Ran Away (19 page)

Muslin curtains divided it in two, after the fashion January had seen in servants’ dormitories in Mexico. A single armoire set between the two cubicles held the bedding for both, and each small section was furnished with a couple of inlaid chests, to hold the girls’ possessions. Though the whole of this upper floor smelled faintly of frankincense, January thought that he would certainly detect it, had two dead bodies been concealed anywhere up here, or in the attic above, even for a day.

‘Did they take any of their clothing with them?’ asked January as Ra’eesa opened the chests to let him look inside.

‘Only what they wore that night at supper,’ replied Jamilla at once. ‘Those were the clothes they had on when their bodies were found, saving only their veils. Those were not found. A woman, you understand, Lieutenant Shaw, does not go veiled within her own household, or before men who are related to her: her father, her brothers, her son.’ As she spoke, she lifted clothing from the chests and spread it out on the divan: fragile chemises of nearly transparent lawn, silk trousers, embroidered coats of crimson and indigo. Many shawls: some cashmere, as fine as silk, and some heavier wool, or thick cotton, oiled against rain.

‘What is this?’ From the side of the chest Jamilla brought out the largest and heaviest of the shawls, and exclaimed as she spread it out: ‘What have those girls been doing?’

And Ra’eesa said something that January remembered Ayasha would say, when one of the cats would try to woo her with gifts of deceased mice.

The shawl – originally a pinkish buff color patterned with blue – was filthy, grubbed all over with reddish-brown dirt, as if it had been spread on bare ground. January carried it to the window, brushed his hand over it, dislodging a shower of particles. ‘Brick dust,’ he said. ‘And common dirt  . . .’ His fingers found bits of broken shell as well.

At the same time Ra’eesa cried, ‘
Qabîh
!’ and brought from the other chest a dark-red shawl, similarly soiled.

‘Wherever they had them wraps, M’am,’ murmured Shaw, ‘I think it’s safe to say they been outside the walls of this house.’

FOURTEEN

J
amilla gathered the dirty fabric in slender fingers. Between veil edge and veil edge, her dark eyes clouded with doubt. ‘To the best of my knowledge neither Noura nor Karida passed the gates of this house unattended since our arrival. It is clear now to me—’ She broke off and put her hand to her head with a wince of pain.

‘My lady?’

‘It is nothing.’ She shook her head quickly. ‘A headache. They have grown worse, since coming to this country. For all that your countrymen boast of it, it is not a healthy land.’

Ra’eesa glided from the room, hastened the length of the gallery to the French doors of Jamilla’s chamber at the far end.

The Lady forced her eyes to smile, but her fingers twisted at the edge of her sleeve. ‘It is clear now to me,’ she went on, ‘that we were deceived. Saturday morning Ra’eesa woke me, to say that Noura and Karida had run away during the night. All the shutters on the outer doors and windows of the house were still locked and bolted from within. My husband and Suleiman and I have keys. Likewise the carriage gate on Rue des Ursulines, and the gate of the passageway on to Rue Bourbon, were locked. Yet I suppose that if one truly wished to escape, a way could be found.’

She motioned them to follow her on to the gallery again. ‘I did not think of it at the time, but they could have gone over the roof to the attic of our neighbor Pavot without much trouble. It would be a simple matter to bribe his servant to leave the window open.’

‘I take it Ghulaam slept Friday night in his chamber?’

‘He did. But if one escaped through one of the windows of the central attic, one could climb past Ghulaam’s dormers, if one were careful – or desperate. Which I promise you,’ she added earnestly, ‘the girls were not! Noura was selfish and greedy, as a child is, but she was not defiant. She always got her way with smiles or tears. Karida—’

Jamilla’s eyes softened and flooded with unshed tears. ‘Karida only wanted to be good, and to be liked.’

Shaw asked, ‘Was the windows of the main attic unlatched?’

‘No.’ She frowned. ‘So they couldn’t have—’ They reached the stair at the end of the gallery, where January had already noticed that one had only to climb over the gallery rail and drop down a few inches, to reach the kitchen roof. It left, of course, the question of what they’d used for a rope to get down – a rope which could easily have been fixed to the kitchen chimney  . . . 

‘Thank you, Ra’eesa.’

The serving maid had reappeared from the Lady’s room, bearing a tray on which a tiny cup was set.
Sitt
Jamilla took it and drank – a few soup-spoons-full of dark liquid – with a frantic eagerness that told its own story and pierced January to the heart with pity and regret, even before he smelled the bitter, swoony odor of the medicine.

Opium.

His glance crossed Shaw’s. No wonder the escaping girls had had no trouble stealing their mistress’s jewels. By the intensity of the smell, they could have taken the sheets off the bed without Jamilla waking up.

But a moment later, the Lady asked, her own gaze on the kitchen chimney, ‘Could they have gone down into the yard next door? The place where the horses are  . . .’

‘The livery,’ said January. ‘And yes, I’d thought of that already.’

‘They had my jewels,’ she said, with a trace of bitterness in her voice. ‘So it would have been simple also to bribe the slaves there to help them, and to let them out the gate. And since those shawls tell us that they had, indeed, found some way out of the house before Friday night, I think they must have had a protector, someone they could go to.’

‘Or thought they could go to,’ murmured January. Beyond the gallery, the rain still fell, gray and cold in the dreary tail-end of the afternoon. In the Place des Armes the clock struck three. And Fitzhugh Trulove’s ball opened at eight, in the English planter’s very elegant house out on the Bayou Road  . . . 

‘First thing we’ll need of you, m’am,’ said Shaw, ‘is a list of the jewels that was taken, theirs as well as yours. Times bein’ what they are, won’t be long ’fore some of ’em shows up on the open market.’

‘I shall have such a list for you tomorrow.’
Sitt
Jamilla led the way down the stairs to the gallery below. Lamps had been kindled already in the parlor. Through the French doors, January could see Suleiman sitting in one of the hearth-side chairs and across from him – bent gravely over a book on his lap – a boy who had to be Hüseyin Pasha’s son.

Shamira’s son.

Jamilla called through the door to the tutor, who stood at once and came to the gallery. ‘These gentlemen are to be admitted to whatever part of the house they ask to see. Please tell the servants that they are to be obeyed, as if they were the master or myself—’

January could just imagine the expression on the maid Lorette’s face at that information.

‘—and are to be admitted to the house, and given complete freedom, at any hour of the day or night. Ghulaam—’ She turned to the eunuch, and – presumably, by the look on his face – repeated the order in whatever language it was that the man spoke.

‘Please let me know, Lieutenant,’ she went on, ‘if there is anything whatsoever that you require, of me or of any other member of the household, that will assist in bringing justice for my poor husband. For he would no more have harmed those girls than he would have raised his hand against his own children. It is not in him to do so.’

Then she turned, rather suddenly, and reascended the stairs to the private floor of the house. Ra’eesa and Ghulaam followed her, close and cautious, as if she had fallen before when taking this particular medicine. And January cursed that he didn’t know enough of the servants’ language to ask them what had originally ailed Jamilla and how long it had been since she had slipped into the clutches of a medicine that was worse than many diseases.

For the short remainder of the afternoon, January and Shaw worked their way methodically through the house, trailed by Ra’eesa and Suleiman and frowned upon by the elegant Lorette. January spoke to the servants – the maids Bette and Desirée, the quadroon cook Louis and the Turkish cook Iskander, André the kitchen boy, and the stable staff, Nehemiah and Perkin the groom, and learned little that he had not already either heard or deduced.

‘And you can bet,’ said January, when he rejoined Shaw in the stables after the last of these interviews, ‘that if Nehemiah suspected Lorette of even
thinking
about concealing some kind of secret, or if Lorette had been kept out of that ballroom over the stables or the loft above it and thought she could get Nehemiah into some kind of trouble over it, they’d have crippled themselves trying to get to me to tell me all about it, to the ruin of the other.’

‘That bad?’ Shaw prodded with his boot at the loose heaps of straw along the stable’s inner wall, near where a narrow service door opened on to Rue des Ursulines. January had heard all about the service door from Lorette: about how Nehemiah the coachman would thieve feed and harness-leather and medicines for the horses, and how he’d sneak them out through there after dark to sell to that scoundrel Sillery who worked at the livery. Nehemiah, for his part, had been eloquent on the subject of Lorette’s own depredations on household stores such as sugar and coffee – Louis the cook being her lover – to the extent that on the fateful Sunday night, she and the other maids had ‘boosted’ nearly a half-pound of cinnamon, and almost twice that much coffee, and they had then gone with them to take tea with Lorette’s cousin who was a housemaid to the Marignys. None of the three maids would dream (they said, and Nehemiah rolled his eyes at the assertion) of spending their evening out at so rude an entertainment as
The Red Rover
at the American Theater.

January sighed. ‘Don’t they understand that they’re all slaves together?’ he said. ‘That it doesn’t matter how fair you are or how many white grandparents you have?’

‘Well, it sure don’t matter to your mother.’ Shaw held up the little stable-lantern he carried – it was densely gloomy along the back wall by the hay – and stroked the nose of one of Hüseyin Pasha’s beautiful chestnut carriage-horses who put its head over the edge of the stall, to see what was going on. ‘I got more white grandparents than she does, an’ I ain’t got a civil word out of her yet.’

‘You’re an American.’ January felt the jambs of that locked service-door in the almost-dark, fingered the battered bolts, turned over the padlock in its hasp. Through the door, he could hear the scrape and swish of iron wagon-tires on the pavement of Rue des Ursulines, the clatter of hooves as they slowed to turn through the gate into the livery stable yard, only a few feet away.

A man cursed, then said, ‘I ordered them bags delivered last week, boy—’

Still, January was well aware that his mother tried to pretend that she’d never had children by a fellow slave on Bellefleur. And even the short time that he’d sat on the Board of Directors of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society had given January a wealth of infuriating experience as to who considered themselves superior to whom at the ‘back of town’.

He came back over to Shaw, where light fell from the stable entrance from the courtyard, and examined what he’d picked up on his fingers at that dark service-door in the corner.

As he’d thought. Sawdust.

‘Well, you may be right, Maestro,’ admitted Shaw as they left the house and made their way back toward the Cabildo again in the thinning rain. ‘An’ I sure couldn’t find a place in the whole of that house where them girls could have been kept without somebody seein’ flies or rats makin’ a beeline for the place, even if they was curled up into a trunk.’

He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and spat into the brimming gutters as they passed across them on the makeshift bridges of plank that were, at last, being replaced all over town by regular pavements and drains.

‘The whole story is ridiculous.’ January tucked tighter beneath his jacket the little bundle Suleiman had handed him, warm and slightly greasy from the kitchen: bread, cheese, vegetables and goat meat for his master in the prison. At the best of times, January was well aware, the food in the Cabildo was inedible, and what meat there was in it would be almost certainly be pork.

‘An’ yet,’ Shaw went on, ‘Oliver Breche is damn clear on his story. He says he’d been doin’ the shop’s books late, in that front room over the shop, an’ when the rain quit, he opened the windows to get some air. He saw light in the dormer, though the rest of the house was dark, he said, an’ was apparently admirin’ the general effect when the sash was throwed open. He saw Hüseyin Pasha framed in the window – he says – with the body of a girl in his arms. He says he recognized him by the lamplight in the attic behind him an’ was transfixiated with horror as our friend the Turk chucked first one, then t’other of the girls out. He knew the Turk, havin’ provided Mrs Hüseyin with medicines these past four weeks—’

‘So he’s the one.’

‘Pharmacy’s right there.’ Shaw nodded across the street at the darkened bricks of the building, the round glass globes of the great display retorts in the windows. ‘He said there was no mistakin’ what he saw.’

They reached the corner of Rue Royale, where the iron street-lamp creaked in the wind on its crossed chains above the intersection.

‘Which leaves us with the question,’ Shaw continued, when they’d gained the banquette – and the sheltering abat-vents of the houses – on the other side, ‘of where Hüseyin did hide them girls’ bodies.’

‘Or the question,’ countered January, ‘of why young Mr Breche would lie.’

‘There is that. Not to mention the question of how you can see a man’s face on an overcast night by light in the room
behind
him.’

Oliver Breche’s motives were elucidated a few moments later, when Shaw and January – after another plunge through the thin sheets of rain that sluiced down on the Place des Armes – reached the arched colonnade of the Cabildo and stepped once more into the chilly shelter of the watch room. Rain generally had a dampening effect on the combativeness of Gallatin Street and the levee, and on this gray tail-end of the afternoon the big stone-floored room was relatively quiet.