Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries)

by Hambly, Barbara

  ‘What time you lock up the yard last Friday night?’

  A small straight line appeared between the boy’s reddish brows. In the cast-off hand-me-downs of a much larger man, Magus Valentine reminded January for some reason of the beggar-boy Poucet, of whom he had not thought in years. That combination of cockiness and wariness, the air of being always ready to run for it? Or was it only because of the four smaller children clustered at the foot of the stairs that led up to the gallery above the coach house, watching him as Poucet’s little gang had done?

  ‘I’d have to get the book, sir, but I think the last team came in at nine, the moon being just short of full. I locked up the yard, and it took us about a half-hour to get them rubbed and bedded down and the harness stowed.’

  ‘Us bein’ you an’ your Pa?’

  ‘Yes, sir. And Sillery, sir.’ He nodded across the yard, where a barrel-chested little man with Ibo features was raking together soiled straw he’d pitched out of the line of stalls.

  ‘An’ nobody can get into the yard nor out of it, ’ceptin’ through that gate –’ Shaw gestured in the direction of the carriageway, which ran between the back of Hüseyin’s coach house and the long side of Valentine’s – ‘or through the door to Pavot’s yard?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Anybody else have the keys? Barrin’ your pa?’

  ‘Mr Pavot has keys to his gate, being that the land’s actually his from that chimney –’ he pointed to the roof of Hüseyin’s kitchen – ‘on back. Who should I tell Pa,’ added the boy doggedly, ‘was askin’ after him?’

  ‘Name’s Shaw. Lieutenant of the City Guards.’ For a moment he studied Magus Valentine’s face, and the boy’s eyes shifted. ‘You mind if my friend an’ I take a look around?’

  ‘No, sir.’ The boy’s glance went to January again. This time the fear was unmistakable.

  Why scared?

  And why of ME? Why not the white man who has the power?

  ‘You keep them lanterns lit all night?’ Shaw nodded toward the iron brackets that projected from the front of both stable and carriage house.

  ‘No, sir. We snuff ’em, last thing we lock up. Sillery sleeps in the stable; Jones and Delilah – she’s Sillery’s sister – sleep in the coach house next to the tack room.’

  ‘An’ you – or your pa – you didn’t see nuthin’ goin’ on in the yard here, late Friday night?’

  ‘No, sir.’ The boy’s voice had a wary patience to it, as if he would not be tricked or pushed. ‘From my window – it’s the one up there –’ he pointed – ‘I can see the whole of the yard. I wake up two, three times in the night, just to have a look, make sure the horses are all right.’

  ‘An’ you heard nuthin’ Sunday neither?’

  The boy’s eyes shifted again. ‘Nor Sunday neither, sir. Anything I can show you gentlemen, whilst you’re here?’

  Shaw and January went over the stables, the coach house, and the yard, and even up into the coach-house loft, which had been roughly partitioned into two chambers, one for the owner of the premises – it had a bed – and the one in front for everyone else. In addition to a pile of straw ticks and blankets in a corner it contained a table, at which, as they entered, the next-oldest child – a bright-eyed red-haired twelve-year-old girl – was carving up half a loaf of bread.

  ‘Maggie, we got any money at all for beans?’ the girl said. ‘We—’

  ‘I told you not to call me Maggie.’ The boy fished in his pockets, glanced worriedly at Shaw, then went to the packing boxes that made up the room’s shelves and dish cupboard and took out a ledger book. ‘I’ll go round to Mr Braeden with his bill again,’ he said. ‘We’ll get somethin’.’

  In the coach house below, January counted two buggies, a wagon, and a stylish fiacre. As Shaw had said, they were all clean as his mother’s dishes, and moreover, the floor between them was swept as well, a good deal cleaner than some parlors January had been in. A tack room was partitioned off the coach house, and beside it, a second cubicle served as the dwelling for the second groom, Jones, and his wife Delilah. As he walked around the great open space of the coach house, January felt them watching him from the doors.

  Last of all he and Shaw took the ladder from where it lay along the stable wall and propped it on the wall just below the chimney of Hüseyin Pasha’s kitchen. It took the two of them to move it, and when Shaw climbed up to have a look at the wall and the chimney January again could feel the eyes of the three livery-yard slaves on his back.

  ‘Nothing?’ he asked quietly, when Shaw descended.

  ‘Rain washed away whatever there was.’ He started to lower the ladder down and was forestalled by Sillery and Jones, who came to assist. Stepping back, Shaw went on softly, ‘If them gals helped theirselves to all the jewels they could lay hands on, that kind of money buys a lot of silence.’

  ‘Maybe,’ agreed January. ‘But even allowing that Tim Valentine is a scoundrel, I don’t think there’s enough food in the house for anyone there to have been bribed.’

  Shaw returned to Rue Bourbon through the little door in the fence and thus through to the Pavot house – outside of which, presumably, Burton Blodgett still waited like a faithful dog. January took a last look around the livery yard and wondered what he was missing.

  From the coach-house door, the three slaves watched him still. The children stood in a line on the gallery, watching also: when one of them would have spoken, the red-haired girl shushed him.

  Magus Valentine emerged from the stable and crossed to the coach house, but was intercepted by Sillery.

  January would have given a great deal, to know what words were said.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘So, do you think it was Sabid?’ asked Ayasha.

  They sat in a dark corner of Carnot’s garret. The painter had finally talked Ayasha into sitting as a model, and the few candles that, as usual, Carnot’s guests had been requested to furnish to the Shrovetide pancake-feast glimmered in front of the half-finished canvas: Susanna and the Elders, with Ayasha looking anything but innocent as she clutched a gauzy drapery to her breasts. It was sufficiently late in the evening that the noise from the Rue Jardinet below had finally grown quiet. Only the soft click of dominoes penetrated the gloom of the big chamber, and the murmur of voices in talk. Somewhere the bells of St Bernardins chimed two.

  ‘What would Sabid be doing in New Orleans?’ asked January. ‘That was ten years ago.’

  ‘Ten years isn’t forever, Mâlik.’ Ayasha folded up Noura’s dirtied pink veil, tucked it into her sewing basket. ‘Passion doesn’t change, neither love nor hatred. In the East, it’s shameful for a man to forgive an enemy, or forget a wrong that was done him. Where is Sabid now?’

  January opened his eyes. By the gray light that came through the jalousies of the window it was after noon. For a moment – as often happened, when he slept in the daytime and woke suddenly – he did not recall where he was, though the smell of burnt sugar and mold told him this is New Orleans.

  A soft clucking – a tiny fretful whimper – drew his eyes to the willow basket crib at the foot of the bed, and he saw his son asleep. Tiny and soft, achingly beautiful, and January felt the years in New Orleans, the years with Rose, come back on him like a descending weight. And in that first moment, though he hated himself to the core of his being for it, he could not stop what he felt.

  He wanted Ayasha back.

  And all the dividing years undone.

  It took him several minutes of lying there, staring at the creamy plaster of the ceiling and the pink folds of the looped-back mosquito-bar, before he felt able to get up and go out into the parlor. He heard Rose in the dining room (to which the room behind the parlor had been reconverted, from its former use as a classroom) – the muted creak of one of the cane-bottom chairs, the clink of a cup on a saucer. Reading. He could almost see the way she propped her cheek on her fist, the pale gleam of the daylight in the oval lenses of her spectacles. Outside the French doors, beyond the high g
allery, a dray rattled by, driven full speed up Rue Esplanade as if it were a Roman chariot. The wailing cry of the milk lady rose, alien and weightless, words transformed into a long African holler such as the men would call from row to row of the sugar fields when he was a child.

  Across the wide street – one of the widest in the city – their neighbor Bernadette Metoyer called out to the milk woman; Bernadette was his mother’s friend, a handsome demi-mondaine whose banker lover had absconded that summer, leaving her and her sisters to pick up the pieces. Yet Bernadette’s rich alto voice drew him back to the world of present friends, present loves. Reminded him that his mother had commanded his presence, and Rose’s, for coffee that afternoon – the Metoyer sisters would be there also – and if he wanted to have a look at the hair he’d taken from beneath Noura’s fingernails, he’d better do it now.

  He drew a deep breath.

  The pain passed, and he folded the dream away.

  ‘Have you compared hair before?’ Rose unlocked the door of her laboratory above the kitchen, the small room warm from the hearth beneath despite the chill of the day. ‘We really should get a sample from Shaw or Hannibal, to compare. My hair is close to a white woman’s, but to be honest, I wouldn’t want to bring anything into a court of law until I was sure.’

  She took the key to her microscope box from the drawer of her workbench, lifted the box to the table by the windows where the light was best. The workbench had begun life as an apothecary’s cupboard, its myriad of minuscule drawers stocked with probes, tweezers, packets of sulfur, or bottles of quicksilver or acid. The microscope was the first thing she’d purchased, back when they’d had money: Swiss, brass, and formidable. ‘Remember too that we’re probably looking at arm hair rather than head hair. The texture will be different.’

  ‘I’ve looked at hair,’ said January. ‘But I’ve never had call to compare with a man’s life at stake. It may tell us nothing.’

  From another drawer she took slips of glass, and tiny tweezers, concentrating as she prepared the slide.

  ‘Have you specifically compared a white man’s hair with a black man’s?’ Rose, January knew, had volumes of notes on her microscopic observations, dating back years. There were times that he suspected that if Rose were confronted by the Destroying Angel and offered a choice of her husband or the microscope, he – January – had better pack an extra shirt to wear in Hell because that’s where he’d end up.

  ‘Oh, heavens, yes. The girls are always comparing each others’ hair. It’s my surest way of teaching them how to prepare slides.’ She clipped a strand from her own walnut-brown curls, sandwiched it between slips of glass, and removed her spectacles to put her eye to the top of the tube. ‘See how round that is?’ January looked – making radical readjustments in the focus, since Rose was nearsighted as a mole. ‘Now look at yours.’

  January withdrew his eye from the eyepiece, blinking, as Rose changed slides.

  ‘Yours is flatter, oval, see? The nappier the hair, the more oval it is in cross section. Now here’s our friend’s . . .’

  January drew back again with an exclamation of disgust. He realized he should have expected that the fragments of flesh and blood around the retrieved hair would be alive with tiny larvae that suddenly looked as big as earthworms under the glass.

  ‘Don’t be a sissy.’ Rose removed her spectacles again to have a look. ‘It looks round.’

  ‘I thought so, too.’

  ‘Which doesn’t mean the man isn’t sang melée – just that he has good hair, as my mother calls it. He could be a brown-haired white man as well.’

  ‘And the skin – if that is skin – is so discolored by blood under the broken nails that we can’t tell what color it is,’ finished January glumly, when after half an hour of changing slides and comparing samples he returned the microscope to its box. ‘Which means that it could be anyone from John Davis –’ he named the owner of the French Opera House and one of his most consistent employers – ‘to Hannibal. And that could include Hüseyin Pasha, his valet, his son’s tutor, the kitchen boy, and probably the American cook.’

  Rose locked the box and replaced the key in its drawer. ‘But at least now we know it couldn’t include Shaw,’ she pointed out as she washed slides in water, dipped from the jar in the corner, then in alcohol. ‘Or Oliver Breche, more’s the pity.’ She set the glass slips neatly in the rack Gabriel had made for her from old forks, to dry. ‘Or even Burton Blodgett, though I wouldn’t put it past him to have done it just to make a good story.’ She wiped her hands and followed January from the laboratory to the gallery above the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t suggest it to him.’

  ‘But speaking of Hannibal – and of hair . . .’ A frown clouded her forehead as she paused at the top of the steps. ‘Is there any condition that you know of – or any drug – that shows itself in a man’s hair? I know arsenic gets into the hair and makes it shiny; is there anything that will change the texture and make it limp and dead-looking?’ She looked up into his eyes for a moment, seeing in them, January knew, his own arrested look. ‘It isn’t my imagination, is it?’

  ‘I thought it was mine.’ January was silent, trying to call back to mind that slight change in their friend’s appearance, and whether the fiddler had seemed quite himself.

  Which in fact, January reflected, he had . . .

  ‘I’ve never heard of a malady that would do something like that to a man’s hair,’ he answered at length. ‘Not so suddenly, and all at once.’

  ‘A drug, then? I know he hasn’t been well, but I’ve seen no sign of his going back to opium . . .’

  January shook his head and wished for the thousandth time that there were something that would still Hannibal’s coughing fits but would not bring with it the deadly temptations of euphoria.

  ‘Where is he living?’ She pulled her shawl close around her as they descended to the crooked little yard. ‘Could it be something in the atmosphere of a place, the way the phosphorous in match factories is supposed to ruin the mouths of the girls who work in them? I understand that Kentucky Williams has a new fancy man who probably objected to Hannibal’s sleeping over her saloon—’

  ‘A properly brought-up lady,’ replied January severely, ‘has no business knowing about fancy men.’

  ‘This from a man who spent last winter playing at the Countess Mazzini’s ganeum . . . Well,’ she added as they ascended the back-gallery steps, and her cool primness melted into a smile. ‘I see someone’s awake.’

  ‘We were coming up to get you.’ Zizi-Marie held out Baby John to her. The infant – a solemn little professor of philosophy whom no one would dream of calling Johnny – had not been crying, only gazing out at the yard with those wide brown worried eyes.

  Rose gathered up her son in her arms and carried him toward the bedroom to feed him, before their departure for the Widow Levesque’s. January moved to follow – he loved to keep Rose company at such times – but Gabriel, reading the same issue of the New Orleans Bee at the dining table that had occupied Burton Blodgett earlier, looked up as January came through the dining room and said, ‘Have you seen this, Uncle Ben?’ He held it out.

  January cursed.

  The paper Shaw had shown him a few hours ago had been the True American – notable for its attacks on the French Creole aristocracy, whose wealth still ruled New Orleans despite American efforts to gain more say in the city government.

  The Bee, however, was the French paper. In addition to decrying the unwillingness of the City Guards to search for the mysterious ‘witness’ CLAIMED by the Haut Ton to be in a position to completely exonerate the Infidel Turk . . . the letter to the editor written by ‘The Friend of the People’ insisted that the entire affair was fueled by the desire of the rich to buy out the city lots of the starving poor with Turkish gold. Why else the eagerness of both Mayor Prieur and Captain Tremoille of the Guards to believe the suave assertions of this foreign Midas who has so frequently been a guest in their homes?


  There were, January knew, quite as many men of French and Spanish descent in New Orleans who had been impoverished by the bank crashes as there were Americans – men frightened enough, and angry enough, to blame those whom they had once regarded as their leaders. It was they – the ‘Friend of the People’ trumpeted – who had been victimized by the wealthy planters, the rentiers and landlords and the bankers whose establishments have yet to repay a single penny of the savings which they cynically stripped from the hard-working folk of this city . . .

  The cry goes up: if a man of wealth is seen to be punished, will this not drive investment from the city? Better these two lost lambs perish unavenged, than that the City (videlicit, the planters and landlords and bankers) should sustain any loss . . .

  And, of course, at his mother’s nothing else was talked about.

  ‘Those letters are the most poisonous concoction of insinuation and lies I’ve ever read!’ January replied, to Virginie Metoyer’s earnest declaration that she had known all the time that Hüseyin Pasha was up to no good. ‘Why is it that everyone assumes that because a man is a Mohammedan that he is ready to casually murder two human beings the way you or I would step on a roach?’

  ‘It is their way.’ Babette – the third-born and prettiest of the Metoyer sisters, resplendent in a new silk tignon that was topped with an astonishing cloud of pink ostrich-feathers – regarded January with wide brown eyes. ‘The Turks are brought up to despise women—’

  ‘Who told you that, exactly?’

  She stammered, discomfited, and Rose came to her rescue by handing January a plate with a slice of cake. ‘Now, Benjamin, you know perfectly well that you have read far more poisonous concoctions of insinuation and lies during the election last year.’

  January drew in breath to retort, then let it out and inclined his head to Babette. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That was execrable of me to get angry at you, for what that “Friend of the People” wrote in his imbecile letter.’