‘Nevertheless,’ continued January, ‘those men are dangerous, and they’ll be back. Not because they’re angry about the murder of innocent girls, or even over the injustices of the rich, but because if there are enough of them, they know there’ll be a chance to loot this house and get away with it. My advice to you, my Lady, is to close up the house and go to one of the big hotels, where they have a staff capable of turning ruffians like that out before they can make trouble.’
‘What you say is true.’ Above the edge of her veil, her eyes were heavy with sleeplessness, and by the movement of her head he guessed she’d taken opium preparatory to going to bed. Hannibal was watching her, too, and when she caught the arm of her chair for balance, his glance crossed January’s, with a curious matter-of-fact compassion.
‘Yet we shall need to sell this house, I think,’ she went on, ‘and if we leave it empty, will they not come the more quickly? Damaged, what will it bring? The former owner seized upon my husband’s offer like a starving child on food; I think it had stood empty a year. For so many of us to live elsewhere—’ She shook her head, as if she were trying to make her way underwater. ‘I know not even how much it will cost, to find a lawyer to help my husband. Suleiman has been asking and has found none, yet, to take the case.’
January cursed under his breath.
‘Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor,’ murmured Hannibal. ‘Even if a lawyer believed in your innocence, why would he take the risk? If he loses, you’ll be in no position to pay him. If he wins, Hüseyin Pasha will undoubtedly have to leave New Orleans anyway, and his attorney will stay on and never be hired again by anyone who believes your husband was guilty. Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win . . .’
‘And if we leave Nehemiah and Perkin here,’ Jamilla continued, her voice groping over the words, ‘will they not run away themselves? And if they prove loyal, will they not be in danger of being killed, or stolen like loot, by a mob?’
January was silent, knowing the truth of what she said. ‘Nevertheless,’ he said after a time, ‘the City Watch has few men. At this season of the year there is trouble all over the waterfronts every night. Fear and superstition will keep chance drunkards away for a time, but the waterfront gangs know of your husband’s wealth. If you remain here, it is worth their while to stir up a mob to attack the place some night. Better you should accept the loss of this place, take your husband’s gold . . .’
‘My husband’s gold.’ Jamilla sank down into the chair behind her, and her whole body quivered, first gently, then more and more violently, until she was shaking with uncontrollable shudders. ‘My husband’s gold. All of this then comes to that: my husband’s gold.’
She put her head down into her hands and began to laugh.
Suleiman whispered, ‘Madame—!’ and January made a move toward her, then drew back as Ghulaam stepped fiercely out of the shadows, his hand on the hilt of his cutlass.
Ra’eesa sprang up from the floor in the corner where she had been sitting, ran to her mistress’s side. ‘Khânom—’
Jamilla shook her head, her laughter dying away into sobs of exhaustion. ‘Forgive,’ she whispered. ‘Forgive. Only that we are all in danger, because of my husband’s gold. All blame us and hate us, because of my husband’s gold. Come.’ She raised her hand against Ghulaam’s protest, and Suleiman’s. Like a graceful phantom in her embroidered coat and silent slippers, she led the way out on to the gallery and up the stair, weaving a little in the light of Ra’eesa’s candle, like a spirit barely able to find its way back to its haunt.
Shadows reeled as they entered her room, caught the filigree of the lamp, the pattern on the quilts that had been tossed aside from the divan when she’d been woken by the noise in the street. A chamber had been partitioned from one side of the bedroom, probably – guessed January – a nursery in some early phase of occupancy of the house; Ra’eesa’s pallet lay on the floor. On the opposite side of the bedroom from this, a sort of alcove had been built out of the side of the chimney and was furnished with latticed doors for the storage of bedclothes in the Turkish fashion.
These doors Jamilla opened, and she knelt, to fumble at what looked – in the wavering candlelight – like a knothole in the wood of the floor.
Ra’eesa said something in Osmanli and helped Jamilla to stand and step back. Then she herself knelt and opened a trap door in the bottom of the alcove. Ghulaam brought the lamp close, his own face a study in consternation and suspense.
There was a chest in the compartment under the trap door.
It was solid iron – January couldn’t imagine how Hüseyin Pasha ever gotten it upstairs – and about eighteen inches square. Ra’eesa, though she steadfastly refused help, could barely lift its lid.
The chest was filled with dirt.
Dirt, and old bricks, and clamshells, such as every path and road in Louisiana was paved with, in that gravel-poor country . . .
Everything, in fact, of which he’d found traces on those big shawls that had belonged to Noura and Karida.
At the back of the dirt, a thin reef of gold pieces was heaped up, perhaps a hundred of them, pushed to the back, as if they’d been thrust away by frightened disbelieving hands.
The hands of someone who had believed, up until a moment before, that the entire chest was filled with gold instead of rubbish.
Jamilla sank down on to the divan and laughed until she cried.
TWENTY
‘Well –’ Hannibal knelt beside the chest as Ra’eesa sprang to clasp her mistress in her arms – ‘this explains why our two young ladies needed to make their exit other than through the stable.’ He picked up a handful of the coins, let them drop with a sweet musical clinking. ‘How many trips would it take, to carry that much gold down three flights of stairs and across the court? But, if they had help, two girls could lug it across the roof and down a ladder.’
‘And we know they had help.’ January leaned one shoulder against the corner of the mantelpiece and tried to purge from his heart his first, involuntary, and overwhelming spurt of impatience with Jamilla’s frantic tears:
You still have two thousand dollars, Madame. Try finding out sometime that you have NOTHING but two dollars and fifty cents . . .
He crossed himself. Holy Mary, Mother of God, lift this poison from my heart . . .
What had Shakespeare said of it? This yellow slave will knit and break religions, bless the accurs’d . . .
And sour a man’s heart with envy against the stricken.
Dearest God, forgive me.
He at least, at the start of the bank crash, had been surrounded by his friends and his family. He had not had his beautiful Rose in peril of being taken from him, had not been stranded in a foreign land . . .
He still had to swallow down the unhelpful urge to tell Jamilla that things could be a lot worse.
Instead he said, ‘I think a return visit to young Mr Valentine is called for. His father is a well-known scoundrel who apparently owes money to everyone in town, and who coincidentally vanished the same night the girls made their escape. The only question is whether he was their murderer or a fellow victim.’
‘Neither.’ Hannibal stood up, took January by the elbow, and steered him to the door out on to the dark gallery.
‘You know him?’ January asked softly.
‘Never saw him in my life.’
‘Then how do you know what he was doing on Friday night? According to Shaw, the last person outside his own family to see him was the moneylender Roller Gyves. If the man gave him an ultimatum for the money he owed—’
Hannibal shook his head. ‘He did give an ultimatum.’ He glanced back into the bedchamber, where Ghulaam, Ra’eesa, and Suleiman gathered around Jamilla, barely more than shapes against the light of the single candle and the wavering lamp. ‘But Valentine had nothing to do with those girls disappearing.’
January stood silent for a time, looking down at his friend, considering the implications o
f Hannibal’s words. Suspicions that had percolated in his mind about the younger Mr Valentine resurfaced and fit together like pieces of a puzzle. From the black pit of courtyard below, Nehemiah’s voice drifted up, reassuring the frightened maids, and January shivered at the knowledge that the first course of action open to Jamilla would be the sale of the American servants. Maybe they’d be lucky and someone in town would have the money to pick up a good coachman, a good housemaid, cheap.
But the likelihood was greater that only those who needed farm labor would be buying. A coachman won’t get you money. A cotton hand will.
‘And did “young Mr Valentine” tell you this?’ He marked off the name with the inflection in his voice, and by the way that Hannibal glanced up at him, January knew that his suspicion was correct.
He wondered if Shaw had guessed also.
No wonder, he reflected, I thought of Poucet . . .
The fiddler shook his head. ‘I know because it wasn’t Tim Valentine that Gyves saw. It was me.’
It was slightly more than three-eighths of a mile from the house of Hüseyin Pasha to January’s doorstep on Rue Esplanade. Had he not known every step of the French Town he doubted he could have found his way there, for by the time he left the big house on Rue Bourbon the fog had thickened, and most of the inhabitants of the quarter had locked up their shutters and gone to bed. Still, he walked with his heart in his throat, one hand extended to touch the walls as he passed before them – stucco, that’ll be the Rastignac cottage; brick, with six sets of shutters new-painted, the Philipon town-house. That gap’s the passway into Pélisser’s yard . . . His ears strained for every sound in the muffled air.
When first he’d come to New Orleans as a child, his mother had cautioned him not to go across Canal Street into the then-tiny American faubourg of St Mary: ‘They’re American animals there; you stay away from them.’ That same year the American President had bought Louisiana from the dictator of the French. Only a few hundred Americans had lived in New Orleans then, connected with the trade down the river. Even when he’d left – fourteen years later, in 1817 – they had been more a nuisance than anything else. He had mistrusted them, but didn’t fear them.
When he’d come back from France, it was a different matter.
January walked swiftly, silently, with pounding heart, and climbed the steps to his own gallery with a sense of having escaped from some terrible peril, to be clasped in Rose’s arms.
‘Evidently Tim Valentine has been dead for about three months,’ he said, after he’d explained what had delayed him – it was almost ten thirty by this time – and Gabriel had brought the cold remains of supper from the kitchen. ‘At least, when his children started hiring Hannibal to impersonate him in dealings with moneylenders – when Hannibal and I got back to town in October – they said he’d died the month before. They buried him under the stable.’
He glanced toward the dining-room door. After initial reassurances he’d sent his niece and nephew from the room, but he could hear, from time to time, the soft creak of feet in the back parlor.
‘Well, I’m sure he was no loss to the community.’ Rose poured a tisane from the tea pot, sugar and mint sweet in the soft candlelight. ‘I trust Hannibal conducted these interviews sufficiently disguised to avoid later embarrassment if they encountered him in a bar room?’
‘False whiskers and bleached hair,’ said January. ‘And I presume an American accent – which he does astonishingly well . . .’
‘Hence that queer look his hair has had, that worried me so much.’
‘He could get the wherewithal from any woman on Perdidio Street,’ agreed January. ‘I’ve never seen tresses the color of Russian Hetty’s, for instance, growing out of any human head. He re-dyed it afterward, to cover the henna. The children are all redheads—’
‘And all under age, of course.’ Rose propped her chin on her fist. ‘And thus would find themselves in an orphanage, while everything their father had owned disappeared into the pockets of his creditors. When the oldest is finally of age to look after her brothers and sisters—’
‘Oh, you guessed that secret?’
Rose cocked a glance at him over the rims of her spectacles. ‘I’ve only been past there once or twice,’ she said, ‘not having any call to rent a horse and carriage . . . But I’ve seen enough Shakespeare to take a guess about the so-called “young Mr Valentine’s” true nature. I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too . . . She’s hardly the first female of our acquaintance to have masqueraded as male.’
‘You’ve done it yourself,’ pointed out January with a smile.
‘Well, only to travel. But if I were faced with the prospect of arguing before a court of law that I should be granted ownership of a heavily mortgaged property and custody of four younger brothers and sisters, I would much rather do so in the character of a boy than a girl. How old does “young Mr Valentine” claim to be?’
‘Sixteen, I think Shaw said. She looks about thirteen.’ January finished the dish of his nephew’s excellent jambalaya and wiped up the juices with bread. ‘But the slaves, of course, back up her story. They know they’ll be the first the state would sell to pay off Valentine’s creditors.’
‘Which means –’ Rose went to fetch from its place beneath the sideboard the china basin to wash the dishes – ‘that you’re not going to be able to believe a word that anyone says to you there.’
January sighed. ‘Not one word,’ he agreed.
As January suspected she would, Maggie Valentine denied any knowledge of anything that had happened in the livery yard on Friday night, or Sunday. ‘We lock up when the last wagon comes back, and that’s the truth,’ she insisted, when January and Hannibal went to the livery yard on the following morning. ‘That was just after nine on Friday.’ Without the hat – which she removed when they retreated into the gloom of the coach house – her thin, boyish face still had an androgynous look to it, in its frame of short-cropped red hair.
‘I locked up the yard, rubbed down the team, then we all had supper and went to bed.’ She put her arm around Emily – the twelve-year-old girl who’d been carving up the only half-loaf of bread on the premises at January’s previous visit – and looked in desperation from January to Hannibal and then back. ‘Sunday we had more custom, even with the rain, but the last teams came in not long after dark. That’s really all I can tell you. It’s all I know.’
It wasn’t. He saw it in her eyes, and in the faces of the other children, grouped close around her. They were terrified. And would have been so, guessed January, even if there had been no murder between Friday night and Sunday. He’d seen beggar children on the New Orleans wharves, sleeping behind cotton bales and fighting with older beggars for promising scraps.
He remembered the winter Chatoine had frozen to death, down on the Quai St-Bernard.
Maggie faced him like an ill-armed, too-young knight squaring off against a dragon she knew she couldn’t defeat. But she was ready to die trying. ‘Yes, I was wrong not to report Pa’s death, and I guess it’s wrong of me to pass myself off as a boy, though I honestly don’t see it’s anybody’s business but my own. I really will be seventeen next year—’
‘If you want, we can dig Pa up and show you he wasn’t murdered,’ put in Emily helpfully.
The two boys – Roger and Sam – and three-year-old Selina all nodded.
‘He just drank himself to death,’ Maggie went on. ‘Lots of people do that. Hell, he had so much liquor in him I’ll bet he ain’t rotted yet. But I will say,’ she added, and raised that tough little chin, ‘if those poor girls had come to me, asking would I set up a ladder so’s they could get out of where they were, I’d have done it. And anyway they couldn’t have got out on Friday, ’cause he killed ’em an’ pitched ’em out the window right there in the house Sunday night.’
‘We think,’ said Hannibal, ‘that they might have been taken away and brought back.’
‘Who’d do a blame silly th
ing like that?’ demanded Maggie, and her fear momentarily dissolved in genuine perplexity. ‘Dangerous, too. If they took ’em away, why not just dump ’em in the bayou?’
January shook his head. ‘That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out. Does anyone else have a key to the gate?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Not Sillery?’ He had watched how the wiry little head-groom spoke to Maggie, when first he and Hannibal had entered the yard asking for her. He’d heard the man call out to her, to get that roan rubbed down first before anything; had heard him snap: You got to get that fodder bill paid this week, or we’re gonna have to sell one of the nags . . .
He’d seen her expression. She was scared of the slave. He could bring her world down in ruins with a word.
But now her jaw tightened hard, and she said, ‘No, sir. We have just the one. I keep it in my pocket.’
And January was perfectly well aware that keys could be stolen and copied, particularly if before they’d been kept in Maggie Valentine’s pocket, they’d been kept in the pocket of a drunkard who might be found passed out on a hay bale any afternoon.
Yet if Sillery – or either of the other two slaves – had done more than take a bribe to open the gate and raise the ladder in the dead hours before dawn, would they not have taken the stolen gold and disappeared themselves? New Orleans was a port. Ships left for Mexico, New York, Europe every day. Admittedly, it would be more complicated for three black fugitives than for three whites, but with sufficient gold a great deal could be done.
‘Were you aware that Sillery was taking money to let one of Hüseyin Pasha’s concubines meet with her lover in the carriage house in the afternoons?’
A flare of pink stained those high cheekbones. ‘I – sometimes I wondered,’ said the girl. ‘I’d find things – once an earring, the kind I’ve never seen around the town before. Another time a man’s handkerchief, in the tack room. I know Sillery always has money. Probably more than me,’ she added wryly. ‘I thought it might have been one of the servants in the Pasha’s house, or maybe one of his wives. But I didn’t see any harm in it. And I wouldn’t have told on those girls,’ she added, ‘even if I’d knowed.’
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 21