Good Man Friday (16 page)

There was blood on his right sleeve and shoulder – ‘Damn, I liked this coat …' – and on his gloves. He tried to sound casual, but though he felt not the slightest remorse over killing a man who'd dragged hundreds into slavery, he had begun to tremble, and felt dizzy, as if he'd run a long way. When they returned to the Ministry, he remained far back in the darkness with the Mudwall brothers, watching Langston and Trigg approach the pillared front porch as if it were a lighted stage.

Most of the carriages were gone from the yard and from the adjacent field. On the porch, Mr Oldmixton was bidding as warm a farewell to Mrs Madison and her niece – always the last to leave any gathering – as if it weren't nearly three in the morning. The former Presidentress chuckled with genuine delight at Oldmixton's account of his new Queen's numerous suitors: ‘Well, what's the poor girl to do, when sweeping her off her feet could get one of them clapped up in the Tower? She's a sentimental little thing but she isn't about to share power with anyone. The first thing she did when they told her she was queen was tell that frightful mother of hers that she wanted her own room—'

Mrs Madison sniffed. ‘What did she think the girl was going to do in a room of her own, have clandestine
affaires
with the footmen? Why, hello, Mr Trigg—' She smiled and extended her hand as Trigg stepped up to the porch. ‘I thought you'd gone home an hour ago … Good heavens, it
was
an hour ago and here we are still standing, and poor Anne –' she touched her niece's shoulder – ‘wanting to get to bed! John, I am
covered
with shame—'

Oldmixton returned her smile, even as he turned to Trigg.

‘Excuse me bothering you, sir, m'am.' Trigg bowed. ‘But we found Mr Bray's manservant wandering over in the circle, and it looks like he's been taken ill—'

‘Good heavens!' Oldmixton peered through the fog to where Langston stood with Mede on the edge of the dim zone of light from the porch lanterns. ‘Mr Bray cursed a good deal – he seems to have had the idea that his Good Man Friday took him at his word and went off to get himself drunk … I shouldn't imagine he has much head for it; he's the soberest young fellow I've ever met. Is he all right?'

‘Quite all right, sir.' Trigg glanced in Mede's direction, and, January thought, to where he and the Mudwall brothers stood in the darkness. ‘Just a touch of fever. He should be right as rain in the morning.'

‘I can put him up here for the night,' offered Oldmixton. ‘There's a spare bed in the grooms' dormitory over the stable, if you're certain it isn't anything catching. Or I'll have Clayton put down a pallet in the tack room. We'll send a message to Mr Bray in the morning.'

And seeing through the well-schooled stillness of Trigg's face, he added, his own voice neutral, ‘Mr and Mrs Bray left nearly an hour ago.'

‘That's very kind of you, sir,' said Trigg, ‘but no need to trouble. We'll take him on home with us.'

O
n the following afternoon, Mrs Howard Kelsey was buried in the Washington Parish churchyard, near the banks of the river.

In between cutting January's bloodstained coat into pieces small enough to be burned, Trigg had written to Luke Bray, informing him that his former valet had been taken ill on his way home and would return to Georgetown before nightfall. No one was going to breathe the words ‘slave stealers', for there was no way of knowing who knew whom in the white world, or where chance words might end up. ‘Generally,' the landlord told January as young Ritchie set off to deliver the note, ‘the constables don't spend too much time askin' about dead niggers, 'specially those that met their destinies after curfew in alleys. But Kyle Fowler's done a lot of favors for the constables over the years, so we'd better walk a little careful here.'

It was fortunate, January reflected, that he'd just made the round of Washington pawnshops and knew where he could acquire another long-tailed formal coat in more or less his own massive size. When he returned from this errand, Mede – who had spent the night in one of the modest bedrooms on the third floor – had wakened and returned to his master's house.

At just before two, then, January arrived at Christ's Church, clothed in the rough tweed jacket and corduroy trousers of an artisan or craftsman: a tavern-keeper's wife wouldn't have black gentlemen in well-cut frock-coats and silk vests seeing her to her grave. The white men gathered at the gray, Gothic-style church were dressed all up and down the social ladder, from the high beaver hats and well-fitting coats of Senators and bankers, down to the rough – though decent – jackets and work pants of teamsters, drovers, builders and laborers who had clearly known Mrs Kelsey over many years of buying her husband's beer. The benches at the back of the church were crowded with black artisans and grocers dressed much like himself, and a fair number whom January guessed – by the old-fashioned cut of their clothing – to be slaves in the wealthy houses of the capital.

Men whose lives this unknown woman had touched. Men she'd spoken cheerfully to after a day of back-breaking work in heat or cold.

Men who thought enough of her husband to stand with him as he saw her to her grave.

Mr Kelsey himself, a tallish, stooped gentleman in his sixties, was guided to his pew by three young men – sons or sons-in-law? – but moved like a man who'd been struck over the head, seeming neither to hear nor see. January almost couldn't look at that terrible lost-dog expression in his eyes.

Did I look like that, when Ayasha died?

Even at a distance of six years, the pain was as vivid as if he had come home only yesterday to find her dead.

Will he go home and box up everything she owned and throw the trunk into the river, lest the sight of it tear the soul out of his body?

He averted his eyes and did what he'd come there to do: watched for a man who
didn't
go up to comfort the widower.

He spotted him almost immediately. The slouchy fellow with the bald head, who stayed at the back of the crowd. If Kelsey or the young men around him seemed about to come in his direction, he slipped away.

As a musician, and an active member in the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society, January had attended hundreds of funerals. Even allowing for differences in the way things were done in the American portions of the United States – such as women not attending – there were some things that remained the same. Things that were part of the human experience of loss, and friendship, and common decency.

Is your Pa going to be all right?

What can I do to help?

I sure am sorry to hear of your loss.

What time's the wake?

This man did none of these things. He took notice, not of the people around him, but of where in the churchyard the grave was dug.

If that's not Wylie Pease
, reflected January, studying the narrow, furtive face,
it's someone who can sure as hell tell me where to find him
.

The Washington Parish cemetery lay near the river, distant from the center of town. It covered a good ten acres, lavishly planted with trees and shrubs after the newest fashion in Europe. A brick wall surrounded it, new enough, and high enough, to require a ladder and a confederate. January made a mental note of the larger monuments and groves, and as the funeral guests made their slow way from the graveside toward the gates, he lagged farther and farther behind. Mr Slouchy, as he dubbed his man, slipped out among the first and didn't linger.

The rest of the mourners clustered around Kelsey and his sons, talking in quiet voices. In New Orleans, the uptown blacks – American-raised Protestants, slave or freedman – would shake their heads when the Catholic funerals of the downtown
gens de couleur librés
would form up processions at the cemetery gates; when the music would turn from solemn marches to the slow, proud strut of joy, of triumph –
You took the one we loved, Baron Cemetery, Mr Death, but you can't make us cry. You can't break our hearts
. The parade would come down Rue Orleans from the gates of the chapel, the women waving their scarves and twirling their parasols, the men dancing as they marched.

This standing around in sorrow, though he understood it to the bottom of his soul, seemed to him very strange. White folks' funerals were just so
gloomy
.

When you've crossed over to Heaven, do you really want to see your friends back home weep?

People talked a little, then walked back toward town through the cold patchy brightness of the cloudy day. Only Mr Kelsey and a small handful of others had carriages, or had rented the black ones from the undertaker, with their sable teams and nodding plumes. No music played them on their way. January guessed there'd be none at the wake.

How did white people stand loss, on those terms?

January himself stood in feigned contemplation of the headstone raised by the King of Prussia to his ambassador – who had had the misfortune to die in Washington – then wandered off toward the line of stumpy granite cenotaphs that represented Congressmen whose remains had later been taken away by their families. In the deep weeds behind one of these, on his way in, he had cached a satchel containing a sandwich, a water bottle, a heavy knit pullover, his new copy of
Don Quixote
, a dark-lantern and a couple of extra candles.

At a guess, as the afternoon drew on, the cemetery watchmen would keep an eye on how many people entered the place, and count how many departed. With the leave-taking of the last of the mourners, January sought out one of the groves at the far end of the grounds. Later, as dusk deepened and fog moved in, he shifted his post to the shrubbery that surrounded the cemetery's public vault on three sides, and from there watched the solitary watchman make a thorough patrol of the place just prior to closing the gates at sunset. At the funeral he'd observed one of Kelsey's sons give this man some money, probably far less than a private guard would charge. In theory, a private guard would protect the body of the deceased in some specific grave until it was beyond the state where it would be acceptable to a body-snatcher's customer … Obviously, reflected January, these were people who didn't know the buyers associated with the Paris medical schools.

Or the guards who were sometimes in league with them.

How long shall a man lie in the earth, ere he rot?
Hamlet had inquired of the jovial gravedigger …

Get thee to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come
…

After passing through a truly unpleasant intermediary stage
.

As a surgeon in Paris, he had visited the crowded rooms of the very poor, to find the corpses of family members six and eight days dead, laid out upon tables:
We can't pay to hire a guard, sir, and we didn't want to risk
…

The fog thickened with the clammy dark. January donned his knitted pullover, but remained where he was beside the half-buried brick vault. He knew he'd have plenty of time. Body-snatchers generally didn't even start work till after midnight, when chilled watchmen grew sleepy after a few too many nips of rum,
To keep me warm
…

The moon was waxing, a day or two from full. Its ghostly pallor diffused faintly through the mists without making anything easier to see. When he heard the clocks of the Christ Church steeple strike two, January moved among the graves toward the remote section where Mrs Kelsey would be sleeping alone for the first time, perhaps, in decades. Her husband's tavern would be closed up but beyond a doubt its upstairs room would be warm and bright, tables spread with food brought by all those wives who hadn't come to the funeral, voices getting louder. As with their funerals, it had always surprised and puzzled January how tame white folks' wakes were, compared to the dancing, gay music and howling grief that he was used to. His landmarks loomed with malevolent suddenness through the blackness: a round-topped headstone here, a row of cenotaphs just beyond. Past that, a modest obelisk watched over the grave of
Clara Teller, 1813-1815
.
She is not dead, but only sleeping
…

Now and then the small vermin of the riverside – foxes or rats – made the black vapors stir, but as long as it wasn't alligators, such as one might encounter in the low ground at the back of New Orleans, January wasn't much concerned. He'd worked too many cholera wards in the murky New Orleans summers to be disconcerted by fog and a few headstones. Despite a rigorous European education he didn't precisely disbelieve in ghosts, but he would have been happy to encounter any number of dead Congressman in preference to the men who'd been waiting for Davy Quent to steer his victim to them last night.

He passed a tomb of whitewashed brick, just tall enough to enclose a coffin. A Lilliputian turret surmounted it, containing a bell, though the rope which had at one time extended, through discreet holes in tomb-top and coffin, to the corpse's hand had fallen away. Fearful as people were about being clandestinely exhumed after they were dead, there seemed to be almost as much morbid terror of interment before they were quite ready for it. January had seen three or four of these tombs in the cemetery, equipped with bell turrets or other escape features. The medical students at the Hôtel Dieu had taken ghoulish delight in trading tales of corpses exhumed with screams frozen on their faces, or fingers lacerated by attempts to claw their way out of the coffin when they'd waked from a coma in the enclosed darkness, but January had personally never encountered such a case. It was always and inevitably something that someone had heard from someone else.

In New Orleans, where tombs lay above ground and the fissures frequently opened between the cracked bricks, everyone could see the crawfish that crept in and out, and the monstrous black roaches. Nobody in that city was under much illusion about how quickly a corpse would be reduced to its bones.