Ran Away (5 page)

Reason enough to flee.

‘If she run,’ Jamilla said at last, ‘it will go hard, when the master return. Our master a good man, but of the old ways. Child –’ the expressive hands groped for a concept – ‘Hüseyin child in Sultan palace, raise up to serve, together like brothers. Sultan read French book, look to West. Hüseyin Pasha read French book, but say:
It is pollution
.
Only in Blessed Qur’an is there truth
. But if Shamira not run, if she
taken
away—’

‘Who would take her away,
Sitt
Jamilla?’ January spoke quietly, for in the woman’s voice – and in her dark eyes – he detected no hint that this was melodrama or far-fetched speculation, but a real possibility.

‘Sabid al-Muzaffar.’ The slim hands cradled the coffee cup, seeking warmth from its smooth sides. ‘Man of new ways. Father
siphari
– own land, own peasants, very rich. Not slave like Hüseyin. School in France, school also in Egypt, school in London. Bridges, steam machine, printing book about stars, about sun. Napoleon law, English gun. Our master say to Sultan:
Send Sabid away. These Infidel things make men turn from Allah, become like Infidel, who believe not in Prophet, not in Allah, also not in own God any more. Without belief, Empire will die
. Sultan  . . .’ She made a sweeping gesture, as if of a man scornfully knocking a tableful of objects to the floor. ‘Sabid flee. Now Sabid in Paris.’

‘You know this?’

She nodded.

‘And your master knows?’

‘My master know.’

‘Do you know where?’

‘Charenton.’ Her pronunciation of the little village was surprisingly accurate. The suburb was a small one. A Turk in residence would be remarked, and his house pointed out, without trouble.

‘Do you think this Sabid could actually have entered your master’s house and taken Shamira?’

Her brows drew together again, troubled. ‘I know not. I think not. I know  . . .’ She shook her head helplessly and held out one expressive hand. ‘Shamira flee, Hüseyin Pasha very angry. This she take, his only son.’ Her eyes dark with concern, she looked at her other palm as she held it out also, as if balancing the weights of two invisible situations. ‘Shamira flee, Sabid hear of it—’

‘And he will,’ broke in Ayasha. ‘A man like that would have a servant, perhaps more than one, in his pay, in the household of his enemy.’

Melodramatic as it sounded, January knew this was almost a certainty. It was not uncommon for even the wealthy ladies of the French aristocracy whose daughters he taught piano to have the maidservants of social rivals on their payroll.

‘Sabid find her,’ went on Jamilla softly, ‘before our master return from London, then he have only son of Hüseyin.’

Only after Ra’eesa had escorted her mistress back to the house – veiled, and dressed in coarse black outer garments, the Lady could have been any anonymous servant – would it be safe for January to go up to the house himself. ‘Allah forfend,’ muttered Ayasha cynically, ‘that the Lady should emerge from its gates, or look upon any man but her master.’

‘Shamira could have gone out the same way.’ Through the cold-misted window of La Marseillaise, January watched the two black nameless bundles disappear into the confusion of carts from the country, herds of geese, donkey-loads of firewood, and vendors of everything from old shoes to country apples that milled around the city customs-tollbooth on the other side of the Étoile.

‘Were such the case, the garments would be missed.’ Ayasha mopped up cream and compote with the remains of her third griddle-cake. ‘Frenchmen all think there is a great pile of
burqa
and
hijab
lying about somewhere in every Muslim house, all of them alike. But in truth, though the Lady borrowed the garments of a servant, I think that any servant who had her garments borrowed would know it. A lady like
Sitt
Jamilla might possess a half-dozen
burqa
and a dozen veils to choose from, but even a favored concubine would have but a few. My father’s maids each had only one, and he was not a poor man. It is the same even in the wealthiest of houses. If Ra’eesa says that no garments are unaccounted for, I think Shamira did indeed have them brought in from somewhere else, or went forth without them.’

‘And if someone brought her clothing,’ murmured January, and finished his coffee, ‘that same someone could have brought in opium as well. Are the kitchen staff French or Turkish?’

‘There are two cooks, one French and one Turkish. The under-cook is a Turk. The French cook’s wife acts as housekeeper.’ Ayasha slung her shawl around her shoulders and shook out her skirts as January counted out coin to leave on the table. ‘They would have dealings with the Lady Jamilla, but not, of course, with the concubines.’ Pale sunlight brightened the leafless trees. As they left La Marseillaise, the bells in the little Convent of St Theresa, on the other side of the thin woods in the village of Batignolles, began to ring sweetly.

‘Do you know anything about the girl Shamira?’ January quickened his step to dodge past the
diligence
coming in from Rouen, laden with passengers and mail. ‘Is it usual for Jews in the East to sell their daughters?’

‘There is selling and selling.’ The young woman shrugged and tucked up the coarse dark tendrils of her hair beneath her bonnet. ‘My father would not have said that he was selling me to be concubine in the house of a man with whom he did much business, but without Labib ibn-Yusuf’s camels, Father would have had no means to pay his debts. Then again—’ She sprang lightly out of the way of a high-wheeled chaise, driven around the Étoile at a great pace by a very sleek young dandy in a pearl-gray English driving-coat. ‘
Naghil
!’ she shouted after the chaise, and made figs with both fists.

‘Then again,’ she went on, turning back, ‘I had met no boys beyond my own family. Why should I not wish to marry this greedy man who never washed? I think my father must still be wondering about it.’

January remembered the morning he’d been called on to the back gallery at Bellefleur Plantation, at the age of seven, and informed that his beautiful mother had been sold to the sugar broker St-Denis Janvier. When he and his sister Olympe had been told that they were going to be free and go live with their mother in New Orleans, he recalled, Olympe had spat on M’sieu Janvier’s shiny shoes and run out of the room. Growing up in New Orleans, ebony African black among the variegated little quadroons and octoroons at the ‘back of town’, January had been well aware that many of his playmates’ older sisters took ‘protectors’ – or were taken by them – who were business partners of their white fathers, without much regard for the preferences of the girls. Their mothers, technically free like his own, could do little about this. Why raise a flurry over a daughter’s tears when your own house and income might be taken from you as a result?

Tears were a girl’s lot.

Ra’eesa met them at Hüseyin’s stable gate and led them across to the kitchen quarters. The scullery maids were assembled in the laundry room, as tough and snaggly-haired a gang as January had ever encountered in ten years of living in Paris. Even girls of the lowest classes would fight shy of taking up service in the house of a man who had three concubines and six veiled maidservants who were his to use as he pleased. Annette, Babette, Colette, and Quatorze-Julliet were the sweepings of the Faubourg St-Antoine, and they glared at the cook with wary hostility when they were introduced to January and told to answer his questions.

No, not a single one of them had taken any kind of note in or out, to or from any of those girls upstairs. The very idea!

‘We ain’t never seen ’em, an’ that’s a fact,’ explained Annette. ‘You’d think the world ended at the pantry door.’

‘It’s true.’ Quatorze-Julliet hitched up her skirt to scratch her posterior matter-of-factly. ‘Half the time His Excellency’s got one of his guards stationed just outside that door, an’ if one of us so much as puts a foot through it’s:
Go back! Go back!
’ She imitated the clumsy French of the guards. ‘’Fraid we’ll give ’em Christian lice or somethin’.’ She laughed loudly at her own wit.

A childhood spent in the quarters had told January that the guards were less concerned with lice (Christian or otherwise) than with the coffee beans, sugar, tea, and vanilla stored in the pantry – not to speak of the linen napkins and silver spoons. Any of these could be sold or traded to the rag-and-bone dealers who trolled the streets in any wealthy neighborhood, wailing:
Old grease! Old tea
 . . . 

Honest cooks jealously guarded the right to sell cooking grease, used tea-leaves and coffee grounds as a perquisite of their office. Less honest ones would peddle tea leaves and coffee beans in a more pristine state – or cooking grease while it was still in the meat – if they thought the mistress of the house wouldn’t notice. Even a cook engaged in such commerce would not welcome the amateur depredations of scullery maids, lest such behavior provoke an investigation of the kitchen account-books.

Bribing one of these damsels to purchase opium and bring it in would be child’s play.

‘The ones you ought to watch is the laundresses,’ provided Annette, and she jerked her blonde head toward the door of the room in which January had taken refuge earlier in the week. Two of the armoires there stood open, displaying shelves stacked deep with pressed, folded, and numbered sheets. The great square wicker hampers lined along the wall, in which soiled linen was taken away and fresh brought back clean, gaped empty, like the mouths of cotton-lined hippopotami.

‘His Nibs has a heathen woman to do veils an’ turbans an’ pantaloons,’ the girl went on. ‘Thinks we’ll stink ’em up with our Christian breath, I reckon. Sheets an’ towels, they sends out. Yesterday a whole parade of ’em was in and out. It’s always like that Saturdays. Baskets all over the room, while the girls went around lookin’ for Ma Boudin – that’s Cook’s missus – to get paid.’

‘Do the Turkish girls – the servants, not the concubines – come down to the laundry room to fetch sheets and towels?’

The girls glanced at each other, then nodded. ‘Always all veiled up,’ added Quatorze-Julliet, ‘lest one of ’em get looked at by one of the stablemen an’ find herself pregnant.’

‘Do you know the laundresses by sight?’

‘Some of ’em.’ Annette shrugged. ‘They comes an’ goes. My cousin Fantine an’ her Ma, they use pretty regular. Others I’ve only seen once or twice. My Ma’s always pullin’ in cousins or the daughters of her friends or whoever she can get, to do deliveries. Ma Boudin don’t tip worth a Protestant’s fart, so there’s always different girls.’

‘So anything could have been smuggled in.’ Followed by Ra’eesa, January and Ayasha exited the back door and retraced the route of January’s precipitate flight of four days ago through the gate into the garden, past the low beds of fallow vegetables, across the small patch of lawn and then in among the rose beds, where a very old black gardener was carefully wrapping the pruned bushes in straw. ‘On any Saturday, for that matter,’ added Ayasha after a moment’s thought. ‘If that’s the day the laundresses are in and out and all over the grounds—’

‘So a note could have been gotten in – or out – to make arrangements. Could the girl write French? Or read it?’

‘You’re very sure she fled of her own accord.’

January looked back across the stable yard, satisfying himself that his estimate of four days ago was correct: it would be almost impossible to cross the yard from the kitchen doors to the garden gate unobserved from the stables. As in any big house – in France or America or, he guessed, Constantinople as well – all the activity went on in the rear quarters. The guards probably occupied the upper floor of the stables. Their windows overlooked the yard between the kitchen door and the gate.

A lantern hung over the gate. Did it remain lit all night?

‘
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘The simplest explanation is best.’

‘The simplest explanation being that you cannot resist showing off your Latin?’

January grinned. ‘That, too.’

The gravel walk among the roses was fresh, impervious to tracks. ‘It’s probably possible to break into the grounds, and then into the house after it’s locked up for the night,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But that would take concerted planning and an inside confederate – a gang, in fact. And I can’t imagine how you’d get a woman, even one drugged with opium, down from those chambers under the roof. You’d have to drug the guards in the stable, and Jamilla didn’t seem to think that had been done. But whether Shamira actually left on her own, or whether she was lured away  . . .  There.’ He stopped, pointed down to the moist clay of the path.

Back here near the vine-covered wall the gravel was older and deeply trodden into the underlying soil. The rose bushes here, though they’d been pruned, had not yet been wrapped up for the winter. The clay was undisturbed since the previous day’s rain, and in it, a narrow foot had left a mark.

‘A laundress?’

‘If you think one would come out all this way on her rounds wearing fashionable shoes.’ January knelt on the grass verge. ‘No one with her, so she’s not out here with romantic intent. A narrow heel and a thin sole – look how dim the edges are. Would you walk all day in such a shoe? It’s an expensive one, but old. See where it’s been repaired on the heel?’

Ayasha drew up her skirts to consider her own stout shoes. Deliberately, she set her foot down in another patch of clay nearby and considered the track.

Clay from the path smeared the tough vines on the wall, close to where January had clambered over. ‘Here—’

Ayasha plucked a thread from a broken piece of vine. ‘White,’ she said. ‘Cotton, not silk. A petticoat, not a veil or pantaloons—’

‘So one of those laundry hampers brought in yesterday contained clothes for her.’ January moved a foot or so to the right, where the vines were stout enough to bear his weight. ‘Shoes, too  . . .  I can tell you, here and now, that things can be concealed in those cupboards in the laundry room for hours while guards search the house for intruders. If Shamira were veiled as a servant, and knew which cupboard to look in, she could be in and out of that laundry room in moments.
Allez-oop
.’ He set his foot into the toughest part of the vines, scrambled to the top of the wall and leaped down on the other side. Ayasha followed him, in a great whoofing umbrella of petticoats, and left Ra’eesa standing in the garden behind them.