Rebels of Babylon (6 page)

His remarkable physiognomy quit my sight.

I must remind you of Mr. Barnaby’s history. He had been a gentleman’s haberdasher in the very city where we stood that night. Until the Yellow Fever took his family. Thereafter, he lost his spunk and lost his business. When first we met, in the shocked weeks after Shiloh, the fellow was a gentleman’s gentleman in service to a Confederate of good family.

An excellent doer at table, Mr. Barnaby was confident at the hip. Shaped like a ripened pear, he was not slovenly fat, but stout and strong. His beef rode high in front. It looked as if a cannonball were about to explode upward through his waistcoat. Bald but for a fringe of chestnut hair and long of face with a plump nose misattached, his person made no proper sense, but seemed randomly collected, if abundant. He was a good-natured fellow who killed without dismay, when events required.

English-born though he was, we had grown fond in the days we rode together, pursuing killers who claimed to act for God. But that is another tale. When last I saw him, Mr. Barnaby had enjoyed a wound to his posterior, which invalided him from the field for uncertain months.

As I heard his footsteps returning, I recalled that Captain Bolt had said “the fat man” had been responsible for my rescue.

Had Mr. Barnaby saved me twice in the course of a single day? That was a heavy debt.

He had retrieved not only a towel, but also the clean uniform I had left with the bath attendant.

Averting his eyes as a gentleman should do, Mr. Barnaby tossed me the cloth then looked over my uniform, inspecting the stitching and trim. He did seem in a state of some anxiety.

“Lovely work!” he declared. “Fit for a very general! Why, when I ’ad my establishment on Canal Street, I ’adn’t no more than two tailors I could call upon to do such sewing as this ’ere.”

“It is my own wife’s work,” I told him proudly. “My Mary is become the proprietress of a grand dressmaking establishment.”

Now, you will say: “Since when is your wife’s dressmaking shop so grand? We thought it was a small affair in Pottsville.” But I will tell you: Grand enough it seemed to me, and a fellow must not insult his dear wife’s efforts. And truth be told, who among us does not like to put the best face on matters?

“Lovely work, just lovely! And, bless me, not a single drop of blood on any inch of it!”

“Why,” I asked, as I rubbed myself down and the serpent gave a jerk, “should there be blood, Mr. Barnaby?”

His eyebrows lifted as if to say the matter was self-evident. “Well, the fellow who ’ad the night duty was brushing down your kit when they cut ’is throat. Gashed as wide as a melon carved with a butcher’s knife, ’e is. They must’ve been wicked quick, sir, for I didn’t see nobody as I stepped in myself.” He looked at me, disregarding my condition of immodesty. “I must say, begging your pardon, Major Jones, that you does seem to leave an unreasonable number of corpses behind when you visit us.”

“Mr. Barnaby … I must ask you a thing. Did you report to the authorities that I had been buried alive?”

He shook his head. Bewildered. “No such thing, sir! No such thing at all!”

I was befuddled. “But …”

“All I told ’em,” Mr. Barnaby said, “was that you ’ad been kidnapped from a ’ouse in the
Vieux Carré.
Couldn’t ’ardly believe my eyes, when I seen ’em dragging you out of Miss Ruby’s salon, as we likes to call it. Couldn’t ’ardly believe it.” He shook his long head until his belly trembled. “At first, I thought you might ’ave ’ad a few sips too many and made a bit of trouble for the ladies, requiring a certain amount of physical restraint. But then I remembered ’ow you was always going on about John Wesley and Methodism and other such dreadful matters, and I began to suspect that something wasn’t quite right between Brighton and Bristol. After I saw Petit Jean come down the steps, ’im bleeding like an Irishman’s ’eart at the sight of an empty bottle, I knew you ’adn’t found New Orleans welcoming.”

I wished to inquire as to the identity of “Petit Jean,” who I supposed must be the giant negro. But Mr. Barnaby had grown extraordinarily agitated. He searched my uniform as if two hands were inadequate.

“Something wrong, is it?” I asked him.

He raised a worried face. “I can’t find it,” he told me. “What ’as you done with it, sir? Begging your pardon, but tell me where you put it …”

His demeanour was transformed. A fellow of aplomb in the midst of battle, he had grown as nervous as a lass who cannot find the slippers she meant to wear to her first ball.

“What
are
you—”

Staring at me, the fellow seemed pushed toward madness.

“For God’s sake,” he cried, “where
is
it, sir? We ’ave no time to waste!”

“Whatever are you on about? Surely, we—”

“The charm, the charm … where is it?” He did seem terribly anxious. “Petit Jean always sneaks one onto ’is victims, for good measure. Did they put anything in your pocket? Around your neck?”

“You mean that stinking little bag?”

“That’s it, that’s it! What ’as you done with it, sir?”

“I threw it away. It was oozing powder and—”

The poor fellow took such alarm I feared he would swoon.

“Dear God!” he bellowed. “We ’as to find it. Quick, sir.”

“It was just a filthy, little sack and—”

“Where is it, sir? I begs you. If you wants to wake up in the morning!”

“It’s in the dustbin in the changing room. Just down the hall. As soon as I—”

He hurled my uniform at me, launching himself back through the curtains so fiercely I thought he would tear them from the railing.

“Dress!” he shouted behind himself. “For the love of God, get dressed, sir!”

It all seemed rather a fuss.

As I was pulling my trousers high and snapping up my braces, my rescuer reappeared between the curtains.

His face was pale as fresh milk in the bucket. He held out a little satchel, just the size and shape of a human finger. Holding it at his arm’s full length, as if it were a thing he feared to touch.

His voice was quieter now, cut to a whisper. “We ’as to go. ’Urry up, sir.”

“Mr. Barnaby,” I began, “you
must
calm yourself. You said a fellow has been murdered. And someone made an attempt on my life with that snake. There are matters I must attend—”

Twas the queerest thing. When I tried to draw my right brace onto my shoulder, my arm refused to obey me.

Mr. Barnaby watched as I struggled to make my limb behave.

“Dear God,” he whispered. “It’s already begun.”

MY REBELLIOUS HANDS were fussing with my buttons as he pulled me from the hotel’s lower entrance, straight out between the shut-up shops and beneath the pillars that aped a Roman temple.

He did not so much select a cab as seize one. Forcing me inside, he followed after, depressing the carriage’s springs by at least six inches. He slapped shut the door, then thrust his head back out through the window leathers.

“Bayou John!” he cried, “By the shell road, past the race course. I’ll tell you when to turn off.”

“Twice the fare for them parts,” the driver said. “Night-time, too.” “Go!” Mr. Barnaby ordered. “Drive, man!
Go!
”

The coachman whistled. “Hoo, she must be sumpin’, yes, sir!” He gee-upped his horse and the cab rocked into motion.

Returning his attentions to my person, Mr. Barnaby said, “This ain’t good at all.”

“Mr. Barnaby,” I began, “while I appreciate your concern for my well-being, I assure you that my arms are simply cramped. I’ve been through more than is sensible today, with falling off roofs and buryings and such like. I will be fine in the morning, when I am rested.”

“You doesn’t understand!” he cried. “If you ain’t dead when the sun comes up, you’ll be paralyzed and worse!”

“My dear Mr. Barnaby—”

It was the queerest thing. My tongue had begun to swell. And my throat tightened. Forming words grew difficult, which is a hard fate for a Welshman.

A realization struck me like a cannonball.

“Poison …” I managed to say, with a new and terrible fear sweeping all through me. I had seen it turn men cholera-black in India.

Mr. Barnaby pitied me by the flicker of the cab lamp. “It’s worse than that, it is. If only it was poison alone, we might put things right with a call on the apothecary.”

I wished to tell him I would not believe any nonsense about spells or charms or spooks. But my powers of speech were disarmed.

The cab rattled and banged along streets that declined in quality. Sentinels at a guardpost made us halt, but when they
glimpsed my rank, they let us pass. It seemed to me a lax defense for a city.

The road grew so rough I feared the cab would break its springs or even shatter a wheel. Yet, Mr. Barnaby urged the driver to greater speed. We rocked through the darkness, unhelped by the moon, and only Providence spared us a frightful accident.

My companion leaned out of the window almost constantly, tilting the carriage.

“There, there!” he cried of a sudden. “Turn into that yard!”

The cab jounced to a halt, with the driver cursing.

“I ain’t going in there,” he told Mr. Barnaby. “And I ain’t going any closer. That’s one of them nigger hant-woman houses. Ain’t it? Anyways, it’s too sumpy.”

Mr. Barnaby did not waste time on argument, but dragged me from the vehicle. My good leg had begun to behave as meanly as the bothered one. I gasped for breath and my arms were utterly useless.

Royally frightened I was by then. At the thought of poison seeping through my veins.

“Oh, dear, dear!” my friend remarked.

“That’s fifty cents,” the cabbie hollered. “Not including the—”

“Wait there!”
Mr. Barnaby snapped without breaking his stride.

He moved with such haste that he almost seemed to carry me. I saw the outlines of a shack and the hint of a glow behind some window rags.

“Don’t let on that you ’as any reservations,” Mr. Barnaby whispered. “Don’t say a word what might be taken ill …”

He had no cause for worry. My mouth was sealed as if I had the lockjaw.

“Madame Bette!”
he called toward the shanty.
“Madame Bette! C’est moi, Barnaby!”

Now, that was French, a language I don’t trust. I did not like the way things were developing.

“Can’t you walk any faster?” the fellow begged me.

I grunted in the negative. I could hardly walk at all.

A woman appeared in a doorway, lofting a lantern. A negress she was, of the sort they call a “mammy.” Wearing a ragged dress and a turban dishevelled.

With a great sigh of effort, Mr. Barnaby lifted me onto the porch and set me down before her.

Her eyes widened.
“Perdu!”
she muttered.
“Il est perdu …”

“Nothing of the sort,” Mr. Barnaby said, in a voice that had changed utterly. He sounded as confident as a banker’s banker. “You can put ’im right, Madame Bette. I says to myself, I was saying, ‘There’s only one woman in all Loosy-anne can put this one to rights, and that’s Madame Bette.’ I’ve been telling ’im all the way ’ere not to worry.”

The woman’s features gathered toward her nose in consternation.

“Been crossed good, eh?” she asked me. I believe I detected the faintest hint of a laugh. “You been crossed
terrible, monsieur.
Cost you gol’ money, not just jingle-silver, lif’ that crossing off you.”

“Spare no effort!” Mr. Barnaby told her. “Spare no effort, spare no cost, Madame Bette!”

Now that is the sort of thing no sensible Welshman would ever say, poisoned or not. A fair price for all must be agreed in advance of any undertaking. But my ability to interject myself was limited.

Mr. Barnaby held out the stinking bag my abductors had tied round my neck.

The woman’s eyes showed their whites again.

“Marie Venin,” she muttered. “That’s her work, how you been crossed.” She grew excited, like Mick Tyrone, my doctor friend, at the sight of a challenging patient.
“Allez, allez!”
she called, rushing into the shanty.

I blush to tell you what I next experienced. The woman’s abode might have been the lair of one of those
fakirs
who haunt the lanes of Lahore. Stinking it was, with smells ineffable to our
Christian noses. By the lantern’s cast, I saw the skins of every sort of reptile, dangling from the ceiling to dry or nailed to the walls in bunches. Jars and pots of every shape competed for space on tabletop and floor, along with plaster statues not a few of which had strayed from a Catholic church. An advertisement for a steamboat line hung beside a cloth stained red with symbols recalling the village mosques of the Punjab. A newly skinned cat lay over a bench, its black pelt drying beside it.

Without warning, the woman tossed a handful of dust in my face. Then she began to chant:

       “Walk on needles, walk on pins,
       Papa Limba, wash our sins …
       
li Grand Zombi, li Zombi Grand,
       
vaincre, vaincre, Marie Venin …
       
l’homme perdu, l’homme perdu …

  he walk on gilded splinters to you …”

That did not resemble anything Charles Wesley wrote.

Hardly had she finished her singing than Mr. Barnaby laid seven gold coins on the planks, forming an arrow that pointed toward a back door.

To my mortification, the two of them undressed me.

“Begging your pardon,” Mr. Barnaby said, “there ain’t time to be modest.”

I might have interfered. But my every limb had stiffened and my tongue was beyond speech.

A devil of a time the two of them had, though. For I had grown stiff as a musket barrel. They had to sweep the dead cat from the bench and lay me down to draw off my shoes and trousers. Impatient with all niceties, Mr. Barnaby took a knife to my underclothing. That was a terrible waste. The garments were almost new.

The queerest thing it was, though. I seemed literally of two minds. The right and proper part of me dreaded the coursing poison, yet clung to some last instinct of propriety. A darker
side hushed every fear, seduced by a peculiar warmth sweeping my body. Twas almost like dreaming, although I remained awake. I began to feel that dying might not be unpleasant.