Ran Away

The Benjamin January Series from Barbara Hambly

A FREE MAN OF COLOR

FEVER SEASON

GRAVEYARD DUST

SOLD DOWN THE RIVER

DIE UPON A KISS

WET GRAVE

DAYS OF THE DEAD

DEAD WATER

DEAD AND BURIED*

THE SHIRT ON HIS BACK*

RAN AWAY*

* available from Severn House

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  

First world edition published 2011

in Great Britain and in the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Hambly.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Hambly, Barbara.

Ran away.

1. January, Benjamin (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

2. Free African Americans–Fiction. 3. Private

investigators–Fiction. 4. New Orleans (La.)–Social life and customs–19th century–Fiction. 5. Murder–

Investigation–Fiction. 6. Detective and mystery stories.

I. Title

813.6-dc22

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-146-0  (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8082-6  (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-382-3  (trade paper)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

PROLOGUE

December 1837

W
ord flashed through the town like pebbles flying from an explosion. Americans, French Creoles, slaves and the
gens de couleur libré
all seemed to know it at once.

‘He strangled them with bowstrings,’ the Widow Levesque announced, over morning coffee and beignets at the house of her son, ‘and pitched them out the attic window.’

‘Who did?’ Benjamin January paused in the pantry doorway, a pitcher of cream for his wife and his mother in his hands.

‘The Turk, of course.’ There could not have been richer satisfaction in Livia Levesque’s tone if she’d been divulging her own acquisition of railway shares.

In a city reeling from the impact of the business depression sweeping the country, the Turk provided – to white New Orleans society and to the blacks, slave and free, who coexisted with it – a welcome combination of diversion and largesse. The house he’d purchased on Rue Bourbon had been the site of a dozen stylish entertainments since his arrival in November. All the best of New Orleans society, both Americans and French Creoles, were invited, and all came: the Turk’s first action upon his arrival had been to acquire one of the best cooks in the city. The penny-pinching evident even in the houses of such notables as the Marignys and the Destrehans these days was nowhere to be seen under the Infidel’s roof. A representative – it was rumored – of the Sultan of Constantinople, the Turk was educated, convivial, spoke flawless French and displayed manners that most of the American planters (said the French Creoles) would do well to copy.

Moreover, in addition to being excellent company when present, in his absence he provided an unending source of whispered speculation, for his household included – as well as the French cook – a number of slaves brought from his homeland, a wife, and two concubines, young women never glimpsed but reputed to be of breathtaking beauty.

The fact that most of the bankers, planters, and brokers in New Orleans had concubines themselves – slave women whose duties included sleeping with the master – was not deemed the same thing, somehow: one bought them for their housekeeping skills, and anyway, they were black. Even the ladies of the free colored demi-monde – the mistresses to those same bankers, planters, and brokers – were fascinated.

Society matrons, though utterly charmed by the Infidel’s polished manner, opined among themselves that no good would come of it.

‘Both his concubines.’ Livia Levesque took the cream pitcher from January’s hand. ‘Murdered and thrown from the window.’

‘Who says this?’ Rose demanded, and offered her mother-in-law a plate of pralines.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ added January.

The Widow Levesque scratched with a critical nail at a chip in the edge of the creamy queensware plate and took one praline, which she laid on the edge of her saucer. ‘Did you make these yourself, dear? I don’t see what’s ridiculous about it.’ She regarded her son with velvet-brown eyes. A former demi-mondaine herself – though nowadays she would never admit such a thing – Livia Levesque kept into her early sixties the striking beauty that had saved her from slavery over three decades before. She was, January knew, inordinately proud of her white father’s blood and generally tried to pretend that her son by a fellow slave in her youth – as African-black as his father – was no relation of hers. Only Rose’s production of a grandchild in October had brought that portion of her family into her good graces again, although she had been heard to hope that Baby John would not inherit his mother’s nearsightedness:
So tedious and silly-looking, having to wear those awful spectacles
 . . . 

‘I could have warned them,’ she declared. ‘Turks have no regard for women. They simply use them and cast them aside – and are madly jealous as well, though Heaven knows the man kept the poor things prisoners in that attic, so closely that they never had the opportunity to make him jealous  . . .  Not that
that
makes any difference to a Turk.’ She shrugged her slender shoulders in their wide sleeves of straw-colored silk. ‘I dare say he tired of them  . . .’

‘If he was tired of them he’d have sold them, surely.’ Rose’s voice was dry. ‘He’d certainly have found a buyer.’

‘Not a Turk, dear,’ corrected Livia darkly. ‘They would sooner kill a woman than believe that she’s been taken by another man.’

‘No,’ said January.

His mother regarded him, eyes widened with surprise, as if she weren’t quite certain what the word meant in regard to herself.

‘I will not believe it,’ he went on quietly. ‘I know the man—’

‘Nonsense, Benjamin, of course you don’t.’

‘—and he would not do such a thing. He saved the life of my wife.’

‘Don’t be silly. Rose has never even met—’

‘Not Rose,’ said January. ‘Ayasha.’

ONE

October 1827, Paris

‘
M
âlik
?’

January opened one eye, squinted against the light in the room.

He’d woken briefly just before dawn, when Ayasha had risen to pray – a habit she’d retained from her childhood, though she had become a Christian and went to Mass as dutifully as any of the other inhabitants of the building. He’d heard the bells of St Séverin strike seven before he’d slipped back into dreams. It was broad daylight now.

Not satisfied with this tepid response, his wife yanked wider the bed curtains, pulled up her skirts and flounced on to the bed in a great whoof of petticoats, straddling his body on the faded coverlet. Offended, Hadji the cat sprang from the pillow, retreated to the window sill that overlooked – far, far down – the Rue de l’Aube, and commenced washing, with the air of Pontius Pilate:
I haven’t the slightest idea who those creatures are
.

‘
Zahar
?’ January drew his hand from under the blanket – the October morning was bitterly cold – and groped for her brown knee.

Her fingers closed on his wrist, strong and warm as a child’s. Her black hair, braided and tucked in a great curly pile on her head, had come down in wisps around her face: she looked like a desert witch, inexplicably masquerading as a housewife in a dress of green-and-white muslin. ‘There is one who needs your help,’ she said.

‘You want me to break into the harem of Hüseyin Pasha and see one of his concubines?’

‘The girl is ill.’

‘I’ll be even more ill if I’m caught. I’ve seen his guards.’

‘You won’t be caught, my husband. The Lady Jamilla – his wife – will let us in—’

‘Oh, he’ll understand
that
.’ Shuddering with cold, January washed with all possible speed in the basin before the hearth which served the big room for both heating and cooking and, on spring nights when all the
gratin
had left Paris for their country estates and there wasn’t quite enough money for candles, sometimes lighting as well. The nobles who had returned to Paris in the wake of the Bourbon kings a dozen years previously valued January’s talents as a musician, and Ayasha’s as a dressmaker, sufficiently to afford them a living decent enough, and at this season they were flocking back to the city demanding entertainment and new clothes. So there was coffee, soft cheese, butter and jam on the domestic end of the long work-table. In a huge willow basket beside the door, January saw shining lengths of silk, blonde lace, gauze like a breath of lilac mist, covered with a towel against the depredations of Hadji and Habibi. Ayasha had been visiting a customer.

Ayasha poured coffee, plucked chunks of sugar from the tin box on the table and added a dusting of cinnamon. ‘Hüseyin Pasha has forbidden any in his household to see
farangi
doctors,’ she said. ‘He says they will bring evil ideas with them and corrupt the household. I told the Lady Jamilla that you were not like the others; that you were taught by wise women as well as by idiots at the Hôtel Dieu, and that you don’t bleed and puke and stick clysters up peoples’—’

‘In other words, that I’m not a doctor at all,’ said January. ‘Just a surgeon – a bone-setter.’

‘Yallah! She’d never let you near the girl if I said that. The girl is with child,’ pleaded Ayasha, her great dark eyes filled with distress. ‘She is far from her home,
Mâlik
.
Sitt
Jamilla fears that one of the other wives has poisoned her because the Pasha is away in London. Please come.’

January pulled his shirt and trousers on, and a warm, if shabby, waistcoat that dated from his first days in Paris, when he’d still been under the impression that
liberté, egalité,
and
fraternité
applied to men of African descent in the medical profession.

He’d arrived in France from his native Louisiana in 1817, aged twenty-two. The long wars between England and France had just ended: the likelihood that a sea voyage undertaken by a man of his color would end in some planter’s cane field in Barbados had shrunk to an acceptable minimum. Armed with an introduction from the
libré
who’d taught him surgery in New Orleans, he had been admitted for training at the Hôtel Dieu, and later had been hired there as a surgeon.

But by that time he’d learned that he could make far more money playing the piano at the entertainments given by such families as the Polignacs and the Noailleses – recently returned to France after living abroad since 1789. This had mattered little to him then. He’d shared a garret in the Rue St-Christopher with two of the other junior surgeons and had been perfectly content. But one morning an eighteen-year-old Berber dressmaker had brought into the clinic one of the girls from her shop, bleeding from a botched abortion.

When he’d emerged from the hospital not long afterwards, he had found the young dress-shop keeper weeping in an alley for her dying friend and had walked her back to her rooms.