Dead and Buried Page 10

  As he set his empty plate and cup in the dish pan, she said, ‘Be careful.’

  He laid his hand to her cheek. ‘I will.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  He was about to shake his head, then reconsidered. ‘There is,’ he said. ‘Would you learn what you can about the household of Madame Celestine Deschamps? Especially, find out who her maid is, and the maid who looks after her daughter Isobel. Learn what time they go to church, and make their acquaintance.’

  ‘If you’re going to corrupt the Deschamps servants, would not some handsome young man better answer the case?’ She considered the matter as she gathered the remaining dishes. ‘Your nephew Gabriel is still a little young . . . Perhaps Helaine Passbon’s younger brother? He’s sufficiently Adonis-like . . . Or Pylade Vassage, who plays the flute so badly.’

  ‘Too obvious. If they’re young and flighty, I’ll set Dominique on them.’

  ‘First murder, now – what? Blackmail? Housebreaking?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ January picked up his parcel from the table, slipped into the jacket of lightweight linen that he habitually wore, even in the hottest point of the summer, as a way of distinguishing himself from the rough-clothed working-class blacks who unloaded the steamboats at the wharves. ‘But it seems to me there are an awful lot of people not telling the truth about what happened last Thursday night. And if you’re looking for the way things really happened, you’re more likely to get the truth from servants than from their masters.’

  TEN

  ‘Now, what would a respectable downtown Free Gentleman of Color like yourself be doin’ to get on the wrong side of the City Guard?’ Auntie Saba cocked her good eye at January. In the ten days he’d worked for the Countess, January had taken care never to let his English sound too polished, and had shown himself willing to help with the clean-up at the end of the night. Yet he’d been aware that the cook and her children still regarded him very much as a ‘downtown nigger’ – or, in the more usual parlance of the American-born, Protestant, and on the whole more African-blooded slaves owned by the Americans, a ‘stuck-up downtown nigger’. The only reason the phrase hadn’t been expanded to include the word ‘yeller’ was because, despite one white grandparent, he looked pure Wolof.

  The style of his piano playing – several cuts above the general run of what was usually found in the town’s bordellos – and the wide classical end of his repertoire, were a dead giveaway. He might lie with his language, but was incapable of doing so with his music.

  ‘I didn’t do nuthin’,’ said January gravely, and Auntie Saba grinned. ‘Musta been some other Free Gentleman of Color.’

  ‘Well, you got nuthin’ to worry about, Big J. City Guards ain’t come knockin’. An’ if they was to do so, you was in the kitchen with us, wasn’t he, babies –’ her glance took in both her children as they came back with pails from the tall copper cistern in the corner of the yard – ‘when the shootin’ started. I’ll make sure Hughie knows it, too.’

  January – chopping kindling in his shirtsleeves beside the kitchen door – raised his eyebrows. ‘You heard that shot, then?’

  ‘Lordy, yes. Only reason Her Ladyship didn’t was she sleeps at the back of the house.’ The cook resumed her steady turning of the coffee grinder. Despite the late hour of the morning, the pink-brick house loomed silent behind them, heat radiating from the open kitchen door as if from an oven. Sensibly, Auntie Saba had built up her kitchen fire in the wide brick hearth as soon as it was light, to get the day’s meals started before the heat set in, and she had moved her coffee making out under the tree in the yard where some coolness still lingered. ‘After a minute or three, we went out on the gallery, but we didn’t see nuthin’.’

  ‘Not even no body,’ added Little J, disappointed.

  ‘Thank you, m’am.’ January whacked another billet from the chunk in front of him. As a child he’d learned to handle an ax easily, and he’d also learned that cutting kindling was a task that would buy him favors from almost anyone. ‘I appreciate it.’

  Elspie’s great hazel eyes widened, and Little J demanded, ‘Who was it?’

  January whacked another long split of wood off the billet on the chopping block. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Since I wasn’t out there. But if Lord Montague comes in tonight, take a look at his jaw, see if he’s got a bruise.’

  ‘Oh dear God—’ Elspie put a swift hand to her lips.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re gettin’ a soft place for that cake-mouth Englishman after all,’ the older woman sniffed.

  ‘What? Nasty beast!’ Elspie made a face. ‘I’m just afraid I’m the one set him on you! Just talking too free . . .’

  ‘Did you, now?’ January cocked his head, spoke in his mildest voice. ‘Talking to who?’

  ‘Marie-Venise. Just talking, you know.’ The girl’s face showed real distress. ‘Oh, I knew I shouldn’t say anything about anything . . .! I just said you asked about Lord Montague, Saturday night, when I told you he kissed me like he did. He come to see her Sunday. I helped her sneak out, ’cause she don’t charge him money an’ she hides most of the gifts he gives her. The Countess’d snatch her bald-headed if she knew.’ Elspie shook her head. ‘She musta told him. I am so sorry—’

  ‘I’ve had worse happen.’ January straightened up. ‘But if you will – all of you . . .’ He looked from Auntie Saba to her children. ‘Best if we don’t speak of this again – not to anyone.’

  Heads were shaken, and Little J crossed his heart and his fingers in mute avowal.

  ‘I never thought he’d come after you with a gun!’

  ‘Course you didn’t,’ said January. ‘Why would you? I’ll just have to keep one eye out behind me for awhile, that’s all.’ He turned the conversation to other things as he finished the kindling and stacked it by the laundry-room door. But he watched the back of the house as he worked, wondering which tightly-curtained bedroom window was that of Marie-Venise, and whether that skinny, boy-shaped French girl was watching him from it. When he donned his waistcoat and jacket to leave – depositing the little parcel of his evening clothes on a shelf in the laundry room – he was careful to depart through the woods, rather than proceed back to the French Town by way of Prytania Street.

  It was nearly noon when he crossed Canal Street and regained the only portion of New Orleans, now, where he felt more or less safe. He could hear the raucous jangle of a brass band down on Rue du Levee, where the local Democrats had got up a parade in honor of Martin Van Buren’s candidacy, but the colonnaded building that he sought on Rue d’Orleans was quiet. He slipped around the corner and through its garden door.

  Even in the dead heat of noon, John Davis’s gambling casino stirred with voices and the clink of coin. Half a dozen French doors stood open to the street, to draw in what breeze there was from the river; an equal number opened to the garden. Through them January glimpsed the establishment’s regulars: French Creole gentlemen who lived in the Old Town, had cottages in Milneburgh, but preferred to come in on the steam train to meet their friends there. At one table a couple of steamboat pilots played a desultory game of cribbage, but for the most part the big, square room, with its high ceiling and crystal chandeliers, seemed half-asleep, waiting for the evening. Flies roared everywhere. John Davis himself – a Frenchman to his fingertips, despite the name of a Scots ancestor – stood near the bar that stretched across one end of the room, talking city politics with a French planter.

  January positioned himself in one of the garden doorways, where he knew that in time he would catch Davis’s eye. Davis saw him – there was no detail of the gaming room that the man’s glance didn’t touch – and gave him a slight nod, though he continued his chat with M’sieu Destrehan. It would never do for a white man to conclude a conversation with another white man and then be seen to go and speak to a black one – even a black one who’d gotten him off a murder charge a few years before. The insult would be intolerable and would possibly result in a duel. But, in
time, Destrehan made his way to one of the tables to speak to another acquaintance – catching January’s eye in passing and nodding a greeting, having himself hired January on any number of occasions to play at his house – and Davis moved toward the windows.

  ‘Ben,’ said Davis with a grin as they both stepped out into the garden. ‘We’re starting rehearsals for Donizetti’s Elixir of Love next month: I hope you’re not intending to make your change of career permanent at this stage.’ Of course, Davis had heard he was playing at the Countess’s, though as a French Creole he would not, naturally, frequent an Uptown whorehouse. ‘We’re counting on you.’

  ‘Oh, sir.’ January wrung his hands in bogus sorrow. ‘Sir, I beg your forgiveness, but it would tear me up inside to have to go back to Donizetti, after playing “Old Zip Coon” seven times a night for drunk Americans . . .’

  Davis threw back his head and laughed. He had aged, January thought, and not just since the death of his wife a few years ago. The scandal and murder at the opera, the winter before last, had left its mark: on the man’s lined face and in the wider streaks of white in his hair.

  ‘What can I do for you, Ben?’ He offered January a cigar – something only John Davis had the social standing to do for a black man and get away with it – and January shook his head in mute thanks.

  ‘Just looking for information, sir.’

  ‘You, too? I told Shaw, Friday, that Stuart fellow wasn’t in here.’

  ‘What about a gentleman named Blessinghurst? Lord Montague Blessinghurst?’

  ‘Not him, either.’

  ‘But there was a set-to here Thursday night?’ January nodded back toward the dim cavern behind them.

  ‘Half a dozen.’

  ‘This one would have involved a gun and the words “bog-Irish bastard”—’

  ‘Oh, good Lord!’ The tired look vanished from Davis’s eyes like dew in the sunshine, and he burst into laughter. ‘Lord Montague Blessinghurst, eh? Tall fellow, good-looking, green coat?’

  ‘That’s the man.’

  ‘That fellow, my dear Benjamin –’ the impresario put a hand on his arm and drew him conspiratorially behind a pepper-tree – ‘is no Lordship, but rather a gentleman named Frank Stubbs, whom I had the ill fortune to see play Malcolm to Charles Kemble’s Macbeth a few seasons ago in New York. All the ladies in the audience were swooning, God help them—’

  ‘An actor?’

  ‘Benjamin, please!’ Davis recoiled in mock affront. ‘Calling Frank Stubbs an actor is a slur on the whole of a noble profession! He’s been on stage and been paid for it. Let’s leave it at that.’

  No wonder ‘Lord Blessinghurst’ wanted to silence me, thought January, when he heard I was asking questions about him. He had only to phrase the thought to discard it. Murder? There was something else. Something deeper . . . ‘What’s he doing in New Orleans, sir? You’re sure it was he?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely.’ Davis chuckled again. ‘I never mistake a voice, and his is remarkable. I’ll give him that.’

  As the owner of New Orleans’s largest theater, and the head of her original opera company, voices were John Davis’s business. And he wasn’t likely to be mistaken about a man he’d seen on a stage.

  ‘As to what he’s doing in town . . . Well, I don’t know the man, but by the look of things on Thursday night, I’d say he was trying to build a small amount of money into a large one.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know what the fight was about?’

  ‘Not an inkling.’ Davis shook his head again, and added, as if to himself, ‘Lord Montague Blessinghurst indeed! What a name! Straight out of a three-volume novel! The good Lieutenant needs to stop taking these scoundrels at their word about who and what they say they are.’

  ‘Did Derryhick come in with him?’

  ‘Derryhick?’ Davis frowned. ‘You mean that was the gentleman whose corpse ended up . . .? Good Lord.’ He stood silent for a moment, evidently putting pieces together in his mind. Rameses Ramilles had played regularly for the balls that Davis hosted in the room upstairs and for the opera; the impresario had, January knew, subscribed generously to the small trust fund that the FTFCMBS was setting up for Liselle and her children.

  Davis went on, ‘Stubbs was playing that night with Fitz Trulove and a couple of Americans. I was keeping an eye on the table by that time, because Stubbs – Blessinghurst! – was winning with suspicious steadiness. Of course, Trulove wouldn’t notice if one of the other players reached over, stuck his hand in his pocket and helped himself, which is precisely what I think Stubbs was doing. But the game broke up, and Trulove and one of the Americans – Schurtz, I think his name is, just come to town this past spring and is staying out at the lake somewhere – went off to talk banking and left the other American and Stubbs to play cribbage in that corner.’ He nodded in the direction of one of the smaller tables, where the regulars would go to play dominoes in the afternoon. On even a moderately busy evening, January guessed that the view of it would be frequently blocked to a man standing – as Davis was wont to do – at the wall end of the mahogany bar.

  ‘Derryhick came in from the street and went straight to them, but I didn’t think much of it, you know. My place is well enough known that if men want to meet, they often do so here.’

  January nodded. It was the same with the coffee stands under the market arcade. ‘So you couldn’t tell if they knew each other?’

  Davis shook his head. January noted again that during the whole of their conversation, the older man had been watching the room through the wide windows. He would have bet money, had he had any to spare, that Davis could have identified every man who had come in and gone out through the French doors into Rue d’Orleans, named three-quarters of them, and – like a good Creole – attached to at least two-thirds of them an account of family history, relative wealth (both actual and putative), and a catalogue of recent scandals.

  ‘I was back by the bar talking about the election with Blodgett from the Bee. What a mess the Whigs are making of it, eh? Next thing I knew, I heard a chair go clattering over, where the American playing with Stubbs had sprung up and backed to the wall. The Irishman had Stubbs by the shirt collar, for all he was a hand-span shorter, and I couldn’t swear it – that corner’s a chasm at night – but I thought he had a gun in his other hand. I was starting over to them when the Irishman all but threw Stubbs away from him against the table, said, “The curse of Cromwell on the pair of ye’s!” and went striding out into the street again. The American didn’t move from where he stood, but Stubbs ran out to look after him up the street. But he was gone.’

  ‘In what direction did Stubbs look?’

  Davis thought about it for a moment, then nodded in the direction up Rue Orleans and away from the river . . . The direction of the Iberville Hotel.

  ‘The pair of you,’ January repeated. ‘Did he mean the American that Stubbs – Blessinghurst – was with, sir, do you think?’

  ‘He could have.’ The entrepreneur frowned. ‘I didn’t have that impression, but, of course, I could be wrong. Though, now that I think of it, I’m not entirely sure the other man was an American. There was something about the way he dressed that said French Creole, but you’ll seldom find a Creole keeping company with our Northern brethren.’

  ‘Our Northern brother Schurtz has a sister with a large dowry.’

  ‘Does he?’ Davis beamed. Added to his Creole fascination for information, like most saloon and theater owners he had an appetite for gossip that would have made a maiden aunt blush. ‘Does he indeed? Well, well . . . No wonder the other man hung about the way he did, waiting for Schurtz to finish his chat with Trulove. What’s his name, this would-be suitor? I haven’t seen him in here before, and I know most of the French Creoles.’

  ‘Martin Quennell. He clerks for Gardiner at the Mississippi and Balize—’

  ‘What, in those waistcoats?’

  January put a finger to his lips. ‘I need to ask for your discretion, if I may, sir. And so fa
r I’ve found nothing,’ he added, seeing Davis’s bright blue eyes suddenly narrow, ‘that indicates there’s any question about stability of the bank. We think he’s getting his money elsewhere. The bank keeps a close eye on its accounts—’

  ‘It had better,’ said Davis grimly. ‘What I’m hearing about the credit market isn’t good. I think the Democrats will be able to keep the lid on things until after the election, but I tell you, Benjamin, I’m moving my funds into a state bank.’

  ‘Not having any funds to move,’ replied January, ‘I feel perfectly indifferent to the outcome of the contest. I shall decide for whom to vote,’ he added grandly, ‘by the toss of a coin.’

  Davis laughed again – the idea of a black man voting for anyone being a subject of humor anywhere in the United States – and clapped January on the shoulder. ‘That’s the spirit! Quennell – not Robert Quennell, of Quennell and LaRouche back before the crash of ’19? Never one of the big ones, but perfectly respectable in their day. Banking must be in the blood.’

  ‘Having a father who knows to send you to school, rather,’ commented January. ‘It must be galling to work as a bank clerk when you can remember better days – not to mention doing the books for the son of your father’s placée. My mother tells me Quennell put Madame Corette aside – his placée, that is – when he married one of old Jules Charlevoix’s daughters, but young Martin seems to have cast in his lot pretty firmly with the Americans.’

  ‘Well, if he’s planning on impressing anyone with supposed wealth and fancy waistcoats,’ said Davis, with a glance back into his gambling rooms, ‘he’d best not play cards with Frank Stubbs. bientôt, my dear Benjamin – I see M’sieu Soniat approaching the bar, and I promised Madame Soniat on the soul of my mother I would water any drink he attempted to buy.’

  ‘You are a worker for the good of the world, sir.’

  Davis laughed and disappeared back into the shadows of his chosen realm.

  The pair of you, January reflected, as he made his way – with a certain amount of caution – back toward Rue Esplanade and, he hoped, a quiet dinner with Rose. With luck the afternoon thunderstorm, slowly grumbling its way in from the Gulf, would hold off until he reached the Countess’s. The fact that Davis hadn’t greeted him with, ‘Good God, Benjamin, don’t you know the City Guards are after you?’ provided a certain amount of comfort, but still, he approached his own house almost as warily as he’d entered the casino.