Barbara Hambly - 04 Sold Down the River

"When the mule barn caught fire I thought it was an accident," she went on. "Baron was always a little careless with his lantern. But then the veves showed up in the house, and the other things started to happen-the axles sawn, and the harnesses rubbed with pepper again and again, and I knew someone else was doing it. But I never thought it was Michie Robert."

Her round, powerful hands toyed with a frayed place in the blanket, her dark beautiful eyes downcast. "I thought I'd best stay quiet and wait. I wanted to kill Michie Fourchet and I knew when I did I'd have to run, and I couldn't do that carrying a child. I'd already got rid of the baby Reuben put in me, a few years ago... And then the sheds burned. And so many people hurt, and those poor babies killed, and it was as if I woke up after a bad, bad dream. Maybe what you said to me, about how a man will burn down a house just to cook eggs, made me think. And I understood I just couldn't do it. After that, all I wanted was to be away."

"And that's when you offered to help Quashie and Jeanette escape, if they'd take you with them?"

She nodded. "I was scared. I can't tell you how scared I was. I wouldn't have done it, if I'd known someone would come along after me, masking his footsteps in my own."

"Wouldn't you?"

Their eyes locked. For a moment it seemed to January that a man's body lay between them, a man who she knew was likely to drink his master's liquor, if he couldn't get his own.

It was her gaze that fell.

She said, very softly, "I don't know. That's the honest truth, Ben. I don't know. I know for five years I got by on hearing those little notes Hector would send me by False River Jones. I know I have them memorized, every word, about what Daniel and Adam looked like, and what they loved, and all the things they did in those five years. I have a hole in my heart a thousand miles deep that it doesn't feel like anything is ever going to fill. And that's all I know."

When January woke-with a splitting headache-Kiki was gone.

"She said you'd know where to catch her up," said Monsieur Conrad's butler, who knocked while January was still lying in his borrowed bed wondering where the woman had managed to secrete a bottle of opium on her person. "She said you'd talked about it last night." He regarded January doubtfully, as if rethinking the whole tale of freedom papers and matrimony, and January put a hand to his head and said, "Of course we did. I have such a headache this morning I can't rightly think."

The butler smiled. He was young and businesslike and had the air of a man who ran the entire household with neat efficiency. Like Esteban, not imaginative, but greatly desirous to have all books balance at day's end. "I understand that. Your wife said you was one of the last ones off the boat, and those blisters look like you was burned bad. Why don't you rest here for another day?

She said she'd stay with your brother in town til you came."

January was very tempted to avail himself of the offer, for he ached all over and the lassitude of shock pressed on him, physically and mentally. If Shaw had survived-and January prayed that he had, and not simply because Shaw could vouch for his identity-the policeman could keep Duffy and his posses at bay. If he hadn't, if he'd been badly hurt, January was still a fugitive. In any case it would take weeks for the garbled tales of slave revolt, house-burning, poisoning, and kidnapping to sort themselves out, if they ever did.

It was best, he thought, that he exit the whole situation through the first door that opened, and not ask questions that would cause delay.

Though frantically busy with his own harvest and boiling, Monsieur Conrad lent January money to take a boat south that afternoon, as, he said, he had lent money to Kiki. The river's rise brought several boats a day past La Cheniere. The butler recalled that Kiki had taken the Achtafayala.

January was willing to bet she wouldn't be aboard it when it docked in New Orleans.

When the Boonslick passed Lescelles plantation there was a flag out on the landing, and Hannibal, Esteban, les deux Mesdames Fourchet, and the children boarded. January concealed himself in the stern section of the deck where the poorer free colored and the slaves were relegated, and it was there that, much later, Hannibal sought him out.

"All I can say is, for a man raised by an opium addict, Michie Robert has only the dimmest possible idea of how much Patna Naptime the really hardened system can absorb with impunity," said the fiddler, perching like a rather worse-for-wear grasshopper on the top of a hogshead of nails. "They dosed me with enough so that I didn't really feel up to much derring-do~not that I'm much in the derring-do line to begin with-but I had plenty of leisure to chip off the business edge of every gun-flint in their boxes there, and dump most of my ration of water into the powder. As I observed before, Solus pro virili parte ago: I can only do the best I can."

"And what you did saved all our lives," said January. "I don't think Shaw and Quashie would ever have gotten on board if the crew had been fully armed. How did you happen to end up as a guest at Refuge anyway?"

"Silly bastard came out onto the gallery as the Heroine went past. There aren't even any trees in front of the house nowadays, just cane. I don't suppose it would have mattered if it wasn't me on board, or if I hadn't seen him board the Belle Dame that morning bound in exactly the opposite direction. That green coat of his stood out a mile. We stopped at Daubray to pick up a letter, and I disembarked and walked up the river road. I hid my luggage in the cane-they must have found it after Jules Ney caught me behind the kitchen that evening."

The fiddler unfastened the clasps of his violin case for the fifth or sixth time, peeking inside as if to reassure himself that the instrument was safe and undamaged; touching the varnished wood as a lover would have touched his lady's cheek. He looked desperately thin but surprisingly well, despite singed hair and an angry burn on his forehead, earned when he'd dragged young Fantine Fourchet out of the inferno of smoke and flame that had been Mon Triomphe.

January could see the charred ruin of the house as they passed it, veiled in the smoke-clogged white mists that still blurred the river. Through the trees his eye picked out the pale tumbledown planks of the slaves' graveyard, the broken crockery and bottles around the graves slowly sinking into the earth.

Mon Triomphe.

Simon Fourchet's pyre, consumed like a barbarian prince with all he owned.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

"Papa Ney was all for scuppering me on the spot, but Robert argued that as I'd written to my fictitious cousins on New River-thank God!-if my body wasn't found among the victims of this slave revolt there'd be a search. After romancing his father's wife for weeks-unsuccessfully, as it turned out-Robert brought her to her father's old house with a note swearing he'd kill himself for love of her if she didn't see him..."

"And Marie-Noel fell for it?"

Hannibal gestured forgivingly. "She's only sixteen. In any case he forced her to drink paregoric that night, and she was still logy from it the next morning, not that any woman's going to endanger the life of her unborn child when a man has a pistol to her side. After Robert forced her and Esteban to tell the slaves they were being sold, and to cooperate, Ney and his father drugged everyone in the house-as you guessed-then put it to the torch. They didn't tie anyone, because we were all supposed to have been driven into the house before it was fired by rebelling slaves. God only knows what possessed me to rescue the children. I quite agree with Robert that murdering the pair of them-and their mother-was not only necessary to his scheme but intensely gratifying as well."