Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (37 page)

He sat for a time, turning the notes over and over in his hand.

Mayerling was an outsider. A white man, true, but a man raised outside of slave-holding society. A man who would pick a surgeon on the grounds of experience rather than color.

If nothing else, it was worth asking what he knew.

“May I take these?”

“You may not!” retorted his sister indignantly. Then, relenting, “I'll make you out a copy; you can get it tomorrow.”

“You're a peach.” He kissed her hand, then looked out the open French doors, where the light was fading to final, rainy dusk. “Something tells me we may need an extra copy where we can get at it.”

“I have the original notes, too,” she said. “I mean the ones the officer made that night. Monsieur Shaw left them here when he had his fair copy and I just put them in a drawer. Will you be speaking to Monsieur Shaw?”

January set down the notes. “I don't know,” he said. “If I can do it without being arrested on the spot, yes. You say you gave him my letter. Did he read it?”

She nodded.

“Did he say anything?”

“Nothing. Just put it in his pocket. But he can read,” she added quickly. “I saw him read these notes when he took them.”

Olympe sniffed, sounding extremely like their mother. “There's miracles every day. Will you need a place to stay, brother? This Shaw will know Mama's house—this house, too,” she added, and January noted, a little cynically, that for one tiny unguarded second Dominique looked relieved. “If worse comes to worst there are other places you can stay as well, until we can get you out of town.”

“Good,” said January bitterly. “So I can be a fugitive, because witnesses don't want to testify anything that'll make a jury think a white killed that woman.”

“Better than bein' a corpse for the same reason.” She shifted the cat off her lap and fetched an oiled-silk umbrella from behind the door. “I'll find somebody who can get a letter to this Shaw, set up a meetin'.” She went to the French doors, looked out at the street, where the oil lamps suspended high on the walls cast flashing coins of light in the dark water of the gutters. “Darn few on the streets now, so you should be safe enough.”

January put on the jacket she'd brought him, kissed Minou, and stepped down from the French doors, helping his sister—who needed it no more than a gazelle— down to the brick banquette, and from there across the plank to the street. Only a few spits of rain flecked them now, but the darkening sky was heavily pregnant with more.

“I'll still want to find this Sally girl and speak to Clemence Drouet if I can.”

“You really think that poor spaniel of a girl was clever enough to know if she killed Angelique in public that way, people'd go lookin' in all directions but at her?” Olympe shook her head. “Unless she was clever all these years—deep clever—I'd say if she killed her friend in anger over her walkin' off with Jenkins, she'd just have sat down beside the body and howled.”

“Maybe,” agreed January, knowing Olympe was probably right.

“I've told you what I know about it,” his sister went on, “and so I'll ask you this, Ben: Be careful what you do with that knowledge. I think Clemence went off cryin' into the night, same as that boy Galen did. But Clemence is a colored gal, where Galen's white. And she did pay for that gris-gris. If the law's out lookin' for someone to hang, like you say, all you'll have to do is speak her name and she'll be a dead woman, for no more crime than hating a woman she wasn't strong enough to leave.” January was silent, knowing again that Olympe spoke true and wondering wearily how he had happened to have the responsibility not only for Madeleine

Trepagier's freedom yoked to his shoulders, but for the life of a girl he'd barely met. For some reason he remembered that Apollo was not only the god of music and of healing but of justice as well.

Monsieur Gomez had taught him, Make your diagnosis first, then decide on treatment when you know the facts.

Augustus first,
he thought. Then we'll see what else we need to know.

“I didn't know you knew Minou,” he remarked, as they drew near the corner of the Rue Douane.

“Not well. I've kept track of her, of course, but Thursday was the first time I ever went through her door.” The dark eyebrows pulled down, troubled by some unaccustomed thoughts. “I didn't think I'd like her, to tell the truth, though she was sweet as a little girl. I was surprised.”

“Why Thursday?”

“I went looking for you when I learned who paid for that gris-gris, and told off them boys to give you a poundin'.” She frowned again. Her front teeth were just prominent enough to give her face a sharpness, a feral quality, like her watchful dark eyes. He wondered if she knew Lucius Lacrime. “And then, I was worried about you. The hairball I keep told me you were in trouble, or hurt.” She glanced down at his bandaged hand.

January cast back in his mind and told himself that it was coincidence that his capture by Peralta, the interview in the sugar mill, and the long torture of escape had taken place on Thursday.

“I was there today because she asked me to come back, asked my help,” Olympe went on. “She's with child, you know.”

Something that wasn't quite anger—but was close to it—wrenched him hard. But he only said, “I didn't think Henri had enough red blood in him to make a child.”

Olympia Snakebones glanced sidelong up at him, under the umbrella's shadow. “He's good to her,” she said. “And he'll be good to the child. They mostly are, as long as those children do what they're told to do, be what they're told to be, and don't go askin' too many questions about why things are the way they are.”

January was silent a moment, stopping at the corner of Rue Bienville, a few blocks above the tall house where Augustus Mayerling had his rooms. Then he sighed. “Nobody's got a monopoly on that, sister. Not the whites, not the blacks, not the sang mele.”

Her smile under the shadow of the umbrella was bright and wry. Then she turned away, crossing a plank to the street and holding her blue skirts high out of the mud as she splashed across, to return to her home, her husband, and her daughters and sons.

Augustus Mayerling occupied two rooms on the top floor, high above a courtyard full of banana plants and plane trees and a shop that dealt in coffees and teas. The rain had eased again to thin flutters, glistening in daffodil patches beneath the streetlights. As he climbed the wooden steps from gallery to gallery, January was surrounded by the rising smells of foliage and cooking from the courtyard beneath him. The high walls of the house muffled the noises of the street, the distant hoot of the steamboat whistles, and the cries of a few final oyster vendors giving up for the day.

While he and Olympe had been walking down Rue Burgundy they'd heard the cannon by the Cabildo, closing down curfew for the night. The rain had damped the dancing in Congo Square some hours before. If he were stopped by the guards he'd have to present his papers, to prove himself free. The thought made him uneasy. The city seemed very silent without the jostling voices of maskers in the streets, the thump and wail of brass bands in the taverns, the riot of parades.

And indeed, thought January wryly, within a week the Creoles would be hiring him to play at discreet little balls again no matter what the church said about surrendering one's pleasures to God in that time of penitence — provided of course he wasn't in jail or on a boat. Life went on, and one could not content oneself with backgammon and gossip forever.

Certainly no gambling hall in the city had closed down. But that, as any Creole would say with that expressive Creole shrug, was but the custom of the country.

The topmost gallery was dark, illuminated only by the thin cracks of light from the French doors of Mayerling's rooms.

January had just reached the top of the stairs when the doors were opened. Mayerling looked right and left, warily, the gold light glinting on close-cropped flaxen hair and a white shirt open at the throat. Clearly not seeing that anyone else stood there in the dark, he beckoned back in the room behind him.

A woman stepped out, clothed in widow's black.

January felt his heart freeze inside him. The light strength of her movement, the way her shoulders squared when she turned, was—as it had been not many nights ago—unmistakable.

“The back stairs are safer,” said Mayerling's husky, boyish voice. “The slaves won't be back for a little time yet.” Reaching back into the apartment, the Prussian brought out a cloak, which he settled around his shoulders. Putting a hand to the woman's back, he made to guide her into the dark curve of the building where the back stairs ran down to the gallery above the kitchen.

The woman stopped, turned, put back her veils, and raised her face to his. Dim as it was, the honey warmth of the candles within fell on her, showing January clearly the strong oval lines of the chin, the enormous, mahogany red eyes of Madeleine Trepagier.

Madeleine Trepagier and Augustus Mayerling.

I was a fool not to guess.

Concealed behind the corner of a carriageway halfway down the street, January watched the sword master help his mistress into a hired fiacre. The banquette was otherwise empty; Sunday, Lent, and Creole dinner parties completing what the rain had begun.

It wasn't only Trepagier's mistress who'd met Peralta through Mayerling's school. Mayerling himself had met his pupil's beautiful wife.

Whoever he marries will have cause to thank the person who wielded that scarf.

I should have no choice but to avenge that lady's honor. . . .
Why hadn't he seen it then, less than two minutes after Mayerling had attributed all dueling to boredom, ignorance, and vice?

Perhaps because of the disgusted horror in Madeleine's eyes when she'd said, Not a man ...

The cab moved away from the banquette. Fair head bowed in the rain, Mayerling turned and vanished into the pitch-dark carriageway from which he and Madame Trepagier had come.

She'll change from the fiacre to her own carriage somewhere,
thought January. Probably the Place des Armes.

He stepped out of hiding and moved through the rainy, lamp-blotched darkness after the fiacre, the mud and water washing over the street's uneven paving-blocks slowing its progress and making it easy for him to keep it in sight.

Augustus was a foreigner. White, but a Prussian. A jury might just rule on the evidence and not the color of the defendant's skin.

But everything in him was saying, No, no as he followed the dark bulk of the carriage through the streets toward the cathedral.

Not a man,
Madeleine had said, with a loathing in her eyes that had told its own tale of Arnaud Trepagier as surely as had the old cook and laundress of Les Saules. Working at the Hotel Dieu, January had met women who had been raped and abused, had seen what it did to them ever after. That any man would have been gentle enough, caring enough, to lead her out of that prison of terror and rage was a miracle and a gift.

Looking back at that Thursday night at the Salle d'Orleans, January could see everything with blinding clarity.

Everything except what he should do.

In a novel the answer would be obvious. “Missy, ain't been no joy in this old world for me since my woman done died.” Followed by a quaintly ill-spelt confession and the rope—or maybe a ticket to France if the novelist was in a good humor.

But New Orleans was his home. And Uhrquahr and Peralta weren't the only enemies advancing through the mist.

By the rustling darkness of the cathedral garden, literally a stone's throw from the Orleans ballroom, the fiacre came to a halt. It was raining more heavily now, but Madame Trepagier, her face hidden by the long veils of a widow, stepped down and paid the driver, then turned and hurried into the alley that ran between the church and the Cabildo, a black form swiftly swallowed by the dark.

Dominique ran that way, the night of the murder,
thought January, following her into the dark. But during the bright Carnival season there had been lamps in every one of the shop fronts along the alley that were now closed up and dark, revelers staggering back and forth in a steady stream between Rue Royale and the Place des Armes. With the cathedral clock striking eight, and the leaden ceiling of cloud mixing with the eternal pall of steamboat smoke, the alley was pitch-black, with only a window or two throwing gold sprinkles on the falling ram.

Creole Sunday in New Orleans,
thought January. Of course Madeleine Trepagier would have dinner with Aunt Picard, with all the Trepagier cousins in attendance, pressing their suits. Why not? Why not? A woman can't run a plantation alone. It would be the easiest thing in the world to claim a headache and retreat to the arms of the one man whose touch she could endure without nausea. Her own coachman would have instructions ahead of time to pick her up in the Place des Armes. There was no one at Les Saules now to mark the time she returned, except her servants.

A chill went through him as he thought, And one of them s gone. For the first time he wondered what exactly it was that Sally might have seen, and whether she had left Les Saules at all.

That far from other houses, as Madame Trepagier herself had pointed out, a woman was at the mercy of her husband, but so a slave girl would be at the mercy of a mistress who had something to hide.

He saw her shape, reflected ahead of him against the few lamps burning in the Place des Armes, and quickened his step. Then there was a blurred scuffle of movement, and her scream echoed in the brick strait of the alley like the sudden sound of ripping cloth.

There was a scuffle, a splash, a glimpse of struggling forms in the dark, and a man's curse in river-rat English. Madeleine screamed again and there was another splash, but by this time January was on top of them, grabbing handfuls of coarse, greasy cloth that stank of tobacco and vomit and pissed-out beer. He shoved someone or something up against the brick of the alley wall and smashed with all his force where a face should be, grating his knuckles on hair. A voice from the square shouted “Madame Madeleine! Madame Madeleine!” and there was gasping, screaming, cursing and the slosh and stench of gutter water.