Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries)

by Hambly, Barbara

  ‘You pusillanimous sons a’ Belial!’ bellowed a voice as three City Guards dragged through the Cabildo doors a powerfully-built Kentuckian whose breath and clothing January could smell across the room. ‘How dare you lay your pussified French hands on a true-born Salt River Roarer! Wee-hah! You come on an’ take me if’fn you can! I killed more men than the smallpox—’

  ‘By breathin’ on ’em,’ muttered Shaw, and he strode toward the melee that ensued just within the doors.

  Breche’s grief disappeared in an expression of disgust, and he moved toward the doors as well, keeping his distance from the affray.

  January followed. ‘One more question, sir, if you will? When you would meet with the Lady Noura, did her friend ever come with her? The Lady Karida?’

  Breche made an impatient gesture at what he clearly regarded as a side issue to his bleeding heart. ‘I think so. Sometimes.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what she did, while you and the Lady Noura spoke together –’ he congratulated himself on sounding like he actually believed these encounters had been platonic – ‘in the stable yard?’

  ‘She kept watch.’ Breche’s self-evident tone led January to suspect that this was another piece of fable gleaned from romances. ‘Kept guard on the door, lest we be discovered.’

  Which would make more sense, January reflected, in a country where girls weren’t perfectly free to come and go once they stepped outside . . . And in circumstances where they didn’t have the coachman Nehemiah on hand to act as lookout.

  They both stepped quickly back as the True-Born Salt River Roarer hurled one of his captors sprawling past them, yanking – as the man went flying – the cutlass from the constable’s belt. The other Guards leaped clear of the now-armed prisoner, and Shaw – timing his swing precisely – stepped in around the slash of the blade and caught the keelboatman a punch on the jaw that lifted the man’s feet from the floor. January guessed the prisoner was unconscious before he hit the flagstones. He certainly put up no kind of fight as Shaw relieved him of his weapon.

  When January turned back to speak to Breche, he saw the man had moved away toward the Cabildo doors, where he had been intercepted by the fat, protective form of Burton Blodgett.

  Shaw saw this also, swore as only a Kaintuck could, and made a move to intercept them. But one of the Guards yelled, ‘Get him in the cells before he comes around!’ and Shaw glanced back. And in that moment, Blodgett put a plump arm over Breche’s shoulders.

  ‘My dear Mr Breche, you must forgive my eavesdropping, but the tale you told wrings my heart! Depend upon it, the True American will not rest until this terrible wrong has been righted . . .’

  Together, the two men stepped out into the rainy dusk.

  Since the portions of the Cabildo which had been piped for gas lighting over the past few years did not include the makeshift morgue beneath the stairs, January arranged with Shaw – when the Kentuckian returned from bestowing the True-Born Salt River Roarer in the cell allotted to white men – to come back early in the morning and examine the bodies of the dead girls.

  Six o’clock was striking from the Cathedral as he crossed the Place des Armes. The rain had ceased, but masses of clouds stirred above the bare branches of the pride of India trees on the levee, and the wind smelled of more rain to come. When January reached his house, it was to find Rose in the workroom over the kitchen – which in more prosperous times had served as a classroom – engaged in a long and complicated experiment involving sulfur, soda, and arsenic, and his niece Zizi-Marie in the kitchen itself, looking after Baby John. Gabriel, January’s fourteen-year-old nephew, was making dinner, something he could do with considerably better results than either Rose or Zizi-Marie.

  Hard times being what they were, January had contracted with his sister Olympe – whose upholsterer husband hadn’t worked since March – to take her two older children into his household, relieving Rose of a good deal of household drudgery and Olympe of the necessity of feeding two extra mouths.

  Hard times being what they were, January’s acquisition of five hundred dollars in hard silver – wages for risking his life over the summer – meant that, with most banks in the city either closed or issuing nothing but paper, it was better to have a few more people in the house at all times, other than Rose and the baby. In that fall of 1837, New Orleans had suddenly become filled with men who were very interested in who had money in their houses, and January was well aware how swiftly word got around. The owners of every grocery knew who paid their bills and who was living on rice, beans, and credit; every man who sold hay, or coal, or candles had a slave or two who had nothing better to do than keep his or her ear to the ground. Gangs that had previously only worked the docks – stealing cargoes or trunks or a hog or two – now found themselves obliged to extend their field of toil to houses as well. Hell, they got SOME silver in their house, an’ I got none . . .

  In addition to Gabriel and Zizi-Marie – on cold evenings like this the kitchen was by far the most comfortable place in the house – January found a young man named Willie, who was currently acting as a sort of sous-chef for Gabriel, cleaning bones, feet, and feelers from the pint or so of mixed fish and shellfish that lay on a couple of sheets of newspaper on the table. ‘Dinner be ready in ten minutes, Mr J,’ said Willie, in English, which was all he spoke. ‘I set the table, just like a fancy butler, an’ I go fetch Miss Rose the minute you say.’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the kind,’ retorted January, and he leaned – carefully – into the glowing hearth, to fill a basin of water from the copper at one side of the flickering coals. ‘You’ll get your supper and go back under the house where you belong. You got to be less helpful when you’re on the run,’ he added, with a grin to take away any sense of banishment from the words, and Willie grinned back. ‘Let other people help you for a change.’

  Willie was the property of a planter named Gosse in Plaquemines Parish, and he was hiding out in one of the two tiny rooms that January had walled off the sides of the storerooms under the old Spanish house. Advertisements containing his description, under the heading RAN AWAY, were in every newspaper in the city. In a night or two, those who made up the greater chain of slave runners in Louisiana would smuggle him on to a boat going north. ‘Riding the underground railway’, it was beginning to be called. Heading north to freedom.

  Sometimes January wondered if he and Rose were both insane, to be mixed up in the organization.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Rose, when January voiced his concern after dinner. ‘There’s a far greater likelihood that I’ll kill everyone in the house with one of my experiments, than that some slave taker is going to report us for sheltering runaways.’ In the bedroom’s warm candlelight she cradled Baby John to her breast, while January changed clothes for Mr Trulove’s ball and a series of clinks and giggles from the dining room punctuated the cleaning-up process. Without her spectacles – for which their month-old son had developed an almost instant fascination – Rose’s green-hazel eyes lost their daytime look of brisk efficiency and became, in the shadows, like a mermaid’s eyes, sea-colored and dreamy.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed January. ‘But that isn’t the point. You take good care with your experiments. I’d trust you with a mountain of gunpowder. But we don’t know who might hear a rumor, or spread a rumor, of the rooms beneath the house. It was my choice to get involved in slave running . . .’

  ‘Disregarding my screams and pleas to the contrary?’ Rose stroked Baby John’s back as the child slipped into sleep.

  January lifted the baby, to allow her to stand and adjust her clothing: the infant (MY son! My SON—!) so tiny in his enormous hands. Rose put a hand on his arm, kissed him lightly with a touch that he felt through the whole of his skin, like electricity, and adjusted the white linen stock around his neck.

  ‘As you said yourself,’ she reminded him with her quicksilver smile, ‘now is the time that we need to remain on the good side of God.’ She put her spectacles back on – and with them,
the calm face she showed to the world.

  Still carrying the sleeping Baby John, January followed her back out to the dining room. Willie had once more emerged from beneath the house and was drying the dishes that Zizi washed in a basin on the long table. ‘Miss Zizi tellin’ me, you’re helpin’ out this heathen that killed two of his wives?’ inquired the runaway.

  ‘A Muslim is not a heathen,’ corrected January patiently. ‘Rose is a heathen.’ Rose hit him with the dish towel. ‘And those girls weren’t his wives. They were his slaves . . . and as his slaves, they had no rights. So why kill them?’

  Willie thought about that for a moment, brow furrowed. He’d been a cane hand, and New Orleans was the first time he’d seen more than a hundred and fifty people in one place in his life. ‘You mean he coulda sold ’em if he didn’t want ’em around?’

  ‘That’s right. There’s something funny about all this, even if I didn’t know the man – and didn’t know he would not have killed those girls, any more than I’d lay a hand on Zizi or Gabriel if I’d learned they’d stolen from me. I’d put them out of the house—’

  ‘We’d never steal from you, Uncle Ben!’ protested Gabriel. ‘Mama’d kill us!’

  ‘I’d kill you.’ Rose gathered a stack of dried plates to take back to the pantry. ‘I have been waiting for weeks for an excuse to grind up your bones for chemical filtrates, which are extremely expensive.’

  ‘Save their hair,’ January reminded her.

  Rose raised her brows enquiringly.

  ‘Their mama told me, if you had to kill them, save their hair to make gris-gris with.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rose serenely. ‘I’d forgotten.’

  But January’s certainty of Hüseyin Pasha’s innocence – not on grounds of character but by simple logic – did not appear to be shared by the very people who’d invited the man to their suppers and had exclaimed at his wit and erudition only a week before. If he heard his mother’s observation about the insane jealousy of Turks repeated once that evening, he heard it a score of times – and that, only within earshot of the little orchestra, behind its rampart of hothouse palms at one end of the enormous Trulove ballroom. Heaven only knew how many times it was made in the rest of the room.

  ‘The man always terrified me!’ The Widow Redfern’s diamonds flashed as she shuddered, exactly as if she hadn’t flirted with that heathen brute – in her ponderous fashion – at a half-dozen balls and receptions at which January had played. ‘The look in his eyes! Cold, without pity—’

  January wondered if she read the same novels that his sister Dominique and Oliver Breche did.

  ‘It is the Mark of the Beast.’ The Reverend Micajah Dunk, whose Salvation Church – largely paid for by its most prominent parishioner, the Widow Redfern – was one of the few establishments in New Orleans that year that seemed to be doing well, took her hands in his black-gloved grip, with the license presumably extended to Men of God, and gazed down into her eyes. ‘One can read Evil in the face of the Infidel, no matter how gorgeous the gold and crimson that covers the serpent’s back.’

  The widow gazed up at him in holy awe.

  As usual, Fitzhugh Trulove’s reception attracted both the old French and Spanish Creole planters – whose wealth dominated the city and the lower parishes of the state – and the newer American businessmen who had come with the American purchase of the land. Trulove was an Englishman who had bought his plantations – he owned four of them – in the days of Spanish rule some thirty-five years previously, and as such was acceptable to both groups. And as usual, the crowd in the red-columned ballroom had divided itself with the symmetrical precision of a lady’s coiffure: Marignys, Verrets, Roffignacs, Prieurs on one side of it, their backs turned with resolute insouciance upon the Bullards and Butlers, Ripleys and Browns on the other.

  White-haired, pink-faced, and hearty in his long-tailed coat of blue superfine wool, Trulove moved between the groups at the side of his slender chilly wife, and now and then gave the polite nod of a stranger to the gorgeous German opera-singer who was his latest mistress, clinging to the arm of an embarrassed clerk.

  Around the Reverend Dunk, the wives and sisters and grown-up daughters of the American planters, the American brokers and factors and cotton buyers and steamboat owners, all nodded and whispered their agreement, as they did at any pronouncement he made. Any Protestant congregation in New Orleans tended to be predominantly female in make-up, but the Reverend Dunk’s sermons in particular held a fascination that January could only attribute to the man’s feral physical power and melodramatic sense of theater.

  ‘My heart bleeds,’ Dunk went on in his somber, beautiful bass, ‘when I think of those poor girls, held prisoner in that terrible house, clinging together, trembling, at the sound of his footfall . . .’

  And on the other side of the room, Dr Emil Barnard, the most fashionable up-and-coming physician of the French Creole community, took a scientific rather than a melodramatic view of the sensation. ‘It has been empirically proven that Turks are of a more primitive emotional make-up than European men. One has only to examine a Turk’s hands, with their blunt fingers and coarse shape, or the characteristically animal shape of their ears, to see—’

  ‘You know, I noticed that, the first moment that I saw him!’ cried the young planter Hercule Lafrènniére.

  ‘Myself,’ added the sugar broker Charles Picard, ‘I wondered from the first how the Turk came by that fortune of his – if indeed he ever had as much as he was rumored. They say that when the pirate nests of Algiers were taken, tens of millions of dollars in gold disappeared – gold that was taken from ships of all nations, when their crews were sold into slavery.’

  ‘I understand that when a girl escapes from a harem,’ whispered Madame Lafrènniére, ‘and is retaken—’

  She sank her voice as Cécile Philipon, Granmere Roffignac, and two of the Viellard sisters drew near to hear the horrific details.

  ‘I hope it shall be remembered in Hüseyin Pasha’s favor when he applies for entry to Paradise,’ murmured Hannibal Sefton as his long, thin fingers adjusted the pegs of his violin, ‘that mutual slander of his name brought a truce between the Royalistes and Orleannistes of this community. Lafrènniére hasn’t spoken to Barnard since the Bourbon Kings lost their throne for the second time, and I understand Barnard’s wife has visited voodoos to cross the house of Philipon over there. Now look at her whispering with Philipon’s wife. In another hour one of them will actually go over to trade rumors with the Americans.’

  ‘I got five cents says they don’t go that far.’ Jacques Bichet wiped the mouthpiece of his flute and hunted through his music for the next dance.

  ‘Done.’ Sefton dug in his pocket. ‘Back-wounding calumny the whitest virtue strikes . . . ’ He produced a couple of Mexican reales. ‘What king so strong can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?’

  ‘You got all kinds of money, since you give up drinkin’,’ remarked the flautist admiringly.

  ‘Good Lord, man, you don’t think I ever paid for any of those drinks?’

  ‘How’d you stay so drunk all the time, then?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest recollection. Amicus meus –’ the fiddler turned to January – ‘might we impose upon you to hold our wagers?’

  ‘Don’t let anyone hear about you saying a Frenchman is going to speak to an American, then,’ said January, holding out his hand for the money. ‘Or you’ll be called out by every French Creole in town. Allons,’ he added, and he struck up the opening bars of L’Alexandrine on the splendid Trulove piano. ‘Let’s see if we can get them thinking about something besides slandering an innocent man.’

  SIXTEEN

  The dancing went on until almost dawn, though most of the Americans left at two. Jacques Bichet won Hannibal’s five cents off him, the satisfactions of back-wounding calumny taking precedence over mere lifelong political feuds.

  In addition to this, there were the usual wagers among the orchestra as to the nu
mber of challenges to duels which would be issued during the evening: two, with some discussion as to whether to count the confrontation between the Reverend Micajah Dunk and the newly-arrived Baptist preacher the Reverend Doctor Emmanuel Promise over the attention of the Widow Redfern.

  ‘Dunk did say that Satan would sweep Promise into the ovens of Hell with a Great Broom,’ pointed out Hannibal, who had bet on three challenges. (The other two were perfectly routine quarrels: a Royaliste planter whose sister had been asked to dance by a Napoleoniste, and two American lawyers whose mutual accusations of graft, bastardy, Whiggery and unnatural appetites had begun in the courtroom last month and had been continued in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ columns of the True American ever since.)

  From the doorway of the kitchen, to which the musicians had been suffered to retreat for ten minutes between sets, January could see the lights and carriages at the front of the house and hear voices raised in furious altercation: ‘Damn it, Swathmore, you got the goddamned sand to come to me to issue a challenge for Butler? After you closed down the Trade an’ Enterprise Bank an’ ruined a thousand good men in this city—?’

  ‘Don’t tell me their seconds are going to challenge each other to a duel also,’ January murmured, and Hannibal said instantly:

  ‘In that case that makes three challenges—’

  ‘That makes four,’ pointed out Cochon Gardinier, the second violinist, perched corpulent and sweating on a corner of the kitchen table – he’d wagered on four – ‘if Preacher Promise calling on God to blast that glittering Lucifer Dunk with His Holy Light counts.’

  ‘If we’re counting name-calling,’ objected Jacques, ‘we’re up to about fifty!’

  And the Trulove servants – trotting back and forth from the house with trays laden with Anne Trulove’s two hundred and ten settings of blue-and-yellow Bow china and enough silver spoons to armor a regiment – all clamored in agreement or dissent, like a cut-rate Greek chorus. They’d all had money on the possibility of duels as well.