Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (24 page)

And she looked up at him smiling, and there was no more talk of the weather that afternoon.

Thus the days passed for them, loving and coming to know love. January would wake in the night and look at her face in the moonlight, or lie between daybreak and morning listening to the liquid concertos of birds above the cock's sawing crow, and feel joy and love so deeply that he didn't have anywhere to put these feelings. Only wanting them to continue forever. One day they walked around the island finding and talking to Hesione LeGros' daughters, and it was abundantly clear that none of them had or knew anything to do with their mother's death. Hesione had made sure they'd be cared for, then walked out of their lives. January sometimes wondered about the slave revolt, and where Tyrone Burke had disappeared to, and how Franklin Mulm planned to double-cross his luckless confederates, but he really had scant hope of finding such things out until it was too late to do anything about them.

Keep your mouth shut, Olympe had said, till the storm's gone by.

Therefore he was as taken by surprise as he would have been by a hurricane when Dominique arrived on the island with word that she knew where the slave revolt would take place.

Trailed by Belle Suzette and Damoiselle-Rose's favorites among the household hounds-January and Rose had gone down to the Gulf beach, three or four days after the storm, and set crab-traps: stakes driven into the shelving sandy bottom where the green waves lapped thigh-deep and warm, and small round nets baited with chickennecks. They'd walked along the sea-brim, picking up shells, smelling the tepid, salty Gulf winds, then came back and got their hand-nets and waded out into the slow, gentle surge off the waves to take in their harvest. The dogs ran after sandpipers. Dolphins played thirty or forty feet away off-shore. Clouds streaked the sky, dark in the south again. It would storm that night.

Walking back to Chouteau with overflowing buckets of crabs between them, Rose remarked, “Shall we send most of these up to the Big House? Alice tells me my brother's not well today. He used to stand up better against summer heat than he does now. The ague wears him down.” She spoke of her half-brother casually, as Artois used to speak of Chloe St. Chinian.

“It isn't a healthy climate for white men.” January brushed at the mosquitoes that had already begun to whine in the slow twilight among the oleanders. “God knows why they ever thought they could make a living here, let alone a fortune.”

“Was it always so?” Rose hitched the smaller of the two buckets in her hand, to get a better grip on its rope handle. Though she'd tucked her skirts up almost to her thighs to wade, they'd still gotten wet and flapped around her ankles now. With her feet bare and her salt-flecked spectacles and her long hair straggling down from its braid, she had the look of an intellectual Gypsy. “When there were only Indians here, I mean? Every explorer's tale I've read says that Africa is a land of terrible diseases, and I've often wondered whether the yellow fever, and the ague, and the other ailments that strike white men here might have come on the slave-ships.”

“Serve them right if they did,” said January. “I know the Romans had ague-in Italy it's called malaria, `bad air.' It seems to strike everywhere that the land is low and marshy. Jesuits' bark is supposed to mitigate it, but I've never found-” He halted, surprised, looking toward the dark bulk of the main house. The dogs bounded ahead of them down the path, barking. In the blue twilight the shapes of two women could be made out on the gallery.

“Will you be all right?” he heard Madame Alice ask.

“Dearest Madame, it's so sweet of you to be concerned, but I'm not going to give birth just going down a flight of steps ... Ben!” The second woman hastened down the gallery steps with startling lightness, considering her condition, and gathered up her skirts of Spanish-brown mullmuslin to hasten toward him. “P'tit, it's so good to see you safe! And Rose, darling, you look beautiful!”

“Minou!”
January, who had caught his younger sister in his arms, now held her off from him, looking down at her, unbelieving. “What are you doing here? How did you get here? You shouldn't be traveling in-”

“Oh, p'tit, I'm not going to give birth for weeks, and it's perfectly safe! I've got Therese with me, and hired three of the most awful ruffians-they're cousins of hers, Therese's, I mean-to come with us......”

January felt his hair prickle at the thought of his sister, huge with child, traversing the bayous and marshes of the Barataria.

“. . . your sister-in-law is the sweetest dear, Rose, and has sat with me there on the back gallery waiting for you.... What a lovely breeze! After all those days in that horrid boat coming down through the marshes ... And, darling, you're looking so well!”

“What are you doing here?” January repeated. In the reflected candle-light from the gallery he could see Dominique was as fresh and pretty as ever, her high waisted brown frock spotless and her tignon of figured brown-and-buff crisp and elaborate as if she were taking the air in the Place d'Armes. A thin strand of pearls circled her throat, and more pearls beaded her delicate ears. “Does Olympe know... ?”

“P'tit, it's quite all right.” She laid a slim hand, gloved in French kid, on his arm, and urged him toward the outbuilding where he and Rose-and the couple who were cook and valet for the Big House-had rooms. “I mean, you're a doctor, and you can deliver a child as well as or better than Olympe.... I left her a note,” she added as they climbed the steps onto the gallery. “I told her Henri had gotten me a cottage across in Mandeville, and that Therese had found me a midwife there already... Darling, I couldn't tell her.”

January set the buckets of crabs, the nets and stakes, on the gallery even as Rose brought out a candle and striker to the cobalt twilight. Dominique's room-the smallest of the four in the building usually reserved for the servants of guests-had clearly been tidied and straightened by Therese, Dominique's small trunk set at the narrow bed's foot and fresh candles of beeswax installed in the holders of iron and whittled oak. A shawl lay ready for her should the evening grow cool, yellow silk embroidered with butterflies. January tried to imagine it around her shoulders as she drifted in a pirogue through the wilds of the marsh.

“She knows about the revolt, you see.” Dominique's voice sank to a whisper, and she glanced around the room as if she thought her maid might somehow be concealed under the bed or inside the armoire-which January wouldn't have put past Therese at that. “I mean, it was Olympe I heard of it from-overheard it,” she admitted as January stared. “When I came into town to buy stockings-and, p'tit, that harpy at the Golden Rose on Rue Chartres charges sixty-five cents a pair! I was never so shocked.... Well, I went to see Olympe, and she let me in and said she was seeing someone in the parlor, and I thought it was someone just having their fortune told or buying a gris-gris.... Which I've told Phlosine a hundred times to buy from Olympe rather than go to that dreadful Queen Regine on Rue Claiborne-and of course, poor Phlosine is being driven just distracted by her friend, who hasn't been with her but a few days this summer and everyone in town is saying he's been flirting with this dreadful little hussy-”

“Did you see who was in the parlor?” interposed January, aware from long experience that Dominique's conversations frequently required skilled piloting in order to achieve their destinations.

“Of course not, p'tit, I'd never dream of prying! But I did hear her say, They're hiding the guns in the wood-stores, and something about waiting for a signal to act. And, oh, darling, I prayed Olympe wasn't really mixed up in something like that, that it was just gossip! And I heard her say later, Ben won't talk-not that I was trying to listen-and it came over me then that that's why you left town in such a hurry, without a word. And of course Olympe seemed to know all about it when you left, too! But that's how I knew there was a revolt being planned somewhere. So when Therese told me-”

“What did Therese know about it?”

“Nothing, darling.”
Dominique glanced around again. Rose had closed up the shutters-it was dark outside anyway and the mosquitoes were growing thick-and touched the candle to three or four more, filling the room with a gentle light. Dominique had settled on the bed, drawing the yellow shawl over her knees. Even eight months pregnant, it was impossible for her to make a clumsy move, or to look less than exquisite. “But you know how Therese prattles-I simply cannot get a word in! In fact, all the way down here, from the time we left New Orleans, she's kept up the most inane chatter with these-these bullies she found to escort us.... It was enough to drive me distracted!”

“And Therese told you where the guns were being shipped?”

“Not in so many words, p'tit, of course not.
But she does talk while she's fixing my hair and hooking me up. And she has a cousin who's walking out with a man named Magnus...or is it Marius? Maybe it's Marcus.... Well, this Marius works for a river trader, and he mentioned-Marcus mentioned-to Therese's cousin Lavinnia, I mean-that they were sneaking boxes of rifles down to Myrtle Landing. Now, if a white man were buying boxes of rifles, for one thing he wouldn't have to sneak them amywhere, and for another thing he'd buy them straight from England instead of buying Spanish guns, which aren't nearly as good, I'm told, through Cuba-”

“Myrtle Landing.”
January tried to recall where that was. Downriver from town, he thought. A considerable distance. There were fewer plantations in that direction, as the river widened and the land along the banks got lower. And he felt a strange, hot quickening in his chest, as he thought, We can catch Mulm red-handed. If we can get proof he was involved...

“Darling...” His sister swallowed hard. “Myrtle Landing is only a few miles downriver from Bois d'Argent. And that's where Henri is.”

Henri and his new wife.
There were no tears in Dominique's eyes, but a kind of soft, wild grimness, a desperation all the stronger for being ignorant of the enormous odds against her.

“He has to be warned.”

Rose shot a quick look at January, across the foot of the bed. Neither spoke. Both understood what would happen to any slaves-or any free blacks-involved in even the whisper of an uprising.

Dominique saw the look, and her face changed. “He has to be warned,” she said again, and there was a slight difference in the tone of her voice, an edge of careful grimness. “P'tit, don't tell me please don't tell me-that you're in it, too.”

“No,” said January. His voice grated harsh in his own ears. “I'm not in it.”

But the trust had gone out of her eyes, and the silence returned.

And January saw-as clearly as if he were watching a play at the American Theater in town-that Dominique's reaction to No would be Oh, very well, p'tit, I'll be on my way back to town then.... And Scene Two, Act One would be Dominique, heavily pregnant, poling a pirogue through a swamp somewhere trying to make it to Bois d'Argent herself.

He wished he had the playbill, which would have written on it somewhere whether it would be a tragedy or a farce.

He said, “I'll go.” Dominique's face blossomed instantly with joy; he held up his hand. “You stay here-I'll be back well before your baby comes, but I think it would be tempting fate for you to try to make it back to town. All right?”

“Darling...” She held out her arms to him. “Thank you, thank you....” Enfolding her scented softness, he shook his head at himself, knowing why Henri loved this young woman ... wondering how the man could be so crassly stupid as to abandon her for any number of thin, pale, tight-lipped heiresses.

And, turning his head, he met Rose's eyes.

For a moment he was back in his nightmare. Seeing her hand closed around the paper-knife, stabbing ineffectively at Mathieu's shoulder. Hearing how she wept when he took the knife away. As clearly as if she'd spoken, he knew her thought, saw it in the blaze of those hazel eyes. If we can catch Mulm red-handed...

Dear God, she can't be serious! And then, Doesn't she know what slave-stealers would do to her if they caught her? (Of course she does, you imbecile, she's lived in this country most of her life. What do you think they'll do to You?) And it passed through his mind to wonder whether she dreamed of killing Mathieu. Dreamed of winning her own freedom, and not having it as any man's gift.

It all passed in moments, while Dominique was still pressing her cheek to his shoulder and telling him that no brother in the world could be better and stronger and more understanding than he. Then January retrieved the buckets of crabs, caught the six or seven escapees who'd managed to clamber out and were crawling determinedly across the gallery, and carried them down the steps and back to the kitchen while Rose helped Dominique unpack. He heard their voices, that sweet, beautiful chatter of women's friendship, when he returned to gather up the crabbing-tackle

“Dearest, I'll see you at supper,” he heard Rose say. “It would be infamous of me to leave poor Ben to put away the nets after I had all the fun setting the traps.” Her shadow crossed the door's tall golden light, and she stepped out onto the dark of the gallery.

They gathered up the stakes in silence, and did not speak till they'd reached the shed. January struck a light, stuck the tallow-stump of the candle on the rough work bench just inside the shed-door, to give them enough light to find the pegs and make sure there wasn't a stray snake or alligator in the black corners. Rose rolled the ropes around her elbow with deft skill, hung the nets in their places.

Then she turned to meet his eyes again and said, as if they'd been talking about it all along, “If we can prove it on Mulm, he'll hang.”

Virgin Mary, guardian of women, PLEASE put the right words in my mouth and don't let me mess this up....

“You think the testimony of two libres will go against whatever lies he cares to come up with in his own defense?” There were two ways this could have been said, and January spoke in a tone of genuine inquiry: Do you think this can actually be done?

But what Rose heard was two, and he saw the tension leave her shoulders and her face. She blew out the candle and her voice was much more relaxed in the dark. “That depends on what we find. On what happens when we get close to Myrtle Landing. Thank you for not saying anything in front of your sister. She'd be horrified.”