Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “Kissing her.” January glanced back through the lighted doorway of the office, where Belaggio, forgetful of the fatal gravity of his wound, was on his feet, declaiming the details of the fray to Shaw. “And then murdering her out of a love too great for his heart to endure.”

  “Hmmm.” Hannibal chewed for a time the corner of his graying mustache. Though the fiddler never spoke of his family or home, January guessed from things he had said—from the lilt of his speech—that Hannibal came of the Anglo gentry that had lands in the Irish countryside and a town house in London, the gentry that sent their sons to Oxford to become good Englishmen on money abstracted from a peasantry that eked out a starving living on potatoes and barely understood a hundred words that were not in Gaelic. Raised on Shakespeare and on the classics of Rome and Greece, it was almost beyond the fiddler’s comprehension that one man would feel revulsion for another of equal merit for no other reason than the color of his skin.

  “And you think someone told him not to put on that particular opera?”

  “You think someone didn’t?”

  Hannibal picked up the coffee-cup again, offered it to January, then, when it was refused, sipped it himself. “And he doesn’t understand.”

  “Could you have written a piece that perfect,” asked January softly, “and not want to put it on? Not have to put it on?” His eyes turned toward the black door of the rehearsal-room next to the offices of Belaggio and Caldwell. There the company had spent most of the evening familiarizing themselves with the libretto of the new piece that would be the center of Caldwell’s Italian season. The other six operas—not all of them Italian, but sung in the melodic Italian style—were in repertory, having been performed at one time or another, somewhere, by everyone in the company. Even small towns in Italy had their opera houses, and for every production at La Scala or La Fenice, there were hundreds of minor Figaros and Freìschützes and Barbers of Seville, done two or three a week.

  But every season had its new opera, its premiere. The one no one in town had yet seen. John Davis, at the French Opera, had invested a great deal of money and time in arranging to premiere La Muette de Portici— which Belaggio, out of sheer effrontery, had selected to present as the second opera of his own season, on the night before Davis’s scheduled production.

  Othello, Belaggio’s own work, was thunder no man could steal.

  “. . . seizing the man, I hurled him from me,” Belaggio boomed, swept away in the torrent of his own récitatif. “But he rose out of the darkness and fell upon me like a tiger with his knife. . . .”

  What, think you I’d make jealousy my life? And chase the moon’s dark changes with my heart. . . .

  The doomed Moor’s heart-shaking aria sounded again in January’s mind, the soar and dip of the music that presaged Othello’s plunge into the very madness he scorned. The building tension that made the listener want to leap up on the stage and shout No, don’t heed him . . . ! Knowing inevitably, tragically, that Othello would. Othello understood passion and war, but he did not understand the pettiness of soul that was his undoing.

  Blood, Iago, blood!

  . . . nigger, the men in the alley had said, and let him pass.

  Had they meant, That’s a nigger, we’re waiting for a white man?

  Or had Othello been the nigger of whom they spoke?

  “Don’t die on us now, Maestro.”

  January opened his eyes with a jolt. Lieutenant Shaw stood before him, the coarse, narrow planes of his face illuminated now only by the lantern in Hannibal’s hand. “We’ll need a ox-team to haul you home.” The lamp in Belaggio’s office had been quenched. The backstage was dark, and cold.

  “Belaggio . . . ?”

  “Gone back to the City Hotel with a couple Guards to make sure he gets there all in one piece. The ladies, too, all of ’em.” Shaw slouched his hands in his pockets, spit toward the sandbox in the corner, and missed it by a yard—a tall, stringy, shaggy-haired bumpkin who looked like he should have been harvesting pumpkins somewhere in Illinois, until you saw his eyes. “You want me to help you all the way back to your rooms, or are you satisfied Mr. Cavallo here won’t try to assassinate you on the way just to keep you quiet?”

  Cavallo looked genuinely alarmed at this jest, as well he might—in Milan under the rule of the Austrians it was no joking matter. January said quickly, “Of course not. That’s absurd. The men who attacked Belaggio were Americans, I’ll swear to it.”

  “You seen ’em? Heard their voices?”

  January hesitated. “I heard one of them whisper ‘nigger,’ ” he said at last. “And I smelled them. Smelled their clothes.”

  Shaw nodded, noting this piece of evidence behind those gray, lashless eyes that, for all their seeming mildness, were cold as glass.

  “They dropped a skinning-knife in the alley.” January staggered a little getting to his feet, and his arm ached hideously under Hannibal’s makeshift bandage. Someone had fetched his music-satchel and hat from the front of the theater. With another wary glance at Shaw, Cavallo put an arm under January’s good shoulder: the young man was almost as tall as he, clear-browed and hawk-featured, and wearing, as Hannibal had pointed out, a short tweed roundabout instead of the nip-waisted blue cutaway he’d had on when first January saw him in the alley.

  “Did they, now?” Shaw wriggled a candle free of the mess of wax on the table around it, picked away a straggle of charred wick, and lit it from the lantern, to precede them down the stairs. Ponte came around to January’s other side and carefully supported him without touching his injured arm. He, too, watched Shaw, not with Silvio Cavallo’s ingrained wariness, but with deeper and more virulent hate. In any of the many dialects of the Italian peninsula, sbirro—policeman—was the foulest of insults, and with good reason. Hannibal followed, holding the lantern high.

  Very softly, as they descended the plank steps to the prop-vault, January heard Ponte whisper a question in Sicilian—“. . . guesses,” January made out the word.

  Cavallo answered immediately “Silencio,” and nodded back at Hannibal. And to January, in the standard Italian in which the various Neapolitans, Milanese, and Lombards communicated with one another and outsiders, “Where is it that the Signor lives?”

  “Rue des Ursulines,” replied January. “At the back of the French town. Hannibal can guide you. It’s about a mile. I’m sorry we can’t take a cab, but for men of my race in this city, it is forbidden by law.” His knees felt weak, and by the time they reached the end of the alley he was glad of the support.

  At this hour of the morning even the final revelers of Carnival had at last gone home to bed. The brass band that had been playing in the Promenade Hotel behind the theater had fallen silent. Even in the Fatted Calf Tavern, just up the street, the lights were out, and in the gambling rooms of the City Hotel. The distant clamor of the levee, audible from the street before the theater at most hours, was stilled, although in less than an hour the markets would begin to stir. The thick air smelled of the river, of mist and the livestock markets close by at the foot of Lafayette Street.

  The city slept.

  Gorged and drunk and sated. Dreaming its dreams of wealth and fever, sugar and cotton and slaves, beside the slow, thick river. Slaves and French and Americans and the free colored sang mêlés united for a few hours in their human need for rest.

  Glancing behind him, January saw Lieutenant Shaw still pacing back and forth in the wet murk, ill-burning candle in hand. He’d stoop now and again to study something in the indescribable muck of churned-up mud, old straw, and trampled horse-droppings. By the lopsided glow January could see the dark niche of doorway where the two assassins had concealed themselves.

  But there was no sign anywhere of a knife.

  TWO

  As a slave-child on a plantation called Bellefleur, Benjamin January had lived in music as naturally as a fish lives in water. His earliest memories were of his father whistling in the freezing dark as he washed in the trough behind the cabin tha
t two families shared: every morning a different tune. Some were those African tunes men sang in the fields, songs whose meaning had been lost over the years but whose haunting melodies still moved the heart and the bones. Some were the bird-bright cotillions heard once or twice, when the Master had company at the big house and folks would loiter in the yard to listen to the fiddle played within. January’s father could whistle a tune back after hearing it once. When January grew older— freed by his mother’s new master and given proper piano lessons in the light-handed Austrian mode from an émigré—he was astonished at how many of those tunes he instantly recognized.

  What would Antonio Vivaldi have thought had he known that his “Storm at Sea” concerto would be whistled by a tall black man with tribal scars on his face, walking out to the sugar-harvest with his cane-knife in his hand?

  Why this should return to January’s mind as he entered the New Exchange Coffee House on Rue Chartres slightly before noon the following day he wasn’t sure. Perhaps because he’d learned to look at music as a sort of armature, a core or frame of reference around which other perceptions of the world were built. Perhaps because he knew, after playing the piano for a thousand dances and ten thousand lessons, how music can slip past the guards that the mind puts on itself, how it can alter the shape of thought before the thinker is aware of the change.

  Else why the anger over Beethoven’s symphonies? Why the riots over Fidelio, whose young lovers weren’t intriguers tricking an old husband or doting father, but patriots standing forth against tyranny? Why in Milan and Parma and Venice could one be arrested for whistling the barcarole from La Muette de Portici: My friends, the dawn is fair . . . ?

  It was only a tale of events centuries old, after all.

  Words were dangerous enough. In most of the United States it was now forbidden to teach slaves to read since the big slave revolts of 1828 and 1831. But music gave words power. Music made them memorable. Burned them like the R brand for Runaway, into the flesh of the heart.

  Thus it was that though January woke with his cut arm hurting so badly that he had to tie it into a makeshift sling in order to walk, he dressed and made his way to the headquarters of the City Guard in the Cabildo, in quest of Abishag Shaw.

  And the men at the Cabildo directed him here.

  January hated the New Exchange.

  As the brightly painted sign above its doors proclaimed, the front room was a coffee-house. The velvet aroma of the beans as they were roasted competed pleasantly in the dim spaces of vaulted plaster with the stinks of hair pomade, sweaty wool, cigar smoke, and the comprehensively uncleaned gutters of the Rue Chartres. January stepped through the tall French doors that lined two walls and searched for sight of Shaw among the men clustered on the backless benches, the rush-bottomed chairs around trestle tables. Well-dressed men for the most part, muttering in low voices and scratching figures in memorandum-books. Sober coats of brown or blue— Carnival did not penetrate to the New Exchange. Over in the corner a flash of delicate sky-blue announced Vincent Marsan’s exquisite presence. High-crowned hats of beaver or beaverette or of the more modern silk. Chiefly white men, though January recognized Artemus Tourneval, a well-off free contractor of color, and noted another immaculate gentleman picking his way among the tables who, though nearly as light as some of the Neapolitans and Sicilians in the opera chorus, definitely had African ancestors as well as white.

  Neither Tourneval nor this other man—probably a planter come to town from the Cane River country— made any move to sit down. Nor would they have been served if they had, even if only with each other. When they spoke to the white men—as they did, dickering and figuring and speculating about interest and credit—both remained on their feet, while the white men sat, and neither looked the white men in the eye.

  January wondered dourly if they were addressed as vous or tu.

  The only other men in the room of African descent were the waiters, and an occasional porter from the yard beyond. Neither Tourneval nor the colored planter gave them a glance.

  When one aspires to mastery, one does not acknowledge cousinship with slaves.

  Tu, thought January. Beyond a doubt.

  In the big back room the auction hadn’t yet begun. Kegs, bales, boxes, were stacked around the whitewashed plaster walls, and on out into the sunlit yard. Nails, tools, seed, foreclosed from failed businesses. Small boxes on the long sawbuck tables contained the deeds to city lots, houses, shares in cotton-presses or sugar-mills or boats. In the yard, mules and horses, ranging from sleek bloodstock to spent ewe-necked nags—foreclosures, probates, the breakdowns of men who’d miscalculated their incomes or debts.

  Slaves.

  “Open your mouth, Deacon, let him see your teeth.” Jed Burton—January recognized him as one of the St. Mary Opera Society—waved his merchandise forward. A man in cheap homespun turned the slave in question half-around, to get better light in his mouth while he peered and thrust his fingers inside.

  Dressed up in their best, the men in jackets of blue corduroy or wool, even those who were obviously fieldhands. The women wore dresses of bright cotton calico, chintz, or sometimes even silk, their hair wrapped in the colorful tignons that the law required all women of color to wear. All smiling, cheerful-looking. Nobody wants a sullen slave, and a “likely” attitude might be the difference between working as a yardman in the city and being sent upriver to cut cane. In a corner a man with leg-shackles on his feet and an “R” burned into his cheek clasped a woman’s hands. Small children clung to their mothers. Older children—ten and up—looked like they wished they could. But they hovered close, and gazed up at the white men with a look in their eyes no child should even know exists. January knew exactly the dread they felt, the dread of that first night in a strange house with no one they knew around.

  Just because the law said Ten years old didn’t mean that private sales weren’t worked all the time for children of six and seven and eight. Besides, the law also said Where possible.

  He looked around again for Shaw. This time saw him: the Kentuckian was within a thumb’s-breadth of January’s formidable height and they were generally the two tallest men in any gathering. Hands in pockets, his battered orphan of a hat shoved onto the back of his head, Shaw looked like any small-time teamster or cracker farmer out after a bargain. The yard was full of such, prying open the mouths of mules or field-hands, peeking into casks of tar or nails, testing an ax-head or saw-blade from job-lots with the edges of horny thumbs. A yard to January’s left a man said, “Shuck down, honey” in drawling flatboat English to a stout young female slave; she unbuttoned her blue-flowered frock and let it drop around her feet, so that the man could knead her belly and pinch her breasts. Her children looked on.

  “Maestro.” Shaw slouched up to January and spit under the hooves of a mule held by a coffee-house servant. “I was just fixin’ to call. You all right?”

  January glanced over at the buyer and the woman who had been wearing the blue-flowered dress. “A little sick to my stomach.” He reminded himself that to go over and strike the man—or even tell him to behave like a gentleman—would be pointless. The next buyer would do precisely the same. “They told me I’d find you here.”

  “For all the good it’s like to do.” Shaw led the way across the yard to the gate onto Rue St. Louis. “As if anybody smugglin’ in Africans behind the law’s back would sell ’em in a public exchange.” He jerked his thumb toward the seller of the woman in blue, haggling now with the cracker in curious archaic French: a little dark, thin-featured man with the bump of an old break in his nose, a knife scar on his cheek, and mustachios down past his chin. He wore a home-made shirt of the blue-and-pink weave typical of the Acadians of the southwest parishes, his long black hair bound back like Hannibal’s in a queue. “One day I might just ask you to help me on this as well, if’n you got the stomach. I speak French right enough but it all sounds pretty much the same to me whether a man’s speakin’ it like a Frenchman or like a Spaniard.”<
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  “That’s where they’re smuggling them in from?” January watched the dark-mustached Acadian, the pot-bellied cracker shaking his head. “Cuba?”

  “Cuba, Puerto Rico. Sometimes they lands ’em at Veracruz or Matamoros an’ changes the bills of ladin’. It’s all very well to outlaw importin’ slaves, but as long as sellin’ ’em on the open market’s no crime, all you do is drive the price up.” Shaw’s drawling voice was soft, but January could see the hard lines of distaste in the corners of the man’s unshaven lips. “And of course, when ol’ Captain Chamoflet there brings in slaves to sell, they’s always Creole, born an’ bred here—an’ if he didn’t pay their owners for ’em, they’re too scared to say.”

  A few streets away in the Place d’Armes the Cathedral clock began to strike. From the brick vaults of the Exchange’s back room a man’s voice called out: “Lot Number One for the day, Court of Probate auction of the possessions of the late Anne-Marie Prudhomme.” Another voice repeated the words in English, and a general stir passed through the coffee-room, men rising, readjusting galluses or hats. Moving through to the back.

  “A woman named Lacey, aged twenty-three, trained in cooking, laundry, ironing, and embroidery—let your dress slip, girl, show ’em what you got—warranted of sober and modest disposition and in good health. What am I bid here?”

  “Three hundred,” called out a voice that January recognized as Vincent Marsan’s.

  Anger swam in January’s head and he put out a hand to the rough plaster of the wall. His arm throbbed again and he felt breathless and giddy. “Yes,” he said. “When you need help against smugglers, count on me.” He took a deep breath. The grayness retreated from his vision. “Is Belaggio all right?”

  “Fair to middlin’.” Shaw’s eyes narrowed. “Leastwise he ain’t claimin’ them two songbirds tried to peck him to death in the alley no more.” He held out a copy of the Louisiana Gazette to January, a paper much favored in the American community. “You sure what you seen an’ heard, Maestro? I was in that alley soon as it got light an’ I went through the mud there with a seine, an’ didn’t find no knife nor nuthin’.”