Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (34 page)

There had to be an overseer's house out in that blackness somewhere. There had to be quarters. If he could find them, they'd be somewhere out a good half-mile beyond the house....

He came around the corner of the house just as lanterns bobbed in the wet blackness below the gallery. Numb with exhaustion, January could do no more than swiftly flatten himself to the wall, shield the lantern with his body, and pray the darkness would cover him. The men had to shout to one another to be heard: he heard one yell, “You sure those niggers going to come on, in rain like this?” but did not hear a reply. Footfalls clumped on the wooden planks, then the house shivered with a crashing blow to the shutters. January risked a peek around the corner, and saw Franklin Mulm and a dozen others, standing huddled together while Tyrone Burke ripped at the lock on the shutters with a crowbar.

January's aching body was filled with a huge irrational unwillingness to move, but he guessed that in these few moments-when the men were intent on getting into the house-lay his best chance of disappearing into the screaming wet darkness unseen. He crawled down the back gallery steps on hands and knees, and away into the darkness again.

The last two miles, from Les Plaquemines to St. Roche, were the worst. He had long ago ceased to judge the physical violence of the wind, or the intensity of the rain that slammed into him, but he could hear the changed note of the noise in the trees. It had risen to a steady, eerie drone that made his skin creep, like a sound heard in nightmare. He fell, not far beyond Les Plaquemines, and though he struggled to his feet he knew he would fall again. Blown branches pummeled him, and once something huge whipped past him-he didn't know what and didn't want to guess.

Shortly after that he realized he was wading and staggered toward his right, seeking for the way up the levee again. But he was already on top of the levee. It was the river coming over, where that barrier was low. The fear clutched him that he would miss St. Roche completely and go stumbling on, like a soul forever damned, until he staggered off into the sea where the river ended. At times he thought he did dream, struggling and half-drowned. That he dreamed finding Dominique's shawl, and Rose's bandanna ...

That he dreamed of Rose loving him ...

That he dreamed of light down to his right, nearly hidden in the trees.

He stood gasping. Rather to his own surprise, he was still on top of the levee, and still alive.

Water stood knee-deep in the snarly jungle of weed and saplings below. The wind was marginally less here, though all the trees around him in the darkness writhed as if trying to work their roots free. At least the saplings, the random stalks of degenerate cane, gave him something to cling to, to haul himself along. He wasn't sure he'd have made it, else. Something brushed past his leg, and he wondered if it was a snake, flushed from its hole by the flood. Last year Olympe had taught him a charm against snakes and he tried to remember it, calling on the Virgin Mary and Damballa-Wedo. As he waded toward the light, it seemed to him that the water was alive with serpents, wriggling like maggots wherever his lantern-light struck it.

Every door and window of St. Roche was shuttered, but light shone between the cracks.

Had Rose made it? he wondered. Had she warned them?

How bad had the wind been when she and Dominique struggled along the river road? Had they been swept bodily off the levee to drown? Or been brained by a flying branch? He could have walked by their bodies and not known it, walked by them trapped in the flooded batture, with them screaming his name not ten feet from him, and would not have heard ...

He pounded the shutters, shouted, “Let me in! In the name of God, let me in!” Wind scoured the gallery; the house seemed to creak and sway as if it, like the trees around it, were trying to twist itself loose of its moorings. Was old Aunt Felice's ghost out there in the screaming blackness, walking toward him with Mad Juana's accursed necklace glittering evilly about her throat?

“Rebellion!” he shouted. “The slaves are up in arms! Up the river at Avocet! Let me in!”

“We heard all about this slave revolt.” January turned his head: to see the overseer Serapis near the end of the gallery, shotgun in hand, the muzzle leveled on January's chest. “And we heard what happened to the folks that fell for that story and went runnin' out into the night.”

“No, it's all right!” The shutters of the women's side of the house opened and a figure stood silhouetted in the blackness. The gown she wore, gauzy white and high waisted in the style twenty years gone, floated about her like a shroud in the wind. Dark, streaming hair caught the wind, too, gleaming in the slits of light from the windows near-by, framing her beautiful face like a stormcloud. “P'tit, is that you?”

Dominique.

“P'tit, it was horrible-just ghastly!” Dominique draped a quilt around January's shoulders. Another man who by his shabby, elegantly-cut coat January guessed to be the household butler brought in another blanket, to lay across his knees.

“This is clean,” the butler told him. The flicker of the parlor's two candles danced ghoulishly over the neat geometry of tribal scars, over hair elaborately braided in a fash ion January hadn't seen since childhood and never on a house-servant. But the butler, under his elegant coat, wore only a loincloth. They Africans down there, the little cowherd from Plaquemines had said. It seemed he was right.

Even in the house they had to speak loudly, over the howl of the wind. Drafts whipped through the open doors between parlor and dining-room, and into the women's side of the building; everything stirred with unholy life and the whole place rocked and creaked sullenly in the wind. “It's been in a chest in the attic many years.”

January could have guessed this by the smell of cedar and mildew that impregnated it and the quilt over his back. He understood the man's need to reassure him on that score, however. Like the outside of the house, the inside showed the last extremities of emptiness and neglect.

Cobwebs draped the parlor walls, old and white and so thick with age that the tunnels the spiders wove could be seen boring away into their cloudy fastnesses-the fleeting drafts made the webs lift and seem to paw at the shadows. The divan on which he sat, with its ornate lotus motifs and carven crocodile feet, was gray with dust and reeked of mold. In their high-waisted, pale gauzes, Dominique and Rose recalled January's youth, while Chloe's flat, immature form was rendered more schoolgirlish still by the sashed frock of some forgotten young lady not yet out when Napoleon was still in military school.

The rifle she held was taller than she was. “Thank you, Kitanga,” she said to the butler.

“Mulm came just after dark, with the warning that the slaves were rising all along the river road.” Rose brought January coffee from the pot on the sideboard, her brows very dark against the ashen pallor of pain. “I saw him ride up, but I was afraid to cross to the house and warn them inside, in case I was recognized. I wish I had. Because a few minutes after he left, Mr. Perth came out the front of the house and was shot on the gallery. . . .”

“M'sieu Perth told that beastly M'sieu Mulm that he was ... that he didn't believe the slaves on Bois d'Argent would rise up,” put in Dominique, her eyes flashing suddenly hard. “M'sieu Mulm waved his arms and swore that the slaves were on their way down the road from Avocet right that very second, that he had barely escaped with his life, and M'sieu Perth only said, We'll see about that, then....”

“I shall never believe that it was the slaves that shot him,” declared Chloe, her voice quiet but her eyes cold as ice.

“Nor was it.”
January tried and failed to find an alternative mise-en-scene to the obvious one: if Dominique had heard Perth's words to Mulm, she must have been in the Big House-that is, talking to Chloe-at the time.

“Of course it wasn't, darling.” Dominique put her arm around Chloe's shoulders. “If they were killing white men, they would have killed M'sieu Mulm when he rode away from the house, to keep him from spreading the alarm.”

“On the other hand,” said Chloe to January, her arm around Dominique's waist, “it was quite clear that somebody was shooting.... ”

“I was halfway to the house when Mr. Perth was shot,” said Rose. “Oliver-Madame Chloe's butler-went out to the quarters. He said most of the hands there had fled, probably because of the rumors of revolt. But Oliver and Lucy stayed with us, when M'sieu Chighizola brought us here....”

“Captain Chighizola agreed to bring me to Bois,” explained Dominique with her sunniest smile. As if, thought January, bring me to Bois didn't involve a day's slogging in a pirogue through marshes infested with slave-stealers... “I hoped to catch you here, because Mimi Rigaud-she lives just past the mimosa grove near Rose's brother-heard from a trapper that the guns were going to Avocet. The Captain is the sweetest old gentleman. . . .”

“Cut-Nose and Oliver are guarding the nursery wing,” explained Rose. “Lucy is there, too, with poor Madame Perth, as loaders.” She glanced at Serapis. The driver stood in the doorway that divided the front parlor from the downstream front bedroom, the bedroom presumably inhabited by the ghost of Aunt Felice. Through the doors that opened to the darkness of the dining-room, January could see the St. Roche butler Kitanga, relieved of his task of fetching “clean” blankets, keeping watch at the rear of the house. In the eerie flickering of the candles, in that disused chamber of dust and cobweb, there was no sign of anyone besides the three girls, the two slaves, and January.

He looked inquiringly at Rose. “And M'sieu Duquille ... ?”

“Michie Joffrey Duquille doesn't speak to company.” said Serapis, glancing out from the dark of the bedroom. The pattern of printed flowers on his loincloth was like the mottling of an animal's hide in the gloom.

Sudden pounding on the shutters of the parlor window made them all jerk. The house was swaying, groaning as it swayed; the screaming of the wind nearly drowned a man's voice shouting, “The slaves! Rising up ... murdering ... burned Autreuil and Boscage and Bois d'Argent . . .”

“Opuró,” muttered Kitanga, crossing to the dead Madame Duquille's bedroom and opening the door onto the gallery-January recognized the word the old aunts of his childhood sometimes used, meaning liar. “Who are you-”

The blast of a pistol on the gallery was like a thunderclap; the impact of the ball slammed Kitanga back against the doorjamb, and the butler was slumping to the floor as Serapis sprang over him. Feet thundered on the gallery outside. Serapis caught up the pistol that had been in Kitanga's pocket and fired out the door, Rose grabbed a pistol from the mantel and shoved open the shutters before January could so much as draw breath. She fired out, slammed the shutters again, ducked as a bullet crashed through in an explosion of wood-fragments and glass, and all around the house boots crashed on the gallery, guns fired, thunder louder than the wind's howl.

There were three pistols on the marble-topped cabinet, perhaps the only objects in the room not silver with dust. January caught up one, Rose another, pushing open the brise to fire through at the men kicking and hammering at the shutters of the door that Serapis had just slammed closed. In the confusion January glimpsed a man lying on the gallery, blood mingling with the rain-water to make a black flood around his head. January fired and ducked, slammed the shutter against the return fire and threw the pistol to Dominique to load-she had powder-flask, bullets, and patches ready on the divan beside her, near to hand. A bullet plowed into the mantel beside her head, and Dominique said, “Bleu,” and dropped to the floor, keeping pistol and ramrod with her. A ball tore splinters from the shutter beside Rose, and Rose said something considerably stronger.

Rank powder-smoke clogged the air, burning January's eyes and mingling with the dead butler's blood to give the house the reek of a battlefield. A voice somewhere called, “We all right in here!”

More shots, and something struck the house, a giant's kick, a tree uprooted by the tempest. The building shuddered in its bones.

“Watch out, sweetheart,” warned Chloe, setting her rifle against the faux marble mantel to carefully tip the divan over on its side, where it would protect Dominique from stray bullets.

When she put her hand on the door that led into the front bedroom, the men's side of the house, Serapis called from the other bedroom door, “Don't go in there, m'am. Michie Joffrey and his boys, they got that side of the house covered.”

Chloe looked startled, and drew herself up to reply, but a crash and splintering from the rear doors of the dining-room cut across her words. She whirled, caught up her rifle, and fired through them, the shot and muzzle-flash like thunder and the stink of powder thicker yet on the gloomy air. January ducked, crawled back through the dark dining-room to fire again, but wasn't sure he hit anyone. When he reached the shutters he heard nothing but the bellowing of the wind and rain.

“Well, at least they can't fire the house.” Crouching next to the downstream brise, Rose slammed the ramrod down the barrel of the pistol she held with neat strength. “Is there a chance of sending to the navy at the Belize fort for assistance?”

“Not in this.” Serapis slid his own pistol, and the one Kitanga had been holding, back to Dominique. Another salvo of shots tore holes in the shutters, sprayed the parlor with glass, and all in the room flattened to the floor. “Flood's already over the fields. When the big flood-wave come, whoever we send gonna be swept away.”

“Have you enough men in the quarters to make a sortie around our attackers?” Chloe spoke from Kitangas old position in the butler's pantry, where a ladder ascended to the attics above. “Or are M'sieu Mulm and his men too widely scattered?”

Still on his belly, January pressed his ear to the floor. “Do you hear anyone?” whispered Rose, leaning close.

“Not on the gallery, no.
Movement somewhere else in the house. But that would be Chloe's butler-Oliver, you said his name was?-and Cut-Nose and their loaders in the nursery.”