Part 6 (1/2)
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 nights.h.i.+rt, 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 steams.h.i.+p, 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.