04 Sold Down the River

TWO

"Rough-spoken, she said." January turned the coffee cup in his hand, and gazed out past the square brick pillars that held up the market's vast, tiled roof. Beyond the shadows, slanting autumn light crystallized the chaos along the levee into the brilliant confusion of a Brueghel painting: steamboats like floating barns, with their black smokestacks and bright paint on their wheel-housings and superstructures; low brown oystercraft and bum-boats creeping among them like palmetto bugs among the cakes and loaves on a table. Keelboats, snub-nosed and crude, being hauled by main force to the wharves. The blue coats of captains and pilots; the occasional red flash of some keelboatman's shirt; gold heaps of oranges or lemons; a whore's gay dress. Piles of corn in the husk, tomatoes, bales of green-gray wiry moss, or tobacco from the American territories to the north. Boxes without number, pianos, silk, fine steel tools from Germany and England. A cacophony of French and Spanish, English and half-African gombo patois and the mingling scents of coffee, sewage, smoke.

"He beat her, Rose. Beat her with a riding crop-I was there-and used her as a man would take shame on himself to use a whore. He cracked two of my ribs beating me, and I couldn't have been six years old. Once when my mother got in a fight with another woman, he nailed her up in the barrel in the corner of the barn, a flour barrel you couldn't stand up in. Does she remember none of that?"

Rose Vitrac stirred her own coffee, and with a gloved forefinger propped her spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose. The small thick oval slabs of glass aged her face beyond its twenty-eight years, and gave it an air of aloofness. Behind them her hazel-green eyes-legacy of a white father and a white grandfather-were wise and kind and cynical. "If you take his money," the former schoolmistress pointed out, "you'll be able to get your own rooms. You'll no longer have to live with her."

"Would you do it?" he asked. "Spy on a man's slaves for him?"

"I don't think that I could." A line of men and women passed close to the half-empty arcade, through the chaos of hogs and cotton bales and sacks on the levee, to the gangplank of the Bonnets o' Blue. Shackled together, the slaves were bound for one of the new cotton plantations in the Missouri territory, each clutching a few small possessions done up in a bandanna.

Afternoon sun sparkled on the water, but the wind that tore at their clothing and at the flags of the riverboat jackstaffs was sharp. One woman wept bitterly. Rose turned her head to watch them, her delicate mouth somber.

"My mother was a free woman," she said. "I was never a slave. I don't think I could pass myself off as one, because I don't know all those little things, the things you learn as a child. If someone wronged me I'd go to the master, which I gather isn't done..."

"Good God, no! " January was shocked to his soul that she'd even suggest it.

Rose spread her hands. "I've never been that dependent on someone's whim," she said. Her voice was a low alto-like polished wood rather than silver-and, like Fourchet, she had the speech of an educated Creole, not the French of France. "Not even my father's. And it does something to you, when you're raised that way. When I lived on my father's plantation, after Mother's death, my friend Cora-the maid's daughter-taught me a lot, but just being told isn't the same. I think that's why Lieutenant Shaw directed Monsieur Fourchet to you."

Savagely, January muttered, "I can't tell you how honored I feel."

"But as to whether I would spy, if I could... Somebody did murder the poor butler, Ben. That the poison was meant for the master doesn't make the servant less dead."

His eyes avoided hers. "It isn't my affair." "No. Of course not. Justice for a slave isn't anyone's affair."

That this was something January himself would have said-had he not just refused to become involved in Simon Fourchet's war with his slaves-didn't help the slow pain of the anger he felt, and he looked for a time out into the square. A man cursed at the deck crew unloading bales of cotton from the steamboat Lancaster; a young woman in the black-and-white habit of a nun stopped with wide fascinated eyes to listen, and her older companion seized her arm and pulled her along. Two boys, white and black, rolled a hoop across the earth of the Place d'Armes just behind the levee, dodging in and out among the brown-leaved sycamores; a market woman in a red-and-purple-striped tignon shouted a good-natured reproof. A few yards farther the hoop bounded out of control, startling a pair of horses being led down the gangplank of the small stern-wheeler Belle Dame: a carriage team by the look of them-from somewhere in the bayous of the Barataria country, to judge from the narrow lines of the boat, the single wheel and shallow draft-matched blacks with white stockings, as if they'd waded in paint.

The nearer horse reared, plunging in fear, and the man in charge of them, tall and fair with a mouth like the single stroke of a pen, dragged brutally on the animal's bit to pull it down. For good measure he added a cut across the hocks with his whip, and turned just in time to see the black boy dart to retrieve his hoop, the white playmate at his heels. The fair man's whip licked out, caught the black boy across the face.

The child staggered back, clutching his cheek. Blood poured from between his fingers. His white friend skidded to a halt, stood staring, mouth open, as the man turned away, cursing and lashing at the frightened horses again. He did not even look back as he jerked them toward the blue shadows of Rue Chartres.

The white boy picked up the hoop. He looked at his friend again, in an agony of uncertainty about what sort of support or comfort he should give or should be seen to give. In the end he ran away crying, leaving his playmate to bleed and weep alone. "Ben."

January turned his head. His sister Olympe stood next to Rose's chair. January had two sisters. The elder, born two years later than himself, was the daughter of that fellow-slave whom his mother never mentioned: the tall man with tribal scars on his face who sometimes walked in January's dreams. The younger, Dominique, was St.Denis Janvier's child, their mother's lace-trimmed princess. Dominique had been only four when January had left for Paris to study medicine eighteen years ago. Dominique, January had long ago noticed, came and went through their mother's bedroom-which opened onto Rue Burgundy, in the accepted Creole fashion-as a matter of course.

Since her departure to join the voodoos at the age of sixteen, Olympe had not entered their mother's house at all.

"It's good to see you." With her awkward, wadingbird grace, Rose moved her rough wooden chair aside to make room, and January brought over another of the several dozen seats scattered around among the tables in the shelter of the arcade. People generally bought coffee from one of the stands in the market and brought it here to sit, but the woman who ran the nearest stand came to the table before anyone went to her, with a cup for Olympe as she was sitting down, and had to be pressed two or three times to take the picayune payment for it. That was what it was, January supposed, to be a voodoo.

"I hear Simon Fourchet asked you to find the one who wants to kill him," said Olympe. She was tall for a woman, as January was tall for a man, and like her brother coal black: beau noir lustre, the dealers called that ebon African shininess. She wore a skirt of bright-hued calico, yellow and red, like the market women, and a jacket of purple wool. Strings of cowrie shells and the vertebrae of snakes circled her neck and wound in the folds of the scarlet tignon that hid her hair, giving her the voodoo name of Olympia Snakebones. When St.-Denis Janvier had bought Livia and her two children from Simon Fourchet, he'd paid to have them tutored in proper French, which after his years in Paris January spoke without thinking. Olympe, on the other hand, had kept her rough African habits of speech through all her teachers' beatings, sliding le and la into a single all-purpose li and casually slurring and dropping the beginnings and endings of words, as if she took pride in speaking like a field hand. Perhaps she did.

"If Fourchet's looking for one who wants to kill him, he doesn't have to walk farther than the quarters on his own land," snapped January. He was getting tired of everyone's opinions on a subject that he himself considered closed.

"That's exactly where he's looking," returned Olympe calmly. "And what you think's going to happen to those folks when he dies?"

The coflle of slaves clustered the railing of the deck of the Bonnets o' Blue, stared back at the swarming levee, the cafes under the sycamore trees around the Place d'Armes, the twin white towers of the cathedral under the sidelong smoke-yellow glare of the autumn sun. Gazing, January knew, for probably the last time. Life expectancy on a cane plantation wasn't long.

Behind him, Olympe's voice went on. "Not four years ago they hanged Nat Turner and near seventy others in Virginia for rising up and killing whites. Every slave-owner in the country has been seeing rebels under his bed ever since. You think getting sold to pay the inheritance tax is the worst that'll befall a man's slaves, if he dies of poison in his own home?"

"You want me to save his life?" January remembered the wet thud of the broom handle on his buttocks and thighs, the agony of blows multiplying as the bruises puffed and gorged the flesh with blood. He couldn't even remember what he'd done to trigger the beating, if anything.

"I'd like you to think about saving the lives of the hundred or so folks who didn't put nightshade into that brandy. However much they might have wanted to."

For that moment, January hated her. He hadn't thought about it consciously, but he realized now that in addition to his sense that Simon Fourchet deserved whatever retribution was coming to him from his slaves-whether incited by his neighbors or not-in addition to his fears of something going wrong, he had been looking forward to a pleasant winter of playing music and being paid for it.

The days of summer heat and summer fever were done. The wealthy of New Orleans the sugar brokers, the steamboat owners, the bankers and landlords and merchant importers, both French and American-were coming back to town to attend the opera and give parties and marry off their daughters and sons to the sons and daughters of their friends. The militia companies and burial societies, those bulwarks of the free colored community, would be organizing subscription balls and fund-raisers even more entertaining than the galas of the whites. January not only earned his bread through Mozart and Rossini, cotillions and schottisches and valses brilliantes. They were the meat and drink of his soul, the fire at which he warmed himself.

For a year he'd lived in pain, after the death of his wife in the cholera. For a year music had been his only refuge.

After that year, there were other refuges in the city as well.

He looked up now, studying Rose's long delicate profile. The cool mouth that was so sensitive beneath the mask of its primness. The way her smile came and went, as if in girlhood she'd been punished for laughing at the world's absurdity. Slim strong hands, stained with ink-she was currently making her living correcting young boys' Greek examinations for a school on the Rue d'Esplanade-and blistered from the chemical experiments that were her refuge and her joy.

A winter of friendship. Of sitting in the markets by the coffee stands with ten cents' worth of jambalaya bought off a cart and talking with other musicians, or walking Rose home through the foggy evenings and seeing the gold lamplight bloom in windows all along the streets.

A winter of rest.

Sugar-grinding. Roulaison. The suffocating heat of the mill-house and the clammy damp of the cabins. The ache of muscles lifting, hauling, dragging armfuls of sharp-leaved cane after not quite enough food and never ever enough rest. The pain that settled into your bones when you couldn't even remember when last you'd slept to your heart's content.

Fear of being beaten. Fear of being sold.

Simon Fourchet's flaying voice and the sense that it would make no difference to anyone if he, Benjamin January, lived or died.

"You think I'd be safe there?" He threw the words at his sister like a lump of dirt. "Maybe Fourchet'll make sure I don't get kidnapped and sold, but that's not going to keep the killer from slipping poison into my food if he guesses why I'm there. And it won't keep me from being beat up by men who think I'm carrying tales to the master. Killed, maybe, if there really is rebellion planned."

"Then you'll just have to be careful," said Olympe, "won't you?"

January visited a free attorney of color whom he knew, who drew up a variety of documents attesting to and reinforcing the already recorded and notarized fact of January's freedom. Copies were deposited with Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard, with January's mother and both sisters, and with John Davis, owner of the Theatre d'Orl?ans and various gambling parlors and public ballrooms about the city, who for two years had been one of January's principal employers. Two copies went to Simon Fourchet's lawyer.

"Not that it will do the slightest bit of good," said January grimly, "should Fourchet's overseer, or his son, turn out to be a cheat and a slave-thief Altruism is all very well, and I'm really sorry for those folks on Mon Triomphe, but I'd just as soon not try to convince some cracker cotton-farmer in the Missouri Territory to write to the New Orleans City Notary about whether or not I'm a free man."

Lieutenant Shaw, slouched so deeply in a corner of the big stone watchroom of the town prison, the Cabildo, that he appeared to be lying in the chair on his shoulder blades with his boots on his desk, raised mild gray eyes from the documents, and scratched with businesslike thoroughness under his shabby collar. "Prob'ly wouldn't do you much good anyways, if n they're like my uncle Zenas-Zenas and his family went to Missouri to grow cotton." Shaw scratched again, and looped a long strand of his greasy ditchwater hair back around one ear.

"Zenas can plug a squirrel through the eye at two hundred and fifty yards and build a house from the ground up includin' the furniture usin' only an ax, but he can't write for sour owl-shit. You think you'll be in much more danger there than you'd be just walkin' around here?"

Shaw asked the question sincerely, and sincerely, January had to admit that in certain sections of New Orleans-the entrepot and hub of slave-trading for the entire region-he was probably in more peril of kidnapping than he'd be on Mon Triomphe.

"It's easy for you to say. Sir." In his tone he heard his own defeat. The thought of what he was going to do made his stomach clench with dread, but he knew that Rose and Olympe were right.

He understood that he could not feel anger that none would give justice to slaves, if he wasn't willing to work for that justice himself.

"I understand that," said Shaw. "And I hope you understand I'd do it, if n I didn't have certain physical limitations that'd make me middlin' unconvincin' as a cane-hand."

January met his eyes with a bitter retort on his lips, but he knew Shaw. And he saw in the Kentuckian's quiet gaze that yes, this man would go out into the fields to trap the murderer... If he didn't happen to be white. And, as he'd said, a middling unconvincing cane-hand. So he only said, "What? You don't think you could pass?" and Shaw relaxed and returned his unwilling grin. January reached into the pocket of his neat brown corduroy livery for his watch and tightened his lips when it wasn't there. The watch was silver, bought in Paris after he'd given up work as a surgeon and returned to being a musician. As a surgeon he'd never been able to afford such a thing, for even in France no one would choose a black surgeon over a white. At least in France, he reflected dourly, he wouldn't have had to go searching through pawnshops for weeks to recover it, after it had been stolen by the same louts who'd cut his coat to ribbons and torn up his music.

Along with his other few valuables, the watch was safe at Olympe's house now. A slave would not possess such a thing.

"Yore pal Sefton'll be along," said Shaw reassuringly. "What do you know about Fourchet's son?" "Not much." January drew a deep breath, tried to convince his muscles to relax. "He's a few years older than I. Esteban, his name is. I think his mother was the daughter of a Spanish wine-merchant here in town."

"Juana Villardiga, accordin' to the records." Shaw folded his hands over the papers, rumpling them as if they were yesterday's newspaper instead of the proofs that January would need, should his freedom be in jeopardy. The morning was chill, and through the arched doors at the inner side of the watchroom the Cabildo courtyard was dusky still. Two prisoners swabbed the flagstones under the watchful eye of a blue-uniformed City Guard.

January's eyes felt gritty. After spending most of the evening getting the documents drawn up and finding musician friends to replace him in his engagements to play at this or that party until after the sugar harvest-not an easy matter, given the perennial paucity of good musicians in the town-he'd gone late to bed, and in the few hours that he had slept, had dreamed of being a child again, and a slave.

"In 1802 Fourchet married, again, a woman name of Camille Bassancourt who came here with her aunt from Paris. They had three sons and two daughters-"

"After my time." January shook his head. "We left Belief!eur in 1801.1 only remember Esteban." Shaw used the corner of the top document to pick his teeth, brown with tobacco like a row of discolored tombstones. He was a lanky man who looked as if he'd been put together from random lengths of cane, close to January's height and homely as a mongrel dog. "The girls an' one boy are still livin'..." He grubbed in a pocket and consulted a much-scribbled fragment of paper. "Solange is at school with the Ursulines here in town. Robert-that's the boy-an' his wife just got back on the sixth from takin' Elvire, the older girl, to a boardin' school in Poitiers." Given the man's raspy, flatboat drawl, it always surprised January that Shaw pronounced the names of French cities and individuals correctly.

"Accordin' to Fourchet's lawyer, Camille died in '28." Shaw extracted a plug of tobacco from his trouser pocket, picked a knot of lint off it, and bit off a hunk the size of a Spanish dollar. "Fourchet remarried this past April to a girl name of Marie-Noel Daubray-" "Daubray?" interrupted January. "Isn't that the name-"

"Of the fellas he thinks might be behind the mill fire an' all? It is." He gestured with the fragment of paper-a bill from Berylmann, a gunsmith on Canal Street, January saw-and concentrated for a moment on reducing the brown chunk in the corner of his jaws to a manageable consistency. "Their first cousin once removed, in fact. Granddaughter of their oldest brother, which is what the lawsuit's about. What's our boy Esteban like?"

"Stiff," said January, the first description that came to his mind. "I haven't seen him since he was twelve, remember, and I was only eight." He leaned back in the chair beside Shaw's cluttered desk with half-closed eyes, summoning back the silent boy who'd stare with such repelled fascination at the naked breasts of the women in the fields. "But he was stiff. He walked around with his shoulders up-" He demonstrated, bracing his whole body in imitation of that tight, silent, awkward boy, and was aware of Shaw's cool eyes flickering over him, reading what that imitation had to say.

"He didn't speak much to anyone. He was clumsy.

You expected him to fall over any minute. You know how there are people that it makes you uncomfortable to talk to? They stand wrong, or they stand too close; it takes them forever to say anything and when they do it's never quite what they mean. That's Esteban. Or it was," he amended, "a quarter century ago."

"Well, Maestro-" Shaw uncoiled his slow height from his chair, dumped the papers on the desk, and glanced across at the wall clock someone had affixed behind the sergeant's high desk.

"People don't change that much, boy to man. Oh, you might not recognize who they are, exactly, but unless he works to do somethin' about it, a awkward boy's gonna grow to a awkward man.

Same as a girl who's cruel to her pets ain't anyone I'd want to be the mother of my children later on down the road. I don't know how much use any of this'll be to you..."

"All of it's of use." January followed him across the big dim stone-flagged room to the outer door.

"Any of it's of use. You have to understand what the pattern is, before you can see where it breaks."

From the Cabildo's front doors they looked out past the cobalt shadows of the arcade and across the gutter to the bustling Place d'Armes. Mid-morning in autumn, and all the world was out enjoying the mild sunshine. The carriages of the wealthy jostled axles with carts of cabbages. A tall old man walked past with a basket of pink roses on his head, and a beggar-woman at her ease on the cathedral steps, her hair a white aurora of chaos, slowly devoured an orange and spit the seeds in great joyful leaping arcs into the gutter. January remembered the rainy gray of Paris in the winter and wanted to fling out his arms and laugh.

Whatever else could be said about it, New Orleans was New Orleans. There was no place like it in the world.

"If it had been clear who's doing the actual poisoning-making the actual voodoo-marks, cutting harnesses and sawing axles-Fourchet wouldn't have come to you. This isn't like coming into a tavern and seeing a weeping woman and a dead lover and a husband with a smoking pistol in his hand. With a hundred and fifty people involved it's not even likely that I'm going to find just one, or two, unaccounted for at any given time."

Shaw's eyebrows lifted. "I figured with slaves in the field you'd at least be able to keep track of where they was."

"That's because you've never tried to do it." There was wry pride in January's voice. "That's what scares the hell out of the whites, you know. Especially out on the plantations. You've got sixty, seventy, eighty grown men, fifty or sixty women-What are you going to do? Keep them in chains all the time? The drivers keep an eye on things and the overseer keeps an eye on things and you know damn well that if somebody wants to sneak away badly enough-if they don't care about getting a beating if they get caught-they'll sneak away. That's what makes them crazy.

"It's a war," he added softly. "Whether or not some of them plan organized rebellion, it's war.

And you have to fight for every inch, a hundred times a day. That's why you have to look for a pattern."

"Waffle man, waffle man, " sang a strolling vendor. "Wash his face in the fryin' pan..."

January felt for his watch again. "I can work with the men, live among them enough to hear rumors, at least so that I can find out who was where when. If there is a conspiracy, a revolt being planned, I think it'll be pretty clear. But if it's just one man, I'm not sure I'll find our killer-almost certainly not before he kills Fourchet. So I need to know the pattern. Why is this happening now?

Why not last month or last year? What made the bearable unbearable? That's why you told Fourchet to speak to me, wasn't it?"

Shaw spit in the general direction of the gutter. His aim, as usual, was abysmal. "That's why."

Beyond the levee, the smokestacks of the steamboats poured sullen columns of soot into the dirty sky. At this season they lined the wharves three and four deep, and more tacked around out in the open river, keeping up their head of steam and their boiler-pumps working while waiting for a berth. January felt for his watch yet again, muttered an oath, and looked back over his shoulder at the watchroom clock, then turned back to scan the faces of the crowd.

"Boat ain't due to leave til ten," Shaw remarked, as if he weren't following January's thoughts.

"And you know as well as I do they never do."

"Wherever he is," January responded gloomily, "I'm going to strangle Hannibal Sefton."

Fourchet's voice, braying out curses, caught his attention. Looking across the crowd to the levee, January saw the man on the deck of the small stern-wheeler on which January himself and his friend Hannibal Sefton had purchased tickets last night. One of the porters had dropped his valise; the boat's master lashed out with the whip he still held and caught the man a cut across the back. After the brutality he'd witnessed yesterday January had raised an objection to traveling on the Belle Dame, but Fourchet would have nothing to do with American boats, and Captain Ney was the only Creole master in town at the moment.

Fourchet's two servants hastily took up the luggage and carried it to the cargo hold. The taller servant took the bags inside. The shorter, given a moment's leisure, turned at the deck railing and gazed back across the square at the cathedral, like a man drinking in the sight.

Something in the way he stood made January remember the field hands yesterday evening on the Bonnets o' Blue.

Of course, he thought. Fourchet's butler had just been poisoned. In addition to finding a spy, Fourchet had come into town to look for a new butler.

Fourchet yelled, "Baptiste, damn you!" His voice carried like a crow's caw through the din. The new servant fled after his companion.

January's hand curled into a fist.

"You familiar with Mon Triomphe, Maestro?" Shaw asked. "Ever been there?"

January shook his head. "I was only seven when St.Denis Janvier bought my mother. I'd never been off Bellefleur. Mon Triomphe was very isolated in those days, but of course now the whole of the riverbank on both sides is in sugar as far as Baton Rouge."

"Well, I got to jawin' some last night with this an' that pilot, after Mr. Fourchet told me as how you'd agreed to go." Shaw spit again toward the cypress-lined gutter that divided the arcade from the open Place; the brown wad of expectorant missed its target by feet. "It did kinda float through my mind as how we's askin' a lot of you, to go up there pretendin' as how you're a slave, and the only ones knowin' you're not is your pal Sefton and Fourchet himself. Now, we know somebody's out to kill Fourchet. And much as I like Sefton you do got to admit reliable ain't the word that springs most skeedaciously to mind when his name is mentioned. So I tell you what."

He pointed across the square, to a woman selling bandannas among the fruit stands that clustered be neath the trees. The bright-colored wares were tacked to a crosspole and fluttered like some kind of exotic tree themselves.

"You go buy yourself seven bandannas: red, yellow, blue, green, purple, black, an' white.

Accordin' to the pilots, see, the riverbank at the north end of the plantation caved in 'bout three years ago, openin' a chute between it an' Catbird Point. Catbird Island, they calls it now. That changed the current, an' built up a bar just above the plantation landin'-blamed if that river ain't like a housewife with new furniture, always movin' things around. When Fourchet cleared an' cut for a new landin' they left an oak tree on the bank above it, that's big enough that the pilots all sight by it comin' down that stretch of the river."

A woman darted through the levee crowds, a flash of cheap bright calicos between stacks of orange pumpkins and dusty cotton bales, skirts gathered up in her hands. On the deck of the Belle Dame Fourchet's new butler pushed his way between the laden porters to the gangway, to seize the woman's hands, to kiss her with a fervent desperation that told its own tale. She was a tall woman, plump and awkward in her ill-fitting simple dress, and as they clung to one another her face bent down to his.

"You be like that old Greek fella," Shaw said, "that was supposed to change the sail of his boat from black to white if n the news he brung was good. You tie a different bandanna to that oak tree every day, just in the order I said 'em. Red, yellow, blue, green, purple, black, an' white, white bein' for Sunday so's you can remember."

"Don't tell me you've convinced riverboat pilots to remember the order as well." Anger twisted again in January's heart as he watched the couple on the gangway. There was nothing he could do about their pain; Shaw's calm arrangements and placid voice grated at him. "I never met a pilot who could take his mind off the river long enough to remember what color necktie he has on."

"Pilots, hell," said Shaw. "They just told me the tree was there. I paid off the stokers on the Lancaster, that makes the Baton Rouge run, and the Missourian and the New Brunswick, that'll be bound on back from St. Louis a week or ten days from now, and cabin stewards on the Vermillion, the Boonslick, and the Belle Dame, to come here and tell me what color the bandanna is and what day they seen it. It ain't much, Maestro," he added apologetically. "But at least it'll let me know yore still there."

January felt sudden shame at his anger; Shaw was doing what he could to keep him safe. In last night's dreams of childhood he'd been hiding in the barn at Bellefleur, and a monster was after him: a monster that shouted in a hoarse drunken voice, a reeling shadow with a whip in his hand.

Come out, you little bastard. Come out or I'll sell you down the river.

He'd waked in freezing sweat, as similar dreams had waked him, many nights across the years.

On the gangway the butler and the woman clung together, not speaking. It was the threat every master held over the head of every slave, up and down the eastern coast of the American states and in the new cotton lands of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. I'll sell you down the river. To the cane plantations of Louisiana. To Hell.

It occurred to him as he crossed the square toward the bandanna woman that his mother had sold him down the river by the act of giving him birth.

To hell with Fourchet, he thought. To hell with Olympe, and Mother, and these god-rotted colored kerchiefs and wondering if I'm going to be found as a spy and beaten to death by the other slaves, or poisoned, or kidnapped and sold-or just break the hands that are my livelihood and my joy.

His fingers trembled with anger as he counted out fourteen cents into the woman's palm. Stowed seven bright squares of cloth in his jacket pockets.

Let Fourchet die and rot, Olympe had said to him last night, as he and she had walked from the market back to their mother's house, to tell her of his change of mind. You're doing this to save every man and woman on the place who didn't try to kill him.

So he crossed the square to the arcade again, to the thin lanky figure awaiting him in the shadows. Though it was probably impossible over the competing din of the waffle man, the fruit vendors, the stevedores singing a chant as they loaded up the clay jars of olive oil that plantations bought in such quantities, and a German sailor having a shouting match with a woman in blue hair-ribbons, January imagined he could still hear Fourchet's voice, like a carrion-bird's as he rasped out instructions on the hurricane deck to the redcoated, hard-faced master of the Belle Dame.

Rose was right about one thing, January thought. With Fourchet's money he would find somewhere else to live. Then he would never be in a position like this again.

Who am I fooling? As long as I'm her son she'll feel she has the right to ask of me what she will.

"A captain bold in Halifax,

Who dwelt in country quarters,

Seduced a maid who hanged herself

One Monday in her garters..."

January winced at the light, hoarse voice scraping over the English ballad, slurred and stammering and yet perfectly true.

Shaw muttered, "Oh, Lordy."

Hannibal Sefton was making his way along the arcade in front of the Cabildo to its doors. He did this with great care, caroming off the square brick pillars, one hand outstretched to catch himself against the building's plastered wall, then retrieving his balance only to loop away toward the pillars again. The portmanteau he carried-his violin case strapped to its side-nearly overbalanced him. One of the chained prisoners engaged in cleaning out the gutter caught the fiddler by the arm and rescued the luggage moments before it went into the brimming muck. Hannibal bowed profoundly.

"Bene facis, famulo probo." The fiddler removed his hat and placed it over his heart, then spoiled the effect by coughing desperately. The prisoner supported him, apparently not much put out at the thin ragged form of the white man clinging to his filthy sleeve. "Medio tutissimus ibis."

Hannibal gestured grandly back at the arcade, took one step in the direction of Shaw and January standing in the doorway, then collapsed in a laudanum-smelling heap.

Across the Place d'Armes the Belle Dame's whistle brayed. Above the square, the cathedral's clock spoke its ten slow chimes.

"Good luck," said Shaw, without irony, and shook January's hand.

January glanced from the unconscious Hannibal across to Fourchet, bellowing down at his new butler, and his stomach tightened. He shoved the last folded bandanna into his pocket, pulled on his gloves, and went to hoist Hannibal bodily to one shoulder, as if he were a sack of meal.

Bending his knees he picked up the portmanteau-his own, in fact, for whatever luggage the consumptive Hannibal had once possessed had been sold years ago to purchase opium or medicine-and, thus burdened, crossed the square to the gangplank. A number of the gentlemen on the canopied hurricane-deck pointed at January and laughed, assuming not unreasonably that this was his assigned job in life: to carry his master's luggage and, when necessary, his master. But glancing up he saw Fourchet gazing down at him with contempt in his eyes.