“You would turn our father’s funeral into an act of black magic?”
CHAPTER SIX
The door was locked, but it was a door whose key Etienne had long ago copied. He let himself in, followed by Monsieur Bondí and Armand. Armand closed the door and waited beside it, hands crossed unthreateningly in front of his waist, and well away from his weapons. Armand’s size was threat enough.
Etienne and Bondí sat.
August Planchet, the parish’s beadle, looked up from his ledgers in surprise. “Vous êtes le…fils de l’évêque.”
The beadle’s office was plain, if not austere. That was as it should be. The tapers were inexpensive, the drapes of plain cloth, the desk and three chairs all sturdy but simple. The two paintings on the wall were of St. Matthew the tax collector and St. Bernardo de Pacioli with his two columns. August Planchet knew what image the beadle should project to any visiting worthy.
That would make this conversation easy.
“The word you have omitted,” Etienne mused, continuing the conversation in French. “What would it have been…notorious? Criminal? Gangster? Violent? Dangerous?”
“Enterprising,” Bondí said. “Industrious. Thrifty.”
“Merciful,” Armand suggested. “Needlessly generous.”
“Other.” Planchet smiled. “You’re the bishop’s other son. I’m more accustomed to seeing Chigozie Ukwu in this office. I haven’t seen you since you were a small boy; remind me of your name.”
“Etienne.” He smiled. “The name my mother wished me to have.” Her locket tingled in his waistcoat pocket. “And these are two of my associates. Monsieur Bondí is an accomplished accountant.” He indicated Bondí, a Creole whom he knew to be part Choctaw, part French, part Sicilian, and part Bantu. He didn’t know the proportions or what else might lurk in Monsieur Bondí’s family tree, but Bondí was an excellent accountant, both managerial and forensic. He was also an apparently bottomless source of perspiration, so his white shirts were generally stained a splotchy yellow and on his best days he smelled a little sour, even in winter. “At the door is Armand, who practices an entirely different sort of reckoning. May I smoke?”
The beadle said nothing, so Etienne struck a Lucifer match and lit a cigarette, savoring the taste and examining his quarry with cool eyes.
Planchet leaned back in his chair, slowly steepling his fingers before him. “I’m pleased to meet any associate of yours, Etienne.” August Planchet was an old man, thin as Etienne’s father, with a short spike of white beard on his chin, long teeth, and eyes so pale they looked as if they’d been drained. “You’re aware I have no cash here.”
Etienne laughed. “Ah, Monsieur Planchet, how I esteem a good sense of humor. What need have I to take a loan from the parish?” He savored a deep puff of cigarette smoke, carefully releasing it toward the corner of the beadle’s office. “No, we’re here because you’ll be seeing more of my associates in the future, in particular Monsieur Bondí. I believe it behooves us to commence our working relationship on the best of all possible bases.”
Planchet continued to smile blandly, but he had visibly paled. Etienne’s father, the former Bishop of New Orleans, had been dead for two weeks. What must Planchet be thinking? Whether Etienne would now shake him down, no doubt. Or rob him at knife-point. Or simply have him killed.
“Oh?” Planchet said neutrally. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this future association?”
“The bishop’s throne is vacant,” Etienne said.
“The bishop doesn’t sit on a throne,” Planchet said immediately.
“Only in a figurative sense, of course. In Latin he sits upon a cathedra, a throne, and the church in which he presides is therefore a cathedral. Please feel free to correct me if I am mistaken…my knowledge of church governance is as rusty as my theology and my Latin.” Etienne steepled his own fingers and mirrored the beadle’s mild expression, cigarette tucked neatly into the corner of his mouth.
“Of course, you’re correct. The church requires a new prince.”
“And the Empire a new Elector. I know, as it happens, that the Synod has already acted. The vote wasn’t unanimous, but a majority agreed on a candidate, and in accordance with its traditions the Synod will only announce the outcome of the discussions, and not the misgivings of the dissenters. I expect that you’ll shortly be informed as to the identity of your new bishop.”
The beadle’s mild expression struggled against a look of terror. “Oh? They took months to appoint your father.”
Etienne nodded. “I understand this time they felt some urgency to act.”
“And…you also know whom they intend to anoint.” It was not a question.
“As I said, you’ll work a great deal with Monsieur Bondí here. And I felt it vital that we discuss one key issue ahead of time, before the new bishop is consecrated.”
“How thoughtful.”
“You’ve been stealing, Monsieur Planchet.”
Etienne leaned forward and placed his hands on the desk between them, palms down. It was a deliberate move to make himself appear harmless. “You’ve been stealing from the parish, Monsieur Planchet. You’ve been picking the pockets of the poor of the church.”
August Planchet looked back and forth between Armand and Etienne. His eyes jumped and his breathing became noticeably shallower, but he said nothing.
“Thank you for not denying it. Monsieur Bondí and I have taken the liberty of letting ourselves in at night to examine your books. And I have enough men in my employ to investigate the factual questions, which made it a simple matter to locate the false charity and the nonexistent widows.”
The Creole cleared his throat. “I make it about one hundred fifty Louis d’or a year you’ve been taking, on top of your salary.”
“The salary,” Planchet said finally, “is a pittance unworthy of a man of my professional qualifications.”
“Quite.” Etienne relaxed back into his seat. “The parish expects you to contribute your time as an act of service. Worship, even. Your salary is merely intended to pay costs of living, and that at a rate I would characterize as…frugal.”
“Your father expected me to live as humbly as he did.”
“Yes, I know my father’s expectations.”
“I don’t believe your father knew. About the theft.”
Etienne laughed. “Of course not. He’d have called you to repentance.”
August Planchet looked around again at the three men in his office. “So…where do we go from here?”
“I propose to pay you twenty Louis a month to continue to act as beadle,” Etienne said.
Planchet frowned. “But the Synod…”
“Not, you understand, from the Bishopric’s funds. The Westwego plantations, the bonds traded in New Amsterdam, the rents from the Esplanade properties, the income from the textile mills, the cotton holdings…you will from this day forward treat that money as utterly sacrosanct. Do you understand me? The parish must be managed in a way that is completely above reproach.”
“But…” Planchet was clearly perplexed.
“You ask yourself two questions. I’ll give you two answers,” Etienne said. “First, your monthly twenty will come from my other businesses, which will continue to operate under the direction of Monsieur Bondí. You will have no contact with those businesses. Monsieur Bondí will examine the Bishopric’s accounts monthly, and provided they are pristine—understand me, they must be so shiningly, spotlessly perfect that you could write them in good conscience on the consecrated host—he’ll pay you twenty Louis.”
“I see.” Planchet finally allowed himself to smile again.
“The other question you ask yourself is: but this Etienne Ukwu is a famed breaker of legs, a man of violence and one who profits from the addictions and dire straits of others. He is a gambler and a whoremaster and a moneylender. How can such a man possibly want an uncorrupted Bishopric?”
Planchet swallowed. “I will confess, the question had occurred to me. There has been more than one…fallible…priest in the past, and many parishes’ accounts show at least some sign of disorder. Why, even the Borgia—”
“The Borgia only saved himself from being forcibly unseated by the Emperor Charles the Affable by preemptively turning Turk. Why do you think we’ve had no popes or cardinals since?”
“And yet…”
Etienne smiled. “My father was an incorruptible man. He was personally abstemious, he was charitable, he was patient, he was good. If an irregularity had been discovered in the Bishopric’s accounts while he was bishop, everyone would have assumed he wasn’t to blame. Indeed, he would have been the first to seek to remedy the breach.”
“Truth.” Monsieur Bondí nodded sagely.
“But the new bishop is a much more fallible person, a man known for certain…irregularities in his attempts to live a Christian life. For such a man to survive as bishop, the parish must be error-free. The books and bank accounts of the Bishopric of New Orleans must come to shine with such a pure light of holiness and honesty that the most jaded and dishonest assailants couldn’t call into question the bishop’s management. Does that help you see the complete picture?”
“You plan to do battle.”
“As any prince must.”
“You will have seen the broadsheets on the Place d’Armes; the chevalier is recruiting additional gendarmes and raising their pay. It’s as if he, too, expects to do battle soon. And with physical arms.”
“Is that so?” Etienne knew.
“Yes.” August Planchet’s sly grin gave away his knowing flattery. “I can build you the suit of armor you ask, Your Holiness.”
Etienne chuckled. “Not yet, Monsieur Planchet. Not yet.” He stood, took his mother’s locket from his waistcoat, and looked at it.
Well done, my son. He felt the warmth of love and approbation from his mother, his gede loa since her death. This was the path onto which she had put him, following her death. Carry on her legacy, follow her spiritual path, protect his father.
Until Etienne failed at that.
And now: avenge his father’s death.
Kill the chevalier, and take the city. End the power of the chevalier’s family forever.
Etienne didn’t feel the summons of the Brides. Perhaps it was the tobacco smoke, which tended to keep them in check; perhaps it was his failure to eat peppers earlier in the day. Their slumber, in any case, was fortunate. He had much to do before the day ended, and no time for their riotous ministrations.
He replaced the locket as Monsieur Bondí climbed to his feet, rather more ponderously than Etienne. “One more thing, Monsieur Planchet.”
Planchet stood. His cautious smile had broken now into a broad, beaming, grin. “Yes…sir.”
“If you were to fail,” Etienne said slowly. “If you were to fall short of the impeccable standard of conduct I expect of you. If, say, you decided that twenty Louis a month were not enough, and that no one would detect a few extra coins given to untraceable orphans or fraternal organizations, rest assured that Monsieur Bondí would notice.”
Bondí grinned. “I’m a great noticer of things.”
“I’ve never yet known him to make a mistake in a matter of money,” Etienne said. “Monsieur Bondí is punctilious to the sou.”
Planchet nodded. “I believe he would notice.”
“And I would be promptly informed.”
“I’m as loyal as I am discreet,” Bondí said.
Planchet nodded, shuffling back half a step.
Etienne took a final drag on his cigarette.
“And no one would ever find your body. Do we understand each other, Monsieur Planchet?”
* * *
“Don’t worry,” Montse whispered to Margaret. “And stay calm.”
Not that the girl looked worried, despite the shackles on both their wrists. Perhaps because she felt she could walk out at any moment she wished. Perhaps because she trusted Montse. Mostly, she looked impressed. The Palais du Chevalier was enormous, and gleamed with art and silver. Even in what appeared to be the administrative portion of the building, the halls teemed with busy servants and rushing clerks.
“This is a rich man,” Margaret whispered back.
“That’s only to say, aquest criminal és més èxit que jo.”
Margaret laughed quietly, her head bobbing up and down like an amused hyena’s, but it was true. The Chevalier of New Orleans was only a more successful criminal, and Montserrat Ferrer i Quintana was not afraid of him.
Or at least, she wouldn’t admit to fear in front of the girl. She owed Hannah better than that.
Once, she had pledged Hannah everything.
Two of the chevalier’s gendarmes had dragged the smuggler and her charge into a room that looked one part office and one part audience chamber. It had a desk and padded seat at one end, and benches lined the walls. No chairs stood in front of the desk. The gendarmes had pushed the two women onto a bench against one wall and then stood silent, waiting.
The gendarmes might have understood Montse’s joke in Catalan, but they gave no sign of it.
“We’ll escape,” Margaret whispered. “I’m sure of it.”
Montse shrugged. “We’ll buy our way out. A message to La Verge Caníbal and Josep will send bags of money to redeem us.”
That was true, Josep was loyal even though Montse had rebuffed him as a lover. He was loyal because she was generous and fair, and really, where else would he go to take hauls as big as they’d made running stolen silver baked into thick clay dishes across the Pontchartrain Sea? So long as the chevalier was unaware of Margaret’s identity, the bribe he’d require shouldn’t even be very much. His people benefited from Catalan and Igbo smuggling, which provided the necessary market for those who couldn’t afford stamped goods brought in by Castilian and Dutch traders.
The door opened and eight men entered. They were tall and all wore padded black pourpoints that covered them from mid-thigh to wrists to neck. Long beards emerged from faces swaddled in silk scarves. They had the poise and the measured step of warriors, though none seemed to be carrying weapons. They stood, feet apart and hands behind their backs, seven of them in a semicircle several steps from the desk and the eighth directly in front of it.
A section of the wooden paneling at the back of the room swung open. Four more gendarmes entered and stood beside the door. These men were armed with muskets and bayonets, but the last man to enter, who followed them through the panel, carried only a dagger at his belt. He was tall and thin, with a thin French aristocrat’s face, and black hair beginning to be dusted with white about the neck and ears.
Gaspard Le Moyne, the Chevalier of New Orleans.
The door stayed open behind him. Through the open panel, Montse saw dim yellow light but no details; a passage of some sort. She heard muffled murmurs.
Le Moyne sat, then looked up at the man standing before him. “How is the Caliph?”
The men in the pourpoints placed right hands over hearts and bowed slightly. Then the one directly before the chevalier lowered his scarf to reveal a small mouth with thin, chapped lips. “Insha’allah, well. He was prosperous when I saw him last, and God continues to send him victory.” Even his lips moved with such economy that he resembled a statue.
Both men spoke French, which was Montse’s second language, and came as naturally to her as cheating.
“You’ve come about my letter,” the chevalier said.
“I don’t know anything about a letter. I’ve come to take possession of a prisoner.”
“The Abbé de Talleyrand is an Elector.” The chevalier said this as if he were thinking aloud and uncertain of what he would do.
The scarfed man stood silent.
“That means he’s an important man in his native Acadia.”
“He’s an important man in France.”
“I understood the Caliph had taken his family lands and confiscated his wealth. What importance could he have in the Caliphate now?”
“The Caliph wants him dead. That fact makes him important.”
“And here, he’s important because he’s entitled to vote emperors in and out, as well as consent to taxes. And he is protected by wealth and power. So if I am to deliver this man to you, I think you realize, the price will be high.”
The scarfed man considered. “I had been given to understand that you already had the Abbé in your custody. Perhaps this was what you wrote in your letter.”
The chevalier arched his eyebrows and pursed his lips.
“I am Ahmed Abd al-Wahid. I am mameluke-born and mameluke-bred, and prince-capitaine of that order. If I have been summoned here with a lie, the Caliph Napoleon will regard this as a declaration of war. His expectation of me is that my first act will be to kill as many enemies as I can before my own inevitable destruction. Is this what you seek?”
The chevalier chuckled. “Bring him in!” he called over his shoulder.
Four more musket-bearing gendarmes came through the short passage. They dragged a prisoner, an ageing man with hair spilling down his shoulders in tight white curls and a broad forehead. The man’s mouth was gagged, but he murmured loudly when the gendarmes threw him to the floor.
“Let us be clear.” Gaspard Le Moyne stood and rested his hands on his belt. “This Abbé is highly inconvenient for your master. He writes letters of encouragement to French Christians, and shelters them as refugees when they flee to Acadia.”
“Oui.”
“He funds the partisans who seek to overthrow the Dhimmi Kings of Spain.”
“Oui.”
“Some say, indeed, that there is no Bourbon worthy to retake the throne. Some say that if a mussulman Napoleon can take it for himself and found a Caliphate, may not the Abbé de Talleyrand take it back, and return France to Christendom? Isn’t this so, Prince-Capitaine Ahmed Abd al-Wahid?”
“Certes, some say these things.” The mameluke’s face had no expression.
Montse had never seen the Abbé de Talleyrand. He was one of the three great Electors of the Acadian north, benevolent and rich, though some said he was a manipulator behind the scenes. It was believed Franklin had personally invited Talleyrand to come to the New World after the Caliph’s Grapeshot Massacres. The elector’s hands were tied together and his mouth gagged, but he knelt now in a posture of prayer or supplication, and craned his neck, trying to catch the chevalier’s gaze.
“Good,” the chevalier said. “We’ve established his value. Now let’s consider his cost. Men delivered him to me, men who ran great personal risks, men whom I had to pay good sums of gold.”
The mameluke nodded.
“At some point, my deed will be discovered. This may result in war with Acadia, or a trial before the assembled Electors. Thomas Penn has reasons to be annoyed with me, and will certainly try to say that what I’ve done is treason.”
“Yes.”
“In addition, the Abbé is known to be a sainted man. It grieves me greatly to act against such a holy man.”
“Indeed?” The mameluke’s face was still as stone. “I had heard the opposite.”
“What would that be?”
“That killing a holy man didn’t trouble your conscience. That maybe you were even known for such acts.”
The chevalier chuckled. “That’s not quite right, though. I don’t rejoice in the blood of priests, Prince-Capitaine. But I do what needs to be done.”
“These are the costs of this man.” The mameluke caught Talleyrand up with a sweep of his arm. “High, indeed. Now tell me the price that will make your trouble, expense, and risk worth while.”
“I have my men counting the gold.”
“Excellent. We brought it for you, of course.”
“All thirteen chests?”
“The wealth of Italy and Egypt.”
“I am pleased.” The chevalier inclined his head slightly. “It’s almost enough.”
“What final feather in the scale would you require, O great chevalier?”
“Only one.” The chevalier held up a finger. “As I have given you one Elector, O prince-capitaine, I require that you deliver an Elector to me.”
“The poet tells us to seek, for search is the foundation of fortune.” The mameluke nodded. “Tell me.”
“He hasn’t yet been appointed Bishop of New Orleans, but my agents tell me that he will be. The prior bishop’s son. Unexpectedly, not the pious one.”
“An Elector for an Elector would be an even trade, no?” The mameluke cocked his head to one side. “Shall I pack up the Caliph’s gold for return shipment to Paris?”
“I think not,” the chevalier said. “You see, the Elector I require you to capture for me is here in New Orleans. Indeed, he is not yet even an Elector. He is a criminal, and but for the fact that he is soon to be an Elector under the Compact, this would be a simple police action for my own gendarmes.”
The mameluke was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “Agreed. Then the renegade Abbé is ours?”
Talleyrand squirmed.
The chevalier gestured with an open hand. “Please feel free to pack him up for return shipment to Paris.”
“We won’t be taking the entire Abbé back to Paris. Only his head.”
Talleyrand leaped to his feet, and Ahmed Abd al-Wahid caught him. The chevalier drew his dagger and handed it across the desk, hilt-first. Montse saw all the chevalier’s men grow tense.
The mameluke grabbed the Abbé’s head with both hands, and Montse got one last look at the terrified cleric. With a single motion, the mameluke twisted at the waist and pulled through with both hands—
snap!
Talleyrand’s neck pulled into an unnatural angle and his body went limp.
“You are my witnesses, with God, that this man’s death was merciful.” The mameluke then took the dagger from the chevalier’s unresisting hand—Le Moyne’s face bore an expression of surprise and maybe disgust—and promptly pushed the blade into the dead man’s throat.
Blood gushed onto the chevalier’s stone floor. Several of his men gripped their muskets as if to respond, but the chevalier inhaled sharply and raised a hand to restrain them.
Abd al-Wahid sawed through Talleyrand’s head in several long strokes and then handed back the chevalier’s blade politely. The Abbé’s body hit the stone floor with a thud. The chevalier laid the dagger on a stack of papers, marring them with the Acadian’s blood. Then the mameluke reached under his pourpoint and produced a red silk sack, pulling it over Talleyrand’s once-white locks. He handed the bagged head to one of his seven men, then nodded to the chevalier. “And this new Elector?”
“I must consider.” Le Moyne’s voice was calm. “For the moment, once you’ve shipped the Abbé off to your master, please feel free to move your possessions into the Palais. I have a room in which you may sleep, and a separate room in which you may pray.”
“Your men have our weapons,” the mameluke said. “There is nothing else.”
The chevalier snapped his fingers and pointed to one of his men. “Their weapons, Bertrand,” he said.
The mamelukes bowed slightly and left by the door by which they’d entered.
The last to depart hesitated in the doorway. “L’Abbé,” he said. “The body.”
“Leave it for now.” The chevalier dismissed his man with a wave. “Later, the river will do.”
Montse was trembling. She touched the arm of her charge and found the girl was also shaking.
The chevalier left his bloody dagger where it lay. Crossing the audience chamber, he stepped over the headless corpse on his floor and seated himself on the bench on the far side of Margaret. Looking at the dead body, he sighed and shook his head.
Montse tried to find her equilibrium and couldn’t. Would the chevalier now kill them as witnesses? But if that was the plan, why let them see anything at all?
She decided to gamble on silence.
“Vous êtes une contrebandière,” he said.
“We’re your prisoners,” she answered, in French. It seemed safe because it was neutral, it only restated the obvious, without even admitting to the relatively harmless fact that yes, she was a smuggler.
She was also, after all, Catalan.
The chevalier smiled and turned to Margaret. “Mais vous,” he said. “Vous êtes une princesse.”
Montse forced herself to breathe. Margaret’s hair swayed slightly, though there was no breeze, and Montse took her hand to calm her.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“There is no need to lie, Ferrer i Quintana,” the chevalier said. “One of my most trusted servants recently died, and I discovered by fortunate accident that he had been lying to me since the day we met. I learned that he was a member of a conspiracy, and when I gathered up some of his fellow-conspirators, I found out astonishing things. The man was in league with Jackson!”
“I am Ferrer i Quintana,” Montse admitted. “Not Jackson. This is my niece.”
“No,” he said. “This girl is a Penn. The conspiracy I speak of has been watching her for some time, but now I have use of her.”
* * *
René must be dead.
They hadn’t admitted as much to her at the Palais, turning her away with no answers. But he hadn’t answered her messages either, including the letter in the secret drop, and though the chevalier had returned to New Orleans, his seneschal hadn’t returned with him.
René only left New Orleans when his master did. His responsibility was to keep order and function in the Palais, this was why he was called its intendant, or in English, its seneschal; a seneschal held a castle for his lord. René oversaw cooks, maids, and butlers, but also the gendarmes who secured the Palais, the grooms who kept its horses, and the gardeners who carved its bushes into the shape of exotic beasts. He also ran certain discreet errands indicated by the Palais’s great inhabitant, the chevalier.
He hadn’t answered, so he must be dead.
René was dead and Simon Sword was active. Had the Heron King discovered him? Would the Heron King discover Kinta Jane? Was the Conventicle itself already revealed and broken?
Regardless, the combination of René’s death and the return of the god left Kinta Jane Embry only one course of action—she was traveling to Philadelphia.
She packed nothing but a few clothes, and those into a single carpetbag she bought for the purpose, second-hand from a blind Portugee pushing his two-wheeled cart through the Vieux Carré. She wore her luck in the form of her cluster of beybey medallions, hanging around her neck. There was no point in telling Elbows Pritchard, her useless drunkard pander; he might beat her out of sheer spite, but even if he had any ability to help her, he wouldn’t offer it. He would get angry about her disappearance and likely batter another girl, but she didn’t see a way around that for certain, and decided that if she left without a message, he might assume she’d died.
All in all, that would be for the best.
Kinta Jane came up the Mississippi River the same way she’d gone everywhere in her life: working.
A keelboat full of Ohio Germans with crates of New Orleans-woven cotton fabric packed into their hold took her with them, favorable winds initially filling the narrow vessel’s sails. The boat flew no banner aft. The keelboatmen were mostly married, several of them to more than one woman at the same time, each in a different port. Few of them turned Kinta Jane away. None of them turned their backs.
It wasn’t painted on the side, but she thought the name of the keelboat was the Stolze Marie.
Of all the boatmen, Johannes was her favorite. He was young and shy, with bright blue eyes and long hair down to his shoulders. When they stopped at Natchez-under-the-Hill, Johannes disappeared for an hour, much to the agitation of his fellow-keelboatmen. When he returned, he had three apples, late and small but tartly delicious, and he gave them all to Kinta Jane. Johannes had a wooden box like a snuffbox in which he kept anis seed, and before seeing Kinta Jane he always chewed a handful of it to sweeten his breath.
Before they reached the Mississippi’s junction with the Ohio, the tide of traffic turned, boats of all descriptions beginning to stream southward past them. Some of those boats looked unmolested, the ordinary agents of planters, manufacturers, and middlemen, moving goods up and down the watery highway that bounded the western edge of the Empire of the New World.
But other boats, or their passengers, had clearly been attacked.
The captain of one such vessel was willing to drop anchor and lay alongside the Ohio Germans’ keelboat for half an hour to tell what he’d seen, why his vessel was stuffed with elegant furniture, and why his passengers were all bandaged and stared constantly upriver behind them, as if fearing pursuit.
Beastmen.
Beastkind were rampaging in the Missouri.
Before any of her Ohio Germans had even muttered Simon Schwert, Kinta Jane knew what was happening. This was Franklin’s vision, this was why he had founded both the Conventicle and the Compact. It might even have something to do, she thought, with his construction of the Lightning Cathedral.
Because Peter Plowshare always dies, sooner or later.
And because Simon Sword is always a reaver.
The Germans muttered more prayers to their queer saints as they continued upriver, but they didn’t stop requiring Kinta Jane’s services. “Die Beruhigung des Ohio,” Johannes tried to explain to her when she managed to communicate her curiosity. His breath was sweet, but Kinta Jane didn’t understand German and he spoke virtually no English.
Maybe that made them a good match.
Though it meant he couldn’t explain what Stolze Marie meant. Marie was Mary, but the hodge-podge of languages spoken daily in New Orleans included little German.
The Ohio Germans were picky about where they moored the boat at night, sometimes engaging in lengthy debates as they pointed alternately upriver and down to discuss possibilities. Kinta Jane followed all this only in part, but she noticed they tended to avoid the Imperial Ohio Company’s trading posts. From time to time they also pulled into difficult-to-spot streams flowing into the river, even going so far as to cut branches off trees and bushes growing alongside the creek and use them to cover the riverward end of their keelboat.
And those posts were hives of activities. The fact that soldiers camped outside them in tents, though winter was fast coming on, suggested that the three trading posts Kinta Jane saw were all full beyond their capacity of Company militia.
And then one overcast night, having left the trading post behind them and moving up the Ohio River mostly by the power of poles and German back muscles, the boat was hailed by a voice out of the darkness.
“Halt, who goes there?” cried one voice.
“Halt, wer da?” called a second.
Baskets were raised, revealing torches on two immense canoes. Gold-painted insignia on their blue hulls marked them as Imperial Ohio Company vessels, and the Company’s men wasted no time in leveling a row of guns, long and short, at the Germans. The Company soldiers looked like irregulars, without a consistent uniform or weapon, but the range was close enough that they couldn’t miss.
“Are you Hansa?” demanded a Company officer with a sword from the bow of one vessel. “Dutch Ohio Company? Traders?”
“Nicht, nicht, nicht!” The Germans tried to explain in slow, accented English and rapid German that they were only locals moving from one town to the next, by night because their appointment was urgent. They were laborers, they had a school to build, or was it a church? They were smooth enough in their falsehoods, but the Company officer wasn’t having any of it.
“No stamped passport? I’m afraid I have no way to tell you from customs-evading criminals. Don’t you support the Pacification?”
“Ja, natürlich,” Johannes said.
The Germans all grinned.
“Good. Then you’ll be happy to pay the thirty percent tariff on all goods you’re carrying. Prepare to be boarded.”
* * *
Nathaniel ran across the earl’s field, trying to get inside the outbuilding where he slept. Two scrawny Irish boys looked up from digging a ditch.
“Lookit Mad Chapel run!” the one squealed.
“He’s got the fear of Herne on him, hasn’t he?” squawked the other.
“Run, Chapel!” they cried together.
Nathaniel didn’t fear Herne, not exactly. He knew that the men who rode across the earl’s land and through the surrounding villages were only men, and their leader a man wearing a Herne mask. But he also knew that when night fell on All Hallows’ Eve, the voices he heard—the voices no one else could hear, and with them the shrieking of the wheels of heaven—would explode.
Nathaniel had encountered an itinerant peddler, a book-cadger, crossing the earl’s fields. He’d become distracted not by the few volumes the man carried on his back, but by the lengthy catalogs of books he claimed he could bring down from Richmond, upon order. Now Nathaniel raced against the sun.
~Kill the child! Kill the child!~
~Drink its blood!~
~Come to us! The water down here is so cold, so lovely. Sleeeeep!~
The heavenly squeal pierced his ear like a lance, and Nathaniel collapsed against the doorframe of the outbuilding, falling down into the dirt.
~Eat him! Eat him now, before he can stand!~
“Help me!” he gasped.
Then hands did help him, lifting him up and pushing him through the door. His vision held, though he couldn’t decide whether that was a mercy or not. A seizure at this moment might spare him an evening of pain.
He collapsed onto his sleeping plank, and a blanket was thrown over him.
“Thank you, Charles,” he mumbled.
“You’re welcome, Nathaniel.” It wasn’t Charles. Nathaniel’s head echoed too much with strange voices and the grinding howl of the world to be able to open his eyes, but he thought the voice might be Jenny Farewell’s.
“Thank you,” he said again, and burrowed deeper under the blanket.
He huddled in darkness, willing time to pass and trying to ignore the bloodthirsty howls, cries for mayhem, and threats that crowded into his cursed ear. He couldn’t tell how much time at passed, or even if time was passing at all.
And then he heard a gunshot.
He was accustomed to phantom voices and shrieks. He’d never heard a phantom firearm.
It was enough to spur his curiosity and chase away the other noises. Nathaniel crawled from his plank, hearing a second gunshot. The fire in the outbuilding was down to embers—the other men and boys he shared it with would be out all evening on the Wild Hunt, or at a dance, or otherwise celebrating the mad god of the Weald.
Afraid to open the door, he crept to a chink in the logs that he’d stuffed with a rag to block the wind. Pulling out the rag, he pressed his face to the gap, looked past the smithy, and saw the earl’s stables. There stood five men masked and cloaked in black; four of them had simple cowls hiding their faces, but the fifth wore Herne’s head, the neck and muzzle of a stag that added two feet to the wearer’s height, crowned with a regal spread of antlers. Each of the five members of the Wild Hunt held a torch—the other lights of the manor had been dimmed already.
Between the Hunt and the stables stood the godi Wickens, leaning on his spear of office and holding up a warning hand.
Had the gunshots been a warning?
“No Yule log!” the old sheep-killer cried. “No Wild Hunt!”
“You defy Herne!” the man in the Herne mask roared. The mask had something in its mouthpiece that amplified and distorted the voice, but Nathaniel still recognized George Isham.
“No.” Wickens chuckled. “I defy the puke-child whelp of a pathetic madman. Your horses will not leave the stables tonight. The earl’s lands will not know the Wild Hunt. You will console yourself as pleases you, boy.”
George-Herne raised a hand to strike the godi, but one of his companions caught his wrist. They grappled briefly, and then George stepped away.
“Ill luck from killing a priest of Woden,” George agreed. “But not, I think, from simply moving him.”
With no ceremony, he knocked aside the godi’s spear, then picked the man up and hoisted him over the rail fence into the horses’ yard. The priest splashed into a trough of drinking water and came up coughing.
“Ing and Erce!” the godi shrieked.
The laughter of the Wild Hunt was cut short when the stable doors swung open. Standing within were the eight soldiers in Old One Eye’s black uniform, muskets raised and pointed at George Isham.
Wickens cackled as he dragged himself up by the rails of the fence. “No Wild Ride tonight! And no log for Yule, boy!”
George’s companions dragged him away, cursing.
~Ride, Herne! Ride!~
The shrieking returned and Nathaniel collapsed.
* * *
“This is too much, even from you.”
Etienne turned from examining the preparations for mass and found his brother Chigozie. Chigozie, unsurprisingly, looked angry. The black and white of his priestly garb stripped away his individuality and reduced him to a mere face, which had the effect of magnifying that face’s expression of rage.
Etienne resolved to remember that, for use on a later occasion.
They both stood within the cathedral’s chancel.
“I have been anointed priest as well as bishop, brother,” he said. “May a priest not officiate at the mass? I have been reading the books closely, but I would certainly be pleased to have your assistance.”
“You were anointed both priest and bishop very quietly.”
“The Synod thought it best.”
“Liar. His Grace, the Bishop of Miami, felt obliged to tell me he was voting for you, after all the years of hinting he thought I would follow in Father’s footsteps. He told me that you would be seated as bishop, and that you would be installed quickly and quietly, as you directed. That was his word, and it was striking: you directed.”
“How could I direct the Synod?” Etienne shrugged. “I was not even a priest, much less a bishop, still less one of their number. I was a layman and, let us be honest, something of a scoundrel.”
“Indeed. You were a Vodun houngan.”
“I am a Vodun houngan. Whose mother was a mambo, and speaks to him still.”
Chigozie raised his hand as if to strike his brother, but held back. “Do not defile her memory.”
“I do not defile her memory, brother. I do as she bids, every day.”
Chigozie staggered away from the just-mended rood screed where Etienne stood, raising his arms to the stained-glass image of God the Father above and roaring. “Why?”
“Love, I suppose,” Etienne said softly. “A son’s love.”
“Oh? A son’s love? And it must have been a son’s love that made you steal the body of our father and bury it in the woods!”
“You are listening to what people in the Vieux Carré say. Good. There is wisdom in rumor, properly sifted. The voice of the people whispers in the streets, all their hopes and fears.”
“The rumor I have heard is that you buried our sainted father in a Vodun ceremony.”
“He is not sainted yet,” Etienne said. “Though I will seek that, too, eventually. But he was saintly.”
“Answer the question!”
“I did not hear a question,” Etienne said softly. “But yes, I gave him a Vodun funeral. Vodun was the spiritual tradition of our mother, who was the love of his life. And the ceremony I gave him kept his body out of the hands of foul necromancers, who might have defiled him in ways that would horrify you even more than you are horrified by what I have done, brother Chigozie. Instead, his limbs are burned and safely buried, and his soul is free. And now I will give him a good Christian service, my first service as a Christian priest, so that his many parishioners who were too Christian to mourn with me in the streets can come remember my father in his church.”
“God’s church,” Chigozie said.
“Yes,” Etienne agreed immediately.
“And in that casket there,” Chigozie said, pointing at the simple but elegant wooden coffin resting on a low raised platform before the rood screen, “there is nothing of our father. Not his body, not his ashes. Did you even put any of his clothing in the coffin, any possession of his?”
“I did not.”
“You will pray over and bury an empty casket.”
Etienne hesitated.
Chigozie’s brow furrowed. “Etienne, what is in the casket?”
Etienne looked up at the stained-glass windows, and specifically at St. Peter, with his key. St. Peter, who was also Papa Legba, the great loa of the crossroads Etienne served. “If I tell you, I fear it will be the final rupture between us.”
Chigozie gripped his own head between his hands. “Etienne, what have you done?”
“I would like you to stay,” Etienne told his brother. “Indeed, I would like you to serve with me in our father’s memory. Perhaps as a suffragan bishop.”
“One does not become a priest to serve a dead man!” Chigozie snapped. “One becomes a priest to serve the living God!”
“I am trying to find common ground with you, brother,” Etienne said slowly. “I would not fight you. I would have you here at my side, in the battle that is coming. I need your wisdom, your priestly acumen.”
“Etienne.” Chigozie stared, eyes and nostrils bulging. “What is in the coffin?”
Etienne consulted his mother’s locket. Tell him the truth. All of it.
He sighed. “A wax image of the Chevalier of New Orleans. It is dressed in clothing made from fabric cut from uniforms of the chevalier’s gendarmes and it holds in its hand a copper coin stamped with his grandfather’s likeness. Regrettably, the chevalier is a careful man, who has his hair clippings immediately burned and the contents of his bedpan poured into the Mississippi River, so it is an imperfect effigy at best. But it is all I can do at the moment.”
Chigozie’s stare, if anything, hardened. “You intend to perform a mass for the dead over this effigy?”
Etienne nodded, grateful at least for the fact that his brother had chosen to confront him alone, in this place, rather than in the street.
“You will tell the world that you are burying our father. In reality, you are burying an effigy of the Chevalier of New Orleans?”
Etienne sighed and nodded again.
“A mass for the dead, said for a living man. This is a curse, brother. You would turn our father’s funeral into an act of black magic?”
“Against the man who murdered him!” Etienne meant only to speak his words, but they came out in a guttural yell. “Yes, Chigozie, I will use this mass as a chance to curse our enemy. That he murdered our father strengthens his connection to this mass, gives the spell power. That our father was murdered in this very spot only adds to the power of the liturgy. That the cathedral will be full of heartbroken worshippers, singing songs of death under my direction strengthens the spell, don’t you see?”
Chigozie backed away a step. “I see.”
“I am led by our mother, Chigozie. I always have been. And now, I will take vengeance on the man who killed our father. I will destroy him, any way I can. This is not our father’s funeral. Our father is buried, and at rest, and with his wife. This is our father helping me take revenge.”
Chigozie backed away further. “Our father would not take revenge.”
“No,” Etienne agreed, “he would not. But our mother would.”
“And who are you, to be so certain the chevalier is guilty of our father’s death?” Chigozie asked.
“Who am I?” Etienne asked, and then suddenly he found himself shouting. “I am a man with eyes, brother! The chevalier’s gendarmes and his Imperial guests entered this cathedral by force! One of those men, an Imperial soldier who was sleeping at the Palais, shot our father! The murder was witnessed by many, and now our great chevalier, fearing retaliation, hires more soldiers! This thing was not done in a corner, brother! It was shouted from the rooftops!” He paused to catch his breath and felt the sudden surge of the Brides’ power within him; they felt his need and they answered. “And yes, I directed the Synod to act quickly…so the chevalier would not stop them. Who am I, you ask? I am my father’s son.”
Chigozie turned, his faltering steps becoming a brisk walk.
“Stay with me, brother!” Etienne called. He breathed hard, fighting to resist the Brides. “I need you!”
Chigozie Ukwu didn’t answer or look back.
Etienne’s heart hurt, but he couldn’t run after his brother; instead, he succumbed to the Brides.
Ezili Freda sang to him in lilting, lyrical French, though when he tried to focus on the individual words of her song they slipped through his hearing like water through the fingers of imperfectly cupped hands. Ezili Freda was an animal force as a Bride, and the sound of her voice told Etienne he was about to be ridden to exhaustion. Ezili Danto sang along at the same time, but her voice was a strangled staccato cry, the arrested song of a slave or a silenced woman. She was the maid, always watching Etienne through the eyes of every Virgin Mary he saw, and though she would come to the bed with her more riotous sister, she would come to oversee, to nurture, and to heal Etienne of his exertions when they were done.
He would have preferred to be in his bed, but there was no time. Etienne staggered down the stairs into the crypt beneath the St. Louis Cathedral. There, Ezili Freda seized him bodily and began to whip ecstasy from him in great lashings.
“My loves,” Etienne murmured, sinking to the cold stone floor. “My loves.”