Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (30 page)

Don't let her die.

And in his mind he saw Mathieu in his dream, grinning as he thrust her legs apart.

The batture was a solid granny-knot of brush, saplings, weeds, and snags-a nearly-impenetrable snarl of desiccated roots and branches, occupied by birds, turtles, snakes of every variety, alligators, and upon occasion runaway slaves. Carrying Rose and thanking God for the size and strength that made most Americans look at him with that dismissive glance that said field-hand, January stumbled along the outside of the levee, shivering himself now, until he estimated they were clear of Avocet. Then he stooped, and set Rose down, fumbling in his pockets for flint and steel even as he realized there was absolutely nothing dry in the entire world to light.

“Rose,” he whispered, bending over her, touching her hair. “Rose.”

He felt her nod her head.

Useless to ask where she was hurt, or how badly. His ear to her lips, he could hear her breathing, and it sounded steady, if shallow and swift. He had no idea how many men might come after them, or whether those would be Mulm's bravos or guards set by Jacinthe himself-in the end, it would come to the same thing. If they were still anywhere in the vicinity of Avocet at first light, they were doomed.

So he gathered Rose into his arms again and moved downstream. He stayed as close to the top of the levee as he could, and prayed the rain would be enough to keep the snakes under cover. They had lost both rifles, and all their food and drink. He found himself desperately calculating how far out of Burke's reach they must go against how much cold and exposure Rose could endure.

The rain seemed to fill the universe with water; the darkness before Creation, when God moved upon the surface of the deep. What time it was January had no idea, but far off, ahead of him and to his right, a light glowed through trees. He thought it must be a steamboat, seen around a bend in the river-there were steamboat captains mad enough to navigate on a moonless night in a storm, though not generally this far below town.

Still, he made his way along the shell road; in time the tossing oceans of dripping cane on his right gave place to rough open ground, dotted with native oaks whose leaves sounded wetly under the rain, and it was clear to him then that the light was indeed shining from the window of a house.

A Big House, but that would mean that at least a few servants were still awake. He came down off the levee and circled among the trees toward the kitchen yard and the outbuildings where the house-servants slept. As he passed the dark shape of what he guessed to be the overseer's house, a chorus of barks resounded from the gallery, and January stood still, to let the dogs come up. From the porch a voice called out in thickly Hibernian French, “Och, who's out there, then?”

January called back, “I'm a free man, sir. But the woman with me is injured, and in desperate need of help.” He spoke in English, and in the same language the voice exclaimed, “The de'il you say!” And over his shoulder, back into the house, “Bide, Aggie, 'tis all right.”

The overseer sprang down the steps and strode toward them, a lantern swinging from his hand and showing him to be a fat, sandy man with a face like a petrified potato and a mouth like a penciled line under a stiff red mustache. “Christ,” he added when the light fell over Rose. And well he might, thought January, utterly aghast: her blood soaked her clothing as if she had been butchered. “This way, man, get her to the hospital! What in the name of God... ?”

“I don't know if it's as bad as it looks, sir. But she was shot, buckshot, I think-by slave-stealers, men we couldn't see.” January followed him as he spoke, toward a brick building near the kitchen.

“Lury!” the overseer bellowed in a voice like Capitoline Jove. “Lury ... !” And, when a woman emerged, shawl-wrapped, from the little cabin built off the rear of the kitchen, “Get Sapphire and be quick about it,” he snapped in French, “we've an injured woman here.... Damned slave-stealers.” He switched back to English as he led January into the cabin designated as the plantation hospital. The lantern-light showed one of its two beds occupied by a boy of eight or so, tossing restlessly with fever. The other was empty, mosquito-bar tied neatly back behind its rough head. “And what were you doin' abroad to be shot at like that, me buck? Water over there.” He pointed toward a jar in the corner. “Rags in the cupboard.”

Under a shelving jut of bleached eyebrow, his pockmarked face was hard but not cruel.

January was so glad just to be indoors, and able to lay Rose down on a bed, that he simply did as he was told. He had had considerable time, in the past few hours, to meditate about honor, insult, and death.

“Christ,” said the overseer again as he pulled the remains of Rose's shirt off her, exactly as he'd have stripped harness from an injured horse. Two or three pellets had lodged in her shoulders, a few more in her back. By the tears in her ragged breeches, more had struck her buttocks and thighs. “Bird shot, thank God, and hit her at a distance.” He cocked a very sharp hazel eye up at January. “Free, you say?”

Without a word January produced his own and Rose's papers. While the overseer was angling them to the lantern's dim flare, the cook, Lucy, came in, with a taller woman who was clearly the head woman of the plantation, presumably Sapphire.

“January, is it?” The overseer held out his hand. “Colin Perth. And Miss Vitrac?” He pronounced it as an American would, with the emphasis on the first syllable rather than the last. “Where is it you were bound?”

“Grand Isle,” said January. “My friend has family there.” Past Perth's shoulder he could see the woman Sapphire gently mopping the rain-diluted blood from Rose's back, and nearly cried out with relief. The wounds, though bloody and obviously very painful, were clearly superficial. “We came ashore at Myrtle Landing. We were told there was a way down Bayou St. Roche. . . .”

“Gah, no wonder you ran into them de'ils. You should have taken a packet, and gone clear 'round by sea.”

“We hadn't the money for that, sir,” said January baldly.

“And I suppose you had the money to buy your ladyfriend back from the likes of old Chamoflet out in the marshes, eh? You couldn't...”

A light step creaked on the gallery; shielded candlelight flickered in the rain. “What is it, Perth?” asked a cool little voice like a porcelain bell and, turning, January saw Chloe St. Chinian Viellard, framed in the doorway.

“You are Mademoiselle Vitrac,” said Chloe Viellard. “Artois' tutor. Uncle Veryl told me about you.”

Rose fumbled for the spectacles that Sapphire had taken off her and said, in a voice weak but surprisingly even given the circumstances, “Yes, Madame. I am Mademoiselle Vitrac.”

“My dear Mademoiselle, this is dreadful.” Even dressed as she was, in a flowing wrapper of Italian silk spotted with rain, Chloe Viellard moved with the precise grace of a woman gowned for a Royal ball. Her pale blond hair, like raw silk around a precise little heart-shaped face, had clearly been brushed out and braided for the night, before being coiled swiftly into a loose coronet; and she wore spectacles, the lenses round and thick as the bottoms of wine-bottles. “What happened ... ? No, never mind that now. Just rest.... Are you hungry? Thirsty? Lucy, wake Marie and have her make a tisane before you come back and help Sapphire if she needs it.... M'sieu ... Janvier?” She removed her spectacles, looked up at January with those enormous pale-blue, myopic eyes. “You are a friend of Mademoiselle Vitrac's?”

“I am, Madame, Yes.” He'd lost his hat, and inclined his head respectfully. “I was escorting Mademoiselle Vitrac to her family's home on Grand Isle.” The top of Madame Chloe's head barely came up to his breastbone. It was like talking to a child.

“Of course,” she said. “It must have been as grievous for her as it was for me.... I think everyone loved Artois. Would you object to occupying the room where my husband's valet stays when he is here? My husband returned to town only yesterday, so the room is still made up. Lury will get you something to eat.”

“If you please, M'am,” answered January, “I'll remain here with Mademoiselle Vitrac, should she wish it.” Sapphire seemed to know what she was doing, removing the bird shot swiftly and deftly with a bullet-probe and cleansing the wounds with an astringent aromatic. Lury, a stout woman with a gap between her prominent front teeth, returned with Rose's tisane, and at a sign from Perth unlocked the corner cupboard and brought out half a dozen more candles, to add to the lantern's smoky light. Their clear, bright radiance and the faint smell of honey filled the long room.

“Ben ... you're tired.” Rose's voice was tight with pain. Her fingers lifted to sign him to go; January returned to the side of the bed and drew over one of the room's two or three low stools, to sit on as he took her hand.

“Sapphire, would you show M'sieu Janvier where the room is when you're done here?” asked Chloe. “Or if Mademoiselle Vitrac wishes it, would you get Marie to bring some blankets for him here? Thank you.” And she took her departure like a diminutive queen, trailed by the overseer Perth and by the somewhat disgruntled Lucy, in quest of clean sheets and food. Rose's fingers tightened hard around January's. When Sapphire's face was turned away, bent over the wounds on her back, Rose brought his hand to her lips and kissed it. She made no sound as the slave-woman continued her treatment, and fell asleep almost as soon as it was done.

January ate some of the congris and sausage Lucy brought, and made up a bed in the corner, under an old mosquito-bar the cook tacked to the wall for him. His own wounds ached damnably-Sapphire had washed them with her astringent before she thriftily pinched out the candles and left-and he thought he'd lie long awake, but he got as far as Blessed Mary ever-Virgin ... in his prayer of thanks and then it was daylight and he was wondering who had pounded him with hammers while he slept.

“I could have wept with envy when I heard Uncle Veryl had hired a tutor for Artois,” Chloe's sweet, silvery voice was saying as he woke. Steamy morning heat filled the room, and diffuse light from the western windows, and the heavy green scents of summer in the country. Through the open door January could see sunlight glaring beyond the building's shadow on the unscythed grass. “Up until Papa died I used to spend most of my days at Uncle Veryl's, you see, reading in the library. The nuns at the convent were so stupid, and there was nothing to read there but edifying sermons and the lives of the saints. Uncle Veryl taught me Latin when I was eight, so he couldn't very well object when I'd read Suetonius or Tacitus, or even Procopius, who must have been part American, I think.... I could always tell him I was practicing my Latin. I don't think he believed me. Just don't tell your mother, he'd say.” Her imitation of the old man's voice was loving, and nearly perfect.

“Someday I should like to lay hold of the man who started this rumor about women being unfit to study,” sighed Rose. She still lay on her stomach, but she'd eaten, to judge by the tray set aside near the bed, and the whitewashed room was fragrant with coffee. In the other bed, the sick boy slept deeply under the mosquito-bar. The two women kept their voices low, lest he or January wake.

“I imagine you would need a spade,” said Chloe thoughtfully. “He's certainly been dead a good many centuries, and serves him right, whoever he was. I do remember reading the advertisement for your school, you know, the one you had a few years ago, if you're the same Mademoiselle Vitrac......”

“I am.”

“I thought you had to be. Papa was horrified-he was spending a fortune keeping me with the nuns-and Mama of course would have had a palsy-stroke at the mere mention of me studying in the same classroom as filles du couleur. I said it was infamous that young French ladies should be denied the teaching those girls were getting.... Which I still think it is.”

“As do I,” agreed Rose, propping herself a little on one elbow to sip her coffee. “But I couldn't teach both, you see.” Her hair had been braided, and pinned to her head. Her back was a criss-cross of plasters and dressings, the flesh between them blackened and swollen. “Surely you could have gotten a decent education in France.”

“I could have, were I not an heiress.” The girl's voice was crisp with a matter-of-fact exasperation, where another girl might have gloried in that state. “My mother was Jean Henri Duquille's only daughter, and he died young, you see. His older brother, my uncle Joffrey, has two sons, but neither of them ever married......”

“That's odd, isn't it? In a Creole family?” Rose was clearly thinking of Chloe's new husband, the hapless Henri.

“They're an odd family.” Without her spectacles, Henri's wife looked forbidding-curiously so, for a girl of her delicate appearance. She was as neatly turned-out here on Bois d'Argent as she would have been in town, in a simple gown of shell-pink sprigged muslin and her ivory hair smooth as moonlight. Her frown of puzzlement made her human.

“Uncle Joffrey's wife, my aunt Felice, committed suicide when the boys were fifteen and seventeen: they're in their forties now. I think it must have affected Uncle Joffrey's mind, for he never left St. Roche after that, and neither did his sons. My husband and I attempted to pay a bridal visit, both before and after the wedding-we were married only last month-and both times, my letter asking could we come was returned. I have it on good authority that my uncle has his slaves turn all visitors off the property.”

Rose opened her mouth to comment on the truth that rumor, then obviously remembered that she and January were supposed to be traveling down from New Orleans, not the other way. She said instead, “How very Gothic.”

“I've always thought so.” Chloe settled back on the stool January had brought up the previous night. “Though you know, if a woman chose to immure herself like that after a husband's suicide, no one would give the matter a second thought. Unless of course she happened to be an heiress, in which case her mother would be serving up more cousins and eligible bachelors with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I used to make up stories, you know, I and Picard cousins, about Aunt Felice's suicide. About what drove her to it, I mean, and why Uncle Joffrey never could be free of it. Sometimes I favored Cousine Musette's theory of a long-lost former lover-who was sometimes called Florizel and sometimes Werther, but in either case he spent the years between Felice's betrothal and her son's forteenth birthday rowing in the Dey of Algiers' galley.”