Hagar (2 page)

Mostly the company assembled in the parlor at
Belle Jour were those Rose knew from Benjamin’s work with the
Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society. The amiable
perfumer Crowdie Passebon (a.k.a. D’Artagnan, for the night) and
his family. The undertaker Beauvais Quennell. Basile Nogent the
stonecutter, Fortune Gerard who sold coffee-beans and teas at the
Sign of the Velvet Mask on Rue St-Pierre… children and
grandchildren of the French and Spanish who’d come to New Orleans
to make their fortunes, as her own father and grandfather had:
white men who’d had the decency to free the women of color on whom
they’d fathered children, and make sure those children had the
education to make their way in the world. Arnaud Levesque, indeed,
had risen in wealth to the point that he could purchase a
plantation on the main river and slaves of his own, while his two
brothers had remained prosperous carpenters to the end of their
days. He and his wife greeted Livia with polite effusiveness and
very proper admiration of her costume – Rose noticed (when she got
close enough to see it clearly) that Candide Levesque was gowned in
a startlingly accurate imitation of Marie Antoinette (always
supposing that the late queen of France had darkened six shades and
put on forty pounds), complete with the obligatory two-foot
powdered wig. “No wonder your grandmother felt she had to dress up
as Queen Elizabeth,” Rose whispered to Gabriel. Up on the dais at
one end of the parlor, the musicians flashed Rose a succession of
welcoming smiles without missing a beat. Jules Cassat was a
perfectly adequate pianist, but he was young and new and Rose – and
most of the musicians as well, she guessed – missed her husband
Benjamin’s light, skillful touch on the keys.

“I’ve had a letter from Benjamin,” said the
fiddler Hannibal Sefton, two hours later at the first break in the
program, when supper was announced. “Written from Baltimore,
evidently the day they arrived.”

“I have, too.” Rose donned her spectacles
again – across the long parlor Agnes Pellicot, as Gabriel had
predicted, had moulted her wings like a queen ant, and various
other guests, having made their costumed entrances, were
surreptitiously discarding their less convenient accoutrements in
every corner. Anne Corbier, a grandmother to her bone-marrow, kept
“Baby Isaac” in her arms.

“He said he’d collected a vast amount of
information about the man Madame Viellard has hired him to find,
which he says is about as helpful as a description of the average
needle when one is about to investigate a haystack – will you bring
yours to dinner Sunday?”

“I kiss your hands and feet.” Hannibal bowed.
Cadaverous in his shabby long-tailed coat, he was the only white
man in the room, and was keeping, Rose observed, as far away from
the champagne on the refreshment table as he could without being
obvious about it. “
Nerine Galatea, thymo mihi dulcior
Hyblae
. I don’t suppose we’ll get word of the results of his
search much before he arrives on your doorstep with them, but I
must admit I’m curious as to how—”

Out on the front gallery, a man shouted,
“Fire!”

Hannibal caught Rose’s hands and drew back
from the sudden surge toward the French-doors onto the gallery. Her
first glance showed her that sensibly, Anne Corbier – with Baby
John in her arms – had likewise retreated: every other guest in the
parlor was shoving like water sloshing in a dish-pan –
What a
stupid thing to shout, fire WHERE? In the kitchen? In one wing of
this house? Should we flee, or
…? – and as if in response to
Rose’s thought someone else – also on the front gallery – yelled,
“Looks like Marais!”

The long room emptied: by the time Rose and
Hannibal made their way onto the front gallery it was crammed with
guests leaning over the rail. Like most plantations along the
river, Belle Jour was built on seven-foot brick piers, and from its
gallery the red-lit smoke was clearly visible beyond the trees to
the immediate south.

“It’s the house!” Arnaud Levesque was already
stripping himself of court coat and red-heeled shoes. Indeed, Rose
could see the glare of the flames was approximately in a line with
the Big House of Belle Jour, and not farther back toward the woods
and swamps, where the quarters and the workshops of a plantation
customarily lay. Arnaud’s valet came running with his boots; every
man on the gallery, like their host, was divesting himself of every
portion of his costume that could conceivably hamper his abilities
as a fire-fighter. Isaak Jumon, Vachel Corcet, and several others
were already running toward the river road in the white tunics
they’d had on under various forms of Roman toga. Arnaud shouted for
someone to get to the quarters and turn out the slaves.

Together Hannibal and Rose clattered down the
gallery steps, and followed along with the crowd.

It was indeed the Big House at Marais
Plantation that was in flames.

The Marais slaves had formed a bucket-line
from the river, but there weren’t nearly enough to cover the
distance. The men who’d come from town for an evening of dancing
and chat with their friends filled in the gaps, shoulder to
shoulder with Arnaud Levesque’s house-servants and field-hands
alike. Back among the crowd of women, Rose observed that the fire
seemed to be spreading from the front corner room of the main
house’s downstream side. She automatically identified the room: in
every French Creole house, that was the chamber occupied by the
house’s mistress. Someone shouted, “Is your Master home?” and the
man nearest in the line replied, “No sir. But M’am Leonie in there,
I seen the light in her room!”

Men ran toward the burning house along the
sweating, struggling line. Rose, running among them, knew – they
all knew – how smoke could overcome a sleeper, or panic trap one
newly-awakened. Shouted fragments of information jolted over the
roar of the flame: “Neuville’s in New York – overseer left last
week – half the crop lost when the fields got waterlogged—”

The house, like Belle Jour, was long and low
in the Carribean style. Someone had broken out the French doors of
the burning room, but backed away from the heat of the blaze;
buckets of water were hurled around and past the would-be rescuer
as Rose and the men pounded up the gallery steps. A young woman in
a night-rail, black curls tumbled over her shoulders, sobbed, “I
tried to get to her, when first I smelled the smoke. The fire’s in
her room, sir, I couldn’t get near. I did try!” Tears ran down her
face.

Mohammad LePas the blacksmith grabbed the
next bucket to come down the line and dumped it over his own head.
The flames within the room were already sinking. Rose seized
another vessel and did the same, and more water was thrown through
the French doors into the room:
curious
, she thought,
how
the common foe of fire will cause men to work together
.

Even more curious – Rose watched the flame
with narrowed eyes – how ferociously and how suddenly the fire had
taken hold. “What will I say to Michie Jèrôme when he comes home?”
wailed the night-gowned young maidservant. “My poor Madame—”

Arnaud Levesque kicked through the last
remains of the door.

The room within was – as Rose had already
glimpsed – surprisingly little damaged. That was Rose’s second
impression, as the torchlight flared up behind her and the stench
of burned wood, charred wool, and the horrible sickly odor of
roasted flesh filled her nostrils like dirty water.

Her first impression, momentary but very
strong, was of two other smells that she recognized at once from
the simplest chemical experiments she had taught her students when
she’d had the school.

One of them was the characteristic garlic
smell of nitre.

The other was the rotten-egg stink of
sulpher.

Long before she’d taught school she’d known
them – from her work making fireworks for the New Orleans
Opera.

The maidservant gave a cry of despair and
staggered, covering her eyes. “Madame! Oh, Madame!” Arnaud began to
lead her away, and from the ground below Rose heard the clatter of
hooves, and someone shouting, “Lieutenant Parton, sir!”

White militia.

The slave-patrol, probably – whoever got the
short straw on the night of Andrew Jackson’s birthday
celebration…

Superheated air burning her cheeks like a
bake-oven, Rose walked over to the charred horror of the bed.

A man behind her in shirtsleeves and the good
wool trousers of a house-servant held his torch high. “That’s the
dress she had on earlier this evenin’, m’am. Sir,” he added, since
Fortune Gerard and Mohammed LePas had joined her.

Gerard gasped, “Dear God!” and crossed
himself, but the blacksmith said,

“What was that mattress stuffed with?”

Rose had been wondering that herself.

The pillow, at least, had been stuffed with
goose down, as the stench of burned feathers amply attested. It was
just as well, she reflected, that Leonie Neuville had lain down
still dressed on her bed, and that some of her long, red hair
remained. Her face was a charred horror, and by the look of her
hands she must have tried to strike out the flame once it had taken
hold.

Yet in that case, why didn’t she try to flee
the room?

And her hands weren’t anywhere near her face.
Nor near the smouldering ashes of the pillow.

Arnaud Levesque came striding back in,
instants ahead of a stockily-built white man in the coarse garb and
an ill-fitting military jacket. A shade more emphatically than he’d
have spoken to a man of his own class, Arnaud announced,
“Lieutenant Parton, may I introduce you to some of my guests this
evening. Madame Janvier, M’sieu Gerard, M’sieu LePas, all of New
Orleans.”

Lieutenant Parton scowled, but replied,
“Well, maybe you-all better tell your guests that the excitement’s
all done here, Mr. Levesque. We’d be best served if they’d take
themselves back to your place. Good
Lord
,” he added, turning
toward the bed. “Jesus Christ, what a sorry business! Frank, bring
up that torch—”

He winced, and drew back from the stench, and
the ghastly thing that the better light revealed. Then he frowned
sharply, and said, “An’ she just laid there while all this was
goin’ on?” Indeed – as Rose herself had observed – neither the
woman’s gray-and-lavender dress, nor the light blankets upon which
she lay, were much disarrayed. Parton bent, and from beneath the
bed took a tumbler of yellowish glass, which still contained a few
drops of liquid. Beneath the small table at the bedside, protected
from the water that had been hurled on the flames, was a covered
pitcher of the same material, still half-full. The militia officer
drew it out, sniffed at the contents and grimaced: “Frank?” he
called to the man behind him. “What’s that smell like to you? And
get Burgess in here, he’s an apothecary—”

The man Frank handed his torch to Rose – she
was the only one of the guests still in the room – and took the
pitcher between his hands to breathe its contents: “Faugh! It’s
laudanum.”

“That’s what I thought.” Parton’s heavy face
was grim. “Somebody dosed her good, then set the place afire. Damn
sneakin’ niggers. They figured with all the white men in the
district up in town tonight the place’d be burned to the ground
before anybody knew what’d happened.” He stood, took the torch from
Rose as another man, stringy and rat-gray, came in, presumably
Burgess the apothecary.

“Round ‘em up, Frank,” grated Lieutenant
Parton. “Get the men out onto the roads and into the woods. Sure as
gun’s iron, some of ‘em’ll have run off. How many niggers did
Neuville have on the place? Fifty-three? This place got a jail on
it? Faugh,” he added, at the news that the Marais jail consisted of
a single cell. “Mr. Levesque, we’d be obliged if you’d lend us
yours for the night. And you better count your own boys over, to
make sure none of Neuville’s is tryin’ to pass himself off among
‘em. Or among your guests.”

*

“Well,
really
!” exploded Helène
Passebon, when Rose related this last remark to the re-assembled
guests in the Belle Jour parlor an hour later. “The very
idea
!”

“Only an American,” fumed Odile Gignac the
dressmaker, “would even
think
that field-hands –
blacks
! – could be mistaken by
anybody
for
respectable colored—”

She was certainly correct, reflected Rose,
particularly given the fact that the Neuville slaves would be
covered with dirt and sweat from trying to put out the fire in
their master’s house. But then, so were many of the men who’d come
from town for the birthday celebrations, and she could also
understand why some of the slaves might try to lose themselves in
the general crowd, once Lieutenant Parton arrived.

While indignation frothed in the parlor and
Arnaud Levesque’s butler and house-boy arranged the late supper
into a buffet instead, Rose passed through the French door and out
onto the back gallery. Her wet costume chilled her in the spring
night, and she hugged closer the threadbare coat Hannibal had
wrapped around her shoulders, with her blue-and-gold striped
Egyptian head-dress drawn over it like a shawl.

Levesque had left Crowdie Passebon –
President of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial
Society, and well known to almost every wealthy white man in New
Orleans – in charge at Belle Jour, with Hannibal the fiddler as his
second-in-command. Adorned himself in somebody’s pink-and-turquoise
Norwich silk shawl, the feckless musician was nobody’s idea of a
leader, but as the only white man present, his was the only
testimony that would be accepted in a court of law (“That it should
come to this!” trumpeted Agnes Pellicot in fury). Passebon had had
cressets set up in the long, narrow yard between the rear wings of
the house, and had assembled there every one of Arnaud Levesque’s
slaves, from Jojo the foreman to old Granmere Lomie to the tiniest
baby, presumably because not all members of the St. Bernard Parish
militia could be trusted not to take advantage of confusion and
darkness, and kidnap a slave for re-sale elsewhere and later.