Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  She murmured, “I know.”

  “Well, comfort yourself with the fact that you probably haven’t lost anything.” January pulled a chair up to the side of Zizi-Marie’s bed and held the bedside candle a few inches from Marguerite’s face. The pupils of her eyes were still of unequal size; she blinked and pulled away. “Most people lose memories when they suffer a concussion, and mostly they come back. How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “I’m trying to decide how many hands you’re holding up.”

  “Does your head hurt?”

  “Like sin.” She coughed, and tried to clear her throat, as if puzzled that it should be sore. The marks there were still livid, yellow and green around the edges as they healed. They would be a long time fading. “Though in most cases I’ve found it has been virtue that’s given me the real headaches.”

  January took the spouted cup of water Olympe handed him and held it to Marguerite’s lips. She sighed and seemed to sink deeper into the bed linen, bruised eyelids sinking shut.

  “Can we get you anything,” asked Rose from the other side of the bed, “before you sleep? Benjamin brought your bags from the hotel.”

  “Yes, I see.” Her thin fingers moved again on the worn lace of her night-dress. “Thank you. I cannot repay you, Benjamin, or your kind sister. . . .”

  “Mr. Caldwell’s taken care of that.” January knew that a lifetime of living hand-to-mouth had given Marguerite a horror of being in debt. “Is there anyone we should write to? Anyone who should know of this?”

  He thought of those she had told him of: the airy, scholarly dilettante father, the pretty stepmother she’d adored. The brothers: Clovis, Claude, Octave . . . All swept away in the Terror, and with them sister, uncles, cousins, aunts. Some publicly beheaded while the unemployed scum of the Paris streets spit on their faces, a number cut to pieces alive in one of the hysterical massacres when the Paris mob was swept by rumors that the prisoners awaiting trial were in communication with “enemies of the Republic.” For as long as he’d known Marguerite, she’d lived in two rooms in the Rue de la Petite Truanderie, had walked to the Odéon for rehearsals, performances, instruction of the little rats who were the whole of her life, and to Les Halles for bread and vegetables and scrap meat for her cats. Nothing that the Terror had taken away had she replaced: not family, not possessions, not wealth. Who Monsieur Scie had been, and when he had crossed her path, she had never said. Her rooms had been spare and clean as a nun’s cell.

  She’d lived on air and light, and the laughter of her friends.

  Looking down, he saw she was asleep again.

  “I’ll sit with her,” said Olympe. “Paul will walk you home if you’d like.”

  “Thank you. They’ve arrested John Davis, of all people. . . .”

  “T’cha!”

  “Have you heard anything? Or has Mamzelle Marie?” Most secrets, January knew, came to Marie Laveau in the end. The voodooienne was the queen of secrets, the center of a web of information, rumor, and blackmail that stretched far up and down the river, a web that touched the slaves who cleaned the gutters and the planters who bought and sold those slaves.

  Like his mother—like Olympe, or any woman of color—Mamzelle Marie kept her ears open for gossip and tales and speculation. But what for others was entertainment, she pursued as a vocation and a livelihood. She fit pieces together that others merely noted in passing, assembled facts with the patience of one of those Florentine artists who form mosaics so intricate, they cannot be distinguished from paintings. People said she could look in your eyes and read your dreams.

  Sometimes January thought she could.

  Other times, he guessed that all she really needed was to have your housemaid owe her a favor.

  “I’ll go to her tomorrow,” Olympe told him, “and see what she has heard. There’s always someone who knows something.” She shrugged. “But it’s like waiting for a branch to come down-stream. It sometimes takes a while.”

  January leaned down and kissed Marguerite’s lips. They felt cold under his own, like silk left outside on a dry winter night.

  Rehearsals for Robert le Diable began the following day at noon.

  Since the little rats would assemble at ten—to receive Herr Smith’s instructions in transforming themselves into the mad ghosts of dancing nuns—January rose early, and reached the Cabildo before eight. As he walked through the chill gray of dawn, he noticed that the city official in charge of such matters had stripped all posters of La Muette de Portici, Davis’s as well as Caldwell’s, though Davis’s production of the opera was to take place that night. Posters for Robert were already pasted to every wall and corner in town.

  In the big stone-floored watchroom of the Cabildo, Shaw slouched at his desk, explaining something to a little man who looked as Irish as a pot of bubble-and-squeak: “This here’s Mr. LeMoyne,” the policeman introduced them as January hung back, and gestured for January to join them. “Mr. Davis’s lawyer.”

  “Pleased.” The lawyer held out his hand. “I know you. You’re the piano master, Mr. Davis spoke of you.” LeMoyne spoke French with the accent of Normandy and called January vous, not tu. “I’ve been telling this—this American”—he might just as well have said sbirro—“that it’s not only ridiculous to hold Mr. Davis here on these absurd charges, but it’s clearly detrimental to his health. He’s not a well man.”

  “That’s true, sir,” agreed January, looking at Shaw. “He’s sixty-two years old and his heart isn’t strong. You know yourself that jail is a pest-hole. . . .”

  “I know that,” replied Shaw. The patience in his voice let January know that the overcrowded cells with their stink of filth and disease—with convicted thieves and murderers cheek-by-jowl beside suspects awaiting trial, drunks sobering up, runaway slaves being held for their Masters’ arrival, and madmen with whom nobody quite knew what to do—had already been a topic of discussion between himself and the attorney. “An’ as I told Mr. LeMoyne here, in cases of murder, there ain’t no provision to let the culprit go walkin’ around the public streets on bail.”

  “Any number of men in this town,” said January dryly, “can reassure you as to the unlikelihood that Mr. Davis, if released, will run wildly through the streets, stabbing strangers at random. Sir.”

  “They’s welcome to come to the arraignment Monday an’ do so.” Shaw folded his big, clumsy hands, the knuckles of which were as swollen and bruised as January’s own. Carnival was not a good time, thought January, looking down at them, then up at the Kaintuck’s black eye and cut cheek, to be responsible for peace and good order in New Orleans.

  “I’m sorry,” January said. “That was rude of me. But you know John Davis.”

  “I do,” said Shaw. At the watch sergeant’s desk an extremely inebriated Texian in soiled buckskins expostulated at length on how his scheme to send a force of armed American warriors to aid the rebels in New Grenada had necessitated a shooting-match in the middle of Gallatin Street at four in the morning.

  “An’ I know Mr. Davis ain’t likely to go around killin’ nobody else—nor probably that he won’t high-tail it, neither. But there’s folks in this town that have sort of remarked as to how them that’s friends of the Prieurs an’ the de McCartys an’ the Bringiers an’ all them other old French families don’t spend near so much time under hatches as Americans do, an’ have made kind of a issue of it in the last City Council meetin’. An’ I must say, they do got a point.”

  “A point,” said LeMoyne, “seems hardly grounds on which to keep a sick man locked in a cell where he’ll be lucky if he has a cot to sleep on. It’s the strongest who get them up there, not the sick. As you know.”

  Shaw’s lips tightened. It couldn’t be easy, thought January, for him to maintain his position, since he guessed Shaw agreed with LeMoyne. He guessed, too, that someone on the City Council had spoken to Shaw—and to Shaw’s superior—about the need to administer justice even to the friends of the Creole planters whose money ran the to
wn.

  “Problem is”—Shaw focused his attention on trapping a flea on his frayed calico shirt-cuff and crushed it beneath a thumb-nail—“that at quarter to one, when Mr. Davis claims he was home in bed, he was seen in the barroom of the City Hotel, which, as you know, is across the street from where Marsan’s body was found. He was masked an’ armed with a small-sword an’ a knife, an’ the witness said as how he appeared to be keepin’ a watch out on the street, like as if he was waitin’ for someone to come past.”

  “What?” LeMoyne jerked to his feet and smote the corner of the desk with his palm. “Mr. Davis was home in bed . . . !”

  “What witness?” asked January more mildly. “How do they know it was Mr. Davis if he was masked?”

  “Feller name of Tillich.” Shaw consulted a rumpled wad of illegible notes. “Described him pretty good: short an’ gray-haired with a round chin, wearin’ a dark-blue waistcoat—which folks at the gamblin’ parlor at the Salle d’Orleans say Davis was wearin’ earlier that evenin’—an’ two watch-chains acrost it, one with fobs of hearts, diamonds, an’ spades. It does sound like Davis.”

  “It does not,” said LeMoyne stubbornly, “sound like anything Mr. Davis would do. There are other fobs of card-pips—I’ve seen them—or Mr. Davis’s could have been stolen—”

  “But they wasn’t,” said Shaw. “They was on his watch-chain when he was arrested. An’ you can’t deny Mr. Davis has been in duels.” Shaw spit—inaccurately—toward the sandbox in the corner. “I understand there was a shootin’-match in ’twenty-nine, with an American feller name of Burstin. . . .”

  “Mr. Davis is the proprietor of a gaming establishment,” said LeMoyne. “On that occasion the American had not only been cheating, but impugned the honesty of the house. Mr. Davis had no choice, under the circumstances, but to issue a challenge.”

  “Oh, I understand.” Shaw folded his notes together and stuffed them under the pile of newspapers, summonses, legal notices, and dog-eared ledgers that heaped the corners of his battered desk. “What I’m sayin’ is, the law has to take all this into account. Now, far as I could find out just askin’ around yesterday, this Mr. Tillich don’t know John Davis from Davy Crockett, ’ceptin’ as he’s played in his gamblin’-rooms now an’ then. He ain’t a personal enemy an’ has nuthin’ to gain through lyin’. An’ even if he was an’ did, we’d still have to indict on the strength of it, an’ the threats Mr. Davis made, in public, the day he heard about this opera they’s both puttin’ on. An’ the day the law starts pickin’ an’ choosin’ who it’s gonna jail,” he added, raising his eyes to January’s face, “is the day I’d say we’s all in trouble.”

  There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence.

  “What about Incantobelli?” asked January. “If anyone would have murdered Belaggio . . .”

  “If’n anyone woulda murdered Belaggio,” said Shaw, and spit again, “it woulda been Marsan. I’d’a picked Incantobelli to come in second myself, but Incantobelli was in Mr. Davis’s gamblin’-rooms, till close on to four in the mornin’, got up like a Roman emperor in this sort of purple-an’-gold tablecloth with about a peck of gold-painted spinach on his head. A hundred people saw him. You couldn’t hardly not. An’, I might add, no matter how dark that alley was, I’d have thought Incantobelli knowed Belaggio well enough to know that wasn’t him.”

  “Damn this town,” muttered LeMoyne as he and January made their way out into the flagstoned arcade that ran across the Cabildo’s stuccoed face. Morning had stirred the Place d’Armes into full life before them: sellers of fruit and chocolate cried their wares beneath the plane-trees, a bright fringe around the confusion of market and levee, cotton-bales and hogsheads of sugar, carriages and market women and pigs. “It would only need that if the Americans on the City Council take it into their thick heads to push for a conviction just because of Mr. Davis’s connections with so many of the French.”

  “Would they?” January glanced uneasily down at the little man. “What business is it of theirs . . . ?”

  “What business?” LeMoyne’s hazel eyes glinted cynically. “You talk like a damned Englishman, sir! What business is it of anyone’s if a man is French or Creole or American or Chinese, for that matter? Except that most of the Americans in this town have tried to borrow money from French-owned banks—and have been turned down—and every Frenchman will tell you how the Americans are upstarts and have to be kept out of any positions that matter before they marry everyone’s daughters.” He shrugged. “What I’m afraid of—other than Mr. Davis suffering a stroke in that Bastille back there—is that if the case comes to trial, Mr. Davis will get caught in a political crossfire that’s none of his doing. That he will be tried, not for his own crime, but for his jury’s grievances against his friends. And don’t think it doesn’t happen all the time.”

  The doors behind them opened, and a man in the blue uniform of a city lamplighter escorted forth a chained group of prisoners armed with buckets and shovels, to clean the garbage from the municipal gutters. Since there were many miles of these, and guards to supervise the prisoners in the task were frequently in short supply, it was a job often pungently in arrears. January watched the sullen, bearded faces of the men, white and black and colored. All filthy, all bestial, all angry.

  He wondered what they would make of the sick man in those overcrowded cells. The man in whose gambling-rooms they had almost certainly lost money.

  “You’re employed at the American Theater for the opera now, aren’t you?” The Frenchman’s voice broke into January’s troubled reverie. “Mr. Davis told me he’d asked you to find out what was going on there.”

  “I’ve kept my eyes and ears open,” replied January. “So far I haven’t learned much. But Belaggio isn’t the only one to be attacked.”

  “So I’ve heard. The ballet mistress, I understand. I may be able to make something of that in court.” LeMoyne stepped aside as Shaw and two Guards slammed through the Cabildo doors with the air of firefighters scenting smoke, and strode away in the direction of Canal Street.

  “Except she remembers nothing.” January wondered what sort of violence anyone would have the energy to commit at not quite eight-thirty on a Saturday morning. “It isn’t uncommon, in cases of concussion. She may remember later.” And if she didn’t, he thought, at least the incriminating bruises on her throat would have time to fade. “Yesterday what appeared to be a trap was laid out at Bayou des Familles, though it isn’t clear whether it was for Belaggio or for the prima soprano. . . .”

  “The one who can’t sing?” LeMoyne made a face, leading January to deduce that the lawyer had been disloyal enough to his employer to attend either Nozze or Muette. “There was trouble between Belaggio and Marsan over her, wasn’t there? Pity someone saw Belaggio.” He shook his head, and as the Cathedral clock struck the half-hour, pulled out a steel watch-chain jangling with fobs, as if to confirm the time.

  “Would you do something for me?” he asked, shoving the whole mess back into his pocket as well as he could. “I understand you have your living to make— pupils as well as rehearsals—but as you have time, could you write out for me everything you’ve learned so far? Send it here. . . .” He checked two or three pockets before producing a steel card-case, through which he searched for a time for a card that didn’t have notes—or other people’s addresses—scribbled on the back. The address was on the Rue Chartres: it had been altered in pencil twice. “In the meantime, I’ll see if I can at least make sure the case comes before a French judge, and try to get as many Frenchmen on the jury as possible.”

  January watched the attorney out of sight, the last of the thinning mists waning away and sunlight sparkling over the confusion of the Place d’Armes. “Peas, peas, goober-peas,” sang a tiny woman in an astonishing purple-and-yellow skirt, the basket of ground-nuts on her tignoned head huge as an oak-tree’s crown. Another woman’s voice lifted, wailed, trailed up and down strange African scales in praise of the flowers she bore; the fragranc
e of jack honeysuckle and verbena smote his nostrils like a brimming cup of mead.

  Just ’cause you keep soap in the kitchen—January heard Olympe’s smoky voice in his mind, hard on the heels of that familiar sweet scent—don’t make it food.

  Thoughtfully, he glanced at his own watch and turned his steps, not toward the gumbo-stand in the market for breakfast, but downriver, toward Dominique’s house in the Rue Du Maine.

  SEVENTEEN

  Iphigénie Picard was just leaving the rose-colored stucco cottage Henri Viellard had given Dominique. Dominique’s bosom friend, she was a year or two older and a little taller, her willowy height still further increased on this occasion by the intricate folds of a spectacular blue-and-yellow silk tignon, several blue-dyed ostrich-tips, and pattens strapped to her blue kid shoes to protect against the mud. “Chère, I know it hurts,” she was saying as she drew on her gloves, fluffed the enormous Montespan sleeves of her jacket. “But I tell you, if you bear this child, it still won’t hold him. Not with that mother—and not with that girl as his wife. They’ll only say you conceived on purpose to get extra money out of him.”

  Dominique looked aside, lips like stone.

  “Pretend it never happened. That way if he does stay your friend—and maybe he can lie to her about you— you’ll have lost nothing.”

  “Except Henri’s child.” January’s sister straightened her back, smiled her bright, sweet smile, and clasped her friend’s hands. “Darling, thank you for caring. Thank you for coming this morning. . . .”

  “Just think about what I’ve said. Please.” Iphigénie looked over at January, standing a few yards off on the banquette to give the girls privacy, and beckoned. “Ben, you tell her. She’s almost three months now. Whatever she’s going to do, she has to do it soon. If she waits till after the wedding . . .”