Ran Away (9 page)

Thoughtfully, January shaved, bathed, and dressed in a morning costume of stylish gray; checked the contents of his music satchel; collected his cornet, since the morning’s agenda included rehearsals for the Opera; and descended the seventy-two steps to the street. To judge by the outcry as he reached the
deuxième étage
, the situation in the Paillole household had not changed since yesterday (‘
You cannot go on expecting your father and me to support you if you show no interest in your studies! Every morning I ask the Blessed Virgin why it was your brother God saw fit to take from us, and not yourself . . . !
’) and on the
premier
, he was delayed by a long diatribe from Madame Barronde about that worthless brat that Ayasha persisted in hiring to carry water up the stairs for her and who was just looking for what he could steal. Yes, it was Christian of her to give the boy a
sou
now and again, but only ill would come of encouraging those devil’s imps of street children  . . . 

Poucet, nine years old, lounged on the steps of the building across the street in a spot of thin sunlight, dividing an apple and part of a loaf of bread with the little gang of younger children who ran with him. The boy saluted January cheerfully as January crossed to him. It was true that Ayasha would generally pay the child to lug water up the four flights from the yard rather than do it herself, and it was also true that Poucet or one of his gang of infant beggars probably did steal stockings if Madame Barronde’s hired girl left them hanging on the clothesline. He suspected that Madame Barronde would have shot Poucet if she’d thought she could have gotten away with it, rather than have him exercise his ‘evil influence’ on her nine-year-old Charlotte or seven-year-old Jean-Stanislas, who regarded the juvenile rabble with awed fascination.

‘
Et alors, copains
.’ January returned the salute. ‘Thank you for bringing up the water.’

‘It’s nuthin’.’ Poucet shrugged elaborately, but January could tell he was pleased. ‘Ma Barronde carried on like we was gonna steal it or somethin’. You shoulda heard your lady dress her down! What’s a
harmoota
?’

‘Just what you think it is,’ said January with a grin – careful, as he always was, to address the boy by the formal ‘vous’ of adulthood, rather than calling him ‘tu’ like a child. ‘You have anything going the next few days?’

‘Saturday I’m speakin’ before the Chamber of Deputies,’ replied the boy grandly. ‘An’ Sunday I have to give the sermon at Notre Dame. ’Til then I’m at your service, chief.’

‘Thank you,’ said January. He handed him ten centimes. ‘You know the Marquis de Longuechasse’s house?’

‘Sure thing. His coachman’s a sport – lets us sleep in the hayloft sometimes, long as we’re up and out of there early before Her Ladyship gets up.’

‘I thought all rich ladies slept until three in the afternoon.’

‘Not her!’ piped in Chatoine, Poucet’s sister, a tiny child almost lost in a much older boy’s cast-offs. ‘Has to get up early, see, ’cause the maids might steal a piece of coal while they’re makin’ breakfast.’

‘You know the Marquis’ brother?’

‘The one that’s been in foreign parts?’

‘That’s the man,’ said January. ‘Can you follow him? See where he goes?’

‘I can tell you now where he goes,’ retorted Poucet. ‘He never goes no place but to the Bishop’s, and to St-Louis-Le-Grand to hobnob with the Jesuits, and out to the convent in Batignolles where his aunt’s a nun.’

‘Batignolles?’ January remembered the clear notes of the convent bells beyond the woods, the cold mists outside the windows of the Café La Marseillaise. ‘St Theresa’s?’

‘Some saint.’ The boy shrugged. ‘Whoever they are, they don’t like kids hangin’ around the gate corruptin’ the girls locked up inside.’

January thought about this for a moment. ‘Does de Longuechasse have a single-horse chaise?’

‘That he does, chief. Red like sealing wax, with black wheels and a black horse to draw it. What a mover!
Formidable
!’

‘Find out if you can – and without anyone at his stables knowing you’re asking – if the chaise went out Saturday night. Can you do all that?’

‘Is he up to something?’ Chatoine’s bright black eyes sparkled under the short-chopped straggle of her fair hair. ‘Him and the Jesuits planning to take over the country?’

‘They’ve already taken over the country, you dumb
andouille
!’ Poucet, sitting higher on the steps than she, nudged her in the back with his foot. ‘But he’s plotting something?’

‘I think he is,’ said January. ‘Not a word, now.’

Hands were raised, fingers crossed for luck, and much spit expended upon the cobblestones in oaths of silence, and January handed them another few centimes before proceeding first to the church of St Séverin – where he was slightly late to morning Mass – and then to Ayasha’s shop. She had rolls there – bought from Renan the baker on her way out that morning – and a small dish of butter, which she shared with the two young seamstresses and the little girl who ran errands and pulled out the basting threads (‘They’re no use to me if they’re starving  . . .’), and while he ate, January recounted what Daniel had told him last night, and Poucet that morning.

‘It would help – if you have time – to learn from Ra’eesa if Shamira was one of those who learned French from the instructor who came to the Sultan’s harem.’

‘And what do I say to Madame de Remiremont?’ grumbled Ayasha as she stitched acres of tiny, pink silk roses on to the immense sleeves of a pink-and-black gown. ‘That I have to go speak to a servant woman, and just wait here for me for two hours? Bad enough that stuck-up servant of ben-Gideon’s comes knocking at the door this morning with a note before it gets light  . . .’

‘I said, if you have time.’ At a guess, the Comtesse de Remiremont wanted her gown that evening. It always made Ayasha cross to be hurried. ‘And if
I
have time, I’ll walk out to Batignolles and have a look at the Convent of St Theresa  . . .’

‘Don’t you
dare
go without me,
Mâlik
!’ She flicked his elbow – the portion of his anatomy closest to hand – with a sharp little blow of one finger in its gold thimble, like one of the cats when annoyed. ‘Or I’ll—’

‘You’ll what?’ He grinned across the workroom table at her.

She threw a pink silk rose at him. ‘I’ll sew up all the sleeves of your shirts when you have to go to the Opera.’

January pressed his palms together and bowed his head in a gesture of submission. ‘Forgive me,
zahar
. Not a step shall I stir without you at my side.’

‘See you don’t. Now give that back.’

January tucked the delicate flower into the band of his hat and set the hat on his head. ‘Even the marks of your anger I treasure as badges of pride.’

‘
Nuti
. I’ll give you a mark of my anger  . . .’

They kissed, the three shop-girls all giggling – they had learned that for all her strictness and parsimony in matters of business, their mistress’s bark was considerably worse than her bite – and January took his leave.

He kept the matter of Shamira out of his mind, and a mental door closed upon it, through the morning’s rehearsals at the Opera – first with the singers for the upcoming production of
Proserpine
, and then with the dancers – and, after a hasty luncheon of soup and coffee bought from a street vendor in the Rue du Petit Luxembourg, through piano lessons with assorted offspring of the rich. Music was an exacting task, and January never quite understood those musicians – and Paris was rife with them – who could dash off waltzes and arias by rote, while chatting to someone else in the room about how they were going to pay the rent.

He put up, too, with the usual expressions of politely concealed surprise from the mother and aunts of a new pupil, that a man of color could teach and understand the finer points of the Viennese style of the pianoforte. (
What do they think I play at the Opera, the tom-tom?
) In Louisiana he’d endured the same, mostly because of his size: everyone expected a black man of his stature to be good for nothing but cutting cane.

He returned to the Rue de l’Aube at five, wondering if Ayasha would be back from the final fitting with Madame de Remiremont and if he was destined to make a dinner out of eggs, cheese, and cold couscous, and found the wife of his bosom pacing Renan’s bakery-shop downstairs.

‘I thought you’d never get here,
Mâlik
!’ She caught him in the doorway, hooked her elbow peremptorily through his. ‘We have but a few hours, to get out to the convent and see what they have to say there, before you have to go to your silly Opera—’

‘So that I can pay our silly rent.’ He let himself be tugged along the street toward the Rue St-Jacques. That few hours was also all he had to encompass any food he was likely to get during what was to be a very long evening, but it was at any time useless to struggle against Ayasha.

‘
Yallah
for our silly rent.’ She released his arm long enough to button her jacket, wind one shawl around her neck and pull another closer about her arms; the afternoon was gray, and chill wind lanced down from the river. ‘Madame de Remiremont paid me, what more do we need? Ra’eesa told me that indeed Shamira was one of those who went with
Sitt
Jamilla, to learn French from the young Abbé from the Embassy—’

‘De Longuechasse?’

‘Even he. The ladies were all veiled, of course, and there were about fifteen eunuchs with swords stationed around the walls, in case de Longuechasse suddenly decided to improve relations between France and the Sublime Porte by ravaging the Sultan’s women  . . .  Too, he taught his lessons at one side of the room, and the ladies sat at the other, with fifteen feet of open floor between them, and a moat of fire, belike  . . .’

January let himself into Ayasha’s shop as they passed it – it was too dark to work by four, and the windows were shuttered fast – and left his music satchel and cornet on the counter.

‘And did Shamira ever speak to Ra’eesa,’ he asked as he re-emerged, ‘of the Abbé de Longuechasse?’

‘She did.’ Ayasha’s voice was grim. ‘She asked Ra’eesa to find where he dwelled, that she might use her new-found skill at the writing of French – she knew a little from her childhood, because her father was a merchant – to thank him.’

‘And did Ra’eesa have any opinion of the Abbé himself?’

‘She says that he is comely – which Hüseyin Pasha definitely is not – and young. And she said that upon the occasion that she spoke to him, and gave him the message of thanks from Shamira, he asked her, “Is the Lady Shamira the one who sat farthest to the right, beside your mistress?” which was indeed the case. Which means that she did something – met his eyes, leaned close to listen, a woman can always do something – that made him take notice of her. Whether she wrote to him again Ra’eesa knew not.’

‘Could she have smuggled further notes out to him from Hüseyin Pasha’s house in Constantinople?’ They reached the river, and the Hôtel Dieu rose on their right as they crossed the bridge, Napoleon’s new brickwork already dark with the soot of Paris chimneys against the raw gloom. The water that rustled beneath the hospital’s pilings stank of blood and decay, and gleamed with sulfurous glints from the windows above it.

‘Oh, yes.’ Beyond the bridge, candles burned high in the black, gothic walls of the houses along the Rue de la Juiverie, a narrow canyon cutting the medieval mazes of the island. ‘Even a rich man’s harîm isn’t like the Sultan’s, or the harîms in the storybooks. Servants come and go. If you trust one, and you can find one who isn’t afraid of being beaten by the master, you can usually get a message out.’

‘But what could she have hoped for?’ January asked. ‘She couldn’t actually have believed that a member of the Embassy staff would rescue her from the house of a high official of the Sultan’s court, could she?’

He stopped at a tiny side-street, bought two pasties from a vendor – God only knew what was in them – and Ayasha promptly devoured both.

‘And what did she think a member of the Embassy staff would do with her? Carry her back to France? Wed her?’

‘She was just turned seventeen.’ Ayasha’s dark eyes were sad. ‘What would seem real to her, or possible? In a
harîm
, all you do is tell each other stories. Even if you despise the other girls, and the servants around you, what is there to do but listen  . . .  and dream?’

The village of Batignolles lay a half-mile beyond the customs barrier at the Étoile. January and Ayasha had walked out there many times on hot afternoons in the summer, to drink cheap wine or water-lily tea. In the cold gray of a rainy evening, most of its cafés were shut, and the only activity seemed to be village boys driving cows home to be milked. The Convent of St Theresa stood at the far end of the town, and like many religious establishments in France these days it showed signs of dilapidation and looting during the Revolution. The statues on its Baroque facade had all been recently given new heads of stone five or six shades lighter than their soot-darkened bodies, and the effect was one of men and women who needed to have their robes washed.