CHAPTER 106 - Hound Dog

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own

Louisiana. Sans Souci.

Sunday, 21 September 2008.

Lucia Lancet pondered the oak allée’s fused branches while failing to discern the purpose of her grandmother’s summons, wondering why they looked like the ribs of something long dead.

A few days ago, Mathias had telephoned and informed her that “Your grandmother has been asking after you,” and then, after a pause she had learnt to fear: “Best come Sunday, Miss Lucia. She won’t be at service.”

So she came.

The public might wonder why Sony’s world-famous pop princess feared a woman who lived an isolated life away from the heart of modern music—Lucia was not a part of that wonderment, just as the CEOs of Warner, Universal, Sony BMG, EMI, and all the labels worth a damn didn’t.

Her great-grandfather had proved to the world that he had dreamed up half the riffs of American Popular music, and a quarter of the British ones, and the Estate had yet to lose a claim since 1959 because of the precedents they had set building their first case. The Richards Case remained how a record clears a sample even today, and Delphine, a generational songstress in her own right before she became the family’s lawyer-in-chief, had turned that record into influence.

Under her blessing, young musicians could use those very riffs, provided they paid their pound of flesh—and she had also provided them with the support and affirmation they needed to flourish. And in 2008, these men and women were now legends in their own right.

If they wanted their protégés to coast on their success, then they had to take Delphine’s calls on short notice, or be denied a vital component of their craft.

Mathias, Delphine’s butler and an unofficial “uncle” to Lucia, was beside the gravel driveway before her car even stopped. He took the bags from Bennet, who allowed it, after which Lucia was handed over from driver to butler like a prized turkey for Thanksgiving.

“In the music room.” Mathias held the door and said no more.

The architecture of the plantation house paid homage to its original history by keeping the inside and outside sounds segregated. One moment Lucia was being browbeaten by heat and cicadas, then suddenly, she was in another world, where the breeze was cool, the outside muffled, and she could hear her own heartbeat.

She crossed the gallery. Forty gold records watched her go.

She stopped.

There was a space marked for one more now.

The House of the Rising Sun.

It was the single that Lucia had brought over three months ago.

Suddenly, Lucia felt a chill travel from the floor, up her bare legs, and into her gut, making her queasy. The shutters were drawn, as they always were in the hot and humid Louisiana morning.

She pushed open the door.

Delphine Richards sat in cool emerald silk with both hands closed on the arms of the chair, like the witch queen of an old palace, her bony body at rest.

A song was playing, on low volume, but also on loop.

O Blow, My Bully Boys, Blow

The mistress of Sans Souci was staring at the little machine as if it had spoken out of turn, and the chorus came round, answering the call, over and over.

Delphine’s knuckles went the colour of the keys on the piano nobody played.

Lucia did not go in.

Last time, she had come home with bruises.

Her father had brought her ice cream as a rare treat against the advice of her private chef. Her mother had asked her to forgive an old woman too old to change.

This time… she knew better than to be within arm’s reach.

The last verse went by. The ship went down. The chorus came a final time with nothing left to carry, and the disc spun.

A pair of gnarled hands with long, once-elegant fingers clicked on a remote.

The music died.

Delphine Richards let go of the chair, after which Lucia watched something impossible happen. Delphine’s frown unwound until it climbed out of its gorge and made something that could only be a bitter smile.

“Shut that door behind you, Lucia. You know the heat gets everywhere.”

Lucia shut it, turned, then curtsied, then stood with her hands behind her back, like she was presenting herself for a military drill.

For the visit, she wore a black and white one-piece, quarter-sleeve, just above the knees, and sensible, the retro type Delphine would have worn in her heyday.

“Mmm…” Delphine made an obscene noise, somewhere between a spit and a chortle. “Now, that is a good riposte.”

“Riposte, grandmother?” Lucia turned her head.

“Yes, your friend has put an old dog back in her place…” Her grandmother coughed. Lucia came closer, wondering if she should help the old woman. “How many upstarts have I buried in this business, and for how long… Mmm?”

Delphine gathered herself. “This is the first time someone’s jumped into the grave, then dug herself out by selling the dirt.”

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When she met her grandmother’s eyes once more, Lucia knew a critique was coming.

“You cannot buy what that girl has. Lord knows Sony has tried to buy it for you. We’ve tried.”

Lucia took the insult the way she had been raised since birth, in the solar plexus, with her hands behind her back, her fingers knotted.

“It was a mistake.” Delphine looked at her a moment longer, then away. “I took the French girl for what Trent Davis sends down here every few years—some pretty little thing with a script in her mouth and a lawyer holding her coat…”

Lucia waited. Her grandmother had never admitted to being wrong. Also, Eppie’s Californian…

“I guess I was wrong. The song’s the rebuke. The song… cannot lie.”

Lucia felt her head spin.

Her grandmother looked at her again, a little sadly now, and it made Lucia’s chest constrict.

“Your great-grandmother had it.”

“Old folks said the devil had put his mouth on Mama when she was a girl. Church folks said the Lord had. Mama never once said which one, but I knew it was both—every Sunday morning Mama would stand up in church with no sleep and no accompaniment, and the whole congregation moved like the sea, and the pews would undulate with the bodies answering her call. Then come next week, Daddy would take her voice down to the crossroads every Saturday night and sell it.” Delphine turned a great gold band on her finger once.

“Your friend… has the voice of the crossroads,” Delphine said.

Lucia had no idea what to say. She had known her great-grandmother as a photograph on the landing—a slim woman in a church hat, unsmiling, black on black, unimpressive visually. What made her hurt wasn’t the portrait, but that Euphemia Fontaine had somehow convinced her grandmother with a single song, while she had… never, not with all her awards, and all her accolades.

“Strange how thieves always wear good suits,” Delphine continued, in a slow, droning rant to the middle distance, one that Lucia was obligated to hear. “I’ve hunted down forty bastards who stole Daddy’s songs. Fifty years, and never the first one, the man at the table. The original sin…”

To say Lucia was confused, confused and hurt, would be an understatement.

“Grandma…” Lucia heard how unsure she sounded, and knew that Delphine hated softness. “Great-granddaddy wrote those songs, didn’t he?”

“Oh sure he did.” Delphine’s jaws were set. “Bailey Ray Richards. The most recorded Black man in the history of American Jazz, they will tell you. And the woman standing one step behind him in every photograph was his muse.”

The old woman’s voice did not rise.

“Muse my ass. He took Mama’s songs, child. Took them to New Orleans, took them to Chicago, put a horn on them, and his friends called him a genius. He built a house here where you can see the sun rise from the lawn. My brother built an empire on top of it. And I have hounded down the scoundrels who stole from us. All except one.” The gold band turned again, then, to Lucia’s horror, she smiled at her.

“You like your inheritance, Lucia Lancet? My daughter’s face, the Lancet fortune, and forty gold frames from Mr Richards himself. Look at your face—it’s a work of art, my dear. The Good Lord has been patient with your great-granddaddy a long while; I wonder why.”

Lucia found herself sitting on the piano stool.

She did not remember doing it.

Why was her grandmother saying this?

Was it because of Eppie?

Because of a sea shanty?

What did it have to do with House of the Rising Sun?

“I don’t understand,” she confessed, and it was true.

Delphine Richards did not explain. Instead—her grandmother closed her eyes, and drew a breath the old body did not seem to have room for, and sang.

It was small. Unaccompanied. A woman’s threadbare voice worn down to the grain.

There is a house in New Orleans

They call it the Rising Sun,

And it’s been the ruin of many a poor girl,

And me, oh God, I’m one.

Lucia stopped breathing. The song was… so sad.

And the melancholy, the bitterness, the anguish… was so clarified.

If I had only listened to what my mama said,

I’d be at home today.

But bein’ so young and foolish, my Lord,

Let a gambler lead me astray.

Her grandmother’s husky voice trailed away. Lucia had memorised the whole song. The verse that followed was about the baby sister, the advice, the hope that the next girl would not follow in the singer’s footsteps into the same pitfall.

“Rising Sun… is not about a house, child,” Delphine mumbled in Lucia’s general direction, her eyes still focused on something unseen. “It’s about a man, a gambling man, who took a girl a long way from home and left her with nothing of her own to her name. Mama sang the song of the crossroads to her little girl in Daddy’s parlour. He sat there and nodded along, and then he took that too.”

Lucia opened her mouth to speak.

How strange it was that, at nineteen, she was rediscovering the root of her family history, that her grandmother’s rage in June wasn’t the product of senility or age. Had her mother known? Was that why her mother had simply sighed and asked her to forgive her grandmother?

“He… took the song?”

“He was a habitual taker.” Delphine snorted derisively. “But our mystery remains. To my knowledge, Daddy never ‘sold’ that one. Never put it on wax. It was the one thing of hers he kept in the house, and I had always assumed that, finally, shame overcame greed.”

“And Eppie has the exact same song?” Lucia asked.

“Identical in many ways, but different arrangement,” Delphine said. “I’ll have to hear it for myself. Bring me the girl, Lucia. I want to look at her.”

Lucia stared.

Bring Eppie?

What was she, the music police?

What if Eppie didn’t want to come?

Delphine must have sensed her hesitation, because she reached for the arm of the chair and got herself upright, and permitted no one to help. “Mathias.”

The butler was in the doorway. He had been at the threshold, out of sight, since the CD player stopped.

Delphine sighed.

“Bring me your friend,” she repeated, and Lucia heard the whole house creak and her own bones groan. “No lawyers. Ask Davis. Ask Curon. The girl comes alone; Lucia will chaperone.” Delphine Richards looked at Lucia, as if she might finally wring some use from her grandchild, then turned to her butler. “Mathias, we are going to show that young lady some Southern hospitality.”

“Yes, Miss Delphine,” Mathias said, then left.

Lucia sat very still on the piano stool and understood that while she had not been dismissed, she was no longer needed, and found her eyes warm, her lips trembling and the nausea in her chest out of control.