Hagar (4 page)

The way was sodden from the bucket-line that
had passed along it earlier in the night, and littered with the
jetsam of the party guests as they’d fallen into the ranks of the
struggling slaves: a gaudy tabard trampled in the mud, that Rose
had seen Crowdie Passebon wearing; an embroidered Turkish slipper;
Father Abraham’s discarded beard.

A curtain had been hastily nailed over the
broken-out French door of Leonie Neuville’s bedroom, to keep foxes
or stray dogs from getting at the body. Hannibal cracked the slide
on his dark-lantern enough to let Rose pick the lock on the
shutters that covered the French doors on the husband’s side of the
house. The rest of the shutters were bolted from within.

“When will Jèrôme Neuville be back?” murmured
Rose, as they stepped into the absolute blackness of the house. The
smell of smoke almost choked her, of burned wool and burned flesh.
Hannibal raised the lantern-slide a little more, and flashed the
beam around the room. The walls were slightly smoke-darkened, but
showed no touch of burning. The single bed was covered with some
dark fabric – American brocade, probably – but had not been made
up, the mosquito-bar looped back and knotted to the tester. Still
the room had the air of a place inhabited: newspapers on the
bedside table, basin and ewer set on the shaving-stand. Benjamin’s
room, in the big old house on Rue Esplanade, though it contained a
bed as was considered proper in all Creole houses, was in fact a
sort of study, equipped with a desk and shelves of books.

This looked like a bedroom.

“Whatever Neuville’s relations with his wife
were,” said Hannibal softly. “It will be shock to the woman’s
family—”

“The only shock anyone who knew Leonie likely
to sustain is that she was home on the night of the biggest
subscription ball between Mardi Gras and Easter,” retorted Livia.
“She spent all her time at the town house. Or she did before
Neuville got Tom Moberly as overseer.”

“The one who left last week?”

“Odd, isn’t it?” asked Rose. “That he went
immediately after the owner departed?”

“After selling half the crop and two-thirds
of the plantation stores of food, I’ll be bound.” The older woman’s
voice was dry as they moved cautiously into the parlor. “Half the
parish knows the place was in trouble, but it was only
mismanagement – mismanagement and lies. That nonsense about the
fields that got water-logged… that’s a lie that would only stand
with a man who hasn’t been around on his own fields. And what else
they expected from a good-looking young snake like Moberly I’d be
hard put to tell. Every time Neuville would leave this place – he
has cotton land up near Baton Rouge, and is buying up acres in
Texas as well – hogsheads of sugar would start disappearing, and
cord-wood from the sheds. And Moberly would sweet-talk Leonie into
thinking it was all misfortune or her poor bookkeeping, belike… the
man could talk anybody into anything, I’ve heard. Like most
good-for-nothing men.”

“I stand chastised.” Hannibal bowed his
head.

“Get along with you. You’re the worst of the
lot.” But her voice softened as she spoke, in a way that made Rose
smile.

But a thought came to her, as the
lantern-beam flashed across the open door to the bedroom beyond.
Smoke had blackened the ceiling on that whole side of the room, and
smutted the furniture. Yet the door-frames weren’t charred, and
when Rose stepped into the bedroom, her earlier impression was
confirmed. The fire had raged across the outside wall that faced
the gallery, had burned the floor on that side of the room, and had
burned the bed.

When Rose – very gently – turned back the
unsullied coverlet that someone had brought in from some other room
of the house, she caught again, above the horror of roasted flesh,
the faint whiff of nitre.

“It looks like she was planning to go to bed,
when the girl – or whoever it was – brought her the poison,” the
fiddler remarked after a time of silence. The lantern-light, fully
uncovered now, shivered with the shaking of his hand. “She’s still
dressed,” he added, his voice held steady with an effort, “but she
hadn’t taken off her shoes. She’d let her hair down, though, and
women often leave that for last. Odd,” he went on after a moment,
“that it wasn’t burned.”

“But fortunate,” returned Rose drily. “Since
it was only by her hair, and her dress, that we – and of course the
good Lieutenant Parton – knew it was she, and not someone else.”
She walked to the end of the bed, and carefully drew back the hem
of that lavender gown, to better expose the woman’s black kid
slippers, and stockings of white knitted silk. “Bring the lantern
close, if you would…”

Hannibal edged forward, eyes averted.

Carefully, Rose felt at the woman’s toes
through the soft leather. Her foot was a good inch shorter than the
shoe that contained it, and even the dimness of the single candle
didn’t conceal the fact that the pale spots worn by the joint of
the big toe didn’t match the shape of the toe itself. When she
removed the shoe and stocking, the tale was clearer still.

“That looks like the kind of blisters you get
when you wear shoes that don’t fit you.” Hannibal bent closer, and
no longer sounded sickened. His dark brows pinched down over the
bridge of his nose. “When you’re getting your shoes second-hand…
and no good Creole lady is going to let her toe-nails get into that
condition!”

“Not while she has a maid to trim them,”
commented Livia dispassionately.

“Who—?”

“I expect,” said Rose, “that Lieutenant Shaw
will be able to find that out, once he knows to look for a missing
red-haired girl along the docks and waterfront.” She slipped the
shoe and stocking back on – Hannibal turned away queasily again,
but Livia, who had certainly seen worse damage to human flesh in
her years as a slave, held the stiffening ankle steady while Rose
worked. “Look,” Rose added, and guided Hannibal’s lantern back to
the burned ruin of the woman’s hand. “That’s not a wedding-ring
that a poor woman would wear; I’m guessing it’s Leonie
Neuville’s.”

“How did you know?” Hannibal slipped the
lantern-slide half down, to shine the beam around the shambles of
the room. “What does flash-paper have to do with this? And why
would Leonie Neuville use it in the murder? How easy is it to
obtain?”

Rose had turned away from the body, and began
to gingerly work open the drawers of the small secretaire that
stood beside the French doors out onto the gallery. The fire had
seized them violently, but the cypress-wood was tough. The contents
– household books, stationery, a box of pen-nibs – were mostly
undamaged. “For a white woman, not difficult, if she knew what to
ask for. And the advantage is that it localizes the burns.” She
held the lantern close as she scanned the pages of the day-books,
then replaced them with a grimace: Nothing.

“Meaning you can lay it over the face, and
wrap the hands, but leave the dress and the hair untouched.”

“Particularly the hair.” Rose returned to the
bed, Hannibal trailing her with lantern raised, like Diogenes hot
on the scent of truth. “Hair is usually what catches first, you
know. It’s actually fairly difficult to get flesh to burn up like
that.”

Hannibal shivered. “I can only hope the poor
girl was dead before Leonie set the place ablaze – What are you
looking for?”

“You needn’t bother,” added Livia, coming up
behind Hannibal to observe Rose’s search beneath the mattress.
“She’ll have taken them with her.”

“Taken what?”

“The plantation financial records.” Livia
nodded down at Rose. “The real ones, I mean, not those that she’ll
have left in her husband’s desk. If the woman was going to fake her
own death and flee – in such a way as to ensure that her rival
would be blamed and her husband would suffer the loss of fifty
thousand dollars’ worth of property, between the servants and the
house itself, not counting the furniture, which I must say I
wouldn’t pay twenty dollars for brand-new – she has to have planned
for her own getaway by diverting profits from last year’s harvest.
She doubtless colluded with that baby-faced weasel Moberly, which
means she’d better have kept an accurate record, if she didn’t want
him
to skim the lot.”

“I’m afraid you’re right.” Rose straightened
up, and dusted the filth and soot from her hands. Her whole arm was
soiled, but in the darkness – and with her shawl wrapped over it –
that wouldn’t be visible. At least she hoped not…

Hooves thudded on the turf outside, passing
around the house toward the slave-jail in the rear. Dim voices
rumbled:
Find anythin’? Nuthin’ yet
…

“And she’ll have made some arrangement to get
away from the house—”

“She’ll have to have run pretty fast,”
remarked Hannibal, as they passed again through the silent parlor,
and into Jérôme Neuville’s chamber. “Once the blaze started every
slave on the place would be working to put it out. She can’t have
counted on your brother-in-law—” He inclined his head politely to
Livia, “—and his guests lending a hand at quelling it so quickly,
Madame.”

“Arnaud is always quick to do what his
neighbors are likely to praise him for.”

She said it as if she herself hadn’t been
putting on a display of gentility for everyone in the French Town
for thirty-five years.

In the upstream bedchamber they listened at
the door, then slipped out into the dark of the gallery, and
hurried down the steps. Men’s voices carried faintly from the
direction of the slave-jail. Only when they were clear of the
house, and without the appearance of having searched it, did
Hannibal unsheathe the light of his dark-lantern, and stride in the
lead like a man secure in his own righteousness, with Rose
following meekly behind. They passed the dark bulk of the
sugar-mill, rising like a stone fortress a short distance from the
house: Rose knew that the mills were invariably the most
solidly-built structures on any plantation, and this one, with its
shut doors and shuttered-up windows, was no exception. This one was
larger than the mill on her white father’s plantation down on Grand
Isle, and newer. As children, Rose and her white half-brothers had
been strictly forbidden to play in the mill, which had been kept
locked; she had, of course, managed to get inside anyway, risking a
beating for the sake of examining the machinery.

A place of forbidden fascination. Of
mysterious gears and levers and wheels.

It meant something different to Benjamin, who
had been a slave.

And, she understood, to Livia as well, though
her mother-in-law would never admit that she, too, had labored
naked to the waist in heat and exhaustion during the long season of
the
roulaison
, under threat of the whip.

To Rose, the
roulaison
had meant only
the singing of her father’s slaves in the foggy darkness of
December nights, the hell-mouth glow of every window seen across
the yard from the gallery outside her room, the smell of burned
sugar in the air and the taste of the low-hanging smoke when they’d
burn over the harvested fields. The slaves’ celebration, when the
harvest was done.

By the way Livia checked her stride, and
stood for a moment looking at the mill’s double doors, Rose
wondered what it was that she saw in her heart, and if she’d have
told the truth, had Rose asked her.

“It’s probably best you stay back, Madame,”
whispered Hannibal – a bit diffidently, because there was no
telling how Livia would react at the prospect of being left out of
things. “Alas,” he added with a bow, “you are dressed too fine to
make anyone believe you a slave.”

“Nonsense,” Livia retorted. “The dresses
Jérôme Neuville used to buy Ariette – according to Candide, anyway
– would put yours to shame, Rose. Twice as fine as anything he’d
put out money for, to clothe his wife, Candide says. But then
Candide’s always been a jealous witch.”

For a moment Rose had a ghastly vision of her
mother-in-law insisting on accompanying her and Hannibal up to the
jail, and informing Lieutenant Parton and his militiamen exactly
what she thought of out-at-elbows crackers gallopping around the
countryside in the middle of the night…

But Livia stepped back without demur, and
slipped like a shadow through the door of the mill.

“Who’s that there?” called out Lieutenant
Parton, as Rose and Hannibal came around the corner of the mill and
approached the jail.

“The name’s Sefton; I’m down from town
visiting Mr. Levesque.” Hannibal bowed – slightly – and offered his
card, which Parton looked at suspiciously and handed back, as if it
were Hannibal’s fault that Parton couldn’t read. “My girl here is
sister to poor Mrs. Neuville’s maid, and begged for the chance to
at least speak to her. Swears she’d never have set the fire or
poisoned her mistress—” He shrugged. “But I didn’t think there’d be
any harm in letting them speak.”

He casually dipped his hand in his pocket,
and the low glimmer of the lantern-light and the fire the guards
had made before the slave-jail door caught a metallic glint in his
hand when it came out again.

“No, no harm in it,” grunted Parton, and took
the coin. “But who else would have done a thing like that, if not
the girl? That’s what I want to know.”

He followed Rose to the door of the jail, and
stood beside her, smelling of cheap whiskey and soiled body-linen.
“You speak English, now, honey.”

She turned upon him him the wide, questioning
gaze employed by the guiltiest of her schoolgirls when confronted
with their crimes. “
Pardon
?” Her eyes went pleadingly to
Hannibal.

“She has no English, I’m afraid,” apologized
the fiddler. “I doubt Ariette does, either—”

While Parton scowled at this, Rose turned to
the barred judas in the door, called through it, “Ariette? I’m Rose
Vitrac, one of Arnaud Levesque’s guests, I’ve come to help
you—”