Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  He had himself barely escaped arrest, he recalled, one night when he’d hauled Carnot out of an altercation with the guarde municipale at the Scarlet Monk in the Rue St-Denis. That was the occasion on which he’d discovered that Anne had been perfectly right about the sewers being a useful escape route. He’d had to burn his clothes afterwards, to Ayasha’s loudly-expressed disgust, but he’d seen the chalk marks on the curved brick vaulting of the walls, and guessed he could have traveled for miles in that fashion, unseen.

  Gerry O’Dwyer could easily have gotten out of Paris that way …

  And anyone could just as easily have transported Philippe de la Marche’s corpse.

  ‘I wonder that anyone was sufficiently organized to arrest your friend Madame Ben-Gideon in the first place,’ remarked Hannibal, and sipped at the tin cup in which La Violette served all of her customers. ‘Much less bring her to trial.’

  ‘Louis-Philippe d’Orléans is a man who never lets the principles of liberty interfere with good order,’ returned January, a little drily. The recollection of the smell of sewage and of his friend’s blood faded – not quite completely – from his hands. ‘Immediately after the revolt he dismissed the old king’s prefect, but he kept on most of the Sûreté – two-thirds of them were former criminals themselves – and sergeants de la ville. The man he put in charge was a minor nobleman who practically fell over himself when a member of the Noailles family came in demanding that the atheistic trollop who murdered her precious son be arrested.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hannibal, who had himself had acquaintance with the powerful Noiailles. ‘Not good.’

  ‘No.’ January turned his head, looking out into the sheets of rain that half-hid the Place des Armes, and across to the fiacre drivers clustered beneath the green pride-of-India trees. Above the levee, the black stalks of the steamboat chimneys poured black smoke into the soot-gray clouds.

  The Americans at the next table had departed, and a woman in an elaborately-dressed silk tignon walked past. ‘It is all very well to love,’ she said to the young girl beside her, ‘but to raise your children in poverty, colored in a white world where the whites own all things and can do as they please, does them no kindness. We can be sure of nothing …’

  ‘No,’ repeated January softly. ‘It was not good.’

  ‘We all took refuge in Ramboulliet,’ said Hannibal after a time of gazing into the battered tin cup. January recalled again that though their paths had never crossed, his friend had also been in Paris in the days of the Restoration. A well-born wastrel in a ‘merry band’ of wastrels, he had gathered, from things Hannibal had spoken of in the past, when he’d been more than usually drunk: latter-day goliards who had abandoned the families who asked of them what they were not able to give, to pursue the fairy-gold of pleasure, wine, and song.

  The fiddler had his own memories, of nine years ago.

  ‘It was ghastly hot in Paris that summer. Achille Tremaine – his father had made an indecent amount of money selling shoddy boots to Napoleon’s soldiers – had a chateau that had used to belong to some relative of the Duc de Soissons. Very stylish, even without most of its furnishings, which of course Achille’s father had sold off … Achille called me out, I remember, for flirting with his mistress. As the challenged party I stipulated blowpipes of cognac at twenty paces, and after the first ten attempts nobody had any very clear recollection of the duel. But it was assumed honor had been satisfied.’

  He was silent for a time, long insectile fingers tracing the rim of the cup. Behind them in the arcade the voices of the last of the marchandes echoed, packing up lettuces and tomatoes they had been unable to vend, and calling good-natured curses down on the weather.

  ‘In effect,’ continued Hannibal softly, ‘we left Paris at the end of June under one king, and made our way back there sometime in December to find another solidly in residence. I fear my memories of the Three Glorious Days concern only the scent of cut hay and the reflection of the moon in the chateau’s lake, and music played in the night.’ His brows pinched together. ‘Not very creditable, I’m afraid. I left Paris, soon after that.’

  You can’t step twice into the same river, reflected January again, studying the thin profile half-turned from him, the deep, exhausted lines around the fiddler’s dark eyes.

  And was it worse, January wondered, to have the remembrance of cut hay, stolen kisses, and moonlight, than the burnt back-taste of anger that still filled him, when he remembered crouching in the scorching heat behind the barricade, killing men he had never met because he thought he was finally going to be able to live in a republic of which he could be proud? Worse than the revulsion he had felt clambering up that same barricade the following day and seeing the corpses of the men who had died – for what?

  We can be sure of nothing …

  Died – left their families bereft and in poverty – so that Louis-Philippe d’Orléans and his rich friends could rule France in the place of his arrogant cousin Charles and his rich friends?

  Quietly, January replied, ‘It doesn’t matter. Not at this distance. You know Juju Filoux? I’m looking for him, and I’m looking for Henry Brooke, whose other name might just possibly be Gerry O’Dwyer. Any information would be welcome. I understand he spent time in the saloons around the basin – probably in the Swamp as well. God knows what he was actually up to – on behalf of Oldmixton and Company on the one hand, or possibly playing them false.’

  ‘The ears of King Midas,’ promised the fiddler, raising his left hand in avowal and crossing his heart with his right, ‘shall be as the blunt organs of adders, compared to mine.’

  ‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’ January bowed gravely. ‘I’ve asked among the uptown musicians, and among the voodoos, and among the slaves along the wharves and in the French Town. Anyone, I hope, who won’t get word of my quest back to Sir John and his minions over at the British Consul. I don’t precisely suspect him of having had a hand in Brooke’s demise, but if Brooke worked for him, and happened to decide to use consulate funds to purchase worthless real estate – for what purpose I am too simple of soul to imagine! – I’d rather keep my distance until I have a better idea of what’s really going on.’

  ‘Timeo Danaos,’ agreed Hannibal. ‘You cannot trust the sassenach, least of all when they’re offering you money. Will you be riding out to have a look at these desirable properties on Bayou des Avocats and in such other charming places?’

  ‘I was just going to ask you,’ said January, ‘if you would be free to accompany me tomorrow?’ He had learned long ago that a black man accompanying a white one outside the narrow confines of the French Town was usually safe from kidnappers – the assumption being that the black man was the white man’s slave and that probably someone would go looking for him if he vanished. ‘In payment for which, would you care to repair to my house for dinner before you have to return to the fields of your honorable labor?’

  ‘It is well known in the Swamp—’ Hannibal lifted his hands – ‘that I may be had for any purpose whatsoever for the price of a plate of beans. Claudito iam rivos, pueri,’ he added, with a glance past the arcade, where the downpour had thinned to a glittering drizzle. ‘Sat prata biberunt. I think we have just time for that.’

  NINE

  Diamond combs.

  The perfume of sandalwood.

  For a long while after Rose had gone to bed, and Olympe’s children had retreated upstairs to the long room that so soon would become the dormitory for the school’s students once again, January sat at his piano, his fingers tracing out the tunes he recalled from that summer of 1830. The overture from La Dame Blanche. ‘I Know a Bank Where the Wild Thyme Blows’. ‘Highland Mary’. All the popular dances he’d practiced, knowing they would be in demand when the best and the beautiful of France returned to Paris – like Hannibal and the ‘merry band’ of his companions – with the fading of the leaves.

  Diamond combs. The moon and three stars.

  Why, he wondered, had the vision sent by
his sister’s private god been of her?

  1830

  January had located Daniel’s former ‘friend’ Apollon Michaud without difficulty, at a high-class gambling-hell on the Rue de Rivoli. Though the new king was said to be moving his residence from the Palais Royale to the Tuileries, and the Opera and many of the gambling houses (and up-scale bordellos) of the Palais Royale remained open (‘Lest His Majesty should lose some rents,’ grumbled Pleyard), a number of gamblers had moved their custom elsewhere for the time being – ‘At least until things calm down,’ said Jeannot Charbonnière.

  Daniel had also provided the name of Michaud’s newest ‘friend’ (‘A man whose family makes boot blacking! After all his comments about Jew parveneux …’), and had offered to go the rounds of the gambling parlors and identify the suspects. (‘Not that I think Apollon would actually do such a frightful thing. He was greedy and vain – Anne positively detested him, and was forever warning me against him – and spiteful as a child. But murder …’)

  January, whose youth in New Orleans and six years at the night clinic of the Hôtel Dieu had taught him what men do when wounded both in pride and in pocketbook, went instead with Jeannot Charbonnière and old Lucien Imbolt the violinist, who between them knew pretty much everyone in Paris’s demi-monde and were less likely to be recognized by their quarry. Daniel’s pomaded curls, kohl-lined eyes and coats of antique brocade – puce or lavender or parakeet-green – weren’t likely to be missed or forgotten.

  At six feet three, January was aware that he wasn’t exactly inconspicuous either – there were numerous other Africans in Paris, but only a few were making their living as musicians. But at least his friendship with Daniel wasn’t known to half the gamblers and Cyprians present at Chez L’Alouette that evening. Charbonnière pointed out Michaud, broad-shouldered and soldierly in a blue superfine coat of rather pronounced cut and trousers strapped tight beneath his insteps; Imbolt quietly identified the over-pomaded dumpling of a man who leaned over the roulette table at his side as Jacques Troue, proprietor of the aforesaid string of blacking factories. Inquiries among the musicians – playing discreetly behind screens at the far end of the room – established that Troue had abandoned Paris weeks before the rioting, with Michaud in tow, and hadn’t returned until all was quiet and Louis-Philippe was safe on the throne. One of the waiters added that he’d heard they’d gone to Dieppe.

  From there it was a simple matter to wait outside Chez L’Alouette until three in the sultry August morning, and follow the Troue carriage (four horses and one of the most ostentatious coats of arms January had ever seen) when it conveyed the young man (and his infatuated erastes) to Michaud’s apartment on the Place de Vendome. On the following evening – summer being the time of leisure (and short commons) for musicians – January made his way to Les Quatres Chiminees in the Rue des Capuchines. It wasn’t the nearest tavern to the apartment, but it was the cleanest, and the haunt of every valet and hostler in the district. Michaud’s valet had been newly hired – only a week after the start of Michaud’s association with M’sieu Troue – and was far from enthusiastic about his employer.

  ‘Now, my granddad was the Marquis de Trebeche’s coachman,’ the valet groused over the pint of ale January bought for him (at Daniel’s expense). ‘Yeah, he’d treat you like you was a dog, but those old aristos, before the revolution, some of ’em treated their dogs damn well. Trebeche was one of ’em. Granddad’d have to wait for the family in the square outside some Versailles town house in the rain til near dawn, but he’d always tip an extra couple of sols for our trouble, or make sure that stuck-up daughter of his didn’t call for her carriage ’til she was damn well ready to walk out the door. Pig-headed and head over ears in debt, the lot of ’em, but they had a sense of noblesse oblige. Not like the trash you’ve got now, callin’ ’emselves noble – T’cha! Marryin’ factory-owners’ daughters, an’ bankers’ sons, an’ hirin’ the children of real nobles to teach ’em manners that they feel deep in their spoilt hearts that they don’t have to learn since Dad’s got money …’

  It was a simple matter and a few francs – and the sympathetic ear that January had early learned worked almost as well – to ascertain that Michaud had been nowhere near Paris on the night Philippe de la Marche had died.

  ‘Which clears some of the underbrush,’ he remarked on the following afternoon, when he joined Charbonnière and Lucien at Carnot’s tiny attic studio. ‘Troue – and Michaud – and Madame Troue – were all at Dieppe from mid-July until just last week, though madame wasn’t aware that her husband was renting rooms in the Rue de l’Epée for the “Paris friend” they coincidentally met every evening at the Petite Theatre.’

  ‘Nor that her husband had purchased that “Paris friend’s” new coat, new hat, and new boots for him either, I’ll wager.’ Carnot, blacked eye fading and the bruises on his jaw and lip diffusing to an unsightly yellowish-green, delicately blended cast shadow with background darkness on the face of Medea, staring wildly around a pillar at her husband Jason and his frail blonde princess.

  ‘A pity, in its way,’ the artist continued. ‘Not only would I not mind seeing Apollon Michaud go to the guillotine – the man can’t hold his wine and lies like a serpent – but nobody would much care if he were taken for the crime. He doesn’t have family – at least, not family who’d work to have him cleared. Something tells me old Moses Ben-Gideon isn’t going to have a conveniently disgruntled valet to question, and if the de Belvoire family themselves – père or fils – were behind it …’

  ‘The de Belvoires?’ Lucien dropped the string he’d been dangling for Thaïs the cat, and sat up in the attic’s single, dilapidated bergère chair. ‘Dear boy, what are you saying? Philippe was madame’s curly-haired lamb. By all I’ve heard, she’s the one who’s pushing so hard to have poor Anne executed for the crime.’

  ‘And was this Comte de Belvoire so enthusiastic about his curly-haired lamb of an heir dallying with men?’ Ayasha, sitting in the dormer stitching buttons on Carnot’s good visit-the-clients shirt (Carnot’s girlfriend being apparently ignorant of which end of the needle the thread went through), raised her brows. ‘Or is his perfectly robust little brother – who according to de la Marche’s prospective mother-in-law, the Marquise de Taillefer, lost thousands of francs in the gaming rooms of every party they took him to last winter – happy to see the family fortune turned over to one who’ll never get an heir in his turn?’

  Charbonnière protested, ‘You can’t go so far as to say—’

  ‘And in any case—’ January set aside the sheaf of sketches he’d been perusing – ‘according to the Gazette de France, the Comte de Belvoire and his family were at Etamps during the rioting. At the Comte’s chateau at Noisette-le-Comte, to be exact, where they’d been since—’

  ‘But they weren’t.’ Lucien detached Thaïs from his shin, and gathered her compact fluffiness into his lap. ‘I saw Celestin – the younger son – at Au Mandragore on the twenty-sixth, the night before the rioting started. Old Moulard who owns the place practically begged me to play there this summer,’ he added, as if he expected one or both of his fellow musicians to cry out in horror at the mention of this low-grade den. ‘Even Orpheus played in Hell.’

  Charbonnière grinned. ‘You could catch the pox just breathing the air in there.’

  ‘I have better ways, dear boy,’ retorted Lucien grandly, ‘of catching the pox, should I desire to do such a thing.’

  ‘You’re sure about seeing him?’ January leaned forward, from the corner of the table where he perched. ‘Because I checked in the Gazette, and it says the whole family was at Noisette-le-Comte—’

  Ayasha set Carnot’s shirt aside and dug from the untidy pile of broadsheets, magazines, and newspapers in the goods boxes along the wall a slightly yellowed issue of the court periodical in question. Like many artists in Paris, Carnot kept track of the great families of the court: one needed to know where one’s clientele could be found. January took it from her hand,
and read aloud: ’

  Friday, 23 July, 1830. The Comte de Belvoire remains at Noisette-le-Comte, summer residence of the family. Enjoying the country air with him are Madame la Comtesse de Belvoire-Clianrouge, his younger son Monsieur Celestin de Gourgue, the Marquis and Marquise de Taillefer, Monsieur le Vicomte de Brancas – ‘that’s Taillefer’s oldest son’ – and Mademoiselle de Chouvigny. One daily expects an announcement of considerable interest.

  ‘Mademoiselle is Taillefer’s daughter,’ Ayasha put in. ‘I was originally inclined to feel sorry for the girl, given the degree of resemblance she bears to a stoat, until the third or fourth tantrum she threw while I was fitting a court dress for her last fall.’

  ‘Celestin de Gourgue – though I suppose we must call him de la Marche now – is mentioned as being at Etamps again on the twenty-sixth,’ said January, scanning the column of print. ‘He may have sneaked into town to go gambling, if he’s as enthusiastic about it as you say—’

  ‘According to Madame de Taillefer, the family hired some frightful old clergyman to follow the boy about and keep him out of trouble. At twenty-three you’d think they’d recognize him as an adult.’

  January queried Lucien with an eyebrow.

  ‘No sign of a pedagogue, frightful or otherwise. Myself, I’d hardly say the boy was the fiendish gambler his mama seems to fear. To my recollection he was only in Au Mandragore for half an hour.’

  ‘I wonder his throat wasn’t cut as he walked out the door,’ Charbonnière commented, and Lucien shook his head.

  ‘The proprietor pays two hundred francs a month to Cut-Throat l’Allemande to make sure the customers aren’t robbed coming out. A great many of the Good and the Beautiful come in of an evening – to play a few hands, or watch part of the show – before going on elsewhere. Particularly in the summer when there’s nothing on but the Comedie Francaise and everyone is out of town.’