Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (5 page)

Best do it now,
he thought. The picture of the doll-like six-year-old in his mother's front parlor returned to his mind, lace flounced like a little pink valentine, clutching the weeping Minou's half-strangled kitten to her and shaking away January's hand: “I don't have to do nothing you say, you dirty black nigger.”

And Angelique's mother—that plump lady in the pink satin and aigrettes of diamonds now chatting with Henry VIII, rather like a kitten herself in those days— had laughed.

The Creoles had a saying, Mount a mulatto on a horse, and he'll deny his mother was a Negress.

Angelique was at the top of the stairs, exchanging a word with Clemence, who came up to her with anxiety in her spaniel eyes; she turned away immediately, however, as a rather overelaborate pirate in gold and a blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe claimed her attention with offers of negus and cake. January hesitated, knowing that an interruption would not be welcome, and in that moment the boy in gray came storming up and grabbed hard and furiously at the fragile lace of Angelique's wing.

She whirled in a storm of glittering hair, ripping the wing still further. “What, pulling wings off flies isn't good enough for you these days?” she demanded in a voice like a silver razor, and the boy drew back.

“You b-bitch!” He was almost in tears of rage. “You . . . stuh-stuh-strumpet!”

“Oooh.” She flirted her bare shoulders. “That's the b-b-best you can do, Galenette?” Her imitation of his stutter was deadly. “You can't even call names like a man.”

Crimson with rage, the boy Galen raised his fist, and Angelique swayed forward, just slightly, raising her face and turning it a little as if inviting the blow as she would have a kiss. Her eyes were on his, and they smiled.

But her mother swooped down on them in a flashing welter of jewels, overwhelming the furious youth: “Monsieur Galen, Monsieur Galen, only think! I beg of you ... !”

Angelique smiled a little in triumph and vanished into the dark archway of the hall with a taunting flip of her quicksilver skirts.

“A girl of such spirit!” the mother was saying— Dreuze, January recalled her name was, Euphrasie Dreuze. “A girl of fire, my precious girl is. Surely such a young man as yourself knows no girl takes such trouble to make a man jealous unless she's in love?”

The boy tore his eyes from the archway into which Angelique had vanished, gazed at the woman grasping him with her little jeweled hands as if he had never seen her in his life, then turned, staring around at the masked faces that ringed him, faces expressionless save for those avid eyes.

“Monsieur Galen,” began Clemence, extending a tentative hand.

Galen struck her aside, and with an inchoate sound went storming down the stairs.

Clemence turned, trembling hands fussing at her mouth, and started for the archway to follow Angelique, but January was before her. “If you'll excuse me,” he said, when their paths crossed in the mouth of the hallway, “I have a message for Mademoiselle Crozat.”

“Oh,” whispered Clemence, fluttering, hesitant. “Oh ... I suppose . . .”

He left her behind him, and opened the door.

“How dare you lay hands on me?”

She was standing by the window, where the light of the candles ringed her in a halo of poisoned honey. Her words were angry, but her voice was the alluring voice of a woman who seeks a scene that will end in kisses.

She stopped, blank, when she saw that it wasn't Galen after all who had followed her into the room.

“Oh,” she said. “Get out of here. What do you want?”

“I was asked to speak to you by Madame Trepagier,” said January. “She'd like to meet with you.”

“You're new.” There was curiosity in her voice, as if he hadn't spoken. “At least Arnaud never mentioned you. She can't be as poor as she whined in her note if she's got bucks like you on the place.” Behind the cat mask her eyes sized him up, and for a moment he saw the disappointment in the pout of her mouth, disappointment and annoyance that her lover had had at least one $1,500 possession of which she had not been aware.

“I'm not one of Madame Trepagier's servants, Mademoiselle,” said January, keeping his voice level with an effort. He remembered the flash of desire he had felt for her and fought back the disgust that fueled further anger. “She asked me to find you and arrange a meeting with you.”

“Doesn't that sow ever give up?” She shrugged impatiently, her lace-mitted hand twisting the gold-caged emeralds, the baroque pearls against the white silk of her gown. “I have nothing to say to her. You tell her that. You tell her, too, that if she tries any of those spiteful little Creole tricks, like denouncing me to the police for being impudent, I have tricks of my own. My father's bank holds paper on half the city council, including the captain of the police, and the mayor. Now you ...”

Her eyes went past him. Like an actress dropping into character, her whole demeanor changed. Her body grew fluid and catlike in the sensual blaze of the candles her eyes smoky with languorous desire. As if January had suddenly become invisible, and in precisely the same tone and inflection in which she had first spoken when he came in, she said, “How dare you lay hands on me?”

January knew without turning that Galen Peralta stood behind him in the doorway.

It was his cue to depart. He was sorely tempted to remain and spoil her lines but knew it wouldn't do him or Madeleine Trepagier any good. And Peralta would only order him out in any case.

The boy was trembling, torn between rage and humiliation and desire. Angelique moved toward him, her chin raised a little and her body curving, luscious. “Aren't we a brave little man, to be sure?” she purred, and shook back her outrageous hair, her every move a calculated invitation to attack, to rage, to the desperate emotion of a seventeen-year-old.

Stepping past the ashen-faced boy in the doorway, January felt a qualm of pity for him.

“You . . . you . . .” He shoved January out of his way, through the door and into the hall, and slammed the door with a cannon shot violence that echoed all over the upstairs lobby.

It was the last time January saw Angelique Crozat alive.

Bitch,
thought January, his whole body filled with a cold, dispassionate anger. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

Anger consumed him, for the way she had looked at him, like a piece of property, and at the knowledge that this woman had flitted and cut and stolen her way through the life of the woman who had once been Madeleine Dubonnet. That for one moment he had wanted her—as probably any man did who saw her—disgusted him more than he could say. His confessor, Pere Euge-nius, would probably call it repentance for the Original Sin, and he was probably right.

Back in the ballroom, major war appeared to have broken out.

January heard the shouting as he crossed the upstairs lobby, which was completely deserted, men and women crowding the three ballroom doors. Monsieur Bouille's shrill accusations rode up over the jangling background racket of a brass band playing marches in the street outside. “A swine and a liar, a scum not fit to associate with decent society.....”

Granger,
thought January wryly. Bouille had used precisely the same wording in his latest letter to the Bee.

“You call me a liar, sir? Deny if you will that you helped yourself to bribes from every cheapjack railway scheme—”

“Bribery may be how you Americans do business, sir, but it is not the way of gentlemen!”

“Now who's the liar?”

There was a roar and a surge of the crowd, and Monsieur Froissart's helpless voice wailing, "Messieurs! Messieurs!

January slipped unnoticed along the back of the crowd, to where Hannibal, Uncle Bichet, and Jacques were sharing a bottle of champagne behind the piano. He had never played a white subscription ball that hadn't included beatings with canes, pistol whippings or kicking matches in the courtyard or the gaming rooms—So much, he thought wryly, for the vaunted Creole concept of “duels of honor.” If it wasn't a Bonapartist taking out his spite on an Orl6aniste, it was a lawyer assaulting another lawyer over personal remarks exchanged in the courtroom or a physician challenging another physician following a lively fusilade of letters in the newspapers.

“Wagers now being taken.” Hannibal poured out a glass of champagne for him. “Jacques here insists it'll be swords. . . .”

“ 'Course it'll be swords,” argued the cornetist. “Bouille spends half what he earns at Mayerling's salle des armes and he's crazy to try it out! He's been challenging everyone he meets to duels!”

January shook his head, and sipped the fizzy liquid. “Pistols,” he said.

“Pistols?
Where's your sword?”

“Americans always use pistols.”

“Told you,” said Uncle Bichet to Jacques.

On the whole, the quadroon balls were far better run. January wondered whether that had something to do with the fact that these men didn't legally control their mistresses the way they did their wives and so had to make a better impression on them, or if the simple social pressure of Creole families caused the men to drink more.

“Live pigs at thirty paces,” decreed Hannibal solemnly, and gestured with a crawfish patty. “Arma virum-que cano . . . Did you encounter La Crozat?”

“Monsieur Bouille, you forget yourself and where you are.” Over the heads of the crowd—and January could look over the heads of most crowds—he saw a snowy-bearded, elderly gentleman in the dark blue satins of fifty years ago interpose himself between William Granger and Jean Bouille, who were squared off with canes gripped clubwise in their hands.

“I do not forget myself!” screamed Bouille. “Nor who I am. I am a gentleman! This canaille has insulted me in public, and I will have my satisfaction!”

Granger inclined his head. His accent was a flatboat man's twangy drawl but his French was otherwise good. “When and where you please, sir. Jenkins . . .”

The Roman soldier stepped forward, putting up anervous hand to steady his laurel wreath as he inclined his head.

“Would you be so good as to act for me?”

“Only think!” wailed Monsieur Froissart. “I beg of you, listen to Monsieur Peralta's so sensible words! Surely this is a matter that can be regulated, that can be talked of in other circumstances.”

The city councilman sneered contemptuously and lifted his cane as if fearing his opponent would turn tail; Granger returned the look with a stony stare and spat in the direction of the sandbox. Froissart looked frantically around him for support, and at the same moment January felt a touch on his shoulder. It was Romulus Valle, the ballroom's majordomo.

“Maybe you best get another set started, Ben?” The elderly freedman gestured at the eager faces crowding to see more of the drama. “Give these good people something else to think about?”

January nodded. If there was one thing that could distract Creoles from the prospect of a duel, it was a dance. Jacques and Uncle Bichet took their places; though Hannibal's hands shook a little as he picked up fiddle and bow, there was nothing unsteady about the way he sliced into the most popular jig and reel in their repertoire. Sets were forming even as Froissart and the senior Monsieur Peralta shepherded the combatants out into the lobby and presumably down to the office.

And let's hope,
thought January dourly, that our bonny Galen and la belle dame sans merci didn't decide the office was a more private venue for their tete-a-tete than the parlor. That would be all it needs, for Galen's father to find the pair of them coupling like weasels on the desk.

Cross passes. Footing steps. Casting off and casting back, and swooping into the grand promenade.

“I'm going to strangle that woman!” Dominique had changed into her costume for the tableaux, and, as Guenevere, had dispensed with the corsets and petticoats of modern dress, unlike at least four of the assorted Rebeccas and Juliets circulating in the crowd. Without them she looked startlingly sensual, thin and fragile and very reminiscent of the girls of January's young manhood in their high-waisted, clinging gowns. He had never adjusted to the sight of women in the enormous petticoats and mountainous sleeves of modern dress.

“Not only does she disappear without helping Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose—and after making them wear those frightful dresses in the first place, and Agnes is ready to spit blood!—but because I'm hunting high and low for her I miss the only real excitement of the evening!”

“She'll be in the parlor,” pointed out January mildly. “She still has to fix her wings.”

“Ben, I looked in the parlor. It was the first place I looked. And in the supper room. And it would have served that . . . that uppity tart right if he'd torn those wings right off her back.” Minou adjusted the fall of one floor-length sleeve of buttercup yellow and straightened the dark curls of her chignon. “Did you hear what she told her mama about price and terms to take back to Peralta Pere? If I ever saw such a . . .”

“I've looked everywhere.” Marie-Anne Pellicot, her long oval face visibly beautiful despite a domino mask of exactly the wrong shade of gray-green for her pale creme-cafe complexion, hurried up, vexation replacing her earlier tears. “It's nearly eleven! She promised to dress our hair. . . .”

Her sister was right behind her. January heard Ayasha's voice in his mind: A designer who knows what she's doing can guide beauty to a woman's form or make that selfiame woman ugly, just in the way she cuts a sleeve. He knew what his wife would have guessed—and said— about Angelique, just from looking at those two dresses, on those two particular girls.

For all her tartness, Ayasha had been a kind woman. She'd never have let Angelique anywhere near those poor children's hair.

“If the parlor is the first place you looked, look again,” advised January. The music had soothed away his anger, and he was able to look dispassionately at Angelique and at the situation, only wondering what he was going to say to Mme. Trepagier to keep her from undertaking some other mad attempt to see the woman. He hadn't liked the hard desperation in her eyes as she had said, “I must see her. I MUST.” She and Galen may have gone somewhere else for their quarrel, but if she's going to repair those wings she'll have to go back where there's light."