‘An asylum,’ said Poe.
They all looked at him.
‘A madhouse. Whoever had him admitted drugs him – which solves the problem of getting him into a vehicle – and arranges with the doctors there to keep him drugged. The mad have no more rights, and their protestations of wrongful imprisonment are no more heeded, than those of slaves. Of course a slave will proclaim that he’s really free, and of course a madman will claim that he’s actually sane … You’ve described the man as being eccentric in his behavior—’
‘Is there a madhouse hereabouts?’ asked Chloë.
‘Alexandria,’ said January at once. ‘Run by a man named Gurry.’
Still struggling with the idea, Henri repeated, ‘But think of the risk! Why not simply kill him?’
‘That’s something we don’t need to know,’ said January. ‘What we do need, right now, is to ascertain whether he’s actually there, and if he is, how to get him out. Because whoever put him in,’ he went on grimly, ‘you can be sure that it isn’t under the name of Singletary.’
There was a practice game that evening, out in the meadow by Reedy Branch. An even larger audience turned out to watch than last night, and a larger percentage of that audience, January noted with uneasiness, was white. He spoke to both Darius Trigg and to Charlie Springer – who as head of the local Prince Hall Masonic Lodge knew most of the free colored population of the District and a large number of the slaves – and gave them a description of Selwyn Singletary.
‘Deke Bellwether works as a cleaner for Gurry, doesn’t he, Charlie?’ asked Trigg.
‘He lives out in Alexandria, but he’s in the choir of my church. He’s one of the basses – got a voice that fills the hall. He said he’d be here today … Here’s our boy,’ Springer added, waving as Mede Tyler strode through the long grass from the direction of Connecticut Avenue, still in the neat white jacket of his waiter’s costume and carrying his rougher clothes, and the bat that Fip Franklin of the Centurions had whittled for him, in a bundle. At his approach, a half-dozen white men separated themselves from the edge of the crowd, teamsters in plug hats and corduroy jackets. With a prickling sensation on the back of his neck, January started in that direction, trailed by Trigg and several others. As they got closer January saw that several of the whites had clubs in their hands, and one of them, what looked like an ox chain.
‘Think you’re good enough to be playin’ a white man’s game, boy?’ one of them called out as they spread in a line between Mede and the playing field.
‘Want to see what kind of games white men really play with uppity fookin’ niggers?’
Mede paused, moved to his left to go around them, and their line stretched to meet him.
‘One thing just makes me retch, it’s a nigger that don’t know his place …’
January reached Mede’s side. The players – Stalwarts and Centurions – grouped around them, unarmed, but outnumbering the whites three or four to one.
‘We’re just out here to play a little ball, sir,’ said Trigg, in his most pleasant voice. ‘It’s just a game. I’m most sorry if our friend spoke out of line to you.’
The man with the chain spat tobacco on to Trigg’s foot. ‘Your friend is breakin’ the goddam law,’ he said. ‘It’s against the law for niggers to play ball. Against the law for niggers to assemble. There’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a law-breakin’ criminal nigger—’
‘There’s one thing I can’t stand,’ retorted a soft voice as the whites – who had begun to close in around them – parted. Kyle Fowler slouched forward, tall and dirty, with two of his own ‘boys’ at his back. ‘And that’s a man that makes a bet and then tries to fuck with the contest beforehand. You bet on the Warriors, O’Hanlon?’ His voice was soft and high, almost womanish, his eyes expressionless a reptile’s.
Without answering the question, O’Hanlon spat into the grass again. ‘These fookin’ niggers are breakin’ the law.’
Fowler looked over at the crowd around Mede, then back at the whites. ‘Shame on them,’ he said. ‘You want to come down to the station house and swear out a complaint. I think Constable Jeffers has money on that game, too. He’ll want to hear what you have to say.’
January’s hand closed silently around Mede’s elbow, drew him back into the crowd, which closed around them like water. As they walked back toward the worn square of the playing field, he said softly, ‘If Fowler wants to arrest us – are those fellows with him part of the police-force? – he’ll come over. I take it the Hibernian gentlemen have bet on the Warriors like he said?’
‘They wouldn’t be trying to stop Mede if they’d bet on us,’ returned Trigg grimly. January could feel Mede shivering.
After a moment Trigg added, ‘It’s a goddam game!’
‘No,’ said January quietly. ‘It’s the honor of America.’
That evening’s game – a practice match against a scratch team of mixed Knights and Centurions – wasn’t notable for anyone’s good playing after that. The one exception was Mede, whom, it appeared, very little could shake once he got into the thrower’s circle. Most of the men – waiting for trouble of one kind or another, either arrest by the constables with Fowler, or attack by the Irish teamsters who’d bet on the Warriors, or even the outbreak of general riot between those teamsters and the Abolitionists – could barely hit the ball, and no wonder, reflected January. Watching Mede in the worn patch of grass, he was struck with how exposed the young man looked, and his eyes went to the line of trees that bordered one edge of the field.
‘Would you send a man over there?’ he whispered to Trigg. ‘It’d be an easy shot, for someone with a rifle.’
‘It’s a goddam game—’
‘I’ll go.’ Preston jogged away in that direction.
A few minutes later Noyes came to where the Stalwarts stood, with the news that O’Hanlon and his boys had taken themselves off. ‘Fowler and Roberts – that’s the assistant constable with him – are still here,’ he said softly. ‘They say Constable Jeffers has a couple thousand bet on the game, besides a percentage of bets he’s brokered for just about everybody in the ward. Lots of men don’t want to admit they’ve bet on black men to beat white ones, but with Bray still out of play – he’s one of the best strikers the Warriors have – it’s pretty clear you boys are going to win.’
‘A win is never clear.’ Trigg turned from watching Mede – with the effortless perfection of a machine – put out yet another Centurion, and the men started to come in from the field. ‘That’s what games are. Not something to make you scared to play them.’
January was the striker for the next round and missed the ball totally. With his mind still running on the O’Hanlons of the world, and rifles in trees, he doubted he could have hit a watermelon on a tabletop. He took his place in right field – where he could do the least harm to his own team’s cause – for the few minutes it took Mede to put out the next striker, and when he came back toward the line of boxes, he found Charlie Springer there, with a short, jolly-looking man with features that January identified as Ibo.
‘This’s Deke Bellwether, Ben,’ Charlie introduced them. ‘My choirman, who works out at Gurry’s madhouse.’
‘Dr Gurry be first to correct you, sir,’ replied Bellwether, in a deep voice like black velvet and the slurry, profoundly African English of the coastal islands. ‘It a Asylum, he say – a place for people for to take refuge.’
‘And did a man come in to take refuge there last October?’ asked January. ‘He’d be an Englishman, probably close to six feet tall, gray beard, gray hair, heavy through the chest and shoulders.’
The attendant cast his mind back for a moment. ‘No English bukra,’ he said. ‘Some been come last fall – planter from Charleston name Criswell, Boston bukra name Leland. None been come that description.’
Damn it.
And yet …
The perfection of Poe’s solution tugged at January’s thoughts: Where else COULD a white man be kept prisoner?
He turned toward the empty fields, the few scattered farmhouses that were all that stood on this end of Washington. He could be held in any of them …
But then why dispose of anything that would identify him?
‘Is there another lunatic asylum in the District?’ he asked. ‘Or over toward Baltimore?’
‘There the state asylum in Baltimore,’ rumbled Bellwether. ‘Dr Gurry he always slangin’ them mad-doctors there, say they imbeciles. And there another private asylum in Manassas, Dr Blaine run.’
‘It’s thirty miles to Manassas,’ put in Springer. ‘And you’ll want to be careful, walkin’ that by yourself, Ben. They talk of puttin’ a railway line through there, but it ain’t happened yet.’
‘Could you get me into Gurry’s, Deke?’ January asked at last. ‘As your assistant, or your cousin, or something, for an afternoon?’
‘Gurry gonna gone Thursday,’ said Bellwether, nodding. ‘You do carpentry? Or plastering? You know fixin’ sash windows? Kumbayah, I make sure somethin’ broken—’
‘You have a piano?’ asked January. ‘I can tune one of those, and I saw the tuning equipment in a pawnshop just last week.’
‘That we do.’ Bellwether grinned. ‘But I tellin’ you, ain’t no English buckra there, with or not with no big gray beard.’
It wasn’t the best ball any man present had ever played, and they split up and went back to their homes while the sun was just touching the tops of the woods along Rock Creek. On fine spring evenings like this one, the teams played until it was too dark to see. But though O’Hanlon and his b’hoys had taken their leave, nobody liked the idea of walking home in the darkness. Mede, Trigg, the Reverend Perkins and January were escorted back to the boarding house by a sizeable crowd of neighbors and friends.
‘It ain’t what a game is supposed to be,’ said Trigg angrily, when, by the warm lamplight of the dining room, he helped hand around the plates of chicken stew and potatoes. ‘Sure as gun’s iron, when that game’s over and those white gentlemen settles their wagers, the constables are going to come down with the letter of the law and our children won’t be able to even get up a game of One Old Cat. And not from anything we’ve done. Just because they was made to look at something they didn’t want to look at.’
‘You ever heard of white teams playing black ones further North, Frank?’ January turned to the conductor.
‘Once or twice.’ The young man, who had maneuvered a place beside Minou, helped Charmian to a chicken leg. ‘Or there’ll sometimes be a black player on a white team. That’s usually if he’s just about the only black man in town. I think it makes them nervous, seeing us in groups.’
‘Not as nervous as it makes me,’ returned January, ‘seeing them in groups.’
‘And what will you do, Mede,’ asked Dominique, ‘when this game is done? It is in a sense the payment for your freedom, is it not? What will you do, when that payment is made?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mede quietly. ‘My whole family is on Red Horse Hill Plantation. My mama, my sisters, my little brother …’
Not to speak of the white side of your family, reflected January. The brother you love. The father who brought you up as a slave …
‘But now I’m a free man, I can’t go back to Kentucky. Once a man’s been freed, he’s got to leave the state. It’s the same here in Virginia, isn’t it? I can’t just go back to Lexington and take a job.’
He ducked his head. ‘You know, after all my life, Marse Luke calling me his Good Man Friday, I read that book it comes out of. And Mr Crusoe’s Man Friday went back to England with him in the end. As if there wasn’t anything in his own world to return to; as if he couldn’t even imagine being free, or doing anything else with his life, except tag along after his master. Now it looks like I can’t even do that.’
He rose from his place with a bow to Mrs Trigg – ‘If you’ll excuse me, m’am.’ Picking up from the sideboard the envelope that had been brought for him that afternoon, he passed into the hall. The lamp there shone briefly gold on his hair, before he ascended the stair into shadow.
It was January’s last sight of him alive.
TWENTY-TWO
‘But if these men who were admitted to the asylum in October bear no resemblance to M’sieu Singletary,’ argued Dominique as she untied the strings of her daughter’s bonnet the following morning, ‘what do you seek in M’sieu Gurry’s madhouse, P’tit? Show Uncle Benjamin what you have found this morning, darling—’
Charmian carefully opened her specimen box, to display, on its filling of felt and cotton wool, the leaves, buttons, stones and feathers she’d collected on this morning’s walk.
She would have gathered dead bugs and cigar ends as well, had her mother permitted it. Like Henri – to Minou’s horror and January’s secret amusement – everything in the world fascinated Charmian to an equal degree.
‘I seek a look at his daybooks.’ January squatted down to study someone’s lost rosette of ribbon, the bright leaves of dogwood in the box. ‘A man could have been admitted any time after October …’
‘If they waited to admit him, where did they hide him in-between-times?’
‘A cellar,’ said January promptly. ‘An attic. A sickroom under drugs. That’s a very beautiful beetle, P’tite, where did you find it?’
‘Beside the stream by Eighteenth Street,’ specified the child precisely. ‘It has long feelers.’
‘So it does. I don’t think I’ve seen such an insect at home in New Orleans, have you?’
Charmian thought about it for a moment, then shook her head.
‘But why?’ demanded Minou. ‘The whole thing is absurd!’
‘And he could have died, at any time between his admission and now.’ He stood and ran a gentle hand over his niece’s mahogany-red curls. ‘I don’t think there’s a soul in creation so completely at the mercy of his jailers, as a lunatic in an asylum,’ he said. ‘At least not in the United States. Even in prisons, the warders and guards are accountable for it, if a prisoner dies. And slaves, God knows, are worth money to their owners. But in a madhouse, a man – or a woman – may be dosed with whatever medication the mad-doctors consider effective that month, from salts of mercury to ipecac. They may be bled, blistered, stood naked under douches of freezing water, puked, purged, and opiated to the point of death in the name of “calming their nerves” or “shocking them back to their senses”, and no one will ask or argue or suggest that the mad-doctors mightn’t know what they’re doing. They could be tarred and feathered if some savant writes an article about how it stimulates the nerves.’
‘You spoke to the man from Gurry’s, then?’ Poe emerged from his parlor, where his breakfast tray lay on the table in the watery sunlight. He was immaculately dressed in his usual black – presumably in preparation for yet another day of waiting in some Senator’s office in the hopes of convincing him to use his influence to get him a job – and looked, January thought, haggard and grim. But his dark eyes came alive as he inquired, ‘Will you need a respectable family member to demand a sight of the madman?’
‘Possibly later,’ said January, rising. ‘Depending on what I can find in the daybooks. I’m guessing whoever locked Singletary up – if he was locked up – has made arrangements to hear of it if someone comes around asking questions. Right now I’m feeling my way in the dark.’
In the dining room, the clock struck half-past eight. Dominique said, ‘Peste— Come along, dearest. Let’s get you changed before Madame Trigg locks the doors on us and casts us out without breakfast—’
They went upstairs, passing Seth Berger the cabman on his way down; Thèrése and Musette hastened from the dining room in their mistress’ wake.
‘There’s a state asylum near Baltimore,’ January went on, and Poe nodded.
‘Yes, I’ve visited that one. A friend of mine – a lad I went to school with – had the … misfortune … to be incarcerated there, for drinking and addiction to laudanum. A horrifying place.’ Shadow c
rossed the back of those dark eyes: shadow and fear. ‘I still have nightmares of being locked up … At least if a man has money, he can go mad in comfort.’
‘There’s evidently a place out in Manassas too, and I may beg your company, if it comes to that—’
‘My dear Benjamin, given the choice between kicking my heels in quest of a job I don’t actually want, and breaking into a madhouse in search of—’
‘Benjamin!’ Dominique appeared at the top of the stairs.
The note of shock in her voice had January vaulting up two steps at a time without asking why. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
When he came close – Poe at his heels – she said, very quietly, ‘It’s Mede. He’s dead.’
And as January turned toward the stair – Mede’s room was on the third floor – she caught his sleeve. In the shadows of the stairway her face looked like a cut-out of ivory, slashed with eyebrows startlingly dark. ‘I wanted to ask him about going to Blodgett’s tonight, before he left …’ She swallowed hard. ‘Someone cut his throat.’
There were no vines, no drainpipes, nothing that would serve for a handhold on the whitewashed brick side of the house. It was twenty-seven feet from the window sill to the ground. ‘How could they have got up?’ Poe asked at once, looking down.
January shook his head.
The shutters and sash had both been open when he came into the room: he and Poe had gone straight to the window. Directly beneath the sill, the room’s single ladder-back chair lay on the floor on its side. January examined the chair’s joints and angles, and almost at once he found a thread of cotton caught in one, where a rope had looped around it to permit someone to descend from the window on a doubled line, which could then be pulled free.
Only then did he turn and approach the bed.
Mede lay on his back, naked under the light blankets. Sheets, pillows, mattress were soaked in blood, but the young man’s eyes were closed and his face peaceful, as if someone had simply bent over him and slit his throat in his sleep. One hand lay at his side, the other arm was extended, doubled back and tucked half under the pillow. There were no cuts on either hand. He hadn’t struggled. He probably hadn’t even woken.
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