Ran Away (24 page)

‘Which doesn’t mean the man isn’t
sang melée
– just that he has
good hair
, as my mother calls it. He could be a brown-haired white man as well.’

‘And the skin – if that
is
skin – is so discolored by blood under the broken nails that we can’t tell what color it is,’ finished January glumly, when after half an hour of changing slides and comparing samples he returned the microscope to its box. ‘Which means that it could be anyone from John Davis –’ he named the owner of the French Opera House and one of his most consistent employers – ‘to Hannibal. And that could include Hüseyin Pasha, his valet, his son’s tutor, the kitchen boy, and probably the American cook.’

Rose locked the box and replaced the key in its drawer. ‘But at least now we know it couldn’t include Shaw,’ she pointed out as she washed slides in water, dipped from the jar in the corner, then in alcohol. ‘Or Oliver Breche, more’s the pity.’ She set the glass slips neatly in the rack Gabriel had made for her from old forks, to dry. ‘Or even Burton Blodgett, though I wouldn’t put it past him to have done it just to make a good story.’ She wiped her hands and followed January from the laboratory to the gallery above the kitchen.

‘Don’t suggest it to him.’

‘But speaking of Hannibal – and of hair  . . .’ A frown clouded her forehead as she paused at the top of the steps. ‘Is there any condition that you know of – or any drug – that shows itself in a man’s hair? I know arsenic gets into the hair and makes it shiny; is there anything that will change the texture and make it limp and dead-looking?’ She looked up into his eyes for a moment, seeing in them, January knew, his own arrested look. ‘It isn’t my imagination, is it?’

‘I thought it was mine.’ January was silent, trying to call back to mind that slight change in their friend’s appearance, and whether the fiddler had seemed quite himself.

Which in fact, January reflected, he
had
 . . . 

‘I’ve never heard of a malady that would do something like that to a man’s hair,’ he answered at length. ‘Not so suddenly, and all at once.’

‘A drug, then? I know he hasn’t been well, but I’ve seen no sign of his going back to opium  . . .’

January shook his head and wished for the thousandth time that there were something that would still Hannibal’s coughing fits but would not bring with it the deadly temptations of euphoria.

‘Where is he living?’ She pulled her shawl close around her as they descended to the crooked little yard. ‘Could it be something in the atmosphere of a place, the way the phosphorous in match factories is supposed to ruin the mouths of the girls who work in them? I understand that Kentucky Williams has a new fancy man who probably objected to Hannibal’s sleeping over her saloon—’

‘A properly brought-up lady,’ replied January severely, ‘has no business knowing about fancy men.’

‘This from a man who spent last winter playing at the Countess Mazzini’s
ganeum
 . . .  Well,’ she added as they ascended the back-gallery steps, and her cool primness melted into a smile. ‘I see someone’s awake.’

‘We were coming up to get you.’ Zizi-Marie held out Baby John to her. The infant – a solemn little professor of philosophy whom no one would
dream
of calling Johnny – had not been crying, only gazing out at the yard with those wide brown worried eyes.

Rose gathered up her son in her arms and carried him toward the bedroom to feed him, before their departure for the Widow Levesque’s. January moved to follow – he loved to keep Rose company at such times – but Gabriel, reading the same issue of the
New Orleans Bee
at the dining table that had occupied Burton Blodgett earlier, looked up as January came through the dining room and said, ‘Have you seen this, Uncle Ben?’ He held it out.

January cursed.

The paper Shaw had shown him a few hours ago had been the
True American
– notable for its attacks on the French Creole aristocracy, whose wealth still ruled New Orleans despite American efforts to gain more say in the city government.

The
Bee
, however, was the French paper. In addition to decrying the unwillingness of the City Guards to search for
the mysterious ‘witness’ CLAIMED by the Haut Ton to be in a position to completely exonerate the Infidel Turk  . . . 
the letter to the editor written by ‘The Friend of the People’ insisted that the entire affair was fueled by the desire of the rich to buy out the city lots of the starving poor with Turkish gold.
Why else the eagerness of both Mayor Prieur and Captain Tremoille of the Guards to believe the suave assertions of this foreign Midas who has so frequently been a guest in their homes?

There were, January knew, quite as many men of French and Spanish descent in New Orleans who had been impoverished by the bank crashes as there were Americans – men frightened enough, and angry enough, to blame those whom they had once regarded as their leaders. It was they – the ‘Friend of the People’ trumpeted – who had been victimized by
the wealthy planters, the rentiers and landlords and the bankers whose establishments have yet to repay a single penny of the savings which they cynically stripped from the hard-working folk of this city  . . . 

The cry goes up: if a man of wealth is seen to be punished, will this not drive investment from the city? Better these two lost lambs perish unavenged, than that the City (
videlicit,
the planters and landlords and bankers) should sustain any loss  . . . 

And, of course, at his mother’s nothing else was talked about.

‘Those letters are the most poisonous concoction of insinuation and lies I’ve ever read!’ January replied, to Virginie Metoyer’s earnest declaration that she had known all the time that Hüseyin Pasha was up to no good. ‘Why is it that everyone assumes that because a man is a Mohammedan that he is ready to casually murder two human beings the way you or I would step on a roach?’

‘It is their way.’ Babette – the third-born and prettiest of the Metoyer sisters, resplendent in a new silk tignon that was topped with an astonishing cloud of pink ostrich-feathers – regarded January with wide brown eyes. ‘The Turks are brought up to despise women—’

‘Who told you that, exactly?’

She stammered, discomfited, and Rose came to her rescue by handing January a plate with a slice of cake. ‘Now, Benjamin, you know perfectly well that you have read
far
more poisonous concoctions of insinuation and lies during the election last year.’

January drew in breath to retort, then let it out and inclined his head to Babette. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That was execrable of me to get angry at you, for what that “Friend of the People” wrote in his imbecile letter.’

‘You must admit,’ added Agnes Pellicot – the Widow Levesque’s former rival among the free colored demi-monde and, since the bank crash, her most assiduous friend – ‘this story of a mysterious witness who
just happened
to vanish at an inopportune moment is a little ridiculous. Why hasn’t he come forward, if the whole transaction was innocent?’

‘And it’s quite true,’ added Virginie, feeding a finger-full of butter to one of Livia Levesque’s two exceedingly fat yellow cats, ‘that every man of wealth and position in this city defends the Turk because of his gold.’

When January opened his mouth to protest that
every man of wealth and position in this city
had been slandering the Turk like a parcel of schoolgirls the previous evening, Bernadette – the eldest of the sisters and, at nearly fifty, still the closest thing January had ever seen to Original Sin – cut him off with, ‘Precisely the reason they’re going to let that dreadful man walk away free. We all know perfectly well that first, Mr Smith never existed, and secondly, that they’re going to let the Pasha go because they’re hoping he’ll invest in their businesses. If he dies, God knows who’s going to get that money. The nearest Mohammedan Orphanage, I dare say.’

During the inevitable speculation about where the
Mohammedan plutocrat
had acquired his gold, and where he had it hidden (‘I’ve heard he has great jars of it buried beneath the floor of his cellar!’ ‘Don’t be silly, Babette, there isn’t a house in New Orleans that
has
a cellar  . . .’) January forced himself to sit back and regather his perspective, noting that one of the Metoyer sisters had acquired a new lover  . . .  and a wealthy one, to judge by Babette’s new tignon and Virginie’s very beautiful new French shawl. Bernadette was, as usual, quietly dressed in plain aubergine silk, but under the edge of her close-wrapped dark tignon glinted new earrings, solitaire diamonds of well over six carats apiece. Moreover, there was something in her manner, sleek and pleased with herself.

‘It’s driving Agnes Pellicot out of her
wits
,’ reported his sister Dominique, when he and Rose walked her to her own little cottage on Rue Dumaine after everyone had imbibed as much tea and gossip as they could stand. ‘She thought she’d just concluded the bargain with some American for Marie-Niège, and yesterday his cotton press and warehouse closed down and he’s had to leave town  . . .  and, Agnes says, she’d already bought Marie-Niège a new set of dishes for the house – Crown Derby, and the most
beautiful
Chantilly pattern! – and silk for three dresses, and M’sieu Cailleteau at the sign of the Golden Rabbit won’t take the dishes back. Which is
monstrously
unfair of him—’

‘It goes to prove, I suppose,’ remarked Rose, ‘that your sister Olympe’s curses actually do work. I understand Marie-Niège went to her and begged for a spell to stop the match, which she didn’t feel she was able to tell her mama she didn’t actually want. I shall have to keep that in mind.’

‘Well, these days one can’t afford to be choosy.’ Dominique paused before the door of her cottage, bought for her – in the usual arrangement – by a stout and still-wealthy sugar-planter. ‘I don’t think anyone I know has been placed in
months
, and in fact poor Iphigènie Picard was told by Hercule Lafrènniére that they would actually have to
part
– because of money, you know – and her mother is just
furious
 . . .  So it drives Agnes
wild
that Bernadette is still able to find a protector on her own, at her age  . . .  though she may very well be sharing him with Virginie and Babette,’ she finished matter-of-factly. ‘The way they did with Mr Granville.’

January said, ‘Hmn.’

And where lay the difference, he reflected as he and Rose continued on their way toward their own house, between such businesslike negotiations by the well-dressed mamas of Rampart street, and Shamira’s mother, who had obliged her daughter agree to concubinage, that there might be money to educate her brother and keep her mother in a modicum of food?

Where else could a girl go, in Cairo or New Orleans or in the swampy wilds of St John Parish? What could a girl do, except thank God that she was beautiful enough to be given the choice between selling her body for a decent return, or spending her life cleaning out someone else’s chamber pots?

He glanced at Rose, seeing – despite her ironic amusement at the follies of the world – sadness in her eyes. The school she had taught – the school she hoped to teach once more if anyone in this world ever had any money again – was a quixotic absurdity in this world, offering to instruct young girls of color in such stupidly useless subjects as history and chemistry, literature and logic, mathematics and microscopes: subjects for which Rose’s own tough mind had hungered as a hunting dog hungers for meat.

No wonder we went broke
, January reflected with a sigh.
Why can’t we let them be bored and ignorant and have done with it? What good will it do them, or us, to know that nappy African hair has a different shape than a white girl’s silky curls?

‘This came for you, Uncle Ben,’ Zizi-Marie greeted him as they came up the steps to the front gallery, and she held out a folded sheet of paper. ‘At least I think it’s for you. It was stuck under the window in the parlor.’

American
, January mentally identified it even as he unfolded the sheet. Americans never understood the Creole rules that only animals came into the house through the French doors of the parlor, instead of through the bedroom of their hostess or host. Personally, he had never understood why, but this had been so firmly beaten into him as a child that it still made him slightly edgy when he saw American men do so, in the houses where he had – up until the bank crash – taught piano to little American children  . . .  Not that he, as a black man, had ever been allowed to go in through the front opening of any house, French or American, not even his mother’s.
It wouldn’t be right
, was all his mother ever said about it when he’d asked.

The handwriting was unfamiliar.

Rose said, ‘I’ll tell Willie to get his things together.’

Pears from Boston
meant the slave runners.

EIGHTEEN

J
anuary half-expected that the meeting-point with P.B. – whoever that was – would be at one of the warehouses that lined the river below Peters Street. The code was a simple one, but the neighborhood, upstream of Canal Street in the American sector, was one to which he didn’t go any more than he had to.

He could think of few buildings in that neighborhood that weren’t warehouses – except for an occasional saleroom where slaves were put on display. Upriver from the market, each cotton factor and sugar exporter had his own warehouses, sometimes his own wharves. In flush times bales or barrels would be brought in on steamboats, the cotton stacked so high on the decks as to completely cover the barn-like superstructure. Even in hard times like these, cotton was big business  . . .