Good Man Friday

by Barbara Hambly

  As January had observed at supper on Friday evening, particularly since the great Virginia slave uprising six years ago, there were statutes on the books forbidding any ‘assembly’ of blacks, for purposes of playing ball or anything else. ‘’Fraid the Abolitionists are going to come around handing out pamphlets and fomenting another insurrection,’ said Trigg as they left Connecticut Avenue and waded across fields of marshy grass. ‘Like we need a bunch of New England white men telling us slavery is bad.’

  ‘Well,’ sighed January, ‘I guess some of us niggers is so stupid we haven’t figured that out yet.’

  ‘And the riot back in ’thirty-five didn’t help anything. But as long as we stay out here –’ Trigg gestured to the empty pastures that stretched along the stream called Reedy Branch above L Street – ‘we’re pretty safe. Besides, Madison Jeffers – he’s Constable of the Second Ward – brokers the bets on our games and takes a cut.’

  Four wooden stakes had been driven into the ground to mark out a sixty-foot square, and an assortment of old goods-boxes and broken fence-rails lined up for the team that was ‘up’ to sit on while waiting for their turn at bat. Though it was only March, the new grass had already been worn into pathways between the ‘bases’, and bald circles had developed where the thrower and striker habitually stood. Another game was in progress on the other side of the avenue, and by the shouts of, ‘Plug that Whig whoreson!’ and, ‘You show that tar-heeled skunk!’ January deduced that Northern clerks were ranged against Southern ones.

  ‘I suppose it’s better than getting in duels,’ he remarked to Dominique, who had come out with Clarice Perkins, whose husband, Sabbath or no Sabbath, was an enthusiastic member of the team.

  ‘Or spending all their days in some salle d’armes practicing for one. Don’t go too far, dearest!’ she called after Charmian, who had darted away in quest of the pale-pink trillium that starred the long grass. ‘I suppose they’re bored,’ she added wistfully. ‘It’s easy for boys, you know, to find things to do in a strange city – even if they aren’t hunting for purple emperor butterflies or missing mathematicians. The Reverend Perkins said I might help him teach the children some evenings.’ She didn’t add, When Henri is at parties, and didn’t need to. They had seen Henri and Chloë at Mass, sitting in the front pew of Holy Trinity Church with the scattering of clerks and secretaries from the French, Spanish, and Italian ministries: the rest of the little church had been crammed with Irish b’hoys from the construction crews. That afternoon, the Viellards had joined the rest of Washington society in paying calls.

  ‘The Reverend is nice,’ Minou added after a moment. ‘He is not how I thought a Protestant preacher would be. Though I don’t think I am how he thought a kept woman would be.’

  ‘Has anyone called you that?’ asked January sharply.

  ‘Oh, P’tit,’ she sighed. ‘They don’t have to. Madame Trigg has been very kind, and I think she talked to Madame Perkins a little …’ She shook her head. ‘But it isn’t the same here. At home, everyone I know, practically, is plaçée. Or else they’re like Rose, or Odile Gignac the dressmaker: their mothers were plaçée. Here, there is nothing between a married lady like Madame Perkins and those … those salopes we saw on the steam train.’

  Around the thrower’s circle, Trigg and the Reverend clustered with several of the Georgetown Knights to toss a coin for ‘first up’. Talk and laughter drifted in the air. It was true, reflected January, that he’d been accepted as a teammate and a brother. That he could seek community anywhere he pleased in this city, while a woman, with her octoroon child …

  Minou tucked her hand into the crook of his arm, smiled up at him. ‘And I think it infamous,’ she added in a jesting voice, ‘that poor Rose should have to stay home and cook and keep house and visit friends and family, and sit on her own gallery in the evening – all those things I would commit murder to do! – when she wants to travel with you and hunt for a man who’s vanished off the face of the earth without a trace … Oh, look at that little dog! Such an adorable … Do you think Henri would get me one? Or should I get a parrot instead?’

  ‘I think Henri would assassinate you,’ said January, ‘if you got either one. And if he didn’t, I would, the minute you brought it into the cabin on the ship going home …’

  She made a face at him, then turned her brilliant smile on Trigg as he came back in their direction, swinging the long striking-stick – like a round cricket-bat – and gesturing for January to try a few hits.

  ‘I meant to introduce you to Tice Byrd,’ said Trigg, after he and the others on the team had patiently coached January in the art of striking. ‘He’s the piano man who usually works with me. Now Dan –’ he nodded at the tall and extremely handsome waiter who was the best hitter on the team – ‘tells me Tice’s gone and broke his wrist—’

  ‘He all right?’ January knew what broken fingers, broken wrists, or – in his own case a few years ago – dislocated shoulders could do in the midst of a season of entertainments. The one thing worse than angering a wealthy white gentleman by being right about his fighting nigger …

  ‘It’s a clean break,’ said Handsome Dan. ‘He was trying to get that sorry brother of his up the stairs to his rooms and the man started to fight him – drunk, of course – and they both went ass-over-teakettle down the whole flight. And of course the brother’s just fine …’

  ‘We’re taking up money for his wife and kids,’ said Trigg. ‘But that still leaves me short a piano man Thursday night—’

  January flung up his hands. ‘Say no more. I’m your man—’

  ‘That’s mighty white of you, Ben.’

  Amid the laughter of the team, January glanced back in Dominique’s direction, saw her standing alone – Thèrése had settled on one of the goods boxes complaining about her feet again – watching her child stalk butterflies.

  Minou, Charmian, and their little entourage returned with Clarice Perkins to the boarding house as the sun began to set; the Stalwarts and the Knights (and the Patriots and the Panthers, across the way) remained playing until it was too dark to see. ‘You just get a little more practice in,’ said Charlie Springer – the head waiter at Blodgett’s Hotel – encouragingly, ‘and you’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’ll be fine if standing out in the field is what you want to do all day,’ sighed January, but there was a chorus of good-natured rebuttals – No, give him a few games, he’d be fine! And it was very good, he reflected, to be out, hitting (or trying to hit) balls and running around in the long grass on a spring evening.

  Behind him, Handsome Dan said something to the Reverend Perkins that made January prick up his ears: ‘What’s that about a National Institution for the diffusion of knowledge?’

  ‘Congress is trying to put it together,’ said the Reverend. ‘I think it a laudable scheme.’

  ‘Bet me,’ said Trigg, ‘that that knowledge is going to get diffused to white men only.’

  ‘Who in Congress?’

  ‘John Quincy Adams,’ said Dan, in his purring South Carolina drawl. ‘See, there was this Englishman name of Smithson died ten years back, and he left half a million in gold to the United States, to found an institution for the diffusion of scientific knowledge for the benefit of all mankind. And of course the Congress turned around and used it to fund state banks—’

  ‘Which lent it out and then closed their doors and defaulted,’ added Springer.

  ‘And Adams,’ finished Trigg, ‘stood up in Congress – this was a couple of years ago – and said, no, Congress had to put the money back to the original terms of the bequest.’ They paused in the darkness opposite the fire station, the dim lights of the scattered houses blurred by the river’s rising mist. ‘You a scientist, Ben?’

  The team split into twos and threes, Trigg, January, the Reverend and Seth Berger the cab driver proceeding along K Street.

  ‘My wife is,’ he replied. ‘But the man I’m looking for – Mr Singletary – is a mathematician, and it sounds to me like h
e’d have an interest in this Mr Smithson’s Institute. I’d be willing to bet he’s written to Congressman Adams about it – maybe even called on him here in Washington.’

  Staggered at the temerity of the idea, Berger said, ‘You’re gonna call on John Quincy Adams?’

  ‘He’s a public official.’

  ‘He used to be President of the United States! He’s not gonna give you the time of day!’

  ‘He’s been fighting for years to get that gag rule about slavery rescinded in Congress,’ said Trigg thoughtfully. ‘I bet he would, too, give you the time of day, quicker than some other used-to-be Presidents I could name. He’s also trying to get the slave trade banned here in Washington—’

  The Reverend Perkins’ hand clamped suddenly on January’s shoulder. Hooves clopped in the thickening mists. Berger whispered, ‘Speak of the Devil …’

  The men halted in their tracks. ‘It’s the Devil, all right,’ breathed Trigg.

  They stood in silence, hidden – January hoped – in fog and darkness as the wagon creaked by. Lanterns on its high front caught the white-furred hooves of the team, outlined the round, motherly face of Elsie Fowler on the box. Glinted on the cudgels of the men sitting in the wagon behind.

  In his years in New Orleans, January had several times gone to voodoo dances: seen the gods take the bodies of the celebrants, speak in their voices, handle fire in their bare hands or summon the dead …

  And nothing he had seen raised the hair on the back of his neck, as did the sight of that half-glimpsed wagon in the fog, the sound of the creaking harness. There could be a man in the hollow beneath the wagon bed, thought January. A free man, drugged, beaten, tied, gagged and maybe awake enough to know what’s happening to him.

  At the back of the wagon sat Davy Quent, pock-marked face pale in the lantern-glow, a rifle across his knees.

  Or there might not.

  And if I ran to the wagon, leaped on it, tried to free that man … What? I’d be shot and Rose would spend the rest of her life struggling to keep a roof over her head.

  And the wagon might be empty.

  Mists swallowed the wagon. Like the Devil’s eyes, the lanterns mocked him in the wet darkness, then slowly faded away.

  Back on Eighteenth Street, dinner was on the table. Afterwards, Trigg got out his flute, and an impromptu dance ensued as he and January familiarized themselves with each others’ tricks of rhythm and timing. Not a gentleman passed up the chance to dance with Dominique, with Thèrése, with Musette and fat little Mrs Perkins and the four giggling little girls; even Octavia Trigg got tugged into a waltz by the Reverend. When January and Trigg played ‘The Moon’, Minou and Octavia sang a duet, voices mingling in the low topaz radiance of the lamps. Glancing through the open door, January saw in the doorway of the opposite parlor, solitary and rather lonely-looking, the white gentleman boarder standing to listen, his dark head bowed.

  Tea was brought in, and the children packed off to bed; Mrs Trigg carried a small pot across the dark hall, to serve to her white boarder in his kingly isolation. When she returned, she fetched the letters from the top of the piano and handed two to January.

  One was from Henri Viellard, on the stationery of the Indian Queen Hotel.

  Mr Janvier,

  Enquiries at the National Hotel reveal no record of any Selwyn Singletary having stayed there, either in October of 1837 or at any time before or since. The register does not list his name, nor is the hand on any other name in it familiar to myself or to Madame Viellard. The manager, a M. Breckenridge, disclaims any recollection of an Englishman of Singletary’s description.

  However, the British Minister, Sir Henry Fox, informs me that M. Singletary left a card upon him on the 12th of October and was to have come to call on the 20th, an appointment which he did not keep. Sir Henry’s secretary, a Mr Oldmixton, is as Mrs Bray attested well acquainted with Singletary. Madame Viellard and I will dine at the Ministry Wednesday night, and inform you of all we learn.

  Yours respectfully,

  H. Viellard

  The second note was written in kitchen-pencil on extremely fine paper, in a hand at once firm and unpracticed.

  Mr January,

  My name is Ganymede, valet to Mr Bray. The last time he came to the house your friend Mr S left his notebook in my care and said keep it secret from every living soul no matter who. I have not known what to do with it. Would you meet me at the Paper Mill Bridge where P Street runs over Rock Creek tomorrow afternoon at four? Mr S said that he was in fear of his life.

  Yr ob’t s’vt

  Ganymede Tyler

  SEVEN

  ‘Why did he leave this with you?’ January turned the notebook in his hands. It was old and much thumbed, red Morocco-leather, stained and flaking.

  Mede glanced over his shoulder, where the road ran into the wooded bluffs that hid Georgetown from the bridge. ‘First time he took tea with Mrs Bray, he’d walked out here from town, sir.’ His voice had the soft inflection of Kentucky, but January didn’t need that to know that Luke Bray’s ‘Good Man Friday’ was one of the slaves he’d brought with him from his father’s plantation.

  Mede, some ten years his master’s junior, was almost his double. His complexion was a generation or two more dusky, his hair the hue of molasses rather than honey; the blue of his eyes tinged with the turquoise-gray familiar to January from the sang mêlé community of New Orleans.

  Mede Tyler was Luke Bray’s brother. His father’s son, by one of his father’s slaves.

  ‘When it came on to rain, she asked me to drive him back—’

  ‘Where was he staying?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. As we were coming down Pennsylvania Avenue, he asked, would I take him on to the Capitol instead, so he could look at the Library. On the way he asked me about my family, and Red Horse Hill Plantation … Not prying,’ added the young man, as if anxious to absolve the old Englishman of nosiness. ‘You know the way some Northerners do. He asked as if I was just anybody he’d met on a train. He was a funny old gentleman, sir, but a very kind one.’

  January opened the notebook. The first half was filled with what looked like jottings, page after page of what January recognized as ‘magic squares’ – mathematical puzzles in which all numbers in the rows of a grid added up to the same sum – interspersed with formulae and calculations. Some of these were in pencil, others in various colors and strengths of ink, made over the course of months or years. The last six pages, however, had all – by the appearance of the ink – been made at the same time. Two columns of numbers side by side ran over all six pages, and at the bottom of the last page, a thick block of numbers.

  17

  21 Ø6191425 Ø7 Ø5 Ø720171316232001151722131623 Ø821 Ø6241424 Ø323101113 Ø1221124 Ø3 Ø8101210202 520

  17151814 Ø42419 Ø120251420 Ø4 Ø125 Ø121 Ø7201924 Ø3201622 Ø11219 Ø6 Ø3 Ø4 Ø22014 Ø12224 Ø8

  1715192410232521202516 Ø1 Ø61925 Ø8 Ø4 Ø8 Ø3 Ø81225 Ø12212 Ø2 Ø62119141219 Ø71324102217121913 Ø6

  171521 Ø5 Ø6 Ø712 Ø11321 Ø22120191413 Ø424121324 Ø3 Ø221221920 Ø713 Ø612 Ø32025

  ‘I think he was one of those people who really doesn’t see if a person is white or black or a man or a woman,’ Ganymede went on as January flipped the fragile pages. ‘Like I was a nun behind a curtain in a convent, and he couldn’t see who or what I was at all. So he’d forget I wasn’t free to do the things he did, or he sort of assumed everybody in the world understood arithmetic or liked cauliflower. To tell the truth, I felt a bit sorry for him. What’s the good being a free man, if you have no friends and no family? I’d never have said so to him,’ he added quickly.

  ‘Then when he came to the house the second time, he came early, and Mrs Bray was out. I brought him in some tea, and we talked a little more. He was all wound up, pacing like a dog in a windstorm. I asked him, was something wrong, and he said someone was trying to kill him; that someone had broke in and searched his rooms the night before.’

  ‘He have a
ny idea who it might have been?’

  The young servant shook his head. ‘But he was scared, sir. He said he woke in the night and someone was there, moving around in the dark. He cried out and the intruder shoved him over and fled; he said in the morning he found a knife on the floor that wasn’t his.’

  Mede was silent. Beneath the bridge, the creek purled over its stones.

  ‘That’s why I’m giving this notebook to you, sir,’ he said after a time. ‘It was starting up to rain again when he left, and I walked him with an umbrella to where Jem had brought his chaise. When we got to the chaise he put this book into my hand and said, “Keep this for me. I’ll send you word where to send it, but don’t let anyone – not a living soul – know you’ve got it.” Then he got in the chaise and drove off fast.’

  Daylight was fading already: January had reached the Paper Mill Bridge just before four, but the young valet had not arrived for nearly forty minutes. ‘Did he speak of anyone else he knew in Washington?’

  ‘He did, sir. That first time, he said he should call on Dr Woolmer at the Potomac School, so I guess he hadn’t yet. And he spoke of Mr Adams – the gentleman that used to be President – and of Mrs Bray’s friend Mr Oldmixton that works at the British Ministry. But I thought—’ He ducked his head, unwilling for a moment to admit what he’d thought, and it went through January’s mind:

  He was afraid they were in on it.

  Or would talk to someone connected with the intruder.

  ‘When we were in the chaise that first time, sir,’ Mede went on after a moment, ‘Mr Singletary also spoke of Mr and Mrs Viellard in New Orleans, who he said were his friends. Lodie – Mrs Bray’s maid, sir – said Saturday that Mr and Mrs Viellard was here, looking for Mr Singletary, and that you were with them and looking, too.’

  ‘Lodie listens at doors, does she?’

  Mede let a little silence lie between them without answering, then said, ‘You – nor Mr and Mrs Viellard – weren’t here in Washington when Mr Singletary disappeared, sir. And if they came all the way here to look for him, they can be trusted. I hope so, sir, because before God I don’t know what else I can do.’