Barbara Hambly - Dead water

She stepped back into the darkness, and her voice came to him, normal again. “You leave me alone, piano-player! You will curse your own hands that you raised against me!”

He heard the slop and squeak of her feet, running away into darkness.

Far off a cannon sounded, signaling curfew for all people of color, slave or free—except, of course, those whose professions made life more convenient for white men, like hack-drivers and musicians and waiters and the stevedores who unloaded cargoes on the levee, even at this slow season, far into the sweltering nights.

The drums in the square had ceased. Like the voice of angels rebuking some pagan chant, churchbells floated out over the lamplit town, calling the faithful to evening Mass. January, who had gone to early Mass that morning, wiped the old woman's spit from his cheek with his bandanna and resisted the urge to head straight for the mortuary chapel of St. Jude that stood at the corner of the cemetery, to confess and take Communion again.

Confess what? That he believed that the name of the Guédé spirits had the power to harm him?

Oh, God will appreciate hearing that .

He made his way out of the graveyard, walking carefully, for it was well and truly dark now and he had no desire to stumble into the brimming brown fluids of the gutter of the Rue des Ramparts.

Along that street, lamps had been lit in a few of the small pastel cottages, where plaçées would be setting tables for a light supper for when their protectors dropped by, seeking quiet and relief after the inevitable and interminable Sunday-dinner gatherings of French Creole families. Most of those houses were dark. Plaçées, protectors, and families alike had retreated to the cooler precincts of Milneburgh or Spanish Fort, or Mandeville on the other side of the lake, leaving the city to the mosquitoes and to the sweltering poor. The Americans, in their own faubourg of big wooden houses and wide yards on the other side of Canal Street, had retreated to such northern resorts as White Sulfur Springs or to the White Mountains of New England. Along the levee the river was low. Most of the big side-wheel steamboats lay drawn up at the wharves to wait until autumn brought higher water and the successive harvests of corn, cotton, and sugar to turn a profit again.

January looked for Olympe as he passed Congo Square, but only a few market-women remained, gathering the last of their produce into baskets and folding up the blankets on which it had been spread. The smell of ashes vied with the stink of sewage and the cemetery reek in the air.

Except for the gambling-parlors along Rue Orleans and Rue Royale—which never closed and never emptied—New Orleans was dark, and quiet save for the roar of the cicadas and the incessant whine of mosquitoes in January's ears.

No, he admitted to himself, he didn't think Queen Régine's curse, or the power of the Guédé spirits, would be able to harm him.

But poison, and surreptitious fires set in the kitchen while he and Rose slept, were another matter. They had bought their house from the French Creoles who owned it for nine thousand dollars, of which half had been paid immediately and another twenty-five percent was due in September, three months away. January didn't think the DeLaHaye family would remit a penny—or allow more time on the loan—should the house itself burn down one night.

He found himself listening behind him, all the way down the breathless street, for the whisper of the voodoo's feet and the rustle of her skirt. He heard nothing.

But he knew she was there.

TWO

The house January and Rose bought when they married the previous October stood on Rue Esplanade, and before this corner of the old French town had been built up, it had been surrounded by extensive grounds. January recalled the place from his childhood, a Spanish house of the kind usually seen on the smaller plantations, two rows of five rooms each with galleries front and behind, built high off the ground to avoid the Mississippi floods. It was angled on its lot so that it wouldn't face directly into the dilapidated old city wall that had still stood at that time—the “Rampart” of Rue des Ramparts—but would instead catch the river breezes.

As a result, the courtyard behind it was an awkward, narrow triangle. A poor man couldn't afford to keep up a house of that size, and a rich one would purchase a regular town-house on one of the more fashionable streets of the French town, Rue Royale or Rue Bourbon, not back here, where these days mostly artisans and free colored plaçées lived. But when, as the result of a singular chain of circumstances, January and Rose had unearthed a small pirate-cache of gold coins in the bayou country, they had bought this place to establish Rose's long-held dream of a school for young girls of color.

Coming around the corner of Rue des Ramparts, seeing the crooked angle of the slate roof, the amber glow of the dining-room window in the sticky cobalt velvet of the evening, January felt his heart lift.

His place. His home.

Rose.

The fear of Queen Régine's silently dogging tread melted in familiar joy. Sometimes he felt he could just stretch out his arms the way he did in dreams and lift off from the dirty brick banquette, and fly to Rose and to that crooked old Spanish house as lightly as a bird. Germaine's mother would have come and gotten her already, he thought as he climbed the tall front steps. He entered the French door of the bedroom—like a civilized person, his mother would have said: only American animals came straight into the parlor, like burglars, like thieves. If Cosette's mother was paying a voodoo to make her sick, he'd have to . . .

Rose was waiting for him in the parlor.

With her was a white man he recognized as Hubert Granville, President of the Bank of Louisiana.

The bank where their money was.

Before a word was spoken—before Rose even could draw breath—January saw her face in the candle-light, and Granville's, and felt as if he'd ducked around a corner to escape a knife in the back, only to take a spear through the heart.

It didn't even hurt.

Yet.

Just the cold of shock.

“What's happened?” His voice sounded astonishingly normal in his own ears.

Your house will be ripped from over your head . . . .

He had not the slightest doubt as to what Granville was going to say.

And he thought: I'm going to kill my mother.

Granville was an old crony of his mother's. It was on her urging—as well as because January himself had known the banker for three years—that he'd put the money left after the initial payment on the house into the Bank of Louisiana.

He took a deep breath while Granville tried to find a way to say Your money is gone. For months January had been reading about bank failures in the newspapers, the messy aftermath of President Jackson's fiscal policies. All over New Orleans, merchants consulted Bank Note Reporters before any major purchase, to learn how much the notes of any particular bank were being discounted that month, and Bank Note Detectors, in a vain effort to learn if the notes they were being offered were counterfeit. There was no way of telling when any of the state-chartered—or frankly private—banks would collapse, leaving depositors with handfuls of worthless paper.

All this went through January's mind in the seconds between his question and the banker's reply.

“I'm empowered to offer you three hundred dollars.”

“Considering we have over four thousand in your bank,” said January, remembering to add—because he was addressing a white man—“. . . sir. Or we did .”