‘I don’t see how,’ said January quietly. ‘He seems to have covered his tracks very thoroughly. Gerry O’Dwyer was a man I knew – well, I met him only once, and that briefly – in Paris, in the summer of 1830. He disappeared immediately after the Three Glorious Days—’ he could not keep sarcasm from the way he pronounced the words – ‘and his disappearance was responsible for the death of the wife of a friend of mine. She was accused of murdering a man. His testimony could have saved her.’
‘My dear January …’ Oldmixton’s brow creased with distress. ‘I’m so sorry—’
‘Nothing for you to be sorry about,’ January said. ‘It was a long time ago.’
It was a long time ago.
He sat in the dining room, by the light of two guttering candles, for nearly two hours after Oldmixton left. Was it like this for Daniel? Something about the gathering that evening took him back to his friend’s gorgeous gold-and-turquoise salon, to the nights when Jeannot Charbonnière and Lucien Imbolt and Armand and Carnot and all the others would gather …
Their faces came back to him, street urchins and medical students, wealthy and poor, grouped around that black-and-gold table. What can we do? How can we solve this? There has to be something …
You go do this – You find this out and report back to me …
He felt as if he had indeed stepped back into some metaphysical river, returned to the place he’d been before.
Find Juju, that’s your task. We’ll find Rose.
Would they? He trusted his friends with his life, but he found he did not – could not – leave this in any hands but his own. Only I can do it … How foolish was that?
He remembered Armand de la Roche-St-Ouen pacing, unable to sit still, twisting his hands, tears sometimes running down his face. ‘There has to be something else,’ he kept saying. ‘There has to be some way to find out.’
Daniel, with less and less to say, losing flesh, growing gray before January’s eyes.
1830
When Ayasha had told them the name of the woman with the moon and three stars in her hair, January had exclaimed, ‘Phaedre Hirondelle? The opera singer?’ As if there were two Phaedre Hirondelles in Paris, both of whom had admirers rich enough to buy them diamond moons to put in their hair.
‘It’s what that poor silly ’uwz at Gemier’s said.’ Ayasha shrugged, and swept into a seat at one of the little tables that cluttered the arcade outside the Chatte Blanche, in a great flounce of striped skirts. Chatoine and her little gang of snarly-haired moppets grouped around her – Ayasha took the youngest of them, a tousle-headed five-year-old named Momicharde, on her lap. The Palais Royale had returned to its customary mode of business some days ago (‘And why not?’ Pleyard had groused. ‘His New Majesty needs the money, I’m sure.’), and music trickled down the steps from the gambling establishments on its upper floor, as if the city had not been rocked by riot and revolution only three weeks ago.
‘And they were bought for her by Celestin de Gourgue,’ she went on, ‘because I asked – claiming, you understand, to be the confidential maid of Celestin’s other mistress. And you owe me twenty francs,’ she added, turning to Daniel. ‘Or else there is no bread and no oil in our house tonight, and no charcoal for the stove. And a cup of coffee would not be out of order either. And some frites for my bodyguard.’ She waved grandly at the children.
‘O jasmine that twines upon the wall of Paradise …’ Daniel rose from his chair and bowed deeply over her hand, to the evident amusement of a group of students and their girlfriends at the next table. ‘I would pay double that amount if it meant going without bread and oil myself.’ He dug in the pocket of his cream-colored silk jacket and produced a packet of Banque de France notes, then went in quest of a waiter, several of these gentlemen having made themselves scarce in the days since the end of the riots. Watching him, January reflected that in the weeks since the uprising his friend had gradually abandoned the extravagant coats of brocade and antique silk. This didn’t make Daniel any less recognizable in a crowd – the banker’s son would have stood out anywhere with his height and the velvet glory of his voice. But the quiet grays and silvers of his jackets, and the subdued conservatism of their cut, were like a species of mourning – or a desperate apology for leaving that gorgeous regalia where Philippe could snatch it up, slip it on, before hastening out into the deadly night.
As for Phaedre Hirondelle, there was no question where she might be found. January had seen her only a few weeks previously, when an illness in the orchestra of the Opera Française had given him several days and nights of extra work. He’d watched that tall, too-thin, plain-looking young woman transform herself through Boieldieu’s music, filling the theater with a golden magic until it was irrelevant whether she was pretty or not.
Everyone in the beau monde in Paris – even in the heat of August in a year marked by rioting and the fall of kings – knew where the chanteuse première of the French Opera lived. Still nursing the bruises acquired in the Rue Notre Dame des Victoires, January hesitated to ask for volunteers among the little group of Daniel’s friends.
But when he mentioned this to Daniel as he returned with Ayasha’s coffee, Chatoine – taking from him the newspaper cone of fried potatoes – piped up, ‘Don’t be a canarie, they’ll see you coming a mile away.’ She licked the grease (and printer’s ink) from her fingers. ‘You stick out like a whore in a church, Ben, and for a second offense they’ll give you more than a warning.’
January was aware of this, too.
‘And what’ll they do to you?’ he asked grimly.
‘Chase us ’til they’re knackered,’ retorted the little girl with a cheeky grin. ‘And then cuss.’
‘I can’t let you,’ said Daniel.
‘You can’t stop us, copain. Me and the marmousins—’ Chatoine gestured around her at Momicharde, Grivot, and Poli – ‘can back Ben up when he goes and watches La Hirondelle, so while he’s getting whallopped by her lascars we can follow her … Or we can save Ben a thumping and he stays back here and we follow her and then come back and tell him where she went.’
‘You could be killed.’ January’s eyes rested for a moment on the little girl, tiny and thin in the cut-down, faded third-hand mourning she still wore for her brother Poucet. The men who’d beaten him, January knew, would swat these infants aside with barely a thought to the force they used, enough to break those tiny bones.
‘They got to catch us first,’ pointed out Poli, the older of the boys.
So January, with deep misgivings, agreed, and within two days Chatoine caught up with him on his way back from Mass one morning with the news that Phaedre Hirondelle wasn’t staying in her stylish apartment on the Rue de Plessy. ‘The porter of the building don’t know where she is,’ reported the little girl. ‘Grec the courtyard sweeper says the porter don’t know – and that wife of the porter’s knows everything. Grec says, La Hirondelle turns up every afternoon to ask whether she’s got mail or not. She’s got her own closed coach and two horses and a driver named Roquille, but they’re not at the local mews. The horses are match bays with white stars. The coach is dark red with cream panels.’
January sighed. ‘At least it’ll be easy to follow.’
Like many young men of wealth, Daniel ‘kept his carriage’, as they said: the rather expensive mark of a gentleman, in that it entailed not only the vehicle itself (Daniel’s barouche was an English model, varnished a deep turquoise-blue and gold) but a pair of horses to draw it, a coachman, a groom, feed bills, and stabling in the nearest mews. Furthermore, Anne – who would never sit in a carriage if she could ride, preferably astride (to the horror of her parents) – owned her own assortment of horseflesh, two beautiful Arabian mares and a long-legged Irish thoroughbred which could outdistance anything in the hunting field.
‘Too light for you,’ said Freytag judiciously, when he took January and Daniel on a tour of the stables the afternoon of Chatoine’s news, and had the groom bring out one of the carriage ho
rses. ‘Madame always speaks well of this lad’s performance under saddle, and if I may say so, sir, his nature is calmer than any of madame’s.’
The handsome black Frisian had a white blaze down his face, but the valet showed himself to be surprisingly adept at horse-coper tricks, and before nightfall, when January returned to the mews, the blaze – and the animal’s white near-fore stocking – had disappeared.
‘Good luck,’ said Daniel, as January swung himself into the saddle. By the stable lanterns his friend looked haggard; it was the twenty-third of August, and the following Monday Anne Ben-Gideon would appear before the juge d’instruction. ‘Whatever you can learn, anything …’ He handed up to January a fat leather wallet which contained – when January glanced inside – a startling quantity of bank notes. ‘Father,’ explained Daniel shortly. ‘He’s always been as horrified of her behavior as her parents are, but one must, as he says, keep these things out of the police courts.’
A shadow of pain crossed the big man’s painted eyes. ‘All this is bad enough,’ he added quietly, ‘without Father – and Mother as well – wailing and beating their breasts over how they knew I would bring them down in sorrow to their graves. Completely ignoring the fact that it was they who wanted me to marry, and to marry Anne …’
‘Why?’ Ayasha swung into the saddle of a gentle black mare lent them by Armand. Her hair tied back, her figure startling in a pair of slop-shop breeches and one of Lucien Imbolt’s old coats, she had taken it on herself – against January’s violent objections – to follow him at a distance. It was a measure of the growing desperation of the situation, January reflected, that Anne’s brother had finally consented to the adventure. The effort to track Celestin de la Marche could not afford to fail.
‘I assume your parents asked about the girl before they started negotiations with the family …?’
Daniel sighed. In the distance, the church clock of St-Roche sounded eight; January estimated that La Dame Blanche would be well into its second act, in a gaudy blaze of gaslight and harp arpeggios. Would Celestin de la Marche be in the audience?
‘Mostly,’ said Daniel quietly, ‘they enquired into the social connections of the Vicomtes de la Roche-St-Ouen and their willingness to admit to society at large that they were connected to bankers and Jews. It was, I’m sorry to say, a point on which Father insisted. One can go only so far in the financial world – or at least one could under King Charles, God knows what things will be like under the Citizen King – without introduction to the more select salons of those who sit on the Chamber of Deputies and have the ear of the king.’
His brow puckered, as if he recalled some pain or distress. ‘Anne’s parents had little enough desire to so admit. But their case was desperate, and Father was not only lenient in matters of dowry but offered an extremely handsome settlement to the family as well. And finances aside – though of course with both Father and the vicomte finances are never aside – to whom else would they marry Anne? Even were she not … not Anne … with a marriage portion of fifteen thousand francs, nobody would look at her. They’d been trying for months to arrange a match between Armand and one of the Comte de Noirchamp’s girls. I am sorry to say …’
He took a deep breath, all the blithe confidence of wealth – which January now realized suddenly was a shield against the scornful Christian world – drained from him, by grief, by fatigue, by anxiety for a woman he had come to love as a sister. ‘I am sorry to say that Father simply didn’t care. And neither did hers.’ He seemed to come to himself a little, and pushed the wallet into January’s hand. ‘But that doesn’t stop him from moaning that all of this is my fault.’ He managed a wry smile. ‘And, he says, if he has to buy his way out of disgrace, he’s perfectly willing to do it. Better, he says, that one should be prepared. I have no idea who he thinks you may have to bribe before the night is out, my dear, but he did tell me to count whatever funds you bring back.’
Sitting above him on the black horse, January wanted to dismount and embrace him, an outsider even among outsiders, incomprehensible to his family and to his family’s society alike. It came to him for the first time that he himself – even in slavery – had always known he was part of a community. Part of a family that would take him in if his mother, his sisters, his father were torn away from him.
No wonder Daniel sought the bohemian world, and the love of a young man who, like himself, was a stranger to his own kin. No wonder he and Anne, despite their forced marriage, found a kinship in one another.
He made himself beam, and replied, ‘I shall turn in accounts to the penny.’
Daniel returned the extravagant smile. ‘It will make my life so much easier if you do, darling. Good luck! And to you, my orchid of the desert.’ He took Ayasha’s foot from the stirrup, and kissed her ankle. ‘I would have let you use my back for a mounting block, but this jacket is velvet and it smudges so easily—’
Dark-clothed on a black horse, the small weak gleam of a bullseye lantern bobbing against the pommel of his saddle, January rode into the blackness of the mews.
It was early enough that some light fell from upper windows, in the Rue de l’Université and Rue des Juives, but January still felt as if he were navigating underwater in a river of ink. Sometimes when he turned down a quiet street he thought he could hear the click of hooves on the cobbles behind him, where Ayasha followed in the dark. But when he glanced back, there was nothing. She’d wrapped her face in a dark scarf, like a highwayman – and he prayed that the soldiers who still patrolled the streets wouldn’t take her for one.
The Rue le Peletier was crowded with carriages and fiacres – the evening’s performance was drawing to a close. Even as he rode along it, watching for the red-and-cream coach, the bay horses with white stars on their foreheads, he saw gentlemen emerging from the Salle le Peletier’s massive doors, sometimes alone, or in little black-clothed groups, sometimes with ladies on their arms dressed far too fashionably to be respectable wives. Lucien Imbolt had spoken of seeing Celestin de la Marche – as he must be called now – in a cabaret only a few streets away, the night before the rioting began. Had he come into town, like so many of these young gentlemen, to see his mistress? Would he risk capture in order to continue to do so?
He found Phaedre Hirondelle’s carriage without trouble. If Celestin de Gourgue bought that for his beloved, January reflected, no wonder his parents believed he was losing tens of thousands of francs gambling. The vehicle stood far up the street, almost to the Rue Chateaudun, and he rode past it, taking note of the little knot of coachmen at the corner, gruff quiet voices amid a blue whiff of tobacco smoke. From the corner of the Rue Chateaudun he could keep an eye on the vehicle – he had not the slightest idea of where Ayasha was, but guessed she was still behind him somewhere – and as the clock on St-Nicholas des Champs struck ten a boy came running along the street, lantern in hand. A big man in a coachman’s many-caped greatcoat separated himself from the group, with the usual handshakes and mock-punches and jests, and carefully removed the light rugs from the star-browed bays of La Hirondelle’s coach. Following them to the Opera itself was easy – the street was choked with carriages by this time and January hadn’t the slightest fear of being noticed – and he was within a few yards of the coach in the crowded little canyon behind the Rue le Peletier where the stage door opened, among a scrim of noisy admirers. He saw La Hirondelle herself when the coachman led his team to the door. She emerged alone, and was as January recalled her from the rehearsals back in June. Her strong jaw and beak nose prominent until she smiled, when all was eclipsed by the dark, sparkling beauty of her eyes.
Tonight, as she had three nights ago in the Rue Notre Dame des Victoires, she wore the moon and three stars in her dark hair. Men handed her flowers, pressed for a word with her. An employee of the theater guided her through the crowd to where the carriage waited, and for a time January saw the pale glimmer of her glove as she leaned through the window, letting her hand be clasped and kissed, and laughing wit
h her too-big mouth, the moon and stars flashing in her hair.
He suspected she’d head for one of the customs gates of the city, where the roads ran out to Montmartre or Courtille and on into the countryside, but she didn’t. Instead, the driver guided the coach along the Rue St-Antoine toward the Marais, the old district of crumbling hôtels which had once been fashionable, and convents where the daughters of the old king’s pious friends were educated in the old way, behind high gray walls. January had to fall farther and farther behind, guiding himself by rooflines and church towers as he had in his childhood guided himself through the Louisiana swamps by the shapes of bent trees and the clumps of palmetto and swamp-laurel; if you lost your bearings there, you were lost indeed.
At least there’s no alligators in the Marais.
Just the coachman to watch out for …
The lane they halted in was somewhere near the Rue St-Denis, a narrow side street with a gray wall at one side, and a small tradesman’s gate. He saw against the pale wall the cloaked woman step from the coach, hurry to the gate. A small light burned above it, and he saw beyond the wall the stumpy tower of a small church, and heard the soft stroke of a bell summoning worshippers to Mass. A convent …
Phaedre Hirondelle unlocked the garden gate, slipped in (And what do I do now?) but he saw the coachman waiting, and knew she’d be out soon, and she was. At the end of the lane, cloaked in the darkness, he saw her come to where the coachman sat in the soft glow of the carriage lamps, and unfold a piece of paper she carried.
Another drop box. What had Chatoine said, in Daniel’s peacock salon? You can add the Convent of Notre Dame de Syon to that …
She climbed in the carriage.
He leaves her word of where he’ll be.
Murder in July Page 20