Part 26 (1/2)

January was very tempted to avail himself of the offer, for he ached all over and the la.s.situde of shock pressed on him, physically and mentally. If Shaw had survived-and January prayed that he had, and not simply because Shaw could vouch for his ident.i.ty-the policeman could keep Duffy and his posses at bay. If he hadn't, if he'd been badly hurt, January was still a fugitive. In any case it would take weeks for the garbled tales of slave revolt, house-burning, poisoning, and kidnapping to sort themselves out, if they ever did.

It was best, he thought, that he exit the whole situation through the first door that opened, and not ask questions that would cause delay.

Though frantically busy with his own harvest and boiling, Monsieur Conrad lent January money to take a boat south that afternoon, as, he said, he had lent money to Kiki. The river's rise brought several boats a day past La Cheniere. The butler recalled that Kiki had taken the Achtafayala.

January was willing to bet she wouldn't be aboard it when it docked in New Orleans.

When the Boonslick pa.s.sed Lescelles plantation there was a flag out on the landing, and Hannibal, Esteban, les deux Mesdames Fourchet, and the children boarded. January concealed himself in the stern section of the deck where the poorer free colored and the slaves were relegated, and it was there that, much later, Hannibal sought him out.

”All I can say is, for a man raised by an opium addict, Michie Robert has only the dimmest possible idea of how much Patna Naptime the really hardened system can absorb with impunity,”

said the fiddler, perching like a rather worse-for-wear gra.s.shopper on the top of a hogshead of nails. ”They dosed me with enough so that I didn't really feel up to much derring-do--not that I'm much in the derring-do line to begin with--but I had plenty of leisure to chip off the business edge of every gun-flint in their boxes there, and dump most of my ration of water into the powder. As I observed before, Solus pro virili parte ago: I can only do the best I can.”

”And what you did saved all our lives,” said January. ”I don't think Shaw and Quas.h.i.+e would ever have gotten on board if the crew had been fully armed. How did you happen to end up as a guest at Refuge anyway?”

”Silly b.a.s.t.a.r.d came out onto the gallery as the Heroine went past. There aren't even any trees in front of the house nowadays, just cane. I don't suppose it would have mattered if it wasn't me on board, or if I hadn't seen him board the Belle Dame that morning bound in exactly the opposite direction. That green coat of his stood out a mile. We stopped at Daubray to pick up a letter, and I disembarked and walked up the river road. I hid my luggage in the cane-they must have found it after Jules Ney caught me behind the kitchen that evening.” The fiddler unfastened the clasps of his violin case for the fifth or sixth time, peeking inside as if to rea.s.sure himself that the instrument was safe and undamaged; touching the varnished wood as a lover would have touched his lady's cheek. He looked desperately thin but surprisingly well, despite singed hair and an angry burn on his forehead, earned when he'd dragged young Fantine Fourchet out of the inferno of smoke and flame that had been Mon Triomphe.

January could see the charred ruin of the house as they pa.s.sed it, veiled in the smoke-clogged white mists that still blurred the river. Through the trees his eye picked out the pale tumbledown planks of the slaves' graveyard, the broken crockery and bottles around the graves slowly sinking into the earth.

Mon Triomphe.

Simon Fourchet's pyre, consumed like a barbarian prince with all he owned.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

”Papa Ney was all for scuppering me on the spot, but Robert argued that as I'd written to my fict.i.tious cousins on New River-thank G.o.d!-if my body wasn't found among the victims of this slave revolt there'd be a search. After romancing his father's wife for weeks-unsuccessfully, as it turned out-Robert brought her to her father's old house with a note swearing he'd kill himself for love of her if she didn't see him. . . .”

”And Marie-Noel fell for it?”

Hannibal gestured forgivingly. ”She's only sixteen. In any case he forced her to drink paregoric that night, and she was still logy from it the next morning, not that any woman's going to endanger the life of her unborn child when a man has a pistol to her side. After Robert forced her and Esteban to tell the slaves they were being sold, and to cooperate, Ney and his father drugged everyone in the house-as you guessed-then put it to the torch. They didn't tie anyone, because we were all supposed to have been driven into the house before it was fired by rebelling slaves. G.o.d only knows what possessed me to rescue the children. I quite agree with Robert that murdering the pair of them-and their mother-was not only necessary to his scheme but intensely gratifying as well.”

And from the upper deck, Jean-Luc's voice called shrilly, ”You give that here! That's mine! It's MINE!” followed by strident and uncomforted tears. Madame Helene remained in the women's cabin, prostrate with shock at what she had undergone.

She recovered sufficiently to go down to the s.h.i.+p wharves the following day, however, in company with January, Hannibal, a slightly singed and bruised Lieutenant Shaw, Madame Fourchet, and a trio of stout, blue-clothed City Guards, and intercept her husband as Robert was boarding the steam packet Anne Louise. January went with Shaw and his minions along the crowded levee, while Hannibal and the women waited in the market arcade, at the same little table by the coffee-stand where January had so often sat with Rose. It was unlikely, Shaw said, that Robert Fourchet would recognize a tall, well-dressed gentleman of color as one of his father's field hands.

But January would certainly recognize him.

The sailing-s.h.i.+p wharves lay downstream of the French town, the levee jammed at this time of the year with the world's commerce. Hogsheads of sugar, pipes of wine, bales of cotton; voices clamoring in every language G.o.d distributed at Babel: wh.o.r.es and Yankee sailors and Greek oyster-fishers and market women selling bandannas. Clothed in his high beaver hat and new black nip-waisted coat, January strolled toward the Anne Louise and scanned the faces, looking not only for Robert, but for Kiki.

January was still not entirely certain what he felt about Kiki. She had murdered an innocent man, and had calculatedly and coldly murdered a guilty one, not to free herself from him, but out of pure revenge. If you cut us, do we not bleed? Shylock had asked of men who, later in the play, had put their boots on his neck and made him eat filth. Having only sipped the cup Kiki had drunk of all her life, January understood exactly why she had done what she had done.

But he understood too that pain and fear are no pardon for murder. On the whole he was glad that Kiki had drugged him-in his exhaustion it had not taken much-and made her escape. He was fortunate, he supposed, that she hadn't killed him as he slept. She was quite capable of it. If he saw her on the wharf he knew he must-and would-raise a hue and cry.

But he did not. He did, however, see Robert Fourchet, decorously clothed in mourning black, hastening along the levee toward the Anne Louise, with a new valet carrying his valise in his wake. January raised his tall beaver hat and wiped his forehead, which was the signal, and Shaw and his myrmidons closed in.

He was close enough to hear Shaw say, ”Mr Fourchet?”

There was a momentary hesitation; January thought he saw the young man's eyes dart among the crowd, pick out the blue-clad forms of the City Guard moving in on him. ”I'm Robert Fourchet, yes.”

”If'n you'd care to come along here to the market for a minute, there's a couple ladies would like to have a word with you.”

”Thank you.” Marie-Noel Fourchet rose from her seat after Robert had been led away, and walked across to where January stood, un.o.btrusive in the curious silent way he'd practiced since early adolescence, against the brick pillars of the market. She'd put back her veils of mourning crepe to speak the few words that identified her stepson as the man who'd held her at gunpoint, forced her to drink opium, left her and her family unconscious in a burning house. In their sooty frame her triangular, homely face looked even paler and more lashless. She held out a black- gloved hand.

”M'sieu Sefton tells me you were working for my husband.” She nodded back toward the table under the arcade, where Hannibal was charming Madame Helene out of the hysterics that she'd considered an appropriate accompaniment to her husband's arrest. ”That you tried hard to save him.”

At the table, the dark, florid woman-in crepe and jet beads and veils to her knees despite the fact that she was mourning only a father-in-law-clutched Hannibal's hand and sobbed, ”We have been left dest.i.tute! Dest.i.tute!”

”Will you be all right, Madame?” asked January. Whatever the courts decided to do with January's evidence from the slaves and Madame Fourchet's account of an attempted murder, Robert's valise had contained two of Thierry's pistols, which could have come into his hands no other way. The rest, January surmised, could safely be left to Shaw.

”I think so. Robert had most of the fifty thousand dollars those men paid him for the slaves. . . .”

Marie-Noel raised her glance to January's face. ”Were all of them killed?” Tears glimmered in her pale eyes.

”I think so, Madame. Some of them got into the water before the boat blew up, but not many, I don't think. And the boat was out in mid-river by then, and rolling with the current. I myself barely got to sh.o.r.e.”

She bit her lips and crossed herself. ”Those poor people,” she whispered in real distress, that had nothing in it of sorrow over the loss of an investment of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

”Those poor people.” A gawky, familiar figure edged its way toward them through the gaudy press of market women and keelboat thugs, stevedores and flaneurs, and January recognized Esteban, followed closely by a tubby, pleasant-faced little gentleman wearing an overly elaborate lilac-striped cravat.

The pair paused by Hannibal and Madame Helene, and Hannibal gestured toward where January and Madame Fourchet stood. January heard Esteban say, ”. . . settlement out of court . . . sixty thousand dollars plus help to get the rest of the harvest in . . .”

Evidently, January thought, in spite of losing all their slaves, Marie-Noel-and the child she carried-were not going to starve.

”Hannibal tells me my husband agreed to pay you for your time and your pain.” Madame Fourchet opened the beaded reticule at her belt, and drew out a stiff piece of pale brown paper-a draft on the Louisiana State Bank for five hundred dollars. ”I'm sorry it cannot be more, for we owe you more than we can say, Esteban, and my . . . daughter-in-law . . .”-her voice stuck on the words-”and myself. But we've lost most of the crop, and it will take everything we have to keep the plantation itself. I hope you understand.”

January took the paper from her black-gloved hand. ”I understand, Madame.” They'd probably sell the town house, he guessed. And use the proceeds, and the settlement, to buy more slaves.

And after everything that he had pa.s.sed through, to save the people who'd plunged into the river, the people among whom he'd lived, nothing had changed.

Vast weariness crushed him and he wanted to tear the bank-draft up and walk away, rather than have anything further to do with the Fourchet family. Even that five hundred dollars, he understood, had come from human sweat and human blood. His mother's and his friends' and his own.

But he put it in his pocket.

”You must not think too harshly of my husband,” said Madame Fourchet, in her soft, gruff voice.

”He was a man who lived with a great deal of pain in his heart. He did the best he could.”

January recalled the dark face creased with rage, that yelled at him in nightmares. The sickening slap of a broom handle on his flesh and the sound of his own ribs breaking.

Screams in rainy darkness. The stink of cigar smoke. I have tried to make amends where I can.

This woman, he thought, looking down at her, had sat beside his bed all through that night, while his son sat out in the rain for the pleasure of hearing him die. ”Did you love him, Madame?” he asked.

”Yes,” she said. ”Yes, I did,” and there was no mistaking the warmth in her eyes, as she drew her veils down.

She turned and walked back to her family, leaving January alone.