“You know, I expect, what His Grace will do, if he is not repaid tomorrow?”
CHAPTER TWO
Bad Bill glared at himself in the mirror shard he’d fixed to the crumbling yellow plaster with scavenged nails. “Hell’s Bells, suh, are you still alive?”
His green eyes, once lively and commanding and the fascination of many a fine-looking young woman, stared dully through bloodshot whites out of a face of hammered stone. The hair on his skull was short white stubble, cropped close to lie under his perruque; at least the long mustache still had some iron in it.
Was Charles shaving? He immediately clamped down on the oft-repeated thought, forcing it from his mind. Bill had never seen it, but of course his son had been shaving for a decade now. Bill hoped Charles wore a handsome, manly mustache.
He fumbled for his battered tin shaving basin and found it full of clean, warm water. Madame Beaulieu cared for him beyond her duty, and in return he was a bad lodger, frequently behind in the rent. He was behind in the rent today, though he couldn’t have named a figure.
He’d have to rectify that ignorance.
Fifteen years! Fifteen years he’d been out of the dragoons, fifteen years he’d been banished from Johnsland, fifteen years of this life worrying about rent and daily bread, and still he couldn’t bring himself to concentrate when it came to matters of accounting and numbers. He still felt that he was a gentleman and that money was beneath him. At least, keeping track of money was beneath him—he was acutely aware that he needed cash to live.
He took the boar bristle brush to the brown bar of soap and began to whip up lather for his face, enjoying the ritual of it and the pungent stink of the soap as it dissolved into foam. At least he was sober and awake enough to tell the washbasin from the chamberpot—that was a mistake he didn’t care to repeat.
What did he have to do today, besides figure out how much rent he owed Madame Beaulieu? He searched his memory as it crept back to him through the fading smoky tendrils of whisky. A duel. Not in his own interest, of course; no one ever had occasion to challenge Bad Bill in an affaire d’honneur, and if anyone ever did, surely his reputation as dangerous bodyguard, bouncer, bounty hunter, ruffian for hire, and general violent man of the frontier would be enough to make all but the most deeply affronted think twice.
Bill sighed.
No, this was a duel for money. He was to act as champion for an offended client. A cuckolded hidalgo merchant, he remembered, without caring very much. The details didn’t matter. Only the time and place mattered, and that information he had stamped clearly in his memory: sunset, under the north side of the Bishop de Bienville Bridge. Some of his pay he’d had in advance, and he wondered as he finished scraping the little hairs off his jaw and chin how much, if any, still lurked in his pocket. The remainder, the lion’s share, he’d have after the duel.
He had challenged the doomed lover the night before, in a glittering salon on the edge of the Quarter. Light from a thousand genuine wax candles had sparkled in crystals hanging from the ceiling and in glass windows and in the polished brass buttons of all the servants. It had been a grand house and a very wealthy set of young people in attendance. Bill had gained admittance by handing the last of his gold coins over to a footman at the kitchen door.
In small, red-brick Richmond and the surrounding plantations a letter, delivered by a second, would have been traditional. If there were to be a personal confrontation, the blow would have been a symbolic one with an empty glove. Here in New Orleans, duels were commenced with rather less ceremony. Bill had spotted his man in a cluster of made-up dandies giggling around a sofa and chattering in French. He had tapped him on the shoulder, enjoyed the look of surprise on his face and then punched the young fop in the jaw. Standing over the stunned man in a sea of the rouged cheeks and grease-penciled facial hair of his gawking friends, he had then announced his errand.
“I’m William Johnston Lee, and you, suh, have offended me, for which I shall have satisfaction of your body tomorrow night at dusk.”
Bill’s client, Don Luis Maria Salvador Sandoval de Burgos—he thought that was the name, or at least close, though it didn’t seem right to him that the man should be named Maria—had insisted that Bill claim to be offended in his own right. He’d promised to pay extra for it. Bill needed the money badly enough that he hadn’t scrupled.
The young man had only stared.
“You are the challenged, suh,” Bill had reminded him. “Will it be swords or pistols?”
The lover, who apparently spoke no English, had taken advice in a flurry of monsieur-jabber from his witnessing friends, and then advised Bill he would prefer “le pistolet,” and no wonder, as Bill was at least a head taller and more heavily muscled. They had fixed time and place, Bill agreeing as a matter of course to the challenged’s suggestion of Smuggler’s Shelf. Exchange Alley, or the dirt square behind the cathedral, were more convenient sites as they involved much less walking and Bill was without a horse, but Bishopsbridge was not extraordinary. Perhaps the young fellow had some reason to wish to keep his duel as discreet as possible. Not that very much discretion was possible, after the highly public challenge.
Bill had tipped his hat and stalked from the salon.
He pulled the hat on now, over the black perruque tied neatly at the nape of his neck with a little black ribbon. It was the same hat he’d worn as captain of the Blues, broad-brimmed and black. He’d worn it with a peacock’s feather then, for elegance and dash; now, after years of sweat and rain, he just tried to keep it approximately in its original shape. The broad brim distinguished it from the tricorner hat that was the uniform of the Blues, almost to the point of making it resemble a Pennslander’s hat. Bill had worn it anyway, with permission from the Imperial Consort; it was Bill’s lucky hat. No star, no medallion, no rabbit’s foot, no lady’s kiss—not even Sally’s—had ever brought him as much luck as this hat, and he had no intention of ever buying another, fashion be damned.
He belted on his heavy cavalry saber, inlaid with gold and silver on the basket guard—that, at least, was as sharp and gleaming as ever, all along its forward edge and the tip sharp as well and good for thrusting.
Next the waistcoat; not his ornate Blues waistcoat, long ago pawned for cash, but a simpler red one, cut for his now-larger paunch. He buttoned it up and then shrugged into the long scarlet coat, torn and weatherbeaten but still serviceable. Its inner pocket jingled, but his brief hopes were shattered when he pulled the coins out and saw that they amounted to a few drinks at most. He didn’t remember spending the rest, but the dry roughness of his mouth and the fog receding from his brain corroborated the likely explanation that it had gone for liquor. And of course, the Louis he had paid the footman as a bribe to get into the salon.
After the coat, the accouterments of a gunman: powder horn, priming horn, and the leather pouch containing rags, mink oil, vent pick, brush, and bone powder measures.
Finally, he picked up his two long horse pistols, also painstakingly maintained. Bill checked that they were both loaded and primed (New Orleans was the sort of town where a man might meet enemies unexpectedly), then tucked one into his belt and the other into the long right-hand outside pocket of the red coat.
He looked at the long-barreled Kentucky rifle leaning in the corner. He couldn’t think of any reason he’d need it today, so he left it. No one ever broke into Madame Beaulieu’s boarding house—there were far too many rough men about, and far too little worth stealing—so it would be safe.
Bill locked the door and headed downstairs.
His room faced the interior of the building, opening onto the balcony running around the unroofed courtyard at the center of the boarding house. The air was no cooler here, but it smelled better and that refreshed Bill, if only a little bit. He was getting old and he was heavier than he’d ever been as a soldier, but he still moved easily as he padded down the hard steps into the jungle of ferns that his landlady made of the open space.
At the bottom of the creaking stairs, Madame Beaulieu herself waited in the greenery, smiling.
“Monsieur Bill,” she addressed him cheerfully. “Avez-vous le loyer? Le…rent?”
Bill winced, then shook his head. “I must again throw myself upon your much-infringed patience, ma’am. I have an expectation of coming into funds this evening. How many months do I owe you? Quant, er…” he fumbled, “months?”
“Trois,” she said, holding up fingers. “Three.”
Embarrassed, Bill realized that he had asked the wrong question. “Yes, ma’am, so I owe you…”
“Trois,” she said, holding up the same fingers. “Three Louis d’or.”
Ah, yes. “Thank you for your forbearance, Madame Beaulieu,” he tipped his hat to her and left the building, passing several fellow-lodgers smoking or just lounging on wrought iron chairs among the plants. They all looked away to avoid making eye contact with Bad Bill.
Three looeys, fine, he’d make that tonight and to spare.
The October afternoon was mild for New Orleans, but humid and warm as Bad Bill stepped out of the Pension de Madame Beaulieu and onto the creaking wood of the boardwalk.
A few steps away lay the tree-lined Esplanade Avenue and beyond that the cesspit of the Faubourg Marigny. The Faubourg was dirtier than the Quarter, smashed up against the eastern wall of the city, and more impoverished, but what mattered to Bill was that it afforded him little opportunity of employment, full as it was of poor drunk Creoles, Irishmen, Portugee, and Catalans. The Faubourg was dangerous. Its inhabitants fought all the time, maybe even more than the people of the Quarter, but they were poorer, so they did their own fighting, with knives and sticks and teeth.
Bill turned his back on the Faubourg’s stink and headed deeper into the Quarter. He stuck to the boardwalk for the shade it afforded. The packed-dirt streets weren’t empty, but afternoon was a slow time for the Quarter, with only actual residents and local tradesman drifting about. The action would heat up when the sun went down and people came from elsewhere into the Quarter to drink, dance, sport, and generally live loud. Those were the people who provided Bill with his livelihood, either as clients or as targets.
What foot traffic there was in the warm afternoon saw Bad Bill coming and steered well clear, other than a wizened, coffee-colored crone, head tightly wrapped in bright silk and shawl bouncing wildly about her shoulders. She trotted up to Bill and pressed him with assorted objects.
“Luck, sir?” She shoved a pink string-doll into his face. “Love? Protection?” She fanned a handful of the little poppets in his direction, wound together of different-colored yarn but each with pins for eyes and tucked into a tiny shift of rough cotton fabric.
“No, ma’am.” Bill tried in vain to step around her. Vodun was not his brand of superstition.
“Beybey?” she changed propositions, scooping all the dolls into one gnarled hand and using the other to show a strand of leather on her shoulder bearing a series of brass medallions, like a thin belt threaded with multiple buckles. The medallions were elaborately cut with the loops and lines that Bill recognized as the holy symbols of various loa. “Legba, he bring you luck. Agwé for a sea journey, or if you a fisherman.”
“I am not a fisherman, ma’am,” Bill objected mildly, “and I try very hard to avoid ever setting foot on any ship.”
She looked him up and down, spying his pistols and his saber. “You a fighter, ah? A fightin’ man? Fine, you want Ogoun, he swing the big machete, he watch over fightin’ men!” She showed him the beybey of Ogoun, a web of triangles and asterisks framed by scrollwork. “You want? Ogoun, he a real bargain, big mojo loa!”
“Jesus is my loa.” Bill was vaguely Christian, but what he really meant was leave me alone.
“Read you a fortune?” the gypsy squeaked at him in a final effort. Bill saw the backs of the cards and recognized a cheap New Orleans printing of Franklin’s Tarock.
“No, thank you, ma’am.” He pushed definitively past her. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe she could read his future in the cards—rather, he didn’t want to know what the future held. He gripped his hat and pulled it securely down over his ears, trying to block out the sound of her spitting and cursing him.
Bill squinted against the sun at the lattice-railed balconies and the hanging green jasmine, not yet blooming as the weather had just begun to turn cool. He had the afternoon ahead of him and nothing in his schedule, so he went where he always did when he had no plan.
Grissot’s—which Bill could not bring himself to pronounce other than as GRISS-uts, though the proprietor said his name grease-OH—was a public house that at night featured musical entertainments, frequently including Igbo banjo-pickers and Bantu fiddlers from east and north of the city, and girls calling invitations from the iron-railed balconies above to passersby in the street.
In the afternoon, Grissot’s featured strong drink and Long Cathy.
At the door, Bill bumped into two plain-robed people, faces so deeply shrouded in hoods that he could see no features. They held their fingers steepled before them, and the sight made Bill sigh. Priests. The empire was lousy with them. They seemed to exist just to disagree with each other; these priests liked the Eldritch, those ones didn’t; these priests ordained women, those objected; these ones over here in red robes taught wizards, and their rivals in green burned witches; some printed books, some preached to the Indians, some fought the Turk. Bill had a hard time caring—he just wanted someone to baptize and marry his children and say the occasional Mass when he was in the mood. Too much priest-talk, and Bill started to wish he burned a Yule log and sang at the solstice with his pagan neighbors in Johnsland.
The priests bobbled slightly, as if anxious about something. Bill wasn’t interested, so he tipped his hat, smiled politely and turned inside.
Cathy was at the bar. She didn’t sit on the stools, she wasn’t leaning, and she didn’t seem to Bill to be floating…she just was. Bill knew very well the worn, smoke-stained, and knife-scarred wood that made up the interior of Grissot’s, but somehow, around Cathy, it became something else, something fine. Something like…a ballroom, maybe, or a salon, though it felt more like Cavalier Richmond to him than French New Orleans. He bowed and swept his hat to her, careful not to dislodge the perruque—nothing was less impressive than a fat old man who was also bald.
“My knight,” she smiled at him, “Sir William.”
More than once, he had taken it upon himself to rid her of some unpleasant client. “Mrs. Filmer,” returned Captain Sir William Johnston Lee. “It’s an unspeakable pleasure to see you again. Might I be permitted the honor of buying you a drink?”
Catherine Filmer was tall and graceful, with dark brown hair to her shoulders and dancing blue eyes. She was born Catherine Howard (like King Henry’s wife, a rose without a thorn), a Virginian, from a small town not far over the border from William’s own ancestral lands. She had grown up a gentleman farmer’s daughter, had been educated by the Sisters of St. William Harvey, had married a bright young schoolteacher with no prospects, had moved west with her husband to allow him to teach at an academy in the Memphis of Menelik V, and had buried him upon arrival, flat dead of the pox.
Trash floats downstream, the Memphites sniffed and the residents of New Orleans agreed in cheerful self-mockery, but in this case, after a stint with a cloister of beguines that Bill vaguely thought had ended in scandal, the mighty Mississippi had brought tumbling down a diamond. Long Cathy had arrived shortly before William and had been brightening his dark days since the first.
“Why, Sir William, you always have my permission to buy me a drink, and I live in hope that you will avail yourself of it.” She smiled and the back of William’s neck tingled.
“I hope you know that if ever you are in need of companionship for a libation, I am most certainly at your service.”
“Would that it were not merely a libation.” She smiled again, and William shivered. He was hopeless before Mrs. Catherine Filmer, he was her votary.
“Two whiskies!” Sir William Lee called to the hunchbacked Irishman behind the bar. He kissed Long Cathy’s knuckles and sat, elbow on the dark wood. “I cannot regret, ma’am, my inability to pay you more personal attentions, as I remain a faithfully married man. In another life, however…” The whisky had arrived, prompt because the public house was otherwise empty, and he raised his glass. “Honor,” he began the toast.
“In defense of innocence,” she finished it, then joined him, sipping like a lady. “In another life, Sir William,” she agreed, “and perhaps yet in this one.”
“Have you heard, ma’am?” he chatted breezily. “The chevalier has promised a stronger gendarmerie to police the Quarter. Apparently some citizens are concerned that there are low characters to be found in this part of New Orleans.”
“No!”
He nodded ruefully. “Ruffians, they say.”
She smiled bells and sunshine at him, dazzling him with her white teeth, shining eyes, and glittering Harvite locket. St. William Harvey had been an English medical doctor. Now his Sisters, sometimes called the Harvites or the Circulators, were physicians and apothecaries, with a special mission to help the needy.
“The poor honest gentlefolk must be trembling in their beds.” She sighed. “Perhaps they could consider hiring protection when they come to the Quarter, if the chevalier cannot provide an adequate number of gendarmes.”
“Perhaps they could at that, ma’am,” he agreed. “Perhaps some enterprising person will undertake to offer them the service of watching their bodies.”
“I fear I am somewhat a-quiver, myself,” Long Cathy said. “Might you do me the service of watching my body?”
“I’m your humble servant,” William replied. “Until the day they row me out into the Pontchartrain Sea and throw me into the Hulks.”
A second whisky came for each, a few more precious minutes of ironic civilized pleasantries passed and then William guessed he was likely out of money and should leave. He thought she would have allowed him to stay and talk longer even without a drink, but he knew that his bearlike presence on the stool could only frighten away potential customers, and he wished her too well to cause her such harm.
“I must bid you a good evening, Mrs. Filmer,” he saluted her, rising to his feet and executing another bow-and-sweep. He emptied his coins onto the counter, relieved to find he had enough to pay for the drinks and also leave a small gratuity for the Irishman. “I fear that I have business to attend to.”
“A good evening to you, too, Sir William,” she replied, “but surely it is your business that fears you.”
Another kiss to her unscarred hand and Bad Bill was out the door again, warmed inside by the two whiskies and by the few priceless minutes of having been permitted to be Sir William.
Fifteen years. He sighed.
For fifteen years it had been only the shared polite moments like this with Long Cathy that had kept him still wishing to live.
The genteel company of Long Cathy and the thought of home, of course, he corrected himself. Sally and the children. The children…Heaven’s beard, they’d be grown now. Images flashed into his mind of stick-fencing with young Charles, and playing at battle with toy soldiers, and he wondered whether the boy was now grown into a military man. He must be; Bill’s family had always produced military men.
Whump!
The club took him by surprise, thumping hard into his belly as he stepped around the corner of Grissot’s. Bill went down, losing his hat. A second blow of the cudgel hit him across the back of the head and turned his vision starry and spinning. Tumbling on the hard boardwalk, Bill groped for his sword hilt but froze when he felt a pistol shoved against his nose.
He eased over slowly, hands held away from his weapons, breath creeping back while his head still swam. His attackers let him roll, and when he lay on his back Bill saw that there were five of them, two armed with clubs, one with a brace of pistols, and one with a bell-mouthed blunderbuss, all scrutinizing him closely.
The four armed men were the usual New Orleans mongrels, killers of any race and country, all with desperation blazing in hungry eye sockets and all wearing simple black waistcoats. Bill ignored them and looked at the fifth man, their leader, whose broad, brown face was smiling in an incongruously kindly way. He wore an expensive coat, polished riding boots and fistfuls of gold rings. He was not visibly armed, and he held a smoldering cigarette. His waistcoat was black like his followers’, but was elaborately stitched with silver thread, a web of triangles and asterisks framed by scrollwork. Beneath it his waist was wrapped in a red silk sash, knotted on his right hip.
“Etienne,” Bill acknowledged the smiling man. “Ubosi oma.” He meant it as a friendly greeting—it was the only Igbo he knew. Or was it Amharic? His head hurt.
“Shut your mouth, you ignorant piece of filth.” Etienne still smiled.
“May I sit up?” Bill asked in his most polite tones.
“I prefer you to lie where you are, you fat old man. It might help you remember this meeting better.”
Bill acquiesced, but did at least reach out and pick his hat up off the boardwalk. His head had stopped spinning and he assessed his chances. They were not good. Even if he managed to distract the thugs’ attention and knock out one of the shooters in a surprise attack, the other would surely get him, and that didn’t take into account the toughs with cudgels. Nor could Bill expect any help from the city’s blue-and-gold-coated gendarmes or any passersby; this was the Quarter, and an attack by one set of thugs on another would raise not a single eyebrow.
He hoped this meeting would prove just to be a reminder. He would try to hasten the conversation to its climax.
“I will be able to repay your father tomorrow, Etienne.” Bill tried to look as trustworthy as he could. He meant it—he would duel the frog lover of his dago employer’s mistress tonight, and then he’d be able to pay back the loan. Even the interest, he hoped, though he had no idea how much that would be.
How interest really worked he had never understood very well, and it struck Bill as likely being somehow part of the curse brought on by Original Sin. Sums of money become larger if you wait was the only summary he could have given of the principle. That was a fine thing if you owned the money or you were a lending banker and a significant inconvenience, Bill had found, when you owed it.
“His Grace,” Etienne corrected him.
“I will be able to repay His Grace tomorrow,” Bill hastily agreed.
Etienne took a long drag. “I am very glad to hear it.”
“I have some work arranged for tonight, and I’ll make good money.” Bill was talking too much. Shut up now.
“Repayment tomorrow would be completely acceptable.” Etienne’s continued happy smiling was beginning to take on an insane cast. “This conversation is a peaceful one, in the nature of a reminder to a friend. An urgent reminder, to a friend who might be about to make a terrible mistake.”
“Thank you,” Bill said.
“With interest, your debt is now a large one, at eight Louis d’or. You know, I expect, what His Grace will do if he is not repaid tomorrow?”
“Excommunication?” Bill tried to squeeze all the charm he had into a roguish grin.
“Last rites.” Etienne stepped back and his two toughs with cudgels closed in. They beat Bill half a dozen strokes each while the bishop’s son laughed heartily at his appropriation of Bill’s jest.
They left him on the boardwalk, battered but conscious and still clutching his lucky hat. Bill let himself lie still and recover, but only for a few moments—his reputation as a man of arms would suffer if any potential client saw him lying there. When he stood he stood tall, for the same reason, willing himself to straighten his aching back and not hunch over or fuss at the bruises he knew were forming on his arms and thighs. He blocked his hat into the best shape he could with his fists and perched it atop his perruque.
If only he weren’t a drinking man. If he’d saved his cash for fifteen years instead of throwing it away on various kinds of rotgut (whisky, whenever possible, but there was a surprising variety of distilled substances that would do in a pinch), he’d own his own house in the Garden District by now. And a business—maybe a stage coach, with drivers and guards in his employ. And he’d never have had to borrow money from that bloodthirsty usurer, the Bishop of New Orleans.
His head hurt, and he almost stepped back into Grissot’s to buy another drink. Abrupt recollection of his completely empty purse, together with a sudden wave of shame at the thought that Long Cathy might see him in this defeated state, stopped him at the door.
He staggered down the street, collecting his thoughts. He would win his duel tonight—he always won, and this hapless frenchie looked more likely to grab the wrong end of the pistol and shoot himself than to be any danger to Bill—and that would let him pay his rent and repay his loan. What had Madame Beaulieu said about the size of his debt? Three looeys? And another eight to the bishop? That should work out just fine. He had ten looeys coming to him from Don Sandoval, and the hidalgo had promised Bill a bonus if the offending Frenchman actually died.
And if he had to owe Madame Beaulieu just one Louis d’or for a few more days, she’d still have to see that as an improvement.
Bill realized he was passing Hackett’s, the pawnbroker, and he stopped to look in the window at the glorious jumble that was the treasure of other people’s lives, sold cheap. Behind iron bars, among jewelry, tools, books, furniture, and even pairs of boots, he saw weapons that other desperate men had pawned, none as nice as Bill’s. He had borrowed money on his guns before—he’d gotten into debt with the bishop the last time he’d needed his pistols out of hock for a job. He hadn’t borrowed eight looeys, either—he wasn’t sure, but it seemed to him he might have borrowed four. Or even three. Someday he would master this concept of interest.
In any case, he wasn’t going to pawn his weapons now; he needed them. His own lengthening shadow reminded him he had an appointment at the river, and he turned and let himself drift out of the French Quarter west, toward the city walls and beyond them the bridge named after Bishop Chinwe Philippe Ukwu’s famous predecessor, Bishop Henri de Bienville.
* * *
Bill arrived at the bridge first, as he’d intended, and breathing through his mouth to keep out the stink.
He took extra care, moving outside of the city after dark. Close as it was to the wild no man’s lands of Texia and the Great Green Wood, New Orleans saw plenty of beastkind even within city limits. Outside city limits, and across the river, they were even more common, and some of them were feral. Not that Louisiana needed wild beastkind to be dangerous—bandits, pirates, robbers, drunk Texians, war bands of the free horse people, and alligators were all possible, even likely, encounters. Bill walked with his hands always on his pistols and his eyes never resting, darting from one Spanish moss-draped oak to the next.
Bishop Henri de Bienville Bridge, or Bishopsbridge, was only a couple of miles west of the city, and crossed the low end of the Mississippi River to connect the highway out of New Orleans with the large Westwego sugar plantations on the south bank of the river. One of the plantations belonged to the bishopric, so it was not pure public-spiritedness alone that had driven Bishop de Bienville to construct his famous crossing.
The Bishops of New Orleans had always been men of wealth and power, from the very beginning. The first Bishop de Bienville was a younger son of the Le Moyne family, and brother to the Chevalier Le Moyne in his day, whenever exactly that was. Perhaps as long as two hundred years. Bishops had owned businesses and land and farms and had servants throughout New Orleans’s history, and Henri de Bienville had been the richest of them all, a major landowner and benefactor in the city and the surrounding country. Bill knew this about the bishopric and about St. Henri because everyone in New Orleans knew it.
But not until the bishopric had passed into the hands of the Igbo Bishop Ukwu had the Bishop of New Orleans ever before been a crime lord and a moneylender. Bill looked at the Bridge and wondered whether he ought to think about actually attending church some time. It might convince the bishop to give him better interest rates.
The bridge was enormous, a span of seven great stone arches shooting across the wide river and creating a passage that could accommodate four large wagons abreast. Local oral history was emphatic that Bishop de Bienville had engaged a team of thaumaturgical engineers to build the bridge, and the sheer size of the thing made Bill believe the tale. The same oral history was also convinced that the effort of constructing the bridge had been so huge that it had actually killed the engineers, and de Bienville had buried their bodies inside the bridge’s foundations.
Around Bishopsbridge, the Mississippi River created shallow muddy stinking wetlands that provided good pickings for fishing birds but fouled the air. The bridge’s first arch began back from the river’s edge and at a low bluff, to keep the bridge above the swamp and the river itself, even during high flood. This created a plain of sand under the stone that was surrounded by mud and water but was itself exposed and firm, if not exactly dry, most of the year. It was also hidden from casual observation. This concealed sandbar, known as Smuggler’s Shelf, saw a steady stream of traffic for a variety of purposes, none of them completely innocent and many of them downright nefarious.
Croaking frogs and wharoooping river birds cheered Bill on as he scrambled down the slope onto the shelf.
Bang!
Bill drove the inevitable clutch of lovers too poor to afford a room from the sandbar with the unanswerable argument of a single pistol shot, fired out over the river. That stopped the birds and frogs, too. He reloaded and checked his other pistol as well while the couples scattered and the river creatures regained the courage to begin singing to him again—loaded and primed. He didn’t fear being reported—even if any of the lovers felt confident enough to do so, he’d be gone by the time any gendarme could get here from the city.
And no gendarme would waste his time, anyway. Men killed each other on Smuggler’s Shelf—that was a simple fact, and the law didn’t very much care. Pistols checked, Bill leaned against the stone to wait.
His client Don Sandoval arrived next, with two bodyguards, on horseback. All three had long rich black perruques and they wore yellow coats and breeches, but only the don wore make-up, his cheeks carefully rouged and a neat moustache penciled onto his upper lip. Mutton dressed as lamb. Bill snorted, but he didn’t say anything. The two bodyguards were scarred and hard-faced, with misshapen noses and notched ears, and they carried two pistols and a long rifle each. One of them was old enough that he might be a veteran of the Spanish War, like Bill, only on the opposite side of the conflict. The other was a relative pup, but in Texia, New Spain, and New Orleans, pups learned to bite at a young age.
The don was a ship-owning trader, soft and weak, and Bill didn’t wonder that he would hire someone else to avenge the insult inflicted by the young frog who had climbed between his mistress’s sheets. He was a bit perplexed that Don Sandoval hadn’t simply had one of his own bodyguards do the job, but maybe the Don overestimated the Frenchman’s skill and preferred not to risk his own man. Maybe the Don didn’t want his men to bear the brunt of any repercussions, if some gendarme decided to take offense to the killing. In any case, Bill needed the cash.
“Will you watch, then, suh?” Bill bowed slightly as the Spaniards dismounted.
“She is a good night for a duel. We will watch from over there,” Don Sandoval told him, indicating a deep patch of shadow beside the bridge.
“Very good, suh.” Bill noted the spot mentally. Odd creature, this dago, with odd notions. He seemed to want to redeem his honor anonymously, which did not at all accord with Bill’s ideas of how things should be done, but the Spaniard would get what he wanted, as long as the Spaniard was paying gold. Bill had learned long ago not to care too much about the strange notions of other men, so long as he got paid.
“Ten looeys after the shots are fired?” Bill willed his employer to remember the bonus he had offered.
Don Sandoval nodded. “And a further ten, señor, if you kill the young man.”
Bill nodded too, keeping his comportment professional. Twenty looeys would see him out of debt and nicely in cash for a while—too bad for the young Frenchman. Maybe his friends would learn a valuable lesson about rich men’s mistresses, and then the boy’s death wouldn’t be a total waste.
The Spaniards took their horses with them and hid.
The sun sank. Bill paced the Shelf in the gloom and waited, listening to the placid gurgle of the river around the stanchions of Bishopsbridge and the harmonies of the frogs and the birds.
The night air was getting colder, and it smelled bad.
Bill’s mind wandered to thoughts of Long Cathy and a wish he wasn’t still bound to a family in Johnsland he hadn’t seen in fifteen years. He felt bad for that wish, and focused his mind on Sally. Sally was a good woman, worth far more to him even than the very good dowry she had brought to the marriage. She’d given him two sons and two daughters, and of those only the one boy had died in infancy, too small and weak to even get a name before he expired in her arms, mewling like a cat.
The girls had both lived, and Charles. Hell, Charles might even have his commission by now. Bill hoped it was in the service of the Earl of Johnsland. However insane the Earl might be, he was better than Thomas Penn.
And he had sworn he would not vent his anger at Bill upon Bill’s family.
Three Frenchman arrived. They clattered down the slope, crashed through a brake of river reeds, and waded into the darkness under Bishopsbridge in the tight yellow embrace of a lantern.
“Ribbit,” Bill called in greeting.
The Frenchmen were young and rich. None of them was wearing the makeup that seemed mandatory in salon society, and that they had been wearing the night before. Bill’s opponent—he knew him by his jaw, bruised and puffy—looked the richest of all, in a silk shirt and elaborately brocaded waistcoat and jacket, but all three dressed like dandies, with plain black cloaks thrown over the top.
“Mistair Lee!” cried the young lover. “I yam ’ere!” His English was ridiculous, but it struck Bill suddenly and painfully that this young man whom he was about to murder was probably the same age as Bill’s own son.
Forget fallen, he thought. It’s a damned world.
Bill swallowed back thoughts of his boy, nodded a salute and approached the foreign dandies. “You are here, indeed, Monsieur le Frog. Shall we mark off ten paces?”
The three men conferred in French, and then one of the friends, shorter and with a round, plump face, spoke. His English was clear, though notably accented. “We believe ze Code Duello entitles my master…er, my friend, to know his offense, and to apologize, if he wishes. We acknowledge zat we have taken ze ground, which in principle precludes any apology until shots have been fired, but my friend informs me zat he does not understand why he has been challenged.”
Bill wasn’t accustomed anymore to transacting violence with gentlemen, and suddenly he wished he had employed more regular process. Well, this was New Orleans, not Richmond or Philadelphia or Paris, and the young monsieur didn’t seem to be standing too unreasonably on his rights.
“Tell your friend, suh, that his offense was to make free with Miss Lefevre.” That much was true. “Miss Lefevre is my mistress.” Bill regretted the lie, but he needed the looeys.
Miss Lefevre was a young actress, well known in New Orleans, particularly for her work in stage comedies. Bill had seen her in something called L’École des femmes, which he understood to mean The School for Wives. The play had been all in French, and considerably less exciting than Bill had been led by the title to believe.
She was also the mistress of Bill’s dago employer.
Bill’s claim to be the actress’s beau occasioned another three-sided flurry of French, and then the plump-faced man spoke again. “My master is surprised that you are so intimate with Miss Lefevre. He acknowledges ze insult and regrets zat it places him at odds with you. Neverzeless, he cannot apologize, as he is in love with ze lady.”
Bill sighed. He needed to kill the Frenchman quickly; he was starting to like the lad, and that would throw off his aim. “Ten paces, then. Your friend fires first, as I expect you know.” The reek of the swamp was even thicker than usual.
The third Frenchman, the lantern-holder, sallow-complected and small, rushed forward. “Please, sir, I beg you! Zis is not just any young man. His fazer—”
“Arrêtez-vous!” shouted the challenged young man. Bill thought that meant stop. The sallow-faced friend fell silent and both he and the interpreter looked at their feet.
Bill hesitated, then decided the brave young man deserved fair warning. “Tell your friend that I’ll be shooting to kill.”
If it were Charles in such a duel rather than the Frenchman, Bill would want the other fellow to warn his son.
Bill laid his coat on the ground carefully and took both his long pistols in hand; the challenged Frenchman armed himself similarly, and Bill noticed that his pistols were a pair of very expensive flintlocks, reflecting the lantern’s light with elaborate gold and silver inlays. The guns were long and light, the pistols of a marksman. Sallow took the lantern off to the side and held it high.
Both men checked their weapons; Bill’s were dry, loaded, and primed.
“Commêncez-vous,” Sallow said, then started counting. “Une…deux…trois.”
Bill marched. He heard the young man’s boots behind him as they paced off ten crunching steps each in the wet sand. Might the young Frenchman be more dangerous than Bill had imagined? He had impressive pistols, and he seemed to know the Code Duello, or at least Plump Face did.
Bill glanced as he paced at the shadows where the Spaniards were hiding, and saw nothing. Even those yellow coats they wore were concealed by the deep darkness under Bishopsbridge.
Bill reached his ten paces and turned. He let both hands hang at his side. Maybe the Frenchman would kill him. Would that really be so bad? Death would come for him somewhere, and Bill had always expected it to be violent when it came. He’d lived through four years of the Spanish War, with battles all over Texia and the Cotton League and of course the Siege of Mobile. He’d been young then, just a boy. He’d lived through ten years of riding with the Imperial Consort, putting down road-agents, Comanche slavers, beastkind riots, and rapacious banks. He’d lived by the sword, so he expected to die by it, too, just as Shakespeare said…or was it Jesus? Why couldn’t the Frenchman be the one to pull the trigger? Would Bill really miss this dishonorable ruffian’s life?
And even if he won, if he killed this Frenchman, repaid his debts and lived, would he ever return to Johnsland? That he might return on the earl’s death had been a constant prayer for fifteen years. He hoped the old man would finally die and the new earl would revoke his sentence of banishment. But the old man seemed to continue unnaturally, as if he had decided to live forever, just to spite William Lee.
If Bill died, though, he would never have the chance to see his son Charles as a grown man.
The Frenchman raised his pistol to take aim, and Bill saw that death would not come for him tonight. The young man’s arm wobbled as he pointed his gun. He might know how to shoot, might even be a good shot, but he had never before shot at a living man. Bill sighed. He hoped that if his son were in such a duel, he would at least be able to aim straight.
Bang!
The sound of the explosion echoed across the river and bounced back from the underside of the bridge, and the Frenchman lowered his gun. As bad a shot as the Frenchman was, Bill thought, his willingness to engage in the duel to defend his lady’s honor was that much more courageous. And courage was a dangerous, dangerous virtue to possess.
“Goodbye, suh,” Bill murmured inaudibly to the young Frenchman. “I’d be proud to be your father.” Then he took steady aim, pulled the trigger of his long pistol, and blew the young man to kingdom come.
The sound of Bill’s shot echoed for a long time in his ears, while he picked up and put on his coat, replaced his pistols in his belt and his pocket, and then approached the Frenchmen again, his feet surprisingly heavy in the sand. Sallow and Plump Face stood jabbering over the body; he needed them to leave, so he could meet with his principal and collect his evening’s payment.
“May I help you with the body, gentlemen?” he offered, and after some more wild-eyed French chattering between the two of them they agreed that he could. Bill quailed momentarily when he saw the gallant young man’s face, still, serene and unfairly dead, but he forced himself to hoist the deceased man by his shoulders. This was not the first young man he’d ever killed. Why should this one bother him more than any of the others? He’d shot Spanish soldiers in Texia who weren’t old enough to shave and who were barely able to hold up a rifle, and it hadn’t bothered him, because it had been necessary. Bill shook his head to clear it.
Each friend took a leg, Sallow still struggling with the lantern as well, and they huffed and puffed the corpse back up the slope to the highway, where a large coach-and-four waited. The blue-and-gold-uniformed coachman crossed himself repeatedly, nearly losing hold of his short, neat wig as he stumbled down from his high seat to open the carriage door.
The three men shoved the body inside the coach onto the floor and Bill stepped back, brushing off his hands. “This is an impressive conveyance,” he observed, examining the blue paint, the gold trim, and above all the gold fleur-de-lis that decorated its door, glimmering in the light of the lantern. “I don’t have occasion often to mingle with French-speaking society, but I’ve seen the chevalier once or twice, and I have to say, this looks every bit as fine as his coaches.”
“I tried to tell you,” Sallow muttered.
“I take it you gentlemen are of good family?” Bill hadn’t worked much for the city’s rich French families, but he wouldn’t object to doing so, and it occurred to him that at least these young men knew he was an accurate shot, and willing to do the job. Even if they couldn’t give him work themselves, they might be able to provide a reference.
“No,” Plump Face said sadly. “We were his friends and servants.”
“I tried to tell you,” Sallow repeated.
“Yes,” Bill acknowledged, remembering the dead man silencing his friend. “What did you try to tell me?”
“The man you killed tonight, monsieur,” Sallow said, “is no ordinary fellow.”
“Yes, suh.” Bill was losing his patience. “You said that part before. And you mentioned his father. What’s the part that you didn’t already tell me?”
Sallow began to weep. Plump Face looked terrified. Bill resisted the impulse to pull out the horse pistol that was still loaded and shoot another frog.
“What is it?” he coaxed them gently.
Finally, Plump Face spoke. “Our master,” he said slowly, “was ze youngest son of ze chevalier.”