Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Liane Pichon,’ whispered Ayasha. ‘Madame Anne’s maid.’

  ‘Seems to have done well for herself,’ murmured January, observing the quality of the girl’s striped satin frock, and the strand of amber beads around her neck. Miss Liane took her seat facing backwards, and Mademoiselle de Taillefer evidently made such a fuss that the servant climbed down and had to be handed up (by a footman) to the seat next to the driver.

  ‘It is true,’ he added, as the carriage rolled away, ‘that a servant in a position to testify against her mistress could face harassment – or even false accusations of theft – from her mistress’s family …’

  ‘Bet me La Comtesse offered her two hundred francs a year.’

  ‘To say nothing of young Laurent’s salary. A cheap price to pay,’ speculated Lucien, ‘if one suspects one’s younger son of killing his brother. Nothing can bring poor M’sieu Philippe back,’ he answered January’s troubled look. ‘And better to live with suspicion gnawing one’s heart than scandal affecting the matrimonial alliances of one’s younger children. The police have to guillotine someone, you know.’

  Discreet enquiries in and around Etamps over the next few days also filled in the list that Daniel had begun, of the de Belvoire properties in Paris and its environs. The old Comte de Belvoire – the current comte’s father – having retired to his estate at Gontchâtel, far away from Paris, in 1789 and renounced his title, he had managed to hang onto most of his property until the title was restored to him (for a hefty consideration) by Napoleon. The family owned four houses, two commercial properties, and an inn in Paris itself, and considerable land immediately to the north of the city where gypsum was mined. The fugitive Celestin, January guessed, might have access to any one of these, with or without the knowledge of his family – or a portion of his family.

  ‘You can add the Convent of Notre Dame de Syon to that,’ piped up Chatoine, the leader of the orphan gang in January’s neighborhood, when, upon their return, a meeting of possible allies was called in Daniel’s elegant turquoise-and-gold salon. ‘Belvoire’s grandpa got hold of their land during the revolution and then handed it back to them free when Old Fatso—’ this was the local name for the restored King Louis XVIII, old King Charles’s elder brother and predecessor – ‘came back. They’d do just about anything for him.’

  ‘Not hide a man on their premises,’ objected Armand de la Roche-St-Ouen heatedly.

  The little girl took one of Daniel’s cigars from her mouth, raised her eyebrows, and stared in haughty surprise at this display of naïveté.

  Armand reddened. He was clearly ill-at-ease, though January wasn’t certain whether this was because of the company in which he found himself or because he had never approved of his sister’s marriage to a Jewish banker’s son (and had said so, often and loudly, within Daniel’s hearing). ‘My aunt is the Mother Superior at Syon. Completely aside from the dishonor of the thing, no patronage on earth would come before her vows. She spent the revolution in La Force prison rather than forswear the supremacy of the Pope. I know at the first hint of trouble last month she locked the convent up tight and took the girls away into the countryside.’

  ‘We might at least have a look at the place,’ temporized January. ‘Find out if the caretaker there – while the sisters were away – was as faithful to his vows as the mother superior is to hers, and if any of the neighbors noticed anything.’

  ‘What could they have noticed?’ Jeannot Charbonnière shook his leonine head. ‘The convent’s right on Rue St-Martin. The fighting was only a few streets away.’

  When January hesitated – Charbonnière was perfectly correct, and what, indeed, could anyone have seen or noticed anywhere in the confusion? – the little girl saluted, and said, ‘We’ll do our best, chief.’

  The tavern Aux Vierges Sages – out in Montmartre near Notre Dame de Lorette – was easy enough to broach: Carnot knew the place and went with his latest sweetheart to make inquiries of the barkeep and hostlers (and the girls who worked the neighborhood). Likewise the two buildings on the Place des Victoires which housed, respectively, a fashionable silk shop and a not-quite-so-fashionable charcuterie, with a score of rental rooms behind and above these establishments. At such places it was always possible to learn about everyone housed under the roof for any length of time, and January didn’t expect to learn anything that would advance his search for Celestin de Gourgue.

  The houses were different. January and Ayasha went out to look at each. All were in the older parts of the city, all purchased as investments and rented to those made newly affluent by the increased stability of a Europe without war. Lucien went with them, but recognized no one who might have been Celestin in hiding, and January’s inquiries among the servants at the neighboring public houses in the evenings – under pretext of searching for a naïve sister who’d been ‘run off with by a toff’ – in three cases elicited no protestations about any toff staying with the family.

  In the fourth case, January, Ayasha, and Lucien all very quickly received the information that the house – which was on Rue Notre Dame des Victoires – had been empty for months.

  ‘And if I’d just murdered my brother,’ mused Lucien, as the three made their way back along the Rue St-Martin in the direction of Daniel’s house, ‘with or without our father’s connivance, I should find a vacant house to which my father kept the key a great convenience, even in August.’

  ‘We can’t forget,’ added Ayasha, and tucked stray curls of her strong dark hair back under her round, working-woman’s bonnet, ‘the places Belvoire père owns outside the city, either. A farm in Batignolles, the mines and a vineyard in Montmartre—’

  ‘And a lot of neighbors likely to be flapping their gums about any stranger staying there,’ the old violinist reminded her.

  ‘Wherever he is,’ said January thoughtfully, ‘the man has to eat. If he’s lying low – if he can’t be seen to come and go – someone has to be providing him with food, even if he has plenty of money. He …’ He turned sharply as they crossed the Rue St-Merci, his consciousness tugged – not for the first time, he realized – by someone or something half-recognized. A jacket or cap in a color he’d seen one too many times before? A figure whose height or bearing or shape touched his memory as familiar? In New Orleans, when he was eight or nine, one of his schoolmates – a boy named Hermes – had been kidnapped when he’d ventured down to the riverfront by himself. His distraught mother never had gotten him back.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Ayasha.

  January scanned the Rue St-Martin behind them. Carts coming up from the river with hay for the thousands of horses in every mews and stableyard in Paris. Washerwomen bearing baskets of linen on their heads to customers. Water-vendors or peddlers of matches, rags, underwear or English pears; children playing with hoops, a few whores out early for a cup of brandy before starting the evening trade.

  ‘I think we’re being followed.’

  He saw no more of his shadow, and when Lucien detached himself from the group, ostensibly to chat up an especially pretty shop girl but in fact to circle behind and look for potential trackers, the old man said he saw no one. Still, it was enough to make January postpone his intention of walking down the narrower street that backed the houses of Rue Notre Dame des Victoires – to see if the gate into the garden of number fifteen showed signs of recent use – until after dark. The waning moon rose late, and with most of the lamps still broken from the rioting, the streets were extremely dark. Ayasha followed him a short distance from Daniel’s flat, to make sure no one was behind him.

  Still he kept listening, glancing back, as he moved along the soot-black faces of the houses across the way, listening to the voices from the dim-lit windows above him. ‘Don’t you lie to me, I’ve seen the way you look at the girl …’ ‘Can’t something be done? If we lose the shop …’ ‘I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s wrong!’ In a doorway that smelled as if the entire district used it as a public urinal (most doorways in Pa
ris did) he stopped, and retreated into the shadow, watching. The voices quieted in the windows around him. In the garden across the way, beyond the wall, a nightingale sang its liquid notes.

  The clock on St Eustache replied. Midnight.

  Not long after that he heard her, the light soft susurration of petticoats – taffeta silk, he thought, remembering Ayasha’s construction of such garments – and the heavier whisper of a domino cloak. The houses on his own side of the street cast shadows like ink, but the moon had just cleared their roofs. Movement on the other side of the street. January waited in silence, and she passed so close to him that he could smell the sandalwood of her perfume, and in the dusky masses of her curls could see the glint of diamonds, the moon above her brow, and the glimmer of three stars.

  Why her?

  His fingers paused, resting on the keys of his piano. The house had grown profoundly still – the Rue Esplanade outside as well. The candle on the corner of the piano had burned nearly to the socket, his mind noted automatically that it must be long after midnight.

  I should go to bed.

  The night was heavy as steamed blankets. He knew he would not sleep. It felt extraordinary to him, that after nine years he could still walk from one end of Paris to the other in his mind, could still recall the route from the rooms he and Ayasha had shared on the Rue de l’Aube to the market, to Daniel’s house, to Notre Dame. As he walked them, at least once a week, sometimes oftener, in dreams.

  Looking for some part of me that I left there? And does that part search, in its dreams, for me?

  Why her?

  The sour stink of piss, rotted cabbage, Paris muck. The glimmer of moonlight on diamonds.

  She’d seemed to turn into shadow herself, in the gateway that led to number fifteen’s garden. So great had been the stillness in the Rue Notre Dame des Victoires that he’d heard the metallic click of the gate-lock turning over.

  He has to be getting his food from somewhere. The woman could have been concealing anything, beneath that all-enveloping cloak.

  A quarter-hour passed, by the clock on St-Eustache; then a half-hour. At one end of the street a peddlar passed by, singing softly:

  Entrez dans la danse,

  Voyez comme on danse,

  Sautez, dansez,

  Embrassez qui vous voudrez.

  Moving soundlessly, tensed to flee at the first whisper of noise, January crossed the street to the garden door.

  She’d locked it behind her. January stepped back a few paces, but the wall was high. The garden was sufficiently long, and the house low enough, that he couldn’t see whether light shone in its windows or not.

  Damn it …

  He retreated across the street, then took a running start and leaped with all his strength. His arms were long; he caught the top of the wall, pulled himself up, and looking over, got a dim impression of a narrow town garden. A small fountain in the center, dry and filled with leaves. Near the gate what looked like a miniature Chinese pagoda, its porcelain roof besmeared with bird droppings and its walls lost in a tangle of vines.

  No lights in the house.

  Curtains?

  Or did she just go through the house – if she has a key – and out the front door?

  He dropped down from the wall and realized a split-second too late that in the act of leaping up to look over the wall he had neglected to keep an eye on the ends of the street behind him. Violent movement in the darkness, men running towards him, how many he couldn’t tell. He plunged toward one end of the street and tried to dodge past. A club cracked across his shins and he staggered, a second blow felled him, and a third smote him across the back of the neck when he tried to rise.

  He lashed out in the darkness – only one man, he thought, and then a second one, or maybe two, came running up from the other side of the street. A brutal kick took him in the belly and he brought up his arms, protecting his head, as more blows rained on him and darkness closed in.

  1839

  It was partly recollection of this turn of events, as well as his customary caution about going outside the bounds of the old French Town, that prompted January to take Hannibal with him on his expedition to view Henry Brooke’s New Orleans real estate on the following afternoon.

  ‘Somewhere,’ he said, as he and Hannibal guided their rented mounts from the shell road along Bayou St John and onto the track beside the smaller waterway, ‘there has to be some trace of a reason for Brooke’s murder. Some thread that will lead me to the real killer – or at least to evidence that someone had better reason to do away with him than poor Jacquette had.’

  ‘Quot homines tot sententiae: suo quoique mos,’ agreed the fiddler. ‘And unfortunately, at first glance, she seems to have the best of all possible reasons.’

  Of the four properties either purchased or negotiated for by Brooke in the two weeks of his residence in New Orleans, Chitimacha was the only one which had ever been actually put to use. The remains of overgrown sugar fields surrounded the house like the castle of La Belle au Bois Dormant, a massive granny knot of cane stalks, palmetto, weeds, and rat nests through which it was abundantly clear nobody had hacked his way in decades.

  The overseer’s house had burned down years ago, its surviving timber and furnishings looted by whatever trappers lived in the nearby swamps. Weeds and vines choked the few slave cabins – far too few, January guessed, to have housed the bondsmen needed to make the plantation a profitable concern. ‘I’m guessing the former owner hauled his cane over to the widow Aury’s—’ he named the nearest large plantation owner – ‘to have it ground and boiled. On a place this small, that’s enough to burn up your profits right there, even before that flood ten years ago cut the bayou off from the main river.’

  Over the seven years he’d been back, January had learned from Olympe most details about what had happened in and around New Orleans during his absence in France. He recalled clearly her mention of the flood in 1829. It happened all the time, in the high-water months of March and April. The levee would crevasse, the land along the river would be inundated six- or eight-feet deep, and when the waters retreated the big bayous like Gentilly, Metairie and St John might easily have altered their courses. New bayous could appear; old ones would find themselves isolated from the Mississippi by silting. As a child he recalled sitting on the sill of one of the high windows of the sugar mill at Bellefleur Plantation, staring out over floodwaters and watching his parents’ cabin drift past.

  On another occasion upon which Michie Fourchet had locked the Bellefleur slaves into the sugar house to prevent their escaping in the confusion of the flood, he’d seen a flatboat eighty-feet long – at that time steamboats were barely a rumor in the valley of the Mississippi – surge calmly past the sugar mill with all its crew struggling on the long sweep-oars and cursing fit to shock the Devil in Hell. And indeed, a few hundred feet from the ruins of the Chitimacha house, the much-decayed carcass of a steamboat lay half-aground in the shallow bayou, the faded letters – REL– half-legible under a snarl of honeysuckle and wild grapevine on its bow.

  ‘How much did he pay for this – um – demi-paradise?’ Hannibal turned in the saddle of his rented horse to survey the desolation.

  ‘Eight thousand, according to Shaw, in three installments. And it would take three times that at least,’ he added, seeing his friend’s eyebrows rocket up, ‘to put it into production, not even counting the cost of slaves.’

  ‘Obviously the previous owner wanted to get rid of the place, and no wonder. Still, it’s a curious thing to buy …’

  ‘It’s an absurd thing to buy.’ January swung down from his own mount, a very large and sturdy riding-mule that Maggie Valentine at the livery – for whom he had done favors in the past – let him take for half price, given the predilection of some members of the white community to take offense at the sight of a black man on a horse. ‘Particularly for a man who is already tangled up with some kind of skullduggery at the British Consulate. So let’s see if we can find wha
tever it was that made the property worth twenty-five hundred dollars out of pocket.’

  January had brought a cane knife – one of several weapons he kept cached unobtrusively around his house – and with that and two snake-sticks, he and the fiddler slashed and prodded their way gingerly up to what remained of the house. Like all plantation houses in bayou country, it stood on six-foot brick piers, the storage rooms beneath now choked with swamp-laurel, and all its floor timbers perilously rotted. As they moved from room to room, January saw little that would have made the place worth buying and nothing out of the ordinary: it had been stripped of the little furniture it had once contained, and such movables as doors, shutters, and window glass had long since been carried away. A square hole in the wall of what had been the owner’s bedroom showed where a safe had once been. Even the tiles that had been laid before the fireplaces had been prised up and taken.

  Systematically, he and Hannibal went through the dilapidated slave cabins, the site of the overseer’s house, and even the non-flooded portions of the ruined steamboat, hung over with foliage, alive with mosquitoes and swimming with copperheads.

  ‘Whatever he was doing,’ said the fiddler, thrashing through a tangled curtain of honeysuckle and back out to the slanted planks of the deck, ‘it can’t have had anything to do with what’s actually here. So what can a man do with land like this? Besides sell it to some other fool?’

  January murmured, ‘What indeed?’

  I’m missing something …

  He felt almost as if he were winding a clock whose inner gearwheels were missing teeth. A sense of things not connecting.

  He climbed to the highest point of the steamboat deck, looked back toward the ruined house. Something brown – a deer? – moved in the trees beyond; Hannibal flinched, and slashed for the thousandth time as mosquitoes whined around their faces. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘“The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves …” Clearly Mr Shelley had never visited the tropics. Nothing is worth being eaten alive in this fashion.’