Ran Away (27 page)

‘I think she’s right,’ said January, when the voodooienne had melted into blackness and he and Hannibal had followed Suleiman back along the passageway to the loggia. ‘I’m amazed men like your friend Pig-Nose would even be able to read newspapers  . . .’

‘Don’t underrate them because they smell like privies. Even in an outhouse you’ll find a newspaper. And it only takes one literate drunkard with a grievance against the rich to stir up a whole tavern – or the whole of a street.’

Suleiman opened the door to the upstairs parlor, where a branch of candles burned on the marble-topped table. Movement further down the gallery caught January’s eye, and in the shadows he saw a boy standing, a blanket wrapped over a pale nightshirt  . . . 

Suleiman saw him, too. January didn’t understand the words he called out, but his voice was reassuring:
Everything’s all right. Go back to bed. It will be better in the morning
 . . . 

The child vanished.

Hüseyin’s child. Shamira’s child
.

‘Thank you.’ Jamilla rose from her chair as they entered the parlor, where the smell of fresh coffee lay thick on the lamplit air. ‘You are kind.’

Hannibal bowed deeply. ‘We were lucky, my Lady,’ he said. ‘
Ignavus fortuna adiuvat
. Lucky that those Gallatin Street slush-buckets believed in Madame LeVeau’s magic – at least in the dark and the fog they do – and luckier still that Madame believed my assertion of your innocence. Nevertheless—’

‘Nevertheless,’ continued January, ‘those men are dangerous, and they’ll be back. Not because they’re angry about the murder of innocent girls, or even over the injustices of the rich, but because if there are enough of them, they know there’ll be a chance to loot this house and get away with it. My advice to you, my Lady, is to close up the house and go to one of the big hotels, where they have a staff capable of turning ruffians like that out before they can make trouble.’

‘What you say is true.’ Above the edge of her veil, her eyes were heavy with sleeplessness, and by the movement of her head he guessed she’d taken opium preparatory to going to bed. Hannibal was watching her, too, and when she caught the arm of her chair for balance, his glance crossed January’s, with a curious matter-of-fact compassion.

‘Yet we shall need to sell this house, I think,’ she went on, ‘and if we leave it empty, will they not come the more quickly? Damaged, what will it bring? The former owner seized upon my husband’s offer like a starving child on food; I think it had stood empty a year. For so many of us to live elsewhere—’ She shook her head, as if she were trying to make her way underwater. ‘I know not even how much it will cost, to find a lawyer to help my husband. Suleiman has been asking and has found none, yet, to take the case.’

January cursed under his breath.

‘
Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor
,’ murmured Hannibal. ‘Even if a lawyer believed in your innocence, why would he take the risk? If he loses, you’ll be in no position to pay him. If he wins, Hüseyin Pasha will undoubtedly have to leave New Orleans anyway, and his attorney will stay on and never be hired again by anyone who believes your husband was guilty.
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win
 . . .’

‘And if we leave Nehemiah and Perkin here,’ Jamilla continued, her voice groping over the words, ‘will they not run away themselves? And if they prove loyal, will
they
not be in danger of being killed, or stolen like loot, by a mob?’

January was silent, knowing the truth of what she said. ‘Nevertheless,’ he said after a time, ‘the City Watch has few men. At this season of the year there is trouble all over the waterfronts every night. Fear and superstition will keep chance drunkards away for a time, but the waterfront gangs know of your husband’s wealth. If you remain here, it is worth their while to stir up a mob to attack the place some night. Better you should accept the loss of this place, take your husband’s gold  . . .’

‘My husband’s gold.’ Jamilla sank down into the chair behind her, and her whole body quivered, first gently, then more and more violently, until she was shaking with uncontrollable shudders. ‘My husband’s gold. All of this then comes to that: my husband’s gold.’

She put her head down into her hands and began to laugh.

Suleiman whispered, ‘Madame—!’ and January made a move toward her, then drew back as Ghulaam stepped fiercely out of the shadows, his hand on the hilt of his cutlass.

Ra’eesa sprang up from the floor in the corner where she had been sitting, ran to her mistress’s side. ‘
Khânom
—’

Jamilla shook her head, her laughter dying away into sobs of exhaustion. ‘Forgive,’ she whispered. ‘Forgive. Only that we are all in danger, because of my husband’s gold. All blame us and hate us, because of my husband’s gold. Come.’ She raised her hand against Ghulaam’s protest, and Suleiman’s. Like a graceful phantom in her embroidered coat and silent slippers, she led the way out on to the gallery and up the stair, weaving a little in the light of Ra’eesa’s candle, like a spirit barely able to find its way back to its haunt.

Shadows reeled as they entered her room, caught the filigree of the lamp, the pattern on the quilts that had been tossed aside from the divan when she’d been woken by the noise in the street. A chamber had been partitioned from one side of the bedroom, probably – guessed January – a nursery in some early phase of occupancy of the house; Ra’eesa’s pallet lay on the floor. On the opposite side of the bedroom from this, a sort of alcove had been built out of the side of the chimney and was furnished with latticed doors for the storage of bedclothes in the Turkish fashion.

These doors Jamilla opened, and she knelt, to fumble at what looked – in the wavering candlelight – like a knothole in the wood of the floor.

Ra’eesa said something in Osmanli and helped Jamilla to stand and step back. Then she herself knelt and opened a trap door in the bottom of the alcove. Ghulaam brought the lamp close, his own face a study in consternation and suspense.

There was a chest in the compartment under the trap door.

It was solid iron – January couldn’t imagine how Hüseyin Pasha ever gotten it upstairs – and about eighteen inches square. Ra’eesa, though she steadfastly refused help, could barely lift its lid.

The chest was filled with dirt.

Dirt, and old bricks, and clamshells, such as every path and road in Louisiana was paved with, in that gravel-poor country  . . . 

Everything, in fact, of which he’d found traces on those big shawls that had belonged to Noura and Karida.

At the back of the dirt, a thin reef of gold pieces was heaped up, perhaps a hundred of them, pushed to the back, as if they’d been thrust away by frightened disbelieving hands.

The hands of someone who had believed, up until a moment before, that the entire chest was filled with gold instead of rubbish.

Jamilla sank down on to the divan and laughed until she cried.

TWENTY

‘
W
ell –’ Hannibal knelt beside the chest as Ra’eesa sprang to clasp her mistress in her arms – ‘this explains why our two young ladies needed to make their exit other than through the stable.’ He picked up a handful of the coins, let them drop with a sweet musical clinking. ‘How many trips would it take, to carry that much gold down three flights of stairs and across the court? But, if they had help, two girls could lug it across the roof and down a ladder.’

‘And we know they had help.’ January leaned one shoulder against the corner of the mantelpiece and tried to purge from his heart his first, involuntary, and overwhelming spurt of impatience with Jamilla’s frantic tears:

You still have two thousand dollars, Madame. Try finding out sometime that you have NOTHING but two dollars and fifty cents
 . . . 

He crossed himself.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, lift this poison from my heart
 . . . 

What had Shakespeare said of it?
This yellow slave will knit and break religions, bless the accurs’d
 . . . 

And sour a man’s heart with envy against the stricken.

Dearest God, forgive me
.

He at least, at the start of the bank crash, had been surrounded by his friends and his family. He had not had his beautiful Rose in peril of being taken from him, had not been stranded in a foreign land  . . . 

He still had to swallow down the unhelpful urge to tell Jamilla that things could be a lot worse.

Instead he said, ‘I think a return visit to young Mr Valentine is called for. His father is a well-known scoundrel who apparently owes money to everyone in town, and who coincidentally vanished the same night the girls made their escape. The only question is whether he was their murderer or a fellow victim.’

‘Neither.’ Hannibal stood up, took January by the elbow, and steered him to the door out on to the dark gallery.

‘You know him?’ January asked softly.

‘Never saw him in my life.’

‘Then how do you know what he was doing on Friday night? According to Shaw, the last person outside his own family to see him was the moneylender Roller Gyves. If the man gave him an ultimatum for the money he owed—’

Hannibal shook his head. ‘He did give an ultimatum.’ He glanced back into the bedchamber, where Ghulaam, Ra’eesa, and Suleiman gathered around Jamilla, barely more than shapes against the light of the single candle and the wavering lamp. ‘But Valentine had nothing to do with those girls disappearing.’

January stood silent for a time, looking down at his friend, considering the implications of Hannibal’s words. Suspicions that had percolated in his mind about the younger Mr Valentine resurfaced and fit together like pieces of a puzzle. From the black pit of courtyard below, Nehemiah’s voice drifted up, reassuring the frightened maids, and January shivered at the knowledge that the first course of action open to Jamilla would be the sale of the American servants. Maybe they’d be lucky and someone in town would have the money to pick up a good coachman, a good housemaid, cheap.

But the likelihood was greater that only those who needed farm labor would be buying.
A coachman won’t get you money. A cotton hand will
.

‘And did “young
Mr
Valentine” tell you this?’ He marked off the name with the inflection in his voice, and by the way that Hannibal glanced up at him, January knew that his suspicion was correct.

He wondered if Shaw had guessed also.

No wonder
, he reflected,
I thought of Poucet
 . . . 

The fiddler shook his head. ‘I know because it wasn’t Tim Valentine that Gyves saw. It was me.’

It was slightly more than three-eighths of a mile from the house of Hüseyin Pasha to January’s doorstep on Rue Esplanade. Had he not known every step of the French Town he doubted he could have found his way there, for by the time he left the big house on Rue Bourbon the fog had thickened, and most of the inhabitants of the quarter had locked up their shutters and gone to bed. Still, he walked with his heart in his throat, one hand extended to touch the walls as he passed before them –
stucco, that’ll be the Rastignac cottage; brick, with six sets of shutters new-painted, the Philipon town-house. That gap’s the passway into Pélisser’s yard  . . . 
His ears strained for every sound in the muffled air.

When first he’d come to New Orleans as a child, his mother had cautioned him not to go across Canal Street into the then-tiny American faubourg of St Mary: ‘They’re American animals there; you stay away from them.’ That same year the American President had bought Louisiana from the dictator of the French. Only a few hundred Americans had lived in New Orleans then, connected with the trade down the river. Even when he’d left – fourteen years later, in 1817 – they had been more a nuisance than anything else. He had mistrusted them, but didn’t fear them.

When he’d come back from France, it was a different matter.

January walked swiftly, silently, with pounding heart, and climbed the steps to his own gallery with a sense of having escaped from some terrible peril, to be clasped in Rose’s arms.

‘Evidently Tim Valentine has been dead for about three months,’ he said, after he’d explained what had delayed him – it was almost ten thirty by this time – and Gabriel had brought the cold remains of supper from the kitchen. ‘At least, when his children started hiring Hannibal to impersonate him in dealings with moneylenders – when Hannibal and I got back to town in October – they said he’d died the month before. They buried him under the stable.’

He glanced toward the dining-room door. After initial reassurances he’d sent his niece and nephew from the room, but he could hear, from time to time, the soft creak of feet in the back parlor.

‘Well, I’m sure he was no loss to the community.’ Rose poured a tisane from the tea pot, sugar and mint sweet in the soft candlelight. ‘I trust Hannibal conducted these interviews sufficiently disguised to avoid later embarrassment if they encountered him in a bar room?’

‘False whiskers and bleached hair,’ said January. ‘And I presume an American accent – which he does astonishingly well  . . .’

‘Hence that queer look his hair has had, that worried me so much.’

‘He could get the wherewithal from any woman on Perdidio Street,’ agreed January. ‘I’ve never seen tresses the color of Russian Hetty’s, for instance, growing out of any human head. He re-dyed it afterward, to cover the henna. The children are all redheads—’

‘And all under age, of course.’ Rose propped her chin on her fist. ‘And thus would find themselves in an orphanage, while everything their father had owned disappeared into the pockets of his creditors. When the oldest is finally of age to look after her brothers and sisters—’

‘Oh, you guessed that secret?’

Rose cocked a glance at him over the rims of her spectacles. ‘I’ve only been past there once or twice,’ she said, ‘not having any call to rent a horse and carriage  . . .  But I’ve seen enough Shakespeare to take a guess about the so-called “young Mr Valentine’s” true nature.
I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too
 . . .  She’s hardly the first female of our acquaintance to have masqueraded as male.’