Hagar (3 page)

Levesque himself, Fortune Gerard, Vachel
Corcet the attorney, and a handful of other men picked because they
were attestably well-known to all members of the New Orleans City
Council and business community, had remained at Marais – sticking
to one another like seeds in a cotton-boll, Rose was certain – to
make sure that no free colored guest who had inadvertantly strayed
from the bucket-lines would wander back to the scene of the fire
and find himself thrust into the plantation slave-jail. Militiamen
swarmed the woods between the two houses.

She stood for a long time, looking out over
the little community of the unfree, as they bedded down
philosophically on their corn-shuck pallets on the ground.

She knew what happened, when a slave murdered
the master. What the penalty was.

“Idiots.” Livia stepped out onto the gallery
behind her. “Anybody in the parish can tell them who did it.” She
was still attired as the Virgin Queen. Sensibly enough, Rose
thought, considering that so clothed, nobody could possibly mistake
her for anything but a guest at the Levesque masquerade. Muted
reflections from the windows whispered in her galaxies of pearls.
“For all the airs the girl gave herself, wailing about her
poor
Madame
and how shocked Michie Jèrôme will be when he hears…
hmpf!”

“You mean the maid?” Rose hadn’t even been
aware Livia had followed the crowd – a startling lacuna,
considering her outfit.

“Everyone from New Orleans to Jesuit’s Bend
knows about Jèrôme Neuville buying Ariette for his wife’s maid and
then taking her as his mistress. And Leonie had to sit still for
it, that her hair was brushed and her wash-water fetched by the
woman her husband was bulling. Not that Leonie Neuville deserves
anyone’s pity, for a colder-hearted witch you’d go far to find. But
what Neuville thought would be the end of it, if not this, I can’t
imagine.”

Rose shivered, and rubbed her arms beneath
the shabby coat. “I wonder the woman didn’t take the first chance
when her husband was absent, and get rid of the poor girl.”

“You don’t know Jèrôme Neuville.”

“It doesn’t sound like I want to.” Rose tried
to keep her voice light, but her mother-in-law gave her a sidelong
look from those dark, brilliant eyes.

“No dealer with a mind to avoid a lawsuit is
going to buy from a woman whose husband is away. Likely they know
that
situation all too well. I’m told Leonie had the little
hussy whipped, the first time Neuville was from home, but when
Neuville came home and heard of it, he whipped his wife for it
himself, stroke for stroke, so there was nothing more heard of
that
. Since her land was all Mistress Leonie had to bring to
the marriage, and it was her brother-in-law who sold this place to
Arnaud before he took himself and the rest of the family off to
Georgia – and why Pauline Giffleurs thought that marrying a
jumped-up Irish American animal was a good idea in the first place
I’ll never know! – Leonie has no one really to turn to. Their
parents – hers and Pauline’s – were dead four years ago in the
cholera, and neither of those girls would give a cup of water to
the other or to anyone else to keep them from dying of thirst.”

Livia shrugged, and Rose inwardly marvelled
at her mother-in-law’s comprehensive command of the slightest and
most
recherché
threads of gossip, not only in New Orleans
but evidently for a considerable distance up and down the
river.

Still her mind returned to the charred-out
oven of that bedroom, with the torchlight throwing her shadow
before her. To the walls that were burned in some places and in
others not, to the mattress that hadn’t taken fire –
wool,
probably
– and the pillow that had, to the gray-and-lavender
gown that lay so unrumpled over the dead woman’s legs, while her
hands and face had been charred nearly to the bone. To the smell of
sulfur, and of nitre.

Below the gallery, the murmur of the slaves’
voices lowered, but did not altogether cease. A child cried and was
hushed; Rose caught drifts of cane-patch French, so thick with
African words that she couldn’t distinguish what was being said.
Benjamin probably could
, she reflected. Even so, she could
guess what was being said. Beyond doubt, there were those among the
Belle Jour hands who wived or husbanded “abroad” to those enslaved
on Marais. Knowing the law in such cases, and aware – through
whispered extrapolation of things seen and heard at Marais when the
militia rode up – that laudanum had been found in the room, that
the fire had been deliberately set.

When a slave killed a master, the law was
that all slaves of the household would die.

*

Candide Levesque was a little surprised at
Rose’s request, but wrote out for her a “pass” for a slave to
travel by night. “It is vital that word of the fire at Marais
Plantation reach the proper authorities in New Orleans by morning.”
Though she had never been a slave, for seven years she had lived on
her white father’s tiny plantation on Grand Isle, and her best
friend, Cora, had educated her in a wealth of detail about the
things slaves had to put up with and watch out for.

Gabriel volunteered to go, mounted on one of
the Belle Jour riding-mules and openly wearing a tin slave-badge
borrowed from Fortune Gerard’s valet, since the patrols – who knew
pretty much everyone in the parish – wouldn’t have believed him if
he’d said he was one of the Levesque slaves. “I don’t know where
Lieutenant Shaw will be—” Rose named the only member of the New
Orleans City Guard whose intelligence and integrity she had learned
to trust. “But take my message to the Cabildo, and tell them there
that it’s important. That a woman has been murdered in strange
circumstances here, and that we need his judgement.”

This was all, in fact, that her note to Shaw
said, because she knew nothing further.

Not yet.

Her heart beat quickly at the thought of the
militiamen who’d still be milling around Marais, guarding the
slave-jail there as two of them were guarding the stout little
brick building here, that lay just beyond the kitchen behind the
Big House, into which the rest of the Marais slaves had been filed.
But though Lieutenant Parton had impressed her as respectful – to a
point – of the custom of the country regarding a free colored
planter, she mistrusted the stubborn set of his mouth, and the
surly resentment that glinted in his eyes.

So as Arnaud Levesque’s house-slaves laid
down pallets in the attic for the male guests, and distributed the
satchels and carpetbags of the women among the bed-chambers and
store-rooms of the house’s two wings, Rose followed the soft
plunking of a banjo out onto the front gallery, and as she had
expected found Hannibal experimentally picking out the largo of
Vivaldi’s Lute Concerto in D. There wasn’t an instrument invented
that the fiddler wouldn’t try to get music out of.

“
Athene swift descended from
above,

Sent by the sister and the wife of
Jove….”

He turned his head at the creak of the
planking underfoot, and Rose smiled at his nickname for her. “I saw
someone who looked suspiciously like Gabriel ride out of here a few
minutes ago – I hope you have plans to explain to Benjamin how it
will come that we’ll be obliged to buy him out of prison…”

“He has a pass,” said Rose. “Also a
slave-badge.”

“
Ad tristem partem strenua suspicio
.”
He made to set the banjo aside. “It isn’t my business, of course,
but might he not be safer by daylight?”

“By daylight,” returned Rose, “that idiot
militia lieutenant will have rummaged around in what’s left of
Leonie Neuville’s bedroom and trampled to pieces whatever there is
to be seen.”

In the shadow of the gallery Hannibal was
little more than a blur, yet still she saw the lift of his mobile
eyebrows. “And what is there to be seen?”

“I won’t know that ‘til I see it.”

*

Rose fed Baby John, and changed from her
assortment of Biblical bedsheets into the striped skirt and
stiffened canvas work-bodice – not to mention stouter shoes – that
she’d brought in a carpet-bag for going home in. She lay for a time
in the shuttered darkness of one of the spare bed-chambers beside
Zizi-Marie, listening to the other women guests gossipping softly
in the room next door:

“Well, of course it was the maid Ariette! And
the way Leonie Neuville treated her it’s no wonder!”

“Served her right, for lying with Neuville,
and in M’am Neuville’s own house, too!”

“She must have thought the poison in that
pitcher would be destroyed in the fire…”

Rose remembered the girl’s face, streaming
with tears in the firelight.
Madame, oh, Madame
…

And who knows if Hagar in the Bible had any
enthusiasm for the job when Sarah “gave her to her husband” that
the younger woman might provide the old man with sons?

When the voices fell silent she tucked the
blankets more firmly around her son, then slipped from the bed,
and, shoes in hand, padded out to the gallery again. The moon was
just past full, the sky blotched with cloud. A pair of militiamen
rode past on the river road, patrolling for runaway slaves. From
the blackness of the gallery Hannibal’s light, scratchy voice
murmured, “
You come most carefully upon your hour
,” and Rose
smelled the acrid harshness of hot metal from a shaded
dark-lantern.

“Did you notice anything odd at Marais this
evening?” asked Rose softly, as they descended the gallery steps.
“Anything about the fire?”

“Other than the fact that it took a woman’s
life?” He shivered. “I wasn’t in the room. How the girl thought
she’d get away with it, since apparently everyone in the parish
knows her relations with the master—”

“Yes.” Rose twisted the night-time braid of
her hair up onto the crown of her head, and fished in her pockets
for a comb to hold it in place. After a moment Hannibal, who
borrowed such articles from his lady-friends for his own use,
disentangled one from his own long hair and held it out to her.
“Thank you—If the girl Ariette had indeed poisoned her mistress,
and set that fire, why would she have stayed?”

“To throw people off the scent? Parton’s got
half an army of men on the roads and in the woods, I doubt anyone
could get away from the house tonight.”

“Maybe,” said Rose. “But what I smelled when
first I stepped into the room was nitre and sulpher – the
ingredients of flash-paper. Where would a slave-girl have gotten
that? And why would she use such a thing, when she could douse the
room in lamp-oil to the same effect?”

“Who else would have wanted Madame Neuville
out of the way? Her husband? I hear he left just after Mardi Gras
for New York, but of course he could always have doubled back. But
surely he wouldn’t deliberately choose a method that would throw
the blame on Ariette—”

“Not to mention that would entail the state
executing fifty thousand dollars’ worth of slaves for complicity in
the murder,” added Rose. “That’s why I want to—”

The soft crunch of a footfall in the gravel
drive made her spin. Freckled moonlight touched a slim, tall
figure, silhouetted the points of a dark tignon stylishly tied.

“Don’t be silly, dear,” said Livia Levesque’s
voice. “They won’t kill all of them. Just the house-niggers.”

“Madame.” Hannibal bowed.

Only her mother-in-law, Rose reflected, would
have paused to arrange her headgear before slipping out for a
midnight excursion. Livia, or her daughter Dominique… And only
Livia (or Dominique, who for a variety of reasons had gone to
Washington City with Benjamin) would have brought, as her
alternative to the costume of the Virgin Queen, a lace-trimmed
challis gown elegant enough to pass in any drawing-room in New
Orleans.

They had reached the belt of woods that
separated Belle Jour from Marais, and the smell of smoke – threaded
with the more sinister stench of charred meat – hung gritty in the
air.

“I’m still going to have a look at that
bedroom,” said Rose. “I don’t think the girl did it, and I
don’t—”

Livia straightened her lacy cuffs. “Good
heavens, dear, I’m not trying to stop you. I’m perfectly well aware
that no amount of talking is going to make you listen to reason.
But I was being driven insane by Agnes Pellicot’s driveling – the
woman
will
not shut up, and insisted on waking that poor
daughter of hers to play picquet with her til she felt sleepy… And
when she sleeps, she snores. I don’t wonder Jacques Pellicot paid
her off the minute he decently could.”

And no amount of talking, Rose was aware in
her turn, was going to send her mother-in-law back when she was on
the track of the freshest information available about whatever
scandal might be brewing. Not a woman to waste her breath, she only
said, “I may ask you to stay out of sight when I go around to speak
to the girl Ariette in the slave-jail. Hannibal, you won’t object
to backing up my story about being Ariette’s cousin—”

“Not in the slightest, Owl-Eyed Athene.”

“I’ll do that last, I think.” Rose paused at
the edge of the trees, surveying the dark bulk of the house in the
spatch-cocked moonlight. A tiny spot of grimy yellow, half-hidden
by the house itself, marked where the slave-jail stood, about a
hundred feet behind it. As she watched, a shadow passed across that
light, where a militiaman – probably more than one – stood guard.
“There’s things I want to see in the house first.”

Livia inclined her head graciously, as if
granting her permission. And, Rose had to admit, the older woman
was quick and quiet-footed as a cat, slipping from tree-shadow to
tree-shadow when they reached the double line of oaks that marked
the drive from the Marais landing to the house. She had been, Rose
recalled, a slave herself. There must have been times in that
portion of her life – of which she never spoke – when she had
needed that particular survival skill.