Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Daniel’s cook will fillet you,’ warned Ayasha, as January looked around for something to use as a bullet-probe, ‘if you take one of his knives. What’s this?’ She picked a fragment of straw from the fragile silk of Philippe’s coatsleeve.

  Then from the doorway, Daniel whispered, ‘Oh, dear God …’

  January stepped back, and his friend crossed the scullery in two strides and flung himself on Philippe’s body, his arms around the broad shoulders as if he could somehow warm him back to life.

  ‘Oh, dear God. Oh, Philippe.’

  Ayasha retreated to January’s side, glanced up at him sidelong, the coal-dark eyes of a desert witch under a working-woman’s linen coif. ‘But who would want to kill him in the first place?’ she breathed.

  January shook his head. For the first time since finding the body, he had time to think of something other than the immediate issues of what to do with it and what could be learned from it, and his thoughts now raced to put together what he had found.

  He whispered, no more loudly than she, ‘He was wearing Daniel’s coat. Remember Daniel said yesterday he’d been here Tuesday and then gone away again. If he’d run into another gang of children on his way here and been pelted with garbage, he’d have borrowed it to go outside …’

  ‘You think someone mistook him for Daniel?’

  ‘I think someone could have.’ He turned back, even in his grief for his friend noticing how Daniel’s hair, long and curly and a rich brown, mingled with Philippe’s golden-bronze curls. ‘They were nearly of a height, and the collar of that coat would make anyone look broad in the shoulder.’

  ‘But who—?’

  Daniel let out a sobbing cry, with the full force of his lungs, like Achilles’ cry at the death of his friend, then sank to his knees. A slender young man in the livery of a valet slipped past Laurent in the doorway, and helped his master to his feet. At a nod from January, Ayasha joined him in leading Daniel, weeping, from the scullery.

  January picked up Daniel’s coat, turned it over in his hands. It stank of the sewers, the silk still damp in long smudges on arms or sides, randomly, where the carried body had brushed the foul bricks. Dots of beeswax marked one sleeve. Flecks of packing straw still clung to the collar and cuffs. When he returned to the body and checked the young man’s lips and eyes, fingertips and earlobes, his observation was confirmed: the body had been protected from both rats and the flies that were even now, he knew, transforming the corpse-strewn barricades into crawling nightmares of mortality. In this week’s savage heat, the body would have been almost unrecognizable within hours.

  And but for the chance of his having emerged early – but for the chance of his knowing Daniel’s incongruously brilliant coat – what was clearly murder would have vanished into the greater toll of the dead, and the victim’s body into a common grave.

  With one of the cook’s filleting knives, and a slender lark-spit skewer, January began to probe for the bullet.

  Daniel’s valet, Freytag, returned a few minutes later, with the request that when M’sieu le Vicomte’s body was cleaned and decent, would M’sieu Janvier be so good as to have Laurent, and whatever other servants were required, carry it across to the house? A room was being prepared for him. ‘For surely, m’sieu,’ said the valet, ‘there will be no one at the Prefecture of Police today, to whom this can be reported. All they will do is recommend that M’sieu le Vicomte be taken to the public morgue. Shall I send word to M’sieu le Comte de Belvoire?’

  ‘Thank you.’ January had reflected at the time only upon the comte’s grief for the death of his heir, though later he regretted the agreement. But in truth, when he looked back on it, there was nothing else really that he could do. The pistol-ball lay on a Limoges-ware saucer, distorted where it had lodged against Philippe’s shoulder blade after tearing through both heart and lung. Examining it, January had already observed how characteristically the soft lead had deformed, from being loaded first, before the barrel of the weapon was screwed on.

  When Anne returned to the hôtel two days later, the first thing January observed of her, was that her little screw-barrel muff pistol was gone.

  Those two days, of grilling July heat and nerve-racking confusion, blurred together in January’s later recollections. Sitting in the light of his single candle, in this other July, this other world, with the cicadas’ droning rattle outside in the darkness, he had difficulty piecing together which events had taken place on what days, and what had been said to whom, and when.

  He remembered someone – Emil, the older of the two footmen – coming in to Daniel’s room to whisper that the tricolor flag now flew over the royal palace of the Tuileries. Even in the midst of his concerns for his friend, and his sorrow for that handsome young man whom he had barely known, January had felt elated.

  The Bourbons were defeated. Humankind – the voices of rationality, education, tolerance, and the rights of all mankind – had finally had their say.

  We will no longer suffer ourselves to be ruled by men whose only qualification for their post was the offchance of birth. We will no longer have to watch them give away to their friends – or keep for themselves – that which our hands bled to produce. We will no longer see their friends take away from us, for their own convenience, those things which are ours by right: our lives, our property, our liberty.

  The Louvre had also been taken. Freytag had told him that, when the last twilight was fading in the windows and the house was filled with shadow. The people of Paris, the young valet had said, had joined together to keep the rioters from laying a finger on the royal art collection there. It was the property, they said, of the people, not the king. Those who sacked the palace of the Archbishop of Paris and hurled all his books, vestments, and furniture into the river, had threatened to drown any thieves or looters who attempted to fish the valuables out.

  Sometime – it must have been Thursday night – the servants of the Comte de Belvoire arrived with a coach, to take the body of their master’s son away. January and Ayasha had remained in the house, for Daniel was devastated with grief. ‘Who would harm him?’ he kept asking, raising a face pasty and haggard with weeping from the pillow of his bed. ‘He hated politics. He didn’t care who ran the government.’ Creased and rumpled on the pillow beside him was a coat of pearl-gray superfine, which, Freytag had whispered to January, had lain across the end of Daniel’s bed when he’d come home Tuesday.

  As January had suspected, street urchins had thrown offal at Philippe on his way to Daniel’s that day: ‘He must have taken M’sieu Ben-Gideon’s lilac brocade when he left the house Tuesday afternoon.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why he left?’ January asked quietly.

  The slender little man shook his head. ‘He said he would wait for M’sieu Ben-Gideon. Indeed, I had no notion he had left the house until M’sieu Ben-Gideon came home and looked about for him.’

  On the bed, Musette, Daniel’s fairy-like Italian greyhound, pawed anxiously at her master’s shoulder, and licked his ear.

  ‘No one saw him leave, but then, he was a very quiet man in his ways, M’sieu le Vicomte, and quite willing to sit without a sound in the library, reading one of M’sieu Ben-Gideon’s books.’

  Freytag set down the candles he bore, and went to pick up the tray of food he’d brought earlier, which lay on the bedside table, untouched. He bent to speak to his master and January didn’t hear Daniel’s reply. Freytag only murmured, ‘Very good, m’sieu,’ and took from the tray a bottle and glass. Daniel’s hand groped for the tumbler, and January smelled the unmistakable swoony mustiness of laudanum. Freytag took it back, empty, his face a non-committal mask, and closed the diaphanous, linen bed-curtains.

  ‘Was there anyone who would have harmed M’sieu le Vicomte?’ January asked on another occasion, a sweltering afternoon, the windows of Daniel’s bedroom thrown wide to the garden and a clanging of church bells all over the city on the air. ‘Or,’ he added, ‘was there any who would have harmed M’sieu
Ben-Gideon himself? For it is clear to me that M’sieu le Vicomte was killed sometime Tuesday night, and his body sneaked onto the barricade early Thursday morning.’

  Freytag sighed, and glanced across at the blur of summer gauze that curtained his unconscious master from view. ‘It is …’ he began, and then stopped himself, as if debating on how much to say, gently tugging on the ears of the dog Musette whom he held cradled in his arm. ‘You must understand,’ he went on after a time, ‘that the circle of M’sieu Ben-Gideon’s friends … The way they lived their lives … It is hard to explain. I don’t really understand it myself.’ His lips pursed. January recalled that the valet was Bavarian, and of a strict Protestant sect.

  ‘Many of the young men of his circle, though they dress and live in the first style of elegance, are practically indigent. They live, as one would say, as parasites on their wealthy friends. In consequence of this, there is a great deal of jealousy, should a gentleman like my master transfer his … his affections … to someone else.’

  January raised his eyebrows, recalling the gold card-case, the ‘charming pied-a-terre’ and a dozen other costly love-gifts Daniel had bestowed upon his beloved. Beyond the dreary tolling of the bells there was no sound, no gunfire at least. ‘And who was M’sieu Ben-Gideon’s dear friend,’ he asked, ‘before he became dear friends with M’sieu le Vicomte? Someone of a nature sufficiently jealous to do harm to a rival? Or to m’sieu himself?’

  ‘His name is Apollon Michaud.’ Freytag’s tone was a world of professional restraint. ‘The son of a good family, I understand, who was at one time in the Guarde Royale. A young man of volatile temperament, yes. At one time he threatened violence against M’sieu le Vicomte, when they encountered one another at a ball shortly after m’sieu began – ah – “keeping company” with M’sieu le Vicomte. I know not whether the threat was serious.’ The valet’s upper lip seemed to lengthen and thin. ‘M’sieu le Vicomte himself was a notable shot, and, I am told, a nimble and powerful swordsman. Considering the amount of money m’sieu spent on this Michaud, he may well have considered himself aggrieved. And then of course, the Comte de Belvoire himself, M’sieu le Vicomte’s father, might well have wished my master harm. There is also his younger son, M’sieu le Vicomte’s brother Celestin …’

  He stopped himself, and shook his head again. Setting Musette on the floor, he whistled softly to her, and she followed him from the room.

  ‘The flics are going to have their work cut out for them,’ remarked Ayasha later, when January spoke to her of these possibilities, ‘if they decide to go after de Belvoire or his number two son for trying to murder either Daniel or Philippe.’ She spoke in a whisper, with a glance toward the dim shape lying behind the gauze curtains, his lover’s coat still clutched in his arms, in a stupor of laudanum and grief. Musette was back on the bed, curled on the pillow, a worried little ball of bones.

  It was night, January recalled, though he couldn’t remember whether it was the Thursday or the Friday. He remembered only that it was very late, and still gluily hot, and that the city outside was silent. Even the great bourdon of Notre Dame had stilled.

  ‘That is, if they investigate at all,’ his wife went on with a shrug. ‘Belvoire’s one of the old crowd that’s been with King Charles since he was having picnics on the lawn at Versailles with Marie Antoinette. His wife’s a Noailles …’ She named one of the wealthiest, most ancient noble families in France. ‘Catch either of them admitting that they snuffed the heir to the title, either by accident or on purpose. Or that Number Two might have done the deed himself. What will you bet me they push off the blame on this poor branleur Michaud?’

  ‘Who might actually have done it,’ January reminded her softly.

  Ayasha only sniffed. Her opinion of the aristocracy was not high.

  And what chance, January had wondered – on that hot Paris night when everything had been simple – would the unknown M’sieu Michaud stand against a man of wealth and nobility who either believed Michaud to be guilty of the murder, or who simply wanted everyone else to believe it? Though the servants had been bringing in a steady stream of rumor and information – that the king had backed down from his resolve to rule the country in the old style, by royal ordinance alone; that a republic was going to be proclaimed (‘It is plain,’ had remarked Freytag dourly, ‘that they don’t recall what happened to their last republic.’); that the king had called for Austrian troops; that the minister Polignac had resigned – it was clear by this time to January at least that the old nobility would keep their hold on the government of France. How would they not? It was they who had the money. It was they who had the land.

  Maybe you couldn’t fight The Man.

  It was into these families that the bankers, the factory owners, the new-rich proprietors of railroads and canals and mines, sought to marry their sons and daughters, desperate for the cachet of nobility and the social connections that it brought.

  And though the king’s stubborn determination to hand the country back to the Pope might be thwarted, it was unlikely that the son of a Jew, be that Jew ever so wealthy a banker, would get a hearing when he demanded that his lover’s true killer be brought to justice.

  Nobody would want to hear it. Much better that a simple solution be found, sordid though it might be. A disgusting love-spat, but easily dismissed, particularly if there was another heir to the title of Comte de Belvoire.

  And perhaps – January glanced back toward the bed, where his friend tossed in his sleep and muttered Philippe’s name – a killer who had sought Daniel’s death, not Philippe’s, was still out there. Waiting, with his little gun that would slip so easily into a pocket or a muff.

  On Saturday, the last day of July, Anne returned. Daniel was up for the first time, moving about the paneled and sun-drenched rooms like a man dazed, fumblingly trying to collect the threads of his life once more. Once, when Musette stood up in his lap to lick his chin, he even smiled.

  Ayasha had returned to their rooms on Rue de l’Aube, and had re-opened her workshop, though between the hot summer season and the paralysis of the king’s government nobody was buying dresses. January remained at Daniel’s, sleeping on a pallet that Freytag had made up for him in the dressing room; the neighborhood children brought January notes from his wife. All was quiet, she said. There hadn’t been a riot anywhere for twenty-four hours. January watched Daniel’s face when the butler carried in tea late in the afternoon, trying to gauge whether he should bid his friend farewell and return tomorrow, or remain another night.

  The milk, he could not help noticing, was fresh. ‘It is, m’sieu,’ affirmed the butler, when January remarked on it.

  ‘A sure sign,’ murmured Daniel, pouring a little into a saucer for the dog, ‘that the trouble is over, if the farmers are bringing their milk to market.’

  ‘Not only that, m’sieu.’ The butler bobbed a bow, and January could see that the man was as pleased as he was himself, to see his master rouse himself to speak of the commonplaces of the living. ‘It was not only in the markets, but Mademoiselle Constitution – the woman who sells it in this quarter, m’sieu – was back this morning peddling it in the street.’

  ‘Mademoiselle Constitution?’

  The servant allowed himself a grin. ‘I understand that her mother was a sans-culotte of the republic, m’sieu.’

  ‘Good Lord. I should think—’

  A sound – a closing door – on the floor below made Daniel jump as if at a gunshot, spilling the milk, and January reflected on how deeply grief and stress had pierced him. His plump face had a fallen-in look, and his soft flesh seemed to have collapsed down onto his bones. This was the first time since Thursday that he was dressed and shaved, but his eyes were still red with weeping. Without rouge he seemed pasty and old.

  Yesterday – Friday – he had talked incessantly of Philippe, blaming himself for not having been home on Tuesday afternoon; asking again and again if word had come from the Comte de Belvoire regarding a funeral.
/>   ‘But of course they won’t tell me,’ he would say, instants later. ‘They regard me as Moloch, the Anti-Christ, the corrupter of their precious boy – as if he hadn’t been struggling for years against what they wanted him to be. What they demanded that he be, a … a family stud-horse, a good administrator of their property, a presentable dummy …’ And then he would cram his fist into his mouth again, trembling all over, and whisper, ‘Philippe …’

  And fifteen minutes later would return to the subject of his friend again.

  Now he looked up as footsteps clicked on the parquet of the stair, his face ghastly. But Musette dashed to the door, whiptail lashing frantically, and a moment later the door opened and Anne stood framed in it. Her chestnut hair was uncovered and unwashed, the striped skirt and leather bodice she had worn Tuesday outside the Palais Royale stained with gunpowder and Paris mud. She strode to him with outstretched hands. ‘Oh, Daniel, they just now told me—’

  He clasped her to him, his face pressed to her breast and his grasp so tight January thought he would snap her in two. She bent over his head, folded the heavy shoulders in her arms, as if he had been a brother, or a child. January took his teacup, and quietly left the drawing room.

  But not before he had noted that the silver pistol was gone from her side.

  SIX

  He attached little importance to that fact at the time.

  Walking back along the Rue de l’Université in the twilight on Saturday, the last day of July, he found scant evidence of the week’s rioting until he was almost opposite the Ile de la Cité. Even those barricades that he passed had been cleared of bodies, and the local workingmen and students who still manned them were mostly smoking and talking in the nearby shops and doorways. The barricades had also, January observed, been cleared of any weapons dropped in the course of the fray. The only muskets he saw were obviously broken. The smell of powder and blood had dispersed days ago.