Good Man Friday (37 page)

Rose …
thought January,
Rose, I won't die on you. I won't let you bring up Baby John by yourself, no matter how much help Henri and Chloë promise to be
…

To the end of his days, January didn't know how he made it back to Washington. The first stains of daylight found them in thin birch-woods that looked the same whichever way he turned, in gray light that had neither direction nor strength. He drifted in and out of consciousness, aware of nothing except gnawing pain. Leopold lent him the smelling salts again, and he clung to them as to a lifeline.

During a period of rest he examined the wound as well as he could. The blood seemed too bright to be coming from his liver, the pain – severe as it was – not bad enough to indicate a perforated bowel. Once he thought he heard Thèrése say,
But surely Ben would not wish us all to be caught, for his sake
… and wished he had the strength to go over and slap her.

Maybe it was only a dream.

Later, as they cautiously approached the outskirts of Washington by roundabout ways, he heard snatches of the maid's account of how the boyish, dark-browed young coachman had thrown open the carriage door in the street in front of the Golden Calf, how Fowler and his men had dragged them out at pistol point.

‘Maman got the whip away from the coachman and hit one of them with it,' provided Charmian, cuddled like a little bird in the circle of her father's chubby arm. ‘The bad man slapped her, and she spat at him. What's an
enculeur
?'

Thèrése, January noticed, had by this time smoothed and dressed her hair, and straightened her torn and dirty dress.

Will Charmian remember this?
he wondered as the horses splashed through Reedy Branch and they passed the field, half-invisible under ground mists and dew, where on Saturday they would meet the Warriors.
She's not quite three – the borderland of memories. In three years, or five years, or ten, will she remember being tied up and loaded into a moving coffin? Will she find herself there in nightmares, with no sound but the creak of the wheels and the sobbing of the terrified woman beside her?

Every now and then Henri would hug the little girl close, his face a silent mask of horror and shame. He had brought her, brought Minou, to this, only because he couldn't bear to be parted from them for three months …

But though the fat man was, in an odd sense, January's brother-in-law, it was not January's place to speak.

The smoke of breakfast fires hung in the gray air as they circled through the unscythed fields in back of the house. Working men would already have gone, leaving the neighborhood quiet. As the horses turned in at last on to the graveled drive, January saw Frank Preston and Dominique in the shadows of the porch. He saw the young conductor take Minou's hands, speaking to her with desperate earnestness. She, like Thèrése, had tidied her hair and had also apparently been brought back to the house in enough time to change her dress as well. In the simple yellow muslin, with its spreading collar of white gauze, she had never looked more beautiful.

Preston raised her hands to his lips, and Dominique gently put one palm to his cheek.

Then she turned her head, at the sound of hooves in the drive. And as if the man who had rescued her had ceased to exist, she flew down the steps, her arms outspread, and like a bird of paradise ran to Henri's side as he clambered stiffly down from his horse.

‘Charmian! Oh, my darling!'

As Henri lifted the child down, she kissed her, embraced her, and with joy as simple as a song flung herself into Henri's arms.

‘It was that silly girl,' said Poe, and the steam from the tea he'd brought up to January's room drifted in a languid veil around his face in the pale late-afternoon sunlight. ‘The one who came in to watch you tune the piano – whose father was supposedly both a piano tuner
and
a famous surgeon? She told Gurry about our visit the moment he returned yesterday … Mrs Bray had given Gurry some story which included a good reason for him to notify her if anyone came asking after her “uncle”, so Gurry dispatched a note to the lady post-haste. Can you manage?'

January took the tisane from him. It smelled a good deal like those his sister Olympe would make, to lower fever and strengthen the blood against infection.

The black midwife who'd extracted the bullet from his ribs had given him laudanum. He knew this would make for a couple of bad days when he quit taking it, but at the moment he didn't care. She had, in addition to removing the bullet, bound up his head, which was where he'd allegedly been struck when the whole party had allegedly been set on by robbers in the woods without ever encountering Fowler's Baltimore-bound coffle at all.

If necessary, January reflected cloudily, he supposed Oldmixton could be blackmailed into testifying that he, Preston, and Perkins had rescued all three of the kidnapped females from Fowler's henchmen on the road to Warrenton last night, instead of just Minou, but he didn't think it would be necessary. As far as he could tell, Mr Oldmixton didn't much care what color one set of Americans was who'd shot another set of Americans in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night.

Poe would care
. When all was said and done, Marse Eddie was a Southern gentleman. He might wink at burying a murdered man secretly in the cellar as part of a complex and nefarious tragedy, but black men killing white ones, for whatever reason, was another matter. When it came down to it, there was simply too much at stake to trust a white man.

But, as Octavia Trigg had said, as the midwife bandaged up January's head,
what he don't know won't hurt him none
.

Feeling as if he were trying to speak in a dream, January finally roused himself to ask, ‘Where's Singletary now?'

‘At the Indian Queen.' Chloë came in from the hall, the ruched velvet opera-cloak she'd had on last night still draped over her pink gown, though she'd gotten rid of the diamonds. He'd heard the crunch of her carriage wheels in the street just as he emerged from several hours' sleep – presumably she'd come to fetch Henri. January had the dim recollection of Dominique telling him, as he clung to her hands while the bullet was being probed for, all about Henri's sufferings, wailings, demands for tea and blancmanges and mustard footbaths and extra pillows where he'd been tucked up on the ‘white folks' parlor' couch.

And January had managed to whisper,
After what he did, give him whatever he asks
.

‘You were quite right, Benjamin,' Chloë went on as Poe brought up a chair for her at the side of January's bed. ‘Jeremiah Hurlstone asked M'sieu Singletary to look into his daughter's activities here. He suspected she'd forged his name on documents to transfer Hurlstone and Ludd funds from a number of European banks into those of what he thought were accomplices: Mssrs Merton, Allen, Sinter, et al. She knew, you see, that the Bank of England is going to withdraw all of its assets from American banks next month, which will mean another wave of closures – I've already made arrangements for our funds to be transferred. It's what I'd have done,' she added, ‘were I in her position.'

‘Would you?' Poe regarded her with respectful amusement. ‘You little minx. And would you have made plans to murder your husband as well, had he turned out to be a drunkard and a gambler?'

‘I don't know.' Chloë folded childlike hands on her knee. ‘It's difficult for a girl, you understand, M'sieu Poe. I should like to think that I wouldn't murder an unoffending old man – or an unoffending young one – to ensure myself enough money to live independent of husband and family, but then I've always been wealthy. Because of the way Louisiana property law is structured, I've never been in danger of finding myself destitute … or completely at the mercy of a man who can't control his drinking or his gambling.'

Something in those huge blue eyes made Poe flush a little, and look aside.

January asked, ‘She intended to kill Singletary, then, didn't she?'

‘Oh, yes. As soon as Mr Oldmixton was out of the country. Mr Oldmixton is furious, by the way – he's gone back to Bray's house in the hopes of picking up her trail, because I'm almost certain she'll go back for her jewellery. She'll need something besides what Fowler gave her, to support her while she makes sure that her other identities aren't being watched.'

‘How is Singletary?'

‘Not well.' For the first time, emotion fleeted across her face, both anger and pity. ‘I'd like you to have a look at him, as soon as you're feeling better yourself—' She glanced worriedly at his bandaged head, in a way that told January that even she didn't know the true story of last night's events.

‘He's very fragile, and I expect he's going to have a frightful time tapering off opium. Your friend Mr Sefton was quite ill when he did so, wasn't he? I have asked him to come back to New Orleans with us for a time. He feared, he said, after his room was broken into, that it might be Mr Oldmixton, or a man in his hire, who was seeking to silence him – because he suspected about Mr Oldmixton being a spymaster. But when he startled the intruder in his room, the ink on his desk was spilt, and at tea with Mrs Bray he saw the stain of it on her hand. The following day she “chanced” to meet him, begged for the opportunity to explain—'

‘—and slipped something into his sherry,' guessed Poe gloomily, ‘and steered him to a waiting cab when he “came over queer”?'

‘It was very simple,' pointed out Chloë. ‘He'd known her from a child. And as I've said, he is a naïve and trusting old man.'

‘Less so now, I presume,' said Poe, ‘than he was?'

In the connecting bedroom, January heard a door open and Dominique's voice ask a soft question; Musette replied, ‘Oh, yes, Madame, peaceful as an angel …'

Poe turned from the window, where he'd gone to look out into the drive. ‘And Mede saw something, or learned something? Or merely put two and two together in a fashion that was beyond his blockheaded master?'

‘I don't think it was anything that definite,' said January. ‘Though I notice when he obtained his freedom, he didn't waste an instant in putting himself where he thought Mrs Bray couldn't get at him. But as you said yesterday, everyone in Washington would be expecting Luke's suicide
except Mede
. Because he knew Luke Bray. He couldn't testify in a court, but once he was a free man, he could certainly write to Luke's father and say,
I know he would not take his own life
. And he would be believed. And because he cared for Bray, he not only could, but he would.'

‘No man is an island.' Poe's dark brows pulled together. ‘Not even poor Singletary … But if Mede were still a slave when Luke “committed suicide”, in a town like Washington Rowena Bray could be rid of him within hours. I can only trust …'

He turned his head sharply, hearing – as January had already heard – footsteps in the hall. Mrs Trigg said, ‘I think he still awake, sir, though he took a awful crack on the head—'

And John Oldmixton replied smoothly, ‘So Mr Trigg has informed me.'

And presumably
, thought January,
coached you in what your part in the rescue was supposed to be
…

‘I won't keep him long, m'am. Thank you.'

The door opened.

‘Did she come back?' Chloë asked.

‘She did.' The British Minister's Secretary closed the door quietly behind him and bent to kiss her hand. ‘If three-fifty was what they offered me for a hulking cotton-hand like Benjamin, I doubt they gave her more than five hundred for both Miss Janvier and her maid. She would need more. I fear –' he straightened and turned to January – ‘that I come like winged Mercury, in advance of Constable Jeffers, though I've informed him how you were injured by those
robbers in the woods
.'

He cocked a dark eyebrow.

‘His interest has nothing to do with my rescue of the ladies –' the very slight emphasis he laid on ‘my' went right past the others in the room – ‘though I understand that the same robbers who attacked you killed Fowler and his men—'

Chloë's eyebrows shot up. Poe exclaimed, ‘Well, there is a God after all!'

‘Then why is he coming here?' asked January.

What kind of story has the Bray woman told, to discredit my witness
…

‘He's going to want to speak to you – and to you also, Mr Poe – on the subject of your conversation with Mr Bray last night. It seems that when Mrs Bray returned to get her jewellery in the small hours of this morning, her husband was waiting for her … and strangled her to death.'

‘S
he killed Mede.' Luke Bray raised his head to regard the men who stood before him in the dismal ‘visitor room' of the jail. ‘She got to have, an' if you ignorant bastards had the sense God gave a day-old chicken you'd have seen that. You'd have called in the police, got them to look for his body …' He rubbed his hand across his unshaven face.

Beside him, January was conscious of Constable Jeffers's glance: inquiring. Questioning, his pencil poised above his notebook.

Behind the barred door that led to the cells, a man's voice raised in despairing howls.

A drunkard in the grips of the horrors? Or one of the slaves locked up there by an owner passing through town?

January shook his head and tried to look like a man who has, himself, nothing to conceal. ‘Sir, I only know what I told you on Monday evening: that Mede Tyler left Mr Trigg's boarding house Tuesday evenin' an' didn't come home. It ain't for me to go accusin' nobody of what I don't know—'

‘Well you should have known!' The young man slammed his hand violently on the cheap pine table. Tears flooded his eyes, and a string of snot elongated itself from his nose. His whole body shook. ‘You should have God-damned known she hated him! Should have God-damned known she wanted to kill him!'