Good Man Friday (14 page)

‘Did he say how one might find this Wylie Pease? Or anything about him?'

‘Only that he's a grave robber.' Dominique looked up from attempting to unwrap the extremely fat volume she'd purchased from its enclosing paper. ‘So I expect if you read the obituary columns and attended the next funeral in town, you'd find him quickly enough.'

For all the impression she frequently gave of not having a brain in her head, Minou had an excellent sense of where the shortest line lay between two points.

Darius Trigg knew all about Wylie Pease. ‘He's in the resurrection trade, all right.' The landlord grimaced as he collected his music satchel and his flute. Mandie came scurrying out of the dining room, where the supper table was being cleared off, to fetch her father his hat; her tiny sister Kizzy, trotting at her heels, fetched January his. January had become a great favorite with the children of the house.

‘You wouldn't happen to know where I could find him?' January rose from the round marble-topped table where he'd been perusing the
Washington Intelligencer.
A Mrs Horace Kelsey, wife of a well-known Washington tavern-keeper, would be laid to rest in the Washington Parish burial ground on Thursday afternoon. January hated himself for his feeling of satisfaction at seeing this news.

But Trigg shook his head: ‘All I ever heard of him was his name.'

January took up his own music satchel, bowed grave thanks to four-year-old Kizzy, and followed Trigg out into the gathering dusk.

‘And his trade,' Trigg went on as they turned their steps along K Street toward Rock Creek. ‘Half the surgeons here in town have used his services, one time or another, and some over at Columbian College as well. The going rate's supposed to be fifty dollars.'

‘Fresh or … not?' inquired January, only half jesting, and Trigg gave him a slantindicular grin.

‘If they was too fresh I'd start to wonder.'

‘When I was studying in Paris,' January went on, ‘the Senior Anatomist at the Hôtel Dieu had an assistant named Courveche. I don't know if he ever studied formally or not, but he probably knew more about the subject than some of the surgeons on the staff. Every few months a rumor would go around among the students that there was going to be a “gathering” at some barn outside of town, in places like Montmartre or Louveciennes. We'd all sneak out like conspirators before the city barriers were closed for the night … This was back in 1818 or 1819. At the Hôtel Dieu we didn't see a dissection more than once or twice a year, with a hundred of us crammed into the galleries of the operating theater trying to see down to the table—'

Lights twinkled in the scattered houses along Reedy Branch. Cow bells clanked as children drove the animals home through the dusk.

‘You think it's right,' asked Trigg – curiosity rather than disgust in his voice – ‘for doctors to go cuttin' up a dead man?'

‘When I sit down to play that new mazurka we're going to try out tonight,' returned January mildly, ‘won't you be glad I'd played through it a couple of times this morning on a real piano, rather than just watching somebody else play it from thirty feet away?'

‘So you cut up dead men?'

‘Cut up live ones, too,' said January. ‘They were glad I'd had the practice.'

Trigg laughed shortly. They crossed an elegant circle, laid out like a dropped carpet in the midst of the fields, and ahead of them saw the handsome residence of the British Minister against the woods along Rock Creek. Cressets burned in front of its shallow steps, and a red carpet had been laid from its door to the carriage block, in defiance of the wet clouds rapidly obliterating the stars.

‘First time I went into surgery,' January added quietly, ‘I wished I'd been able to pay the hundred and fifty francs that was the going rate – that was my rent for six months! And half the time we did get to Courveche's “gatherings” I'd have paid that much again – if I'd had it! – just to have a cadaver that was fresh.'

‘Now
that
,' protested Trigg with a grin, ‘is more than I want to know about
that
!'

The Mudwall brothers joined them then, and the talk turned to other matters as they crossed through the open field beside the Minister's house and circled around to the warmth and light of its kitchen door. But during the course of the evening, as January played German quadrilles and light-footed waltzes, and watched the top couple in the country dances work its way down the set and back, the horror of those evenings in Louveciennes barns and ruined cottages out in Passy returned to him, the sickening reek and the peculiarly slimy touch of rotting flesh beneath his fingers.

And he remembered, in coming and going from the dissections – and mostly he and the other students had to spend the night in a hayrick or a stable, since the city barriers weren't open again until first light – he would sometimes see the anatomy assistant Courveche in quiet converse in the shadows with furtive, unshaven men whose peasant clothing always smelled of grave-mold.

Looking out at the sweeping silk skirts, pink and gray and bronze and green – at the gentlemen with their pomaded hair and embroidered waistcoats – at Henry Clay who owned five hundred slaves, and Dolley Madison who had fled from Washington before the invading army that he, Benjamin January, had helped defeat in New Orleans – at all those others, young and old, hungry for fame or sick of its demands …

Each was after all only a set of lungs, a pair of kidneys, a tangle of guts and arteries and nerves.

Bring me the fairest creature northward born
, says the dark prince of Morocco to Portia in
The Merchant of Venice; and let us make incision … to prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine
…

January could himself attest that he had never seen the smallest difference between a white man's flesh and a black man's, between the blood and organs of a vaunted ‘European' and those of the men they'd said were ‘childlike', ‘animal', and happy in their slavery.

After every dissection, he recalled, he'd gone to confession, and the priests had told him that what he'd done was a grave sin. Every time, he had argued that for every dead man he cut up –
and they're dead, they're DONE with those bodies!
– his chances of saving a living man's life or arm or eye or livelihood increased a dozenfold.

It doesn't matter
, the priests always said.
We must accept on faith that the councils of the Church know more than we do of these matters
…

The way Congress knew more about slavery than did a man chopping cotton in some other man's field?

He turned his heart back to the music, light and precious as fairy gold, lest by looking into the darkness, he should come to hate humankind.

A
nd, of course, with a third of the nation's men out of work and the possibility of war looming with Britain, all anyone talked of that night, in the ballroom at least, was Sunday's defeat by the Invaders of the Washington Warriors of Democracy.

Most of the Warriors were there, from Royall Stockard down to Chilperic Creighton, the seventeen-year-old scion of a local planter family who clearly demonstrated by the cut and color of his waistcoat that he wanted to be Royall Stockard when he grew up, and all of them protesting that they had been robbed. Since Messrs Gonesse and Lenoir – clerks of the French Ministry and co-captains of the Invaders – were likewise present, it took all the combined tact and authority of Senator Clay and Mr Oldmixton of the British Ministry (Sir Henry Fox being, for the most part, absent in the gambling-room) to prevent violence. Only the unilateral promise by Secretary of the Navy Dickerson that any man who issued a challenge would be fired from his position in disgrace warded off a series of duels being arranged at a later date.

‘How many duels you think will come of it?' whispered January, under cover of unfurling the music for the Varsoviana, and Trigg immediately said, ‘Three.'

‘That all?' protested Phinn Mudwall. ‘I say five at least …'

‘I'll cover that …'

‘How'll we tell?'

‘Say, in the next two weeks …'

The musicians hastily straightened themselves up and played an opening bar, as M'sieu Pageot – chargé d'affaires of the French Ministry and, like Mr Oldmixton in the British establishment, the actual power there – took the two French ball-captains like a couple of puppies into a corner near the musicians' bower and threatened them with murder if they behaved like schoolboys here in the very mansion of the British Minister.

‘I know Pageot's coachman,' whispered old Langston the fiddler. ‘I can find out from him if either of 'em gets in a duel …'

But when supper was called, and the musicians descended the narrow stair to the underground kitchen, they found there – among the flustered scullions – the young Frenchmen Gonesse and Lenoir themselves, accompanied by a long-limbed young man in an extremely American coat, and Signor Baldini, the rather youthful secretary of the Minister from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies … last seen throwing the balls that the Warriors of Democracy had shown themselves ultimately unable to hit.

‘Monsieur Trigg?' inquired Gonesse, a bright-eyed Gascon with extravagantly-cut lapels to his swallowtail coat and three waistcoats in different colors on underneath. ‘Have I the honor to address the Captain of the Stalwarts?' He held out his hand.

Trigg stepped forward and shook it firmly. Behind him, Phinn Mudwall whispered, ‘Well, I'll be dipped in shit.'

‘Might I present my colleagues, sir?' said Trigg. ‘Mr Blair Langston; Mr Phineas Mudwall; Mr Phileas Mudwall; Mr Benjamin January. Mr January is the newest member of the Stalwarts.'

‘And I am Jules Gonesse. M'sieu Andreas Lenoir, Mr Caldwell Noyes of the Navy Department, and Signor Baldini—'

‘I had the honor, Signor –' Trigg bowed to Baldini – ‘and the pleasure, I might add, of watching the truly excellent way that you made the Warriors look no-how last Sunday.'

‘You were there?' Gonesse's grin flashed in the gloom of the oil lamps. ‘M'sieu Noyes has only informed me this evening, M'sieu, of the existence of the Stalwarts. I had been told that it was against the laws of this city for men of your race to play ball.'

‘So it is,' replied Trigg. ‘But as long as we play out on the far side of town – and as long as the city's constabulary goes on betting on our games – they're happy to accept our bribes just like they accept everybody else's in this town.'

‘
Pecunia non olet
,' January said, quoting the words of Vespasian, Emperor of Rome and inventor of pay toilets, and all four of their guests laughed and applauded.

‘I had the pleasure of telling our European colleagues,' said Noyes, in the nasal accents of New England, ‘that the Stalwarts are accounted one of the strongest teams in Washington.'

‘That's very kind of you, sir,' replied Trigg. ‘I think we can beat most of the other colored teams, more often than not – but not a great deal more often. It all depends on who's having a good day.' With the genial dignity of an ambassador – or a boarding-house-keeper – he turned to Gonesse. ‘I'm guessing you've learned already that every game's a different game, and every day's a different day.'

‘Spoken as a gentleman and a sportsman!' Gonesse beamed. ‘
Jove lifts the golden balances, that show, the fates of mortal men, and things below
.'

With a slow grin, January quoted the next two lines: ‘
Here each contending hero's lot he tries, and weighs, with equal hand, their destinies
.'

‘And would you and your teammates –' Gonesse inclined his head to Trigg – ‘cast your fate into Jove's golden balances against us, M'sieu, say … two weeks from this Saturday? Like Achilles, we seek glory, and the more worthy the opponents, the better we are pleased.'

‘Then we shall strive to please you, sir.' Trigg bowed in return. ‘And if you gentlemen will forgive my impudence in the name of sport, my teammates and I will whip you soundly and send you back to your embassy in honorable defeat.'

‘
Eh bien
!' The French captain beamed. Eph Norcum back in New Orleans, January reflected, would have struck Trigg for being ‘uppity'. ‘So
you
say, sir! But the master of all victories is fate!'

The skinny New Englander Noyes applauded again, almost glowing with triumph. An abolitionist, January recalled suddenly, was what Bray had called him a few nights ago. And as such, merely in bringing the game about he had challenged the southern Democrats, be they clerks or planters' sons.

There was – he knew immediately – going to be trouble.

News of the upcoming game reached the white folks' supper room even before the dancing resumed. January could feel it as they took their places on the dais again, like the heat-dance above fire on a day too bright to clearly see the flames. Could hear it in the crackling
sotto voce
whispers; see it in the way Congressman Stockard grabbed the sleeve of this teammate or that. But he was also aware of Congressional secretaries, clerks and assistants stepping behind curtains and into doorways to exchange money and write down wagers:
Damned foreigners – goddam insult
…

Luke Bray's voice surged from the door of the gambling-room: ‘Hell yes, they can beat 'em! We was goddam robbed by them Frenchy cheats—!'

Florid-faced Senator Buchanan led Mrs Bray from the dance-floor with as much gallantry as if he hadn't been ‘married' for years to the darkly handsome Senator King from Alabama: ‘Your husband seems to be more than usually exercised over a game of ball, M'am.'

‘My husband is drunk.' Her lovely peridot gaze touched the door of the gambling room with distaste. ‘And it isn't merely a game of ball, sir. It's the honor of America.' Contempt glinted from her words, as from the facets of a diamond.