Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  Seeing their faces, as if they stood before him in the gloom. His beautiful Rose, approaching the ordeal of childbirth for a second time, with the full knowledge of how many women did not survive that experience. (Holy Virgin, Mother of God, uphold her in your hand.) Jacquette Filoux in the dark sweating cavern of the women’s cell, for a murder that January’s instincts told him had more to do with Sir John Oldmixton’s deadly games. (Holy Virgin, Mother of God, lead her safe from that darkness.) Ayasha …

  After seven years, he could still not even pronounce more than her name.

  Anne Ben-Gideon.

  He retreated to a bench, one of the several arranged to face the Virgin’s little side altar, and sat for a time, looking up into the calm face of the Mother of God.

  Anne Ben-Gideon.

  1830

  ‘We stood together on the barricade at the Place des Trois-Maries,’ Anne had said that hot morning in Saint-Lazare. ‘You needn’t look like that, Armand, I wasn’t the only woman in Paris, fighting for our freedom from oppression! The king’s soldiers attacked twice, in the morning and again just as it was growing dark. After we threw them back from the barricade the second time we waited, to see if there’d be a night attack. Some of the local women brought food, and we all shared it, sitting there behind the barricade. Finally the man in command – people called him Grand-Jean – told us we had best get some sleep. He’d keep half his force on the barricade through the night, he said, and the rest of us should come back just before dawn. I went to Gerry’s rooms with him—’

  Armand flinched and waved his hands, as if he could not bear his sister’s open admission that she’d spent a night with a lover, and M’sieu Sarrien muttered, ‘Tut-tut!’

  Anne met their eyes defiantly and continued, ‘And I was there the rest of the night.’

  ‘What time did you get there?’ Speaking to her, January recalled poor Philippe’s board-stiff muscles, mentally calculated arguments to the officiers de la sûreté … Surely the new king (they had heard the news of the duc’s confirmation in that office on their way to the prison) wouldn’t summarily get rid of experienced men of the Paris police, just because they’d been put into office by the ousted King Charles? The men in the prison courtyard had worn the blue-and-white uniforms of the old National Guard, and the dark-clothed nuns who looked after the prisoners seemed not to have been touched by the events of the past weeks.

  Anne grimaced at the question, as if she couldn’t see its relevance, but said, ‘It must have been one or one thirty. I wasn’t looking at my watch,’ she added, with a touch of sarcasm.

  ‘Not much time for rest—’ old M’sieu Sarrien laboriously noted something on his old-fashioned set of ivory pocket-tablets – ‘if you were to return before the sun rose.’

  ‘Gerry let me sleep.’ The hardness of defiance – the fearless brightness that gleamed in her like a sword-blade – softened at the recollection of her lover’s consideration. ‘I don’t think I stirred until noon.’

  ‘And I take it,’ went on the lawyer, ‘that you then returned to the Place des Trois-Maries and your – er – toils of the previous day?’

  The disapproval in his voice made her lift her chin angrily. ‘I did. Well,’ she added, ‘I didn’t go back to the Place des Trois-Maries, because Gerry’s landlady Madame Gruen woke me up running in and saying the guards were attacking the barricade on Rue de Rohan and they needed every hand. I pulled on my clothes and followed her. That was the worst of the fighting,’ she added. ‘I think that was the only time – that day – that I feared we’d be driven back.’ Her lips tightened. ‘And after all that, after all the men – and women too! – who died, to have that pussy-footing lickspittle Orléans … “King of the French” indeed! I—’

  Sarrien held up an arthritic hand. ‘We can debate the fitness of His Royal Highness to rule this kingdom upon another occasion, madame. But Mr O’Dwyer – if he can be found – can testify to your whereabouts from when? The morning of Tuesday the twenty-seventh until … when? When did you finally part from him?’

  Her butterfly-wing brows pulled close over her sunburned nose. ‘He was gone when I woke,’ she said. ‘I think he must have waked before me, and gone out to find breakfast, and gotten swept up, as I was, by those running to one of the barricades when we were attacked again that morning. I was among those guarding the barricade on the Rue de Rohan. I slept that night in a courtyard near there, with some of the other women. After things quieted down I went back to his rooms and asked Madame Gruen if he’d been in, and he hadn’t.’

  She shook her head, her brown eyes filling again. ‘I think he must be dead. I’ve asked everyone I can think of—’

  ‘So you have not seen his body?’

  Young Armand opened his mouth to snap something – probably, reflected January, Who cares? – and then closed it as the truth seemed to come to him. He stammered instead, ‘He must be found …’

  ‘Very inconvenient.’ Old M’sieu Sarrien tut-tutted again, and looked through his shaky notes. ‘Most awkward, of course. But we’ll come up with something. Let this be a lesson to you, though,’ he added, frowning at her as if trying to bring her face into focus. ‘I’m sure you’re facing a very severe sentence – a year in a convent at the very least, though we can almost certainly have it commuted to be spent at Notre Dame de Syon. Your aunt is still Mother Superior there, isn’t she?’ He glanced for confirmation to Armand. ‘Your family name should still count for something, with King Charles—’

  ‘Charles isn’t the king anymore, m’sieu.’

  ‘Oh!’ He made an impatient little gesture. ‘Of course … That’s right. All that rioting … Though how anyone could possibly accept the cadet line when the real king still lives …’

  January’s eyes met Daniel’s, and he felt as if a shadow passed across his heart.

  1839

  ‘And was Michie O’Dwyer in fact dead?’ Rose paused, needle in hand. Much as she hated sewing, January had ruled (as firmly as anyone ever could pass a rule upon Rose) that she would not assist in the repair of the parlor plaster but would instead occupy herself with a mild task fitted to her condition, such as repairing all the sheets and pillowslips that the school would need for its (three-so-far!) scholars. She had thrown a pillowslip at his head, but had agreed that she had lately felt so drained and heavy – and her back ached so much – that she would even accept the burden of mending, if it allowed her to sit down. Gabriel, Zizi-Marie (resplendent in one of Gabriel’s old shirts and a tattered pair of his trousers), and young Ti-Gall (gazing upon his beloved, so attired, in smitten adoration) all waited with trowels and ‘hawks’ for January to finish mixing the tub – over which task he’d related the events of the morning.

  ‘Up until this morning,’ said January, ‘I thought that he was. I didn’t know him, but gave him credit for having died for the revolution – and it was a revolution,’ he added quietly. ‘In its way, a continuation of the revolution that had started in 1789. And he may indeed have died. The book, and Philippe de la Marche’s card-case, could have been taken by Brooke, who may have been one of the fighters at that time or even one of the French king’s soldiers – they weren’t all Frenchmen, you know. Or Brooke’s path may have crossed that of the original looter years afterwards.’

  ‘What about the gun?’ asked Rose.

  ‘And what was he doing here?’ demanded Gabriel, enraptured, as if the whole were a tale by Scott or Dumas.

  ‘And why did you need to find him back then anyway?’ added Zizi-Marie. ‘I mean, hundreds of people must have seen Lady Anne in the fighting, besides this worthless Irishman.’ Her eyes – brown and velvety like Olympe’s – sparkled with delight at the thought of taking potshots at enemy soldiers from behind a wall of dirt and broken furniture. ‘Couldn’t you go around and find other people who could say, she’d been where everybody could see her, when this poor couillon was killed?’

  ‘I doubt any of those with her on the barricade knew her name,’ said
January. ‘She didn’t give her right one to whoever might have asked, you know; she told me that. Believe me, in between everything else I did over those next few weeks, I tried to find someone who remembered her clearly enough to swear to it in court. But once Louis-Philippe set up his own police, nobody was willing to admit where they’d been. And there are few things harder than to prove a negative, especially to a jury. The safe thing to do – her family’s lawyer, and the lawyer Daniel hired to help him, and all of us agreed – would be to find out who’d really killed Philippe de la Marche … if it was Philippe they’d meant to kill. Or to find some way around the fact that he’d been her husband’s lover, and had been shot with her gun.’

  He scooped plaster from the tub with his trowel and dropped it – three thick wads of snowy mud – onto the ‘hawks’ of the three young people. The tarpaulins that covered the parlor floor were strewn with plaster dust and little chunks chipped and scraped away from those places where damp and time had loosened areas like moulted scales. The shutters, usually closed over the French doors in a mostly-futile attempt to block the heat at this time of day, stood open to Rue Esplanade, and the noon sun streamed pitilessly in, emphasizing every ripple and bump in the parlor walls. ‘I want those walls smooth as a fresh-ironed sheet,’ he said, ‘when I get back,’ and they grinned and nodded, delighted to be undertaking so important a task on their own.

  He went into his study, sponged off in the tepid water on the washstand, and dressed again in the corduroy trousers, good boots, linen shirt and jacket that marked him – as surely as if he’d worn his freedom papers pinned to his lapel – as a free householder of the French Town rather than as somebody’s slave loafing off for the afternoon. Thus attired, he kissed Rose, and set forth to cast the wide nets of gossip, and see what he could find.

  EIGHT

  The French Town had changed in the seven years since Benjamin January had returned to it from seventeen years in Paris.

  Changes for the better, some of them. The commercial streets closer to the river were paved now, and the three-foot gutters that had separated the thoroughfare from the brick banquettes – crossed at the corners by planks for the benefit of pedestrians – were mostly covered over and transformed into proper sewers, though in the back of town the old-style gutters still reeked to heaven and provided lodging for innumerable crawfish and frogs. In several streets the old-style lanterns on their chains had been replaced by the bright glare of gaslamps, and on Rue Royale and Rue Bourbon, modern banks and hotels shouldered the old Spanish town houses. The new parish prison had relieved the overcrowding of the Cabildo’s cells. Some shops had new windows, wide sheets of glass instead of small latticeworks of panes that January recalled from his childhood.

  Few of these modern amenities, however, had reached Rue Gallatin, the insalubrious stretch of mud between the market and the levee given over to cheap rooming-houses and even cheaper saloons. Lallie Gardinier’s house combined the two establishments, offering near-toxic forty-rod for five cents a glass and accommodations abovestairs for those who came ashore and those who preyed upon them either by games of chance or more violent expedients. The landlady herself was fat, only a few inches shorter than January’s impressive height, and muscled like a stevedore. When he saw her – as he did every morning at early Mass – January was invariably reminded of an overweight black lioness in a pink tignon.

  ‘Michie Janvier!’ She paused in the task of sweeping her back steps and held out her hands to him. They knew one another slightly from the social gatherings of the FTFCMBS, which she seldom attended but to which she was a regular financial contributor, and he guessed that he was known to her by reputation. Her brother Cochon was a friend and a fellow musician, and he suspected that she’d heard a good deal about him through Olympe. This was confirmed when she said, ‘I hear you’re lookin’ into poor Jacquette Filoux’s trouble,’ and any question about Jacquette’s brother was postponed for the moment while he related what arrangements were being made for the care of Jacquette’s children.

  When the topic of Uncle Juju was broached, however, the tavern keeper had little good to report of her former tenant. ‘A gilt-edged weasel,’ she pronounced, her dark eyes narrowing. ‘He sweet-talked Polline an’ Doucette, that works the levee, into breakin’ off with Suggie Labeaue – that was their man – an’ workin’ for him instead, ’til Suggie came ’round an’ took ’em back. They was ready to go by that time. Juju never gave those girls a penny of what they made for him, an’ I will say for Suggie, he’s clock-stoppin’ ugly an’ he don’t smell so good but he don’t skimp his girls. Juju’s pretty as a girl himself an’ comes across like the sweetest man in the world ’til it comes time for him to lay out so much as a silver dime.’

  She jerked her chin towards the stair that led up the side of the building to, presumably, the rented rooms above the saloon. ‘When I told him in April I needed his rent if I’m gonna make the note on this house he was all, “Oh, I’ll get the money for you by the tenth, I got money comin’ in” – humph! You know where that money was comin’ in from? Playin’ poker at the Proud Cock! An’ when he got cleaned out there, which any idiot could tell you he was gonna, that walks into any joint owned by that skunk Jared Ganch, he went an’ got the money out of that poor sister of his. In May it was the same story, only on top of owin’ money to Jared Ganch an’ every other gambler in town, he goes an’ borrows more from Ganch himself, which if you ask me is like cuttin’ your own throat. He never paid me in June, but it was always “Oh, please, m’am, I got money comin’ in, just give me til Tuesday”’ She shook her head.

  ‘I locked up the room on the twenty-eighth – I wasn’t gonna have him go clean out his things some night an’ leave me stuck – an’ he didn’t have the stones to come in that night nor the Saturday, nor any night since. You can go up an’ have a look at it if you want, but there’s nuthin’ there worth sellin’. It’s all at the pawnshops – Bisson’s, Houssaye’s, an’ Oviedo’s over on Canal Street – an’ I’ve asked all three of ’em to let me know if Filoux ever walks in. Marie-Louise Houssaye say Ganch – the snake that runs the Proud Cock an’ the Flesh an’ Blood over on Girod Street, an’ two whorehouses out in Faubourg Pontchartrain besides an’ smuggles in slaves from Cuba – was into her place yesterday an’ asked him the same thing. So if Ganch’s lookin’ for him, I’m guessin’ Juju’s lyin’ pretty low.’

  ‘Any idea where he’d go to do that?’

  Lallie Gardinier shook her head again, and reached out to catch a skinny boy of six who came rocketing out the back door of the saloon. ‘Whoa, there, Ritchie! I been out here twenty minutes and I ain’t seen you go near that woodpile.’ She shoved the child in the direction of the woodpile, where he began to gather up kindling. To January, she explained, ‘My sister’s boy. Juju … I got no idea where he’s at, but my guess is, he’s sweet-talked some other woman into puttin’ him up.’

  She fished in the pocket of her apron and brought forth a bunch of keys, each with a scrap of colored ribbon tied through it. She sorted a green one from the others, handed it to him. ‘You can go have a look at his things, but Jacob Greenfeld the Jew tailor come by Tuesday an’ took back the coats Juju hadn’t paid him for, an’ Wednesday Dirksen from over the Second Municipality, an’ Risteau that has a shop on Rue Bourbon, came by an’ took back his boots an’ three of his waistcoats, so there ain’t much up there but empty liquor bottles now. Sure as fleas on a dog, nuthin’ that’d tell me where he might be hidin’.’

  And so, January found, it proved. The room formerly occupied by Juju Filoux was small, furnished plainly but comfortably, and contained little beyond a few shirts and three very stylish hats whose seller, January was almost certain, would be by within the week to collect them. As Madame Gardinier had said, a dozen empty liquor bottles were lined up along one wall, and a formidable pile of gambling markers heaped the neatly-made bed, presumably emptied from Uncle Juju’s coat pockets by the defrauded Mr Greenfeld. These, plus a few
crumpled and well-used handkerchiefs and a plethora of pawn tickets, were the only personal items remaining.

  And yet, reflected January, there was no mention that Uncle Juju had left town. He’d tried – unsuccessfully – to search his sister’s house for her lover’s money. At a guess, he was waiting for his chance to do so again.

  January thanked Madame Gardinier (‘Now, you give my regards to your sister, Michie Janvier, hear?’) and turned his steps to the Verandah Hotel on St Charles Avenue, in the so-called Second Municipality of New Orleans – the American district.

  Even in the French Town – now the First Municipality – January was more conscious than he had been, upon his return in 1832, of the presence of Americans. In 1803, when his mother had become St-Denis Janvier’s plaçeé, she had told the seven-year-old Benjamin not to go beyond the old city wall, and above all not to cross the common pastureland that separated the French district from that of ‘the American animals’, for they would have no compunctions about kidnapping a black child and selling him back into the slavery from which he had so recently come. When he’d returned from Paris the wall had been gone and what was left of the common pastureland had become the ‘neutral ground’ along Canal Street, but the warning remained. It was more true than ever, that Americans tended to see all free blacks as potential money on the hoof, if they could be but separated from their freedom papers and from the members of the white French community who knew them and could attest to their legal status. And despite the feverish summer heat, there were more Americans on the streets of the French Town itself: sailors from the wharves, carters, draymen. Clerks from the steamboat companies and those big new hotels. The clamor and chatter of English, threading through the softer music of French as he made his way along Rue Bourbon, seemed to him more insistent, and he noticed how many of the cafés along that street had changed their names to make themselves more attractive to an Anglophone clientele.