Part 20 (1/2)

January nodded. He'd seen the room now and then over the past ten days. Small and spa.r.s.ely 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 Ba.s.sancourt 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 bra.s.s, could have contained the garments of a regiment.

Kiki brought the tea to the table. She moved more briskly now, as if the lingering la.s.situde 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 m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. 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 pa.s.sing 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, ”G.o.d 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 Quas.h.i.+e and Jeanette,” he answered the question in her glance. ”You never did say.”

”Quas.h.i.+e 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. G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 b.u.t.tons 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 G.o.ddam opium, you b.i.t.c.h! You want to see me as bad as you!”

”G.o.d send that he dies soon,” Baptiste whispered, coming in a few minutes later. He crossed himself with a hand that trembled. ”G.o.d 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 f.e.c.kless 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 att.i.tude that January found in many ways worse than the fiscal-or patronizing-calculations of the whites.

”Something Cornwallis said to me about you speaking some other language with Michie Hannibal . . . Did Michie Hannibal by any chance teach you how to read?”

He drew a folded sheet from the pocket of his rainfleckered black jacket, and January saw written on it BAPTISTE GRa.s.sE.

TRIOMPHE PLANTATION-ASCENSION PARISH.

Hope glowed in the older man's eyes. ”It's from my wife,” he said softly. ”Harry gave me this just now. She must have wrote me, same as I wrote her.”

”False River Jones is here?”

Baptiste shrugged. ”He must be.”

Kiki started to speak, then turned and walked quickly away to the hearth, where she sat mending the fire. It occurred to January suddenly that the cook might know of the trader's whereabouts.

She had, after all, her own wares to vend.

It was not lost on him, either, that salts of mercury was a town poison, something not obtainable by merely boiling up leaves or bark. It could be bought quickly, and quickly pa.s.sed from hand to hand.

As January unfolded the sheet he saw again the woman's bright-colored dress, and the way she'd run through the crowd on the levee with her skirts gathered up in her hands.

”Beloved,” he read. The spiky French handwriting was clear and the spelling good. Since it was forbidden by law to teach slaves to read or write, it was clear that Baptiste's wife had sought someone to write for her, as her husband had pet.i.tioned Hannibal.

I pray G.o.d daily you are well and in a good place, and the people around you are kind. Monsieur Pierre is gone to France now with poor Madame, and I am with Monsieur Norbert on the Rue des Bons Enfants. He and his wife are good people. They wanted me to marry their coachman Emil but because I am married already they say I don't have to. Leon and Aurette are still with me and send their Papa all their love. I pray I will soon see you again. All my love, Odette.”

”He's lucky.” Kiki came back over to the table after Baptiste left with the letter folded close in the pocket next to his heart. Her hand flinched as she gathered up the used cup and saucer, set them aside.

”That his wife was sold to people who didn't take her children from her?” asked January. ”Or make her marry one of their own slaves just to have everything convenient?”

”He's lucky to hear from them at all. So many don't. So many just . . . wonder.”

”Do you know where he might be?” asked January. ”The trader?”

Kiki hesitated, dark eyes shadowed in the firelight. Then she shook her head. ”I have no use for him,” she said.

Another howl of pain split the night, the desperate cry of a man pushed to the limit of what flesh will bear. January startled. But only Kiki's eyes moved, sliding sideways, gauging the sound as she would have gauged, by the brisk bubbling of water in the kettle, how long to leave eggs on the boil.

And as she turned away, January thought he saw her smile.

Shortly before dawn on Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of November, Simon Fourchet died. His young widow sent Jacko the groom with a note to Baton Rouge, with orders to locate Robert Fourchet; she dispatched another message to the Waller farm in New River where Sheriff Duffy was supposed to be staying with various members of his posse, giving an account of the new catastrophe.

In the predawn darkness, after the screaming at long last ceased, January climbed the little bluff above the new landing and took down the yellow bandanna from the branch of Michie Demosthenes the Oak.

He did not replace it.

It was time, he thought, to ask for help.

?EIGHTEEN.