Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (5 page)

“And did anyone ever come?” Rose Vitrac glanced back over her shoulder at January, who had loyally accompanied her into the kitchen of the St. Chinian town house on Rue Bourbon to make coffee.

And in fact, with the first cool of evening already drowning the high-walled courtyard in shadow, the kitchen wasn't nearly as infernal as it must have been in the hot part of the day. How old Martine-Veryl St. Chinian's cook had endured turning out a full-on Creole dinner in this weather, January couldn't imagine. Frequent trips outside to chop vegetables or roll pastry on the table under the pepper-tree, probably. But now that most of the work was done, Martine was prepared to tolerate Rose coming in to make coffee.

The cook was dearly fond of old St. Chinian's nephew Artois, and extended this benevolence to Artois' tutor, even if she didn't think it quite right that the tutor was a woman. If Michie Artois was happy, it was well with her.

January shook his head. “No one came,” he said. The last sunlight gilded the roof-slates and fleckered the peppertree's feathery leaves. A rust-red dragonfly darted into the kitchen, perched briefly on Rose's tignon, then whirled away.

“It isn't as if they're inundated with work at this time of year.”

Rose said nothing. She concentrated instead on the slow turning of the roaster crank, and paused to push up her spectacles and wipe the bridge of her nose with a corner of the apron she usually wore to teach. Most of the dinner was done, and the coals that had been heaped around the iron dutch-ovens on the hearth cleared away to simmer sauces in the line of stew-holes on the other wall. Rose had begged a shovel-full of the still-radiating coals to pile around the coffee-roaster. Martine herself was in the house, helping St. Chinian's valet-the only other servant the reclusive old gentleman possessed-to set the table. The courtyard between house and kitchen was a jungle of banana-plants and resurrection fern, of oleanders decades untrimmed and pavement-bricks so heaved and buckled with water-damage as to be worse than bare earth would have been. The carriageway out to Rue Bourbon rivaled most attics January had seen in both quantity and variety of clutter.

The old man's family, one and all, considered Veryl St. Chinian mad.

“Is that M'sieu Janvier?” called a youth's voice from the flagstoned room next door that had once been a laundry. “Shall I put in more water for him?” Without waiting for yea or nay, Artois St. Chinian came into the kitchen with a yellow pottery jar, and ran a couple of cups of water into it from the big glazed-clay water-purifier on the shelf.

Artois was sixteen. Since April, Rose had been the boy's tutor, hired by Artois' uncle in the face of the absolute incredulity of the family that a woman could either hold such a position, or teach a youth anything of value. By the tangle of wires, pots, cranks, and bottles spread over the big worktable in the former laundry, January guessed the subject was still electricity, as it had been for weeks. Nothing that would be of any use to a student preparing for the University in Lyons, of course, but it was a treat that both Rose and Artois indulged each other in after they'd finished the day's ration of Latin, mathematics, and Greek.

“I really will have to talk Uncle Veryl into getting gas laid on, at least in part of the house,” sighed Artois, drawing the gallows-iron of the kitchen fireplace to him with a poker to add the water to the pot. “This is just impossible.”

“Making coffee over a spermaceti lamp in the workshop?” January grinned in spite of his day-long, weary anger at the injustice of the world.

“Heating anything over a spermaceti lamp.
I'll bet Michael Faraday didn't do his experiments by heating his wires and solutions over... over bonfires in the middle of the laboratory floor.” In spite of a white linen shirt, the silk waistcoat, and the sky-blue cravat of a young dandy, Artois St. Chinian still had a schoolboy air. His curly hair, halfway in color between molasses and honey, tumbled loosely over his forehead; his eyes were the hue of pale tourmaline. His mother had been fair, too, January had been told, with nearly European features, and the planter Raymond St. Chinian had lavished as much care and attention on his plaqee's child as he had on the daughter of his legitimate, white wife.

Only at Raymond St. Chinian's death had the care stopped. Had Raymond's uncle Veryl not stepped in, January wasn't sure what would have become of the boy Artois. Apprenticed out as a clerk, he supposed-to waste that shining intelligence copying bills of lading or columns of figures in a bank for the rest of his days.

“Between Creole family politics and low water in the river, I'd be surprised if Shaw returned any time before tomorrow night,” January went on as Artois fetched down the coffee-grinder and perched on the table to adjust the rather delicate, fiddly rollers to his favorite consistency. “There aren't many boats coming upstream from Plaquemines Parish this time of year. From curiosity I might see what my mother knows about the Avocet family when I go out to Milneburgh tomorrow afternoon to see Dominique.”

“You think she'll know?” Rose's eyebrows quirked above the gold rims of her spectacles. “It sounds like whichever brother it was got himself murdered only last night.”

“My mother?”
January chuckled without particular mirth. “She'll have heard everything about it before the family lawyers got to Shaw.”

“There is much in what you say.” Rose shook the roaster and tonged the lid aside to check the color of the beans. January fetched the pot from its shelf and went to the wide-open arch that looked into the courtyard. Relative coolness aside, the kitchen was still stifling.

“Would your mother be able to tell you something about Hesione LeGros?” Artois was a good-looking boy, his golden fairness melding oddly with the features of an African prince. “You said she was at General Humbert's birthday party with her.”

“Being in the same room with her doesn't mean she'd speak to her,” said January, returning to the kitchen. “You should have heard my mother on the subject of the smugglers' women, the day after the party. And I doubt she could tell me much that Olympe didn't know.”

“You think the doubloon might have been a souvenir from her days with Lafitte?” asked Rose. She wiped her face again with her apron-as befit a tutor, she dressed in a frock of dull pink chintz, the apron she wore for experiments as spotless as her white tignon. “And that was what her killer came to get?”

“If the money was what he came to get,” said January thoughtfully, “why didn't he get it? If that was what he was searching the house for, he'd have searched her body, too. And I doubt anything-money or jewels or pirate treasure from her glory days-would have survived a decade or so of hard drinking.”

“True.” Rose nodded, thinking-as January was thinking-of their mutual friend Hannibal Sefton, whose few possessions, with the exception of his books and his vi olin, had been constantly in and out of every pawnshop in town. Most of the books now resided in Rose's cramped little room on the Rue des Victoires. The violin had gone with Hannibal when he had, rather unexpectedly, run off to Mexico with a soprano from the Opera last winter. “And if she'd had it on her, she wouldn't have been begging for food from the market-women.”

“If she'd had it on her,” said January, “she wouldn't have gone home. She'd have walked on over to the Nantucket in the Swamp, which, I understand, sells liquor out the back door to anyone who comes down Gravier Street.” Rose shivered. “I'm astonished no one ever kidnapped her to sell as a slave. You told me yourself that happens fairly frequently, down in the Swamp.”

“It happens to people who're worth money.” January's voice was dry as he held the coffee-mill steady for Rose to pour in the beans. "Hesione was almost past child-bearing and so clearly a drunkard I doubt even a cotton-planter from the Territories would buy her. She was worth nothing to anyone.

“Then why would anyone kill her?” Artois followed them out to the table under the pepper-tree, took his turn at the coffee-mill's crank. James, Veryl St. Chinian's valet, emerged from the loggia at the back of the house looking flustered, Martine at his heels. Together they crossed the courtyard's primordial wilderness to the kitchen, and brought out chunks of wood and bunches of damp lemongrass to put in the iron flambeaux near the dining-room's rear windows. Veryl St. Chinian seldom had guests, and the dinner parry scheduled for tonight was an occasion of major upheaval. Mostly the old man lived in two cluttered rooms in the book-choked, dusty old house and consumed a little soup without ever looking up from the Eclogues.

It was, January had heard, considered an absolute scandal in the family that the son of his nephew's pla~ee lived in an attic bedroom in the town house, and not in the garçonniere behind it-a wing which had been shut up for decades and was now buried under three storeys of feral jasmine.

“Why indeed?” January shook his head. “I'm guessing the killer came into the house sometime between the time Suzie and Titine went inside and closed the shutters, and Hesione's arrival. He searched the place neatly-the mattress was rumpled rather than thrown on the floor, the coffee-beans pawed through, not dumped out. That means he expected her to see what the place looked like when she came in. He brought his own candle and kept it shielded with his hand as he searched, then blew it out once he sat down-I found the spatters on the arm of the chair. Only after Hesione came in did he, or she, light one of her own candles, tallow rather than wax, and whatever they talked about for the ten minutes or so the candle burned, it was so interesting that neither of them thought about trimming the wick.”

Rose said, “Hmn,” and her eyebrows peaked up again above the small oval lenses of her spectacles. Steam blurred the lenses as she poured the boiling water, a few table spoonsful at a time, into the top half-the grecque-of the coffee-urn, and the smoky perfume of the coffee rode above the damp green smell of the leaves matted in the bottom of the fountain's basin. Like all courtyards of the old French town, this one was designed to be aromatic as well as cool, protected from the stench of the streets as well as all but a few hours of direct sun by the towering walls. The afternoon's rain had brought out the smell of the orangetrees, the jasmine, and the sweet-olive. It was quiet, too, save for the drumming of the cicadas in the trees. In the dimming light January saw, to his distress, how the elbows of Rose's simple frock were worn threadbare, and how faded the skirt was, and beginning to fray at the hem.

Two years ago Rose had fallen afoul of a powerful French Creole matron, whose subsequent machinations had robbed her of the girls' school that had been her sole property, her livelihood, and the focus of her life. Since that time Rose had made a sort of living correcting Greek and Latin examinations for a number of the boys' schools in town, the way another woman would have made a living sewing-and it paid the way sewing would have paid. In some cases January knew she was far more fluent in Greek than the instructors she worked for, but it would never have occurred to anyone to hire a woman, much less a woman of color, to actually teach.

Yet he himself made too little to say to her, Marry me...

And he suspected she would rather starve than wed a man simply to keep from starving. Even a man she loved. Maybe especially a man she loved. If indeed Rose was capable of fully loving, fully trusting, any man, after what one man had done to her long ago.

“So it was somebody she knew?” Artois' voice broke January's troubled reverie.

January thought about the woman's hoarse voice, offering her body in trade for liquor on the wharf.

“Maybe not,” he said.

They drank their coffee, Artois excusing himself once or twice to go to the back door of the house and ask James if he needed help getting the dining-room in order. He came back both times, shaking his head: “I've told James my lesson is done for the day. It won't make a servant of me to help him hang the lusters back on the chandelier. He's too old to be standing on that ladder.”

“If he won't let me touch it,” sniffed Martine the cook, crossing back to the kitchen, “he sure as heck won't let you.... The stubborn old mustard-plaster.”

“I didn't think anyone was left in town,” remarked Rose as the three of them went into the workshop to tidy up. She had to strike a light and set candles around the darkening workshop in order to check her barometer one final time. “Anyone who would be dining with your great uncle, that is.”

“Anyone who is anyone, as they said in Paris.”
January thought of Hesione's neighbors out in the Swamp, and his own landlady, patiently sweeping the hearth each evening and fetching water from the cisterns to do her own laundry. “Anyone but the poor.”

Artois glanced at him, troubled at the tone of his voice: guilt in his eyes at his own white shirt and silk waistcoats, his gold watch-chains, polished nails, tutor-perfect French. But seeing that January's bitterness wasn't directed at him, the boy said, “They're coming in from Mandeville to call on him-you never heard such a fuss. Why didn't he leave town like they did, and get a place out on the lake? How can he possibly inconvenience them like that? Because, of course, my sister has to call on everyone in the family before she gets married, and Aunt Marie-Agnes is insisting the wedding be next week, because she claims she's going to die.”

By “sister,” January knew Artois meant his half-sister Chloe, the legitimate daughter of Raymond St. Chinian, and heiress to the considerable family fortune.

As he and Rose picked their way down the carriageway half an hour later he had a chance to glimpse Chloe St. Chinian when she arrived. All the debris that ordinarily choked the carriageway had been moved back to the inner half of the passage, on the courtyard side of the doorway that led into the town house itself, the front portion of the building's ground-floor being occupied, as was usual in New Orleans, by a shop. Cressets had been lit on either side of the house doorway; when the carriage drew up before the archway out onto Rue Bourbon, January and Rose withdrew, with instinctive good manners, into the jumbled shadows of the inner end as the occupants disembarked.