Good Man Friday (35 page)

He was afraid of her.

And he'd thought he was the only one.

But accusation of a man's wife was one of the things that a man must answer with blood, even if he himself suspected the accusation to be true. Bray's eyes shifted as he revolved the problem in his mind, fumbling with it as a drunkard would fumble with his fly buttons, trying to sort out whom to challenge, what to do.

Before Bray could gather his thoughts, January drew from his pocket the crumpled sheet of numbers that he'd taken from Bray's desk, held it out to him with the decoded translation and the magic-square key. ‘Mede gave me this before he disappeared,' he said. ‘He said he'd found the key to the code in your watch case when you were ill. But he didn't know how to decode it. Mr Poe here figured it out only this Saturday.'

Bray's wandering eyes focused as he recognized the text of the decryption. ‘Mede …'

‘Mede told me that he had to leave your house,' January went on. ‘Not from ingratitude or from any desire to run away from you, but because he suspected Mrs Bray was mixed up in something dangerous and he didn't know how to tell you about it. It wasn't his place, he said. And he feared what would happen, if you took her side against him.'

‘I never would …'

But it was clear he sought to convince himself.

Poe spoke up, giving weight to his words like Kean playing Macbeth. ‘He said he'd found things hidden in her room, sir. Spoke of a secret compartment in the top of her armoire, and of a key there that would open another hiding place down under the hearth—'

January shot the poet a glance of startled admiration – he'd been racking his brains for a way to reveal this proof to Bray without opening himself to accusations of searching a white lady's room.

‘He said you had loved her.' Poe dropped his voice, torn with pity and sadness. ‘And, he said, he did not know who to tell, nor how he could learn if what was going on was harmful or not.'

Luke Bray buried his head in his hands. ‘It sounds like him,' he whispered. ‘It sounds just like Mede. My Good Man Friday, always lookin' out for me …'

He looked up, eyes hard as gunmetal in the gloom. ‘She's gone out,' he said. ‘I don't know where. I never know where she goes. She drives herself, most days, handles a four-in-hand better'n that lazy buck Jem ever did. This evenin' she had Jem drive her to the National Hotel, said her friends would see her home …'

Which means she can come back in a cab, and no one the wiser
…

‘You know where Mede's gone?'

January shook his head. ‘He just disappeared, sir,' he said. ‘Went out one evening and didn't come back. Left all his things in his room.'

‘Bitch.' Bray's voice turned soft. ‘God-damned crawling bitch. Who's she sendin' this to?' He held the papers up, with a hand that trembled. ‘It's that English nancy Oldmixton, ain't it?
Fucken
God-damn spy— He put her on to me …' His face twisted suddenly, and the papers fell from his hand as he suddenly pressed it to his chest. ‘Damn her to hell—'

January caught Bray's bandaged wrist, then sought the pulse in his throat. It was thready and irregular. Henri's valet Leopold, who had ridden from Mrs Purchase's behind his master, stepped quickly to the bell pull and tugged it. When a servant appeared January said, ‘Get your master some hartshorn,' though he guessed that the action of the mild sedative, on top of the amount of whiskey he'd consumed, would put him to sleep.

Just as well
…

In the few minutes of waiting for the servant to return he glanced around the dim-lit parlor, noticed that Poe was nowhere to be seen …

The poet slipped back into the room in the wake of Bray's valet Peter with the glass. ‘She's cleared,' he whispered as he knelt at January's side. ‘The key was lying beside the hearth, soot everywhere. The compartment below the hearth is empty. Looks like she grabbed what she could and fled.'

Bray leaned back in his chair, his face ghastly. Peter – a middle-aged, wiry man with grizzled hair – helped his master to his feet and guided him toward the door. A well-trained servant – though, speaking no English, he could have had only the faintest notion of what was going on – Leopold caught up the nearest lamp and followed into the darkness of the hall.

‘But why?' Henri turned to January like a lost dog, his brown eyes flooded with tears of shock and terror. ‘You say she's kidnapped Minou … Surely she knows we'll come after her? She won't hurt her, will she? And Charmian—'

‘Why take a child?' broke in Preston. ‘Won't that only slow her down? She can't have hoped that we wouldn't know …'

His voice like flint – his heart like flint in his chest – January replied, ‘She hoped we would know. If she wanted Minou dead she'd have found a way to kill her without alerting us all an hour later that she was gone.'

He led the way to the parlor door, and there was an awkward moment in the hall as the black members of the party – himself, Trigg, Preston and Leopold, who came running down the stairs again – turned automatically toward the rear of the house and the whites all turned toward the front door …

‘She wants us to stay and search for her,' he said. ‘Just exactly as if she'd cut her and left her bleeding, knowing we'd stop and save Minou and let
her
go free.'

‘Cut her—' Henri pressed his fat hands to his mouth. He was shaking all over and looked worse than the fainting man who'd been led up the stairs. ‘What has she—?'

‘At a guess,' said January grimly, ‘she's turned her over to Fowler and the slave traders.'

And clean against all custom – to the scandalized horror of Bray's butler – the entire party, blacks and whites, went out through the front door to where the carriage waited in the drive.

Chloë caught up with them – springing out of a cab, ethereal in pale-pink satin and coruscating with diamonds – at just short of midnight on the front doorstep of the British Ministry. Sir Henry Fox was still out gambling somewhere, so Poe's peremptory knock on the front door had at least been answered. But the rest of the Ministry staff – as the Scots butler had informed Poe in frosty accents – was long since abed.

‘Give Mr Oldmixton this, please,' January had said, and handed the butler the note he'd written just before leaving Bray's house. ‘I think he'll see us.'

‘What happened?' Chloë demanded as the Reverend Perkins jumped down from the cab driver's box and the cab rattled away into the night. ‘This good man tells me—'

The Ministry door opened, and Mr Oldmixton stood framed in it, dark hair rumpled, swathed in a satin dressing-gown of gorgeous pattern and hue. ‘Rowena, what on earth—?' He stopped short, surveying the assorted group of men and women, black and white, before him on the step.

‘You were able to read my message, then, sir?' inquired January politely, and held out his hand for the note that Oldmixton still carried.

‘
Your
message?' The Englishman made as if to thrust the note into his dressing-gown pocket, then grimaced, and handed it over.

24ØØ2224Ø3162419Ø711Ø81311202321Ø1Ø721Ø813Ø917Ø324242021121912Ø1Ø9 Ø8Ø92221Ø81013Ø424Ø8

‘
Emergency
,' he quoted it, ‘
all is discovered
– by the mere fact that you've managed to encrypt that message I see that this is in fact the case –
must see you at once
. I perceive I am due for a few severe slaps upon my wrist from Lord Palmerston when I'm sent home. But what I've done is no crime, you know. Our nations aren't at war – yet. Where
is
Mrs Bray?'

‘Probably halfway to Baltimore – sir,' said January. ‘Having learned, sometime this afternoon, that we'd discovered the whereabouts of Selwyn Singletary—'

The startled flare of hope in Oldmixton's eyes confirmed what January had suspected, and he went on, ‘Her one idea was to delay pursuit until she could get clean away. Since, as I understand, you employ Mr Kyle Fowler, I think Mrs Bray kidnapped my sister and her child and turned them over to him, knowing we would follow that scent rather than hers. And since Mr Fowler is no idiot, I think the first thing he'll do is get his new merchandise out of Washington, so I hope, sir, that you're going to make matters easier for us by telling us where Fowler has his headquarters and where he'd take a prime fancy for quick sale.'

‘Come inside – McAleister!' Oldmixton shouted over his shoulder as he stepped from the doorway to admit them. And, when the butler appeared: ‘McAleister, send to the stables and have them saddle—' He ran a calculating eye over the group on the steps. ‘Have them saddle Rufus and Masianello and six other horses … I shall be down again in a moment—' He turned toward the steps, then halted in a swirl of purple-and-green satin robe-skirts: ‘Where is Singletary? Is he alive? Is he well?'

‘I don't know how well he is, sir,' replied January, ‘but he was alive this morning. He's been held at Gurry's private insane asylum since October – and I only trust that Mrs Bray was in too much of a hurry to get out of town to go back and poison him after she kidnapped my sister.'

‘I'll go there now,' said Chloë. ‘Mr – Rivers, is it?' She addressed the hired coachman. ‘Mr Rivers, do you know the road out of Alexandria—?'

Oldmixton protested, ‘It's midnight, my dear girl—!'

‘Twelve twenty-eight.' She plucked Henri's watch from his pocket and checked it. ‘If she administered poison to him at ten, I should probably be in time, if I can get in. I don't suppose you could write me a warrant, sir? Henri—'

‘I'm going with Ben.' Henri turned toward his wife with sudden dignity. ‘It's my doing that Dominique came with us here at all. I have to be with them. I have to—'

‘Of course you do, dearest.' Chloë stood on tiptoe, to kiss his heavy cheek. ‘I was only going to say, if you'll be riding – I'm going to take the carriage to the asylum – borrow a scarf from Mr Oldmixton … Mr Poe, might I ask you to accompany me? We'll work out exactly what our relationship is to Mr Singletary on the way. Do you happen to know if she took her jewelry? No? Then I suggest you send someone back there. Dealers don't pay more than thirty percent of market value, and she won't have enough to establish herself if she suspects her bank accounts are going to be watched. She'll need something that can be converted to cash immediately. Take care of him, Ben.' She turned to January, regarded him with huge, pale eyes like a sibyl, behind the thick rounds of glass. ‘And of yourself.'

For a moment something else flitted across her eyes: fear for the husband her family had pushed her into marrying? Regret, that he was riding off to rescue his mistress, even a mistress whom she liked? Or just puzzlement about how to wish someone luck when one didn't believe in luck or miracles?

Then she turned, straight as a soldier in her lace and diamonds, caught up her skirts and ran back to the carriage, where Mr Rivers had already sprung on to the box. Poe looked uncertain, but January said, ‘Go,' not needing to explain that with Henri and – it now seemed – Oldmixton, they had the requisite compliment of white witnesses to whatever else the night would bring.

Like a raven in his black greatcoat Poe dashed to the carriage. The door wasn't even shut when Esau Rivers flicked the reins, and the horses – sweaty but game – broke into a gallop down the wide processional expanse of Twenty-Sixth Street, and vanished into the night.

K
yle Fowler worked out of a tavern called the Golden Calf, in Reservation C. There was a pen out back of the usual sort, with stout plank walls twelve feet tall and a shed built across one side. It was to this pen that Elsie Fowler conducted Oldmixton and his party, with a great show of indignation at being ‘rousted' at a quarter to one in the morning, as if she'd been asleep instead of pouring out stale beer ‘needled' with camphor to men watching two ‘waiter girls' fight in their chemises for a five-dollar purse.

‘We got practically no stock this week,' groused the woman, with a sidelong glance at January and Trigg, who accompanied the Englishman inside. ‘Greedy goddam bastards, think we're made of money – say, you wouldn't be interested in selling those two boys of yours, would you, mister? We pay cash, three hundred on the barrel-head, no questions asked … That big buck of yours looks like a prime field-hand, we'd go three-fifty …'

‘I am the one asking the questions, Madame,' retorted Oldmixton. ‘Is Mr Fowler about?'

She held up her lamp as she led the way into the yard. January followed; Trigg remained in the doorway, one hand in the pocket of his coat where he kept a slung shot, the other hand unobtrusively close to the pistol hidden in his waistband. January bore his own pistol and knife, hidden as always, plus another pistol lent him by Oldmixton, who openly carried a rifle. An uncovered latrine pit on the far side of the yard filled the air with its reek. January felt the furious longing to empty his weapon into the woman's broad calico back as she walked along the open front of the shed with her lamp.

‘Kyle's gone down to Fauquier County; he'll be back Saturday for that ball game …'

Oldmixton returned to the doorway, and January said quietly, ‘Check the cellars, sir.'

There were four cells in the cellar, windowless and stinking. None was occupied, but by the smell, two had been in use recently. Again January stayed in the doorway, Trigg on the stair. This was no time to get trapped underground, and there was no telling how desperate the Fowlers were, or if they thought they could get away with murdering a British Ministry secretary to protect themselves from a possible accusation of treason.

Given the current state of the Washington constabulary, reflected January, maybe they actually could. Oldmixton held the lamp he carried close to each of the cells' walls, and checked the masonry in the storeroom where the establishment kept beer and coals as well. The lamplight wasn't strong, and it would be all too easy to miss something, but at least there probably wasn't a sub-cellar. This close to the canal, the clayey earth underfoot squished from seepage. The fetor was stunning.