His words stopped and he froze, as Hannibal came walking down the broken shells of the garden path in the dappled green shade. ‘The girl in the house told me you’d be back here,’ said the fiddler in French, ‘Armand.’
Armand stood as if turned to stone, and his wife looked from Hannibal to her husband, inquiring; she speaks no French, thought January. Her brow clouded, as she saw her husband’s shocked face. She murmured, ‘Liebchen …?’
Armand appeared not to have heard her. Stiffly, he said, ‘Alec.’
‘It’s not a name I go by these days,’ said Hannibal apologetically. ‘As I understand, neither is Armand de la Roche-St-Ouen. Madame …’ He removed his hat, bowed to Madame Francheville, and kissed her hand.
For a moment, it seemed to January that Armand would have made a run for the ciprière, or the road, or the house. But he looked at his wife, and tightened his fingers reassuringly over the hand that held to his arm. ‘Would you wait for me here, liebling? This is Mr …?’
‘Sefton.’ Hannibal bowed again, and addressed the lady in German. ‘An old friend of your husband’s, though we have long fallen out of touch.’
Her smile was radiant, and she replied, also in German, ‘Of course.’
Armand steered her gently to a garden seat beneath an oak, where some fragments of the morning cool might have lingered. Taking Hannibal by the arm, he led him to the bottom of the garden, so close to the hedge that January feared for a moment that they’d pass on through into the thickets and give the game away entirely.
But they stopped, where the shadows of the trees grew thick.
Quietly, in French, Hannibal said, ‘I know what you did.’
Armand turned his face away. For a long moment there was no sound but the rattle of the cicadas in the swamp, and the voices of children somewhere beyond the trees in the next yard. January understood that he himself wasn’t the only one who looked back over the chasm of years to a different world, a different planet. Paris in the last days of the Bourbons. And a different man who had worn his flesh.
‘I could have wept,’ whispered Armand at last, ‘I could have thrown myself in the river, when I turned his body over and saw that it was de la Marche that I’d shot, not that sodomite Jew.’
He doesn’t even think of Brooke, realized January. It’s as if he has forgotten that murder completely. He’s still in Paris, in his heart.
Maybe he has been so for the past nine years.
Armand was trembling as he looked back at Hannibal, desperation in his eyes. ‘A man of good family, a grandson of the Noailles … A connection of my mother! And then when they arrested Anne, and that poisonous Madame de Belvoire got it into her head that unless and until someone were executed for the crime, her precious Tin-Tin would live under a cloud … Did you know he married some slut of an opera singer? God, I could have laughed—’
But he was sobbing instead as he clutched at Hannibal’s sleeve with frantic hands. ‘I kept telling myself … Kept hoping they’d find someone else, anyone else … Kept praying they wouldn’t really send a daughter of a good family, of an ancient house, to the guillotine! A girl with the blood of the Valois kings in her veins! If King Charles had still been on his throne it would never have happened!’
His voice fell to barely more than a frantic whisper. ‘Do you remember, Alec, that day whenever it was, in ’28 or was it ’29? When the whole pack of us went to watch that execution after spending the night at the Yellow Palace, drunk as David’s sow, to see that fellow, what was his name? Chirac? Thierry? The fellow who’d killed his wife or her mother or whoever the hell it was … Do you remember how he fought them?’ Words tumbled faster and faster from his lips, and even at that distance, January could see the glint of white all around the pupils of his staring eyes.
‘Remember how he kicked and struggled as they dragged him up the steps of the platform? How he cried and pissed himself and fell on his knees, and they had to pick him up and shove him against that horrible little table, to strap him down? Remember how he wept and begged? And when the blade dropped …
‘It’s never left me,’ he whispered. ‘While Anne was in prison I kept dreaming of that morning. Dreaming it was me up there, screaming for mercy and slipping in my own piss on the platform and I couldn’t … I couldn’t …’
So you let Anne go through it instead. January saw again that small slender form in the green dress, that shorn proud head held high.
‘Alec, you were there! You saw it! You saw how his mouth went on forming words after his head was off. You saw how his eyes moved, looking from one to another in the crowd, aware. Alive. His eyes looked into mine, Alec, and the head lived yet …’
‘I was there,’ said Hannibal gently. ‘And yes, I saw his eyes. I dream about it, too. But I wasn’t talking about that, Armand. I know you killed Gerry O’Dwyer.’
Armand began to weep, burying his face in his hands. At the other end of the garden, his wife struggled to rise from the bench where she sat, levering at her cane with all her strength, and called out in English, ‘Bertie? Bertie, is everything all right?’
He swallowed hard, raised his head and put all the cheer he could into his voice: ‘It’s all well, leibling. Just – news of a friend. It’s all well.’
He turned back to Hannibal, as the woman sank again to the bench. ‘He knew what I’d done, you see,’ he whispered. ‘I needed his help to get rid of de la Marche’s body. They’re … heavy. Bodies. When I saw it was de la Marche I’d shot, I needed someone to help me get the body away. I’d sent for the Jew pig to the garden of the convent of Notre Dame de Syon, where my aunt was Mother Superior: I had the key to the garden gate, I knew all the nuns had gone, when the rioting began. I’d been in and out of the place since I was a child, I knew the drains under the balneary opened into the sewers. And Anne had told me about how the rebels would move about through them. Anne had told me they’d be building barricades on the Rue St-Martin and the Rue St-Denis, if trouble started. So I sent him a note, in her hand, to come that night …’
He shook his head, trembling again, as if, thought January, he were still in that convent garden, waiting. Listening for a footfall approaching the gate, hearing the gunshots and the shouting, nursing his grievance. Not that his sister had been given in marriage to a man who might easily have made her unhappy – his sister whom he loved. But that the man was a Jew and compromised his own social chances.
‘I stood waiting for him just inside the gate. I shot him as he stepped through it, there were so many shots being fired all over Paris that night, nobody would even hear. But when I tried to lift him I realized I’d need help. I didn’t … I’d never tried to lift another man before.’
‘It’s not something one thinks of,’ said Hannibal quietly. ‘Tamdiu discendum est, quamdiu vivas …’
‘And he was tall, as tall as Ben-Gideon. I couldn’t get him through the sewers alone. I dragged his body down to the chapel crypt, and sent word to Gerry at his rooms. For a wonder he was there. He didn’t reach me until well after daylight. I gave him two hundred francs – it was all I had. Then when the fighting died down the following night we moved him, when everyone in the city was asleep. He was stiff by that time, Gerry had to break his shoulders … Gerry must have fled Paris that same night. The man always was a coward …’
You should talk, January bit his tongue not to say.
‘I didn’t think anything of it, until Anne was arrested. How was I to know musket bullets are that different? By then I had no idea where Gerry had gone. He would have said Anne was with him! That’s all the police needed to have known!’
Hannibal said nothing, only looked at him with a kind of wondering pity.
‘I couldn’t … every time I thought about telling the police what I knew, I remembered …’ His voice caught on a sob. ‘I was Father’s only son. The only heir to the title. I couldn’t do that to our house. To our name.’
‘But you could do it to her.’ Hannibal’s voice was so soft, Ja
nuary wasn’t certain Armand even heard him. He certainly gave no sign that he had.
‘But then he came back.’ Armand’s voice, which had risen, sank again. ‘Two years, three years … sometime after the cholera. O’Dwyer came back to Paris. He came to our hôtel and asked for money. He was calling himself Preston then. He threatened to tell what he knew. Mother had died the year before, and Father not long after her. I knew Father was in debt, but … even with what King Charles had given us for the lands the revolution had confiscated, there was almost nothing left. I don’t know what Father was thinking, or what he’d spent the money on …’
January saw his friend’s eyebrows lift and guessed he was remembering some extravaganza of carriage horses and waistcoats, gaming debts and good quality champagne. Whatever he’d told them he was doing with his time and their money …
‘I gave O’Dwyer what he asked. It crippled the estate, but I couldn’t let the name of our house be sullied. Then two months later he came back, and asked for more. I fled from France, changed my name, came here. I found work – what Father, or Mother, would think of it I can’t imagine, but better that than our name disgraced. I met Belle …’
His face softened as he looked back along the garden walk, to the thin, tired-looking woman on the bench. ‘Who would have thought that I’d find such joy, such peace, with a penniless, dowerless girl of no family? My parents would never have looked twice at her. But she – and our children – have changed my life, Alec. She is so … good. That’s the only word for her. Good. Even in her pain – and she has been in pain, ever since little Nicko’s birth last winter – she is cheerful and thinks of no one but our children. When O’Dwyer showed up again, three weeks ago, I knew I couldn’t flee again. I couldn’t leave Belle. I knew I had to make sure of him.’
‘So you sent him a note in Anne’s hand,’ said Hannibal softly, ‘knowing he’d come.’
Armand nodded. ‘I bought concert tickets for a musicale in Mandeville that night,’ he said, ‘and made arrangements to rent a cottage for a few days. I try to do that every summer, because Belle feels so much better in the cool by the lake. At the last minute I pretended to be sick, and told them I’d join them later. She took the servants with them – we have only the two – and the house was empty when O’Dwyer arrived. It was just before sunset, when you often hear shots from hunters in the woods. I doubt anyone in this neighborhood thought twice about them.’
‘I take it you shot him in the house?’
‘Just inside the hall door,’ the young man replied. ‘I’d laid down an oilcloth, and layers of old carpet, so the blood wouldn’t stain the floor. It … it took rather more than I’d thought it would. In the end I had to pour linseed oil on the floorboards, and come up with a tale about having had some delivered … there are rugs over the place now. I managed to drag him down under the house – we store wine down there, and there’s a flight of stairs from inside the kitchen. Then a little after midnight I slipped out, and borrowed a pirogue which my neighbor Sansome keeps tied near his house. I thought if I dumped O’Dwyer’s body in the turning basin, amid all those saloons and bawdy houses, everyone would assume he’d been shot in some brawl.’
Hannibal cocked his head like a skeletal bird. ‘As you assumed de la Marche’s death would be attributed to the rioting. Was anyone arrested for it?’
Armand waved dismissively. ‘I think they pounced one of the local whores. I took all his papers from his pockets – bodies become unrecognizable very quickly when they drown in the bayous, don’t they? Because of the … er … crayfish. With luck he’d sink very quickly and wouldn’t be recognized at all. It isn’t as if he didn’t deserve his end,’ he added. ‘Had he not fled Paris the way he did, Anne would still be alive. I would have stayed in Paris …’
He looked back down the garden again blinking in the dense sunlight, in the direction of his wife, and his face changed.
Had you not fled Paris, thought January, you would not have met Belle.
As I would not have known Rose, had I remained with Ayasha. Had Ayasha not died …
But the thought of not knowing Rose, of not holding her in his arms, of not feeling the tiny grip of his son – her son, their son – on his fingers was too terrible to consider.
And what would I, and Rose, and Ayasha, be then? He felt strange, and for an instant just a little frightened, as if coming down a hall in darkness he’d missed a doorway that he should have gone through. A doorway beyond which Ayasha waited for him. Had been waiting for him for nine years now.
But one cannot step twice into the same river.
‘It’s about those papers,’ said Hannibal in his light voice, ‘that I wanted to see you. It so happens that I’m in need of another identity just now, and particularly of someone with a British diplomatic passport …’
Armand seemed to wake himself, and nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said, with unquestioning alacrity. ‘I have them in the wine cellar, where I kept O’Dwyer’s body. I’ll show them to you.’
He took Hannibal’s arm, led him up the crushed shells of the path and toward the gallery steps, pausing for a moment to speak to his wife. January touched Shaw on the arm, and the two men skirted through the underbrush and around the opposite side of the house; Shaw breathed, ‘They’s only two servants an’ one of ’em’s bound to be a cook.’
‘That means they’ll both be in the kitchen.’
‘I’m guessin’ he keeps his gun in his study, when he ain’t layin’ in wait for somebody behind a door …’
The door that led into the low ground-floor rooms beneath the main house – the enclosed wastespace among the tall brick piers of the foundation – was at the front of the house, beneath the wide gallery. Presumably, guessed January, it was through this door that Armand had dragged Gerry O’Dwyer’s body at midnight, a week ago, to the little skiff on the bayou’s brink.
The door was locked, but Shaw had not come unprepared. From the satchel he had brought he took a thin crowbar and a hammer, fitted the metal to the lock and dealt it a blow that Hephaestus in the forges of the gods would have been proud of. The two men ducked inside, both stooping under the low rafters. January closed the door after them, lit a lucifer-match to orient themselves – it was indeed a wine cellar, though most of the racks were empty – and listened to the footfalls of the men in the house above.
Brick piers and cobwebs. The stuffy smell of mud and mould. Boxes and barrels near the ladder-steep wooden stair at the far end of the big chamber, clearly where the household stored apples and yams. Three or four large clay jars which had once held oil – one of them, by its stopper, still did.
January lit another match and Shaw slipped behind the nearest pier, which supported the front of the house. The ground-floor cellar itself, with its brick floor and supporting line of piers, was a single immense chamber and its front doorway was a good fifty feet from the stair from the kitchen. January, stooping, crossed the room in less than a dozen long strides, guessing that a clever man would steer his victim to the front of the house – to lessen the sound of a shot, though Armand would probably send the servants outside on some pretext. Whether Armand – who clearly didn’t keep his head in an emergency – would think of this, he didn’t know. And he didn’t want to risk Hannibal’s life on a wrong guess.
Footsteps in the kitchen above.
He blew out the match.
‘I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them,’ Armand was saying, as he opened the door above. ‘Watch the steps,’ he added. ‘They’re a bit steep.’ Lamplight staggered and veered across the barrels and oil jars. Like Americans, Armand preferred the illumination of oil lamps, rather than the candles which the French – and their libré cousins – invariably used.
Armand descended first, carrying the lamp. It was one of the Argand type, six or eight times brighter than a candle but barely able to illuminate even one end of the dark ground-floor chamber. Certainly Shaw would have been completely invisible at the far end of the room, eve
n had he not been concealed behind a pier.
‘I didn’t dare leave them in the study upstairs, with the servants, you know,’ Armand was saying. ‘Darkies are horribly inquisitive. And … well, I also worried that Belle might perhaps stumble on them, and ask questions. But because he was in the diplomatic, I thought perhaps a reward might eventually be offered, and it would be easy enough to come up with some plausible story about finding them.’ His voice echoed from the low rafters as he and Hannibal walked down the length of the big chamber. January slipped after them – a childhood in slavery had taught him, even at his huge size, to move as silently as a cat when he had to.
The circle of light halted by the wine racks. Armand set the lamp on an empty barrel, turned so that his back was to Hannibal and it looked as if he were taking something from behind one of the racks. From where January stood he could see the young man withdraw a slim sheaf of papers from his pocket.
‘I’d be careful about using the passport if I were you, though.’ Armand passed them to Hannibal. ‘I’m sure the consulate here can trace such things.’
‘Good Heavens, I wasn’t going to leave O’Dwyer’s name on it.’ The fiddler checked them over. ‘What are the deeds for? A plantation?’ He sounded convincingly surprised, for a man still covered with mosquito bites from searching a house and a steamboat on the property in question. ‘Good Lord. I’d better not try to sell that one, either, or at least not in the United States. Still, it might be worth—’
He broke off, as Armand turned around to face him with a gun in his hand.
A silver muff pistol. Lamplight glinted on the stubby barrel.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Armand. ‘I truly am, Alec. But you can see that I can’t take chances. I’m the only support Belle has, the only support for our children. She has no family, no one to turn to. It isn’t that I don’t trust you—’
Hannibal dove, as if trying to duck behind a wine rack, then dropped flat as Armand pulled the trigger.
The boom of the shot echoed like thunder in the huge darkness, and the next instant – as Armand fumbled in his coat pocket – Shaw stepped out from around a pier with a pistol in his hand.
Murder in July Page 27