A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “Maybe you best get another set started, Ben?” The elderly freedman gestured at the eager faces crowding to see more of the drama. “Give these good people something else to think about?”

  January nodded. If there was one thing that could distract Creoles from the prospect of a duel, it was a dance. Jacques and Uncle Bichet took their places; though Hannibal’s hands shook a little as he picked up fiddle and bow, there was nothing unsteady about the way he sliced into the most popular jig and reel in their repertoire. Sets were forming even as Froissart and the senior Monsieur Peralta shepherded the combatants out into the lobby and presumably down to the office.

  And let’s hope, thought January dourly, that our bonny Galen and la belle dame sans merci didn’t decide the office was a more private venue for their tête-à-tête than the parlor. That would be all it needs, for Galen’s father to find the pair of them coupling like weasels on the desk.

  Cross passes. Footing steps. Casting off and casting back, and swooping into the grand promenade.

  “I’m going to strangle that woman!” Dominique had changed into her costume for the tableaux, and, as Guenevere, had dispensed with the corsets and petticoats of modern dress, unlike at least four of the assorted Rebeccas and Juliets circulating in the crowd. Without them she looked startlingly sensual, thin and fragile and very reminiscent of the girls of January’s young manhood in their high-waisted, clinging gowns. He had never adjusted to the sight of women in the enormous petticoats and mountainous sleeves of modern dress.

  “Not only does she disappear without helping Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose—and after making them wear those frightful dresses in the first place, and Agnes is ready to spit blood!—but because I’m hunting high and low for her I miss the only real excitement of the evening!”

  “She’ll be in the parlor,” pointed out January mildly. “She still has to fix her wings.”

  “Ben, I looked in the parlor. It was the first place I looked. And in the supper room. And it would have served that … that uppity tart right if he’d torn those wings right off her back.” Minou adjusted the fall of one floor-length sleeve of buttercup yellow and straightened the dark curls of her chignon. “Did you hear what she told her mama about price and terms to take back to Peralta Père? If I ever saw such a …”

  “I’ve looked everywhere.” Marie-Anne Pellicot, her long oval face visibly beautiful despite a domino mask of exactly the wrong shade of gray-green for her pale crème-café complexion, hurried up, vexation replacing her earlier tears. “It’s nearly eleven! She promised to dress our hair.…”

  Her sister was right behind her. January heard Ayasha’s voice in his mind: A designer who knows what she’s doing can guide beauty to a woman’s form or make that selfsame woman ugly, just in the way she cuts a sleeve. He knew what his wife would have guessed—and said—about Angelique, just from looking at those two dresses, on those two particular girls.

  For all her tartness, Ayasha had been a kind woman. She’d never have let Angelique anywhere near those poor children’s hair.

  “If the parlor is the first place you looked, look again,” advised January. The music had soothed away his anger, and he was able to look dispassionately at Angelique and at the situation, only wondering what he was going to say to Mme. Trepagier to keep her from undertaking some other mad attempt to see the woman. He hadn’t liked the hard desperation in her eyes as she had said, I must see her. I MUST. “She and Galen may have gone somewhere else for their quarrel, but if she’s going to repair those wings she’ll have to go back where there’s light.”

  “Galen?” Marie-Anne looked surprised. “Galen left after what she said to him in the lobby. Which was horrible, I thought—he can’t help it if he stammers.”

  “Galen.” January sighed. “He came back.”

  “Tiens!” Dominique flung up her hands. “Just what we need! That … that …”

  “Wasn’t that you who slammed the door?” asked Marie-Rose, trying vainly to tug the lower edge of her bodice into a more flattering position on her hip.

  “Have you checked the attics?” Hannibal swiped rosin onto his bow with an expert lightness of touch. “Those back stairs go up as well as down.”

  “I swear I’m going to … Ah! There’s Henri.” The annoyance melted from Minou’s face, replaced by a mischievous brightness at the sight of her elephantine beau emerging awkwardly through the curtain of the passageway to the Théâtre. She stroked a tendril of her hair into the slightest hint of seductive dishabille. “I must go, p’tit. It’s one thing to let your protector see you in all your glory in a tableau, but it does mean he’s wandering about the ballroom unattended while you’re getting yourself ready.” She flitted away like a primrose-and-black Gothic butterfly, leaving Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose to their own devices.

  “Clemence might know,” said Marie-Anne, not in the least disconcerted by the abrupt departure. As January had said to Mme. Trepagier, they all knew the rules.

  “Is she still here? I thought she went after Galen.”

  Hannibal poked January in the back with the bow, and mimed fingering a keyboard. “She’ll have to comb her hair when she’s done, anyway,” the violinist pointed out practically. “They can catch up with her then.” And he led the way into the opening bars of a waltz.

  In the blaze of gaslight and candle glow, January’s eyes followed his sister and her protector around the double circle of the waltzers, annoyed in a tired way—as Angelique annoyed him now—at the thought of how she literally dropped everything to dance attendance on this man whose mother, sisters, female cousins, and quite possibly fiancée were standing stiff-backed in a corner of the Théâtre d’Orléans, chatting with other deserted ladies and pretending they had no idea where their errant menfolk had got to just now.

  Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose deserved better.

  Minou deserved better.

  Didn’t they all?

  The ballroom was full, this waltz among the most popular of the repertoire. There were more men than women present now, watching the dancers, talking, flirting a little with the unmarried girls under their mamas’ wary eyes. The costumes made a fiery rainbow, bright and strange, in the brilliant light, like the enchanted armies of a dream. He could identify groups from the tableaux vivants, theme and design repeated over and over, nymphs and coquettes of the ancien régime. Dreams for the men who owned these women, or sought to own them; a chance to see their mistresses in fantasy glory. You don’t love a sang mêlé whose mother bargained with you for her services. You love Guenevere in her bower, you love the Fairy Queen on Midsummer’s Eve. For the young girls, the girls who were here to show off their beauty to prospective protectors, the occasion was more important still.

  No wonder Agnes Pellicot’s face was stone when she hurried through the ballroom and then out again. No wonder there was poison in her eyes as she watched Euphrasie Dreuze trip by, an overdressed, overjeweled pink dove. Where January sat at the pianoforte he could look out through the triple doors of the ballroom to the lobby and see men and women—clothed in dreams and harried by the weight of their nondream lives—as they came and went.

  Angelique’s mother caught Peralta Père as the elderly planter reentered the ballroom, asked him something anxiously. The old man’s white brows pulled together and his face grew grim. Telling him about the quarrel, guessed January, and asking if he’s seen either Galen or Angelique. The old planter turned and left abruptly, pausing in the wide doorway to bow to a group of chattering young girls who entered, clothed for a tableau as the Ladies of the Harîm.

  January returned his attention to the keys. That was one dream he preferred not to regard too near.

  There were about six of them, mostly young girls—he didn’t know their names. Minou had told him, of course, but even after three months back he was still unfamiliar with the teeming cast of the colored demimonde. Though he had never in his life seen Ayasha in anything but sensible calicos or the simple, ivory-colored tarlatan that had been
her one good dress—the dress in which they had buried her last August—still the sight of the Arabian ladies tore at the unhealed flesh of his heart.

  From the waltz they slid into another Lancers, almost without break. Dimly, the sounds of quarreling could be heard when the curtain to the passageway was raised. The night was late enough for just about everybody to be drunk, both on that side of the passageway and this. Still he didn’t look up, seeking such nepenthe as the music had to offer.

  Maybe it was because Ayasha had laughed at the latest fad for things Arabic. “They think it’s so glamorous, the life of the harîm,” she had said, that lean, hook-nosed face profiled in the splendor of the cool Paris sun that poured through the windows of their parlor in the Rue de l’Aube. Beadwork glittered in her brown hands. “To do nothing except make yourself beautiful for a man … like your little plaçées. As if each of them assumes that she’s the favorite of the harîm, and not some lowly odalisque who spends most of her day polishing other women’s toenails or washing other women’s sheets. And the harîm is of course always that of a wealthy man, who can afford sorbets and oils and silken trousers instead of cheap hand-me-downs that have to last you three years.”

  She shook her head, a Moroccan desert witch incompletely disguised as a French bonne femme. The huge black eyes laughed in a face that shouldn’t have been beautiful but was. “Like dreaming about living in one of these castles up here, without having seen a castle, which look horribly uncomfortable to me. And of course, the dreamer is always the queen.”

  Ayasha had left Algiers at the age of fourteen with a French soldier rather than go into the harîm her father had chosen for her. When January met her, even at eighteen she had risen from seamstress to designer with a very small—but spotlessly clean—shop of her own, and had little time for the romantic legends of the East.

  But the sight of a woman with henna in her hair, the smell of sesame oil and honey, could still shake him to his bones.

  He could not believe that he would never see her again.

  When he looked up at the conclusion of the Lancers, the sword master Augustus Mayerling stood beside the piano.

  “Monsieur Janvier?” He inclined his head, neat pale features overweighted by a hawk-beak nose and marred from hairline to jawbone with saber scars. His eyes were a curious light hazel, like a wolf’s. “I am given to understand that you’ve practiced as a physician.”

  “I’m a surgeon, actually,” said January. “I trained at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris. After that I practiced there for three years.”

  “Even better.” The Prussian’s fair hair was cropped like a soldier’s; it made his head seem small and birdlike above the flare of his Elizabethan ruff. Like Hannibal, he spoke with barely an accent, though January guessed it came from good teaching rather than length of time spent in the United States.

  “Bone and blood is a constant. I would prefer a man who understands them, rather than one who spent six years at university learning to argue about whether purges raise or lower the humors of the human constitution and how much mercury and red pepper will clarify a man’s hypothetical bile. That imbecile Bouille’s challenged Granger to a duel,” he added, evidently not considering a Paris-trained surgeon’s current position at the piano of a New Orleans ballroom a subject of either surprise or comment. “Children, both of them.”

  The lines at the corners of his eyes marked Mayerling as older than he looked, but he was still probably younger than either his student or the man that student had challenged. January didn’t say anything, but the lines deepened just slightly, ironically amused. “Well-paying children,” admitted Mayerling, to January’s unspoken remark. “Nevertheless. Bouille’s wife is the sister to two of the physicians in town—physicians who actually studied medicine somewhere other than in their uncles’ back offices, you understand—and the third has money invested in Monsieur Granger’s prospective LaFayette and Pontchartrain railway company. The others who have been recommended to me seem overfond of bleeding.… I trust that your remedy for a bullet in the lung does not involve a cupping glass? It is to my professional interest, you understand, to know things like this.”

  Considering how nearly every young Creole gentleman bristled and circled and named his friends at the most trivial of slights, it wasn’t surprising that Mayerling, Verret, Crocquère, and the other fencing teachers would be on intimate terms with every medical man for fifty miles.

  January shuddered. He knew several who would resort to just that, accompanied by massive purges and a heavy dose of calomel—salts of mercury—for good measure.

  “You think they’ll accept a physician of color?”

  The sword master appeared genuinely surprised. “It is of no concern to me what they accept. Jean Bouille is my student. The American shall accept your ministrations or die of his wounds. Which, it is of little interest to me. May I count upon you, sir?”

  January inclined his head, hiding his amusement at the extent of the Prussian’s imperial arrogance. “You may, sir.”

  Mayerling produced his card, which January pocketed, and accepted one of January’s in return. Mayerling’s said simply, Augustus Mayerling. Sword Master. January’s was inscribed, Benjamin Janvier. Lessons in Piano, Clavichord, Harp, and Guitar. Underneath the lines were repeated in French.

  “I can’t find her anywhere,” wailed Marie-Rose at twenty minutes until midnight, coming up while Minou was flirting with Hannibal across the palmettos that screened the dais on both sides. Henri had returned to the respectable purlieus of the establishment with promises to be back in time for the tableaux; even the senior M. Peralta, pillar of rectitude that he was and assiduous in his attentions to Euphrasie Dreuze, had been back and forth several times.

  By the way the old man was watching the lobby outside the ballroom, January guessed he had no idea where his son was. The boy was only seventeen. If he’d sent him home or banished him to the Théâtre he wouldn’t be watching like that.

  And Euphrasie Dreuze, quite clearly aghast at the possibility that her daughter might have whistled at least some percentage of the Peralta fortune down the wind, was like a pheasant in a cage, flitting in and out from ballroom to lobby in a fluffy scurry of satin and jewels. January dimly recalled his mother telling him that Etienne Crozat, owner of the Banque Independent and stockholder in half a dozen others, had paid Euphrasie Dreuze off handsomely upon his marriage. Her concern might, of course, stem entirely from care for her daughter’s welfare, but the woman’s reputed fondness for the faro tables and deep basset were probably the actual cause of the increasingly frenzied look in her eye.

  When the Roman, Jenkins, returned from negotiations downstairs, he, too, loitered around the lobby with an air of searching for someone, but at the moment January couldn’t see him.

  “It’s just like her,” sighed Minou, as Marie-Anne, Marie-Rose, and one of the Ladies of the Harîm—shedding an occasional peacock eye in her wake—scampered off after the next waltz to make another canvass of the courtyard. “I asked Romulus to check the gambling rooms, but even Angelique wouldn’t have gone down there. Maybe vanishing like this is part of her plan.”

  “No woman wears a getup like that and disappears before the tableaux vivants,” Hannibal pointed out. He turned away to cough, pressing a hand briefly to his side to still it, and the candlelight glistened on the film of sweat that rimmed the long fjords of his retreating hairline.

  “No,” retorted Minou. “But if she’s not back in another few minutes Agnes is going to have to fix her daughters’ hair, and everybody knows Agnes is just dreadful at that sort of thing. And now we can’t find Clemence either. If Henri comes back and so much as speaks to another woman, have a waiter slip some mysterious potion to him to render him unconscious, would you, p’tit?”

  “You’ll need a sledge to get him home.”

  “I’m sure Monsieur Froissart will oblige. Why does everything have to go wrong at these affairs?” She fluttered away again, sleeves billowing like whi
te and gold sails.

  “I don’t know why she’d take an hour and a half at it,” said Hannibal, plucking at the strings again, and turning a key. “Any of the girls down in the Swamp—the Glutton or Railspike or Fat Mary—can have you begging for mercy inside five minutes. Seven, if you’re dead to start with.” He coughed again.

  “Maybe that’s the reason they’re working the Swamp instead of having some banker buy them a house on Rue des Ursulines?”

  “Surely you jest, sir.” The fiddler grinned, and drained the last of his second bottle of champagne. “Though I’d trade a week’s worth of opium to see what the Glutton would wear to one of these balls.”

  “What I’d trade for,” remarked January, beginning to sort through his music and his notes for which tableau would be first, “is to know where they could have gone for an hour and a half. The building’s filled. If Peralta Père and Phrasie Dreuze are that puzzled, it’s got to mean they’ve asked in the courtyard and the gambling rooms whether anyone saw the two of them leave.” He reached up and took the empty bottle from Hannibal’s unsteady grasp.

  “Easy,” said Hannibal. “They could have gone through the passageway to the Théâtre. Those boxes above the stage are curtained. Angelique’s white enough to pass. It’s not easy to tup a woman in a gown like that—twelve petticoats at the least, not to speak of the wings—in a box, but it can be done, if you don’t mind leg cramps.”

  “Peralta would know that,” pointed out January.

  “And there’s lot o’ competition for them boxes,” added Uncle Bichet, who had been following the entire intrigue with interest.

  Minou strode over to them from the direction of the lobby doors, Agnes Pellicot at her heels, like a pair of infuriated daffodils. January saw both of them look automatically in the direction of Euphrasie Dreuze, seated in the triple bank of spindly gilt chaperones’ chairs with two of her cronies, fanning herself with what looked like an acre of ostrich plumes and watching the archways into the lobby with a wild and distracted eye.