Hagar Read online

  “This is the ledger,” said Rose unbelievingly. “Madame Neuville’s… Where did you find this?”

  “In the sugar-mill,” replied Livia calmly. “When you went on to the slave-jail to speak to that servant-girl – who had no business letting her master come to her bed, and I don’t care what sort of sad tale she told you! – I noticed there was no lock on the door of the mill. I daresay it meant nothing to you, but such places are always kept locked, because if a slave is on the run that’s the first place he’ll hide, and do whatever damage he can to the machinery into the bargain… No master ever leaves the mill unlocked. I should imagine Leonie Neuville had a key to it.”

  Rose swallowed back her retort that as a slave, Ariette had no more right to refuse herself to her master than Livia had had, forty years ago, and instead regarded her mother-in-law narrowly. “She could have gotten there from the house in moments,” she said. “And hid among the machinery, or under the cauldrons, for the rest of the night, while the woods were being searched… And you’re only telling me about it now?”

  “I forgot,” said the older woman blandly.

  Annoyance heated Rose’s neck and ears, but she let it slide away. The important thing, she reflected as she slipped the flat green book into her satchel, was that she had the ledger. That she had the case that would prove that Leonie Neuville had stolen getaway money, had engineered the fire, had murdered another woman to take her place, in order to destroy the servant-girl who, like the Biblical patriarch’s maid Hagar, had taken her mistress’ place in the master’s bed.

  “I don’t suppose—” she tightened her shawl around herself and Baby John, “—that Leonie Neuville was there in the sugar-mill when you ‘found’ this, was she?”

  “The very idea!” Livia’s brows went up almost to the edge of her tignon.

  “And that you threatened to shout for the militiamen, unless she gave this to you?”

  “Really, dear, you have the most extraordinary ideas.” The older woman smiled her serpentine, sidelong smile. “I’m sure that Leonie merely experienced a change of heart. She must have realized that it should be enough for her to steal her husband’s money and flee, without entangling herself in a charge of murder, in the hopes of getting revenge on a cheating lout and whatever pretty little hussy he’d put in her place. An unworthy endeavor.” She shrugged. “Foolish, too.”

  “Murder is still murder.”

  “Dearest, there was nothing I could do about that. I can’t bring that poor Irish girl back to life. And I daresay if Leonie Neuville has run off with a gilt-edged snake like Moberly she’ll have her punishment soon enough. One of them’s very likely to murder the other over the money long before they get to Charleston. If Charleston is where they’re going,” she added quickly, and shrugged again, graceful as one of Hannibal’s uncaring goddesses. “It could be anywhere, of course.”

  The crowd around them thinned. The deck passengers – mostly free colored who, like themselves, had come up from the downriver parishes – began to file toward the gang-plank, baggage in hand, and the militiamen moved along the promenade decks with their keys, to unlock their human cargo. It was time to go ashore.

  Rose tucked her shawl more firmly around her child. “Thank you.”

  For a moment they stood looking at one another in the moist gleam of the river’s reflection. Then Livia sniffed. “You didn’t think Benjamin gets his brains from his father, did you?”

  Rose said gently, “He never speaks of his father.”

  “I daresay.” Livia turned toward the gangplank, while Hannibal set down the luggage on the wharf and signalled for a porter. Then she paused, and turned back to Rose. “He was a good man. Maybe the best I have ever known. Kind, and strong, with great capacity for gentleness and love.”

  She put a hand out, and touched one of Baby John’s wooly curls.

  “In that Benjamin is very like him – the more fool he. Had he been a free man, and I a free woman, we might well have been happy together.”

  For a moment, her brilliant eyes grew soft.

  “But a man who is not free has no power to protect his woman or his children. And a woman who is not free, is nothing: either some man’s victim, or every man’s whore. Few enough women are free. Don’t be late getting home,” she added briskly. “The American animals will be celebrating for two days yet in the streets, not that Andrew Jackson had a single thing to recommend him bar killing a couple of thousand British – any excuse will do for Americans to get drunk. Best to be off the street by dark. Get that ledger to your policeman, and we’ll have done with the whole business – and don’t let that porter charge you more than twenty-five cents to take your baggage back to your house.”

  She walked down the gangplank and across the crowded levee as if she owned the city, a free woman, with the over-laden porter trailing meekly in her wake.

  About the Author

  Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.

  Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

  Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

  She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

  The Further Adventures

  by Barbara Hambly

  The concept of “happily ever after” has always fascinated me.

  Just exactly what happens after, “happily ever after”?

  The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold. (It’s a very strong horse.)

  So what happens then? Where do they live? Who does the cooking?

  This was one of the reasons I started writing The Further Adventures.

  The other was that so many of the people who loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the 1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those characters too, and I missed writing about them.

  Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website and started selling stories about what happened to these characters after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each series.

  The Darwath series centers on the Keep of Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a mage.

  The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers. With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil, too.

  In the Winterlands tales, scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do their best to protect the people of their remote villages from whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.

  Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the Council of Wizards in his
own dimension, exiled for misbehavior - meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the 1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might come through.

  Though out of print, all four of these series are available digitally on-line.

  To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color, Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.

  I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I added these four stories to my collection.

  Quest For Glory is a stand-alone, a short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction convention at which I was Guest of Honor.

  Sunrise on Running Water is tenuously connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie Titanic - and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that vampires lose their powers over running water - I just had to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than about the characters.

  The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me - and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.

  Life goes on.

  Love goes on.

  Everyone continues to have Further Adventures for the rest of their lives.

  *

  Novels in the Benjamin January Series (some are available in print, earlier books are out of print but commercially available digitally)

  A Free Man of Color

  Fever Season

  Graveyard Dust

  Sold Down the River

  Die Upon a Kiss

  Wet Grave

  Days of the Dead

  Dead Water

  Dead and Buried

  The Shirt On His Back

  Ran Away

  Good Man Friday

  Crimson Angel