Die Upon a Kiss (34 page)

“Someone had to,” said January. “And I felt I owed it to him. If I hadn’t spoken to him in front of the Cathedral, they might have left him alone.”

Rose glanced up at him, though he would have sworn he’d kept his voice light; she set down the teapot and crossed to where he stood beside the parlor door. “They wouldn’t have,” she said.

January only shook his head, and turned his face aside.

“They wouldn’t have,” Rose repeated. The insistence in her voice drew his eyes back to meet hers. “You had nothing to do with his death.”

“I know that.”

And he did. Or a part of him knew, anyway.

Rose took his hands. “If anything, if he’d stayed to talk to you, you might have learned something that would let you protect him,” she said. “You might have convinced him to put his trust in you, gotten him out of the Hotel Toulouse, hidden him somewhere. He was already afraid,” she reminded him. “He knew they were already after him. Look at the times he went out, always masked: Puss in Boots, Julius Caesar. Only to church . . .”

“And to Trulove’s reception,” said January. “He must have heard about the attack on Marguerite the following morning, and realized he was in danger.”

“And still he stayed in New Orleans.” Hooves clattered furiously in the street. It was the hour of night when rich young men tended to leave parties afire with the impulse to race their phaetons like chariots through the streets. Rose’s strong hands tightened over his own, and she shook his arms gently, as if to make sure he heard her, to make sure he believed. “He could have left. But he wanted his revenge. His honor.”

“If I had written that music,” said January, “and had it stolen, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have done the same.”

“And you would have met the same fate,” said Rose. “He chose it, Benjamin. He knew these people, remember. Not who they were in New Orleans, but the kind of people they were, and what they would do. I suspect that’s why he left Belaggio. Because he didn’t want to have anything further to do with them.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and tiptoed to brush his lips with hers. “You didn’t cause his death. And you may not have been able to save him.”

“But I can avenge him.”

“You seen what happened,” said Olympe, coming quietly into the room with a half-dozen fresh candles, “when he tried to avenge himself, brother. It’s a dangerous thing to go playin’ around with, vengeance. A long chalk more dangerous than them chemicals and gunpowder you get so twitchy about Rose playin’ with. You be here tomorrow to sit with her, Ben?”

“In the afternoon, yes.” He pinched out the burned-down bedside candles one by one. “There’s no regular rehearsal, though M’sieu Bucher’s asked me to spend a few hours taking La d’Isola through Euridice’s part. Belaggio’s had her reading the part, and practicing with him, since she came back from La Cornouiller.”

“God knows what that silly Italian was thinking,” said Rose to Olympe.
“Orfeo
is what they used to call a court opera: masques, pageants, dancing, but not much in the way of a real plot. It’s just people standing around, singing. . . .”

“Oh, I’ll wait in line all night for a ticket to that,” commented Olympe, taking the faintly sheep-smelling tallow stumps from her brother’s hand.

“Don’t listen to her, Olympe, she’s a complete barbarian,” said January.
“Orfeo ed Euridice
is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed. But it’s an old-style piece, and it was certainly not composed with Americans in mind. And with our friend Smith in charge of the divertissements, God help us, all the Hell-fire Tiberio can conjure won’t change the fact that—”

He’d heard, while Paul laughed, the clatter of hooves far down the street. And he’d thought,
Dumb damn Kaintucks
running races. . . .

All this he remembered later.

As the words “all the Hell-fire Tiberio can conjure” came out of his mouth, as if in fact naming Hell-fire was a conjuration, there was flame, and smoke, and shattering glass, spraying into the parlor from the broken windows. Fire skated across the beeswaxed parlor floor, burst from the woven rugs. Paul shouted, plunged into the dining-room for another rug; January grabbed Rose aside, struck at her skirts, which were beginning to catch. Smoke, footfalls, Olympe’s voice shouting for water—people running, and more flame spilling from the lamp as Paul knocked it over in his haste. . . .

Someone pressed towels into his hand; January dunked them in a water-bucket (who’d brought that in? In the smoke he couldn’t see) and slapped at the flames, eyes burning. Someone stumbled into him, nearly knocking him over; a door opened and wind swept through the parlor, fanning the flame. January cursed and realized it must be Zizi-Marie or Gabriel, getting their tiny brother out of the house. Shouting in the darkness.

Then, from somewhere, a child’s scream.

Marguerite’s room. January turned to the door through the front bedroom to the back, and a shape loomed at him in the dark. Collided with him, struggling in the smoke, coughing—he thrust past, and into the rear bedroom, where a single candle still burned blurred with smoke, and Chouchou, Olympe’s five-year-old daughter, crouched in a corner, staring with huge eyes at the door. She screamed again as January came in, and hid her eyes, but January—who would ordinarily have beaten half to death any man who frightened her—plunged instead straight to the bed.

The bed where Marguerite lay, a pillow covering her face.

“She says she came in and saw a man there,” said Olympe quietly. The fire in the parlor was out. January, Rose, Paul, and Gabriel gathered again in the smoke-stinking dining-room as Olympe emerged with her daughter in her arms. The French door from the front bedroom to the street had been standing open. Through the open door between the rear bedroom and the rear parlor, dim candle-light showed January Marguerite’s still face. He kept looking at her breast, where the white sheet lay over it, watching each slow, shallow breath she took with sick dread in his heart.

Nothing he’d tried—not water, nor light slaps on her hand, nor burnt feathers, nor the ammonia stink of hartshorn—had waked her.

She was breathing. That was all.

Olympe rocked Chouchou in her arms, leaned her head down to listen to the girl’s whispered communication. Now and then she nodded. “That’s right. That’s my brave child.” She looked up again. “He had the pillow over M’am Scie’s face, holding it down. A Devil, Chouchou said, in a big black cloak and a mask, with a kerchief over his head.”

“Maybe the one who looked like a tough,” said January. “Maybe Mr. Winkers—the one who ran out of the alley— has more than one bullyboy. Either he or another rode the horse and threw the torch.” For they’d found the torch that had been thrown, butt-first like a flaming javelin, through the French door of the parlor. In spite of the heavy curtain drawn over the broken panes, a draft came through, chilling the room and making the curtain itself quiver and flop with sickening life.

Beside Marguerite’s bed lay the shattered remains of the teapot. Little streaks of blood skimmed the puddles of cold tea. Part of the handle had lain on the sheets near the ballet mistress’s hand, the broken edge wet and red, and blood had spotted the bedclothes, the floor, and the night-dress Marguerite wore.

She had fought.

“Was it chance, do you think”—Rose twisted back her soft walnut-colored curls where they’d fallen over her shoulders in the confusion of beating and dousing—“that all this happened the night after Signor Belaggio fled town?”

It was close to dawn. Neighbors had come crowding over to help put out the flames (which had been out within minutes in any case) and offer other unspecified assistance. In not many hours, January was aware, he was due at the theater again. Coffee and breakfast seemed to make more sense than sleep.

“I don’t think anything is chance, these days.”

He sent his nephew, as soon as it was light, to Madame Bontemps’s for clean clothes, for his music-satchel, and his own shaving-things. “What a spook!” said the boy, coming back when January was shaving with Paul’s borrowed razor in the cabinet behind the dining-room. The cabinet opened onto the yard as well; smoke from the kitchen where Olympe was making breakfast scented the air, coffee-smells, syrup, and grits. In the front parlor Paul was already neatly cutting out the two or three floor-boards that had been badly burned, preparatory to planing and fitting new.

“I told her I had to get your things because you hadn’t been able to come home last night, and she just looked at me and said,
But why didn’t he get them last night when he
was here?
Like she didn’t even hear me.”

Or like someone came to the garçonnière late last night,
thought January.
And waited for me to come home.

Shaw came, but could find little, and the accounts given by the neighbors were not much help. They confirmed what January had guessed, that there were at least two men, one of whom had ridden down Rue Douane at full gallop and thrown a torch through the window to bring everyone into the front parlor, but beyond that there was little to learn. In Carnival time, masked men careering down the streets at full gallop were not uncommon. At that late hour, most of the neighbors—free colored artisans, for the most part—had been asleep in bed.

Shaw examined the broken teapot, the blood, the fading bruises on Marguerite’s throat. The blackened prints of fingers had diffused into a general greenish-yellow mass of discoloration. January still didn’t know if he’d done well or ill to conceal them—he knew only that he’d done what he had to, to keep his friends and himself from the grip of the white man’s law.

He went to Mass—the Fashion Show rather than his usual early Mass—and lit a candle for Marguerite before the statue of the Virgin, as he had every day that week, and another for Incantobelli. But even that brought him no comfort. A week ago he had come here to lie in wait for the singer, and now the man was dead.

Blessed Mary ever-Virgin,
he prayed,
help me to find
these men. Put the clue of thread into my hand, and give me
the strength to follow it wherever it leads.

He was to reflect, later, that he really needed to be more careful about what he prayed for.

Thou hast delivered us, O Lord, from them that afflict us, said the priest as January slipped quietly out through the great Cathedral doors, and made his way upriver to the American Theater to deal with Euridice’s journey to the Underworld and back.

La Cenerentola
being written for a mezzo, and it being unthinkable that Drusilla d’Isola would play an Evil Sister, the prima donna was able to concentrate on learning Euridice’s role. She had more opportunity for this than even she had counted on, it transpired, because on Wednesday, the day of the first general rehearsal for
Norma,
she overslept, waking at last with a splitting headache that January at least recognized as one of the symptoms of being dosed with opium. He had little worry that the Emperor Francis’s minions were to blame for this, however. One of the bottles of laudanum that Hannibal habitually carried in his pockets was missing, and most of the cast had seen Madame Montero, who had been surreptitiously taking sessions with Hannibal in the role, talking with the soprano when she came backstage to congratulate little Signorina Rutigliano, after watching the opera from Mr. Caldwell’s private box.

The upshot of it all was that Madame Montero took the rehearsal. Even compared to the florid, if interchangeable, Princesses of previous operas, Norma is a gruellingly demanding role. What was merely a difference of ornamentation between one soprano and another in the case of
La Muette
and
Robert
became a painfully evident gulf. James Caldwell, a little to everyone’s surprise, put his foot down at Thursday’s rehearsal and politely requested that Madame Montero continue to sing Norma to Rutigliano’s Adalgisa.

“And I’m not sure,” the theater owner confessed, taking January aside into Belaggio’s office between the dance rehearsal and the beginning of dress rehearsal, “whether I shouldn’t replace Miss d’Isola in the Gluck piece as well.”

As the player whose work formed the base-line of the small orchestra—and one of the two most musically knowledgeable men in the ensemble—January was often treated as spokesman by both Caldwell and Davis. Caldwell, who genuinely loved opera, had come to rely more and more on January’s technical advice, particularly after Belaggio’s unexpected departure. “Would you very much mind—and I know you’re certainly stretched thin as it is—taking an extra, private rehearsal Sunday with Madame Montero for the part of Euridice? I know how fond Signor Belaggio is of Miss d’Isola, but . . .”

Caldwell hesitated, stroking his trim, dark mustache. Outside the office, Tiberio could be heard calling upon Heaven to witness that he could do nothing with the final act if Norma and her boneheaded lover refused to show a little courage about the flames of the pyre. What was a little fire, after all?

“In spite of the—the quite dramatic pyrotechnics in Act Two, and the beauty of the music,
Orfeo
is a very . . . a very—”

“Static?” suggested January.

Caldwell nodded eagerly, relieved to be so tactfully seconded. “A very
static
work. Oh, I realize that much of its appeal lies in the stage direction. And Signor Belaggio was most insistent that it be performed.” Despite his best efforts, an edge crept into his voice. “And of course Mr. Trulove backed him in that. . . .”

Had Mr. Caldwell not been a white American gentleman talking to a black musician, January felt he would have expressed himself more fully on the subject of the special dance that Trulove was paying Herr Smith to evolve for Oona Flaherty—utilizing the tune of the Martin Van Buren Quick-Step—to be grafted on to the Dance of the Blessed Spirits.

“But looking over the libretto itself, I must admit that there doesn’t seem to be much activity. Except for the dancing, of course. I fear poor Madame Scie’s talents are greatly missed. How is Madame Scie?”