Hagar Read online

  “I thought you said you’s talkin’ to your sister,” growled Parton’s voice. “I didn’t say you could go passin’ the time of day with every damn murderin’ darky in the jail.”

  “It’s nothing to be concerned about,” soothed Hannibal. “The butler knows the girls’ mother, and begged to be remembered to her, that’s all. I take it nobody was out between the house and the river after it grew dark?” he added, in French, and there was an infinitely soft whisper in the blackness, like the purl of distant water over stone.

  “No one,” said Ariette’s voice. “Because so many are gone up to town tonight for the fireworks, you understand, the militia patrols are on their guard, for people who might take advantage of that fact.”

  “So Madame could have returned in a chaise, for instance, or even walked in from the woods, and none would have seen her?” asked Rose.

  “She must have done so. I saw the lamps lit in her room, and her shadow moving against the jalousie blinds,” said the younger woman. “But as to how she came, and why she didn’t call one of us to help her undress and make her some coffee—”

  “And this overseer,” went on Rose, “whose name we shall not speak—” She threw a warning glance at Parton and the other guard, still glowering behind her by the fire. “Did he by any chance understand fireworks, or explosives, or chemicals, or anything of that sort?”

  More murmuring in the darkness, this time several voices. Then Ariette said, “He did, Madame,” and there was a trace of wonderment in her voice. “Blaz – the foreman, you understand – says that Michie Moberly used to work in the mines in South Carolina, and later in a factory in the north somewhere, before coming to New Orleans. But he left, only a week after—” Her voice hesitated on the name, “—after Michie Jérôme…”

  “And when was that?”

  “Just after Mardi Gras, Madame,” said the young woman. “Ten days ago.”

  “And was Madame grieved,” asked Rose softly, “when Michie Moberly left her so suddenly?”

  There was a long stillness in the jail. A baby cried in the blackness – an infant a few months old, by the sound – and a woman crooned gentle words to it, but Rose could almost feel the glances that went from prisoner to prisoner.

  At length Ariette whispered, “Not as much as we – all of us – thought she would be, Madame. They were… Well, there was talk…”

  LeRoy muttered something, savagely, to her, and Ariette turned her face from the judas to murmur a reply. “LeRoy says—” She looked back, “—it was more than talk.” She stammered with discomfort at passing the tale along. “And it is true, Madame, that Madame would… would go riding with Michie Moberly in the twilight, and come home with… with stains on her dress, as if she had lain on the ground. But – Please, she said if I told anything of this she’d have my child sold—”

  “But she’s gone,” said Rose quietly.

  “I never did it!” repeated the girl. “None here knew she was coming back tonight! Please, please Madame, speak to those you know in New Orleans, to the white judges and the men who’ll be on the jury! Yes, I did wrong, I know I did wrong letting Michie Jérôme come into my bed! But—”

  “You did no wrong,” said Rose firmly. “Any judge in the United States will tell you that to do other than what you did – what you let him do – was against the law.”

  “Not against God’s law, M’am.” Ariette’s voice sank to a breath. “Not with his wife there beneath his roof. I knew God would punish me somehow, but not everyone! Not LeRoy and Ellie and all the others—They wouldn’t harm my child, would they? She’s only a baby, surely they wouldn’t—”

  “Is she Michie Jérôme’s child?” It was difficult to see in the darkness, but Rose had the impression that this young maidservant was barely out of her teens.

  “No, M’am.” The hushed voice sank til barely audible. “Her father was gone before Michie Jérôme ever saw me.”

  Rose was generally not a vindictive woman, but she experienced a sudden, overwhelming desire to take a cane-stalk and thrash both Michie Jérôme and his scheming wife.

  “I’ve sent for a white policeman from town,” she said after a moment. “He should be here tomorrow. His man name is Michie Shaw, an American, very tall and spitting tobacco all around him. But he’s an honest man, and a clever one. Tell him everything. You can trust him, trust him with anything. This I know of my own experience. He can keep you – all of you – from harm.”

  “Only God can keep us from harm, Madame,” said LeRoy’s deep voice. “I pray you’re right, and that this man is his servant.”

  *

  Livia emerged from the shadows of the sugar-mill as Rose and Hannibal came past. “What did the girl have to say for herself?”

  The avidity in her voice made Rose think about cane-stalks again, but she controlled herself and said, “Only that she’s terrified. And that the overseer Moberly almost certainly knew about flash-paper and where to get it. And that it sounds like Leonie Neuville could have brought her substitute victim here anytime after full-dark – stupefied with laudanum, I suspect, since she had to get her to walk up the steps and into the room—”

  “God knows in my laudanum days I walked pretty much the length and breadth of Paris,” remarked Hannibal, “conversing with angels and under the impression that I was actually in London or Rome or Xanadu—”

  Livia nudged him sharply. “And more’s the wonder someone didn’t murder you, sir.” Hooves crunched on the shell-path, and a man’s voice called out,

  “Who’s that?”

  “Hannibal Sefton, at your service, sir,” replied Hannibal, in his most lofty English. “I was just having a few words with Lieutenant Parton—”

  Two militiamen drew rein, and held their lanterns down long enough to identify him as a white man, while Hannibal handed them his card and repeated the tale of Rose’s relationship to Ariette. The men grunted acquiescence, and one of them added, “Ain’t that the way of it? Man I knowed over to Mobile, took to meddlin’ with the maid in the nursery, and sure enough that girl smothered the baby in the cradle, first time her master had to hit her a couple of licks for talkin’ back. You just can’t trust ‘em.”

  “That sound you hear,” commented Hannibal, when the two militiamen had ridden on toward the slave-jail, “is my mind boggling at the mental processes of any man who would rape a woman in his household, hit her a couple of licks, and then leave her in charge of his infant – if indeed any portion of that story is true.”

  “I’m sure the true part,” said Rose, blowing on her spectacles and wiping the dust from the lenses, “is that people believed that the girl did it. Which does lead me to hope that once we inform Shaw of what we’ve found here – once he has a look at that poor girl’s body—” She turned, to glance back at the dark bulk of the house, now fading behind them in the river mists, “—he’ll be able to find evidence in town of a red-haired girl’s disappearance – the Second Municipality along Tchapitoulas Street has quite a colony of Irish, I understand. Otherwise, since we didn’t find any record of getaway money siphoned from the plantation, a jury may not believe a case that hangs on a pair of ill-fitting shoes.”

  “All he really needs to do,” returned Hannibal, “is put up enough of a question for trial to be delayed. Once Neuville returns, I suspect he’ll work to have the punishment mitigated, or will claim to believe your reading of events… Or Shaw’s reading,” he added. “Since it will officially come from him. And come daylight, he’ll be able to search the house better than we could, for evidence of peculation.”

  “I hope he finds it,” fretted Rose.

  Curiously, Livia merely hugged her shawl closer around herself, and said nothing.

  *

  Looking not much at all like a servant of God, Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard ambled down the gangplank of the steamboat Vesuvius the following fore-noon at the Marais Plantation landing, trailed by Gabriel and decorated with a rapidly-blackening eye.
This led Rose to deduce that the lanky Kaintuck had been assigned to keep peace among the celebrants of the former President’s birthday, with results only to be expected in New Orleans. Owing to the fact that the St. Bernard Parish coroner, the undertaker habitually used by the Neuville family, and Jérôme Neuville’s uncle and aunt – who had three other plantations along the river – had all been in New Orleans for the fireworks the previous night, Lieutenant Parton and his merry men had for the most part kept out of the house, which Rose had been watching surreptitiously through her spyglass since sunup. Coming off the boat, Lieutenant Shaw caught her eye, where she stood with Hannibal (and about half the militia patrol and most of Arnaud Levesque’s masquerade guests) to one side of the landing, but it was nearly an hour before he spoke to her. Lieutenant Parton intercepted him, volubly describe every event of the fire, and led him up to the house. Rose – and most of the crowd from the landing (many of whom had gone over at daylight to have a look at the house themselves) tagged along.

  But Shaw had caught Rose’s eye, and she knew he would come around to her eventually.

  Shortly after noon, the smokestacks of the Cincinnati were sighted, coming up-river from the Balize, and Arnaud Levesque put out flags on the Belle Jour landing. Wood-boats had passed, but nobody in their right mind would take a wood-boat upstream during a spring rise when a steam-boat was likely to be by. Standing at the foot of the front gallery steps of Marais, Rose and Hannibal watched the big side-wheeler maneuver its way to the landing: “I hope there’ll be room on the stern-deck for all the guests,” she remarked.

  “It’s not the guests I wonder about,” said Hannibal, “but all those carpet-bags full of costumes. And how are Titania and the Fairy Court going to transport their wings home? Or Queen Elizabeth get that lace collar back in safety? The thing’s the size of a tabletop, she’ll need a box a yard square…”

  Lieutenant Parton’s voice sounded from around the corner of the house, enumerating every case of poisoning, murder, arson, vandalism and machine-breaking by slaves in his experience…

  “Which does remind me,” said Shaw mildly, as they came into view, “I would like to have a word with some of the servants… Sefton,” he exclaimed, as if surprised at the sight of the fiddler still lingering. “Might I enlist you as a translator? My French is a bit rocky.”

  This was a complete lie – Livia claimed Lieutenant Shaw pronounced French words like a badly brought-up tomcat, but after nine years in New Orleans, the Kentuckian understood a great deal more of the language than most French Creoles suspected he did.

  “Certes, centurion,” Hannibal replied promptly. “At your service. Come along, Rose.”

  Parton showed every sign of coming with them – whether out of curiosity or simply because he distrusted anything a slave would say – but at that moment the coroner’s gig appeared on the river road, bearing not only that gentleman but Lothaire Alvarez the undertaker (“They’re like to find that poor lady’s wedding-ring in the pawnshop the day after the funeral,” had sniffed undertaker Beauvais Quennell, when he’d heard that his professional rival was preferred by the Neuvilles). As the militiaman bustled across the straggly lawn to meet them, Shaw led the way back toward the slave-jail.

  “You been in the house?” he asked softly.

  Rose nodded.

  “Them’s damn queer burns.”

  “If you want to see something even queerer,” returned Rose, “take that poor woman’s shoes off.” And she related her observations about flash-paper and fire, and her opinions of what had taken place. “It sounds to me as if Leonie Neuville conspired with the overseer Moberly to divert funds from the sugar-harvest while her husband was away in December, then faked her own death in such a way as to guarantee that her rival would be killed for it… along with any of the other house-servants who might have had suspicions about her behavior of the state of her laundry when she came back from riding with her overseer. I tried to find a duplicate set of financial books last night in Madame Neuville’s room, but I suspect she’s taken them with her. I certainly would. I can only hope you’ll find evidence of a red-haired girl or woman missing from town – her disappearance may not even be reported yet. She was only killed last night…”

  “I’m guessin’,” murmured Shaw, “that M’am Neuville – if’fn she been up to what you think she been up to – would have advertised for a white maid, an’ there will be record of that. Whether I can make it stick in court’s another matter. Fact is, Neuville actually was meddlin’ with this maid of his wife’s. An’ there was damn little time between the minute that fire started an’ every slave in the quarters turnin’ out with the buckets. Then for the rest of the night, the militia was all over the woods like ants at a church picnic, an’ never saw a sign of her. Without hard proof – like them account-books – somebody on that jury’s sure to stick over askin’, Where’d she GO?”

  Hannibal stopped, and turned, as if estimating times and distances between the smoke-fouled walls of the house, and the militiamen pissing into the ashes of last night’s fire by the slave-jail. He glanced at Rose, who shook her head. This was something which had bothered her, too.

  “I’ll give the house a good goin’ over,” said Shaw after a time, “an’ the overseer’s cottage as well. There may be somethin’ there. An’ I’ll check the chandleries in town for who-all’s been buyin’ flash paper. It’ll be a tough case to make, restin’ as it does on just the smell of nitre – an’ the only witness for that a woman of color – an’ the blisters on a dead gal’s toes. But it’ll give us somethin’.”

  “Thank you.”

  The Kaintuck looked down at Rose with rain-gray eyes. “Thank you,” he replied. “There’s few things chap my ass worse’n folks who think they’re smart. That they’re so smart they can treat other folks like animals, without rights – without even the right to live, if they gets in their way. If I was as good a Christian as my mama brought me up to be, I’d do my duty out of the love of God an’ country, ‘th’out a unkind or selfish thought… but I ain’t. An’ I do like the look on their faces, when they find out somebody else is smart enough to catch ‘em an’ make ‘em account for what they done.”

  “I will not tell a soul,” Rose said solemnly, “It is my pleasure.”

  *

  Shaw had (he told Rose) an invitation to spend the night at the house of the militia Captain, a man named Cole, but he put out flags on the Marais landing instead and took the Bunker Hill back up to town shortly before sunset. Gabriel returned to New Orleans on the Bunker Hill as well, but Candide Levesque had asked Rose that morning if she would have dinner (“A quiet meal, for a change!”) at Belle Jour and return to town the following day. Though Rose suspected that part of that invitation depended on her “singing for her supper” with an up-to-date account of events at Marais, she had bettered her acquaintance with Candide over the past twenty-four hours and liked the woman, who shared her interest in gardening. The steamboat Corsair, Arnaud estimated, was due past on the following morning, and flags were put on the landing yet again.

  The dinner invitation extended to Hannibal – who had offered to remain as an escort, so that Rose would not travel back up to town with her baby alone – and, it turned out (Rose was willing to bet, to Candide’s dismay), to Livia as well. This worked out well, however, since Hannibal took it upon himself to charm Livia during dinner and throughout a quiet evening of playing with Baby John in the parlor (Livia disdained grandchildren, her own included), and the visit passed without further incident. (“And Heaven knows,” said Rose to the fiddler the following morning, “what further incident could top fire, mayhem, and murder…”)

  The Corsair also carried the Marais slaves north, chained on the promenade deck under the guard of Captain Cole. They would spend up to a month in the parish prison before the case could be sorted out. Holding her child wrapped warmly in her shawl on the stern-deck with the other passengers of color, Rose could only hope that Shaw would find evidence of a missin
g red-haired girl among the Irish of Tchapitoulas Street.

  “Oh, I think he will,” opined Livia. “Now that someone’s pointed out to him the direction in which to look, I doubt that even he could go astray.”

  This was a total slur on the policeman’s character, but Rose refrained from saying so: as far as Livia was concerned, Shaw’s nationality alone rendered him beneath contempt. The deck-crew tossed ropes to the wharf below Rue St-Pierre and began hauling the Corsair into place. Late afternoon sunlight flashed on the water, and marchandes on the levee called out to passengers to buy oranges, pralines, strawberries. Well-dressed white passengers from Jefferson and Plaquemines Parishes made their leisurely way down from the upper decks, sparing only cursory glances to the two neatly-dressed “ladies of color” who stepped aside to let them pass. Along the wharves, crews of stevedores unloaded the boats already docked, or wrestled crates of dishes and boxes of agricultural tools, sacks of wheat and corn or bales of cheap “Negro cloth” from the mills of Boston, onto waiting wagons or up the shallow steps that led over the levee, looming against the bare lacework of the pride-of-India trees.

  Hannibal went back to the rail, to fetch their carpet-bags and the enormous cardboard boxes containing Livia’s costume. Livia watched him go, then turned back to Rose and went on, “In case he doesn’t, you might give him this.”

  From beneath her shawl she took a green-bound ledger.

  Rose shifted Baby John to her hip, and opened the book. The first entry was for the preceding December, for sugar sold to Temoigne and Sons, with a note that five hundred dollars of the profits had gone to the purchase of bearer bonds from representatives of Hope and Company of Amsterdam. A few days later, three hundred acres of cypress swamp belonging to Marais Plantation had been mortgaged, with half the money going to the same destination; early in January, another sale of sugar had resulted in three hundred dollars diverted—