Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Did your maman have the back shutters closed Saturday night?’

  Manon nodded. ‘You can see the stripes of light through them. Tiennot and Jean-Luc and me, that’s how we’d know sometimes when Michie Brooke came in at night. We’d see Maman’s candle go out.’ She spoke matter-of-factly, her chin up, and January remembered well creeping out onto the gallery of his own garçonnière, all those nights of his childhood, and seeing those threads of light in the windows of his mother’s cottage on Rue Dumaine. In his own case, the memories were merely nostalgic: knowing that Michie Janvier was in residence – or, later, after the sugar broker had married, that he was paying a call on his lovely plaçeé. Sometimes he’d see the candlelight from Olympe’s room – the cottage had four rooms plus the cabinets, not two – and would wonder if his sister was getting ready to sneak out with the voodoos.

  Nothing, he thought, to what these children would think, and wonder, when they saw candlelight in their mother’s room.

  His own worst days of slavery and fear had ended when he was seven. Looking at the defiant calm of this girl’s face, he felt an ache of pity for her. To live dependent on such men as Brooke – on their mother’s precarious shifts to hold such men, to extract from them the money to keep her children sheltered and fed – was bad enough. To lose even that tiny hold on sustenance …

  ‘These look like markers,’ commented Rose, who had remained in the bedroom to search through the bureau drawers. She held up a slim sheaf of torn-out notebook pages, jotted with the names of men and sums of money. ‘No notebook, but that was probably in his pocket when he was dropped into the basin—’

  ‘I wonder,’ said January.

  ‘I’m sure Lieutenant Shaw will let you see everything—’

  ‘I haven’t said,’ put in January quietly, ‘that I’m going to take this up.’

  Rose and Manon looked at him, startled and protesting as Olympe had been.

  ‘There’s something else going on here,’ he said. ‘Something that’s probably dangerous. Until I know how dangerous—’

  ‘It’s mostly dangerous—’ Rose’s voice was that of gently reminding him of something he may have forgotten – ‘to Jacquette Filoux.’ She spoke softly, but behind her spectacles her hazel-green eyes challenged him to say, That isn’t my business …

  He knew it was.

  He had never encountered any of these people – Henry Brooke, eleven-year-old Manon, Jacquette Filoux – before in his life …

  But he knew he couldn’t walk away.

  In a city ruled by whites and for whites, they had no one else.

  ‘This is his.’ Olympe came in from the dining room, turning a card-case over in her hand. ‘I can’t think how the police would have missed it – and I can’t think how Uncle Juju would have missed it.’ She held it out. ‘But it’s got his cards in it.’

  When January didn’t touch it – when he only stood staring at it – she glanced at him and raised her brows. ‘You are going to look into this, brother, aren’t you?’

  January felt exactly as if he’d been descending a staircase in the dark, which had ended, abruptly, before it was supposed to. Jolted, and slightly disoriented.

  There couldn’t be another case like that …

  Well, he told himself, there probably could …

  Expensive, and French, slightly curved to fit the shape of a man’s waistcoat pocket. Its lid was outlined by a simple double line of enamel, green and dark red. The lines met in one corner in an intricate Grecian knot.

  He took it, and opened it, though he already knew what he’d see there.

  He read the inscription, ‘Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit, cras amet. May he love tomorrow who has never loved before; may he who has loved, love tomorrow as well.’

  It was signed, Daniel.

  FIVE

  ‘Who did it belong to?’ asked Rose, as she and January made their way back toward Congo Square. The rocks were burning, as the inhabitants of New Orleans said. The renewed heat of late afternoon turned the rainwater that lay on the brick banquettes to steam, and the whole city smoked in an eerie veil of white. Men, women, children were making their way back to the square, for the music and the dancing. Crowdie Passebon and Mohammed Le Pas, January’s fellow-directors of the FTFCMBS, waved to him as they rolled a barrel of what would become tafia punch through the iron gate. ‘From the sound of it, M’sieu Brooke doesn’t seem the type to be getting love gifts from people named Daniel. Certainly not with inscriptions from The Vigil of Venus.’

  Under the plane trees that surrounded the square, men were settling down on boxes and stools, their drums between their knees: the goblet-shaped djembe, the little hand drum and the big bamboula, old names from places half-forgotten, rhythms passed down from fathers and uncles who had brought them from Africa or Sainte Domingue. The morning’s musicians, the professionals, had mostly gone to play for white peoples’ parties that would extend into the muggy night. The slaves – who were not legally allowed to possess drums – lingered inconspicuously in the background, waiting until the crowds got thicker before they would begin to play. Cicadas whirred in the trees. In the gutters, and along the canals, frogs croaked in many-voiced chorus; guardians, the ancient Greeks had said, of the road to the Underworld.

  January touched the smooth, small rectangle of worn gold in his pocket.

  Smelled again the stink of blood and powder-smoke that had hung over the barricade in another July, when he had been able, at least, to fight for the cause of freedom.

  ‘It belonged to a man named Philippe de la Marche,’ he said.

  There had been, of course, a hideous uproar when Daniel had purchased the case for Philippe, at the most expensive shop in the Palais Royale. The de Gourgue family – Comtes de Belvoire, Vicomtes de la Marche, barons and chevaliers of God knew how many lesser titles going back eight hundred years – might possibly (Daniel had said) have accepted Philippe’s infatuation with a duc or a marquis, or even an Italian prince if he’d had sufficient quarterings to his coat of arms, but a banker’s son? Oh, the horror!

  Anne had only laughed.

  Now in the parlor’s dim lamplight, after curfew had closed down the dancing in Congo Square, January turned the slim case over in his fingers, remembering that shop in the Palais Royale, and the sonnets that Daniel had written to his friend’s beauty.

  They’d been awful. Daniel was no poet. The most one could say was that he penned fresh effusions for each new love, and didn’t re-use those relics of former passions.

  Philippe, Vicomte de la Marche, for his part, though neither intellectual nor intelligent, had nevertheless shared Daniel’s huge curiosity about the world that lay outside the bounds of his own upbringing and the expectations that his family had of him. Tall, broad-shouldered, heroically beautiful and raised in the most ancient traditions of the French aristocracy to look with scorn on the lower classes, he had instead sought to learn about the way they lived.

  And he had loved Daniel, who was everything that his family wasn’t.

  The air that stirred through the shut jalousies on the French windows bore on it the swift click-click of carriages and fiacres passing, and the distant shouting of drunkards outside the whorehouses of Rue des Ramparts.

  Twice January heard the snap of gunshots, from the direction of the basin.

  Somewhere, someone was still playing a drum.

  Philippe de la Marche.

  1830

  He’d started to lift the young man from the barricade, meaning to carry him to some inconspicuous doorway or courtyard, then hasten to the city’s central marketplace to rent a barrow, for who knew when the police would start sending men to cart away the bodies? His first thought was only that Daniel would be distraught. At least let him be spared the additional horror of going down to the Morgue to fetch him …

  But the body came up all of a piece, like a plank. Grotesquely, the arms swung down free from the shoulders, though the elbows remained flexed at an ang
le of about forty degrees. A second look at the young man’s eyes confirmed what January had been too shocked – and too grieved for his friend – to note in that first instant. The corneas were cloudy, the eyeballs flattened back into the sockets.

  It was hot last night …

  But he couldn’t recall ever encountering heat that brought on rigor so complete, so swiftly.

  He edged over on the barricade, to where a man in the uniform of the Guarde Royale lay, the top of his head blown to pieces by musket-fire. January picked up the man’s arm, and let it drop, limp as boned fish. Then he felt the muscles of the soldier’s jaw and neck. They’d just begun to stiffen. The guard lay as Philippe had been, face-down against the clayey snarl of chair-legs and cobbles, and his face had turned livid purple with the slow drain of blood to the bottommost tissues.

  Under streaks of dust and mud, Philippe’s face was pale as wax.

  The backs of his ears, the back of his neck, were dark, like the poor guard’s face.

  January lifted the young man carefully. Six feet three and massively strong, he still found the vicomte’s height and magnificent stature – complicated by rigor mortis – nearly impossible to maneuver. His training in the handling of cadavers at the Hôtel Dieu held good, however, and he bore him, awkwardly, to the tightly boarded-up doorways of a Benedictine monastery a few streets away. It was barely seven o’clock by the chimes of St-Nicholas-des-Champs. The monks had decamped on Tuesday, when the trouble had begun in earnest. The monastery – St-Honoré – backed onto the far older ruins of the demolished medieval fortress of the Temple, whose debris had, since its demolition twenty years previously, still not entirely been cleared.

  January left Philippe’s body in a deep-set doorway, found a couple of planks and an old shutter lying in the middle of the Rue du Temple where someone had dragged them toward a barricade, and arranged them over the body. It was a twenty-minute walk through the silent streets to the Halles. He encountered en route two other people carrying corpses: neither, he noted, displayed advanced signs of rigor. As he’d suspected, a handful of countrymen from Gonesse and Batignolles had opened up shop in the great central market: milk, mushrooms, cherries, newlaid eggs. Even revolutionists have to eat.

  Though he hated to do it, January left his rifle with a farmer whom he knew named Villayer in trade for the man’s barrow and a sheet of canvas. He fetched Philippe’s body, and trundled it through the re-awakening streets of Paris, first to the home of Broussard the plasterer where everyone was trying to talk Ayasha out of sallying forth to look for him, and then – with Ayasha’s assistance – three miles back across the river to the gem-like eighteenth-century hôtel purchased by old Moses Ben-Gideon in an ecstasy of misplaced parental hopes when his son Daniel had married Anne.

  ‘And we have to get the barrow back to Père Villayer by six,’ said January, as the Ben-Gideon porter unlocked the stout gates that guarded the hôtel’s central court. ‘Or sooner, if the shooting starts again and he decides to leave town. My gun’s worth twenty times the cost of this barrow …’

  Ayasha gave her opinion – fortunately in Arabic – as to what Mâitre Villayer could do with himself if he grew impatient for his barrow. ‘My nightingale, as a medical man I have to inform you that what you describe is physically impossible.’

  She gave him a grin, poked him with her elbow, and said, ‘And you can do it, too, Malik, twice,’ as the porter opened the door. He was a stout man with an expression of dread and January thought it was just as well that the canvas hid the barrow’s occupant.

  In fact, though it was full daylight now, the streets remained quiet, particularly here south of the river. North of the river, towards the center of the city, they had passed gang after gang of Parisians – men, women, children – building or re-building barricades. Later January heard that over four thousand of these had been erected in the city. In the more stylish thoroughfares, trees had been cut down to re-enforce the defenses, and on their way to the river with the laden barrow he and Ayasha had passed dozens of lanes completely stripped of their cobblestones. In one place they’d also passed two companies of the Fifth Infantry, surrounded by cheering revolutionaries, on their way to the home of the banker Lafitte, to offer their services to the revolt. Someone had shouted from a window on the Rue de la Juiverie that the Louvre had been taken.

  Waiting for Daniel in the courtyard, January felt strange, almost as if dreaming. He grieved for Daniel’s grief, yet triumph electrified him. We did it! We actually overthrew the Bourbons! A part of him felt as if he’d helped storm the Bastille, the first time the power of kings had been broken. And in spite of all that, deep within him quivered a cold seed of dread, born, he supposed, from a childhood spent in slavery. That sense that the ‘Man’, as the folks in the quarters had called the whites, would always win in the end.

  The butler who opened the door was pale and shaky to begin with and blanched further at the sight of the covered barrow, so that January stepped forward quickly to steady him, fearing that the man would actually faint. There were tears in the servant’s eyes as he whispered, ‘It isn’t … Madame?’

  ‘Madame?’ Through January’s mind flashed the recollection of Anne Ben-Gideon, ablaze with triumph in her borrowed castoffs, brandishing her silver pistol. ‘No,’ he stammered quickly. ‘No, I’m very much afraid it’s M’sieu Ben-Gideon’s friend, the Vicomte de la Marche.’

  ‘Oh, dear God.’ The butler looked aside. Then his training took over, and he straightened. ‘I shall tell him at once, m’sieu. Was he …? Should you …?’

  ‘If there’s a storeroom, or a scullery, with a table—’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man quickly. ‘Yes, of course. Laurent!’ he called out, and a young footman appeared behind him, neatly liveried in blue but also haggard with sleeplessness. ‘Please take Monsieur and Madame to the scullery and help them in whatever way they require. It’s M’sieu le Vicomte,’ he added, with a nod at the barrow.

  Laurent opened his lips as if about to ask what the hell M’sieu le Vicomte was doing out on the barricade – a question which had exercised January’s mind as well, all the way here – but the footman mastered himself and only said, ‘This way, m’sieu.’

  The storms of revolution shake the earth like thunder, reflected January, but a well-trained servant’s amour propre looks upon Armageddon unmoved.

  They spread canvas from the stable over the scullery table, and January stationed Laurent at the door to keep the other servants of the house (including an incandescently indignant cook) out of the big stone room.

  Philippe de la Marche had been dead, January calculated, for some eighteen to twenty-four hours. Immediately after his death, he had lain on his back for six hours at least, with his hands folded over his middle. The dark bruising of livor mortis on the back of his head was unmistakable, under the light-brown curls. Someone had wiped away the blood that had trickled thickly from his mouth, but it had soaked into his shirt collar and the black silk collar of Daniel’s gorgeous coat. ‘Whoever did that was probably the one who broke the rigor on his shoulders,’ he opined, as Ayasha helped him turn the body over gently onto its back. ‘You see how his arms flop free, though the elbows and wrists are still stiff as wood. Whoever put him on the barricade broke them loose because nobody would be lying on the barricade in this position.’

  ‘How were they when you found him?’ She was already checking the dead man’s pockets, her nose wrinkled against the stink of the mud that smeared the delicate silk.

  ‘Flung above his head, as if he’d fallen forward.’ January demonstrated. ‘It’s how many of the others lay. Anything?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean, not anything – not even one of Daniel’s handkerchiefs. Faugh,’ she added, pulling out a kerchief of her own to wipe her fingers. ‘This smells like he was dragged through the sewers!’

  ‘He may have been.’ Gently January unbuttoned the young man’s fancy waistcoat, and pulled up his shirt, which stuck to the wound with crusted bloo
d. ‘Someone has to have got him onto the barricade somehow, from where he was actually killed. Look, there’s a spot of wax on his coat. It’s fresh, Daniel would never tolerate such a thing. Someone broke the rigor on his shoulders, in order to make it look like he’d been caught up in the melee.’ As had been his first impression, the wound simply wasn’t big enough to have been made with a musket. Muskets – and a few rifles, like his own – were the usual weapon of the rioters, and of the Guarde Royale, whose armories the mob had looted. There was only the single wound on the body, in the left thorax from behind. ‘Most of the men around him had been raked by other shots after they fell.’

  ‘The shooting ended – what? Around nine?’

  ‘On the St-Denis barricade, anyway.’ January frowned. ‘But there were people re-building the barricades, or moving about the streets, or looting shops, far into the night. He must have been put there in the early hours of the morning. How far do those sewers stretch?’

  Ayasha shook her head. ‘Anne would know,’ she said. ‘Or Pleyard. I gather revolutionists who’re being chased by the police dodge through them all the time.’

  ‘I suppose it would work,’ said January. ‘Once you came out, though, everybody would know where you’d been. Not somewhere I’d like to try carrying a completely stiffened corpse.’ Carrying poor Philippe a dozen yards through the street had been difficult enough. He pushed the shirt further up, and turned the body again – at the Hôtel Dieu his great strength had made him the man always elected by the others to manipulate the cadavers – seeking an exit wound. ‘He may have been laid out with his hands folded like that, simply because his killer had to find someone to help him move the body.’