Good Man Friday (13 page)

‘Leaves a boy, sir,' said a woman, in the clean, bright calico gown that dealers gave their female slaves to make them look more ‘likely'. ‘Name of Tim.'

‘He smart or stupid?'

The first man grinned. ‘He ain't so smart as he thinks he is.'

January grinned back, paid his informants, and hastened his steps to catch up his ‘master' lest Mr Gryme should look out through his window and observe the transaction.

Trigg's parlor was empty at the pre-dinner hour. January penned a swift note to Henri Viellard and ducked into the kitchen to enlist twelve-year-old Ritchie Trigg to carry it (for a consideration) to the Indian Queen, then returned to the small oak table beside the front window where the light was best.

Poe was already holding the card case to the rainy gray panes to examine every scratch on its finely-pebbled surface. From his pocket January produced the magnifying lens Rose had lent him before leaving New Orleans, came around to Poe's side and studied the silver pen. ‘What do you make of it?' he asked.

Poe opened the case, brought it close to his eyes, to see the delicate hinges, then drew back sharply. ‘What do
you
make of
this
?'

January handed him the pen, took the case, and flinched back.

‘Where's it been?' asked the poet.

While January gently extracted the bloated, mold-glued rectangle of pasteboard from within, Poe went to the escritoire beside the other window and searched the drawer for another magnifier. It was easily found: there was no clutter in any drawer, box, or cupboard in the house of Octavia Trigg. The top card within the case was inscribed,
W. Milliken, Bookseller
, with an address in Boston, but when January gently prized the cards apart with a penknife, it proved that Selwyn Singletary had the habit of storing cards he was given in his case. The last six cards in the case were Singletary's. The other cards included another bookseller in New York, a Baltimore importer of hats, a Mr Deaver who operated a bookstore in Charlottesville, Dr Clarence Woolmer of the Potomac School in Georgetown, Dr Applegrove of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and John Quincy Adams. On the back of one of Singletary's own cards, in the unmistakable, even line of the reservoir-pen, was scribbled the address of Luke Bray.

The cards stank. The hinges of the case – and of the spectacle case, which contained a pair of round reading-glasses in the strength that an old man might need – were gritted slightly with dirt, which, when January poked a few grains free with a pin on to a clean sheet of notepaper, stank too. More of this earth was caught under the hinge of the watch case.

January fetched a back issue of the
Inquirer
from the kindling box by the hearth and spread it on the table. On it he laid the cards and card case, the spectacle case, the pen, the fob, and the cravat pin. The signet he put aside, along with the gloves – which smelled only of camphor and dust – and the cane, all of which he judged to have been added to the order by Gryme to raise the price. Poe tried without success to write with the pen, then carefully unscrewed its thick silver body and examined the gummed residue of the ink.

‘What does it smell like to you?' January asked. For three ghastly summers he'd worked in the cholera wards in New Orleans, and had, every spring, gone with his mother, his sisters, his wife to the St Louis Cemetery on the Feast of All Saints to clean and decorate the tombs. He knew the smell.

Poe replied without hesitation, ‘These things have come out of a grave.'

D
ominique insisted on being the maidservant. ‘
P'tit
, I'm absolutely going out of my
mind
with boredom in this
execrable
village, and if I don't have some entertainment I will throw myself into the river!' She turned from January to Henri, who had arrived with his wife shortly after the conclusion of dinner. ‘We have a
fabulous
mystery, a
fearsome
murder – though I am of course most sorry about poor M'sieu Singletary – and we're on the trail of grave robbers and villainous pawnbrokers and who knows what else, and you tell me to stay here at the boarding house and … and read a good book! I feel like I have read every good book in this
city
!'

‘I fear you cannot argue with the lady there,' put in Poe in his excellent French. ‘If God picked up Washington and shook it like a carpet, I doubt that more than a score of volumes of literature of any sort would drop out.'

‘Besides—' Minou widened her beautiful eyes and put a hand over Henri's protesting lips. ‘You know Chloë cannot act.' She turned to the younger girl. ‘Isn't that so, dearest?'

‘She's quite right, Henri.' Chloë slipped her arm around Dominique's waist. ‘I think you would make a
splendid
maid, darling.'

Because of the children's lessons – and the general business of two families and several single men on a rainy Monday evening – Poe and January had retreated to the ‘white gentleman's parlor' upon the arrival of the Viellards, to lay out the evidence on the small marquetry table there. Both Henri and January were inclined to object when Dominique included herself in the conference, and both had been put sharply in their place by Madame Viellard: ‘After she has been good enough to come with us all this distance –' Chloë as usual made no reference to
why
Dominique and her child (and her two servants) were part of the expedition – ‘surely she has a right not to be kept out of things. Besides,' she added, ‘Minou may see things that we do not.'

So far the only observation that Minou had made concerned the superiority of orient over baroque pearls and the poor quality of pearl earrings available at Law's Emporium on Capitol Street (‘
Honestly
, darling, they couldn't hope to fool a
blind
man! They were flaking even as he took them out of the box …') but that, January understood, wasn't the point.

‘If Minou is to do the talking while Chloë sobs discreetly behind a widow's veil,' he pointed out now, ‘we need to bear in mind that she doesn't speak English very well.'

‘I do, yes!' protested his sister in that language. ‘I speak
magnificent
English!'

Chloë picked up the reservoir pen and turned it in her thin little fingers, as if mentally comparing the metal tip with the even line of the handwriting she had seen on so many letters, and behind her thick lenses her gaze was like frozen aquamarine. Tears had gathered in Henri's eyes. In Chloë's, January saw the anger that avenges in cool blood, without mercy.

‘If I may advance an opinion,' said Poe, ‘and I very much hope Madame Viellard will forgive my observation, I should say that a woman who can weep on command can be taught English phrases, but that one who knows English can not necessarily register convincing grief. My apologies, Madame—'

‘None are called for, M'sieu.' Chloë gave him her precise smile. ‘Indeed, I made a complete disgrace of myself at my father's funeral. For though I credit him with many Christian virtues and a sound business-sense, I had no respect whatsoever for his character, nor any good memories of his treatment of me – and no success in pretending otherwise, even in circumstances which called for it. Therefore I doubt my abilities to summon tears for a fictitious husband who allegedly drank himself to death in the streets of Washington.'

‘Then it's a good thing you'll be wearing a veil,' declared Minou.

Accordingly, at three the following afternoon, Henri Viellard's closed carriage halted in front of the boarding house on Eighteenth Street, and January and Dominique mounted the box. The coachman – a different one than January had previously seen, who introduced himself as Esau – then guided the vehicle through mud and traffic equally thick down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol district. They stopped just opposite the Capitol to lift down Dominique, clothed in calico and a headscarf like a servant (any servant except Thèrése), and to let Chloë alight. Chloë might be incapable of weeping on demand, but she clearly shared Poe's sense of the believable. Swathed in inky mourning and veiled to her knees (‘And, dearest,' Dominique said later, ‘I am
eternally
grateful that I was able to borrow Musette's dress, because crape stains
everything
it touches, and Thèrése would have
killed
me if I'd gotten black all over her muslin!'), she was as invisible as a Turkish woman in
burqa
and
hijab
.

As Mr Gryme's stocky form disappeared along the street in the direction of the taverns on the other side of Capitol hill, the two women picked their way across the rutted muck of last night's rain with every appearance of casualness and disappeared inside. Esau guided the carriage to the edge of the Capitol's so-called ‘lawn' at the end of a rank of vehicles. Men emerged from the doorways of the two wings of the white brick building, surrounded at once by job-hunters petitioning for attention. A few greeted them. Others simply strode off in the direction of the nearest café, trailing their entourages behind as a butcher's wagon trailed dogs.

Discussing the impending crisis with Canada?
January wondered.
Is Congress REALLY going to get us into a war with England in the hopes of taking everyone's minds off the ongoing rats-nest of financial disaster?

He wouldn't have put it past them.

The Right Honorable Junior Representative from Alabama – Luke Bray's crony Royall Stockard – strode down the steps and plowed through the weeds to where a couple of the Warriors of Democracy had gotten up a game of One Old Cat, in the absence of an opposing team. January smiled at the recollection of their defeat on Sunday. There had been a moment – with darkness falling, and the gap between the Warriors' score and that of the Invaders becoming more and more obviously unbridgeable, though neither team was anywhere near the one hundred points required for a clear win – when he'd thought the Americans were going to go after their opponents in the time-honored American fashion with their bats, bowie knives, and the torn-up pegs from the field.

He glanced across the street at Gryme's, but the shop door remained shut. The spring afternoon was cooling.

In the closed carriage below him, did Henri Viellard also watch the pawnshop door, behind which his wife and his mistress chatted away like sisters? Or had he buried himself in the pages of Thomas Wyatt's ponderous
Manual of Conchology
, which he'd brought along to contemplate while waiting? Eleven years of association with Dominique had evidently taught him:
Bring a book
.

From his own pocket, January drew Selwyn Singletary's red-backed notebook, familiar to him now with close study: he had spent the past three evenings copying every page so that Chloë and Henri could examine it at their leisure. Some of it obviously bore no relationship to its owner's disappearance: lists of laundry, prices of cabs in London, ratios of height to breadth of every building on Throgmorton Street and how far each one was from Hurlstone and Ludd's bank (in paces, inches, millimeters and cubits), expenditures on lobster-and-lettuce at the White Tree, the names of all his fellow-passengers on the
Beaufort
appended to strings of nearly-identical numbers (28081837, 30081837, 02091837) that he realized after a moment's puzzling were dates during his voyage, presumably marking a conversation or a first encounter. There were also infinite sets of tally marks, all dated and some labeled:
cockroaches, cats, crossing-sweepers
…

But what of those two sets of columns, on six successive pages, one set hastily scribbled and the other in a more deliberate hand?

And what of that thick, short block of numbers at the end of the book?

The door of Gryme's shop opened. Maid and mistress emerged. A bulky man in a mustard-colored coat, whom January had seen a few moments previously emerge from the halls of Congress, paused on the sidewalk and removed his hat to address Chloë, then tenderly escorted the black-clothed ‘widow' across the goop of Independence Avenue to the carriage.

January dismounted the box, bowed deeply to Chloë as he helped her inside, lifted Minou up to the driving seat and sprang up beside her. Chloë waved a dainty hand at her escort as the carriage pulled away in the direction of the Indian Queen Hotel. ‘You were right,
P'tit
!' exclaimed Dominique the moment the vehicle was in motion. ‘Those things – oh, look at that lady in the pink over there. Do you suppose her hair is
really
that color? But the style of it is
adorable
…'

‘What happened?' asked January.

‘In the pawnshop? Shame on you for doubting! Chloë was
marvelous
! She just stood with her head bowed and spoke to me in a soft voice in French, and I'd turn to the young man behind the counter … Such a
grubby
boy, with a face
just
like a weasel! And the most
frightful
tie, embroidered all over with yellow skulls, which I'm afraid just pointed up the fact that his face was all over with spots … And tobacco! He had a stripe of it, practically, down the middle of his chin—'

‘Did he tell you anything?' January had long ago learned that the only way to get any information out of his youngest sister was to interrupt her ruthlessly.

‘But yes! Of course! Chloë said – through me translating, though her English actually is as good as mine—'

It was in fact much better, but January wasn't about to interrupt her to say so.

‘—that she would pay
three dollars
for information that would lead her to her poor husband's grave … You were absolutely right,
P'tit
! Those things
did
come out of a grave, and that horrible boy with the spots didn't deny it. He said they were brought in by a man named Wylie Pease, and even the offer of another three dollars didn't get him to tell us where he lived, so the boy probably actually didn't know. Oh! And I bought this wonderful book,
Zuliemia, or, The Prisoner of Saragosa
, for only fifteen cents. Frank says that reading novels destroys a woman's character, but this one …'