Good Man Friday

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Did you look in it?’

  ‘I did, sir, yes, that night, after I’d got Marse Luke settled. I could make nothing of it.’

  The light was nearly gone. Ganymede looked over his shoulder again, and January guessed that the valet had stolen away from his master’s house. He wondered if ‘Marse Luke’ beat his valet, brother or no brother.

  What was it, he wondered, about those tiny, regular figures that caught his attention …?

  ‘I told him,’ Mede went on, ‘it could be just a robber. Thieves break in hotels all over town, looking for a gold watch or a silver pen—’

  A pen.

  ‘He had a pen.’ January looked up from the notebook’s pages. ‘One of those new reservoir pens—’

  ‘Yes, sir. He showed it to me on that first ride to the Capitol, told me how it worked. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.’

  The ink lines don’t change shape as a quill’s do …

  That’s why all those tiny numbers look different.

  A friend had showed him one in Paris some years ago. It had bled ink like a stuck pig.

  ‘Silver?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’d never seen one before. Marse Luke takes steel-nib pens from the Navy, for his office upstairs, and Mrs Bray has a gold one downstairs, for doing the books.’

  ‘And had he a gold watch?’

  ‘He did, sir. He looked at it as I was driving him.’

  ‘Could you describe it? Initials? Design?’ And, when Ganymede shook his head: ‘Anything else of value that you remember? Fobs? Fob chain? Pin?’

  ‘He had a pin, sir. He wore an old-fashioned stock, like Marse Luke’s grandpa.’ The young man grinned a little, at some memory of that old man back in Kentucky. ‘What Grandma Bray calls a baroque pearl. Not round, but lumpy. It looked just like a tiny fist clenched up. He had a fob seal, but I never saw what it was. The top of it was shaped like a little chess-piece, when they don’t want to make a whole little soldier for a pawn, but just a ball on the top. More than that I don’t remember, sir—’

  ‘That’s enough.’ January thrust the notebook into his pocket. ‘And thank you, Mede, more than I can say, for coming out here to meet me like this.’ He clasped the young man’s hand. ‘Now head on back, before you get into trouble with Mrs Bray.’

  ‘Will what I told you help you find him?’ The valet’s expression told January more than words could have, about the old man’s friendliness and concern for someone he didn’t have to pay attention to at all.

  ‘After all this time I may not be able to find him,’ January said. ‘But if one of those items turns up in a pawn shop, I may be able to find the man who took them off him.’

  Not even the twinkle of lamplight shone in the formless distance as January quickened his step across the bridge. He followed the curve of the road up the uneven banks of the creek, aware of how isolated this spot was. The moon had not risen and no light penetrated the shadows beneath the trees. He hoped the creak and rustle away to his left was a fox, or one of the capital’s ubiquitous pigs. He strained his eyes, seeking the movement—

  A fragment of breeze brought him the mingled stink of tobacco spit and dirty clothes.

  It was gone an instant later, but his heart froze in his breast.

  The breeze had come from his right.

  To his left, another rustle, which stopped the instant after his own footfalls did. Harness jingled somewhere as a horse tossed its head.

  Oh, Jesus …

  He turned back toward the bridge and saw a shadow for a moment on the pale trace of the road.

  It disappeared into the trees, but he knew it for a man.

  The wagon in the black mists of K Street. The glint of lantern light on the barrel of a gun.

  He reached down and slipped from his boot the knife that he would have been arrested for carrying. What good it would do him, he didn’t know: there were at least three of them, possibly a fourth somewhere in the dark woods.

  He’d stood too long. Feet crunched the leaves to his right. He wondered if leaving the road and striking out cross-country would save him. He could at least get up a tree, if he could locate one suitably large in the dark. Against the blackness of the woods he saw movement, closing in on him …

  ‘Ben!’ shouted a voice, and a lantern flashed on the road ahead of him.

  January swung around, startled at the sound of his name—

  ‘Ben, goddamit, when I sent you to take those books to Mr Smith’s this afternoon I told you not to be all goddam day about it!’

  The man striding up the road toward him, lantern held high, was Mrs Trigg’s white boarder.

  January immediately gave the guiltiest flinch he could manage and scurried toward his benefactor – kidnappers would carry off any free black they could find, but a white master would make serious trouble to recover a piece of property worth fifteen hundred dollars. ‘Marse Poe –’ he was astonished he remembered the man’s name – ‘I swear I wasn’t just foolin’ away the time! Marse Smith wanted me to move some bookshelves for him—’

  ‘Marse’ Poe caught January by the arm – he was a good eight inches shorter, slender and elegant despite the shabbiness of his black greatcoat – and shook him. ‘Don’t you give me your excuses!’ In the light of the upraised lantern their eyes met, Poe’s warning: Play along …

  January nodded very slightly, and Poe thrust him roughly back in the direction of Washington.

  ‘I swear …’ he began again.

  ‘And I swear I’ll wear you out with the buggy whip next time you go off on your own,’ retorted ‘Marse’ Poe, and he stalked away up the road, January scurrying meekly at his heels.

  Behind them, the woods were silent.

  They’d gone about fifty yards before Poe breathed, ‘They still back there?’

  ‘They’re not following us.’

  ‘Well, thank God for small favors, anyway.’ His soft voice had the accent of Virginia. ‘I apologize if I spoke insultingly, sir. Had I leaped to your defense shouting, “You shall not drag this poor nigger into slavery!” they’d probably have shot me.’

  ‘It was damn quick thinking, sir. Thank you. But I fear I’ve disrupted your evening’s plans – you were on your way to Georgetown, I think?’

  ‘No great matter. One of those gatherings at which one barely knows one’s hostess but tries to insinuate oneself into an introduction to another of the guests. A disgusting practice, but apparently how things are managed in these degenerate days, and beggars can’t be choosers. Outwitting slave stealers in the woods has infinitely more appeal than convincing some Western Congressman of what a good postmaster I’d make.’

  ‘I’m grateful,’ said January simply. ‘And a little amazed you recognized me at that distance in the dusk. I don’t think I’d have stopped if you hadn’t called my name.’

  ‘Well, at your height you are difficult to miss.’ They were coming clear of the trees. The first lights of the Washington houses had begun to twinkle, far off to their right. Behind them January heard the clop of hooves, the creak of harness, and stepped quickly aside. A wagon came past in the gloom: four men, dark against the paler sky. Dark horses, white feet.

  Whether the men looked down at him and his ‘master’ as they passed, he couldn’t tell.

  ‘You think they’ve caught some other poor devil?’ whispered Poe.

  ‘They may just have given up for the night. It isn’t a frequented road.’

  But the thought of how close he’d come to lying bound in that coffin-like space, listening to the sounds of Washington’s streets around him and knowing what he was going to, made him shiver. He said again, ‘Thank you, sir. You didn’t have to do what you did.’

  Poe shook his head. ‘I’m no abolitionist, but I’ll not stand by and watch someone who’s legally gained his freedom have it taken away from him – certainly not by the likes of some of the scum one sees lollygagging about this town.’ They turned down one of those long, pointless avenues that stretched from n
owhere to nowhere in Washington, surrounded on all sides by empty fields and thin woods. ‘And your playing has given me a great deal of pleasure.’

  ‘I think that might be a case of “turnabout is fair play”.’ Poe glanced back at him, and January nodded toward the ink-stains on the man’s frayed cuff, where the lantern’s light showed them up. ‘You wouldn’t be Mr Edgar Poe, who writes for the Richmond Intelligencer, would you?’

  ‘The same.’ He looked both a little shy and tremendously pleased.

  ‘My wife and I both are great admirers of your reviews. And your poetry is some of the most astonishing I’ve read. And I’m not saying that,’ he added with a wry grin, ‘just because you rescued me back there. Whenever we can get the Intelligencer in New Orleans, we look for your work.’

  ‘You’re most kind, sir. It’s always gratifying to hear that one’s work is appreciated – particularly that far afield. I had hoped – indeed, it has always been the aim of my life – to be the first American to make his living solely by his pen, as Pope and Johnson did, though of late it’s been borne upon me that this might not be possible. America is less than – kind – toward those from whose work money cannot be gleaned. Hence this evening’s quest for an introduction to the Right Honorable Representative Thumbtwiddle of Ohio, or whatever the man’s name is.’ A note of grimness edged his voice. ‘Still, one lives in hope.’

  They reached the Western Market, lanterns moving about its brick arches like fireflies where a final few vendors packed up their goods. To the south, among the larger houses, more lights glimmered, and carriages proliferated as the business of the government went forward at dinners, receptions, balls. The wealthy bankers, landowners, planters who dwelled in Washington spread feasts of Virginia ham and plum tarts for Senators wearied of boarding house fare, and ambassadors whose ancestors had ridden with Richard the Lionheart bowed respectfully to the dapper little son of a New York tavern-keeper in the White House. Men in shabby greatcoats and beaver hats a few years out of fashion attended gatherings put on by would-be political hostesses, in the hopes of insinuating introductions to someone who could recommend them for a paying job.

  Other men, dressed more shabbily still, drew rein in the alleys behind the slave pens down near the Capitol and unloaded mutely-struggling cargoes from beneath false wagon-beds, or half-carried stupefied men into brick cells by the light of shaded lanterns.

  ‘And you, sir?’ asked Poe. ‘Are you also here in Washington on business?’

  January slipped his hand into his coat pocket and touched the worn binding of the notebook Ganymede Tyler had handed him. ‘In a manner of speaking, sir. In a manner of speaking.’

  EIGHT

  By Thursday afternoon – Henri’s note informed January – Chloë had inveigled an invitation to the reception and musicale being given that night by the Right Honorable Representative from Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams, at which January, under the aegis of Darius Trigg, was scheduled to play.

  From the dais at the end of the ballroom, January saw them enter the handsome house on F Street: Henri in silver-gray bore exactly the appearance of a whale escorting a mermaid. Mrs Adams – a delicate Englishwoman some ten years January’s senior – greeted them with great politeness, but Mr Adams was effusive, expressing – in fluent French – the hope of speaking to them at length later in the evening.

  As he played Schubert’s Leider, operatic barcaroles and the sentimental ballads of Moore on the Adams’ Broadwood grand, January observed the guests, to whom he was – he knew – for all intents and purposes invisible. In this new city he might not have his mother’s gossip to rely on about everybody’s family background, finances, and extramarital escapades, but this lack was more than offset by the knowledge that these were the men about whose policies and foibles he’d been reading for years in political broadsides. Between glees and serenades, Trigg or Blair Langston, the elderly violinist, would pass information to him in a whisper: ‘Tall gentleman’s Mr Clay of Kentucky – handsomest man in America, my wife says … and flirts something shocking, if I do say it of a white man! That lady there is Mrs Corcoran, that’s daughter of Commodore Morris the Navy Commissioner. She run off with Mr Corcoran a few years ago – that’s Mr Corcoran over there. Richest man in Washington … Fellow in the green uniform’s Mr Vorontsov, that’s minister from Russia – I don’t know who that lady is he’s with, but it sure ain’t Mrs Vorontsov …’

  January wondered if he’d be more impressed by this parade of notables had he been permitted to vote. But even the sight of Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster – for whom January would have voted, had it been possible, in the last election – only served to remind him of all he’d seen in his week in Washington: muddy streets, slave pens twenty feet from the Capitol. Frank Preston saying, ‘They barred Negroes from entering the Capitol years ago …’

  A wagon creaking by in misty darkness.

  If you’d been elected, he wondered, watching the Senator’s square, commanding form cross the reception-room toward the punchbowl, would you have tried to change these things?

  Or would you have argued that it was ‘inexpedient’ to offend the Southern states, and let the situation stand?

  But since it was, perforce, not his business, he let his mind slip back into the pleasure of the music. The Adams’ piano had clearly been pampered like a racehorse, and the keys responded to the lightest touch. Prior to supper, the reception was an occasion for talk and pleasantries in the ballroom, with the fashionable alternatives of card-playing and billiards in the library across the hall. The host – a diplomat from the age of fourteen – might be notoriously prickly, unsociable and incapable of political compromise, but he made sure he spoke to every man and woman in the room, inquiring of Henry Clay how his son’s racehorse was shaping up and complimenting the President’s dapper son on his engagement to a wealthy planter’s daughter. He even flirted a little with Dolley Madison, still vividly pretty despite rouge and embonpoint.

  ‘Ma chère Madame Viellard!’

  Mrs Bray, flower-like in rose-hued silk and masses of blonde lace, detached herself from her husband’s arm and fluttered over to Chloë, hands outstretched in greeting. Luke Bray made a beeline for the junior Congressmen, clerks, and attachés clumped around the punchbowl, and within moments January could see by their gestures that town ball was the subject of the conversation.

  ‘Better if you throw it side-arm-around –’ he demonstrated the grip on an empty punch-cup – ‘’stead of underhand …’

  (‘Ten cents says he forgets and throws that thing,’ whispered January to Langston the fiddler, who nodded agreement without missing a note.)

  ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Everybody says.’

  ‘The rules says.’

  (‘Think they’re going to get in a fight over it?’

  ‘They will if one of the Massachusetts Whigs comes over …’)

  A cluster of ladies – including the vivacious Widow Madison – descended upon Chloë and Mrs Bray, and January caught wisps of talk about the ministries, Senatorial receptions, who must be conciliated and who cold-shouldered. The invisible magic behind politics, January was well aware from his days playing for the restoration nobility of Paris; the decisions made outside of Congress, and the women who engineered meetings or prevented them. Rowena Bray, he observed, for all her air of dewy-eyed helplessness, knew everyone, and in the course of the evening made the rounds of the room, as surely as her host and Mrs Madison and Henry Clay and the President’s son, speaking to everyone, unerringly recalling everyone’s name and face and interests.

  If some turned away from the English Minister, with hard words about the Canadians’ right to fight for their own freedom (‘We should have marched up and took ’em when we had the chance!’), Mrs Bray’s marriage to an American seemed to have softened at least some of the animosity. (‘Why should you care, sir? You want us to shed our blood so you can force
the Canadians to send back your escaped slaves?’)

  The only person, in fact, who didn’t seem to be arguing politics, discussing town ball, or seeking an introduction to someone in quest of a job was Henri Viellard, working his way through lobster patties, crème tarts, and marzipan on the buffet with the steady inevitability of an ox pulling a plow.

  ‘Not to worry,’ Trigg reassured the musicians as they filed off the dais. ‘If Sir Henry –’ he nodded back in the direction of the British Minister, deep in conversation with Mr Clay – ‘was to announce that England was sending troops into Canada tonight, I don’t think anybody would have the nerve to pick a fight in Mr Adams’s house.’

  With a glance at the delicate, smiling, steely Mrs Adams – and at the cold sharp eyes of the Right Honorable Representative from Massachusetts – January guessed that Trigg was right.

  In any case, Sir Henry Fox was clearly not about to announce invasion that night or much of anything else. Already visibly drunk, he disappeared almost at once into the gaming room. It was his secretary, a sturdy, pink-faced gentleman attired point-de-vice in a long-tailed coat and knee-smalls, who intercepted questions from irate New Englanders about the rebellion in Canada, and who smoothed the feathers of a much-ruffled Secretary of War.

  ‘You think we’ll really go to war over Canada?’ asked January as they descended the narrow stair to the kitchen – suffocating with the stink of lamp oil and onions and jostling with servants as they organized the supper’s opening course.

  ‘What the hell else we gonna do?’ demanded Phinn Mudwall, who doubled clarionette and cornet in the little orchestra. ‘Wring our little hands and say, “Oh dear”? They came across the Niagara river, seized one of our boats on our side, burned it, and sent it over the Falls with all hands—’

  ‘I heard there was only one man killed.’ The musicians edged around the turmoil, ascended the stair that led to the yard. The night air was cold, and fog held in the smoke of the cressets that burned in the yard, where a dozen carriages – their teams snugly blanketed – were ranged between the house and the stables.