Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  He propped himself on his elbows on Hannibal’s low pallet bed, and tried to concentrate on the fiddler’s well-worn copy of As You Like It. But the tale of brothers seeking the lives of their brothers, of mismatched lovers pursuing one another and hanging love notes on trees, turned his mind back to Paris again. When he slept, he dreamed of the prison of Saint-Lazare, and of Anne, gray-faced and shivering with terror.

  1830

  ‘The swine!’ cried Armand, as January and Daniel were ushered into the cell, the afternoon following January’s adventure in the Rue Notre Dame des Victoires. ‘The blackguards, to treat a lady this way! Filthy san-culottes! I think they revel in insulting the daughter of our house!’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Daniel dumped the food they’d bought on the way to the prison – bread, cheese, fresh peaches and figs and a bottle of pale wine – on the end of the bed, strode to the window and caught Anne’s shoulders between his hands.

  Her glance had gone past him to January, and she exclaimed, ‘Are you all right, Ben? What …?’

  ‘Just bruises.’ January crossed the cell to take the young woman’s other hand.

  Armand took another look at him and yelped with shock. ‘Did someone attack you?’

  January repressed a sarcastic reply, and answered, ‘I tried to get a look at one of Belvoire’s houses on the Rue Notre Dame des Victoires. Someone followed me, and I was beaten up and dumped in the gateway of Belvoire’s hôtel. Obviously, somebody thought I’d been sent by the comte—’

  ‘The blackguard!’ Tears of frustration and rage swam in Armand’s wide, blue eyes.

  That morning, while Ayasha pursued her enquiries at the shop of M’sieu Gemier, January and Daniel had returned to the Rue Notre Dame for another look over the garden gate, an expedition which had yielded them nothing beyond the information that the house – or more probably the garden – was being used as accommodation address by the lady with the moon and stars in her hair. All around the miniature pagoda beside the overgrown path, fragments of trash and birds’ nests were littered, as if scraped out of the tiny structure by someone dragging something forth. As far as January could tell (standing on Daniel’s back, this time, to look over the wall) the nesting material didn’t look weathered or widely scattered, as it would have been had it lain there even a few days.

  The house, when they’d gone around the front for a better look at it, was shuttered up tight, and the neighborhood children affirmed (for a consideration) that it had been so for many months.

  (‘Fat lot of good any of this does us,’ had groused Daniel. ‘After last night they’d be fools if they used this place again.’)

  Still holding Anne’s hand, he now guided her to the room’s single chair, and January poured out a glass of wine.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Anne shook her head, unable to speak, and Armand blurted in fury, ‘That swine, that … that animal Quicherat – the man from the Sûreté – has been implying that Anne set some kind of ambush for de la Marche. Followed him, or lay in wait for him …’ He shook his head violently, trembling all over. ‘It’s that hag of a wife of Belvoire’s! That hag wife, and her powerful friends … and that bastard Taillefer, pimping that rat-faced girl of his to whatever heir comes handy—’

  ‘Lieutenant Quicherat is in charge of … of the investigation,’ said Anne. She kept her voice steady, but January could see the effort it cost her. He remembered a girl on Bellefleur Plantation – Caline, her name had been: why did I remember that? I couldn’t have been more than six … Caline had been twelve, bright and pretty and petted by Michie Fourchet’s family for her cleverness. He didn’t remember why Michie Fourchet had taken it into his head to ‘give her a lesson’, but he had. She was uppity, January’s mother had whispered to him at the time, when Fourchet had finally opened the door of the woodbarn where he and one of the foremen had ‘punished’ Caline. She was spoiled. That’s how they ‘un-spoils’ you.

  More than the pulped flesh of her back, the swollen mess of her face, January remembered Caline’s eyes. The look in them, of a hurt and terrified animal, that will never suffer a human touch again.

  Caline’s back, and face, had healed. Her eyes had never gone back to what they’d been before.

  He wondered if Anne’s ever would.

  Anne went on, ‘He keeps trying to get me to admit that I hated Philippe. That I’d set out deliberately to murder him. That it was my gun that killed him. Daniel, I’d never—’

  ‘Of course not!’ Daniel put his hand to her cheek, a gesture of tenderness January had never seen his friend make towards his wife, pity and protectiveness breaking through the friendly bantering that had always been between them. ‘Good God, Anne—’

  ‘I was never jealous.’ Her voice pleaded as she put her small hands on his chest. ‘You know that! Not of Philippe – not of any of them. Not even that frightful bitch Apollon—’

  ‘Anne, I never thought you were!’ He caught her hands in his own. Daniel, being Daniel, had insisted on stopping home between their morning investigation and coming to the prison, to change clothes, have Freytag fix his hair, and put on a little rouge, so that he would be, as he said, ‘fit to be seen’. But as he bent his head down over hers, January was aware of Armand’s grimace of distaste.

  ‘Good thing she never was,’ the boy whispered furiously, ‘the way he paraded them around the town.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Anne. ‘If I hurt you—’

  ‘Hurt me?’ Daniel seemed momentarily nonplussed. ‘What, with those …’ He stopped himself from one of the several joking names that, over the past eighteen months, he’d applied to her ‘stable of stallions’, her ‘muscle-bound boys’. His voice tender, he murmured. ‘Don’t be a goose, Anne. And don’t go talking as if we’re not going to be shaking our heads over this whole business over Freytag’s coffee two months from now in our salon,’ he added. ‘There’s probably hundreds of those muff pistols being sold around Paris. I saw some only the other day, at Montjoie’s in the Palais Royale. Anyone in the city could have been using one. And Benjamin’s found a perfectly brilliant way to trace little Tin-Tin—’

  ‘Do you really think,’ murmured Anne, ‘that Celestin’s mother is going to let him stand trial for murdering his brother? Even if she knows that he did it? This … this Quicherat – the investigator – seems so sure, as if he had proof. But what proof could he have? Do you really think the comte is going to lose the second heir to his lands, and see them go to some cousin in the Limousin? Or that the Marquis de Taillefer is going to lose the chance to wed his daughter to Belvoire’s heir?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if Celestin is convicted,’ said January grimly. ‘Only that the juge d’instruction can be shown that there were others who could have done the murder besides yourself. Daniel’s right, the gun means little. It’s an antique type, but anyone could have such a thing. But as it is, we’re trying to prove a negative. To show that you have no proof about where you were and what you were doing because you are innocent, because you never thought you’d need such a thing. Gerry O’Dwyer—’

  ‘He’s dead.’ Anne turned her face aside, and gently, Daniel tightened his arm around her shoulders, so that her cheek pressed the dark silk of his lapel.

  ‘If he were not dead – if he were anywhere in Paris – he’d come forth. You knew him, Armand. He was your teacher … he’d find some way.’

  ‘Of course he would.’

  She looked past her husband’s shoulder to January. ‘And nothing has been heard – or found …?’

  ‘He had no family in Paris, I take it?’ said January, his own eyes going from Anne to Armand. ‘You’d know better than I about that, m’sieu. You said he was your teacher?’

  ‘No, he had no one in Paris.’ The youth spoke stiffly, and January guessed that this was how the flamboyant young Irishman had come to know Anne. But the admission that his sister would take a mere fencing master as her lover was clearly more than Armand de St-Roche-Ouen
wanted to admit. ‘And yes, he was my teacher – in English, a little, and in fencing. The only ones he knew in Paris were the other men in his reading group – men who’d been students with him at the Faculté des Lois. Or journalists. None who’d go looking for his body, who’d dare to be seen themselves, poking about the morgue.’

  His blue eyes filled again with tears. ‘You have to find the one who did this, M’sieu Janvier. Anne goes before the juge d’instruction next week. This … this monster Quicherat comes in every day and hounds her, questions her, always, Who was your accomplice? and hints how much she hated de la Marche. Sits there digging at his hairy ears and scratching himself, stinking of pipe smoke. He was a thief himself, that one, and a murderer, before he joined the Sûreté – half of them were! Stupid as a brick and blind as a bat. To send such a one to harass a lady, a daughter of a house renowned while his own were stealing sheep! I want to kill them.’ His voice broke, and he turned away, tears of anxiety running down his face.

  ‘I want to kill them all.’

  ‘Would the juge d’instruction believe such a thing?’ asked Daniel, as they made their way along the Rue du Faubourg St-Denis back to town. Under his rouge and eye paint and his pomaded curls, his face was haggard with a fear he had tried to conceal at the prison. ‘That Anne … What? Lured Philippe, like the villainess of an opera, to some deserted spot? Where, for heavens’ sake? We’re in the middle of the largest city in Europe!’

  ‘And yet the house at 15 Rue Notre Dame des Victoires is deserted,’ returned January quietly. ‘A man could have been shot in its garden and no one the wiser, until the body started to stink. The convent of Notre Dame de Syon was deserted when its mother superior, of whom Armand bragged, took her charges out of town; the monastery of St-Honoré d’Autun in whose doorway I hid Philippe’s body; the old gypsum-mine tunnels in Montparnasse, your father’s town house, for that matter, for I’d bet – if I had anything to bet with – he absquatulated, as the riverboat men say back home, at the first whiff of hot weather …’

  ‘Well, yes, but …’

  ‘This is the largest city in Europe,’ said January. ‘And one of the most crowded.’ He gestured around them at the thickening traffic: carriages, barrows of vegetables from the countryside, a hurdy-gurdy player with a trained monkey, a knife grinder and a vendor of second-hand underwear. ‘Yet all throughout it there are little hollows, like the holes in Swiss cheese, where murder can happen. And does happen, every day. One only has to get one’s victim alone, and stand close enough to him with a muff pistol.’

  ‘Anne would never have done such a thing.’

  ‘Anne’s maid, and a servant who was in your house on the night Philippe went out to meet his death, are now both in the employ of La Comtesse de Belvoire. Her elder son is dead. Whether she believes or not that her younger son committed the crime, until someone is guillotined for it, that son will stand in danger of being accused.’

  Daniel turned his face quickly aside at the mention of the machine that criminals jokingly called the National Razor. A small, protesting sound died in his throat.

  ‘So let’s hope,’ concluded January quietly, ‘that Ayasha has something to tell us.’

  THIRTEEN

  1839

  The recollection didn’t come to him whole and in order, of course.

  As is the way of dreams, the images were but fragments – Armand cursing at the Sûreté, Daniel wrapping Anne gently in his arms – mingled with the pissy, moldy stink of the courtyard of Saint-Lazare and the momentary cloud of perfume as he and Daniel passed a vendor of roses in the Rue du Faubourg St-Denis. Things that had nothing to do with these events obtruded themselves with agonizing clarity: Ayasha washing her hair in a bowl and pitcher in their room, while rain trickled down the windows; morning sunlight on the towers of Notre Dame as he walked back from early Mass. Then he’d wake, and lie listening to the cicadas in the trees of the ciprière that stretched out behind the Broadhorn, or the yelling of the men in the saloon in the other part of the building: brags and shouts, challenges and curses, ‘Fucken swine, you talkin’ to me? You skunk-face French pussy, you ain’t fit to eat with a dog nor drink with a nigger …’ ‘I’m cut! I’m cut! Oh, God, I’m killed …’

  And the rest of the memories would sort themselves into logical order for a time.

  Then he’d drift off, and see Anne under the arcades of the Palais Royale, with her hands on her hips and the silver muff pistol tucked into her tricolor sash: Nobody has ever accused His Majesty of not being a fool! And Gerry O’Dwyer adjusting his shabby cravat in the reflection of a shop window, before turning to her with his dimpled chin and dazzling smile.

  For a moment he dreamed about Ayasha’s laughter, before his visions slipped to the dank, stinking cell at the Cabildo, and a woman’s voice sobbing with the horrors, ‘Gimme some! Gimme some! Jesus Christ, doesn’t anybody got any dope?’ The smell of piss and vomit. Someone else screamed, ‘Get them off me! Get them off me!’ The rattle of cockroach wings and the scrabble of rats.

  A slim girl in filthy white sat crammed in a corner, staring around her in the darkness.

  And as one sees in dreams, even in the blackness he saw her face, and it wasn’t Jacquette Filoux.

  It was Anne Ben-Gideon, weeping the tears she could let no one see by day.

  First light waked him.

  Will they be watching the house?

  Rose would get word to him, from Olympe’s.

  The kitchen below, the saloon and the yard, were silent, save for the barking of a far-off dog. Hannibal was still gone, presumably murmuring Classical Latin endearments into Kentucky Williams’s shell-like ear. Cocks crowed in a half-hundred backyards beyond the trees. Visible through the open window – railless and looking straight out onto a twelve-foot drop to the yard – a distant hawk gyred in air like gray crystal.

  Are my friends of yesterday still following me? Do I need to send Hannibal – or one of Kentucky Williams’s girls – out looking for Tyrell Mulvaney?

  He reviewed yesterday’s visit to Chitimacha in his mind, the untouched tangle of weeds and maiden-cane that walled in the stripped-out ruin of the house, the swampy green water of the bayou like a sullen moat.

  Had he seen someone in the woods? Or had that really been a deer?

  Now he wasn’t sure. Getting the tar beaten out of him in Paris – added to a lifetime of looking over his shoulder for kidnappers (Something I didn’t have to deal with in Paris, Secret Police notwithstanding) – had made him wary, especially when he knew this was a matter that was worth a hundred dollars to one of Queen Victoria’s agents.

  Abishag Shaw boarded these days in one of the spare rooms at Valentine’s livery stable. Even if the policeman hadn’t gotten his message of last night, it should be easy enough to slip over there, and get him to check the neighborhood of Rue Esplanade, to see whether the house was being watched or not. If Shaw was out already, he could find Ti-Jon at the levee.

  He heard the creak of the ladder below the open doorway, a single whisper of sound. His mind identified it moments before he thought, I didn’t hear anyone cross the yard …

  There were riders in the woods …

  He was off the pallet bed and halfway across the attic, his boot knife in his hand, when a head appeared dark against the dawnlight and a scratchy voice whispered, ‘Maestro?’

  January put down his knife, and took a few more relaxed strides to reach the opening as Abishag Shaw scrambled the rest of the way into the room.

  ‘Did you have a look at the house?’

  Silently, the policeman held out a folded piece of paper. The handwriting in which the words ‘B. Janvier’ were written was unfamiliar and January’s eyes flashed, fast, to his friend’s face; his stomach sank at the bleakness in the gray gaze.

  The note was in French, and unsigned.

  M. Janvier

  My representative will meet you where the turnpike road meets the shores of the lake, at noon today (Saturday). Your wife and
children are unharmed and will remain so as long as you are unaccompanied and unfollowed. There will be no second warning, nor any other attempt to communicate with you.

  ‘I didn’t get your note til past midnight.’ Hands in pockets, Shaw spit a long stream of tobacco at a turtle creeping from the ditch along one side of Perdidio Street, a few feet from a man lying half in the water, snoring. The tobacco missed the reptile by several feet.

  January said nothing. Had said nothing, since they’d left the Broadhorn.

  ‘You said in your note as how you was havin’ M’am Janvier an’ the youngsters go to your sister, so’s I didn’t think nuthin’ of it, when I went by an’ saw the shutters all up an’ nobody there. Wasn’t ’til this mornin’, when I seed the shutters still up, that I went in.

  ‘At a guess,’ the guard continued, glancing sidelong at his still-silent companion, ‘that note’s from Jared Ganch, gambler what owns the Flesh an’ Blood on Girod Street. Leastways he’s the feller what employs Pasky Peever, who I seen watchin’ the Filoux place yesterday. Just watchin’,’ he added, answering January’s sharp glance. ‘For Uncle Juju, most like. If anybody is watchin’ your house, they’d’a seen me go in there already, an’ won’t be surprised none to see me come back with you.’

  Still January made no reply. The sun was barely up. Clear and tiny above the low roofs of the shabby collection of saloons, tents, and hovels that made up the Swamp, the bells of the cathedral, and of the mortuary chapel across the street from Jacquette Filoux’s house, called the faithful to early Mass. The air had begun to smell of fresh woodsmoke, as stoves were lit to boil morning coffee and to heat water for the washing of glasses in the more respectable of the district’s establishments.

  He felt as if electricity were coursing through his veins. I will kill them …