Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (40 page)

If the jury hadn't been largely French Creole, they might well have convicted her.

But they didn't.

January felt genuinely sorry for Shaw, because the moment he'd stepped into the courtroom in the Cabildo he'd foreseen the outcome. The jurymen were mostly French and Spanish Creoles-men of families who had lived in New Orleans for generations, and who, if not related to the Avocets, did business every day with them and with the entangled ramifications of their family. They weren't about to convict one of their own on the testimony of a tobacco-spitting Kaintuck river-rat.

They acquitted her, and ascribed Guifford's murder to “person or persons unknown”: most probably the vanished overseer Raffin, whose body was in fact never found.

By Christmas, Annette Avocet had the good taste-and the funds-to move to New York, whence litigation over their uncle's fortune proceeded against her surviving brother and his new wife Vivienne for years.

But to January, the affairs of les blankittes, except insofar as they touched his life or the lives of those he loved, were more and more like some huge, gaudy theatrical performance. He would watch, from the third-tier gallery where he and his friends were obliged by law to sit. It was sometimes an entertaining show, but there were more interesting things for him to do.

He and Rose bought a house the week before their wedding, a ramshackle Spanish structure back on Rue Esplanade, large enough-when first frost brought the well-off free coloreds back into town, and the wealthier plaçees-to be made into a school. “You'll do better to invest in slaves,” said his mother when he encountered her at Dominique's the evening after the trial. “Or land. They're talking about splitting the city into three, and let the American animals run their own affairs-good riddance, I say-and town lots are going like hotcakes. Or set up a contracting business. You'll coin money-”

“I'm not a contractor, Mama,” he interrupted gently. He passed her the coffee-cup with her two lumps of sugar-he couldn't imagine how Rose could drink hers black. “I couldn't push a work-gang from can't-see to can't-see, and argue with some rich white man about the price of roof-slates.”

“I don't see why not.” Her lips pursed in impatience.

In the chair by the little hearth, Dominique caught his eye and smiled. Since her return to town, Henri had virtually lived in this peaceful pink cottage on Rue Burgundy while his wife saw to her uncle's affairs. Dominique never mentioned what had passed between herself and Chloe, or whether Henri's wife even knew that Dominique was her husband's mistress, but Rose told January that Chloe had said that she was aware that it was not in her to make a husband happy.

But that's no reason why he shouldn't BE happy, Chloe had said. And I would like him to be. For I do like Cousin Henri, useless as he is about money. Chloe sent Dominique a little gold cross for the baby to wear, and grapes from the arbors at St. Roche.

“Mama,” said Dominique now, “one cannot be a contractor and write music. And Ben has written some beautiful things since he's returned from Grand Isle.”

“Music.”
Their mother sniffed. “And what does music put on the table, pray? What does music put over your head?”

“The sun and the stars, Mama,” said January, taking her hand, with its old cane-stalk scar that she told her friends had come from a scratch with a hat-pin. The doors stood open onto Rue Burgundy, and over the stillness of the town and the thrumming of the cicadas a marketwoman cried her gingerbread in a long sing-song wail. “Besides, I know Rose, and Rose would never have married a man who built houses.”

“Then she's as foolish as you.”

“Yes.” January smiled. “That way we know we'll be happy.”

And his mother looked up at him, puzzled, and for one moment he saw in her eyes that she genuinely did not expect happiness to come from the person she gave her body to. That it was not something that had ever crossed her mind. Her gaze met his blankly, as if she'd put her hand on what she thought was a painting, and felt under her fingers the true scented velvet of flowers.

Then she pulled her hand away from his, her half-closed eyes masking whatever it was that she felt, or thought, or might have said had she been seventeen and alone with the man who had been January's father. The man from whom St.-Denis Janvier had taken her-and her children-without a moment's thought.

St.-Denis Janvier had given her the rose-colored silk she'd worn on the night of General Humbert's birthday party twenty-three years ago, and enough jewels to shine down even the gaudy Grand Terre women. He'd taken her to bright banquets with the ladies of the demimonde and let her meet the rich men who came there, and had bought her a house like this one of Dominique's, and had paid for the education of her son.

But he'd never asked her if this was what would have made her happy. Had never asked her what she dreamed. She said, “You're a silly boy.” And she swept into the yard, calling for Therese to come close the shutters before the mosquitoes devoured them all alive.

January kissed Dominique, and returned to the echoing, nearly-empty house on Rue Esplanade, where he'd moved his bed and his books and his piano the moment the place was his. Rose had been staying at Uncle Veryl's town house, where the old man-to the shocked horror of the entire Viellard and St. Chinian clan-was insisting on holding the wedding reception, having claimed the right to give the bride away in the church. That night, however, Rose came to the Esplanade house, too, and the two of them cleaned out the kitchen hearth and cooked their first supper together. When Henri Viellard knocked on the door at midnight, flustered and panting with the news that Dominique had gone into labor, Rose was still there.

“I'll have Therese to help me, and Olympe,” said January, kissing her as he dressed. “There's no sense in both of us falling asleep at the wedding Mass tomorrow.”

Charmian was born two hours before first light. Coming out of Dominique's house into the steamy darkness, January started to turn inland, to his own house, then, on impulse, went the other way, river-ward. Even at this hour, when he crossed the Place d'Armes, he could see torchlight and movement on the levee; men's voices called out, and from the gambling-halls the jangle of music came, softened with distance to something almost resembling beauty. He felt wakeful in the warm thick-scented night, aware that he'd pay tomorrow for every half-hour's delay in returning to his bed, but knowing there was something he must do.

The Cathedral doors were open. The two nuns keeping prayer-vigil before the Host glanced back at him as he made his way down the side-aisle, but either he looked sufficiently respectable, or their faith upheld their courage: as he took a taper from the box and lighted a candle before the Virgin's image, they merely returned to their prayers.

A candle for Dominique, and a candle for tiny Charmian.

And a candle of thanks, for the wedding to come.

“If you are there, Artois,” he said-for the longer he stayed around Olympe, the closer he felt to those no longer in this world-“I hope you will be with us, too, later on today, as I would have prayed you be, had things been otherwise. And maybe had you not been killed-had Rose and I not had to flee together to the south-she and I would not be wedding. We would only have gone on as we were, to come together differently, or not at all. If that's the case, I'm sorry. I would not have traded your life for this, sweet as this happiness is.”

And in the dark of the Cathedral the candles flared up bright, the light consuming the wax, and glowing on the face of God's mother, bent down over them and watching all the earth with her benevolent secret smile.

January knelt there for a long while, and in time, his thoughts of what might have been, or could have been, dissolved only into the scent of the incense, and the honey perfume of the wax, and the starry brightness of the flame; and that was enough. “Artois,” he said, “I love you.”

And the flame and the dark both answered, in the voice of the boy and the man he would not grow to be, And I you, my friend.

January went out into the hot night with peace in his heart, and walked down the blue streets of the French town with his soul full of music, knowing Rose waited for him.

In the winter of 1835 a man named Murrel organized a conspiracy to foment widespread slave rebellion, with the intention of looting plantation houses in its wake all along the lower Mississippi valley when their owners fled. Murrel was arrested on another charge-slave-stealing-before the plan could go into effect, but others were tried and hanged.

The island of Grand Terre, where Jean Lafitte had his pirate settlement, is now completely occupied by a government research station. Most houses on the near-by Grand Isle sit on fourteen-foot piers, fourteen feet being the height at which flood insurance kicks in. Numerous Chighizolas still inhabit the island, and a blacksmith shop-said to be Jean Lafitte's-stands to this day on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, though it's now a rather pleasant little bar.

If you dig among the flottants that make up the northern shore of Grand Terre Island, you'll find, mixed with any amount of mud and broken clamshells, fragments of china dishes. These are the remains of the resort hotels built from the 1860s to the 1890s-a period of relatively few hurricanes in that area--on the barrier islands that divide Barataria Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. It's understandable why people would want to vacation there: the islands of Grand Isle and Grand Terre and the little peninsula of Chenier Caminada have an indescribable sleepy magic that's extremely seductive. By the 1890s a number of large resort communities had joined the original small populations of fishermen, shrimpers, and trappers.

In 1893 a massive hurricane came ashore at Chenier Caminada and wiped out most of the population and nearly all of the resort hotels, killing over 1,900 people.

Approximately where Jean Lafitte had his camp, the United States government later built Fort Livingston, which is itself slowly collapsing into the Gulf of Mexico as tidal forces erode the island from beneath it. Grand Terre, Grand Isle, and the lesser islands of the Barataria are much smaller now than they were in the 1830s, gradually being chewed away by the sea as the ecological balance of river silt and tides is altered for the convenience of shipping.

There are a lot of stories about Jean Lafitte, who became a figure of romance almost as soon as he disappeared, and I am indebted to the papers of the Jean Lafitte Society for a whole spectrum of fact and theory. Lafitte seems to have come to prominence primarily as a broker of smuggled and pirated goods, only uniting the various factions of the Barataria pirates in 1812 into a single operation. In 1814 he threw in his lot with the Americans against the invading British, and won his niche in American history. But whichever side won the battle-and with it, control of the entire mid-section of the North American continent-Lafitte's freebooting days were numbered, since neither the Americans nor the British would tolerate organized piracy in the Gulf. Lafitte's camp of over one thousand men was burned out in 1816, and he retreated to Campeachy on the Texas coast. In 1821, out of consideration for past services, the American navy gave him twenty-four hours to give up that headquarters also, and he sailed away, presumably to the Yucatan, though I have encountered those who argue that he gave up piracy and settled in Missouri and lived to a ripe old age.

He appears to have been the last of the organized pirates in the Caribbean.

Louisiana is the only state in the United States where leprosy-almost certainly imported with the African slaves-was endemic. The only leprosarium in the continental United States still exists at Carville.

BARBARA HAMBLY attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master's degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Ms. Hambly lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on The Emancipator's Wife, a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln.