Ran Away (28 page)

‘You’ve done it yourself,’ pointed out January with a smile.

‘Well, only to travel. But if I were faced with the prospect of arguing before a court of law that I should be granted ownership of a heavily mortgaged property and custody of four younger brothers and sisters, I would much rather do so in the character of a boy than a girl. How old does “young Mr Valentine” claim to be?’

‘Sixteen, I think Shaw said. She looks about thirteen.’ January finished the dish of his nephew’s excellent jambalaya and wiped up the juices with bread. ‘But the slaves, of course, back up her story. They know they’ll be the first the state would sell to pay off Valentine’s creditors.’

‘Which means –’ Rose went to fetch from its place beneath the sideboard the china basin to wash the dishes – ‘that you’re not going to be able to believe a word that anyone says to you there.’

January sighed. ‘Not one word,’ he agreed.

As January suspected she would, Maggie Valentine denied any knowledge of anything that had happened in the livery yard on Friday night, or Sunday. ‘We lock up when the last wagon comes back, and that’s the truth,’ she insisted, when January and Hannibal went to the livery yard on the following morning. ‘That was just after nine on Friday.’ Without the hat – which she removed when they retreated into the gloom of the coach house – her thin, boyish face still had an androgynous look to it, in its frame of short-cropped red hair.

‘I locked up the yard, rubbed down the team, then we all had supper and went to bed.’ She put her arm around Emily – the twelve-year-old girl who’d been carving up the only half-loaf of bread on the premises at January’s previous visit – and looked in desperation from January to Hannibal and then back. ‘Sunday we had more custom, even with the rain, but the last teams came in not long after dark. That’s really all I can tell you. It’s all I know.’

It wasn’t. He saw it in her eyes, and in the faces of the other children, grouped close around her. They were terrified. And would have been so, guessed January, even if there had been no murder between Friday night and Sunday. He’d seen beggar children on the New Orleans wharves, sleeping behind cotton bales and fighting with older beggars for promising scraps.

He remembered the winter Chatoine had frozen to death, down on the Quai St-Bernard.

Maggie faced him like an ill-armed, too-young knight squaring off against a dragon she knew she couldn’t defeat. But she was ready to die trying. ‘Yes, I was wrong not to report Pa’s death, and I guess it’s wrong of me to pass myself off as a boy, though I honestly don’t see it’s anybody’s business but my own. I really will be seventeen next year—’

‘If you want, we can dig Pa up and show you he wasn’t murdered,’ put in Emily helpfully.

The two boys – Roger and Sam – and three-year-old Selina all nodded.

‘He just drank himself to death,’ Maggie went on. ‘Lots of people do that. Hell, he had so much liquor in him I’ll bet he ain’t rotted yet. But I will say,’ she added, and raised that tough little chin, ‘if those poor girls had come to me, asking would I set up a ladder so’s they could get out of where they were, I’d have done it. And anyway they
couldn’t
have got out on Friday, ’cause he killed ’em an’ pitched ’em out the window right there in the house Sunday night.’

‘We think,’ said Hannibal, ‘that they might have been taken away and brought back.’

‘Who’d do a blame silly thing like that?’ demanded Maggie, and her fear momentarily dissolved in genuine perplexity. ‘Dangerous, too. If they took ’em away, why not just dump ’em in the bayou?’

January shook his head. ‘That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out. Does anyone else have a key to the gate?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Not Sillery?’ He had watched how the wiry little head-groom spoke to Maggie, when first he and Hannibal had entered the yard asking for her. He’d heard the man call out to her, to get that roan rubbed down first before anything; had heard him snap:
You got to get that fodder bill paid this week, or we’re gonna have to sell one of the nags
 . . . 

He’d seen her expression. She was scared of the slave. He could bring her world down in ruins with a word.

But now her jaw tightened hard, and she said, ‘No, sir. We have just the one. I keep it in my pocket.’

And January was perfectly well aware that keys could be stolen and copied, particularly if before they’d been kept in Maggie Valentine’s pocket, they’d been kept in the pocket of a drunkard who might be found passed out on a hay bale any afternoon.

Yet if Sillery – or either of the other two slaves – had done more than take a bribe to open the gate and raise the ladder in the dead hours before dawn, would they not have taken the stolen gold and disappeared themselves? New Orleans was a port. Ships left for Mexico, New York, Europe every day. Admittedly, it would be more complicated for three black fugitives than for three whites, but with sufficient gold a great deal could be done.

‘Were you aware that Sillery was taking money to let one of Hüseyin Pasha’s concubines meet with her lover in the carriage house in the afternoons?’

A flare of pink stained those high cheekbones. ‘I – sometimes I wondered,’ said the girl. ‘I’d find things – once an earring, the kind I’ve never seen around the town before. Another time a man’s handkerchief, in the tack room. I know Sillery always has money. Probably more than me,’ she added wryly. ‘I thought it might have been one of the servants in the Pasha’s house, or maybe one of his wives. But I didn’t see any harm in it. And I wouldn’t have told on those girls,’ she added, ‘even if I’d knowed.’

Sillery was even less forthcoming. The yard had been shut and locked by nine o’clock both nights.
Ask Jones here, and
’
Lilah, if you don’t believe me  . . .  Ask Miss Maggie. She’ll tell you
. The dark eyes that regarded January were wary but calm.

And slaves, January knew, were always wary in the face of questions. When the truth of a black man’s guilt or innocence mattered to so few whites – when the consequences of how a white man would take
any
piece of information could be so arbitrary and so devastating – how could they not be?

‘She knows something,’ said January as he and Hannibal emerged on to Rue des Ursulines again. ‘Or suspects. The girls didn’t flee until the small hours of Saturday morning. Sillery and Jones could have raised the ladder for them, carried the gold down without knowing what it was, harnessed a team and for all we know driven them to their destination—’

‘Given the efficiency of the City Guards,’ put in Hannibal, ‘it’s unlikely they’d have crossed their path.’

‘Personally,’ January added, ‘I wouldn’t like to go into court with a story about the girls running away and then mysteriously being brought back. Maggie’s right. It was dangerous – and stupid – for the murderer to put himself into Sillery’s hands that way. Why
not
just dump them in the bayou?’

Hannibal shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you this, though. Hüseyin Pasha’s odalisques weren’t the only ones using that carriage house as a
maison d’assignation
.’ He dug in his pocket, produced a necklace of cheap beads, such as slave women wore. One of them, rudely-painted black and white, looked like it had come from Africa. ‘This was in a corner near the back.’

The charcoal man, leading his little white donkey along Rue des Ursulines, crossed over the street to the river-ward side as he approached them. On this gray and chilly morning, January was interested to note how many people were doing that, dodging drays and wagons if necessary, to avoid walking near the vèvès written on the walls of Hüseyin Pasha’s house. Even in daylight they looked ominous, scrawled crookedly across shutters and doors. The shopfront that occupied the corner rooms of the ground floor was also shuttered fast, the renter – January recalled the place sold fans and gloves – having no doubt realized that between scandal and voodoo, he had better find another place of business.

As they passed the courtyard gate, the coachman Nehemiah emerged with a bucket of whitewash. ‘I’ve contracted with your sister Olympe to come back after dark and renew the signs,’ said Hannibal. ‘
Sitt
Jamilla agrees that it’s best that the household doesn’t appear to realize that the signs may have the effect of keeping potential troublemakers away  . . .  the point being how many of them are likely to read this.’ He took a newspaper from his pocket and held it out: it was the
Bulletin
, not the
True American
, but the long letter on the editorial page about the rich men of the city defending an Infidel Murderer was initialed B.B.

January cursed, but in fact only one person lingered on the corner of Rue Bourbon to gawk at the house, and that person, January saw, was Abishag Shaw.

‘Suleiman said as how you was here last night.’ The Kentuckian stepped back to let a couple of slave women pass, crossing themselves even as they stared at the house. ‘One of our boys came by just after dark an’ cleared off a couple of two-legged alligators an’ their girlfriends then. But there ain’t but twenty of us on the night watch, an’ eight of them I couldn’t set to keepin’ schoolboys out of a candy shop. You seen what it’s like down on the levee these days, Sefton.’

‘Indeed I have,’ agreed Hannibal. ‘
Chaos, rudis indigestaque moles
 . . .  One reason I agreed last night to take up my residence temporarily under the Lady Jamilla’s roof.’ He nodded across the street. ‘That, and the fact that Russian Hetty turns out to have a boyfriend she didn’t tell me about – not that I would dream of laying so much as a disrespectful finger upon the hem of the lovely Hetty’s garment.’

‘M’am Hüseyin holdin’ up?’

‘As well as can be expected,’ said Hannibal grimly. ‘She asked me about breaking free of the opium habit – and I fear I could give her little encouragement that it would be easy. She has the shakes this morning, but hasn’t taken any yet. It isn’t a condition in which I’d care to try running for my life across the roof ahead of a drunken mob myself, but then a state of stupefaction wouldn’t be much help either.’

‘Damn Breche,’ January whispered. ‘He should try being a slave to the opium bottle, if he thinks it’s so clever of him to start feeding it to her  . . .’

‘Oh, he is.’ Hannibal regarded him in mild surprise. ‘I thought you knew. Walk past the shop’s rubbish bins sometime. Somebody in that house is going through four bottles of Gregory’s Soothing Syrup a week, and something tells me it isn’t old master Philippe. Nasty stuff, all sugar and treacle, and not nearly the punch that a good spoonful of Kendal’s Black Drop will give you.’ He shook his head in disapproval at the young apothecary’s juvenile taste in drugs.

‘You got a gun?’ inquired Shaw.

‘Hüseyin Pasha has a number of truly formidable fowling-pieces.’

‘I’ll send you over somethin’ with a little more meat to it. That wouldn’t be your sister’s work –’ Shaw nodded across the street at the vèvès – ‘would it, Ben?’

January shook his head, neglecting to say that by tomorrow morning it would be. The whitewash Nehemiah was applying did little to cover the marks, for the stucco was originally a clear, pale blue and the shutters red. While speaking to Shaw, January had observed the passers-by, and he had to agree that though many stopped and stared, even Kaintucks who knew nothing about what the signs meant kept their distance. A second layer of marks over the whitewash would only increase the eerie appearance of the house – the announcement that the place was sufficiently accursed.

Sufficiently, at least, for those whose only intention was to vent upon the helpless their own anger at the rich.

‘How long before Hüseyin goes to trial?’ he asked. ‘And has any progress been made in finding out about this Mr Smith?’

‘None,’ said Shaw. ‘Nor is there like to be. I sent off letters to the newspapers in Mobile an’ Baton Rouge, but if our bird came in disguise – an’ damn few businessmen walk around wearin’ beards like a keelboat captain’s – stands to reason he had some call to do it. Just as it would stand to reason for anyone wantin’ to start up a bank to go to Hüseyin, him havin’ just about the only specie in New Orleans.’

‘Not any more, he doesn’t.’ January recounted what they had found – or rather, what they had not found – in the alcove in the Lady Jamilla’s room. ‘It looks like the girls sneaked dirt and bricks out of the livery yard a little at a time in their shawls, when Nehemiah let them slip out so that Noura could meet her beloved. They’d carry up the rubbish late at night and substitute it for the gold while Jamilla was asleep.’

‘Well, them clever little minxes.’

‘I’m guessing they hid the gold in the divans in their room,’ put in Hannibal. ‘It’s what I’d have done. Even one piece would be enough to win Sillery’s assistance, for such things as putting up ladders and lugging heavy bags across kitchen roofs in the middle of the night. Far easier to lower the gold by a rope wrapped around the kitchen chimney than lug it down through the house in the middle of the night. I can’t imagine why they didn’t wait until Sunday night, when they knew the servants would be out of the house, but they didn’t.’

‘The only problem,’ concluded January, ‘is that we have not discovered one single shred of proof of any of this.’

‘All we
have
discovered,’ added Hannibal, ‘is a splendid reason – far better than mere jealousy – for Hüseyin Pasha to strangle our larcenous damsels and toss them out the window  . . .  as the imaginative Mr Breche is going to point out if we take this to court. So it perhaps behoves us—’

‘It behoves us nuthin’.’ Shaw shoved his hands into his pockets and spat. ‘Monday afternoon Mayor Prieur sent off a letter to the Sultan’s consul in Havana, askin’ him to send somebody to fetch Hüseyin Pasha an’ deal with him elsewhere – Constantinople, for preference. Captain Tremouille’s like an old maid with an engagement ring: it gets us outta the whole shootin’ match, an’ the word is now that we just hang on to the man, ’til the Sultan’s Guards come an’ take him away.’