But a moment later, the Lady asked, her own gaze on the kitchen chimney, ‘Could they have gone down into the yard next door? The place where the horses are . . .’
‘The livery,’ said January. ‘And yes, I’d thought of that already.’
‘They had my jewels,’ she said, with a trace of bitterness in her voice. ‘So it would have been simple also to bribe the slaves there to help them, and to let them out the gate. And since those shawls tell us that they had, indeed, found some way out of the house before Friday night, I think they must have had a protector, someone they could go to.’
‘Or thought they could go to,’ murmured January. Beyond the gallery, the rain still fell, gray and cold in the dreary tail-end of the afternoon. In the Place des Armes the clock struck three. And Fitzhugh Trulove’s ball opened at eight, in the English planter’s very elegant house out on the Bayou Road . . .
‘First thing we’ll need of you, m’am,’ said Shaw, ‘is a list of the jewels that was taken, theirs as well as yours. Times bein’ what they are, won’t be long ’fore some of ’em shows up on the open market.’
‘I shall have such a list for you tomorrow.’ Sitt Jamilla led the way down the stairs to the gallery below. Lamps had been kindled already in the parlor. Through the French doors, January could see Suleiman sitting in one of the hearth-side chairs and across from him – bent gravely over a book on his lap – a boy who had to be Hüseyin Pasha’s son.
Shamira’s son.
Jamilla called through the door to the tutor, who stood at once and came to the gallery. ‘These gentlemen are to be admitted to whatever part of the house they ask to see. Please tell the servants that they are to be obeyed, as if they were the master or myself—’
January could just imagine the expression on the maid Lorette’s face at that information.
‘—and are to be admitted to the house, and given complete freedom, at any hour of the day or night. Ghulaam—’ She turned to the eunuch, and – presumably, by the look on his face – repeated the order in whatever language it was that the man spoke.
‘Please let me know, Lieutenant,’ she went on, ‘if there is anything whatsoever that you require, of me or of any other member of the household, that will assist in bringing justice for my poor husband. For he would no more have harmed those girls than he would have raised his hand against his own children. It is not in him to do so.’
Then she turned, rather suddenly, and reascended the stairs to the private floor of the house. Ra’eesa and Ghulaam followed her, close and cautious, as if she had fallen before when taking this particular medicine. And January cursed that he didn’t know enough of the servants’ language to ask them what had originally ailed Jamilla and how long it had been since she had slipped into the clutches of a medicine that was worse than many diseases.
For the short remainder of the afternoon, January and Shaw worked their way methodically through the house, trailed by Ra’eesa and Suleiman and frowned upon by the elegant Lorette. January spoke to the servants – the maids Bette and Desirée, the quadroon cook Louis and the Turkish cook Iskander, André the kitchen boy, and the stable staff, Nehemiah and Perkin the groom, and learned little that he had not already either heard or deduced.
‘And you can bet,’ said January, when he rejoined Shaw in the stables after the last of these interviews, ‘that if Nehemiah suspected Lorette of even thinking about concealing some kind of secret, or if Lorette had been kept out of that ballroom over the stables or the loft above it and thought she could get Nehemiah into some kind of trouble over it, they’d have crippled themselves trying to get to me to tell me all about it, to the ruin of the other.’
‘That bad?’ Shaw prodded with his boot at the loose heaps of straw along the stable’s inner wall, near where a narrow service door opened on to Rue des Ursulines. January had heard all about the service door from Lorette: about how Nehemiah the coachman would thieve feed and harness-leather and medicines for the horses, and how he’d sneak them out through there after dark to sell to that scoundrel Sillery who worked at the livery. Nehemiah, for his part, had been eloquent on the subject of Lorette’s own depredations on household stores such as sugar and coffee – Louis the cook being her lover – to the extent that on the fateful Sunday night, she and the other maids had ‘boosted’ nearly a half-pound of cinnamon, and almost twice that much coffee, and they had then gone with them to take tea with Lorette’s cousin who was a housemaid to the Marignys. None of the three maids would dream (they said, and Nehemiah rolled his eyes at the assertion) of spending their evening out at so rude an entertainment as The Red Rover at the American Theater.
January sighed. ‘Don’t they understand that they’re all slaves together?’ he said. ‘That it doesn’t matter how fair you are or how many white grandparents you have?’
‘Well, it sure don’t matter to your mother.’ Shaw held up the little stable-lantern he carried – it was densely gloomy along the back wall by the hay – and stroked the nose of one of Hüseyin Pasha’s beautiful chestnut carriage-horses who put its head over the edge of the stall, to see what was going on. ‘I got more white grandparents than she does, an’ I ain’t got a civil word out of her yet.’
‘You’re an American.’ January felt the jambs of that locked service-door in the almost-dark, fingered the battered bolts, turned over the padlock in its hasp. Through the door, he could hear the scrape and swish of iron wagon-tires on the pavement of Rue des Ursulines, the clatter of hooves as they slowed to turn through the gate into the livery stable yard, only a few feet away.
A man cursed, then said, ‘I ordered them bags delivered last week, boy—’
Still, January was well aware that his mother tried to pretend that she’d never had children by a fellow slave on Bellefleur. And even the short time that he’d sat on the Board of Directors of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society had given January a wealth of infuriating experience as to who considered themselves superior to whom at the ‘back of town’.
He came back over to Shaw, where light fell from the stable entrance from the courtyard, and examined what he’d picked up on his fingers at that dark service-door in the corner.
As he’d thought. Sawdust.
‘Well, you may be right, Maestro,’ admitted Shaw as they left the house and made their way back toward the Cabildo again in the thinning rain. ‘An’ I sure couldn’t find a place in the whole of that house where them girls could have been kept without somebody seein’ flies or rats makin’ a beeline for the place, even if they was curled up into a trunk.’
He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and spat into the brimming gutters as they passed across them on the makeshift bridges of plank that were, at last, being replaced all over town by regular pavements and drains.
‘The whole story is ridiculous.’ January tucked tighter beneath his jacket the little bundle Suleiman had handed him, warm and slightly greasy from the kitchen: bread, cheese, vegetables and goat meat for his master in the prison. At the best of times, January was well aware, the food in the Cabildo was inedible, and what meat there was in it would be almost certainly be pork.
‘An’ yet,’ Shaw went on, ‘Oliver Breche is damn clear on his story. He says he’d been doin’ the shop’s books late, in that front room over the shop, an’ when the rain quit, he opened the windows to get some air. He saw light in the dormer, though the rest of the house was dark, he said, an’ was apparently admirin’ the general effect when the sash was throwed open. He saw Hüseyin Pasha framed in the window – he says – with the body of a girl in his arms. He says he recognized him by the lamplight in the attic behind him an’ was transfixiated with horror as our friend the Turk chucked first one, then t’other of the girls out. He knew the Turk, havin’ provided Mrs Hüseyin with medicines these past four weeks—’
‘So he’s the one.’
‘Pharmacy’s right there.’ Shaw nodded across the street at the darkened bricks of the building, the round glass glob
es of the great display retorts in the windows. ‘He said there was no mistakin’ what he saw.’
They reached the corner of Rue Royale, where the iron street-lamp creaked in the wind on its crossed chains above the intersection.
‘Which leaves us with the question,’ Shaw continued, when they’d gained the banquette – and the sheltering abat-vents of the houses – on the other side, ‘of where Hüseyin did hide them girls’ bodies.’
‘Or the question,’ countered January, ‘of why young Mr Breche would lie.’
‘There is that. Not to mention the question of how you can see a man’s face on an overcast night by light in the room behind him.’
Oliver Breche’s motives were elucidated a few moments later, when Shaw and January – after another plunge through the thin sheets of rain that sluiced down on the Place des Armes – reached the arched colonnade of the Cabildo and stepped once more into the chilly shelter of the watch room. Rain generally had a dampening effect on the combativeness of Gallatin Street and the levee, and on this gray tail-end of the afternoon the big stone-floored room was relatively quiet.
Quiet enough that, as January stepped through the door, the first thing he heard was a young man’s voice raised in anger. ‘That’s ridiculous! The man murdered them! How can you argue that, having perpetrated so shocking a slaughter upon their innocent bodies, he now has the right to reclaim even their poor sweet flesh for his own foul purposes?’
‘M’sieu,’ sighed Sergeant Boechter, behind his tall desk, ‘those two young women were, in effect, members of M’sieu Hüseyin’s family. I believe that his wife wishes to bury them, not cut them up and serve them to Hüseyin for his dinner.’
‘Listen to yourself!’ The young man before the desk flung up his arms. ‘You pronounce this obscenity, and you don’t even understand what you are saying!’
Beside January, Shaw stopped, his sparse, pale eyebrows drawing down over his gargoyle nose. ‘Well, fancy that,’ he said.
‘How can you give them back to their murderer?’ cried the young man – smallish and plump, with fine light-brown hair already thinning back from his narrow forehead. ‘When I am offering those poor lost souls the resting place in my own family’s tomb?’
January’s eyes met Shaw’s, and his eyebrows raised. ‘Is that who I think it is?’
Shaw nodded. ‘That’s Oliver Breche.’
FIFTEEN
‘Well, now.’ Shaw ambled up behind the young man. ‘That is mighty neighborly of you, Mr Breche.’
Breche’s mouth pursed like a rosebud trying to make a fist. ‘It is only Christian—’
‘But she warn’t a Christian,’ pointed out the Kentuckian. ‘Did you know her?’
‘Well, I – I saw her, of course.’ He was one of the worst liars January had ever seen. The weak blue eyes flinched away from Shaw’s pale gaze, and those soft nail-bitten hands fumbled with each other and then took guilty refuge in his pockets. ‘I prescribed for the Lady Jamilla, and naturally when I came into the house I would see her – I would see them both. Like indigo ghosts on the shadowed loggia—’
His features contracted at the memory of that first glimpse of forbidden beauty. ‘Her eyes met mine above their veils, filled with despair and loneliness; speaking eyes that said a thousand things. Later I would see her at her window, gazing hungrily into the world of the living from which pagan enslavement shut her out. How could any man who is a man not pity her? How could any man deny her the single scrap of freedom, that she might at least lie in the tomb of a free woman, rather than be given back to those who had bought her body and her beauty . . .’
‘That gallery’s near forty feet long,’ remarked Shaw, and he scratched under his hat. ‘Kind of a far piece, to see despair an’ loneliness in somethin’ as little as an eye.’
Breche’s lip curled. ‘I dare say you couldn’t recognize them at the distance of a yard. A rich man’s sins always find forgiveness—’
‘If you mean, money has ways of purchasing transgression, sir,’ put in January, with careful diffidence, ‘you are quite right. And curiously enough, I have every reason to believe that the coachman Nehemiah was paid at regular intervals to unscrew the hasp from the service door of the stables—’
Shaw snapped his fingers, like a stage bumpkin suddenly enlightened. ‘You know, January, now you speak of it, I did wonder who was bribin’ the man. I thought that jacket he had on looked awful new an’ swell.’
‘Let’s go back and ask him.’ January had wondered if Shaw had observed the newness – and the bespoke fit – of the coachman’s dark-red coat.
Sergeant Boechter had lighted the gas jets behind his desk just in time to illuminate the flush that crept over Breche’s face. ‘And what if I did join her?’ Breche demanded sulkily. ‘What if I did contrive it, that hearts destined for one another could meet? Though we were born on different continents, of different faiths and speaking different languages—’
‘Your father know of it?’ inquired Shaw.
Breche’s round little chin came up. ‘We would have told him.’
‘I’m sure he woulda been thrilled.’
Since one of the few opinions January had heard old Philippe Breche deliver – he avoided the shop, having reason to suspect that the old man adulterated his camphor with turpentine – had been that ‘goddamned Protestant Jews’ should be turned over to the Inquisition, he suspected that the apothecary would not have welcomed a Muslim daughter-in-law, be the circumstances of her rescue never so romantic.
Breche snarled, ‘Much you know about it, American!’ and January, as the lover drew in breath for further observations, asked gently:
‘Did she plan to run away to you?’
‘She did.’ Breche shot a resentful glare at Shaw. ‘Friday night. I waited for her, nearly all night in the shop.’
‘She could get out of Hüseyin Pasha’s house, then?’
The apothecary emitted an angry titter, like a boastful child. ‘Of course! Cupid is a mighty deity, when true hearts love! I’d pay off Nehemiah to let her out that side door that goes into the stable. And Sillery – Mr Valentine’s nigger, from the livery –would unlock the gate to the yard for us, so that we could go in and . . . and have a private place to speak.’ He glared at the other men, defying them to read anything but honorable friendship in such trysts.
Given the minimal French of which Noura was capable, January guessed their meetings had little to do with speech, or honorable behavior either. But he knew better than to interrupt this flow of information by saying so.
‘Because of the lamp above the intersection, we didn’t dare even cross the street to the shop, for fear of being seen from the house. It’s just a step, from that service door into Valentine’s yard. She told me there was another way she’d go out on Friday, because she would be carrying her things.’
January’s glance crossed Shaw’s.
‘You got no idea what way?’ asked the Kentuckian, and Breche shook his head.
‘And I take it,’ said January, and he found it an effort to keep the anger out of his voice as he asked, ‘that you’d made sure that the Lady Jamilla’s medicine would keep her from discovering that the girl was slipping out at night?’
The apothecary giggled again. ‘Child’s play! All I had to do was slip a little opium into her medicine, then gradually raise the dose. I know it couldn’t have been she who discovered the escape. No –’ the smugness at drugging an unsuspecting woman vanished in an agony of anxiety again – ‘it must have been he, who surprised my beautiful Noura as she fled. All day Saturday I watched their windows, but they were shuttered fast. Imagine my agony! Not knowing, fearing, picturing every horror that I know the Infidels do to women who escape from their harems!’
January longed to ask him where he had the information about what the Infidels did, though he suspected the source was novels of romance. His sister Dominique had a dozen.
‘All Saturday night I watched, my bleeding soul crucified with fear. The
n Sunday night, when the rain ceased, as I stood at the window, bending the whole of my heart and my gaze upon that dark house, the glow of a lantern sprang up! The attic window was thrown open, and framed in it I saw the Turk, with Noura’s body in his arms! His face was twisted into an expression of jealous rage, more like a beast’s than a man’s! I cried out in horror as he flung her down, and the next instant he reappeared with the other girl, like a dead butterfly in her veils! As I watched in terror he shrieked a curse upon her and hurled her down as well!’
‘An’ you saw all that,’ marveled Shaw, ‘at a hundred an’ seventy-seven feet, an’ two storeys up from the balcony where you was standin’. An’ heard his curse at that distance in open air.’
‘I did!’ Breche stamped his foot. ‘He learned of her flight and killed her – killed them both! – in jealous rage—’
‘I ain’t sayin’ he didn’t,’ replied Shaw soothingly. ‘An’ if’fn he did catch them girls absquatulatin’ in the middle of the night – with his wife’s jewelry – he’d have the best of good reasons to be sore-assed about it. All I’m sayin’ is, that rich as he is, he’s gonna bring in a fancy lawyer who’s gonna tear your story apart, so you need to be good an’ clear. Did you see his face?’
‘I did.’ Breche’s soft fists clenched. ‘As clearly as I see yours. I know it was he. Who else would wish to kill her – she who was so innocent and beautiful? And why? Only vile jealousy that she would have found love beyond his loathsome clutch!’
‘An’ she never spoke to you of any reason, any other thing that was goin’ on?’
The apothecary shook his head, as if he did not even understand the question. As if there could be nothing else, but what concerned him. ‘It is a cruel world,’ he said after a moment. ‘We were twin souls, Lieutenant Shaw, hearts born for one another, brought together by a miracle. You must grant me what I seek: permission at least to lay my beautiful Noura in the tomb where I myself will one day lie! Where my bleeding heart already lies, waiting for her!’
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