Good Man Friday by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online Page B

of local businessmen, barbers, clerks, slaves, sailors and prostitutes. Charmian clung to her mother’s hand and gazed about her like an Italian princess kidnapped by gypsies. On shipboard she’d taken her meals in their cabin with her nurse Musette and Thèrése, Dominique’s maid, and in the saloon she’d been made much of by the other passengers. This was her first experience with the filth and discomfort of hard benches, unswept floors, flying soot and drunken cursing at the back of the car. She looked as if she hadn’t made up her mind whether to burst into tears or go over and investigate.
    â€˜Pay no attention to them.’ Thèrése glared at a couple of loud-voiced market-girls flirting with some sailors. ‘They are Americans: drunk as holes and crazy as sticks. You are not to speak to such as they.’
    When they disembarked in Washington the noise was worse. Porters shouted, passengers cursed; the squeal of brakes and the rattle of wagons and cabs beyond the platform. A long coffle of slaves passed them, chained neck and ankle: Washington and Baltimore were collection points for the slave dealers who traveled the roads of Virginia, buying men from the old tobacco-plantations whose exhausted soil no longer produced crops enough to support large villages of slaves. In the faces of the chained men, January read the echo of his own childhood nightmare. Some wept; the young men joked with defiant bravado: ‘Oh, yeah? Well,
my
marse got nine hundred dollars for
me
…’
    Most wore only the shuttered expression of silent despair.
    Men loitered on the platform: rough-clothed white men whom January thought at first were waiting for work. But they didn’t approach the gangs of stevedores, or speak to the bosses. Just spat tobacco and watched.
    He thought it was on the black passengers that their gaze lingered.
    Congress was in session, and every boarding house in town was full. Henri and Chloë – and Henri’s valet Leopold and Chloë’s maid Hèléne and fourteen trunks of books, dresses, waistcoats, hats, seashell collections, a microscope and a barometer – set off for the Indian Queen Hotel with an army of porters and cabs. January sought out the conductor who’d been in charge of their car on the journey, a solemn young man named Frank Preston, and handed him half a Spanish dollar: ‘You know a place where my family can get lodgings?’
    â€˜I do, sir.’ Preston had fetched a cup of water for Charmian during the stuffy, rattling journey and – when she’d thanked him – had replied in excellent French, ‘
Je vous en prie, Mademoiselle
.’ ‘It’s the place I live myself when I’m here in Washington.’ He signed for a porter. ‘Take this gentleman’s trunks to Trigg’s on Eighteenth Street.’
    â€˜I don’t suppose,’ said January resignedly, ‘that here in the nation’s capital the likes of us are permitted to take a cab?’
    â€˜No, sir.’ The young man’s mouth compressed, but he was well-trained to his job, and part of his job, January understood, was to express no opinions while in the uniform of the Baltimore and Washington Railroad. ‘But if the ladies don’t mind –’ he tipped his cap in the direction of Dominique, with whom he appeared to have fallen in love in the preceding hour and a half – ‘I’m sure Tim and Ollie here –’ he nodded to the porters – ‘won’t object to taking you up in their wagon.’
    Thèrése looked as if she would rather walk three miles across a strange city on a warm spring afternoon rather than accept a ride in a goods wagon – and from Americans who were probably Protestants at that – but Minou at once held out her kid-gloved hands, first to Preston, and then to the two grubby porters, and beamed. ‘Thank you, M’ssieux! Charmian, say