A Free Man Of Color Part 7

January had to reflect that his sister was right about the Drouet girl's dresses: Like her costume last night, this one-also designed by Angelique, if Dominique spoke true-though costly and beautiful, made her look like nothing so much as a green-gold pear.

"That Trepagier put her up to it! She put her up!" It was astonishing how Madame Dreuze could keep her face buried in his sleeve without either m.u.f.fling her voice or disarraying her tignon. "She hated her like poison! They poisoned my child, the two of them together!"

"Angelique was strangled," Livia reminded her dryly. She went to the sideboard and handed January a clean napkin from a drawer as he fished vainly in his pockets for a handkerchief. "And you can't very well say Madeleine Trepagier turned up at the Orleans ballroom and did it. Get that child out of here, Odile. She's been nothing but underfoot since..."

"Why not? She could have come in through the Theatre..."

"With all the Trepagier family in the Theatre to recognize her? And that hag of an aunt of hers?"

"That black s.l.u.t Judith did, then! Why not? She hated my child...."

At Livia's impatient signal, Catherine Clisson came forward and eased the weeping woman from her leaning post. Clisson relieved Ben of his napkin and proceeded to dry Euphrasie's eyes as she guided her toward the settee. Livia Levesque took her tall son's arm and steered him briskly toward the door, and January went willingly, unnerved by the accuracy of Madame Dreuze's chance shot.

"I swear," declared Livia, as they descended the two high brick steps to the banquette, "it's like a summer rainstorm in there, between those two watering pots." She pulled her delicate knit-lace gloves on and flexed her hands. "Give me my parasol, Ben."

"Why does she say the girl Judith hated Angelique?" January handed his mother the fragile, lacy sunshade she had thrust into his hands on the way through the door. "I take it Judith belonged to Madeleine Trepagier?"

Like the jewels and the dresses, he thought. When there's only a man and a woman alone in a house miles from town... When there's only a man and a woman alone in a house miles from town...

The thought conjured up was an ugly one.

Livia opened the sunshade with a brisk crackle of bamboo and starch, despite the fact that the day was milkily overcast. Even so far back from the river, the air smelled of steamboat soot.

"She's carrying on as if she she were wronged, not her daughter murdered," the elderly lady sniffed. " were wronged, not her daughter murdered," the elderly lady sniffed. "And not her only child, as she's been saying. She has two sons still living, one of them a journeyman joiner with Roig and the other a clerk at the Presbytere, but they're not the ones who've been giving her gambling money and buying her silk dresses. Etienne Crozat left her a house and five hundred a year when he married Andre Milaudon's daughter in '28, so she hasn't any room to talk." She moved with small, quick steps along the brick banquette, the river breeze stirring the pale green chintz of her bell-shaped skirts. Like Catherine Clisson, she was dressed very plainly and very expensively, her tignon striped pale green and white and fitting her fine-boned face like the petals of a half-closed rose. A gold crucifix sparkled at her throat, and Christophe Levesque's wedding ring gleamed through the fragile net of the mitt. not her only child, as she's been saying. She has two sons still living, one of them a journeyman joiner with Roig and the other a clerk at the Presbytere, but they're not the ones who've been giving her gambling money and buying her silk dresses. Etienne Crozat left her a house and five hundred a year when he married Andre Milaudon's daughter in '28, so she hasn't any room to talk." She moved with small, quick steps along the brick banquette, the river breeze stirring the pale green chintz of her bell-shaped skirts. Like Catherine Clisson, she was dressed very plainly and very expensively, her tignon striped pale green and white and fitting her fine-boned face like the petals of a half-closed rose. A gold crucifix sparkled at her throat, and Christophe Levesque's wedding ring gleamed through the fragile net of the mitt.

"And Madame Trepagier?"

She c.o.c.ked her head up at him. "Arnaud Trepagier was free to do with his own Negroes as he pleased," she said, in that deep voice like smoky honey that both her daughters had inherited. "I think the girl used to be his wife's maid, but as far as I'm concerned that's of a piece with giving her his wife's dresses and his wife's jewelry. That cook of Angelique's was Trepagier's, too, and a good one, for a Congo."

He remembered the way Angelique had looked at him, the slight, impersonal regret in her eyes as she'd said, You're new. You're new. He knew his anger at her was wrong, for he was alive and she was dead, but he felt it all the same. He knew his anger at her was wrong, for he was alive and she was dead, but he felt it all the same.

His mother spoke as if she'd never sweated in a cane field at sugaring time, had never been bought and sold like a riding mare. January remembered huddling in terror in the gluey, humming blackness of a dirt-floored cabin, holding his little sister and fighting not to cry, wondering if the Frenchman who was buying his mother would buy him, too, and whom he'd have to live with if he was left behind.

Olympe had told him once that buying them hadn't been their mother's idea. He had no clue where she'd gotten this information, or if it was true.

"The whole time she was hunting through that room for a gris-gris-and she turned the place upside down, with Angelique lying there in her bed in that white dress looking like the Devil's bride-she was picking up every brooch, earring, and bracelet she could find and putting them in her reticule." Livia paused at the corner of Rue Burgundy to let her son cross the plank that spanned the cypress-lined gutter and hold out his hand to help her over.

"And a fair pile of them there were, too. Some of them were French and old-antique gold, not anything a wastrel like Arnaud Trepagier would have the taste to buy for a woman and surely too tasteful for any of Angelique's asking. If that silly heifer Clemence thinks she's going to get a keepsake out of her she's badly mistaken. Every st.i.tch and stone of it's going to be in the shops tomorrow, you mark my words, before Madame Trepagier can claim them back."

"Can she?"

"I don't suppose Trepagier made a will. Or Angelique either. That girl Clemence kept blundering around underfoot, hinting that Angelique had promised her this and promised her that, but a fat lot of good that'll do her. I never saw anybody who looked so much like a sheep. Acts like one, too."

A carriage pa.s.sed in front of them, curtains drawn back to show a pair of porcelain-fair girls and an older woman in a fashionable bonnet and lace cap. Livia remarked, "Hmph. Pauline Mazant has her nerve, setting up as chaperone to her daughters-the whole town knows she's carrying on an affair with Prosper Livaudais. And him young enough to be her son, or her nephew anyway."

She turned her attention back to January and the matter at hand. "At Trepagier's death, presumably the jewelry would revert to Angelique, and then to her mother-those brothers of hers wouldn't touch it, and small blame to them. But Madame Trepagier may sue her for the more expensive pieces, like that set of pearls and emeralds, if they ever find them, and the two slaves. The cook should fetch a thousand dollars at least, even if she can't make pastry, and the girl nearly that."

Only his mother, reflected January wryly, would keep track of the relative price of her friends' servants.

"Unless Phrasie decides to keep them for herself. She's only got the one woman now and she can't cook worth sour apples, but she may sell them and keep the cash, to prevent La Trepagier from getting them back. Weeping about the hardship of her lot all the while, of course. And G.o.d alone knows what she owes in faro games."

They walked in silence for a few minutes, threading their way among servants, householders, men and women abroad on the errands of the day. The air was warm without brightness, heavy with the strange sense of expectation that the dampness frequently seemed to bring. Even here, at the back of the old town, the well-dressed servants of the rich came and went from the small shops, the dressmakers and furniture builders, the milliners who copied the latest French styles, the dealers in books and linen, soaps and corsetry. Here and there the tall town houses of the wealthy lifted above the rows of brightly painted stucco cottages or the old Spanish dwellings, built half a story above the ground for coolness-the voices of children sounded like the cries of small birds from courtyards and alleyways. A pair of nuns walked slowly down the opposite banquette, black robes billowing a little in the wind off the river-they stopped to buy pralines from a woman in a gaudy head scarf, then moved on, smiling like girls. From far off a riverboat whistled, a deep alto song like some enormous water beast. Livia made a little detour to avoid the puddles where a man was washing out the stone-paved pa.s.sageway into a court, and past its shadows January glimpsed banana plants, palmettos, and jasmine.

"You know anything about what kind of terms Madame Dreuze was negotiating with Monsieur Peralta?"

"Euphrasie Dreuze hasn't the wits to negotiate the price of a pineapple in the market," retorted Livia coolly. "She was trotting back and forth for weeks between her daughter and Monsieur Peralta, pretending she was 'checking' with that harpy and really taking her instructions, and a pretty bargain it was, too. She wanted that piece of downtown property on Bourbon and Barracks, six seventy-five a year and and a clothing allowance, household money plus freehold on whatever young Peralta might give her." a clothing allowance, household money plus freehold on whatever young Peralta might give her."

January didn't even bother to ask how his mother had come by those figures.

"Grasping witch. Personally I can't see how Peralta Pere would countenance it, because he'd be just laying his son open for a drain on the capital. And her playing bedroom eyes with Tom Jenkins since last May. Pere et fils, they're well rid of her."

A cat blinked from an iron-grilled balcony. Two boys ran by, chasing a hoop.

"Tell me about Madeleine Trepagier," said January.

"You knew her." Livia angled her parasol though there was no sunlight strong enough to cast shadow. "She was one of your piano students. Madeleine Dubonnet."

"I know." January felt that much admission was better than trying to remember a lie. "The one who played Beethoven with such...rage." He was surprised his mother remembered the students he'd had before he left.

His mother's dark eyes cut sidelong to him, then away. "If she had rage in her she had a right to it," she said. "With a drunkard of a father who married her to one of his gambling friends to cancel a debt. Oh, the Trepagiers are a good family, and Arnaud had three plantations, if you want to call that piece of swamp in Metairie a plantation. Good for nothing but possum hunting is what I've heard, and wouldn't fetch more than fifteen dollars an acre even now, and less than that back when he sold it to that American." The inflection of her voice added that as far as she was concerned, the American was a tobacco-chewing flatboat man with fleas in his crotch.

"I've ridden past Les Saules," he remarked, to keep her on track.

"It's been going downhill for years." Livia dismissed it with a wave of her hand. "Cheap Creole cane. It won't produce more than eight hundred pounds an acre, if the cold doesn't kill it. And And three mortgages, and lucky to get them. Arnaud Trepagier was a fine gentleman but not much of a planter, and they say the woman's a pinchpenny and works her slaves hard, not that slaves won't whine like sick puppies if you make them step out any faster than a tortoise on a cold day. G.o.d knows what the woman's going to do now, with all the debts he left. I'd be surprised if she could get ten dollars an acre for that land. That worthless brother of Trepagier's left town years ago, when he sold his own plantation, also to an American"-there was that inflection again-"and got cheated out of his eyeteeth on railroad stock. And I'd sooner peddle gumbo in the market than go live with Alicia Picard-that's Dubonnet's sister-and her mealymouthed son." three mortgages, and lucky to get them. Arnaud Trepagier was a fine gentleman but not much of a planter, and they say the woman's a pinchpenny and works her slaves hard, not that slaves won't whine like sick puppies if you make them step out any faster than a tortoise on a cold day. G.o.d knows what the woman's going to do now, with all the debts he left. I'd be surprised if she could get ten dollars an acre for that land. That worthless brother of Trepagier's left town years ago, when he sold his own plantation, also to an American"-there was that inflection again-"and got cheated out of his eyeteeth on railroad stock. And I'd sooner peddle gumbo in the market than go live with Alicia Picard-that's Dubonnet's sister-and her mealymouthed son."

January almost asked his mother if she wanted to go back over the battlefield and slit the throats of anyone she'd only wounded in the first fusillade, but stopped himself. Behind them, a voice called out, "Madame Levesque! Madame Livia!" and January turned, hearing running footsteps. The woman Judith was hurrying down Rue Burgundy toward them, her hand pressed to her side to ease a st.i.tch. She'd put on her head scarf again, and against the soft yellows and rusts and greens of the houses the dull red of her calico dress seemed like a smear of dark blood.

"Madame Livia, it isn't true!" panted Judith, when she had come up with January and his mother. "It isn't true! I never went to a voodoo woman or made any gris-gris against Mamzelle Angelique!"

Livia looked down her nose at the younger woman, in spite of the fact that Judith was some five inches taller than her. "And did you run away?"

The slave woman was, January guessed, exactly of his mother's extraction-half-and-half mulatto-but he could see in his mother's eyes, hear in the tone of her voice, the exact configuration of the white French when they spoke to their slaves. The look, the tone, that said, I am colored. She is black. I am colored. She is black.

Maybe she didn't didn't remember the cane fields. remember the cane fields.

And Judith said, "M'am, it was only for a night. It really was only for a night." As if Livia Levesque had been white, she didn't look her in the face. "She'd whipped me, with a stick of cane.... I really would have come back. Madame Madeleine, she told me I had to.... I never would have gone to a voodoo."

"Did Monsieur Trepagier take you away from Madame Madeleine and give you to Angelique?" asked January.

Judith nodded. "Her daddy bought me for her. Years ago, when first they got married. I'd waited on her, fixed her hair, sewed her clothes.... She was always good to me. And it made me mad, when Michie Arnaud give that Angelique her jewelry and her dresses and her horse, that little red mare she always rode. She tried not to show she cared, same as she tried not to show it when he'd taken a cane to her."

She shook her head, her eyes dark with anger and grief. "There'd be nights when she'd hold on to me and cry until nearly morning, with her back all bleeding or her face marked, then get up and go on about sewing his shirts and doing the accounts and writing to the brokers, until I'd have to go out back and cry myself, for pity. Later when he gave me to that Angelique, sometimes I'd run away and go back, just to see her. I did when Mamzelle Alexandrine died-her daughter-long of the fever. She was my friend, Madame Livia. But I'd never have hurt Angelique. I go to confession, and I know that's a sin. Please believe me. You have to believe. And as for her saying Madame Madeleine put me up to a thing like that...I never would have! She She never would have!" never would have!"

Livia sniffed.

Gently, January asked, "Would the cook? She was Madame Madeleine's servant too, wasn't she?"

"Kessie?" Judith hesitated a long time. "I-I don't think so, sir," she answered at last. "I know she left a man and three kids at Les Saules, but I know, too, she's got another man here in town. And she didn't...didn't hate Angelique. Not like I did. For one thing," she added with a wry twist to her lips, "if anything happened to Angelique, Kessie wouldn't be able to steal from the kitchen, like she was doing. She might have put graveyard dust someplace in the bedroom, but she wouldn't have done that kind of a ouanga, a death sign."

She looked from Livia's cool face to January's, anxious and frightened, her hazel eyes wide. "I go to church, and I pray to G.o.d. I don't go to the voodoo dances, Sundays. You have to believe me. Please believe me."

January was silent. He wondered if his mother was right, if Euphrasie Dreuze would sell off her daughter's two slaves quickly, for whatever she could get, to avoid Madeleine Trepagier's bringing suit to get them back. He wondered if Judith knew, or guessed, what would happen to her.

But Livia only c.o.c.ked her sunshade a little further over her shoulder and asked, "And why are you so fired up all of a sudden that I have to believe you?"

"She'll tell that policeman that I had something to do with Angelique's death," whispered Judith. "She'll tell him Madame Madeleine and I did it."

"Policeman?"

"That tall American one, as tall as you, Michie Janvier. He's at the house now. He's askin' questions about you."

"About me me?"

EIGHT.

Madame Madeleine TrepagierLes SaulesOrleans ParishFriday afternoon15 Fev. 1833Madame Trepagier-My attempt to deliver your note to Madame Dreuze met with no success. She has conceived the opinion that at your instigation, the slave woman Judith obtained a death talisman from a voodoo and placed it in Angelique Crozat's house, and that this was what drew Mlle. Crozat's murderer to her. She has expressed this opinion not only to five of her friends-Catherine Clisson, Odile Gignac, Agnes Pellicot, Clemence Drouet, and Livia Levesque, all free women of color of this city-but I believe to the police as well. Though I doubt that the police will take any action based on what is quite clearly a hysterical accusation, that she made this accusation told me it would do no good for me to plead your cause. take any action based on what is quite clearly a hysterical accusation, that she made this accusation told me it would do no good for me to plead your cause.It appears that Madame Dreuze is in the process of gathering together all jewelry in her late daughter's house preparatory to selling it as quickly as possible. Moreover, I have reason to suspect that she intends to sell both slave women-Judith and the cook Kessie-as soon as she can, to forestall any claim you may make upon them. I strongly suggest that you get in touch with Lt. Abis.h.a.g Shaw of the New Orleans police and take whatever steps you can to prevent Madame Dreuze's liquidation of her daughter's valuables until it can be ascertained which of these items are, in fact, yours by right.Please believe that I remain your humble servant, Benj. January, f.m.c.

It was, January reflected, rubbing a hand over his eyes, the best he could do. Dappled shade pa.s.sed over the sleeve of his brown second-best coat like a coquette's trailing scarf, and on the bench beside him, two young laundresses with heaped willow baskets on their laps compared notes about their respective lovers amid gales of giggles. By the sound of it, the Irish and German girls in the front of the omnibus-maids-of-all-work or shop a.s.sistants, grisettes they'd have been called in Paris-were doing the same. A carriage pa.s.sed them, the fast trot of its two copper-colored hackneys easily outpacing the steady clop of the omnibus's hairy-footed nag.

It was perhaps intelligence that would have been more kindly conveyed by a friend in person rather than by note, but even had he gone back to Desdunes's Livery and rented another horse to ride out again to Les Saules the moment Judith had told him about Lt. Shaw's visit to the Crozat household, January doubted he could have returned to town before two. And two o'clock, murder and wrongdoing aside, was the hour at which, three times a week, the daughters of Franklin Culver had their music lesson, at fifty cents per daughter per hour, or a grand total of four dollars and fifty cents each Friday. If he thought Shaw would place the slightest weight on Euphrasie's accusations it would have been a different matter, but his warning was one that could as easily be conveyed by note, and he had not the smallest doubt that Madeleine Trepagier would act upon it with all speed.

He sighed, and rubbed his eyes again. On either side of Nyades Street cleared lots showed where cane fields had once rattled, dark green, hot, and mysterious. A double line of ma.s.sive oaks shaded the road, draped in trailing beards of gray-green moss, and far off to his left he could glimpse the green rise of the levee, and the gliding, silent smokestacks of the riverboats beyond. Past the oaks stood new American-style houses, built of wood or imported New England brick, brave with scrollwork and bright with new paint, gardens spread about them like the multicolored petticoats of market women sitting on the gra.s.s. After the enclosing walls and crowding balconies of the French town, the American town seemed both airy and a little raw, its unfinished streets petering out into rows of oaks and sycamores or ending in the raw mounds of the cane fields, bare looking or just beginning to bristle with the first stubble of second or third crops. A black man was scything the gra.s.s in one yard behind a white-painted picket fence; a woman with a servant's plain dark dress and an Irishwoman's fair complexion walked a baby in a wicker perambulator down the footpath by the roadside, trailed by a small boy in a sailor suit and a smaller girl in frilly white with a doll.

The houses glittered with windows, the farthest dwellings imaginable from the sordid cabins of the Irish Channel just upriver from the French town, or the filth of the Girod Street Swamp. Not that his mother-or any of the old French planters-would admit that there was any difference in the quality of the inhabitants. "They are Americans," Livia-or Xavier Peralta, for that matter-would say, with the tone Bouille had used of his opponent Granger, with the look in her eyes like the eyes behind those velvet masks regarding Shaw from the doorway of the Orleans ballroom last night.

He suspected that because they could afford such houses-because they owned so many steamship companies and banks, so much of the money that kept the old French planters going from sugar crop to sugar crop-only made the situation worse.

"Ma! The n.i.g.g.e.r music teacher's here!"

The small boy's bell-clear voice carried even through the shut back door of the house, and January felt his jaw muscles clench even as he schooled his face to a pleasant smile when the housemaid, wiping flour-covered hands on her ap.r.o.n, opened the kitchen door. The knowledge that the girls' white drawing master also had to come to the back door was of little comfort.

Franklin Culver was vice-president of a small bank on the American side of Ca.n.a.l Street. He owned four slaves: the housemaid Ruth, the yardman Jim, and two other men whose services he rented out to a lumberyard. January suspected that if any of the three daughters of the household knew that his given name was Benjamin, they'd call him by it instead of Mr. January. He could see that the matter still profoundly puzzled Charis, the youngest. "But slaves don't have last names," she'd argued during the first lesson.

"Well, they do, Miss Charis," pointed out January. "But anyway, I'm not a slave."

Upon a later occasion she'd remarked that slaves didn't speak French-French evidently being something small girls learned with great labor and frustration from their governesses-so he could tell she was still unclear about the entire concept of a black man being free. He suspected that her father shared this deficiency. He didn't even try to explain that he wasn't black, but colored, a different matter entirely.

Still, the girls were very polite, unspoiled and charming, clearly kept up with their daily practicing, and four-fifty a week was four-fifty a week. Three dollars of that went to Livia, and two or three from what he earned teaching small cla.s.ses in her parlor on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. They didn't have the pa.s.sion, or the gift for music, that Madeleine Dubonnet had had, nor the secret bond of shared devotion, but he'd instructed far worse.

He occasionally asked himself what he was saving for, squirreling away small sums of money in his account at the Banque de Louisiane. A house of his own?

In New Orleans? Paris had been bad enough, knowing that he was a fully qualified surgeon who would never have his own practice-or never a paying one-sheerly because of the color of his skin. Even as a musician his size and color had made him something of a curiosity, but at least people on the streets of Paris did not treat him like an idiot or a potentially dangerous savage. At least he didn't have to alter his manner and his speech in the interests of making a living, of not running afoul of the Black Code. At least he could look any man in the eyes.

In the few months he had been back he had found himself keeping almost exclusively to the French town, among the Creoles, who had not been brought up with the a.s.sumption that all those not of pure European descent were or should be slaves.

But the thought of returning to Paris turned his heart cold. During the weeks after Ayasha's death he had nearly gone crazy, expecting to see her around every corner, striding up the cobbled hill of Montmartre or arguing with market women, a straw basket of apples and bread on her hip-looking for her, listening everywhere for her voice. One night he'd gone walking for hours in the rain, searching the streets, half persuading himself that she wasn't really dead. He'd ended up sobbing at three in the morning on the steps of Notre Dame, the blue-beaded rosary wrapped around his hands, incoherently praying to the Virgin for he knew not what. He knew then that he had to leave that city or go mad.

And where else was there for him to go?

He listened to Charis's careful simplifications of Mozart airs, to Penelope's mechanical cotillions, and Esther's studied, overemphatic mutilation of Childgrove; Childgrove; gave them exercises and new pieces to learn; watched and listened for patterns of mistakes. He was conscious of pacing himself, giving the attention and care necessary but offering nothing beyond. Weariness had caught up with him, between his early ride to Les Saules and the exhausting scene at the house on Rue des Ursulines, with no sleep the night before. As a result he felt a curious disorientation in this overdecorated room, with its fashionable German furniture of heavily carved black walnut and slick upholstery, its beaded lampshades and fussy break-fronts and printed green wallpaper-a very American house, unlike the pared simplicity of Les Saules or his mother's simple cottage on Rue Burgundy. Sixteen years ago, when he'd left, most of this land had been cane fields, and English was a language one seldom heard in New Orleans. gave them exercises and new pieces to learn; watched and listened for patterns of mistakes. He was conscious of pacing himself, giving the attention and care necessary but offering nothing beyond. Weariness had caught up with him, between his early ride to Les Saules and the exhausting scene at the house on Rue des Ursulines, with no sleep the night before. As a result he felt a curious disorientation in this overdecorated room, with its fashionable German furniture of heavily carved black walnut and slick upholstery, its beaded lampshades and fussy break-fronts and printed green wallpaper-a very American house, unlike the pared simplicity of Les Saules or his mother's simple cottage on Rue Burgundy. Sixteen years ago, when he'd left, most of this land had been cane fields, and English was a language one seldom heard in New Orleans.

His mind feeling thick and heavy, he dozed on the omnibus as it clopped its way down Nyades Street. The walk back to his mother's house revived him a little, and there was enough time, before his pupils arrived at four, to go back to the kitchen and beg a dish of beans and rice from Bella, the woman who had cooked and cleaned and done the laundry almost as long as his mother had lived there. After he ate he went into the parlor, where his mother was reading the newspaper, and played some Bach to clear his mind and warm up his hands. The children, ranging in ages from seven to fourteen and in colors from the clear medium brown of polished walnut to palest ivory, appeared a few minutes later, and he switched his mind over to the disciplines of teaching again, studying the way those small hands labored over the keys and guessing half instinctively how their minds interpreted what they were doing with rhythm and sound.

One was the child of a placee and a white man; the others, offspring of well-off artisans, merchants, leaders of the colored community who wanted their children to have a little more than they themselves might have had.

He wondered what Charis Culver-or her father-would have made of that.

When the last of them had gone he crossed the yard, climbed the narrow stair to his room above the kitchen, and slept, all the windows open against the heat that rose from below. But his dreams were uneasy, troubled by images of Madeleine Trepagier in her silly deerskin dress and c.o.c.k feathers standing on an auction block, while masked men in rich satins called out bids for her in the rotunda of the St. Charles Hotel. He was aware of one figure moving at the rear of the group, a figure he could barely see, shrouded, with the bound jaw of a corpse. Every time that figure raised its hand the bidding halted for a moment, uneasily, and when it continued it flagged, as if none dared bid against that greenish, dreadful shape.

A crashing, thumping noise woke him, like giant's footfalls in the room beside his bed. Bella, he realized. She was. .h.i.tting the ceiling of the kitchen with a broom handle to tell him it was seven o'clock. The Grand Ball of the Faubourg Treme Militia Company began in two hours. His head thick with the dissatisfied, incompleted ache of daytime sleep, he lay for a moment feeling the moist air from outside walking over his face, rippling silently at the thin white curtains. The smell of lost bread and coffee drifted up with the kitchen's warmth, and the ache, the longing, the wanting to wake up completely and find Ayasha still lying in the bed beside him pa.s.sed over him as a dark wave would have pa.s.sed across a sleeper on the beach, salt wetness lingering for hours after the drag and force were gone.

Somewhere in his mind an image lingered-part of a dream?-of the slave block in the St. Charles Hotel, empty save for a couple of black c.o.c.k feathers and a lingering sense of despair.

Angelique's funeral was to be at noon.

Sipping what he hoped would be a restorative cup of cafe noir at one of the tables scattered under the market's brick arcade and listening to the cathedral clock chime four-thirty, January wondered if he'd be able to sneak in some sleep before then.

"Maybe they're both terrible shots," said Hannibal, dusting powdered sugar from the beignets off his sleeves. New Orleans had one of the best systems of street lighting in the country, and even beyond the arcade the sooty predawn murk was streaked and blotted with amber where iron lanterns hung high above the banquettes. "Maybe they'll just miss each other and we can all go home."

"Maybe somebody'll discover I'm the long-lost heir to the throne of France, and I can give up teaching piano."

January glanced uneasily around him. Curfew was seldom enforced during Carnival, and for the most part the city guardsmen only bothered those who were obviously slaves or poor, but still he felt wary, unprotected, to be abroad this late.

"Creoles will end a swordfight after first blood-everybody in town is each other's cousins anyway. With bullets it's hard to tell." He shrugged. "With Americans it's hard to tell. Mostly they shoot to kill."

Across the street the shutters of the Cafe du Levee were still flung wide, the saffron light blurred by river mist but the forms within still visible: the elderly men who had fled the revolution in Santo Domingo and younger men who were their sons, playing cards, drinking absinthe or coffee, denouncing the filthy traitorous Bonapartists and lamenting the better life that had existed before atheism, rationalism, and les americains. Many wore fancy dress, coming in as one by one the b.a.l.l.s and dances around the French town wound to conclusion, and all around January at the tables beneath the arcade, men-and a scattering of women-in evening clothes or masquerade garb rubbed elbows with market women and stevedores just starting their day as the revelers were ending theirs. Pralinieres and sellers of beignets or callas moved among them, peddling their wares fresh from the oven out of rush baskets; a coffee-stand sent white steam billowing into the misty dark. If some few of the gentlemen at the other tables looked askance at Hannibal for eating with a colored man, the lateness of the hour and the laxness of Carnival season kept them quiet about it. In any case, Hannibal was well enough known that few people commented on his behavior anymore.

Beyond the arcade's brick pillars dyed gold by lamp-light, past the dark lift of the levee, the black chimneys of steamboats cl.u.s.tered like a fire-blasted forest in the dark, spiked crowns glowing saffron with the fire reflected within and glints of that feral light catching the gilded trim of flagstaffs and pilothouses. The thin fog tasted of ash, and drifting s.m.u.ts had already left streaks on the two men's shirtfronts and cuffs.

"Monsieur Janvier."

Augustus Mayerling appeared in the shadows of the arcade. He had removed his mask but wore the Elizabethan doublet of black-and-green leather he'd had on for Thursday night's ball. Despite his short-cropped hair and the four saber scars that marked the left side of his face and must, January reflected, make shaving a nightmare for him, the high-worked ruff and the odd glare of the cafe's lights gave his beaky features an equivocal cast, almost feminine in the iron gloom. "Hannibal, my friend. I had not looked to see you."

"What, and miss a duel?" As usual for this hour of the morning the fiddler looked as if he'd been pulled through a sieve, but his dark eyes sparkled with irony. "The single, solitary chance of an entire lifetime to see a Creole and an American actually taking potshots at each other? Heaven forfend." He raised the backs of his fingers to his forehead in the manner of a diva quailing before circ.u.mstances too awful to endure. "It's all a matter of timing," he explained and went back to the dregs of his coffee.

"When now Aurora, daughter of the dawn, With rosy l.u.s.ter purpled o'er the lawn...

"The very hour, my friends, when the sporting establishments in the Swamp customarily close their doors and disgorge the flatboat crews into the-er-I suppose I have to call it a street. They'll still be drunk, but not drunk enough yet to pa.s.s out, and they don't go back to work until sunrise. If I come along to the duel I only have to worry about one one bullet." bullet."

"I like to see a man who is provident as well as talented." Mayerling nodded gravely, then held out a gloved hand to January. "Thank you again for agreeing to accompany us. It's a nuisance, and cuts into your rest-and mine, I might add-but they seem to think their manhood will fall off in the dirt if they are deprived of the chance at least to put their lives in danger to prove the veracity of their claims. You're familiar with their quarrel?"

"Only that it's the biggest shouting match since that last mayoral election when the editors of the Argus Argus and the and the Courier Courier got into that fistfight in the Cafe Hewlett," said Hannibal cheerfully. got into that fistfight in the Cafe Hewlett," said Hannibal cheerfully.