Ayasha, sewing in the last of the daylight; she sat in the other side of the window’s aperture, black hair bundled up carelessly into a crest on the crown of her head, stockinged feet tucked against his. Her gold thimble flickered against the silver needle, the delirious waterfall of blue-and-white silk that streamed from her lap to the floor. It was his turn to cook supper, and he’d been turning over in his mind what was in the cupboard and if he’d have to go down all seventy-two steps to Renan’s to get bread—
—and then the thought came to him: I’ll have to write to Rose.
Guilt and horror and a terrible confusion flooded over him as he realized he didn’t even remember how long he’d been back in Paris, or whether he’d told Rose he was coming back here . . .
John! What about John?
The thought that he’d left his son – even for Ayasha – turned him sick. How could any woman walk away from her child? Ayasha had asked him as they returned home from the L’Ecolier house on that Sunday afternoon in 1827, and January knew she spoke true. So how could he have left Baby John? How could he have left Rose . . . ?
I’ll have to go back to them . . .
Yet the beauty of this place, this city – this world where white men didn’t call him tu like a dog, and where he could walk any street in the city, and risk murder, perhaps, but not enslavement. The thought of leaving it twisted at his heart . . .
Someone knocked at the door. ‘Uncle Ben?’
Waking was like dropping a yard down into darkness.
‘Uncle Ben?’
Gabriel’s voice. The panicked confusion of his dream left him disoriented. He felt Rose move beside him, heard the clack – saw the blinding spark – of flint striking—
From the parlor Zizi-Marie screamed, ‘Uncle Ben!’ and there was the crunching rip of nails pulled from wood, the thunk of a window thrown open.
January came out of bed fast and silent, shot through the door into the parlor past his nephew, caught up a chair – thank God for Rose’s ability to light a candle, to give him that fragment of golden light . . .
The rear gallery and the high walls of the yard kept any light from silhouetting the men in the French doors of the rear parlor, but one of them had a bullseye lantern. January charged them, flung the wooden chair full-force to disrupt their aim if they had a gun, caught up another chair and shouted.
The men turned and fled, back through the French door, out on to the gallery.
Hollers, cries, and a woman’s voice yelling: ‘Damn you snot-suckin’ thieves!’ Peggy and Del, from under the house.
January sprang through the French door – where the light of Rose’s candle didn’t penetrate, and the thieves had dropped their lantern – grabbed a handful of somebody’s jacket. A fist scraped his jaw in the dark. He struck back, his blow connecting meatily with the side of someone’s head. He tried to sling the man against the door jamb, but somebody kicked him hard in the knee and he stumbled, cursing. Peggy had not once stopped swearing nor repeated herself. Under the house, her little girl Alice screamed in terror.
Someone fell down the gallery steps to the yard, and Del yelled, ‘God damn it!’
Footfalls rattled on the stair.
Then light as Peggy set up the fallen lantern and yanked off the slide. At the same moment Rose appeared in the French door with two more candles, backed up by Gabriel with the fire poker. Thank God he didn’t come out earlier and start swinging that thing.
‘I heard them on the gallery.’ Zizi-Marie came out behind her brother, the quilt from her bed wrapped around her over her nightgown. When Rose’s school had had nearly a dozen students, they’d slept in a dormitory in the big old house’s attic, but because of the cold, January had moved two of the beds downstairs, so that Gabriel could sleep in one of the former classrooms downstairs, and his sister in the other.
‘Me, too,’ agreed the boy.
‘We heard ’em go up the steps,’ corroborated Del as Peggy darted down the gallery steps – which, being old, creaked and clumped like a cord of wood dropped out of a cart – to fetch up tiny Alice. Inside the dark house behind them, January heard Baby John wailing. Rose shoved one of the candlesticks into his hand and hurried back inside.
‘We thought for a second it was the patterollers,’ Del went on – the term American slaves used for the bands of whites hired by the white planters to ride the roads by night in search of runaways, ‘but then they didn’t say nuthin’, just started crunchin’ at your shutters with a crowbar. Look, they dropped it here.’
He knelt, Peggy moving close behind with the dark-lantern, and picked up a short iron pry-bar that January was damn glad had been dropped in the confusion. It was not something he’d have wanted to catch between the eyes.
‘And look here, they got your candlesticks!’ Peggy straightened up, a pair of silver candlesticks in her hand. ‘Damn friggin’ thieves – and they’d got your money!’ She strode a step further along the dark gallery, bent to pick up a wash-leather bag that jingled heavily with silver. ‘Better check if they got anythin’ else—’
‘But they didn’t get into the house,’ protested Zizi-Marie.
‘And those aren’t your candlesticks, are they, Uncle Ben?’ Gabriel took them: graceful work of the previous century, each embellished with a garland of tiny shells and roses. He held them close to the candle in January’s hand. ‘I’ve never seen anything like these in your house.’
In the rear parlor Rose had kindled all the after-supper reading-candles on the sideboard. January checked the hasp on the French door’s shutter – it had indeed been forced with the crowbar – then re-entered, for the night was freezing. Zizi-Marie had already gone to build up the fire.
‘But how’d they get your money?’ Gabriel dumped the leather bag on to the table and brought the candles over. It was English coin, all of it silver crowns and half crowns, unusual in New Orleans where a great deal of business was still done in Mexican reales.
January said, with a curious prickling sensation on his scalp, ‘That isn’t my money.’
‘I’ve heard of thieves breaking in to steal.’ Rose came to look over his shoulder, Baby John in her arms. Once his mother’s arms were around him the infant seemed perfectly content to have everyone in the household milling about at – January glanced at the clock – three in the morning. ‘But never to give money away.’
‘Haven’t you?’ said January softly. ‘I have. And I think I need to find Shaw and hand this over to him – without getting anywhere near the Cabildo – without a moment’s delay.’
TWENTY-TWO
January took Peggy, Del, and little Alice to spend the remainder of the night in the back room of a disreputable ‘grocery’ out beyond the ‘back of town’, on land which up until recently had been the Labarre Plantation. The term ‘grocery’, in much of Louisiana, also included gambling and the sale of alcohol on the premises, but of course every establishment in New Orleans included gambling and the sale of alcohol on the premises – and in Django’s case it also included a back room where the black musicians who played the uptown American whorehouses could get together in the small hours, play music, drink beer, and talk about lazy nothing until they’d unwound enough to go home and sleep.
It was an unnerving trek in the misty blackness, but at this pre-dawn hour even the keelboat hoo-rahs from the Swamp had drunk themselves into oblivion, and in December one was reasonably safe from alligators. The City Guards, as Shaw had pointed out, numbered only twenty for this municipality and never came this far back from the river.
‘I wouldn’t ask this of you,’ he told Django – who, as he’d suspected, they found still awake, sweeping the front gallery in the clammy, drifting fog. ‘But I have reason to fear the house’ll be searched.’
‘We’ll be movin’ on in a day,’ promised Del.
‘Stay long as you please.’ Django shrugged: tall and thin, gray-haired and covered with tribal scars. He had a voice that seemed to come from a Titan imprisoned at the bot
tom of a well. ‘Make no difference to me.’
January spent the remainder of the night sleeping on one of the tables, with the silver candlesticks and the little sack of English coin under the rolled-up jacket he used for a pillow. Though the back room reeked of beer, and of the dried marijuana some of the country blacks smoked to relax, the old Yoruba kept a clean place, and his half-dozen cats were at least a guarantee against the rats that were to be found everywhere in this district. Not long after first light January woke from troubled dreams and tiptoed on to the back gallery, to wash in the freezing water from the barrel there.
This part of the Labarre lands had supposedly been divided into lots for development, but the bank crash had put paid to that scheme for the time being. The marshy ground was sheeted with ice, and the thinning fog mingled with the stinks of woodsmoke fires from the squatters’ shacks built here and there among the woods that still mostly covered the area. A few hundred yards upriver lay the part of town that everyone called the Swamp – brothels, barrel houses, flop joints and gaming hells where the ruffians from the keelboats spent their money and their time. From Django’s back gallery he could smell the untended privies. This area lay slightly deeper in the woods, on the edge of the genuine swamps – the ciprière – and functioned as a hideout for runaways and a sanctuary for those who could afford nothing better.
Despite the cold, he stayed out on the gallery until Gabriel appeared, with the morning fully bright and the fog burned off but the silence of sleep still thick as a fairy’s spell.
‘They say at the Cabildo, Mr Shaw’s gone down to Chalmette,’ reported the boy, and he uncovered the food he’d brought with him: a crock of last night’s rice and beans done up in a towel, with a couple of sausages and a double-handful of freshly-boiled shrimp thrown in on top. ‘There’s a revival meeting there. Protestants.’ He shrugged dismissively. ‘But one of those preachers says – I guess it’s in the newspapers, too – that another one of ’em has been stealing money.’
January rolled his eyes. ‘Would this be the Reverend Dunk? Never mind,’ he added as his nephew shook his head in ignorance. ‘Doesn’t matter. Would you tell your Aunt Rose I’m all right so far, and that I’m going down to Chalmette – and that I promise I’ll come back and get her crock back from Django as soon as all this is straightened out?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Gabriel grinned brightly. ‘She gave me a cracked old one, in case it doesn’t come back. There’s banana leaves in the bottom, to keep it from leaking.’
‘Your Aunt Rose,’ said January, ‘is a wise woman.’
I have to write to Rose . . .
The words echoed briefly in his mind, and because of them he tore a page from his notebook, and with a stub of pencil wrote: A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband – her price is far above rubies.
He folded it up and wondered: And what is the price of a virtuous husband? I have brought her nothing but trouble . . .
‘Tell her to be careful,’ he said. ‘And that I love her. I’ll be at your Aunt Dominique’s tonight—’
‘Does Aunt Minou know this?’
‘Not yet,’ said January, ‘but you’re going to tell her on your way home. And you tell your Aunt Rose that I hope to be home tonight.’
‘You know what’s going on?’ asked the boy as he turned to go. ‘Or who those men were?’
‘I don’t know who they were,’ said January. ‘But I think that – like that preacher down in Chalmette that Mr Shaw’s gone to see – somebody’s trying to get me thrown in jail.’
He left the crock of food for Del and Peggy – less a percentage for his own breakfast – and made his way cautiously riverward through the bright chill sun of the new morning. Though it filled him with uneasiness to do so, he kept upriver of Canal Street. Thanks to the enmity between the Americans and the old French Creole aristocracy, these days this portion of New Orleans had a completely separate police force and city council from the French town, and they would almost certainly have heard nothing of any charge against him. He was stopped twice by City Guards with demands to show his Free Papers, but evidently nobody was looking for him for stealing silver candlesticks and a sack of English money just yet. The loot, distributed in a money belt under his clothing and bound rather painfully to the calves of his legs, felt like it was burning a hole in his flesh, and he knew that if he were caught with it on him, it was going to be impossible to explain. But he couldn’t think of anywhere safe to leave it.
Damn them, he thought, not knowing who they were . . . Damn them, damn them. He felt as if every man he passed – and as he neared the river front he passed hundreds – could hear his heart pounding, could smell the guilty sweat that drenched his face despite the day’s brisk chill.
He remembered the way Breche had giggled, when he recounted how he’d casually driven the habit of opium like a barbed fish-hook into an innocent woman’s flesh, just so that he could meet his mistress undetected.
Was there more to it, he wondered as he walked, than a concoction of stupid romantic dreams?
He recalled old Philippe Breche, shouting into the back of the shop at his son: See if you can get it right this time . . .
How far would almost a hundredweight of gold pieces go, in buying the young man his freedom?
A romantic ass, or a malicious schemer? Breche was certainly, with Burton Blodgett’s help, making damned certain that Hüseyin Pasha wasn’t going to start hunting for his stolen money in the apothecary shop down the street.
January was almost certain there had been two men who’d broken into the house. One chance in two, then, that Breche would bear the mark of the struggle on his face.
Old Philippe Breche was short, January recalled. Stocky, but shorter enough than Hüseyin Pasha that the Turk would almost certainly have commented on it. Otherwise, he would be a good candidate for Mr Smith: it would make sense that he’d disguise himself behind false whiskers and spectacles, to conceal a face that his victim might see on Rue Bourbon any day.
Had it been coincidence, that Smith had requested a meeting on the Sunday night after the two girls had disappeared? A meeting that virtually guaranteed that his host would have no witnesses to speak for his actions and whereabouts, alone in that great house on that rainy night?
Yet he was almost willing to bet that Breche knew nothing more about the events of Friday than he’d said: that he hadn’t been the one who’d bribed Sillery . . . Possibly, that he had known nothing of the gold. If Noura was clever – ‘troublesome’ – she might well not have told her lover of it, particularly if she planned to break with him as soon as she could find a better protector.
And where did the pliant Karida fit in?
Buzzards circled overhead as he skirted the cattle pens that lined the river; cold wind blew across the water. The girls’ faces returned to him, waxy and stiff and beginning to discolor.
Fabled for their beauty by men who’d never seen them, who’d offered Hüseyin money for them sight unseen . . .
Why bring Karida in on it? Or had she found out Noura’s plans and simply included herself? Had she, like Shamira, only wanted a life where she could choose?
And who among us has that?
He turned the facts that he knew, the surmises and possibilities, this way and that, like a puzzle box in his mind.
Sillery knows Jerry – he’d seen them at the same church. He’ll have a copy of the key to the door into the Pavot property.
Was it Sillery’s plan from the start? The slave was certainly in a position to take the girls anywhere in the dead small hours of Friday night, though it left the problem of how he’d gotten them back into the livery yard sufficiently early on Sunday night for them to be thrown out of the window at ten. Yet the man was clever and had his two fellow slaves – Jones and Delilah – to act for him.
But to implicate Sillery, thought January, I need unshakeable proof. Or I will be destroying the lives of those children for nothing.
Poucet’s face flickered
through his mind, and Chatoine’s – brave as little soldiers. Poucet had died in the cholera epidemic, fourteen years old, a few weeks before Ayasha’s death. And Carnot the painter had been killed on a barricade, in the revolt that had finally thrust the Bourbon kings again from their mismanaged throne. The happiness he had felt in his dream twisted at him, like the thorned tentacles of some monstrous sea-creature, wrapped around his heart.
He reached the Tchoupitoulas Road, made his way downstream along the batture. The river was high, the pebbled gray stretch of beach that lay below the levee narrowed to a walkway of a few yards. Above Canal Street it was all cotton: in ordinary years he would barely have been able to thread his way through the unloading bales. Now most of the wharves had only one boat, or stood empty. At five cents a pound, sale on the wharves wouldn’t cover the cost of shipping it from Missouri. Already – though it wasn’t yet ten in the morning – many of the stevedores had given up and crossed the road to the taverns.
January found the man he was looking for on the levee below the Place des Armes, where the fishermen put in from the Gulf. As he came at last below Canal Street he moved more carefully, watchful though he guessed that if the Guards were on the wharves at all, they wouldn’t be looking for an accused burglar, but for the gangs that stole cargoes.
Natchez Jim was at Auntie Zozo’s coffee stand, under the brick arcades of the market, a sturdy handsome man with the features that January identified as Wolof ancestry – as his own father had been – and graying hair braided into dozens of plaits: couettes, they were called in the country. ‘Hell, I had no downriver cargoes three days now,’ said Jim, when January spoke to him. ‘Barely pays me, to bring in wood into town. So sure, I can take you down Chalmette.’ He shrugged. ‘If those boys of mine –’ he nodded at the two youths who helped work the oars – ‘had anything better to do with their time, I couldn’t pay ’em.’
The boys finished their coffee, grinning, and followed them down to where Jim’s wood boat was tied. As they rowed into the current that swept past the dark-hulled ocean ships docked downriver, January relaxed at last. The brown opaque water widened between the Black Goose and the shore. Under the bright-blue sky with its drifting masses of clouds, the town seemed small and very low, for all the growth that the newspapers bragged. Houses of pastel stucco, green and gold and pink, a little faded against the dark-green monotony of trees. Brick warehouses, cotton presses, mills – a scattered line of newer wooden dwellings, where one planter or another had sold off his cane fields to the immigrants who crowded to this fever-ridden city, in the hopes they’d make a fortune or at least a living.
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 23
