‘Thrown by whom?’ January, still kneeling by the sofa, half-turned to face the tutor. ‘We’ve already established that Breche couldn’t have seen the face of the man who did it. It could as easily have been you or Ghulaam.’
‘We were at the theater! And may Allah curse the night that we went.’
‘Allah has already cursed that night,’ said January softly. ‘The court will say that if it was not your master, it was one of you acting upon his orders. The unfortunate girls had been dead a day already. This is a big house, and everyone in town knows it’s a big house. They will say: Big enough to keep the girls locked somewhere without anyone seeing or knowing that they were dead. If I can find—’
In the deeps of the house, pounding started, fists hammering on the door downstairs. Ra’eesa, who had sat silently at her mistress’ side, ran to the front window to look down, and Hannibal dragged her back as a brick crashed through the glass of the window she opened. The sound of glass breaking in another room told them other bricks had been thrown. January said, ‘Damn it,’ and Jamilla spoke quickly to Suleiman, who strode to the parlor’s French doors and yanked the shutters closed against a sudden hail of bricks.
Suleiman shouted something, and January – already at the next window, leaning out to pull the shutters to – heard Ghulaam’s light tread on the gallery. A moment later, as January leaned out to shut the next set of shutters, he saw the eunuch doing the same from the study next door.
‘Better bar them,’ said January as he and the tutor strode through the dining room to the garçonnière wing. ‘One man can boost another up on to the balcony.’
‘I have commanded it, yes.’ By the time they and Ghulaam had shuttered up every window of the schoolroom and young Nasir’s bedroom, and returned to the parlor, Ra’eesa had lit candles against the thick gloom and was trying to talk Jamilla – by the sound of it – into going up to her bedroom.
The Lady shook her head, pale as ash.
Outside, feet clattered on the gallery stair. Lorette, her voice frantic, called in, ‘Mr Suleiman, they’re beatin’ on the side door of the stable!’
‘Ahku sharmoota!’ Suleiman strode to the corner of the room, where two six-foot, silver-mounted blunderbusses stood: they must have been eighty years old. ‘Lorette, get Bette and Desirée in here.’
‘Get the gold,’ commanded January. ‘Put it in a sack, or a couple of pillowcases. Hannibal, do you think you can talk Maggie Valentine into raising up that ladder from her yard? Bribe her if necessary – you can certainly bribe Sillery. Have you rope, Suleiman?’
‘In the stable.’ The tutor plunged through the door, and January heard his feet on the stair.
Desirée, the youngest of the maids, whispered, ‘They wouldn’t hurt M’am, surely . . .’
‘Don’t you think it,’ returned January. ‘Three years ago when a mob broke into the Lalaurie house over on Rue Royale, the coachman tried to go back into the house and was beaten to death. Hannibal, with me—’
He caught up the rifle Shaw had provided, and they descended the stairs at a run.
‘Have you ever climbed down a rope before?’ January asked. ‘Wrap it around your arms, put a turn around your body, brace your feet on the wall—’
‘I have descended from enough windows on knotted bed-sheets,’ replied the fiddler with dignity, ‘to understand the principles.’
‘Well, you’ll have to work fast, or the mob may turn on Valentine as well.’
‘Not if they have a well-stocked house to loot, they won’t. Pecuniae obediuntomnia. . . . When I compounded with the despicable Mr Gyves to get another three months’ grace on the late lamented Valentine’s loan, Mags swore she owed me whatever I cared to ask of her, so I think hiding space in the lofts isn’t too unreasonable a boon. And you, sir,’ Hannibal added, turning abruptly in his tracks to face Nasir, who had followed them down the stair and across the court, ‘belong upstairs with your mother—’
From inside the stable came the crashing of what sounded like hammers or crowbars on the door, and the terrified neighing of horses. A single lantern burned above the stalls and showed January Perkin the groom and Iskander the Turkish cook as they struggled to hammer wood wrenched free from the sides of the stalls against the small outer door. Nehemiah said, ‘What about the horses, sir?’ turning to Hannibal as the only white man present.
‘They’ll be stolen,’ said January simply. ‘And we’ll give the police a description to get them back. They’re not more important than anyone’s life.’
‘If they break in,’ added Nasir firmly, ‘get the lantern out of here, so it doesn’t fall and set the place on fire.’
‘Rope,’ said Hannibal, and at the same moment January saw a coil of it on the wall. He caught it down, tossed it to the fiddler, who seized Nasir firmly by the hand and dashed across the courtyard again.
‘Hold them as long as you can,’ said January to the two stablemen. ‘If they do break in –’ there was another crash, and even in the near-darkness he could see the door jerk on its hinges – ‘don’t fight. Hide in the dark and slip out as quick as you can. We’re getting Madame and the Turkish servants out over the roof. They’re the only ones who’ll be in danger.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Perkin looked uncertain about taking orders from a black man instead of a white one, but bowed to the voice of authority.
January stepped out into the courtyard, now deep in darkness. A little light filtered down from the house gallery above, but it was only because he was watching the roofline of the kitchen that he saw Hannibal, a few minutes later, make his scrambling way from the third-floor gallery across the steep slates to the kitchen chimney. He put his head into the stable again, said to Iskander, ‘You’d better get up there and help them collect anything of value they want to save.’
The cook – an immensely dignified gentleman with a long mustache – said, ‘Ibn-kalb,’ handed January the hammer he’d used to pound the re-enforcing planks into place, and went.
‘Where the hell are the City Guards?’ Nehemiah emerged from the stable, panic in his voice.
‘Probably on their way. But I’m guessing they think Hüseyin Pasha is as guilty as everybody else in this town does, between that idiot Breche and those damn journalists.’
‘I swear he didn’t harm them girls – damn!’ he added as there was another rending crash in the dark of the stables. ‘I’m just hopin’ those fools don’t fire the place, nor hurt the horses.’
‘When they break in, you slip out past them and head for the Cabildo. You, too,’ he added, to the kitchen boy who’d come running up, butcher-knife in hand. ‘You’ll probably meet the Watch on the way. Damn it,’ January added, at the sound of another crash, and he glanced back up at the kitchen roof. Still no sign of Hannibal. Mobs had always frightened him – perhaps the reason he’d never been a wholehearted participant in the impassioned rhetoric that had been so freely slung around in the cellar of the Chatte Blanche and a dozen other illegal political gathering-places in Paris in the late twenties. Old Lucien Imbot had remembered very well the crowds of Parisian poor storming in triumph down the Rue St-Antoine with human heads impaled before them on pikes, and the ballet mistress Marguerite Scie, as a little girl, had been in La Force prison when a mob had decided that the Revolutionary Tribunal was too slow about bringing enemies of the Revolution to trial.
Even less did he trust mobs of whites in Louisiana.
Now he darted across the courtyard, climbed the gallery stair. The worst thing he could do, he knew, was use the rifle he carried: white men would kill him for that. But he guessed that the Lady Jamilla, at least, stood in danger of being beaten to death, and probably the boy Nasir also, as well as any of the Muslim servants who would try to protect them.
He heard another, louder crash from the stables, and a man emerged into the darkness, dashed across the court toward the stair. At the last second January recognized Nehemiah as the coachman clattered up the steps to his side, a piece of lumber held lik
e a club in his hand.
The next moment men poured from the stable door and across the court toward the stair.
Behind him he heard Nasir’s voice in the parlor cry out something – some sharp order – in Romanli; was aware of the women retreating up the gallery stairs to the third floor. They’ll be cut off, thought January as Nehemiah reached him, turned at bay with his makeshift weapon. Suleiman joined them, a silver-mounted musket in hand, and Louis the American cook.
Damn it, if anybody fires they’ll kill us before we can reload . . .
A shot cracked out, and the first man to reach the bottom of the stairs crumpled, clutching his arm and screaming. The next four men tripped over him.
From the kitchen roof, Abishag Shaw’s voice called out, ‘Next man gets it ’tween the eyes.’
The last of the twilight in the sky silhouetted him, tall and thin beside the kitchen chimney. Two smaller shapes flanked him, just emerging up the ladder from the livery. Lanterns flickered in the blue darkness of the courtyard below as City Guards came in through the stables and the carriageway. Enough light, thought January, to enable Shaw to make good his threat. He’d seen the man hit his target at a hundred yards in starlight.
From behind him, Suleiman touched his shoulder. ‘From my master’s bedroom at the end of the gallery, a stair goes down to the shop below,’ he murmured. ‘Here is the key—’ It was pressed into January’s hand. ‘Return it to my Lady when you can.’
January handed him the rifle and the hammer that he still carried, and touched his hat brim. ‘Give her my thanks,’ he said. ‘Tell Hannibal, if the Lady needs a place for herself, her son, and her maid tonight, to take them to my house, which is not far from here.’
‘Shukran.’ The tutor bowed. ‘Assalamu alaikum, wa rahmatullahi.’
‘Walaikum assalam.’
January strode soundlessly along the gallery to the French doors at the end and was out of the building and walking innocently up Rue St-Philippe before Shaw and his minions finished arresting the rioters in the courtyard.
TWENTY-FOUR
From Dominique’s beautiful little cottage on Rue Dumaine, January sent a message to Rose. He didn’t think Shaw would actually be watching his house, but he wouldn’t put anything past the Kentuckian when the man was on the scent of a wrongdoer – even one whom he himself, personally, didn’t think had done any wrong.
So when Rose came to Dominique’s the following morning, she was duly dressed in a shirt and pants belonging to Gabriel, with a wide-brimmed hat pulled on over her hair. For her part, Dominique was fully prepared to receive her and lend her one of her own dresses, since Shaw would immediately suspect any tall youth emerging from the January residence with a bundle of petticoats and corset, and follow accordingly.
‘Honestly, p’tit, you’re worse than your nephew.’ Dominique shook her head disapprovingly as she considered the five candidate costumes which her maid had brought down from the attic, arranged tastefully on the bed. ‘You’re going to get yourself into real trouble one day – and Rose is just as bad . . . What do you think of the pink delaine? Rose always looks so attractive in pink, but the sleeves are terribly out of date – what can have possessed me to make up anything so hideous as those great silly pumpkins? And that gauze is simply absurd . . .’
Having heard his younger sister’s ecstasies three years ago on the subject of the gauze-covered sleeves whose globular tops measured nearly two yards in circumference, January wisely held his peace.
Instead he said, ‘I am in real trouble, Minou. Or I will be unless I get to the bottom of who it is who’s trying to make the world think that Hüseyin Pasha killed his two poor concubines.’
‘Maman says that a Turk would think nothing of killing wives who had offended him.’
‘And Maman has spoken to exactly how many Turks in her lifetime?’
‘Do you like the straw-yellow? Oh, no, the lace is loose – if I’ve told Thèrése once I’ve told her a thousand times . . . How about the gray?’ She lifted several acres of translucent skirt in slender fingers: like an adorable bronze Aphrodite, but kinder than that capricious goddess ever was. ‘I can’t think why I bought it, gray doesn’t suit me in the least, but then it doesn’t suit Rose either . . . Oh, but if you put a pink tignon with it . . . Thèrése, run back up to the attic and bring down my other gray, and the brown sprigged challis . . . Darling, everyone knows how jealous the Turks are. But it did seem to me that it was an extremely stupid thing to do. Yet who else would have? Who knew them, who could have gotten into the house? I mean, people generally don’t go around killing total strangers, do they?’
‘That,’ said January, ‘is exactly what I’m trying to—’
‘You sent fo’ me, suh?’ Rose appeared in the doorway that communicated, through baby Charmian’s room, with the rear yard – since no tall, skinny sang melée boy would have been permitted to enter the house through the French door that opened from Dominique’s bedroom on to the street. She made a somewhat more Shakespearean boy than Maggie Valentine did, being taller enough than Gabriel that his borrowed trousers showed off slender ankles. But, like Maggie, she was thin, and she took care to slouch and scratch her bottom and use the slurry mo kiri mo vini French of the cotton patch and cane field.
‘Who saw Cesario, ho!’ quoted January solemnly.
‘I hear tell you wants to burn down a house, suh?’
‘Only burgle it.’
‘P’tit!’ said Dominique, shocked. ‘If that’s why you asked me to invite Bernadette Metoyer for tea this afternoon . . .’
Rose put on her spectacles and removed the hat. ‘Well, that’s no fun. As far as I know I wasn’t followed, Ben . . . Oh, Minou!’ she exclaimed, her eye lighting on the dresses as Thèrése brought in another wicker hamper and began laying out more over every piece of furniture in sight. ‘How beautiful! We shall arouse suspicion instantly.’
‘Silly.’ Dominique smiled with pleasure at the compliment. Had she been a pigeon, reflected January, amused, she would have fluffed her feathers. ‘I’ve had those for just ages.’
‘Well, we shall arouse suspicion,’ amplified Rose thoughtfully, ‘since I’m four inches taller than you.’
‘Oh, it won’t take but a moment to let the hem down . . .’
January didn’t comment on the length of time it would take to re-sew some twenty feet of seam, but merely asked, ‘Did you bring the rocket?’
Rose produced it from her trouser pocket. ‘The casing is tinned iron,’ she explained as January took it gingerly. ‘What the British Navy puts up beef in for long voyages. There should be no danger whatever of actually setting Bernadette’s house afire—’
‘Rose!’ protested Dominique.
‘—but smoke should come out in clouds.’
‘No one is ever going to speak to me in this town again!’
‘If I’m correct about what happened – at least in the study – at Hüseyin Pasha’s house last Sunday night,’ said January, ‘I think we can count on no word getting back to Bernadette about the smoke in her parlor curtains.’
Bernadette Metoyer and her sisters arrived an hour or so after that. It was not a long walk – the three women shared a yellow stucco cottage across Rue Esplanade from January’s house. January and Rose retired in silence to the nursery as Dominique rustled into her bedroom to open its French door to her guests – Rose now respectably attired in Dominique’s second-best pink delaine frock and looking as if she’d never evaded possible police surveillance in the guise of a boy in her life. Bernadette, January was interested to observe through the smallest crack in the nursery door, had on another dress that he’d never seen before – amber silk shot with darker notes. Ten years of living with a dressmaker had forever heightened his awareness of what people wore and what it meant. Ayasha could pinpoint a man’s income by the lace of his wife’s collar.
Babette and Virginie also wore new shawls.
Speculation was rife in the New Orleans demi-monde as to whe
ther the fourth sister – Eulalie – had, despite her marriage to a bank clerk, also been involved with Bernadette’s former patron, the banker Hubert Granville, but none of the Metoyer sisters were forthcoming on the subject. Virginie had gotten a house out of the affair, which was now bringing in a handsome rent while its owner lived with Bernadette.
‘Darling, what’s this I hear about Benjamin being sought by the police?’ demanded Virginie. ‘Surely he didn’t have anything to do with those poor concubines being murdered?’
‘I hear he’s a good friend of the Turk – oh, the little darling!’ Babette added, for Dominique had taken the precaution of having Charmian’s nurse bring the little girl into the parlor, to forestall the inevitable demands to enter the nursery.
‘Is it true that the mob that broke into their house last night killed the family and all the servants?’ Bernadette tried to school her voice to sound concerned when in fact all she wanted was to be the first with the best information.
‘How is my Lady?’ whispered January as he closed the door.
‘Not well.’ Rose’s face clouded as they stepped through the nursery’s French doors into the rear yard, then followed the passway around the ‘swamp’ side of the house and so out to the street. Gabriel’s clothing she had left under Dominique’s bed: it had served its purpose. ‘I could kill that lout Breche. And your news that the Turkish ship has already put into port has added a great deal to the . . . the desolation of spirit that she suffers. Hannibal is with her, and her son – only, he isn’t her son, is he?’ she asked. ‘He would be Shamira’s son.’
‘He would be,’ said January thoughtfully. ‘But I don’t actually think he is.’
Rose regarded him in surprise.
‘I think Shamira’s son,’ said January, ‘never existed . . . Rather like Mr Smith.’
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 25