Death on the Moon Read online

  DEATH ON THE MOON

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

  Copyright 2016 Barbara Hambly

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  Table of Contents

  Death on the Moon

  About the Author

  Death on the Moon

  “But there is life on the Moon, Madame!” Germaine Barras cried, her delicate schoolgirl features blazing with enthusiasm. “Professor Herschel’s telescope proves it! And I’ve seen it myself!”

  Rose Janvier folded last week’s edition of the New Orleans Bee – with its accounts of the war in Spain and the rumblings of rebellion in the Mexican state of Texas related to minor notes under a page of shipping news, advertisements for pianos and imported silk, announcements of debt and auctions, and notices for runaway slaves – and put on her oval-lensed spectacles to regard the youngest of her pupils. “Have you indeed?”

  Mignot Lebrun – daughter of the woman who helped in the kitchen of the girls’ school on Rue Esplanade – poured another round of tea for the three pupils gathered around the breakfast table, then lingered in the dining-room door, her eyes like saucers.

  “That’s nonsense.” Marie-Anne Caulier – at sixteen the oldest of Rose’s scholars – folded her napkin and tucked it into its silver ring. “If there had been people on the Moon, it would have said something about it in the Bible, and it doesn’t. How would they have gotten up there? And when?”

  “They didn’t get up there!” protested the younger girl. “They’ve always been there! Listen—“ She opened the pamphlet, printed, Rose observed, by the New York Sun, the paper which had carried the initial story about Sir John Herschel’s extraordinary discoveries the previous August. “They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs…these creatures were evidently engaged in conversation; their gesticulation, more particularly the varied action of their hands and arms, appeared impassioned and emphatic. We hence inferred that they were rational beings, and although not perhaps of so high an order as others which we discovered the next month on the shores of the Bay of Rainbows…”

  She shuffled at the pamphlet, seeking the description – Rose knew, for she’d read her own copy of that astounding document – of the more civilized “man-bats” dwelling in an area of the Moon dubbed the Ruby Colosseum.

  “If they’re not like Earth-people, then they’re animals,” returned Marie-Anne primly. “However ‘clever’ this Mr. Herschel thinks they look. Man was the only creature God made in His own image.”

  “Whatever our opinions of Professor Herschel’s work,” corrected Rose gently, “let’s give him his proper title, shall we? So you’ve been to see Professor Tixall’s telescope, Germaine? I take it that was on Sunday, when you got up so early?”

  The girl flushed, a little guiltily, because her Sunday excursion had been ostensibly to morning Mass with her older cousins. “It was my Christmas present, early,” she excused herself. “But Professor Herschel is right! They didn’t act like animals. They were talking, and walking about the gardens, or flying, or reading these scrolls. They really are people!”

  “It is the Devil,” said Marie-Anne, her lips tightening, “who causes people to believe that. Who sends these illusions, these lies, to these telescopes—”

  “I’m afraid we’ll need to see some logical proof of that, Marie-Anne,” put in Rose calmly, and the girl’s color deepened in a complexion like the softest crème-café.

  “Then Germaine has to show me logical proof that Professor Herschel’s telescope isn’t being fooled somehow about what he’s seeing! How does he know he’s seeing the Moon?”

  A good question. In keeping with the principles of her school, Rose mediated the extremely lively discussion which followed, and kept to herself her own opinion that, however much she might object to Marie-Anne’s religious dogmatism, neither Sir John Herschel (conveniently located in South Africa where nobody could check his methods or instrument) nor Germaine Barras had seen people on the Moon. The result was inconclusive, but at least when she finally herded the girls away to their much-delayed Latin lesson, she had the impression that at least two out of the three would continue, in their leisure time, to seek scientific information about the Moon.

  And that, in its way, was the point of the school.

  For girls – and especially girls of color, the daughters of wealthy white men and their quadroon and octoroon plaçées – to study something besides the dainty sewing and perfect French that would qualify them (if they had beauty) to be plaçées in their turn. To feed minds hungry for the meat of history, mathematics, science and languages, as Rose’s had been hungry in her own girlhood. With the new year of 1836 beginning a week from Friday, there was no excuse for closing that door in their faces.

  As Rose helped Mignot – and Mignot’s mother Abigail – to clear the serving-dishes onto the sideboard, she set Germaine’s luridly-illustrated pamphlet carefully aside. Tucked into it, she found an even more lurid broadsheet advertising Professor Jeremiah Tixall’s telescope, In every detail the replica of that trained by Professor Herschel upon the Moon from South Africa, but – Miracle of miracles! – set up here, in this very city of New Orleans, for a limited time only, so that all who chose to could, for the nominal sum of twenty-five cents, actually view events that were taking place on the surface of the Moon!

  When her husband Benjamin came in a few minutes later, having set the girls to the day’s Latin translation, Rose remarked, “I think I’m going to have to go out to Livaudais Bend and have a look at Professor Tixall’s marvelous telescope.”

  “I should say you are.” He brought the scraped dishes from the sideboard, to the towel-draped dining-table where Abigail had set the basin to wash them. (Rose’s mother, a plaçée of the old school, had insisted that no lady ever trusted a servant to wash china.) “The young ladies talked of nothing else when they came in for their lesson.” He caught up the cup of coffee and the last two fried rice-balls – callas – from the plate, holding the callas meticulously as he gulped it down to keep the powdered sugar from his immaculate black wool sleeves. Though Rose was up at the crack of the icy December dawn to help Abigail start the day’s cooking, and to prepare lessons for the girls for the day, Ben had slept until nearly ten. It was the season of the roulaison – the sugar-harvest and boiling – and most of the planters would remain on their lands until after Christmas, but the town bankers and sugar-brokers, rentiers and traders, both the old creole French and the new-come (and detested) Americans, were preparing for the Christmas season with a succession of parties and balls at which Ben was often hired to play.

  “Get Hannibal to take you,” he added, wiping his fingers carefully on a corner of the towel. “I’m going out to Mandeville this afternoon – Hannibal says he’ll take over my classes—”

  “Clélie Jumon?” Rose named one of their younger friends, the wife of a stone-cutter who lived out in Mandeville by the lake, on the brink of giving birth to twins after a horrendous pregnancy.

  Ben nodded. He had been trained as a surgeon, and had practiced in France in the ‘twenties, until it had become painfully obvious that e
ven in the land of liberté, égalité, and fraternité no white person was going to hire a medical man who looked like a coal-black cotton-hand straight out of the fields. “Things seem all right with her so far,” he said. “But I want to keep my eye on her. I’m hoping I’ll be able to have a look at the surface of the Moon myself, before it starts to wane and the Professor packs up his marvelous telescope and disappears like dew on the desert’s dusty face… after having made a pretty tidy sum from the good citizens of New Orleans. But at this rate I’m afraid I might not even be able to spend our first Christmas together in our new home.” He leaned across and kissed her, the sweetness of sugar clinging to his lips.

  “There’ll be plenty more,” promised Rose quietly. Her fingers closed around his hand, drawing him into another kiss. “Better that you should make sure Clélie and Isak have them as well. I’ll give you a full report.”

  *

  “Well,” remarked Hannibal Sefton the following morning, as he and Rose led their charges past the bare trees along the road up-river from the landing, “if I were going to perpetrate a hoax that depended on the existence of a twenty-four-foot telescope-lens, this is the place I’d pick for it.”

  “According to the article in the True American—“ Rose fished it from her satchel, “—the principles upon which Professor Tixall’s telescope is constructed ‘improve upon Herschel’s design to allow somewhat greater portability…’”

  “One hopes so. Twenty-four feet is bigger than your dining-room floor.” He coughed, took a flat silver flask from his pocket, and allowed himself a judicious swig. The air was raw, the last fogs of the night dispersing in a reek of burning sugar. “How would you even move a lens like that?”

  “On its edge in a very large box. By water, presumably – hence the proximity of the house—“She pointed to the dwelling which had been known for the past ten years as “Waverley” (presumably for its highly American interpretation of an English manor-house) and which had been vacant for the past seven, “—to the river. I’m told the parts to the telescope, including two enormous, flat crates, were moved up the river road late in the evening last Saturday and were presumably installed in the night. And I will say that Mr. Jean-Louis Benndorf—“ She re-folded the True American to the “Letters to the Editor,” “—is as skeptical as yourself concerning what might have been in those crates. Professor Tixall’s claim to have bettered Herschel’s telescope ‘by the addition of a second hydro-oxygen microscope’ is utter nonsense, as no such article exists. One could as easily speak of adding a ‘magic jewel’ to a telescope to improve its range and magnification… How do we know that what we see is actually taking place on the Moon, and not in some other building, rented for the purpose, upon whose windows the telescope is actually trained?”

  “I’d say the same building, myself.” Hannibal paused in the trellised archway of the path that led towards the imposing – if slightly dilapidated – mansion, and studied it with a skeptical eye. The Mansard roof-line of that huge, three-story block of a building had already been broken by an enormous, badly-proportioned gable filled in with plate glass, presumably to light an attic studio or drying-room. This glass had been removed and in its place a somber and portentous black box, twenty feet by twenty, poked out, like a square cannon-barrel aimed at the sky.

  “No buildings near enough, or high enough, to get a look into that housing to see if there’s a lens in there. You’d need a balloon – and there’s the biggest ballroom in three parishes around at the back among those trees.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It always pays,” remarked the fiddler, limping forward again on his ebony cane, “to know where one can take refuge, should one’s living arrangements fall through. The first year I came to New Orleans I had the misfortune to be taken in by Flatboat Hattie, who gave me house-room at her – um – place of business on Tchoupitoulas Street near the wharves. An unpleasant woman – only persistent consumption of raw spirits and opium can explain our mutual attraction – but in my more sober moments I did take the precaution of locating whatever empty residences or unguarded hide-aways I could, in case she, or one of her friends, decided to cut my throat. Animis opibusque parati, as they say… The place was always vacant because you’d need an army of servants to keep it up, besides being too heavy for its foundations on such marshy ground – you can see how that end of the house has settled already. Which wouldn’t matter, if all you wanted was a base of operations for a humbug lay.”

  Still, for a humbug lay, Rose had to admit that Professor Tixall did it very nicely. There were benches on the porch – and on the path leading up to it – for eager viewers to wait, all of them occupied when Rose and her party came up the drive, which argued for a profitable business considering how early in the morning it was. Once the line moved up and they were inside the house itself, the two parlors open for the use of the spectators were amply furnished with chairs, and cozy fires burned in the fireplaces (which, as Hannibal had pointed out, were already beginning to crack owing to the subsidence of the house). A neatly-lettered sign in the hall pointed in the direction of the necessary-houses out back. The line, Rose observed, moved fairly quickly up the uneven stairs.

  “Professor Herschel’s telescope in South Africa projects the images from the Moon onto a screen of canvas on the wall,” provided Germaine, her pansy-brown eyes shining with excitement at the thought. “But Professor Tixall’s telescope, because of its construction, requires one to look through the eyepiece, so only a few can see at a time. But there are multiple eye-pieces.”

  Rose said, “Indeed!” and glanced at Hannibal. Not by so much as a quirk of his mobile eyebrows did he indicate that his thoughts echoed her own: that without gas laid on, there would be insufficient light to project a mirrored image any distance, even from a room close-by. At a guess, she thought, looking around at the handsome little parlor reserved for the free colored (and those white gentlemen – and they usually were gentlemen – who chose to accompany the ladies of that hue), the scenes taking place on the “Moon” were actually being enacted in the immense ballroom of which Hannibal had spoken. A system of angled mirrors could convey the image up – she noticed that all doors to other parts of the house were locked, and the French doors not only shuttered with jalousies but heavily curtained, so that no view of the rear of the house, inside or out, could be obtained.

  One could, she supposed, project images with mirrors if one had access to the new “calcium lights” or “limelights” of which she’d read, but equipment for forcing oxygen and hydrogen through tubes was expensive (and probably dangerous). Depending on how elaborate the “Moon” set was, what she’d seen of the place was expensive enough.

  But at twenty-five cents per head – and the line of customers, both black and white, stretched through both parlors and out the door – Professor Tixall was clearly making money like a bank-robber.

  And, he gave a good show.

  The New York Sun had described in detail the lives and appearances of the “biped beavers” and the winged “man-bats” which inhabited the Moon. And there they were in all their furry glory, carrying their babies in their arms, and conducting “animated conversations” among the outlandish foliage of strange gardens. Around a huge column in the center of what had been the largest bedroom of the house – now painted a mysterious black, and with all its windows shuttered and draped – ten small eye-pieces had been set, recognizably the smaller ends of telescopes. Peering into one (not easy on account of her spectacles) Rose had the delighted sensation of looking into a peep-show, of the sort designed to amuse children – which indeed, she supposed, this was. She recognized what she saw as a well-“dressed” stage-set, with odd plants and lots of hanging vines to obscure everything but the immediate foreground, peopled with what appeared to be slightly misshapen, fur-covered humans, naked save for garments of leaves. They moved about, chatted, the taller, bat-winged “Vespertilio-Homo” variety (as the Sun’s Dr. Grant described them) giv
ing orders to the shorter “beavers” (whose fur was shaggier and who, by their proportions, were quite clearly human dwarfs). Sometimes the bluish-furred goats described by the Sun wandered through the garden, as did several smaller creatures which Rose, at least, recognized as South American armadillos heavily embellished with glued-on fur and spikes. (Poor things!)

  “It has to be the ballroom,” she murmured to Hannibal, as she helped him down the stairs when a small chime announced the end of their ten minutes. “That ground is extremely flat and smooth for a garden! And peeping through a lenses one can’t really tell. One could rig a system of angled mirrors up the side of the house and through the floor of this room; the light in that garden is nothing like sunlight.”

  “To say nothing of the angle at which we’re viewing all this. It’s a little high – the peep-window must be up near the ceiling – but nothing like one would actually see if one were on Earth and looking more or less down on people walking about on another planet entirely.”

  “Now, how would you know?” demanded Rose with a grin, and the fiddler made the gesture of a duelist conceding a hit.

  But the girls spoke of nothing all the way back to the school, Marie-Anne maintaining her position that the visions within the telescope were sent by the Devil to trick the viewer into believing that life existed on other planets and the others exclaiming over the strange creatures they had seen and wondering what sort of language they spoke. Cosette Gardinier asked about how the “hydro-oxygen microscope” might work, but none of them appeared to question that such a thing existed. Germaine and Cosette both asked if they could use Rose’s telescope that night, and Rose, smiling, agreed.

  It was enough, for the moment, to get them asking questions, and becoming aware that the world of stars and planets and foreign civilizations existed, without diminishing their pleasure in what they’d seen.