Ran Away (11 page)

‘Raihana,’ said Jamilla promptly. ‘I send her into the garden, in Shamira dress, Shamira veil. Sabid cease to hunt for her outside? Only, we must watch.’ She put a hand on Ra’eesa’s arm and explained something to her in quick low sentences. Ra’essa nodded, her wrinkled eyes grim.

‘We must watch,’ Jamilla repeated. ‘For if Sabid think it is Shamira, he may take her, may kill her, only to make my husband weep. You found her not,
Hakîm
?’ Her eyes, dark as a gazelle’s, returned to January. ‘Hüseyin return Friday.’

‘There are two places where I think she might be.’ January stood and bowed over Jamilla’s hand. ‘Those I will visit tomorrow—’

His outraged mind flung up at him the tasks already allotted for tomorrow – piano lessons in three different parts of Paris, rehearsals for
Proserpina
, that private rehearsal with the opera singer La Dulcetta that he’d worked so hard to get hired for  . . . 
Why am I going to all this trouble, for a girl I saw once, a girl who has barely spoken a word to me . . . ?

Because she is alone, as Ayasha was alone when she came here. As I was alone
.

Because she is a slave, as I was a slave. Because she ran away, as Ayasha did. As all those did in New Orleans, whose owners advertised for them like straying dogs
.

‘—those I will visit tomorrow, if I can.’

If I don’t starve to death between now and then
. Ayasha had just finished devouring the remaining batter-cakes.

‘I must go. Ayasha, will you see
Sitt
Jamilla safely home?’

And almost before his wife had said
Yes
or
No
, January was out the door and striding as swiftly as he could back toward the Rue Le Peletier.

January made it to the gaudy, gilt-trimmed Opera House with moments to spare and without further dinner, ravenous yet handsomely attired in dark well-cut wool and carrying his music satchel and his cornet. After the Opera was a ball in the fashionable district along the Vielle Rue du Temple – the aristocracy was indefatigable during its season of pleasures, and from autumn to Lent January felt that he was married to an insane, many-headed monster that never slept. Because the Comte de Cruzette had been ennobled by Napoleon, most of the older aristocracy eschewed his entertainments, but the
chevaliers d’industrie
, as they were called, were out in force: bankers, manufacturers, financiers whose social-climbing wives glittered with jewels. Carriages clogged the narrow streets, the dancing lasted until five in the morning, and since, at that point, it was easier to stay up than to get up, January proceeded with Lucien Imbot and Jeannot Charbonnière to a worker’s café on the Quai Beaufils for a breakfast that lasted until well after sunup.

‘Who is Sabid al-Muzaffar, anyway?’ he asked at one point, and Lucien gestured with a fragment of buttered roll.

‘Al-Muzaffar is the best and dearest friend of such men as the Rothschilds, Lafittes, and Städels.’ He named some of the most powerful banking families in Paris. ‘Allegedly their agent in the Sultan’s court until old Mahmud chucked him out. Quite the reformer, though coincidentally those reforms always entail large purchases of equipment through loans engineered by the Rothschilds, Lafittes, and Städels.’

‘That’s hardly fair, old man.’ Jeannot shook back his leonine golden mane. ‘You can’t have an omelette without breaking a few eggs, you know. And you can’t deny that the Sultan’s empire could do with being brought forward into the nineteenth century.’ He signed to the girl for another round of coffee.

‘Can’t I, though?’ retorted Lucien. ‘Centralize power in the hands of the Sultan so that he can more easily locate those who disagree with him? Make everything alike, as the Revolution tried to make everything alike here in France? Build factories to put artisans out of work?’

‘Build factories to bring down the price of shoes so an honest musician can afford them when they wear out?’ Jeannot held up his foot to display a well-cut boot. ‘I only wish! I lived on bread and cheese for three months, to save up so that I could look decent enough to play in a gentleman’s house. Sabid’s a reformer,’ he added, turning to January. ‘Men with vision are always hated by the old crumblies.’

‘Men with vision are always fanatics.’ Lucien sipped his coffee – he’d been friends with Jeannot for years – and turned his heavy-lidded gaze along the quay, where the first of the water sellers waded down through the thinning mists to dip their buckets full from the Seine. ‘Give me a kind-hearted reactionary who doesn’t keep his wife locked behind iron gates.’

‘Is that what al-Muzaffar does?’

‘Every man follows the customs of his country.’ Jeannot shrugged. ‘A Mohammedan woman is used to it.’

‘I know one formerly Mohammedan woman who would knock your brains out with a skillet for that remark,’ said January, and both men laughed.

An old man came along the quay selling waffles, his grandson at his heels with a hurdy-gurdy, and the icy morning air transformed the yowling music into alien and ethereal beauty. Across the river, the bells of Notre Dame began to ring.

When January reached home Ayasha had already gone out – her basket of laces and silks was missing from its place beside the door. She had, however – he silently blessed her – left water simmering all around the back of the hearth in kettles, enough for a bath and a shave. January slept for an hour – something he’d learned to do in Mardi Gras season in New Orleans – then made a hasty toilette, donned clean linen and his very natty gray morning costume, and set forth for the home of the Harbonnières: a well-to-do broker of corn who owned half a score of bakeries and considerable city property.

On the way he passed within a few streets of the Rue St-Denis, where the ancestral Hôtel de Longuechasse stood. Because he had walked swiftly and was a little ahead of his time, he turned aside and stood for a while considering what he could see of that handsome residence above its protective wall. The gate into the forecourt had at one time been a beautiful openwork of iron. Revolution and rioting had prompted the addition of iron backing-plates, but as January turned to proceed on his way, the gates opened and a stylish barouche emerged, drawn by gold-maned chestnut horses matched like liveried footmen – with one white stocking apiece – and check reined to within an inch of their lives. Through the open gateway, the hôtel could be viewed for some moments in all its baroque glory: two floors of polished and pedimented windows, and a high mansard roof under which – like that of Hüseyin Pasha’s establishment on the Rue St Honoré – would be found rooms for servants or lesser members of the household.

Or, January reflected thoughtfully, anyone the Marquis or his family wanted to conceal there.

Judging by the length of the street frontage, there was room for service courtyards on either side of the narrow court that led to the main block of the house. He could glimpse the entrance to one of them as the concierge closed the iron-backed street gates. But unlike dwellings in Hüseyin Pasha’s more rural suburb, the main gate was the only way in or out.

Thus if the girl Shamira had taken refuge with Arnoux de Longuechasse, she would be as much a prisoner in his brother’s house as she was in that of her former master.

January put the matter from his mind as he ascended the steps of the Harbonnières’ town-house and for the next hour gave his thoughts and energy exclusively to Mesdemoiselles Eliane and Andromaque, neither of whom had practiced since their previous lesson and both of whom swore they had, an assertion backed up by their mother’s statement that she was usually out of the house at the time of the girls’ practice, but that neither of her daughters would ever lie. ‘Of course, Madame  . . .  Certainly, Madame  . . .’

‘It is up to you to make sure that they practice.’

‘Certainly, Madame.’ Actually, reflected January resignedly, it was up to their governess, but his impression of that individual was that she’d long ago given up trying to make her golden-haired charges do anything.

‘And I’m sure they’re both much better than you’re giving them credit for, M’sieu Janvier. They’re just a little nervous.’

Eliane, who had just taken a sheet of music from her sister’s folder and dropped it out the parlor window into the courtyard, assumed an expression of soulful innocence.

‘It happens to everyone, Madame. Will you stay and hear them play?’

‘I should love to, M’sieu, of course, but I’m just out to
dear
Madame Chamillart’s luncheon  . . .  I’m positive they’re just perfect, aren’t you, my darlings?’

‘Not as perfect as you, Maman.’

As January bowed Madame out of the drawing room, Andromaque pulled her sister’s hair.

At least his next pupil – a tiny boy named Camille Fontdulac over in the old Marais district – was a joy to teach, too young to have any technical skill but with a genuine feeling for music. January had never seen the boy’s merchant father, nor any member of the household but the boy’s tutor, who assured him that M’sieu Fontdulac would never countenance his son following any course in life but to inherit Fontdulac et Fils.

The third of his Wednesday pupils was a fragile young lady who always gave January the impression that she would kill herself with chagrin if she played a wrong note. The parents of Desireé Boulanger moved on the outskirts of Court circles, and Madame Boulanger – who held her ‘at home’ on Wednesday afternoons during Desireé’s lesson – was careful to let January know just how many marquises and comtesses would be among the callers whom her daughter would entertain with whatever new piece the girl was learning. The folding doors between the parlor where Madame received her callers, and the salon where the piano was located, were invariably left slightly open so the ladies might admire the lesson in progress.

Thus it was that while Desireé sought for the new Schubert lied she was learning, a fragment of conversation flickered tantalizingly from the parlor: ‘ . . . actually converted one of the Sultan’s wives to Christianity!’

Even before January could turn his head, Desireé cried breathlessly, ‘Oh, here it is! After all this I should have
died
if I couldn’t have found it—’

And because under no circumstances would it be acceptable for a music master to let anyone suspect that he eavesdropped on conversations in the parlor, January was forced to turn back with a smile, and to give his fullest attention to her painstaking execution of ‘The Linden Tree’.

Converted one of the Sultan’s wives
 . . . 

Or the wife – or concubine? – of some other Muslim official in Paris?

To the resounding glory of the Church – and of the man who accomplished such a coup?

The note of delighted triumph in the woman’s voice was unmistakable, but he couldn’t even go to the half-open parlor door to see who it was who had spoken, or who was there.

And perhaps it had nothing to do with the vanished Shamira, or the expression of radiant triumph on the face of Mother Marie-Doloreuse as she led her latest young novice into the shadows of the convent.

They might have been speaking of someone other than Arnoux de Longuechasse altogether.

And yet  . . . 
Is it being bruited about Paris?

As Madame Boulanger’s ‘at home’ would go on until five or six, there was nothing that January could do to further his knowledge at the lesson’s end. He only took his money from the extremely discreet butler, bowed deeply to the ladies in the parlor in passing (‘He’s done simply
wonders
with her playing – would you care to favor the marquise with that polonaise you learned last month, darling?’), and made his departure.

As he descended the stair he heard someone in the parlor behind him exclaim, ‘How
extraordinary
to find that sort of talent in a Negro!’

And: ‘Aren’t you terrified to leave Desireé alone with him?’

Some things, he had found out early, were precisely the same in France as they were in America. At least they addressed him as ‘vous’ – an adult and an equal – and not ‘tu’.

One of the women in the parlor was indeed the Marquise de Longuechasse.

EIGHT

A
yasha was still gone when January returned to their room. She’d changed clothes, leaving her ‘respectable’ green-and-white delaine spread out on the bed with the two additional petticoats that she wore with it over and above the usual complement: Hadji and Habibi lay curled up together in the precise middle of this billowing ensemble. Her work basket lay beside the door, covered with its usual protective towel. After a momentary debate about whether food or sleep was the most pressing requirement, January settled for a half-hour’s nap and thrust a couple of apples and a hard-cooked egg in his pockets as he went out the door. He promised himself something more substantial after the two rehearsals slated for the afternoon  . . . 

Actually converted one of the Sultan’s wives
.

Had the next words – the words he’d missed – been,
or something
 . . . ?

Had the Marquise – notoriously pious and notoriously proud – been boasting of her young brother-in-law?

Ayasha wasn’t at the shop. She hadn’t been in, the seamstresses told him, after stopping there in the morning to assign them to work. She was going to Madame Torcy that morning, then Madame Blé, and on to the Comtesse de Remiremont  . . .  January barely made it to the Opera before the ballet mistress arrived.

Generally ballet rehearsal – held in one of the maze of rooms behind the enormous backstage – included a number of visiting gentlemen. Young, elderly, noble, or of the wealthy bourgeoisie, they would sit on hard wooden chairs beside the door and admire the young ladies’ ronds de jambes.
Lions visiting gazelles
was how the ballet mistress put it. Upon occasion one of these visitors would be Daniel ben-Gideon, who like many wealthy men in Paris kept a dancer as a mistress – a sinecure, January guessed, mostly to keep his family in ignorance of his true preferences. But he was absent today.