‘All the world who knows exactly how an Infidel Turk will behave toward his concubines.’ There was no anger in Hüseyin Pasha’s voice, nor even, January thought, bitterness. Just a deep sadness, that men should be as they are.
It was dark when the Black Goose put in at the wharf below the Place des Armes. Hannibal was waiting for them at the Cabildo, and he remained with January and Hüseyin Pasha at Shaw’s desk under the glowering eye of the desk sergeant, while Rose walked over to Auntie Zozo’s coffee stand in the market for a jug of coffee and a dozen slightly stale callas done up in a newspaper, the only thing any of them had had since breakfast. When Rose returned, Shaw was with her, consuming one of the fried rice-balls with sugar all over his fingers.
‘The gold was there, all right,’ he said, and he wiped his hands on the skirts of his jacket, lest it be said that he ate at the same desk as blacks. ‘Close on to a hundred pounds of it, done up in a couple of carpet bags with these.’ From a drawer of his desk he withdrew three necklaces, gold vermeil set with rubies, and two pair of elaborate earrings. ‘There was a couple silk veils there as well,’ he added more quietly. ‘Mrs Hüseyin’s already identified ’em as the girls’.’
‘And will the courts believe this tale,’ asked Hüseyin quietly, ‘with only black men as witnesses?’ His dark glance passed from January to Bannon, and then to Shaw.
‘Oh, they ain’t gonna be allowed even to testify.’ The policeman dug in his pockets for a twisted quid of tobacco, bit off a chunk of it with strong, brown-stained teeth. ‘But the judge for sure will listen to me. An’ we have an affidavit from Mr John Smith – of the newly-formin’ Merchants an’ Citizens Bank of Louisiana – as to how he was with you in your study the night in question, before havin’ to suddenly an’ unavoidably leave town for Philadelphia. The affidavit was swore to by six or seven prominent citizens, many of whom was stockholders in the old Bank of Louisiana, attestin’ that yes indeedy Mr Smith was their representative . . . It’s amazin’ what recoverin’ that gold did for peoples’ memories. An’ the Right Reverend Micajah Dunk,’ he added, ‘has hinted to me that he knows dark an’ terrible things about the Right Reverend Doctor Emmanuel Promise – whose real name in Boston was Lemuel Smart – that he might be moved to come forward an’ testify to in open court.’
‘I think there’s a commandment about that,’ warned Hannibal.
‘T’ain’t my business who’s bearin’ false witness against his neighbor,’ returned Shaw. ‘An’ speakin’ of bearin’ false witness, Maestro, Mr Tremmel, upon hearin’ that the Reverend Promise has been locked up in the chokey, recollected that he didn’t see his attacker so very clearly after all t’other night an’ has dropped all charges.’
‘My mother will be crushed,’ said January. He offered the last callas to Bannon, who shook his head, as if he barely saw what was passing in the watch room around him. ‘She has a bet going with her dressmaker that I’ll come to a bad end.’ He handed the confection to Rose, who – knowing how dearly he loved the deep-fried balls of rice and flour – meticulously divided it with him.
Together they crossed the watch room and emerged into the wild, windy dark of the Place des Armes. The chimes on the cathedral clock spoke eight, and through the great doors golden candlelight shone as men and women moved about the confessionals. Mass tomorrow . . . January remembered the sailor he’d struck down in the hold of the Najm, not knowing if he’d killed him or not. He would have to confess, and be absolved, before partaking of the Host.
Bannon gazed into the church – into the light – with pain and bitter loss in his eyes.
‘What will you do?’ asked January. ‘Are there others in New Orleans willing to sponsor your ministry to the slaves?’
‘Promise was the only one,’ the younger man replied. ‘When I think of the money we raised for him . . . money most of them couldn’t spare. The white gentlemen on the Church boards would rather keep slaves where they can see them: in the gallery, or the benches at the back. The white ladies who give money would rather think their people, as they call them, are listening to a white man’s teaching, about a white man’s God. Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward . . . For what glory is it if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? But if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God . . .’
‘Your Bible actually says that?’ Hüseyin looked appalled.
‘First Peter,’ assented January.
‘The founder of the Catholic Church,’ said Bannon, without irony. ‘I think I shall go into the countryside,’ he went on, ‘and preach God’s word without a church. Preach it on the plantations, and in the woods. Some of the men I met on the boat this afternoon spoke of preachers who do that. Men of color. Men who don’t really think that the greatest gift God can give a darky is to make him white when he gets to Heaven.’
‘You ask Natchez Jim to send someone with you.’ January put a hand on the preacher’s slim shoulder. ‘Until you know your way around, you don’t go alone.’
‘I won’t.’
‘And take these.’ Hannibal dug in his pocket and handed him the little bundle of picklocks. ‘You’ll need them.’
When Bannon had gone on his way, and the four friends turned their steps toward the Rue Esplanade and supper, January asked, ‘Will Sabid return?’ He glanced at Hüseyin Pasha in the dull yellow of a street lamp’s swaying glow. ‘Or will the knowledge that forgery of diplomatic credentials can be proved upon him keep him away?’
‘I fired at him in the thick of the fray on the ship,’ said Hüseyin, ‘and saw him fall. Whether he is dead or living I know not, and I fear I shall not learn until the least convenient time. Yet I think it shall behove me to take this moment of his weakness and see if anywhere in the wide world can hide me from him. My son I shall take with me, for only so can I protect him. If my Lady wife choose not to accompany me, Janvier, may I leave it in your hands to arrange for her return to Constantinople? Or to Paris, or whithersoever she chooses to go?’
‘I will see her safe dispatched,’ promised January. ‘Yet I think, my friend, that she will go with you.’
‘So I hope.’ The Turk sighed and hunched his powerful shoulders against the cold wind. ‘It has been too many years that I have taken her presence for granted, as one takes the air in one’s lungs. Yet I think,’ he went on as the lighted gallery of January’s house took shape in the blackness before them, ‘that I shall have done with concubines. I have not been so fortunate in them, as I have been in my wife.’
‘How did you guess that it was Granville?’ asked Rose, much later, when Hannibal had disappeared into the night and Hüseyin Pasha – bathed and fed and with his bruises cleaned – had retired to the bedroom that had been made up for him and his wife. Nasir and his tutor, and the faithful Ghulaam and Ra’eesa, had been given beds in the attic dormitory. As Rose laid Baby John in his wicker cradle, January heard the occasional soft tread of footfalls overhead. In the room behind theirs, Gabriel said something to Zizi-Marie. Tomorrow, January recalled, there would be another ‘visitor’ underneath the house as well.
He moved over to let Rose slip under the comforters at his side. The wind screamed around the eaves, yet the house itself seemed filled with silence, a dark ship in a lightless ocean.
All safe together, thought January, for this time, in this night . . .
Fathers and sons, wives and friends, secrets and time.
‘Partly, it was when Hannibal spoke of being hired to play the part of Tim Valentine, for the convenience of Valentine’s daughter,’ he said. ‘And seeing how he’d dyed his hair. But it didn’t come to me how a person could be entirely invented for convenience – like Mr Smith – until I saw Nasir ibn-Hüseyin for the first time. Then I realized that Mr Smith was a fabrication, played by someone who couldn’t let his face be seen in New Orleans . . . therefore, someone who was known. And I remembered Bernadette
Metoyer’s new earrings, and her sisters’ new feathers and furbelows. It had to be Granville – and he had to be hiding in Bernadette’s house.’
‘And she’s never going to speak to you or me or Dominique again, if Granville ever tells her how we flushed him out,’ said Rose as she laid her spectacles aside. ‘But what has Nasir got to do with it? He’s a very handsome and well-spoken little boy and nothing like an absconding banker with four mistresses.’
‘And nothing like his father either,’ said January thoughtfully. ‘Or his purported mother. Who he is like – strikingly so – is a young man I saw only once in Paris. He was the younger brother, I think, of a widowed female cousin in the household of the banker Jacob L’Ecolier: the household to which Hüseyin’s concubine Shamira fled after she escaped. A widowed female cousin who had five children already,’ he went on as Rose’s brow pulled down over those lovely green-hazel eyes. ‘And few prospects to bring up or educate the sixth.’
‘You mean Shamira talked this woman into switching her child for Shamira’s, when they both gave birth? I can see why,’ she added quickly. ‘Hüseyin Pasha is still a wealthy man – as Sitt Jamilla assured me in very solid terms after dinner, I meant to tell you . . .’
‘Shamira had no child,’ said January. ‘The amount of quinine Hüseyin’s lesser wife poisoned her with would have caused her to abort, and there was no sign of that. Shamira had planned to escape from the moment she heard that there was the slightest chance of leaving Constantinople and going to France. And she knew her master would take her with him – and give her all the comforts and favoritism she could ask for – if he thought she was carrying his son. But it meant that she would draw down on herself the jealousy of the other women in the household . . . And it meant that, once in France, she had to escape, before it became obvious that her pregnancy was a lie. It was her passage to freedom.’
‘Do you think Hüseyin knows?’
January was silent, thinking of what he knew of that coarse-featured, ugly man who slept beneath his roof. The man who had wept for the concubines who had betrayed him. Who had given freedom to that fleeing girl in Paris – and had handed over the letter that would have destroyed his enemy, in order to save Ayasha’s life.
‘I don’t know. He certainly saw the widow’s brother when we were in L’Ecolier’s house, though of course he may not remember. He might guess,’ he said. ‘But whether it would matter to him – whether he would only see the infant that was handed to him in Paris as the son God chose to give him, for reasons of God’s own – that I cannot say.’
He leaned across Rose and blew out the candle.
Falling rain woke him, and the far-off chiming of the cathedral clock. Though he did not recall his dream, he knew it had been about Paris. The rain had quenched the smell of sugar from the air, and for the first moment, on wakening, it seemed to him that if he lit the candle, he would see the steep pitch of the mansard roof, the shallow dormer of the Rue de l’Aube, the armoire that had stood against the wall near the bed’s foot, and beyond that, Ayasha’s work table, the tiny tiled cook-range, the glow of the banked fire shining in the cat Hadji’s eyes.
The memory of the place came back to him with such wrenching force that it took his breath away. It seemed to him that if he were to put his hand to his face, he would smell on it the sandalwood and frankincense that had always seemed to perfume Ayasha’s hair.
He wrapped the quilt from the bed’s foot around him, and his feet found their way in the darkness out into the parlor. He opened one shutter of one window, and though the moon broke through the clouds enough to show him the wet trees of Rue Esplanade beyond the dark frame of the gallery, mostly there was only darkness beyond.
A darkness that wasn’t Paris.
As if he’d strayed from the proper road somehow through an error of his own and could not find his way back to the world he was supposed to occupy, he felt bereft, stranded and sick with grief. There was nothing I could have done, he thought. I couldn’t stay, when she was gone . . .
He pressed his forehead to the window’s framing, the pain inside him like a ball of broken glass.
Rose. How can I tell Rose?
Tell her what? That he loved a woman who was dead? Loved her still and forever?
This was something he’d never even told his confessor.
And if Olympe offered me a hoodoo, to uproot the shadow-flower of that love out of my heart, I would turn away.
The floorboard creaked. He didn’t look around.
Rose asked, ‘Can I do anything?’
He shook his head.
‘Get you anything?’
‘A heart that will do you justice?’
Her arm slipped through his. ‘Hearts have nothing to do with justice,’ she said. ‘Or with waking life. Did you think I’d be jealous, when I hear you whisper her name in your sleep?’
His whole body heated with shame. ‘I thought it was done.’
‘How can it be done,’ asked Rose reasonably, ‘when it’s part of what you were, of what you are? Does dreaming of her make you happy?’
He wanted to say: No, for her sake, but there is a truth that lives in darkness and he whispered, ‘Yes.’
The gallery cut off the watery moonlight, so he could not see her face, but he heard the smile of genuine joy in her voice. ‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘We aren’t responsible for where our dreams take us at night, or for our first thoughts when we wake in darkness. If we could change them I dare say we would.’
She went on, ‘It isn’t often, now, that I dream of the man who raped me. But I have woken, and lain in the darkness, shaking as if he had just left me lying in the woods behind my father’s barn. Having been mauled by a wolf, even though I know to the core of my bones that the one who lies next to me is the kindest, the gentlest and most loving soul on this earth – the friend who loves me dearest and whom I most dearly love – all that my heart knows in that moment is that his flesh smells like a wolf’s flesh, and if I reached out to touch him my hand would feel a wolf’s pelt. And so I don’t.’
He stared at her – or at the dim silhouette of her in the darkness – aghast that these were the dreams of which she never spoke; that this wound remained in her, that he had hoped would heal. Had healed . . . He could only put his arms around her, light and thin and gawky as a heron.
‘Beloved . . .’
Helplessness filled him, worse than any fear of death.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It almost never happens now, and when it does, the . . . the dreadfulness passes more quickly. I’m glad I can tell you,’ she added softly. ‘I’ve felt so bad about it, as if there were something I could do about what I feel.’
Her head rested against his arm – high on his shoulder, higher than Ayasha’s had been – and her hair smelled of chamomile and gunpowder, from some experiment . . . ‘I’m glad when you dream, it’s of someone you love. Would you like some cocoa, before we go back to bed?’
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 29