Shallow steps descended from the two wings of the Capitol, where the Houses of Congress met. ‘They barred Negroes from entering the Capitol years ago,’ said Preston, in that carefully neutral voice he had used at the train station. ‘I’m sorry for it, for I would have liked to see the laws of our country made.’
‘Maybe that’s why they did it,’ January said.
The inevitable clumps of office seekers, waiting on the Capitol steps for the appearance of Senators or Congressman who might recommend them for work, watched the ball players, too. Now and then an elected official would emerge from the halls of Congress, dignified in an elegant coat and a tall beaver hat; the office seekers would surround him, practically wagging their tails.
The representatives of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness passed down the steps and within twenty feet of the chained men on the benches without so much as a glance.
Many of them, January reminded himself, had probably seen slaves sold before.
But as they walked away from the legislature of their nation, January found himself remembering the story of Jesus’ visit to the Temple: how he had become so enraged at the moneylenders who’d set up shop in its courtyard that he’d taken a whip to them, overturning the tables, scattering the coin, and driving their sacrilegious greedy asses out into the street …
And got nailed to a cross for his trouble.
Jesus, thought January, where are you now?
FIVE
‘I would not,’ said January to Darius Trigg, later that afternoon, ‘want your good wife to have wrong ideas about my sister. Hers is a common arrangement, the custom of the country in Louisiana. Henri Viellard has been my sister’s protector for eleven years. It isn’t …’
He hesitated, seeking a word, leaning in the doorway of the shed where he’d found his host cutting kindling for the next morning’s fires.
‘It’s like a marriage,’ he finished. ‘For many men in New Orleans, it is marriage – they never take white wives. It drives their families insane,’ he added, with a certain satisfaction.
‘You know –’ Trigg drove the hatchet into the block – ‘if I had the choice to be rich and white, and barred from ever marrying Mrs Trigg … I don’t think I could do it.’
January thought of that formidable woman, six feet tall and square and solid as a drystone chimney, and smiled at the light in the smaller man’s eyes. ‘I feel the same way about Mrs Janvier,’ he said. ‘The real Mrs Janvier, back in New Orleans. I was asked to pretend Dominique was my wife, for the sake of appearances, on the voyage out here … If that kind of arrangement was good enough for the patriarch Abraham in the Bible,’ he added gravely, ‘it should be good enough for us regular folks.’
‘Except that Abraham pretended his wife was his sister,’ Trigg grinned, ‘not that his sister was his wife … And I don’t care if he did have some kind of special deal with God, that business with the Pharoah always sounded fishy to me.’
‘Me, too, but I got hit with a ruler by Père Antoine for asking about it.’
‘I think we musta gone to the same school.’ The landlord rubbed the back of his head reminiscently, then bent to gather up the kindling. January fetched the big willow basket from beside the door. In the yard, eight-year-old Mandie Trigg called to her sister to stop chasing those chickens before she got pecked, and help her with the eggs. ‘And this M’sieu Viellard’s here in town?’
‘At the Indian Queen Hotel. With his wife – who seems to have no objection to the arrangement—’
‘If he dies, can I marry her?’
‘You wouldn’t like it.’ January recalled Chloë Viellard’s prim humor and astringent tongue. ‘She’s often said that she knows she couldn’t make M’sieu Viellard – or any man – a comfortable wife, and that it isn’t his fault their families insisted on the match. And she knows my sister makes him happy.’
Trigg grimaced. ‘I guess it’s better than everybody sneaking around making each other miserable … I’ll let Mrs Trigg know.’
Upon their return from their tour of the city, January had found two letters on the table in the hall, addressed in Henri Viellard’s tiny, unreadable hand. One was to Minou, advising her that his carriage – hired, coachman and all, for their stay in the capital – would call for her that evening, to take her to a house in Georgetown, also rented for the evening from a Mrs Arabella Purchase. It was this which had prompted January’s quest for his host, not only to make sure that Mrs Trigg understood the conventions inherited from French society which might not be viewed in the same light by Americans, but to ask about Mrs Purchase. The memory of Preston’s words about Kyle Fowler and his hollow-bottomed wagon lingered unpleasantly.
‘Oh, she’ll be perfectly safe,’ said Trigg, when January – a little circumspectly – mentioned the evening’s program. ‘I know Bella Purchase. She knows her business depends on a good reputation and repeat customers. That’s the custom of the country here in Washington.’
They climbed the two rear steps to the kitchen door: like the new American houses in New Orleans’ Second Municipality, those here in Washington had kitchens built into the back part of the main house, rather than as a separate building across the yard. ‘Men are in and out of town all the time. Most of their families are back at home, especially if they live in some Godforsaken place like Wisconsin. Some of ’em just go down to Reservation C if they need their ashes hauled, or visit places like Mrs Newby’s over on Louisiana Avenue if they’ve got the money. But a lot of gentlemen take regular mistresses. Ladies who’re maybe married to somebody else.’
He set down the kindling basket beside the wide hearth. ‘So there’s folks in town who run “houses of accommodation”. Nice little cottage, quiet neighborhood, servant or two who know how to keep their mouths shut. Gentleman books ’em for an afternoon, or an evening, same as you’d book a church hall. For a little extra, they’ll even arrange to find you a lady. The owners have their regular customers, some of ’em for years.’
‘Considering how the overseer of the place I was born on went about getting his greens,’ said January drily, ‘I’m not going to throw stones at any man who commits adultery like a gentleman. Besides,’ he added, ‘anything that’ll put a Senator in a kindlier frame of mind before he goes into Congress is all right with me.’
The second note from Henri contained a request that January accompany himself and Chloë to Georgetown the following afternoon, to meet with Rowena Bray, who had had tea with Selwyn Singletary shortly before the elderly mathematician’s disappearance.
Georgetown (according to Trigg) was an older community than Washington, slightly upriver on the other side of the wooded gorge of Rock Creek. From what January could see from the driver’s box of Henri Viellard’s extremely stylish landaulet on Saturday afternoon, it was also a more prosperous one. No cows browsed in its vacant fields, no pigs rooted in its lanes. When the landaulet rumbled across the wooden bridge at P Street and out of the trees, it was as if they had entered another world.
Handsome houses of mellowed brick lined streets of cobblestone or gravel. Further up the bluffs along the creek, January glimpsed a paper-mill and a couple of grist-mills, half-hidden among sweet gum and sycamore just coming into spring leaf. As they turned on to Monroe Street, he saw another group of young men playing ‘town ball’, shouting like schoolboys: Frank Preston had evidently been right that everyone in town was playing it this year. At supper last night, it had been clear that his host (to Mrs Trigg’s outspoken disdain) was captain of a team known as the K Street Stalwarts, who regularly trounced the Alexandria Conquerors, the Georgetown Knights, and even sometimes the formidable Centurions from Judiciary Square. (‘Like grown men don’t got better things to do …’)
‘I thought any “assembly” of Negroes is illegal in this town,’ January had asked, and Trigg had merely grinned and made a gesture as if counting out coin.
According to Darius Trigg, Luke Bray was a Kentucky planter’s son who had been appointed a
ssistant to the Secretary of the Navy by President Jackson, in spite of having never set foot on a boat in his life. His house on Monroe Street boasted a peach orchard on one side and a hedged rose garden on the other, both in the slight state of dilapidation that told January that either there were not quite enough servants, or that the servants weren’t being kept to their work.
A liveried slave led them into the parlor, where Mrs Bray – sylphlike, worried-looking, and dressed in a plain dark-blue gown whose sleeves were several seasons out of date – came forward to greet the Viellards in exquisite boarding-school French. ‘I was horrified to receive your letter, Madame. Oh, please,’ she added, turning her wide green eyes on January, who had remained standing beside the parlor door when the slave bowed himself out. ‘Do have a seat, Mr January. My husband and his father will die of outrage if they learn of it, but I will not turn myself into one of these frightful Democrats for their sakes.’
She clasped Chloë’s hand, drew her to the sofa.
‘Poor Mr Singletary called on me twice – in fact he was supposed to take tea here again with me on the eighteenth of October. When he didn’t come I simply thought he’d forgotten. He’s shockingly absent-minded, you know. He said he’d write me when he reached Charlottesville, and I should have worried earlier. It wasn’t like him to forget completely, but it was like him to forget for awhile, I’m afraid.’
‘Do you know where he was staying, M’am?’ Being welcomed to sit in a chair was one thing, but January was certain that it was his inclusion in the parlor which accounted for the absence of a tea tray. As on the Anne Marie, one could accept blacks with every sign of equanimity, but one would never risk having it said that one ate with such people.
Particularly not if one’s husband was ambitious for advancement in the Department of the Navy.
Or was the son of a tobacco planter in Kentucky.
‘The National Hotel, I believe he said, though I may be misremembering.’
‘How well did you know him?’ Chloë leaned forward. ‘It sounds strange to say so, but though I feel I’ve known him half my life, he and I have never met face to face.’
‘That sounds so like him.’ Mrs Bray was, January guessed, a year or two younger than Rose – twenty-five or -six – and not precisely pretty, though there was great vivacity in her thin face. ‘He’s been in and out of Papa’s bank since I was quite a tiny child. Such an odd man, like a big gray bear, at a time when nobody in the City –’ January could almost hear the capital letter, as she spoke of London’s banking district – ‘ever wore a beard. But I never spoke to him – he’s very shy. Only when Father wrote to me that Mr Singletary would be passing through Washington on his way to take up this teaching post, of course I invited him to tea.’
She chuckled, amusement turning her face beautiful, like sunlight on marble. ‘Mr Bray was here the first time Mr Singletary called and hadn’t the slightest idea what to make of him. In many ways my husband is … I suppose what you in New Orleans would call a Kain-tuck, though you could search the earth and not find a nobler heart.’ She frowned for a moment, as if troubled at some thought concerning her husband.
Then she gave her head a little shake and went on gaily, ‘And of course Mr Singletary, having no more small talk than the kitchen cat, proceeded to explain to him the principles of double-entry accounting, with an aside into methods of converting Turkish lire into pounds, poking at him with his eyeglasses all the while …’
Her smile faded. ‘What do you suppose happened to him?’
‘I spoke to the Chief Constable yesterday.’ Henri straightened his spectacles and fished in his vest pocket for his notebook. ‘He said that no – er – body has been found bearing anything that might be identified as his, although I must say the constabulary did not impress me. At the coach office, the clerks said they had no record of anyone of his name purchasing a ticket to Charlottesville, and I can’t imagine why he would have done so incognito. Now that we have some idea of what he looked like we can inquire at the hospitals …’
‘Surely if he’d been taken ill,’ protested Mrs Bray, ‘the hospital would have written to me. I know he had my card. In any case –’ her dark brows knit – ‘when it became clear that Mr Singletary was missing, Mr Oldmixton at the British Ministry – Sir Henry Fox’s secretary – sent a clerk to make enquiries along the stage route to Charlottesville. It was then,’ she finished simply, ‘that I wrote to you.’
In the silence that followed, the voices of slaves drifted from the kitchen, then dimmed as the door closed, which divided the small office at the back of the parlor from the kitchen quarters behind. The long parlor, looking on to the rose garden at the east of the house through three tall French windows, was suffused at this hour with a gentle dimness that would turn into twilight soon. January guessed the two marble busts – one of Athena, the other of a young woman with a hairstyle of fifty years ago – had been brought by this soft-voiced young woman to her marriage; probably the handsome spinet piano as well.
Chloë asked, ‘And he spoke of no one else that he might have seen here?’
Mrs Bray shook her head. ‘Though conversation with Mr Singletary was always a bit problematic. I wish I’d insisted that he take Mede with him to Charlottesville …’
‘Mede?’
‘Ganymede, my husband’s valet. His Good Man Friday, he calls him – when he’s not ordering him about quite shockingly. An invaluable young man. But Mr Bray wouldn’t hear of it.’
Through the long windows January glimpsed a flurry of movement as a groom ran out to meet the horseman who’d come up the drive at a canter on a horse that easily could have cost a thousand dollars. The man who leaped from the saddle was tall, wide-shouldered, and moved with feral grace. Honey-colored hair, straight, clear features … he sprang toward the front stairs and January heard him yell, ‘Mede! Where the hell are you, you lazy savage …? Get my bath ready …’
An expression of tightness fleeted across Mrs Bray’s face.
But Henri, his thoughts pursuing other tracks, asked suddenly, ‘Should we be inquiring about Mr Singletary’s friends? Or asking about his enemies?’
‘Enemies?’ Mrs Bray looked startled. ‘I shouldn’t imagine the poor old man had an enemy in the world! What makes you say that?’
Henri frowned, clasping and unclasping his kid gloves in his plump, ink-stained hands. Like his tiny wife, he was nearly blind as a mole, and behind thick spectacle lenses his enormous brown eyes usually had a bovine mildness that most people took for stupidity. ‘I took a walk yesterday afternoon along the marshlands where the canal flows into the river,’ he said, ‘and saw a cerulean warbler and at least three different varieties of Limenitidinae, by the way … But it occurred to me that the Potomac isn’t at all like the Mississippi. It’s all mudflats hereabouts. If a man were knocked on the head and dumped into the river from the bank, he wouldn’t be swept out to sea unless this occurred at the very flow of the tide. Or else, he’d have to have been taken out to midstream on a boat, or dropped from the middle of the Alexandria bridge, which I’ve observed is closed at night. And both of those procedures sound like a great deal of trouble for casual robbers.’
Mrs Bray looked baffled; Chloë, suddenly thoughtful.
‘It’s actually quite difficult to completely dispose of a human body, isn’t it, Benjamin?’
‘That’s true,’ January agreed.
‘I think both of you have been spending entirely too much time listening to Dominique.’
Henri looked disconcerted – as well he might, January reflected, coming from his wife – but he himself only said, ‘Maybe. But M’sieu Viellard is correct, Madame. And put in that light, something about the completeness of Mr Singletary’s disappearance is … odd.’
The parlor door flew open; the tall gentleman from the drive stood framed in it. ‘Rowena— I’m sorry, I beg your pardon.’ He bowed, flustered. His face was older, January observed, than the boyish energy of his body, lined about the eyes and
with a kind of settled tiredness in the corners of his mouth. His voice had the soft upcountry accents of Kentucky, reminding January of Abishag Shaw’s.
‘Madame Viellard, Monsieur Viellard,’ said their hostess as Henri and January rose, ‘my husband. And this is Mr January,’ she added, ‘who is helping them look for poor Mr Singletary.’
‘Good Lord, is he still missin’?’ Bray yanked off his glove, held out his hand first to Chloë, then to Henri, and then to January, with no sign of sudden death from outrage. ‘I do beg your pardon, m’am … Mrs Bray, is it tonight we’re due at that shindig at the Arlington House? There anythin’ else beforehand?’
‘Dinner,’ she said patiently. ‘At Mr Creighton’s—’
‘Damn! Dang,’ he corrected himself, with an apologetic glance at Chloë. ‘I meant dang, m’am. If you’ll excuse me … Mede!’ he yelled, and retreated into the hall. ‘Mede, God damn you—’
‘It sounds as if you have a busy evening before you.’ Chloë rose and gathered her point-lace shawl about her. ‘I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to see us. If you recall anything else about M’sieu Singletary – anything he might have said to you, or anything odd about his behavior … given the general context,’ she added, with a quirk of her brows, ‘please do send me a note. We’re staying at the Indian Queen Hotel.’
Mrs Bray’s eyes grew wide. ‘You don’t honestly think …?’
‘I don’t honestly think a thing yet. But Benjamin – and Henri – may in fact be right … and it may behoove us to learn a good deal more about who else M’sieu Singletary might have known in Washington, and how he spent his time here.’
SIX
The following afternoon – after walking out to Georgetown to Mass in the morning, there being no Catholic church in Washington itself – January was inducted into the K Street Stalwarts and the mysteries of town ball.
Good Man Friday Page 6