Good Man Friday (11 page)

‘And you, sir?' asked Poe. ‘Are you also here in Washington on business?'

January slipped his hand into his coat pocket and touched the worn binding of the notebook Ganymede Tyler had handed him. ‘In a manner of speaking, sir. In a manner of speaking.'

B
y Thursday afternoon – Henri's note informed January – Chloë had inveigled an invitation to the reception and musicale being given that night by the Right Honorable Representative from Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams, at which January, under the aegis of Darius Trigg, was scheduled to play.

From the dais at the end of the ballroom, January saw them enter the handsome house on F Street: Henri in silver-gray bore exactly the appearance of a whale escorting a mermaid. Mrs Adams – a delicate Englishwoman some ten years January's senior – greeted them with great politeness, but Mr Adams was effusive, expressing – in fluent French – the hope of speaking to them at length later in the evening.

As he played Schubert's Leider, operatic barcaroles and the sentimental ballads of Moore on the Adams' Broadwood grand, January observed the guests, to whom he was – he knew – for all intents and purposes invisible. In this new city he might not have his mother's gossip to rely on about everybody's family background, finances, and extramarital escapades, but this lack was more than offset by the knowledge that these were the men about whose policies and foibles he'd been reading for years in political broadsides. Between glees and serenades, Trigg or Blair Langston, the elderly violinist, would pass information to him in a whisper: ‘Tall gentleman's Mr Clay of Kentucky – handsomest man in America, my wife says … and flirts something shocking, if I do say it of a white man! That lady there is Mrs Corcoran, that's daughter of Commodore Morris the Navy Commissioner. She run off with Mr Corcoran a few years ago – that's Mr Corcoran over there. Richest man in Washington … Fellow in the green uniform's Mr Vorontsov, that's minister from Russia – I don't know who that lady is he's with, but it sure ain't
Mrs
Vorontsov …'

January wondered if he'd be more impressed by this parade of notables had he been permitted to vote. But even the sight of Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster – for whom January would have voted, had it been possible, in the last election – only served to remind him of all he'd seen in his week in Washington: muddy streets, slave pens twenty feet from the Capitol. Frank Preston saying, ‘They barred Negroes from entering the Capitol years ago …'

A wagon creaking by in misty darkness.

If you'd been elected
, he wondered, watching the Senator's square, commanding form cross the reception-room toward the punchbowl,
would you have tried to change these things?

Or would you have argued that it was ‘inexpedient' to offend the Southern states, and let the situation stand?

But since it was, perforce, not his business, he let his mind slip back into the pleasure of the music. The Adams' piano had clearly been pampered like a racehorse, and the keys responded to the lightest touch. Prior to supper, the reception was an occasion for talk and pleasantries in the ballroom, with the fashionable alternatives of card-playing and billiards in the library across the hall. The host – a diplomat from the age of fourteen – might be notoriously prickly, unsociable and incapable of political compromise, but he made sure he spoke to every man and woman in the room, inquiring of Henry Clay how his son's racehorse was shaping up and complimenting the President's dapper son on his engagement to a wealthy planter's daughter. He even flirted a little with Dolley Madison, still vividly pretty despite rouge and embonpoint.

‘
Ma chère Madame Viellard!
'

Mrs Bray, flower-like in rose-hued silk and masses of blonde lace, detached herself from her husband's arm and fluttered over to Chloë, hands outstretched in greeting. Luke Bray made a beeline for the junior Congressmen, clerks, and attachés clumped around the punchbowl, and within moments January could see by their gestures that town ball was the subject of the conversation.

‘Better if you throw it side-arm-around –' he demonstrated the grip on an empty punch-cup – ‘'stead of underhand …'

(‘Ten cents says he forgets and throws that thing,' whispered January to Langston the fiddler, who nodded agreement without missing a note.)

‘Can you
do
that?'

‘
No
—'

‘Who says?'

‘Everybody says.'

‘The rules says.'

(‘Think they're going to get in a fight over it?'

‘They will if one of the Massachusetts Whigs comes over …')

A cluster of ladies – including the vivacious Widow Madison – descended upon Chloë and Mrs Bray, and January caught wisps of talk about the ministries, Senatorial receptions, who must be conciliated and who cold-shouldered. The invisible magic behind politics, January was well aware from his days playing for the restoration nobility of Paris; the decisions made outside of Congress, and the women who engineered meetings or prevented them. Rowena Bray, he observed, for all her air of dewy-eyed helplessness, knew everyone, and in the course of the evening made the rounds of the room, as surely as her host and Mrs Madison and Henry Clay and the President's son, speaking to everyone, unerringly recalling everyone's name and face and interests.

If some turned away from the English Minister, with hard words about the Canadians' right to fight for their own freedom (‘We should have marched up and took 'em when we had the chance!'), Mrs Bray's marriage to an American seemed to have softened at least some of the animosity. (‘Why should you care, sir? You want us to shed our blood so you can force the Canadians to send back your escaped slaves?')

The only person, in fact, who didn't seem to be arguing politics, discussing town ball, or seeking an introduction to someone in quest of a job was Henri Viellard, working his way through lobster patties, crème tarts, and marzipan on the buffet with the steady inevitability of an ox pulling a plow.

‘Not to worry,' Trigg reassured the musicians as they filed off the dais. ‘If Sir Henry –' he nodded back in the direction of the British Minister, deep in conversation with Mr Clay – ‘was to announce that England was sending troops into Canada
tonight
, I don't think anybody would have the nerve to pick a fight in Mr Adams's house.'

With a glance at the delicate, smiling, steely Mrs Adams – and at the cold sharp eyes of the Right Honorable Representative from Massachusetts – January guessed that Trigg was right.

In any case, Sir Henry Fox was clearly not about to announce invasion that night or much of anything else. Already visibly drunk, he disappeared almost at once into the gaming room. It was his secretary, a sturdy, pink-faced gentleman attired point-de-vice in a long-tailed coat and knee-smalls, who intercepted questions from irate New Englanders about the rebellion in Canada, and who smoothed the feathers of a much-ruffled Secretary of War.

‘You think we'll really go to war over Canada?' asked January as they descended the narrow stair to the kitchen – suffocating with the stink of lamp oil and onions and jostling with servants as they organized the supper's opening course.

‘What the hell else we gonna do?' demanded Phinn Mudwall, who doubled clarionette and cornet in the little orchestra. ‘Wring our little hands and say, “Oh dear”? They came across the Niagara river, seized one of
our
boats on
our
side,
burned
it, and sent it over the Falls with all hands—'

‘I heard there was only one man killed.' The musicians edged around the turmoil, ascended the stair that led to the yard. The night air was cold, and fog held in the smoke of the cressets that burned in the yard, where a dozen carriages – their teams snugly blanketed – were ranged between the house and the stables.

‘That makes it better?' Mudwall drew himself up, hugely indignant for a man who wasn't allowed to vote. ‘One dead man or a dozen—'

‘The ship was taking supplies to the Canadian rebels. What would we have done, if the French or the Spanish sent guns to the Cherokee a couple of years ago when Jackson had them run out of Georgia?'

‘That's different!' boomed Mudwall. ‘That's a completely different issue!'

A voice from the depths of the kitchen called up that sandwiches and beer were ready for the musicians. At the same moment, around the corner of the house, reflected light from the torches caught in rectangular spectacle-lenses, and January said, ‘Save me a sandwich, would you?' as the others went back into the door and down the stairs. He crossed the porch as the rotund silhouette detached itself from the corner of the house.

‘Did you speak to Mr Adams, sir?' January said as Henri stepped into the glow of the lantern above the porch. The mere fact that Henri would make himself late for dinner – particularly in light of the reputation of the Adams' cook – argued a deep concern indeed for his missing friend.

‘I did. You were quite right: not only had M'sieu Singletary corresponded with M'sieu Adams for years, but he visited him on October tenth. M'sieu Adams says they spoke of astronomy and the respective school systems of the United States and Britain, of the proposed Smithsonian Institution, and of the contents of their libraries. No mention whatsoever of mutual acquaintances in Washington, and certainly not of anyone who would wish poor Singletary harm.'

‘But someone seems to have.' January produced the little red-bound notebook from his pocket. ‘Singletary gave this to Ganymede Tyler – Mr Bray's valet – on the fourteenth because someone had broken into his hotel-room the previous night. Someone he feared was not a thief, but a would-be murderer.'

Henri's brown eyes widened as if he'd read bad luck in the pulling of daisy petals and moments later had witnessed a comet destroy Washington.

‘Murderer?'

‘According to Tyler.' January wondered if Tyler had been the surname of Mede's mother, or if he'd later chosen it for himself. ‘And it sounds to me as if Singletary suspected the danger might be coming from someone he knew or might know. It may pay me to make the journey down to Charlottesville—'

‘Oh, that's hardly necessary.' Henri looked up from peering at the notebook's pages in the glow of the nearest cresset. ‘We also spoke with Mr Oldmixton – Madame Viellard and I did – the secretary from the Ministry who sent a clerk to make enquiries along the Alexandria–Warrenton road about whether the body of a traveler had been found. Have you any idea what these numbers might be?'

January shook his head. ‘But the two long columns there at the back aren't precisely identical. In that second column there'll be a set of about a dozen numbers identical to the first, then one that isn't in the first, or sometimes two or three … then another set of a dozen that are the same.'

‘The writing is different.' Henri moved his chubby thumb down the page. ‘Look how the numbers in the first column slant and run together, while those in the second are neat and wider-spaced.' He frowned up at January, standing above him on the step. ‘Might they have been written on different occasions?'

‘No reason to think they weren't.' January studied the small differences in the hand. ‘I'm guessing they're simply
aides
-
memoires
, the context of which Singletary understood. That short block of numbers at the end with a seventeen at the top, I have no idea what it means.'

‘Would you be willing to make a copy of this?' Henri riffled the pages of magic squares, his fair brows drawn down over his nose. ‘I'm not certain Madame Viellard would be able to make more of it than yourself, but she's far cleverer than I with numbers.'

‘I'll do that.'

‘If our poor friend handed the book to a servant rather than to his hostess – with whom he'd been taking tea moments before …' He glanced worriedly at the lighted windows of the dining room. ‘You don't think he feared
her
?'

‘More likely someone she might speak to of the matter.' January reflected on young Mrs Bray's constant airy chatter and the way she clung to the arm of the British Minister or his secretary. ‘And she's the daughter of Singletary's employer. If he learned something to the discredit of Hurlstone and Ludd – or if he came to be mixed up in something that would damage the firm – he might hesitate to tell her about it. Even a comment in a letter to her family back home might be enough to topple a house of cards … if a house of cards is what Singletary was building.'

Across the yard a gust of laughter came from the stables, where coachmen and grooms diced by lantern light.

‘At this point we can't know, sir. But Mede gave me a description of Singletary's watch, pin, and watch fobs, so with your permission I'll ask around at the pawnshops—'

The kitchen door opened, and Trigg put his head out. ‘I can't keep Phinn's greasy hands off your sandwich much longer, Ben. You better get in and eat it 'fore he kills his brother over your beer.'

‘Tell 'em I'll drown the both of 'em in the rain barrel if they even think of takin' it!'

He glanced back to the driveway, but Henri was gone.

January was aware that the ‘musicale' portion of the evening – which customarily meant the little orchestra of piano, flute, cornet, violin and violoncello playing for various of the female guests to sing – was always something of a mixed bag. But he knew also that the point was the pleasure of the singers and their personal friends and relatives, not the excellence of the performance, and in any case many of the young ladies who participated were quite good. Mrs Bray sat with Mr Oldmixton of the British Ministry, as neither the British Minister himself nor Luke Bray would desert the card tables of the library to listen. But when the dancing started at eleven, the younger clerks and secretaries from the Navy Department and Treasury emerged from the smoke-filled chamber with the news that a challenge had been issued by a ball team made up of their opposite numbers in the various foreign ministries.