“Was it a man?”
She flinched, the revulsion that crossed her face too sudden and too deep to be anything but genuine. “No.” Her voice was small, cold, but perfectly steady. “Not a man.”
He felt ashamed.
“You were in the building, then?”
She drew a deep breath, as if collecting herself from the verge of nausea, and raised her eyes to his face again. There was something opaque in them, a guardedness, choosing her words carefully as she had always chosen them. “The reason I stayed had nothing to do with Angelique’s death. Nothing to do with her at all.”
Every white man of wealth and influence in the city had been there that night. And their wives next door.
But after she’d spoken to him, she’d had reason to hope that Angelique could be met with, pleaded with.… Against that hope was the fact that she’d already sent her notes and been snubbed more than once.
Somewhere an ax sounded, distant and clear, men chopping the wood they’d be stowing up all year against grinding time late in fall. The tall chimney of the sugar mill stood high above the willows that surrounded the house, dirty brick and black with soot, like the tower of a dilapidated fortress watching over desolate land. You couldn’t get ten dollars an acre for it, his mother had said, and he believed her: run-down, almost worthless, it would take thousands to put it back to what it had been.
Yet she clung to it. It was all she had.
“Yes,” the woman went on after a time. “I saw her when she came upstairs, when the men all clustered around her. The way every man always did, I’m told. I can’t … I can’t tell you the humiliation I’ve suffered, knowing about Arnaud and that woman. Knowing that everyone knew. I was angry enough to tear my grandmother’s jewels off her myself and beat her to death with them, but I didn’t kill her. I didn’t speak to her. To my knowledge I’ve never spoken to her.”
The muscle in her temple jumped, once, with the tightening of her jaw. Standing closer to her, January could see she had a little scar on her lower lip, just above the chin, the kind a woman gets from her own teeth when a man hits her hard.
“I swear I didn’t kill her.” Madeleine Trepagier raised her eyes to his. “Please don’t betray that I was there.” January looked aside, unable to meet her gaze. I doctored enough of her bruises … washed enough blood out of her shifts and sheets and petticoats.…
The house, like most Creole houses, was a small one. He wondered if the children, Philippe and Alexandrine, had heard and knew already that they couldn’t not have.
She was estranged from both the Trepagiers and her father’s family. No outraged sugar planters were going to go to the city council and demand of them that another culprit—preferably one of the victim’s own hue or darker—be found.
Or would they? Was that something the city council would demand of themselves, no matter who the white suspect was? The courts were still sufficiently Creole to take the word of a free man of color against a white in a capital case, but it was something he didn’t want to try in the absence of hard evidence.
And there was no evidence. No evidence at all. Except that he was the last person to have seen Angelique Crozat alive.
There was a ball that night at Hermann’s, a wealthy wine merchant on Rue St. Philippe. He would, January thought, be able to talk with Hannibal there and ask him to make enquiries among the ladies of the Swamp about whether a new black girl was living somewhere in the maze of cribs, attics, back rooms, and sheds where the slaves who “slept out” had their barren homes. The girl Sally might very well have gone to her much-vaunted “gentleman friend,” but his rounds as Monsieur Gomez’s apprentice, and long experience with the underclass of Paris, had taught January that a woman in such a case—runaway slave and absconding servant alike—frequently ended up as a prostitute no matter what kind of life the man promised her when she left the oppressive protection of a master.
Another of those things, he thought, that most frequently merited a shrug and “Que voulez-vous?”
But when he returned to his mother’s house after the Culver girls’ piano lesson, he found Dominique in the rear parlor with her, both women stitching industriously on a cascade of apricot silk. “It’s for my new dress for the Mardi Gras ball at the Salle d’Orléans.” His sister smiled, nodding toward the enormous pile of petticoats that almost hid the room’s other chair. “I’ll be a shepherdess, and I’ve talked Henri into going as a sheep.”
“That’s the most appropriate thing I’ve heard all day.” January poured himself a cup of the coffee that Bella had left on the sideboard.
“Not that he’ll be able to spend much time at the Salle,” she added blithely. “He’ll be at the big masquerade in the Théâtre with that dreadful mother of his and all his sisters. He said he’d slip out and join me for the waltzes.”
“I wish I could slip out and join you for the waltzes.” He turned, and above the yards of ruffles and lace, above his sister’s bent head and dainty tignon of pale pink cambric, he tried to meet his mother’s eyes.
But Livia didn’t so much as look up. She’d been out when he’d returned from the market after his conversation with Shaw—after his visit to the cathedral, to burn a candle and dedicate twenty hard-earned dollars to a Mass of thanks. She had still been gone by the time he’d bathed and changed his clothes for the ride out to Les Saules. He wondered if she had engineered Minou’s presence, had maneuvered things so that when he returned—as return he must, around this time of the day, to have a scratch dinner in the kitchen before leaving for the night’s work—she would have a third person present, keeping her first conversation with him at the level of unexceptionable commonplaces.
And when they spoke tomorrow, of course, the easiness of today’s conversations would already act as a buffer against his anger.
And what good would it do him anyway? he wondered, suddenly weary with the weariness of last night’s long fear and today’s exhausting maneuvering in a situation whose rules were one thing for the whites and another for him. If he got angry at her, she would only raise those enormous dark eyes to him, as she was doing now, as if to ask him what he was upset about: Lt. Shaw had gotten him out of the Calabozo, hadn’t he? So why should she have come down?
If they’d sent her a message the previous night, she’d deny receiving it. If he quoted Shaw’s word for it that she already knew he was a prisoner when Shaw spoke to her, she’d only say, “An American would say anything, p’tit, you know that.”
Whatever happened, she, Livia Levesque, that good free colored widow, was not to blame.
So he topped up his coffee, and moved toward the table: “Don’t sit here!” squealed both women, making a protective grab at the silk.
January pulled a chair far enough from the table so that the fabric would be out of any possible danger from spilled coffee, and said “Mama, have you ever in my life known me to spill anything?” It was true that, for all his enormous size, January was a graceful man, something he’d never thought about until Ayasha commented that the sole reason she married him was because he was the only man she’d ever seen she could trust in the same room with white gauze.
“There’s always a first time,” responded Livia Levesque, with a dryness so like her that in spite of himself January was hard put not to laugh.
“Minou, did you know Arnaud Trepagier’s first plaçée? Fleur something-or-other?”
“Médard,” replied Livia, without missing a stitch. “Pious mealymouth.”
Grief clouded Dominique’s eyes, grief and a glint of anger. “Not well,” she said. “Poor Fleur.”
“Nonsense,” said her mother briskly. “She was delighted when Trepagier released her.”
“Her mother was delighted,” said Minou. “He used to beat Fleur when he was drunk, but she was brokenhearted just the same, that he turned around and took up with another woman that same week. And her mama was fit to kill Angelique. I always thought it served that Trepagier man right, that he had to buy a
second house.”
“If I know Angelique, it was more expensive than the one Fleur had, too. Houses on the Rue des Ursulines cost about a thousand more than the ones over on Rue des Ramparts. Put one paw on that lace, Madame,” she added severely to the obese, butter-colored cat, “and you will spend the rest of the day in the kitchen.”
Dominique measured a length of pink silk thread from the reel, snipped it off with gold-handled scissors, neatly threaded her needle again and tied off with a knot no bigger than a grain of salt. “Fleur deeded the house to the Convent of the Ursulines when she entered as a lay sister, and that’s where she was living when she died.”
“And from what I understand, Euphrasie Dreuze tried to get her hands on that, too,” put in Livia. “On the grounds that it was still Trepagier’s property, of all things. But what do you expect of a woman who’d use her own daughter to keep her lover interested in her, when the girl was only ten?”
“What?”
“Don’t be naïve.” She raised her head to blink at him, emotionless as a cat. “Why do you think Etienne Crozat suddenly got so interested in finding Angelique’s killer? He was having the both of them. Others, too, the whiter the better and not all of them girls. Whomever Euphrasie could find.”
January’s stomach turned as he remembered those two quiet-faced young men carrying their sister’s coffin—those boys who would have nothing further to do with their mother.
“So she hardly needs your services in that direction anymore, p’tit.” Livia wrapped two fingers in the gathering threads and pulled the long band of hemmed silk into ruffles with a gesture so heartbreakingly like Ayasha’s that January looked aside. Did all women learn the exact motions, the same ways of doing things with needle and cloth, like the positions and movements of ballet? “I hope,” she went on crisply, “that we will have no more trouble of that kind. By the way,” she added, as January opened his mouth to inform her that yes, they were going to have a good deal more trouble of that kind if they didn’t want to see him hanged. “Uncle Bichet’s nephew came by to tell you they’ve had to find another fiddler for tonight. Hannibal’s ill.”
Minou’s dark eyes filled with concern. “Should one of us go down to his rooms? See that he’s well?”
“I’ll go tomorrow.” January got to his feet, glanced at the camelback clock on the sideboard as he put up his coffee cup. The dancing started at eight-thirty at Hermann’s, and his bones ached for sleep.
“I’ve told Bella to get you some supper in the kitchen,” said his mother, threading another needle and beginning to whip the ruffles onto the skirt. “Your sister and I will be working for a few hours yet.”
Not “I’m sorry you spent last night in the Calabozo,” thought January, half-angry, half-wondering as he stepped through the open doors to the courtyard in the back. Not “I’m sorry I didn’t come and get you out.” She didn’t even bother to make an excuse: “I broke my leg. A friend died. I was kidnapped by Berber tribesmen on my way down Rue Saint Pierre.”
Not “Are you in any danger still, p’tit?”
Not “Can I help?”
But he could not remember a time when she would ever have said such a thing.
The company crowded into the great double parlor of the Hermann house on Rue St. Philippe was smaller than that of the Blue Ribbon Ball but considerably more select. Still, January saw many of the costumes he’d been seeing on and off since Twelfth Night, and thanks to Dominique’s notes, he could now put names to the blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe, Anatole—attending tonight with the fair Rowena rather than the dark Rebecca—to the Jove with the gold wire beard, to various corsairs, Mohicans, lions, and biblical kings. The Creole aristocracy was out in force, and Uncle Bichet, who knew everyone in the French town by sight and reputation, filled in the gaps left in his knowledge between waltzes, cotillions, and an occasional, obligatory minuet.
Aunt Alicia Picard was the massive-hipped, clinging woman in the somber puce ball gown who never ceased talking—about her rheumatism, her migraines, and her digestion, to judge by her gestures. She had a trick of standing too close to her peevish-faced female companion—her son’s wife, according to Uncle Bichet—and picking nervously at her dress, her glove, her arm. January noticed that every time the daughter-in-law escaped to a conversation with someone else, Aunt Picard would feel faint or find some errand that could be done by no one else.
“I’d rather peddle gumbo in the market than live with Alicia Picard,” his mother had said. He began to understand why Madeleine Trepagier would do almost anything rather than be forced by the loss of Les Saules to live in this woman’s house.
When Aunt Picard came close to the musicians’ bower, January could hear that her conversation centered exclusively on her illnesses and the deaths of various members of her family insofar as they had grieved or inconvenienced her.
Indeed, most of the Creole matrons wore the sober hues suggestive of recent mourning. Madame Trepagier had not been the only one to suffer losses in last summer’s scourge. There could not have been a family in town untouched.
“The chances of the cholera returning?” The voice of Dr. Soublet, one of the better-known physicians of the town, carried through a lull in the music. “My dear Madame Picard, due to the expulsion of the febrile gasses by the burning of gunpowder to combat the yellow fever, all the conditions conducive to the Asiatic cholera have been swept from our city, and in fact, there were far fewer cases than have been popularly supposed.”
Xavier Peralta, as regal in dark evening dress as he had been in the satins of the ancien régime, frowned. “According to the newspapers, over six thousand died.”
“My dear Monsieur Peralta,” exclaimed the physician, “please, please do not consider a word of what those ignoramuses say in the paper! They persist in the delusion that a disease is a single entity, a sort of evil spirit that seizes on a man and that can be chased away with a single magic spell. Disease is dis-ease—a combination of conditions that must be separately treated: by bleeding, to lower the constitution of the patient, while certain ill humours are driven out with heroic quantities of calomel. What are popularly ascribed as cases of Asiatic cholera may very well have had another source entirely. For instance, the symptoms of what are lumped together as cholera morbus are exactly those of arsenical poisoning.”
“I say,” laughed one of the Delaporte boys, “does that mean that six thousand wives poisoned their husbands in New Orleans last summer?”
“Slaves poisoned their masters, more like,” declared a tall, extremely beautiful Creole lady in dark red. She turned burning black eyes upon Peralta’s companion, a tallish trim gentleman in a coat of slightly old-fashioned cut and a stock buckled high about his neck. “You cannot tell me you haven’t seen such, Monsieur Tremouille.”
The commander of the New Orleans City Guard looked uncomfortable. “On rare occasions, of course, Madame Lalaurie,” he said. “But as Dr. Soublet says, a variety of causes can engender the same effect. Frequently if a servant considers himself ill-used—”
“Dieu, servants always consider themselves ill-used,” laughed Madame Lalaurie. “If they are but chided for stealing food, they whine and beg and carry on as if it were their right to rob the very people who feed and clothe them and keep a roof above their heads. Without proper discipline, not only would they be wretchedly unhappy, but society itself would crumble, as we saw in France and more recently in Haiti.”
“Servants need discipline,” agreed a tall man, gorgeously attired as the Jack of Diamonds. “Not only need it, but crave it without knowing it. Even as wives do, on occasion.”
“That is a matter which can easily be carried to extreme, Monsieur Trepagier.” An enormous, ovine-countenanced woman, whom January would have deduced as Henri Viellard’s mother even without Uncle Bichet’s sotto voce identification, turned to face him, a maneuver reminiscent of the Château of Versailles executing a 180-degree rotation with all its gardens in tow. “And an opinion I would show a certain
reticence in expressing, were I in quest of a bride.”
“Trepagier?” January glanced over at the cellist. “Not the long-lost brother?”
“Lord, no.” Uncle Bichet shook his head over his music. “Brother Claud took off right after the wedding with one of Dubonnet Père’s housemaids and five hundred dollars’ worth of Aunt Paulina Livaudais’s jewelry. That’s Charles-Louis, from the Jefferson Parish branch of the family. He was there at the Théâtre d’Orléans t’other night, but spent most of his time dallyin’ in one of the private boxes with Madame Solange Bouille.”
Trepagier’s cheeks darkened with anger below the edge of his mask. “Well, begging your pardon, Madame Viellard, but I suspect the women who go on about it are making more of it than it is. Women need to feel a strong hand, same as servants do.”
“I was never conscious of such a need.”
Surveying Madame Viellard, January suppressed the powerful suspicion that the woman had never been married at all and had produced Henri and his five stout, myopic, and nearly identical sisters by spontaneous generation.
“Yet I must agree with Monsieur Trepagier,” said Madame Lalaurie in her deep, beautiful voice. “A woman respects strength, needs it for her happiness.” Her eye lingered dismissively on Henri Viellard, clothed for the occasion in a highly fashionable coat of pale blue and several acres of pink silk waistcoat embroidered with forget-me-nots. “There is no shame in a young man displaying it. Perhaps your young Galen, Monsieur Peralta, took the matter to an extreme, when not so long ago he took a stick to an Irishwoman who was insolent to him in the street, but ferocity can more easily be tamed than spinelessness stiffened to the proper resolution.”
Her husband, pale and small and silent in the shadow of her skirts, folded gloved hands like waxy little flowers and vouchsafed no opinion.
“That incident was long ago,” said Peralta quickly. “He was little more than a child then, and believe me, these rages of his have been chastised out of him.” His blue eyes remained steady on the woman’s face, but January could almost sense the man’s awareness of Tremouille—wholly occupied himself with a cup of tafia punch—at his elbow. “These days he would not harm so much as a fly.”
A Free Man of Color Page 19