Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  Handbills plastered the city trumpeting the defeat of King Charles, and praising to the skies the virtues of the king’s cousin, the Duc d’Orléans. It crossed January’s mind even then to wonder who’d paid for printing – much less distributing – those. ‘That dear good friend of bankers and factory owners and men of wealth!’ sneered Maurice Pleyard, who was waiting for January – with half a dozen friends, Ayasha, several loaves of bread and a couple of bottles of wine – at January’s rooms when he reached them. ‘Lafitte the banker had them printed up, of course! Every shopkeeper and café owner in the Palais Royale is saying how Orléans should be made king – those of them that want to keep their leases there! And idiots all over the city are starting to say, “H’mn, well, the republic actually didn’t work out too well … Maybe we should have another king!” Imbeciles!’

  ‘Well, they have a point,’ argued Dumare, a very young law student who had only joined the Société Brutus the previous winter. ‘What glory did the republic ever bring to France?’

  ‘The glory of opening the doors to an age of righteousness, you—’ began Carnot furiously.

  ‘Yes, of course, but how those idiots can even think about a slick enfonceur like Orléans when the son of Napoleon himself dwells just across the border in—’

  ‘Napoleon was a tyrant!’ shouted Pleyard. ‘Napoleon deserted his own armies – twice! – when he thought his power might be in danger. Napoleon was responsible for the deaths of over half a million of our countrymen—’

  January sprang in at this point to avert a fistfight over the respective merits of republic and empire, and informed all parties concerned that he would throw any and all combatants out the window.

  ‘Deputations went back and forth all day yesterday between Lafitte’s house and the Palais Royale,’ said Ayasha, disengaging a couple of candles from the bundle Pleyard had brought and puffing gently on the banked embers of the little cooking range to light them. ‘Not that any of the gambling dens in the Palais closed – I think even the naughty theaters stayed open.’ Outside the air was still infused with light, but blue shadow filled the narrow streets of the Left Bank, and from every rooftop, swallows dipped and darted in quest of flies.

  ‘The king’s still out at St-Cloud,’ added Chatoine, a skinny little street urchin whose brother Poucet, at the age of twelve, had been one of the youngest members of the Société – and one of the youngest to die on the barricades. ‘He’s supposed to be assembling troops, but me, I don’t believe it.’ She divided the bread and cheese Pleyard had given her with the other members of her little gang, dirty, shock-headed infants who ran errands for Ayasha in return for food. ‘The man’s got no couilles.’

  ‘The prince imperial—’ insisted Dumare.

  ‘The prince imperial is a boy of nineteen!’ yelled Carnot. ‘A boy who’s been brought up in Austria, for God’s sake – in the very palace of our country’s foe! This is our chance, the chance France has waited for since 1795! The chance to have a real republic, for workingmen to have a voice in their own government, to make the laws that will benefit themselves and not take ordinances handed down by the whores that surround the throne!’

  But January heard the note in his voice – a kind of frantic urgency – that told him that somewhere, the tide had turned. That there would be no republic.

  The following morning Pleyard came again to January’s rooms, meeting him on the stair as he descended to go once more to Daniel’s, and gave him the news that King Charles had offered the Duc d’Orléans a position as Lieutenant General of France.

  ‘Whatever the hell that means,’ grumbled Ayasha, pouring out coffee for the three of them when January led the student back upstairs to share a spartan breakfast with them.

  ‘He turned the offer down.’ Pleyard slumped into a chair, ran a tired hand through his fair, thinning hair. He had formed the Société Brutus six years ago, January recalled, when the feckless King Charles had succeeded his obese and wily brother on the throne of France. Had dedicated his time and energy to running reading groups, making plans, speaking to workingmen and as a result hiding from the secret police. ‘Orléans has already formed a cabinet, appointed ministers, taken over the government, in effect. His men are dismantling the barricades, re-paving the streets, just as if someone had given him the authority to do so … And so they have. The banker Lafitte. The Rothschilds. The landlords of Paris who want to protect their property and the owners of railroads and factories who want laws made to keep the workingmen’s heads down. Whores,’ he whispered, staring out the open window into the hot, morning brightness, and his voice broke with grief. ‘Whores.’

  That afternoon, January and Ayasha went (with pretty much everyone else in Paris) to watch the parades in the Tuileries and the Champs-Elyseés. There were still no carriages in the streets, on account of the remaining barricades, but the prostitutes, January saw, had reappeared in force. ‘You can tell the fighting’s really done,’ Ayasha remarked.

  Tricolor flags – the colors of the republic – flew from every window and building. But it was as if a dark lens of apprehension covered the sun, and over the shouts of the populace and the marching feet of the companies of National Guard and neighborhood troops, January found himself listening for gunfire in the distance.

  None came.

  All day Sunday, the first of August, Paris waited with held breath. The following day – Monday, the second of August, 1830 – King Charles X of France abdicated, bypassing his son Louis, the Duc d’Angoulême, and leaving his throne to his nine-year-old grandson the Duc de Bordeaux. The Duc d’Orléans, a chubby and undistinguished (and phenomenally wealthy) cousin of the king’s, was already firmly ensconced in authority, and ignored the claims of the new king – who had taken the name Henri V. On the third, Orléans dispatched troops to escort the deposed King Charles and all members of his family to Cherbourg, to take a ship for England.

  A week later, on the ninth, the Chamber of Deputies proclaimed Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, ‘King of the French’. The revolution was over. Again.

  January himself barely felt either the exultation of triumph: ‘We have defeated the House of Bourbon forever!’ proclaimed his fellow musician Jeannot Charbonnière in ecstasy – or the disgust of defeat: ‘We didn’t bleed on the barricades to get ourselves another fat king!’ yelled Pleyard, when he read the news. This was because on the previous day, the eighth of August, news reached him that Anne Ben-Gideon had been arrested for the murder of Philippe de la Marche.

  1839

  Vachel Corcet, attorney at law, had an office on Rue Bourbon, in the courtyard of what had once been a townhouse but was now being rented out as offices and flats. The elderly little lawyer greeted January with pleasure – they had worked together frequently over the business of the FTFCMBS – and agreed at once to go with him to the Cabildo, ‘Though in all honesty I have to advise you, when Madame Filoux’s case comes before the court, hire a white lawyer as a senior colleague to plead. I never know from one week to the next,’ he added, in a voice that he strove to make annoyed rather than deeply discouraged, ‘when the gods that sit up in Baton Rouge might decide to forbid gens du couleur librés to appear before the bar, and never mind that we’ve been doing so – and I’ve personally been doing so! – for longer than most of them have lived in this state …’

  His soft little mouth pursed tight under its wisp of moustache. ‘And in any case,’ he added, with a resigned quirk of his brows, ‘it seems to go over better with juries.’ Meaning, January knew, that since the juries were all white they tended to believe white attorneys. ‘Though as a placeé, as I’m sure I have no need to tell you, Madame Filoux is going to need a very strong case.’

  ‘And we’d better hope the actual murderer isn’t white.’ January sighed, and picked up his hat as Corcet rose from behind his desk.

  ‘Now, there’s no need to prove that any specific person actually committed the crime.’ The attorney donned his own hat – a new and stylish si
lk tophat, like January’s own an investment in avoiding the appearance of shabbiness – and slid into his frock coat, though the morning outside was already stifling. ‘Just that she could not have done so.’

  January had taken the precaution of speaking to Corcet – and having the little lawyer accompany him to the Cabildo – in case Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the City Guards was out, but in the event he was lucky. The tall, stringy Kentuckian stood beside his desk in the corner of the stone-floored watch room, clearly just returned from his morning mosey of inspection along the levee, and was going over his notes on the experience with three men of the guard. The Fourth of July being as much a day of celebration among the flatboat men, filibusters, and steamboat crews as it was among the planters and businessmen of the American community, Shaw sported a cut on one cheek and a bandage wrapped around his left wrist. In his yellow calico shirtsleeves, his greasy dust-brown hair straggling to his shoulders, he had the look of someone who was in the Cabildo on his way to the cells himself, rather than of a minion of justice.

  ‘Maestro,’ he greeted January, when the three policemen left and January and Corcet approached the desk. ‘Figured I’d see you this mornin’. You here about that li’l gal they pulled in for shootin’ the Englishman? Mr Corcet …’ He extended his hand to the lawyer. ‘Always a pleasure.’

  Corcet shook hands and nodded, though he looked, January thought, slightly pained. Like most natives of the French Town, he found Shaw’s pronunciation of the language an abomination.

  ‘We’d like to speak with Madame Filoux, if we may,’ said January. ‘And, if you have a few minutes, we’d deeply appreciate hearing the police side of the story. If possible, might we see Mr Brooke’s effects?’

  ‘Got ’em right acrost here.’ Shaw led them through the rear doors of the watch room and through the courtyard – its high walls still guarding what little coolness the night had brought. ‘Such of ’em as we found at Ma’m Filoux’s, though I will say there was a couple of things that shoulda been there as wasn’t. You have a look at the place?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘You find any Bank of England stock sustificates?’

  ‘Stock certificates?’

  Something Mama said was a bank credit-paper …

  ‘She had a fifty-dollar stock certificate from the Bank of England in the pocket of her dress when she’s arrested.’ Shaw opened the door to what had once been the only prison in Orleans Parish, at the rear of the Cabildo courtyard. Though the male prisoners had been moved to the new prison a block away, and the town whipping-post removed from the courtyard, the stink of decades of filth and human waste seemed ground into its bricks. ‘She claimed it was hers, but it was fresh – hadn’t been folded up but the once, an’ there was no scuffin’ or smudgin’ on the back of it. An’ she couldn’t give any good account of where she’d got it from. An’ it so happens this Brooke jasper used Bank of England stock to back up land he purchased, out on Bayou St John an’ Bayou des Avocats—’

  ‘Land?’

  He had assumed Olympe’s tales of ‘a group of Englishmen looking to invest’ had simply been the usual verbal smokescreen that men put up, to explain their presence in a place where they had no business being.

  ‘Brooke actually purchased land?’ He wondered if Oldmixton had known about this, and if so, why he’d kept that particular card concealed in his hand.

  ‘Bought the old Chitimacha Plantation.’ The policeman ambled ahead of him into what had once been the prison’s tiny infirmary and opened its single, barred window. Watching January – January was well aware – out of the corner of his cold rain-gray eye. ‘Also about an arpent of land on Bayou St John that you could get rich off of the minute somebody figures out a way to make money raisin’ mosquitoes. Both places worthless – myself, I wondered if’n he had some plan goin’ to bilk investors back in England, sellin’ ’em “plantations” that don’t exist. He was negotiatin’ with the Labarre brothers, an’ with Angelica Aury, ’bout small parcels they own along Bayou Metairie. Same story: nuthin’ there but palmetto an’ gators. You didn’t happen to find the deeds to any of them places whilst you was goin’ through the house, did you?’

  January said, ‘No,’ with such patent bafflement in his voice that Shaw half-turned from the stack of boxes in the corner, to consider the expression on his face.

  ‘Had he anything in his pockets?’ asked Corcet, who had remained back in the doorway as if unwilling to get closer to the smell of the room.

  ‘Nary a huckleberry.’ Shaw spit a stream of tobacco juice at a cockroach that stomped grumpily from among the other boxes by the wall – such containers formed a sort of inner wainscot about four-feet high along one side of the room, reeking already of mould. Blobs and stains of tobacco spit dotted the boxes, the wall, and the floor: Lieutenant Shaw was far from the only man in the guards who chewed. The lieutenant carried the box to the room’s central table and set it down with a thump. Another roach emerged and fled.

  ‘Them’s his duds.’

  The attorney looked appalled at the thought that he’d have to touch anything that had been stored here, but advanced, gingerly, nonetheless to look over January’s shoulder.

  Shaw drew down a lamp on its chain over the table, kindling it with a lucifer-match, for the room’s tiny window let in only a few spoonfuls of light from the courtyard. The lamp helped only a little, its chimney not having been cleaned, January estimated, since Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from the French. ‘Rest of his wardrobe’s here.’ He crossed back to the wall of boxes for another crate.

  ‘Would it be possible also to see the body?’

  ‘Lord, no! We planted the poor bastard same day we pulled him outen the basin. Heat like this, he’s already startin’ to go off. Wisht I’d known,’ he added, ‘that you’s gonna take an interest in the case, Maestro. I would purely have liked to hear your opinion of that corpse.’

  January paused in the act of leafing through the letters which had evidently been found in the dining-room desk, tucked into the front cover of an octavo copy of The Lustful Turk. All were recent, from assorted tradesmen in New Orleans and property owners in the surrounding countryside. Two were, indeed, from Alcinde Allard – former owner of the abandoned Chitimacha Plantation – and Angelica Aury, who owned land along Bayou Metairie in which, to judge by her brief description, Brooke had been interested. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘Well, for starters—’ Shaw ticked off points of observation on his long, bony fingers – ‘he sure weren’t dressed to go drinkin’ down on Basin Street. An’ he hadn’t been drinkin’, on Basin Street nor noplace else, ’cause when I cut open his gut there was no smell of alcohol. An’ I asked around some, among the sweepers an’ the whores an’ the small-time gamblers that don’t care one way or t’other. They knew Brooke, all right – he’d sometimes drink at the Four Kings – but nobody’d seen him that night till they pulled him outen the basin.

  ‘Two.’ He held up another finger. ‘His neck an’ jaw was stiffened up already, like they get after six-seven hours. Brooke’s head was tucked for’ard—’ he demonstrated, tucking his gargoyle chin down onto his breast – ‘like as if he’d laid someplace too short for him. He was a tall man,’ he added. ‘Six foot I’d make him. Then too, he’d laid on his back long enough for the blood to settle, an’ stayed put long enough for it to stay settled when he was dumped in the drink. That’s what? Five hours?’

  ‘Five or six. Who found the body?’

  ‘Railspike Adams.’ Shaw named one of the most notorious prostitutes of the back of town. ‘Says she saw him floatin’ in the basin when the Blackleg Saloon closed down, which was right around sun-up: six a.m, accordin’ to the almanac. How much earlier he’s there, we don’t know. No lights thereabouts save what comes through the barroom windows. This neighbor of M’am Filoux says she seen a man she figured was Brooke lettin’ hisself into M’am Filoux’s house with a key, round about one thirty, by which time accordin’ to my
reckonin’ Brooke, wherever he was, was long dead an’ turnin’ cold. An’ the shot they heard was somethin’ after two. But Cap’n Tremouille—’ he nodded back towards the main Cabildo across the court – ‘says on a hot night corpses stiffen up quick. Which is true, but not that quick. An’ he says likewise M’am Filoux don’t give just anybody keys to her house, which is also true, so I hear from her neighbors.’

  ‘And no key was found on the body?’

  Shaw spit at another roach. ‘Not as Railspike says.’

  ‘Railspike find anything else in his pockets?’ Any girl who worked around the basin, January knew, wouldn’t have reported a floating cadaver without hauling it to shore first and helping herself to whatever pickings she could find. He was a little surprised the woman had reported a corpse at all.

  ‘She says not. An’ generally they just keeps money an’ rings an’ such, not keys. Nor, as you’ll see—’ he nodded at the assortment of pens, ink bottles, cuff-buttons, hairbrushes, and stickpins in the box on the table – ‘was there a house key anyplace in the house but the one M’am Filoux herself had on her ring, which don’t mean she didn’t drop Brooke’s in the basin, Tremouille says. An’ he could be right.’

  ‘Rigor can start within a few hours, on a hot night,’ agreed January slowly. ‘But I’ve never heard of hypostasis fixing itself in a body in under four hours. And I still haven’t heard anything that explains how Jacquette Filoux got Henry Brooke’s body from Rue Toulouse to the basin.’