Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (35 page)

Rose nodded. Blood marked a number of the wounds that had opened again, giving her the horrible air of some blood-boltered spirit from a bad Gothic novel. “Madame Perth's as formidable as her husband was. Can you hear M'sieu Duquille and his sons in the garçonniere as well?”

“I can't tell.” January raised himself on his elbows, glanced to the shut upstream doorway beside which Serapis waited in the shadows, and switched to Latin. “If there is a M'sieu Duquille. Did you see him when you came here?” Rose's eyes widened behind their oval lenses. “Kitanga made us welcome, fetched us clothing from the attics-which he assured us was clean, meaning, I suppose, that it isn't covered with mildew like everything else in the house. I don't know what he thought we expected: calico loincloths? Which seem to be all they wear here...”

“That's exactly my point,” said January softly. “How long has it been since anyone has seen Uncle Joffrey Duquille? How long has it been since there was another white person on this plantation, to tell whether Duquille was alive or not? Think about it, Rose.”

His hand moved, taking in the dust-filled parlor, the cushions breathing of mildew, the indigo-washed plaster of the walls sheeted with cobweb and the portrait of a woman, beautiful and sad, looking down on them from beside the locked door of what had been the gentlemen's side of the house. “Freedom doesn't have to mean escaping in boats to Mexico or Africa. Maybe it only means having Africa here-having your village here. Your freedom here. Raising enough sugar to sell for a little profit, having one or two people on the place who can write a hand sufficiently like Duquille's to fool his factor in town ... And who's to know? Who's to know if the man hasn't been alive for years?”

She glanced toward the doorway again, at Serapis' lean, dark shadow in the dimness. “Until someone wants to come dig for Jean Lafitte's treasure on his land.”

“Until someone wants to dig for treasure on his land,” agreed January.

More gunfire outside made them all tense. Chloe tucked her diaphanous skirts tight above her knees and crawled to the fireplace, to pick candles from the tin box there and gingerly replace the nearly burned-out stubs in the holders on cabinet and mantel. January guessed Mulm's filibusters were all around the house, firing into the lighted rooms, but he dreaded still more what would happen when the candles gave out.

He heard Chloe whisper, “Are you all right, darling?” leaning over the tipped-up sofa.

“Fine, thank you. Not,” Dominique added, “that any of us could do anything about it if I did go into labor . . .”

“Don't even say it,” returned the younger girl with such comic alarm in her voice that both women giggled.

In Latin, January asked Rose, “Does she know?”

Rose shrugged helplessly. “I haven't the faintest idea. The first I knew Dominique was at Bois d'Argent was when I ran into the house after seeing Mulm. I almost fell over when I came on the two of them sitting together on the back gallery....”

The house shuddered again, as something struck it-That HAS to be a tree. A moment later, from the upstream side of the house-from the locked garçonniere side came the snap of gunfire. Serapis slipped into the parlor, whispered to January, “Take the parlor window, if you would, Michie,” and from a cord around his neck took the key to the locked door. Despite the crash of the wind and the hammering rain, January heard the door lock behind him.

It made a bizarre kind of sense. He'd heard of runaway villages, little fragments of Africa out in the cipriere. Such villages were rare now, but he'd visited one not far from New Orleans itself, where slaves raised their own crops, tended their pigs and their chickens, set watchers in the marsh, and pulled up stakes and moved on when the patrols started coming too close. How difficult would it be, he wondered, to take that one step further? To dispose of a master known for his eccentricity, to take over an isolated plantation. Michie Joffrey doesn't speak to company.

A line of men, singing an African song as they carried wood in from the marsh.

We don't have strangers comin' around St. Roche. And the shotgun in Serapis' hands.

He pressed his ear to the boards again, listening for the thud of invading boots, and the storm shrieked and rocked the house--empty for how long? he wondered. Haunted-inhabited-not by the specter of Madame Duquille, as Chloe and her cousins had imagined, but by the much more useful ghost of Joffrey Duquille himself. By the legal fiction of his continued existence that enabled his slaves to live in security and peace.

Serapis slipped back into the room again, locked the door behind him. “Wind gonna stop,” he said softly, and dropped another couple of powder-flasks down into Dominique's little fortress of upended divan. “When it does, they'll make their try. It's light, when the clouds break.”

January glanced at the mantel clock, covered so thick in cobweb that it was hard to see the hands at all. He pulled his own silver watch from his pocket. It was twenty min utes to seven. “Can we make a sortie and take them from behind? You, me, maybe Oliver or one of the ... one of M'sieu Duquille's sons?”

“No.” Serapis moved from the divan to the cabinet, then across to the bedroom door again. His back, January noticed, was unscarred as a child's, something you seldom saw in a slave with that proud carriage and watchful eye. Certainly not in a slave who bore tribal scars on his face. “It's death to go out when the wind stops.”

“Good heavens, no!” said Rose. “In hurricanes like this there's a stillness of perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, then the wind starts up from the opposite direction, harder than be fore. Redfield wrote that it was because of the cyclonic nature of such storms. It hits without warning.... ”

“There speaks a lady from the islands.” Serapis' eyes glinted approval. “The men from the quarters, they're all hid up in the sugar-mill.” He nodded in the direction that January recalled vaguely that the mill would lie. “I doubt any will come out during the stillness. Not against men in the woods with guns. We'll have to hold them, keep them out of here until the winds come again. When the winds come, and the flood that will follow on them, we'll be rid of those evil men.”

When the stillness came, the silence was shocking. He felt, for a moment, a strange elation, a kind of relaxed peace, as if the night were over and they were safe....

Then Serapis slammed open the shutters and fired through, and January, throwing back the jalousie nearest him, saw men pushing through the tangled brush and weeds, knee-deep in water and struggling to reach the house. Men with rifles, water splashing around their boots; at least a dozen of them. He recognized Mulm, black closebuttoned coat shiny with wet, and Burke beside him with his slouch hat still tied to his head. January fired, and the men scattered, vanished into the tangle of laurel and sugarberry that grew too close around the ruinous house. He settled his sights on the top of the gallery stairs, but knew they'd likely climb up some less obvious way.

Gunfire sounded on the other sides of the house. Then, breaking from the brushy thickets along the rim of the sugar-fields, he saw four running forms in white. Three women and a girl, long hair soaked, wet nightgowns sticking to their bodies and impeding their flight; stumbling, falling in the water, dragging one another up to run on.

And behind them, wading grim, mud-smeared, and bloody as the platt-eye devil from childhood fable, was Abishag Shaw.

He still had two rifles with him, and two pistols around his neck on ribbons, the way the pirates used to wear them, stuck through his belt to keep them from flopping. His right side was one huge rain-diluted bloodstain over the torn rags of his shirt. He fell against the corner of the nearest building, a sort of shed that had probably been a laundry or pottery or cooper's shop, and turned back to face the fields-all this January saw in seconds. The running women blundering through half-submerged brush, Shaw bringing his rifle to his shoulder like a man near the end of his strength, and then the black, loping shapes of the pursuers. Angry men, frightened men, appearing and vanishing among the half-drowned foliage, cane-knives gleaming in their hands.

Shaw fired once, and the pursuing slaves took cover. January was less astonished that Shaw had tracked the rebels and freed the women than he was that the Kentuckian had kept his powder dry through the storm. They'll creep up on him at their leisure, thought January-if snakes didn't get them in the water first. January heard Mulm's high nasal voice yell an order: two men broke from the trees and splashed toward the women to intercept them, pistols waving in their hands.

Still moving carefully, leaning on the shed for support, Shaw fired at the approaching filibusters, and as usual Vivienne Avocet stopped dead in her tracks, clutched her hair, and screamed. From his window January fired, too, and the men ducked for the nearest trees. In a single long spring January crossed the gallery; another stride took him over the rail, praying gators hadn't come up from the river with the floodwaters. He landed with a monumental splash on something that rolled underfoot, almost spilling him off his balance. Someone shot at him from somewhere and he heard men yelling in the cane-fields, Jacinthe's slaves closing in on Shaw.

Vivienne Avocet screamed again at the sight of January and tried to break from her companions and flee, but her daughter shouted, “Mama, he's from the house!”

January yelled, “Make for the house!” and fired at Shaw's rebel attackers, breaking their charge. Bullets slapped the water near him and one of the slaves launched into him from behind with a cane-knife; January grabbed the man's wrist, wrenched his arm around, and pulled him into a punch that snapped his head back and buckled his knees. Dropping him, he waded toward Shaw without turning to see if the man he'd struck drowned or not.

Shaw fired off his last shot-January was counting-just as January reached the shed. If Jacinthe's men were counting, too, they'd come on again soon. He wrenched one of the pistols from around the Lieutenant's neck, flipped open the patch-box in its handle, and dumped out ball and wad as Shaw wordlessly placed a pinch of perfectly dry powder into his hand.

“Sorry I kicked you.” He rammed the charge home and handed the gun back to Shaw, who he knew to be a far better shot than himself.

“Had to be done.”
Shaw brought up his own rifle, and scanned the muck of hackberry seedlings and weeds and water, watching for the movement that would tell him the rebel slaves were working their way around under cover. His breath labored and his gargoyle features were taut under streaming lines of watered blood. “I'll get over it.”

His right arm would barely move, something that didn't seem to affect his aim much, or his speed at loading. A bullet tore a chunk off the corner of the shed between them, and they both ducked, made a dash along the side of the little building, and vaulted through a window. More shots cracked outside. Looking back, January could see the gun-flashes in the two windows in the front-Serapis and Rose, he thought-and counted three on the garçonniere wing. There was no sign of the four Avocet women and presumably they'd made it to the gallery in safety. He found himself thinking, If they'd been shot they'd still be floating. ...

It was a hundred yards to the house. The shed offered little protection, Jacinthe and his rebels would ...

Movement in the water that stood in the doorway, men swimming, trying to stay beneath the surface.
January caught up a rifle and strode to the door, slammed it down, heard at the same instant a grunting howl from the window and guessed others had come up there. God knew how much longer Shaw was good for. January cursed himself grimly as he smashed one attacking slave across the face, seized the cane-knife from the attacker's hand, and slashed at another-for himself, he didn't care if the Avocet women lived or died, and resented being put in the position of protecting them. Not when Rose and Dominique needed his presence in the house.

He stomped, kicked, thrust a bloodied slave back through the door, risked a glance over his shoulder. Shaw was clinging to the window-frame to keep himself on his feet, gasping for breath, and past him, January could see more of Jacinthe's rebel slaves dashing through the water toward the shed, and toward the house beyond.

Well never stop them....

Like the drop of a theater curtain, darkness fell. January saw, a split-second before he felt it, the crawling turmoil of wind race across the floodwaters in the over grown yard, saw the trees buck and heave and lean.
Heard the bellowing clash of leaves, of canes, of wind.

Then rain hit, like Noah's flood; the deeps broken up, the skies emptied. The shed which had seemed to be so stable a few moments ago creaked and swayed like a drunk ard; January contemplated for a moment trying to make it to the house and looked out the door in time to see an oaktree pinwheel past in the rain.

Shaw said, “Fuck me,” and pressed his hand to his right side. At a guess, the bullet that had taken him down on the levee had lodged against-and probably broken some ribs. The window beyond him had turned into a cinder-colored sheet of streaming water. The slaves that had been only a dozen yards away never arrived.

The water began to rise. In the gloom January saw now the rats clinging to the shed's rafters, or swimming madly in the corners; something that he thought was a deer swam past the door, antlered head cleaving the flood like a floating snag. Branches slammed into the landward side of the shed, and now and then something softer that had to be a bird. January couldn't imagine where Jacinthe and his slaves would go; not to speak of those who had fled Boscage and Autreuil and Les Plaquemines. No wonder Serapis had said that no one would dare emerge from the sugar-house long enough to attack Mulm and his filibusters.

“Who-all's in the house, Maestro?” Shaw waded to the corner where January stood, away from the bending, creaking landward walls. Bloody hair hung in his eyes-he groped for the wall's support.

“One or two house-servants, a woman named Chloe Viellard-the niece of St. Roche's owner-along with Rose and my sister Dominique. Supposedly Joffrey Duquille and his sons are there, too, but I haven't seen them.”