FIVE
The following afternoon – after a morning spent giving piano lessons to various young ladies of the aristocracy and three hours rehearsing with the Opera chorus – January, instead of returning to dinner and, it was to be hoped, an hour of rest at Ayasha’s side, made his way up the river to Charenton.
The villa rented by Sabid al-Muzaffar lay four miles from the Rue Le Peletier where the Opera stood, near the Bois de Vincennes, a detached villa in its own grounds surrounded by gardens and a pink brick wall. But January ascertained, by dint of inquiring for a fictitious brother who might have taken employment in the district, that there was no concubine nonsense about al-Muzaffar. ‘As good as a Christian, he is,’ proclaimed Madame Lyons, who kept the local café. ‘Except for going to church on Friday instead of Sunday, and what is that, eh? But no falling on his knees five times a day and refusing to sit at my tables just because I might happen to use a little honest salt-pork in my stew. The Lord knows what’s in a man’s heart whether he’s on his knees or on his feet, says he – and it’s always beat me, how anything gets done in those Mohammedan countries, with everyone stopping what they’re doing five times a day . . . And I say, the good Lord will prosper us only if we lend Him a hand and prosper ourselves, without always slacking off to pray.’
‘I couldn’t agree more.’ January gazed consideringly through the windows at the rain-wet lane that led toward Sabid’s villa, as if expecting to see this paragon of secular rationality appear at any moment. ‘Yet what do his servants think of this? Surely it would be difficult for him to find men of his own faith who share his outlook.’
‘He’d not have them around him, he says.’ By her tone she considered this a further mark of civilization. ‘He’s not a man to go bringing in a lot of Infidel devils into our village—’
For the district around Charenton was much more like a village than it was like a part of Paris.
‘—when there’s good men hereabouts needing the work in these hard times.’ She glared and nodded, as if January had announced his opposition to this view of the matter. ‘Laurent – my godson, who works as a footman in his house – says the only heathen servants are the grooms, who speak no French and keep to themselves in the stables where they belong, and whether they pray or not, Modeste – that’s the coachman, whose mother is my neighbor and has a tongue in her head that a Christian woman should take shame to herself to own! – Modeste has no idea. Not that Modeste could tell the difference between a priest’s sermon and a donkey’s bray!’
There followed an embittered diatribe against Modeste and his mother, whose father had cheated Madame Lyons’ father out of farmland that would have kept her from the indignity of having to run a café in the first place, not that she had the slightest objection to honest work . . . to which January listened with patience before guiding the conversation back to Sabid and his servants.
There were five grooms, and two eunuch servants for Sabid’s wife – ‘Not that anyone ever sees her, but what can you expect? A man needs a wife, and no Christian woman could be expected to marry a Mohammedan . . . But, Laurent tells me, His Excellency keeps to one wife and doesn’t go bringing in those nasty concubines. And his wife’s servants are respectable old women – barrin’ those nasty eunuchs, which I don’t hold with, but I will say there’s some in this land that could do with having capons in their henyards instead of roosters.’
‘But this is astonishing,’ exclaimed January. ‘My brother gave me the impression – I don’t know why – that His Excellency’s circumstances were reduced. Yet so large a household—’
‘Your brother,’ retorted Madame Lyons, ‘has no notion of how the aristocracy lives – hand to mouth and in the pockets of moneylenders, who should be outlawed from any Christian country! As for His Excellency, it’s true he had to flee from Constantinople, through wicked lies that was told about him by an enemy who had the Sultan’s ear. But he has friends in this country, good friends who owed him for favors he did them, and he doesn’t do so badly, Laurent says. And, Laurent says, he’s seen any number of wealthy gentlemen at His Excellency’s – not those lazy nobles that hang about the King, but bankers like M’sieu Rothschild and M’sieu Bethmann, even if they are Jews, and folk like that fellow Savart who made such a fortune selling boots to the Army back under the Emperor, though what France was doing with an Italian Emperor is more than I can stomach . . . and Englishmen like that M’sieu Polders who owns all those factories and banks.’
This information gleaned, January strolled down the lane that Madame Lyons had pointed out to him and took as good a look at al-Muzaffar’s house as he could without being conspicuous. This wasn’t easy for a man six-feet three-inches tall and proportioned like a coal-black oak-tree, so January took care not to linger. Still, he formed an impression of a dwelling far less palatial than that of Hüseyin Pasha, with a garden to one side and a single-story stable building at the rear.
Five horses, he estimated as he turned his steps back toward the Rue de Bercy. Not nearly enough to justify the keeping of five grooms.
Bodyguards?
The house itself was two floors plus an attic. Plenty of room to keep a woman prisoner up under that tall mansard roof. If Sabid’s wife had eunuchs of her own there was no reason for the French servants to even know.
A horseman was approaching him on the grassy verge of the road, but January didn’t realize it was Sabid al-Muzaffar until the man was opposite him: such was the effect, he realized – looking up into the brown Arabian face, the hooked nose and aloof dark eyes – of Western clothing. The man wore neat riding-breeches and English boots, a trim coat of dark-gray superfine wool, and a white neckcloth, without a single pin or jewel or flare of color to speak of the East.
But the horse was pure Arab stock and probably had a pedigree longer than a number of the Marquises whose daughters January instructed in the piano.
And do you permit your wife to go abroad as you do, he wondered, in the garb and character of the West? From the opposite side of the lane he watched two very tall and beefy ‘grooms’ emerge from the gate to greet their master: swarthy-complected Berbers, like Ayasha, with scarred faces and gold rings in their ears. Does she receive these Rothschilds and Bethmanns and Polders at your house? Will she be on your arm the next time you visit the Opera?
Or is that ‘different’?
Madame al-Muzaffar certainly didn’t accompany her husband to the ball that night at the town house of the Duc de Bellegarde.
January played for a performance of La Cenerentola which ended at ten thirty, changed his shirt and neckcloth backstage along with half the other musicians who also had balls to play at, and was ensconced with Jeannot Charbonnière, Narcisse Panchaud, Lucien Imbot and two or three others behind a bower of hothouse ferns at one end of the Bellegarde ballroom by eleven, hungry enough to eat his own sheet music.
The Duc himself had fled France before the blood of the Bastille’s garrison was dry on its stones, and of his own accord he would no sooner have invited to his house anyone he had not known at Versailles in its heyday than he would have invited the relatives of his footmen. His daughter, however – married to the Comte de Villeneuf – had a daughter of her own to dispose of and was, January had heard, well aware of the financial situation of most of the ancient nobility who had returned to France in the wake of the Kings. He hid his smile as he watched the Comtesse – daughter in tow – bestow her convent-bred charm upon the assortment of bankers, financiers, and government contractors that the Old Duc so resolutely ignored. One could almost hear her saying: Ah, M’sieu Savart, and how is your so-distinguished son . . . ?
‘Even the ones without sons, she smiles upon,’ whispered Jeannot to January between minuets, and he shook the moisture from his flute. ‘They know people who have sons.’
‘In New Orleans,’ replied January thoughtfully, ‘when I would play at the Blue Ribbon balls for the demi-mondaines to meet their white protectors, the older ladies would bring their
young daughters, to introduce in just the same way. Although mind you,’ he added, ‘the young ladies were far better dressed than Mademoiselle de Villeneuf—’
‘Hssh!’ Old Lucien poked him in the back with his fiddle bow. ‘D’you want the Duc to throw you out? Then what would we do for a piano?’
The resemblance to New Orleans balls didn’t end there, January reflected as the little orchestra glided into the first exquisite bars of a Mozart contredanse. When the fed-up populace of Paris had started murdering aristocrats in the streets – or, more usually, murdering in the streets the hapless soldiers that the aristocrats had hired to protect themselves – large numbers of those aristocrats had fled to the great French sugar-island of St-Domingue, where many of them had family. Others fled to New Orleans, still a very French town though it had been ruled by the Spanish for a generation at that point. When the fed-up slaves of St-Domingue had started murdering whites – to the horror of the French originators of liberté, egalité, etc. – the aristocrats and every other white on the island had quickly decamped to New Orleans as well. There they had encountered a great many French who were all in favor of the Revolution, about whose opinions they could do nothing – the country being under the control of the Spanish – except write scathing diatribes against them in New Orleans’ several newspapers and be as rude as possible to them at social events.
Thus, any ball in New Orleans had an air about it of a badly-made béchamel sauce, its elements separating to opposite ends of the ballroom: Republicans not speaking to Royalists, Napoléonistes snubbing Republicans, and nobody speaking to the Americans, who showed up in greater and greater numbers, with money falling out of their pockets . . .
Here in France, the old nobility resolutely snubbed the Ducs and Marquises created by Bonaparte in his years of imperial rule, the Ultras refused to speak to the Liberal Royalists, the Liberal Royalists (not to be confused with the actual Liberals, whom no one invited anywhere) turned their backs on the Doctrinaires. Nobody invited the Constitutionnels anywhere either – the rich, educated middle-class and professionals.
Unless, of course, they had marriageable sons.
‘My dear Benjamin . . .’
At the conclusion of the minuet, Daniel ben-Gideon appeared on the other side of the banked foliage.
‘You’re in luck.’ He nodded toward the elderly gentleman at the center of a group of Liberal Royalists: tasteful in dark grays in contrast to the ancient nobility, many of whom wore the brilliant uniforms of the Army. ‘Jacob L’Ecolier has numerous family connections in Cairo and in Constantinople – where the family name is Talebe; Heaven only knows what it is in Egypt. They import wheat and finance slave-vessels to Brazil. And that –’ he gestured with a kid-gloved hand in the direction of a stout, hook-nosed man in conversation with the Napoleonic Baron DesMarines – ‘is Abraham Rothenberg, first-cousin to the primary banker of the Khedive of Egypt and related to half the Israelites in Alexandria.’
Ben-Gideon himself, perfumed and pomaded and resplendent in a beautifully-cut pale-green coat that made him look like a colossal melon, had the air of one who didn’t even know where the Palais Royale was. ‘I think Elias Haber is here as well. He’s also got connections in Constantinople and family that covers the North African coast from Algeria to Sinai.’
January noticed that none of the men in question seemed to have family with them. A precaution against the resounding snub from the ancient aristocracy that awaited any woman of Jewish birth, be her husband never so wealthy? He had observed on other occasions that when the Jewish financiers and traders brought their wives, the only ones who spoke to them were the wives of their husbands’ business partners, and even then – if they were Christian – not for any longer than was strictly polite. Most men understood that business is business – except for the diehard Ultras, who did not appear to understand anything whatsoever. The Marquises and Duchesses, and the female hangers-on and cousins of the great families, in their gowns of point lace and Italian silk and their elaborately wired topknots, dared not be seen to speak to those dark, quietly-dressed, often elegant ladies, lest the haut ton whisper: She receives – well – JEWS . . .
Meaning if you went to her teas or her at-homes, you might find yourself in a position of having to recognize a Jewess socially.
There are some barriers – he had overheard this more than once, while teaching little Mademoiselle La Valette or Coigny or Régnier their simplified scraps of Mozart – that one simply must never let down . . .
‘I’ll tackle Rothenberg first.’ Ben-Gideon set his champagne glass on the tray of a liveried footman who passed by. ‘He’s a cousin of mine.’
‘One other question.’
Lucien flourished into the opening bars of ‘Le Pantalon’. It was time to get back to work.
‘Is there anyone here connected to the French Embassy in Constantinople?’ January whispered hastily, even as his fingers followed the violin’s lead. ‘Can you find out if anyone has recently returned from there, who might have encountered this girl—’
‘While casually dropping in on Hüseyin Pasha’s harem?’ Ben-Gideon’s eyebrows bent like neat little bows. ‘I’ll ask.’
For the next twenty minutes, January devoted the whole of his attention and the whole of his heart to the light-hearted glitter of chassés, jetés, rigadoons and emboittés; to the soft swish of silk petticoats and the light pat of dogskin slippers on the waxed parquet of the ballroom floor. And within seconds, all other concerns vanished. There were times when he missed the sense of helping people that he’d had, in his days as a surgeon; the joy of seeing a woman walk out of the Hôtel Dieu alive, whose life had been despaired of, or of hearing the voices of a family clustered around the bed of an injured child as that child woke once more to life . . .
The sense that he had acted, for a brief space of time, truly as a servant of God.
But God dwelled in music, too.
And there was nothing that gave him greater joy and so deep a peace of heart.
When he looked up again, as the dancers separated – the young men in their clocked silk stockings and bright cutaway coats to fetch lemonade for girls like pastel blossoms in ivory, primrose, cream – it was to see Sabid al-Muzaffar stroll into the ballroom with a young and soberly-dressed gentleman whose face seemed vaguely familiar.
He leaned over to Lucien Imbot and whispered, ‘Who’s the rutin?’ with a nod in that direction.
The violinist shook his head. ‘Not a clue. The one with al-Muzaffar, you mean?’
January nodded. In the course of several ‘seasons’ of playing for the wealthy, he knew most of them by sight, and old Lucien – who as first violinist in the household orchestra of Queen Marie Antoinette had come within twenty-four hours of losing his head in the Terror – knew them all. Which meant that this sunburnt young gentleman, whose eyes seemed so much older than his face and who bore himself with the unmistakable carriage of the old aristocracy, must be newly-returned to Paris. His plain black coat was new and exquisitely tailored – just home, from wherever he’s been, and tricked out by his welcoming family. Thus its color was a deliberate comment on the brilliant hues of the men around him. Church? That would make him a younger son.
But there was something in his expression that rebuked the fashionable young Abbés and Chevaliers who crowded around the stylish Bishops in attendance at the ball.
‘Arnoux de Longuechasse.’ Jeannot knocked the moisture from his flute again. ‘The Marquis’ brother. I played for the family Wednesday night – whilst the rest of you lot were amusing the riff-raff at the Opera – a little affaire to welcome him home from Constantinople. Most elevated. Gluck and Salieri . . . None of your opera airs and waltzes for the Abbé.’
‘Constantinople?’
‘Attached to the Ambassador’s suite. Almoner or something. Holier than the College of Cardinals all rolled into one. But the Marquis’ valet tells me Arnoux made his name teaching French to the ladies of the Sultan’s harem.’
A gigue followed, and another minuet. It was only in the houses of these ancient families that these court dances were still performed, when everyone else in Paris was doing the waltz. At intervals January glanced from his music to sweep the ballroom with his eye: the place was ablaze with a thousand francs’ worth of beeswax candles, and the young Abbé de Longuechasse was easy to spot in his sober garb. Sabid remained in the ballroom, watching the dancers, though he did not himself dance. The Abbé was gone the first two times January looked for him, but on the third occasion – after the minuet – he was in conversation with Sabid again, presenting him to his brother the Marquis . . .
Which is why his face was familiar. January had played at the balls given by Louis-Antoine du Plessis-Vignerot, Marquis de Longuechasse, a score of times. The Marquis bowed stiffly, but did not offer snuff, nor accept that which al-Muzaffar extended to him in a golden box.
The du Plessis-Vignerots, January knew, were among the most Ultra of the Ultras, clinging haughtily to the old ways. January noted with amusement that the Marquis and his wife likewise snubbed both the wealthy business gentlemen invited by Madame de Bellegarde and the assorted counts and barons whose titles had been created by Napoleon. When, much later in the evening, Daniel ben-Gideon reappeared beside the orchestra, January asked him if the Abbé de Longuechasse had by any chance taught any other ladies besides those of the Sultan’s household.
The banker’s son flung up his hands in mock dismay. ‘You don’t expect he’d answer that question – or any question I addressed to him – do you? I should be lucky if he didn’t fling Holy Water at me.’
‘He didn’t fling it at Sabid,’ pointed out January.
‘He probably didn’t bring any with him tonight, then,’ retorted ben-Gideon. ‘The whole family suspects the Banque de France is part of a plot against the Pope and thinks the King should bring back the Inquisition. They’ll barely speak to Protestants, let alone a money-grubbing Jew. I’m surprised His Holiness the Abbé consented to lend his countenance to the ball here tonight.’
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 6