Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (35 page)

Catching January's arm, Esteban shoved him out onto the gallery. The younger Fourchet's eyes were red rimmed from want of sleep and his face gray with dust and streaked with sweat. “What did you say to my father?”

“M'sieu Fourchet, I think your father's been poisoned.”

Esteban's eyes flared with shock. Then his hand tightened on January's shirt and he slammed him into the house wall. “Who told you this? Where'd you hear this?”

“Hear it? For God's sake, look at him, man! Six days ago he strained his heart! Now he's off his head, he's bleeding from the gums, vomiting . . .”

“You uppity whore!”
Fourchet screamed inside. “You think your son's too good to be part of the family? He's not a genius, he's just goddam lazy! Lazy and weak! All he wants to do is play with his worthless machines and his worthless friends. . . .”

“Is he voiding blood? Vomiting blood?” January demanded, as Esteban made a move to go through and into the room. “Has he passed urine in the last day or so? Any at all?”

He realized Esteban was staring at him as if he were speaking Chinese. For a moment their eyes met, then January hastily lowered his, remembering that in this country it was taken as a sign of rebellion, of challenge, for a black man to meet a white man's eyes.

“I'm sorry, sir,” he mumbled. “It's just one of Michie Georges' brothers was took just this way, from drinkin' salts of mercury. Now I hear as how someone tried to poison your daddy before, and did kill the old butler here, and when he started talkin' so crazy, and with blood comin' out his gums, I thought . . .”

Pick up the hint, you stubborn oaf. Slap your forehead and cry, My God, could it possibly be . . . ?

But Esteban, not an imaginative man, only looked at him with sidelong suspicion, and said, “That's a common-uh-effect of calomel-medicine, you understand? I think you'd better just-uh-leave such things to the doctors. You had something you wanted to tell my-uh-my-my father?”

“Yes, sir,” said January. All he could do was try. “How that Quashie, and Jeanette, they couldn't have done that murder the other night, since they knowed Thierry had wrecked their boat; they wouldn't have been on that island.” But as the words came out of his mouth he could see Esteban barely heard him, and his own attention was jerked away, again and again, by the tumult in Fourchet's room.

“Goddamned bitch, you will live where I tell you! I'll not pay a lazy whore to have her own establishment . . . !”

At the sound of a blow and a cry, Esteban thrust January aside mid-sentence, and strode through the office to his father's room. January hesitated on the gallery, heart pounding, smelling blood very clearly now as Fourchet vomited again and thinking, Poison. Salts of mercury. His kidneys must be disintegrating within his body.

Dear God, what a hellish way to die!

The jingle of bridle-bits came suddenly from the yard, the clatter of hooves. Men called out and laughed. Someone said, “Hey, sweetheart, not home yet!” and someone else, “Hey, the house!” January ran over to the rail of the gallery on the mill side to look.

A posse of the patrollers had captured Jeanette. The rope that bound her wrists ran up to the saddlebow of a long youth in dirty jean and a low-crowned hat. The girl had fallen, for the front of her green dress was brown with dirt and mud, the buttons torn away and her skirt spotted with blood from her grazed knees. Her head rolled on her shoulders with exhaustion, the curly cloud of reddish-black hair hanging over her face, and, as the men had said, when the horses came to a halt she collapsed among them, sitting in the wet earth of the yard before the mill.

From the gallery January saw Esteban hurry down the back steps and cross toward them, a tall thin figure stiff and awkward in his blue coat, his whip in his hand. He spoke to the men of the patrol, fumbled money from the pocket of his coat to pass among them. Then he bent, took Jeanette's chin in his hand, and forced her to look up at him. January knew what he would ask.

She shook her head, swaying, denying it, her whole body shaken with sobs. Esteban straightened, stood looking down at her for a moment. Then, as if making up his mind to do so, he caught her shoulder and shook her, and she cried in a voice shrill with pain and terror: “He didn't! He didn't! I swear you we weren't anywhere near there!”

No, thought January. The pair would have gone straight inland, across the fields and into the cipriere, striking out toward New River and heading to New Orleans that way. Without a boat they'd be fools to stick to the river.

Esteban looked down at her from his height. He must have asked her something else, quietly, probably where Quashie was now, because Jeanette shook her head again, wrapping her arms around her half-exposed breasts and crumpling slowly to the ground. One of the men still on horseback tilted his hat and said something, pointing inland-that she'd been picked up over toward New River, January learned later-and Esteban's stiff shoulders lifted and settled a little without ever relaxing. Behind him in the house January heard Fourchet cry out, “Not opium! Don't give me that stuff! Oh, dear Christ!”

And from the dining room a bell jangled, impatiently summoning servants, and a moment later Madame Helene's voice exclaimed, “Honestly, what is this house coming to? Jean-Luc Jean-Luc you will stay in your chair . . . ! Marthe . . .”

In the cloudy cool of noon, the women sitting on the cane carts before the mill, eating their midday food and suckling their babies, watched silent-eyed as Esteban lurched forward and pulled Jeanette firmly to her feet. Two of the patrollers sprang from their horses and followed man and slave across the mucky ground to the little brick jailhouse, as if they expected Jeanette to turn on Esteban and gut him with her fingernails.

In the doorway Jeanette clung to the jamb for support, turning back to speak to Esteban. Pleading with him to believe her. Swearing that though the dead man had raped her repeatedly, had flogged the man she loved nearly to death, had harried her and insulted her and battered her, still she had not lifted her hand against him.

Her master pushed her awkwardly into the jailhouse, locked the door, pocketed the key. January could almost hear him saying it: I understand there are abuses but you just-uh-can't have slaves going around murdering their masters. . . .

In his curtained room, the dying man groaned, “Dear God, save me! Dear God, save me!” as the bloated tissues of his body swelled tight with water he could not void.

January descended the back steps of the house and was on his way to the fields again before Esteban returned.

Through the night Simon Fourchet screamed. The sound carried to the mill doors, where those who hauled cane up to the rollers, or dragged wood in from the shelters through the thin drizzling rain that started at sunset, paused to look at one another with fear in their eyes. Nobody spoke much. Once, when January helped Chuma pick up some cane she'd dropped, the woman said, “Dear God have mercy on him. I'd wear any child of mine out, that gave pain like that to a dog.” But January saw she was afraid, too, wondering what would happen to them when Fourchet died.

Slavery, January understood now as he never had before, made you fear change almost more than anything else. Once he looked over in the direction of the jail, and thought he saw movement behind the bars of the single high-set window, as if someone had grabbed the bars and pulled herself up a little, to look out at the torchlight and the rain.

She will hang for his murder, he thought.

And almost certainly, Duffy was going to try to get out of her where Quashie was.

He leaned into the harness and gritted his teeth, to drag the sledgeload of expensive wood-at three dollars and fifty cents the cord-through the softening mud to the mill door.

Bad enough that Jeanette had to sit there in the tiny brick room listening to Fourchet die. What it was like for Madame Fourchet, sitting in the bedroom beside him, he couldn't imagine.

That would still be true, he thought, whether or not she'd given her husband the mercury herself.

“It's in the medicine,” he said to Kiki, when, after the night shift men came on, he walked over to the kitchen. The light rain had eased, but the air was full of moisture; rain would start and stop like a seeping wound til daybreak. “It's the only thing he's getting that no one else in the house would touch. Our killer learned a lesson with your husband.”

The cook glanced across at him in the muted glow of the hearth. Her black sleeves were rolled back and she tilted boiling water from the great kettle into the small clay pot that the servants used for their tea; flames reflected in her dark eyes like the sack of far-off towns.

January asked, “Where is the medicine kept?”

“In the birthing-room.
Behind Madame's room.” There was a long French door from that chamber onto the gallery that faced over Camille's garden.

“It isn't locked up or anything,” Kiki went on. “It sits on the dresser in there. Anyone could come in or go out.”

January nodded. He'd seen the room now and then over the past ten days. Small and sparsely furnished, the walls washed a pale cheerful yellow, with its big bed and cypress-wood armoire it could double as a sickroom or lodging for a female guest. Even there, as in the mistress's bedroom next door, Camille Bassancourt had left her mark. The bed was an elaborate confection of pear-wood and ebony, imported from France by the woman who had never gotten over losing her place in Paris society. The armoire, inlaid with slips of pearl and brass, could have contained the garments of a regiment.

Kiki brought the tea to the table. She moved more briskly now, as if the lingering lassitude and cramps that had followed her abortion were departing. When a desperate, moaning shriek ripped the night, more animal than human as Fourchet's strength waned, she did not even check her stride.

January recalled the way Fourchet had said, Your mother tells me . . . and the casual glance he'd given to the woman he'd bedded with as little thought as most men would masturbate. To the woman he'd sold as he'd have sold a riding-mare, to a friend who liked her action. It was of only passing concern that he'd included her two children in the transaction. In spite of the law mandating the sale of children under the age of ten along with their mothers-“if at all possible”-it was a far from universal practice.

I wanted this, he thought, wondering at himself. The night he'd seen Fourchet whip the young Mohammed nearly to death, he remembered he'd crept trembling into the corner of the bed he shared with Olympe and his parents. Remembered thinking, I hope he dies screaming.

He closed his eyes. I hope he dies screaming. He remembered his father holding him, powerful hands comforting him with their strength, and a soft deep voice saying, “God answers prayer. You want to be careful what you ask for.”

“Where were you going to go?” he asked after a time, as silence crept over the kitchen. He glanced up, and saw Kiki had been listening. “With Quashie and Jeanette,” he answered the question in her glance. “You never did say.”

“Quashie wanted to follow the river north,” said Kiki softly. "Past Vicksburg and Natchez and St. Louis, and on into the territories, and live in the woods, he said. God knows how he planned to do it. He'd never done nothing but cut cane in his life and didn't so much as know how to make a fish-trap, though I will say for him he was a good shot. Jeanette said no, it'd be better to go to New Orleans, where they could make a living. There's plenty of people in New Orleans who'll draw up freedom papers that'll pass if the police don't look at 'em too closely.

“Me . . .” She smiled a little. “I think I'd go west to the Texas lands, or south to Mexico. I'm a good cook, you know. I was trained up in town. I'd get a little money and open an eating-house, and have my own room with no one to share it.”

Her voice broke off and her round little mouth clipped together hard, as if at a memory. Tears swam in her eyes and she turned her head away fast and cursed as if she'd got a cinder in her eye.

“You loved him,” said January gently, and Kiki looked back at him. “Gilles.”

After a split second's hesitation she nodded. Then she made herself flash a quick grin. “That's not to say I wouldn't fall in love right away with some handsome Mexican with silver spurs on his boots and silver buttons on his jacket. . . .”

January laughed, Kiki's eyes smiling with him. Then the smile faded, and she asked, “What'll they do to her? Jeanette? Hang her?”

He nodded, sick again with his own impotence. He was sure that one of Thierry's keys, tucked in his blanket in the bachelors' cabin, was to the jail, but it would do him little good. Another of Jules Ney's sons or nephews had been left to guard the jail, keeping an eye on it from the shelter of the mill door. The workers walked wide around him.

“I thought of going out through the cipriere, and finding the cores of those Ashford apples that I know would be out there, proof that's the road they took and were nowhere near Catbird Island or wherever it was that Thierry really died. But no one would listen, and no one would care. I'll have to wait til Hannibal gets back. . . .”

His eyes met Kiki's.

“And he will be back,” said January quietly. “Or send someone.”

The cook sniffed. “If he thinks of it.”

From the darkness came another cry, forming up into incoherent words, curses and ravings. “You're in it with him! You're in it together!” And later, “No goddam opium, you bitch! You want to see me as bad as you!”

“God send that he dies soon,” Baptiste whispered, coming in a few minutes later. He crossed himself with a hand that trembled. “God forgive me for saying it, but for both their sakes, for all their sakes . . .”

“He's a tough old man.” January poured the butler a cup of bitter, second-brewed tea. He should, he knew, return to the quarters to sleep, for Jules Ney in his calculating fashion was worse than Thierry, uncaring even for a position that wouldn't be his after the roulaison was done. It was nothing to Ney if slaves died to make his two-hundred-dollar bonus.

But he knew he wouldn't sleep.

“I was hoping I'd find you here, Michie Ben.” Baptiste sat down on the bench beside him. Having come north with him on the Belle Dame--and presumably seen that he wasn't, in fact, a field hand, but the minder of the feckless scion of a well-off planter family-he had never treated January with the dismissive contempt of the other house-servants. Even Cornwallis, who'd also been on the Belle Dame, acted as if January were an animal, liable to break something or besmirch the beeswaxed floors at any moment, an attitude that January found in many ways worse than the fiscal-or patronizing-calculations of the whites.