Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  Dominique’s head lifted. “I’m not going to kill Henri’s child until I know. . . .” She looked from her friend to her brother, eyes filling with tears. Very quietly, she said, “I’m not going to kill Henri’s child.”

  “Dearest . . .”

  Dominique held up her hand against Iphigénie’s words. The older girl stood for a moment regarding her with exasperation and tenderness, then tiptoed awkwardly—Dominique still stood on the high brick step of the French door of her bedroom—and kissed her.

  Then she walked away up Rue Du Maine, pattens clacking on the soft brick.

  January walked around to the passway at the side of the house—it went without saying that no plaçée would admit even her brother through the doors a white man would use—and Dominique met him in the dining-room doorway. She looked up at him with her chin raised, as if she expected another argument of the kind she’d clearly just finished with Iphigénie; January bent his tall height and kissed her cheek.

  “Did you know Sidonie Lalage?” he asked, and she regarded him for one blank, startled moment, then relaxed and smiled.

  “Iphigénie told me Marsan was dead,” she said, correctly bridging the reference. She glanced back into the parlor behind her, lifted her voice. “Thérèse, darling, would you bring another cup and some cocoa for my brother? Do you have time, p’tit?”

  Past her, January could see the cocoa-cups on the parlor table beside the hearth, the warm amber glow of the fire reflected in simple vases of Venice glass, on yellow and white winter roses like the skirts of the little rats, on the sugar-bowl’s plump custard-colored cheek.

  “Was he going to see that poor silly singer who loved him so much? He was killed near the theater, Thérèse said.” She seemed glad to put aside the topic of Henri and the decision she must make. Glad to be reminded that there were other griefs in the world not her own, and worse things that a man could do than marry a porcelain-pale girl with a mermaid’s diamond heart.

  January settled in the chair by the hearth that Iphigénie had vacated and related everything Shaw had told him about the manner of Marsan’s murder and the condition of the body. “As it happened, Drusilla d’Isola was having her own adventures with slave-stealers down in the Bayou des Familles Thursday night. She says Marsan would have gone to the rehearsal and seen she was absent. But if he didn’t, he might have returned to the theater to keep an assignation, particularly if he didn’t believe whatever Belaggio might have told him about Drusilla not being there. You said Sidonie’s family made trouble in court.”

  Dominique’s forehead puckered. “Her mother did, yes. But even if it was Sidonie’s brothers after all these years—and they might very well have attacked M’sieu Belaggio by mistake that first night, because he is a big man like M’sieu Marsan—I can’t imagine them harming the rest of the company. That will be all, Thérèse, dearest, thank you. . . . Why would they lie in wait for you? Why hurt poor Madame Scie? Or leave that ghastly warning for Mademoiselle d’Isola? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It might,” said January, spreading jam on the roll Thérèse had brought him and hearing, from the rear bedroom, the stealthy creak of floorboard that told him the maid was eavesdropping again. He lowered his voice. “If whoever killed Marsan knew about the attacks on the opera company, and decided now was a good time to strike.”

  The roll was hot and fresh, the butter new from the market, garish with the dye of marigolds or carrots that covered the pallor of the winter season.

  “At Roseaux the slaves immediately assumed that Marsan was the intended victim. And Olympe reminded me when Marguerite was hurt, that any one of these crimes may not, in fact, be connected to the others. Certainly the attempt to poison La d’Isola was part of another conflict entirely. Now, Marsan’s own sins may in fact have nothing to do with his death, but I’m just a little curious as to where Sidonie Lalage’s brothers were at the time of Marsan’s death.”

  Dominique sighed, and stroked the plump white cat, Voltaire, who had come padding into the room and jumped onto her lap, kneading at her skirts with enormous soft paws. She was dressed in a gown of pink-striped jaconet, but Iphigénie had evidently arrived before she’d put up her hair—it lay over her back and shoulders in silky waves, catching mahogany gleams in the cool sunlight from the street. Her eyes looked suddenly older than her twenty-two years, and tired. Eyes that had seen too much, and understood too thoroughly how it was, between white men and the ladies of color they took unto themselves. “Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, it was Vincent Marsan who deserved to die.”

  “Tell me about Sidonie.”

  “I didn’t know her, you understand.” Dominique sighed, and in that sigh was the accumulated pattern of everything she had heard and knew from her mother, from her mother’s friends, from the gossiping Thérèse. From other women who, like Sidonie Lalage, had stayed with men who struck them because they had contracted to do so, because they had nowhere to go except down. Women who had seen the men who claimed to love them walk away arm-in-arm with white girls of fortune, sending maybe a bouquet of flowers, maybe a strand of pearls: pour prendre congé. “I was twelve when Sidonie died, and still in school. But later I got to know her sister. And Cresside Morisset’s aunt Marie-Pucelle was one of the witnesses at the trial. And of course Mama followed the case in the papers, and I heard about it every morning at breakfast for weeks.”

  She folded her hands on Voltaire’s fluffy back. Collected her thoughts.

  “According to Delia—Sidonie’s sister—and to my friend Phlosine, who’s Liane’s cousin, Vincent Marsan was one of those men who didn’t like his plaçée to see her family or her friends. He’d fly into blind rages if he came to the house when Phlosine or Liane’s sister was there; I gather he did the same with Sidonie’s friends. Even if they left before he came, he used to look around the house for signs that they’d been there, or come by at odd times during the day. You know how most people are very good about not visiting in the evening, when Henri’s likely to be here—except poor Clemence Drouet, who has no tact—and of course I’d never dream of visiting Iphigénie or Phlosine, for instance, after dinner, because of course Yves or Philippe might be there. You know how it is.”

  January knew how it was. In the Paris demimonde it was the same. Daytimes belonged to one’s friends, unless one’s lover had sent word he’d be there for a drive in the Bois or an excursion to the shops of the Palais Royale. Nighttimes, women spent alone. Waiting. Jeweled and bathed, powdered and smiling, reading yellow-bound novels or thinking pleasant thoughts as they waited for a man who might or might not arrive, and might or might not be sober when he did.

  Generally, January knew, men and women reached their little agreements. There were men like Henri Viellard, who scrupulously sent their mistresses notes when they might—or could not—be expected. Men who understood that these young ladies might like a night out with their friends now and then, or an evening to visit their families, mothers and sisters who were often in “the life” themselves. But even those men expected that when they came by the little houses at the back of the French town—the cottages along Rue des Ramparts and Rue Burgundy that they had purchased as part of the contract of plaçage—that they’d find their ladyfriends at home.

  Waiting with a smile, just for them.

  Get you to bed on the instant, Othello commands. I will be returned forthwith.

  The women for their part knew that this was expected. And all except the queens of the demimonde understood that this was something they must accept. This was part of what it was to be a plaçée. They knew, too, what they themselves might expect if the man who supported them arrived, at any time of the day or evening, and found them gone.

  “It’s funny”—Dominique ran her fingers gently over Voltaire’s apple-domed skull—“but men get so angry when you say they’re like that. Jealous, I mean, and wanting their ladyfriend to be right there every minute. As if you said they had smelly feet or didn’t clean their teeth. As if every wom
an in town can’t tell what’s going on when one of their friends suddenly just drops out of sight. Doucette’s friend M’sieu Bouille is like that, and nobody sees Doucette anymore— Oh, I mean you’ll see her in the market, and at the Blue Ribbon Balls with M’sieu Bouille, but she never comes to tea, or goes strolling in the Place d’Armes just because it’s a lovely day. She never goes to see her mama and sisters, and always goes to the very earliest Mass on Sundays, and leaves before the end. When you see her she’s always in a hurry, to get done what she has to do and then run home in case he comes. Liane is like that. And Sidonie was like that.”

  “Is Liane all right, by the way? Did someone tell her Marsan was killed?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s stunned, I think—Catherine Clisson told her, she heard it from an uncle of hers who works at Charity Hospital in the morgue. He said he knew right away who it was, because no one else in town would wear a coat of buff-colored velvet like that. Liane cried, Phlosine said, and said she felt hideously guilty about feeling so relieved. And fortunately she has family. Her sister Daphne is Prosper Livaudais’s plaçée, because, of course, M’sieu Marsan won’t have left Liane a penny, if he made a will at all.”

  Liane—the woman in red at the Blue Ribbon Ball— had tried to commit suicide last year, January recalled. He thought of Isabella Marsan, stiff as a doll in that shabby carriage, telling over her beads. Had she wept, he wondered, when she saw her husband’s mutilated body in the morgue? Had she said, O my beautiful one . . . ?

  “What happened the night Sidonie died?”

  “I don’t remember the details exactly.” Dominique sank back in her chair, slim hands folded with an unconsciously protective gesture over her belly. January rose, and knelt by the hearth to add another few billets of pine to the flickering blaze. The nostalgic whiff of the smoke mingled with that of bread and cocoa and flowers, a kind of sweet sadness, like the songs he remembered his father whistling on the way to the fields. By the time he turned back to his chair, Voltaire was curled up in the center of the seat with every appearance of settling in for the day.

  “There was a Blue Ribbon Ball that night, and Marsan challenged a man to a duel because he’d talked to Sidonie,” Dominique went on as January lifted the cat’s hefty weight and sat down again, Voltaire protesting in his pitiful kittenish voice. “Flirted with her, Marsan said, but the man—a French wine-merchant or something—swore he’d only spoken commonplaces with her, as any man will with a pretty girl.”

  Puta, January heard Belaggio scream, putana, and the icy splintering of the dish, spinning from d’Isola’s hands to shatter on the beeswaxed floor.

  “Marsan fought him later, too, days after Sidonie was dead. The surgeons had to stop the fight because the other man was so badly injured.

  “In any case, Marsan took Sidonie away from the ball early and stayed with her for an hour or so at her house. Then he left, but he came back—Aunt Marie-Pucelle had the cottage across the street, and she was just about the only person who hadn’t gone to the ball, because she had a cold that night. Except for everybody’s servants, of course, but they all sleep back from the street and couldn’t hear as well. Aunt Marie-Pucelle couldn’t sleep and she saw a man she swears was Marsan let himself into the house with a key. A few minutes later she heard Sidonie screaming, screaming over and over. . . .”

  “And she didn’t investigate.”

  Dominique’s mouth tightened like a furled rose. “Sidonie had screamed earlier that night, just after she and Marsan went into the house that first time,” she replied, carefully devoid of expression. “Aunt Marie-Pucelle saw Sidonie let Marsan out a few minutes later and kiss him on the doorstep.”

  January said, “Ah.”

  “And she’d heard her scream on other nights. The slave-girl who lived in the room next to the kitchen— Sidonie’s kitchen, I mean—said the same thing. Said she just put the pillow over her head. When you deal with someone like Marsan, that’s all you can do, really. When the slave-girl—her name was Marthe—came out in the morning, she found a cab-driver who lived near there dead in the yard, stabbed through from the side, and Sidonie in the house. Her throat was cut. . . .” Dominique’s gaze remained fixed on the leaping yellow silk of the new fire. “She had cuts on her hands and chest, and across her back, as if Marsan had chased her around the house. There was blood in every room, and furniture knocked over. The door from the house into the yard was open, and just inside they found a rose-colored kid glove that was supposed to be Marsan’s, though at the trial he said it wasn’t.”

  “And of course Marthe couldn’t testify.”

  “No,” said Dominique. “Cresside’s aunt did. But the jury was all white men. So I’m not sure how much good it would have done if a slave like Marthe could testify. The jury ruled Sidonie had been killed by ‘person or persons unknown,’ but there was the most awful scandal, and M’sieu Marsan was in all sorts of financial trouble, because no one would back bills for him or extend him credit. Then later Mr. Knight came to town and took over running his plantation for him, and all of a sudden he had lots of friends again—”

  If he was smuggling in slaves and selling them cheap, I just bet he did.

  “—and new carriages and things. But Mama says there are still people who won’t ask him to dinner.”

  He was carved up bad, Shaw had said. Face, chest, belly . . . He didn’t fight.

  A massive jade-green form squared off against the bull-like Belaggio. A sky-blue dandy in the courtyard of the New Exchange, golden hair gleaming in the morning light. The curve of a dusky purple arm, lifting d’Isola and bearing her up the stairs, and the way the girl Liane turned her head aside from the cup of negus, the bright liquid spilling on her crimson dress. . . .

  Like as if he’d fallen down an’ the man what did it knelt on top of him an’ cut.

  “How many brothers did she have?” asked January.

  “Three. Delia died three or four years ago—her protector paid her off when he . . . when he married”— Dominique’s voice stuck a little on the words—“and later she married a man who worked in the iron foundry. She died in childbed.” Again that expressionlessness; again the protective touch on the smooth curve of pink-and-turquoise jaconet, the sleeping life inside. “If it was her brothers, wouldn’t they have to have been connected with the theater in some way? To know about the attacks on the rest of the company? Though, of course, the way everyone in this town talks—I swear Thérèse was telling me the other day about why Mayor Prieur wants to sell off his matched bay carriage team! Because her sister is walking out with M’sieu Prieur’s groom’s friend . . . Why would they have waited till now? Sidonie’s brothers, I mean. Why not when it happened?”

  “I don’t know.” January shook his head, baffled. “This is all just—just thoughts. Questions I have. When I was out in Bayou des Familles, I thought there was something amiss with all this: that a slave, or a free colored, had to be involved.”

  Dimly the clock of the Cathedral sounded the three-quarters past nine, and January knew it was time for him to go. He’d promised to meet Rose for an early dinner that night, and to assist her backstage with Mount Vesuvius. It was the least he could do, he reflected, to make sure John Davis’s theater didn’t burn down or blow up while its master was incarcerated.

  “Will you be all right?” he asked as he rose.

  “Oh, yes,” She stood, too, and walked with him through the little double parlor to the rear door. The small dining-table there was set already for lunch à deux: French china, exquisitely simple. Linen napkins freshly pressed. January recalled the chipped china on Madame Bontemps’s table, the mended sheets worn nearly transparent. Faded curtains, and empty servants’ rooms rented out to strangers.

  Would Dominique come to that?

  He couldn’t imagine that chill-faced doll of a girl sanctioning a stipend that anyone could live on.

  He paused in the door, aware of Thérèse somewhere in the house listening, and of the cook shelling peas at t
he table in front of the kitchen. “Can I do anything for you?”

  The sweet mouth curved in a sudden wry smile that reminded him she was Olympe’s sister, too. “You should see your face, p’tit,” she said. “Can I—er—DO”—she pulled down the corners of her mouth in an expression of somber and significant discretion, at the same time mimed a grasping motion, like a surgeon’s hand, toward her belly— “. . . uh . . . ANYTHING . . . for you? Not that we’ll say what.” She was laughing at him, but tears sparkled in her eyes.

  And January laughed at his own euphemisms. “All right,” he said, keeping his voice low. “But Iphigénie was right, you know. You’ll have to make up your mind soon. And you probably won’t know what Henri is going to do until after his wedding.”

  “I know.” Dominique sighed. “And I’ll speak to you when I . . . When I decide.” She brushed back the tendrils of hair that surrounded her face, re-settled her tortoise-shell combs.

  Had Sidonie Lalage’s hair been up or down, January wondered as he walked away, that morning ten years ago when her slave-girl had found her soaked in her own blood?

  When he reached the theater, it was to find James Caldwell in the midst of replacing Princess Isabella’s second act aria with “Look Out Upon the Stars, My Love,” and Tiberio grumbling about the decision to incorporate all the smoke and fire effects of Vesuvius into the cave of the doomed Robert’s infernal parent, while Belaggio in his office recounted his narrow escape to Hector Blodgett, a journalist who worked for the New Orleans Bee.

  “The man is insane!” Belaggio’s voice boomed forth as January came up the steps to the backstage. “Obsessed! I have heard him myself, blaming the failure of his opera season this year on me—blaming me for the losses in his gaming-rooms, even! Envy . . .” He shook his head gravely, and Blodgett, sloppy and bewhiskered and more than half drunk, nodded and scribbled something in his notebook. “Envy is at all times and places the greatest foe of art. . . .”