Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 8

  ‘And you heard from my nephew the Marquis that his brother Arnoux taught French there, to ladies in the households of the Sultan’s officials. How that man loves to boast of vainglorious trappings! But I assure you, M’sieu Janvier: Arnoux would never compromise his family in the eyes of – I will not say the King. His Most Christian Majesty is a true Son of the Church. Arnoux would never run his family afoul of the King’s ministers, hollow men, nameless souls themselves who would spit upon the Host, if by doing so they could curry the favor of those who have for five centuries enslaved and desecrated the very Tomb of Our Savior.’

  January glanced sidelong at Ayasha: this was an extreme view to take of such conservative gentlemen as Villèle and Polignac and others who had approved of the Anti-Sacrilege Act, merely because they might be expected to object to giving offense to one of France’s chief allies. From the wall of the parlor – recently wallpapered to cover the damage done during the Revolution – a small oil-painting of St Theresa frowned disapprovingly, as if she detected January’s lie.

  ‘Whoever sent you,’ the old nun went on, ‘you may inform them that neither my nephew, nor I myself, have any knowledge of this unfortunate girl. Yet you may tell them also that all Christians applaud her courage and wish that more here in France shared it. Who is not with us is against us, the Apostle says. If this girl should ever come knocking upon our gates, seeking the truth of salvation, we – God’s true Church – shall welcome her among us, and let the Devil and the Sultan and all the wealthy Jews who seek to buy the King’s favor with their ill-got pelf break their teeth with gnashing, that a single soul has run away to the Light.’

  ‘So there,’ said January as St Peter conducted him and Ayasha out of the cloister house and across the cold twilight of the grounds toward the gate once more.

  ‘Did you tell her that Shamira was a Jewess?’

  ‘St Peter might have . . . Now you’ve got me calling him that.’ Better that, he supposed, than Papa Legba, who was the voodoo equivalent of the Heavenly Gatekeeper and whose marks had a way of turning up on the old saint’s statues in New Orleans churches . . . ‘But I don’t think either you or I mentioned the Sultan to him.’

  He stopped at the side door of the convent church, at the unaccustomed sound within of applause. St Peter beckoned impatiently, but January gestured – Let me behold this – and the lay brother stood back, wearing the expression of a sulky bulldog, while January stepped to the rear of the crowd.

  It was fortunate that he stood half a head taller than any man in France and a head taller than most, for the little church of St Theresa was packed to the doors. Those gentlemen in their swallow-tailed coats and the ladies in Brussels lace clustered up almost to the tall grating of barred iron that stretched clear across the room before the altar. Diamonds flashed around most of the feminine throats in the assembled watchers, and diamonds glittered also in the hair of the girl who stood before the altar, on the inner side of the grate: a girl of fifteen or sixteen, clothed in Italian silk of pink, rust, and gold. She had just turned toward the audience – family and friends of the family, January knew – hence the applause, and her face almost glowed with the exaltation and joy that very young girls can feel, when they are the center of attention and can make a splendid gesture with all eyes upon them and only them.

  All eyes including God’s.

  A panel opened behind the altar. Chanting in their sweet voices, the nuns emerged in their coarse black habits, their dark veils; at their head walked a tall woman whose resemblance to the Marquis de Longuechasse was striking, even at that distance and in the dimness of candlelight.

  The nuns stripped the diamonds out of the girl’s hair, and from her wrists and hands, and threw the jewels to the floor at the feet of the man who stood next to the altar, the man whose crimson garments gave him a look of flame. They took the girl by the hands, led her to the open panel, where other nuns waited with a dark screen. Behind this they would, January knew, swiftly change the girl’s dress from the ostentatious gown to the black habit of a novice, so that all who watched would not only know that their sister – daughter – cousin – friend had forsaken the world for the glory of the Church, but would also see it, acted out like a pageant.

  Then the girl would kneel among them before the altar – or in some orders, he knew, lie on the stones with her arms spread in the shape of the Cross – as a black curtain descended on the inner side of the grate.

  Your sister – daughter – cousin – friend is dead to the world.

  She has gone on to the wonderful mysteries of marriage to Christ . . . Which too frequently, January knew also, consisted of endless sewing, reading the lives of saints, and trying to fit into a community of women no more educated than oneself, with very little to do.

  Yet how many little girls – and he could see the boarding pupils of the convent gathered like an angel choir to one side, watching their former friend – saw only the ecstasy of doing what everyone wanted you to do, with all eyes upon you, like a bride? Like young girls dreaming of their wedding, without a thought about the life that lay beyond.

  Lights, candles, sweet voices chanting. The black screen was moved aside, and the Mother Abbess led the new nun forward.

  The girl’s face was filled with a wild joy, which January hoped, for her sake, meant a genuine religious vocation and not simply the overwhelming thrill of the occasion.

  Mother Marie-Doloreuse’s face held triumph, and pride that not only glowed but burned. Not only had another soul been led into the light, but was also shown to all to be led into the light. And led by her. A lesson, to those still in darkness.

  And yet with this triumph to proclaim, she took the time to tell us that her nephew had nothing to do with Shamira’s disappearance, and that we should go away.

  He took Ayasha’s hand and backed from the church, before the black curtain fell.

  SEVEN

  Damp mist rose from the Seine as they crossed the Étoile. January checked his silver watch, an expensive bauble he’d bought for himself upon his arrival in Paris ten years before, just prior to receiving the news that his mother’s protector – the man who was going to finance his education in France – had died. It looked like they would actually get back to their room in time for him to gulp down something resembling dinner before he had to race to the Opera . . .

  Then as they passed the lane that led from the Champs Élysées toward the Beaujon Hospital two men came from the other direction, talking quietly, and turned up the lane. At the sound of their voices Ayasha looked sharply back, but January caught her arm and steered her on without change of pace. As soon as the men had gone on, however, he said, ‘Can you get to Hüseyin Pasha’s house? Not by that lane –’ he nodded back toward the one they’d just passed – ‘but going around by way of the Church of St Philippe? Quickly.’

  ‘Those men were speaking—’

  ‘Arabic,’ said January. ‘They’re Sabid’s grooms. The man with the broken nose is unmistakable. Go, quickly, get in through the stable gates and don’t let them see you. Tell Sitt Jamilla I need to speak to her at La Marseillaise at once.’

  Madame Dankerts of the Cafe La Marseillaise, in addition to good Flemish batter-cakes and strong coffee, cheerfully provided January with paper, pen, and ink. He had no intention of leaving his colleagues at the Opera to attempt the overture of La Cenerentola without a first cornet, and he fully expected to have to impart his information to Jamilla by means of a letter.

  But Ayasha must have made astonishing speed to the Rue St-Honoré, for he was only up to his third batter-cake and the only reason I can think of for Sabid to keep watch upon your house is . . . when his wife and two black-veiled forms appeared in the café’s door.

  ‘This true what Ayasha say?’ The Lady took the seat opposite in a dark swirl of gauze. ‘Sabid men watch house?’

  ‘They do. I recognized two of them – there have probably been others.’

  Her brows pulled together below the edge of
her dark hijab. ‘Then is not he who took Shamira?’

  ‘No. But it may mean he’s looking for her; that he knows she’s escaped. What would he do if he found her? If he had her in his power? Kill her?’

  ‘Not first.’ Jamilla’s voice was barely a whisper. ‘Sabid – Hüseyin – hate.’ She tapped the faces of her two fists, like the butting heads of rams. ‘Long time. Hüseyin spies in house of Sabid in Constantinople. Spies tell him Sabid take money like a street whore, from French, from English, from Austrians. Men who make gun, make steamboat, make boots. Give Sabid money. Sabid tell Sultan: to be modern, to be like West, Empire need gun, need steamboat, need boots. Sabid say, I get them for you, for such a price.’

  ‘And is this true?’ asked January.

  ‘I know not. But Hüseyin tell Sultan, and Sultan very angry. Send Sabid away. But, Sultan still need farangi gun, farangi steam-engine. Hüseyin fear, Sultan call Sabid back while Hüseyin away.’

  ‘Not an unreasonable fear. I doubt Sabid is the only modernizer in Constantinople – nor the only man around the Sultan to be taking bribes to get his favor.’

  ‘It will go ill for Hüseyin,’ said Ayasha softly, ‘if this Sabid does return to favor.’

  ‘Worse than ill,’ agreed Jamilla. ‘I will make you weep, Sabid say. I will make you curse the light of the day when you spoke against me.’

  ‘And he followed him all this way here, only out of hate?’

  ‘Not hate only.’ Jamilla glanced around the little room, as if she expected the hook-nosed, scar-faced grooms of her husband’s enemy to be sipping coffee at the next table. ‘In Constantinople, my husband hear of farangi – Inglis – send bribe unto Sabid, and later Sabid cheat the Inglis, I know not how. This man my husband go to England to seek. Sabid wrote the Inglis a letter, and this letter, my husband will send unto the Sultan, that the hand of Sabid, the lips of Sabid, the seal of Sabid all bear witness to treason.’

  ‘And does Sabid know this?’ asked January.

  ‘I know not. My husband now careful. I careful . . .’

  ‘And those salopes in the kitchen talk like monkeys,’ finished Ayasha. ‘Else why does Sabid send men to watch the house, save to learn whether Shamira is still there or not?’

  ‘If he’s sending men to check,’ pointed out January, ‘that sounds as if he isn’t sure. If there were a spy regularly in the household, he would be. Is there one in the house who is of a height to counterfeit Shamira? Of a shape to be taken for her, in her clothing, at a distance?’

  ‘Raihana,’ said Jamilla promptly. ‘I send her into the garden, in Shamira dress, Shamira veil. Sabid cease to hunt for her outside? Only, we must watch.’ She put a hand on Ra’eesa’s arm and explained something to her in quick low sentences. Ra’essa nodded, her wrinkled eyes grim.

  ‘We must watch,’ Jamilla repeated. ‘For if Sabid think it is Shamira, he may take her, may kill her, only to make my husband weep. You found her not, Hakîm?’ Her eyes, dark as a gazelle’s, returned to January. ‘Hüseyin return Friday.’

  ‘There are two places where I think she might be.’ January stood and bowed over Jamilla’s hand. ‘Those I will visit tomorrow—’

  His outraged mind flung up at him the tasks already allotted for tomorrow – piano lessons in three different parts of Paris, rehearsals for Proserpina, that private rehearsal with the opera singer La Dulcetta that he’d worked so hard to get hired for . . . Why am I going to all this trouble, for a girl I saw once, a girl who has barely spoken a word to me . . . ?

  Because she is alone, as Ayasha was alone when she came here. As I was alone.

  Because she is a slave, as I was a slave. Because she ran away, as Ayasha did. As all those did in New Orleans, whose owners advertised for them like straying dogs.

  ‘—those I will visit tomorrow, if I can.’

  If I don’t starve to death between now and then. Ayasha had just finished devouring the remaining batter-cakes.

  ‘I must go. Ayasha, will you see Sitt Jamilla safely home?’

  And almost before his wife had said Yes or No, January was out the door and striding as swiftly as he could back toward the Rue Le Peletier.

  January made it to the gaudy, gilt-trimmed Opera House with moments to spare and without further dinner, ravenous yet handsomely attired in dark well-cut wool and carrying his music satchel and his cornet. After the Opera was a ball in the fashionable district along the Vielle Rue du Temple – the aristocracy was indefatigable during its season of pleasures, and from autumn to Lent January felt that he was married to an insane, many-headed monster that never slept. Because the Comte de Cruzette had been ennobled by Napoleon, most of the older aristocracy eschewed his entertainments, but the chevaliers d’industrie, as they were called, were out in force: bankers, manufacturers, financiers whose social-climbing wives glittered with jewels. Carriages clogged the narrow streets, the dancing lasted until five in the morning, and since, at that point, it was easier to stay up than to get up, January proceeded with Lucien Imbot and Jeannot Charbonnière to a worker’s café on the Quai Beaufils for a breakfast that lasted until well after sunup.

  ‘Who is Sabid al-Muzaffar, anyway?’ he asked at one point, and Lucien gestured with a fragment of buttered roll.

  ‘Al-Muzaffar is the best and dearest friend of such men as the Rothschilds, Lafittes, and Städels.’ He named some of the most powerful banking families in Paris. ‘Allegedly their agent in the Sultan’s court until old Mahmud chucked him out. Quite the reformer, though coincidentally those reforms always entail large purchases of equipment through loans engineered by the Rothschilds, Lafittes, and Städels.’

  ‘That’s hardly fair, old man.’ Jeannot shook back his leonine golden mane. ‘You can’t have an omelette without breaking a few eggs, you know. And you can’t deny that the Sultan’s empire could do with being brought forward into the nineteenth century.’ He signed to the girl for another round of coffee.

  ‘Can’t I, though?’ retorted Lucien. ‘Centralize power in the hands of the Sultan so that he can more easily locate those who disagree with him? Make everything alike, as the Revolution tried to make everything alike here in France? Build factories to put artisans out of work?’

  ‘Build factories to bring down the price of shoes so an honest musician can afford them when they wear out?’ Jeannot held up his foot to display a well-cut boot. ‘I only wish! I lived on bread and cheese for three months, to save up so that I could look decent enough to play in a gentleman’s house. Sabid’s a reformer,’ he added, turning to January. ‘Men with vision are always hated by the old crumblies.’

  ‘Men with vision are always fanatics.’ Lucien sipped his coffee – he’d been friends with Jeannot for years – and turned his heavy-lidded gaze along the quay, where the first of the water sellers waded down through the thinning mists to dip their buckets full from the Seine. ‘Give me a kind-hearted reactionary who doesn’t keep his wife locked behind iron gates.’

  ‘Is that what al-Muzaffar does?’

  ‘Every man follows the customs of his country.’ Jeannot shrugged. ‘A Mohammedan woman is used to it.’

  ‘I know one formerly Mohammedan woman who would knock your brains out with a skillet for that remark,’ said January, and both men laughed.

  An old man came along the quay selling waffles, his grandson at his heels with a hurdy-gurdy, and the icy morning air transformed the yowling music into alien and ethereal beauty. Across the river, the bells of Notre Dame began to ring.

  When January reached home Ayasha had already gone out – her basket of laces and silks was missing from its place beside the door. She had, however – he silently blessed her – left water simmering all around the back of the hearth in kettles, enough for a bath and a shave. January slept for an hour – something he’d learned to do in Mardi Gras season in New Orleans – then made a hasty toilette, donned clean linen and his very natty gray morning costume, and set forth for the home of the Harbonnières: a well-to-do broker of corn who owned hal
f a score of bakeries and considerable city property.

  On the way he passed within a few streets of the Rue St-Denis, where the ancestral Hôtel de Longuechasse stood. Because he had walked swiftly and was a little ahead of his time, he turned aside and stood for a while considering what he could see of that handsome residence above its protective wall. The gate into the forecourt had at one time been a beautiful openwork of iron. Revolution and rioting had prompted the addition of iron backing-plates, but as January turned to proceed on his way, the gates opened and a stylish barouche emerged, drawn by gold-maned chestnut horses matched like liveried footmen – with one white stocking apiece – and check reined to within an inch of their lives. Through the open gateway, the hôtel could be viewed for some moments in all its baroque glory: two floors of polished and pedimented windows, and a high mansard roof under which – like that of Hüseyin Pasha’s establishment on the Rue St Honoré – would be found rooms for servants or lesser members of the household.

  Or, January reflected thoughtfully, anyone the Marquis or his family wanted to conceal there.

  Judging by the length of the street frontage, there was room for service courtyards on either side of the narrow court that led to the main block of the house. He could glimpse the entrance to one of them as the concierge closed the iron-backed street gates. But unlike dwellings in Hüseyin Pasha’s more rural suburb, the main gate was the only way in or out.

  Thus if the girl Shamira had taken refuge with Arnoux de Longuechasse, she would be as much a prisoner in his brother’s house as she was in that of her former master.

  January put the matter from his mind as he ascended the steps of the Harbonnières’ town-house and for the next hour gave his thoughts and energy exclusively to Mesdemoiselles Eliane and Andromaque, neither of whom had practiced since their previous lesson and both of whom swore they had, an assertion backed up by their mother’s statement that she was usually out of the house at the time of the girls’ practice, but that neither of her daughters would ever lie. ‘Of course, Madame . . . Certainly, Madame . . .’