Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Read online

  Above the edge of her veil, her eyes held his. Seeking what? Courage and resolution? The nerve to stay in hiding, possibly for hours, until the guard walks away? Maybe only seeking a sign of trust. If he did not trust – if he panicked, tried to flee or to fight – they would all be doomed.

  ‘I stay.’

  The dark eyes shut for a moment in relief, and her hands tightened on his, the way he would have slapped a friend on the arm and said: Good man.

  She tugged him down the backstairs, through the pantry, into the kitchen. Beyond the wide kitchen window he glimpsed the man in the yard, squat and formidable in a rough combination of French jacket and Turkish trousers, his head shaved. In addition to a curved Turkish sword and a dagger the man bore a very businesslike rifle.

  Not a man to argue with about what you were doing in the house.

  A small door led from the kitchen into the linen room, long and brick-floored and lined with cupboards, and smelling of cedar and scorched sheets. From her belt Jamilla took a key, opened the big armoire at the far end of the room. It was a close fit, but January unhesitatingly curled his six-foot three-inch height on to the lowest shelf – four feet long and some two feet deep – and Jamilla closed the doors on him at once. He heard the lock click. So still were these rooms at the back of the house that he heard the pat of her slippers retreat across the brick floor to the kitchen.

  It had all been as neatly accomplished as a military campaign: well, a military campaign by a general who knew what he was doing – Caesar or Alexander or Frederick the Great. The one military campaign which January actually witnessed – at the age of nineteen, crouched behind redoubts made of cotton bales at the top of an embankment, while a British army three times the size of the defenders attempted like idiots to charge uphill at them into a wall of rifle fire – would have had any proper general tearing his hair.

  For a moment he smelled the fog again, heard the steady beat of the British drums, invisible in the cinder-colored darkness, and the sneeze of a man somewhere down the line to his left. After the battle, working in the infirmary tent among the captured wounded, he had felt such pity for them as they were carried in, soaked in blood and mud and begging for water – men he’d shot himself, or bayoneted: ‘You can’t think about it,’ one of the surgeons had advised him, a Scot from one of the British regiments who’d permitted himself to be captured, so that he could look after the prisoners. ‘When you start to think about the battle, just imagine yourself closing a door on it, so you’ll be able to work.’

  The Lady Jamilla, January felt sure, would never have ordered a stupid charge like that.

  He smiled.

  You’d have thought she was sneaking very large men in and out of her lord’s harem all her life.

  A childhood in slavery had given January plenty of experience in hiding, so he knew prolonged stillness would very quickly result in agonizing cramps. Michie Simon, the owner of Bellefleur Plantation, had been a drunkard who thought nothing of rawhiding a six-year-old. What to the white children of the parish were merely the finer arts of hide and seek had been to January and his sister almost literally life-or-death skills. He knew how to ignore the cramps, keep still and wait.

  He knew how to listen, too.

  Voices of the guards in the yard, little chips of sound. (And what language is it THEY speak?) Ayasha’s voice, raised in angry imprecation as she passed through the kitchen and went on outside without pausing. For her to linger would have been as good as an announcement that she still had an accomplice in the house – the groom in the yard would remember an immense broad-shouldered black man in a brown corduroy jacket. For Ayasha to flounce through the stable gates and down the lane without a backward glance was the best corroboration that could be offered to the statement: ‘Who, Benjamin? He left an hour ago, muti . . .’

  But it left him utterly at the mercy of that dark-eyed woman in the saffron veil, who had so cared for her husband’s concubine that she’d risked her own safety – perhaps her life – to bring in a Western doctor.

  There was a clock in the kitchen. Through the open doorway its notes drifted faintly: noon, then one, then two. Cook and kitchen maids came in and chattered in French, wooden clogs clattering on the bricks. ‘Intruders . . . heathens . . . they say that he whipped a concubine to death for looking at one of his guards . . . Hand me that cream, would you ever, dearie?’ The smells of garlic sautéed with onions. ‘Is it true Jojo’s marrying that Chinese?’ (Chinese???) He wondered what was happening above stairs and whether the search was still in progress.

  It was well past three when someone shut the door between the two service-rooms and approached the armoire with pattering slippers. January hoped his cramped legs would still bear him.

  The lock clicked. Jamilla gave him her hand to steady him as he rose – he needed it, and caught her shoulder as he staggered. She led the way to the outer door, opened it and pointed toward a tall hedge. ‘Garden,’ she whispered, and gestured: straight through, then over the wall.

  ‘Shukran jazeelan,’ he whispered, another of the few Arabic phrases he knew. ‘Thank you. Shamira?’

  ‘It goes better with her.’

  He nodded, turned at once, and strode across the open space of the deserted yard to the gate in the hedge. When he glanced back, Sitt Jamilla was gone.

  The hedge didn’t completely conceal the garden from the yard, but at least he was no longer in the house itself. He spent the minute or so that it took him to cross the formal rose-beds, the graveled walks, inventing an indignant explanation. What, I in the house? Never! I waited in the lane for my wife and have come back to seek her—

  And of course the guards probably haven’t a word of French . . .

  Old vines covered the brick of the garden wall and easily took his weight. Only when he slipped over the top and dropped down to the lane on the other side did he breathe easily again.

  His fellow musicians at the Opera, he reflected with a grin, would hang themselves with envy at the story: I invaded the Pasha’s harem, eluded his guards – we won’t speak of hiding for four hours in an armoire in the linen room – sprang over the garden wall . . .

  And we won’t speak of any of it at all, of course. The other thing he’d learned in the small, gossipy world of that African village in Louisiana’s cane country was not to ever say anything that could get someone hurt, no matter how good a story it made.

  You never knew who was listening. Or how trustworthy they were when they’d had a drink or two.

  The better the story was, the likelier it was to be passed along.

  Like Hüseyin Pasha killing a concubine only for glancing at a handsome guard – but that was a story that might possibly be true.

  This was an adventure he’d have to keep to himself.

  ‘Perfidious woman,’ he said, when he reached the Rue St-Honoré and Ayasha sprang from the table of a café on the other side of the street. ‘If you wanted me out of the way could you not simply have arranged to be taken in adultery with M’sieu Barronde? I’d have given you a divorce. I’m aware of your undying passion for M’sieu Renan—’

  The baker, who lived behind his shop on the ground floor of their building, was sixty-two, enormously fat, and – owing to the loss of most of his teeth – drooled.

  ‘Sahîf.’ She slipped her arm through his. ‘If I just let you divorce me for adulterating M’sieu Barronde I wouldn’t get any of your money.’

  ‘Let me tell you, Madame,’ said January severely as they crossed the street, ‘I have registered it in my will that if I die at the hands of the Pasha’s guards, or in fact the guards of any Mohammedan potentate whatsoever, you shall not get a centime.’

  ‘Oh, curse!’ Ayasha pressed a dramatic wrist to her forehead. ‘Oh, spite! I am undone. I shall just have to think of something else, then.’ They turned their steps, not toward the river, but toward the Étoile and Napoleon’s pretentious half-constructed triumphal arch, beyond which lay the non-taxed wine shops and inexpens
ive cafés of the banlieue. The chilly afternoon was already growing dark, and the district beyond the limits of the old tax-wall had a country stillness to it at odds with the liveliness of that place in summertime. But it was still possible to get a good dinner of stewed rabbit and fresh-baked bread at the Café Marseillaise before returning to the Rue de l’Aube so that January could change for the Opera.

  The performance was Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, a piece that Ayasha regarded with scorn, knowing from experience what it was to actually grow up in a harîm. Through the evening as he played, January’s thoughts returned many times to the low-ceilinged chambers at the top of that walled house, and the sweat-soaked Jewish girl on the divan whose face he had not even been allowed to see.

  The following day Ayasha came back late from work at the shop, with the news that she’d walked out to Rue St-Honoré to ask how Shamira did. ‘She is well, the child also,’ she reported, and covered the mix of fish and onion on the small brick potager built into the corner of the room. ‘Allah be praised . . .’

  Freezing rain had started last night on the way home from the Opera, and all day it had hammered the gray cobbled streets. Kneeling by the hearth, January stirred coffee beans in the roasting pan over the fire and cringed at the thought of making his way to the theater again that night.

  ‘She didn’t lose the child?’

  His wife shook her head. ‘Sitt Jamilla spoke well of you. It isn’t every man, she said, who would follow a woman he had never before met, without stopping like an imbecile to ask questions that would have got them killed.’

  ‘What would have happened to Shamira,’ asked January, ‘if I’d been found there? Surely no one would think that in her state she’d be receiving a lover.’

  ‘That isn’t the point, Mâlik.’

  ‘For that matter,’ he added – though he knew she was right – ‘in France, Hüseyin Pasha has no jurisdiction over those girls, not even the command a man has over his wife.’ He shook the pan, judging the color of the beans as the indescribable miracle of their scent filled the long room. ‘No matter what he paid for them back in Constantinople, they’re free women here.’

  ‘Free to do what, Mâlik?’ She brought out dishes from the cupboard, rested them on the tiled counter that edged the cook hole, barely wider than January’s palm. ‘Free to find work in a sewing loft, without a word of French to their names? Free to find a gawaad – a pimp – to protect them while they earn money the only way they can?’

  The autumn day was already dark, and the warmth of the hearth and the little potager didn’t penetrate even to the other end of the room. Mine enemy’s dog, King Lear had said, though he had bit me, should have stood that night against my fire . . .

  ‘They have a place to stay,’ Ayasha went on softly.

  ‘That isn’t the point, zahar.’

  It rained the next day, and the day after. Homicide, the beggars called this season. The Opera went into rehearsal for La Cenerentola, and January was out most afternoons, playing piano for the ballet company. Since frequently he was hired to play at balls that started when the performance was done, he and Ayasha saw one another only in passing. It was a life they were used to. They both complained of it, loudly, but when he’d stop home, between rehearsal and return to the theater with his cornet, he’d find bread, cheese, and apples waiting for him, and the room filled with a fantasia of tulle, silk, muslin pattern-pieces. He’d leave a new comb, or hair ribbons, on the pillow for her and carry up the coal and water, seventy-two steps, to be ready for when she returned.

  In Paris, as in New Orleans, this was the rhythm of winter as the town filled with the wealthy and their money ran out like water from a squeezed sponge. All the musicians’ wives and mistresses understood that one dipped up the water while it flowed. Summer would be dry.

  Then on the Sunday morning – St Hilarion’s Day, and four days after what January thought of as the Adventure of the Seraglio – while he and Ayasha drowsed in bed, someone knocked at the door.

  ‘Tell him we’re dead.’ Ayasha pulled the blankets up over their heads.

  And, when January – always conscientious – rolled from beneath the quilts and caught up the second-hand velvet robe against the cold outside the bed curtains, she thrust aside the curtains and shouted at the top of her lungs, ‘Go away! We’re dead! Coward,’ she added as January crossed to the door.

  Standing in the dark of the landing, wrapped in what looked like twenty cloaks and veils, was the maidservant Ra’eesa. Relief, anxiety, pleading mingled in her dark, wrinkled eyes.

  With the air of a schoolchild repeating by rote a memorized verse, she said, ‘Shamira gone.’

  THREE

  RAN AWAY, was how an advertisement would start out in New Orleans, reflected January.

  He’d seen thousands of them – they had been among the first things he’d learned to read, after he’d been given his own freedom.

  A little illustration of a fleeing slave, a description, and a reward.

  Only, no American would ever admit that the fugitive in question was a concubine.

  At the Café La Marseillaise on the Boulevard de Passy they waited while Ra’eesa scurried like a black beetle across the Étoile and vanished between the tall stumps of Napoleon’s Arch. Madame Dankerts, who knew them well, brought sweetened cream, griddle cakes, plum compote and coffee, and within half an hour, Ra’eesa reappeared through the Arch, accompanied by Sitt Jamilla, cloaked and veiled against the clammy fog.

  ‘Will your coming bring you trouble?’ Ayasha asked at once.

  The Lady looked about her at the café with great curiosity: the plastered walls painted a vivid yellow, the tin-sheathed wooden counter that separated the little kitchen from the common room, the few working men and their wives and girlfriends drinking coffee and consuming Madame Dankerts’ excellent griddle-cakes at the plain little tables. The sight of Ayasha, and of those other women in their Sunday bodices and high-crowned, beribboned hats, seemed to reassure her. This was obviously a place where it was appropriate for a woman to be.

  She shook her head. ‘Sitt Utba know not. My lord come Friday from London. I will say, Shamira gone, I fear some harm to her. This – me – he will forgive.’ She sat, and Ra’eesa took the chair at her side with the air of one who has never done such a thing in public before. ‘Shamira he will not forgive.’

  ‘When did she leave, Sitt Jamilla?’

  ‘Night. Ra’eesa –’ the Lady touched the maid’s wrist gently – ‘sleep beside her. Shamira walk about the house yesterday. Better. I watch, cook watch, Ra’eesa watch, that Lady Utba give no poison—’ She shook her head, her eyes filling with concern. ‘Taryak –’ she gestured, trying to summon the French word – ‘dawâ – ma’jûn . . .’

  ‘Opium,’ provided Ayasha.

  ‘Opium, yes. Opium in water. Girls all asleep. Shamira gone.’

  ‘Was the Lady Utba drugged as well?’

  ‘Lady Utba, her lady, her eunuch—’ She lost the word, pantomimed the shape of the house with her hands, which were astonishingly expressive.

  ‘The girls are at one end of the house, the Lady Utba at the other,’ provided Ayasha. ‘The Prophet has said, a man may take unto himself more than one wife only if he provide them with equal households.’

  ‘So the poison was only administered to the harîm upstairs?’

  Ayasha nodded.

  ‘Could Shamira have done this herself?’

  Jamilla was silent for so long after January asked this question that he feared she had not understood. But when he began to repeat it, she shook her head, raised her hand. I understand . . .

  At last she said, ‘I do not know.’ She brought her dark-blue veil a little away from her face and lifted up under it Madame Dankerts’ prosaic white pottery coffee-cup, to drink.

  ‘Is there opium in the house?’

  ‘Yes. Key of chest . . .’ Beneath her cloak she jingled them slightly on her girdle. ‘Lady Utba also. I look in chest; I
think not any gone. But, Shamira walk about the house. And girls . . . Raihana –’ she named one of them – ‘always a little opium, here, here.’ Her slim hands conjured an invisible pillow, an invisible jewel-box, little packets of the drug tucked secretly inside.

  ‘Was any of her clothing gone?’ asked January. ‘Her shoes?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Or the clothing of any of the other girls?’

  Another emphatic head-shake. Then, with the first wry flicker of a half-smile in her eyes: ‘Girls watch clothing. Always taking.’ She mimed snatching something and snatching it back. ‘Watch like misers. No thing gone.’

  Ayasha rolled her eyes at some memory of her own upbringing, and January smiled. Even in the slave cabins of Bellefleur Plantation, where one would think no one would possess anything, he recalled how his six-year-old sister Olympe nearly tore the hair off Judy, the daughter of the other family that shared the ten-by-ten cabin with them, for ‘borrowing’ her hair ribbon.

  No wonder the Prophet mandated that the households of wives be kept strictly apart.

  ‘Sitt Jamilla,’ he said. ‘Do you think she has run away?’

  Again silence, while the Pasha’s chief wife considered. The omens had predicted a male child, and had given young Shamira precedence over the other women who lived beneath the Turk’s roof. But the woman to whom a girl had been predicted was still a legal wife, not a concubine, and still ‘delighted’ the master’s heart.

  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.