Barbara Hambly - 04 Sold Down the River

Fourchet's two servants hastily took up the luggage and carried it to the cargo hold. The taller servant took the bags inside. The shorter, given a moment's leisure, turned at the deck railing and gazed back across the square at the cathedral, like a man drinking in the sight.

Something in the way he stood made January remember the field hands yesterday evening on the Bonnets o' Blue.

Of course, he thought. Fourchet's butler had just been poisoned. In addition to finding a spy, Fourchet had come into town to look for a new butler.

Fourchet yelled, "Baptiste, damn you!" His voice carried like a crow's caw through the din. The new servant fled after his companion.

January's hand curled into a fist.

"You familiar with Mon Triomphe, Maestro?" Shaw asked. "Ever been there?"

January shook his head. "I was only seven when St.Denis Janvier bought my mother. I'd never been off Bellefleur. Mon Triomphe was very isolated in those days, but of course now the whole of the riverbank on both sides is in sugar as far as Baton Rouge."

"Well, I got to jawin' some last night with this an' that pilot, after Mr. Fourchet told me as how you'd agreed to go." Shaw spit again toward the cypress-lined gutter that divided the arcade from the open Place; the brown wad of expectorant missed its target by feet. "It did kinda float through my mind as how we's askin' a lot of you, to go up there pretendin' as how you're a slave, and the only ones knowin' you're not is your pal Sefton and Fourchet himself. Now, we know somebody's out to kill Fourchet. And much as I like Sefton you do got to admit reliable ain't the word that springs most skeedaciously to mind when his name is mentioned. So I tell you what."

He pointed across the square, to a woman selling bandannas among the fruit stands that clustered be neath the trees. The bright-colored wares were tacked to a crosspole and fluttered like some kind of exotic tree themselves.

"You go buy yourself seven bandannas: red, yellow, blue, green, purple, black, an' white.

Accordin' to the pilots, see, the riverbank at the north end of the plantation caved in 'bout three years ago, openin' a chute between it an' Catbird Point. Catbird Island, they calls it now. That changed the current, an' built up a bar just above the plantation landin'-blamed if that river ain't like a housewife with new furniture, always movin' things around. When Fourchet cleared an' cut for a new landin' they left an oak tree on the bank above it, that's big enough that the pilots all sight by it comin' down that stretch of the river."

A woman darted through the levee crowds, a flash of cheap bright calicos between stacks of orange pumpkins and dusty cotton bales, skirts gathered up in her hands. On the deck of the Belle Dame Fourchet's new butler pushed his way between the laden porters to the gangway, to seize the woman's hands, to kiss her with a fervent desperation that told its own tale. She was a tall woman, plump and awkward in her ill-fitting simple dress, and as they clung to one another her face bent down to his.

"You be like that old Greek fella," Shaw said, "that was supposed to change the sail of his boat from black to white if n the news he brung was good. You tie a different bandanna to that oak tree every day, just in the order I said 'em. Red, yellow, blue, green, purple, black, an' white, white bein' for Sunday so's you can remember."

"Don't tell me you've convinced riverboat pilots to remember the order as well." Anger twisted again in January's heart as he watched the couple on the gangway. There was nothing he could do about their pain; Shaw's calm arrangements and placid voice grated at him. "I never met a pilot who could take his mind off the river long enough to remember what color necktie he has on."

"Pilots, hell," said Shaw. "They just told me the tree was there. I paid off the stokers on the Lancaster, that makes the Baton Rouge run, and the Missourian and the New Brunswick, that'll be bound on back from St. Louis a week or ten days from now, and cabin stewards on the Vermillion, the Boonslick, and the Belle Dame, to come here and tell me what color the bandanna is and what day they seen it. It ain't much, Maestro," he added apologetically. "But at least it'll let me know yore still there."

January felt sudden shame at his anger; Shaw was doing what he could to keep him safe. In last night's dreams of childhood he'd been hiding in the barn at Bellefleur, and a monster was after him: a monster that shouted in a hoarse drunken voice, a reeling shadow with a whip in his hand.

Come out, you little bastard. Come out or I'll sell you down the river.

He'd waked in freezing sweat, as similar dreams had waked him, many nights across the years.

On the gangway the butler and the woman clung together, not speaking. It was the threat every master held over the head of every slave, up and down the eastern coast of the American states and in the new cotton lands of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. I'll sell you down the river. To the cane plantations of Louisiana. To Hell.

It occurred to him as he crossed the square toward the bandanna woman that his mother had sold him down the river by the act of giving him birth.

To hell with Fourchet, he thought. To hell with Olympe, and Mother, and these god-rotted colored kerchiefs and wondering if I'm going to be found as a spy and beaten to death by the other slaves, or poisoned, or kidnapped and sold-or just break the hands that are my livelihood and my joy.

His fingers trembled with anger as he counted out fourteen cents into the woman's palm. Stowed seven bright squares of cloth in his jacket pockets.

Let Fourchet die and rot, Olympe had said to him last night, as he and she had walked from the market back to their mother's house, to tell her of his change of mind. You're doing this to save every man and woman on the place who didn't try to kill him.

So he crossed the square to the arcade again, to the thin lanky figure awaiting him in the shadows. Though it was probably impossible over the competing din of the waffle man, the fruit vendors, the stevedores singing a chant as they loaded up the clay jars of olive oil that plantations bought in such quantities, and a German sailor having a shouting match with a woman in blue hair-ribbons, January imagined he could still hear Fourchet's voice, like a carrion-bird's as he rasped out instructions on the hurricane deck to the redcoated, hard-faced master of the Belle Dame.

Rose was right about one thing, January thought. With Fourchet's money he would find somewhere else to live. Then he would never be in a position like this again.

Who am I fooling? As long as I'm her son she'll feel she has the right to ask of me what she will.

"A captain bold in Halifax,

Who dwelt in country quarters,

Seduced a maid who hanged herself

One Monday in her garters..."

January winced at the light, hoarse voice scraping over the English ballad, slurred and stammering and yet perfectly true.

Shaw muttered, "Oh, Lordy."

Hannibal Sefton was making his way along the arcade in front of the Cabildo to its doors. He did this with great care, caroming off the square brick pillars, one hand outstretched to catch himself against the building's plastered wall, then retrieving his balance only to loop away toward the pillars again. The portmanteau he carried-his violin case strapped to its side-nearly overbalanced him. One of the chained prisoners engaged in cleaning out the gutter caught the fiddler by the arm and rescued the luggage moments before it went into the brimming muck. Hannibal bowed profoundly.

"Bene facis, famulo probo." The fiddler removed his hat and placed it over his heart, then spoiled the effect by coughing desperately. The prisoner supported him, apparently not much put out at the thin ragged form of the white man clinging to his filthy sleeve. "Medio tutissimus ibis."