Frankenstein in London Page 2

  “It wasn’t me,” she said. “The pirates took care to search you. You were probably fortunate—had you not had the secret papers, they’d probably have cut your throat, and saved me from my obligation.”

  “What obligation?” he asked, still utterly bewildered.

  She did not answer directly, but she did ask: “Why did you defend me, Monsieur Knob? Why did you prevent the mestizo assassins from carrying out their mission? Does the English King have some reason for wanting me alive?”

  Fortunately, these questions acted as a trigger, releasing a trickle of memory.

  Ned had been in his so-called cabin, asleep, when someone on deck had raised a belated alarm, informing him that the ship was under attack. He had slipped on his jacket and picked up the swordstick that he had bought from a shop in Jermyn Street before embarkation, in anticipation of the fact that he might need a disguised weapon in Port-au-Prince. He had gone out into the narrow corridor that connected the cabins, treading softly but ready for action.

  There had been a lantern in the corridor—a further testimony to the cabins’ supposed “first class” status—but its candle had burned low. Even so, he had been able to see two shadowy figures descending the staircase that led up to the deck, moving as stealthily as he was, clutching cutlasses. By the time he had drawn his blade from its wooden sheath, they had already passed the door of Trelawny’s cabin, which was situated between his own and the stairway, and had seemed to be headed straight for him with murderous intent. He had, inevitably, backed away along the corridor while striking a defensive stance, glad that the corridor was so narrow that the attackers could only come at him one at a time.

  Ned was no polished fencer, but Thomas Paddock’s school had offered courses in dirty fighting that were the equal of any in the world. He remembered seeing the first of the cut-throats smile as the lantern-light had revealed his exceedingly small stature. He had been mistaken for a child or a dwarf before, but even when he really had been a child the appearance had been deceptive. The cutlass-bearer had moved forward recklessly, expecting an easy kill, and Ned had planted his own blade in the imbecile’s heart with a riposte of which Henri de Belcamp himself would have been proud.

  The second man, alas, had thus been forewarned of what he was facing, and had skipped over his fallen colleague’s body with ominous agility. The corridor along which he was backing had a right-angled bend in it, and Ned had been driven into the corner, backed up against the door of one of the other cabins. There he had made his stand, against a slender, long-armed fellow who had a cudgel as well as a cutlass, and knew how to use both weapons. In defending himself against the blade, Ned had been forced to expose himself to the cudgel.

  He could not remember exactly how the flurry of blows had come out, but he did remember the door of the cabin opening, allowing him a useful backward step at a critical moment. He thought that he might have contrived a lethal thrust of his own, at the very moment when the cudgel had come down on his well-seasoned head. What seemed more important for the moment, however, was what the pretty woman might have thought.

  Apparently, finding him with his back to her door, fending off two assassins whom she believed—rightly or wrongly—to have been commissioned to murder her, she had seen him as her defender, risking his own life for hers, rather than merely as a ruffian raised in Sharper’s with no other thought in his head but to defend himself. More than that—for some unfathomable reason, she thought that he might actually have been commissioned by the English crown to protect her.

  Ned prided himself on his adaptability to any and all circumstances, so what he actually replied was: “It was not for the King of England’s sake that I defended you, Mademoiselle, but out of loyalty to a higher duty. I’m not a gentleman by birth, but I am one by vocation, and I could never allow a lady to be attacked without doing everything in my power to protect her.”

  The woman studied him even more intently for some ten or 12 seconds, with dark eyes that seemed suddenly to become supernaturally intense. Eventually, she said: “Do you really expect me to believe that a white man would feel any ready-made desire or compulsion to defend the honor or life of a zambo woman from other half-breeds?”

  Ned had not even bothered to take note of whether or not the two men he had fought had been white, black or anything in between, and he had not the slightest idea what a “zambo” was. “I’ve lived most of my life within spitting distance of the London docks,” he told her, accurately enough, in a metaphorical sense. “I’ve long grown used to the company of men and women of every color and creed—there’s no color bar, and precious little discrimination, in Sharper’s. I might have been temporarily reduced to taking the King’s shilling in order to support myself, but in my heart I’m a Radical, a diehard follower of Tom Paine. So yes, Mademoiselle, I would feel exactly such a desire and exactly such a compulsion—but if it relieves your conscience, you need feel no obligation. As a matter of fact, I thought the blackguards were trying to murder me, and was defending myself. If I rendered you some service in the process, then I’m sincerely glad of it—but I’ll admit that it was accidental, and that what I said just now was mere bravado.”

  The pretty woman nodded, as if satisfied that he was now being honest—as, indeed, he was. “Is that why Monsieur Trelawny told the mercenary captain that you were not to be trusted, and were probably a traitor to your own ostensible cause?” she asked.

  “Did he?” Ned queried, genuinely astonished and offended. “I would not have thought him capable of that degree of treachery.”

  “He had his own life to save, and his intervention might well have done as much to save you from immediate execution as your apparent status as an agent of the crown. It was Trelawny who persuaded Amédée Desart that you and I ought to be set adrift, subjected to trial by ordeal, rather than summarily killed. I have a similarly ambiguous status myself—and a reputation that complicated my situation further.”

  It was Ned’s turn to study her. “If you were captured by the pirates after I was knocked out,” he said, “why did they not simply complete the mission in which the first two assassins had failed?”

  “Wheels within wheels,” she said. “There are mercenaries and mercenaries. The two men who came to kill me did not have the same paymasters as the master of the pirate vessel. Desart was after the precious fraction of the Belleville’s cargo; he probably didn’t know that I was aboard. He probably has a dozen mestizos in his crew, but knows nothing about their feuds and cared even less—until their subsidiary enterprise posed a tacit challenge to his despotic authority.”

  “I didn’t know that Belleville had a precious cargo,” Ned observed, thoughtfully. “I thought the bulk of what she was carrying comprised agricultural machinery.”

  “That is the precious fraction to which I referred,” the woman told him. “There are Frenchmen willing to supply Boyer with economic necessities, and there are Frenchmen who are desperate to bring his infant republic to its knees by any means humanly possible. Wheels within wheels, as I say.”

  Jean-Pierre Boyer, Ned knew, was the President of the recently reborn Republic of Haiti, first proclaimed by Toussaint L’Ouverture, then smashed—albeit briefly—by Charles Leclerc, on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. It had been reasserted in the wake of the Emperor’s defeat at the hands of the English, much to the chagrin of the restored Bourbon monarchy. It was not difficult to understand, in those tangled circumstances, how the presence on the Belleville of an English secret agent bound for Port-au-Prince might have seemed significant in all sort of strange ways.

  “Might I ask what your own ambiguous status is, Mademoiselle?” Ned asked, politely.

  “Do you really not know my name?” she countered. “You’re a poor spy, if so—and you must really have been seasick when you hid away in your cabin for the first week of the voyage.”

  “I’m not so poor a spy as all that,” he told her, “but your presence on the ship was of no relevance to my mission, and I rea
lly was horribly seasick. My being raised so close to the docks was no guarantee of immunity to the typical agues of seamen, unfortunately. Might you not trust me a little, given that we’re in the same tumbrel, headed for the same cruel guillotine? Is there really any point in your keeping secrets, even if I am an agent of the English secret police?”

  “We’re not going to die, Monsieur Knob,” she said—although he could not for the life of him see any such hope as he scanned the circular horizon, where the lighter blue of the sky met the darker blue of the sea with an ominous uniformity. “And you’re right—even if I did not owe you an obligation for saving my life, there would be no point is concealing my identity at the stage in the game. My status is ambiguous because I’m an American citizen, born in New Orleans, although my loyalty is to my parents’ people. I’m a zambo—a maroon, if you prefer, although that’s a far more general term. The men who came to kill me were mestizos—sworn enemies of the zambos on hereditary and historical grounds—who would have considered my murder a triumph for their cause. I have no papers linking me to the American government, alas, but I do have a reputation as a practitioner of vaudou. My name is Marie Laveau.”

  Ned’s first thought, absurdly, was that the surname should surely have been Leveau, as veau was a masculine noun—but this was the Caribbean, where grammatical niceties probably did not apply. He did, however, know what a maroon was: the result of interbreeding between runaway slaves and the native islanders whom Europeans persisted in calling “Indians.” He had also heard the term vaudou before, in sinister and superstitious contexts.

  “Are you saying that you’re some kind of witch?” he asked. “Is that why we aren’t going to die.”

  “Put crudely,” she said, “yes. Whites and mulattos consider vaudou to be a kind of witchcraft, or black magic, while blacks consider it a kind of hybrid religion. There are many varieties of it, even in Haiti, and in New Orleans the situation is even more confused, because of its confusion with Cuban Santeria. As to what it really is…well, some of its hybrid forms incorporate the traditions of the Tairo, reputedly handed down from Queen Anacaona herself, of whom I’m said to be a descendant, and a reincarnation. There’s no proof of that, by European or American standards—the Tairo’s genealogical records were purely oral, and now that the tribe is extinct, save for its zambo and mestizo relics…well, a great deal has to be taken on trust, even if one holds the secrets.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ned said, “but I don’t understand many of the terms you’re citing. Who are—or were—the Tairo?”

  “The original inhabitants of the island that Columbus called Hispaniola—the island he mistook for the Garden of Eden, although that didn’t stop him making war on the island’s Queen, Anacaona. Her forces initially defeated his, despite Spanish steel and firepower, but he had secret weapons of whose power even he was ignorant: measles and smallpox. What military power failed to do, disease achieved. Anacaona’s depleted forces were eventually defeated, and she was executed. The Spaniards were obsessed with gold, stealing all they could find and opening mines of their own; they had no interest in the Tairo’s knowledge and arts apart from that. What they did discover of the Tairo’s beliefs and practices, their priests condemned as devilry, which they considered it their holy duty to obliterate.

  “When the Tairo retreated to the hills and forests, the Spaniards followed their usual policy of importing African slaves to labor in their mines and their plantations. As usual, many ran away and found refuge with the Tairo, with whom they interbred to produce the zambo—the maroons of Hispaniola. In the meantime, the Spaniards interbred too, with both the Tairo, producing mestizos, and the blacks, producing mulattos. Although they were second-class citizens, despised by the whites, the mestizos and the mulattos remained agents of the colonial force, electing in their turn to despise the zambo, and developing a fierce hatred for them, and for the remnants of Tairo wisdom that the zambo preserved within their own version of vaudou.

  “Vaudou was, of course, primarily a black institution, but it mutated in various ways among such marginal populations as the zambo and the mulattos, accommodating itself to circumstance. My vaudou is not the same as black or mulatto vaudou, and is opposed by them as fiercely as heresies invisible to external eyes have been opposed within Christendom. As Spanish authority was succeeded by French authority in the western half of the island, which became Saint-Domingue, the situation was complicated further, but the underlying factors remained the same. The American Revolution and the French Revolution were followed by a Haitian Revolution—but neither the American nor the French revolutionaries were sympathetic to the Haitian one…and you must surely know the rest, Monsieur Knob, if you are any sort of agent at all.”

  “I’m a spy, not a diplomat,” Ned reminded her, wryly. “But yes, I’m vaguely familiar with recent political developments, and the re-establishment of Boyer’s republic. I know that Saint-Domingue was the richest of all France’s colonies, supplying enormous quantities of sugar, tobacco and other produce, and that the restored monarchy would be very glad indeed to re-establish control of it, formally or informally. England and America, for their own reasons, would prefer that no such control was re-exerted, although neither nation would go so far as to attempt an actual conquest of all or part of the island. All in all, it’s what we in England call a can of worms.”

  “It’s more like a bucketful of snakes,” she told him. “Mercifully, you killed the mestizos’ agents, and Desart was more inclined to put my powers to a trial by ordeal than simply slit my throat. He threw you in, I suppose, merely to add a little spice to the situation.”

  “But not Trelawny?”

  “No—for some reason, Desart was inclined to befriend Trelawny. I find it strange that Lord Byron’s authority should be taken more seriously by La Tortue’s pirates than that of King George, but the intricacies of British politics are far beyond my comprehension.”

  “How did this Desart contrive to intercept the Belleville?” Ned wanted to know. “According to Captain Argile, we made an unusually fast crossing. How could news of our arrival possibly have outdistanced us?”

  “Ships leave Le Havre for the New World almost every day,” she told him. “The Belleville’s cargo and passenger list were matters of common knowledge for a week before she sailed. Ships bound for Florida and New Orleans left within that week, making their first ports of call in the Bahamas. The news flew south from there. That, at least, required no magic.”

  Ned looked at her quizzically, trying to assemble all the information she had given to him into a coherent whole.

  “You may ask me the question, if you wish,” she said. “I shan’t take offence.”

  Ned was wary of a trap, so he said: “What question?”

  “Don’t pretend to be more innocent than you are, Monsieur Knob. Short as you are, I know you’re no child. I can believe that terms like Tairo and zambo are unfamiliar to you, but you must have heard talk of vaudou, and I know what associations the word must conjure up in your mind.”

  “Even so,” Ned said, still exceedingly wary, “I’m unsure as to what question you expect me to raise.”

  “Don’t you want to know,” she said, “whether the secrets of which I claim custody include the secret of making zombies—of resurrecting the dead?”

  Chapter Two

  Answered Prayers

  Ned Knob was, indeed, very curious to know whether Marie Laveau knew the secret of making zombies. It was, in fact, the secret of resurrecting the dead—in the proven manner practiced by Germain Patou rather than that of reputed vaudou magicians—that had brought him to the Caribbean region in search of the Outremort and the enigmatic General Mortdieu, but he was not yet ready to admit that to the pretty lady.

  All he said, therefore, in response to her provocation, was: “Do you?”

  “Of course I do,” she replied, more than a trifle ironically. “Am I not the direct descendant and reincarnation of the Devil-Queen Anacaona, the supposed ser
pent in Christopher Columbus’ Eden? Am I not the Anti-Christ of the mestizos and the mulattos, feared even by the Enlightened likes of Jean-Pierre Boyer, Henri Christophe and Alexandre Pétion? Am I not the Messiah of the zambo, destined to lead them back to dominion over the empire the Tairo lost, and to reign over it as their Queen?”

  “If that is what you are,” Ned said, judiciously, “then I’m very glad indeed to hear it. Not only does it imply that I might not die a wretched death as a castaway after all, but that I might have a more interesting future than I had imagined. As a servant of the English King, I offer you the kind regards of his people, O Queen.”

  She consented to smile at that. “You’re a more amusing companion than I had expected,” she said. “Do you need more water?”

  “I’d be very grateful for another drop,” he confessed, “but your need must be as great as mine, and I would not like to deprive you. I can do without for a while longer, if necessary. How long will it be until nightfall, do you think? The Sun still seems unpromisingly high in the sky to me, although it’s surely past its zenith.”

  “At least four hours, alas,” she said.

  Ned scanned the circle of the horizon, but could not see the slightest sign of land—which seemed perversely frustrating, given that the maps he had studied had implied that the region where the Atlantic Ocean bordered the Caribbean Sea was replete with scattered islands. There were few reference-points available to him, save for the fins of the sharks circling the boat, but he guessed that there was no substantial current to move the boat along. If that were the case, the possibility of any land appearing on the horizon seemed remote. There was a wind blowing from the west—although it was little more than a breeze, for the moment—but the parasol, capacious though it was, could not provide much service as a sail.