Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 7

  January watched the Marquise de Longuechasse – a stout woman without a trace of the jolliness commonly attributed to stout women – herd her far-traveling young brother-in-law in the direction of the Comtesse de Villeneuf and her marriageable daughter. ‘Perhaps he’s under duress.’

  The banker laughed. ‘Perhaps he is. And I must say he’s a most handsome young man, despite the sunburnt look. A shocking waste. Half the family’s in Holy Orders; the only aunt that survived the Revolution is an abbess, and all three of her sisters – also nuns – were guillotined. The only reason he’s not in orders himself is because he’s his brother’s heir. He’s the last person who’d be telling tales of what went on in the Harem of the Sultan, even if he was admitted . . . I wonder if they castrated him? It would account for the gloomy expression. I shall inquire . . .’

  And ben-Gideon moved off, with the same expression of perpetually fascinated interest that he’d worn listening to the would-be rebels at the Chatte Blanche.

  SIX

  On the following morning, when January woke – late – to find Ayasha gone as usual, it was also to find three buckets of water lined up in front of the fire, the largest kettle filled and simmering gently at the back of the little hearth, and a note on the shelf beside his shaving razor.

  My dearest Benjamin,

  Enquiry among the other members of my tribe last night unearthed no mention of a fleeing girl seeking refuge in the tents of her kinsfolk. Jacob L’Ecolier does – or did – indeed have family in Cairo who have business dealings with Hüseyin Pasha. He was aware that his second-cousin Isaac was gathered to the bosom of their fathers late last year, but because of estrangements in the family knew nothing of the fate of Isaac Talebe’s wife or children. He has asked to be kept notified of any information you learn, and has offered – discreetly – to reimburse monies laid out in the search for the girl.

  Scalded with the holy water that was flung in my face, and muttering curses against all Christians, I shall continue to creep about the city making enquiries after our Most Christian Abbé’s adventures in the Sultan’s harem.

  Daniel

  Thoughtfully, January shaved, bathed, and dressed in a morning costume of stylish gray; checked the contents of his music satchel; collected his cornet, since the morning’s agenda included rehearsals for the Opera; and descended the seventy-two steps to the street. To judge by the outcry as he reached the deuxième étage, the situation in the Paillole household had not changed since yesterday (‘You cannot go on expecting your father and me to support you if you show no interest in your studies! Every morning I ask the Blessed Virgin why it was your brother God saw fit to take from us, and not yourself . . . !’) and on the premier, he was delayed by a long diatribe from Madame Barronde about that worthless brat that Ayasha persisted in hiring to carry water up the stairs for her and who was just looking for what he could steal. Yes, it was Christian of her to give the boy a sou now and again, but only ill would come of encouraging those devil’s imps of street children . . .

  Poucet, nine years old, lounged on the steps of the building across the street in a spot of thin sunlight, dividing an apple and part of a loaf of bread with the little gang of younger children who ran with him. The boy saluted January cheerfully as January crossed to him. It was true that Ayasha would generally pay the child to lug water up the four flights from the yard rather than do it herself, and it was also true that Poucet or one of his gang of infant beggars probably did steal stockings if Madame Barronde’s hired girl left them hanging on the clothesline. He suspected that Madame Barronde would have shot Poucet if she’d thought she could have gotten away with it, rather than have him exercise his ‘evil influence’ on her nine-year-old Charlotte or seven-year-old Jean-Stanislas, who regarded the juvenile rabble with awed fascination.

  ‘Et alors, copains.’ January returned the salute. ‘Thank you for bringing up the water.’

  ‘It’s nuthin’.’ Poucet shrugged elaborately, but January could tell he was pleased. ‘Ma Barronde carried on like we was gonna steal it or somethin’. You shoulda heard your lady dress her down! What’s a harmoota?’

  ‘Just what you think it is,’ said January with a grin – careful, as he always was, to address the boy by the formal ‘vous’ of adulthood, rather than calling him ‘tu’ like a child. ‘You have anything going the next few days?’

  ‘Saturday I’m speakin’ before the Chamber of Deputies,’ replied the boy grandly. ‘An’ Sunday I have to give the sermon at Notre Dame. ’Til then I’m at your service, chief.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said January. He handed him ten centimes. ‘You know the Marquis de Longuechasse’s house?’

  ‘Sure thing. His coachman’s a sport – lets us sleep in the hayloft sometimes, long as we’re up and out of there early before Her Ladyship gets up.’

  ‘I thought all rich ladies slept until three in the afternoon.’

  ‘Not her!’ piped in Chatoine, Poucet’s sister, a tiny child almost lost in a much older boy’s cast-offs. ‘Has to get up early, see, ’cause the maids might steal a piece of coal while they’re makin’ breakfast.’

  ‘You know the Marquis’ brother?’

  ‘The one that’s been in foreign parts?’

  ‘That’s the man,’ said January. ‘Can you follow him? See where he goes?’

  ‘I can tell you now where he goes,’ retorted Poucet. ‘He never goes no place but to the Bishop’s, and to St-Louis-Le-Grand to hobnob with the Jesuits, and out to the convent in Batignolles where his aunt’s a nun.’

  ‘Batignolles?’ January remembered the clear notes of the convent bells beyond the woods, the cold mists outside the windows of the Café La Marseillaise. ‘St Theresa’s?’

  ‘Some saint.’ The boy shrugged. ‘Whoever they are, they don’t like kids hangin’ around the gate corruptin’ the girls locked up inside.’

  January thought about this for a moment. ‘Does de Longuechasse have a single-horse chaise?’

  ‘That he does, chief. Red like sealing wax, with black wheels and a black horse to draw it. What a mover! Formidable!’

  ‘Find out if you can – and without anyone at his stables knowing you’re asking – if the chaise went out Saturday night. Can you do all that?’

  ‘Is he up to something?’ Chatoine’s bright black eyes sparkled under the short-chopped straggle of her fair hair. ‘Him and the Jesuits planning to take over the country?’

  ‘They’ve already taken over the country, you dumb andouille!’ Poucet, sitting higher on the steps than she, nudged her in the back with his foot. ‘But he’s plotting something?’

  ‘I think he is,’ said January. ‘Not a word, now.’

  Hands were raised, fingers crossed for luck, and much spit expended upon the cobblestones in oaths of silence, and January handed them another few centimes before proceeding first to the church of St Séverin – where he was slightly late to morning Mass – and then to Ayasha’s shop. She had rolls there – bought from Renan the baker on her way out that morning – and a small dish of butter, which she shared with the two young seamstresses and the little girl who ran errands and pulled out the basting threads (‘They’re no use to me if they’re starving . . .’), and while he ate, January recounted what Daniel had told him last night, and Poucet that morning.

  ‘It would help – if you have time – to learn from Ra’eesa if Shamira was one of those who learned French from the instructor who came to the Sultan’s harem.’

  ‘And what do I say to Madame de Remiremont?’ grumbled Ayasha as she stitched acres of tiny, pink silk roses on to the immense sleeves of a pink-and-black gown. ‘That I have to go speak to a servant woman, and just wait here for me for two hours? Bad enough that stuck-up servant of ben-Gideon’s comes knocking at the door this morning with a note before it gets light . . .’

  ‘I said, if you have time.’ At a guess, the Comtesse de Remiremont wanted her gown that evening. It always made Ayasha cross to be hurried. ‘And if I have time, I’ll wa
lk out to Batignolles and have a look at the Convent of St Theresa . . .’

  ‘Don’t you dare go without me, Mâlik!’ She flicked his elbow – the portion of his anatomy closest to hand – with a sharp little blow of one finger in its gold thimble, like one of the cats when annoyed. ‘Or I’ll—’

  ‘You’ll what?’ He grinned across the workroom table at her.

  She threw a pink silk rose at him. ‘I’ll sew up all the sleeves of your shirts when you have to go to the Opera.’

  January pressed his palms together and bowed his head in a gesture of submission. ‘Forgive me, zahar. Not a step shall I stir without you at my side.’

  ‘See you don’t. Now give that back.’

  January tucked the delicate flower into the band of his hat and set the hat on his head. ‘Even the marks of your anger I treasure as badges of pride.’

  ‘Nuti. I’ll give you a mark of my anger . . .’

  They kissed, the three shop-girls all giggling – they had learned that for all her strictness and parsimony in matters of business, their mistress’s bark was considerably worse than her bite – and January took his leave.

  He kept the matter of Shamira out of his mind, and a mental door closed upon it, through the morning’s rehearsals at the Opera – first with the singers for the upcoming production of Proserpine, and then with the dancers – and, after a hasty luncheon of soup and coffee bought from a street vendor in the Rue du Petit Luxembourg, through piano lessons with assorted offspring of the rich. Music was an exacting task, and January never quite understood those musicians – and Paris was rife with them – who could dash off waltzes and arias by rote, while chatting to someone else in the room about how they were going to pay the rent.

  He put up, too, with the usual expressions of politely concealed surprise from the mother and aunts of a new pupil, that a man of color could teach and understand the finer points of the Viennese style of the pianoforte. (What do they think I play at the Opera, the tom-tom?) In Louisiana he’d endured the same, mostly because of his size: everyone expected a black man of his stature to be good for nothing but cutting cane.

  He returned to the Rue de l’Aube at five, wondering if Ayasha would be back from the final fitting with Madame de Remiremont and if he was destined to make a dinner out of eggs, cheese, and cold couscous, and found the wife of his bosom pacing Renan’s bakery-shop downstairs.

  ‘I thought you’d never get here, Mâlik!’ She caught him in the doorway, hooked her elbow peremptorily through his. ‘We have but a few hours, to get out to the convent and see what they have to say there, before you have to go to your silly Opera—’

  ‘So that I can pay our silly rent.’ He let himself be tugged along the street toward the Rue St-Jacques. That few hours was also all he had to encompass any food he was likely to get during what was to be a very long evening, but it was at any time useless to struggle against Ayasha.

  ‘Yallah for our silly rent.’ She released his arm long enough to button her jacket, wind one shawl around her neck and pull another closer about her arms; the afternoon was gray, and chill wind lanced down from the river. ‘Madame de Remiremont paid me, what more do we need? Ra’eesa told me that indeed Shamira was one of those who went with Sitt Jamilla, to learn French from the young Abbé from the Embassy—’

  ‘De Longuechasse?’

  ‘Even he. The ladies were all veiled, of course, and there were about fifteen eunuchs with swords stationed around the walls, in case de Longuechasse suddenly decided to improve relations between France and the Sublime Porte by ravaging the Sultan’s women . . . Too, he taught his lessons at one side of the room, and the ladies sat at the other, with fifteen feet of open floor between them, and a moat of fire, belike . . .’

  January let himself into Ayasha’s shop as they passed it – it was too dark to work by four, and the windows were shuttered fast – and left his music satchel and cornet on the counter.

  ‘And did Shamira ever speak to Ra’eesa,’ he asked as he re-emerged, ‘of the Abbé de Longuechasse?’

  ‘She did.’ Ayasha’s voice was grim. ‘She asked Ra’eesa to find where he dwelled, that she might use her new-found skill at the writing of French – she knew a little from her childhood, because her father was a merchant – to thank him.’

  ‘And did Ra’eesa have any opinion of the Abbé himself?’

  ‘She says that he is comely – which Hüseyin Pasha definitely is not – and young. And she said that upon the occasion that she spoke to him, and gave him the message of thanks from Shamira, he asked her, “Is the Lady Shamira the one who sat farthest to the right, beside your mistress?” which was indeed the case. Which means that she did something – met his eyes, leaned close to listen, a woman can always do something – that made him take notice of her. Whether she wrote to him again Ra’eesa knew not.’

  ‘Could she have smuggled further notes out to him from Hüseyin Pasha’s house in Constantinople?’ They reached the river, and the Hôtel Dieu rose on their right as they crossed the bridge, Napoleon’s new brickwork already dark with the soot of Paris chimneys against the raw gloom. The water that rustled beneath the hospital’s pilings stank of blood and decay, and gleamed with sulfurous glints from the windows above it.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Beyond the bridge, candles burned high in the black, gothic walls of the houses along the Rue de la Juiverie, a narrow canyon cutting the medieval mazes of the island. ‘Even a rich man’s harîm isn’t like the Sultan’s, or the harîms in the storybooks. Servants come and go. If you trust one, and you can find one who isn’t afraid of being beaten by the master, you can usually get a message out.’

  ‘But what could she have hoped for?’ January asked. ‘She couldn’t actually have believed that a member of the Embassy staff would rescue her from the house of a high official of the Sultan’s court, could she?’

  He stopped at a tiny side-street, bought two pasties from a vendor – God only knew what was in them – and Ayasha promptly devoured both.

  ‘And what did she think a member of the Embassy staff would do with her? Carry her back to France? Wed her?’

  ‘She was just turned seventeen.’ Ayasha’s dark eyes were sad. ‘What would seem real to her, or possible? In a harîm, all you do is tell each other stories. Even if you despise the other girls, and the servants around you, what is there to do but listen . . . and dream?’

  The village of Batignolles lay a half-mile beyond the customs barrier at the Étoile. January and Ayasha had walked out there many times on hot afternoons in the summer, to drink cheap wine or water-lily tea. In the cold gray of a rainy evening, most of its cafés were shut, and the only activity seemed to be village boys driving cows home to be milked. The Convent of St Theresa stood at the far end of the town, and like many religious establishments in France these days it showed signs of dilapidation and looting during the Revolution. The statues on its Baroque facade had all been recently given new heads of stone five or six shades lighter than their soot-darkened bodies, and the effect was one of men and women who needed to have their robes washed.

  Through the barred gate January could see the church was brightly illuminated, its doorway crowded with men and women clearly well off and dressed to advertise that fact. The elderly lay-brother who kept the gate produced a long list of reasons why he shouldn’t have to go inquire of the Mother Superior as to whether she would see these decidedly un-rich visitors or not . . . And no, he knew nothing of any Jewess taking refuge in the convent. What kind of a place did they think this was?

  In time, however, St Peter (as Ayasha irreverently described him) shuffled away to see if Mother Marie-Doloreuse had a few moments before the beginning of the Mass. January was reminded of the butlers in the houses of his pupils who would see, as they said, if Madame were at home, when everyone knew jolly well that Madame was at home and watching out the drawing-room window to see if she wanted to have anything to do with the caller or not.

  The convent bells struck seven. January qui
etly gave up all hope of getting anything resembling dinner before he reported to the Opera at half-past eight. Maybe the same pastie vendor would be in the Rue St-Christophe on their way back across the island?

  The judas opened in the convent gate, and St Peter announced in an aggrieved tone that the Mother Abbess would see them, and then took good care to herd them in a long circuit by the convent wall, as far as possible from the ladies in their lace pelerines and the gentlemen in their tall beaver hats in the church porch.

  The Mother Abbess will see you meant, of course, that the Mother Abbess would sit on one side of a wooden window-grille curtained in purple velvet, and hear their voices, and permit them to hear hers.

  ‘It gratifies me to learn that any soul should repudiate the Devil and flee the gates of Hell,’ proclaimed the sweet, steely soprano from the other side of the curtain. ‘Yet you are mistaken, if you think that my nephew Arnoux would be involved in a . . . a deliverance from a seraglio, like a character in some cheap romance. Though worldly considerations have forestalled him from taking Holy Orders until such time as his brother’s wife brings forth a son, yet his only bride has ever been the Church, and he has been a faithful lover.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested January, ‘your nephew acted out of pity for the girl. If that is the case, I assure you that members of the girl’s family here in Paris have expressed themselves willing to take her in.’

  ‘What sort of Christian are you, sir?’ The Abbess sounded scandalized. ‘When a soul lost in darkness seeks the light, do you think that any true Christian would send them back into the abyss? Probably you do,’ she added bitterly. ‘So deep has this country gone into atheism. Even His Majesty – a priest himself and God’s representative on Earth! – stands in need of a reminder of his duties.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said January, in his most contrite voice, ‘if I have expressed myself ill. When the girl’s family begged me to seek her, I only asked myself if there were anyone now in Paris, whom she might have seen in Constantinople.’