Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Please understand, m’sieu.’ Again he shook his head, struggling with thoughts he had pushed aside. ‘I know my brother was a sinner, but … There was much in him that was good. In any case between Father and Monsieur le Marquis and his awful daughter, I panicked. I fled Noisette. I married Phaedre as quickly as I could, under my family name …’

  His hand sought hers, and she returned its pressure. On the table, the candles guttered, the gold light flicking over the diamond moon, the diamond stars, and calling echoes in the black coffee dregs.

  ‘And I have been in hiding ever since. But because of Philippe’s death I haven’t dared to simply leave Paris. In case of some emergency, some sudden event – whose nature I can’t even begin to imagine! – I wanted to be on hand. As Phaedre says, she would leave me keys, and instructions, of where to find money, and food, and shelter. One night I slept in the crypt of Notre Dame de Lorette, whose sacristan is the brother-in-law of one of the stagehands and the most venal being God in his wisdom created. On another, Phaedre’s arrangements fell through and we slept in her dressing room at the Opera, with Roquille keeping guard in the street. But you see,’ he finished, ‘on the night my poor brother was killed, whether it was by Madame Ben-Gideon or by someone else, Phaedre and I were together, at our friend Boulanger’s apartment. And Boulanger, and the tenor Valette, and five members of the ballet, were with us. I am sorry.’

  1839

  And so they left them, together in that comfortable little house in Picpus: the soft-faced young gentleman who later did indeed, January recalled, become the Comte de Belvoire, and his wife, the beautiful Hirondelle.

  The candles were burned down. It was almost dawn.

  The new comtesse, he remembered, had been roundly snubbed by the whole of French society – at least during the two years between that stifling night and the terrible cholera summer that had ended with Ayasha’s death and January’s departure from his adopted homeland. He had read not long ago of her death, at the age of thirty-six.

  Childless, the newspaper had said. Almost certainly, January guessed, because of earlier abortions undergone for the sake of her career. He had not read anywhere that the comte had married again, but such things often didn’t make the American papers.

  In any case, six mornings after that meeting in Picpus, Anne Ben-Gideon had gone before a juge d’instruction and had her case remanded for trial before the red-robed judge of the assizes, on the testimonies of Laurent the footman, Liane Pichon (‘hated all her husband’s men-friends like poison, she did …’), and Apollon Michaud (‘A more spiteful woman I never encountered in my life … in spite of all the men who paraded through her bed!’).

  Two months later, on the seventh of November, she had gone to the guillotine.

  In Rue Esplanade, the charcoal-seller’s wailing cry rose: ‘My donkey white, my coal be black, buy yo’ charcoal, ten-cents sack, chaaaaar-cooooal …’

  January blinked, but beyond the last guttering flare of the candles, he could see no whisper of light past the jalousies. A mosquito lighted on his wrist: he swatted it to a blot of gore. In an hour the bells would ring for morning Mass. Somewhere – he was virtually certain – Rose, and Gabriel, and Zizi-Marie would be hearing that bell. Like the bells of Paris, he thought, as Ayasha and he rode their black horses through iron darkness that smelled of cut hay and wood smoke, not speaking. Wondering what to do next. What they could do.

  He rose, and the smoking candles bent and flickered, the gold light dancing momentarily on the black coffee dregs in the cups on the table.

  Honeysuckle, he thought. For a moment he almost smelled it.

  What had Olympe said? The gold smells of honeysuckle; the way the diamond moon, the diamond stars had smelled of the sandalwood in Hirondelle’s hair.

  What can a man do with land like this? Hannibal had asked, thrashing through a tangled curtain of honeysuckle that hung over the doors of the ruined steamboat that was slowly rotting on Henry Brooke’s new-bought land.

  And January knew the answer. La Hirondelle had told him, with the memory of the diamond stars in her hair, and the scent of sandalwood in the night.

  Use it as a drop box.

  Like the birdhouse pagoda in an overgrown garden on the Rue Notre Dame des Victoires.

  I’ll leave information as to where and how he can find the packets I leave, the singer had said, the lamp in her hand and her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders.

  You have three weeks, Ganch had said.

  The other pieces of land – cheap and worthless – were only blinds. Diversions.

  And the question is now, reflected January, how to retrieve whatever is in that ‘drop box’ without having Ganch follow me to the place and rob me of even the leverage of making a trade.

  SEVENTEEN

  With gray light growing in the sky and the last balminess of the night yielding to morning’s thick heat, January fetched rough brown soap, and tepid water from the cistern, and washed himself in the yard. The ‘spit bath’ (as his mother called them) made him feel better. So would the last of yesterday’s rice, he reflected. But instead he bolted every shutter and window of the house, and walked the ten streets – over and down – to the cathedral, where he knelt among the marchandes and laborers, to hear Mass and receive the Body of Christ.

  Instead of praying that Jared Ganch and all his men would roast screaming in Hell, he made himself pray: ‘Thank you for giving me this chance. Thank you for guidance. Thy will be done.’

  He couldn’t imagine what life would be like without Rose. Without his son. Sometimes it felt to him that when Ayasha had died, his heart – and a huge amount of the surrounding flesh – had been carved, bleeding, from his chest. When he had met Rose, loved Rose, he had acquired a new heart, of a different color, a different consistency, a different composition than the heart that was gone.

  If that, too, were taken from him he suspected that this time he would simply bleed to death.

  If the gods really want to do this to me, I won’t fight them anymore.

  In any case he knew that if something went wrong and Ganch made good on his threat to sell his family, the gambler would almost certainly have him killed; Just to be on the safe side, as he would undoubtedly explain, without any personal animosity. It’s only business.

  Then as he rose from his knees to walk back to the outer world, he saw the cab driver Tyrell Mulvaney kneeling just within the doors.

  Mulvaney’s cab, with its two beautiful bronze-bay mules, was tied near the cathedral steps. January stood by the team’s heads, genuinely admiring the animals, until their owner emerged, a square-built, craggy-featured man in his forties wearing a cinnamon-colored coat and a top hat with a rose stuck in its brim. January said, ‘Mr Mulvaney,’ and held out his hand. ‘Benjamin January. Could you spare me a few minutes for a word, sir?’

  Mulvaney’s eyes narrowed, placing him. ‘You’re the feller what plays for the opera,’ he said after a moment, and returned his grip.

  ‘I am that, sir. Granville’s Marcellus told me where I might find you.’ Which wasn’t entirely the truth, since anyone in New Orleans who was paying attention to what went on around him would know where Mulvaney had his stand, but the driver’s shoulders relaxed and he smiled.

  ‘Ah, now, there’s a man what understands horseflesh!’

  ‘And from what I can see of those beauties of yours,’ returned January, ‘he didn’t lie about your eye for a good mule.’

  Respectable artisans and their wives, both white and colored, were arriving for the later Mass – the very few wealthy who remained in town wouldn’t put in an appearance until the ten o’clock Mass – but the driver took no notice of them. After a good ten minutes’ discussion of the intelligence, willingness, saint-like forbearance and esteemed parentage of mules in general and Tulip and Hotspur in particular, January brought up the English gentleman in the bottle-green coat whom Mulvaney had conveyed to Bayou St John on the last day of June. ‘For I won’t deny to you, si
r, the man was found shot the next day, and the woman he’s been staying with is accused of it. A friend of my sister’s, who was asleep in her bed at the time – and of course, being asleep in her bed by herself, can come up with no witness …’

  ‘Lord, the damn’ guards’d have you be robbin’ a bank where everybody can see you, rather than waterin’ your flowers in your own backyard!’ Mulvaney flung up his hands. ‘Pigs are all the same, they are, the whole world over!’

  ‘Certainly every part of the world that I’ve seen, sir,’ agreed January ruefully.

  ‘Cheap bastard he was, too, your Englishman,’ added the driver. ‘Give me an argument about the fare, an’ then tried to get me to come back in an hour, an’ then wait about til he came out to me … pah! All the same, bloody Sassenach …’

  ‘Where did you drop him?’

  ‘Bloody should have dropped him in the bloody bayou, is what I should have done. Got himself shot, did he? Good job on somebody.’

  ‘Bad job on the poor girl he’s been living with,’ returned January, ‘if we can’t find where he really was that evening before he ended up floating in the basin.’

  ‘How’d he end up in the basin, then?’ Mulvaney leaned one elbow on Tulip’s back and frowned, working out the geography in his mind. ‘There’s not current enough in that bayou to float a paper boat, not ten feet in a year. And I left the man just on the town side of that big bayou, what’s it called? The one that divides the Widow Fortin’s land from Howe’s …’

  ‘I know the place,’ said January. ‘Which side of the bayou?’

  ‘Upstream,’ replied the Irishman, using the standard Orleanean topography rather than the North-South-East-West directions favored by the rest of the world.

  ‘You turned around and left him there?’ Bayou Fortin was a good hundred yards beyond the last of the houses; Brooke must have either turned around and walked back, or have walked on to a meeting place further up the shell road. A place which would, he reflected, have had every trace of a meeting, fatal or otherwise, wiped out by the daily aspersion of summer rains. ‘Could you swear to that in court?’

  ‘That I can, sir,’ promised the driver, ‘that I can. Anythin’ to help a little lady that’s shot an Englishman.’

  Nevertheless, reflected January, crossing the Place des Armes toward La Violette’s coffee stand beneath the market arcade, he would have to go out – with Hannibal along for protection – and search along the verge of the shell road and back into the woods.

  After we finish at Chitimacha, he thought. And maybe whatever we find there will tell us what we need to know to free Jacquette Filoux – without having to track down the execrable Uncle Juju …

  ‘Uncle Ben?’ He turned sharply, and yes, it was Ti-Gall, tall and solemn and awkward in a much-stained calico shirt.

  He must have just come off-duty at the Flesh and Blood …

  ‘I think I found where they got Zizi and M’am Rose.’

  The bordello operated by Cassie Lovelace on Harter Street stood at the very edge of the Second Municipality, a few blocks beyond the last of the built-up area. It was early enough that none of the whores would yet be awake, particularly on a Sunday: the inhabitants of the Second Municipality, though they might own whorehouses, didn’t like to see the Sabbath violated. Nevertheless, January kept to the trees on the next lot. The kitchen windows at the back of the house were open and he could see a servant woman come and go to the woodpile and the outhouse, and it wouldn’t do to have even the chance of word getting back to Jared Ganch – the house’s owner – that a black man six foot three and built like Hercules had been loitering around looking at the place. It wouldn’t take him long to guess who that was.

  Ti-Gall had said to him that Mrs Lovelace – a trim blonde not much over thirty – had visited Ganch at the Flesh and Blood, dressed with a severe respectability one didn’t often encounter on Girod Street. This wasn’t something a madame would often do – she wasn’t trolling for customers in the gambling parlor – and the coincidence of timing was marked. After five minutes in Ganch’s office the pair of them had entered the saloon and sought out a fat, balding, rather bleary young man whose air of crushed defeat seemed to stem less from the alcohol he’d imbibed – ‘He been there all evenin’,’ Ti-Gall had said – than from the fact that he’d run through all his money at the craps table and the house wouldn’t front him any more. They’d talked to this individual for some minutes and he’d nodded, but had finished his drink with no air of hurry before accompanying Mrs Lovelace out the door. Later inquiry of the barkeep had told Ti-Gall that the young man was Dr Sparger, one of the dimmer lights of the American medical community.

  ‘It didn’t seem like there’s any emergency,’ Ti-Gall had concluded, as he and January had walked towards Canal Street. ‘But I thought you’d want to know.’

  January had sent the young man home when they’d reached the wide strip of ‘neutral ground’. He himself, if recognized, might face a reprimand or, at worst, a beating from Catastrophe Watling and his boys, but Jared Ganch needed him for the moment. There was a real possibility that Ti-Gall would be killed for snooping, and the New Orleans City Guards probably wouldn’t even investigate the random murder of a black saloon-boy. Watching the house now, January guessed that Rose, Gabriel, and Zizi-Marie weren’t being held on the premises itself. Deserted as the place seemed at this hour of a Sunday, in the evenings there would simply be too many people around who might see or hear something. It wasn’t fancy, but it was no dockside dive, either. Even Jared Ganch’s influence with the municipal council might not serve to keep him out of trouble.

  Particularly, reflected January, if the trouble involved information acquired from foreign consulates.

  But two hundred yards further on, beyond even the last of the staked-out promises of streets and lots, he found what looked like an old indigo mill, a ruinous brick building recently repaired with the usual back-of-town resource of old flatboat-planks, and flanked by a similarly reconstructed overseer’s house, and what had undoubtedly been a slave jail.

  The outhouse was newly dug, within the last few weeks, January guessed. The earth thrown beside where its pit had been delved hadn’t completely settled. By the midden of broken cigar boxes, eggshells, breadcrusts and chicken bones outside the back door, the house had been in occupation for roughly that long. A makeshift corral near the old mill housed a dozen horses, among whom he recognized a stripe-backed dun like the one Catastrophe Watling had been riding yesterday (was it only yesterday?).

  Do not be caught anywhere near this house.

  The place was silent – it was still only eight in the morning – but January knew a hideout when he saw one, and the fact that the place was this close to town told him roughly what was going on. He backed, very quietly, into the woods, and though his whole skin prickled with danger at being alone in the ciprière outside of town, he made his way back to Rue Esplanade by the most circuitous route he knew, looking over his shoulder all the way.

  Now was not the time to be seen taking even the slightest interest in Jared Ganch’s plans.

  Upon reaching home, he made himself a cup of coffee. A yellow-ware bowl that he recognized as Olympe’s sat, covered with towels, on the table outside the kitchen; it contained some of his sister’s excellent ‘hoppin’ john’. Evidently La Hirondelle wasn’t the only woman who left secret offerings of food for her menfolks. He reflected wryly that for a woman who had a sometime reputation as a poisoner, his sister was a marvelous cook.

  He couldn’t bear to return to the stillness and shadow of that unnaturally empty house, filled with the smell of drying plaster and fresh paint. Rose’s dream, he thought. Rose’s school. When the first of the girls arrived in October, would Rose even be alive?

  Will I?

  He settled at the worktable that stood in front of the kitchen’s open shutters, gazed across the crooked yard at the barred and shuttered house. I’d better write something, he thought, leaving the house to Olympe.
Otherwise, he knew, their mother would lay claim to a portion of it, and force a sale. If I leave it in a will, I can stipulate that Olympe give shelter to Hannibal, so he won’t have to go on towsing Kentucky Williams to keep a roof over his head.

  There had been summers, he recalled, when his friend had fallen afoul of the saloon owner (or when Williams had a new boyfriend) and Hannibal had taken refuge in the attics of disused houses here and there around the French Town, whose owners had gone to the lake. He’d spent two and a half months once, in the loft of Lorette’s livery stable, his presence unsuspected by anyone. January shook his head, smiling a little. Like Tin-Tin in his father’s various houses to which he had the keys …

  With an almost audible click, a dozen things fell together in his mind at once.

  The moon and three stars.

  Phaedre La Hirondelle bending to unlock the gate at fifteen, Rue Notre Dame des Victoires.

  He set his coffee cup down and said, ‘Oh …’ as the streetgate of the crooked little yard opened and Hannibal Sefton slipped through.

  ‘Ave, amicus meus.’

  Still feeling a little dazed at his revelation, January said, ‘Ave. You’re just the man I wanted to see.’

  ‘Every time anyone says that to me,’ said Hannibal plaintively, ‘I find myself in danger of my life or facing an accusation of paternity.’