Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (3 page)

They passed through an archway into the lobby at the top of the main stair. The open stairwell echoed with voices from below as well as above, a many-tongued yammering through which occasional words and sentences in French, Spanish, German, and Americanized English floated disembodied, like leaves on a stream. Pomade, roses, women, and French perfumes thickened the air like luminous roux, and through three wide doorways that led into the long gas-lit ballroom, only the smallest breath of the night air stirred.

Hannibal
paused just within the central ballroom door to collect a glass of champagne and a bottle from the bucket of crushed New England ice at the buffet table. One of the colored waiters started to speak, then recognized him and grinned.

“You fixin' to take just the one glass, fiddler?”

Hannibal
widened coal-black eyes at the man and passed the glass to January, ceremoniously poured it full and proceeded to take a long drink from the neck of the bottle.

"Oh, for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth."

He solemnly touched the bottle to January's glass in a toast, and resumed his progress toward the dais at the far end of the ballroom. January collared two more glasses for Jacques and Uncle Bichet, who awaited them behind the line of potted palmettos. The waiter shook his head and laughed, and went back to pouring out champagne for the men who crowded through the other doorways from the lobby, clamoring for a last drink before the dancing began.

As he settled at the piano—a seven-octave Erard, thick with gilt and imported at staggering cost from Paris —and removed his hat and gloves, January thought he caught a glimpse of the creamy buff of a buckskin gown in the far doorway. He swung around, distracted, but the shifting mosaic of revelers hid whoever it was he thought he'd seen.

Concern flared in him, and anger, too. Damn it, girl, I'm trying to keep you from ruining yourself His hands passed across the keys, warming up; then he nodded to Hannibal and to Uncle Bichet, and like acrobats they bounded into the bright strains of the Marlboro Cotillion. First thoughts were best—I'm getting too old to be a knight-errant. His lip smarted and he cringed inwardly at the thought of seeking out and interviewing Angelique Crozat later in the evening.

And for what? So that she could come up here anyway . . .

But why would she come up? He'd seen her relax at the thought that she didn't have to find the woman herself, saw the dread leave her.

He'd probably been mistaken. He hoped he'd been mistaken. Men were leading their ladies in from the lobby, forming up squares. Others came filtering through the discreetly curtained arch that led to the passageway from the Theatre next door, greeting their mistresses with kisses, their men friends with handshakes and grins of complicity, while their wives and fiancees and mothers no doubt fanned themselves and wondered loudly where their menfolk could have got to. The custom of the country. January shook his head.

All of Madeleine Trepagier's family, and her deceased husband's, were probably at that ball. He'd never met a Creole lady yet who didn't have brothers and male cousins. True, if they didn't know she'd be here they wouldn't be expecting to see her, but there was always the risk. With luck the first dances—cotillion, waltz, Pantalon— would absorb their attention, giving the woman time to make her escape.

If that was what she was going to do. The skipping rhythms of the cotillion drew at his mind. He knew that for the next hour, music would be all he'd have time to think about. Whatever she decided to do, she'd be on her own.

It was her own business, of course, but he had been fond of her as a child, the genius and the need of her soul calling to the hunger in his. She had to be desperate in the first place to come here. Quiet and well-mannered and genuinely considerate as she had been as a child, she had had the courage that could turn reckless if driven to the wall. He wished heartily that he'd had time to escort her back to the Trepagier town house himself.

He was to wish it again, profoundly, after they discovered the body in the parlor at the end of the hall.

Benjamin January's first public performance on the piano had been at a quadroon ball. He was sixteen and had played for the private parties and dances given during Christmas and Carnival season by St.Denis Janvier for years; he was enormously tall even then, gawky, lanky, odd-looking, and painfully shy. St.Denis Janvier had hired for him the best music master in New Orleans as soon as he'd purchased—and freed—his mother.

The music master was an Austrian who referred to Beethoven as “that self-indulgent lunatic” and regarded opera as being on intellectual par with the work hollers Ben had learned in his first eight years in the cane fields of Bellefleur Plantation where the growing American suburb of Saint Mary now stood. The Austrian—Herr Kovald—taught the children of other placees and seemed to think it only the children's due that their illegitimate fathers pay for a musical as well as a literary education for them. If he ever thought it odd that Ben did not appear to have a drop of European blood in his veins it was not something he considered worthy of mention.

Ben was, he said quite simply, the best, and therefore deserved to be beaten more, as diamonds require fiercer blows to cut. Common trash like pearls, he said, one only rubbed a little.

Herr Kovald had played the piano at the quadroon balls, which in those days had been held at another ballroom on Rue Royale. Then, as now, the wealthy planters, merchants, and bankers of the town would bring their mulatto or quadroon mistresses—their placees—to dance and socialize, away from the restrictions of wives or would-be wives; would also bring their sons to negotiate for the choice of mistresses of their own. Then, as now, free women of color, pla?ees or former plasees, would bring their daughters as soon as they were old enough to be taken in by protectors and become plafees themselves, in accordance with the custom of the country. Society was smaller then and exclusively French and Spanish. In those days the few Americans who had established plantations near the city since the takeover by the United States simply made concubines of the best looking of their slaves and sold them off or sent them back to the fields when their allure faded.

At Carnival time in 1811, Herr Kovald was sick with the wasting illness that was later to claim his life. As if the matter had been discussed beforehand, he had simply sent a note to Livia Janvier's lodgings, instructing her son Benjamin to take his place as piano player at the ball. And in spite of his mother's deep disapproval (“It's one thing for you to play for me, p'tit, but for you to play like a hurdy-gurdy man for those cheap hussies that go to those balls . . .”), he had, as a matter of course, gone. And, except for a break of six years, he had been a professional musician ever since.

The ballroom was full by the time the cotillion was done. January looked up from his music to scan the place from the vantage point of the dais, while Hannibal shared his champagne with the other two musicians and flirted with Phlosine Seurat, who had by this time discovered that powdered wigs and panniers were designed for the stately display of a minuet, not the breathtaking romp of a cotillion. Between snippets of Schubert, played to give everyone time to regain their breaths, January tried again to catch sight of Madeleine Trepagier—if that was she he had thought he'd glimpsed in the ballroom doorway—or of Angelique Crozat, or, failing either of them, his sister Dominique.

He knew Minou would be here, with her protector Henri Viellard. During the four years between Dominique's birth and January's departure for Paris, he had known that the beautiful little girl was destined for pla-fage—destined to become some white man's mistress, as their mother had been, with a cottage on Rue des Ramparts or des Ursulines and the responsibility of seeing to nothing but her protector's comfort and pleasure whenever he chose to arrive.

The practical side of him had known this was a good living for a woman, promising material comfort for her children.

Still, he was glad he'd been in Paris when his mother started bringing Minou to the Blue Ribbon Balls.

He caught sight of her just as he began the waltz, a flurry of pink silk and brown velvet in the wide doorway that led to the upstairs lobby, unmistakable even in a rose-trimmed domino mask as she grasped the hands of acquaintances, exchanged kisses and giggles, always keeping her alertness focused on the fat, fair, bespectacled man who lumbered in at her side. Viellard appeared to have been defeated by the challenge of accommodating his spectacles to the wearing of a mask—he was clothed very stylishly in a damson-colored cutaway coat, jade-green waistcoat, and pale pantaloons, and resembled nothing so much as a colossal plum. When the waltz was over Dominique fluttered across the dance floor to the musicians' stand, holding out one lace-mitted hand, a beautiful amber-colored girl with velvety eyes and features like an Egyptian cat's.

“First I heard Queen Guenevere had her dresses made from La Belle Assemblee.” Benjamin gestured to the fashionable bell-shaped skirt, the flounced snowbank of white lace collar, and the sleeves puffed out—Dominique had recently assured him—on hidden frameworks of whalebone and swansdown. Like every woman of color in New Orleans she was required to wear a tignon—a head scarf—in public, and had used the license granted by a masked ball to justify a marvelous confection of white and rose plumes, of wired and pomaded braids, of stiffened lace dangling with tasseled lappets of rose point in every direction, the furthest thing from the grace of Camelot that could be imagined.

Women these days, January had concluded, wore the damnedest things.

“Queen Guenevere is for the tableaux vivants, silly. And I'm just appallingly late as it is—you can't get any kind of speed out of waiters during Carnival, even in a private dining room—and I've just found out Iphegenie Picard doesn't have her costume for our tableau finished! Not,” she added crisply, “that she's alone in that. Iphegenie was telling me—”

“Is Angelique Crozat here?” In the three months he'd been back in New Orleans, January had learned that the only way to carry on a conversation with Dominique was to interrupt mercilessly the moment the current appeared to be carrying her in a direction other than the one intended.

She said nothing for a moment, but the full lips beneath the rim of the mask tightened slightly, and the chill was as if she'd imported a chunk of New England ice to cool the air between them. “Why on earth do you want to talk to Angelique, p'tit? Which I wouldn't advise, by the way. Old man Peralta has been negotiating with Angelique's mama—for his son, you know, the one who doesn't have a chin—and the boy's crazy with jealousy if any other man so much as looks at her. Augustus Mayerling's had to pull him out of two duels over her already, which he hasn't any right to be getting into— Galen, I mean—because of course negotiations are hardly begun . . .”

“I need to give her a message from a friend,” said January mildly.

“Better write it on the back of a bank draft if you want her to read it,” remarked Hannibal, coming around to lean on the corner of the piano. “In simple words of one syllable. You ever had a conversation with the woman? Very Shakespearean.”

Reaching out, he extracted two of the plumes from Dominique's hat and twisted his own long hair into a knot on the back of his head, sticking the quill ends through like hairpins to hold it in place. “Full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.” Dominique slapped at his hands but gave him the flirty glance she never would have given a man of her own color, and he hid a grin under his mustache and winked at her, thin and shabby and disreputable, like a consumptive Celtic elf.

“I haven't had the pleasure,” said January wryly. “Not recently anyway, though she did call me a black African nigger when she was six. But I've heard conversations she's had with others.”

“I've done that two streets away.”

“She'll be here.” Dominique's tone was still reminiscent of the ominous drop in temperature that precedes a hurricane. “And I don't think you'll find her manners have improved. Not toward anyone who can't do anything for her, anyway. Well, I understand a girl has to live, and I don't blame her for entertaining Monsieur Peralta's proposals, but . . .”

“What's wrong with Peralta?” January realized he'd run aground on another of those half-submerged sandbars of gossip that dotted New Orleans society—Creole, colored, and slave—like the snags and bars of the river. One day, he knew, he'd be able to negotiate them as he used to, unthinkingly—as his mother or Dominique did —identifying Byzantine gardens of implication from the single dropped rose petal of a name. But that would take time.

As other things would take time. In any case he couldn't recall any scandal connected with that dignified old planter.

“Nothing,” said Dominique, surprised. “It's just that Arnaud Trepagier has only been dead for two months. Arnaud Trepagier,” she went on, as January stared at her in blank dismay, his mind leaping to the fear that she had somehow recognized Madeleine, “was Angelique's protector. And I think—”

“Filthy son of a whore!”

All heads turned at the words, ringingly declaimed. There was, January reflected, something extremely actor-like in the way the dapper little gentleman in trunk hose and doublet had paused in the archway that led through to the more respectable precincts next door, holding the curtains apart with arms widespread and raised above the level of his shoulders, as if unconsciously taking up as much of the opening as was possible for a man of his stature.

The next second all heads swiveled toward the object of this epithet, and there seemed to be no doubt in anyone's mind who that was. Even January spotted him immediately, by the way some people stepped back from, and others closed in behind, the tall and unmistakably American Pierrot who'd been spitting tobacco in the courtyard earlier in the evening.

For an American, he spoke very good French. “Better a whore's son than a pimp, sir.”