Date: 2016-04-18 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: moon hoax of 1836; Mystery; Historical; History
Description: A novelette of 12,000 words in the Benjamin January Free Man of Color historical mystery series. All of New Orleans is agog over Professor Tixall's telescope, which can reportedly see life on the Moon. Rose Janvier is convinced that it's a hoax, and a harmless one (though profitable for Professor Tixall), until one of her servants, looking through the telescope after hours, sees one of the "bat-people" of the Moon murder another one. Rose knows that murder has been done, but how do you prove it when the events supposedly took place on another planet?

DEATH ON THE MOON

by

Barbara Hambly

Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 Barbara Hambly

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Death on the Moon

About the Author

Death on the Moon

“But there is life on the Moon, Madame!” Germaine Barras cried, her delicate schoolgirl features blazing with enthusiasm. “Professor Herschel’s telescope proves it! And I’ve seen it myself!”

Rose Janvier folded last week’s edition of the New Orleans Bee – with its accounts of the war in Spain and the rumblings of rebellion in the Mexican state of Texas related to minor notes under a page of shipping news, advertisements for pianos and imported silk, announcements of debt and auctions, and notices for runaway slaves – and put on her oval-lensed spectacles to regard the youngest of her pupils. “Have you indeed?”

Mignot Lebrun – daughter of the woman who helped in the kitchen of the girls’ school on Rue Esplanade – poured another round of tea for the three pupils gathered around the breakfast table, then lingered in the dining-room door, her eyes like saucers.

“That’s nonsense.” Marie-Anne Caulier – at sixteen the oldest of Rose’s scholars – folded her napkin and tucked it into its silver ring. “If there had been people on the Moon, it would have said something about it in the Bible, and it doesn’t. How would they have gotten up there? And when?”

“They didn’t get up there!” protested the younger girl. “They’ve always been there! Listen—“ She opened the pamphlet, printed, Rose observed, by the New York Sun, the paper which had carried the initial story about Sir John Herschel’s extraordinary discoveries the previous August. “They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs…these creatures were evidently engaged in conversation; their gesticulation, more particularly the varied action of their hands and arms, appeared impassioned and emphatic. We hence inferred that they were rational beings, and although not perhaps of so high an order as others which we discovered the next month on the shores of the Bay of Rainbows…”

She shuffled at the pamphlet, seeking the description – Rose knew, for she’d read her own copy of that astounding document – of the more civilized “man-bats” dwelling in an area of the Moon dubbed the Ruby Colosseum.

“If they’re not like Earth-people, then they’re animals,” returned Marie-Anne primly. “However ‘clever’ this Mr. Herschel thinks they look. Man was the only creature God made in His own image.”

“Whatever our opinions of Professor Herschel’s work,” corrected Rose gently, “let’s give him his proper title, shall we? So you’ve been to see Professor Tixall’s telescope, Germaine? I take it that was on Sunday, when you got up so early?”

The girl flushed, a little guiltily, because her Sunday excursion had been ostensibly to morning Mass with her older cousins. “It was my Christmas present, early,” she excused herself. “But Professor Herschel is right! They didn’t act like animals. They were talking, and walking about the gardens, or flying, or reading these scrolls. They really are people!”

“It is the Devil,” said Marie-Anne, her lips tightening, “who causes people to believe that. Who sends these illusions, these lies, to these telescopes—”

“I’m afraid we’ll need to see some logical proof of that, Marie-Anne,” put in Rose calmly, and the girl’s color deepened in a complexion like the softest crème-café.

“Then Germaine has to show me logical proof that Professor Herschel’s telescope isn’t being fooled somehow about what he’s seeing! How does he know he’s seeing the Moon?”

A good question. In keeping with the principles of her school, Rose mediated the extremely lively discussion which followed, and kept to herself her own opinion that, however much she might object to Marie-Anne’s religious dogmatism, neither Sir John Herschel (conveniently located in South Africa where nobody could check his methods or instrument) nor Germaine Barras had seen people on the Moon. The result was inconclusive, but at least when she finally herded the girls away to their much-delayed Latin lesson, she had the impression that at least two out of the three would continue, in their leisure time, to seek scientific information about the Moon.

And that, in its way, was the point of the school.

For girls – and especially girls of color, the daughters of wealthy white men and their quadroon and octoroon plaçées – to study something besides the dainty sewing and perfect French that would qualify them (if they had beauty) to be plaçées in their turn. To feed minds hungry for the meat of history, mathematics, science and languages, as Rose’s had been hungry in her own girlhood. With the new year of 1836 beginning a week from Friday, there was no excuse for closing that door in their faces.

As Rose helped Mignot – and Mignot’s mother Abigail – to clear the serving-dishes onto the sideboard, she set Germaine’s luridly-illustrated pamphlet carefully aside. Tucked into it, she found an even more lurid broadsheet advertising Professor Jeremiah Tixall’s telescope, In every detail the replica of that trained by Professor Herschel upon the Moon from South Africa, but – Miracle of miracles! – set up here, in this very city of New Orleans, for a limited time only, so that all who chose to could, for the nominal sum of twenty-five cents, actually view events that were taking place on the surface of the Moon!

When her husband Benjamin came in a few minutes later, having set the girls to the day’s Latin translation, Rose remarked, “I think I’m going to have to go out to Livaudais Bend and have a look at Professor Tixall’s marvelous telescope.”

“I should say you are.” He brought the scraped dishes from the sideboard, to the towel-draped dining-table where Abigail had set the basin to wash them. (Rose’s mother, a plaçée of the old school, had insisted that no lady ever trusted a servant to wash china.) “The young ladies talked of nothing else when they came in for their lesson.” He caught up the cup of coffee and the last two fried rice-balls – callas – from the plate, holding the callas meticulously as he gulped it down to keep the powdered sugar from his immaculate black wool sleeves. Though Rose was up at the crack of the icy December dawn to help Abigail start the day’s cooking, and to prepare lessons for the girls for the day, Ben had slept until nearly ten. It was the season of the roulaison – the sugar-harvest and boiling – and most of the planters would remain on their lands until after Christmas, but the town bankers and sugar-brokers, rentiers and traders, both the old creole French and the new-come (and detested) Americans, were preparing for the Christmas season with a succession of parties and balls at which Ben was often hired to play.

“Get Hannibal to take you,” he added, wiping his fingers carefully on a corner of the towel. “I’m going out to Mandeville this afternoon – Hannibal says he’ll take over my classes—”

“Clélie Jumon?” Rose named one of their younger friends, the wife of a stone-cutter who lived out in Mandeville by the lake, on the brink of giving birth to twins after a horrendous pregnancy.

Ben nodded. He had been trained as a surgeon, and had practiced in France in the ‘twenties, until it had become painfully obvious that even in the land of liberté, égalité, and fraternité no white person was going to hire a medical man who looked like a coal-black cotton-hand straight out of the fields. “Things seem all right with her so far,” he said. “But I want to keep my eye on her. I’m hoping I’ll be able to have a look at the surface of the Moon myself, before it starts to wane and the Professor packs up his marvelous telescope and disappears like dew on the desert’s dusty face… after having made a pretty tidy sum from the good citizens of New Orleans. But at this rate I’m afraid I might not even be able to spend our first Christmas together in our new home.” He leaned across and kissed her, the sweetness of sugar clinging to his lips.

“There’ll be plenty more,” promised Rose quietly. Her fingers closed around his hand, drawing him into another kiss. “Better that you should make sure Clélie and Isak have them as well. I’ll give you a full report.”

*

“Well,” remarked Hannibal Sefton the following morning, as he and Rose led their charges past the bare trees along the road up-river from the landing, “if I were going to perpetrate a hoax that depended on the existence of a twenty-four-foot telescope-lens, this is the place I’d pick for it.”

“According to the article in the True American—“ Rose fished it from her satchel, “—the principles upon which Professor Tixall’s telescope is constructed ‘improve upon Herschel’s design to allow somewhat greater portability…’”

“One hopes so. Twenty-four feet is bigger than your dining-room floor.” He coughed, took a flat silver flask from his pocket, and allowed himself a judicious swig. The air was raw, the last fogs of the night dispersing in a reek of burning sugar. “How would you even move a lens like that?”

“On its edge in a very large box. By water, presumably – hence the proximity of the house—“She pointed to the dwelling which had been known for the past ten years as “Waverley” (presumably for its highly American interpretation of an English manor-house) and which had been vacant for the past seven, “—to the river. I’m told the parts to the telescope, including two enormous, flat crates, were moved up the river road late in the evening last Saturday and were presumably installed in the night. And I will say that Mr. Jean-Louis Benndorf—“ She re-folded the True American to the “Letters to the Editor,” “—is as skeptical as yourself concerning what might have been in those crates. Professor Tixall’s claim to have bettered Herschel’s telescope ‘by the addition of a second hydro-oxygen microscope’ is utter nonsense, as no such article exists. One could as easily speak of adding a ‘magic jewel’ to a telescope to improve its range and magnification… How do we know that what we see is actually taking place on the Moon, and not in some other building, rented for the purpose, upon whose windows the telescope is actually trained?”

“I’d say the same building, myself.” Hannibal paused in the trellised archway of the path that led towards the imposing – if slightly dilapidated – mansion, and studied it with a skeptical eye. The Mansard roof-line of that huge, three-story block of a building had already been broken by an enormous, badly-proportioned gable filled in with plate glass, presumably to light an attic studio or drying-room. This glass had been removed and in its place a somber and portentous black box, twenty feet by twenty, poked out, like a square cannon-barrel aimed at the sky.

“No buildings near enough, or high enough, to get a look into that housing to see if there’s a lens in there. You’d need a balloon – and there’s the biggest ballroom in three parishes around at the back among those trees.”

“How do you know that?”

“It always pays,” remarked the fiddler, limping forward again on his ebony cane, “to know where one can take refuge, should one’s living arrangements fall through. The first year I came to New Orleans I had the misfortune to be taken in by Flatboat Hattie, who gave me house-room at her – um – place of business on Tchoupitoulas Street near the wharves. An unpleasant woman – only persistent consumption of raw spirits and opium can explain our mutual attraction – but in my more sober moments I did take the precaution of locating whatever empty residences or unguarded hide-aways I could, in case she, or one of her friends, decided to cut my throat. Animis opibusque parati, as they say… The place was always vacant because you’d need an army of servants to keep it up, besides being too heavy for its foundations on such marshy ground – you can see how that end of the house has settled already. Which wouldn’t matter, if all you wanted was a base of operations for a humbug lay.”

Still, for a humbug lay, Rose had to admit that Professor Tixall did it very nicely. There were benches on the porch – and on the path leading up to it – for eager viewers to wait, all of them occupied when Rose and her party came up the drive, which argued for a profitable business considering how early in the morning it was. Once the line moved up and they were inside the house itself, the two parlors open for the use of the spectators were amply furnished with chairs, and cozy fires burned in the fireplaces (which, as Hannibal had pointed out, were already beginning to crack owing to the subsidence of the house). A neatly-lettered sign in the hall pointed in the direction of the necessary-houses out back. The line, Rose observed, moved fairly quickly up the uneven stairs.

“Professor Herschel’s telescope in South Africa projects the images from the Moon onto a screen of canvas on the wall,” provided Germaine, her pansy-brown eyes shining with excitement at the thought. “But Professor Tixall’s telescope, because of its construction, requires one to look through the eyepiece, so only a few can see at a time. But there are multiple eye-pieces.”

Rose said, “Indeed!” and glanced at Hannibal. Not by so much as a quirk of his mobile eyebrows did he indicate that his thoughts echoed her own: that without gas laid on, there would be insufficient light to project a mirrored image any distance, even from a room close-by. At a guess, she thought, looking around at the handsome little parlor reserved for the free colored (and those white gentlemen – and they usually were gentlemen – who chose to accompany the ladies of that hue), the scenes taking place on the “Moon” were actually being enacted in the immense ballroom of which Hannibal had spoken. A system of angled mirrors could convey the image up – she noticed that all doors to other parts of the house were locked, and the French doors not only shuttered with jalousies but heavily curtained, so that no view of the rear of the house, inside or out, could be obtained.

One could, she supposed, project images with mirrors if one had access to the new “calcium lights” or “limelights” of which she’d read, but equipment for forcing oxygen and hydrogen through tubes was expensive (and probably dangerous). Depending on how elaborate the “Moon” set was, what she’d seen of the place was expensive enough.

But at twenty-five cents per head – and the line of customers, both black and white, stretched through both parlors and out the door – Professor Tixall was clearly making money like a bank-robber.

And, he gave a good show.

The New York Sun had described in detail the lives and appearances of the “biped beavers” and the winged “man-bats” which inhabited the Moon. And there they were in all their furry glory, carrying their babies in their arms, and conducting “animated conversations” among the outlandish foliage of strange gardens. Around a huge column in the center of what had been the largest bedroom of the house – now painted a mysterious black, and with all its windows shuttered and draped – ten small eye-pieces had been set, recognizably the smaller ends of telescopes. Peering into one (not easy on account of her spectacles) Rose had the delighted sensation of looking into a peep-show, of the sort designed to amuse children – which indeed, she supposed, this was. She recognized what she saw as a well-“dressed” stage-set, with odd plants and lots of hanging vines to obscure everything but the immediate foreground, peopled with what appeared to be slightly misshapen, fur-covered humans, naked save for garments of leaves. They moved about, chatted, the taller, bat-winged “Vespertilio-Homo” variety (as the Sun’s Dr. Grant described them) giving orders to the shorter “beavers” (whose fur was shaggier and who, by their proportions, were quite clearly human dwarfs). Sometimes the bluish-furred goats described by the Sun wandered through the garden, as did several smaller creatures which Rose, at least, recognized as South American armadillos heavily embellished with glued-on fur and spikes. (Poor things!)

“It has to be the ballroom,” she murmured to Hannibal, as she helped him down the stairs when a small chime announced the end of their ten minutes. “That ground is extremely flat and smooth for a garden! And peeping through a lenses one can’t really tell. One could rig a system of angled mirrors up the side of the house and through the floor of this room; the light in that garden is nothing like sunlight.”

“To say nothing of the angle at which we’re viewing all this. It’s a little high – the peep-window must be up near the ceiling – but nothing like one would actually see if one were on Earth and looking more or less down on people walking about on another planet entirely.”

“Now, how would you know?” demanded Rose with a grin, and the fiddler made the gesture of a duelist conceding a hit.

But the girls spoke of nothing all the way back to the school, Marie-Anne maintaining her position that the visions within the telescope were sent by the Devil to trick the viewer into believing that life existed on other planets and the others exclaiming over the strange creatures they had seen and wondering what sort of language they spoke. Cosette Gardinier asked about how the “hydro-oxygen microscope” might work, but none of them appeared to question that such a thing existed. Germaine and Cosette both asked if they could use Rose’s telescope that night, and Rose, smiling, agreed.

It was enough, for the moment, to get them asking questions, and becoming aware that the world of stars and planets and foreign civilizations existed, without diminishing their pleasure in what they’d seen.

It was all they talked about for the rest of the week, out-weighing even Christmas presents in their thoughts. Cosette went so far as to extract another fifty cents from her father (a prominent white banker) for two additional visits to the observatory, under the chaperonage of one of her aunts. Since the girls’ mothers were those who had chosen to send their daughters to a school which offered the same curriculum as the best of the boys’ schools in the city, the girls themselves were intelligent and devouringly curious, and Benjamin – though increasingly worried for his patient out in Mandeville – produced the True History of Lucian of Samosata from his library, and Cyrano de Bergerac’s accounts of his own visits to the Moon.

The girls went back to their families for Christmas – even the numerous public balls and social demands of the season couldn’t loosen the close family ties of the free colored community – and Rose had the felicity of waking on the first Christmas Day of her marriage, with Benjamin, in their own home, after all. But a message arrived that afternoon from Isak Jumon in Mandeville that Clélie had gone into labor, and on the 26th Rose found herself in the still-empty house, thoughtfully washing up the dishes and reflecting upon how deeply she enjoyed the silence of being alone.

“M’am Rose?” A hesitant foot patted on the rear gallery. Turning, Rose saw the servant-girl Mignot framed in the French door, and even by the dim gleam of the work-candles, saw how the whites of her eye shone all around the dark pupils.

“What is it, dearest?” Rose crossed the dining-room swiftly, drying her hands on her apron. “What’s happened? Are you all right?”

Mignot nodded, but her face struggled to contain tears. “M’am, it… He killed her! He came up behind her, put his hand over her mouth, cut her throat with a knife—”

“Who?” said Rose quickly. “Where?” She guided the shaken girl to a chair.

“On the Moon, m’am!” Mignot stared up at her face with wild eyes. “I didn’t know what to do, or to say, or who to tell! But it… it was awful! She clawed at his hand and tried to get away—”

“Sshhh,” Rose commanded, as the girl began to weep at what she had seen. She wrapped Mignot in her arms, held her for a moment, then made a long arm for the tea-pot and poured out a lukewarm cup, to which she added honey. “Dearest, hush! Tell me from the beginning.”

“M’am I never…” Mignot’s hands shook so that she nearly spilled the tea. “I didn’t mean to. But hearin’ the young ladies all talk about the Moon, I wanted so bad to see it, too. And this afternoon I snuck down there, and waited til Mr. Tixall put up his little sign saying there wouldn’t be no more visitors in today. Then I sneaked in, after the last visitors had gone up, and I waited til they were all gone, and the house was quiet. I tip-toed up the stairs, and looked through the telescope.”

Poor child, I could have found twenty-five cents from somewhere to take her…

But Abigail, Mignot’s mother, Rose was well aware, was strict with her daughter about not asking for favors, or imposing demands on their employers.

“And I – there was Moon-people still in the garden. It was so beautiful, M’am! All them queer animals, and strange-lookin’ plants. And them little furry people left, and there was only this beautiful bat-lady sittin’ on her bench. And she was beautiful, M’am! I know everybody says they’re like animals but they’re not—”

Rose remembered her well. She’d seen her on her own visit to Professor Tixall’s ‘Observatory’ on Tuesday, and both Germaine and Cosette had spoken of the ‘beautiful bat-lady’ as well. Both girls having seen her on several occasions, dainty and slender in her little dress of leaves. She was generally picking flowers, or playing with a leashed (and very unwilling-looking) armadillo. Even the copper fur and yellow paint of the girl’s make-up hadn’t concealed a sweet face and lovely dark eyes.

“And this man-bat came in,” Mignot gulped. “He was great big and tall, and he wasn’t naked like the others – he was wearin’ a shirt and pants, like a regular Earth-man. He went straight up behind her and grabbed her by the hair, and she tried to fight away from him, tearin’ at his hand. But he had a knife in his other hand and he—he—”

She shook her head desperately. “I haven’t never seen anybody get killed, M’am! He pushed her body down on the ground and just turned around and disappeared behind the bushes. I seen it, M’am, but… but who can I tell? Who’s gonna do anything about it? It’s all up on the Moon—”

*

“Who can she tell indeed?” agreed Hannibal, when he arrived in response to the note Rose had sent him at his current residence, one of the ramshackle ‘cribs’ behind the Keelboat Saloon for which the fiddler traded his services as a musician. “Even if this Professor Tixall wasn’t involved – and I can’t imagine why he’d have dressed his players up in costume if he wanted to get rid of one of them – he’s certainly never going to admit that the crime took place. How can he? He’d be arrested for fraud. So the murder might just as well have taken place on the Moon.”

He fished forth his flask again and drank. It was a longish walk from the “Swamp” at the back of town, and the leg the fiddler had broken in Mexico nine weeks ago still gave him, Rose knew, considerable pain.

“Ubi enim non est lex, nec prevaricatio, an interesting extension of the principle of extraterritoriality.” He took one more quick sip, and tucked the flask away. “Did you send word to Lieutenant Shaw?”

“Bastien—“ Rose named the slave youth owned by the Metoyer sisters across Rue Esplanade, whom she’d dispatched in quest of the only representative of the law whom she knew and trusted, “—says they had no idea where he was, down at the Cabildo. The most he could do was leave my note, and leave word at Shaw’s lodgings for when he comes in – if he comes in tonight.”

“I have looked out

In the vast desolate night in search of him…”

Hannibal frowned into the thick gloom of the dining-room beyond the candle-gleam, skeletal fingers half-raised, as if to catch some passing Byronic thought.

“And when I saw gigantic shadows in

The umbrage of the walls of Eden, checquered

By the far-flashing of the cherubs’ swords,

I watched for what I thought his coming…

“He could be anywhere between here and Red Church at this point. Not that any of this is any of our business, of course.”

“Of course.”

He rose, and offered her his hand. “So, are we going?”

“Moriamur et in media arma ruamus,” she responded, gathering up her coat.

It was early enough in the evening – particularly in the French Town on the night after Christmas – that they easily found a fiâcre. People of Rose’s color were forbidden by law to ride in rented vehicles, but – as with so many “customs of the country” in New Orleans – this ruling generally applied to men, and to women of color only when they weren’t accompanied by white gentlemen. Rose paid the driver to wait for them at the Livaudais Point wood-yard – the man who ran the “grocery” there would sell a beer to a driver at any hour of the day or night, and let him sit in the warmth of his back room – and she and Hannibal walked on by the blue-white glimmer of the waxing moon.

“Will he pack up and flee, do you think?”

“Not a chance.” The fiddler paused to catch his breath, leaning on his stick. “The New Moon isn’t til after Twelfth Night. Every planter in the countryside is going to come into town for Carnival. Professor Tixall can no more leave New Orleans now than a farmer can leave his fields at harvest. No. He’ll try to hush it up.”

The house “Waverly” was dark among the bare trees, the queer, jutting outline of the “telescope” black against the stars. Even with the slide on her dark-lantern most of the way down, Rose glanced constantly behind her as Hannibal led the way along a fence of iron bars – nearly overgrown with withered resurrection-fern and years’ worth of winter-dead vines – and thence down a short lane to a small, wrought-iron gate. Only the house-roof was visible from here, above a tangled jungle of unkempt garden. Hannibal knelt, rather shakily, and took from his coat-pocket a set of pick-locks: for a man who, by his speech and education, had been raised in the Anglo-Irish upper classes, the fiddler had skills that argued for many years in very bad company. While he worked Rose studied the squishy mud of the path underfoot, and saw numerous tracks, all of them smaller than her own and some no larger than those of children. Her mind went back to her own surmise – and that of the indignant Mr. Benndorf in his letter to the True American – that Professor Tixall was employing both smaller-than-average people, and outright dwarfs, to personate the inhabitants of the Moon.

The gate opened without a creak.

Somebody was obviously oiling it.

As they slushed through the thick-growing elephant-ear underfoot, the heavy growth of laurel and hackberry that choked the back of the house, Rose narrowed the shutter on her lantern to barely a trace.

The house is curtained tight, she reminded herself. We can’t see a trace of light, but neither can they see out.

Hannibal’s breath was a ghost-whisper against her ear. “There’s an overseer’s cottage about fifty feet back from the rear of the house. I suspect that’s where his actors stay.”

The ballroom, built onto the back of the house, had, like the rest of Waverley, been constructed on a foundation both too short, and too cheap, to deal with the marshy land this close to the river. Even with its walls cloaked in leafless vine and dark clots of laurel, she could see where the floor was already sagging with subsidence, and where the panes in the many French windows were cracking from being pulled out of true.

Someone had clearly spent a great deal of money building a house that was un-livable.

No wonder someone had been happy to rent it to Professor Tixall for his “observatory.”

A spavined gallery had once surrounded the ballroom on three sides. It was mostly fallen to pieces now, but flights of brick steps, thick with resurrection fern, led down to ground level.

Hannibal put his ear to a broken shutter, then fished in his pocket for the pick-locks again.

“Silence doesn’t mean there isn’t someone in there,” Rose murmured, stepping close as he slipped a thin-bladed file between the leaves of the shutter to lift the latch.

“Tsk! The least they could do, with a house this size, is to pay for decent bolts on the windows – no wonder they can’t rent the place.” He eased the shutter open a few inches. “Let’s hope this lock isn’t rusted solid… ah.”

Gently he pushed the door inward, waited a moment, then fingered aside the heavy curtain. No light came through its crack.

“Remember there’s a peep-hole with an angled mirror.”

“Nobody’s going to be sitting watching the room at this hour. I don’t smell any blood, do you?”

Rose flashed a cautious lantern-beam around the enormous room.

They were, beyond any doubt, on the Moon. The foliage of the prop trees had been painted the odd purples and blues that Rose recalled, and strangely-shaped plants deftly concealed the fact that the “ground” was actually a carpet. In one place, where (Rose recalled) a bench had stood before a particularly thick boscage, both bench and carpet had been removed. Even the uncertain lighting and tiny relative size of the telescope image wouldn’t be able to conceal the floor-boards underneath.

Directly behind where the bench had once stood, masses of heart-shaped paper leaves and weirdly-painted silken flowers concealed a door into a little chamber that could have been used as a card-room in the house’s more mundane days. A further door opened to the night outside, and shining the narrow beam of her lantern along its edge to find the latch, Rose whispered, “The latch is broken.”

“Recently, by the look of it.” Hannibal limped over, and steadied the light on the splintered wood around the screws.

Rose closed the lantern-slide and pushed the door open. In the dim moonlight she made out a brick path, and, against the night sky, the line of a near-by roof. The overseer’s cottage, presumably. No lights in its windows, but if that was where the cast of the lunar tableau was staying – not to speak of stabling for armadillos – the windows would be shuttered and curtained…

Light flashed across her from the garden below, a dark-lantern’s beam, and a woman’s voice whispered hoarsely, “Hands up!”

Hannibal, who was slightly behind Rose in the darkness of the card-room, promptly dodged sideways and vanished into the shadows, but since barely four feet separated Rose from Mademoiselle Hands-Up she obeyed instantly. She was still trying to think of a plausible explanation for her presence when the voice demanded, in a strong German accent, “Where have you taken her?”

“I came here to find that out myself,” returned Rose. “My servant saw her killed.”

The dark-lantern was raised, to about the level of Rose’s shoulder. She saw by its light that the woman who held it – and a formidable-looking horse-pistol in the other hand – was one of the dwarfs who had impersonated the lunar “bi-pedal beavers,” clothed now in a neat dark dress, her short-cropped hair concealed beneath a day-cap. “Come away,” said the dwarf quickly. “Professor Tixall sleeps in the house. He listens always for someone investigating, and he will be twice as bad, now this has happened.” She set the lantern on the gallery at her feet, carefully un-cocked the pistol (and shoved a scrap of torn cloth under the hammer for good measure), and thrust the weapon into the waistband of her skirt, then held out her hand to Rose.

Rose took it, and followed her at once down the rickety steps into darkness. Hannibal, she knew, would follow.

“Philomène Pilchard is my name,” said the woman. “Alys was my sister.”

“Not a dwarf?” asked Rose matter-of-factly. “I believe I saw her – my students and I came to see the telescope Tuesday morning.”

“Not as I am, no.” Fraulein Pilchard shut the slide on the lantern but led Rose unerringly into the squishy boscage surrounding the house. And thank God it’s too cold for alligators at this season… “But she was small, not five feet. We were acrobats, you understand, in New York. Your servant saw what happened?”

“She did. Rose Janvier is my name, I operate a girls’ school in New Orleans. The girls talked of nothing but the telescope for days after they saw it, and of course the girl who helps in the kitchen wanted to see it, too. She slipped in this afternoon, after the last party left.”

“What happened?” They had reached what had probably once been a sort of summerhouse. Its rickety planks creaked dangerously when the two women entered, and something – several somethings, by the sound of it – scuttered away from underneath it and into the Stygian foliage all around. “Professor Tixall told us that she’d run away, but I knew this couldn’t be so. She would never have left me, Madame, not without telling me. I am…” She hesitated, as if trying to put into words what a person would not understand, who only saw dwarfs in a freak-show.

Rose said, “I understand that those of your condition often suffer from ill health.”

“It’s true. Alys was five years the younger—“ Fraulein Pilchard’s smile, of tenderness and grief, told Rose all she needed to know about the love between the sisters. “Yet she made herself the mother to me. She would never have left me. And… I knew. I knew something had happened to her. I felt it.”

Rose nodded. It was not the first time she had heard of such an unspoken, indescribable connection between siblings.

As if reassured, the other woman went on, “Professor Tixall locked up the house, and commanded us all to remain indoors in the cottage. It is part of our contract that we do so – that we do not leave the grounds of this place – but usually we can cross to the kitchen, which is warmer to sit in. But I was frantic about Alys, and searched about these grounds for her. The others said, she might have gone into town again – sneaked away early, to meet her friend, and this was why Tixall was so angry. But I could hear furniture and sets being dragged about within. What did your servant see? Did she see the man who did the thing?”

“She saw him,” said Rose quietly. “He was dressed in shirt and trousers, but still in make-up, she said. He was tall, much taller than your sister—“ Rose frowned, thinking back on the scenes she herself had seen through that tiny lens. “Not someone I saw, in the time I was looking. Though I think I saw your sister, unless there were two beautiful girls with long hair.”

“She was the only one.” Fraulein Pilchard’s long, honest face convulsed briefly, and she put her hand to her mouth, struggling against tears. “But none of the men – and there are – were – four women and five men – are any taller than five feet three, Madame, so that all would look in proportion and the animals would appear larger. But who would do such a thing? And why? No one even knew we were here!”

*

“Obviously someone did,” pointed out Hannibal, on their way back to Rue Esplanade in the fiâcre. Fraulein Pilchard had led Rose back to the rear gate; Hannibal had clambered quietly over the wrought-iron fence the moment the dwarf’s lantern-gleam vanished into the foliage. “You say she spoke of her sister having a ‘friend’ in town—”

“She wasn’t the only one.” Rose hugged her cloak tighter about her – mist had begun to rise from the river, heavy with the burnt-sugar smell of the roulaison. “Evidently several inhabitants of the Moon would slip out for visits to Earth on a regular basis – those whose size and proportions weren’t such as to draw comment, or speculation, from passers-by. The most frequent culprits were Alys, and two men named Halliday and Trask, Irish and German respectively, like Alys and her sister actors from New York. They had an arrangement with a cab-driver to meet them at the landing every other night. They claimed they were staying in the area, and paid the man not to ask questions. Halliday and Trask went to gamble, backed by funds from a consortium of the other – um – Lunarians. I gather Mr. Trask was singularly lucky at the tables.”

“Hmn. God helps those who help themselves. And Fraulein Alys?”

“She went first – this was over a week ago, when Professor Tixall first set up his Observatory – because had shopping she wished to do. I gather she also represented a consortium, in quest of stockings and gloves, dress goods, ribbons, and soap for the other women of the troop. They’d had no opportunity to replenish their wardrobes since the start of this tour in September.”

“I am fascinated by this insight into the lunar trading and investment economy. I take it was on this expedition that Fraulein Alys met a gentleman friend?”

Rose nodded, and grief returned to her as she remembered the older sister’s tears. “It didn’t sound how you think. Fraulein Pilchard said Alys was… ‘aglow,’ was how she put it. Happier – more at ease – than she had seen her in many years. The sisters… watched over one another. It did not sound to me that Alys had gone into town seeking anything other than soap and gloves.” Rose frowned down at her own gloved hands.

“After the second evening, she was… ‘as if she was afraid it would turn out not to be real,’ her sister said. Because of course in her position, on the stage, there are a great many things that turn out not to be real.”

“That,” sighed Hannibal, “is the nature of the stage, alas.” He helped Rose down from the fiâcre, and gallantly insisted on paying the driver, though Rose suspected that this left him without grocery-money for the week. Though the house was empty, and the night profoundly cold, Rose – after a moment’s hesitation – fetched a lamp and a couple of shawls so that she and Hannibal could sit on the gallery: as the teacher of a girls’ school there could be no question of admitting a man to the house when her husband was not home, particularly not one whom the whites of the town (and many of the free colored as well) considered slightly degenerate for playing at public entertainments with black musicians.

And in the crowded neighborhood at the “back of town,” somebody was always watching.

“And the young lady didn’t happen to mention to her sister the name of her new friend?”

“Not a new friend, really.” Rose passed Hannibal a shawl. “She told her sister she’d known him before, five years ago when he visited New York. It’s how he happened to recognize her at the milliner’s. And, she said, he seemed as happy to renew their friendship as she was. According to Fraulein Pilchard, the gentleman asked after her – though she’d never met him, evidently Alys had spoken of looking after her – and she said she had hopes, from what he had said, that an arrangement could be reached which would include provision for Fraulein Pilchard’s welfare.”

“A generous gentleman.” Hannibal spoke without irony: a dozen of Rose’s neighbors on Rue Esplanade, and three-quarters of the little pastel cottages that lined Rue Rampart, Rue Burgundy, and the small back streets of the French Town in between, had been bought by generous gentlemen for women whom the custom of the country – and Louisiana law – forbade them to marry. Many of these unofficial households included relatives of the plaçée herself: unmarriageable or widowed sisters, cousins or nieces insufficiently pretty or insufficiently “accomplished” to become plaçées themselves, here and there a mother who for one reason or another had been obliged to sell her own cottage (or who’d decided to rent it out while she kept house for her daughter). “I suppose one can reach one’s limit fairly quickly of dressing up cum Vespertilio-homo and hiding out in supposedly-deserted cottages. And Fraulein Pilchard didn’t seem to think her sister was in a position to – or was inclined to – hold this gentleman to his promises, should he think better of them on the morrow?”

“I asked that.” Rose shook her head. “As tactfully as I could, in the circumstances. Fraulein Pilchard said, without any hesitation, that Alys wasn’t the sort to do that sort of thing. And indeed I don’t see how she could have. He didn’t send her letters, her sister said. And without social position or friends to back her in her claims, unless he actually made her an offer of marriage there isn’t much she could do. In fact, if she tried to cause trouble she would only expose herself to an accusation of fraud – not to speak of the pressure that would be brought to bear on her by Professor Tixall.”

“I don’t suppose Tixall himself—?”

Rose chuckled. “Completely aside from the fact that the murderer was in full make-up barely fifteen minutes after Tixall had cleared the last of his pigeons out of the telescope-room, you saw him. He could play Humpty-Dumpty in a pantomime.”

“Ah,” said Hannibal. “Yes. Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face/ Great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race… A pity the young lady didn’t confide in her sister where she and her friend met. If we knew something more of him, we’d know who and what we were looking for. She didn’t happen to—“ He broke off, bent nearly double by a wrenching spasm of coughs, and Rose quickly took his wrists in her hands.

“Come inside,” she said. “You’re freezing—”

He shook his head, his hand pressed to his side.

“I can’t let you—”

“The purest treasure mortal times afford,” he managed to gasp, and coughed again, “is spotless reputation… And you know those Metoyer harpies across the street watch their neighbors like hawks. I won’t cause you to lose your school, dearest Athene—“ Another paroxysm racked him. “A pity there’s noplace we can meet in propriety at this hour of the night: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram. I suppose we could repair to the coffee-stand in the market, but at this hour—“ Two o’clock was just striking from the Cathedral, “—even La Violette will have packed up her kettle and gone home.”

“La Violette.” Rose’s grip tightened on the skinny arms as she spoke the name of the old coffee-seller who had brewed her elixir in the same corner of the market for forty years. “Of course! Here—!” She sprang to her feet, darted halfway down the steps that led to the street as a late-wandering fiâcre emerged from the thin mists. “Oh, it’s you, Alcide—“ From long residence she knew half the drivers in the French Town. “I know it’s late, but can you take one more fare? Bless you—”

She took Hannibal’s arm, and helped him limp down the steps to the street. “I insist,” she added, and dug two Mexican dollars from her reticule to slap into his palm, far more than the cost of a ride back to the Swamp. “Usquam iustitia est… even justice upon the Moon… praemia digna ferant.”

*

“Ah.” Old La Violette nodded, her wrinkled face like a dark rose-hip beneath a pink-and-blue tignon easily the size of a watermelon. “Li ’tite Mamzelle in the blue dress.” Steam from her tin barrow, with its bed of glowing charcoal, wreathed her face and drifted away among the chiaroscuro of lamp-light among the brick arches of the market.

In the daytime – even on Sunday (to the disgust of the American preachers) – the covered arcade that stretched down-river along the levee from the Place des Armes was the site of gay-colored chaos, barrows of apples and pears and Mexican oranges vivid against the velvety garnets and browns of yams and potatoes; market-women in gaudy head-cloths wailing the virtues of their onions and cauliflower; and everywhere, clay jars of oil, and bins and barrels and buckets of fish, shrimp, crabs brought up from the Gulf. With fall of night most of the marchandes had gone, leaving only scattered blots of leaves and peelings, and the occasional fish too stale to vend on the morrow. The shadows were blacker under the hanging oil-lamps, and the dresses of the women brighter.

But at the rough tables around La Violette’s stand – and those of the other coffee-sellers, pastry-women, vendors of pralines or pan dulce – men and women sat at all hours, sipping coffee, smoking, watching the passers-by.

“I was her sister,” said Philomène Pilchard, keeping her voice steady with an effort, and Rose saw the old woman’s glance rake the dwarf, perhaps identifying the fabric and color of her dress as the same, perhaps seeing an echo of Alys’s small stature in that of her sister, or a similarity in their faces or their beautiful brown eyes. “She has come to… misfortune.”

“We think she would meet a friend here,” said Rose, who was a regular customer of La Violette’s stand, known to her as a part of her life and her world. “He will not know what happened to her—”

The coffee-seller nodded. “He waited here last night,” she said. “Baptiste Mercier, the banker, that also owns the steamboat Mirielle and the cotton-press on Rue du Levee. They had a rendezvous, I think – he looked half a dozen times at his watch, before he left.” She nodded toward a man alone at a table near a woman selling the last bunches of dried lavender from a basket. The man looked at his watch again even as she spoke, and then around him, scanning the passers-by who were emerging, now, from late Mass and crossing to the market for a final gossip before going home.

Rose paid for two tin cups of La Violette’s brew, and the old lady slipped her a praline wrapped in newspaper, for lagniappe. Even before they reached the table the plain dark indigo of Philomène’s dress must have caught the gentleman’s eye, for he turned sharply in his chair, and Rose saw first the hope that flooded his face, and then how his grizzled eyebrows yanked together in consternation as he realized who Philomène had to be.

He rose as they approached the table, removed his hat. Anxiety in every line of his shoulders and back.

“Monsieur,” said Philomène in her careful French, and held out her little round hand with its stumpy, crooked fingers.

“Mamzelle.” He took it and bowed. “You must be Philomène.”

The woman’s eyes flooded with tears. She turned her face aside and whispered, “Oh, sir, I am so sorry—”

He pressed his gloved hand quickly to his mouth, his eyes also filling. Hands trembling, he nevertheless held a chair for her, and for Rose, who said, “M’sieu – Mercier? My name is Rose Janvier, and I’m afraid it is true. Mademoiselle Pilchard is dead. Murdered. Yesterday evening.”

He stared at her, aghast; a trim man of slightly under average height, Of course he would be drawn to one as petite as Alys… By the oil-lamp flickering overhead, the waxing moon sinking above the barren trees, she saw blue eyes, dark hair just slightly fluffed with gray, though his mustache was streaked with silver. A kind face, wrung now with sorrow and shock.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, as they sat. “I wish there was some other way for you to learn of this. But they’ll hide her body, conceal her death…”

And in a few words, she sketched for him the details of what the sisters were doing in New Orleans.

“Dear God,” whispered Mercier. “And I was going to ask her to marry me. I – I knew she was in the theater – even when first we met, in New York five years ago, I knew this of her. I was married then – my wife passed away three years ago. I wrote to her, you know…”

Philomène shook her head. “We never received a letter.” She wore a lace cap over her short-cropped hair, and it gave her a motherly air. “Three years ago… we were in England then, for nearly a year.” She fumbled a handkerchief from her reticule. “My dear Herr Mercier—”

“What happened? Murdered? Who would harm her? How do you know this, if this blackguard Tixall would conceal the deed—?”

“My servant saw it, through Professor Tixall’s telescope. She said the man who did it wore the make-up of the Moon men – to pass without comment, I am sure, should he encounter others of the cast in the grounds. But he was tall, my servant says, much taller than any of the men of the company. A thin man with long arms—“ During the day Rose had taken Mignot aside for as many details as she could glean, “—and his hair was black and curly. Does that…?”

In his eyes she saw that she didn’t need to go on.

“Dear God,” he whispered: grief, shock, recognition. “Dear God in Heaven.”

Rose was silent. There was no doubt whatever in his face as he looked from her to Philomène and back. “My stepson,” he said softly. “My stepson Jean-Louis.”

*

“He has a violent temper,” he explained, when he had fetched them all another cup of coffee from La Violette’s stand. “Like a spoilt and savage child. His mother doted on him, gave him whatever he wished. Since she has been gone I have… I have let him have his way. One grows tired of struggling, and he has no interest whatsoever in doing anything, save strolling along the levee, and gambling, and drinking in the afternoons. I know that everything I’ve built up – worked for – in my life is going to disappear when he takes control of it, but since my own son died in the cholera I… it has been difficult…”

He shook his head.

“My husband,” said Rose softly, “has said the same, of the days when he lost his first wife.”

The blue eyes met hers, briefly, and he sighed, and wiped them again. “He asked me, last week, if I had fallen in love. One of his gambling friends probably told him that when a man takes a renewed interest in life, starts to plan for the future again…” His face tensed, and he shook his head again, like a horse tormented by flies. “They may even have seen us together, here, or walking in the Place des Armes. Vile young blackguards. He has counted on his inheritance – borrowed against it, I know. Either for his gambling, or his clothes, or to buy himself books or a new telescope—”

“Telescope?” said Rose, startled. “This isn’t Jean-Louis Benndorf, is it? The one who’s been writing to the True American about Professor Tixall’s Observatory being a hoax?”

“His name is Benndorf,” agreed Mercier. “And yes, I’ve heard him rant himself into trembling rage, when people either won’t believe that – What’s the fellow’s name? Herschel? In South Africa or wherever it is? – won’t believe that he’s lying, or the newspaper is lying – or even that they simply don’t care. I can see him doing it,” he added, his voice sinking again, as if speaking to himself. “I can see him… But if your servant saw him, Madame Janvier—”

“My servant is a woman of color,” Rose replied gently. “Her word would carry no weight in court of law. And even were she as white as yourself, the man she saw was made up to look like a Moon man. No court in the country would convict your step-son on those grounds.”

“But I know—”

“No,” said Rose. “We may all of us hold true opinions, but without proof, the murder may just as well have happened on the Moon indeed.”

“Her body—”

“Will have been buried secretly. And would tell us nothing. Her killer wore a white shirt, my servant said, and the blood spilled over the sleeve and breast. But once the shirt is thrown away – and I will speak to those who know the rag-pickers and scavengers in your part of town, to see if they can find the garment – it could have belonged to anyone.”

Philomène’s small hand clenched on the table. “I will not leave it so! I will not let her go unavenged.”

“Nor I.” Mercier laid his hand over hers. “And it isn’t enough,” he added grimly, “simply to disinherit the young bastard to starve – which he will do, and quickly. But if there is no proof… There has to be some way of bringing this home to him.”

“There is,” said Rose. “Not this crime, but another crime.”

Both looked at her, faces fierce with a helpless anger.

“This is his first great crime,” said Rose, turning to Mercier. “Isn’t it? I don’t mean cheating at cards, or stealing money out of your desk, M’sieu, or signing your name to a bill. Real crime. No earlier trouble, no accusation—”

The banker shook his head.

“Then he’ll be afraid. Afraid that he missed something; afraid that somehow, someone learned of what he did; someone who can bring proof into the hands of the law. No one who can testify in court of law saw what he did last night. But I think it will be fairly easy to induce him to attack me, before witnesses – white witnesses – if he thinks himself safe and alone. I know a man in the City Guards who will believe me, who will help us—”

“Madame…” Mercier turned to stare at her in surprise. “To put yourself in danger… Why would you do this? For the sake of a woman whom you have never met? For the sake of people you have not known for an hour?”

Rose propped her spectacles more firmly onto her nose, and looked, for a moment, down into the coffee this man had bought for her – cold now, like the first cup. She had spoken her thought, which seemed to her the natural thing to do – and if all went well the danger would not be so very great. It took her a few moments to form what seemed to her needed no explanation.

At length she said, “Your friend – your sister, Fraulein Pilchard – was a stranger in a strange land, with no one to speak for her. No one to protect her, or to avenge her. In many ways she did live on the Moon, so far as men were concerned. She was not an American. She was a woman who made her living on the stage: someone men thought themselves free to use, kiss, buy – cheaply – ogle, comment about before her face as if she were deaf. And kill unavenged, as it turns out. Had she been killed in New York, or Havana, or any of the other places Professor Tixall has taken his Observatory, would the police seek out her killer?”

Philomène whispered, “I doubt it.”

“I am such a woman, here in New Orleans and in much of the United States, because of the color of my skin and the ancestry of my mother. My husband is such a man. I have a dear friend who is another such man, not because of his color but because of his poverty. Others also. The world needs more justice, M’sieu.”

She raised her eyes then, and met those of the graying man across the table. “And it seems to me – if you will excuse me speaking against your step-son and a white man – that I would feel safer personally, if there were one man fewer walking about the streets, who feels that he can kill with impunity. And I think you might feel safer,” she added, “among other things, if a man who feels that way were not your heir.”

Mercier’s blue eyes slitted. “He won’t be, from the moment my lawyer’s office opens in the morning—”

“It would be better to keep silent for the moment, M’sieu,” said Rose quietly. “Don’t let him know. Don’t let him even suspect. Rather, write a letter, as if to Mamzelle Alys, promising marriage… Has your step-son seen you today? Is there something of yours, something he would recognize, like a signet-ring, that you can give me? If I appear at your house late tomorrow afternoon, demanding to see you – you will be out, of course – letting your step-son know that I have proofs that the murder is known… If he indeed has done the crime, he will follow me when I get disgusted waiting for you, and return home after darkness has fallen. My friend in the City Guards will be waiting—”

Mercier was already pulling from his finger the gold signet that he wore. But as he reached to give it to Rose, Philomène put out a hand and took it: “No,” she said. “It will be better if he sees me at his step-father’s door. That way he will be in no doubt, that someone in the company knows what really happened, and has traced the deed to him.”

“I can’t—”

“My dear Fraulein—”

“You must. Please.” She tightened her hand over the ring when Rose would have taken it. Her beautiful eyes were wide with a bitter resolve. “I don’t fear this man. And it will work better. It will trap him. This is all that I care about.”

*

These “bi-pedal beavers” which the New York Sun claims Herschel has seen upon the Moon—Jean-Louis Benndorf had jeered in his letter to the True American –these “Vespertilio-homo” bat-people – could easily be counterfeited with simple stage-make-up on dwarfs or other misshapen or miniature people…

So Rose, at the reins of a rented fiâcre (and praying that she hadn’t forgotten how to drive a horse, having last done so – other than a hasty lesson from Hannibal that afternoon – in a farm-wagon when she was eighteen), wasn’t in the least surprised that M’sieu Mercier’s step-son took the bait. From her stand at the intersection of Rue St-Louis and Rue Bourbon on Monday evening she saw Philomène emerge from the Mercier townhouse, stiff with assumed impatience and clutching the satchel of “compromising” letters which she had proposed to sell to the absent banker. She signed for the fiâcre in which Hannibal was very conveniently passing, and the vehicle had barely reached the corner when a tall, gangly young man in a stylish coat emerged from the house and waved impatiently at Rose.

Rose quickened her horse to a trot – M’sieu Mercier had been at pains to rent animals with better mouths and better manners than the average hacks in town – and the young man scrambled in. “Follow that carriage,” he ordered. “Don’t lose them but don’t let them see you or it’ll be the worse for you.”

“Ya’suh.” Rose tugged on the brim of the miserable wide-brimmed hat that hid her pinned-up hair. Bedight in a pair of Hannibal’s old trousers and a superannuated coat purchased from a slop-shop, she guessed that she probably didn’t even need the false moustache that adorned her upper lip; Philomène had entered the Mercier townhouse a little before five, and it was now past six-thirty and pitch dark. The day had been overcast, sparing them all the complications of Philomène feigning sickness to participate in the trap. Even Professor Tixall couldn’t claim that his telescope would work through intermittent clouds. She guessed young Benndorf had no suspicion in any case that his driver was other than he should be; he jabbed her in the back with his cane as they approached the edge of the up-river Faubourg of St. Mary and snapped, “Get down and put out the lamps!”

“Might be dangerous, suh,” protested Rose in a boyish growl. “Moon’s goin’ in an’ outta the clouds—”

“Shut up and do it.” Benndorf struck her hard on the arm with the cane. “You can follow the lights of the cab ahead, can’t you?”

“Ya’suh.” Rubbing her arm, Rose complied, with a private hope that her fare would either be hanged for attempting to murder Philomène Pilchard or be shot by Lieutenant Shaw – her friend in the City Guards – while trying to escape.

“And don’t lose them!” added Benndorf angrily, when Rose climbed once more onto the box. “Are you stupid or just lazy? Keep up with them!”

“Ya’suh.” Or we’ll both break our necks when the horse goes into the ditch…

But the horse evidently had better eyes – and better sense – than either of the people in the carriage, for though it increased its pace to a trot it kept to the road, largely invisible to Rose on the box. She knew the road along the river was in reasonably good shape as far as the wood-yard at Livaudais Point, and the tiny blot of light up ahead – Hannibal’s fiâcre – showed no disposition to plunge into a ditch. Though the trees thickened to their right, the moon, waxing to full behind its veil of cloud-cover, put a sort of diffuse radiance in the sky by which it was possible to discern the leafless brush and trees of the levee, and the occasional landmark that told Rose they were nearing Waverley’s gate.

Sure enough, the light ahead ceased its movement, and Rose said, “Looks like they stoppin’, suh—”

“Keep your voice down, damn you!” Another whack with the cane. “Here.” A couple of coins were slapped into her palm.

“That’ll be a dollah—”

“Shut up and be glad to get that.” Benndorf’s voice was shrill with nerves as he scrambled down, and against the pale dirt of the road she could see his movements had the jerky swiftness of a man almost trembling with anticipation.

Rose wanted to tell him that if he wanted to be remembered as the man who’d taken a cab out to the site where a body was later found, he was doing a good job of it… But then, she supposed, Professor Tixall would be no more inclined to report Philomène’s murder than he’d been to report her sister’s. Bastard…

She turned the horse – carefully, in the narrow road – but didn’t need to drive far. She heard Benndorf striding swiftly through the long grass at the roadside, and guessed he wasn’t looking back. She re-lighted the lamps, hitched the reins around the brake-handle, and hurried after him, straining her eyes for the sight of the iron fence, and the small lane that led to the rear gate. Her mind timed Benndorf’s long strides, Philomène’s short ones; calculated the turnings of the overgrown path that led toward the overseer’s cottage. What if Tixall guessed there was something planned, something “up” tonight? In her very brief encounter with the man a week ago – bowing in the waiting-parlor to his ‘guests’ – he hadn’t impressed her as malicious, but she knew him to be a man who would conceal the murder of one of his cast members, for the sake of avoiding prosecution for fraud.

She slipped through the gate – which stood open – felt her way along the path. Wet branches slapped at her boots, vines tangled her feet.

If Tixall made trouble of any kind – fuss of any kind, noise of any kind – Benndorf was wound up enough to take fright, and then she, and Shaw, and Mercier, and Philomène would be back to planning how else they would trap the killer… who would have been alerted that someone was trying to trap him. She was well aware that all he had to do was hold his ground and deny everything.

Unless and until he made an attempt on Philomène, there was nothing they could—

A scream cut through the night. She heard Benndorf curse, and broke into a run – Shaw and Mercier were supposed to be waiting near the cottage but if something went wrong—

Crashing sounded in the undergrowth. Coming this way—

Filtered moonlight flickered on Benndorf’s curly hair, and Rose barked in as manly a voice as she could muster, “Get yo’ hands up, fucker!” despite the fact that she had no gun and wouldn’t have dared fire one if she had.

But Benndorf, panicked, jerked to a stop, wavered, then tried to plunge sideways into the foliage and tangled his feet in the creepers.

The men must have been right behind him. There was a great deal of thrashing and cursing, followed by Abishag Shaw’s scratchy, light-timbred voice saying, “Jean-Louis Benndorf, I arrest you for—none of that, now!” (A gasping cry of pain). “I arrest you for the attempted murder of Miss Philomène Pilchard—She all right back there?”

Hannibal called back something indistinctly from the darkness, and the glare of an uncovered dark-lantern flashed feebly across the serpent-snarl of bare branches. When Rose reached them, Shaw and Mercier had been joined by three other men, one of them a dwarf even shorter than Philomène and two barely five feet tall, all three grim-faced and all three armed with pistols. “This is a conspiracy!” Benndorf was shouting. “A plot by my enemies! I’ll have your job over this, and sue you personally, and sue the city—”

“I’m guessin’,” replied Shaw, his unbreakable grip around his captive’s arm and his face even more like a gargoyle in the jagged shadows, “your lawyer’s gonna have problems enough gettin’ you off a charge of attempted murder before witnesses. Not to speak of murder, since we did locate that shirt of yours—You was right, m’am,” he added, turning to Rose and tipping his greasy old hat with the barrel of the horse-pistol in his other hand. “One of M’sieu Mercier’s servants found it in the trash an’ sold it to a rag-an’-bone dealer: there was the blood all over the sleeve, an’ brown make-up stains an’ crepe hair an’ what-all all over the collar.”

He turned politely away, and spit a stream of tobacco-juice into the darkness. “Juries ain’t supposed to convict on circumstantial evidence,” he added, bowing again as Hannibal and Philomène appeared from the jungle of leaves, “but they do it all the time.”

“It’s a lie!” Benndorf screamed. “My step-father hates me! He has always hated me! He’d say anything to rob me of my rights!”

“What rights?” asked Mercier quietly. “The right to live off my money after your mother passed away? The right to keep me from finding a woman who could have made me happy?”

“I have a right to that money! After all the help I’ve been to you! You can’t cut me out for some circus whore—”

“Let’s go,” sighed Shaw. “Tomorrow we can—”

“Here,” demanded a stout little man, pushing past Hannibal and Philomène out of the darkness. “What’s going on?” He held a lantern in one hand, a stout stick in the other, and his gray hair – neatly pomaded when Rose had last seen him, during his little introductory lecture to his ‘guests’ in the Waverley parlor – now ruffled up around his pink face. He was trying to look indignant, she thought, but in fact there was fright in his dark eyes. “This is private property! The Observatory is closed this evening, and I will not hesitate to – uh—”

“What’d you do with her body?” Shaw spoke over his shoulder without loosening his grip on Benndorf’s arm.

Professor Tixall gulped, and would have been seen to blench had the lighting been better. “I—uh—Body? I have no idea what you—”

“Alys Pilchard. Little gal what was murdered in your house night ‘fore last—AN’ which you never reported…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about…” He looked wildly from Philomène to the three diminutive men and his voice tailed off.

“We ain’t even gonna go into that set-up you got in that ballroom of your’n.” Shaw nodded in the direction of the main house, the great dark box of the telescope looming against the inky sky. “Nor what you’re claimin’ it to be. But concealin’ the body of a murder victim – no matter who killed the poor girl – is makin’ yourself an accessory after the fact, an’ I’m sure that warn’t your intent, now, was it? Completely aside from the disrespect of the thing, an’ the grief to Miss Pilchard’s family.”

“I—we—That is, of course I wanted to have her decently buried as quickly as…”

“Without benefit of botherin’ the coroner nor an undertaker? Right kindly of you, Professor.” He spit again. “Hadn’t been for M’am Janvier here hearin’ about the killin’, I ‘xpect you’d have just sort of dropped her in the river when nobody was lookin’, wouldn’t you?”

Philomène made a noise of anguish, and Professor Tixall said hastily, “No, no, of course not! She is… She is buried here in the garden—”

“If you would be so obliging,” said Mercier, “as to show me the place tomorrow, I’ll arrange to send men from the undertaker’s.”

He turned to Rose, and bowed over her hand. “Thank you,” he went on quietly. “For having the justice – and the courage – to make sure that one whom you didn’t even know was not simply treated as a stranger in a strange land. The least I can do – the only thing I can do – is to give her a proper interment in my family’s tomb. Where she would have had a place, in time, at my side.”

*

On the following morning, however, the undertaker’s men had to find Alys Pilchard’s shallow grave themselves: easy enough to do, for the earth had not yet settled over it, and on the last day of 1835, Rose was one of the few who attended the little acrobat’s simple funeral. Alys had been found, grotesquely, in the makeup and leaf-dress of the Vespertilio-homo of the Moon, but because of the harsh chill, her body had barely begun to decompose. The torn and broken condition of her fingernails, coupled with the raked gashes on Jean-Louis Benndorf’s left hand, clinched his conviction of her murder. He was hanged at the new penitentiary in Baton Rouge in April.

The undertaker’s men had to hunt for the grave because Professor Tixall had vanished in the night, taking with him only the ingenious angled mirrors with which he’d given his customers a view down into the ballroom, and abandoning sets, make-up, three cases of printed advertising, his entire cast (whom he had not paid) two blue-painted goats and four armadillos. Within a few weeks, newspapers arrived from New York and other cities reporting the fact that the entire story of Dr. Herschel’s lunar observations had been a gigantic hoax, written by one of the Sun’s editors for the purpose of selling newspapers.

Rose’s Uncle Veryl, a scientist like herself, adopted the four armadillos, to the utter disgust of his cats.

Most of the former inhabitants of the Moon returned to New York, where enough theaters and “museums of curiosities” existed that they could find work. Philomène Pilchard, however, remained in New Orleans, Baptiste Mercier having offered her the position of housekeeper. In 1839 they were married.

While clearing his step-son’s things out of his house after Benndorf’s trial, Mercier offered Rose the young man’s telescope, which she refused – with a good deal of regret, since it was better than her own. “Still,” she said, as she walked home with Hannibal and her husband Benjamin from Alys Pilchard’s funeral, “I could never really have brought myself to use it. It’s not that I think I’d see ghosts whenever I look through it, or anything – but… Well, I’d really rather not.” She tightened her hand slightly over Benjamin’s arm. He had returned the previous night from Mandeville, where Clélie Jumon had been safely delivered of twin sons.

“Commodum ex iniuria sua nemo habere debet,” said Hannibal. “Though I hardly think anyone would seriously imagine you went through all this simply to acquire Mr. Benndorf’s telescope.”

“No.” Rose half-smiled at the notion. “Even so…”

“Even so,” the fiddler agreed.

And it would be a long time, Rose knew, before she pointed her own telescope at the Moon without at least for a moment searching for the cliffs of the Ruby Colosseum, the woods where the bi-pedal beavers dwelt, and the sapphire temple of the gentle bat-people of the Moon.

As for Sir John Herschel – ensconced in South Africa observing the stars of the Southern Hemisphere – he was only informed much later that his name and works had been used as the foundation of a hoax, and was, to his great annoyance, plagued by both scientists and curiosity seekers about his discoveries on the Moon for many years.

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. She currently concentrates on horror (a vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, but the various fantasy series she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s for Del Rey still hold a strong place in her heart.

For this reason, in 2009 Barbara started writing the “Further Adventures” series - short tales about the further adventures of the characters from her Del Rey fantasy series: the Darwath series centering on the Keep of Dare, the Unschooled Wizard stories about the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers, the Winterlands tales about the scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest, the Windrose Chronicles which recount the adventures of exiled archmage Antryg Windrose trying to make his way - with the assistance of his computer-programmer partner Joanna - in Los Angeles in the 1980s. To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War; the stories that she has written for various Sherlock Holmes anthologies; and a couple of entertaining stand-alones.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

Table of Contents

- Death on the Moon

- About the Author