[Continuing chapter nine]
Beacon's was a house on Burgundy Street a few doors river-ward of Hospital Street, in the north-eastern part of the old city. The size and style of the houses suggested that this neighborhood might once have been the home to many of New Orleans's wealthier Creoles. It had definitely suffered in recent years. Stewart stared at the narrow, three-storey buildings, hoping that somehow concentration might illuminate the course of action he should take. He'd spent the half-hour riding here from his hotel trying to develop a plan of approach that wouldn't frighten off a potential source of information, or warn a potential culprit, or place him in any danger in either case. For the first time since leaving Richmond he was out of uniform, wearing the suit his parents had bought for him when he'd gone away to school. It felt odd to be in civilian clothes after so long, but he had learned how much attention the uniform could draw, and it was important now to be as unobtrusive as possible.
His carefully prepared plan vanished in a cloud of embarrassment and distraction when he was introduced to Mrs. Beacon. A tall, stocky woman wearing bright green, she was possibly the ugliest person of either sex Stewart had ever seen. Her hair had been dyed an unlikely shade of red, her cheeks were rouged in a way that would have looked obvious even on stage, and there was a trace of a mustache on her upper lip—the reddened, puffy skin around it suggested that she was forever trying to remove the unwanted hair. Looking at her broad-shouldered form, stuffed into the green dress like a badly made sausage, it was impossible not to see her as a man dressed in woman's clothes—an image further strengthened when she offered him a hand that in size and roughness would do a meat-packer proud.
Subterfuge was beyond him. Stewart found himself stammering, "I'm—ah, a friend was supposed to be meeting me here. I was wondering if he'd come—if he's been here."
"A lot of young men come through here," Mrs. Beacon said. "Though few arrange to meet at ten o'clock in the morning. We don't open for business until lunch."
"My friend might not have known that," Stewart said, trying not to look directly at Mrs. Beacon. "He's a visitor in town. And he might have been here last night, as well." Stewart described Patton, down to the color of the buttons on his uniform. The slaves he'd talked to, and the staff at the hotel, had been certain that Patton had been wearing his uniform when he'd left the hotel last night. The idiot, Stewart thought.
"Sorry, young friend," Mrs. Beacon said. She spoke in an absurd accent, something that combined English working-class with the drawl of a deep-south slave. "Nobody looking like that came into this house last night. I would have remembered, I assure you."
"You're positive he wasn't here?"
"I just said that nobody like you described came in here last night," she said. Her forehead was now the color of her abused upper lip. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to ask you to leave. I've got to get my girls out of bed. There's lots to do yet before we can open."
Stewart walked his horse around the corner onto Hospital, but didn't mount. Instead, he tied the horse to an iron fence-rail and returned to the corner to watch the house. Mrs. Beacon hadn't been telling the truth. Or at least not all of it.
After ten minutes' watching, he gave up. Nobody had emerged from the house, and it looked as if nobody was going to. So much for the guilty party sneaking out to look after her handiwork, he thought. This is what comes of reading novels.
As he was about to turn back to his horse, though, Stewart noticed movement on a balcony across the street from Beacon's. Sprinting to the house, he called up before the shadowed figure could disappear back inside. "Qu'est-ce que c'est? " a husky voice demanded.
"I wonder," Stewart gasped, "if I could ask you a question or two about last night."
"Why?"
"I'm looking for someone who may have been here last night." He looked over his shoulder at Beacon's. It was impossible to tell if he was being watched from within the brothel. "Please. This is important."
"You're not English, are you?" The question emerged as more of a statement of fact.
Stewart sighed. I can take off the uniform, he thought, but I can't shuck the way I speak. "I'm from Virginia," he said. "Just visiting."
"You can come in," the voice said. A moment later an elderly black man in a time-worn suit appeared at the front door, unlocked the gate and bade Stewart enter the cool dark house. He was directed to an uncomfortable chair in an unlit parlor whose curtains remained drawn against the day.
"That putain has been the ruin of my life," the husky voice said from somewhere in the gloom. As Stewart's eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he saw a short, round figure descending a staircase. Eventually, an elderly woman appeared in the parlor, dressed and bonneted in black, her face all but invisible. From the anger in her voice, though, Stewart had a good idea of what sort of expressions would be playing across her features. "Your friend went into that place of infamy, heh?"
"The—uh, proprietress insists that he didn't," Stewart said. "But I don't believe she was telling the truth, or at least not the whole of it."
"Hah. That one couldn't speak the truth on her deathbed with the gates of Hell opening before her, by the Good Lord. Tell me about your friend."
"He's young, a bit younger than I am, and he's also from Virginia so he speaks with the same sort of accent as I do. He was wearing a white military uniform"—
"Oui!" The old woman’s voice was suddenly alive. "Je me souviens le blanc! He was one of those soldiers come to help us throw out the English!"
Stewart kept his expression steady, so that the woman would not see his amusement. Those stories the Creoles told one another about anti-English liberators had even reached into this gloomy, shuttered place and caused an old woman to remember the white of Patton's jacket. "So he did go into Beacon's?"
"He did not. I saw him with a—a woman in the street. I did not see whether they came from inside the place—I only saw them as they stood in the street, talking. She seemed to be very well acquainted with him by that time. They walked off together. He looked as if he’d had too much to drink. I hope, for the sake of the young man's soul, that the woman was not what she appeared to be."
"What did she look like?" Stewart asked. "I mean, what color was her hair, her dress—that sort of thing."
"She was blonde, and thin, and wore a dress of pale gray or lavender—it was hard to tell in the poor light. I can tell you, though, that it was several years old. The style was definitely passé."
Stewart leaned forward, a cold uncertainty beginning to gnaw at his vitals. This sounded like Pauline's friend, Marie-Anne. "You said you heard her speak. Did she sound French? Not Creole, but"—what were her people called? "Oh, yes—Acadien?"
"I couldn't say, m'sieur. She didn't sound Acadien, no, but her voice was very low. So I can't be certain. If she was what I think she was, though, it's quite possible she was Acadien. Those people are like savages."
"Which way did they go?" Stewart got to his feet.
"They went that way," the woman said, pointing uptown, toward Canal. "Is your search so urgent that you could not stay for coffee, m'sieur? I haven't much, but I would be honored if you would share it with me."
"You are very kind, Ma'am," he said. "I would like very much to accept your offer, and some time soon I may. Today, though, I must go. As you said, my search is urgent."
He excused himself, ignoring her entreaties to stay just a little longer. Outside her door he tried to chastise himself for ignoring the sadness of an old woman so lonely she'd beg company of a total stranger; once, he guessed, she had wielded some sort of power here, but that was long ago. He had his own potential catastrophe to worry about, though.
If Patton had been lured into a trap by Marie-Anne, did that mean that Pauline had betrayed him as well? He'd half-suspected that there was as much artifice as enthusiasm in her attentions to him the other night; was he to be punished for letting himself be drawn so completely into her orbit?
Of course not, he told himself. Pauline hasn't betrayed you, because it wasn't Marie-Anne who lured Patton into danger last night. There must be dozens of blonde prostitutes in this neighborhood alone who would gladly accept six bits or a dollar to act as Judas-goat. Don't think about Pauline being anything but what she is. Think instead about what you have to do to find Patton.
His horse was gone when he turned back onto Hospital Street. No, he reminded himself—the Canadian army's horse was gone. For a long moment he simply stood and stared at the railing to which he'd tied the animal, as though concentration could bring it back or show him which way it had gone. Then he turned back to Burgundy and began to walk uptown, toward Canal.
It could have been a random theft, he tried to tell himself. That would certainly be easier—and safer—than the alternative, which was that someone was now stalking him the way Patton had been followed and assaulted. At least he was in a busy part of the city, and in broad daylight; he ought to be able to get back to the hotel without difficulty, however long it might take. That was a really good horse, he told himself as his pace slowed with each block.
"Hey, Captain."
Stewart realized he'd made a mistake as soon as he'd begun to turn. I'm not in uniform, he thought—and then a white flash obliterated everything.
When he returned to awareness, he was flailing out with hands and feet while blows rained on him from several different directions. A voice screamed. It was his. He heard a grunt as he kicked and connected with something yielding. His hand over his face failed to ward off a cudgel. He was stunned, insensate, for a moment, until a blow connected with his bad leg and every nerve in him seemed to explode.
There was a pause—a suspension of time—and then one of his attackers spat out something in a wild alien tongue, and he heard footsteps receding. A second later a voice said, "Are you able to move, sir?"
He was, he realized, face-down. How did that happen? he wondered. He tasted blood, and something gritty and foul on his lips. Spitting, he pulled himself around and sat up. "Which way did they go?" he tried to say.
"You're safe, sir. They've gone, the bastards." The speaker came into focus; he wore the dark blue wool of the city watch. "Do you think you can stand?"
"I think so," Stewart said. By now a handful of men surrounded him, drawn by the knowledge that whatever threat there might have been had safely gone away.
"Did you see which way they went?" he asked again.
"Probably back to their lair in Ponsonby Street," one of the men said. "We shouldn't have to put up with this sort of thing, Fitzroy. Those damned Irish thugs are going to drive custom away from this neighborhood."
"They don't normally come out here," the watchman said. "They're usually content with robbing anyone fool enough to go to Ponsonby to drink or whore or gamble. I haven't seen one of the mobs this far uptown in months. So why don't you stop complaining, Mr. DeLisle, and help me get this man to a doctor?"
Irish, thought Stewart through a haze of pain and ache. "There's a druggist you could take me to," he said. "Cleburne's his name; he's on Canal near the Custom House."
"I know him," one of the voices said. "I have a carriage behind my shop."
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