An Embarrassment of Riches (26 page)

“It is not a pleasant place.”

“Correct. And you are very unhappy in it, aren't you?”

“I am lonely. And hungry.”

“Then take these tools and pick the lock and I shall help you escape.”

“What if Uncle Fernand catches me?”

“With me at your side, Lou-Lou, he will never catch you.”

“Sammy!”

“What?” I replied with mounting anxiety. “What, for heaven's sake?”

“Are you a greater genius than my Uncle Fernand?”

“Lou-Lou, please, I beg you! Get to work on that lock.”

“Tell me, Sammy.”

“Yes.” I assured him, nearly beside myself. “I am a far greater genius than your Uncle Fernand. Next to me, he is a muttonhead.”

Lou-Lou giggled and took the tools, to my vast relief Next, I heard the scratch and screak of metal against metal, followed by a dull click, as of heavy tumblers falling into place.

“I am finished, Sammy.”

“Excellent!”

“I am coming out now, Sam—”

Another light, this one moving, bobbled dimly around the distant corner of one corridor.

“Sssshhh!”

“Whu—”

“Sssshhh, Lou-Lou!”

I pulled his cell door shut again. The yellow light grew brighter.

“Someone is coming, Lou-Lou,” I whispered. “I have to go at once. Pretend you never saw me. If, for any reason, I cannot return, make your way upstairs and out the gate to our keelboat. Hide yourself in the cabin behind the meal sacks. We shall depart this very afternoon, I promise you.”

“But Sammy—”

“Sshh! Listen to me! I am a
genius
! You must do exactly as I say! Silence!”

I snuffed my own candle and crept hastily away from the poor booby's cell 'till I made it 'round the corner. A figure with a lantern advanced toward Lou-Lou's door and stopped before his cell. My belly wound itself like a frightened little animal in a burrow. Suddenly, something dropped on the back of my neck. It felt rather like a bird alighting. I reached behind. My hand closed around a huge spider, its body soft as a velvet pincushion, its legs like bristling sticks—the whole of it altogether repulsive. I lacked the specific knowledge at the time that it was the rare and venous great spotted hirsute recluse spider of the mid-American rivers
(Latrodectus solitarius gigantus)
.

“Feh!” I could not help but exclaim as I flung it out of my hand. It bounced off a near wall and landed with a little splash in the stinking water. A series of shudders shook me. The fleshy part of my palm burned as though I had touched a red-hot stove.

The figure down the hall, an Indian, I now discerned, raised his lantern, peered under it, and began hurrying adroitly down the treadway in my direction. I quit my position with equal haste and fled to the spiral staircase that led to the backstage area; thence dashed off the apron and up to the box where we had sat and watched
Othello
. The Indian was hard on my trail. He strode to the forestage, held up his lantern, and surveyed the seemingly empty auditorium. I peered down at him behind a velour curtain. Soon, satisfied that he had driven out the trespasser, he grunted and left the stage, presumably to return to the bilges.

I remained concealed for several minutes, making sure he was gone, then stole down from the box and exited the theater at its rear. It wasn't until I reached the dining room that I even wondered who the Indian had thought he was chasing. Some enemy, no doubt. But who, in this howling wilderness kingdom, which they completely dominated, might be their enemy? Other Indians?

Uncle and the Woodsman were at table in the dining room when I blundered in from below. Neither LeBoeuf nor Yago were present, not to mention Madame. An Indian emerged from the pantry with a tray of victuals, and in a sullen, careless manner all but flung the platters upon the table.

“Rude fellow,” Uncle remarked. “Hmmm. What's this?”

He poked at the food before him. It comprised a gritty-looking flatcake of course-ground maize, a partially burnt segment of a squash, seeds and all, and a boiled hank of some fatty, nondescript meat.

“Buffalo hump,” the Woodsman declared, fanning its aroma up to his nostrils. “A Choctaw specialty.”

I waited and waited for the Indian to leave the room, but he merely stood there, behind Uncle's chair, with his back to the wall.

“Go on! Away with you!” I shouted at him. He glared at me in an insolent manner and then skulked off.

“Nephew!” Uncle exclaimed.

“Uncle,” I whispered, “I have located Lou-Lou. He is down in the bilges in a stinking dungeon.”

Uncle shrank, visibly discomfited.

“He must be there on some good account,” he said.

“He is there because Fernand LeBoeuf no longer has any use for him—”

“I have sure had a better mess o'punkin set in front o'me,” the Woodsman interjected in a tone of disappointment. “Why this is half burnt to perdition. The hump ain't bad, though.”

“Furthermore,” I whispered yet more softly. “I have found proof that Lou-Lou is … who I said he was. And I have uncovered a perfidious scheme on the part of your dear Monsieur LeBoeuf that would make Benedict Arnold's treachery compare as a mere rigging of thimbles. Here—”

“These corncakes is plum awful,” the Woodsman said.

I reached to the rear pocket of my breeches. The letter from Napoleon was gone!

“Chicane!” I howled in despair and gnashed my teeth. “Damn me!”

“Nephew! Hast gone mad?”

“This is some of the worst Injun fixin's that ever I et,” the deaf and sightless Woodsman declared. “Sumpthin ain't right here.”

Endeavoring to beat a hasty path back to Madame LeBoeuf's studio and reclaim the document by force if necessary, I took a wrong turn in the labyrinthine maze of corridors and found myself climbing yet another unfamiliar staircase, which, I soon ascertained, led to the great tower that loomed over Chateau Félicité.

Aloft was a small observatory room about ten feet square with windows on all four sides. A worn Chinese rug and a cushioned cherrywood stool were the only furnishings besides a beautiful polished brass telescope mounted upon a tripod.

The view from that room was spectacular. It must have been an hundred feet above the surface of the lake. Storm clouds boiled out of the sky to the horizon and wind rattled the windowpanes but the view was unobstructed. Beyond the wide lake lay an ocean of dark green foliage—first the orderly rows of the hemp fields, and beyond them forest unending.

Between the edge of the hemp fields and the forest, to the east, rose a thin column of smoke. Its source was a long, gray horizontal anomaly in the landscape. I climbed upon the stool and trained the telescope at the distant object, then squinted into the eyepiece. All was a blur. I screwed out the drawtube and the image neatly resolved.

The gray horizontal streak was a timber stockade surrounding a sort of compound. Most of what lay within the compound was obscured by a screen of trees. Of what I could observe there was an assemblage of huts or shacks within the stockade walls. Moving about amidst these rude structures were many little black figures: Negroes. Even with the aide of the glass, it was not immediately possible to tell what they were doing, such was the distance.

Around the top of the stockade there appeared to be a kind of catwalk, upon which lighter-skinned figures stood: Indians. The column of smoke rose from a point obscured by the trees, but it was very thick smoke, and grayish white like the cloud-clotted sky above. On the outside of the stockade was a silvery band, which I eventually determined to be some kind of moat. It looked inconsequential from this height and distance, but was probably fifty feet across. Outside of this moat was yet another perimeter, vague and insubstantial in the lens. A closer study revealed it to be a barrier of sharpened sticks pointed inward toward the stockade.

I swung the fine instrument back upon the stockade. The figures in view looked like ants, red and black. Here and there upon the catwalk, little puffs of smoke bloomed in front of the red ants. It took some reflection on my part to understand that this was the smoke of gunfire, and that the red ants were shooting down upon the black ones. Several of the latter crumpled in quick succession. Many of the others fled, but seemingly with no place to go. A few Negroes ran into the flimsy hovels inside the stockade. Others poured out. Some knelt to comfort the wounded, whilst others dragged off their dead beyond my vantage. Little puffs of smoke erupted from their midst now, and I surmised that they had somehow acquired weapons.

The entire spectacle took place without accompanying sound, so distant was the action, like the combat of a small boy's tin soldiers played out on a patch of grass on a summer's day. Yet the conclusion to be drawn was obvious. Somehow, an insurrection had been mounted by the Negroes in the miserable stockade where they were really forced to live, and the Indians were now putting it mercilessly down with superior force. No wonder LeBoeuf had been absent all day. But then again, what had that cad Yago been doing here when he should have been at his
seigneur
's side? I realized that I might never learn the answer to that question, for as soon as I had the letter from Bonaparte back in my hand, I would depart this viper's nest of cruelty and intrigue.

I had swung the telescope out of the way and resolved to find my way back to Madame's studio when two figures appeared on the wharf an hundred feet below. One of them clutched an enormous potted plant to his bosom. The other figure clung to him. I realized with a jolt that they were none other than Uncle and the Woodsman!

They hurried to the end of the wharf. Uncle put the potted plant—the
Puya
, apparently—upon the foredeck of our keelboat. He then returned to the wharf and helped the Woodsman aboard. The window sash was stuck fast. I could not throw it open. Instead, I swung the telescope through the glass. A blast of wind nearly blew me across the room. I fought my way back.

“Uncle! Woodsman! Wait!” I shouted to them far below, but Uncle did not hear me in the howling gale and, of course, the Woodsman was deaf. Desperate, I heaved the entire telescope through the glass, hoping to attract attention, but the wind carried it back and the instrument landed upon the third-story roof far short of the wharf. The next thing I knew, Uncle was casting off the mooring lines. They were leaving without me.

I raced downstairs again at breakneck speed, caring not who saw me. But the corridors of Chateau Félicité seemed wholly deserted. One had the eerie sensation of being aboard an huge floating tinderbox that might, at any second, go up in a hellfire.

From the courtyard garden I retraced my steps taken earlier that day and found the obscure stairway leading to Madame's studio. Upon the landing below, I could see that the door was open. I thought I heard singing.

She was dressed in an ecru gown of silk adorned with seed pearls, and in her hair were woven the lilies she had picked that morning. On her face was a look of the most unequivocal and abject lunacy.

“Oooo, monsieur,” she giggled. “Do you like my wedding dress?”

“Where is the letter, madame?”

“You are wasting your breath, monsieur. I have decided to marry Arlequin. Is that not right, my pet?”

“
Bawk bawk!
King and Queen of Louisiana.
Bawk pweet!
”

“I warn you, madame. I will turn this place upside down unless you hand it over.”

“As you wish,” she said and waved a handkerchief in my face. She repaired to the other side of the room, where a large chest stood open. From it she withdrew various oddments of raiment—scarves, hats, cloaks—and tried them on, singing all the while like a little girl playing in the attic. I believe that since our interview that morning, she had gone completely insane.

I now went about the room myself like a man crazed, flipping over the cushions, rifling every chest of drawers.

“
Bawk bawk!
You will be my little white love slave!” the parrot cried.

In one drawer lay a lady's pistol, a small LePage, along with a flask of powder and a pouch of balls. It was not the sort of thing one should leave at the disposal of a lunatic, and besides, I needed the weapon, so I stopped to charge it and stuck it in the back of my waistband.

“
Bawk Bawk!
A blood sausage!
Mon dieu! Bawk!
”

“Madame! The letter!”

“
Bawk!
What a man! What a man!”

“You glaucous knave!” I cried, near my wits' end, and lunged for the ridiculous bird, seeking to wring its neck. There, at the bottom of its cage, spattered with droppings, was the document in question. I reached in and seized it.

“Do you like my trousseau, monsieur?” Madame asked. The poor woman, in her divorce from reality, had donned one costume atop another, as some people confined to an asylum are wont to do.

“I am truly sorry for you,” I told her, and, preparing to depart this den of wickedness and lunacy, once again pocketed the precious letter. I had barely taken a step toward the doorway when Yago appeared there, his filed teeth glinting in the meager light and a buffalo skinner's knife in his hand.