The Nubian's Curse, page 5
Outside in the salon, Wishart’s velvety baritone: ‘Of course he miscalculated the number, sir. He would not have been familiar with the change-over from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and must not have made allowance for it. My fault entirely …’
‘I didn’t forget.’ Arithmus kept his eyes on the floor of the little pantry. His voice – no longer the rough growl of the ‘secret savant of the dark continent’ – was a low, flat monotone, but not unpleasant, and his French was good. He wiped his nose again. ‘That was eleven days, between 4 October and 15 October of the year 1582. It was the Christian Pope Gregory who did that. I don’t know why. It was the year 960 back home, because you have to add six hundred and twenty-two years for the Blessed Prophet. But I shouldn’t have got angry.’
‘We all get angry,’ said January.
‘I don’t want to get M’sieu Wishart in trouble. I don’t want to be this way,’ he added, moving his gaze to another portion of the floor beside Daniel’s highly varnished boots. ‘I don’t know how not to be. I get angry sometimes, and I can’t stop.’
New Orleans – December 1840
When he heard Hannibal’s voice in the parlor, January got up. He and the fiddler crossed the yard to the kitchen (where Zizi-Marie, Olympe, Olympe’s Junoesque mother-in-law Cassy Corbier, and Rose were poking the sweet potatoes boiling over the hearth, or chopping peppers and corn), borrowed a firkin of hot water from the boiler, and retreated to the tiny laundry room to wash and shave.
‘Rose tells me you and I are accompanying the incomparable Persephone to Natchez,’ remarked Hannibal.
January met his eyes. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. ‘That will make things a great deal easier. I could pass myself off as Madame de St-Forgeux’s footman, but I don’t know how trustworthy this young Miss Emmett of hers is about keeping her mouth shut. For all I know, she may resent the hell out of being given a chaperone and may tell everyone she meets that Madame didn’t have a footman all the way from Washington City to New Orleans … And she may even recognize me from playing last night. You being my “master” will wallpaper over any number of holes in the story.’
‘Vivo solum servire.’ The fiddler inclined his head. ‘And who am I to turn down four days in the gambling room of a steamboat filled with wealthy gentlemen on their way home from selling their cotton in town?’
January grinned, in spite of his annoyance (No, he corrected himself … anger …) at having to masquerade as a slave because it was safer for a black man to travel that way in America. Slave stealers, up and down the Mississippi, knew that the hunt for a missing free man of color would be considerably less assiduous than for a man who was worth twelve hundred dollars to somebody.
‘Look upon it as your gift from Père Noël. Arithmus Wishart – the man we’re going to search for – may or may not be in Natchez. He may be across the river on one of Creon Grice’s plantations: Grice is owner or part-owner or manager of about seventeen of them. Arithmus knows me,’ he went on quietly. ‘He’s … People call them idiot-savants, but he’s no idiot. He just doesn’t think the way other people do. He’ll recognize Persephone, but he may not come forward, and she only saw him a few times, that winter of twenty-five. She says they never spoke. I don’t know what he’s been through, in the past sixteen years. I don’t know who he’ll trust, who he’ll speak to, or who he’ll believe.’
‘To say nothing of what people will say,’ remarked Hannibal, toweling his scrawny torso and slipping into one of Gabriel’s clean shirts – the laundry room, despite its proximity to the kitchen, was sharply cold – ‘if a white woman – and a French viscountess at that – tries to go up and have a conversation with a field-hand. Not a strategy to pursue if one wishes to be discreet.’
‘That, too.’ January pulled on his own shirt, buttoned up his good white satin waistcoat and tied his cravat.
From the kitchen he heard his niece denouncing her brother for abandoning them all to work today – ‘Don’t none of those hotel folks think that black folks may … oh … have families or somethin’ that they’d like to spend Christmas with?’
(Actually, no …)
‘And I swear it,’ she added, as January and Hannibal emerged – scrubbed and shaved and point-device in black swallowtail coats and pale trousers – into the kitchen again, ‘if Uncle Ben isn’t back by the fourteenth for the wedding …’
‘I swear I will rival Odysseus in my struggles to return to my home again!’
‘Huh.’ Zizi tossed her head, beautiful in a holiday tignon of pistachio-green and gold. Slim and tall, like her mother, the rounder contours of Paul Corbier’s good-natured face softening Olympe’s sharp bone-structure. ‘Aunt Rose read me those books, and it took that man ten years to get his sorry butt home, and after he’d fooled around with goddesses and nymphs all from one end of the ocean to the other.’
‘That’s what you get for educating women,’ sighed Hannibal, reaching around Rose to filch a cookie.
‘Mama …’ The dangerous glint in Zizi’s eye reminded January all too sharply of Olympe – and of their mutual mother … ‘If Uncle Ben doesn’t come back here by the fourteenth, I want you to put a curse on him.’
‘How bad of a curse, cher?’ asked Olympe, hiding a malicious grin. ‘Big curse or little curse?’
‘Zizi!’ exclaimed Gran’mère Corbier. ‘Olympe! Shame on the both of you, talkin’ of cursin’ on Christmas Day!’
‘Big curse,’ declared Zizi. ‘Biggest you got. Black salt double-cross goofer-dust with fish hooks in it.’ Paul Corbier had made sure that all their children went to Mass and studied their catechism, but January reflected that a girl couldn’t very well grow up in the same house with a voodooienne for a mother, and not learn at least something about black salt double-cross goofer-dust with fish hooks.
‘That’s not very fair to your Aunt Rose, honey,’ replied Olympe mildly. ‘But if you’ – she turned suddenly, and pointed a long, thin finger at the startled Hannibal – ‘don’t bring Ben back safe, I’m gonna put a curse on you. A love-curse,’ she added, as the fiddler opened his mouth to protest.
‘You mean no lady’s ever gonna fall in love with him again?’ The girl looked distressed at the thought. January was aware his niece had had a tender spot for Hannibal since she was ten years old.
‘Lord, no.’ Olympe waved the thought aside. ‘You’d have to change the motion of the stars an’ planets to keep ladies from fallin’ in love with that worthless blankitte. But if you don’t bring Ben back safe …’ She sank her voice, as she did when scaring the socks off her Corbier nieces and nephews with tales of the platt-eye devil, and made her eyes glitter, ‘I will put the love-curse on you, that the ladies who fall in love with you will be possessive, an’ troublesome, jealous an’ wicked, an’ will be crazy in love.’
Eyes wide with not-entirely-feigned terror, Hannibal whispered, ‘I swear I will bring him home safe.’
Zizi grinned, and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You see you do that.’
Rose slipped him another cookie, as the whole posse – less Olympe and her mother-in-law – trooped out of the kitchen and back across the overgrown little yard toward the house.
FOUR
‘Uncle Ben …’ Zizi-Marie caught his arm.
The others clattered up the back-gallery stairs, Rose with a platter of cookies, Hannibal indignantly pointing out that Odysseus and his crew had only themselves to blame for their misfortunes on the way back from Troy to Ithaca. (‘Vain toils! Their impious folly dared to prey/On herds devoted to the god of day … If they’d obeyed orders, they’d have made it home in a week …’)
The afternoon had grown cold. Already candles were being lit inside the house. From within, January heard his mother’s smoky drawl, ‘Pff! What’s a vicomtesse? I understand that an actual prince will be at the Mabillet ball.’ And Ti-Gall’s booming threat, ‘Fee, fi, fo, fum, I’m’a gon’ get you an’ eat you all up!’ Thundering little feet: Professor John, little Ti-Paul Corbier, the youngest two of Ti-Gall’s sisters, Charmian Viellard – daughter of January’s youngest sister Dominique and Henri Viellard. Shrieks of terror as they fled the ogre …
Christmas light.
We all be together in one room, with all the lamps burning, as old Lucien said, while the cold midnight of the year rolls over us and spirits walk the dark air.
They stopped at the bottom of the steps, and January took his niece’s hands. ‘What is it, honey?’
‘Can I talk to you – and—’ She glanced back over her shoulder at the cheerful hell-mouth of the kitchen. ‘And you not tell Mama? Or anyone?’
‘You’re a grown woman now, Zizi. What you choose to tell me – what you choose to do – isn’t your Mama’s business anymore.’
Her eyes ducked away from his. ‘Thank you.’ Then long silence, as she collected what she wanted to say, how she wanted to say it.
Don’t tell me Ti-Gall’s gotten her with child …
‘Uncle Ben,’ she said again slowly. ‘How do you know if you’re in love with somebody? I mean, when you meet them. When you haven’t lived with each other, like you and Aunt Rose. How can you tell?’
How can you tell? He remembered his heart breaking, when he was fourteen and the beautiful girl he adored told him she was going to become plaçée to a rich white planter with seven children and barely twice that many teeth. (He and Rose had had her, and her beautiful daughter, and her faithful now-octogenarian lover to a holiday dinner last Sunday, his love for her mellowed to a friendship more precious than gold.)
Remembered laughter and summer evenings in Paris with the long-legged mistress of the opera ballet, love worn lightly as a chaplet of flowers as they’d walked out to St-Cloud for water-lily tea. Love mingled with laughter, pretty as candle-flame, whose nature he hadn’t clearly perceived until he’d met Ayasha, like seeing the sun.
Ayasha.
And after that sun was quenched in abyssal darkness, he hadn’t believed that day would ever dawn again. And when Rose Vitrac had turned to him in the murky shadows of the Charity Hospital, that rainy night in the fever season of 1834 – I need a doctor … three of my girls are down sick …
Had he known then?
He didn’t remember. His own grief for Ayasha had still been raw flesh.
When did I realize I couldn’t live without her?
He asked, ‘Have you met someone?’
Someone other than Ti-Gall, tall and clumsy and so kind-hearted that he’d gently chase a bee out of the parlor rather than swat it.
Zizi-Marie’s beautiful bronze lips tightened. ‘I don’t want to hurt Ti-Gall.’
How much more will he be hurt if you’re unfaithful to him within the first year of your marriage? Or if you’re not, but wish you were?
He put his arm around her, drew her to a rough-hewed bench set under the back gallery of the house, where the runaways he sometimes sheltered in the storerooms would now and then come out to take the air in late evening darkness, where nobody could see.
‘There’s this man – a white man – Marc-Antoine Picard—’ She kept her eyes on her fingers, interlaced in her lap. ‘He asked me to … to be plaçée. He’s not some fly-by-night American,’ she added quickly, looking up into January’s face. ‘He’s related to just about everybody – to all the decent white folks – in town—’
‘This would be one of Isaïe Picard’s sons?’ The Picards were indeed one of the oldest French Creole families in New Orleans, owning half a dozen sugar plantations among them, as well as ten cotton plantations up-river, town lots and rentals in New Orleans and Natchez, and shares in steamboats and cotton-presses. Years of listening to the gossip of his mother and sisters – not to speak of seeing every member of French Creole society at seven years’ worth of balls and parties since his return from Paris – let him triangulate upon Marc-Antoine Picard with the exactness of a guide hearing a stranger’s description of well-known territory. There’s a toy shop with two armies of lead soldiers in the windows, green coats on one, white coats on the other, across the street from a blacksmith shop … Oh, yes, that’s Rue St-Philippe at Rue Bourbon …
To his mind came the image of a good-looking youngish man in a modish Indian-red coat, joking with the other young gentlemen around the punchbowl at this reception or that, or leading one young lady or another out into a set of quadrilles. Someone who had never caught January’s attention by being argumentative or drunk or loud or pushy. Someone who brought cups of lemonade to his mother and aunts.
Oh, yes, that’s Marc-Antoine Picard … he would have said in the same tone.
‘How do you know him?’ When a girl was asked to become plaçée – placed – by a white man as a mistress, it was generally because her mother had been plaçée before her. Had brought her to one of the Blue Ribbon Balls at the Orleans Ballroom.
Olympe had run away from home at the age of sixteen, rather than let her mother take her there. She still had a way of lifting the left side of her lip, when such functions were mentioned.
‘He and his parents used to come to Papa’s shop.’ Zizi turned her face aside again, as if the knuckles of her own hands were the most fascinating things in the chill slow-gathering shadows beneath the gallery. ‘This was back before the bank crash. His Mama was having all their parlor furniture redone. He’d chat with me a little then. I liked him then,’ she added, meeting his eyes once more, like one who fears her story will be doubted. ‘Then a couple weeks – I guess a month – ago, I was at the market and he was buying flowers, at the next stall. He said, Zizi! And we … we talked. He walked with me a little ways back toward the house.’
Her glance dodged aside again, to the warm scarf of amber light that lay outside the kitchen doors. January didn’t say, That isn’t usual, for a white man in his late twenties to walk with a librée girl up Rue Esplanade …
But it wasn’t unheard of. And he wanted her to go on, without breaking her train of thought.
‘I told him I was engaged to be married. He asked, could he meet me, and walk maybe along the bayou? I didn’t want to tell Mama.’ The eyes fleeted back to his. ‘Or you, I guess. Or Aunt Rose.’
No, thought January. No. Rose, or I, would certainly have asked questions, and you may not have known the answers then. Zizi-Marie and her brother had lived with them, since the bank crash of 1837 had made it impossible for Rose to hire the help she would need to keep a house clean without turning herself into a drudge. Impossible, also, for the upholsterer Paul Corbier to get enough work to support all five of his children. January’s risky employment – finding missing persons, or unraveling puzzles that the City Police either wouldn’t touch or couldn’t be informed of (for one good reason or another) – had served to eke out the family finances during the two years that Rose’s school had been untenanted and white folks’ paying balls and musicales had been few and far between. It had been logical for Olympe’s two oldest children to go share the big house on Rue Esplanade. Zizi helped with household chores so that Rose could get a little money by translating Greek poetry for local booksellers or publishers. Gabriel had quickly found work as a sous chef at the Hotel Iberville.
But there had been plenty of time when Zizi-Marie had not been at the house. When she could have been meeting, not her friends, but one particular friend. And that particular friend, not always Ti-Gall L’Esperance.
‘Does he care for you?’ One didn’t – not in New Orleans or anywhere in the United States – speak the word love about a white man and a black woman. At dozens of balls, of course, January had overheard any number of white men casually boast of the intensity with which their librée mistresses adored them. But that – every one of those white men would have said – was ‘different’.
‘Yes.’ The word came out like a fingernail flicked against the side of a tin pan.
‘Do you love him?’
Zizi drew a deep breath. ‘I … I guess I need to know if I love Ti-Gall.’
That isn’t what I asked—
She went on, rather quickly, ‘We’ve talked, we’ve been together – one night he came, quiet, to the gate, and we kissed in the passway … Uncle Ben, you know M’sieu Viellard loves Aunt Minou—’ That was the family name for Dominique, and yes, January knew. Fat, timorous Henri Viellard did love Dominique and was passionately loved in return – a love he didn’t get from his precise, cold-blooded little wife.
‘And you saw Sunday, how old M’sieu Motet loves M’am Clisson—’
January couldn’t help smiling again, at the recollection of the girl who’d broken his fourteen-year-old heart, all those years ago.
But you still didn’t answer my question.
‘And Ti-Gall … Uncle Ben, this sounds terrible, terrible to say, but the more I look at it, the more I think about it … Our children, Ti-Gall’s and mine, would be … would be like I am. Like Gabriel’s going to be, struggling all his life, because Mama and Papa have so little. You go out and risk your life, only to keep a roof over your family’s head. If anything happened to you … You know what would happen to the Little Professor, and to Xander, in spite of everything Aunt Rose could do.’
Her words stumbled over each other, and he could see how she quivered with the effort of bringing them out at all. ‘I know I shouldn’t be thinking like this about getting married and falling in love, but it’s true! I can’t … You know Ti-Gall! You know he’s not like you, he’s not like Madame Metoyer—’ She named their neighbor, the sharp and successful owner of a chocolate shop … who had been plaçée and had gotten the capital for the shop from her white lover. ‘Ti-Gall will be good, he’ll be faithful … but he’ll never be more than what he is.’
‘He will, in fact,’ pointed out January. ‘He’s apprenticed to his Uncle Ghis, making harnesses. There’s no reason he won’t make his living at it.’
‘He’ll never own his own shop.’ Zizi turned to face him yet again. ‘You know that. He just doesn’t have the money for that. None of his family do.’
