Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries)

by Hambly, Barbara

  January shook his head. Suleiman, who had waited by the door of the south-western room, locked the door behind them. ‘Hüseyin told me he’d fallen out of favor with the Sultan and was obliged to leave Constantinople. He was looking to invest in imports, for he knows merchants throughout the Mediterranean, and in land.’

  ‘Well, he can sure pick that up cheap these days.’ Shaw glanced back over his shoulder at the door of Ghulaam’s chamber as they reached the stair that led down, and he halted, to close his eyes, and sniff.

  January stopped, too. The attic – unlike most of those in New Orleans – was almost completely uncluttered, Hüseyin having lived in the house only a few weeks. A line of wicker boxes along one wall held a little clothing, but it was nothing, January knew, compared to what an American family’s attic would be like, with trunk after trunk of dresses, for which servants would be sent up every morning when Madame and her daughters awoke. There was no old furniture, no stacks of newspapers, no piled-up household accounts. The big room that lay between Ghulaam’s chamber and the maids’ dormitory was for the most part bare to its walls.

  He knew what Shaw was thinking. Where would you put the bodies of two girls, that the servants wouldn’t find them? Wouldn’t at least detect them, by the increased presence of insects or rats?

  ‘Think about it,’ he urged softly. ‘Hüseyin had complete control over those girls’ lives. They had no family in this country, no one to whom he had to account for their whereabouts. If they displeased him, he could simply make them disappear. Why kill them in his own house, pitch them off his own roof on to his own doorstep, for all the world to see?’

  ‘You know,’ said Shaw in a thoughtful tone as they descended the stair to the third-floor gallery, ‘I asked myself that very question a dozen times, when I come acrost a planter that’s beat his wife to death with a curtain weight, or a woman that’s cut her husband’s throat while he’s asleep in bed an’ left the body there layin’ in its blood. An’ generally I don’t get a very good answer.’

  They emerged on to the gallery, the courtyard a gray well beneath them in the drenching rain. The roofs of the service buildings that surrounded it on three sides were typical New Orleans structures, slanting inward from a high outside wall, like the roofs of sheds, rather than ridged down the center as the roofs of houses were. January had heard outsiders opine that this style had been adopted to keep slaves from climbing over into the next courtyard to safety, but in fact – because the service wings of the buildings next door would be constructed in exactly the same way – there was nothing to keep a determined slave from scrambling up one side and then down the other into the next property.

  In this case the effort would be complicated by the fact that the building which housed the kitchen – and, he guessed, the laundry – backed on to the yard of a livery stable, with no structure behind it and a two and a half story drop from its outer edge. Not an insurmountable problem, he reflected, going to the gallery rail to look out across the kitchen roof – the service buildings being only two storys in height, and the main house rising above them like an island set in the sky.

  From here he could see down into the livery stable yard behind the kitchen and note that a two-story ladder lay along the ground there, easily long enough to serve.

  ‘I ain’t sayin’,’ Shaw went on, ‘that some ill-intentioned rat-bastard couldn’t’a sent a letter beggin’ that the house be cleared for the evenin’, to permit of nefarious fiscal dealins in the study, an’ then lugged them girls over the roofs from Pavot’s attic. Could happen.’ His heavy Conestoga boots clattered on the next flight of steps down to the second-floor gallery beneath. ‘But I’d still like to have a good hard sniff around the premises, ’fore we leave.’ He turned his head and spat his tobacco chaw down into the courtyard below, lest chewing it in her presence offend a lady.

  The Lady Jamilla awaited them in her husband’s study on the second floor, Ra’eesa in attendance. Both women were veiled, and it distressed January to see the unmistakable signs of illness in the Lady’s darkened and swollen eyelids, as well as the marks of tears.

  ‘My lady Jamilla,’ the tutor introduced with a bow. ‘May I present Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, of the City Guards? And M’sieu Janvier . . .’

  ‘M’sieu Janvier and I are old acquaintances.’ She inclined her head in welcome as both men bowed. Her French had enormously improved. ‘Please be seated. Thank you, Lorette,’ she added as the disapproving housemaid appeared in the doorway, bearing a tray of tea and sugar cakes.

  There were men in New Orleans who would have refused to sip tea and eat sugar cakes if a black man was doing so in the chair next to him, but Abishag Shaw wasn’t one of them. In any case, January guessed that the Lady Jamilla was insufficiently acquainted with the intricate etiquette in play in New Orleans society which prevented such a situation from ever arising. It was almost, he reflected, like being in Paris again . . .

  But he resolved to explain these niceties to this woman, lest she incur social damage later.

  By the expression in the maid Lorette’s sour eyes, he guessed that she might well beat him to this.

  ‘How is my husband?’

  ‘As well as can be expected, under the circumstances, my Lady. Lieutenant Shaw is here in his official capacity,’ January went on, ‘and I can assure you that he is a man of honor whom you can trust with your life, as I have more than once trusted him with mine. I am here only as a friend, to offer whatever help you may need in finding the true killer of those poor girls. Who, I am bound to say, despite my account of his character, the Lieutenant is perfectly ready to believe was your husband.’

  Something that might have been a smile flickered in the corners of those dark eyes. ‘Such is his duty.’

  ‘I am glad to hear you say so, M’am.’ Shaw’s French was worse than execrable, but the Lady inclined her head to show that she understood. ‘That makes it easier. Will you have any objection to my searchin’ this house?’

  A slight crease of puzzlement appeared between her brows, but she said, ‘None, M’sieu.’

  ‘You feel able to talk about them gals? An’ I begs pardon,’ he added, ‘if’fn I don’t know the customs of your country. I purely do not mean to offend.’

  ‘It is not the custom in my country,’ returned Jamilla, ‘for a woman to pretend that her husband does not have concubines . . . as it is, I understand, in yours. Your question does not offend.’ For a moment her brow twitched, and her fingers suddenly shook, where they fidgeted with the edge of her sleeve.

  ‘When my husband’s enemies gained power in the court of the Sultan, so that he knew that he must leave, he gave all the women of his household a choice: to remain with him, or to go to other homes. His other two wives, the ladies Marayam and Utba, both had family in Constantinople, and my husband gifted them with sufficient gold to ensure they would find other husbands – or at least find a welcome in the homes of their brothers. One concubine, Raihana, chose to go with Utba, for over the years they had become dear friends. She is as a second mother to Utba’s two daughters.’

  She moved her hand as if she would sip her tea, but her fingers trembled so badly that she barely touched the handle of the cup before giving up the effort.

  ‘I chose to remain with my husband. Noura and Karida had no family, and no other protector. I think Noura would have stayed in the East if she could, yet she is a . . . a troublesome girl.’ Exasperation rather than anger tinted the soft voice. ‘She has no malice in her – had none,’ she corrected herself. ‘Yet neither Marayam nor Utba would have her with them. Nor did my husband wish to abandon her, for she was very comely. And young, not yet twenty. Karida was a few years older, gentler in soul, yet easily led. She had been a Christian, and she renounced her faith, I think, only because it was expected of her.’

  As she spoke January looked around him at the study, which was furnished – like the parlor next door – very much in the Western fashion, the tables French, of brass-mounted mah
ogany, and with only a single Wilton carpet on the floor instead of the piled rugs of Eastern custom. The rosewood desk he recognized as local, the work of M’sieu Seignouret on Rue Royale: Hüseyin would have sat there, he thought, while his bearded and bespectacled visitor Mr Smith sat in the chair now occupied by the lady. Very likely, he thought, Hüseyin had had the letter of introduction in his hands, asking about this detail or that . . .

  And when Hüseyin rushed downstairs, how easy for Mr Smith to simply pocket it before he stepped out on to the back gallery, hurried down the stairs, across the courtyard while Hüseyin was dealing with the angry men already accusing him of the murder, and out the carriage gate.

  ‘I have heard many ridiculous things that are believed in this country,’ Sitt Jamilla went on. ‘My husband did not keep us locked up, though of course we did not walk about the streets. Every week, sometimes oftener, he would have Nehemiah harness the carriage and take us out to walk beside the lake, or along the . . . the little river . . .’ Her hand flickered in a ghost of her old swiftness of gesture.

  ‘The Bayou St John?’

  ‘Even so. Thank you. The Bayou St John. Always with Ghulaam and Suleiman in attendance, of course. Noura asked, many times, to be permitted to go out shopping, as from the windows of her room she saw other ladies do along Rue Bourbon, and she pouted when this was forbidden to her. But my husband is a man of the old ways and would not hear of it. He would buy us – any of us – whatever we asked for, but he would not hear of us dressing in the fashion of this country, or leaving off the veil.’

  ‘An’ did Miss Noura,’ asked Shaw, ‘come to know anybody – any man – here in town?’

  ‘No one. As I know no one save M’sieu Janvier. It is my husband’s belief that for a woman her family should suffice.’

  ‘Well,’ said Shaw grimly, ‘he ain’t alone in that. It’s right Christian of him, as a matter of fact. An’ was you surprised, M’am, when Miss Noura an’ her friend disappeared a few nights back?’

  A small sigh escaped her, and her brow contracted in another flash of pain. ‘Not really. My husband was invited to a dinner on Friday evening, at the home of a Christian, a planter here. Thus my son ate his dinner after the custom of our country, which my husband does not wish him to forget. The two sarârî – the young ladies – and I served him in my husband’s apartment upstairs. Later we three all ate in the same chamber, which adjoins the room where Noura and Karida slept. I will show you the place, if you will.’

  She rose and led the way out on to the rear gallery, Ra’eesa padding silently behind them. Suleiman followed, face dark with disapproving puzzlement. At the foot of the stairs another man barred their way, very tall and chubby in his baggy crimson trousers and long, embroidered coat. He barked a question in a soft alto voice, and Jamilla replied in the same mixture of Arabic, Greek, and Turkish that was spoken in Constantinople. January thought he heard her call him Ghulaam.

  Ghulaam shook his head, ready to die in defense of the stair. Suleiman gave him a sharp order, and with a sullen glare, the eunuch stepped aside. He was, January observed, armed, not only with a short cutlass worn openly at his belt, but also with a pair of pistols – who is he expecting to storm the harîm? He fell into step behind them as Jamilla led the way up the stairs, leaving Suleiman at the bottom.

  Even so, January recalled, on Bellefleur Plantation in his childhood, no field hand was permitted to set foot in the Big House, on pain of being beaten bloody – a stricture which included every child in the quarters, even if their parents were employed inside. To each country its own custom.

  Four rooms made up the private quarters of Hüseyin Pasha and his women, a floor above the level of the rooms around the courtyard, and from these four rooms, as had been the case on the upper floors of the house in Paris, most Western furniture had been removed. Low divans ringed the walls, widened only slightly to provide sleeping space. Armoires – the only local objects that remained – held the bedding that would be laid out at night. Through the French windows beside the stair, as they came up on to the third-floor gallery, January recognized the pillows he’d hidden under, ten years ago in the house on the Rue St-Honoré, gold and bronze and cinnamon silk, and the sight of them was like a hand placed around his heart. At the downstream corner of the house, the Lady led them into a chamber which had been painted in brilliant persimmon orange and furnished with a divan and cushions of black and white. Costly lamps hung over a low table of inlaid ebony; a low stand held cups and bowls, and equipment for the making of coffee.

  Layers of piled-up carpet sighed beneath their feet. With Ghulaam growling like a suspicious dog at their heels, she led them through this chamber and into the room that had belonged to the two concubines.

  Muslin curtains divided it in two, after the fashion January had seen in servants’ dormitories in Mexico. A single armoire set between the two cubicles held the bedding for both, and each small section was furnished with a couple of inlaid chests, to hold the girls’ possessions. Though the whole of this upper floor smelled faintly of frankincense, January thought that he would certainly detect it, had two dead bodies been concealed anywhere up here, or in the attic above, even for a day.

  ‘Did they take any of their clothing with them?’ asked January as Ra’eesa opened the chests to let him look inside.

  ‘Only what they wore that night at supper,’ replied Jamilla at once. ‘Those were the clothes they had on when their bodies were found, saving only their veils. Those were not found. A woman, you understand, Lieutenant Shaw, does not go veiled within her own household, or before men who are related to her: her father, her brothers, her son.’ As she spoke, she lifted clothing from the chests and spread it out on the divan: fragile chemises of nearly transparent lawn, silk trousers, embroidered coats of crimson and indigo. Many shawls: some cashmere, as fine as silk, and some heavier wool, or thick cotton, oiled against rain.

  ‘What is this?’ From the side of the chest Jamilla brought out the largest and heaviest of the shawls, and exclaimed as she spread it out: ‘What have those girls been doing?’

  And Ra’eesa said something that January remembered Ayasha would say, when one of the cats would try to woo her with gifts of deceased mice.

  The shawl – originally a pinkish buff color patterned with blue – was filthy, grubbed all over with reddish-brown dirt, as if it had been spread on bare ground. January carried it to the window, brushed his hand over it, dislodging a shower of particles. ‘Brick dust,’ he said. ‘And common dirt . . .’ His fingers found bits of broken shell as well.

  At the same time Ra’eesa cried, ‘Qabîh!’ and brought from the other chest a dark-red shawl, similarly soiled.

  ‘Wherever they had them wraps, M’am,’ murmured Shaw, ‘I think it’s safe to say they been outside the walls of this house.’

  FOURTEEN

  Jamilla gathered the dirty fabric in slender fingers. Between veil edge and veil edge, her dark eyes clouded with doubt. ‘To the best of my knowledge neither Noura nor Karida passed the gates of this house unattended since our arrival. It is clear now to me—’ She broke off and put her hand to her head with a wince of pain.

  ‘My lady?’

  ‘It is nothing.’ She shook her head quickly. ‘A headache. They have grown worse, since coming to this country. For all that your countrymen boast of it, it is not a healthy land.’

  Ra’eesa glided from the room, hastened the length of the gallery to the French doors of Jamilla’s chamber at the far end.

  The Lady forced her eyes to smile, but her fingers twisted at the edge of her sleeve. ‘It is clear now to me,’ she went on, ‘that we were deceived. Saturday morning Ra’eesa woke me, to say that Noura and Karida had run away during the night. All the shutters on the outer doors and windows of the house were still locked and bolted from within. My husband and Suleiman and I have keys. Likewise the carriage gate on Rue des Ursulines, and the gate of the passageway on to Rue Bourbon, were locked. Yet I suppose that if one truly
wished to escape, a way could be found.’

  She motioned them to follow her on to the gallery again. ‘I did not think of it at the time, but they could have gone over the roof to the attic of our neighbor Pavot without much trouble. It would be a simple matter to bribe his servant to leave the window open.’

  ‘I take it Ghulaam slept Friday night in his chamber?’

  ‘He did. But if one escaped through one of the windows of the central attic, one could climb past Ghulaam’s dormers, if one were careful – or desperate. Which I promise you,’ she added earnestly, ‘the girls were not! Noura was selfish and greedy, as a child is, but she was not defiant. She always got her way with smiles or tears. Karida—’

  Jamilla’s eyes softened and flooded with unshed tears. ‘Karida only wanted to be good, and to be liked.’

  Shaw asked, ‘Was the windows of the main attic unlatched?’

  ‘No.’ She frowned. ‘So they couldn’t have—’ They reached the stair at the end of the gallery, where January had already noticed that one had only to climb over the gallery rail and drop down a few inches, to reach the kitchen roof. It left, of course, the question of what they’d used for a rope to get down – a rope which could easily have been fixed to the kitchen chimney . . .

  ‘Thank you, Ra’eesa.’

  The serving maid had reappeared from the Lady’s room, bearing a tray on which a tiny cup was set. Sitt Jamilla took it and drank – a few soup-spoons-full of dark liquid – with a frantic eagerness that told its own story and pierced January to the heart with pity and regret, even before he smelled the bitter, swoony odor of the medicine.

  Opium.

  His glance crossed Shaw’s. No wonder the escaping girls had had no trouble stealing their mistress’s jewels. By the intensity of the smell, they could have taken the sheets off the bed without Jamilla waking up.