“I only regret that you are not emissaries of Father Christmas instead, ma’am.”
Chapter Six
Bill drifted back down the bluff and onto Smuggler’s Shelf feeling shaken. He had been troubled enough about the young frog’s death when the lad was a gallant nobody, and only reminded Bill of his own Charles; knowing he was the chevalier’s son made Bill downright uncomfortable.
He thrashed his way with both arms through a thicket of brittle reeds, boots splashing in thin mud, and emerged onto the sand.
Well, Bill would pay off his debts in the morning—later tonight, if he could find Etienne Ukwu—and then figure out what to do about the chevalier. Maybe nothing, maybe the chevalier wouldn’t know who had killed his son.
No, that was unlikely, given how publicly Bill had challenged the young man, and how he’d told the onlookers and the seconds that he, personally, William Lee, was affronted by the Frenchman’s attentions to his actress lover. That was more than unlikely, it was delusional.
Was this why Don Sandoval had insisted that Bill challenge his romantic rival in Bill’s own name?
Was Bill being set up?
Bill reached into the pocket of his coat and wrapped his hand around the grip of the pistol that was still loaded and primed, just in case.
He could simply apologize to the chevalier.
But dueling was a hanging offense, no matter how generally it was tolerated, and the chevalier was New Orleans’s chief officer of the law. Even if the chevalier himself didn’t come after Bill, how many of his gendarmes would get the notion they could curry favor with their master for the low price of a single bullet?
He could run. To the Ohio, or the upper Mississippi, or across the river to the lands of the free horse people.
But first he had to deal with the Spaniards.
Under Bishopsbridge, Don Sandoval and his two bodyguards waited in their yellow coats. In the moonlight and shadow, the yellow looked like sickness. They looked like three men covered in pus and vomit.
Don Sandoval sat on his horse and in front of him, blocking Bill’s path to his employer, stood the two bodyguards, hands on their belts. Bill sized up the two toughs and chose the one he’d kill first—the older one, the one who had probably seen more action and looked calmer.
“Twenty looeys, suh!” Bill called, keeping his voice as jocular as he could. He bowed slightly, sweeping his hat off with his left hand but keeping his eyes on the three men.
Don Sandoval raised a white handkerchief and dabbed at the corner of one eye with a mock tragic air. “Good-bye, Señor Dollar Bill.”
His men grabbed for their guns.
Bill didn’t bother to pull the horse pistol from his coat; he simply swung it up, still in the long pocket, and fired right through the fabric.
Bang!
The older bodyguard dropped in a fountain of blood, one gun snagged in his belt and the other leaping from his dead fingers into the night.
As Bill fired, he charged, and the world about him slowed. Don Sandoval yelled something in Castilian, struggling to keep mastery over his suddenly bucking mount. The surviving bodyguard, surprise registering on his face at the unexpected annihilation of his comrade, pulled his guns from his belt—
and Bill flung his broad brimmed hat, spinning it like a skipped rock, into the bodyguard’s eyes.
Bang! Bang!
Both the bodyguard’s pistols went off. His aim was spoiled by the hat in his face, but one of the bullets hit Bill anyway; he felt it punch into his left shoulder and push him a little off-center, but Bill was a large man and his forward charge was not slowed. He crashed into the bodyguard with all his weight and all the strength in his legs pounding down behind his big, bony knuckles.
Bill’s aim was put off by the bullet, so he missed the man’s nose and pounded his jaw instead, and the Spaniard’s strangled cry of pain and the satisfying crack! made by the bone as he connected told Bill his attack had hit home.
Lucky hat.
The merchant’s mount got the better of him and bolted. The other horses followed, ripping out tethering stakes and galloping away.
“Damn you!” Bill whirled away from the flailing bodyguard. He hated to turn his back on an enemy who could still fight, but rage at his betrayal boiled within him, overwhelming cool trained fighting habits.
He threw himself at the body of the dead bodyguard, landing fully prone on the man with a jar that sent lightning bolts of pain from his own shoulder into his chest and arm. He gritted his teeth against the agony and jerked the pistol from the Spaniard’s belt. Resting his elbows on the dead man’s chest to steady his aim, he squinted at the retreating horseman, and shot the horse.
Bill was rewarded with a whinny of surprised pain and the sight of Don Sandoval hurtling from the animal’s back onto the sand, and then he heard the steel rasp of a blade being drawn behind him.
Bill threw himself sideways and the attacker’s knife slashed down into the corpse with a meaty thunk! The bodyguard shouted incoherently, spitting syrupy blood from his dangling mouth, and Bill spun on his shoulder blades to kick at the man with both his feet. The Spaniard was stooping low to free his knife, so one heavy boot smashed his jaw and the other caught him in the belly, sending him staggering away.
Bill risked a glance over his shoulder as he climbed to his feet; Don Sandoval was struggling to get up. Perfect. Bill drew his sword and faced the Don’s bodyguard, bloodied and unsteady on his feet.
If only he had reloaded his other pistol.
But the Spaniard might not realize he hadn’t.
Bill jerked the empty pistol from his pocket and pointed it at his antagonist. “Entrénase!” he barked. Didn’t that mean surrender in Castilian?
The man blinked and swayed on his feet. Bill noted that he was losing a lot of blood out his mouth and down the front of his chest. Bill’s own shoulder felt as if a drill was chewing its way through it and he bit back a powerful urge to vomit.
“Give up, you dago bastard!” Bill repeated himself. “You’ve nothing worth dying for here! Entrénase, dog on you!” The man made no move to attack, but also didn’t raise his hands, drop his knife, or otherwise indicate surrender. He just stood where he was, shifting back and forth a bit on the balls of his feet as if he were a green tree swaying in a strong breeze. In the darkness Bill couldn’t see the man’s eyes.
Bill looked over his shoulder again. Don Sandoval had risen to his feet and was limping in a meandering line across the Shelf toward the bluff.
No more time for fooling around.
Bill took a step forward, raising his saber…and the hidalgo ruffian collapsed, falling sideways without bending, like a felled tree trunk.
Bill shoved his pistol back into his pocket, his sword into its scabbard, and his victorious hat onto his head. Taking a deep breath, he scanned the mud and sand and quickly found the only unfired pistol on Smuggler’s Shelf, the one that had been dropped to the ground when Bill had blasted the first man to oblivion. He blew off the sand and checked its firing pan, then stomped across the Shelf toward his former employer.
Don Luis Maria Salvador Sandoval de Burgos was beginning to clamber on all fours up the scrub grass, still groggy and whimpering, when Bill grabbed his black coat by the shoulders and pulled the merchant down, throwing him into the mud with a soggy splash.
“Twenty looeys!” Bill raged.
Don Sandoval looked up trembling and Bill shoved the borrowed pistol into his cheek, just below one eye, irreparably smearing the Don’s rouge. Should he be demanding more? Something held him back. Bill shook his head to clear it, and for a moment he thought he saw, out of the corner of his eye, the dead young frog.
He shuddered.
“I-I d-do not have it, Señor.” Tears furrowed the wrecked make-up on the merchant’s cheeks.
“Show me your purse,” Bill snarled. Don Sandoval fumbled at his waist and then handed over a black silk purse that was, to Bill’s disappointment and mounting sense of fury, empty. Bill had more than half a mind to shoot the dago, regardless of his observation by dead Frenchmen.
“D-d-do not kill me! I have treated you ill, it is true, but please, do not kill me! Please, I…I have a son!”
Damn the man! “Just because you’re named Maria, suh, doesn’t mean you have to cry.”
“I am s-sorry, and you are right. Please, I d-do not have the money.”
“Twenty looeys—how soon can you get it?” These fat merchants lived off the poor planting Cavaliers, and Don Sandoval must have chests of cash. Bill tried to remember what the Don traded in. Sugar? Wheat? Bantu cotton? He glanced discreetly to his side to make sure the chevalier’s son was not looking over his shoulder.
“Soon!” the Spaniard’s eyes brightened and he clasped his hands together as if in prayer. “Ten days, maybe she is a week only!”
“What!?” Bill yelled. “You’re rich as Croesus, suh, rich as William Penn, rich as John Hancock and just as much a thief! Don’t lie to me!” He was furious at the betrayal, at the lancing pain in his shoulder, and at the thought that if the Bishop of New Orleans didn’t kill him tomorrow, the chevalier surely would.
“I am no smuggler,” the merchant protested. “My money, she is in bales of cotton, and notes, and bills of exchange. I have no cash, I would have to borrow from my partners, and she will take time. I am sorry, my cotton is all stamped by the chevalier’s customs men, and my cash, she is all spent.”
“Spent on what?” Bill asked.
“Some of it you have already had,” Don Sandoval told him. “The remainder is all gone…on Miss Lefevre, mostly.” His eyes teared up and he looked away.
Bill snorted. “Don’t weep on Miss LeFevre’s account. She’s had other affections before yours, and she’ll have others after.”
“I weep for myself,” the Spaniard sad. “And for the young Frenchman. And maybe for you, too. Please, Señor D-Dollar Bill, do not kill me.”
Bill pulled back the hammer on the gun and carefully considered his future. There was nothing Don Sandoval could do to save him from the chevalier—Bill had publicly called out the nobleman’s son, and killed him, and now Bill would pay the price. Apparently, the merchant couldn’t help him with the bishop, either, at least not tomorrow. Should he hold Don Sandoval for ransom? How much would the hidalgo’s partners or his family pay to free the fellow?
On the other hand, Bill was tempted by the idea of justice. One squeeze of his finger and at least the Spaniard would never trouble him again. Bill’s finger twitched, but in his mind’s eye he saw the chevalier’s son, bravely and uselessly waving his pistol at Bill, and above the young man’s shoulders he saw the face of his own son Charles.
The Frenchman would not have approved of this vindictive killing, and that thought strangely shamed Bill. The frog would have disapproved, Charles would have been ashamed, and once, he acknowledged to himself, feeling sick to his stomach, such a murder would have been anathema to Sir William Lee as well.
The Spaniard was beaten. It was enough.
“My name, suh,” he squeezed out through clenched teeth, “is not Dollar Bill. My name is Captain Sir William Johnston Lee.” With an effort of will, Bill eased the hammer back into place and then tossed the gun aside. “You owe me twenty looeys, suh. You should anticipate that I shall come collecting soon, and thank God that I am no great friend of the concept of interest.”
Bill marched up the bluff without looking back. He tried to take dignified steps, imagining that at least one, and maybe two hidalgos were watching his departure, but between the pain of his shoulder and the weight of his gut he found it impossible to do better than a rolling uphill lurch. He hoped he’d find one of the Spaniards’ horses at the top of the hill—he didn’t feel up to hobbling all the way back to New Orleans.
Bill stumbled onto the highway groaning. Every heartbeat pounded in his shoulder and a fair amount of blood ran through his sleeve and his shirt, puddling sticky at his belt and dripping down his fingers to the ground.
At least the air got a little easier to breathe as he rose up away from the river.
On the highway waited two figures, standing like puppets against a curtain of Spanish moss, dark and gloomy and silvery-green in the moonlight. They were robed and hooded in dark cloth, so he could not see their faces or tell whether they were armed. They seemed dimly familiar, and then he realized where he’d seen them before—standing in front of Grissot’s that afternoon.
“This is becoming an eventful evening.” He stopped in his tracks.
“We are messengers,” creaked one of the figures in a dry, slow voice.
“Just tell me that you monks aren’t servants of the chevalier.”
“No,” the same figure said. It peeled back its hood to reveal the forward-curling, leathery head of a tortoise, gray in the moonlight, bullet-shaped eyes glittering black and silver.
“We are not servants of the chevalier.”
The other figure pulled back its hood—her hood—as well, revealing a woman’s face that was strikingly beautiful in all respects but one. She had a waterfall of golden hair, slender eyebrows, fair skin, high cheekbones, shimmering blue eyes…and where her nose and mouth should have been, there protruded from her face the long yellow beak of a duck.
“Moreover, we are not monks,” she said. “We serve the Heron King.” Her voice tinkled like tiny silver bells. As he looked at it, Bill began to think that her beak wasn’t ugly, after all. It was strangely feminine and alluring.
“Beastkind,” Bill muttered. That he found the duck-billed woman beautiful only made him mistrust her more. He kicked himself for not reloading the pistols. He rested his hand on the hilt of his saber, but left it in its scabbard. “If you are road-agents, you have chosen the wrong man. I’m penniless.”
“We are not outlaws.” The woman’s duck-smile troubled Bill.
“If you’re hungry, I’m armed.” Bill felt his strength ebbing with his blood loss.
“We are not here to hurt thee, Captain Sir William Johnston Lee,” the tortoise-headed man croaked, twisting its beak into something approaching a smile. The night had already been so strange that Court Speech coming out of the mouth of this turtle-headed man barely struck Bill as incongruous. “Thou art not an enemy and we are not feral.”
“If you truly wish me no harm, suh,” Bill quipped, refusing to be drawn into the Jacobean thees and thous that had once been second nature to him, “that fact may make you unique in the entire territory of Louisiana.”
“We have come looking for thee, Sir William,” fluted the beautiful duck.
Bill wondered whether her body was feathered underneath the robe she wore. He wondered…he snapped his mind back from pointless speculation. “I don’t suppose I’m so fortunate that you might be moneylenders, anxious to lend me twenty gold looeys? Preferably not subject to the terrible Adamic curse of interest? If not, and if you’re not offering me a ride back to New Orleans in your invisible carriage, then I must be on my way.”
They ignored his jokes. Blasted beastkind—no sense of humor. Bill felt faint.
“We are emissaries of the Heron King,” the duck-bill tinkled again. “We bear thee a message.”
Bill snorted. He’d heard stories of the Heron King, growing up in Johnsland, but they weren’t stories of the sort you took very seriously once you were out of short pants. “I only regret that you are not emissaries of Father Christmas instead, ma’am,” he rejoined, “bearing me gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and twenty gold looeys.”
It must be the blood loss. Bill was lightheaded; he must be hallucinating. This whole encounter was all in his head. There was no Turtle Head, no Duck-Faced Woman. He was probably lying unconscious on the Shelf while Don Sandoval hacked him to pieces with a dagger and put rouge on his cheeks.
At least he couldn’t feel it.
“Thou shalt see the queen soon,” Tortoise-head told him. “Tell her Peter Plowshare is dead. The Heron King conveys his congratulations upon the occasion of her return, he supports her in her claims to her thrones, and he hopes she will entertain his suit for a close alliance between his kingdom and hers…a close alliance, and also marriage.”
Bill sucked in cool air through his teeth. Peter Plowshare? The queen? This hallucination got odder as it was prolonged. He could just manage to keep the beastfolk’s faces in view, but the world around them spun in crazy smears of silvery-moonlit color.
“The difficulty you face, suh,” he tried to tell the tortoise-headed man, “isn’t my memory, which is passing adequate to the herald’s task, but the fact that I don’t expect in the proximate future to be seeing any queens…or any other gentlefolk at all…unless, you understand, they happen to reside in the bottom of potter’s field.”
He wasn’t sure how much of his message he got out coherently.
He began losing consciousness in the middle of it, and when he reached the end, Bill passed out and fell.
* * *
“Someone on the boardwalk wants to talk to you,” Petit Jacques the stable boy told Cathy, speaking French, the only language he knew.
Petit Jacques was out of place in the smoke-clouded common room of Grissot’s, where he was not generally allowed at night. His breeches and shapeless cap were battered and dirty, but the horse smell wasn’t strong enough to cut through the odors of woodsmoke, tobacco and sweat, and he wasn’t trailing straw or manure behind him, so Cathy didn’t mind, whatever Grand Jacques said.
Over the bum-ditty of the banjo picker in the corner and the click-and-roll of the man beside him, shuffling his hard-soled shoes and snapping a pair of rib bones in each hand to keep time, no one but Cathy could hear Petit Jacques, anyway. The musicians were dark-skinned Igbo men in long, embroidered tunics, and while the banjo-picker hummed a wordless basso drone, the bones player sang a folk tune. Cathy knew it well, though it was not a song she’d ever heard in her native Virginia; she’d been catching snatches of it on and off for over fifteen years, since she’d first come to the Mississippi.
Peter Plowshare’s a farming man
King of maize and bean and gourd
Who takes your crop whene’er he can?
The rascal, Simon Sword!
“I don’t entertain gentlemen in the street,” she told the boy softly in his tongue, and smiled at him. Charm everyone. “That simply wouldn’t do.” Maintain your standards. Let people come to you.
“I don’t think they’re gentlemen, and I don’t think they want to be entertained,” Petit Jacques insisted. “They might be priests.”
“How very interesting,” Cathy said. “Well, I do hope they decide to come in and see me, then.” Patience in all things. She scanned the room, disappointed that the potential clientele was so scarce and poor tonight. She prided herself on giving men more than some of her fellow entertainers did: class and sophistication. She could converse, she had read widely, she could sing, and some men came to her for those things. They paid more for it, and that was important, as it almost made up for the fact that many men found her simply over-priced.
Petit Jacques fished something from his pocket. “This was their tip to me.”
Peter Plowshare’s a builder fair
Log and chink and stone and board
Who tears down buildings everywhere?
The villain, Simon Sword!
It was a gold coin, one that Cathy did not recognize, stamped simply with a plow on one side and a sword on the other, no letters or numbers at all. Her eyebrows arched involuntarily, and she beat them down with a will of iron. Grace at all times. She smiled. “How fortunate, Jacky. Be careful how you spend it, now.” Restraint.
Cultivate an impression of mastery and mystery.
Petit Jacques shook his head. “Very well, Madame, you do whatever you want to. I told them you would not come out, but they asked me to try. It has something to do with Monsieur Bad Bill, they said. I think he may be in danger.” He eyed Grand Jacques at the bar, then skipped out.
Peter Plowshare shapes the land
Road and fence and bridge and ford
Who smashes all with a hateful hand?
The reaver, Simon Sword!
Cathy mastered her surprise. Bad Bill! Captain Sir William Johnston Lee, once an Imperial officer of some renown. He didn’t know it, but she owed Bill a great debt—two debts, really.
In the first place, his daily visits to her and his reputation as a dangerous man had freed her of the need to work for a procurer, since most of the Quarter assumed she worked for Bill, and they feared him too much to harm Cathy. It helped that Bill had more than once intervened when a client of hers had become troublesome, throwing men into horse troughs or frightening them away simply by resting his hand on a pistol grip. Having no pander and working out of a tavern rather than a true bawdy house meant Cathy kept all her earnings, which was an enormous gain. Some working women she knew gave up more than half their take for the ‘protection’ of a gold-toothed cutthroat who beat them, or worse.
In the second place, and on a less mercenary plane, Sir William’s visits kept her sane. She thought they might serve the same function for him—a daily moment of deliberate refinement and gentility to keep the stinking, fleshy, oil-lit barbarism of New Orleans at bay—and she loved him for it. She flirted with him knowing it was in vain, on account of William’s dogged faithfulness to a wife whom he believed might still be true to him.
Paradoxically, his insistent loyalty to the family—and wife—he hadn’t seen for years made him more attractive to Cathy. She admired his stubborn attachment, she found it reassuring. The fact that that family included children, that Sir William was a father, made her think of her own child, the child she had never told Sir William about, and in her fancy she liked to imagine that Sir William was the child’s father.
In some secret chamber of her inner heart into which even she could not see clearly, Cathy Filmer suspected, she was in love with Bill. She loved him almost enough to be completely honest with him.
Almost, but not quite.
She rose to her feet gracefully. The clients, the diners and the drinkers in the room didn’t notice, but as she headed to the door she looked to the bar and saw Grand Jacques’s tiny-eyed, heavy-jowled face staring at her. He knew Cathy did not leave her position while she was at work—she let the men come to her—and he knew she was too professional to quit work early. He said nothing, though, and went back to refilling tumblers.
Peter Plowshare’s an even judge
Fair to farmer, and mighty lord
Who hates us all with an even grudge?
The waster, Simon Sword!
The street outside roiled, fumed, and belched with the midnight traffic of the Quarter, all sins bought and sold in the cool night air, which at least had the virtue of reeking less of tobacco smoke than did the air inside. Among the loungers on the walk stood a solitary robed and hooded figure, rather than the two Petit Jacques had described. This was not an atmosphere that attracted many clerics, so the figure must be one of the priests in question.
“Good evening,” she said, “bon soir.” This commonplace New Orleans maneuver gave the other party the choice of language in which to proceed.
“Good even,” the figure replied, and pulled back its hood slightly. Cathy nearly jumped at finding that beneath the hood was a woman’s face with long yellow hair and a duck’s beak. Grace.
“I am Mrs. Catherine Filmer.” Cathy nodded slightly.
“Thou mayest call me Picaw.” Picaw wasn’t so much a name as a sound like a bird’s cry, picaw!
“A pleasure.” Cathy nodded again. “Are you one of the persons who sent me young Jacques? He indicated that you might have business concerning my friend, Sir William Lee.”
“If thou art a friend of the man Lee,” the duck-faced woman said in musical, lilting tones, “come now. He lieth at death’s door.”
Picaw got several steps’ head start as Cathy recovered from the surprise. Mastery, she told herself. Mastery and grace. She followed the beastwife down the boardwalk to the alley running up the side of Grissot’s. The narrow street stank of boozy piss. There, shadowed from the flickering torch- and oil-light of the street, Bill lay unconscious, with a tortoise-headed beastman crouching over him. Bill’s waistcoat was gone and his shirt and neckcloth were dark with his own blood, oozing through a rude bandage around his left shoulder.
“We have no healing magics to help him,” creaked the beastman.
“Carry him,” Cathy heard herself saying, her instincts of control taking over even as the perceiving part of her retreated into a distant, stunned shell, “and come with me.”
She smiled with all the force of her charm to the smoky common room as she entered, but it was not enough to prevent a stunned hush. Even the banjo and bones fell silent at the sight of the beastfolk following her, Tortoise-head hoisting Bad Bill slung over his shoulder. How far had they carried Bill? Who were they? What was their connection with William Lee?
Grand Jacques’s eyes bulged, but she pushed past him into the kitchen. The beastfolk followed, Tortoise-head shrugging Bill to the floor in front of the fire.
Jacques trailed them into the kitchen, protesting. “Monsieur Grissot will not like this.” He was right.
Cathy sighed. “I have to stop the bleeding, and the fire in my room isn’t lit. Now get me a bottle of whisky. I’ll pay for it and I’ll handle Monsieur Grissot.”
The bartender stood undecided.
Cathy sighed. She pulled one of Bill’s pistols from his coat pocket and pointed it at Grand Jacques’s forehead.
“Don’t get me the whisky,” she snarled, “and I will shoot you!” Her own ferocity surprised even her, but it worked. By the time she had Bill’s shoulder stripped and a couple of kitchen knives lying to be sterilized in the hot coals, a square bottle of whisky had appeared.
Thankfully, the bullet had passed through Bill’s upper arm without hitting a bone—she could see the entrance and exit wounds clearly. Still, this would hurt, even if she did everything right. It was a good thing Bill was unconscious. She began with a prayer she hadn’t said in years: “St. William Harvey, guide now my knife. As I have faith and seek to follow thee, restore thou health to this suffering child of Adam. Amen.”
Wrapping its handle in a dishtowel, she picked up a knife.
* * *
Bill opened his eyes to pain. He lay in an unfamiliar bed that smelled of flowers and stared at a white plaster ceiling illuminated dimly by cracks of light creeping between heavy velvet curtains.
His arm was killing him.
His head hurt, too, but his head generally hurt when he woke up.
“Franklin’s teeth,” he said. “Where am I?”
“Why, Sir William,” drawled a familiar woman’s voice. “I finally have you where I have always wanted you.”
Bill tried to prop himself up on his elbow and collapsed immediately as a jagged shard of agony ripped through his shoulder. He remembered killing the young Frenchman, being double-crossed by his dago employer and shot by the man’s bodyguards, and then, he thought he recalled, meeting some queer figures on the highway. Had he been delirious? He shook his head to clear away the fog.
He must be in Cathy’s bed; he felt an illicit thrill.
She sat on a wooden chair beside him. She wore a straight blue frock and no makeup. Perhaps it was the elation and relief of finding himself still alive, but Bill thought he had never seen her look more beautiful.
Incongruously, for a moment he imagined that she might be covered with fine golden feathers all over her body.
And then he realized that he was naked.
“Whatever adventures may have brought me here last night,” Bill commented wryly, “I am saddened to discover that I’ve forgotten the pleasing part. I do note, however, that I appear to be entirely disrobed.”
“Mrs. Lee need not fear, I’m afraid,” she said, smiling at him. “Although I’ve pierced the veil of your modesty quite ruthlessly, Sir William, and I confess that I’ve made free with your shoulder, I haven’t otherwise abused your person.”
Bill probed at his wounded shoulder and found both an entry and an exit wound from the bullet, each puckered, cauterized, and tender. “I find myself regretting not having been abused, ma’am. Sin without guilt has always been the secret goal of the Christian man. Someone has very neatly treated my wounds.”
“Simple Circulator training.” She shrugged.
“Other than your failure to take advantage of me in the night, I see that I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate.”
She nodded seriously. “Your beastmen…friends brought me to you. They left once I had stopped the bleeding.”
So it hadn’t been a hallucination. Bill puffed his cheeks and exhaled slowly. “I wouldn’t have called them my friends. I met them by chance on the highway, and it’s my pure good fortune and much to my surprise that they turned out to be benevolent beastkind, and not maneaters. Did they tell you their names?”
“The woman is called Picaw,” she said. “The tortoise never told me his name.”
“I found the woman with the duck face disturbingly attractive,” Bill remembered. He winked at Cathy. “I’ll be grateful to you, Mrs. Filmer, if you can help me forget her.”
“I don’t know that I can, Sir William.” Cathy arched a suggestive eyebrow in Bill’s direction. “I found her troubling, myself.”
Bill chuckled and fell to rumination.
He had no money. He owed the Bishop of New Orleans, what was it, eight looeys? He owed eight looeys today. And he owed Madame Beaulieu another three. He would prefer to lie here in Long Cathy’s bed and enjoy tantalizing conversation, but he needed to get going.
He sat up, pulling himself with the strength of his good arm and trying to protect his punctured modesty with the bedsheet. The effort made him lightheaded, and he breathed deeply to recover.
“Mrs. Filmer,” he asked, “does God smile so much upon me this morning that my clothing has been salvaged?”
“He does,” she told him, “although apparently He hated your shirt, which could not be saved, and which I’ve replaced out of the impeccable wardrobe of Grand Jacques. I’ve cleaned your clothes and darned a large hole in the bottom of your coat pocket.”
She stepped out to let him dress, which he accomplished with gingerness and muttered oaths, leaving his waistcoat unbuttoned to avoid putting too much pressure on his injury. He found his weapons and he armed himself, though he didn’t bother to load the pistols. There was no need now.
He took extra care fist-blocking out his hat. It had served him well.
Grissot’s creaked and hummed with the soft sounds of a tavern’s daily routine in the absence of customers. It all smelled of old wood, and too many people. The hall and stairs were dark, but Bill managed to grope his way through by instinct.
He saw Long Cathy again in the common room, composed and calm, alone at a small table with a bottle of whisky. Sunlight poured in through the glass windows like an army of avenging angels, burning Bill’s eyes into a squint. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said to her, sweeping his hat. “I find that I must add you to my list of creditors, for laundry, clothing, hospitality, and medical services.”
“And drink,” she added, pouring him a glass.
“And drink. Honor,” he said, belting the whisky back. The throbbing in his head and his shoulder both eased slightly. He would have liked to take the whole bottle.
“In defense of innocence.” She drank.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Bill said, beginning to feel like himself again. “As it happens, I’ll be visiting Mr. Hackett’s in an attempt to resolve some of my outstanding debts this very day, but I expect that I’ll find you eternally in my ledger on the creditor side.”
“Bill.” Cathy looked as earnest, as direct, as uncomposed as he had ever seen her. “Sir William. I don’t know what you’re involved in that has you trafficking with beastfolk and being shot, but I urge you to be careful. There is at least one heart in New Orleans that would grieve for you.”
It took Bill a moment to recover his balance.
“The beasts are terrifying and strange,” he managed to agree, and he winked at her, “but in my experience, Mrs. Filmer, the Spaniards are much, much worse.”
He didn’t allow himself to linger—Etienne Ukwu would be up and looking for Bill soon, if he wasn’t already. He kissed her hand, bowed, and squinted out into the warm, bright afternoon.
No sign of the bishop’s collectors on the street. For that matter, no sign of the gendarmes, or any other of the chevalier’s men. And no sign of the thugs who worked for Don Luis Maria Salvador Sandoval de Burgos. Just the iron grillwork of the Quarter’s balconies, the walls of jasmine and wisteria, and a token population of residents getting ready for the evening.
Bill headed straight for Hackett’s.
It was noon, and the pawnbroker’s shop was open. The boardwalk creaked under his boots and a tiny bell above the door jingled as Bill entered. Hackett himself manned the counter, with his fine silver hair, his jolly lined face and the leaping gleam in his slitted eyes. Around the other three walls of the shop were shelves groaning with all manner of pawned objects.
“Captain Bill.” Hackett dealt with old soldiers on a regular basis, and was known for treating them with sympathy.
With a heavy heart, Bill laid both his pistols and the scabbarded sword on Hackett’s thick countertop. “Mister Hackett,” he pleaded, “you know I’m not good at figures. I beg you to treat me generously.”
With very little discussion—Bill could not bear to negotiate when money was at issue—Hackett loaned him six Louis d’or and gave Bill the ticket that would let him redeem the weapons for nine looeys if presented within a month.
Interest again, dammitall.
Bill looked at the six gold coins in his hand with ashes in his mouth. It wasn’t even enough to pay off the bishop.
He’d go get his rifle and pawn that, too. Then pay off Bishop Ukwu and…and what? He hated to be without weapons; Bill had enemies. He needed to find work to let him buy back his weapons and pay Madame Beaulieu. Maybe he could force Don Sandoval to pay what he owed in a week, though how he would persuade the dago to do that without guns, Bill couldn’t imagine. Pure bluster, maybe. If he was lucky, maybe he could find someone else to loan him the money to buy back his weapons from Hackett, and then recover his twenty looeys from Don Sandoval and pay off the new loan. Thinking about money made his head hurt.
Bill squinted as he stepped onto the boardwalk.
He made it onto the street.
He made it to the Pension de Madame Beaulieu. Madame Beaulieu stood in the ferns and seemed a bit nervous as she nodded to him, passing through the door on his way up to retrieve the long Kentucky rifle for pawning.
Her nerves disquieted him. No doubt she was anxious to be paid, but she had never seemed uncomfortable around him before.
Bill hesitated.
Best not go upstairs—Etienne might be waiting, or the chevalier’s men. Bill retreated from the courtyard and stepped back out the front door.
A heavy cudgel cracked down on the back of his skull. He staggered off the boardwalk onto the dirt and fell face up, seeing nothing but the merciless blare of the sun until Etienne Ukwu’s smiling brown face poked into one corner of his whirling field of vision.
“Ubosi oma,” Etienne greeted him. “Your time is up. You owe His Grace eight Louis d’or.”
Bill had lost his hat. His head hurt, and his shoulder, and his pride. He still clutched the six looeys in his hand, and he tried to hold them out to Etienne, fumbling them onto the dirt in an attack of vertigo.
Etienne’s thugs crowded around as Etienne picked up the coins and counted them. “I know you are not very good at mathematics, Bill.” Blasted iggy accent made him sound cheerful all the time. “But even you must realize that eight is greater than six.”
Bill gaped like a fish as he tried to form words of explanation, tell Etienne that he had been on his way to resolve the debt at this very moment, but no sound came out. His shoulder felt as if a mule had just kicked him. He pulled the claim ticket from his pocket and tried to show it to Etienne, but he was overwhelmed by vertigo and nausea and he dropped the paper.
“We have taken your rifle from your lodgings and will sell that to achieve final satisfaction of your outstanding debt to His Grace,” Etienne said. “Which means that I, to my regret, will not be killing you today.” He stooped and picked up Bill’s dropped claim ticket, looked at it and tucked it into the pocket of his waistcoat. “Perhaps Mr. Hackett will wish to purchase it.”
Mercy from the bishop’s son seemed impossible, and the mere hint of it made Bill nervous. What was going on? Was Etienne about to take off his arm, or torture him?
But Etienne and his red sash and his men simply walked away, leaving Bill lying on the earth with his head running around him in circles. Bill took a deep breath, managed to sit up—
and found himself surrounded by blue-and-gold coated gendarmes.
The chevalier’s men.
Hell’s Bells.