Die Upon a Kiss (15 page)

Not, thought January, what any of the Opera Society wanted to hear.

Henri Viellard had not returned. January was aware of his sister’s glance, flickering from the passageway to the triple arch that led through to the broad vestibule and the grand staircase of white marble and black. “It’s just that I’m afraid poor Henri’s going to be made absolutely wretched by that girl, and of course he hasn’t the least notion how to defend himself.” She tossed her head, making the miniature windmill and its tiny grove of trees tremble in her enormous powdered wig.
“Bleu,”
she cursed. Behind a curtain in an alcove, the first of the
tableaux
vivantes
was assembling—the inevitable Maidens of Camelot. The
tableaux vivantes
hadn’t changed much since January had first started playing at the quadroon balls in 1808: the Ladies of Camelot. The Sultan’s Harem. (His wife, Ayasha, had been a Berber. Her accounts of what life was really like in her father’s harîm made January wince at these tableaux, as he winced at the Duchesse du Durras’s romanticized novels of slavery.) A Garden of Living Flowers.

“But at least I have no intention of making a fool of myself, like the white ladies who sneak over here in masks. . . .”

“Do they often?”

“Let me remind you that ten years ago, you faced ruin,” Knight was telling Marsan angrily. “Certainly for saving you from that, if for no other reason, you owe it to me. . . .”

“Darling, of
course
they do!” Dominique flourished her fan. “That girl there, you see? In the pink domino cloak? You can always tell the white girls, because they never talk to anybody, and their dresses aren’t nearly as smart—and they
stare
so. Like they’ve never seen men before in their lives.”

Certainly the maiden in the pink domino was keeping herself well to the back of the big room, lingering in corners while other chatting groups teased and flirted with the men. When Belaggio approached her, creaking in his leather armor, she made a hasty excuse and fled through the vestibule doors. . . .

“They can’t
abide
the thought of their precious husbands and fiancés and brothers coming over here to be wicked with us,” Dominique went on with bright artificial cheer. The old-fashioned flat-fronted corset gave her an air of curious dignity, the exaggerated white wig making her face at once older and more serene. “I quite expect Madame Chloë will be here eventually with the best of them, looking absolutely silly, of course, because they all do. . . . Darling, what a lovely idea!” She whirled and skipped away to greet Phlosine Seurat, her other bosom-bow, entering the Salle late on her protector’s arm and leaving a trail of detached silk flower-petals in her wake.

You only hope,
thought January sadly,
that Madame
Chloë will be here with the best of them, spying on her husband.

Rather than that she succeed in forbidding him to come
at all.

Rather than forcing Henri—through money, through
family, through sheer strength of will against his luxury-loving softness—to give you up.

“You know not what you ask of me,” intoned Belaggio a little later, when Caldwell—ridiculously got up in the blue velvet robe of a mystical adept and a false beard like a horse’s tail—stopped him between dances. “There are things a man cannot be seen to accept from another man. Am I to wear horns before the whole of the town?” He pushed up his mask and peeped cautiously around.

“It isn’t as if she were your wife,” replied the theater owner, and he picked a tendril of beard out of his mouth. “Or even as if you’d been with her more than a month or so. I understand you—er—encountered her only at Christmastime. . . .”

“You have been speaking to that Mexican Messalina,” Belaggio said. “Consuela is jealous of my beautiful one, and spiteful as a cat. She would say anything to her disadvantage. And surely you know, Signor, that when one finds the woman of one’s dreams, length of time is nothing. When souls love for a thousand years . . .”

He froze, eyes bulging. January, floating effortlessly on the opening bars of the Sylph Cotillion, followed his gaze to the vestibule doors. The man who stood framed in the triple archway was costumed in close-fitting black trousers and jacket accentuated by crimson bucket-topped boots, a crimson hat with a white plume, a crimson baldric on which hung a very businesslike sword. A long velvet rope attached to the back of the trousers did duty as a tail; the black velvet mask that covered the beardless face bore whiskers of silver wire; and around it, long silver hair swept in a gleaming mane. Without another word, Belaggio yanked his mask back into place and bolted for the passageway, the renowned feline trickster striding in his wake.

“Did he catch him?” asked January nearly two hours later when next Hannibal made his appearance. It was now past two. The St. Margaret’s Ball had broken up, and several of the musicians drifted across to play a few more songs and chat with friends as the tail-end of the Blue Ribbon proceedings grew more relaxed.

In the street the rattle of carriages could still be heard, women’s voices calling farewells and invitations to future dinners and danceables. The male population of the room, thinned by the necessity of last dances with wives and fiancées, burgeoned again:
Just going to have a drink
with old Granville before coming on home, my dear. Won’t be
a half-hour, I assure you.

All around the Salle d’Orleans couples stood quietly talking in the shadows of curtains and pillars. Masks were lifted, kisses stolen.

“Puss in Boots?” Hannibal grinned. “I take it that was the famous Incantobelli?” He made his violin embroider a little ornament on the dreamy waltz January and the others were playing, a counterpoint comment plucked from
Don Giovanni
—he could quote phrases of music the way he quoted fragments from his omnivorous reading. “I’ve never seen a statue move that fast. He nearly ran down Marsan in the doorway.”

Marsan had returned to the Salle d’Orleans an hour previously, much the worse for drink. He stood now in the corner with his mistress, a ripe-figured woman with the almost-straight bronze-dark hair so prized by whites. His head was bent down over hers, forcing her to drink a cup of punch. She kept shaking her head, trying to push him away, and January saw possessiveness transform that Adonis face as rage had transformed it last night. Saw the blue eyes grow paler with malice, the carven lips wrinkle like a beast’s. Marsan seized her roughly by the back of the neck and pushed the cut-glass rim to her lips. The liquid spilled down her chin, splashed the soft, heavy breasts, and wet the gold-stitched ruby velvet of her gown.

“There’s another one.” Dominique strolled back to them as January surrendered his piano to Ramesses Ramilles, who broke into a far livelier jig than had been permissible at the St. Margaret’s Ball. Minou had lost a few more roses from her coiffure, and under the edge of her mask her mouth had an ashy paleness. She’d flirted most of the evening, with no man more than another, but, January had observed, she’d spent the bulk of her time between dances talking with her female friends.

The woman she nodded toward now moved lightly from group to group but never spoke to anyone. She kept to the rear of the room, and always managed to be just turning away when any man approached.

“They sneak dominoes in with them because they’re easier to bundle up in a dress-box than a completely different costume,” Dominique went on, sketching with her gesture the billowing cloak of black velvet that hid the slender figure, the ruffled hood that covered the hair. “Not that a man would ever recognize what a woman had on, of course. And even if two of them happened to have the same idea and ran into one another here, they’d cut their own throats before they’d admit it.”

“They might sneak dominoes into the cloak-room,” remarked Hannibal. “But they’d be smarter to smuggle in a change of shoes as well. Because those particular pink-and-yellow slippers belong to the American Theater’s costume for Roxalana, the Sultan’s Bride, and I last saw them earlier this evening, at the St. Margaret’s Ball, being worn by Drusilla d’Isola.”

“But I love him.” La d’Isola pressed her lips with one pink-gloved hand, and tears filled her eyes. “God help me.”

January thought of Belaggio in his bronze armor, coming and going between the two balls. Of the woman in crimson shaking her head at the champagne punch, and how the spilled liquid splattered on her heavy breasts as Marsan forced her to drink. Of the ugly glitter in those cerulean eyes. “God help you indeed,” he murmured.

Every table around the coffee-stands in the market was crowded with imitation Ivanhoes and masked counterfeits of Raleigh and Essex. Turkish beauties, classical goddesses, hennaed princesses laughed too loudly at their jests and leaned too close to their shoulders. Respectable women had taken to their beds long ago. Cressets stitched the bare branches of the sycamores around the Place d’Armes with gold and made every word a puff of luminous fire. From the steamboats on the levee—and the levee was a rampart of them, like floating barns—rolled the tinny jangle of a dozen conflicting tunes. A man with a bottle in either hand and a ragged Boston accent staggered along trying to sing to all of them.

“Do you hope he’ll make you his mistress?” asked January. Drusilla’s dress was pink and yellow—he found himself reflecting irrelevantly that in such colors Marsan would never let her near his somber crimson splendor. “You saw him with his plaçée tonight. Do you think he’ll put her aside?”

“Vincent’s said he loves me.” She looked pleadingly from January’s face to Hannibal’s, begging them to make all things well.

“Darling,” said Dominique, “I understand how it is to love. But he’s not going to abandon Liane for you.”

“You don’t know that.”

Dominique’s mouth tightened. A breeze from the river caught the sails of the tiny windmill that crowned her wig, making them turn; rustled in the miniature grove of Lilliputian trees. “Believe me,
chère,
I know that. M’sieu Marsan isn’t a man to let
anything—
certainly not a woman—go, once it has been his. He’s not a good man, Mademoiselle. Not good for you, or for anyone.”

The dark eyes lifted to hers, sulky and frightened with a fear unacknowledged—furious, too. “You’re only jealous,” Drusilla said in her stumbling French. “Jealous because Vincent’s so handsome, so wealthy—jealous that he loves me. You want him for yourself, don’t you?”

Dominique slapped her fan down onto the table.
“Marsan?
I’d sooner bed the crazy old man who sells gumbo on the corner! Darling, Vincent Marsan—”

“I will not hear this!” The girl turned her face away. Dominique reached out as if to grasp her wrist, to shake her, pulling her hand back only at the last moment, remembering that this dusky girl, in her fancy-dress and her gaily-striped mask pushed up to her tumbled dark hair, was white, and not to be casually touched. “I do not have to listen! Yes, it was wrong of me to seek Vincent in that place! But the heart is stronger than the head! From the moment I saw him, I knew we were one heart, one soul! You do not understand, you who
sell
your love!”

Flouncing to her feet, d’Isola plunged away between the brick pillars, and a moment later her bright dress flashed in the jumble of torchlight and darkness in the square. January started to rise but then sank down again in his chair, and glanced sidelong at Dominique: his sister’s mouth was open in shocked indignation, but if there was anger in her great brown eyes at d’Isola’s remark about
you who sell your love,
at least there were not tears.

“Well,” remarked Hannibal, edging his way back to the table with four cups of coffee in his hands and a plate of beignets balanced on one forearm like a waiter, “I can see it wouldn’t take more than a few pennyweights of heart to be stronger than whatever she’s got in
her
head.
God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more / Is woman’s
happiest knowledge and her praise.
More beignets for us.”

“I’d better go after her,” sighed January. He picked up the satchel she’d left behind her, in which she’d stowed her cloak at the Théâtre—nearly new, lined with green silk and expensive. Belaggio’s gift, beyond a doubt. “She doesn’t know much French and no English at all, and this isn’t the time of night for a young woman to be roving about the streets alone. I’m not sure she even knows the way back to her hotel.”

“If she’s so purblind foolish as to fall in love with Vincent Marsan,” retorted Dominique acidly, “it’s quite obvious she shouldn’t be abroad without a keeper in the first place. Not that it wouldn’t serve her right . . .”

But by the time January had crossed the jostling darkness of the Place d’Armes, he glimpsed that daffodil headdress again in the light of the torches on the Cabildo arcade, bobbing as d’Isola negotiated in her laborious French with a cab-driver. January watched from the shadows until she got into the fiacre, then made his way back across to the market, satchel still in hand, with little detours to avoid a shouting-and-shoving match of drunk keelboatmen and what sounded like a furious argument among seven or eight equally inebriated French Creoles over the putative parentage of France’s Citizen King.

When he reached the torchlit market arcade again, Hannibal was kissing Dominique’s wrist and quoting Petrarch to her—a marvelous antidote, thought January, to whatever reflections she might have entertained about Henri Viellard’s absence from the ballroom. “No wonder you were obliged to leave Ireland, if you carry on with ladies like this.” She tapped the fiddler’s cheek with her folded fan. “The cloud you left under must have covered the earth and the sky.”

“No greater than the darkness that will devour me should you turn your eyes away. Oιoν τo γλυϰύμαγoν εγεύϱεται αϰϱὀ επ υσδὀ. . . . Find her?”

“She got a cab.” January removed the saucer Hannibal had set over his coffee-cup, to keep it warm. River mist blurred the torches—the sounds of festival seemed to grow distant as well, retreating like voices in a dream. “Minou, you say Marsan never lets go of anything, particularly women. Might he have been the one who hired those bullies to beat up Belaggio? Is Marsan the jealous type?”