Ran Away (38 page)

‘How did you guess that it was Granville?’ asked Rose, much later, when Hannibal had disappeared into the night and Hüseyin Pasha – bathed and fed and with his bruises cleaned – had retired to the bedroom that had been made up for him and his wife. Nasir and his tutor, and the faithful Ghulaam and Ra’eesa, had been given beds in the attic dormitory. As Rose laid Baby John in his wicker cradle, January heard the occasional soft tread of footfalls overhead. In the room behind theirs, Gabriel said something to Zizi-Marie. Tomorrow, January recalled, there would be another ‘visitor’ underneath the house as well.

He moved over to let Rose slip under the comforters at his side. The wind screamed around the eaves, yet the house itself seemed filled with silence, a dark ship in a lightless ocean.

All safe together
, thought January,
for this time, in this night
 . . . 

Fathers and sons, wives and friends, secrets and time.

‘Partly, it was when Hannibal spoke of being hired to play the part of Tim Valentine, for the convenience of Valentine’s daughter,’ he said. ‘And seeing how he’d dyed his hair. But it didn’t come to me how a person could be entirely invented for convenience – like Mr Smith – until I saw Nasir ibn-Hüseyin for the first time. Then I realized that Mr Smith was a fabrication, played by someone who couldn’t let his face be seen in New Orleans  . . .  therefore, someone who was known. And I remembered Bernadette Metoyer’s new earrings, and her sisters’ new feathers and furbelows. It had to be Granville – and he had to be hiding in Bernadette’s house.’

‘And she’s never going to speak to you or me or Dominique again, if Granville ever tells her how we flushed him out,’ said Rose as she laid her spectacles aside. ‘But what has Nasir got to do with it? He’s a very handsome and well-spoken little boy and
nothing
like an absconding banker with four mistresses.’

‘And nothing like his father either,’ said January thoughtfully. ‘Or his purported mother. Who he is like – strikingly so – is a young man I saw only once in Paris. He was the younger brother, I think, of a widowed female cousin in the household of the banker Jacob L’Ecolier: the household to which Hüseyin’s concubine Shamira fled after she escaped. A widowed female cousin who had five children already,’ he went on as Rose’s brow pulled down over those lovely green-hazel eyes. ‘And few prospects to bring up or educate the sixth.’

‘You mean Shamira talked this woman into switching her child for Shamira’s, when they both gave birth? I can see why,’ she added quickly. ‘Hüseyin Pasha is still a wealthy man – as
Sitt
Jamilla assured me in
very
solid terms after dinner, I meant to tell you  . . .’

‘Shamira had no child,’ said January. ‘The amount of quinine Hüseyin’s lesser wife poisoned her with would have caused her to abort, and there was no sign of that. Shamira had planned to escape from the moment she heard that there was the slightest chance of leaving Constantinople and going to France. And she knew her master would take her with him – and give her all the comforts and favoritism she could ask for – if he thought she was carrying his son. But it meant that she would draw down on herself the jealousy of the other women in the household  . . .  And it meant that, once in France, she
had
to escape, before it became obvious that her pregnancy was a lie. It was her passage to freedom.’

‘Do you think Hüseyin knows?’

January was silent, thinking of what he knew of that coarse-featured, ugly man who slept beneath his roof. The man who had wept for the concubines who had betrayed him. Who had given freedom to that fleeing girl in Paris – and had handed over the letter that would have destroyed his enemy, in order to save Ayasha’s life.

‘I don’t know. He certainly saw the widow’s brother when we were in L’Ecolier’s house, though of course he may not remember. He might guess,’ he said. ‘But whether it would matter to him – whether he would only see the infant that was handed to him in Paris as the son God chose to give him, for reasons of God’s own – that I cannot say.’

He leaned across Rose and blew out the candle.

Falling rain woke him, and the far-off chiming of the cathedral clock. Though he did not recall his dream, he knew it had been about Paris. The rain had quenched the smell of sugar from the air, and for the first moment, on wakening, it seemed to him that if he lit the candle, he would see the steep pitch of the mansard roof, the shallow dormer of the Rue de l’Aube, the armoire that had stood against the wall near the bed’s foot, and beyond that, Ayasha’s work table, the tiny tiled cook-range, the glow of the banked fire shining in the cat Hadji’s eyes.

The memory of the place came back to him with such wrenching force that it took his breath away. It seemed to him that if he were to put his hand to his face, he would smell on it the sandalwood and frankincense that had always seemed to perfume Ayasha’s hair.

He wrapped the quilt from the bed’s foot around him, and his feet found their way in the darkness out into the parlor. He opened one shutter of one window, and though the moon broke through the clouds enough to show him the wet trees of Rue Esplanade beyond the dark frame of the gallery, mostly there was only darkness beyond.

A darkness that wasn’t Paris.

As if he’d strayed from the proper road somehow through an error of his own and could not find his way back to the world he was supposed to occupy, he felt bereft, stranded and sick with grief.
There was nothing I could have done
, he thought.
I couldn’t stay, when she was gone
 . . . 

He pressed his forehead to the window’s framing, the pain inside him like a ball of broken glass.

Rose. How can I tell Rose?

Tell her what? That he loved a woman who was dead? Loved her still and forever?

This was something he’d never even told his confessor.

And if Olympe offered me a hoodoo, to uproot the shadow-flower of that love out of my heart, I would turn away
.

The floorboard creaked. He didn’t look around.

Rose asked, ‘Can I do anything?’

He shook his head.

‘Get you anything?’

‘A heart that will do you justice?’

Her arm slipped through his. ‘Hearts have nothing to do with justice,’ she said. ‘Or with waking life. Did you think I’d be jealous, when I hear you whisper her name in your sleep?’

His whole body heated with shame. ‘I thought it was done.’

‘How can it be done,’ asked Rose reasonably, ‘when it’s part of what you were, of what you are? Does dreaming of her make you happy?’

He wanted to say:
No
, for her sake, but there is a truth that lives in darkness and he whispered, ‘Yes.’

The gallery cut off the watery moonlight, so he could not see her face, but he heard the smile of genuine joy in her voice. ‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘We aren’t responsible for where our dreams take us at night, or for our first thoughts when we wake in darkness. If we could change them I dare say we would.’

She went on, ‘It isn’t often, now, that I dream of the man who raped me. But I have woken, and lain in the darkness, shaking as if he had just left me lying in the woods behind my father’s barn. Having been mauled by a wolf, even though I know to the core of my bones that the one who lies next to me is the kindest, the gentlest and most loving soul on this earth – the friend who loves me dearest and whom I most dearly love – all that my heart knows in that moment is that his flesh smells like a wolf’s flesh, and if I reached out to touch him my hand would feel a wolf’s pelt. And so I don’t.’

He stared at her – or at the dim silhouette of her in the darkness – aghast that these were the dreams of which she never spoke; that this wound remained in her, that he had hoped would heal.
Had
healed  . . .  He could only put his arms around her, light and thin and gawky as a heron.

‘Beloved  . . .’

Helplessness filled him, worse than any fear of death.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It almost never happens now, and when it does, the  . . .  the dreadfulness passes more quickly. I’m glad I can tell you,’ she added softly. ‘I’ve felt so bad about it, as if there were something I could do about what I feel.’

Her head rested against his arm – high on his shoulder, higher than Ayasha’s had been – and her hair smelled of chamomile and gunpowder, from some experiment  . . .  ‘I’m glad when you dream, it’s of someone you love. Would you like some cocoa, before we go back to bed?’