Good Man Friday (19 page)

After a few moments' thoughtful silence, January said, ‘I can't argue with you there.'

Cold wind skirled down the wide avenues of Washington, whipped the black skirts of Poe's shabby greatcoat. Flecks of rain bit like the promise of sorrow to come.

‘Well.' Poe sighed and straightened his shoulders. ‘In the meantime, I comfort myself with the reflection that to an artist, no experience is ever wasted – and I must and will have an interview with a bona fide grave-robber!
Allons-y
, Benjamin.' And with that curious inward reconfiguration characteristic of actors, he ceased to be a wryly intelligent poet, critic, and observer of human nature, and became the arrogant and self-obsessed would-be Michelangelo Mr Allan. ‘Come along.'

A good and humble valet, January said, ‘Yes, sir, Marse Eddie,' and followed him along to the surgeon's door.

‘Of course I have no dealings with such people myself,' Mr Wellesley hastened to explain.

‘No, certainly, sir, I would never mean to imply …'

‘But one does hear things in my profession.' The stooped gray-haired gentleman cast a sharply calculating eye over his visitor …
His WHITE visitor
, January observed. The large valet who had accompanied Mr Allan into the outer room of the surgery was, of course, no more regarded than the hat his master had handed him. ‘I believe I could get in touch with someone who could provide us the – er –
facilities
you require … though I warn you now, a hundred dollars …'

‘The hundred dollars is for your services, sir,' replied ‘Mr Allan' loftily. ‘Naturally, I understand such people charge for their – ah – goods.' He produced a twenty-dollar gold-piece from his pocket and laid it on the corner of the surgeon's scarred desk. January took note of how Mr Wellesley's eyes flared. Judging by the disused look of the office, enthusiasm was understandable. Surgeons cost money. Poe was far from the only man in Washington with a family to support.

‘Approximately how long should your enquiries take, sir? I can return Thursday, at about this hour …'

‘That should give me time.' Mr Wellesley's skinny fingers nipped up the coin as if he feared Poe would change his mind and take it away again. ‘Farcy uses an accommodation address, but he's generally fairly quick to reply …'

Since Henri was no more an actor than he was a medical student, it had been agreed that it was Chloë who would be the besotted and ambitious wife, and who would do all the talking. Like Poe, she had sufficient experience with overbearing French Creole matrons to personate one with terrifying accuracy.

‘I only hope I shan't be obliged to actually assist at a dissection,' fretted Henri that evening when they reassembled in the boarding house parlor. ‘I'm not sure that I could – well – sustain the role to that extent.'

‘No reason why you should have to, sir,' returned January bracingly as he spread his list and Chloë's on the table in the small parlor. ‘Remember, you're a
poseur
. You only
think
you're a second Michelangelo. This may be the first occasion you've ever been in the same room with a corpse.'

‘If you faint dead away, I'll have smelling salts on hand,' encouraged Chloë heartlessly.

‘
Cher
—!' Dominique put her arms protectively around Henri, who had turned slightly green. She looked tired and fretful, as if the day's inclement weather bore upon her nerves. Like Mede Tyler, thought January, she was separated from almost everyone she knew – her friends, the little household she kept on Rue Dumaine, the familiar rhythms and activities of her community. She might assist the Perkinses with teaching the children, or cut and stitch clothing for her own child, or shop – accompanied by her maid – in such facilities as Washington offered women of color, but the fact remained that she was uprooted and alone in a strange town.

‘In any case,' soothed Poe, ‘we will have made our contact with our resurrectionist – and gotten from him Mr Pease's direction, if he isn't Mr Pease himself – long before the proceedings start.'

‘
Bleu
.' Chloë looked up from considering the lists over January's shoulder. ‘I have never seen a dissection – don't look like that, Henri … I don't suppose there's a way that I can come along and watch, M'sieu Poe? Oh, all right,' she added as January and Henri both shook their heads. ‘How many took the bait today, and who must we visit tomorrow?'

‘Benjamin and Mr Poe – if Mr Poe would be so good as to continue his efforts on our behalf – could take Alexandria all in a day, I dare say.' Henri took up the papers, on which January had underlined in kitchen pencil the surgeons willing to “make arrangements” and had further noted the names mentioned by the surgeons in question, if any. ‘But if you recall, my dear, you and I will be paying a call on Dr Woolmer at the Potomac School.'

With this, Chloë and Henri departed, and Poe ascended to his own spartan chamber to change shirt and waistcoat before setting forth for another Washington ‘at home' in the hopes of encountering some department head in quest of a clerk. ‘And I can only pray that none of the other guests there is one of the surgeons we've visited,' sighed the poet as he came downstairs, adjusting his best black silk cravat, to encounter January in the hall again. January had changed clothes also – a coarse mechanic's shirt made of ticking – and bore four long ‘pegs' and his bat on his shoulder.

‘I shouldn't worry, sir,' returned January cheerfully. ‘What would a surgeon be doing at such an event? He's already
got
a job.'

The afternoon's sprinkly showers had ceased. A sufficient number of the Centurions were assembled in the field beside the Reedy Branch in the gray end of afternoon to ensure a ball game, but the atmosphere was more helpful than competitive. ‘Hell,' said Fip Franklin of the Centurions as he took January aside to give him a little extra practice at hitting the ball, ‘every man on the team got money on you boys, against the French.'

January picked out Gonesse and Lenoir in the crowd along the fringes of the field – quite a gathering, this evening, particularly for a Monday – observing the game. With them he recognized Mr Noyes, the lanky young abolitionist clerk who'd come down to the kitchen of the British Ministry Tuesday night.

‘He's captain of the Eagles,' Trigg identified him, coming over to January while the other Stalwarts lined up into ragged order behind the striker's position, halfway between two of the pegs. ‘New England boys – Whigs.'

‘I didn't know there were any in Washington these days.'

‘More than you'd think. They've got a game going Saturday against the Warriors, but I'm told the betting on it is nothing to the money on ours.'

Hence, reflected January drily, the relative pallor of the crowd. All the sporting Senators and youthful Congressmen, jealously gauging not only the actual prowess of the black team and the foreigners, but what their strength
should
be, in whatever universe of race nobility or degeneration existed in their heads and hearts.

Should
Frenchmen be able to beat Americans – even if those Americans were black?

Or was there no such thing as a black American? Did Trigg, and Mede, gangly Reverend Perkins and January himself, count only as transplanted Africans, a lesser and degraded race?

There's a dilemma for you, gentlemen. Are you ready to put good money on what you feel SHOULD be?

Reason enough to ride out to the far end of the Second Ward to see Ganymede Tyler throw.

His gaze passed across the crowd – as usual, January was the tallest man present – and he picked out curly-haired Royall Stockard in a fancy gig, with young Chilperic Creighton, the planter's son, beside him. Close by, a little surprisingly, January saw Frank Preston – fresh from the Baltimore run and still in his neat blue conductor's uniform – with Dominique, Thèrése, Charmian and Musette. Thèrése, in an extremely fashionable plumed bonnet, looked bored, as usual, by the absolute American vulgarity of the gathering, but Minou was arguing animatedly with the young conductor about something on the pad of paper that he held.

‘I hear tell,' put in Handsome Dan, ‘there's folks got a
thousand dollars
on that game.'

‘That's ridiculous.' Trigg looked almost angry at the words. ‘It's a damn
game
…'

This was all the commentary he had time for, because Luther Jones threw a high sidearm lob to Reverend Perkins, who knocked it straight at the feet of the Centurion behind third base. The Centurion picked it out of the air on the first bounce and neatly plugged Seth Berger, sprinting from the second peg to the third, and that was that.

Not that it made a difference, with Mede pitching. The Centurions were out in the field again before some of them had time to find places on the boxes.

‘I just hope Bray leaves Mede alone until Saturday,' remarked January, swinging his bat experimentally and hoping he'd actually hit something when he came up to position. ‘The last thing we need is for him to be put off his game by the kind of scene we had Friday.'

‘As I understand it –' Trigg glanced in the direction of Stockard – ‘Bray's been warned to stay away from Mede, for just that reason.'

As Mede stepped up to the striker's zone, he too scanned the crowd worriedly, the setting sun transforming him into a slim long-limbed young god. Then he returned his attention to the Centurion thrower, the bat held above his shoulder, gauging the toss not as a move from an enemy, but simply as a job to be done, and done to perfection.

Why?
January wondered.
Because of a love for the game, or for these comrades he'd known for so short a time?

Or because his former master – his brother – had ordered him to win?

And where would he go from here?

It wasn't until the night before the game that Bray was heard from.

It was Good Friday, and January – who, mindful of the Philadelphia priest's penance, had fasted all day – walked out to Georgetown with Minou, Charmian, and the servants to Mass. They had barely been home an hour when Henri's rented carriage arrived and Dominique departed again, with Thèrése, whom she generally took along to Mrs Purchase's to make coffee. Everyone else in the boarding house went to the I Street Methodist Chapel (colored) to hear Reverend Perkins preach and returned just before dark, to tea and jam cakes in the parlor, and a late dinner of cold meats and cheese. The Reverend and January read the Bible to the children in the parlor, and Mede then helped Clarice herd the little ones up to bed.

Mrs Trigg had just begun to clear up the cups when knocking clattered at the front door.

Talk in the parlor silenced at once. All eyes went to the clock.

It was after curfew. At this hour, a visitor's knock never boded well.

Trigg's footfalls sounded loud as hammer blows on the oak planks of the hall.

Hurried voices. Returning feet.

‘Mede?' Trigg came back in, followed by a skinny youth in a coachman's caped greatcoat.

Bray's coachman. January knew his face, from brief glimpses by torchlight.

The boy was ashen with shock.

‘Jem—' Mede started forward toward him.

‘It's Marse Luke, Mede,' said Jem. ‘He's tried to kill himself.'

‘H
as a doctor been sent for?'

Jem shook his head. ‘Miz Rowena said nobody's to know—'

‘Will you come with me, Mr J?'

In Mede's turquoise eyes, January saw that Luke's Good Man Friday knew that Luke's wife wouldn't send.

‘Mrs Bray—' Mede bit off whatever he had to say about his master's wife. ‘Will you come?'

Luke Bray's phaeton waited at the end of the gravel drive. The youthful coachman scrambled up into the high rear seat, and against every city ordinance from Maryland to the Sabine River, Mede took the reins of the sleek black team.
And let's hope the city constables are too drunk to be watching
…

Jail was not where January wanted to end up tonight.

The moon was just past full, and though fog lay thin toward the river and the canal, as the vehicle swept up Nineteenth Street, most of it was left behind. January breathed a prayer of thanks for those racecourse thoroughfares.

‘What did your master do?' he asked over his shoulder to Jem. ‘How did he do it?'

‘He cut his wrists, sir.' The boy's accent was local – Virginia or Maryland rather than the rougher inflections of Kentucky. ‘Miz Rowena says he was drunk. An' he
was
drunk, sir, when he came home, drunker'n I've ever seen him. Peter – that's his new valet, sir – put him to bed. Then just about midnight he rang his bell, an' Peter went in an' found him, with his wrists cut an' blood all over the room.'

‘Did Mrs Bray bandage up his wrists herself? Or have one of the servants do it?'

‘Herself, sir. She sent Robbie – that's the gardener, sir – for that Mr Oldmixton at the British Ministry, that's a friend of her father's. But she said,
Nobody else
. She said, Mr Luke's reputation couldn't take the scandal.'

‘
Her
reputation, she means.' Mede's voice was tight.

‘Do you know any reason why he would have done it?' January glanced to the young man beside him.

Mede kept his eyes on the pale smudge of the road. ‘No, sir.'

The woods by Rock Creek cut out even the glimmer of moonlight. Jem sprang from his perch to lead the horses across the Paper Mill bridge, the smell of the creek cold and ferrous in the blackness below.

Curtains masked all trace of lamplight behind the shutters of the Bray house. In the rear yard a shiny English brougham was drawn up, its horse rugged against the cold and its coachman seated in the kitchen drinking coffee with the cook. As they came into the dim oil-lamp glow of the kitchen Mede asked, ‘How is he?' and the cook spread his hands.