04 Sold Down the River bj-4 Page 6

  "I know." Baptiste leaned his elbows beside January's on the railing and watched the miniature drama enacted in dumb show on the gallery of a white-pillared house: mistress chiding a sewing-maid, leaping to her feet, rustling into the house; the master emerging, catching the girl by the arm, speaking intently. Kissing her. Trees intervened.

  "My mistress my old mistress, M'am Grasse-was consumptive also, and there wasn't a thing Michie Pierre didn't try to get her well. In the end he took her to Paris, where the doctors are better, they say." He stared out at the glittering riffle along the water's surface, while from the bow a leadsman called out "Deep four... deep four... quarter less four..."

  "It help?" asked January, after several minutes of silence.

  The little man glanced sidelong at him. "That I don't know. I hoped they'd take us with themwhich was what Michie Pierre said they'd do." He opened his mouth to say something more, then closed it.

  But they found they needed another fifteen hundred dollars instead.

  January could see it, in the tears that slowly filled the elderly man's eyes. But there was nothingliterally nothing-that he could say.

  Traveling without interruption, a fast boat could have covered the distance between New Orleans and two rusted smokestacks poking up from the black waters. Here a boat had either been gutted on a sawyer or blown up her boilers. Above him the ship's bell clanged and a voice called, "Give us a little more steam."

  At about eight the engine's thud-thud-thud altered yet again to a steady shuddering, and the whistles howled as the engine let off steam. From the darkness a voice called, "Mon Triomphe! " and yellow smears of torchlight spotted the batture's indistinct bulk.

  Men put out in a boat with towlines. The Belle Dame could not maneuver into a dock the way a sidewheeler could. After a few minutes the boat began to move again, with the silent sideways steadiness of dead weight being hauled by main force. The mate, a short bearded man with a Spanish lilt to his voice, yelled, "Let's do this, then! Captain don't want to have to damp the fires."

  Voices on the wharf, and the jangle of harness. A lookout would have warned the coachman of the steamboat's approach. January remembered angling for the job of lookout, a task more interesting than pulling weeds or gathering kindling, and being trumped out of it every time by a boy named Gideon, who was older and quick and silver-tongued. He wondered what had become of him.

  The batture took shape through the mist. Above the landing loomed the dark baroque shape of a twisted oak tree, gesturing like Demosthenes warming to a Philippic peroration-an ideal place, January thought, to hang his bright-hued bandannas.

  Today had been Friday. Tomorrow, Saturday, the kerchief would be black: purple for Christ's blood shed on a Friday, black for the day Our Lord spent in Hell. White for His resurrection-and then red for the red beans everyone in New Orleans cooked on Mondays when they did the wash.

  After a day of observing what Mon Triomphe in five hours. But all the way upriver, the Belle Dame stopped at plantation landings, to take on cargo or passengers, to drop off letters and small consignments of goods.

  January checked on Hannibal twice, and found him as well as could be expected-though bored senseless with nothing to do but pretend to be on his deathbed-and tried to get up a conversation with Cornwallis, only to meet with a cold sarcasm and the kind of mocking double-entendres that couldn't be answered without revealing himself to be a good deal more intelligent than he was supposed to be. Once, in his idle rounds of the decks, January heard the valet describing in detail to the new butler their master's habit of nailing up malefactors in a flour barrel in the barn, and Cornwallis's eyes glinted with spiteful satisfaction at the tale.

  January wanted to say, Don't pay any attention to that, but couldn't. He knew Cornwallis spoke the truth. Darkness fell. Mists rose from the river and rendered the moon away to a ravel of shining wool. Smoke from the mills hung thick in the raw air, and through night and fog smudges of gold burned like the maws of ovens, where the mills of every plantation blazed on through the night. January shivered, for it seemed to him they ran awfully close to the shore for low water, fog, and night, but Captain Ney, standing in the open pilothouse in his long coat of scarlet wool, seemed to know what he was doing.

  "Hell, he was born hereabouts, him," said the cook, when January went to fetch another pot of coffee for Hannibal. "I seen him take her so close to shore you could kiss a girl that was standin' on the batture. One day he may blow her up, for he do like to lay on the speed, but he never snag her."

  Following the receipt of this Dutch comfort January reemerged from the galley to the unpromising sight of every woman on the river was wearing, he had no doubt that the stokers and stewards would report the colors accurately to Shaw.

  His hand sought the rosary in his pocket, the rosary that never left him, and the touch of the blue beads like the grasp of God's reassuring fingers around his own.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee... Pray for us sinners. Pray for us sinners. Me, and those I'm seeking to help in the house of chains.

  Men pelted by him, manhandling the gangplank into position. A rope was tossed across the narrowing space of black water. Captain Ney descended the steps from the hurricane deck and spoke to Fourchet as the planter came around the corner of the boat's barnlike superstructure. The younger man was distant and wary, January saw, as if the captain had indeed grown up watchful of this unpredictably violent man.

  In the torchlight on shore, January identified Esteban Fourchet at once-was it possible a man nearing fifty could look that much like the shuffle-footed boy he'd been?-and guessed the narrow-headed leathery gent in dark corduroy to be the overseer Thierry. The neat little fop in a beryl-green tailcoat would be the surviving son of Camille Bassancourt. It was time to get Hannibal and the luggage, and go ashore.

  And let's hope, January thought, as Fourchet's voice slashed the fog like an oyster shell tearing flesh, Shaw keeps the colors straight in his mind as well, and comes hotfoot if the bandanna says the same color two days running.

  Because if something prevents me from changing the signals, I'll be either dead, or a slave somewhere for life.

  FOUR

  "This is Monsieur Sefton." Simon Fourchet gestured stiffly as January carried Hannibal; wrapped in a number of blankets against the night's raw chill, down the Belle Dame's gangplank to the rough wharf floating at the river's edge. "He did me a good turn on the trip up from town, saved me from a bad investment. He'll be staying in the gar?onni?re until he's well enough to go on to St. Louis."

  "Thank you," whispered Hannibal, and coughed-for effect, this time. In Paris, January had seen the great Kean expiring as Romeo. So, it appeared, had Hannibal. "I am indebted to you beyond what I can say."

  It was sixty feet from the levee to the house, but a green-lacquered barouche waited for them at the top of the flight of shallow plank steps. "Ben, give Lundy M'sieu Sefton's bags and get on the back," ordered Fourchet curtly, as January helped Hannibal into the carriage and tucked the blankets around him. "Lundy, give Ben your torch and follow with the men. This is Baptiste." He nodded toward the new butler. "He'll be taking Gilles's place."

  January took the torch from the slim white-jacketed man who bore it, and stepped up onto the footman's perch at the rear of the carriage. Thierry, the overseer, sprang up beside the coachman with a catlike lightness, and the driver's wary flinch told January what he had to expect from this man, when he was working under him in the fields.

  "Robert, God damn you, leave the bags alone! We haven't got all night! "

  The handsome young dandy sprang nervously away from the luggage pile and Captain Ney, and scrambled into the carriage as the vehicle jerked away.

  "What'd you-uh-pay for him?" Esteban glanced back to where Baptiste and the others were picking up the various valises and portmanteaux under the Spanish deck-mate's snapped commands.

  "Eleven hundred, from Davideaux."

  "Not bad. How-uh-old is he?" They mi
ght have been speaking of a pack-pony. "Forty-eight? Umuh-Things have been quiet here. We got-uh-ten acres cut today, and the new grinder's behaving itself. Oh, and Reuben died."

  "Ten? Damn it, boy, those lollygagging niggers should have been able to clear off fifteen! Are you so stupid you don't realize we're weeks behind? Frost could hit us any day! Thierry, God damn you, I'd better see more cane coming in tomorrow or..."

  So much, thought January sourly, for poor Reuben, dead of shock or gangrene or simply because he lacked the physical reserves to pull him through having his legs crushed by a thousand pounds of falling iron. The stretch of ground between the house and the levee's gentle rise was scattered with the native oaks of the area. Through their dark trunks away to his right January could see the hell-mouth glare of the sugar-mill door, and the shapes moving before it as the women unloaded the cane carts. The men of the first gang-having completed a day in the field that began the instant it was light enough to avoid injury-dragged wood from the sheds to feed the boilers, a long line of half-naked bronze figures struggling out of the night.

  The smell of burning sugar clogged his nostrils, the choke of woodsmoke and the thick scents of wet earth and cane.

  Home.

  Something inside him seemed to be falling a long way into blackness. Cold fear and dreads of things he barely recalled:

  His father...

  "... damn Daubrays are behind it, I tell you! They have to be! It would be just like that weasel Louis to incite a man's own niggers to revolt. That Mammy Hera of theirs is a voodoo and I wouldn't put it past Louis Daubray to pay to have his own grandmother poisoned, if he thought he could get a half-arpent of land out of it. And that greasy brother of his would know who to ask! "

  "Father-uh-whatever else may be said of them, the D-Daubrays surely wouldn't-"

  "Don't you back-talk me, boy! I was knocking heads with those lying Orleannistes before you could piss standing! Ever since I married your stepmother they've been trying to find a way to keep me from claiming her father's land. Paying my own niggers to wreck the harvest would be of a piece with their sneakiness."

  "D-Did you speak-uh-to the police about that trader, Jones? He'd stick at nothing-"

  "Listen, Father," Robert interjected. "In France they were speaking of a new system of physical characteristics by which those of born criminal inclination might be identified. I'm sure if you examined the blacks-"

  "Oh, shut up, the both of you." Fourchet flung away his cigar. The carriage drew rein before the steps of the big house, whose long windows glowed through the mists in sulfurous lozenges of muzzy light. "If we examined the blacks we'd find that every Sambo of'em was a liar and a thief, and what a surprise that would be! Use your brain."

  "I was endeavoring, sir, to-" Robert broke off as a tall shape appeared against the luminous rectangle of what January knew-since nearly all Creole plantation houses were built on the same plan-to be the bedroom of the lady of the house. He had an impression of pale hair pulled tight into an unfashionable knot at her nape. Of a small white hand resting protectively over a belly swollen with child. Then she passed into the shadow of the gallery as she descended the steps six feet to ground level, and stepped out into the torchlight once more as January sprang from the back of the carriage.

  "M'sieu Fourchet," she greeted her husband in a gruff shy voice.

  "Madame." He bowed over her hand.

  Over his bent head, his wife's gaze crossed Robert's, questioning and uneasy, and held for a moment before it fled away.

  A servant with a branch of candles had come out behind Madame Fourchet, slim and boyish and, like Cornwallis, pin-neat; only when he came closer to take in his free hand the torch January held did January see the wrinkles around eyes and lips that marked him as a man in his forties.

  Like Cornwallis, the servant wore a small slip of black mustache, and like Cornwallis he was light-skinned, quadroon or octoroon, with some white forebear's blue-gray eyes.

  January lifted Hannibal gently from the carriage as Fourchet made introductions and produced again the story of investments averted and money saved.

  "Welcome to Mon Triomphe, M'sieu Sefton," said Madame, in the hesitant voice of one who has never been sure of her position, and Hannibal extended his hand.

  "How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter," he quoted, and kissed the lacemitted knuckles. "Forgive me my trifling infirmity. Tomorrow I will prostrate myself to the ground as befits a kind hostess and a lovely woman."

  She pulled her hand from his and muttered, "Thank you. It's nothing," and hurried before them up the steps. "Agamemnon, stay and help the men in with the luggage." In the multiple luminance of torch and candles January saw the speculative glance Robert darted from Hannibal to his stepmother, and the burning, bitter glare directed at the fiddler by Fourchet, an undisguised anger that made January's chest clench inside with reactive fear.

  The overseer Thierry touched his hat brim and made off in the direction of the mill, his duty to his employer accomplished. He moved, not with a swagger, but with a sidelong swiftness, watching everything around him.

  Fourchet led them into the house through his own bedroom, meeting his wife once more in the parlor. This room was small compared to a town house's, as in most Creole plantation houses: sparsely furnished, neat and plain. Over a mantelpiece of cypresswood painted to resemble marble hung the portrait of a young woman clad in the caraco jacket popular in the nineties. A square-faced, dark-eyed boy clung frantically to her striped skirts; a baby in a white christening gown perched on her knee. Next to the mantel a miniature of the same woman was framed in the glittering jet circlet of an immortelle wreath.

  Through the parlor's inner sliding doors a child could be heard piping angrily, "But I want to see!

  Henna says there's company and they may have something for me! "

  A hushed female voice interposed, cut off furiously. "I want to see! I want to see! I'll have you whipped if you don't let me see!" and a second, younger child screamed, "Me, too! Me, too!"

  By the rather fixed smile that widened onto the face of the other woman who waited for them in the parlor-dark-haired, ripely pretty, and clothed in a gown of figured lilac muslin with gauze bows and enormous "imbecile" sleeves-January guessed that this was the children's mother.

  "Pardon me," said Robert hastily. He stepped through the sliding doors, closing them behind him.

  "M'sieu Sefton," introduced Madame. "My daughter-in-law, Madame Helene Fourchet."

  "If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And with fresh numbers, number all your graces, The age to come would say, 'This poet lies;

  Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces."

  Hannibal's lips brushed her hand, and Helene Fourchet tapped his cheek playfully with her fan.

  "Oh, I just adore poetry! Is it Lord Byron? I am most passionately devoted to 'The Corsair.' And 'The Bride of Abydos,' of course. Such a thrill goes through my heart..."

  "English pap," snapped Fourchet. "Will you shut those brats of yours up?" For the noise in the next room continued unabated, despite whatever efforts the children's father was putting up.

  "Do I understand from what you said in the carriage that you're behind in your harvest?"

  Hannibal turned to Fourchet and coughed again, with every evidence of great agony valiantly concealed. "I beg that you will let me repay a little of your kindness by lending you Ben here while I'm laid by the heels. You don't mind a day or two in the fields, do you, Ben?"

  "To help the good folks who take you in when you're sick?" January did his best to sound like a character in a Chateaubriand novel. "Why, Michie Hannibal, I worked the cotton-fields before this. Won't do me no harm to cut sugar for a while."

  "Well done, good and faithful servant."

  "M'sieu Sefton, no," protested the young Madame. In the warm amber dimness of the parlor she didn't look much over sixteen, a big-boned, flat-chested girl with a plain triangular face and the sandy coloring that mak
es a woman appear lashless and washed-out. "Our hospitality-"

  "Don't be an ass," snapped Fourchet, and looked January up and down with the same coldness that had been in Esteban's eyes when he'd surveyed Baptiste. "We lost Reuben and it'll be days before Boaz is over his fever. Thank you, sir." He spoke to Hannibal as if the words were being extracted from him with forceps. "I appreciate it. Cornwallis!" He raised his voice like the thwack of a board striking pavement.

  The valet, who had evidently finished bestowing the luggage in his master's chamber and the guest room, stepped through the parlor's inner doors.

  "Take Ben here out to the quarters and find him a place to stay for a night or two. Tell Thierry he's to be put to work while he's here. And get that Baptiste in here, so Madame Fourchet can teach him his duties."

  It was close to nine already, but if the young Madame Fourchet would sooner have had a night's sleep before inducting a complete stranger to a complex set of responsibilities and tasks, she knew better than to say so. Robert, stepping back through the parlor doors in time to hear this, began to protest, "Sir, it's quite late for her to be-"

  "Shut up." Fourchet lashed the words at him. "Better tonight than she waste half the day tomorrow when he could be of some use. We need to get this place back into order. Cornwallis, take Monsieur Sefton here to the gar?onni?re. Good night to you, sir. Esteban..." With a peremptory wave at his elder son, Fourchet stalked through the door that led into his bedroom and thence, probably, to his office behind it. Esteban followed, and closed the door with the care of one who fears that a sound will bring the house crashing about everyone's ears.

  "I do apologize, Madame." Robert hastened to his stepmother's side as the young Madame led the way through the dining room-cypresswood table, the gleam of glass and flowers in the uplifted shudder of Comwallis's branch of candles and she gave her head a quick little shake and hastened her step. "I beg you to forgive my father, and apologize on his behalf."