Ran Away (33 page)

January handed him the rifle and the hammer that he still carried, and touched his hat brim. ‘Give her my thanks,’ he said. ‘Tell Hannibal, if the Lady needs a place for herself, her son, and her maid tonight, to take them to my house, which is not far from here.’

‘
Shukran
.’ The tutor bowed. ‘
Assalamu alaikum, wa rahmatullahi
.’

‘
Walaikum assalam
.’

January strode soundlessly along the gallery to the French doors at the end and was out of the building and walking innocently up Rue St-Philippe before Shaw and his minions finished arresting the rioters in the courtyard.

TWENTY-FOUR

F
rom Dominique’s beautiful little cottage on Rue Dumaine, January sent a message to Rose. He didn’t think Shaw would actually be watching his house, but he wouldn’t put anything past the Kentuckian when the man was on the scent of a wrongdoer – even one whom he himself, personally, didn’t think had done any wrong.

So when Rose came to Dominique’s the following morning, she was duly dressed in a shirt and pants belonging to Gabriel, with a wide-brimmed hat pulled on over her hair. For her part, Dominique was fully prepared to receive her and lend her one of her own dresses, since Shaw would immediately suspect any tall youth emerging from the January residence with a bundle of petticoats and corset, and follow accordingly.

‘Honestly, p’tit, you’re worse than your nephew.’ Dominique shook her head disapprovingly as she considered the five candidate costumes which her maid had brought down from the attic, arranged tastefully on the bed. ‘You’re going to get yourself into real trouble one day – and Rose is just as bad  . . .  What do you think of the pink delaine? Rose always looks so attractive in pink, but the sleeves are
terribly
out of date – what can have possessed me to make up anything so
hideous
as those great silly pumpkins? And that gauze is simply absurd  . . .’

Having heard his younger sister’s ecstasies three years ago on the subject of the gauze-covered sleeves whose globular tops measured nearly two yards in circumference, January wisely held his peace.

Instead he said, ‘I
am
in real trouble, Minou. Or I will be unless I get to the bottom of who it is who’s trying to make the world think that Hüseyin Pasha killed his two poor concubines.’

‘Maman says that a Turk would think nothing of killing wives who had offended him.’

‘And Maman has spoken to exactly how many Turks in her lifetime?’

‘Do you like the straw-yellow? Oh, no, the lace is loose – if I’ve told Thèrése once I’ve told her a thousand times  . . .  How about the gray?’ She lifted several acres of translucent skirt in slender fingers: like an adorable bronze Aphrodite, but kinder than that capricious goddess ever was. ‘I can’t
think
why I bought it, gray doesn’t suit me in the
least
, but then it doesn’t suit Rose either  . . .  Oh, but if you put a pink tignon with it  . . .  Thèrése, run back up to the attic and bring down my other gray, and the brown sprigged challis  . . .  Darling,
everyone
knows how jealous the Turks are. But it did seem to me that it was an
extremely
stupid thing to do. Yet who else would have? Who
knew
them, who could have gotten into the house? I mean, people generally don’t go around killing total strangers, do they?’

‘That,’ said January, ‘is exactly what I’m trying to—’

‘You sent fo’ me, suh?’ Rose appeared in the doorway that communicated, through baby Charmian’s room, with the rear yard – since no tall, skinny
sang melée
boy would have been permitted to enter the house through the French door that opened from Dominique’s bedroom on to the street. She made a somewhat more Shakespearean boy than Maggie Valentine did, being taller enough than Gabriel that his borrowed trousers showed off slender ankles. But, like Maggie, she was thin, and she took care to slouch and scratch her bottom and use the slurry
mo kiri mo vini
French of the cotton patch and cane field.

‘
Who saw Cesario, ho
!’ quoted January solemnly.

‘I hear tell you wants to burn down a house, suh?’

‘Only burgle it.’

‘P’tit!’ said Dominique, shocked. ‘If that’s why you asked me to invite Bernadette Metoyer for tea this afternoon  . . .’

Rose put on her spectacles and removed the hat. ‘Well, that’s no fun. As far as I know I wasn’t followed, Ben  . . .  Oh, Minou!’ she exclaimed, her eye lighting on the dresses as Thèrése brought in another wicker hamper and began laying out more over every piece of furniture in sight. ‘How beautiful! We shall arouse suspicion instantly.’

‘Silly.’ Dominique smiled with pleasure at the compliment. Had she been a pigeon, reflected January, amused, she would have fluffed her feathers. ‘I’ve had those for just
ages
.’

‘Well, we
shall
arouse suspicion,’ amplified Rose thoughtfully, ‘since I’m four inches taller than you.’

‘Oh, it won’t take but a
moment
to let the hem down  . . .’

January didn’t comment on the length of time it would take to re-sew some twenty feet of seam, but merely asked, ‘Did you bring the rocket?’

Rose produced it from her trouser pocket. ‘The casing is tinned iron,’ she explained as January took it gingerly. ‘What the British Navy puts up beef in for long voyages. There should be no danger whatever of actually setting Bernadette’s house afire—’

‘
Rose
!’ protested Dominique.

‘—but smoke should come out in clouds.’

‘No one is ever going to
speak
to me in this town again!’

‘If I’m correct about what happened – at least in the study – at Hüseyin Pasha’s house last Sunday night,’ said January, ‘I think we can count on no word getting back to Bernadette about the smoke in her parlor curtains.’

Bernadette Metoyer and her sisters arrived an hour or so after that. It was not a long walk – the three women shared a yellow stucco cottage across Rue Esplanade from January’s house. January and Rose retired in silence to the nursery as Dominique rustled into her bedroom to open its French door to her guests – Rose now respectably attired in Dominique’s second-best pink delaine frock and looking as if she’d never evaded possible police surveillance in the guise of a boy in her life. Bernadette, January was interested to observe through the smallest crack in the nursery door, had on another dress that he’d never seen before – amber silk shot with darker notes. Ten years of living with a dressmaker had forever heightened his awareness of what people wore and what it meant. Ayasha could pinpoint a man’s income by the lace of his wife’s collar.

Babette and Virginie also wore new shawls.

Speculation was rife in the New Orleans demi-monde as to whether the fourth sister – Eulalie – had, despite her marriage to a bank clerk, also been involved with Bernadette’s former patron, the banker Hubert Granville, but none of the Metoyer sisters were forthcoming on the subject. Virginie had gotten a house out of the affair, which was now bringing in a handsome rent while its owner lived with Bernadette.

‘Darling, what’s this I hear about Benjamin being sought by the police?’ demanded Virginie. ‘Surely he didn’t have anything to do with those poor concubines being murdered?’

‘I hear he’s a good friend of the Turk – oh, the little darling!’ Babette added, for Dominique had taken the precaution of having Charmian’s nurse bring the little girl into the parlor, to forestall the inevitable demands to enter the nursery.

‘Is it true that the mob that broke into their house last night killed the family and all the servants?’ Bernadette tried to school her voice to sound concerned when in fact all she wanted was to be the first with the best information.

‘How is my Lady?’ whispered January as he closed the door.

‘Not well.’ Rose’s face clouded as they stepped through the nursery’s French doors into the rear yard, then followed the passway around the ‘swamp’ side of the house and so out to the street. Gabriel’s clothing she had left under Dominique’s bed: it had served its purpose. ‘I could kill that lout Breche. And your news that the Turkish ship has already put into port has added a great deal to the  . . .  the desolation of spirit that she suffers. Hannibal is with her, and her son – only, he isn’t her son, is he?’ she asked. ‘He would be Shamira’s son.’

‘He would be,’ said January thoughtfully. ‘But I don’t actually think he is.’

Rose regarded him in surprise.

‘I think Shamira’s son,’ said January, ‘never existed  . . .  Rather like Mr Smith.’

They made their way cautiously up to Rue des Ramparts, and thence circuitously back to Rue Esplanade. Gabriel met them on the corner: ‘No chickens so far.’ Meaning,
police
. He nodded down the street. ‘Zizi’s keeping watch down toward the river, and she just signaled me a couple minutes ago.’ He looked as if he were enjoying himself hugely.

‘I hope you’re right,’ said January. ‘Considering what we’re about to do is illegal, the last thing I need is the Watch right at hand.’

Two streets away he saw Hannibal come down the gallery steps from the big Spanish house and stroll up toward them: he was also, January noticed, keeping a sharp eye about him. He had a basket in one hand, containing a pineapple and a half-dozen crawfish. ‘Shouldn’t be difficult,’ he said, when he reached them. ‘The Metoyer cook’s been out three times just since the ladies walked out, to chat with the scissors grinder, a girl selling berries, and Phlosine Seurat’s maid who happened to be passing by. She also walked back to the kitchen when the charcoal man came by, to chat with him. If I ask her opinion about the crawfish when I deliver the pineapple, ten to one she’ll take me back to the kitchen for a consultation.’

‘Good.’ January hefted Rose’s tin cylinder in his hand.

‘What’s
in
that thing?’

‘Mostly saltpeter and sugar,’ replied Rose cheerfully. ‘With a little gunpowder to make it stink.’

‘I can throw it,’ offered Gabriel.

‘Absolutely not. The last thing I need is for your mother to put a cross on me for getting you in trouble.’

‘I thought you said we wouldn’t get into trouble,’ challenged the boy with a grin.

‘I’ve been wrong before. Hannibal, the minute you hear Rose shout, you run to the house and be there at the bottom of the stair. We need a white man for a witness.’

‘I warn you I charge for court appearances.’

They crossed the street. As it turned out, that was actually the most dangerous item of the program: Rue Esplanade was one of the main arteries of trade from the lake to the River and twice the width of most streets in the town. Between the drays and carriages, the water sellers and strollers and goods wagons, there was no way Gabriel and Zizi-Marie could have spotted Abishag Shaw, had he really been on January’s trail.

Looking like any respectable couple out for a promenade, January and Rose idled a few houses down while Hannibal strolled up to the yellow cottage with his basket and rapped at the French door that opened into the Metoyer parlor.

He would not, of course, have been admitted into the parlor from the street, had any of the Metoyers been home, nor would he have dreamed of asking to be so. But a gentleman did not rap at the window of a lady’s bedroom.

The door opened and Elise emerged, small and wrinkled and cunning as a Roman empress in the arts of intrigue and gossip, and succumbed in five seconds flat to Hannibal’s feckless charm. She emerged from the house and ushered him through the passway to the yard, for a consultation in the kitchen about whether the crawfish in the basket were wholesome or not.

‘How long is the fuse?’ murmured January as he and Rose approached the house.

She held up two fingers, and they stepped through the unlocked French window – he half expected his mother to appear and shriek at him for entering through the parlor  . . . 

Soundless as spies they passed into the dining room, hugging the walls where their footfalls wouldn’t creak. The stairs from the attic descended through a ‘cabinet’ next to a French door, through which, in the yard, Hannibal could be seen chatting amicably with both women servants in the door of the kitchen.

A careful housewife, Rose turned over a silver tray on the highly polished cherrywood of the dining table to protect the finish. On this she set her smoke bomb, lit the fuse, and both she and January retreated through the door into Babette’s bedroom.

Black smoke belched forth with the stink of gunpowder. It was followed at once by a rolling cloud of white smoke, pouring from every nail hole in the tin. Rose dashed into the dining room, feet clattering in panic, and shouted, ‘Fire! Fire!’

From the yard behind, Hannibal took up the cry, ‘Fire!’

At the door of the cabinet stair, Rose cried, ‘Hubert, run! Fire!’ and stepped back into the bedroom, at the exact moment that Hannibal yanked open the door from the yard.

A man raced down the stair, slammed through the cabinet door. A tall, stout gentleman, whose ruddy complexion and red-gold beard-stubble matched extremely ill the black dye still lingering in his hair. He wore shirtsleeves, trousers, and a handsome lounging-robe of green and gold brocade, and he skidded to a horrified stop at the sight of Hannibal in the doorway. It took January and Rose mere seconds to dash through Bernadette’s room, out to the street, and back into the house through the parlor French door, and their victim hadn’t moved.

‘My goodness,’ cried Rose as they plunged into the smoke-filled dining-room, ‘is that Mr Granville?’

The still-smoking bomb was borne into the yard (‘
I can’t imagine who would have done such a thing!’ ‘It must have been those boys we saw running out of the house and down the street, Rose!
’)

When January said quietly, ‘Mr Smith, I presume?’ the banker Hubert Granville glowered, but consented to cross the street to the January house to continue the interview. Far too many neighbors were appearing – to be greeted with Hannibal’s shocked tale of malicious boys – for the defaulting banker to wish to remain in the home of his former mistresses.