There Shall Your Heart Be Also (2 page)

Hannibal leaned around his shoulder and read:
“
And the greater house he cieled with fir tree, which he
overlaid with fine gold
....” He glanced up inquiringly.

“Not at the words. Under them.”

Hannibal leaned close to the page, squinting
in the strong morning sunlight. They’d carried the book out to the
porch, and rested it on the rail. Around them, in sheds and
shanties and tents, the Swamp was waking up, as usual with a
hangover. “Are those pencil-dots?” asked Hannibal after a moment.
“Under each letter?”

“Not just pencil-dots.” January took a
magnifying-lense from his instrument-case and held it above the
page. “That page has been marked two or three times – sometimes in
pencil, once with a pin. Look back in Genesis, you’ll see some of
the pages have been marked that way four and six times, sometimes
for as much as a dozen lines down the column. Always starting at
the top of the page...”

Hannibal’s mobile eyebrows shot up in
englightenment. “Someone was using it for a book-code.”

“That’s right. And instead of doing the
sensible thing one would do with a Bible – citing book, chapter,
verse, and then letter-count – our code-makers simpy treated it as
an ordinary book, starting at the top of the page: page 394,
101
^st
letter, or whatever it was. Which meant that both
the sender and the receiver had to have the same edition of the
Bible, which would have been easy, if they’d originally bought them
together in the same shop in Philadelphia. What did you say your
uncle’s name was, Mrs. Williams?”

“Walter.” The proprietress scratched under
one uncorseted breast. “Walter Buling. My daddy had a farm below
Natchez. Uncle Walter came there in 1825, sick as a horse with the
consumption. That’s where he died.”

“Walter Buling.” January nodded slowly, and
turned to the back of the book. Where pages are sometimes inserted
to make up odd-numbered signatures, only a single, ragged, yellowed
edge remained.

“When I was eleven years old,” he said, “in
1806, New Orleans was clapped under martial law for a number of
weeks by the Governor of the Louisiana Territory, a gentleman named
Major-General James Wilkinson.”

“Wilkinson!” exclaimed Williams. “Gentleman
my arse - wasn’t he the skunk who swindled all them folks out of
Texas land-grants about ten years ago?”

“He was indeed,” January replied. “He’d
earlier been twice court-martialled for botching invasions of
Canada and Spanish Florida during the war with England in 1812, and
died in disgrace in Mexico shortly after the Texas debacle. But in
1806, while Governor of the Territory, he teamed up with former
Vice-President Aaron Burr, allegedly to conquor Mexico, to separate
the Southern states from the North, to loot all the banks in New
Orleans in the confusion, and to form an empire that Burr would
then rule from New Orleans, presumably with the help of Wilkinson’s
American troops.

“Now, my mother still swears that Wilkinson
was playing a double game and taking money from the Spanish viceroy
of Mexico – then as now, she knew everyone in town. In any case,
Wilkinson sold Burr out, testified against him in court, and was
protected by Thomas Jefferson for the rest of his life as a result.
Who was paying whom how much back in 1806 I have no idea, but I do
remember that Walter Buling of Natchez was one of Wilkinson’s
lieutenants.”

“So you think Buling lifted some money in the
confusion?” Hannibal thumbed the onion-skin pages, peering through
the glass at the lines of pin-pricks and dots, the occasional notes
in the margin:
e-45, t-67, a-103
... “Either a Spanish
pay-off or from one of the New Orleans banks...”

“In partnership with a confederate who either
died or was taken out of the game somehow. The confederate’s coded
directions to the money is probably what’s in our friend’s hands –
and I’d guess our friend has only recently learned that the books
that contained the key were Bibles owned by Buling and the
confederate.”

“How would he find out?”

“Probably the same way you did,” said
Hannibal. “The confederate may very well have been our friend’s
uncle or father, the same way Buling was related to you.”

January nodded. “However he found it out, he
did
find it out. But since Buling counted the letters as if
the Bible were an ordinary book – from the top of the page, rather
than by chapter and verse – our friend needs to have the identical
edition to decode them. Obviously he doesn’t: his relative’s Bible
having disappeared in the intervening years, leaving only the coded
message itself. So all he could do was trace Buling’s.”

Williams scowled, and she rubbed gingerly at
the bandages January had put on her arm. “That means he’ll be back,
don’t it?”

“If he’s come this far, I think it definitely
means he’ll be back.”

Her eyes narrowed, cold as a wild pig’s.
“Thinks he can go cuttin’ up Delly an’ whoever gets in his way...
I’ll be ready for him. When he comes back....”

“It will probably be with confederates of his
own,” pointed out Hannibal. “
Bella, horrida bella, et Thybrim
multo spumantem sanguine cerno
...”

“Oh, I think we can deal with our friend
without causing the river to run red with blood.” January picked up
the Bible and thumbed again to the torn-out page at the back. “And
if we’re lucky, compensate poor Delly for her injuries as
well.”

*

It didn’t take January long to locate the
culprit. It was all a question of knowing who to ask. The Carnival
season was in full swing, and he and Hannibal were playing that
night at a ball in one of the great American mansions that lined
St. Charles Avenue, upriver from the old French town. In between
sets of marches and quadrilles, waltzes and schottisches, January
made it his business to nod smiling greetings to every one of the
dozen or so physicians who attended, men with whom he’d worked at
the Charity Hospital during the summer epidemics of cholera and
yellow fever. These greetings led to soft-voiced chats and a little
friendly joshing about his “winter job” from white men who hadn’t
the slightest idea what it was like to be denied work because of
the color of their skin. From this, January deftly steered the
conversation to inquiries about a thin-faced white man with a
vandyke beard, probably at a hotel, who’d called in a physician’s
services that morning for knife-wounds...

By the end of the evening he knew that the
man who’d knifed Delly – and who’d been cut in return by Kentucky
Williams – was Matthew Porter, of St. Louis. St. Louis, January
recalled, being the city from which Major-General Wilkinson had
governed the Louisiana Territory in 1806.

Since January was a law-abiding soul, even
when the laws included Black Codes that forbade him among other
things to smoke cigars in public, the following morning he
consulted the City Guard, in the person of his friend Lieutenant
Abishag Shaw. He suspected it would do him no good and his
suspicion was rapidly confirmed.

“Iff’n you want me to I’ll speak to Captain
Tremouille about it,” offered Lieutenant Shaw, scratching his
verminous hair. “But I’ll tell you right now what he’ll say: that
we got too few men – ‘specially now in Carnival season – to go
chasin’ after a white man who’ll just say he never knifed no nigger
gal in his life. No jury in town’s gonna convict him of it on the
word of a Salt River man-eater like Kentucky Williams anyways.”

His due to law and order paid, January then
took a long walk into the genuine swamp beyond the Swamp, the
ciprière
: the maze of small bayous, impenetrable tangles of
palmetto and hackberry, tall silent groves of cypress and magnolia
that lay between New Orleans and the lake. Few white men came here.
Even now, in the winter with the ground mostly dry, it was easy to
become lost, even for January who’d been raised with a
slave-child’s awareness of the invisible geography of landmarks,
paths, rendezvous-points. In the summer it was a nightmarish jungle
of standing water, gators, snakes and mosquitoes that would swarm a
man like a living brown blanket.

He wasn’t sure if there was still a runaway
slave-village somewhere west of Bayou St. John, but as he quartered
the squishy ground he would occasionally see fish-lines in the
bayous, or red flannel juju-bags hanging from the trees. He was
just beginning to wonder if he’d have to abandon his quest and
return to town – he would be playing at a subscription ball at the
Théâtre d’Orleans that night – when he turned his head and saw,
standing in the deep oyster-grass across a murky little bayou, the
one man in New Orleans taller than his own six-foot, three-inch
height: massive, African-black like himself, clothed in rags with
only a muscular stump where his left arm had been.

Cut-Arm, King of the runaways of the
ciprière
.

“You not wanderin’ around out here lookin’
for anybody, Music-Master, are you?”

“It just so happens,” said January, “that I
am.”

*

Cut-Arm’s dark eyes narrowed with fury when
January spoke of what had happened to Delly, who like most freed
slaves in town had some passing acquaintance with the runaways in
the
ciprière
. When January spoke of how he intended to get
his revenge, the big runaway’s teeth showed white in a savage grin.
“That’s good,” he rumbled. “Maybe not so good as seein’ his blood,
but it’ll take a lot longer, and I think he’ll suffer more.”

Thus it was that January was loitering on the
brick banquette of Rue Chartres opposite the Strangers Hotel at ten
the next morning when a man who fit the description of Matthew
Porter emerged from its doors: tallish, well-dressed, his brown
Vandyke beard newly barbered and his right arm in a sling.
January’s guess was confirmed a few minutes later when, as Cut-Arm
had promised, one of the hotel’s maids came across the street to
him and whispered, “He just left. It’s all clear.”

January had taken the precaution of dressing
that morning in the simple but respectable dark clothing that could
have passed him as either a free workman or an upper servant.
Nobody gave him a glance as the woman brought him up to one of the
smaller guest-rooms on the second floor. He’d gambled that Porter
would be too cautious of pickpockets to take the coded message –
whatever it was – with him when he went out, and a few minutes’
search of the trunk yielded it, tucked between pages 102 and 103 of
an almanac that was in turn nestled among Porter’s shirts.

It was, as January had suspected, the
end-leaf torn out of the back of Kentucky Williams’s Bible, covered
with neatly-inscribed numbers. In his own memorandum-book he made a
note of the number of lines (32) the approximate number of
characters per line (between 47 and 54), and the width of all
margins. “Meet me tomorrow,” he said to the maid, handing her a
dollar, “at the same place, at the same time as today, bringing me
this paper.” He slipped it back into the almanac. “You make a note
of what two pages it’s between when you take it out – he may move
it, and I don’t want him to guess it’s been messed with. I’ll give
you another piece of paper, just like it, to put back in its place.
You think you can do that?”

“Shoot.” She grinned. “For two dollars I’d
swap out the whole damn almanac one page at a time. Cheap bastard
didn’t give me no tip, not even a dime, when I brought him up a
bath last night, and pinched my tit into the bargain. You know how
heavy it is, luggin’ all that hot water? What it is?” she asked
hopefully. “You put a juju on the new piece of paper?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said January.

Returning to the room his rented from his
widowed mother on Rue Dauphine, he carefully tore one of the front
blank pages from Kentucky Williams’s Bible, meticulously matching
the irregularities of the ragged remains of the torn page in the
back. It took him a little experimentation with watering ink, to
achieve the faded hue of the original. While his various samples
were drying, he set to work with the Bible to code a new message,
using for good measure as many of the letters as had been in the
original’s first three lines, which he’d taken the precaution of
copying.

“My guess is, those are all that Porter read,
if he read that far,” he said to Hannibal that night, when he
walked out to the Broadhorn to check on his two patients. “If
anything sticks in a man’s mind out of a mass of numbers like that,
it’ll only be the first few. Which is the reason, of course, for a
code in the first place.”

“Did you figure out what them first lines
said?” Delly asked, her brown eyes round in the grimy lamplight of
her attic cubicle. “Does it say where the treasure’s hid?”

“It does.” January tied up the clean
dressing, gently tugged the girl’s ragged night-dress back into
place. “The first three lines – and I suspect, the rest of the
coded text – were names, clearly invented. Jack Falstaff was one;
Montague Capulet was another. Beside each name was the name of a
bank.”

Delly frowned at this prosaic anticlimax –
she’d clearly expected paces counted from Death-Head Oak and Skull
Rock. But a slow grin spread over Hannibal’s thin face. “Where
Uncle Water Buling cached whatever he could make off with under
Wilkinson’s nose, in the confusion of Burr’s projected invasion.
How many of those banks are still in operation, do you suppose?
Private banks come and go like waterfront cafés.”

“Which would be why Uncle Walter spread the
funds out among so many. The first on the list was the Bank of New
York, and that’s still in operation. So Kentucky will get at least
a little money out of it.”

“Which she’ll probably drink up within a
week,” sighed Hannibal. “I would, anyway. It does seem a waste.”
Screams resounded from the yard below, followed by shots and the
crash of a body being heaved out the Broadhorn’s back door. Both
men and Delly tilted their heads a little toward the window, to
ascertain that it was only a fight between six or seven customers,
clawing and gouging in the mud of the yard while Kentucky Williams
roared curses at them from the porch.