Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries)

  The Benjamin January Series from Barbara Hambly

  A FREE MAN OF COLOR

  FEVER SEASON

  GRAVEYARD DUST

  SOLD DOWN THE RIVER

  DIE UPON A KISS

  WET GRAVE

  DAYS OF THE DEAD

  DEAD WATER

  DEAD AND BURIED*

  THE SHIRT ON HIS BACK*

  RAN AWAY*

  * available from Severn House

  RAN AWAY

  A Benjamin January Novel

  Barbara Hambly

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published 2011

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Hambly.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Hambly, Barbara.

  Ran away.

  1. January, Benjamin (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Free African Americans–Fiction. 3. Private

  investigators–Fiction. 4. New Orleans (La.)–Social life and customs–19th century–Fiction. 5. Murder–

  Investigation–Fiction. 6. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  813.6-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-146-0 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8082-6 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-382-3 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  PROLOGUE

  December 1837

  Word flashed through the town like pebbles flying from an explosion. Americans, French Creoles, slaves and the gens de couleur libré all seemed to know it at once.

  ‘He strangled them with bowstrings,’ the Widow Levesque announced, over morning coffee and beignets at the house of her son, ‘and pitched them out the attic window.’

  ‘Who did?’ Benjamin January paused in the pantry doorway, a pitcher of cream for his wife and his mother in his hands.

  ‘The Turk, of course.’ There could not have been richer satisfaction in Livia Levesque’s tone if she’d been divulging her own acquisition of railway shares.

  In a city reeling from the impact of the business depression sweeping the country, the Turk provided – to white New Orleans society and to the blacks, slave and free, who coexisted with it – a welcome combination of diversion and largesse. The house he’d purchased on Rue Bourbon had been the site of a dozen stylish entertainments since his arrival in November. All the best of New Orleans society, both Americans and French Creoles, were invited, and all came: the Turk’s first action upon his arrival had been to acquire one of the best cooks in the city. The penny-pinching evident even in the houses of such notables as the Marignys and the Destrehans these days was nowhere to be seen under the Infidel’s roof. A representative – it was rumored – of the Sultan of Constantinople, the Turk was educated, convivial, spoke flawless French and displayed manners that most of the American planters (said the French Creoles) would do well to copy.

  Moreover, in addition to being excellent company when present, in his absence he provided an unending source of whispered speculation, for his household included – as well as the French cook – a number of slaves brought from his homeland, a wife, and two concubines, young women never glimpsed but reputed to be of breathtaking beauty.

  The fact that most of the bankers, planters, and brokers in New Orleans had concubines themselves – slave women whose duties included sleeping with the master – was not deemed the same thing, somehow: one bought them for their housekeeping skills, and anyway, they were black. Even the ladies of the free colored demi-monde – the mistresses to those same bankers, planters, and brokers – were fascinated.

  Society matrons, though utterly charmed by the Infidel’s polished manner, opined among themselves that no good would come of it.

  ‘Both his concubines.’ Livia Levesque took the cream pitcher from January’s hand. ‘Murdered and thrown from the window.’

  ‘Who says this?’ Rose demanded, and offered her mother-in-law a plate of pralines.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ added January.

  The Widow Levesque scratched with a critical nail at a chip in the edge of the creamy queensware plate and took one praline, which she laid on the edge of her saucer. ‘Did you make these yourself, dear? I don’t see what’s ridiculous about it.’ She regarded her son with velvet-brown eyes. A former demi-mondaine herself – though nowadays she would never admit such a thing – Livia Levesque kept into her early sixties the striking beauty that had saved her from slavery over three decades before. She was, January knew, inordinately proud of her white father’s blood and generally tried to pretend that her son by a fellow slave in her youth – as African-black as his father – was no relation of hers. Only Rose’s production of a grandchild in October had brought that portion of her family into her good graces again, although she had been heard to hope that Baby John would not inherit his mother’s nearsightedness: So tedious and silly-looking, having to wear those awful spectacles . . .

  ‘I could have warned them,’ she declared. ‘Turks have no regard for women. They simply use them and cast them aside – and are madly jealous as well, though Heaven knows the man kept the poor things prisoners in that attic, so closely that they never had the opportunity to make him jealous . . . Not that that makes any difference to a Turk.’ She shrugged her slender shoulders in their wide sleeves of straw-colored silk. ‘I dare say he tired of them . . .’

  ‘If he was tired of them he’d have sold them, surely.’ Rose’s voice was dry. ‘He’d certainly have found a buyer.’

  ‘Not a Turk, dear,’ corrected Livia darkly. ‘They would sooner kill a woman than believe that she’s been taken by another man.’

  ‘No,’ said January.

  His mother regarded him, eyes widened with surprise, as if she weren’t quite certain what the word meant in regard to herself.

  ‘I will not believe it,’ he went on quietly. ‘I know the man—’

  ‘Nonsense, Benjamin, of course you don’t.’

  ‘—and he would not do such a thing. He saved the life of my wife.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Rose has never even met—’

  ‘Not Rose,’ said January. ‘Ayasha.’

  ONE

  October 1827, Paris

  ‘Mâlik?’

  January opened one eye, squinted against the light in the room.

  He’d woken briefly just before dawn, when Ayasha had risen to pray – a habit she’d retained from her childhood, though she had become a Christian and went to Mass as dutifully as any of the other inhabitants of the building. He’d heard the bells of St Séverin strike seven before he’d slipped back into dreams. It was broad daylight now.

  Not satisfied with this tepid response, his wif
e yanked wider the bed curtains, pulled up her skirts and flounced on to the bed in a great whoof of petticoats, straddling his body on the faded coverlet. Offended, Hadji the cat sprang from the pillow, retreated to the window sill that overlooked – far, far down – the Rue de l’Aube, and commenced washing, with the air of Pontius Pilate: I haven’t the slightest idea who those creatures are.

  ‘Zahar?’ January drew his hand from under the blanket – the October morning was bitterly cold – and groped for her brown knee.

  Her fingers closed on his wrist, strong and warm as a child’s. Her black hair, braided and tucked in a great curly pile on her head, had come down in wisps around her face: she looked like a desert witch, inexplicably masquerading as a housewife in a dress of green-and-white muslin. ‘There is one who needs your help,’ she said.

  ‘You want me to break into the harem of Hüseyin Pasha and see one of his concubines?’

  ‘The girl is ill.’

  ‘I’ll be even more ill if I’m caught. I’ve seen his guards.’

  ‘You won’t be caught, my husband. The Lady Jamilla – his wife – will let us in—’

  ‘Oh, he’ll understand that.’ Shuddering with cold, January washed with all possible speed in the basin before the hearth which served the big room for both heating and cooking and, on spring nights when all the gratin had left Paris for their country estates and there wasn’t quite enough money for candles, sometimes lighting as well. The nobles who had returned to Paris in the wake of the Bourbon kings a dozen years previously valued January’s talents as a musician, and Ayasha’s as a dressmaker, sufficiently to afford them a living decent enough, and at this season they were flocking back to the city demanding entertainment and new clothes. So there was coffee, soft cheese, butter and jam on the domestic end of the long work-table. In a huge willow basket beside the door, January saw shining lengths of silk, blonde lace, gauze like a breath of lilac mist, covered with a towel against the depredations of Hadji and Habibi. Ayasha had been visiting a customer.

  Ayasha poured coffee, plucked chunks of sugar from the tin box on the table and added a dusting of cinnamon. ‘Hüseyin Pasha has forbidden any in his household to see farangi doctors,’ she said. ‘He says they will bring evil ideas with them and corrupt the household. I told the Lady Jamilla that you were not like the others; that you were taught by wise women as well as by idiots at the Hôtel Dieu, and that you don’t bleed and puke and stick clysters up peoples’—’

  ‘In other words, that I’m not a doctor at all,’ said January. ‘Just a surgeon – a bone-setter.’

  ‘Yallah! She’d never let you near the girl if I said that. The girl is with child,’ pleaded Ayasha, her great dark eyes filled with distress. ‘She is far from her home, Mâlik. Sitt Jamilla fears that one of the other wives has poisoned her because the Pasha is away in London. Please come.’

  January pulled his shirt and trousers on, and a warm, if shabby, waistcoat that dated from his first days in Paris, when he’d still been under the impression that liberté, egalité, and fraternité applied to men of African descent in the medical profession.

  He’d arrived in France from his native Louisiana in 1817, aged twenty-two. The long wars between England and France had just ended: the likelihood that a sea voyage undertaken by a man of his color would end in some planter’s cane field in Barbados had shrunk to an acceptable minimum. Armed with an introduction from the libré who’d taught him surgery in New Orleans, he had been admitted for training at the Hôtel Dieu, and later had been hired there as a surgeon.

  But by that time he’d learned that he could make far more money playing the piano at the entertainments given by such families as the Polignacs and the Noailleses – recently returned to France after living abroad since 1789. This had mattered little to him then. He’d shared a garret in the Rue St-Christopher with two of the other junior surgeons and had been perfectly content. But one morning an eighteen-year-old Berber dressmaker had brought into the clinic one of the girls from her shop, bleeding from a botched abortion.

  When he’d emerged from the hospital not long afterwards, he had found the young dress-shop keeper weeping in an alley for her dying friend and had walked her back to her rooms.

  To take a wife, a man needed more money than could be got as a surgeon in a clinic.

  As a musician, he didn’t make a great deal – not enough to purchase a new waistcoat for everyday wear. But the room in the Rue de l’Aube was only a few doors from Ayasha’s shop, and times – January hoped – would improve.

  Provided he didn’t get himself beheaded by the Pasha’s guards for breaking into a harem in the Rue St-Honoré.

  ‘What’s the girl’s name?’ he asked as they descended four flights of narrow stairs – seventy-two steps in all – to the street. On the landing of the deuxième étage – back home the Americans would have called it the third floor – the door of the upholsterer Paillole’s chamber stood open and Madame Paillole could be heard berating her eldest son for Heaven only knew what transgression. With Jacques-Ange it could be anything. On the premier étage the wives of both Renan the baker and Barronde the lawyer, who despised one another, stood listening intently, and they leaped apart at the appearance of January and Ayasha. Madame Barronde vanished into her husband’s apartment – which occupied the whole of the premier étage and was the most elegant in the building – and Madame Renan (‘Such a woman would not have been called Madame in my day,’ Madame Barronde was rather too fond of saying) went downstairs to her husband’s shop.

  ‘Her name is Shamira,’ Ayasha replied. They crossed the tiny yard behind the bakery, where moss grew on grimy cobbles amid smells of bakeshop and privies, circumvented the pump, ducked under the laundry of the students who occupied the attic, and followed the damp little passway out to the street. ‘She is the youngest in the harîm, only seventeen. Hüseyin Pasha bought her only a few months before he left Constantinople for Paris, just after the New Year. He has brought the whole of his harîm, and both his wives . . .’

  ‘And a platoon of scimitar-wielding guards?’

  ‘Only ten, Lady Jamilla says.’ Ayasha’s blithe tone indicated that she considered her husband more than a match for ten scimitar-wielding Turks any day of the week. ‘Alors, copain,’ she added, in slangy street-French, and waved to old Grouzier who ran the Café l’Empereur on the other side of the narrow street. ‘And anyway, he has taken four of them to London with him,’ she went on, as if this improved matters. ‘And two of those who remain are eunuchs. There are four other eunuchs in the household: two to serve in the harem, and one each for the Lady Jamilla and the Lady Utba, who is also with child.’

  She ticked off these facts on her strong brown fingers: short, like a child’s, though her small square palms were as wrinkled as an old lady’s. ‘Hüseyin Pasha is a great friend of the Sultan – so great that His Highness merely sent him to Paris when he spoke out against the Sultan bringing in men of the West to train the Army and teach young men science and medicine. He is a great hater of all things of the West and says they foul the hearts of the true followers of God’s Law . . . Is it true that the Sultan’s mother was French?’

  ‘Not French French.’ January smiled, with a trace of pride. ‘Creole French, from the sugar islands. She was kidnapped by pirates in the Mediterranean on her way to a convent and sold to the Sultan’s father back before the Revolution. I’ve heard she was a cousin of the Empress Josephine, but that’s always sounded to me like the kind of story someone would make up.’

  ‘I’ll bet her father sold her himself for two centimes.’ Ayasha adjusted the ribbons of her bonnet. In the raven cloud of curls her earrings glinted, gold cut in the primitive spiral patterns of the desert where she’d been born, like the flicker of a pagan smile. ‘He won’t let them leave the grounds – Hüseyin Pasha won’t let his wives leave, I mean – and has forbidden them to wear Western clothing: For whom does a woman wear these garments, he has asked, save for her husband, who hates the sight o
f these immodest shapes? It’s why I was called upon today, while he’s away—’

  ‘To make the Lady Jamilla a Turkish entari of Lyon’s silk?’

  ‘Sahîf.’ She poked him with her elbow. ‘That’s what the Lady Utba thinks – and what she’s having me do. But the Lady Jamilla looks ahead to the time when the Sultan will summon them back and make Hüseyin Pasha dress his wives in the style of the West. She plans to have the fashions of Paris all ready, to shine down every woman of the court. Which she cannot do,’ she added encouragingly, ‘if she lets harm befall you.’

  ‘That sound you hear,’ responded January politely, ‘is my sob of relief at the assurance that all will be well.’

  The hôtel rented by Hüseyin Pasha stood amid handsome gardens on the Rue St Honoré, near the city’s northern customs barrier. It was an area that still boasted market gardens and drying grounds among the small cottages of artisans; garden beds lay fallow in the chill flash of cloud and sunlight, and there was a strong smell of backyard poultry and cows. A lane flanked by a yellow sandstone wall ended in a stable gate. ‘We’re here to see Bellarmé about the milk,’ Ayasha casually informed the single groom they met as they crossed the stable court toward the kitchen.

  January raised his eyebrows. ‘You told Madame already that we’d be coming?’

  ‘I knew you would not turn your back on a girl who is in trouble and afraid, far from home.’

  ‘When I get sewn in a sack and thrown in the river I’ll take comfort in the thought of my virtue.’

  ‘Mâlik . . .’ She looked up at him – compact and voluptuous, she stood almost a foot shorter than his towering six-foot-three – with the expression of an adult being patient with a child’s fears of the platt-eye devil beneath the bed at night. ‘The guards are as lazy as other men. With the Pasha gone, they scarce even trouble to patrol—’

  And immediately gave the lie to her words by yanking him through the doorway of the stone-flagged dairy beside the kitchen to let a servant pass: a black man whose slim build and sharp features marked him, to January’s eye, as of the Fulani tribe. Hüseyin Pasha’s ordinance about proper dress seemed to extend to his servants: the man wore billowy Turkish pantaloons – salvars – and a long tunic of bright orange wool, his shaved head covered by a scarlet cap. January wondered if this man had consented to come to this chilly Infidel country, or if, like the girl Shamira, his master had simply ordered him to pack.