Murder in July Page 3

  ‘They’re saying the king’s going to send troops into the city,’ reported Anne, emerging from one of the excited knots of working-folk gathered in the pilastered shopping arcade. A broad-shouldered, extremely handsome young man stood protectively at her elbow, presumably her brother’s erstwhile fencing master. He wore the out-at-elbows coat and the over-emphatic waistcoat of a student, and now and then turned his head – January observed – to catch a glimpse of his own reflection in the nearest shop window, and to straighten his cravat or the curl of honey-golden hair that fell over his forehead.

  ‘There’s going to be a demonstration in the Place du Carousel at noon,’ the girl went on. ‘Not that the king’s at the palace, but you can bet that swine Polignac’ – she named the first minister – ‘is there. We stoned his carriage yesterday.’ She grinned like a schoolboy at the recollection. ‘There’ll be twenty thousand of us at least.’

  Anne Ben-Gideon was dressed like a woman of the people, her skirt of striped drugget kilted up to show pink lace stockings, the sort worn by shopgirls when out with their sweethearts. Her shift was patched and the leather bodice that sheathed her slim form stained and supple with wear – January guessed she’d bought the outfit at a slop-shop. But her shoes were incongruously expensive, the sort that English countrywomen wore to go shooting in with their husbands. She sported a tricolor sash, the colors of the revolution, and a pistol was stuffed into it, a small silver weapon of the sort called a muff pistol, with a screw-on barrel. ‘He’ll be a fool if he doesn’t listen.’

  ‘And you’ll be a fool,’ returned January, ‘if you think there won’t be trouble.’

  ‘Of course there’ll be trouble!’ Her grin sparkled as she looked up at him, brown eyes –bright and lively as a squirrel’s – fairly dancing at the thought. ‘Nobody has ever accused His Majesty of not being a fool!’

  The daughter of aristocrats who had fled France in 1789, January guessed that Anne Ben-Gideon looked forward to a battle with the royal troops far more eagerly than she’d looked forward to any of the balls, operas, and court levées she’d been forced to attend since her ‘presentation’ to polite society. She pulled the pistol from her sash and brandished it, competently. ‘But we’ll make him listen …’

  ‘With that?’ January took it from her hand, weighed it in his own. It was small, but the barrel was large, designed for defense against highwaymen or footpads. The chased silver barrel was designed to be screwed into the breech after the lead pistol-ball had been seated; a silly nuisance, January had always thought of such weapons, but it did mean that it could be carried inconspicuously, if you didn’t have to use it in a hurry.

  ‘With these.’ From the back of her belt she drew two other weapons, heavy horse-pistols, capable of knocking a man down. ‘And this.’ Replacing them, she reached back to her decorative lover and took from him a handsome Wilkinson hunting-rifle. ‘And don’t think I don’t know how to use them.’

  That, at least, January believed. Anne de la Roche-St-Ouen, despite everything her despairing parents could do, had managed, as a child, to learn to shoot, to hunt, to ride astride à l’Amazone and to fence, as if fitting herself for the role of the intrepid heroine of any of a thousand novels she had read; according to Daniel, she was getting her current lover to teach her to box. January didn’t know whether to feel exasperation or pity when his friend spoke of her. She had studied chemistry and astronomy by turns, and had tried to get the artist Carnot to teach her to dissect corpses, in her quest for arcane and flamboyant areas of knowledge wherewith – January suspected – to shock parents and a brother whom she held in good-natured contempt.

  Had she been a boy, he knew, the Comte and Comtesse de la Roche-St-Ouen would have welcomed her taste for adventure and hard-riding, for cigars and swordplay, with proud delight. Nobody January knew would have striven to squeeze a son’s over-brimming energy into the narrow tracks of fashion, sketching, and embroidery. No parent on earth would have considered it laudable to train a male child to sit, straight-backed and gracious, for hours at a time doing absolutely nothing, for the sake of social discipline and proper court manners. At the age of fourteen Anne had discovered newspapers and politics, and her parents had been even more horrified by that than they’d been when they’d discovered that she’d been bribing the old gardener at the convent of Notre-Dame-de-Syon to teach her to handle a gun.

  ‘Any other demonstrations?’ he asked now.

  ‘Vendome,’ she said, ‘and L’Elephant,’ meaning the Place de la Bastille, where Napoleon had intended to erect an eighty-foot-tall bronze elephant to memorialize one of his battles. The Emperor of the French had only gotten so far as to raise a full-size plaster model, which, sixteen years later, still stood, filthy, crumbling, and rat-ridden in a tangle of weeds on the site of the ancient fortress. She took the silver muff pistol back from him, and shoved it once more into her sash. ‘And a march along the boulevards …’

  Since the stylish boulevards were also the site of a number of gun-shops – not to mention establishments that sold silks, jewels, and other lootable commodities – January suspected that it was there that troops would be sent.

  She glanced at the handsome fencing master for further information, but he was adjusting his cravat in the reflection of a nearby window. ‘Gerry?’

  The dimple in his chin deepened with his dazzling smile. ‘That’ll be enough to have ’em on the run, acushla.’

  Maurice Pleyard, the Norman divinity student who had formed the Société Brutus, emerged then from the Café de la Chatte Blanche with the news that the Société would meet at noon and join the demonstration in front of the Tuileries Palace. At shortly before that hour, Ayasha closed up her shop – none of the girls who worked for her had come in that day in any case – and went with January to the Palais to meet the others. But they found the gates to the immense courtyard of shops and cafés closed, the doors of the adjoining theater locked, and shutters over the windows of the palace of the Duc d’Orleans who owned (and collected rents on) the entire complex.

  Guards in the blue-and-scarlet of the king’s troops were stationed among the archways that fronted the small square. Gangs of children skirmished around the soldiers, pelting them with stones. A young man – no child – in the shirtsleeves and patched breeches of a laborer ran out to join one of these bands, with a torn-up cobblestone the size of a man’s two fists. The whores who customarily populated the central garden of the Palais stood around at a safe distance and jeered.

  January took Ayasha’s hand, and retreated into the Rue des Bons Enfants.

  By late afternoon – that grilling Tuesday seemed endless – troops had begun to concentrate in the Place du Carrousel before the palace, in the Place du Vendome and along the boulevards. More were said to be moving into the city, ‘Proving that His Majesty would rather shoot his subjects than listen to them,’ proclaimed Pleyard, when the Société Brutus finally gathered in the twilight at a café on the Quai du Louvre.

  Most of the shopkeepers of the city had boarded up their establishments by this time, and the strollers and carriages which had earlier promenaded in the mellow warmth of the early evening had vanished, like birds seeking shelter at the growl of thunder. ‘It’s the Allies who put the kings back onto us,’ cried Carnot, shaking back his tangle of dark hair from his blazing eyes. ‘And foreigners – our enemies! – are the ones who seek to keep them there! They know that the republic cannot be stopped—’

  January didn’t think it was quite the moment to bring up the fact that the Republic had been succeeded, in fairly quick succession, by a corrupt directory and then by a military dictator who had had himself crowned emperor. At thirty-five, he was older than most of the members of the Société, and remembered, as a young man, both hearing from witnesses, and reading in the New Orleans newspapers, accounts of Napoleon’s ruinous ambitions. At least the republic had tried to right the accumulated wrongs of centuries. Thanks to state education, it might now have a better chance to
do so again.

  Thus when the fighting started – crowds raining the troops with broken roof-tiles, bricks, and the torn-up cobbles of the streets, the soldiers firing back, first into the air and then into their attackers – January and Ayasha joined their friends in building barricades across the mouths of the Rue des Capuchines and the Rue St-Denis, to hem the royal troops into the Boulevard. Against the evening sky the tricolor of the republic could be seen flying from the towers of Notre Dame and from the spire of the Hôtel de Ville, and through the night – which they spent in Pleyard’s garret near the barricade – even after the crackle of rifle-fire died down January heard dimly the great bells of the cathedral sounding an alarm, answered by those of half the churches in the city.

  What was later called the July Days had begun.

  Troops moved through the city on Wednesday. Twice they attacked the St-Denis barricade, a six-foot redoubt built clear across the street, over five-feet thick: carts, furniture, packing-crates filled with dirt; doors and shutters torn from houses, empty barrels and baskets, the timbers of a dismantled shed. The interstices of all these were packed with the granite squares of cobblestones torn from the roadbed, and further filled in with the black, heavy Paris dirt. Guns had come out of hiding, or had been distributed (voluntarily or otherwise) by the owners of the gun-shops along the Rue de Rivoli. Other barricades – some large, most barely breastworks of cobblestones and chairs – were going up all over the city.

  ‘I actually suspect you’re better armed than the royal troops,’ said Daniel, when he slipped through the back door of the house that faced onto the Rue de Rivoli, where the defenders of the barricade had taken refuge. ‘They’ve only got eleven rounds apiece, you know, and General Marmot’s made virtually no provision for them to get food or drink.’ The back room of the building’s tight-shuttered ground-floor shop had been converted into a sort of guard-post for the men firing from the upper windows or manning the defensive wall itself. Local women and children brought in buckets of water and what food they could spare through most of the night and into the morning. Even his old master on Bellefleur, January reflected, had taken care that his field hands had water in heat like this.

  Daniel himself looked bathed, barbered, rouged, rested, perfumed and free of powder-stains. His coat today was a marvel of changeable green silk with golden buttons – January wondered that one side or the other hadn’t picked him off like a gigantic bird as he’d made his way through the tortuous streets behind the barricades.

  ‘You haven’t seen Philippe, have you, darling?’ he asked, and January and the others – Ayasha, Carnot, a handful of printers and stevedores from the market district – all shook their heads.

  ‘I thought Philippe wanted nothing to do with politics,’ said Ayasha, loading guns with the mechanical speed of a Yankee factory line.

  ‘He doesn’t, poor lamb.’ Daniel adjusted his beautifully-tied cravat in the glass of a shuttered window. ‘Not any more than I do, really. He and I were leaving town this morning – I’ve rented us an absolute bijou of a house outside of Vouvray, as far as possible from that frightful family of his – but he didn’t come to my house this morning as we had agreed. I went to his apartment – not that awful mausoleum of his family’s on the Ile St-Louis, but a most charming pied-à-terre I rented for him on the Rue St-Honoré … Here, let me help you with that, my beautiful one …’ He picked up one of the rifles from the table and, with surprising adeptness, measured powder from one of the several canisters and proceeded to charge the weapon. The war ministry had been broken into early that morning, so there was no shortage of guns or powder.

  ‘He wasn’t there, and his man tells me he went to my house yesterday afternoon, and didn’t return. Freytag – my man, you know – had told me Philippe was there whilst I was at that demonstration at the Elephant – fearfully ill-organized, and I won’t even speak of the so-called logic of the speeches … but that he’d left before I got back. I must say I’m a bit concerned about him. The dear boy is as beautiful as an angel but has no sense whatsoever …’

  Someone shouted down the stairway from above, ‘They’re coming!’

  ‘Either get out of here, tapette,’ put in a thickset man whose ragged shirt was stained rusty with tanning liquor, ‘or come out with us.’ He snatched up an army musket and shoved it at the dandy. Daniel backed away in surprised alarm.

  ‘What about Anne?’ January caught up his own rifle and headed for the stair.

  ‘Good Lord, I expect she’s with Gerry,’ said Daniel. ‘O’Dwyer … Her fencing master, you know … He’ll take good care of her. Anyway she’s a thousand times smarter than poor Philippe – although I’m afraid the same could be said of my dog!’ And he darted out into the Rue St-Denis.

  General Marmot’s troops drove the rebels back from the barricade shortly after that, and January, with the others, retreated in good order through the houses along the Rue St-Denis to the next barricade, while those remaining in the upper stories of the buildings along the street continued to hurl paving-stones, roof-tiles, and broken furniture on the heads of the advancing soldiers. The tortuous streets of Paris seemed built for the ‘little war’ – the guerilla – tactics pioneered by the Spanish against Napoleon’s troops twenty years before. The men crouched behind the barricades simply broke and ran when the troops finally came storming over, and disappeared through a hundred doors opened for them. When barricades were taken, the royal troops frequently found the walls rebuilt behind them, trapping them in the open between one barricade and the next. In the baking-hot day their water-carriers were shot, their messengers – with pleas for more ammunition – intercepted.

  All over Paris, fashionable perfumers or tailors or bootmakers took down the fleur-de-lys signs which had marked them as ‘Perfumer (or tailor or bootmaker) To The King’.

  By the time the shadows began to lengthen, the royal troops were pulling back to the Palace of the Tuileries and the long, rambling courts of the Louvre.

  January and Ayasha slept that night on the floor of a family of plasterers on the Rue du Temple. Four bare walls, a curtained bed for their host (and his wife and five children) and an assortment of rags and dishes stacked on goods-boxes. Pleyard and four other students shared the floor with them, their guns lying ready beneath their hands. Ayasha’s hair had smelled of gunpowder, January recalled. Now and then, lying awake in the heat, he’d heard the furtive scratching of rats in the corners of the room.

  1839

  Like tonight. January remembered it vividly, nine years later, lying in the dense heat of a New Orleans summer in his own house, his wife – not Ayasha – by his side. Suffocating darkness, and lying awake, listening …

  Nine years ago it had been the tolling of the bourdon of Notre Dame.

  Tonight it was thunder, across the lake in a place where – at that other time, in that other place – he had held in his heart the iron determination never to lie again.

  Louisiana. The land where he had been born a slave.

  In Paris at least he could fight for the hope of justice for the poor, and freedom from the tyranny of kings.

  It is true, he thought, that you can’t step twice into the same river …

  1830

  It was barely light when he’d gone downstairs, seven flights, rifle in hand, to piss in the courtyard and see if anybody in the building had water left, or if any of the city’s thousands of water-carriers were afoot yet. The streets were still, the smell of gun-smoke everywhere. The hoarse croaking of ravens sounded very loud. When he turned the corner and made his way towards the last of the barricades they’d abandoned – on the Rue St-Croix – the birds flew up in their hundreds, from the dead men lying there.

  He walked through the twilight streets – as he was to walk, over and over again for years, in dreams – a clear gray world inhabited by stray dogs, by rats, by scavenger-birds. For several blocks the streets would appear perfectly usual for this time of the morning, save that they were utterly deserted
, and strewn with broken bricks and shattered roof-tiles. Then he’d come on a barricade, or the remains of one – or sometimes two, one that had been stormed by the troops, and then re-erected behind them, trapping them in crossfire. The blood had darkened on the ground, blending with the infamous Paris mud. But the smell of it, and of the waste the dead men had voided, was everywhere.

  In the Rue St-Martin, near the church of St-Nicholas-des-Champs, a huge barricade had been erected. January paused to admire it: an omnibus had been commandeered, the horses unhitched, the passengers debarked, and the whole vehicle turned over on its roof as the core of the makeshift fortification. Around this cobbles and earth, barrels and furniture and planks, had been reared nearly ten-feet high, and the men of the district had made their stand against the royal troops who’d been attempting to clear a way around the fighting in the nearby Rue St-Denis. The dead lay where they’d fallen, though January guessed General Marmot would have bearers out later in the day to collect them.

  They were already beginning to stink.

  He glanced warily down the street – the mud blood-soaked and denuded, from edge to edge, of paving-stones – and would have passed by, but for a glimpse of incongruous color on the barricade.

  Among the dark-blue uniforms of the troops, the rough browns and grays of the students, printers, clerks, butchers who’d considered their freedom worth dying for, there was a single, gaudy splash of lilac, like a peony in a basket of turnips.

  January crossed to the barricade, scrambled up the steep slope littered with the dead.

  Even smeared with black Paris mud, the brocade coat was unmistakable.

  Terrible grief closed his throat. Daniel had been an observer of the world, not a participant in its violence. How will I tell Anne? If I can locate her?