You got her, Philippe had said.
Even if Shaw didn’t believe January had tried to kill a white woman—a woman he was known to have bedded—it was no guarantee the crime wouldn’t be fastened on him anyway. Or on someone else who’d been at Bichet’s, Paul or Mohammed or any of a dozen others, by who knew what vagaries of blankitte reasoning.
Once you called on the whites, and the white man’s law, everything was out of your hands.
Behind him, Madame Bontemps’s voice called out, “He had a knife.”
EIGHT
“If Madame Bontemps objects that much to a woman knowing how to read,” remarked Rose, gravely stirring the fist-sized clot of rice provided into the rest of the gumbo that had been brought to their table at the Buttonhole Café, “I shudder to contemplate what she’d say if she knew I’d been hired to put together pyrotechnics for Mr. Davis’s production of La Muette de Portici on the thirty-first.”
As the landlady had not torn Rose’s note into thumb-nail-size fragments and dropped them into the privy— something she had done often enough in the past for Rose to be resigned about it—but had merely ripped it several times neatly across and added it to the box of old newspapers left there for the convenience of the occupants, January had been able to meet Rose without trouble. The Buttonhole was a small establishment on Rue St. Anne that catered to free colored musicians and artisans, and served up in its tiny plank-walled front parlor the best gumbo and jambalaya in town. Cora Chouteau, who owned the place, further enlivened the room by pasting up every playbill she could lay hands on—advertisements for both Caldwell’s and Davis’s rival productions of La Muette smeared the wall behind Rose’s head.
“Caldwell may have bought up all the red silk and ready-made fireworks in town,” Rose added, seeing January’s start of surprise. “But colored fire is fairly simple to manufacture. It’s surprising what you can make people think they’re seeing, with a little red glass and forced perspective.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” The scant sleep January had managed to achieve that afternoon had refreshed him somewhat, between dreams of Desdemona’s song in the darkness, and jolting awake every few minutes at the fancied creak of a foot on the gallery. Outside the café’s open windows, Rue St. Anne was already noisy with carriages full of maskers, with gaudily-costumed women calling out to men, and the racket of someone playing “When Darkness Brooded O’er the Deep” very, very badly on a cornet.
It would be, reflected January wearily, a very long night.
Rose took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. There were few ways by which the quadroon daughter of a plaçée could earn her living in New Orleans at the best of times, were she unwilling to place herself under the protection of a man. If Carnival was the harvest of January’s year, it was the starving winter of hers. Poverty was beginning to tell on her—he could see where her gloves had been mended, and where the sleeve of her blue merino dress was shiny with wear. He was glad she’d been able to find the work with Davis, particularly since it might well lead to more, and to work better paid than she was generally able to find.
Since her involvement in the same scandal of lies and libel that had robbed January of most of his living the previous winter, she had been unable to teach. January was daily astonished that this bookish, brilliant woman had survived the destruction of the school that had been her life’s work. He knew she eked out a desperate living these days with her translations, but he’d never heard her repine, or speak of might-have-beens or if-onlies. She was jealous of her liberty, of her solitude and her work, and the treatment one man had given her had left its terrible mark on her spirit. One day, he hoped, he’d have sufficient money saved to be able to ask her to be his wife, but hadn’t the faintest idea of what she would say when he did.
And he knew it was not a question he would be able to ask twice.
“Do you think he followed you?” She replaced her spectacles on her nose and devoted herself to the gumbo. “Incantobelli?”
“He was at Trulove’s. And if, as Madame Montero says, Belaggio stole his opera, I can see him being angry enough—hating enough—to want to destroy not only Belaggio, but the entire opera season as well. So I can almost understand coshing the ballet mistress. Certainly Marguerite’s replacement by Herr Smith isn’t going to help the performance. But surely Incantobelli can’t intend to murder the orchestra piecemeal.”
“He can intend to murder the one member of the orchestra who held sufficient conversation with the ballet mistress to be a witness. That’s always assuming Incantobelli to be sane,” she went on thoughtfully. “Though why he would bother to go after Belaggio is beyond me. Belaggio seems to be running toward his own doom swiftly enough to outdistance the most vindictive of foes.”
Playing schottisches and waltzes, marches and cotillions a few hours later in the tasteful ivory-paneled confines of the Salle d’Orleans, January understood the schoolmistress’s point. As usual, one of the Carnival subscription balls of white society—the French Creole St. Margaret’s Society—was taking place in the Théâtre d’Orleans next door, and there was much discreet coming and going through the olive-colored velvet curtain that masked the passageway between the Théâtre and the Salle. January watched some of the most socially prominent white gentlemen of the town as they danced with their mistresses, or the women they hoped to make their mistresses, and shook his head. The custom of the country, he’d heard people say—he himself had said it, many times, as if that somehow made it acceptable. At the other end of the passageway, where a floor had been set up over the Théâtre’s parterre and other musicians played, the wives and sisters, fiancées and mothers of these selfsame gentlemen sipped lemonade and chatted, and pretended mutual bafflement about where their menfolk had slipped away to.
The gambling-rooms downstairs, they all said. That’s where they’ve gone.
January recognized Lorenzo Belaggio despite the mask of bronze leather that hid his face. The impresario, clad in bronze armor, kept as far from Vincent Marsan as possible: by the way he kept drifting toward the olive-curtained windows, January guessed he was suffocating in the costume never designed for dancing. Marsan was all in crimson satin, a full-skirted coat and breeches, long waistcoat, and crimson stockings and shoes, topped off with an old-fashioned periwig the size of a sheep. Watching him flirt with the café-crème princesses, Columbines, shepherdesses, and odalisques, January wondered if the drab Madame Marsan had been left bredouillée, as they called it, in the Théâtre, “making a tapestry” with the other women along the walls.
Hubert Granville’s wife certainly had. January glimpsed the banker tripping through a sprightly cotillion with Eulalie Figes, a former plaçée and the mother of a hopeful young damsel. The banker’s motley rags and exaggerated back-hump made January wonder for a dizzying moment if the squabbish Mrs. Granville in the next room was really clad in gypsy-dancer garb and accompanied by a stuffed goat. Hannibal’s evaluation of the upcoming duel as material for a bad opéra bouffe seemed amply justified: every time Marsan left the Salle, Granville would stride over to Belaggio, take him by the bronze vambrace, and expostulate furiously, clearly trying to talk him out of the duel. At the reappearance of that tall crimson figure, Quasimodo would hop back into the cotillion to catch Eulalie Figes’s hand as if nothing had happened.
Had Marguerite not been lying at Olympe’s house unconscious—had January not heard, over and over again in his mind, his landlady’s flat, harsh voice saying He had a knife—he would have been hard-put not to laugh.
Belaggio wasn’t the only one being worked on. During the course of the evening Jed Burton, James Caldwell, the prim little Mr. Knight—his immaculately anonymous evening-dress scorning the fantasies of the other men— and his lumbering clerk, all made it their business to corner Marsan with varying degrees of vehemence. “The Widow Redfern and Mrs. Trulove have been at him across the way,” remarked Hannibal, strolling through the velvet curtains and over to the buffet table when supp
er was announced at the Théâtre. About half the men in the Salle rather sheepishly made their excuses to their ladyfriends and retreated to rejoin their wives: “I can’t imagine why they bother,” remarked the fiddler, who’d been hired to play at the Society Ball rather than this one. “La Redfern was in charge of the refreshments over there. I never saw so much bread and butter in my life. They water the champagne, too.” He’d helped himself to a bottle of Mr. Davis’s, and a vol-au-vent, and leaned against January’s piano, chalky and shaking with fatigue.
Around them, the men who’d lingered moved from woman to woman, chatting with the young ladies, gazing into dark eyes or more discreetly down the tender-shadowed creases of half-exposed breasts. They talked more easily with the mothers, who hovered smiling, waving their painted silk fans, graceful and gracious and sharply cognizant of the value of money, aware—as their daughters were not—of the transitory nature of male passion, of the precarious position of any free woman of color in New Orleans. January’s eye picked them out, too: Dominique’s friends and neighbors, his mother’s friends and their daughters. Marie-Anne Pellicot, shy and lovely on the arm of her young protector, a wealthy planter’s son. Catherine Clisson, darker than most of the other plaçées, almost African-black, and striking in a Renaissance gown of yellow silk, whose plaçage with a rich planter twentyfive years ago had nearly broken January’s very youthful heart. Dominique’s friend Iphigénie Picard, laughing as she teased the discomfited Yves Valcour about having to return to his mother and sisters next door. . . .
White men and young ladies of color—for of course the only men of color in the room were the musicians, and the waiters who brought in the food. Not all of the girls, January knew, were entirely willing, legally free though they might be. It is easy to persuade the young, who are aware of how limited their options are; easy to play upon family obligations, to convince a girl to become what her mother was. Obligations to their mothers: obligations, too, to their white fathers, invisible in the background but capable of using these left-handed children as pawns, as they used everything else. Be my mistress and I’ll give you a house, you who will have nothing without help. Be my friend’s mistress or I’ll cancel your mother’s pension, or speak a bad word of her at the bank next time she wants to borrow a little money to enlarge her business, or educate your brother.
The white men all knew one another. And they were strong.
And behind them all lurked the shadow of Kate the Gouger, a terrible reminder of what happened to a girl who had no protection, and nothing to sell.
“Is Henri there?” Dominique rustled over to the musicians’ dais, gorgeous in the pink-and-gold panniered Court gown that January had seen on Iphigénie last year.
Hannibal hesitated. The exhaustion of the long walk to Tchoupitoulas Street had taken its toll—he was weaving a little on his feet and the soft Anglo-Irish accent that mostly disappeared when he was sober was much to the fore. Then he shrugged, and said, “With La Mère Terrible playing monster to his Andromeda, O Queen. The lot of Viellards—Henri and his sisters—are done up as, I think, the Kingdom of the Ocean—in any case it more nearly resembles a school of whales than anything I’ve recently. . . .”
“And is she?”
There was no need to ask of whom Dominique spoke.
“You might as well tell me,” said January’s sister, when Hannibal did not reply. “It can’t be worse than what I’m imagining.”
“He doesn’t look happy, if that’s what you fear.” He’d acquired a nosegay of small yellow roses from somewhere, and used it to tie up his long, graying hair. “She’s a well-looking girl. Pale and skinny, but nothing to—”
“I’ve seen her,” interrupted Dominique. “One does, you know, on the streets and in church. I know Chloë St. Chinian is beautiful. And I know she’s cold as stone. And no, I don’t imagine . . .”
Her breath snagged. January followed her gaze. Henri Viellard, ridiculous in fish-scale green-and-silver, stood before the passageway curtain. He had a trident tucked under one chubby arm and was in the act of carefully putting his spectacles back on after pushing up his mask. That done, he looked around for Dominique, met her eyes . . .
She held his gaze for a long moment, then turned her head, flipped open her gold lace fan, and went on as if she hadn’t seen him, “I don’t imagine Henri will want for anything in the way of a dowry from her. Good heavens, is that Babette Figes over there, dressed up like a sultana? I must find out where she got those silks—darling, how gorgeous . . .” And she rustled off just as Viellard came lumbering across the ballroom toward her, his hand held out and misery on his round face.
“Is she beautiful?” January asked softly, watching his sister retreat, chattering nineteen to the dozen with her friends about the newest shape in sleeves and why Marie-Toussainte Valcour had been obliged to cut off most of her hair.
Hannibal polished off the champagne. “Like the night / of cloudless climes and starry skies. . . . A little blond thing like a china doll and not more than sixteen. In that costume she really does look like a mermaid—not the sweet ones sailors dream about, but the other kind, the ones that have no hearts.”
“It’s not that I’m jealous, p’tit,” sighed Dominique, returning to January’s side later in the evening, after Hannibal had gone back to work on his side of the passageway and most of the men had drifted in again for the tableaux vivantes that were a feature of quadroon balls during Carnival. Having played the other side of the passageway in his time, January was familiar with the hemming and hawing, the muttered avowals of it being time for a smoke or the assurances that they had to go meet a man down in the gambling-rooms—No, I’ll just be a few moments, my sweet. . . .
Mr. Knight had cornered Vincent Marsan at the buffet beside the musicians and jabbed at him with a tiny finger: “You’re asking too much of me!” shouted Marsan, and Knight made a gesture for silence, with coldly blazing eyes. And then, more quietly, Marsan said, “In any case, it’s all arranged.”
Not, thought January, what any of the Opera Society wanted to hear.
Henri Viellard had not returned. January was aware of his sister’s glance, flickering from the passageway to the triple arch that led through to the broad vestibule and the grand staircase of white marble and black. “It’s just that I’m afraid poor Henri’s going to be made absolutely wretched by that girl, and of course he hasn’t the least notion how to defend himself.” She tossed her head, making the miniature windmill and its tiny grove of trees tremble in her enormous powdered wig. “Bleu,” she cursed. Behind a curtain in an alcove, the first of the tableaux vivantes was assembling—the inevitable Maidens of Camelot. The tableaux vivantes hadn’t changed much since January had first started playing at the quadroon balls in 1808: the Ladies of Camelot. The Sultan’s Harem. (His wife, Ayasha, had been a Berber. Her accounts of what life was really like in her father’s harîm made January wince at these tableaux, as he winced at the Duchesse du Durras’s romanticized novels of slavery.) A Garden of Living Flowers.
“But at least I have no intention of making a fool of myself, like the white ladies who sneak over here in masks. . . .”
“Do they often?”
“Let me remind you that ten years ago, you faced ruin,” Knight was telling Marsan angrily. “Certainly for saving you from that, if for no other reason, you owe it to me. . . .”
“Darling, of course they do!” Dominique flourished her fan. “That girl there, you see? In the pink domino cloak? You can always tell the white girls, because they never talk to anybody, and their dresses aren’t nearly as smart—and they stare so. Like they’ve never seen men before in their lives.”
Certainly the maiden in the pink domino was keeping herself well to the back of the big room, lingering in corners while other chatting groups teased and flirted with the men. When Belaggio approached her, creaking in his leather armor, she made a hasty excuse and fled through the vestibule doors. . . .
“They can’t abide the thou
ght of their precious husbands and fiancés and brothers coming over here to be wicked with us,” Dominique went on with bright artificial cheer. The old-fashioned flat-fronted corset gave her an air of curious dignity, the exaggerated white wig making her face at once older and more serene. “I quite expect Madame Chloë will be here eventually with the best of them, looking absolutely silly, of course, because they all do. . . . Darling, what a lovely idea!” She whirled and skipped away to greet Phlosine Seurat, her other bosom-bow, entering the Salle late on her protector’s arm and leaving a trail of detached silk flower-petals in her wake.
You only hope, thought January sadly, that Madame Chloë will be here with the best of them, spying on her husband.
Rather than that she succeed in forbidding him to come at all.
Rather than forcing Henri—through money, through family, through sheer strength of will against his luxury-loving softness—to give you up.
“You know not what you ask of me,” intoned Belaggio a little later, when Caldwell—ridiculously got up in the blue velvet robe of a mystical adept and a false beard like a horse’s tail—stopped him between dances. “There are things a man cannot be seen to accept from another man. Am I to wear horns before the whole of the town?” He pushed up his mask and peeped cautiously around.
“It isn’t as if she were your wife,” replied the theater owner, and he picked a tendril of beard out of his mouth. “Or even as if you’d been with her more than a month or so. I understand you—er—encountered her only at Christmastime. . . .”
“You have been speaking to that Mexican Messalina,” Belaggio said. “Consuela is jealous of my beautiful one, and spiteful as a cat. She would say anything to her disadvantage. And surely you know, Signor, that when one finds the woman of one’s dreams, length of time is nothing. When souls love for a thousand years . . .”
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