Sally didn’t laugh, she didn’t leave, she sat and thought for a moment and when she spoke I knew I had done the right thing.
“Slaves do exist today, I can tell you that much. They must do. The abolition acts made it illegal but once an evil like that is out in the world there’s no way to stop it. As my daddy always says, ‘you can’t uninvent the bomb’. It’s like drugs and prostitution, if there’s money to be made you can be damn sure someone’s making it. Now I don’t know where Charlemagne and his sons fit in but I’m willing to bet that poor girl didn’t spend her last breath on this earth shouting you a whole mess of nonsense. So how about we figure this out together? I’ve still got access to the universities libraries, we’ll find more references there.”
“Why would you help me?” I asked limply.
“Simply put Hun? This job bores me so much, sometimes I wish someone would kidnap me just so I could get some adventure. You might just be that adventure.”
For a moment she seemed to be examining me with a forensic stare.
“Could it be?” she asked softly as she moved closer and stared into my eyes. I felt a flicker in my vision and she must have sensed it too. She smiled briefly before turning away from me. When she looked back at me Sally’s face had changed. The bright, light visage had hardened in some small way. Her features were somehow more angular and now there was a hint of a frown brewing on her forehead. She hadn’t disappeared completely but she was no longer fully present on the library floor. It was as if she was shifting in time and space, moving metaphysically to a memory. That stare into middle distance that I’d seen on the faces of those children on Live Aid, that manifestation of the mind taking the bearer to somewhere else. She tipped her head back until it lent against a shelf, her eyes pointed towards the ceiling.
“My name is Sally Milton. I was born in New Orleans. My daddy raised me on his own after my mother left on my third birthday. A few months’ later daddy took a job in The Rib Room of the newly opened Royal Orleans Hotel. He started as a bus boy and part of his wage was a small room in the hotel for us to live in. I lived in that hotel until I was eighteen. Daddy worked his way up to be Maître d’ of that damn restaurant, putting in all the hours God sent. When I wasn’t at school I spent my time in the hotel. I helped the maids sometimes, or went down to the loading dock to marvel at the produce being delivered for the high-end guests to enjoy. The Royal Orleans sure is the place to be seen at in New Orleans. Senators, Mayors, rock stars, actresses, they all stay at the Royal. I met some of them of course. My daddy would introduce me to them if I was hanging around the Rib Room when they came in. Sometimes I met them in the halls or the lobby but to them I was normally just an invisible kid in another hotel somewhere in the world. I met John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin in the early seventies. I must have been thirteen or fourteen at the time. The band were staying in the hotel and one night they came back late from some bar or other out on Bourbon Street. I was hanging around in reception with the night manager, Danny Trevail. Daddy was either finishing a shift or already asleep upstairs. We didn’t see much of each other if truth be told, ships passing in the night I guess. Anyways the band came rolling in and Danny gave them the sycophantic greeting as usual. John Paul Jones had a transvestite with him. I don’t know if he knew he had a transvestite with him but we all knew her, him, whatever. We knew her as Stephanie, I don’t know his real name, never needed to. Anyways John called me over and asked if I fancied partying a bit in his room. He showed me the weed he had and gave me a sort of half drunken wink. I don’t think he was being pervy or nothing, I didn’t exactly look fourteen or whatever I was and he was too far gone to figure it out. I politely said no and they went on their way. I wanted to stay downstairs with Danny, he was the one I really wanted. Of course, Danny knew exactly how old I was and wasn’t interested but a little girls heart won’t be told you know? A few hours later we were all stood outside watching the firemen putting out John Paul’s room. Turns out he fell asleep with a joint in his hand and burnt the room down. No-one got hurt but I’ll always remember Stephanie stood there wearing one shoe. She was tearing up like a levy fit to burst over her missing shoe. When she left the next day, she had both shoes but one was all charred from the fire. She was clutching that shoe to her heart like a dead puppy. There’s a song on the ‘Presence’ album about it. No mention of Stephanie’s shoe though.
I had a lot of time on my hands while daddy was working and I learnt a lot listening to the maids, the kitchen porters, the barmen, you know. See the Royal was opened in 1960 but it stood on the site of the old City Exchange Hotel. That old place was opened in 1838 as a rival to another hotel across the street. See the other place was built by an American after the Louisiana Purchase so the Creole’s wanted to out do it. The City Exchange Hotel, named after the restaurant that had stood on the spot, was magnificent. It burnt down two years later but was still magnificent after they re-built it. It had this amazing rotunda where they held auctions in the afternoons. Hell, it even gets a mention in ‘Uncle Tom’s cabin’. Anything that could be bought and sold was traded in that place and that included slaves. After the abolition of international slave trading from 1808 the domestic trade was even more profitable. Supply and demand you see. Without the influx of new slaves, the ones already around became more valuable to their owners. Auctions were so regular folks wouldn’t even pay them any mind, just part of life in New Orleans. So, I know a little about slavery.
After serving as a hospital in the civil war the old place fell into disrepair. I don’t know I guess they had some bad management or maybe times had changed but that place that had given the world Gumbo and the cocktail was done. Long story short the hurricane of 1915 finished it off and forty-five years later the Royal opened on the very same spot.
I heard all the stories about the place being haunted from mostly everyone who worked in the Royal. You hear a thing so often you get to ignoring it, a bit like those folks ignoring the auctions I guess. I never saw no ghosts or heard rattling chains or felt a chill late at night. It seems to me that any ghost of a slave would be fixed to haunting the place they died anyhow, and no slave ever died at the City Exchange. They were bought and sold there but they suffered and died elsewhere.
When I was eighteen I met Steven. He came to the hotel with his parents, a couple of travel agents from Bristol. He was so handsome and had that wonderful English accent that I’d never heard before. He was nineteen and bored of hopping from one hotel to another. I was eighteen and bored of being stuck in the same hotel for ever. We fell in love almost instantly. I don’t know how it happened but we seemed to just fall into each other’s stride so perfectly. It was like I’d spent eighteen years thinking I was breathing clean air but then he arrived and everything became so clear and crisp. We spent every minute together and after three weeks, when he was due to leave for Texas with his parents, he told them he was staying with me. A month later we decided to leave together. Steven had to come back to Bristol to run the business and I was so ready to leave New Orleans. I would have gone anywhere with him. Daddy didn’t want me to go but he knew that in truth we didn’t know each other anymore. He had worked so hard for me but left me alone. It wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t mine, but there was little left between us then.
So, I came to England with Steven. To Bristol. We were so in love, so caught up in each other. Every day seemed like a dream, fuzzy at the edges with the intoxication of love. My stomach turned every time I saw him, every time he touched me. I can still remember how it felt when he kissed me. But a week after we got to Bristol he was dead. We were walking down Whiteladies Road towards a restaurant we liked to go to. A drunk driver mounted the curb behind us and hit Steven. If I’d been stood the other side of him it would have been me but Steven always insisted on walking on the curb side, he said a gentleman always walks closest to the road. The car ploughed straight into him, scooped him up and carried him with it into the glass front of the estate agents window. I held him in
my arms for ten minutes before the ambulance arrived. He was dead before they got there. The driver was pretty banged up in the accident so he was taken to hospital. No-one thought to breathalyse him first and by the time the police got around to it he was sober. There was no evidence he was drunk and he claimed something broke on the car. The police wanted the whole sorry mess forgotten so he got away with it. Steven died because he was a good man. Because he had manners, because he was English and chivalrous and kind. His death was ordinary and brutal and random and unnecessary and I think about him every day. So, I know a bit about death and police ineptitude as well.
After his death, Steven’s parents did their best for me. They let me stay in his flat for a few months, paid the bills and offered to pay for me to go back to America. I didn’t want to leave. I felt somehow I’d be abandoning Steven’s memory. I needed to stay close to him. I talked with his parents about what I should do and Steven’s father suggested I attend the university. He was friends with a history professor and arranged for me to have an interview. I must have impressed him, that or I had novelty value, because I was offered a place and accommodation in Hiatt Baker halls of residence. Professor Cooper was also the warden of the halls so he swung it for me. I spent the next three years studying European history, immersing myself in the Bristol student population and trying not to fall apart. I came out the other end with a 2:1 and no prospects. I hadn’t given any thought to the future, hell I hadn’t given thought to much of anything other than deadlines and Steven for three years. I took a job in a bar on Whiteladies Road, just down from the estate agents, and rented a tiny bedsit in Cotham. I existed in the night like an automaton from West World serving drinks and not getting the jokes. I saw Steven’s parents now and again but we just reminded each other of what we’d all lost. I think they blamed me a bit for his death and I couldn’t begrudge them that. A few months after I left university I ran into Professor Cooper on Park Street. He told me he’d heard of a job going at the central library and that it might suit me better than pulling pints. That was six years ago. I’ve been here since then. I still live in my tiny bedsit, I still think of Steven every day and I wonder what it is I’m still doing in Bristol. I see something in you. Something I know is inside me. Something dark and dangerous and beautiful.” She turned to face me. “Maybe you’re why I’m still here.”
For a moment I was dumbstruck. She was looking deep into my eyes. I felt most of my blood rushing to my face though my body kept a bit back for the erection growing in my pants. Now I felt like the automaton ready to do her bidding. My mouth was moving but I wasn’t saying anything and my face was so hot I was sure I would ignite any book I got too close to. Sally was smiling and a moment later was laughing.
“I’m sorry Hun I didn’t mean to embarrass you! I just meant that maybe it’s fate or something that a girl from New Orleans with a history degree would be here when you needed help. Now come on, I’ve given you my story and I don’t even know your name.”
I did my best to compose myself.
“My name is Ian Harper. I’m twelve, I live in Coombe Dingle. I don’t have any stories about my life because I’m twelve. I bunked off school to be here and if my parents find out they’ll kill me.”
“I’m not gonna rat you out Hun. Do you want to work together on this thing?”
“Yes.”
“O.K. Seems to me we need to start with Charlemagne but he was the eight hundreds or round about so to get from him to here is gonna take some work. I’ll give you some books to take home and look through and we’ll meet again at the weekend O.K? “
“Why the weekend?” I asked, “Why not tomorrow?”
“Because you’ll be in school tomorrow right? You can’t just disappear from school or your parents will really kill you.”
She was right. It struck me though that if I took books home there was a chance that the whole thing might be discovered. A heap of history text books about Charlemagne would look suspicious to even the most casual observer in my house. My parents were not stupid, my mother particularly having a nose for a deception. If I was under suspicion I couldn’t do what I needed to do. Like the day I played it safe before sneaking out at night I needed everything to appear normal.
“I can’t take books home. If someone sees them I’ll be under scrutiny. I need everything to look normal. I’ll figure out a way to be here tomorrow.” I looked up at the clock, it was three fifteen.
“I have to go. If I miss my normal bus home my mum will think I had detention.”
As I gathered my stuff together Sally nodded and stood up.
“O.K Hun I’ll get some stuff ready for tomorrow.” We walked together out to the entrance and just as I was pulling back the heavy door Sally put her hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll figure this out Ian. We’ll get justice for that girl and God knows how many more.”
“Thanks. See you tomorrow.” I turned and walked out into the cool air. It took a couple of minutes to walk from the library, past the Hippodrome and the wino’s and around the corner to the Colston Hall where the bus home stopped. By the time I got there I had it figured out. I would need my sister’s help but with what I knew that wasn’t going to be a problem. The trickiest bit would be forging my father’s signature.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When I got home I went straight to my room. I found an old exercise book that hadn’t seen too much action and, sitting at my desk, I began my work. I needed to forge a letter from one of my parents stating that I was ill and wouldn’t be in a school for a few days. I had gotten angry with myself on the journey home that if I’d taken more action in the summer I wouldn’t have these problems. Having to successfully avoid school was a job in itself and would take planning and energy that I should be using to find out about The Sons. By the time I was walking up Arbutus Drive with my sister I had reasoned two things. Firstly, I did do something in the summer and the police didn’t investigate properly. Secondly, I may not have met Sally if I had gone to the library on another day at another time. I’d watched enough Doctor Who to have a short grasp on the multiverse. Somewhere, in an alternative universe, was a me that went to the library in the summer when Sally was on holiday and we never met. Of course somewhere there was a universe where I hadn’t seen the girl die. There were further worlds where she hadn’t died at all, where The Sons of Charlemagne didn’t exist, where I didn’t exist, where I was a girl called Lucy. The possible configurations were endless when you realised that for every decision anyone ever makes there is a parallel universe where the opposite decision is taken.
It was pointless to deal in what ifs and maybes. I was in the situation I was in and no amount of wishing it away or regretting past decisions was going to change that. I needed to focus and make sure I didn’t waste any more time. So, I sat at my desk, put an ink cartridge into the cheap fountain pen I had bought for school a few weeks ago, and began.
I had decided that I would write the letter from my father. My mother’s handwriting was quite small and flowed in a loopy, swirly arc that was distinctly female. It was very difficult for me to imitate her style with any consistency other than her signature. I had practiced her signature so often that I could reproduce a reasonable facsimile of it if required. A signature can be forged if you break it down into parts and view it as a drawing. By taking two or three letters at a time and practising them over and over you can find the logic in the pen work. Every signature looks as it does for a reason. The pen moves along a path of least resistance within the muscle memory that the body has. Studied for long enough a signature is no more difficult than copying a windmill in two-point perspective. Forging a letter in someone’s handwriting is an altogether different prospect. A letter needs to sound like the person you are imitating, it needs to convey their thoughts in a manner consistent with their personality. That alone is difficult enough but it also has to look right. Every letter in every word must be right, every loop or line from one letter to the next, every space betwee
n every word, the size of the letters, the space between lines, it all has to be right and it has to be created. Not copied like a signature but created in isolation. If a signature is copying a windmill in two-point perspective, a letter is painting a long-lost Picasso that will stand up to scrutiny.
For these reasons, I had decided to work in the style of my father. His letters were always shorter than my mother’s so needed less intricacy and he was left handed and wrote entirely in capitals. This had the welcome bonus of meaning that I didn’t need to join the letters together in his script. I could take my time and, as long as I placed each letter correctly, the overall effect should pass muster. I needed to practise to get his style right but in broad strokes, less Picasso more Winslow Homer, and with the right sales pitch I was confident it would work. My father hardly ever wrote to the school so there was less material with which to make a comparison and I would have it delivered by a credible source, namely my sister. She would have to sell it correctly but under my instruction she would have no trouble with that. I set to work training my left hand and arm to become that of a frustrated father whose son is inconveniencing the family with illness.
Those who broke the boy: The Sons of Charlemagne Book One Page 8
