Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  January’s friends in the Paris demimonde—the courtesans whose lovers paid for flats for them in the fashionable St. Honoré district, not the streetcorner whores or the little grisettes who labored by day making hats—had asked him about the Blue Ribbon Balls, half expecting him to say that the women who attended them were slaves. January had disabused them of this notion—like most of the Parisian demi-castors, the majority of the plaçées had been raised by plaçée mothers with the hope and intention of entering a permanent relationship with a wealthy gentleman. Of “finding a place,” or “being placed.” The only difference lay in the fact that the plaçées, though free, were all women of color.

  The ladies of the Rue des Ramparts implicitly understood the price they would have to pay.

  To have a wealthy lover, but not a husband.

  To love, maybe, and have love, but never to be secure in that love.

  To bequeath to her children the property and education that they might not otherwise have. And with that property and education, to bequeath the fairer skin that altered the way people looked at you, white and black and colored alike.

  Henri Viellard had done well by his sister, January knew. And yes, of course Minou had always known that one day the man she loved would take a wife, and do his duty to the family property, the family name.

  Viellard was there with his mother, a massive woman nearly as tall as her six-foot son and swathed in a terrifying confection of eggplant-hued velvet. “There’s never any keeping up with them!” Madame Viellard cried, surveying her audience, the French Creole portion of the company in the pillared ballroom, which had fractured along its usual lines. That the Creole French attended at all was a tribute to Fitzhugh Trulove’s long residence in the town, dating back to the days of Spanish governorship. His position as a bridge between the two societies, as much as his wealth, was the reason the canny Caldwell had sought him for the Opera Society. “What should war in Spain have to do with the price of sugar, I ask you? What are they fighting about anyway? Or these ridiculous countries popping up in South America, always changing their names and fighting each other and making everything awkward for everyone? One simply cannot keep track of them.”

  The galaxy of candles—in mirrored sconces on the walls, on the double line of painted columns, in the four chandeliers, on girandoles like a forest of silver trees rising among the heaped platters of the buffet—picked a second galaxy of brightness in the diamonds on Madame Viellard’s massive bosom as she turned. “They should make up their minds once and for all what sugar is to sell for and then hold to it! One simply cannot get business done any other way!”

  “But one never knows,” demurred Mr. Knight, folding small, neat hands gloved in dandyish lavender kid, “what the markets in Europe will demand in any given year.”

  On their side of the ballroom—the side that encompassed the buffet—the Americans present muttered in English of slave prices and the profits to be made from cotton in the newer states and territories of the north and west, of tight money and buying stock on credit, as if Europe didn’t exist. The little stack of Othello libretti sat untouched on a marquetry side-table.

  And perhaps for them, reflected January, between the light, flowing minuet from Don Giovanni and a sentimental rendering of a Beethoven nocturne, Europe didn’t exist. Six weeks’ steady vomiting in a cramped cabin if you went by steam packet, with high seas and bad food and the possibility of the boiler blowing up as lagniappe. Three weeks if you wanted to pay clipper prices. And to most Americans it was only stories: castles and churches and crowded streets, and we have all that and more and better in America, don’t we? And for a quarter the price!

  Descriptive words meant little. You didn’t understand, unless and until you’d actually walked through the green magic of the Versailles gardens in morning fog, or come out from between those crowding soot-stained buildings to see Notre Dame’s square towers soaring up and up above you for that first time. Until you’d heard real opera sung by professionals in a good hall with a full orchestra, or rambled from bookshop to bookshop to bookshop along a cobbled street delirious with the knowledge that you could find anything you wanted— anything—somewhere along the way.

  “One should know, Mr. Knight,” declared Madame Viellard. “That is precisely my point.” One side of the huge double parlor faced out onto a formal garden, and with the heat of the hundreds of candles—Trulove would never subject his guests to the smuts and stink of gas— long windows had been opened, admitting the green scent of wet foliage and the occasional rattle-winged palmetto-bug. The matron glared at her son as if demanding support, but Henri, consuming pâté in wretched silence, would not meet her eye.

  “It’s a dreadfully ill-regulated place anyway, Europe,” laughed Trulove, and he cast a fond glance toward Oona Flaherty, done up in lilac tulle and an astonishing three-lobed topknot bedecked with artificial grapes, clinging dutifully to the arm of one of Mr. Knight’s clerks. January smiled at the burly young man’s expression of grim concentration: it was one of the duties of a planter’s business agent to purchase and send upriver whatever the family might require in the way of tools or supplies: chinaware, spices, salt, coffee, or wine. Presumably a screen for an employer’s amours—Knight also handled the Truloves’ business—came under the same heading.

  “Nonsense,” retorted Mr. Knight. “You have been away from it for too long, sir. Since the Congress, Europe has been one of the most peaceful and best-ruled places on earth.”

  “If one equates good rule with oppression,” returned another voice, and January, eliding smoothly from schottische to waltz, broke off for a moment, turning his head, seeking the owner of the voice—

  Knowing absolutely that it had to be Belaggio’s former partner, Incantobelli.

  He could think of no other reason for a castrato—as the lead in Giulio Cesare had to be—to be in New Orleans.

  “True enough, one does not see the blood of kings washed down the gutters much anymore, nor hear the tocsins ringing through the night,” that soft, sweet alto continued. All January could glimpse was a flash of white hair, something he’d already deduced the man must have: even during the early days of his stay in Paris the fashion for those heartstopping, magical voices had been a thing of the past. For Incantobelli to have had enough of a career to make him an impresario now, he would have to be sixty at least.

  “Yet as the price for that peace was to hand the states of Italy and Germany around to the victors like petitsfours, to rule and tax as they choose and to infest with their secret police, one cannot but reflect that there must have been some middle ground.”

  A frilled ruffle of violin music at his back reminded January what he was there for: Hannibal covering up for the fact that the piano had fallen out of the waltz in mid-bar. He fumbled, pulling his mind back to the piece, annoyed and embarrassed, and when next he tried to listen for that curious combination of child’s voice and man’s, all he could hear was Jed Burton complaining to the banker Hubert Granville about a horse someone had tried to sell him.

  “What happened?” asked Hannibal quietly when the waltz curtsied to its end. “I thought your piano had broken a string.”

  January shook his head. “Incantobelli’s here.”

  “Half a reale says Belaggio calls him out,” replied Hannibal with barely a pause for breath.

  “Who’s Incantobelli?” demanded Jacques Bichet, shaking the spit out of his flute. “I have five cents on Davis. . . .”

  “Oh, I’m still covering Davis,” said the fiddler. “I’ve got my money down for ten-thirty, five minutes either way. Incantobelli’s Belaggio’s former partner.”

  “Two cents on nine-thirty,” chipped in Cochon Gardinier, an enormously fat man who was probably the best fiddler, after Hannibal, in New Orleans.

  “It’s nearly quarter-past now.” Hannibal glanced at the intensely ormolued case-clock that dominated the far end of the parlor. “And Belaggio hasn’t even arrived yet. Incantobelli will have to b
e standing on the front porch for a challenge at nine-thirty. . . .”

  “Considering Incantobelli wasn’t invited,” said January grimly, “that’s probably exactly where he’ll be.” Not far from the leafy screen that half hid these negotiations from their employer, John Davis was gesticulating angrily and saying something to Vincent Marsan. Marsan, resplendent in pale jade-green down to his gloves and the emeralds in his breast-pins, nodded sympathetically and stroked his golden mustache. But the sky-blue eyes never left the doorway to the hall. January heard “La Muette de Portici” and “—accuses me of hiring men . . .”

  “On the other hand,” he said, and brought out the music to the first quadrille of the evening, “I’ll lay you that Davis gets in with a challenge first.”

  “Never!” Cochon whipped a Mexican reale from his pocket and slapped it down on the corner of the piano. “I’m for this Italian.”

  “For shame, sir!” Hannibal drew himself up like a demented Irish elf. “A fip on Davis before him.”

  “Done, sir!”

  “And I,” added Bichet.

  “Covered.” January counted out eighteen pennies from his pocket, the rough equivalent in the various currencies available in New Orleans to cover the various bets.

  “Gentlemen!” Uncle Bichet finished touching up the tuning-keys of his cello and regarded the other members of the little orchestra with a stern eye. “Didn’t your mamas raise you right? It ain’t polite to lay wagers on white men at their own parties.” He spoke the gombo French, the “mo kiri mo vini” French of the cane-brakes and the slave-quarters—which most of the musicians would have sworn, in white company, that they didn’t rightly understand. Behind his spectacles the old man’s eyes sparkled, disconcerting amid a graceful criss-cross of tribal scars. “ ’Sides, you all ought to know better than to bet on anythin’ a blankitte’s gonna do. Now, let’s shake these folks up a little. Ben . . .”

  January grinned, and danced his fingers over the first bars of “La Bonne Amazone.” As if by magic the crowd that jammed the room shifted, transforming from a wall of backs into an open aisle of non-dancers crowding aside between the pillars and around the buffet, and dancers forming up three sets—

  —as cleanly divided along French and American lines as if on a battlefield. Anne Trulove, a biscuit-blonde in rigidly tasteful gray, took her husband by the arm and firmly steered him into the American set farthest from the one graced by Oona Flaherty and her lumbering cicisbeo. Henri Viellard, after an unsuccessful attempt at concealment behind one of the buffet table’s silver epergnes, gracelessly led his middlemost sister into the French set. Vincent Marsan’s wife, a colorless woman with the face of one who has neither laughed nor wept in years, made a move toward the French set, then flushed as her husband did not respond, and retreated hastily to the wall again.

  Nowhere did January see anyone who might have been Incantobelli.

  “At least we should have a lively evening,” remarked Hannibal, and the orchestra whirled into the music like a thousand colored ribbons released at once into the wind.

  Later that evening, crouched in the darkness with the stink of blood filling his nostrils, January remembered Hannibal’s remark with rage, and bitterness, and despair.

  FIVE

  Lorenzo Belaggio made his appearance at ten, Mademoiselle d’Isola radiant on his arm.

  “Guess Incantobelli didn’t meet him on the gallery,” taunted January as the impresario thrust aside the tawny velvet curtain that swagged the vestibule doors, held it back with a dramatic gesture that halted the dancers mid-pirouette, and drew all eyes to the dazzling figure framed there in her gown of white and emerald. One felt she waited for applause.

  “The night’s young.” Hannibal rounded off the truncated waltz with a little flourish of notes, like a satin bow.

  “I hope that six cents wasn’t your rent.”

  Caldwell and Trulove made haste to bow to the young soprano, Marsan to kiss her hand. La d’Isola preened happily and uncomprehendingly at the compliments that rained about her in English, nodded earnestly to the French ones, and said, in her soft, sweet voice with its Neapolitan lilt, “Merci . . . merci, Mi-sciou,” like a child pronouncing her lessons. “Please. You are so kind.” Though she had the air of one who certainly accepted the praise as deserved, she also thanked the giver of each compliment with a sparkling, genuine smile. She seemed more relaxed than she had at the theater—maybe because Consuela Montero wasn’t present.

  Few of the singers were. Madame Chiavari had come early with her husband, and had departed early; some of the ladies were distantly polite, but enough of a stigma still clung to a woman of the stage that even the Creole ladies weren’t sure if they should be seen in conversation with her or not. The men, of course, had no interest in a woman so respectably wed. Other than Oona Flaherty, still on the arm of Mr. Knight’s trussed-looking clerk, the only person January had glimpsed so far from the theater was Madame Scie, clothed in a rather old-fashioned gown of apricot gauze and listening politely to young Harry Fry expostulate at the far end of the refreshment table.

  “What do the midwives do in this country?” she demanded a few minutes later, coming around the corner of the leafy musicians’ screen. “Crush the bump that governs interest in anything they cannot eat, invest in, or take with them to bed?” She tapped the back of her head as if participating in a demonstration of phrenology.

  “He seems to have heard of Napoleon, for which I suppose he is due some credit, but all else is either I have got such-and-such a bargain dealing for cotton, or How much is proper to spend on a gift for the Señorita Felina? What sort of jewels would best advance my suit? Mr. Fry knows, he tells me, where to procure them cheap. Would I take a message to her? Not that the girl can read, even should I permit myself to be used as a letter-box—or a bawd.” Her thin wrist flicked in a gesture eloquent of exasperation and self-mockery. “I wept for your exile before, mon vieux, but I see now my tears were ignorant, falling far short of the truth.”

  “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo,” agreed Hannibal gravely. He and the ballet mistress had taken to each other at sight. “It’s a malady akin to the cholera, I believe, borne upon the insalubrious air. A man can be a very paragon of political theory while he lives in Paris, but within six months of stepping from the gangplank, he hasn’t an idea in his head but what percentage of his next cotton crop can be invested in slaves.”

  January leaned an elbow on the edge of Trulove’s grand piano. “White people in this town just don’t have any idea how to have a good time. Especially during Carnival. That’s the one bad thing about being good in this town: the whites pay you more, but if the pay were equal, I’d sooner play for the free colored militia and burial societies. Better food, better talk, better dancing, funnier jokes, and far, far, far better music.”

  “Would you care to accompany us to Jacques Bichet’s party after everyone here goes home?” inquired Hannibal, who was by this stage of the evening weaving slightly with exhaustion and brandy. He picked from the dancer’s hair a spray of the fragile straw-flowers that were its only ornament, and tucked them into his buttonhole like a skeletal wisp of smoke. “He did say we should bring whomever we liked,” he added, seeing January’s expression of shock that he should even make such a suggestion to a white woman, and the daughter of a beheaded French marquis at that. “Jacques, your good wife wouldn’t have any objection to Madame Scie coming along to your place afterward and hearing real music, would she?”

  The flautist’s eyes widened. Like January, he was far more disconcerted at the average white lady’s reaction to such a suggestion than at any danger that might attach. But Marguerite Scie was not the average white lady. She’d trodden the opera stage for too long to concern herself with scandal, and had long since, January knew, abandoned the convention of seeking a respectable protector who might be shocked at her behavior. The crowfoot lines around her gray eyes deepened with amusement and delight, and old Uncle Bi
chet, seeing this, leaned around his cello and answered for his flabbergasted nephew, “I think my nephew’s wife would be pleased and honored, if this meets with your approval, Madame.”

  “Indeed it does.” The ballet mistress inclined her head, first to the old man, then to Jacques, then Hannibal. “And considering the number of people here who have injured themselves in their haste to speak to a mere dance mistress, and an elderly one at that,” she added dryly, “I shall count the minutes.”

  And as James Caldwell and Lorenzo Belaggio between them led La d’Isola toward the musicians, she strolled away, erect and solitary, to the pillar where she had stood before.

  “Gentlemen,” said Caldwell, “perhaps you’d be good enough to play for our beautiful nightingale to give our company here a taste of what’s in store at the American Theater this season?”

  Drusilla looked around her, startled, and tried to draw back, but Belaggio put a firm hand on the small of her back.

  “That pretty song the Countess sings in Act Three of Marriage, perhaps?” suggested Trulove, coming up from the other side. His wife was beside him, her cool blue glance touching the soprano—and the way Belaggio held her—with impersonal contempt, flavored by the malice of a woman whose husband has been insulting her for weeks with an Irish opera-dancer.

  Blushing, Drusilla shook her head in a nodding forest of green-and-white ostrich-tips. “Oh, no, you must sing, my dear,” purred Mrs. Trulove. “What about that lovely aria in Mr. Bellini’s Norma?” And she hummed the first few bars of “Casta diva,” arguably one of the most difficult pieces ever written for a soprano.

  “Do not be so modest, cara mia!” boomed Belaggio, tightening his grip as the girl showed signs of trying to slip away. “You must show these people what a spectacle awaits them in our opera season! I insist. Gentlemen, you have the music. . . .”

  Pale under her rice-powder and rouge, La d’Isola looked around at the faces of the men, and of the women closing in, smiling with curiosity at this woman of whom they’d heard. And January, looking at the girl’s eyes, realized, She knows.