Good Man Friday (32 page)

‘It's a bay on Lake Erie. Perry launched his fleet from there, to defeat the British on the Great Lakes during the war. The
Iroquois
and the
Inflexible
are gun brigs.'

‘War with England would be just what some people in Congress are looking for,' mused January, ‘as an excuse to seize the Oregon country … if we won.'

‘What, America lose?' Poe flung up his hands. ‘Perish the thought!' Then he was silent for a time, turning the chalk in his long fingers. ‘Are they in it together, do you think? Bray and his wife?'

‘I doubt it. He'd never have freed Mede, if he knew there were things going on in the household that Mede might have seen or guessed.'

‘He was drunk,' said Poe. ‘God knows the blamed stupid things I've done when drunk …'

‘He was sober the following morning when he signed Mede's freedom papers,' pointed out January. ‘He was suspicious enough to copy the messages he found, and the keys. And he may have remembered that Oldmixton put Mrs Bray on to him.'

I feel responsible
, the Ministerial Secretary had said.

And Mede:
He couldn't wait to go back to Fayette County … but by then he'd met Mrs Bray …

‘As long as Mede was a slave in the household,' January continued softly, ‘Mrs Bray was safe. Most Southerners barely notice their slaves – one of our neighbors used to have male slaves bring in hot water for her while she was bathing. But although he could never testify against her in court, the minute Mede became a free man he was away from Mrs Bray's control. And someone might listen to what he said.'

‘About a foreigner, they would,' said Poe thoughtfully. ‘From the country we're close to war with. She
couldn't
let him live.'

January considered the papers for a few minutes more, the blocks and strings of numbers that a man's eye would skim right over …

Unless he knew it was a code.

Or unless he was a man who saw numbers differently than did other men.

He turned to the little morocco notebook, opened it to the last page of numbers. Then he studied the long columns that preceded it, noting that the numbers were short, in two distinct columns rather than a block-like text, and that they included no Ø symbols.

‘Look at this,' he said, and put the notebook before the furiously scribbling Poe. ‘Both columns start with 61836. Look down them – on the first, the fifteenth entry is 71836, then further down 81836. And the numbers are roughly close: 13076 here, 12953 opposite it … They're household accounts.'

‘By Jove, I think you're right.' Poe set down his chalk, shoved the hair from his high, pale forehead with chalky fingers. ‘That's June of 1836, then further down is July, then August—'

‘They carry on up to 91837.' January flipped over two pages of columned numbers. ‘The month that Selwyn Singletary disappeared. Now compare that second column with the first. Identical numbers, but with interpolations in the second column: 25015 here, between what I'm guessing by its size is a month's expenses for either clothing or feed for horses – 15050 …'

‘A hundred and fifty dollars, fifty cents. He was just in too much of a hurry to mark the decimal point or the symbol for dollars—'

‘Or didn't use one if he was just making notes to himself. He knew what he meant. Still in June, another hundred and seventy-five thirty extracted, and in October of '36 three hundred …'

‘The wretched girl is cooking the books!' Poe flung down his chalk and regarded January in mingled bemusement and rage. ‘That twelve thousand that's the first item in June, September, and December – or a hundred and twenty dollars – that would be quarterly rent for a house that size. The next item is always somewhere between thirteen thousand and sixteen thousand—'

‘A hundred and thirty and a hundred and sixty dollars,' interpreted January. ‘Food for a household that includes eight slaves. But she's skimming out those extra sums – a hundred and fifty dollars, a hundred and seventy-five, three hundred, sums that she told me
Bray
was paying out in blackmail – and putting them somewhere …'

‘Putting them in banks,' said Poe grimly. ‘Under another name – or four other names.' He tapped the slate sharply. ‘That short block of text at the end of the notebook: Rothschild's bank in Philadelphia, under the name of Rodger Allen of Water Street, Lynn; Bethmann's of New York, as Jonas Sinter of Pine Street, Providence; Barclays of New York …'

‘All foreign banks.' January studied the decryption. ‘She married Bray right about the time Jackson started to dismember the National Bank. As a banker's daughter, she wouldn't trust a state bank. Rothschild's is French; I think Bethmann's headquarters are in Frankfurt. And none of those aliases hails from the city the bank is in. I was interrupted in my search of her room, but I'll go bail that's what those packets of papers were, hidden under the fireplace bricks. Bank books and letters of identity.'

‘So between what she gets from selling the naval information she finds in her husband's study—'

‘—to Oldmixton, I'll be bound—'

‘—and picking her husband's pocket every month …'

‘Our Mrs Bray,' concluded January, ‘has been a busy young lady indeed.'

At that point, January considered sending a note to Deke Bellwether at Gurry's madhouse, cancelling – or at least postponing – his appointment to impersonate a piano tuner on Monday. Given the labels on the bottles he'd seen in Rowena Bray's armoire – not only opiates, but toxic salts of mercury which many physicians considered medicinal – he had no doubt what fate had befallen Selwyn Singletary, once Mrs Bray had guessed what he'd learned of her peculations.

‘It must have been she, who broke into his hotel room,' said January, when supper was done and Poe had joined him in a corner of the main parlor, mostly so that January could have an after-dinner cup of tea without violating anyone's sense of the proprieties about who was allowed to share food or drink with whom. It was perfectly acceptable for a white man to have tea in the dwelling-area of black folk – as a guest doing them a social politeness – without acquiring, even in his own eyes, the stigma of a man who ‘ate with Negroes'.

The parlor was quiet. Darius Trigg had gone out to play at a soirée being given at the house of Senators Buchanan and King, and the Reverend Perkins was at choir practice. Under Musette's watchful eye, the household children played dominoes at the big table, and their laughter and talk covered the quiet voices of January and his white guest in the corner.

‘She may have said something to him the following day that made him realize it was she. Or maybe she was simply called away and he got a chance to look at her account books. They're in an office just off the parlor; you can see them from almost anywhere in the room. Or he might have marked his assailant somehow, and then glimpsed the mark on her.'

‘He panicked,' surmised Poe. ‘God knows I would have, if I'd begun to suspect my employer's daughter was not only a very clever thief but also a spy. He handed his notebook over to the only person at hand he thought he could trust, intending to get it later. Although why Mrs Bray thought her father would object to her doing a little spying for King and Country—'

‘Queen,' corrected January, and remembered to add, ‘sir. And for all we know, Jeremiah Hurlstone may be a Conservative and have no use for anything that will help Lord Melbourne's government. One can never count on a man choosing – or even seeing – what's good for his country, if it will hurt the faction he wants to see remain in power.'

‘You have a Machiavellian turn of mind, my friend.' Poe slowly thumbed through the various transcriptions they had worked on until the supper gong. ‘And a hard way of looking at the world. I dare say you're right.'

‘Spying – particularly spying professionally – is a dirty game. It isn't like it sounds in novels. At the very least it would raise a tremendous scandal with her family, especially if Mrs Bray's father was at loggerheads with her. He may have sent Singletary via Washington particularly to inquire into her affairs. Given the situation in Canada, if word got out, Mrs Bray would lose her position in Washington society and might well be faced with the choice of either going home to a family she detests, or more likely sent to ruralize on a small plantation in Fayette County, Kentucky, far from good music, interesting books, political power and the company of anyone but one or two plantation wives …'

‘Much like Acropolis, Indiana, in fact,' said Poe glumly. ‘The town to which I shall, it seems, shortly become postmaster … I was offered the position today, pending my interview with Senator Thumbtwiddle on Monday. I sympathize with the woman.' His jaw tightened, and for a moment a bleak desperation flickered in his eyes. ‘Or I would, had she not killed an innocent man to get out of such a fate.'

‘Two innocent men.'

Poe nodded. On the other side of the room, the dominoes game had been abandoned in favor of an extensive building-project with the tiles, amid cries of, ‘You're going to crash it!' and, ‘When I grow up, I'm going to have a house like that …'

‘You think Singletary is dead, then?'

‘Once she put him into a madhouse to establish an alternate identity for his corpse,' said January, ‘there's no reason she would need him to remain alive – and every reason to finish him quickly. The medicines I saw in her armoire would be more than sufficient. All she'd need – either in her own persona or in disguise as one of her banking alter egos, Allen or Sinter or whoever – would be to tell Gurry that her “uncle's” physician back home recommends that Uncle be dosed with mercury. She disposes of his personal effects in such a way that there's no chance anyone who knew Singletary will ever see them, Singletary is buried under whatever name she committed him under—'

‘Merely to get out of living in Fayette County?'

‘You wouldn't do it,' said January. ‘Nor would I – nor would your wife, or mine, or my sister Minou, or any of the ladies of our acquaintance—'

‘I wouldn't lay money against Madame Viellard.'

January grinned. ‘All right, I'll give you a maybe on Madame Viellard – and I'd bet the other way on my mother, now that I come to think of it.' His smile faded. ‘But we're talking about a young woman who disguised herself as a boy in order to gain entrance to this house, who hid herself in the attic, and who came downstairs and cut the throat of a young man – a young man whom she knew, who had lived under her roof for two years – while he slept, only because of what he might have seen or learned.'

Poe said, ‘Hmmn.'

‘Killing a man by cutting his throat,' said January slowly, ‘is different from shooting him in war, or even bayoneting him in the heat of battle. And she seems to have done so without turning a hair. I think,' he continued, ‘that I'm going to go to Gurry's on Monday after all. All this is purely conjecture, until I can have a look at the daybooks for October of last year. I'll send a note to M'sieu Viellard –' they both knew he meant Chloë – ‘asking for a meeting tomorrow evening when I get back …'

‘We,' said Poe.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘We.' The poet stood up and stretched his slender frame. ‘Acropolis, Indiana, may perish for want of a postmaster, and I shall bitterly weep to see it destroyed, yet I cannot and will not for any consideration pass up the chance to break into a madhouse in the guise of a piano tuner in order to catch a foreign spy. There are things which humanity cannot demand of mortal flesh and blood.'

Their eyes met.

‘Nor would I dream of it,' replied January politely. ‘Sir.'

Though trained as a surgeon, January had always been fascinated by the heartbreaking conundrum of the mad. There'd been a man named Tyo on Bellefleur Plantation who heard voices speaking to him from the ground, who saw things he could barely describe and which no one else could see. Though it was obvious to everyone that during his ‘spells' he was not responsible for his own actions, both the overseer and Michie Fourchet – the plant-ation's owner – punished him repeatedly for disobedience, for insolence, for troublemaking.

Eventually Michie Fourchet – who seemed possessed by his own demons when he drank – beat Tyo to death.

Later in life, January had gone with the other junior surgeons from the Hôtel Dieu out to the asylums of Charenton and Bicêtre, to see the mad, though he had been one of the few who spent more time talking with the doctors about the nature of madness than watching the inmates scream and struggle against such cures as the Swing and the rotating board.

‘Half of them, we don't know why they start exhibiting symptoms of madness,' one of the doctors at Charenton had said to him. ‘Nor why they recover, if they recover. Sometimes the shock to their senses – from the water cure, for instance, or icing the scalp – seems to snap them back into sanity. I suspect – but I can't prove – that others simply learn what's wanted of them, and perform it, only to regain their freedom. Still others simply waste away.'

All this returned to January's mind as he and Poe approached the rambling brick house in the woods beyond Alexandria.

They'd set out across the Long Bridge shortly after breakfast on Monday, clothed like workmen. January bore a satchel containing a piano tuner's hammers, tuning forks, and mutes … as well as the spyglass he'd bought for Rose, and his set of picklocks, just in case. Beyond Alexandria – a small town of brick houses, green lawns, trees in new leaf and the biggest slave-depot in the District – they stayed off the road, and only approached the house after Gurry had gotten into his carriage and departed. ‘I should hate to explain to the head of the asylum that somebody called in the piano tuners and forgot to tell him about it.'