A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “Maybe,” agreed January, knowing Olympe was probably right.

  “I’ve told you what I know about it,” his sister went on, “and so I’ll ask you this, Ben: Be careful what you do with that knowledge. I think Clemence went off cryin’ into the night, same as that boy Galen did. But Clemence is a colored gal, where Galen’s white. And she did pay for that gris-gris. If the law’s out lookin’ for someone to hang, like you say, all you’ll have to do is speak her name and she’ll be a dead woman, for no more crime than hating a woman she wasn’t strong enough to leave.”

  January was silent, knowing again that Olympe spoke true and wondering wearily how he had happened to have the responsibility not only for Madeleine Trepagier’s freedom yoked to his shoulders, but for the life of a girl he’d barely met. For some reason he remembered that Apollo was not only the god of music and of healing but of justice as well.

  Monsieur Gomez had taught him, Make your diagnosis first, then decide on treatment when you know the facts.

  Augustus first, he thought. Then we’ll see what else we need to know.

  “I didn’t know you knew Minou,” he remarked, as they drew near the corner of the Rue Douane.

  “Not well. I’ve kept track of her, of course, but Thursday was the first time I ever went through her door.” The dark eyebrows pulled down, troubled by some unaccustomed thoughts. “I didn’t think I’d like her, to tell the truth, though she was sweet as a little girl. I was surprised.”

  “Why Thursday?”

  “I went looking for you when I learned who paid for that gris-gris, and told off them boys to give you a poundin’.” She frowned again. Her front teeth were just prominent enough to give her face a sharpness, a feral quality, like her watchful dark eyes. He wondered if she knew Lucius Lacrîme. “And then, I was worried about you. The hairball I keep told me you were in trouble, or hurt.” She glanced down at his bandaged hand.

  January cast back in his mind and told himself that it was coincidence that his capture by Peralta, the interview in the sugar mill, and the long torture of escape had taken place on Thursday.

  “I was there today because she asked me to come back, asked my help,” Olympe went on. “She’s with child, you know.”

  Something that wasn’t quite anger—but was close to it—wrenched him hard. But he only said, “I didn’t think Henri had enough red blood in him to make a child.”

  Olympia Snakebones glanced sidelong up at him, under the umbrella’s shadow. “He’s good to her,” she said. “And he’ll be good to the child. They mostly are, as long as those children do what they’re told to do, be what they’re told to be, and don’t go askin’ too many questions about why things are the way they are.”

  January was silent a moment, stopping at the corner of Rue Bienville, a few blocks above the tall house where Augustus Mayerling had his rooms. Then he sighed. “Nobody’s got a monopoly on that, sister. Not the whites, not the blacks, not the sang mêlé.”

  Her smile under the shadow of the umbrella was bright and wry. Then she turned away, crossing a plank to the street and holding her blue skirts high out of the mud as she splashed across, to return to her home, her husband, and her daughters and sons.

  Augustus Mayerling occupied two rooms on the top floor, high above a courtyard full of banana plants and plane trees and a shop that dealt in coffees and teas. The rain had eased again to thin flutters, glistening in daffodil patches beneath the streetlights. As he climbed the wooden steps from gallery to gallery, January was surrounded by the rising smells of foliage and cooking from the courtyard beneath him. The high walls of the house muffled the noises of the street, the distant hoot of the steamboat whistles, and the cries of a few final oyster vendors giving up for the day.

  While he and Olympe had been walking down Rue Burgundy they’d heard the cannon by the Cabildo, closing down curfew for the night. The rain had damped the dancing in Congo Square some hours before. If he were stopped by the guards he’d have to present his papers, to prove himself free. The thought made him uneasy. The city seemed very silent without the jostling voices of maskers in the streets, the thump and wail of brass bands in the taverns, the riot of parades.

  And indeed, thought January wryly, within a week the Creoles would be hiring him to play at discreet little balls again no matter what the church said about surrendering one’s pleasures to God in that time of penitence—provided of course he wasn’t in jail or on a boat. Life went on, and one could not content oneself with backgammon and gossip forever.

  Certainly no gambling hall in the city had closed down. But that, as any Creole would say with that expressive Creole shrug, was but the custom of the country.

  The topmost gallery was dark, illuminated only by the thin cracks of light from the French doors of Mayerling’s rooms.

  January had just reached the top of the stairs when the doors were opened. Mayerling looked right and left, warily, the gold light glinting on close-cropped flaxen hair and a white shirt open at the throat. Clearly not seeing that anyone else stood there in the dark, he beckoned back in the room behind him.

  A woman stepped out, clothed in widow’s black.

  January felt his heart freeze inside him. The light strength of her movement, the way her shoulders squared when she turned, was—as it had been not many nights ago—unmistakable.

  “The back stairs are safer,” said Mayerling’s husky, boyish voice. “The slaves won’t be back for a little time yet.” Reaching back into the apartment, the Prussian brought out a cloak, which he settled around his shoulders. Putting a hand to the woman’s back, he made to guide her into the dark curve of the building where the back stairs ran down to the gallery above the kitchen.

  The woman stopped, turned, put back her veils, and raised her face to his. Dim as it was, the honey warmth of the candles within fell on her, showing January clearly the strong oval lines of the chin, the enormous, mahogany red eyes of Madeleine Trepagier.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Madeleine Trepagier and Augustus Mayerling.

  I was a fool not to guess.

  Concealed behind the corner of a carriageway halfway down the street, January watched the sword master help his mistress into a hired fiacre. The banquette was otherwise empty; Sunday, Lent, and Creole dinner parties completing what the rain had begun.

  It wasn’t only Trepagier’s mistress who’d met Peralta through Mayerling’s school. Mayerling himself had met his pupil’s beautiful wife.

  Whoever he marries will have cause to thank the person who wielded that scarf.

  I should have no choice but to avenge that lady’s honor.… Why hadn’t he seen it then, less than two minutes after Mayerling had attributed all dueling to boredom, ignorance, and vice?

  Perhaps because of the disgusted horror in Madeleine’s eyes when she’d said, Not a man …

  The cab moved away from the banquette. Fair head bowed in the rain, Mayerling turned and vanished into the pitch-dark carriageway from which he and Madame Trepagier had come.

  She’ll change from the fiacre to her own carriage somewhere, thought January. Probably the Place des Armes.

  He stepped out of hiding and moved through the rainy, lamp-blotched darkness after the fiacre, the mud and water washing over the street’s uneven paving-blocks slowing its progress and making it easy for him to keep it in sight.

  Augustus was a foreigner. White, but a Prussian. A jury might just rule on the evidence and not the color of the defendant’s skin.

  But everything in him was saying, No, no as he followed the dark bulk of the carriage through the streets toward the cathedral.

  Not a man, Madeleine had said, with a loathing in her eyes that had told its own tale of Arnaud Trepagier as surely as had the old cook and laundress of Les Saules. Working at the Hôtel Dieu, January had met women who had been raped and abused, had seen what it did to them ever after. That any man would have been gentle enough, caring enough, to lead her out of that prison of terror and rage was a miracle and a g
ift.

  Looking back at that Thursday night at the Salle d’Orléans, January could see everything with blinding clarity.

  Everything except what he should do.

  In a novel the answer would be obvious. “Missy, ain’t been no joy in this old world for me since my woman done died.” Followed by a quaintly ill-spelt confession and the rope—or maybe a ticket to France if the novelist was in a good humor.

  But New Orleans was his home. And Uhrquahr and Peralta weren’t the only enemies advancing through the mist.

  By the rustling darkness of the cathedral garden, literally a stone’s throw from the Orleans ballroom, the fiacre came to a halt. It was raining more heavily now, but Madame Trepagier, her face hidden by the long veils of a widow, stepped down and paid the driver, then turned and hurried into the alley that ran between the church and the Cabildo, a black form swiftly swallowed by the dark.

  Dominique ran that way, the night of the murder, thought January, following her into the dark. But during the bright Carnival season there had been lamps in every one of the shop fronts along the alley that were now closed up and dark, revelers staggering back and forth in a steady stream between Rue Royale and the Place des Armes. With the cathedral clock striking eight, and the leaden ceiling of cloud mixing with the eternal pall of steamboat smoke, the alley was pitch-black, with only a window or two throwing gold sprinkles on the falling rain.

  Creole Sunday in New Orleans, thought January. Of course Madeleine Trepagier would have dinner with Aunt Picard, with all the Trepagier cousins in attendance, pressing their suits. Why not? Why not? A woman can’t run a plantation alone. It would be the easiest thing in the world to claim a headache and retreat to the arms of the one man whose touch she could endure without nausea. Her own coachman would have instructions ahead of time to pick her up in the Place des Armes. There was no one at Les Saules now to mark the time she returned, except her servants.

  A chill went through him as he thought, And one of them’s gone. For the first time he wondered what exactly it was that Sally might have seen, and whether she had left Les Saules at all.

  That far from other houses, as Madame Trepagier herself had pointed out, a woman was at the mercy of her husband, but so a slave girl would be at the mercy of a mistress who had something to hide.

  He saw her shape, reflected ahead of him against the few lamps burning in the Place des Armes, and quickened his step. Then there was a blurred scuffle of movement, and her scream echoed in the brick strait of the alley like the sudden sound of ripping cloth.

  There was a scuffle, a splash, a glimpse of struggling forms in the dark, and a man’s curse in river-rat English. Madeleine screamed again and there was another splash, but by this time January was on top of them, grabbing handfuls of coarse, greasy cloth that stank of tobacco and vomit and pissed-out beer. He shoved someone or something up against the brick of the alley wall and smashed with all his force where a face should be, grating his knuckles on hair. A voice from the square shouted “Madame Madeleine! Madame Madeleine!” and there was gasping, screaming, cursing and the slosh and stench of gutter water.

  The man January had struck came back at him like a bobcat, but January was a good five inches taller and far heavier and lifted him bodily, slamming him to the pavement like a sack of corn. He kicked him, very hard, then turned to seize the second man, who was wading knee-deep in the heaving stream of the gutter, knife flashing in his hand, above the billow of black petticoats and floating veils beneath him. He stomped his foot down, pinning Madame Trepagier under the water, then cursed in surprise and fell on top of her. January was on them by then, dragging him up by a wad of dripping, verminous hair.

  The knife slashed and gleamed. January twisted sideways, losing his grip, and then the man was pelting away along the building fronts of Rue Chartres, as a slender old man with a coachman’s whip came running up unsteadily, gasping for breath, his face ashy.

  Madame Trepagier was trying to rise, her dragging skirts and veils a soaked confusion about her, trembling so badly she could barely stand. She shrank from January’s steadying hand with a cry, then looked up at his face. For an instant he thought she would break down, cling to him weeping, but she turned away, hugging herself desperately in her soaked winding-sheets of veils. “I’m all right.” Her voice was tense as harp wire, but low and steady. “I’m all right.”

  “Madame Madeleine, Madame Madeleine!” The old coachman looked as if he needed to be propped up himself. “You all right? You hurt?” In the shadows of the alley mouth only his eyes and teeth and silver coat buttons caught the reflection of the lights along the Cabildo’s colonnade. Like a drenched crow in mourning weeds, wet veils plastered over her cheeks, Madame Trepagier was little more than a sooty cloud. “Come on, Madame Madeleine. I’ll take you back to your Aunt Picard’s, get those wet clothes off you—”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Not my aunt’s.”

  Not, thought January, if she’d left there three hours ago with a manufactured headache.

  He put a steadying hand under her elbow. She stiffened, but did not pull away.

  “Come,” he said. “I’ll get you to my sister’s.”

  “It … was foolish of me. Walking down that alleyway, I mean.” Madeleine Trepagier made a small movement with her hand toward her unraveled torrent of dark hair, and Dominique said, “Sh-sh-sh,” and moved the trembling fingers away. Her own hands worked competently with the soft pig-bristle brush, stroking out the long, damp swatches, less now to untangle them than to let them dry and to calm the woman who sat in the chair before her, laced into a borrowed corset and a borrowed dress and with a cup of herb tisane steaming before her. The honey-gold moire of the gown, with its ribbons of caramel and pink, set off Madeleine’s warm complexion as beautifully as it did Dominique’s. January wondered how long it would be before the woman abandoned her mourning and returned to wearing colors like this again.

  “I never thought ruffians would be lurking that close to the police station,” continued Madeleine, folding her hands obediently in her lap. “I was just walking back from my Aunt Picard’s over on Rue Toulouse.”

  Dominique’s dress was cut lower than a widow’s high-made collar, and the small gold cross Madeleine wore around her throat was just visible in the pit between her collarbones. January saw again the way her head had fallen back to receive the sword master’s mouth on hers, the desperate strength with which they had held each other in the thin spit of the rain.

  Augustus and Madeleine. A glimpse of deerskin, as golden as the dress she wore now, in the doorway as he began the first waltz. Looking for him? And the Prussian in his black-and-green Elizabethan doublet, crossing the downstairs lobby as Galen Peralta descended after his fight with Angelique.

  Questions crowded his mind, a jam of logs at high water behind his teeth, and the first of them, the largest of them, was always, What do I do?

  He was glad of Dominique’s prattle, of her presence in the room. It gave him time to think.

  “Cathedral Alley isn’t so very far from the levee,” he pointed out in time. “Or from Gallatin Street. We had Kaintucks all over town during Mardi Gras.”

  Dominique sniffed. “And I’m sure the significance of Ash Wednesday completely escaped them. One would think after a week they would get the hint.” If she felt any uncertainty at all about the presence of a white lady in her parlor, she certainly didn’t show it. “You poor darling, thank God Ben was there. What were you doing down on Rue Royale, anyway, Ben? I thought you were going to Olympe’s.”

  “I thought I saw someone who could give me an explanation about the night of the murder,” said January, and his glance crossed Madeleine’s. Her eyes, downcast with confusion at finding herself in the house of a plaçée, went wide with shock and dread.

  “Now, don’t talk about murders,” said Dominique severely, and patted Madeleine’s shoulders. She hesitated for a long moment, then picked her words carefully. “My brother is helping the police inve
stigating Angelique Crozat’s murder—for all they’re doing,” she added tartly. “Personally, I’m astonished the one who was strangled wasn’t that awful harpy of a mother. I was speechless when I heard how she’d sold off all your jewelry and dresses … and do you know, Ben, she’s been flouncing around town for days in a mourning veil down to her feet, and the most dreadful cheap crêpe dress. It streaked black all over Mama’s straw-colored divan cushions. Excuse me, dears, I’ll just go to the kitchen and see if your coachman is all right.”

  Not even random violence that could have ended in murder, thought January wryly, could shake Dominique’s sense of caste. Watching his sister through the arch into the rear parlor, and thence through the French door at the back and into the rainy yard, he knew that the coachman would be shown all consideration, given a cup of coffee and some of Becky’s wonderful crêpes, in the kitchen. The rain had let up almost completely, and through the open French doors to the street a few droplets still caught the lamplight as they fell. The streaming brightness flashed on the millrace of the gutter, and on the slow, lazy drips from the abat-vent overhead. A fiacre passed, the driver cursing audibly at the Trepagier carriage that stood, horse blanketed, before the cottage. A few streets away a man’s voice bellowed, “Now, don’t you push me, hear! I am the child of calamity and the second cousin to the yellow fever! I eats Injuns for breakfast.…”

  Madeleine shuddered profoundly and lowered her forehead to her hand. Very softly, she said, “Don’t ask me about it tonight, Monsieur Janvier, please. Thank you—thank you so much—for helping me, for being there.” Her shoulders twitched a little, as if still feeling the grasp of heavy hands, and she brought up a long breath. “I know why you were there. You followed me from … from Rue Bienville, didn’t you? I thought I saw you as the fiacre pulled away.”

  “Yes,” said January softly. She raised her face, her eyes meeting his, steadily, willing him to believe.