Hagar Read Online Free Page B

gallery Hannibal’s light, scratchy voice
murmured, “ You come most carefully upon your hour ,” and Rose
smelled the acrid harshness of hot metal from a shaded
dark-lantern.
    “Did you notice anything odd at Marais this
evening?” asked Rose softly, as they descended the gallery steps.
“Anything about the fire?”
    “Other than the fact that it took a woman’s
life?” He shivered. “I wasn’t in the room. How the girl thought
she’d get away with it, since apparently everyone in the parish
knows her relations with the master—”
    “Yes.” Rose twisted the night-time braid of
her hair up onto the crown of her head, and fished in her pockets
for a comb to hold it in place. After a moment Hannibal, who
borrowed such articles from his lady-friends for his own use,
disentangled one from his own long hair and held it out to her.
“Thank you—If the girl Ariette had indeed poisoned her mistress,
and set that fire, why would she have stayed?”
    “To throw people off the scent? Parton’s got
half an army of men on the roads and in the woods, I doubt anyone
could get away from the house tonight.”
    “Maybe,” said Rose. “But what I smelled when
first I stepped into the room was nitre and sulpher – the
ingredients of flash-paper. Where would a slave-girl have gotten
that? And why would she use such a thing, when she could douse the
room in lamp-oil to the same effect?”
    “Who else would have wanted Madame Neuville
out of the way? Her husband? I hear he left just after Mardi Gras
for New York, but of course he could always have doubled back. But
surely he wouldn’t deliberately choose a method that would throw
the blame on Ariette—”
    “Not to mention that would entail the state
executing fifty thousand dollars’ worth of slaves for complicity in
the murder,” added Rose. “That’s why I want to—”
    The soft crunch of a footfall in the gravel
drive made her spin. Freckled moonlight touched a slim, tall
figure, silhouetted the points of a dark tignon stylishly tied.
    “Don’t be silly, dear,” said Livia Levesque’s
voice. “They won’t kill all of them. Just the house-niggers.”
    “Madame.” Hannibal bowed.
    Only her mother-in-law, Rose reflected, would
have paused to arrange her headgear before slipping out for a
midnight excursion. Livia, or her daughter Dominique… And only
Livia (or Dominique, who for a variety of reasons had gone to
Washington City with Benjamin) would have brought, as her
alternative to the costume of the Virgin Queen, a lace-trimmed
challis gown elegant enough to pass in any drawing-room in New
Orleans.
    They had reached the belt of woods that
separated Belle Jour from Marais, and the smell of smoke – threaded
with the more sinister stench of charred meat – hung gritty in the
air.
    “I’m still going to have a look at that
bedroom,” said Rose. “I don’t think the girl did it, and I
don’t—”
    Livia straightened her lacy cuffs. “Good
heavens, dear, I’m not trying to stop you. I’m perfectly well aware
that no amount of talking is going to make you listen to reason.
But I was being driven insane by Agnes Pellicot’s driveling – the
woman will not shut up, and insisted on waking that poor
daughter of hers to play picquet with her til she felt sleepy… And
when she sleeps, she snores. I don’t wonder Jacques Pellicot paid
her off the minute he decently could.”
    And no amount of talking, Rose was aware in
her turn, was going to send her mother-in-law back when she was on
the track of the freshest information available about whatever
scandal might be brewing. Not a woman to waste her breath, she only
said, “I may ask you to stay out of sight when I go around to speak
to the girl Ariette in the slave-jail. Hannibal, you won’t object
to backing up my story about being Ariette’s cousin—”
    “Not in the slightest, Owl-Eyed Athene.”
    “I’ll do that last, I think.” Rose paused at
the edge of the trees, surveying the dark bulk of