Libre (4 page)

“The rubies were worth more,” pointed out the
fiddler.

“If she was the kind of girl who’d take
jewels from one suitor to hand to another, she might have.” January
picked apart the little screw of newspaper the coffee-woman had
sold him for a penny, fished forth a broken lump of strong-tasting
muscavado sugar. “She could have stuffed them into her
marketing-basket, along with the worming-medicine that she used to
poison Marie-Therese.”

Behind and around them, market-women,
porters, slaves with shopping-baskets came and went among the
stalls with their bright heaps of vegetables, their silver cascades
of fish; a thousand elbows and basket-rims brushed his shoulders
from behind, like the leaves of a gently-moving tree. “But their
disappearance would announce her intentions more quickly. It’s just
possible that Nicholas Saverne would know the voodoos in town, and
where to find poison like that to slip into Marie-Therese’s coffee:
if he was disguised he could probably have done it undetected. But
if Zozo didn’t expect to disappear, why would she have worn any
jewels? No,” he said softly. “She planned it herself. And she
wanted no fortune to hand to an indebted lover; nothing that came
from her family, or the protector she was leaving behind. That much
was clear. She took only what her grandmother had given her – and
her gris-gris. Even if she were fleeing New Orleans, taking another
life and another name, she would not leave that behind.”

“Is that what she did? What she’s doing?”

January nodded. Behind Hannibal’s shoulder,
he caught a brief glimpse of a thin, stooped, scholarly old man in
a rusty black coat, leading a young woman along the wharves toward
the gangplank of the
Mary
, bound for Boston, according to
the chalked board outside the shipping office. A lovely
eighteen-year-old with dark curls escaping from beneath her bonnet,
and the gray eyes that told nothing of her heritage.

I will not be what my mother was
, he
heard her voice again in his mind, the words she had spoken to him
that morning in old M’sieu Vouziers’s little house.
I will not
take a kind protector, only to save me from an unkind one. It is
the world that I must flee, and not only one man
.

The crowd closed around them and they were
gone.

“I knew she spoke Spanish from the copy of
Don Quixote
I saw in her room – well, half the people in New
Orleans do. And since the only family she has are under the thumb
of her father, I guessed she’d go to her tutor, for advice at
least. If old M’sieu Vouziers trusted her enough to lend her books
that he’d owned for years – books he’d brought with him from Paris
– that argued a bond beyond what her family would comprehend or
even be aware of. I’ll have to get the books back from her mother,
by the way, and return them to the old man. I’ll do that sometime
after I slip this under the door, early tomorrow morning.”

He held up the note she’d given him. A single
pale spot on one edge of the wafer marked where her tear had fallen
as she’d sealed it up.

Hannibal coughed, the racking wheeze of a
consumptive that shook his whole thin frame. “You’ll have to be
quick about it, before she sells them.” He fished in his pocket for
his laudanum-bottle as January tucked the note back into his
jacket. “She won’t have an easy time, you know.”

“She knows that. It’s infinitely harder for a
woman to leave a man, not for another man, but for herself,” he
went on softly. “And harder for a woman of color than for a white
woman; a woman of color moreover whose family can conceive of no
other position for a woman, if she’s fair-skinned and pretty, than
the plaçee of a white. Not only her family, but her friends –
literally every other person she knows.”

“I suppose King Solomon’s family thought him
insane when he chose wisdom over riches – not that, as King of
Israel, Solomon was ever in a position of having to wonder whether
he’d eat on any given day. At least in Boston she’ll be allowed to
hold a position in a girls’ school somewhere. Louis Rochier won’t
really cast the whole family off because Zozo put a spoke in his
wheel with his business partner, will he?”

“I hope not. I don’t think so, since she’s
disappearing from town. She meant to literally disappear, you know,
without a trace, for that very reason. I convinced her to write to
her mother, at least. Casmalia can let Rochier know, or not.”

“Care to take a small wager on what she’ll
decide to do?”

January sniffed with bitter laughter. “Not a
chance.”

“I didn’t think you would.” Hannibal poured
another dollop of laudanum into his coffee, raised the cup in a
toast. “To Marie-Zulieka then – or whatever name she’ll take in her
new life.
Macte nova virtute, puella, sic itur ad astra
, as
Virgil said..
Blessings on your young courage; that’s the way to
the stars
. Though we had best pray she succeeds. I doubt
Casmalia will welcome her, if she ever comes back.”

“No.” January watched, above the milling
crowd on the wharves, as the
Mary’s
white sails
half-unfurled, and the current took the ship from the dock. A dark
small form still stood at the rail, watching the water widen
between herself and all the world as she had known it. “No, she
won’t be back.”

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 -
The Time of the Dark
- Barbara Hambly has touched most of
the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror,
mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy,
romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in
Southern California, she attended the University of California,
Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux,
France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger,
and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her
work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don
Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the
well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written
another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara
Hamilton.

Professor Hambly also teaches History
part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her
on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los
Angeles with several small carnivores.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these
stories.

The Further
Adventures

by Barbara Hambly

The concept of “happily ever after” has
always fascinated me.

Just exactly what happens after, “happily
ever after”?

The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her
dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched
on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold.
(It’s a very strong horse.)

So what happens then? Where do they live? Who
does the cooking?

This was one of the reasons I started writing
The Further Adventures.

The other was that so many of the people who
loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the
1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those
characters too, and I missed writing about them.

Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website
and started selling stories about what happened to these characters
after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each
series.

The Darwath series centers on the Keep of
Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their
world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of
civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two
stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now
part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a
mage.

The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the
former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds
himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil
Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred
years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers.
With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he
must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil,
too.

In the Winterlands tales, scholarly
dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do
their best to protect the people of their remote villages from
whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and
occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.

Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the
Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior -
meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the
1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young
computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the
Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might
come through.

Though out of print, all four of these series
are available digitally on-line.

To these have been added short stories about
the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series,
set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color,
Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back
lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s
was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his
schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy
Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are
in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.

I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the
Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I
have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes
anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I
added these four stories to my collection.

Quest For Glory
is a stand-alone, a
short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction
convention at which I was Guest of Honor.

Sunrise on Running Water
is tenuously
connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon
makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie
Titanic
- and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from
Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that
vampires lose their powers over running water - I just
had
to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than
about the characters.

The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the
main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their
own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people
are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their
various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me
- and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and
I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when
they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not
world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.

Life goes on.

Love goes on.

Everyone continues to have Further Adventures
for the rest of their lives.

*

Novels in the Benjamin January Series (some
are available in print, earlier books are out of print but
commercially available digitally)

A Free Man of Color

Fever Season

Graveyard Dust

Sold Down the River

Die Upon a Kiss

Wet Grave

Days of the Dead

Dead Water

Dead and Buried

The Shirt On His Back

Ran Away

Good Man Friday

Crimson Angel