01 A Free Man of Color bj-1

by Barbara Hambly

  Mayerling only raised his colorless brows.

  Crowded close against him-the single seat of the two-wheeled chaise barely accommodated three people at the best of times, and only the Prussian's slightness made it possible for a man of January's size to fit-January said softly, "Young Peralta's taking it hard, isn't he? Mademoiselle Crozat's death."

  The strange eyes cut to him, then away.

  "It takes a lot to make a Creole absent himself from backing a friend's honor."

  "The boy is a fool to mourn," said Mayerling, his voice cold. "The woman was evil, a poisonous succubus with a cashbox for a heart. Whoever he marries will have cause to thank the person who wielded that scarf."

  January glanced in surprise at the ivory profile. "I didn't know you knew her." He remembered the way the Roman had lurked and lingered in the ballroom, the way masculine conversation stopped when she appeared, like a glittering idol of diamonds, in the ballroom doorway, the way all men had clustered around her.

  Except, now that he thought back on it, Mayerling.

  "Everyone in this city knows everyone," replied the sword master. "Trepagier was one of my students. Did you not know?" He returned his attention to the road.

  The duel itself went as such things customarily did. The two carriages followed the Esplanade to the leaden, cypress-hung waters of Bayou St. John, and as dawn slowly bleached, the mists reached a patch of open ground on the Allard plantation, near the bayou's banks, overshadowed with oaks the girth of a horse's body.

  Granger, too, had decided against the possibility of being carried dead back to his family in the white baggy costume of Pierrot, and had worn evening dress instead. His second, however, still sported the gleaming pasteboard armor of the Roman legions, while the purple pirate with his unfortunate copper-colored beard held the heads of their phaeton's team. Both Granger and Bouille, January noticed, wore dark coats whose buttons were noticeably small and inconspicuous.

  Mayerling produced the pistols, a pair of his own Mantons that Jenkins and the blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe examined minutely. While the fencing master loaded the pistols, the seconds made a last effort-albeit a fairly perfunctory one-to talk their principals out of battle: January heard Granger state loudly, "Were I not given the opportunity to sponge away this impudent crapaud's bilious spewings in blood I would be forced to reenact the final scenes of Macbeth upon his verminous person." A remark clearly intended for Bouille's ears since Granger, an American speaking to two other Americans, said it in French.

  Bouille replied-to his own seconds, but in loud English-that he had no fear of "a canaille who can no more pass himself for a gentleman than our surgeon can pass himself for a white man. One cannot pretend to be what one is not."

  And January, standing next to Mayerling, saw the sword master's ironic smile. Bouille, that champion of Creole culture, like Livia Levesque, had evidently forgotten that he'd fled a typesetter's job in France ahead of a couple of sordid lawsuits and a welter of bad debts. Mulattos were not the only ones to suffer amnesia on horseback.

  January and Hannibal prudently retired to the shelter of the oak trees fifty feet away. Mayerling, with what January considered reckless confidence in both men's aim, remained where he was. "You going to bleed whoever gets hit?" inquired Hannibal irreverently, leaning his chin on a horizontal bough.

  January nodded. "And purge them. Two or three times."

  "Couldn't happen to more deserving men."

  There were two loud reports. Egrets squawked in the misty bayou.

  January peered around the deep-curved limbs of the tree in time to see William Granger stalk back to his phaeton and climb in. Bouille was expostulating to the little cluster of fencing students.

  "You see?" the city councilman crowed triumphantly. "The coward has outsmarted himself! In fear of my marksmanship he selected an impossible distance- fifty feet-at which he himself could not hit the door of a barn! Myself, I saw the shoulder of his coat rent asunder by my bullet."

  While the exultant Bouille and his fellow pupils toasted one another and Hannibal with more hip flask brandy, Mayerling, with the air of a naturalist in quest of a new species of moth, paced off the spot where Granger stood and searched the surrounding trees until he found the bullet. Given even the most flattering estimate of its trajectory, it would have missed the American by yards. "More work in the gallery," he

  said to Bouille, returning like the ghost of another century through the knee-deep ground mist, white ruff and sleeves pale in the dawn gloom. "Or less at your writing desk."

  They climbed into the vehicles once again.

  The entire colored demimonde, past and present, turned out for Angelique's funeral, Euphrasie Dreuze weeping in too-tight weeds and covered with veils that hid her face and trailed to her knees. From his position at the organ of the mortuary chapel of St. Antoine, January counted and tallied them: The chapel itself was small, but the overwhelmingly female audience did not overcrowd its hard wooden pews. In New Orleans' climate of fevers and family ties there were few women who didn't possess mourning dresses, but January was aware that if Angelique had been better liked many of those tricked out in well-fitting plum- and tobacco-colored silks would have worn black even if it didn't show off their figures. Few women of color looked really good in black.

  As the pallbearers-handsome if embarrassed-looking young men, Angelique's surviving brothers and two cousins-slid the coffin past the hanging curtain and into the oven tomb in the upstream wall of the cemetery, Madame Dreuze threw herself full-length on the ground before it, sobbing loudly.

  "Oh, Madame," whispered Clemence Drouet, dropping to her knees beside her, "do not yield that way! You know that Angelique..." She was one of very few clothed in black, which did nothing for the ghastly pallor that underlay her warm, mahogany-red coloring. Her eyes were swollen, and tears had left gray streaks in the crepe of her bodice.

  "Phrasie, get up," said Livia Levesque calmly. "You're going to trip the priest."

  Euphrasie permitted herself to be raised to her feet by the younger of her two sons.

  "There is no justice," she cried, in ringing tones. "That Woman used witchcraft to murder my girl, and no one will do anything to bring her to her just deserts." She turned toward the assembled group, the beautiful veiled ladies of the Rue des Ramparts, their servants, and a scattering of the merchants who served them. They stood crowded close, for the tombs rose up around them like a little marble village, tight-packed as the French town itself. January reflected that one didn't have far to seek for the source of Angelique's penchant for theatrics.

  "I told that dirty policeman how it was! Told him about the injustices That Woman had perpetrated on my innocent, before she hounded her to death! And he as much as told me they weren't going to investigate, they weren't going to prosecute... they weren't going to lift a finger to avenge my child!"

  She threw back her veils to display a puffy, tear-sodden face framed by large earrings of onyx and jet, an enormous gold crucifix on her black silk breast. Obviously reveling in the role of tragedy queen, she turned to January, her lace-mitted hands clasped before her. "Ben, for the love of your own sweet mother, help me bring That Woman to justice, who witched my girl and brought down death on her. I beg you."

  "What?" said January, horrified. Lack of sleep slowed him down, and the delay was fatal; Euphrasie stepped forward and enveloped him in a heavily scented embrace and laid her head on his breast. He stared wildly around him, at Euphrasie's friends, his mother's friends, all gazing at him as if waiting for him to agree to the absurd demand.

  Then Livia's voice cut the silence. "Phrasie, don't ask my son to do anything for love of me. Just because somebody put a piece of voodoo trash in your daughter's bed doesn't mean her death has the smallest thing to do with her man's wife, much less does it give you leave to drag poor Ben into what isn't his business, or yours either."

  "It is my business!" Euphrasie whirled, drawing back from January but keeping a hold on his hands. "My on
ly child's murder is my business! Bringing the murderess to justice is my business! That policeman-that American- would let That Woman get away with the crime as if she'd strangled her with her own two hands-which I'm not sure even now she didn't do!"

  "Madame Dreuze-" bleated the priest.

  "Tell him." Madame Dreuze's plump finger, glittering with a diamond the size of a pigeon's eye, stabbed at Dominique, and the jewel sparkled in the gray winter light. "Tell him what you got this afternoon! Tell him about the note from that policeman-that illiterate Kain-tuck usurper!-that the police have no further need of your testimony, of anyone's testimony, because they're not going to take the matter further!"

  Shocked, January's eyes went to Minou, beautiful in exquisitely cut spinach-green silk with sleeves that stuck out a good twelve inches per side. "Is that true?"

  She hesitated for a long minute-probably out of a general unwillingness to agree with anything Euphrasie Dreuze said-then nodded. "Yes. He didn't say in so many words the investigation was being dropped, but I can read between the lines."

  "Well, I won't have it!" Euphrasie threw up her arms, as if pleading with heaven, and her bulging eyes fixed on January. "I won't have it! My daughter must be avenged, and if you won't do it, Benjamin January, I will find someone who will!"

  NINE

  "Oh, Ben, don't tell me you're actually surprised?"

  "Of course I'm surprised!" January dished greens onto Minou's plate, and jambalaya, and handed it to her where she sat at the table, barely conscious of what he did. He wasn't merely surprised but deeply troubled.

  Beyond the tall windows of Dominique's exquisite dining room, the small light that got past the wall and rooflines of the houses behind them was fading, though it was barely six. Knowing he'd have to be out at a ball in the Saint Mary faubourg for most of the night, January had slept a few hours after the funeral, but his dreams had been unsettling. When he came down to the kitchen, Dominique was there, an apron over the spinach-green silk, sleeves rolled up, helping Bella and Hannibal wash up tea things. "Mama's over at Phrasie's," she said. "I told Bella I'd get you supper."

  "You've been in Paris too long," said Hannibal. He raised his wine glass to Dominique in what was mostly a respectful salute to his hostess but partly a flirtation. She caught his eye and returned him her most melting smile.

  "Or not long enough." January returned to the ta-ble.

  "You really thought the police would investigate the murder of a colored woman if the leading suspects were all white?"

  January was silent, feeling the heat of embarrassment rise through him and disgust at himself for the trust he'd felt in the law, in the police, in the Kaintuck officer Shaw. He had, he thought, in fact been in Paris too long. Law-abiding as he was in his soul, it had taken him years to learn to trust authority there.

  "What did the note say?" he asked in time. "Because you have to admit, Madame Dreuze's story about Madame Trepagier sending a confederate to plant hoodoo hexes under her rival's mattress isn't

  something I'd care to take into court."

  "Oh, that..." His sister made a dismissive gesture. "Everybody in that crowd knew perfectly well that Madame Trepagier tried to swear out a writ late yesterday afternoon to stop the sale of the jewelry and the two slaves, and Madame Dreuze spent the whole morning at Heidekker and Stein's, peddling every fragment, dress, and stick of furniture. Why else do you think Phrasie was carrying on so? She had to cover up. God knows anybody who causes Euphrasie Dreuze inconvenience has got to be the Devil's in-law. Just ask her."

  "I had a wife like that once," remarked Hannibal, dreamy reminiscence in his eye. "Maybe more than one. I forget."

  Minou rapped him on the arm with her spoon. "Bad man! But no, Ben. It wasn't that."

  She rose and crossed to the sideboard where the covered dishes of greens and jambalaya, the rolls, and the wine stood ready, and from a drawer took a half a piece of yellow foolscap, folded small. Hannibal got to his feet and held her chair for her when she returned; she looked as surprised as she would have had her brother performed this gentlemanly office, then smiled at him again, and seated herself in a gentle froufrou of skirts. January had watched his sister at the Blue Ribbon Balls enough to know that, without being unfaithful to Henri Viellard in thought, word, or deed, she always had that effect on men. Certainly, to judge by the warm solicitousness of her eyes, Hannibal was having his customary effect on Minou.

  The note was written in the labored hand of one who has acquired the discipline of orthography late and incompletely. At least, thought January dourly, it wasn't tobacco stained.

  February 16 1833 Mis Jamiary:

  Regarding the notes which I askt you to make last Thursday night, many thanks for yor efort and time. It apears now, however, that they will not be necesary, and I would take it as a grate favor if you would put them aside in some safe place where they will not be seen. My deepest apolagysforputingyou to the trouble of making them.

  Yr o'bt s'vt, Abishag Shaw

  She was only a plaice, after all.

  January's hand shook with anger as he set the paper down.

  "An American," he said softly. "We should have known better than to look for more."

  Minou was silent, turning the tall crystal wine glass in her fingers. Henri Viellard was a good provider: The cottage on Rue Burgundy was decorated with expensive simplicity, the table china French, the crystal German. When first he had entered the house last November, January had immediately guessed that the podgy young man had simply given his mistress carte blanche. If tonight's simple meal was anything to go by, her choice of a cook was in keeping with the rest of the establishment-and possibly, though Viellard wouldn't have admitted it, the real attraction of the menage.

  It was not the house of a prostitute, not the house of a woman who sold herself to a man. It was the home of a couple who would have been married had the Black Code not forbidden it, the home of a woman whose man was prevented by law from living with her. The home of that curiously nuanced class of individual, a free placee of color...

  Whom Americans like Shaw would see only as nigger whores.

  With a certain amount of effort he kept his voice even. "Do you have the notes?"

  Hannibal was out of his chair and helping her rise before January could make even a belated move in that direction. Therese, the servant woman, entered in silence and cleared away plates and serving dishes as Dominique extracted a thick mass of yellow foolscap from yet another drawer in the sideboard, and in equal silence brought coffee things and a little pale brown sugar in a French porcelain bowl.

  "So far as I can tell," said Dominique, spreading the papers as the men cleared the cups to one side, "these are the people who were at the ball, and next door in the Theatre d'Orleans. I checked with all my friends, and all their friends, and we figured out even the Americans and decided who had to be at least some of the people in the other ballroom... We know Henri's family had to be there, for instance, because that awful mother of his never lets him go out without taking her and his sisters and Aunt Francine, and we know Pauline Mazanat and the Pontchartrain Trepagiers had to be there because they're the heads of the subscription committee that was running the ball... That kind of thing."

  Her long, slim fingers shuffled neatly through the pile of foolscap scribbled with Shaw's uneven lines and the guardsman's pinched hand, sorting them out from the scented buff sheets of her own notepaper.

  "The only ones we're not sure of were the men downstairs in the gambling rooms, but of course without tickets, they weren't allowed up the stairs. You can be sure Agnes Pellicot knew exactly who was asking her about her daughters. Can you believe that awful Henry VIII with his six wives is a man named Hubert Granville who's been talking to Francoise Clisson about her daughter Violette?"

  "Were all those six wives his?" asked Hannibal, interested.

  "Oh, no." Dominique laughed, and ticked them off on her fingers. "One of them was Bernadette Metoyer, who knows him through her bank-he
's the president of the Union Bank and he lent her the money to set up her chocolate business when Athanase de Soto paid her off. Two of them were her sisters who help her in the chocolate shop, one was Marie Toussainte Valcour-Philippe Cournand, her protector, had to attend his grandmother's dinner that night-one was Marie-Eulalie Figes, who is pla?ee to Philippe's cousin, and he had to dance attendance on Grandma Cournand as well, and one was Marie-Eulalie's younger sister Babette. Marie-Eulalie is trying to come to an understanding for Babette with Jean duBose."

  With that kind of intelligence system in operation among the placees and their families, January no longer doubted the accuracy or completeness of Dominique's lists. Names were appended in Dominique's small, flowery hand to all the witnesses who had remained to testify, and to all but perhaps twenty of the costumes listed by various persons as "seen." Among those "seen," January was unsettled to note, was "Indian Princess." And she had been seen by at least three people in the upstairs lobby after the music had started playing.

  Damn, thought January. The charge that she could have had anything to do with Angelique Crozat's death was ridiculous, but Madame Trepagier had put herself in serious trouble by remaining. Why had she come upstairs after he'd told her to leave? Even without a ticket, a costumed woman could have slipped past the ushers, who were only there to keep out drunks and chance strangers from the gambling rooms. But it was, after all, a Blue Ribbon Ball.

  Had she had second thoughts? Something else she had to tell him and was later prevented?

  Had she decided to seek out Angelique herself?

  In either case, she had lied to him Friday morning when she said she had gone directly back to Les Saules.

  I was home by eight-thirty, she had said.

  Why the lie?

  He scanned the rest of the list.

  There were only three other women unaccounted for, "seen" but not identified: "lavender domino," "green-striped odalisque," and "gypsy."

  "Creole girls spying on their husbands," said Dominique offhandedly, when January asked.