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Overview
“Don’t go to Cold Bayou, brother … Nuthin’ good waiting for you there.”
New Orleans, 1839. Despite his misgivings, Benjamin January has agreed to play the piano at the wedding of wealthy French Creole landowner Veryl St-Chinian. All is not well, for the marriage of 67-year-old, profoundly infatuated Uncle Veryl to an 18-year-old Irish tavern-slut spells potential disaster for everyone in the inter-married Viellard and St-Chinian clans. But the old man is determined to marry Miss Ellie Trask, and nothing will stand in his way.
On the isolated plantation of Cold Bayou where the ceremony is to take place, tension is rife even before the body is discovered in the woods behind the dower house, its throat cut. A yet more disturbing turn of events sees January himself accused of the crime…
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847519245 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Severn House |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2019 |
| Series: | Benjamin January Series , #16 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 904,549 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
'I see blood, brother.' Olympia Snakebones raised her eyes from the bowl of ink on the table before her, and worry creased her brow. 'I see death.' She passed her hand across the top of the bowl, a shallow Queensware saucer she had found years ago on the bank of the river, miraculously intact; one shouldn't, she always said, turn down the gods when they handed you a gift. The small house on Rue Douane was silent in the dense heat of the early autumn afternoon, far enough back from the river that little sound that came from New Orleans's steamboat wharves. Little even from the gambling-hells along Rue du Levee and Rue Gallatin, which even in the depths of the September doldrums ran full-cock, day and night. Smoky daylight pierced the louvered shutters and crossed the narrow shelf, fixed up in a corner as an altar. A handful of marigolds. A cheap painted statue of the Virgin. A couple of cigars (the gods all liked tobacco) and some graveyard earth in an old perfume-jar. A circle of salt and mouse-bones.
A black-painted bottle that was always kept sealed.
'M'am L'Araignée say —' The voodooienne gestured toward the bottle with one long-fingered hand – 'there's blood waiting for you at Cold Bayou. Death in the water, she say. Death in the fire.'
Benjamin January was silent for a long time.
He should not believe his sister, he knew. Thirty-seven years of white man's school, of training as a surgeon at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris, of confession and prayer and devotion to the saints, all insisted that there was nothing in that bottle. Or if there was, it was a demon in service to Satan.
But the dream he had dreamed that morning lingered, like the black stain of poison.
He had waked from it to profound stillness. Even Baby Xander, not yet two months old, seemed to be settling at last into a rhythm of sleep, and it had felt to him for a time that the world outside his own house, that big old ramshackle dwelling on Rue Esplanade, had somehow slipped away into gray twilight. Though he was sharply and clearly awake, the veils of his dream still wrapped him, and he had had the strange feeling that if he'd risen from his bed, slipped from beneath the mosquito-netting and gone to the French doors that opened onto the gallery, he would have seen outside not the shaggy, tree-shaded neutral ground in the center of Rue Esplanade – not the cottages of the Metoyer Sisters and the Becques and Lalie Gouvert across that wide expanse of street – but yellow floodwaters. As he had seen in his dream.
Silent as death, in his dream the water had rushed past the gallery-rail, inexorably rising. He'd seen trees floating in it, ripped from their moorings by the weight of the flood. Whole lengths of fence, chicken-coops and the roofs of houses. The sight was one he had seen before, and recalled clearly: he'd been six years old, sitting on the sill of one of the high windows in the stone sugar house on Bellefleur Plantation, where he and Olympe – Olympia Snakebones was what the voodoos called her – had been born. Every separate floating plank and gourd, every knot of snarled cane, he remembered distinctly from that evening thirty-eight years ago.
Yet in his dream he had been his present age. The house around him, his present house, not the sugar mill into which Michie Fourchet had been wont to lock all his slaves during the river's floods, lest they escape into the swamps in the confusion. In his dream he'd been conscious that Rose was asleep behind him, hidden by the gauzy scrim of mosquito-bar. That Xander lay curled in his crib. Conscious of his older son, not quite two years old, asleep also beyond the open door of his little nursery, and of his niece, his nephew – Olympe's children – sleeping upstairs. All unconscious as the waters rose around the house.
At the same time, in his dream, he'd smelled the smoke of fire.
'Death for me?' he asked at last.
Olympe's eyes – so like their mother's – focussed on him again, as if returning from a world far away. 'I don't know,' she said. 'What did you dream?' She hadn't let him tell her before she'd looked into the ink-bowl.
January hesitated, trying to put into words the deep horror that the vision had brought.
Waking from it, he had washed and dressed and gone to early Mass in the cathedral, with the men who worked the levee, and the marchandes who sold milk and strawberries and watermelon in the streets. But the incense and the dim glow of the votive-lights had not brought him their accustomed comfort. Leaving the cathedral, he had made his way through the French Town, inland, to find his sister scrubbing the front step of her dark-red cottage with brick-dust in the clammy warmth of a September morning that would swiftly turn hot.
He stammered a little as he spoke of the dream, for the images of it frayed away from him, like very old cloth damaged by the sun. It was in any case impossible for him to convey to her the uneasy terror he had felt. In his actual life – in the actual childhood he had shared with Olympe – there had been no such fear. They had had real things to fear then, like Michie Fourchet when he got drunk (although sober he was no saint either), or the possibility of encountering an alligator or a puma when they'd run off to play in the ciprière. There was also the ever-present dread that one or the other of them, or their mother or their father, would be sold off ...
Michie Fourchet locking everybody into the sugar mill during a flood was just an interesting adventure.
In real life – in the real flood he'd watched at the age of six – there had been no smell of smoke.
Old Mambo Jeanne, the wise-woman of that little African village that the white folks called 'the quarters', used to say of dreams, 'They're how God talks to you, when you get too smart to listen to anythin' else He says.'
Olympe rose from the table where she sat, and went to the shelf in the corner. She came back with a carved tray, a gourd and a bowl. From the gourd she scattered dust on the tray, from the bowl she took a handful of beans. These she shook over the tray, her fingers held half-open, so that the beans scattered on the wood.
Père Eugenius, January's confessor, would, January knew, have a thing or two to say to him at confession Saturday, when he got back from Cold Bayou.
Wagons rattled in the street outside, and an old woman's hoarse voice wavered over a sing-song chant:
I sell to the rich, I sell to the po' Gonna sell to that lady standin' in that do' Wa-a-a-a-a-a-termelon ...
The last word dissolved into a melismatic wail, like the cry of a muezzin summoning the faithful to prayer.
On a day this sticky-hot, at the end of that gruesome summer of 1839, red sweet watermelon, reflected January, would itself be a form of prayer ...
'Don't go to Cold Bayou, brother.' Olympe raised her head from a study of the dropped beans. 'Nuthin' good waitin' for you there.'
It wasn't the first time she'd said something of the kind to him since he'd been asked to play at the wedding of Veryl St-Chinian on Tuesday. As one of the best piano-players in New Orleans, January was delighted to get the job – summer was the starving time for musicians, with all the planters, bankers, sugar brokers and merchants out of town on the lake. He knew he had his youngest sister Dominique to thank for the engagement. Her protector, Henri Viellard, was the nephew of the elderly groom, and St-Denis Janvier – Dominique's father and the man who'd purchased January's mother, freed her, and 'placed' her as his mistress – was a remote connection of that whole sprawling French Creole clan.
He had, in fact, had second thoughts about the job, but the money was too good to turn down. Their mother, the elegant Widow Levesque, had received an actual invitation to the ceremony, as had Dominique and a number of other free colored connections of the family: children and grandchildren of the St-Chinian or Viellard or Duquille sons and uncles by 'plaçeés' of their own. Their mother had been preening herself about it for weeks, casually inserting the phrase 'They look upon us as part of the family, you know', into every single one of her conversations with her friends in the free colored demimonde. Americans might be thrusting themselves into every corner of New Orleans, taking greater and greater shares of its trade, its businesses, its wealth, but it was the old French and Spanish families that were the true heart of the town. Among the free people of color – the gens du couleur librés – there were few greater distinctions than to be recognized for what they were: a part of those old families, albeit 'on the shady side of the street'.
Invitation to be at the wedding of the head of one of those great French land-owning families – even if it was only because she had once been plaçeé to a four-times-removed cousin – meant far more than presentation at the White House would have done, always supposing that a) any person of color would be received by the president's wife under any circumstances whatsoever and b) the president hadn't been a widower for the past twenty years. (January could almost hear his mother sniff, 'What's she, anyway? Some Dutch girl from New York.')
Olympe, who hadn't willingly spoken to their mother since 1816, would have been delighted had he refused to have anything to do with the wedding at Cold Bayou.
But to the marrow of his bones he knew that his sister wouldn't bend to such purposes the things she saw in the ink-bowl.
She gathered up the beans, one by one, and dropped them back into their dish. Tapped and patted the sides of the tray to shake the dust onto a clean newspaper, which she rolled into a neat funnel into the gourd again. Watching her, January was reminded strongly of their mother, who was tallish, like Olympe, and who, though fleshier, moved with the same light economy of motion which she had schooled into incomparable grace. Olympe lacked their mother's startling beauty, and, like January, was African-dark, a complexion not admired among the mixed-race librés: black was the color of the slavery they had themselves so recently escaped. He didn't know whether Olympe even remembered their father, who'd been out in the fields when their mother had been sold to St-Denis Janvier. He recalled vividly, though, his sister spitting on Janvier's shoes, when their mother had informed them that Michie Janvier had purchased – and freed – not only herself, but her two children as well.
I won't have no white man buy me what I ought to be. I'll be what I was born, the child of my ancestors; the daughter of their gods. From the age of five, Olympe had held their mother in anger and contempt, clinging to her cane-patch French and the dark loa of African belief. When she was sixteen she'd run off to become a voodooienne, and their mother – who had long before that transformed herself into the perfect plaçeé – had not even gone to look for her.
Yet January knew that what she'd said had nothing to do with the past.
He replied, after long silence, 'It's not that simple.'
Her wide mouth quirked. 'It's never simple for you, brother. You got no business goin' down to Plaquemines Parish to see some old white man marry a gal young enough to be his granddaughter. The food afterwards ain't gonna be that good. You think Maman's gonna admit to anybody there you're her kin?'
'Maman's got nothing to do with me going.' He answered her expression with a grin as wry as her own. 'That was old M'am Janvier who asked her, since she's kin to the Duquilles and grew up with Madame Viellard's mother. She likes Maman, and she can't stand M'am Marie-Hélène —' He named the wife of their mother's deceased protector – 'and didn't invite her to keep her company. So of course Maman's got to go, even if the place is the back-end of nowhere and Maman will complain the whole time about how hot it is and how she's gonna die of boredom. For me it's a job,' he finished. 'And if it wasn't, I'd go anyway. Rose was asked, by M'sieu St-Chinian himself.'
Olympe sniffed. 'Just 'cause your wife is kin to the family, through her mama or her grandmama sellin' herself for some white man's money —'
'It's not just kindred.' January shook his head, knowing his sister looked down upon the whole custom of plaçage – the 'custom of the country' – with scorn. 'Back in '34, Veryl St-Chinian hired her to tutor one of his nephews, when her school had closed and she was broke. Hired a woman to tutor science and mathematics. He put in money to help us re-open our school come October. And with every member of his family screaming bloody murder at this marriage of his, he wants to know at least that some of the people who'll be down at Cold Bayou for the wedding will genuinely wish him well.'
His sister rolled her eyes. 'He'll need it.'
'He will.' January replied as if her words had not been a jeer. 'Henri Viellard cares for him enough to do so —' Olympe sniffed again at the mention of the protector of their younger sister Dominique. That fat, indolent, and extremely wealthy planter's mother – Madame Viellard – was the aged groom's sister – 'even though he and his mama will lose their stranglehold on the family holdings, when Uncle Veryl brings a wife into the family councils. And I know Minou —' He used their sister's family nickname – 'is very fond of the old man as well.'
Olympe made a face. As vividly as he recalled that flood in his childhood, January remembered their mother's attempt to push Olympe into a contract of plaçage with one of St-Denis Janvier's business associates when she was barely fifteen. In his sister's eyes he saw, too, the reflection of the other young women they knew, whose choice of 'protectors' had not been entirely free despite their legal status as librées.
'She must dote on that fat pudding Viellard if she's going down to a place like Cold Bayou just to hold his hand while he watches his uncle make a fool of himself.' In very few of the twenty-six states could Henri Viellard have married Dominique – who, as far as January knew, the podgy young planter genuinely loved – and a little to the surprise of both January and Olympe, Minou had made it clear that she loved Henri in return.
'And I suppose that cold little wife of his will be there as well.'
January nodded.
'I wonder if she wishes him happy?'
'Veryl St-Chinian is Madame Chloë's uncle,' returned January. 'And she's said to me that he was more a father to her than her own was. Which could just mean he let her read some of the more scandalous Latin authors in his library. But yes,' he added, 'I wonder, too. With César St-Chinian's death last year, Uncle Veryl and old Madame Aurelié Viellard are the only two members left, of the family's senior generation. They control I don't know how many plantations and town properties, and since Veryl's hopeless at anything concerning the real world, Chloë and Madame Aurelié have had a pretty free hand in running things as they choose. I know nothing against this girl —'
'She's an eighteen-year-old tavern slut who can't write her name,' retorted Olympe, and turned to replace the ifa tray on its shelf. 'What else do you need to know?'
In the bedroom, the voice of her youngest child, baby Zephine, rose in a fretful clucking. Olympe sighed, and knocked the last flecks of dust from her long fingers.
'I see bad things in the ink, brother,' she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. 'Bad things at Cold Bayou. Fire and water, and blood soaking into the earth. There's no need for you to be there.'
'If Rose is going to support Uncle Veryl,' he returned, 'and there is danger there, I do need to be there.' He leaned a massive shoulder against the bedroom door-jamb, as she bent over the crib. 'And they've asked me – Veryl, and Minou, and Henri – to be there, not just to play at the wedding, but because I'm the personal physician to Uncle Veryl's friend Michie Singletary – who'll probably be the only person present who truly wishes Veryl happy, unreservedly and with the whole of his heart. Or anyway the whole of his heart that isn't occupied with trisecting angles or squaring circles. He's frail, Olympe. He needs me with him.'
She turned from the crib-side, her baby in her arms, a whip-slim black Madonna with the five points of her red-and-gold tignon that marked her as a voodooienne like an incongruous halo. The anger in her voice had turned to exasperation. 'To take care of this old white man's old white friend?'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Cold Bayou"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Barbara Hambly.
Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
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