A Time For Every Purpose Under Heaven Read online

  A TIME TO EVERY PURPOSE

  UNDER HEAVEN

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2010 Barbara Hambly

  Cover art by Eric Baldwin

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be re-sold. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please include this license and copyright page. If you did not download this ebook yourself, consider going to Smashwords.com and doing so; authors love knowing when people are seeking out their material. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author!

  Table of Contents

  A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven

  About The Author

  The Further Adventures

  A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Rose Janvier was the first neighbor across Rue Esplanade that morning at the sound of Agathe Truande’s screams: this turned out to be an extremely unfortunate circumstance for a number of the people concerned.

  It was early June and suffocatingly hot in New Orleans. Though by nature a scholar rather than a housewife, Rose had enough sense to begin her day’s chores as soon as it was light enough to see. As a result, she had the worst of them – ashes shoveled out of the kitchen hearth and the chamber-pot scoured with turpentine – finished by seven, and had just filled the tea-pot from the hearth-kettle and taken up the butter from the cold-jar buried in the coolest corner of the yard, when she heard the scream.

  Rose caught up her long skirts and dashed from the pantry through the long, dim parlor, stopped on the gallery for the instant it took her to identify where the second scream originated – on the opposite side of the Rue Esplanade – then fleeted across and through the French door of the little green cottage, to find Joseph Truande sprawled dead beside the breakfast-table in a pool of his blood.

  Joseph’s sister Agathe, crumpled on her knees in the doorway that led from the dining-room into the yard, pressed her hands to her face, her thin body racked with weeping. Rose demanded immediately, “Are you hurt?” and when the woman only sobbed louder, jerked her around to face her, and scanned her swiftly for blood. Seeing none she went to the table, where there definitely was blood.

  And confirmed that yes, Joseph Truande was dead.

  His silk dressing-gown gave his body the look of a slaughtered pheasant. He’d been stabbed in the side, and brought down his chair in his fall. Flies roared around the wound. A few had already drowned in the darkly sticky blood-pool. The first thread of what was swiftly going to become a ribbon of ants, the bane of New Orleans kitchens, already snaked its way from the baseboard across to the young man’s face.

  As a little girl on the Gulf islands, Rose had helped lay out various members of her own family and had little squeamishness about the dead – in fact she shared her surgeon husband’s fascination for the intricate machinery of the human body. She knelt and pressed her fingers to Truande’s neck in search of a pulse and found none, and hadn’t even straightened up again when the Metoyer sisters, who lived next door, swept into the room in an enormous frou-frou of taffeta, lace, and hysterics.

  “Oh, dear God!” gasped Virginie. Pretty Babette screamed, and Bernadette took one look at the deceased and snapped, “Well, about damn time,” and went to Agathe.

  “As far as I can tell she’s not hurt.” Rose got to her feet, and helped Babette to the nearest chair, where she gasped and sobbed and clutched at Virginie’s comforting hands. Rose poured water from the pitcher on the sideboard, and handed it to the plump little courtesan, though her personal inclination was to dash it into Babette’s face.

  “What happened?” asked Bernadette, still trying to get some sense out of the howling Agathe.

  Rose joined the tall, elegant Bernadette at Agathe’s side and asked,“Who was here?” The breakfast-table was set for two, and Rose knew well – everyone in the neighborhood did – that Joseph ate in the dining-room, as if he’d been a white gentleman, while his sister was relegated to the kitchen.

  Babette raised her face from her handkerchief long enough to answer for Agathe, in a perfectly calm voice: “Cerise Hoban.” Then she went back to her vapors.

  Rose’s eyebrows quirked up. What surprised her wasn’t the assignation with the wife of one’s business partner - with Joseph Truande it was always somebody – but the fact that it had been a breakfast rendezvous.

  “It’s true,” said kind Virginie, dipping a clean napkin from the sideboard into the water-glass and pressing it to Babette’s plump face. “We saw her go in, Babette and Agathe and I.” The wet napkin came away pink with rouge.

  “What happened?” Lettice Becque – whose pink stucco cottage stood on the other side of the Truande house – pelted in through the French doors from Rue Esplanade, half a dozen neighbors boiling in her wake. One result of the wave of bank closures that had rolled across the United States that spring of 1837 was that it was very easy these days to find any one of Rose’s neighbors at home. Shops all over town (and all over the twenty-six states for that matter) were closed, and there was no work to be had on the levee, on the canal, and certainly not in any of the closed-down cotton warehouses, banks, and import offices that had made New Orleans Queen of the Gulf. Even the slave-dealers on Baronne Street, usually proof against almost any economic fluctuation, were in despair (And may they all cut their throats with grief, reflected Rose grimly). The only reason her own husband Ben wasn’t home was because he’d had the offer of work up the river. Henri Becque, Aristide Gouvert, and Louis Mercier – all of whom would have been at their respective counters and counting-houses at this hour of the morning –crowded into the little dining-room on the heels of their wives, agog with speculation.

  “He was bankrupt—”

  “That greedy woman was the ruin of both partners—”

  “Petrus Hoban came back to town last night I hear—”

  “Was it that new little cher amie of his, from Madame Rosalie’s?”

  “He was gambling last night at at the Quatre Voleurs on Girod Street like the devil was in him—”

  Crouched beside the French doors that opened from the dining-room into the yard, Agathe could only wail, “What will I do now? How will I live?” and cling to Bernadette’s gauzy sleeves. “He cared for me—”

  Bernadette snapped, “Huh! Turned you into a servant, more like—”

  Rose crossed to the sideboard, found another coffee-cup – there were two on the table, each half-empty and the steam still rising gently from the one nearer her. The pot was pink-sprigged Limoges ware, and by its smell, the steaming coffee of the highest quality. Of a piece with the silk dressing-gown, reflected Rose automatically, and the heavy silver forks and spoons that lay crossed on the dirtied plates. Of a piece, too, with the half-finished bits of pork-chop and egg, with the white biscuits, with the cream sauce and the extravagant block of butter with a pattern of flowers pressed into it: Rose’s own small store of that commodity was being nursed carefully along to last the week. Which reminded her, she thought distractedly as she bore the cup to Agathe, she’d better get back to her own kitchen and get it safe back into the cold-jar in the yard, before the cat made free with it or—

  “What’s this, then?” boomed a voice from the parlor. Everyone in the crowded dining-room turned, as the City Guard made their entrance through the parlor: two constables and a sergeant, white men, one of the constables an American. “I’m Sergeant Rochier – and you are all of you, under arrest.”

  *

  “This is ridiculous!” Bernadette Metoyer jerked her elbo
w away from the escorting constable’s hand, as the women were piloted across the courtyard of the Cabildo and up a flight of stone stairs to the long cell alotted to members of their sex. “None of us had any more to do with Joseph Truande’s death than did your wife, m’sieu, if any woman will have you—”

  “Please be patient, Madame.” The constable – a very large young man named Tallien – held the cell door open for them. “There was a fight last night in the Swamp – in the First Municipality,” he corrected himself – the town having but lately culminated its long feud between the French and Americans by dividing itself bodily into several separate governing bodies. “There is a dispute as to jurisdiction…”

  “And when is there not a dispute as to jurisdiction?” demanded Bernadette. “American animals!”

  “It is necessary that we hold all the witnesses until such time as statements can be taken…”

  “I can give you a statement now, cochon!” The tall woman turned in the barred doorway of the narrow, oven-hot room. “Truande was stabbed by Madame Hoban, of the Rue Burgundy, who is probably even at this moment on her way to the wharves to make her escape…”

  “What happened?” Rose led Agathe to one of the cots that lined the two long walls of the cell. Summer was the slow season in New Orleans, and the women’s cell was empty except for two prostitutes and a woman known all about the town as La Calentura, who was sleeping it off after having vomited comprehensively all around the far end of the cell near its single window. To judge by the state of the straw-ticks on the cots, La Calentura was far from the only person to have been taken unwell in the cell in the past decade or so, and the bedding was moreover alive with insectile livestock.

  Babette was in hysterics again – understandably, Rose thought, mopping her face with her handkerchief – and Lettice Becque gagged on the stench of the place and showed signs of making her own contribution to it. Not one of the women, Rose guessed, had the slightest experience with such conditions as these. Despite the fact that they were all, at one remove or another, descended from slaves – Rose included - all had been raised in the hard-won decencies of the community of the gens du couleur libré.

  She herself, she guessed – and Agathe – were the only ones who had probably ever cleaned their own out-houses. That was, after all, what slaves were for.

  Marie-Euphémie Ouvard began to wail that she was due at her mother’s house, that she must meet her… Rose had been on the receiving end of old Madame Brun’s self-pitying monologues and couldn’t imagine what the daughter’s hurry was. Having had a certain amount of contact with the City Guards since her union with Benjamin, Rose guessed this visit wasn’t going to happen. She herself had hoped to spend at least a part of the morning in her laboratory drawing up experiments to demonstrate the use of catalysts – always supposing that she ever acquired students again – but guessed that wasn’t going to happen either.

  She readjusted her spectacles, wiped her face again. Captain Tremouille of the City Guards was far more concerned with the discipline of American roughnecks, which would earn him praise from the officials of the French Powers That Were, than with taking the statements of a pack of libré women whose husbands, if they had such, couldn’t vote.

  Agathe wiped her face with both hands, shakily adjusted her tignon – the headscarf mandated by Louisiana law that all women of color, slave or free, must wear. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Finding him like that…”

  She was, Rose guessed, her own age – twenty-eight - and had the misfortune of extreme homeliness in a city where feminine beauty was not only highly prized, but constituted one of a woman’s few marketable assets. Agathe Truande was as fair-skinned as the most refined of the plaçées – the mixed-race courtesans of whom her mother had been one, as Rose’s had been – but that fairness was the only legacy she’d had from that mother and her white father… her fairness and her half of the little green cottage. Agathe’s features were strongly African – despised as a mark of slave ancestry by whites and gens du couleur alike. And a heavy chin, close-set small eyes, and a complexion coarsened by childhood acne would have guaranteed her a lifetime of unmarriageable drudgery even had she been blessed with the most European of noses.

  It probably hadn’t helped, Rose reflected, that Joseph Truande – likewise fair and likewise of strongly African features – had been handsome as an angel. But then, the rules were always different for men.

  “I warned him,” said Agathe at last, and wiped her eyes. “When he started seeing that little pichouette from some house down by the river, I warned him that Cerise wouldn’t stand for it. Men worship Cerise Hoban and think that because she’s dainty and beautiful that her heart matches her pretty eyes.”

  “She came to breakfast with him?”

  “He sent me with a note to her yesterday.” Agathe sniffed. “Just as if Petrus Hoban weren’t there, as if she were a plaçee without a husband. As if I were his servant.” Her mouth bunched into a knot of resentment. “And he had me serve them – serve her. Pour out her coffee and fetch biscuits and butter from the sideboard, while she sat there glaring at him so you could almost see the smoke coming out her her eyes—”

  “Because of the pichouette?”

  “I don’t know.” Agathe wiped her eyes again with her handkerchief, then mopped her face in the oppressive heat. “He kept calling me back, do this and do that, until finally Cerise said – Cerise, even though it’s my house as much as it is his! – She said, We’re done with you here, Agathe…”

  She turned her face away, and with sudden anger rolled a fold of her skirt around her hand to pound into oblivion an enormous but unoffending roach who had at that moment been so unwise as to emerge from the straw mattress to crawl up the wall.

  “Jealous as a cat.” Virginie Metoyer picked her way over the crawling straw to stand – her petticoats gathered carefully in hand – beside the cot. “She jealous! After what the pair of them put poor Petrus Hoban through, this past year! Aphrodite LaJeunesse, I understand the girl’s called – though her real name’s probably Bessie Jones, for a more American slut I’ve never seen.” She glanced at the plastered wall as if she longed to lean against it, but seemed to think better of the idea. “Only the good Lord and his saints know why Petrus Hoban hasn’t ordered Cerise from his house—”

  “The good Lord and the President of the Bank of Pennsylvania.” Bernadette joined them, her own mull-muslin skirt and voluminous petticoats tucked up into her belt like a washerwoman’s. “That’s where Cerise’s father has his money invested.” The tall woman – a former plaçee and at forty, still strikingly handsome – wiped her face with a square of white gauze that was already soaked with sweat and stained with rouge. Rose wondered academically whether the ‘dispute as to jurisdiction’ that occupied the attention of the City Guards would prevent anyone from removing Joseph Truande’s body from the dining-room, and how long it would be before it occurred to anyone that the man’s only next-of-kin was in the Cabildo cells.

  Her mind automatically formulated a graph of her unfortunate neighbor’s decay-rate in the crushing heat, even as Virginie protested, “It isn’t only that, chere. Petrus Hoban loves her to distraction—”

  “Petrus Hoban knows what wines people will buy, but about that wife of his he isn’t any smarter than— M’sieu!” Bernadette darted to the barred end of the cell as an officer of the City Guards walked past. She snaked her arm through the bars to catch at him. “M’sieu Rochier, I demand to be permitted to contact my attorney—”

  “M’sieu, think of my children!” Serafine Gouvert flung herself at the bars and clutched Rochier’s sleeve like a drowning woman. “They’re home alone – Antoine and Souline and Constant, and baby Emile…”

  “M’sieu,” wailed Marie-Euphémie Ouvard, “you must let us out of here before I go insane—!”

  “Imbeciles!” Bernadette turned on the other women as the sergeant wrenched himself free and fled. “Let me handle this—”

  “O
h, and who are you, then? The Queen of France?”

  “Just because your lover was a banker—”

  “Who’s fled town now that his bank has failed—”

  “And carried off all the silver in its vaults—”

  “How dare you—?”

  Rose pushed up her spectacles and mopped her face again. “Was he expecting other visitors that morning?”

  Agathe shook her head. “He never made plans, when that – that zinc-plated cow would come of a morning! I went across to the kitchen and got the fire started for his dinner – he always would have a hot dinner, even in weather like this. When I came out into the yard to fetch water I heard her shouting at him, calling him all manner of things. The woman has a temper like the devil and a mouth like a barrel of sewage! Next time I went into the yard I heard nothing, and I thought… Well, I knew how often they had made up after they fought. So I thought, I can clear away the breakfast things while they’re busy in his room. I knew Joseph would be angry, if he came out and found food left on the table. Even one ant would drive him to rage…”

  Her face puckered for a moment and she added, “He was not always like that. When he was little, he was kind. It was she who made him that way.”

  This was not what Rose had heard from various residents of that block of Rue Esplanade, who had known the Truande siblings from childhood. But she only said, “So you heard nothing?”

  “Nothing.” Agathe’s face twisted again, and she pressed her fist to her lips. “I thought, if I was very quiet, not to disturb him. But I came into the dining-room—” Her body shuddered, and she looked away. “Joseph—”

  “How long—?” Rose began, and at that moment the cell door opened, and Constable Tallien pushed Cerise Hoban among them.