Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (22 page)

And what if Rose conceived? He knew she was going to Olympe for advice-the smell of the vinegar she used was a sharp, lingering fragrance in the luminous darkness-but he also knew that pessary sponges, and lambskins, and the annoyance of coitus interruptus all failed as often as they succeeded.

He knew Rose, too, lived in fear of it, and who could blame her? How insane did you have to be to risk everything you cared for, everything you valued, to give yourself to one you loved?

Virgin Mary, he prayed into the shadows, if what we do is sin, please understand that we're doing as well as we can. Thank you for freeing Rose's heart of the chains of her fear.

Please show us a way, you who guide wandering mariners home.

Please show us a way.

He slept, like a wanderer in utter darkness lying down on the very brink of a cliff; and the following night the entire question of marriage and money and how they were going to get through the summer became suddenly and hideously moot.

“Benjamin!”

January jolted from sleep. In that first instant-hearing Rose's voice, panting and laced with terror-he thought, Bad dream....

No. He was in his own room in the garçonniere. That was last night he'd spent at Rose's.

The door rattled, frantic. He rolled from beneath the mosquito-bar, two strides took him to the door, shutters latched as they always were against his landlady's night wanderings. He'd gone out to Milneburgh that day, to see Dominique, and the aftermath of the evening rain that had been so welcome on his way home was a tarry swelter now. “Benjamin!” whispered Rose again, and the fear in her voice was clear. He pulled the door open. She caught his arm. “Run! Get out! We have to-”

He was already grabbing his trousers from the chair, pulling them on, knowing Rose didn't panic and seeing her barefoot, her hair down, a rough skirt and shawl wrapped on over her nightgown and mud and scratches on her face. He didn't wonder even for one second what was going on: he knew.

Mulm.

The men came into the yard like wolves, shadows barely visible in the overcast night. “House behind us is empty, hide in the kitchen,” said January as he caught Rose by the waist, boosted her over the gallery rail, held her steady till she could swing herself up onto the roof and so up its tall peak, to the peak of the slave-quarters on the LaPlace property behind. She moved fast, but he scarcely had time to put his head and shoulders back through the door of his room, to grab his desk and heave it at the first man up the stairs, knocking him back. As he sprang up onto the rail himself, he heard the baluster of the garçonniere stairs tear and shatter, heard men howl as they fell fifteen feet to the paving-bricks of the yard.

No one shot at him. The men were professionals, and knew they had no chance of finding their target in the dark. But he heard retreating boots, knew his pursuers would be around into the next street in moments and they'd better have someone to follow. As he went over the peak of the garçonniere roof, January glanced back and saw the white, ghostly shape of his landlady herself, standing on the back gallery of her cottage, watching the scene unmoving and presumably unmoved.

Then January went over the roof peak, slid and scrambled down slates greasy with moss and lawned with resurrection fern. He knew the LaPlace family had departed, taking their three slaves with them, for the quarters chamber immediately behind his own room was so thinly-walled he could hear their muffled voices when they spoke at night. He turned on the roof, swung his legs over the edge, and slipped down onto the gallery, cast a quick, scared glance down at the yard, half-expecting to see Rose crumpled on the bricks below. The moon rode high, a fragile nail-clipping a few days old, and it was so dark in the yard he could see nothing. He couldn't wait to look. Down the stairs, hearing and feeling through the bones of the little building the jarring weight of men clambering over the roof-peak after him. Please don't let her be hurt. Please don't let them catch her...

A glance showed him no white blur of nightdress, but that had to be all. He plunged through the breezeway at the side of the house, heard a man curse behind him on the roof and another say in English “Hell, Rob, I thought you said you fought Comanche-”

“Well, there ain't no fuckin' buildin's in Comanche country!”

-and he was blundering through the black pit of the breezeway to the street and praying desperately he'd reach the mouth of it before his way was blocked at the street end. They'd run out of Madame Bontemps' yard and around to intercept him. He had only seconds of leeway....

He saw them, just coming around the corner, by the flare of the iron lantern that hung where Rue de l'Hopital crossed Rue Bourbon. Four, five-a confused impression of slouch hats, clubs, lead slung-shot probably held in hand, that could crack open a man's skull. He bolted lakeward, up Rue de l'Hopital, guessing they could see only movement in the dark, and not how many people ran. Praying Rose would wait, would lie quiet in the deserted kitchen till he came. Praying she'd trust.

Virgin Mary, help us get out of this....

He bolted around the corner into Rue Dauphine and instantly, drawing the deepest breath he could, flung himself into the gutter. It was two feet deep and two wide and brimming from the rain and any quantity of chamber-pots, and he stretched out on the bottom as if in a water-filled coffin and listened.

“Fuck, where'd they go?”

“Check that doorway over there. Look in that carriageway....”

Voices dimming.
Cursing. He'd heard nothing for a few seconds when he rolled over, raised himself cautiously until he could just feel his face break the surface, opened his mouth, breathed out, breathed in, and went down again. Like a gator in the swamp. This time of year there were baby gators in the gutters, but only in the back of town. Mostly you didn't get them here, though his friend Hannibal claimed he'd encountered a three-footer crossing Perdidio Street one night last summer when he'd been staggering home. Given the number of corpses that ended up in the gutters in that part of town, thought January, one didn't have to ask what it lived on....

He wondered how many men there were. If any had been killed, tumbling in confusion off the garçonniere stairs. If Madame Bontemps would have the wits to call the City Guards, and if she'd let him go on renting from her after tonight.

Virgin Mother, let Rose be all right. . . .

The kitchen door of the LaPlace house was locked. January whispered “Rose?” and heard the minute scrape of the bolt drawn back. He slipped through the door into ab solute darkness. Felt her arms go around him, her hands draw his dripping head down to hers, her lips press his, slime and sewage and all. In spite of everything-maybe because of everything-the soft pressure of her breasts against his chest through the thin linen of her nightrail brought his manhood up hard; he turned his hip to her so she wouldn't feel it, forced his voice steady.

“Are you hurt?”

“No. You?” It was like Rose, he thought, not to ask questions, not to panic, not to waste words or breath, although he could feel her trembling-which did nothing to quell the instinctual fire burning so insistently in his groin. At the age of twenty, he reflected ruefully, he'd have had her on the kitchen table and to hell with Mulm and his myrmidons.

“I'm fine.”

“What do we do?”

Couple like
minks... No.

“Get out of town. Now, tonight, at once. They'll be back. If either one of us goes to the City Guards, we have nothing to tell them, and they'll be watching your place and mine. Do you have your papers?”

Her hair brushed his arm as she shook her head. “They broke the door in, pulled me out of bed. Told me if I made a sound they'd shoot me. I keep my papers under the mattress; I was lucky I had a pen-knife and a pencil in my skirt pocket.” She stepped away from him. He could hear her groping along the tabletop, heard the faint knock of a drawer, and her muttered curse.

Of course the family would have taken anything in the nature of cutlery.

Mulm and his bravos would come back in minutes, to wait by January's rooms. Watching for his return.

It was time to run.

Rose. They'd tried to take Rose. To get him to keep his mouth shut, of course. Or to bring him to them.

The anger that washed over him was so intense that for a moment he couldn't breathe. He could have killed, gladly and unthinkingly. How DARED they... ?

The yard behind the house was silent, black as pitch. A blur from the distant street-lamp put a smudge of ochre along the roof-line of the house itself, allowing January and Rose to orient themselves; if they hadn't just come out of the coalsack kitchen they probably couldn't have seen it. Ears strained so that he wondered that he didn't rupture them, January led the way through the hot dark as they made their way among the unpaved streets downriver, past the Esplanade and into the Faubourg Marigny. The foreigners who lived there, for the most part Germans and Italians fleeing the confusion and high taxes of their home principalities, hadn't the money to leave town in the summer. When the fevers came, as they did one summer in three, the people of the district died like flies.

They spent the rest of the night in the hay behind a livery stable, taking turns to sleep. When first light came, January tore a small square off the blank bottom of his own freedom paper and with Rose's pencil wrote a note to Olympe. There was blood on the pencil, a good four inches of it. Rose must have driven it like a dagger into the man nearest her, the moment she judged it safe to do so, in order to get away.

“You've killed him,” he said, and licked his finger to scrub the dried blood off the lead point. “Puncture wounds that deep go septic very quickly, even if you didn't pierce an organ.”

“Good,” said Rose in a voice like a plucked guitarstring wound too tight. Without her spectacles her eyes seemed very large, ringed with dark exhaustion. She said no more about it, but sat stiff and withdrawn as she had been when first they'd met. He thought about what men of that type would have done with a quadroon woman before they killed her or sold her. The anger surged back again, burning heat, making his head swim.

I will kill them....

He'd seen men die of puncture-wound sepsis, and like Rose he thought, Good. Let's hope it was Burke.

The Italian boy who came out to clean the stables was visibly astonished when addressed in his own tongue by what were clearly a couple of runaway slaves. He agreed to take the note, and January's watch, to Olympe's house, and even brought them bread and cheese before he went.

“They'll give you some money there,” January told him. “If they don't, you can keep the watch.” It was more than likely the boy would keep the watch anyway and not mention that part of the bargain to Olympe, which gave him a pang. He'd bought the watch in Paris, and it was dear to him. But it was silver, and the only thing of value he'd had in his trouser pockets, and from what he knew of the men he was dealing with, it was a small price to pay.

When the boy came back two hours later, it was not only with the watch-which he returned-but with a friend of Olympe's named Natchez Jim, who had a wood boat he plied up and down the river: “You tell me where you aim to go,” the boatman told them in his deep, mellow voice, “and I take you there.”

“Grand Isle,” said Rose. She and January had talked about it during the long, wakeful night. “I have family there, my father's family. We'll be able to stay for as long as we have to.”

Natchez Jim studied her face for a moment, then looked at January, eyebrows raised under a scraggy multitude of string-wrapped pickaninny braids. He was probably in his thirties but looked older, his face like black oak blasted by lightning. The gris-gris Olympe had made for him many years before dangled among an assortment of ragged beads and chains around his neck: mouse-bones, old keys, a heart-shaped locket of gold. “Your sister say you may be in trouble,” he said, switching to the thickest French-African patois, to exclude the Italian boy who still stood near them. “Zes blankittes, she say.”

“That's true.” January wondered if Jim also knew about the revolt being planned, and where it would be. He was a small-time trader; his boat went everywhere on the river. Among all those little cargoes of vegetables grown in slave gardens, of bales of moss harvested in hours spared from the master's allotted tasks and of trinkets and toys whittled by firelight in the night, it wouldn't be hard to slip in guns.

“The police in on it?”

He meant, Are we likely to be searched? The river traders were the slaves' lifeline to the world outside their captivity and as such they drove the plantation owners crazy. But there was little the masters could do about them beyond giving them whatever grief they could.

January shook his head.

Jim brought money enough to buy Rose a jacket and shoes, and a madras kerchief to tie on her head. The last thing they needed was the police to stop them about her uncovered hair. There was no way of telling who would see them if they were delayed even a few hours in town. No way of knowing which of Mulm's informants would carry word of their whereabouts or destination. The money was probably more than Olympe could afford, and as January washed off the crusted gutter-stink in the livery-stable horse-trough, he made a silent vow that he'd repay every penny. His sister had further found someone, probably her twelve-year-old son, Gabriel, to sneak to Rose's rooms and get her papers and her spectacles.

Olympe included no note, no communication with these items. As he and Rose made their way without appearance of hurry through the muddy streets toward the levee, January wondered how long this exile would last: would he in fact be able to return to New Orleans at all? At a guess, he thought, slouching his shoulders and wishing he weren't so unmissably tall, if Mulm's scheme succeeded-whatever it was-he would be no danger to the man, although he knew he'd need to walk very carefully for some time to come. He corrected himself he would be perceived as no danger. Mulm was white, Mulm was welloff, and Mulm almost certainly had powerful friends among the more raffish American property holders of the town. A complaint against the saloonkeeper-unprovable at that-would result in nothing but a more determined effort to rid the world of Benjamin January.