Benjamin January 4 - Sold Down The River (8 page)

“Robert, God damn you, leave the bags alone! We haven't got all night!”

The handsome young dandy sprang nervously away from the luggage pile and Captain Ney, and scrambled into the carriage as the vehicle jerked away.

“What'd you-uh-pay for him?” Esteban glanced back to where Baptiste and the others were picking up the various valises and portmanteaux under the Spanish deck-mate's snapped commands.

“Eleven hundred, from Davideaux.”

“Not bad. How-uh-old is he?” They might have been speaking of a pack-pony. “Forty-eight? Um-uh-Things have been quiet here. We got-uh-ten acres cut today, and the new grinder's behaving itself. Oh, and Reuben died.”

“Ten? Damn it, boy, those lollygagging niggers should have been able to clear off fifteen! Are you so stupid you don't realize we're weeks behind? Frost could hit us any day! Thierry, God damn you, I'd better see more cane coming in tomorrow or . . .”

So much, thought January sourly, for poor Reuben, dead of shock or gangrene or simply because he lacked the physical reserves to pull him through having his legs crushed by a thousand pounds of falling iron. The stretch of ground between the house and the levee's gentle rise was scattered with the native oaks of the area. Through their dark trunks away to his right January could see the hell-mouth glare of the sugar-mill door, and the shapes moving before it as the women unloaded the cane carts. The men of the first gang-having completed a day in the field that began the instant it was light enough to avoid injury-dragged wood from the sheds to feed the boilers, a long line of half-naked bronze figures struggling out of the night.

The smell of burning sugar clogged his nostrils, the choke of woodsmoke and the thick scents of wet earth and cane.

Home.

Something inside him seemed to be falling a long way into blackness. Cold fear and dreads of things he barely recalled:

His father . . .

“. . . damn Daubrays are behind it, I tell you! They have to be! It would be just like that weasel Louis to incite a man's own niggers to revolt. That Mammy Hera of theirs is a voodoo and I wouldn't put it past Louis Daubray to pay to have his own grandmother poisoned, if he thought he could get a half-arpent of land out of it. And that greasy brother of his would know who to ask!”

“Father-uh-whatever else may be said of them, the D-Daubrays surely wouldn't-”

“Don't you back-talk me, boy! I was knocking heads with those lying Orleannistes before you could piss standing! Ever since I married your stepmother they've been trying to find a way to keep me from claiming her father's land. Paying my own niggers to wreck the harvest would be of a piece with their sneakiness.”

“D-Did you speak-uh-to the police about that trader, Jones? He'd stick at nothing-”

“Listen, Father,” Robert interjected. “In France they were speaking of a new system of physical characteristics by which those of born criminal inclination might be identified. I'm sure if you examined the blacks-”

“Oh, shut up, the both of you.” Fourchet flung away his cigar. The carriage drew rein before the steps of the big house, whose long windows glowed through the mists in sulfurous lozenges of muzzy light. “If we examined the blacks we'd find that every Sambo of 'em was a liar and a thief, and what a surprise that would be! Use your brain.”

“I was endeavoring, sir, to-” Robert broke off as a tall shape appeared against the luminous rectangle of what January knew-since nearly all Creole plantation houses were built on the same plan-to be the bedroom of the lady of the house. He had an impression of pale hair pulled tight into an unfashionable knot at her nape. Of a small white hand resting protectively over a belly swollen with child. Then she passed into the shadow of the gallery as she descended the steps six feet to ground level, and stepped out into the torchlight once more as January sprang from the back of the carriage.

“M'sieu Fourchet,” she greeted her husband in a gruff shy voice.

“Madame.”
He bowed over her hand.

Over his bent head, his wife's gaze crossed Robert's, questioning and uneasy, and held for a moment before it fled away.

A servant with a branch of candles had come out behind Madame Fourchet, slim and boyish and, like Cornwallis, pin-neat; only when he came closer to take in his free hand the torch January held did January see the wrinkles around eyes and lips that marked him as a man in his forties. Like Cornwallis, the servant wore a small slip of black mustache, and like Cornwallis he was light-skinned, quadroon or octoroon, with some white forebear's blue-gray eyes.

January lifted Hannibal gently from the carriage as Fourchet made introductions and produced again the story of investments averted and money saved.

“Welcome to Mon Triomphe, M'sieu Sefton,” said Madame, in the hesitant voice of one who has never been sure of her position, and Hannibal extended his hand.

“How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter,” he quoted, and kissed the lace-mitted knuckles. “Forgive me my trifling infirmity. Tomorrow I will prostrate myself to the ground as befits a kind hostess and a lovely woman.”

She pulled her hand from his and muttered, “Thank you. It's nothing,” and hurried before them up the steps. “Agamemnon, stay and help the men in with the luggage.” In the multiple luminance of torch and candles January saw the speculative glance Robert darted from Hannibal to his stepmother, and the burning, bitter glare directed at the fiddler by Fourchet, an undisguised anger that made January's chest clench inside with reactive fear.

The overseer Thierry touched his hat brim and made off in the direction of the mill, his duty to his employer accomplished. He moved, not with a swagger, but with a sidelong swiftness, watching everything around him.

Fourchet led them into the house through his own bedroom, meeting his wife once more in the parlor. This room was small compared to a town house's, as in most Creole plantation houses: sparsely furnished, neat and plain. Over a mantelpiece of cypresswood painted to resemble marble hung the portrait of a young woman clad in the caraco jacket popular in the nineties. A square-faced, dark-eyed boy clung frantically to her striped skirts; a baby in a white christening gown perched on her knee. Next to the mantel a miniature of the same woman was framed in the glittering jet circlet of an immortelle wreath.

Through the parlor's inner sliding doors a child could be heard piping angrily, “But I want to see! Henna says there's company and they may have something for me!”

A hushed female voice interposed, cut off furiously. “I want to see! I want to see! I'll have you whipped if you don't let me see!” and a second, younger child screamed, “Me, too! Me, too!”

By the rather fixed smile that widened onto the face of the other woman who waited for them in the parlor-dark-haired, ripely pretty, and clothed in a gown of figured lilac muslin with gauze bows and enormous “imbecile” sleeves-January guessed that this was the children's mother.

“Pardon me,” said Robert hastily. He stepped through the sliding doors, closing them behind him.

“M'sieu Sefton,” introduced Madame. “My daughter-in-law, Madame Helene Fourchet.”

"If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

And with fresh numbers, number all your graces,

The age to come would say, `This poet lies;

Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces."

Hannibal's lips brushed her hand, and Helene Fourchet tapped his cheek playfully with her fan. “Oh, I just adore poetry! Is it Lord Byron? I am most passionately devoted to `The Corsair.' And `The Bride of Abydos,' of course. Such a thrill goes through my heart . . .”

“English pap,” snapped Fourchet. “Will you shut those brats of yours up?” For the noise in the next room continued unabated, despite whatever efforts the children's father was putting up.

“Do I understand from what you said in the carriage that you're behind in your harvest?” Hannibal turned to Fourchet and coughed again, with every evidence of great agony valiantly concealed. “I beg that you will let me repay a little of your kindness by lending you Ben here while I'm laid by the heels. You don't mind a day or two in the fields, do you, Ben?”

“To help the good folks who take you in when you're sick?” January did his best to sound like a character in a Chateaubriand novel. “Why, Michie Hannibal, I worked the cotton-fields before this. Won't do me no harm to cut sugar for a while.”

“Well done, good and faithful servant.”

“M'sieu Sefton, no,” protested the young Madame. In the warm amber dimness of the parlor she didn't look much over sixteen, a big-boned, flat-chested girl with a plain triangular face and the sandy coloring that makes a woman appear lashless and washed-out. “Our hospitality-”

“Don't be an ass,” snapped Fourchet, and looked January up and down with the same coldness that had been in Esteban's eyes when he'd surveyed Baptiste. “We lost Reuben and it'll be days before Boaz is over his fever. Thank you, sir.” He spoke to Hannibal as if the words were being extracted from him with forceps. “I appreciate it. Cornwallis!” He raised his voice like the thwack of a board striking pavement.

The valet, who had evidently finished bestowing the luggage in his master's chamber and the guest room, stepped through the parlor's inner doors.

“Take Ben here out to the quarters and find him a place to stay for a night or two. Tell Thierry he's to be put to work while he's here. And get that Baptiste in here, so Madame Fourchet can teach him his duties.”

It was close to nine already, but if the young Madame Fourchet would sooner have had a night's sleep before inducting a complete stranger to a complex set of responsibilities and tasks, she knew better than to say so. Robert, stepping back through the parlor doors in time to hear this, began to protest, “Sir, it's quite late for her to be-”

“Shut up.” Fourchet lashed the words at him. “Better tonight than she waste half the day tomorrow when he could be of some use. We need to get this place back into order. Cornwallis, take Monsieur Sefton here to the garçonniere. Good night to you, sir. Esteban . . .” With a peremptory wave at his elder son, Fourchet stalked through the door that led into his bedroom and thence, probably, to his office behind it. Esteban followed, and closed the door with the care of one who fears that a sound will bring the house crashing about everyone's ears.

“I do apologize, Madame.” Robert hastened to his stepmother's side as the young Madame led the way through the dining room-cypresswood table, the gleam of glass and flowers in the uplifted shudder of Cornwallis's branch of candles and she gave her head a quick little shake and hastened her step. “I beg you to forgive my father, and apologize on his behalf.”

“Really-” Madame Helene's strident voice floated behind them, “Robert, you might at least have the goodness to-”

The closing door cut her off.

It was a peculiarity of Creole households that the young men of the family, from the age of thirteen or so, were given quarters separate from the family. In town these usually consisted of a wing behind the main town house, or, in the case of the cottages wealthy men bought for their mistresses along Rue Rampart, Rue Burgundy, and the other small streets at the back of the old French town, a room or two above the kitchen, lest a white man find himself sleeping under the same roof as a young man-however nearly related to him-of color. On plantations the garçonniere was usually a separate building connected to the main house by the galleries that surrounded the whole, forming a U that drew the cooling river breezes through. In the case of Mon Triomphe, it was one wing on the downstream, or men's, side of the house. The corresponding wing on the upstream side was, mercifully, given over to nurseries.

“I'll clear this away.” Robert followed Madame Fourchet into the second of the garçonniere's two rooms ahead of January and gathered, from the small desk there, a quantity of Parisian journals and newspapers, stationery, wafers, and ink. “I use this room as a study when we're here. And indeed, M'sieu Sefton,” he added, setting down the books he'd begun to pick up, “you're quite welcome to peruse any of my library. I rather pride myself on it.”

He nervously stroked the neat Vandyke that framed red lips whose pliant poutiness spoke of what his mother must have looked like. “I've been collecting scientific volumes since I was quite a little boy. By the time I was six, I and a friend had made a little steam engine and fitted it to one of the pirogues we had here. A boy's toy merely, but it worked. My mother always said . . .”

Through the French doors, the petulant shrieks of the children floated across the open piazza between the arms of the house.

“Thank you,” Hannibal murmured, as January laid him on the tall half-tester bed. Either Cornwallis or Agamemnon had already been in and unpacked the portmanteau and placed Hannibal's violin carefully on the bureau. Four of Hannibal's half-dozen bottles of opium were arranged tidily beside it.

Robert turned again to his stepmother. “I do apologize for my father. He was drunk, to have spoken to you thus-”

“He was not drunk.” Madame Fourchet's voice was low and stammering, like an ill-at-ease boy's.

“And I suppose that sober-” began Robert, and stopped himself. Turning back to Hannibal, he finished, “Whatever the case, I do apologize, and bid you welcome to Mon Triomphe. Should you require anything, M'sieu, please feel free to ask any of the servants. And thank you again for the loan of your boy. His help will be invaluable in getting the cane in.”

“I'll just get him settled, if you don't mind, M'am,” said January diffidently, and Madame Fourchet inclined her head.

Cornwallis lit the candles on the bureau from those on the girandole he bore, then led Robert and Madame out onto the gallery again. “Go on ahead and find Baptiste,” January heard Robert say, as they closed the doors. Then, voice low but still audible, “You can't let him talk to you like that, Marie-Noel.” The candlelight had departed, and they would be standing, January guessed, in the velvet shadows of the gallery, away from the leaked glow of Fourchet's office window. “He treats you like a servant. Like a dog.”

If the young woman replied she did so in a voice too low for January to hear. But he guessed that she only stood with her head bowed and turned a little away. Lips folded close, as they had been when her husband's voice had cut at her before strangers and servants. Pale-lashed eyelids lowered. Heretofore Robert-whose French was irreproachably Parisian-had addressed her with the formal vous of a man speaking to his father's wife. Now he called her tu, as one would speak to a sister or a friend.