Barbara Hambly: 04 Sold Down the River

The thought of losing that-even that-was usually enough to make a man or a woman think twice about open revolt.

Still he said nothing. But he felt as if the whole core of him had shrunk and cured to a rod of iron, ungiving and utterly cold.

"Then yesterday morning the servants found Gilles, my butler, dead in the storeroom under the house." Fourchet's mouth hardened. "Beside him was a bottle of liquor, cognac. My cognac. The cellaret in the dining room was unlocked, the keys lying beside Gilles's hand."

Bitter hatred froze the old planter's face as he gazed unseeing at the bright slim slat of Rue Burgundy visible beyond the window louvers, remembering whatever sight it was that he had been brought down to see.

"Livia will have told you I used to drink," he said. "And that when I drank, it was as if there was a devil in me."

"My mother never spoke of you, sir," replied January, and the dark eyes slashed in his direction again, then cut toward the straight cool figure in the yellow muslin, sipping her cafe creme. But since January hadn't actually said, What makes you think she gave you a moment's thought after she wiped your spunk off her legs and went about her business? there was nothing with which Fourchet could take issue.

"Just as well. I'd like to say that all the evil in my life sprang from drink, but I don't think even that's true." He took a cigar from his pocket, bit off the end with carnivorous-looking teeth. "For eight months now I have not tasted a drop. Nor will I. But I've spoken of this to no one. Only my wife knows of my decision to put it out of my life, to make some reparation for the harm I've caused. Not so very long ago poisoning my liquor would have been the quickest way to get shut of me." He was silent again, as if he expected praise or admiration for this abstinence-as if every slave on Bellefleur hadn't known to stay out of the master's way when he'd been at the bottle. As if even the scullery maid hadn't held him in fear-filled contempt.

"Well, it's clear to me what's going on this time." The planter shook his head. "I don't think it's revolt-they're taking too goddam long over it. No-someone's set out to destroy my land. To destroy me." His hands balled into fists upon his knees, his face like a storm-scarred stone.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, Percy Shelley had written of an ancient colossus, battered and alone. A shattered visage... whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command...

Fourchet held the cigar to his lips and glanced at January, not even expectantly, but impatiently.

A slave, January realized, would spring at once to the spiritlamp beneath the coffee and kindle a spill for him.

So, of course, would a gentleman host who didn't want to relegate the task to the only lady in the room. January fetched the spill, his anger smoldering in him like the ember at the spill's tip. The comparison with Shelley's poem was too grand, he thought. Yet the words would not leave his mind.

"It might just be my neighbors, the Daubray brothers, are behind this, or paying one of my blacks to do it." The dark glance flickered sideways to January again through the curl of the smoke. "I've been in lawsuit against them for near a year now, and the case is coming to court as soon as the harvest's in. I wouldn't put it past them to burn my mill." For a moment the old black glint of unreasoning hate showed through his brooding self-control.

"Sneaking bastards. They know what my land means to me." He puffed his cigar like a caged dragon blowing smoke. "They know I was putting my blood and my sweat into its soil while that lightskirt mother of theirs was promenading the New Orleans docks in quest of a husband, and they know the land is my body and my life. I've done evil in my time, wasted the gifts of God and harmed those it was my duty to protect. But through it all the land was mine. It's the one true good in my life, the only thing I have to show for living: truly my Triumph. They're spiteful as women, the whole family is," he added. "They'd be glad to see me lose it. Glad enough to pay my own field hands to turn against me.

"That's what I want you to find out."

He raised his chin and stared at January, who still stood before him-stood as if this man were still his master. Were still able to beat him, or nail him up in the barrel in the corner of the barn in July heat or February frost. Still able to sell him away, never to see his friends or his family again.

Heat blossomed somewhere behind January's sternum. Ice-heat, tight and furious and dangerously still. He'd set his music satchel on the floor by his feet upon coming in from the backyard-yet one more of those myriad tiny prohibitions imposed upon him in his mother's house. Neither he nor Olympe-his full sister by that slave husband of whom their mother never spoke-had ever been allowed to enter the house through the long French door from the street.

With the coming of the November cool, balls and the opera were beginning again. Likewise, most of January's piano pupils had returned to town, the sons and daughters of the wealthy of New Orleans: Americans, French, free colored. He'd just returned from a house in the suburb of St. Mary's-quite close, in fact, to where Bellefleur's cane-fields had Iain-after talking to a woman about lessons for her son. That angelic sixyear-old had announced, the moment January was on the opposite side of the parlor's sliding doors again, "Mama, he's a nigger!" in tones of incredulous shock.

Did he think I was going to play a tom-tom instead of a piano?

Now he moved his satchel carefully up onto one of the spare, graceful cypress tables that adorned the parlor, and folded his hands. In the impeccable Parisian French that he knew was several degrees more correct than Fourchet's Creole sloppiness, he said, "In other words, sir, what you want is a spy."

"Of course I want a spy!" Fourchet's eyes slitted and he looked like a rogue horse about to bite.

His harsh voice had the note of one who wondered how January could be so dense. "No question it's the blacks. I just need to know which ones, and if the Daubrays or someone else are behind it.

This Shaw fellow I spoke with yesterday said you'd be the man."

"I'm afraid the lieutenant mistook me, sir." January fought to keep his voice from shaking. "I'm a surgeon by training, and a musician. I've looked into things when friends of mine needed help.

But I'm not a spy."

"I'll pay you," said Fourchet. "Five hundred dollars. You can't tell me you'd make as much between now and the end of the harvest, playing at balls." He nodded toward the piano in the front parlor, where January gave lessons three mornings a week to a tiny coterie of free colored children, the sons and daughters of white men by their plac?es.

"I told Monsieur Fourchet that you certainly needed the money," put in Livia.

January opened his mouth, then closed it, fighting not to snap, You mean YOU want-not NEEDthe money. But his mother didn't even avert her gaze from his, evidently seeing nothing amiss in charging her son five Spanish dollars a month for the privilege of sleeping in the room he'd occupied as a child, nor in reminding him of the hundred dollars he owed her.

That debt had come about three weeks ago, when January had gone to play at a ball and, returning late, had encountered a gang of rowdies, Kentucky river-ruffians of the sort that came down on the keelboats. Coarse, dirty, largely uneducated, they were habitually heavily armed and drunk. He'd escaped with his life, and without serious injury, only by refusing to resist, putting his arms over his head and telling himself over and over that to put up a fight would escalate the situation to a killing rather than just "roughing up a nigger." It hadn't been easy.

The custom of the country, he'd told himself later. And he had known, returning from France in the wake of his wife's death from the cholera two years ago, that in the land of his birth he could be beaten up by any white man, that he had no right to resist. It was the price he'd paid, to return to the only home he had.