Good Man Friday (28 page)

‘And did a man come in to take refuge there last October?' asked January. ‘He'd be an Englishman, probably close to six feet tall, gray beard, gray hair, heavy through the chest and shoulders.'

The attendant cast his mind back for a moment. ‘No English bukra,' he said. ‘Some been come last fall – planter from Charleston name Criswell, Boston bukra name Leland. None been come that description.'

Damn it
.

And yet …

The perfection of Poe's solution tugged at January's thoughts:
Where else COULD a white man be kept prisoner?

He turned toward the empty fields, the few scattered farmhouses that were all that stood on this end of Washington.
He could be held in any of them
…

But then why dispose of anything that would identify him?

‘Is there another lunatic asylum in the District?' he asked. ‘Or over toward Baltimore?'

‘There the state asylum in Baltimore,' rumbled Bellwether. ‘Dr Gurry he always slangin' them mad-doctors there, say they imbeciles. And there another private asylum in Manassas, Dr Blaine run.'

‘It's thirty miles to Manassas,' put in Springer. ‘And you'll want to be careful, walkin' that by yourself, Ben. They talk of puttin' a railway line through there, but it ain't happened yet.'

‘Could you get me into Gurry's, Deke?' January asked at last. ‘As your assistant, or your cousin, or something, for an afternoon?'

‘Gurry gonna gone Thursday,' said Bellwether, nodding. ‘You do carpentry? Or plastering? You know fixin' sash windows? Kumbayah, I make sure somethin' broken—'

‘You have a piano?' asked January. ‘I can tune one of those, and I saw the tuning equipment in a pawnshop just last week.'

‘That we do.' Bellwether grinned. ‘But I tellin' you, ain't no English buckra there, with or not with no big gray beard.'

It wasn't the best ball any man present had ever played, and they split up and went back to their homes while the sun was just touching the tops of the woods along Rock Creek. On fine spring evenings like this one, the teams played until it was too dark to see. But though O'Hanlon and his b'hoys had taken their leave, nobody liked the idea of walking home in the darkness. Mede, Trigg, the Reverend Perkins and January were escorted back to the boarding house by a sizeable crowd of neighbors and friends.

‘It ain't what a game is supposed to be,' said Trigg angrily, when, by the warm lamplight of the dining room, he helped hand around the plates of chicken stew and potatoes. ‘Sure as gun's iron, when that game's over and those white gentlemen settles their wagers, the constables are going to come down with the letter of the law and our children won't be able to even get up a game of One Old Cat. And not from anything
we've
done. Just because
they
was made to look at something they didn't want to look at.'

‘You ever heard of white teams playing black ones further North, Frank?' January turned to the conductor.

‘Once or twice.' The young man, who had maneuvered a place beside Minou, helped Charmian to a chicken leg. ‘Or there'll sometimes be a black player on a white team. That's usually if he's just about the only black man in town. I think it makes them nervous, seeing us in groups.'

‘Not as nervous as it makes me,' returned January, ‘seeing
them
in groups.'

‘And what will you do, Mede,' asked Dominique, ‘when this game is done? It is in a sense the payment for your freedom, is it not? What will you do, when that payment is made?'

‘I don't know,' said Mede quietly. ‘My whole family is on Red Horse Hill Plantation. My mama, my sisters, my little brother …'

Not to speak of the white side of your family
, reflected January.
The brother you love. The father who brought you up as a slave
…

‘But now I'm a free man, I can't go back to Kentucky. Once a man's been freed, he's got to leave the state. It's the same here in Virginia, isn't it? I can't just go back to Lexington and take a job.'

He ducked his head. ‘You know, after all my life, Marse Luke calling me his Good Man Friday, I read that book it comes out of. And Mr Crusoe's Man Friday went back to England with him in the end. As if there wasn't anything in his own world to return to; as if he couldn't even imagine being free, or doing anything else with his life, except tag along after his master. Now it looks like I can't even do that.'

He rose from his place with a bow to Mrs Trigg – ‘If you'll excuse me, m'am.' Picking up from the sideboard the envelope that had been brought for him that afternoon, he passed into the hall. The lamp there shone briefly gold on his hair, before he ascended the stair into shadow.

It was January's last sight of him alive.

‘B
ut if these men who were admitted to the asylum in October bear no resemblance to M'sieu Singletary,' argued Dominique as she untied the strings of her daughter's bonnet the following morning, ‘what do you seek in M'sieu Gurry's madhouse,
P'tit
? Show Uncle Benjamin what you have found this morning, darling—'

Charmian carefully opened her specimen box, to display, on its filling of felt and cotton wool, the leaves, buttons, stones and feathers she'd collected on this morning's walk.

She would have gathered dead bugs and cigar ends as well, had her mother permitted it. Like Henri – to Minou's horror and January's secret amusement – everything in the world fascinated Charmian to an equal degree.

‘I seek a look at his daybooks.' January squatted down to study someone's lost rosette of ribbon, the bright leaves of dogwood in the box. ‘A man could have been admitted any time after October …'

‘If they waited to admit him, where did they hide him in-between-times?'

‘A cellar,' said January promptly. ‘An attic. A sickroom under drugs. That's a very beautiful beetle,
P'tite
, where did you find it?'

‘Beside the stream by Eighteenth Street,' specified the child precisely. ‘It has long feelers.'

‘So it does. I don't think I've seen such an insect at home in New Orleans, have you?'

Charmian thought about it for a moment, then shook her head.

‘But why?' demanded Minou. ‘The whole thing is absurd!'

‘And he could have died, at any time between his admission and now.' He stood and ran a gentle hand over his niece's mahogany-red curls. ‘I don't think there's a soul in creation so completely at the mercy of his jailers, as a lunatic in an asylum,' he said. ‘At least not in the United States. Even in prisons, the warders and guards are accountable for it, if a prisoner dies. And slaves, God knows, are worth money to their owners. But in a madhouse, a man – or a woman – may be dosed with whatever medication the mad-doctors consider effective that month, from salts of mercury to ipecac. They may be bled, blistered, stood naked under douches of freezing water, puked, purged, and opiated to the point of death in the name of “calming their nerves” or “shocking them back to their senses”, and no one will ask or argue or suggest that the mad-doctors mightn't know what they're doing. They could be tarred and feathered if some savant writes an article about how it stimulates the nerves.'

‘You spoke to the man from Gurry's, then?' Poe emerged from his parlor, where his breakfast tray lay on the table in the watery sunlight. He was immaculately dressed in his usual black – presumably in preparation for yet another day of waiting in some Senator's office in the hopes of convincing him to use his influence to get him a job – and looked, January thought, haggard and grim. But his dark eyes came alive as he inquired, ‘Will you need a respectable family member to demand a sight of the madman?'

‘Possibly later,' said January, rising. ‘Depending on what I can find in the daybooks. I'm guessing whoever locked Singletary up –
if
he was locked up – has made arrangements to hear of it if someone comes around asking questions. Right now I'm feeling my way in the dark.'

In the dining room, the clock struck half-past eight. Dominique said, ‘
Peste
— Come along, dearest. Let's get you changed before Madame Trigg locks the doors on us and casts us out without breakfast—'

They went upstairs, passing Seth Berger the cabman on his way down; Thèrése and Musette hastened from the dining room in their mistress' wake.

‘There's a state asylum near Baltimore,' January went on, and Poe nodded.

‘Yes, I've visited that one. A friend of mine – a lad I went to school with – had the … misfortune … to be incarcerated there, for drinking and addiction to laudanum. A horrifying place.' Shadow crossed the back of those dark eyes: shadow and fear. ‘I still have nightmares of being locked up … At least if a man has money, he can go mad in comfort.'

‘There's evidently a place out in Manassas too, and I may beg your company, if it comes to that—'

‘My dear Benjamin, given the choice between kicking my heels in quest of a job I don't actually want, and breaking into a madhouse in search of—'

‘Benjamin!' Dominique appeared at the top of the stairs.

The note of shock in her voice had January vaulting up two steps at a time without asking why. Whatever it was, it wasn't good.

When he came close – Poe at his heels – she said, very quietly, ‘It's Mede. He's dead.'

And as January turned toward the stair – Mede's room was on the third floor – she caught his sleeve. In the shadows of the stairway her face looked like a cut-out of ivory, slashed with eyebrows startlingly dark. ‘I wanted to ask him about going to Blodgett's tonight, before he left …' She swallowed hard. ‘Someone cut his throat.'

There were no vines, no drainpipes, nothing that would serve for a handhold on the whitewashed brick side of the house. It was twenty-seven feet from the window sill to the ground. ‘How could they have got up?' Poe asked at once, looking down.

January shook his head.

The shutters and sash had both been open when he came into the room: he and Poe had gone straight to the window. Directly beneath the sill, the room's single ladder-back chair lay on the floor on its side. January examined the chair's joints and angles, and almost at once he found a thread of cotton caught in one, where a rope had looped around it to permit someone to descend from the window on a doubled line, which could then be pulled free.

Only then did he turn and approach the bed.

Mede lay on his back, naked under the light blankets. Sheets, pillows, mattress were soaked in blood, but the young man's eyes were closed and his face peaceful, as if someone had simply bent over him and slit his throat in his sleep. One hand lay at his side, the other arm was extended, doubled back and tucked half under the pillow. There were no cuts on either hand. He hadn't struggled. He probably hadn't even woken.

The smell of the blood brought back the alley behind the Globe and Eagle, and the man for whose sake he was to fast on Lenten rations until Easter of next year … The man who had tried to kidnap Mede into slavery on his first night of freedom.

All that struggle for nothing
.

All the anguish it cost Mede to pull himself free of a master he loved. To take the harder, colder road that led to manhood.

It's a damn game
…

Flies were beginning to circle the bed and settle on the clotted slash.

Children's voices on the stairway. Musette said sharply, ‘No, stay away, that isn't for you to see.'

A shadow darkened the doorway. Trigg said, ‘Jesus Christ—!' He came in and shut the door. ‘How could they have got in the house?' he asked. ‘I locked the place up good after that hoo-rah at the game. And I told Mede to make sure his shutters was bolted fast.'

‘Mine surely were.' January walked to the window again. ‘This's how he got out. Ran a double length of clothes-rope, it looks like, around this post of the chair-back. With the chair taller than the window is wide it just braced against the frame. He climbed down, then pulled the rope down after him.'

‘Still doesn't tell us how he got in.'

The door opened a crack, more than filled by Octavia Trigg's towering shape. ‘We gotta get him outta here.'

January half-drew breath to begin a sentence containing the word
constables
, then let it, and the thought, dissolve away.

In New Orleans – at least in the French Town, where everyone knew who was who and the free colored owned property – it was still possible to deal with the City Guard and have some assurance that one wasn't going to be comprehensively sorry you'd called them in. But as if he'd opened the door to the future and looked down a lighted vista populated with inescapable events, he saw Kyle Fowler with the second ward constables; he saw men stinging with disappointed rage at the loss of their bet money; he heard those rough American voices:
Arrest 'em all, one of 'em's got to have done it
. And then,
We gonna lose our bet money, they owe us to make it up
…

And saw Kyle Fowler, and George Klephert, and every other one of the dozens of slave dealers operating in the District walking through the crowded cells:
I recognize that one, he's a runaway … Yeah, that wench is a runaway too …

Rage went through him like a poison.

He took a deep breath, let it out. Closed his eyes. The brotherhood of man, the fatherhood of God, for that moment jeered back at him, an obscene jest.

God, guide me
…

Don't let me go down that road
.

First things first. ‘Get the children out of the house,' he said, and opened his eyes. ‘Octavia, can you tell them Mede's suffered an accident and needs to be taken to a hospital? We'll need a couple of quilts, laid on the floor here for the blood. We can keep him in the cellar till it gets dark—'