Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (36 page)

“Right inhospitable of 'em.”
Shaw had to shout over the screaming winds. “Seems like nobody's seen 'em. Not for years.”

“You know anything about his wife's suicide?”

“Only it was hushed up.” His words carne in broken fragments. “Miss Laurene told me Felice Duquille's family bought new altar-cloths for the Cathedral ... new vest ments for every priest an' altar-boy... she was wrote down as havin' died of a fall down the gallery steps. Fact is she hanged herself. Most of the parish knew it ... though I 'xpect the altar-boys did need new duds that year. When I was a kid ... woman the next place over from ours did the same ... but it was a two-day ride to Nason's Corners if you had a horse, an' that woman was the only female in fifty miles, barrin' the squaws-women needs other women to be with.... But St. Roche is only a few hours from town on the steamboats.”

“What'd Joffrey Duquille have to say about it?”

“Not much. An' what he said, he said by letter to his factor. But this was right after the British ... things was a bit unsettled.” His breath caught and the muscles bunched along his jaw. “I think... M'am Felice was buried here.... We gonna get outa here, Maestro, we better do it.”

The water had risen breast-high, pouring in through window and door. The corpse of a fox washed by. “Can you swim?”

Shaw glanced at the fresh blood that dyed his palm. “Not far.”

“Here.” January hooked an arm around the Kaintuck's body, worked his way around the walls to the door. Even in that few minutes the water-level had risen, so that he had to duck his head under water to get through. Coming up, rain pounded him, beat cold on his head and his arms as he dragged himself and Shaw up to the shed-roof. “Rose tells me the water sometimes gets as high as ten or twelve feet,” he yelled. “I make the shed to be about that at the peak.”

“How high's the house?”

“Six feet above the ground on piles.”
January started to turn, to strain his eyes through the whirling iron-gray maelstrom of the air toward the house, but the shed beneath them lurched, staggered like a foundering horse, then sagged sideways, nearly tilting them from the roof. He flung his arms wide, worked his fingers through the plank roof's cracks, pressed his cheek to the soaked wood. Rain flayed him.

The shed jerked a few more times, spun slowly around its northwest corner-probably the only cornerpost still attached to whatever slight foundation it had had-then steadied, rocking in the bleak, dark waters and tugging with every floating deadfall that rammed it.

“Bastard better hold or we'll be swept out to the river. We'll never swim to shore.”

Something that January thought was a floating branch bumped his leg-he kicked at it, and a moment later it bumped him again. He turned, squinting through the rain, and saw that it was a sixteen-foot alligator.

January wasn't conscious of rolling and flipping himself over the peak of the shed-roof, but by the time the gator opened its pink mouth and hissed, January was over, and Shaw-who had seemed only barely possessed of the strength to cling like a drowned water-rat to the planks-was beside him. The gator heaved itself up farther, glad of the room. The shed jerked at its uncertain mooring.

January pulled up the pistol on its ribbon and fired at that blinkless yellow eye, hoping that the powder was still dry, but of course it wasn't. He caught Shaw's rifle, reversed it, and began clubbing the gator on the snout, shouting against the wind and not daring to raise himself up enough to get leverage lest he be blown bodily off the roof. God knew what else was swimming around. The gator backed, hissed again, but clearly wasn't about to plunge back into the current. The huge tail lashed, the shed lurched, and then they were floating free.

For an instant January thought the gator would lunge up over the roof-peak at him. He'd seen even six-foot gators spring the length of their own bodies in seconds. The floating shed rocked, turning ponderously as it blundered among the submerged trees, headed for the sweeping gray vortex of the river, and there wasn't more than a space of six feet by eight or so in which he and Shaw could maneuver. But the unsteadiness of the footing may have kept the big reptile where it was. It snapped at the rifle-butt, its eyes expressionless as beads in their crusts of gray-green armor; January hammered it, shouted, glanced hastily over his shoulder and saw that they were approaching the upstream side of the house.

“Get ready to jump!”

Shaw, clinging grimly, lifted his head a little to see, but January wasn't sure that he'd be able to move when he had to. The water swirled only a foot or so below the Big House's eaves. Above that pale churning, the high peak jutted like an island. They'll be in the attic, January thought-narrow dormers projected from the hipped roof, the windows shuttered against the storm's hammering. An oak twenty feet from the upstream end of the house made another island in the heaving near-dark, funneling the water between them, and toward this chute the floating shed swept. January struck again at the gator to keep it from gathering itself enough to lunge, and snatched a handful of Shaw's drenched shirt by which to inch him painfully toward the edge of the shed-roof-

Then the shed spun a leisurely forty-five degrees and snagged in the oak-tree, wedged between it and the roof of the Big House. January and Shaw were on the tree side, the shallow peak of the roof between them and the gator, and the gator on the house side.

Silent under the sluicing rain, the gator lunged. January grabbed Shaw, scrambled, and rolled backward. The current was stronger than he'd thought, slamming the two of them onto the half-submerged wall as he worked his way along it, praying the shed wouldn't dislodge until they'd reached the house-roof, and the gator wouldn't decide to drop into the water after them. Eyes, nose, mouth filled with water, blinded by wind and rain, he could only grope as nameless things rammed into his back and head and the current dragged at his limbs and at the limp body he supported.

The shed lurched, tore loose of the oak, and disappeared just as January caught the overhanging eaves of the house. He'd have sworn Shaw was unconscious, but the Kentuckian got one arm up onto the roof, and with the current tearing at him January braced himself on a beam, boosted Shaw, then fought his own way up. Wind nearly scoured them off the wet slates, pinned them flat, not daring to move, and January thought, Now the Big House comes loose of ITS foundations and we all get swept out to the river, and down to the sea....

The shutters of the dormer were fastened on the inside, but only with a latch. January considered pounding on them and shouting, but the noise of the wind was so enormous, he doubted he'd be heard, even if Rose and the others happened to be at that end of the attic. Dragging himself little by little into the shelter of the projecting dormer, he worked his knife from his boot, slid it through the crack and up, easy movements enough if one's hands weren't wet and shaking with exhaustion and shock, if one weren't being lashed by the rain and torn by wind. He dropped the knife twice, the second time barely catching it before it slid away off the roof slope. A branch struck him like the bolt of an arbalest, numbing him as he pushed open the shutters, dragged himself through....

A gunshot roared in the narrow gap of the dormer, the yellow explosion of muzzle-flash blinding him. Pain lanced his arm like the sting of a giant hornet, and he plunged into darkness.

“Don't even think about it, my girl,” said Franklin Mulm's nasal voice. “Just do as I say, and your mistress will take no harm.”

There was a candle. January opened his eyes.

He couldn't tell if the rocking was still the wind that pummeled the house, or the waves of dizziness and nausea that swamped him with the mere movement of his eyelids, the mere intensity of that single small gold light.

He'd been hit-arm, shoulder, he couldn't tell. Nausea.
Searing pain and the weakness of shock and lost blood.

He lay where he'd fallen in the narrow space beneath the slant of the roof and the dormer window, where the smell of dust and mildew was overwhelming. Cobwebs thick with dust caught the dim yellow glow. Mulm was between him and the main attic, his arm hooked around a girl's throat and a pistol pressed to her head. It took January a moment to realize that the white blur of her clothing was the old-fashioned schoolgirl dress that Chloe had been wearing, and not young Laurene Houx's nightdress.

He blinked, consciousness battling its way back to focus. Candle-light revealed faces, past Mulm's narrow silhouette. Serapis, blood on his forehead and his flesh ashy-gray beneath it, slumped in a corner with hands bound. Beside him Lucy, the Bois d'Argent cook, watched the proceedings with wary eyes. Her tignon was gone and her hands were also bound. A skinny little bald man whom January recognized as one of Mulm's filibusters from the Nantucket was tying Annette Avocet's hands with strips torn from an old dress-a trunk thrown open near-by showed where it had come from. Tyrone Burke stood near a shut door into a farther attic, almost hidden in the shadows of the great beams, his pistol trained on the rest of the occupants of the dim-lit room: Dominique, Rose, the quadroon maid, and Laurene Houx, all gathered around the unconscious Vivienne. It was to Rose that Mulm had spoken, Rose who'd half-risen from among them.

“We don't mean anyone here any harm.” Mulm spoke in the soft, reasonable voice January remembered from the yard of the Nantucket. “We want only one thing here, and when we've got that, we'll be on our way. We never intended to harm anyone-”

“Except Madame's brother Artois.”
Dominique's voice shook. With her dark hair hanging wet over her half-bared shoulders, her wet, gauzy gown tattered and clinging to her swollen belly, her eyes wide in a face hollowed and gray with fatigue, she looked more than ever like some spirit, if not of this place, then of the flooded marshes all around them. “Except poor M'sieu Perth, back at Bois, and his wife, and Kitanga the butler downstairs, and Madame's butler Oliver, and how many others who got in your way.”

Rose touched her arm, warning, but Dominique shook free of her hand.

“What does it matter? He's going to kill us anyway! He knows we've seen him, can identify him-”

“My dear girl,” interposed Mulm softly, “whoever gets killed here, it wouldn't be a valuable nigger like yourself. And so far in pup, too.”

“Oh, en effet!” cried Dominique passionately. “Whisper words of love in my other ear, cochon! They want to believe you, Serapis and Lucy and Melisse, because they think, Oh, I'll be sold, I'll getaway, I'll still live. . . . But you no more plan to let any of us live than you plan to shave your head and become a monk!” She turned, wildly, furiously, to the Avocets' maid, and the girl Laurene, both huddling in the shadows among the cobwebbed trunks and ancient chairs. “He will kill you, too! He kills just to silence whispers, the way he shot that poor fool rebel who only seeks to come out of the storm. . . .” She gestured at January.

“Burke,” said Mulm. “Shut her up.”

Burke moved toward Dominique, his free hand reaching with a man's casual anger at a troublesome woman, the pistol still in his right hand but lowered. The bald man, clearly under the impression that none of this had anything to do with him, continued to tie Annette Avocet's hands... and January flung himself full-force into the backs of Mulm's legs.

Mulm yelled, the gun flying-it hadn't been cocked and January suspected the powder was wet. He'd formed a pretty good idea of Chloe's level-headedness, watching her during the earlier fighting. He tried to grab Mulm: pain ripped through his left arm. Mulm reared over him with a knife in his hand and January seized his wrist in his right hand, twisted him one-handed, and slammed him, hard, against the corner of the roof where the dormer formed a sharp angle. The saloonkeeper went down like a schoolboy January was very powerful, and very angry. In the same instant he heard a gun fire-Burke, he thought, so much for my theory their powder would all be wet-and as Mulm slipped down unconscious, blood and hair leaving a huge dark smear on the rafter, January turned and saw Burke sprawled on the attic floor, twitching in a pool of gore.

Chloe was just picking herself up from between two trunks where she'd dived the moment Mulm's grip had loosened. The bald man scrambled up-Annette Avocet had kicked him in the belly like a mule and was herself on her feet now with a paper-knife-goodness knew where she'd gotten it-upraised in her hands. Baldy dashed for one of the dormers but another shot cracked from the shadows of the inner door near which Burke had stood, yellow gunflash silhouetting for an instant the two forms that stood there. January had a momentary impression of dark faces, calico shirts-an overwhelming stink of camphor, sulfur, rotting flesh....

Baldy flung out his arms and fell. At the same time a voice from the dark of another dormer called out, “Hey, in there, watch the shootin', eh? I woulda take care of that American....”

Cut-Nose Chighizola dropped down through the dormer as he spoke, cutlass in hand and dripping with rain, and stopped, blinking at the two shadows in the inner at tic's dark door. Vivienne Avocet, rousing herself from her faint, looked, too, peering through the wreaths of powdersmoke and candle-glow. Her eyes widened and she scrabbled backward, screaming now in good earnest.

“Shut up, Vivienne,” said Annette Avocet, and Laurene whispered, “Mama, please,” her own eyes huge.

“There should be a knife in that man's boot.” Serapis spoke into the silence that followed. Rose went to Burke's side, took the weapon. The filibuster moved his hand, made one final, horrible sound, and died. Rose didn't spare him a glance. January dragged himself upright against the nearest trunk, Chloe coming to help him.

“Shaw's on the roof,” he panted, and Chighizola backed uneasily from the two newcomers in the shadows, and went to the dormer through which January had come, using the lid of a trunk to scramble up. Annette Avocet and her maid grabbed for the candles as the wind and rain bellowed in again. The movement flung light into the shadows, the yellow glow failing and uncertain but confirming what January suspected. Neither of the men in the shadows moved.