Good Man Friday (4 page)

P
assage had been booked for them on the British merchantman
Anne Marie
, en route from Havana to Baltimore and eventually back to Liverpool. Henri Viellard chose the vessel because neither its captain nor its owners had any objection to assigning a cabin to a couple of color and their child, if they could pay for it.

January only wished that the ‘wife' and child he was to accompany to Washington were his own.

But when hands had been shaken, and preliminary arrangements made for the payment of one hundred and fifty dollars to Rose – half of the agreed-upon fee – Henri took January aside and whispered discreetly, ‘If you would, M'sieu, I should be personally very much indebted to you, should you consent to act as escort for your sister. She'll be accompanying us to Washington as well.'

January reminded himself that
personally very much indebted to you
meant
in the event of financial disaster, you can come to me for help
, and refrained from moaning aloud.

The sister Henri meant was not Olympe – mother of Gabriel and Zizi-Marie – but their younger half-sister Dominique: frivolous, beautiful, privileged since birth as the daughter of a white sugar-broker, and Henri Viellard's mistress. January was dearly fond of Dominique and understood why this fat, scholarly mama's-boy of a planter would want to bring her on an expedition in which he had been included merely because respectable wives did not travel unaccompanied. But he understood also that his duties as sleuth-hound and henchman would now be expanded to include posing as Dominique's husband, sharing the minuscule cabin with four trunks containing her dresses, and vacating it whenever Henri arrived for a visit.

Not to mention listening to any amount of his sister's non-stop prattle of dresses, hats, gossip about fellow-passengers and the myriad perfections of her beautiful daughter Charmian, who would – along with her nurse and Dominique's maid – also be part of their little shipboard household.

The voyage to Baltimore took almost three weeks. The weather in the Caribbean was stormy; in the Atlantic, the ship rolled in high seas under an almost constant pelting of sleety rain. Henri remained in his cabin in an agony of seasickness, and because Chloë was impervious to the ailment – and had the maternal instincts of the average garden-spider – Dominique spent most of every day at his side.

January walked the decks when he could, his muscles screaming for exercise, but many days Captain Fancher issued orders that the passengers must remain below, out of the way of the struggling crew. The only other passengers were three German businessmen and the seventeen-year-old son of a Mexican grandee bound for school in France – and all their respective valets, who, along with Henri's valet Leopold, slept and ate with the crew. All of them fell immediately and violently in love with Dominique. When the pitching of the ship permitted, January and Herr Rosenstein teamed up on piano and concertina so that everyone could take turns dancing with the two ladies, vigorous waltzes that for most of them constituted their only physical activity for days on end.

January forbore to mention to his fellow passengers that ‘dancing the slaves' was precisely how slave traders kept their cargo ‘in trim' on the long voyage from Africa.

Dominique's maid Thèrése, Chloë's maid Hèléne, and Musette – Charmian's nurse – remained below.

Afterwards, when Dominique took her daughter to bed and Captain Fancher's man came in with the tea, January fleshed out his information about the disappearance of Mr Selwyn Singletary in Washington City the previous fall.

‘I've corresponded with M'sieu Singletary most of my life.' Chloë took the teacup that January brought her, from the gimballed urn on the saloon's main table where Herren Coppert and Franck had settled to their usual game of picquet. The lanterns swayed with the motion of the ship, and rain spattered the windows as if hurled from a bucket.

‘He was president of the British Mathematical Society, of which my Uncle Veryl is a member, though uncle's hopeless with numbers.' Madame timed her sip to the roll of the ship. Her marriage two years previously to Henri had been considered a phenomenal coup by the Viellard family; what she felt about it, she had never said. ‘I've always been very good with them, so starting when I was nine, Uncle Veryl had me write his letters for him. I've never actually met M'sieu Singletary.'

‘Can you describe him?' January collected Charmian's alphabet blocks from the low table beside the sofa where they sat, keeping the words together that she'd spelled out, everything from
Anne Marie
to the name of Captain Fancher's manservant, which was Skorsmund.

‘Uncle Veryl says he's “about” his – Uncle Veryl's – height, which is five foot eight or nine. But of course he describes Henri the same way, and Henri is over six feet tall.' She rearranged the blocks, changing their upward faces so that instead of spelling out
pineapple
and
piano
, they made neat rows of the alphabet. Chloë was fond of Charmian in her precise way, and fast friends with Dominique, a situation which bemused January but which at least would not result in murder before they reached Baltimore. ‘When I asked him, “Are M'sieu Singletary's eyes blue?” he said yes, he thought so. When I asked, “Are his eyes hazel?” he agreed that they probably were. And as he only met M'sieu Singletary once, twenty years ago, he wouldn't know if he was bearded or clean-shaven, though he hadn't the slightest idea what color his hair was …'

‘It's probably gray by now,' said January. ‘A lot of people are unobservant that way.'

Chloë sniffed, as if this were something that she would arrange, were she ever to find herself in the position of ruling the world.

‘How would he have been dressed? Was he a wealthy man?'

‘I believe his family was quite poor. He never had much formal schooling, which is probably just as well. From what I gathered from his letters – those that weren't entirely preoccupied with proofs and theorems – he had a sort of self-taught genius for mathematical relationships, the kind of thing I only glimpse now and then, when I see waves break on the bow of this vessel, or how a loose rope will swing from a mast. Uncle Veryl describes him as shabby, though the Virgin and all the saints know what that means, considering the kind of things
he
wears. “Shabby and old-fashioned,” he said.'

‘
Old-fashioned
could mean anything from a narrow-cut coat, to small-clothes and a cocked hat.'

‘Or trunk-hose and a slashed doublet, knowing Uncle Veryl.' Chloë sighed.

‘What does he do? Teach, I assume.'

‘Oh, no. At least, he does so now … or that's what he came to America to do.' She rearranged the alphabet blocks again, trying to reverse the letters of the alphabet without moving any block from its original place. A small frown printed itself between her pale, delicate brows. In her gown of gray silk, severely cut and relieved only with the thinnest of ivory piping, she looked like a child dressed by grown-ups to counterfeit adulthood, thin and solemn behind her round spectacle-lenses.

‘For most of his life M'sieu Singletary has done the accounts for banks. Five or six in various parts of England, two in France, and one in Amsterdam. Most of his time he spends traveling between them. I suppose it's why he's such an odd man: no family, no friends, but hundreds of correspondents through mathematical and scientific societies, like me and, it turned out, Henri.'

‘I didn't know Henri was mathematical.'

‘He's not. But M'sieu Singletary is also interested in insects, and Henri wrote to him after reading a monograph M'sieu Singletary published on cockroaches in Bordeaux. The correspondence flourished. Many people admire Henri's collections of butterflies, but he has found few to share his enthusiasm for Dictyoptera.'

January said, ‘Hmmn.' In the cottage that Henri had purchased for Dominique on Rue Dumaine, where Henri himself lived three or four days a week in carnival season, he had seen the planter's collections of insects, shells, and flowers exquisitely desiccated in sand. His medical training appreciated the other man's fascination with those delicate variations in the forms of organic life, but he'd lived too long in New Orleans to take any delight in trays of preserved roaches. Dominique – Minou, the family called her – wouldn't even go into the room.

‘Be that as it may,' Chloë went on, ‘last year the University of Virginia offered him a year's post. Henri and I both had to write assuring him that Americans were not barbarians and that the United States was a perfectly safe place to visit if one refrained from playing cards in waterfront taverns.

‘To do him justice,' she added, ‘while I don't think M'sieu Singletary capable of telling a scoundrel from a Presbyterian minister, he dislikes human company so much that I can't really see him blundering into trouble that way. Yet something has undoubtedly happened to him.' She sat back on the sofa, folded lace-mitted hands. ‘Quite apart from the affection I feel for him, I feel responsible for encouraging him to come. I meant it for the best …'

‘Does he play cards?'

‘Not as most people understand playing. He's written to me more than once that games as such bore him, as they bore me. You have no idea what a relief it was to hear from someone who understood about working out mathematical probabilities when you're playing copper-loo with idiots who think they're being so daring, playing cards behind the nuns' backs. Indeed,' she added wistfully, ‘to write to
any
one about
any
thing other than how my music lessons were progressing, not that a single member of my family can distinguish a nodal pattern from a cat's cradle.'

She smiled her precise cut-glass smile. ‘Even when I was little – and he deduced quite quickly that I was a ten-year-old girl and not Uncle Veryl – he'd send me long treatises on the algorithmic probabilities generated by shuffling – he hadn't the slightest idea of what little girls were interested in, of course – exactly as if I were an adult member of the Mathematics Society. He always assumed I'd be able to follow him, though he was perfectly ready to explain if I couldn't. You can't imagine what that … that assumption of intellectual equality meant to me when I was eleven, and bored to the screaming-point surrounded by the other girls in the convent. And he always did write. That meant a great deal to me, too. My aunts never did. His letters always came. I lived for them.'

In the swaying lantern-light her heart-shaped little face looked older than her eighteen years, and sad. Looking back, perhaps, on that tiny heiress, surrounded by the expectation of what a good French Creole girl should be. A pious wife, a doting mother, an accomplished hostess. And not able to understand why she wasn't it.

Reason enough, reflected January, to travel nine hundred miles, to pick up a trail months cold. So that the old man, who had opened for her that door to the world of the mind, should not be forgotten, or left to die unheeded in a foreign land.

Even if it meant hauling along her husband to lend her countenance, and her husband's mistress to keep
him
company, and the aforesaid mistress's brother to pretend to be a husband so that he could lend
her
countenance, plus the mistress's child, the child's nurse, and the mistress's maid, like so many lapdogs on a single leash … all pretending they had nothing to do with that cold little fair-haired lady sipping her tea in the shifting lamplight.

‘
Darlings
…' cooed Dominique's sweet voice from the doorway, ‘thank you
so
much for seeing me here safely.' She tossed back the oiled-silk hood of the cloak that covered her dress and smiled meltingly up at Captain Fancher, to whose arm she clung. ‘The violence of the sea must be nothing to you, after years of striding across it like a conqueror, but it
terrifies
me.'

Then she turned and touched young Señor Calaveras lightly on the biceps, her smile like honey and velvet. ‘But you don't seem to be bothered by it at
all
, and it's your first voyage …'

And all of it, reflected January with an inner smile, perfectly sincere. At four years old, Minou in a tiny gown of lace, like the Christ Child on a Mexican altarpiece, would always go to the most distinguished visitor first, whether it was their mother's lover St-Denis Janvier – Minou's father – or whichever of his guests it was most vital to impress.

‘And it's just as I feared,' she continued, smiling. ‘Benjamin has lost no time in finding another woman—'

January said, ‘Fie, woman!' and all the men laughed heartily, since no one on board would take seriously the remotest possibility that a respectable white lady like little Madame Viellard would enter into an intrigue with a black man – not even a dusky-hued Caribbean Creole, and certainly not a man so extremely black. Dominique kissed her ‘husband' lightly in greeting, and immediately embraced Chloë Viellard as well.

‘Darling—'

‘Sweetheart—'

The next instant little Herr Coppert was at Minou's elbow with a cup of tea in one hand, a small plate of sweet biscuits in the other, and adoration in his eyes.

And indeed, with her silky brown curls no longer confined in the tignon which Spanish law in New Orleans had once mandated for any woman of color – and which tradition in that city still demanded – Minou could easily have passed for a Spanish or Italian lady, as did many
gens du couleur librés
when they traveled north. January's presence as ‘husband' put paid to that illusion, but his perfect French and educated English, coupled with the cost of Dominique's dresses, his own well-bred tailoring, and his ability to hold his own in a chess game with Herr Rosenstein, made him in the eyes of the Europeans acceptable company – particularly since accepting him would include the lovely Minou in their midst.