‘That makes it better?’ Mudwall drew himself up, hugely indignant for a man who wasn’t allowed to vote. ‘One dead man or a dozen—’
‘The ship was taking supplies to the Canadian rebels. What would we have done, if the French or the Spanish sent guns to the Cherokee a couple of years ago when Jackson had them run out of Georgia?’
‘That’s different!’ boomed Mudwall. ‘That’s a completely different issue!’
A voice from the depths of the kitchen called up that sandwiches and beer were ready for the musicians. At the same moment, around the corner of the house, reflected light from the torches caught in rectangular spectacle-lenses, and January said, ‘Save me a sandwich, would you?’ as the others went back into the door and down the stairs. He crossed the porch as the rotund silhouette detached itself from the corner of the house.
‘Did you speak to Mr Adams, sir?’ January said as Henri stepped into the glow of the lantern above the porch. The mere fact that Henri would make himself late for dinner – particularly in light of the reputation of the Adams’ cook – argued a deep concern indeed for his missing friend.
‘I did. You were quite right: not only had M’sieu Singletary corresponded with M’sieu Adams for years, but he visited him on October tenth. M’sieu Adams says they spoke of astronomy and the respective school systems of the United States and Britain, of the proposed Smithsonian Institution, and of the contents of their libraries. No mention whatsoever of mutual acquaintances in Washington, and certainly not of anyone who would wish poor Singletary harm.’
‘But someone seems to have.’ January produced the little red-bound notebook from his pocket. ‘Singletary gave this to Ganymede Tyler – Mr Bray’s valet – on the fourteenth because someone had broken into his hotel-room the previous night. Someone he feared was not a thief, but a would-be murderer.’
Henri’s brown eyes widened as if he’d read bad luck in the pulling of daisy petals and moments later had witnessed a comet destroy Washington.
‘Murderer?’
‘According to Tyler.’ January wondered if Tyler had been the surname of Mede’s mother, or if he’d later chosen it for himself. ‘And it sounds to me as if Singletary suspected the danger might be coming from someone he knew or might know. It may pay me to make the journey down to Charlottesville—’
‘Oh, that’s hardly necessary.’ Henri looked up from peering at the notebook’s pages in the glow of the nearest cresset. ‘We also spoke with Mr Oldmixton – Madame Viellard and I did – the secretary from the Ministry who sent a clerk to make enquiries along the Alexandria–Warrenton road about whether the body of a traveler had been found. Have you any idea what these numbers might be?’
January shook his head. ‘But the two long columns there at the back aren’t precisely identical. In that second column there’ll be a set of about a dozen numbers identical to the first, then one that isn’t in the first, or sometimes two or three … then another set of a dozen that are the same.’
‘The writing is different.’ Henri moved his chubby thumb down the page. ‘Look how the numbers in the first column slant and run together, while those in the second are neat and wider-spaced.’ He frowned up at January, standing above him on the step. ‘Might they have been written on different occasions?’
‘No reason to think they weren’t.’ January studied the small differences in the hand. ‘I’m guessing they’re simply aides-memoires, the context of which Singletary understood. That short block of numbers at the end with a seventeen at the top, I have no idea what it means.’
‘Would you be willing to make a copy of this?’ Henri riffled the pages of magic squares, his fair brows drawn down over his nose. ‘I’m not certain Madame Viellard would be able to make more of it than yourself, but she’s far cleverer than I with numbers.’
‘I’ll do that.’
‘If our poor friend handed the book to a servant rather than to his hostess – with whom he’d been taking tea moments before …’ He glanced worriedly at the lighted windows of the dining room. ‘You don’t think he feared her?’
‘More likely someone she might speak to of the matter.’ January reflected on young Mrs Bray’s constant airy chatter and the way she clung to the arm of the British Minister or his secretary. ‘And she’s the daughter of Singletary’s employer. If he learned something to the discredit of Hurlstone and Ludd – or if he came to be mixed up in something that would damage the firm – he might hesitate to tell her about it. Even a comment in a letter to her family back home might be enough to topple a house of cards … if a house of cards is what Singletary was building.’
Across the yard a gust of laughter came from the stables, where coachmen and grooms diced by lantern light.
‘At this point we can’t know, sir. But Mede gave me a description of Singletary’s watch, pin, and watch fobs, so with your permission I’ll ask around at the pawnshops—’
The kitchen door opened, and Trigg put his head out. ‘I can’t keep Phinn’s greasy hands off your sandwich much longer, Ben. You better get in and eat it ’fore he kills his brother over your beer.’
‘Tell ’em I’ll drown the both of ’em in the rain barrel if they even think of takin’ it!’
He glanced back to the driveway, but Henri was gone.
January was aware that the ‘musicale’ portion of the evening – which customarily meant the little orchestra of piano, flute, cornet, violin and violoncello playing for various of the female guests to sing – was always something of a mixed bag. But he knew also that the point was the pleasure of the singers and their personal friends and relatives, not the excellence of the performance, and in any case many of the young ladies who participated were quite good. Mrs Bray sat with Mr Oldmixton of the British Ministry, as neither the British Minister himself nor Luke Bray would desert the card tables of the library to listen. But when the dancing started at eleven, the younger clerks and secretaries from the Navy Department and Treasury emerged from the smoke-filled chamber with the news that a challenge had been issued by a ball team made up of their opposite numbers in the various foreign ministries.
‘You got to play, Stockard!’ proclaimed Luke Bray in a loud and slightly drunken voice, clinging to the arm of the Right Honorable Junior Representative from the State of Alabama. ‘The honor of America is at stake!’
‘The honor of America and my twenty dollars—’ added a slight and rather chinless young gentleman whom Langston had earlier pointed out as the son of a prominent local planter.
‘Hell, Luke, Miss Russell says she’ll kill me if I don’t come to this tea-squall her ma’s giving Saturday.’ Stockard was a little older than his teammates, broad-shouldered, curly-haired, and resplendent in a waistcoat embroidered with hearts and skulls.
‘A woman who don’t enter into her husband’s interests and concerns – let alone keeps him back from upholdin’ the honor of his country – is no bride for a Congressman, Stockard.’
‘What the hell do Frenchies know about playin’ ball, anyway?’
‘I dunno,’ opined somebody else. ‘That feller Lenoir can knock that ball clear across the Canal.’
‘They’re nancies—’
‘The Warriors can rub ’em out, same as we mopped up them snot-nosed abolitionists from the Treasury last week—’
January smiled as he followed the lead of Trigg’s flute through the figures of the Quadrille. Silk petticoats whispered, dancing slippers patted on the waxed oak of the floor. Gas flames bent with the passage of the dancers: jeté and rigadoon, chassé and pas de basque. The pacing differed from the more sedate New Orleans style, with a sort of peasant verve. Chloë Viellard danced every dance, with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and Brom Van Buren, and even coaxed Mr Adams out on to the floor – probably talking to him in French about astronomy the whole time. Henri, no matter what longing he may have felt for a quiet evening with Minou, crème caramel, and his butterfly collection, danced also, with surprising grace for a man of his bulk, deftly squi
ring the formidable leaders of Washington fashion like Mrs Madison and the elegant Sophie Hallam, and shy matrons like the lovely Mrs Lee.
Rowena Bray danced not at all. Her husband would now and then blunder, red-faced with liquor, from the gambling tables in the library, then return almost at once to his cronies. He was still there when the guests began to call for their carriages, and Mr Adams and his wife bowed and shook hands and acknowledged a hundred variations of, Thank you so much for having us, we have had a splendid time …
At four, the musicians packed up their instruments. The fog was now thick outside. Rugs were pulled from the backs of the carriage teams; servants sent to the yard, or out to the square where a dozen equipages had been forced to wait all evening beside makeshift bonfires. Since all the musicians lived above K Street, they waited together on the narrow back porch while Trigg collected their pay from the Adams’ major-domo. Around the corner of the drive January heard Luke Bray shouting incoherently as his friends led him down the steps to his carriage.
‘—not fucken drunk! Everybody in this goddam town acts like a bunch of Christly Puritans if a man takes one goddam drink—’
‘You watch the step here, Mr Bray,’ said a voice with a Northern twang to it, and January, stepping to the end of the porch, saw a lean-faced young senior clerk assist the Right Honorable Representative Stockard in getting Bray down to the drive.
‘Don’t you goddam tell me what to do, Noyes, you goddam suck-arse abolitionist!’ Bray swung at him; Stockard grabbed Bray’s arm, and a dark figure sprang down from the footman’s perch of the carriage.
‘Now, Marse Luke, it’s nothing to get yourself in a conniption over,’ said Ganymede Tyler’s familiar soft voice. ‘You just sit here for a spell – no, up here, where it’s soft – and you’ll feel better by and by …’
The stocky form of Mr Adams appeared on the porch, Mrs Bray leaning on his arm.
‘Are you sure you wish to ride with him?’ the Massachusetts Congressman asked. Adams had the reputation of a cold-fish intellectual, but there was genuine concern in his voice. ‘His Good Man Friday seems well able to see him home. I can have Dick put the horses to in a moment, and Mrs Adams will be glad to accompany you …’
‘Thank you, Congressman – and please thank Mrs Adams for me. It’s most kind of you both. But I think it’s best that I stay with Mr Bray. He … Sometimes when he gets like this, he has said things …’ She shivered and drew her cloak about her. ‘Things that lead me to feel that now, of all times, he ought not to be left alone.’
Adams was silent. His head tilted slightly, as if he were thinking about deeper meanings of the remark, and Mrs Bray quickly pressed his hand – ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. A few years ago, January recalled, the Congressman’s son had either fallen from a boat en route to Washington while drunk … or had thrown himself overboard.
But Adams said only, ‘Quite all right, Madame.’
She turned to the servant, said, ‘Thank you, Mede,’ and climbed into the carriage.
Luke Bray could be heard, still shouting drunkenly, as the vehicle rolled away into the darkness.
NINE
Over the next four days, January visited every pawnshop in the District of Columbia.
Georgetown boasted two. He visited them on Saturday with Henri Viellard and noticed that the proprietors gave greater attention to the white man’s tale of a fictitious brother who had come to grief in Washington than those few in Alexandria, on the other side of the river, did to his own quest for the effects of a missing friend.
Most such establishments, however, seemed to be in Washington City itself. Evidently, many of those office seekers who cluttered the Senatorial steps or buttonholed the President whenever he put his nose out of his office door underestimated the cost of living in that city while Congress was in session. January and Poe visited a dozen in the course of Monday afternoon, and the poet seemed to grasp instinctively – as Henri didn’t – that a man who waltzed into a pawnbroker’s with a list of missing items in his hand was simply asking to be lied to. January would have sworn he saw the glisten of tears in Poe’s soulful dark eyes as he spoke of: ‘A silver reservoir-pen and a gold watch … I know my brother was in Washington last fall, and he had nothing in his pockets when his poor body was found in Baltimore. His widow begged me to make enquiries …’
‘I suppose it’s because my parents were actors,’ Poe said as they emerged from Bronstein’s on Judiciary Square. ‘I never knew them – my mother died before I turned three – but there is something in the blood … A fact which horrified my stepfather, I might add.’ Old bitterness mingled with wry, exasperated affection tugged at the corner of his mouth.
The disclaimer of any knowledge of silver reservoir-pens would be followed, in every establishment, by perusal of the shelves of shoes, watches, tiepins, earrings, musical instruments, birdcages, needle cases, dishes (individually or in sets of up to forty), and ten thousand other items—
(‘What the devil is that?’
‘Obstetrical forceps, sir.’)
—and a murmur of, ‘I’ll just look around a little before I go …’
The day was chill and cloudy, the smell of rain blowing from the east. On the previous afternoon – pawnshops being closed on the Sabbath – January had had the pleasure of walking out to the fields along Delaware Avenue and watching the Warriors of Democracy – mostly Democrat clerks but including the sons of two local planters and the Right Honorable Representative from Alabama, Royal Stockard – get their American honor soundly trounced by the Invaders …
A pleasure, because on Trigg’s advice January had unpatriotically bet two dollars on the foreign ministry team and could afford to buy Rose a very fine Swiss spyglass at a pawnshop on Constitution Avenue, and a well-thumbed copy of Don Quixote.
Monday, in the course of quartering the thickly-built blocks between Judiciary Square and the Tiber Canal, they found – in addition to the spyglass – half a dozen ball-topped seals which bore initials that did not include the letter ‘S’—
(‘He might have kept someone else’s seal out of sentimental attachment.’
‘A father’s or a brother’s would still have “S”. It isn’t something that’s usually passed outside the family.’)
—at least fifteen cravat-pins decorated with round ‘orient’ pearls but no baroques—
(‘If that’s actually a pearl than so is the knob on my bedpost.’)
—and a white linen handkerchief bearing the embroidered initials ‘S.S.’.
‘A woman’s,’ said January.
‘It’s perfectly plain.’
‘A sensible woman’s.’ January held the fragile square up to the light of the old-fashioned window’s small panes. ‘One who doesn’t need lace all over every square inch of her possessions – unlike my sister. A man’s handkerchief would be at least two inches larger, and of heavier fabric.’
‘You’re an observant devil,’ remarked the poet as they returned to Capitol Street. ‘I shall have to use that in a story.’
‘Be my guest.’ January sprang out of the way of yet another empty goods-wagon whose driver imagined himself in the Circus Maximus. ‘I grew up among people who lived by watching others. Is the overseer rumpled and angry, with a shaving-cut on his chin? Walk soft. Is Madame storming up and down the house with her hair down? She’s mislaid a comb and in a minute she’ll decide someone stole it. Is one of the carriage horses starting to cough? Start praying, because somebody’s going to get sold to buy a new one, and it might just be you.’
Poe said, ‘Hmn,’ and looked uncomfortable, as whites frequently did when the subject of getting sold came into the conversation. No wonder they don’t want to mix socially with us. But he only said, after a time, ‘My stepmother would have it that Negroes had “second sight” and could divine things white men could not.’
‘Sure would have helped.’
The Virginian was silent for another few moments as they passed a couple of slaves unload
ing hay in the gate of a livery-stable yard. But his writer’s curiosity got the better of him: ‘You were born a slave, then?’
‘On a sugar plantation near New Orleans. My sister and I grew up playing in the woods – another place to learn to observe what’s around you, because it was easy to get yourself lost.’
Poe’s dark brows pinched together as he studied January, as if trying to align the well-dressed, well-spoken (and obviously well-read, if he appreciated Poe’s poetry) musician with a people considered too superstitious and simple-brained to be anything more than laborers.
January let him think about this as they walked on in the direction of the Capitol, wondering how a Southern man of letters would ultimately deal with the conundrum.
Probably by deciding I’m the exception to a known rule, and that most black men can’t tell their right hands from their left …
Or maybe he just knows what his editors will buy.
They were in the district of shabby boarding houses and taverns that surrounded the Capitol’s low hill, a neighborhood of mud-wallow alleys that swarmed with children – black or Irish, never both in the same alley – stray dogs, and wandering pigs.
Gryme’s – one of the largest pawnbrokers in the city – stood just south of the Capitol, between a shop selling watches and Cullie’s Slave Exchange. Poe had the grace to look discomfited as they walked past men and women in ankle chains on the benches in front of Cullie’s.
Once inside, however, the poet’s moving saga of a deceased brother and a distraught widow brought forth a silver reservoir-pen immediately. January, wandering among the glass-topped cases in the center of the great wooden barn of a store, at the same moment spotted the cravat pin with the little blue-gray fist of a black baroque pearl. ‘Ben! Come tell me if this wasn’t your master’s!’ called out Poe, and January caught his eye for an instant, then came over and held the pen to the light of the dirty windows.
Good Man Friday Page 9