Lady of Perdition Read online

  ‘Stop it! Don’t leave me! For God’s sake—’

  Shaw’s hand was on the doorframe.

  ‘Neumann! Andreas Neumann!’ Javel writhed against his bonds, as if he’d dislocate his own arms in his frenzy to pull free. ‘He’s got a place on Avenue B! Oh, God—’

  ‘When’d you sell her?’

  ‘The second. Night after we got in town … Oh, dear God, hurry—!’

  How Shaw could stand there with the fire swarming up the wooden walls and across the shed’s roof January couldn’t imagine. He gathered the cards hastily from the little table on the porch, shoved the cribbage-board into his pocket, and retreated, knowing the brittle-dry building would collapse any minute. Away from the smoke of the shed the night sang with mosquitoes; the flames made a growing curtain of topaz and gold against the low black wall of swamp oak and water holly. The ground away from the bayou wasn’t squishy, as it would have been in New Orleans, and the whole world smelled of the sea. Six miles along from town, not even the new community’s stink competed with the acrid smoke of the burning shed. The stillness reminded January of the islands of the Barataria south of New Orleans, empty and peaceful and deadly.

  He heard Javel scream something else, before a shot cracked the night.

  A few moments later Shaw’s lanky form silhouetted against the flame as he walked to where January stood.

  ‘He told you where she was.’ January felt just a little shocked, though he knew that he shouldn’t.

  ‘Maestro –’ Shaw sounded just the smallest bit apologetic as he shoved his pistol into his belt – ‘you are a godly man. You go to church regular, an’ believe God gives a crap about humankind an’ what we do on this earth.’ The firelight caught in the cold gray of his eyes. ‘Now, by my calculation, if this little gal was sold to Neumann on the second, Neumann raped her that night, just to show her who’s boss, an’ I’m bettin’ the man what runs his barracoon for him did the same, soon as Neumann was outta the buildin’, just ’cause he could. Third, maybe fourth she’s in the barracoon –’ he ticked off the dates on his long fingers – ‘gettin’ it from both of ’em, til she sells … An’ if she’s as pretty as you tell me, I’m bettin’ she didn’t stay here long. That’s not even mentionin’ whether Neumann’s the kind what gives customers free samples to get ’em to buy. Say she’s sold on the fourth; fifth, sixth, seventh …’

  He held up his hands to show the number of days Selina Bellinger had been a slave, sixteen years old, headstrong, pretty, the daughter of a planter from Shreveport who could deny nothing to the child of his pretty Caribbean placée. Quietly, Shaw went on, ‘You ever know a white man that bought a slave-girl an’ didn’t rape her, ’fore he left town an’ every night on the road? For all we know, she coulda been sold to a whorehouse. They may still be breakin’ her in. I figure I owed Javel a little somethin’ for her. He’s lucky I shot him, an’ didn’t leave him to burn.’

  January nodded. ‘I’d have left him to burn, myself. You think he was working with others?’

  ‘Prob’ly was.’ Shaw shrugged. ‘He sure as hell sent somebody that note, sayin’ as how he’d got a free black pigeon out cold on opium at the grocery last night. My guess is he works with half the dealers in Galveston. An’ my guess is won’t be one of ’em that’ll give a hoot in hell iff’n he disappears. I’m pretty sure,’ he added, ‘we didn’t commit a sin – given what the Bible tells us wrongdoers deserve at the hands of the righteous. An’ technically, we didn’t commit a crime neither. We’re in the Republic of Texas now, Maestro. So far as I know, it ain’t against the law for a white man to kill a black one here.’

  ‘No,’ said January quietly. He took from his pocket the tin slave-badge that proclaimed him the property of Hannibal Sefton, and hung it around his neck: ironically, the best protection he had in the western hemisphere’s newest republic. ‘No, it’s not.’

  Together, the two men started along the bayou road back to town.

  TWO

  Neumann’s Texas Exchange stood on Avenue B, close by the bustle of the Galveston waterfront. It was built of sawn lumber, American-fashion, whitewashed, and one of the largest on its block.

  January’s skin crawled at the sight of it.

  A line of men sat on benches along the unshaded front wall, hands on their knees, faces beaded with sweat in the compressed stickiness of the April heat. Clearly, the man who’d put the steel shackles on their ankles had ordered them in no uncertain terms not to loosen the collars of their calico shirts – starch-stiff and buttoned to their chins – nor to open the neat blue wool jackets they wore: Who wants to buy a sloppy-lookin’ nigger?

  They looked uncomfortable but January knew this wasn’t the worst misery they’d had to put up with in their lives and they looked like they knew it, too. They talked quietly, squinting against the morning’s cloudy sunlight, and watched the street scene before them with, for the most part, resigned interest. If any man of them remembered the family he’d been taken from – because his master needed money, or had died leaving his heirs in need of money, or because he’d stolen silverware or coffee for liquor-money or had perhaps been ‘uppity’ about his master bedding a wife or a child – he kept it to himself. He was now a thousand miles away from family, friends, wife, children, past, and there was for the moment nothing he could do about it.

  January nodded greetings to the men as he followed Hannibal Sefton up the plank steps to the Exchange’s door. Some of them nodded back, cordial. For all they knew, the thin, threadbare Hannibal, with his old-fashioned white linen neckcloth, gray-streaked mustache and threads of silver in his antiquated queue, could be bringing him in to sell. Or could be, for all his unassuming scholarly mien, a monster. January was aware of it in their glance, as they eyed the white man up and down. This man out to buy? He decent or mean? They studied January, too, as if trying to read whether there were whip-scars, or cigar-burns, or marks worse than those, beneath his scuffed linen jacket and faded trousers.

  Rage filled January’s heart, that anyone would have to look at another man that way. Would have to make those desperate calculations over a potential new life. At such times it was hard not to hate all white men.

  The Exchange was dim inside, shuttered against the glare. Andreas Neumann evidently dealt in goods other than human chattels: hundred-pound sacks of coffee ranged along one wall, and on another was a counter bearing bolts of calico, and boxes of books, crates of pineapples and the inevitable, enormous cockroaches. A stairway ascended to the floor above, and to the right of it, on another bench, sat the women slaves, sweltering also in the heat. Their eyes, too, flicked to Hannibal and January as they entered.

  But their glances returned, expressionless, to the four men who stood around a shackled girl in front of the bench. January guessed the hatless man – big and rosy with a jawline ‘Quaker’ beard and a bald patch in his fair hair – must be Neumann. The shortest of the others, whose red sunburned complexion marked him as a planter or rancher, had just opened the girl’s calico bodice and pulled it down to her waist. ‘Nice tits,’ the man approved, and squeezed one. The girl stared stonily out over his shoulder at a corner of the ceiling. She looked about thirteen.

  ‘You sure she’ll breed?’

  Neumann nodded vigorously. ‘Ja, sure, she got her period regular.’ His accent placed him from one of the southern German kingdoms, Bavaria or Hesse. ‘Just last week, matter of fact.’

  ‘Them tits don’t mean nuthin’, Jimmy,’ said one of the other men, and gestured impatiently at the lascivious commentary of his companions at the remark. ‘You gotta take a look at her box.’

  ‘Oh, sure!’ Neumann fished promptly in his pocket for a key. ‘Sure enough thing! Help yourself. You want to take her upstairs? First door on the right as you go up.’

  He unlocked the girl’s shackle and stepped aside as the three men led the child up the bare board steps. January saw one of the women on the bench – a woman in her thirties, with the girl’s same Fulani bone st
ructure, the girl’s same Spanish-dark eyes, turned her face aside. She didn’t make a sound, but tears ran down her face.

  January shoved his hands deep in his trouser pockets to hide the clench of his fists.

  ‘Mr Neumann?’ Hannibal stepped forward and held out his card, which had been printed the week before in New Orleans. The Bourbon Street address on it actually belonged to a white great-uncle of January’s wife Rose. Hannibal himself was in fact a musician whose current residence was in one of the disused cribs behind Kate the Gouger’s bath-house on Perdidio Street, but his respectable upbringing, and a long-ago Oxford education, stood him in good stead.

  ‘Hannibal Sefton, of New Orleans … Very nice stock you have here, sir. Very nice.’ He made a slight bow and tipped his hat to the women on the bench, who were linked – as were the men outside – along a single chain with ankle-fetters. ‘I wondered if perhaps you might help me?’

  ‘Of course, Mr Sefton, of course.’ Neumann bowed, but his blue eyes, though genial, held the wariness of one who has dealt with every grifter and confidence-artist ever spawned.

  ‘I understand,’ said Hannibal, ‘that you have – or had – a young wench named Selina on the premises recently. Octoroon, tall, slim-built; I’d put her age at sixteen or seventeen. Light eyes and a reddish-gold cast to her hair. Hair curly, rather than wooly, and unbraided reaches to her waist. She may have been claiming that she was a free woman, the daughter of a planter?’

  Something shifted in the slave-dealer’s eyes. But he only raised his brows, in an expression of polite inquiry.

  ‘She is in fact the property of my wife.’ Hannibal produced sale papers, dated 1836 and proving that the girl Selina had been purchased at the St Charles Exchange in New Orleans by one Ransom Hardy and deeded to his daughter Emma Sefton the following year. The papers were very convincing – during the slow summer season when no one was hiring musicians, Hannibal made ends meet by discreetly forging freedom papers for the local Underground Railroad.

  ‘She ran away on the ninth of last month,’ he continued, ‘with a young man named Javel – if that was his real name. According to our cook, this Javel promised he’d take her to Kingston in Jamaica, and get her work as a free woman. We later learned that Javel is in fact in league with slave-stealers and regularly lures slaves – particularly housemaids who are not strictly kept – into escaping.’

  And the fiddler shook his head, dark brows knitting at the incomprehensible unreasonableness of silly-minded wenches who want to be free.

  ‘Someone told me that this Javel might have brought her to you,’ Hannibal went on. ‘I am, of course, prepared to pay you something for your trouble—’

  He slipped his hand into the front of his coat.

  Neumann’s brow wrinkled in thought, as he waved the offer aside with a beefy hand. January’s heart sank a little, though he would have been astonished had any slave-dealer divulged the name of a customer to a stranger who might well be a confidence-trickster – or in the employ of the law on the trail of a receiver of stolen goods. Slave-stealing was a hanging offense in Texas.

  ‘The name is not familiar,’ Neumann said. ‘The last fancy we had in here was two months ago. Musterfino, she was, from Cuba—’

  January, standing quietly in the shadows beside the women’s bench, felt a quick, slight pinch of fingernails on the back of his hand. Glancing down, he met the eyes of an older woman, African-black like himself, heavy-breasted and too old, he thought, to bear children or do heavy work in the fields. ‘This wife of his,’ she breathed, in the accents of the Georgia Sea Islands, ‘she treat that girl good?’

  January nodded. Of course the woman assumed – as Neumann and every person they’d passed on Avenue B assumed – that January, neatly dressed and trailing respectfully at Hannibal’s heels, was the fiddler’s valet.

  ‘She was here,’ the Georgia woman went on, under Hannibal’s closer questioning of the blandly uninformative Neumann. ‘Last week. Said her daddy a planter, an’ she a free woman – your massa tellin’ the truth?’

  ‘It’s her daddy who sent us,’ murmured January. ‘If you know who bought her, for God’s sake tell me.’

  ‘Pollack,’ said the woman. ‘Gideon Pollack. Got him a rancho northeast of San Antonio, next by Onion Creek in the hill country.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Sattiday. Said he goin’ up to Houston, then on up to Austin where he got kin—’ She turned her face sharply away then, and slapped January’s hand aside as if he’d tried to touch her. January, knowing that she’d been watching Neumann throughout their whispered conversation, drew back a little, apologetic, aware that the dealer must have turned his head and seen them talking.

  ‘Danny, what’re you doing?’ demanded Hannibal in patient exasperation, and January replied in his most cotton-patch English.

  ‘Nuthin’, sir, nuthin’ – just only this ol’ wench, she was on Bellefleur Plantation when I was a little boy, sir.’

  Hannibal sighed, and said, ‘Go stand over by the door, Danny.’ Then he shook his head as if to say, Like children, all of them, and returned to his talk with Neumann.

  One doesn’t comment, reflected January, as he obeyed him, on the random antics of a child – and he knew that to over-explain anything is to arouse suspicion. The conversation with the old woman was in any case over. Not for the world would he have exposed her to a slap and a reprimand – if nothing worse – from Neumann.

  Gideon Pollack. San Antonio.

  All the way along the Gulf coast on the French brig L’Alouette from New Orleans, January, Hannibal, and Abishag Shaw had pored over the map of the republic that they’d bought the day before sailing.

  Mentally, January studied it now.

  When Roux Bellinger had brought his daughter to New Orleans in December to enroll her in boarding school, the love he bore her had been clear in every word he spoke. Every glance he gave across the little parlor of the house on Rue Esplanade where January and his wife Rose had established their little academy, spoke of how he treasured this pert, pretty, young lady. ‘Her mama was what they call a placée,’ the graying Scotsman had said, looking from Rose to January. ‘The dearest, gentlest treasure God formed with His own hand, and the most beautiful. But her mama had been a placée also, and my Marie had got only the education that ladies then – and now, I might add – thought good for a girl of … of that class.’

  He hushed his voice a little, as if he feared his daughter would be hurt. In fact, January had inquired of his various friends in the New Orleans demimonde the moment Rose had received Bellinger’s letter inquiring about her school, and he knew that Roux Bellinger had kept Marie Pargette as his mistress in the small Cane River town of Cloutierville for the past twenty years. Bellinger had been married all that time to the daughter of a wealthy trader on the Spanish Trail, a fact of which his treasured Selina could not have been ignorant.

  Tactfully, Rose had said, ‘As the daughter of a placée myself, M’sieu, I understand perfectly the kind of education considered appropriate for a girl who is expected to do nothing but follow in her mother’s footsteps.’ The oval lenses of her spectacles had flashed as she tilted her head, a slim, rather gawky woman whose smallest smile January wouldn’t have traded for a week of lovemaking with Helen of Troy. ‘Since I was not suited for that kind of life, either mentally or in spirit, it cost me considerable struggle to take a different path.’

  Bellinger’s hard, lined face had softened. He’d set down his teacup with the air of a man who realizes he is in a safe place. ‘I’m glad you understand, m’am. I want something different for Selina, something useful. The world’s changing. Who’s to say what it’ll be like ten years from now, or whether my girl will have to make her own way? I’d like her to at least have the right tools, whatever choice she might make.’

  ‘That is the act,’ said Rose, ‘of a father who is kind as well as wise, sir.’

  But looking across the parlor, bright with the chilly winter sunlight t
hrough the French doors, January had seen the pretty Selina’s expression of discontent at the sight of the well-stocked bookshelves, and her prospective schoolmistress’s old-fashioned headscarf. A girl, he had thought then, used to winding her doting father around her finger. He hadn’t eavesdropped on their extended leave-taking, but through the windows he’d seen them on the gallery, Selina tugging at her father’s sleeves with a desperate look on her face, shaking her head. When at last the planter had gone, the girl had rushed upstairs to the dormitory beneath the slanted roof, and two of the other girls had reported that she’d wept, the bitter tears of a thwarted child. In the weeks which had followed, she had made it plain that whatever her father wanted for her education – history, mathematics, botany and Latin as well as more stylish accomplishments like needlework and music – Selina was having none of it.

  Dizzy with delight at the amenities of New Orleans – after a short, dull lifetime in Cloutierville – Selina saw no reason why she would ever need more than those things that had served her so well at her home: beautiful manners, bright conversation, considerable skill on the pianoforte (it was a genuine joy to teach her), and the ability to look like she was paying rapt attention to whatever was being said to her. She felt put-upon at the school, and she clearly considered the other girls – aged eleven to thirteen, and all of them darker of complexion than herself – beneath her.

  Of course she’d fall in love.

  January shook his head, half exasperated and half in despair.

  Of course she’d believe any handsome young man – of her own octoroon complexion, so clearly ‘available’ (as a white man would not be) without being ‘disgusting’ (as many light-skinned girls described boys of even moderate brownness – much less January’s coal-black hue). Of course the handsome Seth Javel would find it child’s play to work on her sense of grievance, her craving for romance, as well as her awakening senses.