Good Man Friday (30 page)

‘
Dearest
—!'

‘And I will go,' added Dominique, ‘to break the news to the other servants in the kitchen that poor Mede has disappeared, and to give them all the details of the fracas at the ball game Tuesday—'

‘Excellent, darling!'

‘—and the scarlet-fever scare last night—'

‘Dearest, I beg of you—'

Chloë turned to regard her husband, her small hands folded primly on the tabletop in the dappled sunlight. That evening, January knew, the Stalwarts would be out practicing by the creek, and given the probable presence of O'Hanlon and the Irish teamsters, rumors about Mede's disappearance would be flying by dark.

‘I have been seeking a good reason,' Chloë went on, ‘to have someone go in and search Madame Bray's establishment for some days now.' From her reticule she plucked the copies January had made for her of the notebook, and of the paper he'd found in Luke Bray's watch, and unfolded both on the table. ‘I've had tea with Madame Bray three times and have spoken to her at a dozen different entertainments. Likewise have I spoken to M'sieu Bray when I could catch him on his way to the gaming rooms. And neither of them is of a mathematical turn of mind.'

‘So why did Bray copy those five squares?' Poe, who had been standing by the chimney breast, came to the table, turned the papers over in his long, ink-stained fingers. ‘There are close to a hundred squares in that notebook. Why only those five? And why only five in the order of five?'

‘They all add up to sixty-five.' Dominique leaned around his shoulder. ‘Is there significance to sixty-five?'

‘It's the only number you can get on a square of the order of five,' said Poe. He had volunteered to help in the grave-digging and coal-moving yesterday evening, but Mrs Trigg had posted him instead in his little parlor with a cup of coffee and orders to intercept any white men who might come to the door. He'd remained on guard until past midnight, when all the shovels had been cleaned and everyone had bathed and gone to bed, and January felt that he was slightly disappointed that absolutely nothing had transpired.

‘Then what is the importance of five? Were these the only squares of five in the notebook?'

‘No.' Poe shook his head. ‘There were near a dozen of this order.'

‘They are the
last
five squares of the order of five in the notebook,' provided Chloë. ‘But they are not all written together. Three were together, one was on a page with squares of orders from three up to eight, and one was on a page with a scheme – I don't know if it was his idea or something he'd heard – to relieve traffic congestion in Leicester Square by running underground tunnels underneath it with carriages pulled by pit ponies, as they have in mines. But he was fascinated by magic squares. He used to write to me about them when I was little.'

‘And it is understandable,' said Poe. ‘There's an eerie quality about magic squares; an incomprehensible persistence, that whichever way you add up the numbers, the answer is always the same. Like those dreams in which you keep asking a question – of the face in the mirror that isn't yours, or a bird with a demon's eyes – and it answers with an answer that you cannot comprehend but which you know to be true. You say, “What is sixty-five?” and it answers, “Sixty-five.”'

‘We have too few pieces of the puzzle.' January's mind returned again to Ganymede Tyler, as they'd borne him down to the cellar wrapped in quilts. Like Selwyn Singletary, a person that no one would miss and no one would look for … possibly not even his brother-master, Robinson Crusoe infuriated and hurt at his Good Man Friday's departure.
Of course he'd run away, ungrateful nigger, after all I done for him
…

He deserves better
, Dominique had said: certainly better than a secret grave beneath three-quarters of a ton of coal.
He has not dealt with us after our sins
, the Reverend Perkins had read over the grave last night,
nor recorded us according to our iniquities …

And it crossed his mind suddenly that this was why the priest in Philadelphia had consigned him – without any means of enforcing the penance or even knowing if his supplicant paid heed – to fish, porridge, and water for a year: so that every day he would remember that though he had acted in what he felt to be a good cause, he had still taken the life of another person.

Whatever had turned Davy Quent's steps to being the man he had become, January guessed he'd remember him a lot longer than Kyle Fowler would.

His days are as grass … the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more
.

‘Mede asked me once about blackmail,' he said slowly. ‘About a letter that was written completely in numbers, which he found in Mr Bray's desk. But I've found,' he went on, ‘in solving these puzzles, that if you start with
why
, it's hard to get anywhere. People kill one another for stupid reasons, or for no reason at all. People kill in drink, or because one man's black and another is white; or because some small irritation, rubbed at constantly, seems on a hot day, when the wind is blowing from the wrong direction, justification enough to end a man's life …'

He shook his head. ‘What we need to find out is who
could
have spent the night in that attic. Minou—' He turned to his sister. ‘While you're keeping the Bray servants enthralled tomorrow morning with an account of the confrontation with the b'hoys at the ball game, I trust you'll find out for me whether Mrs Bray was home on Sunday night.'

There was a judas hole cut in the wooden gate marked ‘Bray' that opened from the service alley behind Monroe Street. Through it, January watched Dominique loaf her way up the gravel path, like a slave who knows that the completion of her errand is only going to get her set to some other task. In a neat calico dress borrowed from Musette, her hair bound in a slave's headscarf, she was a far cry indeed from the exquisite courtesan who graced her protector's arm at the Blue Ribbon balls in the Orleans Ballroom.

In the quiet of the spring morning, January heard her tap at the kitchen door, heard the voices of the Bray cook and maid. Heard the door open and shut.

In one of the stables a little further down the alleyway a couple of grooms were harnessing a handsome team of chestnut geldings. He set down his satchel, thrust his hands in his pockets, gazed idly around him –
I'm just waitin' on my friend who got an errand here
…

The coachman leaped to the box, drove away up the alley. The grooms were already turning back into the stable gate. January caught up the satchel – carpentry tools purchased yesterday after the conference at the inn, from the same downtown pawnshop where he'd acquired a piano tuner's kit – and slipped through the service gate. He dodged through the rose garden, slipped along the hedge toward the garden door that Chloë had spoken of.

As Chloë had surmised, the garden was deserted, the gardener pressed to service shifting furniture in the house. January worked his way along the hedge, found the glass French-door, and let himself in. It wasn't locked. He wore the rough corduroy jacket and scuffed wool trousers of a workman and had both explanation and attitude ready, in case of discovery:
The man tol' me go on in an' fix the window upstairs
…

He doubted anyone would believe it, but it might give him time to make a break for it. The thought of burgling the house by daylight appalled him, but Chloë was right. To do a proper search of Rowena Bray's bedroom he needed daylight. A candle's glimmer wouldn't suffice.

And the more he thought about it, the more he concurred with Chloë Viellard. Mrs Bray's room needed to be searched.

The obvious places – the small desk, and under the mattress of the bed – were swiftly disposed of. A well-trained English lady would keep the servants at their work, and that included turning the mattress regularly and painting every crack and joint of the bed frame with camphor and turpentine twice a year. Though servants made life easier for the wealthy, every servant was a stranger under one's roof: a stranger who had goals and intentions never spoken of to the master.

Doubly so, if that servant knew that he or she could be sold to cover poker debts.

That left the floor, the walls, the chimney, and the armoire.

He found no false backs to any of the drawers in the bottom of the armoire, and nothing pinned or tacked to the bottom of the tall cupboard itself. No woman in her right mind would simply hide things under the shelf paper, but he checked anyway. The armoire towered above his own six foot three, its pediment of carved leaves coming within a few feet of the tall ceiling. A glance at the waxed floorboards revealed no tell-tale scratches where it had been moved, or where a chair had been placed to stow things on top of it. The top – when he placed the chair himself and checked – was clean of dust. The servants really were kept to their work.

Neither did the floor reveal scuffs or scratches to indicate that the desk had been shifted to give access to a loose board. From his satchel he took a sheet he'd borrowed from Mrs Trigg, laid it over the hearth, took off his jacket, and ran a cautious hand up the chimney – something a lady could only do, he reflected, if she was in her chemise, and even then she'd have to account for the soot in the water on the washstand after she'd cleaned it off her arm …

At least the hearth was cold. The spring day was a warm one. The windows stood open, and he heard the buzzing of a fly that blundered into the room, amplified as it bumbled its way into the open armoire.

January turned his head.

Why would a fly go
into
a cupboard?

He got to his feet.

As a child growing up in the slave quarters, January knew well the ways of flies. Hot afternoons, in the long, sticky summers, he'd observed them on the walls of the cabin, when all the boys and his sister Olympe would have contests as to how many they could kill.

Flies go to warmth, and to light
.

A second fly had found its way there by the time he'd crossed the room to the massive piece.

Both insects were crawling around on the underside of the huge cupboard's top, glossy green-brown in the shadows.

And to blood
.

It occurred to him, almost without conscious thought, that the high carved pediment around the top of the armoire could easily be concealing space above the top shelf, like an attic. There was a long crack between the two halves of that whitewashed underside where the flies crawled, and he pushed gently up on it. It yielded easily to the pressure, revealing a space five feet by almost two and a half, and nearly a foot deep.

Groping in that space, he found a small pair of laborer's brogans, a pair of britches splattered across one thigh with blood that looked two or three days old, a man's calico shirt with blood on its front and a corduroy jacket whose right sleeve was splattered, as it would be if the wearer had cut the throat of a man lying asleep in bed. A brown woolen cap, of the sort the Irish laborers wore. A coil of clothesline rope. A razor and the stumps of two white wax candles.

Damn the woman to hell
…

Four bottles of patent medicine – he sniffed them and shrank from the reek of opium – and a little box containing ink and a couple of steel-tipped pens. There was also what looked like a very long-barreled iron key with two wards, diametrically opposite one other, so that, looked at face-on, it resembled a circle with a bar across its equator, projecting from either side. Two pairs of cheap cotton gloves, one clean, one much dirtied with soot, and a folded sheet, also sprinkled and smudged with soot.

Very like, in fact, the sheet that he himself had borrowed from Mrs Trigg.

He returned to the hearth, knowing now what he had to look for. A foot-square section of the hearth bricks, beneath the fire grate itself, contained a round hole with projections that exactly matched the key. Inserted in the hole and turned, it proved to be not a key but a detachable handle, with which he lifted up the whole section of bricks, to reveal a space about two feet deep beneath.

There were four packets of papers within. Each packet – he could see at a glance – included what looked like a bank book. But his eye was drawn to the paper folded on top, which bore the now-familiar magic squares. He lifted it out, and though, like most people, his memory for a random grid of twenty-five numbers was not good, he thought the two that were immediately visible were the same.

He had no time to unfold the paper to see all of them, however, because at that moment footfalls creaked the board immediately outside the bedroom door. January dropped the paper back into its hole and replaced the bricks, scooped the sheet together and thrust it under the bed even as the doorknob turned, and rolled after it as the door opened.

‘Goddam bitch,' whispered Luke Bray's voice.

J
anuary held his breath.

The decision to go under the bed had been a split-second choice and it precluded any alternative explanation. Anyone, black or white, concealing himself under the bed of the mistress of the house was
ipso facto
Up To No Good. Moreover, the counterpane didn't extend entirely to the floor. Had Bray bent down and looked under the bed they'd have been nose-to-nose.

But Bray didn't.

He crossed at once to the desk, opened the drawers – by the sound of it, pulled them entirely free of the body of the desk – and rifled through them, muttering a
sotto voce
string of imprecations against some woman, presumably his wife, as he did so.

Reason enough
, thought January,
to have those little hidey-holes under the hearth and on top of the armoire constructed, even had one NOT done murder in disguise.

‘Goddam lazy wenches …' Bray turned to the armoire. January had replaced the false ceiling but hadn't shut its doors. He heard the master of the house take the drawers out of the bottom, as he himself had done, and systematically look under the shelf paper. January could see Bray's feet, shod in polished half-boots, such as an assistant secretary to the Secretary of the Navy would wear in pursuit of his duties. He even brought over the same chair that January had brought from the desk, and stood on it, as January had done, to look on the armoire's top, though it evidently never occurred to him – no more than it had occurred to January – to measure the distance between the top of the armoire and the ‘ceiling' above its uppermost shelf.