Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (12 page)

“They didn't manage that,” grinned Artois. “But Gran'mere Marie-Agnes was there, in full mourning....”

“At a wedding?”

“Obviously her grief is more important than her grandson's good luck,” remarked Rose.

“How unkind of you to cavil!” declared Artois in mock reproof. “If the old lady has any gowns that aren't black crepe, they'll be the kind with the big skirts and panniers. I think she's been wearing mourning since Napoleon left for St. Helena-and claiming she's going to die for at least that long. We saw the wedding procession coming out from town....”

“And I owe you an apology, Minou, for not believing you,” added Rose, passing Dominique the bread-and-butter. Breezes floated across the lake and its waters murmured around the piers beneath the back gallery on which they sat; music from the Washington Hotel colored the warm air. “Not only was Henri's grandmother immured like a Turkish lady in crepe and jet jewelry and lockets made of her dead husband's hair, for all I know, she actually did have four servants-also in mourning livery-following her carriage with a carrying-chair to get her in and out of the Cathedral and the cottage for the breakfast, all draped in black like a catafalque. I thought you had to be making that part up......”

“Darling, who could make up a story like that?”

January smiled, listening to them, hearing his sister laugh for the first time in weeks. Grateful that the day of the wedding, which he knew Dominique had been dreading, had been turned, by company, into an occasion of laughter and coffee.

Had Dominique watched the wedding procession, too, coming along the shell road that was visible from the gallery where they now sat? Henri Viellard, enormous in a gray satin coat and knee-breeches, blinking myopically through his spectacles and not looking at his bride.
The bride herself, a chill, pale girl of barely seventeen, gazing straight before her with enormous china-blue eyes, her arms full of flowers. Aurelie Viellard, Henri's formidable mother, in the same carriage, immense in plum-colored silk and reminiscent, with her Roman-nosed arrogance, of a huge and highly-bred sheep; the unmarried Viellard daughters clumped in the next equipage, all five dressed in extravagant lilac gowns that suited none of them. Eloise Viellard de McCarty and her husband in the carriage behind them, with their children, the whole tale told right there, thought January: Henri must marry, and must produce an heir, so that the four plantations, the town houses, the sugar-mills and the hundreds of slaves would remain in the control of the Viellards and not be dispersed among sons-in-law.

And every child Henri might father upon a mistress, his mother-and his wife-would see as seed robbed from the legitimate line.

The rest of the procession had been, as Artois described, the usual French Creole gallery of types: bachelor cousins and old aunts. Uncle Veryl, resplendent in knee smalls and a linen cravat tied in a trene d'amour style such as January hadn't seen in public for twenty years, in a decrepit phaeton far back in the line of carriages, driven by the valet James.

“Everyone in the family thinks Uncle Veryl's hopelessly eccentric to live in that big town house with only a valet and a cook,” said Artois.

“And here I've been unable to hold up my head all this time,” sighed January, “because I have only a valet, a cook, a footman, and a gardener.”

Artois flashed him a grin. “James and I hunted all over town for a suitable wedding-gift. We got a pair of Sevres soft-paste candlesticks-Louis Fifteenth-which I hope Uncle will recognize when he sees them at the wedding breakfast.”

“We'd best go inside,” said Rose at the grumble of thunder above the lake. Lightning flickered among the gathering black clouds. “Water conducts electricity.”

“From how far away?” inquired Artois at once. “If the lightning struck three miles out, could it kill us here?” He didn't sound particularly worried over the possibility, just curious.

“If water conducts electricity, why wasn't Mr. Franklin electrocuted when he stood out flying his kite in a storm, like an imbecile?” objected Dominique. “And more importantly, why didn't he catch his death of chill? What did his wife have to say about him coming home soaking wet and spending the next three days demanding foot-baths and blancmanges and fortifying steams?”

“I don't think he had a wife,” said Rose.

“And a good thing, too,” sniffed Minou. She broke a croquette in half and left it untasted on the edge of her plate; her condition, though gracefully concealed by the raised waist of her gown and a lace-ruffled pelerine, made her peckish. “If he left a great clutter with kites and keys and parts for his new stove and spending all his time at philosophical societies and scribbling the Declaration of Independence, hmph!”

Therese brought more coffee and croquettes, and Artois took out the red-bound commonplace-book that never left him, and made notes about the waterspouts that wavered far off over the dark surface of the lake. As on the previous occasion, they all went inside and lit the candles, and the rain drummed gently on the lake and the gallery and the willow-trees. January played Purcell and Artois studied Dominique's cageful of German finches: “Uncle Veryl's paying for my education,” he said when Dominique asked him how Rose came to be his tutor. “Poor Uncle Veryl. He has no children of his own, and the Perrets and Picards-my grandmother's family-are all as stupid as owls. The Viellards, too, except for Henri, who comes over all the time to borrow Uncle's books, you know. I think what Uncle Veryl really wanted was to be a teacher himself, but of course the family wouldn't hear of it any more than they'd hear of Henri becoming a scholar.”

“And I suppose the whole family is up in arms now.” Dominique rolled her eyes. “How can he pay to educate the son of That Woman ... do they call your maman That Woman, cher? I suppose they call me that, too. How can he pay to educate the son of That Woman and not our own dear little Gnat-Brain and Sheep-Biter?”

“Ah, that's his strategy in hiring me,” smiled Rose, cradling her coffee-cup between her palms. “By employing a Mere Female as a tutor he evades the entire question.”

“Nonsense.”
Artois ducked his head shyly. Like Chloe St. Chinian, he had sky-blue eyes, but his were startling against a complexion like old ivory, and his dark, curling lashes made them stand out like jewels. “My uncle's strategy in hiring you was that he wanted me to have the best.”

Later, when the rain cleared and Dominique went to lie down for her rest, January Artois, and Rose made an expedition along the steamy lakeshore to test the skyrocket propellants Rose and Artois had been working on in the laboratory behind Uncle veryl's town house, shooting rockets out over the restless surface of the lake. This was how Artois had joined the party at Dominique's in the first place, carrying his rockets in a satchel which January had insisted he leave in the outhouse during their visit. It still raised the hair on his head to see Rose casually tinkering around with artillery of that kind-not to mention wading in the ooze of the lakeshore in the habitual haunts of gators and snakes-but he knew it gave her pleasure.

So he carried the satchel, and helped her and Artois set their charges, and held his peace.

Needless to say, their activities that afternoon had been wildly illegal. No person of color, slave or free, was permitted to handle firearms anywhere in the United States after the big slave revolts in the east a few years ago, and January couldn't imagine Captain Tremouille of the City Guards stretching the point for experimentation with rockets. Hence the choice of venue, among the cypress-knees and stands of sedges far from even the optimistic stakes of land developers.

“You have no idea how grateful I am,” sighed Rose as they made their way back toward town at day's end, “every time you don't say what a woman should and should not do.” Her face was smutted with soot where she'd wiped sweat from her forehead, and the hem of her dress was muddy. Behind her spectacles her eyes sparkled bright.

He grinned. “I didn't think you saw me getting ready to die in your defense every time I glimpsed some keelboatman or filibuster in the distance, wandering along the path from town.”

He spoke lightly, but in fact he felt drained by his nervous readiness, watching both in the direction of town and all around in the mucky green monotony of the swamps. Rose, from her days on Grand Isle, knew all about snakes and alligators, and had more than once dragged Artois back from cheniers or deadfalls and made the boy probe them with a stick before he set foot on them. And January knew his own fear stemmed from something else: fear of losing this second treasure, just as he had lost Ayasha.

And that, he supposed, was the true source of his unquiet dreams.

“I've spent most of my life being told how I'll feel or what I'll think, if only I do as I'm told.” He heard Rose try to make her voice light as she said it. “You'll feel differently about wanting an education when you're married. That was my father's favorite. Would you-or anyone-say such a thing to a boy? All any woman really wants is children of her own. I don't know how many times Papa and his wife said that to me. My own mother, too, before she died. And that ... that pitying expression in their eyes when I'd cry and cry and tell them they didn't understand.”

She looked up into his face, her hazel-green eyes not velvety with the softness of a lover, but clear with a friend's joy in friendship. “You understand. I don't think you realize how rare that is.”

“You forgot You'll look back on this when you're older and thank us,” put in Artois, skipping back to them from where he'd gone to see if that was really a baby alligator he'd glimpsed in the ditch beside the shell road-it hadn't been, to his disappointment and January's vast relief. The boy had shed the trim coat of gray superfine he'd worn to Dominique's, and the yellow silk waistcoat; his sleeves were rolled to his forearms and he was licking up the half-melted remains of the Italian ice he'd bought back in Milneburgh, out of its little rolled-paper cup. “I think the nitrate of potassa gave the most distance, don't you? The oil of vitriol by itself in the propellant didn't seem to make much difference one way or the other.”

And he skipped forward again to catch a better view of the great mounds of cloud slowly dispersing over the lake.

“Yet my father wanted me to be happy,” continued Rose quietly. “Even when he was trying to force me into marriage with Mathieu Patric, he honestly believed that I would `learn to love,' and be happy.”

Hearing her speak the man's name touched a fire in January, as when she had touched a burning match to the fuse of Artois' rocket; red heat went up through his body and into his head.

“He would say that to his own daughter about a man who'd...” He bit the words off, remembering that Rose had never told him what Mathieu Patric had done. For a few moments he said nothing, his whole body hot, fearing that she would shrink from him, and from the memory and the shame.

But she only regarded him with those hazel-green eyes, a slight smile on her mouth: “Who told you?” she asked at last.

“Alice. Your sister-in-law.” He felt he could barely get the words out. “And I would never have. . .”

“Oh, I certainly guessed you knew.” Rose took his hand, those long fingers firm and confident now in his. “And believe me, I appreciate Alice for letting you know and you for not saying anything of it before. I find it doesn't... I'm glad to know that you know.”

There was nothing he could think of to say, and this, it seemed, was the right thing; her grip tightened, then she sighed, and shook her head. “Father ... had no imagination. He wouldn't have admitted that he wanted to get me off his hands-but he wanted to get me off his hands. If I would marry someone and be happy it would mean he'd done well, and could think well of himself. He never could understand why I wanted to go to school. Mathieu was... an easy answer to his dilemma.”

Even though Mathieu was the kind of man who believed raping a woman was the best way of forcing her father's consent to their marriage.

January asked instead, “Was there money to send you to school?”

Her smile glinted, swiftly tucked away as she guessed his line of thought: that marrying this troublesome daughter to Mathieu Patric, besides allowing him to “settle well” a girl who was now damaged goods, would be cheaper than educating her.

“There was and there wasn't,” she replied, and turned her head to watch Artois, a hundred feet ahead of them on the shell path, stooping over the roadside ditch to investigate something there: gecko, snake, turtle. “There would have been if he didn't get new mules. Which is nearly always the case,” she added, “when it's a daughter asking for schooling, and not a son.”

The day after this, January sought out Marie Laveau on the subject of Hesione LeGros and what family she might have left on Grand'I'erre. Sundays, the voodooienne could be found in the market the slaves held in Congo Square across the street from where the old city walls used to be. Summer afternoons, the market was quiet, the slaves from the plantations along the lakeshore, or those who managed little garden plots near the city itself, setting out their wares on old blankets or squares of straw matting: corn and eggplants, fat red tomatoes and baskets of ground-nuts and okra, foods most white folks and certainly most Americans had no idea what to do with.

“Is it good?” asked Artois a little hesitantly, bending over the okra, and the woman who was selling it-grinned up at him.

“Depends on who's cookin' it, Blue-Eyes.”

They sold fish there, and game, squirrels and possums and alligator. Snakes, too, hung up by their heads, and baskets woven from braided Spanish moss. Women sold pralines, brown sugar and pecans, or white sugar and coconut, or coconut dyed pink with cochineal, the smell of them vying with the stench of the cemetery a few dozen feet away behind its walls. Others had little fires going and sold coffee by the cup, or gumbo, or coarse stews of shrimp and tomatoes and rice. Artois gazed around him in astonishment, but January smiled to hear him modulating his Parisian-perfect French when he spoke to the vendors, and calling a worm a loulou, as they did, and greeting this man or that by January's slangy inquiry How's your green-beans? rather than the formal How do you do?