Hagar Read Online Free Page A

wearing a tin slave-badge
borrowed from Fortune Gerard’s valet, since the patrols – who knew
pretty much everyone in the parish – wouldn’t have believed him if
he’d said he was one of the Levesque slaves. “I don’t know where
Lieutenant Shaw will be—” Rose named the only member of the New
Orleans City Guard whose intelligence and integrity she had learned
to trust. “But take my message to the Cabildo, and tell them there
that it’s important. That a woman has been murdered in strange
circumstances here, and that we need his judgement.”
    This was all, in fact, that her note to Shaw
said, because she knew nothing further.
    Not yet.
    Her heart beat quickly at the thought of the
militiamen who’d still be milling around Marais, guarding the
slave-jail there as two of them were guarding the stout little
brick building here, that lay just beyond the kitchen behind the
Big House, into which the rest of the Marais slaves had been filed.
But though Lieutenant Parton had impressed her as respectful – to a
point – of the custom of the country regarding a free colored
planter, she mistrusted the stubborn set of his mouth, and the
surly resentment that glinted in his eyes.
    So as Arnaud Levesque’s house-slaves laid
down pallets in the attic for the male guests, and distributed the
satchels and carpetbags of the women among the bed-chambers and
store-rooms of the house’s two wings, Rose followed the soft
plunking of a banjo out onto the front gallery, and as she had
expected found Hannibal experimentally picking out the largo of
Vivaldi’s Lute Concerto in D. There wasn’t an instrument invented
that the fiddler wouldn’t try to get music out of.
    “ Athene swift descended from
above,
    Sent by the sister and the wife of
Jove….”
    He turned his head at the creak of the
planking underfoot, and Rose smiled at his nickname for her. “I saw
someone who looked suspiciously like Gabriel ride out of here a few
minutes ago – I hope you have plans to explain to Benjamin how it
will come that we’ll be obliged to buy him out of prison…”
    “He has a pass,” said Rose. “Also a
slave-badge.”
    “ Ad tristem partem strenua suspicio .”
He made to set the banjo aside. “It isn’t my business, of course,
but might he not be safer by daylight?”
    “By daylight,” returned Rose, “that idiot
militia lieutenant will have rummaged around in what’s left of
Leonie Neuville’s bedroom and trampled to pieces whatever there is
to be seen.”
    In the shadow of the gallery Hannibal was
little more than a blur, yet still she saw the lift of his mobile
eyebrows. “And what is there to be seen?”
    “I won’t know that ‘til I see it.”
     
    *
     
    Rose fed Baby John, and changed from her
assortment of Biblical bedsheets into the striped skirt and
stiffened canvas work-bodice – not to mention stouter shoes – that
she’d brought in a carpet-bag for going home in. She lay for a time
in the shuttered darkness of one of the spare bed-chambers beside
Zizi-Marie, listening to the other women guests gossipping softly
in the room next door:
    “Well, of course it was the maid Ariette! And
the way Leonie Neuville treated her it’s no wonder!”
    “Served her right, for lying with Neuville,
and in M’am Neuville’s own house, too!”
    “She must have thought the poison in that
pitcher would be destroyed in the fire…”
    Rose remembered the girl’s face, streaming
with tears in the firelight. Madame, oh, Madame …
    And who knows if Hagar in the Bible had any
enthusiasm for the job when Sarah “gave her to her husband” that
the younger woman might provide the old man with sons?
    When the voices fell silent she tucked the
blankets more firmly around her son, then slipped from the bed,
and, shoes in hand, padded out to the gallery again. The moon was
just past full, the sky blotched with cloud. A pair of militiamen
rode past on the river road, patrolling for runaway slaves. From
the blackness of the