Hagar (6 page)

“I’m guessin’,” murmured Shaw, “that M’am
Neuville – if’fn she been up to what you think she been up to –
would have advertised for a white maid, an’ there
will
be
record of that. Whether I can make it stick in court’s another
matter. Fact is, Neuville actually
was
meddlin’ with this
maid of his wife’s. An’ there was damn little time between the
minute that fire started an’ every slave in the quarters turnin’
out with the buckets. Then for the rest of the night, the militia
was all over the woods like ants at a church picnic, an’ never saw
a sign of her. Without hard proof – like them account-books –
somebody on that jury’s sure to stick over askin’,
Where’d she
GO
?”

Hannibal stopped, and turned, as if
estimating times and distances between the smoke-fouled walls of
the house, and the militiamen pissing into the ashes of last
night’s fire by the slave-jail. He glanced at Rose, who shook her
head. This was something which had bothered her, too.

“I’ll give the house a good goin’ over,” said
Shaw after a time, “an’ the overseer’s cottage as well. There may
be somethin’ there. An’ I’ll check the chandleries in town for
who-all’s been buyin’ flash paper. It’ll be a tough case to make,
restin’ as it does on just the smell of nitre – an’ the only
witness for that a woman of color – an’ the blisters on a dead
gal’s toes. But it’ll give us somethin’.”

“Thank you.”

The Kaintuck looked down at Rose with
rain-gray eyes. “Thank
you
,” he replied. “There’s few things
chap my ass worse’n folks who think they’re smart. That they’re
so
smart they can treat other folks like animals, without
rights – without even the right to live, if they gets in their way.
If I was as good a Christian as my mama brought me up to be, I’d do
my duty out of the love of God an’ country, ‘th’out a unkind or
selfish thought… but I ain’t. An’ I
do
like the look on
their faces, when they find out somebody else is smart enough to
catch ‘em an’ make ‘em account for what they done.”

“I will not tell a soul,” Rose said solemnly,
“It is my pleasure.”

*

Shaw had (he told Rose) an invitation to
spend the night at the house of the militia Captain, a man named
Cole, but he put out flags on the Marais landing instead and took
the
Bunker Hill
back up to town shortly before sunset.
Gabriel returned to New Orleans on the
Bunker Hill
as well,
but Candide Levesque had asked Rose that morning if she would have
dinner (“A
quiet
meal, for a change!”) at Belle Jour and
return to town the following day. Though Rose suspected that part
of that invitation depended on her “singing for her supper” with an
up-to-date account of events at Marais, she had bettered her
acquaintance with Candide over the past twenty-four hours and liked
the woman, who shared her interest in gardening. The steamboat
Corsair
, Arnaud estimated, was due past on the following
morning, and flags were put on the landing yet again.

The dinner invitation extended to Hannibal –
who had offered to remain as an escort, so that Rose would not
travel back up to town with her baby alone – and, it turned out
(Rose was willing to bet, to Candide’s dismay), to Livia as well.
This worked out well, however, since Hannibal took it upon himself
to charm Livia during dinner and throughout a quiet evening of
playing with Baby John in the parlor (Livia disdained
grandchildren, her own included), and the visit passed without
further incident. (“And Heaven knows,” said Rose to the fiddler the
following morning, “what further incident
could
top fire,
mayhem, and murder…”)

The Corsair also carried the Marais slaves
north, chained on the promenade deck under the guard of Captain
Cole. They would spend up to a month in the parish prison before
the case could be sorted out. Holding her child wrapped warmly in
her shawl on the stern-deck with the other passengers of color,
Rose could only hope that Shaw would find evidence of a missing
red-haired girl among the Irish of Tchapitoulas Street.

“Oh, I think he will,” opined Livia. “Now
that someone’s pointed out to him the direction in which to look, I
doubt that even he could go astray.”

This was a total slur on the policeman’s
character, but Rose refrained from saying so: as far as Livia was
concerned, Shaw’s nationality alone rendered him beneath contempt.
The deck-crew tossed ropes to the wharf below Rue St-Pierre and
began hauling the
Corsair
into place. Late afternoon
sunlight flashed on the water, and
marchandes
on the levee
called out to passengers to buy oranges, pralines, strawberries.
Well-dressed white passengers from Jefferson and Plaquemines
Parishes made their leisurely way down from the upper decks,
sparing only cursory glances to the two neatly-dressed “ladies of
color” who stepped aside to let them pass. Along the wharves, crews
of stevedores unloaded the boats already docked, or wrestled crates
of dishes and boxes of agricultural tools, sacks of wheat and corn
or bales of cheap “Negro cloth” from the mills of Boston, onto
waiting wagons or up the shallow steps that led over the levee,
looming against the bare lacework of the pride-of-India trees.

Hannibal went back to the rail, to fetch
their carpet-bags and the enormous cardboard boxes containing
Livia’s costume. Livia watched him go, then turned back to Rose and
went on, “In case he doesn’t, you might give him this.”

From beneath her shawl she took a green-bound
ledger.

Rose shifted Baby John to her hip, and opened
the book. The first entry was for the preceding December, for sugar
sold to Temoigne and Sons, with a note that five hundred dollars of
the profits had gone to the purchase of bearer bonds from
representatives of Hope and Company of Amsterdam. A few days later,
three hundred acres of cypress swamp belonging to Marais Plantation
had been mortgaged, with half the money going to the same
destination; early in January, another sale of sugar had resulted
in three hundred dollars diverted—

“This is the ledger,” said Rose
unbelievingly. “Madame Neuville’s… Where did you
find
this?”

“In the sugar-mill,” replied Livia calmly.
“When you went on to the slave-jail to speak to that servant-girl –
who had
no
business letting her master come to her bed, and
I don’t care what sort of sad tale she told you! – I noticed there
was no lock on the door of the mill. I daresay it meant nothing to
you, but such places are always kept locked, because if a slave is
on the run that’s the first place he’ll hide,
and
do
whatever damage he can to the machinery into the bargain… No master
ever
leaves the mill unlocked. I should imagine Leonie
Neuville had a key to it.”

Rose swallowed back her retort that as a
slave, Ariette had no more right to refuse herself to her master
than Livia had had, forty years ago, and instead regarded her
mother-in-law narrowly. “She could have gotten there from the house
in moments,” she said. “And hid among the machinery, or under the
cauldrons, for the rest of the night, while the woods were being
searched… And you’re only telling me about it now?”

“I forgot,” said the older woman blandly.

Annoyance heated Rose’s neck and ears, but
she let it slide away. The important thing, she reflected as she
slipped the flat green book into her satchel, was that she had the
ledger. That she had the case that would prove that Leonie Neuville
had stolen getaway money, had engineered the fire, had murdered
another woman to take her place, in order to destroy the
servant-girl who, like the Biblical patriarch’s maid Hagar, had
taken her mistress’ place in the master’s bed.

“I don’t suppose—” she tightened her shawl
around herself and Baby John, “—that Leonie Neuville was there in
the sugar-mill when you ‘found’ this, was she?”

“The very idea!” Livia’s brows went up almost
to the edge of her tignon.

“And that you threatened to shout for the
militiamen, unless she gave this to you?”

“Really, dear, you have the most
extraordinary ideas.” The older woman smiled her serpentine,
sidelong smile. “I’m sure that Leonie merely experienced a change
of heart. She must have realized that it should be enough for her
to steal her husband’s money and flee, without entangling herself
in a charge of murder, in the hopes of getting revenge on a
cheating lout and whatever pretty little hussy he’d put in her
place. An unworthy endeavor.” She shrugged. “Foolish, too.”

“Murder is still murder.”

“Dearest, there was nothing I could do about
that. I can’t bring that poor Irish girl back to life. And I
daresay if Leonie Neuville has run off with a gilt-edged snake like
Moberly she’ll have her punishment soon enough. One of them’s very
likely to murder the other over the money long before they get to
Charleston. If Charleston is where they’re going,” she added
quickly, and shrugged again, graceful as one of Hannibal’s uncaring
goddesses. “It could be anywhere, of course.”

The crowd around them thinned. The deck
passengers – mostly free colored who, like themselves, had come up
from the downriver parishes – began to file toward the gang-plank,
baggage in hand, and the militiamen moved along the promenade decks
with their keys, to unlock their human cargo. It was time to go
ashore.

Rose tucked her shawl more firmly around her
child. “Thank you.”

For a moment they stood looking at one
another in the moist gleam of the river’s reflection. Then Livia
sniffed. “You didn’t think Benjamin gets his brains from his
father, did you?”

Rose said gently, “He never speaks of his
father.”

“I daresay.” Livia turned toward the
gangplank, while Hannibal set down the luggage on the wharf and
signalled for a porter. Then she paused, and turned back to Rose.
“He was a good man. Maybe the best I have ever known. Kind, and
strong, with great capacity for gentleness and love.”

She put a hand out, and touched one of Baby
John’s wooly curls.

“In that Benjamin is very like him – the more
fool he. Had he been a free man, and I a free woman, we might well
have been happy together.”

For a moment, her brilliant eyes grew
soft.

“But a man who is not free has no power to
protect his woman or his children. And a woman who is not free, is
nothing: either some man’s victim, or every man’s whore. Few enough
women are free. Don’t be late getting home,” she added briskly.
“The American animals will be celebrating for two days yet in the
streets, not that Andrew Jackson had a single thing to recommend
him bar killing a couple of thousand British – any excuse will do
for Americans to get drunk. Best to be off the street by dark. Get
that ledger to your policeman, and we’ll have done with the whole
business – and don’t let that porter charge you more than
twenty-five cents to take your baggage back to your house.”

She walked down the gangplank and across the
crowded levee as if she owned the city, a free woman, with the
over-laden porter trailing meekly in her wake.

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 -
The Time of the Dark
- Barbara Hambly has touched most of
the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror,
mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy,
romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in
Southern California, she attended the University of California,
Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux,
France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger,
and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her
work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don
Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the
well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written
another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara
Hamilton.

Professor Hambly also teaches History
part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her
on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los
Angeles with several small carnivores.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these
stories.

The Further
Adventures

by Barbara Hambly

The concept of “happily ever after” has
always fascinated me.

Just exactly what happens after, “happily
ever after”?

The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her
dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched
on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold.
(It’s a very strong horse.)

So what happens then? Where do they live? Who
does the cooking?

This was one of the reasons I started writing
The Further Adventures.

The other was that so many of the people who
loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the
1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those
characters too, and I missed writing about them.

Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website
and started selling stories about what happened to these characters
after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each
series.

The Darwath series centers on the Keep of
Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their
world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of
civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two
stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now
part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a
mage.

The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the
former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds
himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil
Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred
years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers.
With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he
must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil,
too.