "When I was only ten or eleven I read journals for months and came up with a primitive form of multiple-effects evaporator of the kind that they're even now experimenting with in France. But will my father invest in such a thing?" The window of Thierry's cottage creaked sharply, bringing January's heart to his throat. He reminded himself desperately that he had to be invisible, here under the house; that in the event of a confrontation Hannibal would defend him. . . . Then a slim shape wriggled through, and dropped noiselessly to the deep carpet of weeds and long gra.s.s that grew thickly and patchily among the oaks. It was so dark, away from the house, that January didn't see where that shadow went, but he heard the muted crunch of feet on last year's dead leaves. The cane lay only a few yards beyond the cottage, and at this point stretched to the levee.

Harry's voice, in the dark beneath the cistern, whispered, "It's nothing, darling. Come here." And there was a woman's soft moan of delight.

"Will he even consider using a polariscope to determine concentrations of sugar in the various.

stages of production?" demanded Robert pettishly. "Heaven forfend! And Esteban is just as bad.

All he thinks about is getting away to town, and not from any concern about the more civilized things in life, I might add. Tell me, M'sieu Sefton, what is the point of being civilized men-of living in the nineteenth century, in the world where rationalism and scientific methods have finally begun to make inroads against the benighted clutch of outmoded traditions if no one pays the slightest attention to one's advice? My mother made sure I was exposed to the finest . . ."

The woman beneath the cistern gasped, and whispered, "Again!" January wondered where Harry would get the energy to do anything but fall asleep.

"I suppose one has to feel sorry for him," remarked Hannibal later, when after many more minutes Robert took his leave and January slipped up the back steps to scratch quietly on the garconniere door. "Or at least I did before that endless lecture on the subject of how dilute sulfuric acid makes a better detection agent for sugar than lime does. He very kindly left me books, lest I be bored."

Hannibal hefted one volume in either hand. Clothed in a linen nightshirt, long dark hair spread loose over his thin shoulders, he looked like a disreputable wood-elf in the chamber's dim light.

"Thomas Brown on the philosophy of the human mind, or this roguish little romp of Saint- Simon's on the industrial system. I wonder if Madame Helene reads?"

"How do you feel about Sir Walter Scott?"

Hannibal shuddered. "It may come to that, G.o.d forbid. Nulla placere diu nec vivere carmina possunt/ Quae scribuntur aquae potoribus. Are you all right?" "Compared to what I'll be like a week from today," January replied, surveying his cut hands and filthy clothing, "I'm Bellona's very bridegroom, disdaining fortune with my brandished steel." He flexed his hands gingerly, cursing the stiffness that he knew he'd be weeks getting rid of. "Since you're on your feet I a.s.sume the answer to my question is No: You didn't touch any of the liquor in Simon Fourchet's cabinet, did you?"

Hannibal shook his head, and padded back to the bed. "I did set little pans of it about in the storeroom under the house. I tried to set them in different areas, but of course there's no guarantee which particular rat supped which particular dish. If sack and sugar be a fault, G.o.d help the wicked. They all died, manifestly in the same conditions attending the death of the unfortunate Gilles, of which Cornwallis treated me to the fullest possible description. Cheery fellow. After that I wasn't thirsty for some reason."

"Throw away the dishes." January started to bring up the Hitchc.o.c.k chair from beside the desk, then remembered the filthy state of his clothes and sat instead on the floor near the bed.

"Oleander, boiled up in water. By the look of the branches, it was done several weeks ago.

Mambo Jeanne, the plantation midwife when I was a child, told me and Olympe about that one, and I ran across a number of cases when I was in France. There were two children who died of making whistles from its bark." "So mortal that but dip a knife in it, Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare, Collected from all simples that have virtue Under the moon, can save the thing from death That is but scratched withal. . . . "

"More or less," agreed January. "And though Mambo Jeanne died years ago, according to what I've heard her son and daughter are here-the daughter's the overseer's woman. So it might behoove you to watch what you eat and drink."

"Like a Persian Emperor, amicus meus." Hannibal opened the case that lay on the foot of his bed and unraveled his violin from its wrappings of silken scarves. "The same goes for yourself."

"One thing that can be said for living in the quarters," said January dourly. "The food may not be lavish or delicious, but a poisoner would be hard put to pick out a single man to kill."

"It's pleasant and rea.s.suring to know there is good in all situations of life. Why would someone who wished to murder Simon Fourchet take the trouble to set fire to his sugar-mill and his mule barn? Why interfere with the harvest by making the work gang sick and putting red pepper and turpentine on the mule harness?" He experimented with the first few bars of the Largo from Vivaldi's Lute Concerto in D, then tightened a string. "Why give yourself away in advance?

Wouldn't it be safer to simply dose the man's blue ruin and look surprised?"

"It would," agreed January. "Hence my curiosity about what may actually be going on. It isn't an organized rebellion, I'm almost sure of that. I think I'd have felt it, at the shout last night.

Everyone in the quarters is frightened, the way they look at each other, the way the men in the fields speak."

"Could they be lying? Or just not in on it?"

"I don't think so." January recalled what Rose had said, about not knowing the unspoken rules, and thought about who'd spoken to him in the fields, and at the shout. The men and women with the position in the quarters to have led a rebellion had been as genuinely perplexed and afraid as anyone. No one had been wary of a newcomer.

Not rebellion, he thought, at least not on a large scale. Something else that looked like it.

But it was that resemblance that would be fatal to the innocent, if the true culprit were not found.

"Have you had a chance to speak to Madame Fourchet?"

"Only briefly. Madame Helene, however, has been in here most of the day, keeping me apprised of her new mother-in-law's perfidious and high-handed alterations in household routine . . . and I suppose she has a point. When she and Robert left for France in March, Helene was very much the woman of the house, both here and in the town house during the winter season. Now, upon stepping off the steamship, she is informed that she's been usurped by a schoolgirl twelve years her junior with little tact and less tolerance of Helene's sensitive nerves-and not a trace of the schoolgirl admiration which H&ne's beauty and sophistication apparently excited in Madame Fourchet's Daubray cousins."

Usurped of more than her position in her father-inlaw's home, thought January.

Il tu traite comme chienne. . . .

"Did Robert know Madame Fourchet before she wed his father?"

"He must have met her, at least. Everyone around here knows everyone else."

"Find out," said January. "And learn what you can about this lawsuit between the Daubrays and Fourchet. If the intention is to damage the plantation, then it might be that . . ."

Nails scratched at the jalousies. January got swiftly to his feet, stiffening muscles knifing him in the side like an a.s.sa.s.sin.

It was the plump little woman in black, who had wept at the shout.

She stepped back, eyebrows rocketing tignon-ward as if she were about to demand what a field hand was doing in the big house. Then she glanced at January's face and closed her lips. Looking past him to the bed, she said, "Michie Hannibal?" in the gentle voice that told January that, like every other woman he'd ever encountered, this one had succ.u.mbed to Hannibal's courtly and vulnerable charm.

"Kiki, bellissima mia." He set aside his violin and extended his hand. January stepped out of the doorway; Kiki drew her skirts aside lest they brush his clothing, and crossed to the bed.

"I'm just closing up the kitchen now, Michie Hannibal," she said. "I wondered if there was something I could get for you before I do? You barely touched your supper."

"Thank you, no, nothing." He took her fingers in his: Hers were startlingly big and heavy, muscled like a man's. "Kiki, this is my man Benjamin."

"Pleased," she lied, and bobbed the tiniest of polite curtsies. "I've left bread and b.u.t.ter for you in the pantry, in case you do get hungry," she said, turning back to Hannibal with a shy smile she endeavored to hide. From her ap.r.o.n pocket she produced a square businesslike copper bell. "You ring this should you need anything, sir. Agamemnon and Leander, and that Cornwallis"-her sweet-toned voice had a flick of scorn to it as she spoke the Virginia valet's name-"sleep over the kitchen, and I have a little room right behind it. Any of us will hear."

"Acushla-" He kissed her hand. "My slumbers will be the sounder knowing myself so much cared for."

She pa.s.sed January without glancing at him, only by the tightening of her lips registering his presence at all. January had the impression she was going to instruct the maids to give the floor of the room an extra scrub in the morning.

If Harry and his ladyfriend still reposed themselves under the cistern they'd settled, like the lovers on Donne's moss-grown bank, into silence when January descended the steps. Rather than cross the open ground that lay between the big house and the cl.u.s.ter of kitchen, forge, shops, and stable-illumined still by the reflected glare from the open doors of the mill-he retraced his earlier route under the gallery, around three sides of the house and along the black deadly hedge of Camille's garden, until he could attain the darkness of the stubble cane.

As he went he heard Hannibal begin to play a Vivaldi largo, the sweet sad beauty of the notes a reminder that a world existed beyond the boundaries of Mon Triomphe, beyond the chains of place and time. From the cane's edge he looked back, to the men and women of the night crew still hauling wood along the mill's wall from the closest of the three huge sheds like a trail of torchlit ants. This is not all there is, he told himself.

But as a child he had not known that.

Gosport had seen to it that a couple of yams and a pone of ash-bread had been left for him in a basket hung from the cabin's rafter, to keep it from the everpresent rats. Groping for his blankets January noted the absence of both Jeanette's brother Parson-who was in the second gang and on night duty at the mill-and Quashie. When he rose a few hours later, washed as well as he could, and crept through the raw mist of not-quite-dawn to change the bandanna on the branch from black to white, neither had yet returned.

And the evening and the morning were the first day.

?SIX.

In the iron-cold dark of predawn, the men heard Thierry cursing before they were halfway down the quarters' street. Without a word exchanged among them they pa.s.sed by the rice cart and went straight on. Even January could tell that someone was going to bleed.

Thierry stood on the steps that led up to the lean-to back room of his house. Through the open door behind him January could see the boxes where the overseer kept the cane-knives, and a portion of the wall above. There was a lamp lit in the room, and the smoky gold light showed up a veve-a voodoo sign to summon the spirits-written on that wall. January recognized the triangles and stars and skulls of one of the evil loa, Baron Cemetery or Brigitte of the Dry Arms. Beneath the sign had been drawn a stylized tombstone surrounded by arrows.

Most of the cane-knives were gone.

After his outburst Thierry was even more softspoken than usual, but standing among the bachelors in the main gang, January saw how the man was nearly trembling with rage. "You think maybe you're going to scare us, hunh?" he asked, almost pleasantly, voice smooth as a razor's blade. "Think you'll make things easier for yourselves? Well, let me tell you, before I'm done you're the ones gonna be scared."

He snaked the whip out along the ground, cracked it savagely inches from the nearest man's feet.

"You think I don't know who's behind this? Ajax, Herc, you take that Quashie and you lock him in the jail-"

"I didn't do nuthin'!" Quashie fell back a pace as the two drivers handed off the torches they held to others, and stepped up to flank him. "I went right straight back to the cabin when I was done workin'! Ben, Gosport, Kadar, you seen me!"

"I did, sir," put in Gosport, who had probably been unconscious before his head hit his corn- shuck pillow and hadn't stirred until January's return from the oak on the levee. "We was all of us there."

"You lie to me, boy, and you'll get a couple of your friend's licks. That what you want?" The whip cracked the air so close to Gosport's chest it stirred his shirt, though the man-eyes respectfully downcast-didn't flinch. And to Quashie, "Now where'd you dump those knives, my friend?"

"I didn't touch 'em! I didn't-"

"Seems to me you're in trouble enough without lying, son."

"I didn't touch 'em!" yelled Quashie again, as Ajax and Herc took him by either arm. "You think if I was in your house and you sleepin' . . ." His voice faltered and for a moment his eyes met the white man's, as if he were not a slave, as if the man were not the whip in his master's hand.

Thierry regarded him for a moment with a certain amount of surprise, as if a lump of his own excrement had spoken to him. "Maybe somebody you know had somethin' to do with it?" he asked pleasantly. And then, in a voice like an ax in wood, "Jeanette!"

She appeared in the lamplit golden doorway, hair over her shoulders in a cloud like sheep's wool.

He hadn't given her time to dress and she was barely breathing with shame as she b.u.t.toned her bright calico frock. It was one thing, thought January, for all your friends and all your family and everyone you grew up with to know you shared the overseer's bed, and another to be called publicly to the door of his house at dawn. "Yes, Sir?" It was the first time January had heard her voice and in it he heard old Mambo Jeanne's, like woodsmoke and honey. "You and this boy here been up to something?" Behind the softness there was an edge of terrible danger in Thierry's voice. "You maybe let him in my house while I was asleep, and the two of you threw them cane-knives in the river?"

Quashie's face was like stone. "No, sir," the girl said.

"I slept real hard last night. You hear anyone coming or going in the night?"

Her jaw set and January remembered how the window had creaked open last night, and the light swift scrunch of feet in the oak leaves. He glanced beside him at Parson, Jeanette's brother. Saw the thin young face set expressionless, giving the Man neither shame nor fear.

"No, Sir. I slept sound, too, sir."

He said, "s.l.u.t," and turned to glance at Parson. "Your sister's a wh.o.r.e, Parson."

"Yes, Sir."

Thierry waved impatiently at Quashie, standing between the two drivers. "Get him out of here.

There's ten knives left," he went on, as the young man was led away toward the small brick jailhouse, twisting against their grip to look back at Jeanette. "And if those fifteen that's missing ain't found I'll have the rest of you out chewing that cane down with your teeth."

Eight men were given torches and detailed to search for the knives. Most of the search concentrated on the riverbank, the levee, and the narrow channel that lay between the bank and Catbird Island. Doing the best he could to look as if he were searching for cane-knives, January checked in the gra.s.s and weeds around the overseer's cottage itself.

It was built in the old Creole fashion, river mud and moss between studs, the New World version of the half-timber houses of England and France. Two rooms opened onto a gallery that faced the river, with the narrow lean-to built all across the back, the whole of it lying some twenty yards downstream of the big house. Under the window that he'd seen open last night, January found scuff marks in the weeds. There were more a little farther off where the long gra.s.s gave way to the mats of oak leaves between the cottage and the cane-fields. He checked in the cane-field itself, as well as he could between the close-growing rows, and found, as he'd expected, various sorts of scuffs and partial prints, but no convenient outline such as invariably presented itself to the Deerslayer when culprits needed to be identified or evildoers trailed across several hundred miles of wilderness. By the unsteady glare of his pine-knot it wasn't easy to tell, and in any case that stretch of cane was a logical pathway from the quarters to the river, and the whole unfree population of Mon Triomphe had probably trodden it during the past week.

"G.o.d curse you, man!" Fourchet's roar sliced the chilly gray gloom from the other side of the house. "I pay you to keep those n.i.g.g.e.rs in line and if you can't do it I'll find someone who can!"

Thierry's reply, if any, was inaudible, but Esteban's voice said, "Father-uh-now isn't-isn't the time-"

"Don't you tell me when I can speak and when I can't, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d weasel! I wish to G.o.d those n.i.g.g.e.rs had killed you instead of your mother. . . ."

"Michie Fourchet!" a child's shrill voice interposed. Looking around the corner of the house January saw b.u.mper, Ajax's eleven-year-old son, running toward them through the weeds. The boy was accompanied as always by his seven-year-old brother Nero, a chubby silent shadow.