Ran Away (23 page)

The gates of Valentine’s Livery stood open on to Rue des Ursulines. January stepped quickly through them into the yard, looking around him with an air of slightly bewildered innocence.

As he’d suspected, where the lot formed an L – the extension of the yard rented to Valentine by Pavot – there was a small door in the fence that separated Pavot’s truncated lot from the rented-out extension. If there hadn’t been a door there Shaw would simply have to scramble over the fence  . . . 

‘Can I help you, sir?’ A thin red-haired youth emerged from the stable.

‘I’m looking for Mr Valentine.’

‘I’m Mr Valentine.’ The youth shaded his eyes and looked up at him, with a slight air of defiance, as if expecting laughter at the assertion. Shaw had said sixteen, but this ‘Mr Valentine’ didn’t look a day over fourteen, if that. ‘Magus Valentine, at your service with the best conveyances and the finest horseflesh you’ll find in the city.’

‘And Mr Tim Valentine is  . . . ?’

‘In Baton Rouge this week. He should be back Thursday.’

The door from Pavot’s side of the fence opened. Shaw slouched through and handed money to someone behind him, presumably Pavot’s obliging servant Jerry. January glanced around him and observed that the livery yard occupied much of the center of the block bounded by Ursulines, Bourbon, Dauphine and St Philippe. A ragged line of the back walls of kitchens, stables, and outbuildings hemmed it in, two and sometimes three stories tall, and with the addition of the back half of what had originally been the Pavot lot, the whole must have occupied some ten thousand square feet, half again the area of the average city lot. Most of that space was occupied by a long stable, a number of fodder sheds, and – across the carriageway that led out to Rue des Ursulines – a large coach house, whose upper floor, to judge by the lines of washing hung from its windows, served the Valentine family as their dwelling place.

Shaw ambled over to January and Magus Valentine, taking in all these details with that deceptively mild gray glance. ‘Your pa got a key to that door, son?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Under the brim of the boy’s cap, the hazel eyes grew wary.

‘Keep it on his key ring?’

‘Yes, sir. It’s always locked.’

‘
Always
is a big word.’ Shaw spat into the dirt. ‘When did he leave?’

‘Saturday morning. He took deck passage for Baton Rouge on the
Daffodil
. I was tellin’ this gentleman he should be home Thursday or Friday.’

‘What time you lock up the yard last Friday night?’

A small straight line appeared between the boy’s reddish brows. In the cast-off hand-me-downs of a much larger man, Magus Valentine reminded January for some reason of the beggar-boy Poucet, of whom he had not thought in years.
That combination of cockiness and wariness, the air of being always ready to run for it?
Or was it only because of the four smaller children clustered at the foot of the stairs that led up to the gallery above the coach house, watching him as Poucet’s little gang had done?

‘I’d have to get the book, sir, but I think the last team came in at nine, the moon being just short of full. I locked up the yard, and it took us about a half-hour to get them rubbed and bedded down and the harness stowed.’

‘
Us
bein’ you an’ your Pa?’

‘Yes, sir. And Sillery, sir.’ He nodded across the yard, where a barrel-chested little man with Ibo features was raking together soiled straw he’d pitched out of the line of stalls.

‘An’ nobody can get into the yard nor out of it, ’ceptin’ through that gate –’ Shaw gestured in the direction of the carriageway, which ran between the back of Hüseyin’s coach house and the long side of Valentine’s – ‘or through the door to Pavot’s yard?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Anybody else have the keys? Barrin’ your pa?’

‘Mr Pavot has keys to his gate, being that the land’s actually his from that chimney –’ he pointed to the roof of Hüseyin’s kitchen – ‘on back. Who should I tell Pa,’ added the boy doggedly, ‘was askin’ after him?’

‘Name’s Shaw. Lieutenant of the City Guards.’ For a moment he studied Magus Valentine’s face, and the boy’s eyes shifted. ‘You mind if my friend an’ I take a look around?’

‘No, sir.’ The boy’s glance went to January again. This time the fear was unmistakable.

Why scared?

And why of ME? Why not the white man who has the power?

‘You keep them lanterns lit all night?’ Shaw nodded toward the iron brackets that projected from the front of both stable and carriage house.

‘No, sir. We snuff ’em, last thing we lock up. Sillery sleeps in the stable; Jones and Delilah – she’s Sillery’s sister – sleep in the coach house next to the tack room.’

‘An’ you – or your pa – you didn’t see nuthin’ goin’ on in the yard here, late Friday night?’

‘No, sir.’ The boy’s voice had a wary patience to it, as if he would not be tricked or pushed. ‘From my window – it’s the one up there –’ he pointed – ‘I can see the whole of the yard. I wake up two, three times in the night, just to have a look, make sure the horses are all right.’

‘An’ you heard nuthin’ Sunday neither?’

The boy’s eyes shifted again. ‘Nor Sunday neither, sir. Anything I can show you gentlemen, whilst you’re here?’

Shaw and January went over the stables, the coach house, and the yard, and even up into the coach-house loft, which had been roughly partitioned into two chambers, one for the owner of the premises – it had a bed – and the one in front for everyone else. In addition to a pile of straw ticks and blankets in a corner it contained a table, at which, as they entered, the next-oldest child – a bright-eyed red-haired twelve-year-old girl – was carving up half a loaf of bread.

‘Maggie, we got any money at all for beans?’ the girl said. ‘We—’

‘I told you not to call me Maggie.’ The boy fished in his pockets, glanced worriedly at Shaw, then went to the packing boxes that made up the room’s shelves and dish cupboard and took out a ledger book. ‘I’ll go round to Mr Braeden with his bill again,’ he said. ‘We’ll get somethin’.’

In the coach house below, January counted two buggies, a wagon, and a stylish fiacre. As Shaw had said, they were all clean as his mother’s dishes, and moreover, the floor between them was swept as well, a good deal cleaner than some parlors January had been in. A tack room was partitioned off the coach house, and beside it, a second cubicle served as the dwelling for the second groom, Jones, and his wife Delilah. As he walked around the great open space of the coach house, January felt them watching him from the doors.

Last of all he and Shaw took the ladder from where it lay along the stable wall and propped it on the wall just below the chimney of Hüseyin Pasha’s kitchen. It took the two of them to move it, and when Shaw climbed up to have a look at the wall and the chimney January again could feel the eyes of the three livery-yard slaves on his back.

‘Nothing?’ he asked quietly, when Shaw descended.

‘Rain washed away whatever there was.’ He started to lower the ladder down and was forestalled by Sillery and Jones, who came to assist. Stepping back, Shaw went on softly, ‘If them gals helped theirselves to all the jewels they could lay hands on, that kind of money buys a lot of silence.’

‘Maybe,’ agreed January. ‘But even allowing that Tim Valentine is a scoundrel, I don’t think there’s enough food in the house for anyone there to have been bribed.’

Shaw returned to Rue Bourbon through the little door in the fence and thus through to the Pavot house – outside of which, presumably, Burton Blodgett still waited like a faithful dog. January took a last look around the livery yard and wondered what he was missing.

From the coach-house door, the three slaves watched him still. The children stood in a line on the gallery, watching also: when one of them would have spoken, the red-haired girl shushed him.

Magus Valentine emerged from the stable and crossed to the coach house, but was intercepted by Sillery.

January would have given a great deal, to know what words were said.

SEVENTEEN

‘
S
o, do you think it was Sabid?’ asked Ayasha.

They sat in a dark corner of Carnot’s garret. The painter had finally talked Ayasha into sitting as a model, and the few candles that, as usual, Carnot’s guests had been requested to furnish to the Shrovetide pancake-feast glimmered in front of the half-finished canvas: Susanna and the Elders, with Ayasha looking anything but innocent as she clutched a gauzy drapery to her breasts. It was sufficiently late in the evening that the noise from the Rue Jardinet below had finally grown quiet. Only the soft click of dominoes penetrated the gloom of the big chamber, and the murmur of voices in talk. Somewhere the bells of St Bernardins chimed two.

‘What would Sabid be doing in New Orleans?’ asked January. ‘That was ten years ago.’

‘Ten years isn’t forever,
Mâlik
.’ Ayasha folded up Noura’s dirtied pink veil, tucked it into her sewing basket. ‘Passion doesn’t change, neither love nor hatred. In the East, it’s shameful for a man to forgive an enemy, or forget a wrong that was done him. Where is Sabid now?’

January opened his eyes. By the gray light that came through the jalousies of the window it was after noon. For a moment – as often happened, when he slept in the daytime and woke suddenly – he did not recall where he was, though the smell of burnt sugar and mold told him
this is New Orleans
.

A soft clucking – a tiny fretful whimper – drew his eyes to the willow basket crib at the foot of the bed, and he saw his son asleep. Tiny and soft, achingly beautiful, and January felt the years in New Orleans, the years with Rose, come back on him like a descending weight. And in that first moment, though he hated himself to the core of his being for it, he could not stop what he felt.

He wanted Ayasha back.

And all the dividing years undone.

It took him several minutes of lying there, staring at the creamy plaster of the ceiling and the pink folds of the looped-back mosquito-bar, before he felt able to get up and go out into the parlor. He heard Rose in the dining room (to which the room behind the parlor had been reconverted, from its former use as a classroom) – the muted creak of one of the cane-bottom chairs, the clink of a cup on a saucer. Reading. He could almost see the way she propped her cheek on her fist, the pale gleam of the daylight in the oval lenses of her spectacles. Outside the French doors, beyond the high gallery, a dray rattled by, driven full speed up Rue Esplanade as if it were a Roman chariot. The wailing cry of the milk lady rose, alien and weightless, words transformed into a long African holler such as the men would call from row to row of the sugar fields when he was a child.

Across the wide street – one of the widest in the city – their neighbor Bernadette Metoyer called out to the milk woman; Bernadette was his mother’s friend, a handsome demi-mondaine whose banker lover had absconded that summer, leaving her and her sisters to pick up the pieces. Yet Bernadette’s rich alto voice drew him back to the world of present friends, present loves. Reminded him that his mother had commanded his presence, and Rose’s, for coffee that afternoon – the Metoyer sisters would be there also – and if he wanted to have a look at the hair he’d taken from beneath Noura’s fingernails, he’d better do it now.

He drew a deep breath.

The pain passed, and he folded the dream away.

‘Have you compared hair before?’ Rose unlocked the door of her laboratory above the kitchen, the small room warm from the hearth beneath despite the chill of the day. ‘We really should get a sample from Shaw or Hannibal, to compare. My hair is close to a white woman’s, but to be honest, I wouldn’t want to bring anything into a court of law until I was sure.’

She took the key to her microscope box from the drawer of her workbench, lifted the box to the table by the windows where the light was best. The workbench had begun life as an apothecary’s cupboard, its myriad of minuscule drawers stocked with probes, tweezers, packets of sulfur, or bottles of quicksilver or acid. The microscope was the first thing she’d purchased, back when they’d had money: Swiss, brass, and formidable. ‘Remember too that we’re probably looking at arm hair rather than head hair. The texture will be different.’

‘I’ve looked at hair,’ said January. ‘But I’ve never had call to compare with a man’s life at stake. It may tell us nothing.’

From another drawer she took slips of glass, and tiny tweezers, concentrating as she prepared the slide.

‘Have you specifically compared a white man’s hair with a black man’s?’ Rose, January knew, had volumes of notes on her microscopic observations, dating back years. There were times that he suspected that if Rose were confronted by the Destroying Angel and offered a choice of her husband or the microscope, he – January – had better pack an extra shirt to wear in Hell because that’s where he’d end up.

‘Oh, heavens, yes. The girls are always comparing each others’ hair. It’s my surest way of teaching them how to prepare slides.’ She clipped a strand from her own walnut-brown curls, sandwiched it between slips of glass, and removed her spectacles to put her eye to the top of the tube. ‘See how round that is?’ January looked – making radical readjustments in the focus, since Rose was nearsighted as a mole. ‘Now look at yours.’

January withdrew his eye from the eyepiece, blinking, as Rose changed slides.

‘Yours is flatter, oval, see? The nappier the hair, the more oval it is in cross section. Now here’s our friend’s  . . .’

January drew back again with an exclamation of disgust. He realized he should have expected that the fragments of flesh and blood around the retrieved hair would be alive with tiny larvae that suddenly looked as big as earthworms under the glass.

‘Don’t be a sissy.’ Rose removed her spectacles again to have a look. ‘It looks round.’

‘I thought so, too.’