Barbara Hambly: 04 Sold Down the River

January's eyes felt gritty. After spending most of the evening getting the documents drawn up and finding musician friends to replace him in his engagements to play at this or that party until after the sugar harvest-not an easy matter, given the perennial paucity of good musicians in the town-he'd gone late to bed, and in the few hours that he had slept, had dreamed of being a child again, and a slave.

"In 1802 Fourchet married, again, a woman name of Camille Bassancourt who came here with her aunt from Paris. They had three sons and two daughters-"

"After my time." January shook his head. "We left Belief!eur in 1801.1 only remember Esteban." Shaw used the corner of the top document to pick his teeth, brown with tobacco like a row of discolored tombstones. He was a lanky man who looked as if he'd been put together from random lengths of cane, close to January's height and homely as a mongrel dog. "The girls an' one boy are still livin'..." He grubbed in a pocket and consulted a much-scribbled fragment of paper. "Solange is at school with the Ursulines here in town. Robert-that's the boy-an' his wife just got back on the sixth from takin' Elvire, the older girl, to a boardin' school in Poitiers." Given the man's raspy, flatboat drawl, it always surprised January that Shaw pronounced the names of French cities and individuals correctly.

"Accordin' to Fourchet's lawyer, Camille died in '28." Shaw extracted a plug of tobacco from his trouser pocket, picked a knot of lint off it, and bit off a hunk the size of a Spanish dollar. "Fourchet remarried this past April to a girl name of Marie-Noel Daubray-" "Daubray?" interrupted January. "Isn't that the name-"

"Of the fellas he thinks might be behind the mill fire an' all? It is." He gestured with the fragment of paper-a bill from Berylmann, a gunsmith on Canal Street, January saw-and concentrated for a moment on reducing the brown chunk in the corner of his jaws to a manageable consistency. "Their first cousin once removed, in fact. Granddaughter of their oldest brother, which is what the lawsuit's about. What's our boy Esteban like?"

"Stiff," said January, the first description that came to his mind. "I haven't seen him since he was twelve, remember, and I was only eight." He leaned back in the chair beside Shaw's cluttered desk with half-closed eyes, summoning back the silent boy who'd stare with such repelled fascination at the naked breasts of the women in the fields. "But he was stiff. He walked around with his shoulders up-" He demonstrated, bracing his whole body in imitation of that tight, silent, awkward boy, and was aware of Shaw's cool eyes flickering over him, reading what that imitation had to say.

"He didn't speak much to anyone. He was clumsy.

You expected him to fall over any minute. You know how there are people that it makes you uncomfortable to talk to? They stand wrong, or they stand too close; it takes them forever to say anything and when they do it's never quite what they mean. That's Esteban. Or it was," he amended, "a quarter century ago."

"Well, Maestro-" Shaw uncoiled his slow height from his chair, dumped the papers on the desk, and glanced across at the wall clock someone had affixed behind the sergeant's high desk.

"People don't change that much, boy to man. Oh, you might not recognize who they are, exactly, but unless he works to do somethin' about it, a awkward boy's gonna grow to a awkward man.

Same as a girl who's cruel to her pets ain't anyone I'd want to be the mother of my children later on down the road. I don't know how much use any of this'll be to you..."

"All of it's of use." January followed him across the big dim stone-flagged room to the outer door.

"Any of it's of use. You have to understand what the pattern is, before you can see where it breaks."

From the Cabildo's front doors they looked out past the cobalt shadows of the arcade and across the gutter to the bustling Place d'Armes. Mid-morning in autumn, and all the world was out enjoying the mild sunshine. The carriages of the wealthy jostled axles with carts of cabbages. A tall old man walked past with a basket of pink roses on his head, and a beggar-woman at her ease on the cathedral steps, her hair a white aurora of chaos, slowly devoured an orange and spit the seeds in great joyful leaping arcs into the gutter. January remembered the rainy gray of Paris in the winter and wanted to fling out his arms and laugh.

Whatever else could be said about it, New Orleans was New Orleans. There was no place like it in the world.

"If it had been clear who's doing the actual poisoning-making the actual voodoo-marks, cutting harnesses and sawing axles-Fourchet wouldn't have come to you. This isn't like coming into a tavern and seeing a weeping woman and a dead lover and a husband with a smoking pistol in his hand. With a hundred and fifty people involved it's not even likely that I'm going to find just one, or two, unaccounted for at any given time."

Shaw's eyebrows lifted. "I figured with slaves in the field you'd at least be able to keep track of where they was."

"That's because you've never tried to do it." There was wry pride in January's voice. "That's what scares the hell out of the whites, you know. Especially out on the plantations. You've got sixty, seventy, eighty grown men, fifty or sixty women-What are you going to do? Keep them in chains all the time? The drivers keep an eye on things and the overseer keeps an eye on things and you know damn well that if somebody wants to sneak away badly enough-if they don't care about getting a beating if they get caught-they'll sneak away. That's what makes them crazy.

"It's a war," he added softly. "Whether or not some of them plan organized rebellion, it's war.

And you have to fight for every inch, a hundred times a day. That's why you have to look for a pattern."

"Waffle man, waffle man, " sang a strolling vendor. "Wash his face in the fryin' pan..."

January felt for his watch again. "I can work with the men, live among them enough to hear rumors, at least so that I can find out who was where when. If there is a conspiracy, a revolt being planned, I think it'll be pretty clear. But if it's just one man, I'm not sure I'll find our killer-almost certainly not before he kills Fourchet. So I need to know the pattern. Why is this happening now?

Why not last month or last year? What made the bearable unbearable? That's why you told Fourchet to speak to me, wasn't it?"

Shaw spit in the general direction of the gutter. His aim, as usual, was abysmal. "That's why."

Beyond the levee, the smokestacks of the steamboats poured sullen columns of soot into the dirty sky. At this season they lined the wharves three and four deep, and more tacked around out in the open river, keeping up their head of steam and their boiler-pumps working while waiting for a berth. January felt for his watch yet again, muttered an oath, and looked back over his shoulder at the watchroom clock, then turned back to scan the faces of the crowd.

"Boat ain't due to leave til ten," Shaw remarked, as if he weren't following January's thoughts.

"And you know as well as I do they never do."

"Wherever he is," January responded gloomily, "I'm going to strangle Hannibal Sefton."

Fourchet's voice, braying out curses, caught his attention. Looking across the crowd to the levee, January saw the man on the deck of the small stern-wheeler on which January himself and his friend Hannibal Sefton had purchased tickets last night. One of the porters had dropped his valise; the boat's master lashed out with the whip he still held and caught the man a cut across the back. After the brutality he'd witnessed yesterday January had raised an objection to traveling on the Belle Dame, but Fourchet would have nothing to do with American boats, and Captain Ney was the only Creole master in town at the moment.