Hagar Page 3

  “Maybe,” said Rose. “But what I smelled when first I stepped into the room was nitre and sulpher – the ingredients of flash-paper. Where would a slave-girl have gotten that? And why would she use such a thing, when she could douse the room in lamp-oil to the same effect?”

  “Who else would have wanted Madame Neuville out of the way? Her husband? I hear he left just after Mardi Gras for New York, but of course he could always have doubled back. But surely he wouldn’t deliberately choose a method that would throw the blame on Ariette—”

  “Not to mention that would entail the state executing fifty thousand dollars’ worth of slaves for complicity in the murder,” added Rose. “That’s why I want to—”

  The soft crunch of a footfall in the gravel drive made her spin. Freckled moonlight touched a slim, tall figure, silhouetted the points of a dark tignon stylishly tied.

  “Don’t be silly, dear,” said Livia Levesque’s voice. “They won’t kill all of them. Just the house-niggers.”

  “Madame.” Hannibal bowed.

  Only her mother-in-law, Rose reflected, would have paused to arrange her headgear before slipping out for a midnight excursion. Livia, or her daughter Dominique… And only Livia (or Dominique, who for a variety of reasons had gone to Washington City with Benjamin) would have brought, as her alternative to the costume of the Virgin Queen, a lace-trimmed challis gown elegant enough to pass in any drawing-room in New Orleans.

  They had reached the belt of woods that separated Belle Jour from Marais, and the smell of smoke – threaded with the more sinister stench of charred meat – hung gritty in the air.

  “I’m still going to have a look at that bedroom,” said Rose. “I don’t think the girl did it, and I don’t—”

  Livia straightened her lacy cuffs. “Good heavens, dear, I’m not trying to stop you. I’m perfectly well aware that no amount of talking is going to make you listen to reason. But I was being driven insane by Agnes Pellicot’s driveling – the woman will not shut up, and insisted on waking that poor daughter of hers to play picquet with her til she felt sleepy… And when she sleeps, she snores. I don’t wonder Jacques Pellicot paid her off the minute he decently could.”

  And no amount of talking, Rose was aware in her turn, was going to send her mother-in-law back when she was on the track of the freshest information available about whatever scandal might be brewing. Not a woman to waste her breath, she only said, “I may ask you to stay out of sight when I go around to speak to the girl Ariette in the slave-jail. Hannibal, you won’t object to backing up my story about being Ariette’s cousin—”

  “Not in the slightest, Owl-Eyed Athene.”

  “I’ll do that last, I think.” Rose paused at the edge of the trees, surveying the dark bulk of the house in the spatch-cocked moonlight. A tiny spot of grimy yellow, half-hidden by the house itself, marked where the slave-jail stood, about a hundred feet behind it. As she watched, a shadow passed across that light, where a militiaman – probably more than one – stood guard. “There’s things I want to see in the house first.”

  Livia inclined her head graciously, as if granting her permission. And, Rose had to admit, the older woman was quick and quiet-footed as a cat, slipping from tree-shadow to tree-shadow when they reached the double line of oaks that marked the drive from the Marais landing to the house. She had been, Rose recalled, a slave herself. There must have been times in that portion of her life – of which she never spoke – when she had needed that particular survival skill.

  The way was sodden from the bucket-line that had passed along it earlier in the night, and littered with the jetsam of the party guests as they’d fallen into the ranks of the struggling slaves: a gaudy tabard trampled in the mud, that Rose had seen Crowdie Passebon wearing; an embroidered Turkish slipper; Father Abraham’s discarded beard.

  A curtain had been hastily nailed over the broken-out French door of Leonie Neuville’s bedroom, to keep foxes or stray dogs from getting at the body. Hannibal cracked the slide on his dark-lantern enough to let Rose pick the lock on the shutters that covered the French doors on the husband’s side of the house. The rest of the shutters were bolted from within.

  “When will Jèrôme Neuville be back?” murmured Rose, as they stepped into the absolute blackness of the house. The smell of smoke almost choked her, of burned wool and burned flesh. Hannibal raised the lantern-slide a little more, and flashed the beam around the room. The walls were slightly smoke-darkened, but showed no touch of burning. The single bed was covered with some dark fabric – American brocade, probably – but had not been made up, the mosquito-bar looped back and knotted to the tester. Still the room had the air of a place inhabited: newspapers on the bedside table, basin and ewer set on the shaving-stand. Benjamin’s room, in the big old house on Rue Esplanade, though it contained a bed as was considered proper in all Creole houses, was in fact a sort of study, equipped with a desk and shelves of books.

  This looked like a bedroom.

  “Whatever Neuville’s relations with his wife were,” said Hannibal softly. “It will be shock to the woman’s family—”

  “The only shock anyone who knew Leonie likely to sustain is that she was home on the night of the biggest subscription ball between Mardi Gras and Easter,” retorted Livia. “She spent all her time at the town house. Or she did before Neuville got Tom Moberly as overseer.”

  “The one who left last week?”

  “Odd, isn’t it?” asked Rose. “That he went immediately after the owner departed?”

  “After selling half the crop and two-thirds of the plantation stores of food, I’ll be bound.” The older woman’s voice was dry as they moved cautiously into the parlor. “Half the parish knows the place was in trouble, but it was only mismanagement – mismanagement and lies. That nonsense about the fields that got water-logged… that’s a lie that would only stand with a man who hasn’t been around on his own fields. And what else they expected from a good-looking young snake like Moberly I’d be hard put to tell. Every time Neuville would leave this place – he has cotton land up near Baton Rouge, and is buying up acres in Texas as well – hogsheads of sugar would start disappearing, and cord-wood from the sheds. And Moberly would sweet-talk Leonie into thinking it was all misfortune or her poor bookkeeping, belike… the man could talk anybody into anything, I’ve heard. Like most good-for-nothing men.”

  “I stand chastised.” Hannibal bowed his head.

  “Get along with you. You’re the worst of the lot.” But her voice softened as she spoke, in a way that made Rose smile.

  But a thought came to her, as the lantern-beam flashed across the open door to the bedroom beyond. Smoke had blackened the ceiling on that whole side of the room, and smutted the furniture. Yet the door-frames weren’t charred, and when Rose stepped into the bedroom, her earlier impression was confirmed. The fire had raged across the outside wall that faced the gallery, had burned the floor on that side of the room, and had burned the bed.

  When Rose – very gently – turned back the unsullied coverlet that someone had brought in from some other room of the house, she caught again, above the horror of roasted flesh, the faint whiff of nitre.

  “It looks like she was planning to go to bed, when the girl – or whoever it was – brought her the poison,” the fiddler remarked after a time of silence. The lantern-light, fully uncovered now, shivered with the shaking of his hand. “She’s still dressed,” he added, his voice held steady with an effort, “but she hadn’t taken off her shoes. She’d let her hair down, though, and women often leave that for last. Odd,” he went on after a moment, “that it wasn’t burned.”

  “But fortunate,” returned Rose drily. “Since it was only by her hair, and her dress, that we – and of course the good Lieutenant Parton – knew it was she, and not someone else.” She walked to the end of the bed, and carefully drew back the hem of that lavender gown, to better expose the woman’s black kid slippers, and stockings of white knitted silk. “Bring the lantern close, if you
would…”

  Hannibal edged forward, eyes averted.

  Carefully, Rose felt at the woman’s toes through the soft leather. Her foot was a good inch shorter than the shoe that contained it, and even the dimness of the single candle didn’t conceal the fact that the pale spots worn by the joint of the big toe didn’t match the shape of the toe itself. When she removed the shoe and stocking, the tale was clearer still.

  “That looks like the kind of blisters you get when you wear shoes that don’t fit you.” Hannibal bent closer, and no longer sounded sickened. His dark brows pinched down over the bridge of his nose. “When you’re getting your shoes second-hand… and no good Creole lady is going to let her toe-nails get into that condition!”

  “Not while she has a maid to trim them,” commented Livia dispassionately.

  “Who—?”

  “I expect,” said Rose, “that Lieutenant Shaw will be able to find that out, once he knows to look for a missing red-haired girl along the docks and waterfront.” She slipped the shoe and stocking back on – Hannibal turned away queasily again, but Livia, who had certainly seen worse damage to human flesh in her years as a slave, held the stiffening ankle steady while Rose worked. “Look,” Rose added, and guided Hannibal’s lantern back to the burned ruin of the woman’s hand. “That’s not a wedding-ring that a poor woman would wear; I’m guessing it’s Leonie Neuville’s.”

  “How did you know?” Hannibal slipped the lantern-slide half down, to shine the beam around the shambles of the room. “What does flash-paper have to do with this? And why would Leonie Neuville use it in the murder? How easy is it to obtain?”

  Rose had turned away from the body, and began to gingerly work open the drawers of the small secretaire that stood beside the French doors out onto the gallery. The fire had seized them violently, but the cypress-wood was tough. The contents – household books, stationery, a box of pen-nibs – were mostly undamaged. “For a white woman, not difficult, if she knew what to ask for. And the advantage is that it localizes the burns.” She held the lantern close as she scanned the pages of the day-books, then replaced them with a grimace: Nothing.

  “Meaning you can lay it over the face, and wrap the hands, but leave the dress and the hair untouched.”

  “Particularly the hair.” Rose returned to the bed, Hannibal trailing her with lantern raised, like Diogenes hot on the scent of truth. “Hair is usually what catches first, you know. It’s actually fairly difficult to get flesh to burn up like that.”

  Hannibal shivered. “I can only hope the poor girl was dead before Leonie set the place ablaze – What are you looking for?”

  “You needn’t bother,” added Livia, coming up behind Hannibal to observe Rose’s search beneath the mattress. “She’ll have taken them with her.”

  “Taken what?”

  “The plantation financial records.” Livia nodded down at Rose. “The real ones, I mean, not those that she’ll have left in her husband’s desk. If the woman was going to fake her own death and flee – in such a way as to ensure that her rival would be blamed and her husband would suffer the loss of fifty thousand dollars’ worth of property, between the servants and the house itself, not counting the furniture, which I must say I wouldn’t pay twenty dollars for brand-new – she has to have planned for her own getaway by diverting profits from last year’s harvest. She doubtless colluded with that baby-faced weasel Moberly, which means she’d better have kept an accurate record, if she didn’t want him to skim the lot.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right.” Rose straightened up, and dusted the filth and soot from her hands. Her whole arm was soiled, but in the darkness – and with her shawl wrapped over it – that wouldn’t be visible. At least she hoped not…

  Hooves thudded on the turf outside, passing around the house toward the slave-jail in the rear. Dim voices rumbled: Find anythin’? Nuthin’ yet…

  “And she’ll have made some arrangement to get away from the house—”

  “She’ll have to have run pretty fast,” remarked Hannibal, as they passed again through the silent parlor, and into Jérôme Neuville’s chamber. “Once the blaze started every slave on the place would be working to put it out. She can’t have counted on your brother-in-law—” He inclined his head politely to Livia, “—and his guests lending a hand at quelling it so quickly, Madame.”

  “Arnaud is always quick to do what his neighbors are likely to praise him for.”

  She said it as if she herself hadn’t been putting on a display of gentility for everyone in the French Town for thirty-five years.

  In the upstream bedchamber they listened at the door, then slipped out into the dark of the gallery, and hurried down the steps. Men’s voices carried faintly from the direction of the slave-jail. Only when they were clear of the house, and without the appearance of having searched it, did Hannibal unsheathe the light of his dark-lantern, and stride in the lead like a man secure in his own righteousness, with Rose following meekly behind. They passed the dark bulk of the sugar-mill, rising like a stone fortress a short distance from the house: Rose knew that the mills were invariably the most solidly-built structures on any plantation, and this one, with its shut doors and shuttered-up windows, was no exception. This one was larger than the mill on her white father’s plantation down on Grand Isle, and newer. As children, Rose and her white half-brothers had been strictly forbidden to play in the mill, which had been kept locked; she had, of course, managed to get inside anyway, risking a beating for the sake of examining the machinery.

  A place of forbidden fascination. Of mysterious gears and levers and wheels.

  It meant something different to Benjamin, who had been a slave.

  And, she understood, to Livia as well, though her mother-in-law would never admit that she, too, had labored naked to the waist in heat and exhaustion during the long season of the roulaison, under threat of the whip.

  To Rose, the roulaison had meant only the singing of her father’s slaves in the foggy darkness of December nights, the hell-mouth glow of every window seen across the yard from the gallery outside her room, the smell of burned sugar in the air and the taste of the low-hanging smoke when they’d burn over the harvested fields. The slaves’ celebration, when the harvest was done.

  By the way Livia checked her stride, and stood for a moment looking at the mill’s double doors, Rose wondered what it was that she saw in her heart, and if she’d have told the truth, had Rose asked her.

  “It’s probably best you stay back, Madame,” whispered Hannibal – a bit diffidently, because there was no telling how Livia would react at the prospect of being left out of things. “Alas,” he added with a bow, “you are dressed too fine to make anyone believe you a slave.”

  “Nonsense,” Livia retorted. “The dresses Jérôme Neuville used to buy Ariette – according to Candide, anyway – would put yours to shame, Rose. Twice as fine as anything he’d put out money for, to clothe his wife, Candide says. But then Candide’s always been a jealous witch.”

  For a moment Rose had a ghastly vision of her mother-in-law insisting on accompanying her and Hannibal up to the jail, and informing Lieutenant Parton and his militiamen exactly what she thought of out-at-elbows crackers gallopping around the countryside in the middle of the night…

  But Livia stepped back without demur, and slipped like a shadow through the door of the mill.

  “Who’s that there?” called out Lieutenant Parton, as Rose and Hannibal came around the corner of the mill and approached the jail.

  “The name’s Sefton; I’m down from town visiting Mr. Levesque.” Hannibal bowed – slightly – and offered his card, which Parton looked at suspiciously and handed back, as if it were Hannibal’s fault that Parton couldn’t read. “My girl here is sister to poor Mrs. Neuville’s maid, and begged for the chance to at least speak to her. Swears she’d never have set the fire or poisoned her mistress—” He shrugged. “But I didn’t think there’d be any harm in letting them speak.”

  He ca
sually dipped his hand in his pocket, and the low glimmer of the lantern-light and the fire the guards had made before the slave-jail door caught a metallic glint in his hand when it came out again.

  “No, no harm in it,” grunted Parton, and took the coin. “But who else would have done a thing like that, if not the girl? That’s what I want to know.”

  He followed Rose to the door of the jail, and stood beside her, smelling of cheap whiskey and soiled body-linen. “You speak English, now, honey.”

  She turned upon him him the wide, questioning gaze employed by the guiltiest of her schoolgirls when confronted with their crimes. “Pardon?” Her eyes went pleadingly to Hannibal.

  “She has no English, I’m afraid,” apologized the fiddler. “I doubt Ariette does, either—”

  While Parton scowled at this, Rose turned to the barred judas in the door, called through it, “Ariette? I’m Rose Vitrac, one of Arnaud Levesque’s guests, I’ve come to help you—”

  “I did nothing!” In the reeking darkness within the jail, the reflection of the firelight showed little but the gleam of eyes. The face of the maidservant, brought close to the judas, was scarcely more than a pale blur, but the girl’s hands gripped the close-set bars on the tiny window. She spoke low and swiftly in French, as if aware that the guards would end the conversation within minutes. “I swear it, I never brought her anything to drink tonight! I didn’t even know she was home! She’d gone up to town three days ago, and left the house locked up: LeRoy walked all around it like he usually does, just after supper-time, and saw nothing—”

  “That’s a fact, M’am,” affirmed a man’s deep voice from the darkness. “Michie Jérôme’s particular about locking things up, and so is – so was…” His voice hesitated over the change of tense, over the fiery tragedy that had taken place and the darker tragedy to come, “…so was Madame. I don’t sleep in the house, but it’s my job to make sure each night, everything’s locked up tight, not just the house but the kitchen and the store-rooms and every other building on the place. How she came to return without a soul knowin’ of it I can’t imagine, nor why, if she’d let herself in, she didn’t send at once for Ariette, and have Ellie draw her up a bath—”