Good Man Friday (7 page)

‘And what,' inquired January, ‘do they plan to put into this nice new Treasury when it's finished?'

Preston looked more than usually grave. ‘That I wouldn't know, sir. But Democrats from all over the country are coming into town asking for jobs there—' He extended a hand to assist Dominique over a modest puddle, which in January's fraternal opinion his sister could easily have hopped across herself.

‘Those gentlemen there.' Preston nodded toward the knots of men in threadbare coats, spitting and reading newspapers on the steps of several of the grand houses of Lafayette Square. ‘First thing the Democrats did, when Jackson got into office, was fire all the men who opposed him and replace them with his own supporters. Senators, and the gentlemen that head up the departments, have the disposal of jobs as well. Last fall, during the Special Session of Congress, you'd see a line outside the President's House clear to the street.'

‘When in the fall?'

‘All through September, and the first two weeks of October,' the conductor replied. January guessed his age at just over thirty, and he spoke with the accent of New England. His customary gravity seemed to extend to the protectiveness he'd developed toward Dominique, and he led her along as if he feared the slightest jar would shatter her.

Having seen London, Paris, and Rome, January felt a sort of amazement at the backwater provincialism of this capital city of the country in which he'd been born. Grandiose boulevards stretched for miles, wide as processional ways and unpaved as village cart-tracks, between cow pastures and swampy streams. The brick mansions and commercial row-houses of ‘downtown' were more reminiscent of a modest river-port – Baton Rouge or Natchez – than of the national grandeur frequently claimed in political speeches. As they passed the President's House and entered the more populous zones traffic was thick, noisy, and bogged in the mud of the unpaved streets; where the thoroughfares were firm, draymen black and white seemed unable to resist the urge to lash their horses like Roman chariot teams at a dead gallop, scattering pedestrians right and left.

As they sprang clear of one such speeding Jehu, January inquired, ‘If a stranger were run down by one of those lunatics, where would they take him? Is there a public hospital?'

‘Up on Crow Hill,' said Preston. ‘That's a couple of miles north of here.'

‘Is
everything
in this town a couple of miles apart?' Thèrése lifted her petticoats to pointedly examine her too-tight shoe.

‘What about the police department?' asked January. ‘If he were shot in a tavern—'

‘You don't want to get anywhere near the constables.' Preston lowered his voice and glanced back at Charmian and Musette, stopped now to gaze in wonder at a stuffed owl in a shop window. ‘Nor the jail. There's only one constable to each ward here, and their job is purely and solely to keep black men from “illegally assembling”. There's a dealer named Fowler who pays the constables to let him into the jails “looking for runaways”. And any likely-looking man who finds himself jailed for having abolitionist newspapers in his possession, or failing to step out of the way of a white man on the street, is going to be “recognized” as a runaway and taken into Fowler's slave jail.'

Preston's mouth hardened. ‘Dealers like Neal at the Central Market, and Bill Williams, have their own slave-jails – the smaller dealers pay off the constables to keep their slaves in the public jails. If your friend was a black man—'

‘A white man, English. He disappeared here in October.'

‘I should go to the Ministry, then. If he was killed in a tavern, the owner would pay off the constables and not report it. But if he were in a street accident, the Minister might have heard.'

Since Chloë Viellard had written to the British Minister as soon as she guessed Singletary was missing, January only nodded, and they passed on to other topics. They were now in the center of town, and the street was lined with boarding houses and hotels, oyster parlors and barber shops, harness makers, livery stables, tobacconists and stationers. At the far end of the street, above a scrim of straggly poplar-trees, the flattish copper dome of the Capitol rose above its shallow hill, like a countryman's hat.

‘Last year was a short session,' Preston explained. ‘They rose in March. The long sessions, they'll sit through May or sometimes June, if they've a great deal of business. After the short sessions, the Congressmen all go home – many of the foreign ministers as well.

‘Most Congressmen come here without their families.' Preston waved at the façade of a grubby clapboard structure grandly named
The Virginia House
. ‘Senators sometimes bring them, and gentlemen like Mr Henry Clay, or Mr Daniel Webster, are wealthy enough to rent houses for their terms. But most Congressmen live in rooms and eat around a common table like students at a college. The biggest houses belong to folk like Mr Corcoran the banker, and Mr Peabody who owns buildings all over town. They're the ones that the Congressmen go “calling” on to leave their cards … Those, and the foreign ministries.'

‘Benjamin, look!' Minou caught his arm. ‘Oh, the darling thing … That lady across the street, just look at her bonnet … Is that Belgian lace, do you think, or French?'

‘You'll want to visit Rochelle's up on K Street,' said Preston with a smile. ‘Mrs Perkins will take you—'

Thèrése rolled her eyes to indicate her opinion of the sartorial taste displayed by the Reverend Perkins' chubby wife. Dominique said, ‘Thèrése, hush! Honestly, I don't know why I put up with you …'

As they neared Capitol Hill, the neighborhood deteriorated. Among the shabby plank boarding-houses and taverns they passed half a dozen buildings which bore signs: SLAVES FOR SALE. Chained coffles of slaves passed them from the direction of the Baltimore road, bare feet thick with gray mud. Everywhere in town January had seen dark faces, but further up the avenue the black men and women he'd seen were well-dressed, like artisans or shopkeepers. Here they wore the clothes of laborers, or the numbered tin badges of slaves. Thèrése ignored them and Dominique seemed to, but Charmian, who had been chattering brightly to Preston, grew silent, and January felt her small, lace-gloved hand tighten around his fingers.

‘There.' Preston halted, and his voice sank. ‘Across the street in that doorway, see 'em? The man in the green jacket, the woman in the striped skirt …'

January nodded.

To call the man's face bestial would have insulted every harmless four-footed creature God had made. It was, rather, the worst of human: hard, calm, with brown eyes like a doll's, expressionless. The long chin was unshaven, and his long dark hair unclean. He'd been talking to one of the dealers under a sign that said: SLAVES – TOP PRICES PAID – FANCIES, but he turned his head, watched Dominique, January, and those with them with calculation that made January's blood go cold. The woman's round, lumpy countenance would have been pleasant were it not for the watchful squint and the stripe of tobacco-stain down the middle of her chin.

‘Mark 'em good,' murmured Preston. ‘Those are the Fowlers, Elsie and Kyle. They run the biggest ring of kidnappers in town. They work with all the dealers. They have houses of prostitution, too, just across the Avenue in Reservation C. The yellow man behind them—'

January looked: a man almost his own height and powerful build, with African features, a broken nose, and a complexion little darker than a Spaniard's.

‘—that's Kyle's chief driver, Davy Quent. They work with a wagon with a false bottom; two big bay horses with white feet. Kyle, Quent and their boys can knock a man out and have him under the bottom of the wagon in half a minute, tied and gagged. If you see that team or any of the three of them in a place where there aren't a dozen people about, turn around and get out of there as quick as you can walk.'

The line of slaves went by. Davy Quent didn't even glance at them.
This is our job. This has nothing to do with me.

The Capitol's low hill rose a few streets beyond, surrounded by what was probably supposed to be a lawn of weedy grass. A gang of young men – they could have been apprentices or clerks – played what appeared to be a four-cornered game of cricket: ‘That's town ball,' explained Preston. ‘They play it all over New England, and the year before last a couple of Massachusetts clerks at the Navy Yard got up a team. Now everyone in town's playing. It's just One Old Cat with Massachusetts rules.'

January had never heard of One Old Cat, but the game looked like what children played on Hounslow Heath, on his one visit to London in 1822. Across the street from the Capitol stood two slave-jails, and the men chained on the bench outside watched the game, and cheered when one or another of the team that was ‘up' thwacked the thrown leather ball with a round stick like a cricket-bat, and dashed the circuit marked out with four-foot pegs.

Shallow steps descended from the two wings of the Capitol, where the Houses of Congress met. ‘They barred Negroes from entering the Capitol years ago,' said Preston, in that carefully neutral voice he had used at the train station. ‘I'm sorry for it, for I would have liked to see the laws of our country made.'

‘Maybe that's why they did it,' January said.

The inevitable clumps of office seekers, waiting on the Capitol steps for the appearance of Senators or Congressman who might recommend them for work, watched the ball players, too. Now and then an elected official would emerge from the halls of Congress, dignified in an elegant coat and a tall beaver hat; the office seekers would surround him, practically wagging their tails.

The representatives of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness passed down the steps and within twenty feet of the chained men on the benches without so much as a glance.

Many of them, January reminded himself, had probably seen slaves sold before.

But as they walked away from the legislature of their nation, January found himself remembering the story of Jesus' visit to the Temple: how he had become so enraged at the moneylenders who'd set up shop in its courtyard that he'd taken a whip to them, overturning the tables, scattering the coin, and driving their sacrilegious greedy asses out into the street …

And got nailed to a cross for his trouble
.

Jesus
, thought January,
where are you now?

‘I
would not,' said January to Darius Trigg, later that afternoon, ‘want your good wife to have wrong ideas about my sister. Hers is a common arrangement, the custom of the country in Louisiana. Henri Viellard has been my sister's protector for eleven years. It isn't …'

He hesitated, seeking a word, leaning in the doorway of the shed where he'd found his host cutting kindling for the next morning's fires.

‘It's like a marriage,' he finished. ‘For many men in New Orleans, it
is
marriage – they never take white wives. It drives their families insane,' he added, with a certain satisfaction.

‘You know –' Trigg drove the hatchet into the block – ‘if I had the choice to be rich and white, and barred from ever marrying Mrs Trigg … I don't think I could do it.'

January thought of that formidable woman, six feet tall and square and solid as a drystone chimney, and smiled at the light in the smaller man's eyes. ‘I feel the same way about Mrs Janvier,' he said. ‘The
real
Mrs Janvier, back in New Orleans. I was asked to pretend Dominique was my wife, for the sake of appearances, on the voyage out here … If that kind of arrangement was good enough for the patriarch Abraham in the Bible,' he added gravely, ‘it should be good enough for us regular folks.'

‘Except that Abraham pretended his wife was his sister,' Trigg grinned, ‘not that his sister was his wife … And I don't care if he
did
have some kind of special deal with God, that business with the Pharoah always sounded fishy to me.'

‘Me, too, but I got hit with a ruler by Père Antoine for asking about it.'

‘I think we musta gone to the same school.' The landlord rubbed the back of his head reminiscently, then bent to gather up the kindling. January fetched the big willow basket from beside the door. In the yard, eight-year-old Mandie Trigg called to her sister to stop chasing those chickens before she got pecked, and help her with the eggs. ‘And this M'sieu Viellard's here in town?'

‘At the Indian Queen Hotel. With his wife – who seems to have no objection to the arrangement—'

‘If he dies, can I marry her?'

‘You wouldn't like it.' January recalled Chloë Viellard's prim humor and astringent tongue. ‘She's often said that she knows she couldn't make M'sieu Viellard – or any man – a comfortable wife, and that it isn't his fault their families insisted on the match. And she knows my sister makes him happy.'

Trigg grimaced. ‘I guess it's better than everybody sneaking around making each other miserable … I'll let Mrs Trigg know.'

Upon their return from their tour of the city, January had found two letters on the table in the hall, addressed in Henri Viellard's tiny, unreadable hand. One was to Minou, advising her that his carriage – hired, coachman and all, for their stay in the capital – would call for her that evening, to take her to a house in Georgetown, also rented for the evening from a Mrs Arabella Purchase. It was this which had prompted January's quest for his host, not only to make sure that Mrs Trigg understood the conventions inherited from French society which might not be viewed in the same light by Americans, but to ask about Mrs Purchase. The memory of Preston's words about Kyle Fowler and his hollow-bottomed wagon lingered unpleasantly.

‘Oh, she'll be perfectly safe,' said Trigg, when January – a little circumspectly – mentioned the evening's program. ‘I know Bella Purchase. She knows her business depends on a good reputation and repeat customers. That's the custom of the country here in Washington.'