Man carry them over to the Blanchard house, effectively entrusting her stolen fortune to a stranger. But some risks had to be run. Of those in Louise’s life so far, this was nowhere near the greatest.
Stowing them safely in her bag, she said, “No offense intended, Euday, but how come a piano player can advise me better than a banker would?”
“Music’s not my living,” he said. “I make that as a bookkeeper. When a banker mislays your money, it’s the bookkeeper’s job to find out exactly where he put it. So if you think it through, with me you got a better deal. Only drawback for you is, it’s black folks and white folks. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I’m beginning to,” she said. “If you have a regular job, why are you here instead of working?”
“The office is closed,” he said. “For the celebrations.”
“Then you could be celebrating.”
“It’s nothing to me,” Euday said.
Throughout all of this, the carriage driver had sat hunched over his reins, playing no part in their conversation and paying it no attention. He was dressed in livery that would have looked handsome on some better-built and fitter man. As it was, he looked as if he was fleeing a famine by way of the dressing-up box. Euday leaned over and said a few words to him, and at the next fork in the road he tweaked at the reins and took a left, down a wide avenue of live oak trees hung with Spanish moss.
After another mile or two they saw the river, and a while later they saw it again—the road running more or less straight while the river snaked in and out of view. Patenotre had told her that his family’s plantation was on land by the Mississippi. It was land that was flat, fertile, and likely to flood.
All along the River Road, they passed antebellum homes in various states of repair. Most of the bigger ones were in a Greek Revival style, century-old wooden mansions fashioned to resemble millennia-old stone temples. Sugar planters had built them in the years before the war. Theirs was an immensely wealthy economy, but one that had depended entirely upon slave labor for its vitality.
After a particular milepost, they came to a long driveway. It had been a dirt road, and now it was choked with grass that came almost up to the hubs of their wheels. The horses waded ahead, pulling the carriage along like a barge on a canal of greenery, trailing a neatly cut line down the center of the road. At the end of the driveway stood the gates to a mansion house.
The house seemed largely undamaged. The roof had lost a few of its red tiles and the white paint was peeling off, but its lines were fairly straight and the gallery didn’t sag too much. It was two stories high and about eight rooms wide, with outbuildings beyond. As the victoria drew in before it, a stray dog on the porch scrambled to its feet and came down the steps, barking.
Euday said, “Don’t get down till I chase him away.”
“You can leave him be,” Louise said. “He’s doing no harm.”
“They carry all kinds of diseases.” He looked around for rocks, but found none. He found a stick and threw that. The animal dodged it, then turned around and picked it up and carried it a short distance to where it settled, gnawing at the stick to make it splinter. The dog was long-legged and rangy, some kind of a hound crossed with a spaniel.
Euday went to shoo it further, but it just moved a few feet, resettled, and carried on.
By this time, Louise had climbed down from the victoria and was approaching the house. The windows were all boarded up, giving the place a blinded look. The main entrance was secured with a chain, and the chain secured with a padlock.
She brought out the keys that she’d taken from Jules Patenotre. One had given her access to his strongbox. The other, larger one had been inside it.
The key from inside the strongbox fit the lock, but would not turn. She stepped back for Euday to try, and with a sound like old bones grinding together, he was able to get the lock to open. He unhooked it from the chain and drew the chain from the doors.
Then he opened the doors as wide as they would go.
Louise stopped on the threshold. The house was gloomy, but not dark. Although the windows were boarded, there was a skylight dome at the top of the main stairway. This created a perpetual twilight in the center of the house, falling away into shadow as one moved off into other parts.
She took a few steps forward. She’d been expecting a ruin. But this house was merely neglected, and compared to some of the places where she’d been forced to hide out—Richmond’s theater of varieties or that empty grocery store in Oregon, to name a couple—it was more than habitable. Some of the plaster had come down and there was an odor of sweetness and rot in the air, but there was nothing here that couldn’t be fixed, disguised, or ignored.
From behind her, Euday said, “A lot of these places got burned.”
She looked around. He was standing there squinting up at the dome. “In the war?” she said.
“People didn’t wait for the soldiers to come. They dragged all the cotton bales out of the warehouses and onto the levee so they could set light to them. Then they fired the ships at the wharves and cut them loose to float downstream. My granddaddy remembers steamboats burning on the river. Imagine that. You’d think it was the fleet of the devil himself sailing through.”
“Was your grandfather a slave?”
“No ma’am. My granddaddy was a free man.”
From the central hallway, she moved through a wide arch and into one of the reception rooms. It was big enough to dance in. There were thin stripes of sunlight across the floor and up the walls, streaming in through gaps in the planking. They picked out odd details: a plaster cornice, some hanging wallpaper black with mold, the pink marble of an elaborate fireplace whose full splendor would only be revealed when the boards came off the windows.
Euday didn’t follow her into the room, but from the archway said, “Looks like the furniture went.”
“It was sold,” she said, her voice echoing. “I’ve got all the receipts. I may see if I can buy it back. If it hasn’t already been sold on.”
She could do it, too. She had the money as well as the paperwork. The furniture had gone for a song. Let her servants object, with their subtle pressures and their poisonous looks. She’d have her way.
Louise continued through the rooms, and Euday went upstairs. She could hear him above her, knocking on walls and stamping on boards.
Toward the back of the building, she found signs that someone had managed to find a way in. There were cold embers from a long-dead fire, and scattered animal bones that had been barbecued over it and picked clean. But that was all. Someone had camped here and moved on. In a scullery, she found the broken window they’d got in by. She found birds’ mess and pigeon feathers in the room.
She couldn’t dislodge the picture that Euday had planted in her mind. As she moved back through the house, she kept imagining what it must have been like to stand on the riverbank and watch burning ships go by. Rudderless, unpiloted, fully alight as they came into view around the bend. One Flying Dutchman after another. Roaring bright and yellow from masthead to waterline, the wash of their heat blasting the watcher as they passed…and as the current bore them on downstream, still more of them coming into sight.
In their blazing majesty, they must have been like a glimpse of something greater. A devil’s fleet, indeed. A peek into the abyss.
Louise found no other signs of intrusion. Whoever had broken in here that one time, he’d found little reason to stay. It made for an intimidating squat, and there was nothing here to steal.
She went back to the hallway and out through the front door. Euday had found an exit onto the second-story gallery, and was descending some outdoor stairs with a hand on the rail.
“Doesn’t look as if the rain’s been getting in,” he said.
Louise backed off from the house a few steps and looked up at it. “I can imagine living here,” she said.
“Still needs some work.”
“I’ve got people.”
She sensed that he was probably in broad agreement, but in no rush to commit himself without seeing more.
He said, “Let me take a look at the cistern.”
While he went off to check on the water supply, she walked around the house and out into the land behind it. A broken fence showed the outline of a kitchen garden. A riot of bushes and weeds now grew within its boundary,
