Free There Shall Your Heart Be Also by Barbara Hambly

 
     
     
    THERE SHALL YOUR
HEART BE ALSO
    By
    Barbara Hambly
     
     
    “Kentucky Williams owns a Bible ?”
Benjamin January cast a doubtful glance cattycorner across the
trampled muck of the Broadhorn Saloon’s yard to the shabby
building’s open back door. The Broadhorn was a substantial building
for this part of New Orleans, a neighborhood known quite accurately
as The Swamp. Constructed of the lumber from dismantled flatboats,
it stood a story and a half tall and boasted not only porches but a
privy, though the four whores who worked out of it did so in a line
of sheds that straggled away into the trees of the true swamp – the ciprière -- beyond. Under the brilliant winter sunlight the
bullet-pocked planks and unspeakably-puddled weeds looked every bit
as grimy and rough-hewn as the establishment’s proprietress, who a
few moments before had bellowed out the back door for January to
come in: she needed his services.
    “Last night some suck-arse bastard tried to
steal my Bible.”
    “In many ways that’s the most surprising
element of last night’s fracas,” remarked January’s friend and
fellow-musician Hannibal Sefton, fishing in the pocket of his
dilapidated frock-coat for a bottle of opium-laced sherry. “It was
her uncle’s – another surprise, since I’d always assumed that, like
the Athenian hero Erechtheus, she was birthed from the earth
itself. It’s in no way a remarkable volume: printed in Philadelphia
thirty or forty years ago by a Bible society. The frontier was
flooded with them when families started taking up lands in the
Mississippi and Alabama territories.”
    He rose from the bottom step of the ladder
he’d been sitting on when January had emerged from the trees.
January had reason to approach the Broadhorn cautiously: even at
nine-thirty on a Tuesday morning there were men aggressively drunk
enough to take violent exception to a man of January’s color
appearing in the vicinity of white men’s chosen watering-holes.
January stayed away from the Swamp when he could. Only Hannibal’s
note had brought him that morning.
    “I thought myself something might have been
hidden in it,” Hannibal went on, as they crossed the goo of the
yard to the saloon’s rear door. “Pages cut out to make a hollow, or
something of the kind. I can’t imagine anyone in the Broadhorn ever opened the book. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. For
whatever reason, the thief was prepared to do murder to get
it.”
    January paused on the saloon’s sagging rear
porch, trying to see into the impenetrable gloom within. Born a
slave, one of the first things he’d learned in early childhood was
that there was “buckra territory” – in his case, the front part of
his master’s house – where a black child would be thrashed for
setting foot. Even after his mulatto mother had been freed and
they’d gone to live in New Orleans, he’d still been forbidden to
use the front entrance of the house her white protector had given
her.
    In the Swamp, it was as much as a black man’s
life was worth, to go into a saloon patronized by the white crews
of the flatboats and keelboats that came down the river with their
cargoes of furs, pigs, and corn. The black prostitutes would be
tolerated in most saloons in that insalubrious district that
sprawled from the upper end of Girod Street along the back of the
town to the canal and the cemeteries. But the only black who was
truly able to come and go freely in the Broadhorn was Delly, a
sweet-tempered, simple-minded girl of seventeen whose buck teeth,
skewed jaw, and prominent facial moles had relegated her to the
role of washing cups and doing as much cleaning-up as the Broadhorn
ever got.
    It was Delly who lay on the narrow bed in
Kentucky Williams’s room behind the bar. Williams yelled, “Git the
hell in here, Ben, what you doin’, wipin’ your goddam feet?” and
January followed her voice into that tiny cubicle, which appeared
to do duty as the Broadhorn’s