Ran Away (32 page)

He felt their eyes on him as he crossed the street to the house door, pounded on it with his fist.

After a long time – someone must have looked down from one of the upstairs windows – an eye he recognized as Hannibal’s appeared in the judas, and he heard the clank of the lock, the scrape of bolts drawn back.

He stepped inside quickly, conscious of two men and a woman crossing the street after him as Hannibal slammed the door behind him and shot the bolts. Someone pounded on the door as January followed the fiddler down the passageway to the courtyard. ‘The Watch have been by twice,’ reported Hannibal as they ascended the stairs to the gallery above. Looking down into the shadowy courtyard January saw Nehemiah briefly appear in the kitchen doorway, carrying what looked like the handle of an ax or shovel. Perkin the groom came out of the stable to see who was in the court, then disappeared again. January wondered if the hasp on the side door of the stable, so many times unscrewed and reattached, would hold against a determined attack.

‘Breche was on the corner earlier,’ Hannibal went on, ‘talking like he was running for office. I think the Watch told him he was in danger of arrest, because he hasn’t returned, but everyone’s been back and forth to the shop.’

January cursed in Arabic. Ghulaam, standing guard outside the door of the parlor, said, ‘
Âmîn, hâbib
,’ as they passed through into the parlor.

Jamilla, properly dressed and veiled, sat on the Western-style sofa, but the visible hand-breadth of her face was pallid and beaded with sweat. The boy Nasir stood beside her, a look of agony on his round, snub-nosed face. As Hannibal and January entered, the boy asked in French, ‘When it gets dark they’ll come, won’t they, sirs?’ He cast a quick glance at the swift twilight already gathered in the windows. ‘When the Watch are all down at the taverns?’

‘I think so, yes.
Night’s black agents to their preys do rouse
 . . .  and I’m sure they won’t make a move until the house is actually broken into. Can’t arrest people for standing on the street corner, can you? Not whites, anyway. You haven’t seen Shaw by any chance, Benjamin?’

‘He’s still down in Chalmette,’ said January grimly, ‘as far as I know. At least, no steamboat passed us from that direction. But I suspect he’ll have his hands full. My Lady, with your permission—’ He took Jamilla’s hand, felt the pulse of her wrist. ‘How have you fared?’

‘Mr Sefton warned me that it would be difficult.’ He could see the attempt at a smile in her eyes. ‘All these years I have taken care to keep away from
afyûn
– my mother, and my father’s concubine, were much given to it, you understand – and now to be caught that way by a Christian. I’m sorry,’ she said at once. ‘I am weary. I should not have spoken ill of your faith.’

‘Having come from a Christian gathering this afternoon,’ sighed January as he brought the candle close to look at her eyes, ‘I have no words with which to refute you, Lady.’ And he recounted, briefly, the events of the day, which had started in the small hours, and was glad that the account of the riot in the revival tent drew a whispered laugh from her.

‘Who is this Tremmel?’ asked the Lady, when January had finished. ‘And why does he accuse you? Might he be this Smith, that came to see my husband—?’

‘I thought of that,’ said January. ‘Because it’s clear to me that Mr Smith – as
Smith
– doesn’t really exist. Like some other people I could mention –’ he glanced trenchantly at Hannibal’s bleached and recolored hairline – ‘he was invented  . . .’

He stopped as a thought struck him.

He looked back at Jamilla, and at the boy beside her.

‘He was invented to get something from my father?’ asked Nasir. ‘Like a spirit, called into being from smoke to accomplish a task?’

January was silent. He felt as if he should be shocked, but he felt no shock. Only a kind of irritation at himself, such as he felt sometimes when he’d been searching all over the house for his hat or his gloves or a piece of music, only to find it in the obvious place.

‘No,’ he said at length, aware that Jamilla and the boy were both looking at him, troubled by his silence. ‘No, I don’t think Tremmel is Smith. In fact, I’ve just realized who Smith might be. It doesn’t help us tonight, and I’m not sure how much it will help your husband—’

‘It will not help him,’ demanded Suleiman, from a chair beside the fire, ‘if a man can be made to testify that he was with my master at the moment that Noura and Karida were thrown – were
seen
to be thrown – from the window?’

‘Thrown by whom?’ January, still kneeling by the sofa, half-turned to face the tutor. ‘We’ve already established that Breche couldn’t have seen the face of the man who did it. It could as easily have been you or Ghulaam.’

‘We were at the theater! And may Allah curse the night that we went.’

‘Allah has already cursed that night,’ said January softly. ‘The court will say that if it was not your master, it was one of you acting upon his orders. The unfortunate girls had been dead a day already. This is a big house, and everyone in town knows it’s a big house. They will say:
Big enough to keep the girls locked somewhere without anyone seeing or knowing that they were dead
. If I can find—’

In the deeps of the house, pounding started, fists hammering on the door downstairs. Ra’eesa, who had sat silently at her mistress’ side, ran to the front window to look down, and Hannibal dragged her back as a brick crashed through the glass of the window she opened. The sound of glass breaking in another room told them other bricks had been thrown. January said, ‘Damn it,’ and Jamilla spoke quickly to Suleiman, who strode to the parlor’s French doors and yanked the shutters closed against a sudden hail of bricks.

Suleiman shouted something, and January – already at the next window, leaning out to pull the shutters to – heard Ghulaam’s light tread on the gallery. A moment later, as January leaned out to shut the next set of shutters, he saw the eunuch doing the same from the study next door.

‘Better bar them,’ said January as he and the tutor strode through the dining room to the garçonnière wing. ‘One man can boost another up on to the balcony.’

‘I have commanded it, yes.’ By the time they and Ghulaam had shuttered up every window of the schoolroom and young Nasir’s bedroom, and returned to the parlor, Ra’eesa had lit candles against the thick gloom and was trying to talk Jamilla – by the sound of it – into going up to her bedroom.

The Lady shook her head, pale as ash.

Outside, feet clattered on the gallery stair. Lorette, her voice frantic, called in, ‘Mr Suleiman, they’re beatin’ on the side door of the stable!’

‘
Ahku sharmoota
!’ Suleiman strode to the corner of the room, where two six-foot, silver-mounted blunderbusses stood: they must have been eighty years old. ‘Lorette, get Bette and Desirée in here.’

‘Get the gold,’ commanded January. ‘Put it in a sack, or a couple of pillowcases. Hannibal, do you think you can talk Maggie Valentine into raising up that ladder from her yard? Bribe her if necessary – you can certainly bribe Sillery. Have you rope, Suleiman?’

‘In the stable.’ The tutor plunged through the door, and January heard his feet on the stair.

Desirée, the youngest of the maids, whispered, ‘They wouldn’t hurt M’am, surely  . . .’

‘Don’t you think it,’ returned January. ‘Three years ago when a mob broke into the Lalaurie house over on Rue Royale, the coachman tried to go back into the house and was beaten to death. Hannibal, with me—’

He caught up the rifle Shaw had provided, and they descended the stairs at a run.

‘Have you ever climbed down a rope before?’ January asked. ‘Wrap it around your arms, put a turn around your body, brace your feet on the wall—’

‘I have descended from enough windows on knotted bed-sheets,’ replied the fiddler with dignity, ‘to understand the principles.’

‘Well, you’ll have to work fast, or the mob may turn on Valentine as well.’

‘Not if they have a well-stocked house to loot, they won’t.
Pecuniae obediuntomnia
. . . . When I compounded with the despicable Mr Gyves to get another three months’ grace on the late lamented Valentine’s loan, Mags swore she owed me whatever I cared to ask of her, so I think hiding space in the lofts isn’t too unreasonable a boon. And you, sir,’ Hannibal added, turning abruptly in his tracks to face Nasir, who had followed them down the stair and across the court, ‘belong upstairs with your mother—’

From inside the stable came the crashing of what sounded like hammers or crowbars on the door, and the terrified neighing of horses. A single lantern burned above the stalls and showed January Perkin the groom and Iskander the Turkish cook as they struggled to hammer wood wrenched free from the sides of the stalls against the small outer door. Nehemiah said, ‘What about the horses, sir?’ turning to Hannibal as the only white man present.

‘They’ll be stolen,’ said January simply. ‘And we’ll give the police a description to get them back. They’re not more important than anyone’s life.’

‘If they break in,’ added Nasir firmly, ‘get the lantern out of here, so it doesn’t fall and set the place on fire.’

‘Rope,’ said Hannibal, and at the same moment January saw a coil of it on the wall. He caught it down, tossed it to the fiddler, who seized Nasir firmly by the hand and dashed across the courtyard again.

‘Hold them as long as you can,’ said January to the two stablemen. ‘If they do break in –’ there was another crash, and even in the near-darkness he could see the door jerk on its hinges – ‘don’t fight. Hide in the dark and slip out as quick as you can. We’re getting Madame and the Turkish servants out over the roof. They’re the only ones who’ll be in danger.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Perkin looked uncertain about taking orders from a black man instead of a white one, but bowed to the voice of authority.

January stepped out into the courtyard, now deep in darkness. A little light filtered down from the house gallery above, but it was only because he was watching the roofline of the kitchen that he saw Hannibal, a few minutes later, make his scrambling way from the third-floor gallery across the steep slates to the kitchen chimney. He put his head into the stable again, said to Iskander, ‘You’d better get up there and help them collect anything of value they want to save.’

The cook – an immensely dignified gentleman with a long mustache – said, ‘
Ibn-kalb
,’ handed January the hammer he’d used to pound the re-enforcing planks into place, and went.

‘Where the hell are the City Guards?’ Nehemiah emerged from the stable, panic in his voice.

‘Probably on their way. But I’m guessing they think Hüseyin Pasha is as guilty as everybody else in this town does, between that idiot Breche and those damn journalists.’

‘I swear he didn’t harm them girls – damn!’ he added as there was another rending crash in the dark of the stables. ‘I’m just hopin’ those fools don’t fire the place, nor hurt the horses.’

‘When they break in, you slip out past them and head for the Cabildo. You, too,’ he added, to the kitchen boy who’d come running up, butcher-knife in hand. ‘You’ll probably meet the Watch on the way. Damn it,’ January added, at the sound of another crash, and he glanced back up at the kitchen roof. Still no sign of Hannibal. Mobs had always frightened him – perhaps the reason he’d never been a wholehearted participant in the impassioned rhetoric that had been so freely slung around in the cellar of the
Chatte Blanche
and a dozen other illegal political gathering-places in Paris in the late twenties. Old Lucien Imbot had remembered very well the crowds of Parisian poor storming in triumph down the Rue St-Antoine with human heads impaled before them on pikes, and the ballet mistress Marguerite Scie, as a little girl, had been in La Force prison when a mob had decided that the Revolutionary Tribunal was too slow about bringing enemies of the Revolution to trial.

Even less did he trust mobs of whites in Louisiana.

Now he darted across the courtyard, climbed the gallery stair. The worst thing he could do, he knew, was use the rifle he carried: white men would kill him for that. But he guessed that the Lady Jamilla, at least, stood in danger of being beaten to death, and probably the boy Nasir also, as well as any of the Muslim servants who would try to protect them.

He heard another, louder crash from the stables, and a man emerged into the darkness, dashed across the court toward the stair. At the last second January recognized Nehemiah as the coachman clattered up the steps to his side, a piece of lumber held like a club in his hand.

The next moment men poured from the stable door and across the court toward the stair.

Behind him he heard Nasir’s voice in the parlor cry out something – some sharp order – in Romanli; was aware of the women retreating up the gallery stairs to the third floor.
They’ll be cut off
, thought January as Nehemiah reached him, turned at bay with his makeshift weapon. Suleiman joined them, a silver-mounted musket in hand, and Louis the American cook.

Damn it, if anybody fires they’ll kill us before we can reload
 . . . 

A shot cracked out, and the first man to reach the bottom of the stairs crumpled, clutching his arm and screaming. The next four men tripped over him.

From the kitchen roof, Abishag Shaw’s voice called out, ‘Next man gets it ’tween the eyes.’

The last of the twilight in the sky silhouetted him, tall and thin beside the kitchen chimney. Two smaller shapes flanked him, just emerging up the ladder from the livery. Lanterns flickered in the blue darkness of the courtyard below as City Guards came in through the stables and the carriageway. Enough light, thought January, to enable Shaw to make good his threat. He’d seen the man hit his target at a hundred yards in starlight.

From behind him, Suleiman touched his shoulder. ‘From my master’s bedroom at the end of the gallery, a stair goes down to the shop below,’ he murmured. ‘Here is the key—’ It was pressed into January’s hand. ‘Return it to my Lady when you can.’