Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (12 page)

“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 reassuring 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 assassin.

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 succumbed 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 butter 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 apron 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 passed 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 cluster 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.

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 passed 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 buttoned 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, “Slut,” and turned to glance at Parson. “Your sister's a whore, 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 grass 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 grass 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.

“God curse you, man!” Fourchet's roar sliced the chilly gray gloom from the other side of the house. “I pay you to keep those niggers 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 bastard weasel! I wish to God those niggers had killed you instead of your mother. . . .”

“Michie Fourchet!” a child's shrill voice interposed. Looking around the corner of the house January saw Bumper, 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. “Michie Fourchet, sir, they found the knives!”

January unobtrusively followed the little group-Fourchet, Thierry, Esteban, and the boys-to the plantation blacksmith shop, unobtrusively because he was joined by most of the other men who'd been ordered to search. By the time they reached the low building that stood at the end of the row of plantation shops, there was a sizable gaggle of withesses. The cane-knives had been thrust into the forge, coals piled in, and the bellows plied to heat the fire red-hot. The wooden handles had been reduced to crumbling charcoal.

“By God I'll string them up for this!” Fourchet's flushed face looked almost black in the rose-colored glare of the furnace. “The man who did this is going to suffer, and see his family suffer as well, and that I swear to you. ...”