First Adventure, The Case of the Missing Merchant, Session 004
Perusing the Menu
This is an emergent narrative; this story is the retrospective recounting of a TTRPG Session that involved emergent play in an open world.
Opening Narration
To properly understand the Crescent City, a man must first come to terms with her cooking— an intoxicating alchemy that weighs on the stomach like a beautifully told lie. It is a savory and unruly parade of refined French pretension anchored by a dark, slow-cooked roux, sharp Spanish pepper biting with fiery cayenne, the undeniable genius of the African brought to bear through the okra pod, and a pinch of Choctaw swamp-root in the form of ground sassafras filé thrown in to thicken the plot. They call it gumbo, or perhaps jambalaya, but in truth, it is a brilliant distraction. The spices and the heavy roux are piled on with a heavy hand, designed by some native instinct to please the senses and politely mask the scent of the general moral decay that bubbles up through the floorboards the moment the sun gets hot.
Naturally, the consumption of this heavy fare has been elevated to high theater, particularly across Canal Street in the American Sector. Take a place like the Café des Négociants , where the heavy wrought-iron gates keep the rattling dray carts at bay and the creeping jasmine attempts a valiant, losing battle against the smell of the docks. Here, beneath the canvas awnings, the midday meal is a choreographed shield. Amidst the polite clinking of crystal and the pouring of pitch-black chicory coffee , the city’s cotton brokers, carpetbaggers, and spies carve up the post-war world. They hide their brutal, cutthroat agendas behind crisp linen napkins, offering a gentleman’s smile while slipping a knife into a competitor’s ribcage between the soup and the fish courses.
And so, our varied assembly of investigators finds themselves sitting at one of these very iron tables, having just scraped the bottom of the bowl. They have spent the morning swallowing not just the heavy roasted duck , but the sanitized, highly polished lies fed to them by the senior staff over at L’Agence Commerciale du Croissant. The polite pleasantries of the morning have officially run their course, and indigestion could begin to set in. The meal is done, the coffee is cooling and now comes the unseemly business of scraping past the societal grease to see what bones are buried in the pot. It is time to peruse a different sort of menu, one consisting of unstated secrets, empty safes, missing files, and the dangerous business of auditing a ghost.
Lunch, 1:20 PM February 2, 1866 – Digesting the Morning’s Events (Caleb, Lars, Dr. Fischer, Madeleine, Leopold)
Situated directly across the bustling thoroughfare from No. 42 Carondelet Street, this establishment caters specifically to the bankers, cotton brokers, and maritime adjusters of the American Sector. The street-facing facade is a modest, whitewashed brick wall pierced by a set of heavy wrought-iron gates. These gates open into a deep, shaded interior courtyard, providing a highly desirable al fresco dining experience insulated from the deafening rattle of drayage carts.
On the way to the Café, Caleb asked Lars if he could share what he had learned the night before. Lars assented, stating that would be fine. As they settled in, the party discussed the morning’s events and the state of the investigation. They all agreed that Adrien-Luc’s business trip to Galveston in mid-November 1865 seemed to precipitate some break in his behavior, which escalated until his disappearance. Leopold pointed out that they should determine what that trip was about, and Madeleine emphasized that they should really prioritize that lead. They all agreed that a trip to Galveston was out of the question at present, and Lars and Caleb shared a private, cynical chuckle, acknowledging an unspoken in-joke regarding their own grim history in that territory. “Nothing good ever happened to me in Texas,” Lars chuckled.
Caleb leaned in, his massive frame casting a shadow over the wrought-iron table, and briefed the group on his grueling nocturnal excursion into the Irish Channel. He detailed his tracking of the Creole prostitute, Coralie, to the smoky taproom of Jacob Alexander’s Coffee House. For the price of a five-dollar bribe, she had painted a grim picture of Adrien-Luc’s final days: the Frenchman had been sweating profusely, intensely paranoid, and heavily under the influence of narcotics, throwing money around with manic desperation. Crucially, Caleb revealed the geographic source of this degradation, explaining that the missing merchant procured his laced absinthe and cocaine from a hollow-cheeked Faro dealer, who operated out of a sagging weatherboard joint called The Black Cypress in the Faubourg Trémé.
As the implications of Caleb’s waterfront excursion settled over the table, Leopold Schuyler withdrew the torn, crumpled half-sheet of high-quality French stationery he and Caleb had extracted from beneath a damaged stair tread at the agency. The antiquarian laid out the explicit, written instructions they had uncovered, which directed an unknown person or persons to systematically clear all documents dating from April 1862 to the present day. The party quietly discussed the highly specific, targeted terminology within the purge order, noting the commands to look for and remove any files referencing “Special Transfer Cargos,” “Locally Manifested Materials,” and logistical information regarding “that Steamer”.
Leopold pointed out a distinct physical peculiarity in the elegant, left-handed script: a severe, rhythmic, neurological hand tremor left unwittingly on the page by the author, and also pointed out this script was written with a left hand. This unsettling anomaly was compounded by the second document they had salvaged—an original 1864 cargo manifest authorizing a bulk shipment of “locally manifested mining tools” bound directly for Veracruz. The group debated the highly unusual authorizing signature at the bottom of the page; bypassing standard executive approval, the manifest was signed simply and cryptically by “La Lavandière,” or “The Washerwoman”. Both the note and the signature were in the same handwriting with the same tics.
With the table cleared of their midday repast and the intelligence laid bare, Lars marshaled the group, establishing a multi-pronged itinerary for the remainder of the afternoon.
First, Dr. Matthias Fischer and Lars would return to the sweltering third-floor sample room to conduct a highly delicate follow-up interview with Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau. During the morning triage, the young, aristocratic Creole clerk had blushed violently and completely fractured when questioned about Adrien-Luc’s erratic late-November behavior. Dr. Fischer’s clinical eye had definitively marked him as harboring an unseemly, deeply embarrassing truth that required careful, private extraction away from the prying ears of the bullpen.
Simultaneously, Madeleine and Leopold were tasked with handling Henri Broussard. The sharp-eyed, barefoot Creole office boy clearly possessed valuable street-level secrets, but Lars knew the tough kid required a different sort of transactional leverage to open up. The elegant Madeleine and the refined antiquarian planned to escort the fast-moving courier out of the stifling agency to a nearby street vendor. By purchasing him a candy apple, they hoped to employ a disarming, generous approach, utilizing their high-society grace to probe the youth further and loosen his guarded tongue.
Finally, Caleb Grayson was assigned the most precarious physical task. The methodical junior clerk, Arthur Penhaligon, had promised to leave a highly incriminating personal file containing the mismatched cargo manifest weights sitting exposed on the edge of his sloped mahogany standing desk. Caleb would have to navigate the bustling ground-floor clerical bullpen, quietly securing these raw inventory tallies right under the nose of the strict, ink-stained overseer Auguste Landry and the eager office gossip, Samuel Higgins.
With the immediate business at the commercial front concluded, the group made a plan for the evening and coming night.
Madeleine Mercier remained deeply unsettled by the unprecedented, fluid nature of her morning vision—a terrifying, real-life nightmare of a leering, hollowed-out Adrien-Luc that had violently assaulted her senses. Confused by how her “Eye” had behaved so differently, she planned to seek sanctuary and answers at the restricted Ursuline Academy archives located at the corner of Chartres and Ursulines Streets. She intended to research these phenomena directly. After completing her research, she intended to head home to the Prytania Street villa.
Caleb Grayson, carrying the heavy physical toll of his morning sparring and anticipating a grueling agenda for the evening, needed a secure place to recuperate. Accepting Lars’s offer of hospitality, Caleb planned to take Lars’ key and return to the office at No. 18 Carondelet Street. Lars had explicitly encouraged the former cavalryman to help himself to the food in his lodgings, noting as an aside that the empty transom attic space was available for his use at any time to rest.
Dr. Matthias Fischer resolved to return to his own combined practice and residence at No. 128 Canal Street. The Austrian alienist remained clinically unconvinced by the narrative of Adrien-Luc’s mental breakdown, knowing such a sudden, isolated descent into acute mania defied all medical logic. From his office, he planned to draft and dispatch a letter via steamer mail to his academic colleagues in Europe, inquiring specifically regarding historical or clinical incidents of similar sudden manic descents.
Leopold Schuyler played the polite gentleman, publicly stating to the rest of the party that he was heading home for the afternoon. Privately, the antiquarian’s mind was racing with the threat of the aggressive enquirers in the Hotel St. Charles lobby the previous day. He plotted to hire a street runner to deliver a note to the underworld fence, Étienne “Tinny” Boudreaux. By “warning” Tinny about the Wells Fargo men aggressively asking around for “Cumberbatch Santiago,” Leopold hoped to bait the massive fixer into revealing any sightings or intelligence he might possess regarding any pursuers.
Lars Prittwitz would remain behind at the sweltering offices of L’Agence Commerciale du Croissant. Armed with the raw inventory tallies quietly secured from junior clerk Arthur Penhaligon’s desk, the INA surveyor intended to correlate the numbers and conduct a formal audit of the secured agency files and records.
Once their individual tasks were complete, Caleb and Lars had agreed to follow up on the intelligence Caleb had extracted the previous evening. They planned to depart from Lars’s office before the streetcars shut down at 9:00 PM to investigate the possible source of Adrien-Luc’s cocaine at The Black Cypress Social Club.
Inadvertent Eavesdropping and the Waiter’s Information
While the party finalized their logistics, the cafe hummed with the quiet, high-stakes commerce of the American Sector. Dr. Fischer, sitting with his back near a waiter’s station, casually monitored the ambient noise of the courtyard. His sharp hearing pierced the clatter of silver and crystal, catching a hushed exchange between the impeccably postured Maître d’, Julian Villeret, and a deferential young Irish waiter named Thomas O’Connor.
Fischer overheard the Maître d’ instructing the waiter to leave the gate open at closing, along with a spread of bread, cheese, and wine, because “that man will be back again”. When the waiter clarified if it was the same man from December 23rd, the Maître d’ laughed and mocked him, “What are you, the caretaker?” They both laughed, but Dr. Fischer felt the Maître d’ was essentially underlining that the waiter should mind his own business.
Fischer quietly rose from the table and approached the young waiter. Employing flawless diplomacy, the Austrian doctor engaged Thomas in a hushed, discreet tone that completely bypassed the rest of the staff.
The smooth approach broke the waiter’s professional silence. Thomas explicitly recounted that on the night before Joyeux Noël, a fifty-dollar bribe had been paid to keep the courtyard open and unlit long past midnight to accommodate a local “chess club”. Crucially, the waiter described the man who paid the bribe: a pale, unassuming European speaking precise French, afflicted with a rhythmic tremor in his left hand, directly corroborating the trembling penmanship Leopold had identified on the torn purge order earlier that morning.
The Revised Itinerary
Dr. Fischer returned to the table and relayed the interesting intelligence. Lars immediately connected the dots, noting that the dark, shaded courtyard of the Café des Négociants offered a perfect, secluded vantage point to surveil the front doors of L’Agence Commerciale du Croissant across the street.
In light of this development, the party rapidly amended their evening plans. While Lars and Caleb still intended to hit the Trémé, Dr. Fischer and Leopold volunteered to meet a block up from Carondelet Street at 9:00 PM. From the shadows, they would observe the café to see exactly what was occurring that evening, if anything.
With their dual-pronged evening operations set, the investigators agreed to reconvene the following morning for breakfast at Sumner’s Mercantile Café, located at No. 120 Common Street in the American Sector. As they returned to L’Agence Commerciale du Croissant is was 2:30 PM.
2:45 PM, Friday, February 2, 1866: Interviewing Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau (Lars and Dr. Fischer)
Having established their operational plan, Lars Prittwitz and Dr. Matthias Fischer returned to the sweltering, dust-moted third-floor sample room of L’Agence Commerciale du Croissant. Their target was Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the young, aristocratic Creole clerk who had previously blushed violently and completely fractured when questioned about Adrien-Luc’s erratic late-November behavior. Dr. Fischer’s clinical eye had already definitively marked the clerk as harboring an unseemly, deeply embarrassing truth.
Recognizing the fragile 19th-century social decorum at play, Lars and Dr. Fischer coordinated their approach. When Charbonneau entered the room, Lars offered a polite greeting, introduced the doctor, and then deliberately excused himself. Stepping out into the hall, Lars closed the heavy oak door but remained positioned just outside, quietly listening to the exchange. He had wisely advised the Austrian alienist that absolute privacy was the best strategy for a man crippled by social mortification.
Alone with the clerk, Dr. Fischer employed a masterpiece of clinical diplomacy and psychology. Speaking with a delicate, soothing tone, the doctor bypassed Charbonneau’s aristocratic defenses by framing Comtesse Élodie as the true, tragic victim of her husband’s disappearance. He gently offered that any information the clerk possessed, no matter how distasteful, could help save the noblewoman from further suffering.
The empathetic, “noble” justification worked flawlessly. Charbonneau, his fragile pride protected by the doctor’s discretion, finally broke his silence. He stammered out a long, breathless confession regarding the proprietor. He explained that Adrien-Luc had been keeping highly irregular hours ever since returning from a trip to Texas. The merchant had become impossible to reach for business matters, causing severe friction with the strict bullpen overseer, Auguste Landry, who was furious over missing signatures on vital forms.
Then, Charbonneau recounted the specific, humiliating incident. He told Dr. Fischer that after seeing Adrien-Luc arrive at the agency at 10:30 AM on December 3, 1865, he had ventured upstairs to the executive office to secure those necessary signatures. Finding the heavy oak door slightly cracked, the young clerk had opened it.
Charbonneau’s face flushed deep crimson as he confessed what he saw: Adrien-Luc, standing at his desk with his wall safe hanging open and its contents apparently dumped into a valise, was openly seeking a solitary pleasure in the office. Mortified by the vulgar, manic display, Charbonneau had quietly pulled the door shut and fled downstairs, telling no one. However, the clerk was now consumed by guilt; Adrien-Luc had not returned to the office the following day and had not been seen since.
Trembling, Charbonneau begged Dr. Fischer for absolute, ironclad discretion regarding his testimony.
Dr. Fischer immediately promised that his clinical confidentiality was absolute. Relieved, Charbonneau admitted his deepest fear: he was terrified of being forced to testify about the perverse incident in a public forum, dreading the social ridicule and personal mortification it would bring upon his family name.
However, in an attempt to be transparent, Dr. Fischer made a severe, unexpected miscalculation. Misreading the clerk’s fragile state, the doctor honestly replied that while public testimony shouldn’t be necessary, one could never be certain if there were criminal connections involved in the disappearance.
The mere mention of “criminal connections” shattered the young aristocrat’s composure entirely. Charbonneau was instantly mortified all over again, his reaction dropping to a hard, terrified neutrality. Visibly shaken by the prospect of being dragged into a police investigation, he abruptly begged off the remainder of the interview and lunged for the door.
Out in the hallway, Lars heard the sudden scuffle and the heavy thump of footsteps. Startled by the abrupt end to the interrogation, he had to scramble away from the doorframe to avoid being caught eavesdropping as Charbonneau bolted from the room.
Once the panicked clerk had descended the stairs, Lars slipped back into the sample room. He immediately pressed Dr. Fischer, asking if Charbonneau’s reaction to the phrase “criminal connections” betrayed any indication that the clerk himself was actually involved in anything criminal. Dr. Fischer firmly assured Lars that there was absolutely no indication of guilt; the young man was simply paralyzed by the fear of social scandal.
Visibly relieved that the clerk wasn’t a compromised asset, Lars allowed himself a wry smile. He lightly teased the brilliant Austrian alienist over his clumsy, “amateur detective” mishandling of the interview’s conclusion. Despite the awkward exit, both men agreed that the vital intelligence had been secured, and no lasting harm had been done to their investigation.
2:45 PM, Friday, February 2, 1866: Interviewing Henri Broussard (Madeleine and Leopold)
While Lars and Dr. Fischer navigated the delicate aristocratic pride of Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, Madeleine Mercier and Leopold Schuyler positioned themselves near the dispatch alcove at the rear of L’Agence Commerciale du Croissant. They waited patiently until the sharp-eyed, barefoot Creole office boy, Henri Broussard, returned from a waterfront errand, his feet stained with the mud of the paved streets.
As the youth dropped his satchel, Samuel Higgins, the eager office gossip, intercepted him. Higgins pointed toward the elegant Lady and the refined antiquarian, instructing the boy to cooperate fully with whatever the distinguished guests required before promptly turning on his heel and leaving them alone.
Stepping forward, Madeleine took the lead. Recognizing that the boy was a street-smart survivor, she nonetheless adopted a soft, maternal approach, treating the hardened youth somewhat like a little boy. She offered to buy him a nice candy apple from a street vendor outside so they could converse privately away from the stifling heat of the bullpen.
Henri, despite being only fourteen years old, lived essentially as a grown man, navigating the brutal New Orleans waterfront to financially support his family. He possessed a strong, pragmatic will and was naturally inclined to bristle at being patronized.
However, Madeleine’s execution was an absolute masterclass in high-society grace. Utilizing her innate cultural cache and her striking physical beauty, she entirely bypassed his street-hardened defenses.
Henri looked up at her, entirely disarmed by the elegant Creole Belle. “You are very beautiful, and I like you,” the youth stated with absolute, unvarnished honesty. He then turned his calculating gaze to Leopold. Rather than showing deference, the boy extended a calloused, ink-stained hand, shaking the antiquarian’s hand firmly. “I don’t know you, I am Henri,” he declared.
Despite his insistence that he was a working man, the offer of a rare indulgence won out. “I like candy apples,” he admitted, agreeing to leave the agency with them.
The trio shifted their location to a quiet, shaded bench on the wooden banquette a few storefronts up Carondelet Street, situating themselves comfortably near a vendor’s cart. While Madeleine sat with the boy as they ate their candy apples, Leopold stood casually nearby. The antiquarian feigned disinterest, appearing to inspect the street traffic, but in reality, he was actively eavesdropping on the conversation and maintaining a strict, protective overwatch against any lurking informants.
Between bites of the sugar-coated apple, Henri proved his immense value. He looked at Madeleine with a completely earnest expression. “You are a nice lady, and I like you,” he reiterated, before casting a sideways glance at Leopold. “I know ‘not listening man’ is really listening, but that’s ok, that’s his job”.
Having established the ground rules, the youth provided an exhaustive, highly detailed account of the night before Joyeux Noël (December 23rd).
Henri explained that he had been forced to make a late delivery back to the agency—an imposition he described as “ridiculous” given the hour. He had navigated to the back alley to drop the parcel through the mail slot, noting that the agency was completely dark and locked, as it was well past ten o’clock.
Just as he finished, he heard a heavy noise. Relying on his survival instincts, Henri retreated deeper into the shadows of the back alley and watched. Two workmen arrived pulling a heavy dray cart. To the boy’s surprise, one of the men produced a brass key, unlocking the heavy doors and entering the empty building.
Henri stayed hidden, tracking their movements. After twenty to thirty minutes, the men emerged carrying heavy wooden boxes filled with files, papers, and ledgers. They loaded the cart, went back inside, and returned with more. Alternating between referring to himself in the first and third person, Henri noted that “Henri doesn’t have all night,” and realizing the men were simply going to “rinse and repeat” this laborious extraction, he decided to leave the alley.
He made his way to the corner of Carondelet Street, intending to head back to his home in the poorer wards of the French Quarter. As he passed the restaurant directly across the street from the agency, he spotted a strange man standing in the dark, interior courtyard. The man was holding a lantern, sipping a glass of wine, and actively, intensely observing the front doors of L’Agence Commerciale du Croissant.
Without realizing the geopolitical weight of his description, Henri provided a flawless physical sketch of the watcher. He described a pale, unassuming European who muttered to himself in precise, upper-class French, and who possessed a distinct, rhythmic tremor in his left hand. Henri, possessing the uncanny stealth of a true street urchin, remained entirely unspotted by the trembling man. He crept up another block before finally breaking into a run and heading home.
Madeleine was profoundly impressed by the boy’s sharp memory and absolute fearlessness. Recognizing his value as a potential spy and localized messenger, she formally offered the boy a position working for their investigative party.
Henri considered the offer with a mature, businesslike gravity. He informed the delicate Lady that he already had a regular day job at the agency, but he conceded he could pick up some extra work, provided he could “work it in” around his current schedule. He gave them the address of his family’s rooms located in a cheap boardinghouse deep in the impoverished section of the French Quarter. If they needed him, he instructed them to send word “in care of Mama, Madame Broussard”. He continued, “but certainly, what Henri has provided is absolutely of value to you and is very well-presented. Ten dollars would be appropriate.” He held out his hand. Madeleine gave him the ten-dollar bill with thanks.
With his apple finished and his testimony complete, the fourteen-year-old adjusted his tattered shirt, adopting the posture of a busy man with pressing commercial obligations. “I have to get back to work,” Henri announced briskly. “Goodbye beautiful lady, and ‘not listening man’.”.
As the barefoot courier sprinted back down the banquette toward the heavy oak doors of the agency, Leopold Schuyler stepped out from his overwatch position, shaking his head in quiet, amused disbelief.
“That kid is going to be Governor,” Leopold murmured.
3:10 PM, Friday, February 2, 1866: Securing the File (Caleb)
While Lars and Dr. Fischer conducted their interrogations in the sweltering sample room, Caleb Grayson was left with the task of securing the raw inventory tallies. Junior Clerk Arthur Penhaligon had quietly promised to leave his personal file of mismatched manifest weights exposed on his standing desk for the party to retrieve. However, the ground-floor clerical bullpen was a dangerous environment. It was fiercely overseen by Auguste Landry, a strict, ink-stained taskmaster who constantly monitored the floor, and the eager office gossips, Samuel Higgins and Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, were present at their nearby stations.
Lars had pre-briefed Caleb on Penhaligon’s exact appearance, so the massive former cavalryman knew his target. As an accepted, lingering presence in the agency following his morning sweep, Caleb took a seat on a wooden bench in the railed front entry area, observing the bullpen.
The problem was immediately apparent. Caleb was a bruising physical operator, not a nimble pickpocket; he possessed no natural talent for sleight of hand or stealth. Sitting heavily on the bench, he watched the busy clerks, internally wrestling with the logistics of how a man his size was supposed to execute a quiet theft.
Penhaligon, situated at the second desk from the front on the left side of the bullpen, noticed the big man waiting. Knowing what was supposed to happen, the clerk shot Caleb a look, clearly wondering why the extraction was taking so long. Penhaligon looked away, then back again, offering a polite but pointed cough. Caleb registered the signal, but hesitated, remaining firmly planted on the bench.
Fortune provided a brief opening when the clerk stationed directly in front of Penhaligon gathered his files and headed upstairs. Penhaligon seized the opportunity. He locked eyes with Caleb, delivered another sharp cough, and gathered a stack of papers. Leaving the precious file sitting dangerously exposed on the edge of his desk, Penhaligon marched to the front of the room and engaged the severe overseer, Landry, in a fabricated work discussion.
Despite the clear runway, Caleb still delayed.
“There could be a discrepancy, Mssr. Landry,” Penhaligon stated loudly, throwing a wide-eyed, exasperated glance over his shoulder at the massive man still sitting immobile on the bench.
Finally, the diversion reached its limit. Landry let out an impatient sigh and declared, “We’ll check the archive room”. The overseer and the junior clerk exited behind Landry’s desk, heading toward the rear staircase.
Caleb knew his window was closing. He stood up and carefully checked the remaining clerks; their heads were all down, absorbed in their endless copying. Taking his time to ensure his movements were deliberate and steady, Caleb walked past Penhaligon’s empty station. He smoothly snatched the file with his right hand, pulled it tight against his broad chest, and walked cleanly out the rear exit of the bullpen, securing the documents without raising a single alarm.
3:35 PM, Friday, February 2, 1866: Examining the File and Auditing the Inventories (Lars)
With the rest of the investigative party having departed L’Agence Commerciale du Croissant to pursue their separate leads, Lars Prittwitz remained behind in the sweltering offices at half past three in the afternoon. Commandeering a desk in the quieted room, the INA Surveyor began the grueling task of systematically cross-referencing the firm’s remaining, mundane paperwork, sifting through official outbound customs declarations, bank drafts, and maritime insurance policies.
Crucially, Lars possessed the raw warehouse inventory tallies that Caleb had quietly secured from junior clerk Arthur Penhaligon. Armed with this vital ledger, Lars was able to effortlessly cut through the bureaucratic quagmire. He painstakingly cross-referenced the mundane receipts against Penhaligon’s raw numbers, successfully revealing the negative space left behind by the previously purged files.
His meticulous audit revealed two distinct, quiet irregularities in the administrative record.
First was a glaring tonnage mismatch. The firm’s dockside drayage and cart transport costs clearly indicated that incredibly heavy freight was routinely entering the Water Street warehouse. However, the corresponding outbound customs declarations consistently listed the cargo as lightweight goods, deliberately categorized as “textiles” or “barrel staves”.
Second, Lars uncovered a severe deficit anomaly. The firm’s operating capital vastly outpaced its legitimate sales revenue. Mathematically, the company should have been in dire financial trouble, yet it consistently paid premium harbor fees in pure cash. This definitively proved the existence of a massive, off-the-books cash flow fueling the operation, though Lars noted that recent administrative measures enacted since December had seemingly alleviated this specific deficit.
With the financial realities of the smuggling front officially confirmed, Lars cleared his workspace and prepared his report. Working carefully, he drafted a specialized note, utilizing a cipher to encrypt his findings before sealing the document tightly.
His task complete, Lars located Maître Julian Beaufort. He bid the French lawyer a polite goodbye, formally stating that the investigative party would have a comprehensive report ready for the Comtesse the following day.
Stepping out of the agency and into the humid afternoon street, Lars scanned the banquette until he spotted a local street youth. Approaching the boy, Lars produced a five-dollar bill and handed it over.
“Son, here’s five dollars,” Lars instructed quietly. “Take this note to Palmer & Hughes Stationers up the road and tell Mr. Thomas Albright you want four Hartford Quills. Give him this note and buy them. He’ll give you five more dollars, and you can keep the quills”.
The street-smart kid eagerly agreed to the lucrative errand. Ensuring absolute operational security, Lars demanded the boy repeat the instructions back to him. The youth did so flawlessly. Satisfied, Lars watched the boy sprint up the street, concluding his work for the afternoon. It was 4:40 PM in the afternoon.
3:45 PM, Friday, February 2, 1866 – The Ursuline Consultation (Madeleine)
The Old Ursuline Convent stands at the corner of Chartres and Ursulines Streets not merely as a building, but as a silent, immovable testament to the enduring faith of a forgotten French king. It is a fortress of white plaster and heavy masonry, its sheer walls rising with a stark, unadorned severity that rebukes the humid decay and the creeping, chaotic modernity of the American port surrounding it. Its steep, slate-covered roof and severe dormer windows seem to stare down upon the Vieux Carré with the unblinking, eternal patience of an ascetic; it is a monument born of colonial mud that has survived fire, fever, and the shifting flags of empires, demanding absolute reverence from the mud-spattered streets below.
To cross the threshold of the convent is to step entirely out of the loud, profane republic of 1866 and into the absolute, cloistered silence of the eighteenth century. The air within is instantly cool and heavy, possessing the distinct, consecrated scent of beeswax, old linen, and the slow, inevitable aging of hand-hewn cypress timber. The eye is drawn immediately to the massive wooden staircase—its dark, polished treads worn into deep, smooth concavities by generations of soft, deliberate footsteps ascending in silent prayer. The thick plaster walls, blindingly white where the slanted, dust-moted light cuts through the deep-set window embrasures, seem to absorb every sound, reducing the frantic commerce of the city outside to a mere phantom whisper. Here, in the archive rooms where centuries of colonial births, plagues, and quiet deaths are bound in cracked leather, the immense weight of time is palpable; it is a profound, architectural sanctuary where history is not simply recorded, but fiercely protected by the unwavering, maternal gaze of a faith that views the passage of centuries as but a single day.
Madeleine was greeted warmly by Sister Claire, who had been her teacher at the academy five years prior. The nun’s eyes crinkled with fond recognition, and though she wished to help her former pupil immediately, strict convent protocol demanded she first present Madeleine to the Mother Superior, Sister Catherine Rose.
Madeleine approached the formidable matriarch, dropping into a graceful curtsy and respectfully kissing her hand. Though Madeleine had met the Mother Superior before, they were not intimately acquainted. Recognizing the young woman’s impeccable aristocratic bearing and her undeniable devotion, Sister Catherine Rose guided Madeleine away from the echoing corridors and into a quiet, shadowed alcove for a far more serious inquiry regarding her “gift.”
Lacking the rigid theological vocabulary of the clergy, Madeleine spoke with earnest, unvarnished honesty. She described her heavy burdens objectively: the sudden flashes of events yet to come, the fragmented, static sensory echoes—tableaus, never moving images—that assaulted her when she touched certain objects, and the overwhelming, involuntary capacity to feel the raw, unfiltered emotions of those around her. She leaned entirely on her devout heart and her standing as an alumna, framing her terrifying experiences not as occultism or spiritualism, but as a genuine, inexplicable phenomenon she was struggling to endure.
The Mother Superior listened with a heavy, sympathetic silence. Moved by Madeleine’s pure intentions and elegant diplomacy, she granted the young woman permission to enter the restricted archives to seek her answers. However, as Madeleine turned to walk toward the heavy cedar doors, Sister Catherine Rose stopped her with a stern, chilling admonition.
“You have told me you think these gifts are God-given, and they may be, but be warned,” the older woman cautioned softly. “What you find may trouble you. Satan has befuddled many more holy, stoic, and erudite than we are, my dear. Read. Investigate. But I highly advise you find a learned man of the church and investigate this ‘eye’ and other matters you have seen with it to protect your very soul, if needed.”
Left to navigate the massive, climate-controlled cedar chests alone, Madeleine entered the stark, blindingly white archive rooms. For hours, she breathed in the scent of camphor and decaying paper dust, sifting diligently through mountains of leather-bound colonial ledgers, baptismal records, and donated plantation diaries.
Her exhaustive, solitary search finally yielded a breakthrough. She withdrew a heavy, leather-bound theological quarto. Its pages were pressed from thick cotton rag, and the cover bore a stark, blind-tooled Dominican cross. It was the Speculum Spirituum (The Mirror of Spirits), authored by Friar Guillaume de Saint-Malo of the Order of Preachers, and published in Brest, France, in 1714.
As Madeleine turned the heavy pages, she realized she had found her conceptual key. Brought across the Atlantic by early French clergy to combat regional superstitions before being absorbed into the convent’s library to instruct novices, the treatise gave formal, orthodox names to her terrifying afflictions. Through the text, she learned the proper ecclesiastical terms for her condition: the Charism of Discernment of Spirits, Cardiognosis, and Prophecy.
She read, with trembling recognition, the chronicles of the holy virgin Christina, whose bodily senses were so exalted she could perceive the invisible rot of the soul. The text described Christina grazing the rusted spikes of an iron mourning-star belonging to a cruel knight and being cast backward as if struck by the fires of Gehenna. Through the charism of Cardiognosis, the iron became a glass of revelation; she experienced a waking terror where she witnessed the phantom shade of the devilish man laughing amidst a slaughter, the iron weeping with the phantom blood of his unconfessed sins.
Madeleine read further of the Blessed Mother Teresa, who, upon touching a silver coin left on a chapel altar, felt her spirit recoil in cold revulsion. The charism of discernment allowed her to instantly perceive the icy, lingering malice of the enemy upon the metal, confirming it acted as a dark anchor for a soul entirely possessed by demonic ambition.
She wrote down these cited encounters, translated from the French vernacular the long-dead Priest used and wrote them for her own reference in English. For Madeleine, the 18th-century text was a profound revelation. It provided a documented, divine framework for her parapsychic “Eye,” offering her the orthodox justification she needed to shield her mind against the creeping fear of madness or heresy.
Approximately 6 PM Friday, February 2, 1866 – Montage and Epilogue (Madeleine, Dr. Fischer, Caleb, Lars, Leopold)
As the afternoon humidity settled like a heavy, damp blanket over New Orleans, the investigative party scattered across the city, each retreating to their respective sanctuaries to process the day’s unnerving discoveries.
Madeleine Mercier secured a hired fiacre—the Crescent City’s enclosed carriage equivalent to a Northern hansom cab—and slumped back against the worn leather upholstery. The rhythmic clatter of hooves on the cobblestones offered a numbing counterpoint to the terrifying, leering visage of Adrien-Luc that still burned in her mind’s eye. Leaving the noise of the French Quarter behind, she rode toward the shaded, affluent avenues of the Garden District, finally arriving at the flaking, fluted columns of the rented Mercier Villa at No. 242 Prytania Street.
Dr. Matthias Fischer caught a rattling, mule-drawn streetcar down the wide neutral ground of Canal Street. Escaping the chaotic thoroughfare, he ascended the private staircase to his refined bachelor’s suite at No. 128. The air inside was a familiar, comforting cocktail of old paper, pipe tobacco, and the faint ozone tang of his galvanic battery. Settling behind his heavy mahogany desk, the Austrian alienist dipped his steel nib into an inkwell and began meticulously drafting an urgent letter for the steamer mail, querying his European colleagues regarding any clinical precedent for sudden, isolated descents into acute mania.
Caleb Grayson walked the few short blocks through the American Sector, his heavy iron-shod boots thudding a steady rhythm against the wooden banquettes. Using the brass key Lars had provided, the massive former cavalryman let himself into the quiet, scrubbed-pine flat above No. 18 Carondelet Street. Seeking a mundane anchor after a morning spent navigating strict office politics and psychic horrors, Caleb bypassed the empty transom attic for the moment. Instead, he found his way to the modest kitchen, methodically slicing bread and preparing a simple, grounding meal in the quiet domesticity of the Pinkerton’s home.
Having sealed his encrypted findings at L’Agence Commerciale du Croissant and dispatched his street runner, Lars Prittwitz finally stepped out into the baking late-afternoon heat. He walked the brief stretch of Carondelet Street, his mind turning over the staggering tonnage mismatches and illicit cash flows he had just uncovered in the French firm’s ledgers. He reached the handsome, freshly painted oak door of No. 18, fitting his key into the lock to open the door to his own maritime insurance office.
Leopold Schuyler took the St. Charles streetcar out of the suffocating commercial district, stepping off to walk the final, quiet blocks through the Garden District. The sun was setting as Leopold Schuyler walked toward the Garden District, the fading light casting long shadows across the flagstones leading to Prytania Street. The heavy scent of blooming camellias and sweet olive masked the faint, underlying decay of the neighborhood’s grand estates, but before the antiquarian could reach the sanctuary of the Mercier Villa, his solitary progression was abruptly halted.
He was intercepted by a breathless waterfront runner who had freshly disembarked from an upriver packet steamer. The messenger thrust a crumpled, wax-sealed note into Leopold’s hands, the paper smelling faintly but unmistakably of cheap cigars and river mud. Delivering the missive just as the clock neared five in the evening, the runner departed as quickly as he had arrived.
Standing in the fading evening light, Leopold broke the wax and unfolded the hastily scrawled message from Étienne “Tinny” Boudreaux.
End Session 004