Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  He emerged from the bedroom leading Baby John by the hand, to find Olympe with their younger sister, the beautiful Dominique, and a little group of the other ladies of their circle: Rose’s friend Cora, the Metoyer sisters from across Rue Esplanade, his own dear friend Catherine Clisson (with whom he’d been desperately in love at the age of fourteen), Jacquette Filoux and her daughter Manon, looking shy but determined, like the others, to bring gifts of jambalaya and spoon bread, ‘dirty rice’ and sausage, to tide the family over days in which cooking was likely to be disrupted (As if Rose ever went into the kitchen in her life, reflected January). Gabriel made coffee and batches of fresh pralines, and Zizi-Marie did the honors as hostess, greeting all the ladies with kisses while Ti-Gall – shy also in the presence of the strong January women – went about the room lighting candles.

  Rain had fallen. The banquettes had smoked. The sun had set. A little later January’s mother arrived, complaining like an affronted queen about the heat and dressed, clearly, for a leisured afternoon at the lake.

  ‘A little scrap of a thing, isn’t he?’ she commented about baby Xander and inspected the rim of the candy plate for chips.

  The only male present who wasn’t a member of the family was, not at all to January’s surprise, Hannibal. The fiddler was stunned at the news that the child would be named Alexander (‘After someone I knew long ago,’ he explained to Dominique), and was left uncharacteristically speechless. The only thing he said on the subject was, tentatively, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I can think of no one better.’ January put a hand on his shoulder.

  Later, when the ladies started helping Gabriel carry what remained of the food out to the kitchen, or to be put in the cool jars buried in the garden, the fiddler took January aside and told him, ‘I was out at Lovelace’s this afternoon. Jared Ganch has been arrested.’

  Uncle Juju.

  January felt for a moment as if he could have wept. Or driven his fist through the smooth new plaster of the parlor wall.

  He blabbed to someone. And Ganch will blame me. Stupid, stupid bastard …

  He had hoped that, by staying quiet, he would have time to make plans, that Rose would have time to recover if they needed to flee. The fragile joy he’d felt an hour before seemed to splinter in his hands, cutting the flesh to the bone.

  ‘He’ll be out by morning.’ And on my doorstep. ‘Half the municipal council is in his pocket.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Hannibal. ‘The charge is treason.’

  According to Abishag Shaw, whom January visited at the Cabildo the following noon, the charge had nothing to do with the missing Bank of England stock. ‘Don’t rightly know what it’s got to do with,’ confessed the policeman, scratching his greasy hair. ‘All I know is, yesterday afternoon Captain Tremouille calls me in, says I’m to take three of my boys down to the Flesh an’ Blood, an’ wait for Ganch to come back from seein’ off that brig he bought – the Hecate – on her way to Cartagena. When we got him back here that slick lawyer of his was here, with Prado an’ Wiltz from the municipal council, goin’ on about how he’s an upstandin’ citizen an’ a property owner, an’ that’s when Tremouille breaks it to ’em that actin’ on information from confidential sources, they had grounds for arrestin’ the man for treason against the United States of America.’

  He nodded toward the stair which led to the more sanctified offices on the Cabildo’s upper floor. ‘They’s up there now,’ he said. ‘Arguin’ it. But I don’t look for any results soon. Nor does Ganch, I gather. He’s paid off the parish prison to have his own cell, private-like, an’ made arrangements for food to be brought in to him. Better’n what most of the councilmen gets at their homes, I gather. There he goes,’ he added, and gestured to a tall deliveryman in a scarlet coat who crossed before the wide outer doors of the watch room, presumably on his way to the parish prison a block away, bearing two cardboard boxes and a bottle of wine.

  January said, ‘If anything changes – if there’s any word of his getting out on bail – would you let me know of it?’

  ‘That I will, Maestro. Is M’am Janvier all right? Sefton brought me word this mornin’ you’s a daddy again – I hope an’ trust they’s both well?’

  They spoke a little, of Rose, and of Baby John (‘He still fixin’ to be a professor of philosophy, soon as he learns to talk?’), and of the students who would be coming to Rose’s school as soon as the weather began to cool. Spoke also of Armand de la Roche-St-Ouen, in the common cell of the parish prison. ‘Though he’s in the infirmary last night. Seems he got into it with another prisoner ’bout bein’ really a nobleman back in France, an’ that’s not a good idea in a cell full of half-drunk flatboat men. That poor wife of his comes in two, three times a day, an’ speaks of hirin’ a lawyer for him – seems she got some money from someplace – but I told her, it won’t be no use.’

  As January left, Shaw walked him to the doors, open onto the Place des Armes and the tepid breeze off the river. Thunder grumbled over the gulf, where hurricanes would be brewing in a few weeks; clouds gathered for the afternoon rain.

  Shaw put a hand on January’s shoulder. ‘I don’t know what’s to come of Ganch, nor where he’ll be tried nor by who, seein’ as it’s a federal charge. If’n he’s let out I’ll give you warnin’. An’ if’n he’s let out, I’ll keep a eye on him, an’ on you.’

  January said, ‘Thank you,’ and turned away.

  As he did so, he nearly collided with the red-coated food deliveryman, returning from the parish prison, whistling a little tune.

  It was the slave Ti-Jon.

  The following day January received a note from Shaw, informing him that Jared Ganch had been taken sick in the night with what appeared to be cholera – to the frightened panic of the staff and the other prisoners, though no one else had as yet come down with the disease and as it turned out, no one did. Ganch himself had died, in great agony, in the early hours of the morning.

  The next time January went to confession – which was the following Wednesday – he confessed to rejoicing in another’s death, and gladly did the penance Père Eugenius prescribed for him. But as he walked back in the sweltering evening from the novena, his mind kept straying to M’sieu Naquet, the maitre d’hote at the Verandah Hotel, and that fat, red-bearded American who insulted the waiters. And he could not keep from remembering the way the cooks had grinned and slapped each other on the backs and whispered, ‘Well, he ate it.’

  And of what Naquet had said, about white men who ‘ain’t yet figured it out, that you don’t cause trouble for them that handles your food’.

  Or, evidently, them who were friends with them that handled your food.

  At Mass on Sunday he thought, when his sister Olympe traded smiling greetings with Ti-Jon, that a glance might have passed between them, but he couldn’t be sure. No more sure than he’d been that Ganch had intended to have him killed. If he asked Olympe about it he knew she’d only protest that no such thought had even crossed her mind.

  Certainly the City Guards were no more interested in investigating the death of a gambler and whoremaster than they’d been in taking trouble to prove the innocence of a young woman of color.

  Later that same week, a small paragraph in the New Orleans Bee mentioned briefly that an attempt by American filibusters to take advantage of the disordered state of things in war-torn New Grenada had come to grief. The men – and one woman – who came ashore from the brig Hecate, had evidently been under the impression that the government troops would be elsewhere than the convent of St Helen of the Blessed Shroud, which it was their intent to rob. To their surprise and dismay, government troops had been waiting for them.

  They had been captured and shot.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to be beholden to Sir John Oldmixton to that extent,’ said January, folding up the newspaper and dropping it to the floor of the gallery. Baby John – or Professor John, as they were beginning to call him now there was another baby in the household – pi
cked it up and began trying to fold and re-fold it in patterns known only to himself. ‘And I suspect it will lead to trouble later. But I can’t say I’m not grateful for so many … fortunate coincidences.’

  ‘You did say,’ pointed out Rose, ‘that he owed you.’ And she adjusted the linen cap over tiny Xander’s wispy brown curls.

  Something in the tone of her voice made January wonder for a moment whether his wife knew anything about whatever Olympe might or might not have put into the food that Ti-Jon took to Jared Ganch in prison. Then he let the thought go.

  The sun was setting behind their roof line, dyeing all the tops of the raggedy trees on Rue Esplanade with gold. Up and down the wide street, every window and door was open to the breath of breeze from the river. From behind the house, from the streets that had once been the quiet and proper domain of the plaçeés, voices drifted: raggedy children, two women arguing, a man shouting them both down. A whispered reminder that towns changed even as lives did. Here, facing the Rue Esplanade, there was quiet, and peace and the thrum of frogs and cicadas. He had finished the last of the painting in the parlor that afternoon, and his muscles were just starting to stiffen – a reminder that lives changed, bodies changed, even as towns did.

  The first of their students would arrive in October. Rose would have her school again; January, a little coterie of piano students to teach.

  Somewhere close by, one of the little cottages on the other side of the neutral ground, someone was playing on a piano – badly – a Chopin sonata that had been popular in Paris, the summer of the Three Glorious Days.

  Another world and another life. Another self, who would have recoiled in disbelief at the suggestion that he would ever live in New Orleans again.

  Across a chasm of time he looked back at himself, sitting in the window of the rooms on the Rue de l’Aube with Ayasha and the cats. Like the gallery, their room had faced roughly east, and at this time of the afternoon, as here, the city visible across the river had been blue with shadow, gold-crowned from the setting of the sun. Memory filled him – the Rue de l’Aube, the Palais Royale, moss on ancient cobblestones and the yelling of mobs. Daniel in his gorgeous coats, frail old Lucien Imbolt and the Société Brutus, Ayasha – the structure of his life …

  As Bellefleur Plantation had been, he supposed, in the days of his childhood: the dark-green bayous, the platt-eye devil that lurked in the night, his aunties and uncles and the burnt-sugar smell of the fog during the grinding season. The fear and the wonder of childhood.

  But it was true that you couldn’t step twice into the same river, and the Mississippi was a long way from the Seine. These things had once existed – they would exist forever in his heart – but they were things which were no more.

  Armand de la Roche-St-Ouen had lived within a few miles of him for the past four years, without his knowledge – and arguably had not been the same pampered youth he’d known in Paris. Nor was the wastrel fiddler who’d spent the early part of the summer of 1830 with Armand entirely the same man who’d been January’s friend for these past seven years.

  Nine years later, January was here. And this was what truly mattered, within the circle of his arms: now, this evening, this moment. Rose, Professor John, Xander …

  The smell of paint, the voices of Gabriel and Zizi-Marie, the cursing of draymen on the road to the bayou that ran before his door. The plaintive (and badly-played) echoes of the world he’d left came to him like the ghostly ringing of church bells that fishermen were said to hear, from cities drowned in the sea.

  New Orleans. Not a misstep, or someplace he’d accidentally wandered when he should have stayed in Paris, in whatever world it was in which the cholera hadn’t come and Ayasha hadn’t died.

  Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit, cras amet, Daniel had written to the man he had loved.

  May he love tomorrow who has never loved before; may he who has loved, love tomorrow as well.

  This was where he needed to be.

  This was home.

  FOOTNOTES

  CHAPTER ONE

  1 See Good Man Friday

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1 See Drinking Gourd

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  1 See The Shirt on his Back