Die Upon a Kiss (14 page)

The boy nodded, wiped his eyes and his nose again on the back of his bare arm. “We got to wait on Michie Napier. He got Charlie in there fightin’ Big Lou now.”

Lucky Charlie.

“Do what you can.” January stood, and patted the boy’s bony shoulder.

Behind him a man said, “You’re behind the fair, friend. You want to get your boy ready if you’re going to get him in against Big Lou.” January turned. The man was an American, dressed like a tradesman in a rough wool jacket and pants and a calico shirt. He spoke to Hannibal with a friendly matter-of-factness, sized January up with polite approval, and added, “What’s your boy’s name?”

January opened his mouth to express a sentiment both unwise and inappropriate for a man of color, be he ever so free, along Tchoupitoulas Street, and Hannibal cut in with “Plantagenet. Hal Plantagenet.
A bawcock and
a heart of gold.
Let’s go, Hal.”

January went. The frenzy of shouting died abruptly into a sated growl and the tight-clotted wall of backs opened abruptly into a myriad of little groups. Men counted money into each other’s hands, men joyfully relived each hold and throw and bludgeon, here and there men cursed furiously.
(And how much would people lay on
YOU, fat man, if you and that scrofulous weasel you’re
screaming at started hammering each other naked?)
January glimpsed Vincent Marsan, towering in his tobacco-brown coat, gloves, and waistcoat all en suite, illuminating the finer points of the match to Harry Fry with explanatory jabs of a sardonyx-headed gold toothpick. A few feet away, an older slave, a tough little man who was clearly a trainer, kneaded Big Lou’s shoulders while the fighter slumped on a broken crate with his forehead on his knees. Blood glistened on a shaven scalp. He looked exhausted, uncaring; an iron mountain of a man with strips of pickled leather wrapped around his enormous hands. January glanced at the angle of the sun above the curtain of trees and wondered how many more men Big Lou would have to fight before he could go home.

Other men crowded around, obscuring the scene. Hannibal said, “Ah!
A lovely being, scarcely formed or
molded / A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded,”
and wove his way to Kate the Gouger, a nondescript, hard-faced girl with red hair skinned back into a dirty knot on the back of her head. She was handing around a brown glass bottle, saying “. . . better at my place over yonder past the trees.” She shot a swift glance toward the Eagle, wary of its owner’s prior claims to customers on his property. “Pussy’s better, too.”

“Yeah?” demanded a squat cut-throat whose long brown hair crept visibly with lice. He spit—there was enough tobacco underfoot to send up a smell that rivaled the piss-stink of the bushes all around the clearing.

“Sure enough.” Kate blew a cloud of cigar-smoke in the man’s face. “ ’Cause it’s
me!
I’ll take on the lot of you and have you beggin’ for mercy!”

The men whooped and laughed and slapped her narrow buttocks, and said, “Well, we’ll just come along and see who begs for mercy!” Then there was a shout as the milling crowd coalesced. Heads turned, and the men crowded back to where Big Lou was squaring off again, leaving the Gouger momentarily alone. She looked after them with contempt and weary calculation in her hard brown eyes.

“Poor bastards,” remarked Hannibal, and she glanced over at him and grinned, broken-toothed, like a wolf. “Don’t know what they’re getting into.”

“Thought you was playin’ for the op-ree.” She stuck a black-nailed brown hand down her uncorseted bosom to scratch one shallow breast. Most of the small-time madams of her sort in town usually wore cheap Mother Hubbards—good-time dresses, the free colored of the lower sort called them—but Kate had rigged herself out for the fights in a faded frock of red calico rotting away under the armpits, and a skinning-knife the length of January’s forearm sheathed at her belt. She was probably, January guessed, not more than twenty. “You missed good fightin’ this afternoon.”

“Well, and so I am playing for the opera.” Hannibal bent to kiss Kate’s hand with the same reverent attentiveness he’d lavished on Consuela Montero’s. “But I couldn’t forgo a few moments of your delightful company.” Kate made a simper and pushed him, like a schoolboy shoving a mate, but for one instant January saw the look in her eyes: shy pleasure that someone had called her delightful. That someone cared.

“You gonna get yourself in trouble one day,” she said, and under its hoarseness her voice was the voice of a girl. “You come around sweet-talkin’ every girl.”

“Then I’ll rely on you to rescue me.” Hannibal pressed his hand to his side, fighting a cough. “Kentucky Williams tells me you had a couple of heroes staying at your place who might have been hired for an alley job last Thursday.”

“Gower boys.” The Gouger nodded briskly, once. “Buck an’ Bart. Sounds like a couple hounds, don’t it? Came down on a flatboat with a load of corn, spent all they daddy’s money on forty-rod an’ quim, you know how it is. Hangin’ around my place, tryin’ to make five hundred dollars choppin’ wood. Then all of a sudden Bart comes in, pays me what they owe—this is Wednesday around supper-time. They pack up their plunder. Stuff’s still in my attic. I ain’t no thief. ’Sides, it’s just a couple shirts an’ a powder-horn. Bart come in Friday mornin’, begs me for some medicine an’ bandages an’ sech truck. Looked like he been in a fight, cheek all bust to hell an’ swole up, mud an’ blood on his shirt. Last I saw him.”

“And his brother?” Hannibal produced a bottle from his coat pocket, took a sip, and offered it to her.

She shrugged, and drank like a thirsty sailor.

“How tall is Bart, m’am?” asked January.

She glanced up at him.

“You see, m’am, we both play for the opera, and it looks like somebody might have hired Bart and his brother to go after different people in the company. Go after ’em and kill ’em.” January carefully graded his English to the same roughness as hers. He had long ago learned that nothing intimidates and alienates so much as elegant speech. His English was, most of the time, as excellent as his French, but the music of speech was a hobby of his: fortissimo to pianissimo, Paris-perfect to the “mo kiri mo vini” of the cane-patch. “We don’t know who they’ll go after next”—he glanced worriedly at Hannibal—“nor who hired ’em nor why. We ain’t gonna get Bart an’ his brother in trouble, m’am. We just need to know.”

Mollified, the girl said, “Bart’s about six foot. Buck’s bigger, near your height.”

“They both got beards?”

She looked surprised at the question—a clean-shaven man on this part of Tchoupitoulas Street was usually either a pimp or a gambler—then nodded. “They’s both kinda blondy. Not real blond, but like Kentucky,” meaning, since the remark was addressed to Hannibal, Kentucky Williams, their mutual acquaintance. “Bart asked me to listen around for somebody takin’ a boat upriver next week. I said I would.”

Hannibal and January traded a glance. Then January said, “If we was to leave a note with you, m’am, to give Bart when he comes in, would you do that?”

She thought about it, glanced at Hannibal again, and nodded. “I’ll do that.”

“Thank you.” Hannibal kissed her hand again.
“If the
heart of a man is depres’t with cares / The mist is dispelled
when a woman appears.
We shall be deeply in your debt.”

Madame Bontemps was still sitting in the parlor when January returned from the levee. It was now late afternoon—nearly five—and the harsh rays of the sinking sun showed up the chips and stains in the stucco of the house, the cracks where resurrection fern had taken greedy root. As January started to go down the passway to the yard, his landlady’s flat voice grated out at him from the street window: “That woman with the spectacles was here.” In six weeks of residence, January had yet to hear Madame Bontemps refer to Rose by her name. “I told her not to wear them. They bring bad luck. That woman in the veil this morning, she doesn’t wear spectacles, and you see the kind of luck she’s had.”

“That’s true,” agreed January, coming back to the parlor’s French door. It was far easier to agree with Madame Bontemps than to disagree and continue any conversation, and he wanted to have at least a short nap before meeting Rose for supper. “Did she leave a message? A note?”

The woman thought about that, rocking her body in her chair, lips pushing in and out like dry kisses. She had a tea-cup on her knee. The saucer covered its mouth and her hand pressed down the saucer. January didn’t want to think about what she might have trapped inside.

“It isn’t right that women should write,” she declared at last. Which meant, January knew, that he’d have to search the privy for the scraps of whatever Rose had slipped under his door. “I told her that. I told her I saw the Devil, too. She didn’t believe me. But he was here last night. He waited beside the house until it started to get light.”

January, who had nodded agreement again and started to walk away, stopped. Cold stillness gripped his chest. “Beside the house? In the passway, you mean?”

Madame Bontemps nodded, still rocking. In his mind, January heard the crack and rustle of a stealthy foot, first in the wet, leafy dark of the labyrinth, then in the shadows along the Bayou Road. Saw Marguerite lying beneath an oak-tree, blood dotting the strawflowers tangled in her hair.

“What did he look like?” he asked, and the unguessable reverie in Madame’s dark eyes sharpened to scorn.

“He was invisible,” she said, as if explaining the obvious to a stupid child. “He looked like the Devil.”

Meaning it had been pitch-black along the side of the house. Meaning there might not have been anyone at all waiting there for him to come home by himself.

Seeing that nothing else would be gotten out of the landlady, January turned to go. Too much to hope, he thought, that the visitor—if there had been one—had left a scrape on the moldy bricks that paved the passway and the yard, or had dropped a glove or a signet-ring or a letter bearing his seal.

He wasn’t sure which of the American town’s numerous heretical Protestant establishments counted Shaw as a member, or what he could tell the policeman if he went to him.
I think we were followed after the Trulove reception last
night? I think Madame Scie was attacked in the woods by
someone who may or may not have been at Bichet’s illegal
gathering?

You got her,
Philippe had said.

Even if Shaw didn’t believe January had tried to kill a white woman—a woman he was known to have bedded—it was no guarantee the crime wouldn’t be fastened on him anyway. Or on someone else who’d been at Bichet’s, Paul or Mohammed or any of a dozen others, by who knew what vagaries of
blankitte
reasoning.

Once you called on the whites, and the white man’s law, everything was out of your hands.

Behind him, Madame Bontemps’s voice called out, “He had a knife.”

EIGHT

“If Madame Bontemps objects that much to a woman knowing how to read,” remarked Rose, gravely stirring the fist-sized clot of rice provided into the rest of the gumbo that had been brought to their table at the Buttonhole Café, “I shudder to contemplate what she’d say if she knew I’d been hired to put together pyrotechnics for Mr. Davis’s production of
La Muette de Portici
on the thirty-first.”

As the landlady had not torn Rose’s note into thumb-nail-size fragments and dropped them into the privy— something she had done often enough in the past for Rose to be resigned about it—but had merely ripped it several times neatly across and added it to the box of old newspapers left there for the convenience of the occupants, January had been able to meet Rose without trouble. The Buttonhole was a small establishment on Rue St. Anne that catered to free colored musicians and artisans, and served up in its tiny plank-walled front parlor the best gumbo and jambalaya in town. Cora Chouteau, who owned the place, further enlivened the room by pasting up every playbill she could lay hands on—advertisements for both Caldwell’s and Davis’s rival productions of
La
Muette
smeared the wall behind Rose’s head.

“Caldwell may have bought up all the red silk and ready-made fireworks in town,” Rose added, seeing January’s start of surprise. “But colored fire is fairly simple to manufacture. It’s surprising what you can make people think they’re seeing, with a little red glass and forced perspective.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” The scant sleep January had managed to achieve that afternoon had refreshed him somewhat, between dreams of Desdemona’s song in the darkness, and jolting awake every few minutes at the fancied creak of a foot on the gallery. Outside the café’s open windows, Rue St. Anne was already noisy with carriages full of maskers, with gaudily-costumed women calling out to men, and the racket of someone playing “When Darkness Brooded O’er the Deep” very, very badly on a cornet.

It would be, reflected January wearily, a very long night.

Rose took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. There were few ways by which the quadroon daughter of a plaçée could earn her living in New Orleans at the best of times, were she unwilling to place herself under the protection of a man. If Carnival was the harvest of January’s year, it was the starving winter of hers. Poverty was beginning to tell on her—he could see where her gloves had been mended, and where the sleeve of her blue merino dress was shiny with wear. He was glad she’d been able to find the work with Davis, particularly since it might well lead to more, and to work better paid than she was generally able to find.

Since her involvement in the same scandal of lies and libel that had robbed January of most of his living the previous winter, she had been unable to teach. January was daily astonished that this bookish, brilliant woman had survived the destruction of the school that had been her life’s work. He knew she eked out a desperate living these days with her translations, but he’d never heard her repine, or speak of might-have-beens or if-onlies. She was jealous of her liberty, of her solitude and her work, and the treatment one man had given her had left its terrible mark on her spirit. One day, he hoped, he’d have sufficient money saved to be able to ask her to be his wife, but hadn’t the faintest idea of what she would say when he did.

And he knew it was not a question he would be able to ask twice.

“Do you think he followed you?” She replaced her spectacles on her nose and devoted herself to the gumbo. “Incantobelli?”

“He was at Trulove’s. And if, as Madame Montero says, Belaggio stole his opera, I can see him being angry enough—hating enough—to want to destroy not only Belaggio, but the entire opera season as well. So I can almost understand coshing the ballet mistress. Certainly Marguerite’s replacement by Herr Smith isn’t going to help the performance. But surely Incantobelli can’t intend to murder the orchestra piecemeal.”

“He can intend to murder the one member of the orchestra who held sufficient conversation with the ballet mistress to be a witness. That’s always assuming Incantobelli to be sane,” she went on thoughtfully. “Though why he would bother to go after Belaggio is beyond me. Belaggio seems to be running toward his own doom swiftly enough to outdistance the most vindictive of foes.”

Playing schottisches and waltzes, marches and cotillions a few hours later in the tasteful ivory-paneled confines of the Salle d’Orleans, January understood the schoolmistress’s point. As usual, one of the Carnival subscription balls of white society—the French Creole St. Margaret’s Society—was taking place in the Théâtre d’Orleans next door, and there was much discreet coming and going through the olive-colored velvet curtain that masked the passageway between the Théâtre and the Salle. January watched some of the most socially prominent white gentlemen of the town as they danced with their mistresses, or the women they hoped to make their mistresses, and shook his head.
The custom of the country,
he’d heard people say—he himself had said it, many times, as if that somehow made it acceptable. At the other end of the passageway, where a floor had been set up over the Théâtre’s parterre and other musicians played, the wives and sisters, fiancées and mothers of these selfsame gentlemen sipped lemonade and chatted, and pretended mutual bafflement about where their menfolk had slipped away to.

The gambling-rooms downstairs,
they all said.
That’s
where they’ve gone.

January recognized Lorenzo Belaggio despite the mask of bronze leather that hid his face. The impresario, clad in bronze armor, kept as far from Vincent Marsan as possible: by the way he kept drifting toward the olive-curtained windows, January guessed he was suffocating in the costume never designed for dancing. Marsan was all in crimson satin, a full-skirted coat and breeches, long waistcoat, and crimson stockings and shoes, topped off with an old-fashioned periwig the size of a sheep. Watching him flirt with the café-crème princesses, Columbines, shepherdesses, and odalisques, January wondered if the drab Madame Marsan had been left
bredouillée,
as they called it, in the Théâtre, “making a tapestry” with the other women along the walls.

Hubert Granville’s wife certainly had. January glimpsed the banker tripping through a sprightly cotillion with Eulalie Figes, a former plaçée and the mother of a hopeful young damsel. The banker’s motley rags and exaggerated back-hump made January wonder for a dizzying moment if the squabbish Mrs. Granville in the next room was really clad in gypsy-dancer garb and accompanied by a stuffed goat. Hannibal’s evaluation of the upcoming duel as material for a bad opéra bouffe seemed amply justified: every time Marsan left the Salle, Granville would stride over to Belaggio, take him by the bronze vambrace, and expostulate furiously, clearly trying to talk him out of the duel. At the reappearance of that tall crimson figure, Quasimodo would hop back into the cotillion to catch Eulalie Figes’s hand as if nothing had happened.

Had Marguerite not been lying at Olympe’s house unconscious—had January not heard, over and over again in his mind, his landlady’s flat, harsh voice saying
He had
a knife—
he would have been hard-put not to laugh.

Belaggio wasn’t the only one being worked on. During the course of the evening Jed Burton, James Caldwell, the prim little Mr. Knight—his immaculately anonymous evening-dress scorning the fantasies of the other men— and his lumbering clerk, all made it their business to corner Marsan with varying degrees of vehemence. “The Widow Redfern and Mrs. Trulove have been at him across the way,” remarked Hannibal, strolling through the velvet curtains and over to the buffet table when supper was announced at the Théâtre. About half the men in the Salle rather sheepishly made their excuses to their ladyfriends and retreated to rejoin their wives: “I can’t imagine why they bother,” remarked the fiddler, who’d been hired to play at the Society Ball rather than this one. “La Redfern was in charge of the refreshments over there. I never saw so much bread and butter in my life. They water the champagne, too.” He’d helped himself to a bottle of Mr. Davis’s, and a vol-au-vent, and leaned against January’s piano, chalky and shaking with fatigue.

Around them, the men who’d lingered moved from woman to woman, chatting with the young ladies, gazing into dark eyes or more discreetly down the tender-shadowed creases of half-exposed breasts. They talked more easily with the mothers, who hovered smiling, waving their painted silk fans, graceful and gracious and sharply cognizant of the value of money, aware—as their daughters were not—of the transitory nature of male passion, of the precarious position of any free woman of color in New Orleans. January’s eye picked them out, too: Dominique’s friends and neighbors, his mother’s friends and their daughters. Marie-Anne Pellicot, shy and lovely on the arm of her young protector, a wealthy planter’s son. Catherine Clisson, darker than most of the other plaçées, almost African-black, and striking in a Renaissance gown of yellow silk, whose plaçage with a rich planter twentyfive years ago had nearly broken January’s very youthful heart. Dominique’s friend Iphigénie Picard, laughing as she teased the discomfited Yves Valcour about having to return to his mother and sisters next door. . . .

White men and young ladies of color—for of course the only men of color in the room were the musicians, and the waiters who brought in the food. Not all of the girls, January knew, were entirely willing, legally free though they might be. It is easy to persuade the young, who are aware of how limited their options are; easy to play upon family obligations, to convince a girl to become what her mother was. Obligations to their mothers: obligations, too, to their white fathers, invisible in the background but capable of using these left-handed children as pawns, as they used everything else.
Be my mistress and I’ll
give you a house, you who will have nothing without help. Be
my friend’s mistress or I’ll cancel your mother’s pension, or
speak a bad word of her at the bank next time she wants to
borrow a little money to enlarge her business, or educate your
brother.

The white men all knew one another. And they were strong.

And behind them all lurked the shadow of Kate the Gouger, a terrible reminder of what happened to a girl who had no protection, and nothing to sell.

“Is Henri there?” Dominique rustled over to the musicians’ dais, gorgeous in the pink-and-gold panniered Court gown that January had seen on Iphigénie last year.

Hannibal hesitated. The exhaustion of the long walk to Tchoupitoulas Street had taken its toll—he was weaving a little on his feet and the soft Anglo-Irish accent that mostly disappeared when he was sober was much to the fore. Then he shrugged, and said, “With
La Mère Terrible
playing monster to his Andromeda, O Queen. The lot of Viellards—Henri and his sisters—are done up as, I think, the Kingdom of the Ocean—in any case it more nearly resembles a school of whales than anything I’ve recently. . . .”

“And is she?”

There was no need to ask of whom Dominique spoke.

“You might as well tell me,” said January’s sister, when Hannibal did not reply. “It can’t be worse than what I’m imagining.”

“He doesn’t look happy, if that’s what you fear.” He’d acquired a nosegay of small yellow roses from somewhere, and used it to tie up his long, graying hair. “She’s a well-looking girl. Pale and skinny, but nothing to—”

“I’ve seen her,” interrupted Dominique. “One does, you know, on the streets and in church. I know Chloë St. Chinian is beautiful. And I know she’s cold as stone. And no, I don’t imagine . . .”

Her breath snagged. January followed her gaze. Henri Viellard, ridiculous in fish-scale green-and-silver, stood before the passageway curtain. He had a trident tucked under one chubby arm and was in the act of carefully putting his spectacles back on after pushing up his mask. That done, he looked around for Dominique, met her eyes . . .

She held his gaze for a long moment, then turned her head, flipped open her gold lace fan, and went on as if she hadn’t seen him, “I don’t imagine Henri will want for anything in the way of a dowry from her. Good heavens, is that Babette Figes over there, dressed up like a sultana? I must find out where she got those silks—darling, how gorgeous . . .” And she rustled off just as Viellard came lumbering across the ballroom toward her, his hand held out and misery on his round face.

“Is she beautiful?” January asked softly, watching his sister retreat, chattering nineteen to the dozen with her friends about the newest shape in sleeves and why Marie-Toussainte Valcour had been obliged to cut off most of her hair.

Hannibal polished off the champagne.
“Like the night
/ of cloudless climes and starry skies. . . .
A little blond thing like a china doll and not more than sixteen. In that costume she really does look like a mermaid—not the sweet ones sailors dream about, but the other kind, the ones that have no hearts.”

“It’s not that I’m jealous, p’tit,” sighed Dominique, returning to January’s side later in the evening, after Hannibal had gone back to work on his side of the passageway and most of the men had drifted in again for the
tableaux
vivantes
that were a feature of quadroon balls during Carnival. Having played the other side of the passageway in his time, January was familiar with the hemming and hawing, the muttered avowals of it being time for a smoke or the assurances that they had to go meet a man down in the gambling-rooms
—No, I’ll just be a few moments, my
sweet. . . .

Mr. Knight had cornered Vincent Marsan at the buffet beside the musicians and jabbed at him with a tiny finger: “You’re asking too much of me!” shouted Marsan, and Knight made a gesture for silence, with coldly blazing eyes. And then, more quietly, Marsan said, “In any case, it’s all arranged.”