Hambly, Barbara - Benjamin January 05 - Die Upon a Kiss by Hambly Barbara

Author:Hambly, Barbara [Hambly, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-05-30T15:31:48+00:00

He said only, "Let's see if we can find her tracks."

All the horses were gone, including the stocking-footed bay gelding January had ridden. The scuff-marks in the dust and weeds of the yard were too unclear, in the failing light, to make out whether d'Isola had taken one of them. Certainly someone had unharnessed the gig. Though there were marks of some kind in the direction of the bayou, it was impossible, in the carpet of elephant-ear and last year's brown oak-leaves, to make out the shape of the foot or whether it was a man's or a woman's, or which way they led.

January cursed. Leatherstocking never had this problem. But then, judging by what he'd read of Cooper's continuing epic, Leatherstocking could evidently see in the dark as well. January wondered if Abishag Shaw had the same abilities.

"I think the best thing we can do," he said, rising from the soft muck of shell and mud at the water's brim,

"is to start back to town. I told half a dozen people where I was going this morning. When all four of us fail to appear at rehearsal, they'll send out a search party. With luck we'll meet them on the way to Point Algiers, and we'll be in a better position to look for Drusilla then. Agreed?"

Ponte nodded, but Cavallo strenuously resisted the idea of abandoning their friend in an unknown countryside and growing darkness-darkness that was considerably further advanced by the time January convinced him that the three of them would have far less hope of success if they simply started wandering the cipriere, looking for her. With Cavallo's objections, Ponte reversed himself and refused to leave; and when they finally set off, it was nearly full night, and all three were ravenously hungry and thirsty. Both of the house's great wooden cisterns had burned at the time of the original fire.

"According to my mother, the Doughertys and the Buttons are still fighting over the land in the courts,"

said January, leading the way along the verge of the bayou. "Not that it's worth a great deal-not like land along the river." He glanced back at the blackened ruin disappearing between the trees. "If the families don't get their differences settled soon, it won't be worth the labor it'll cost to bring the place back at all."

"How came they to build it all in the first place," asked Cavallo, "if it was not worth the labor?" He waved irritably at the cloud of gnats that rose around them, ample evidence that the modest levee along the bayou had crevassed in half a dozen places during the years of neglect. January breathed a silent prayer of thanks that it was winter and mosquitoes were few. In summer the place would be unendurable.

"This was all built in the nineties." January skirted a soggy pot-hole, boots crunching on shell-an Indian mound, where once a campsite had stood. Oaks crowned it, and crumbling platforms of brick marked the tombs of the Dougherty family, eroding as this wet land eroded everything in time.

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