Die Upon a Kiss (41 page)

For one instant Drusilla d’Isola’s eyes widened with shock, staring up into the bright black gaze of Vincent Marsan’s daughter. For one instant January saw in her eyes the shaken, almost unbelieving relief he had seen at Trulove’s reception, when he’d offered her a simpler song to sing, to save her the humiliation of Anne Trulove’s steely gaze. With barely a pause for breath, she said, “I got to thinking that you might be with them—with the men who tied me up and took me away. The place was a—a jail.”

“But I told you my father was away,” said Jocelyn Marsan, perhaps a little more emphatically than normal conversation required. She cocked her head a little, to regard January. “I didn’t tell Mother—didn’t tell anyone— that I’d found someone there, because I was afraid I’d be punished. Father had very—distinct—ideas about where girls should and shouldn’t go.” She hitched around her shoulders the blanket someone had given her, to cover her soot-stained white petticoats: white and black, like her colorless face with its streaks of smoke and grime.

He would even beat his own . . .
Judy the cook had started to say, and stopped herself. And January recalled the bruises on Jocelyn’s arms.

“She was gone when I went out in the early morning.” The girl’s voice was matter-of-fact. “But I didn’t dare say anything, because of Big Lou.”

Big Lou’s dark form stood silhouetted by the dimming gold light in the stable-yard gate, swaying a little between two City Guards and two men in soaked and mud-smeared evening-dress. Beyond the wall, the flame could no longer be seen; the smell of fresh smoke had given way to the wet pong of ashes. Somewhere January heard Caldwell talking about fire insurance: “I’m only glad no one was killed. It’s almost a miracle so few were injured. Fire usually spreads so fast in theaters. . . .”

The light of cressets, borne into the yard by hotel servants, took the place of the wild flare of the fire, and by it Jocelyn Marsan’s thin face looked older, and very calm.

She turned to look down at d’Isola again. “Were you my father’s . . . friend?”

“I knew your father, yes,” said the singer, still a little hesitant, but settled now into her role. “It is strange that it would be his daughter who helped me that night. I never even thought to ask your name.” And she clasped the young girl’s hands. “Thank you, Signorina . . . Jocelyn, is it? Thank you.”

For a moment their eyes locked.

“And so you see . . .” Jocelyn transferred her gaze to January, bright black eyes like a lizard’s, or a bird’s. “You must have been mistaken about this person you think killed my father. Because this is the woman who spent that night in the jail-house at Les Roseaux.” One hand rested on the white cerement of her shoulder, and the small, pointed chin lifted a little. “She could not possibly have killed my father, sir. And that I will swear in court.”

D’Isola’s hand stole up and touched those square-ended, stick-thin fingers. The face she turned to January, with its paint smeared and smuts and streaks of ash clinging to her hair, was serene and just the tiniest bit defiant. Susanna facing down Count Almaviva. The lovely Anna defying the evil steward Gaveston to take her castle and her lover away from her. And in Jocelyn’s face, equally steady, equally still, January saw the dilapidated house at Les Roseaux, the terror in Madame Marsan’s eyes when Big Lou said,
Michie Vincent don’t like to be kept waitin’.
The bruises on the faces of the slaves.

Sidonie Lalage—and Aucassin Couvent—had gone unavenged because no white jury would credit the evidence of a person of color against a white. This, too, was in Jocelyn’s eyes.

January sighed. “Then I don’t think there’s anything more to be said.” He rose, and nearly fell to his knees. Every limb ached searingly; nausea swept from his blistered shoulders and back. He staggered, and then straightened up. Shaw and Hannibal were coming toward him, as more and more lanterns and torches were brought into the stable yard. More and more men and women in mud-bespattered evening-dress or gaudy and improbable costumes, nursing bruises and abrasions but, January gathered, no burns. He saw Rose slip in through the crowd by the gate, stand looking around for him. Saw Dominique, with a half-dozen of her girlfriends, exclaiming on ruined skirts and ripped petticoats but already beginning to shake their heads and negotiate whose house they’d go to for coffee . . .

Across the yard, a small, pale woman called out Jocelyn’s name, and the girl waved, called back, “I’m here, Tante Louise!” She turned back to January and held out her hand. “May I have my father’s toothpick? We’ll be selling most of his things in order to get along.”

January laid it in the small, black-gloved palm.

TWENTY-FIVE

Of the fifty Africans who comprised the Demon Chorus, about two dozen were eventually rounded up in diverse parts of the city. Those members of the St. Mary Opera Society who applied to the Cabildo for recovery of their errant human property—Mrs. Redfern, Fitzhugh Trulove, Jed Burton, and others—swore they’d bought them from Erasmus Knight in good faith, and variously stormed, cursed, and threatened legal action when Shaw informed them that the slaves had been smuggled into the country and would be shipped back to Cuba by the next boat. They were repaid out of the money found in Belaggio’s satchel, which Bruno Ponte had had in his hands at the time of his arrest.

The rest of the slaves were never found.

At least, not by anyone who ever reported them so.

Lorenzo Belaggio, Silvio Cavallo, and Bruno Ponte were incarcerated in the Cabildo for two weeks, until an attaché arrived from the Austrian consul in Havana to take them back to that city. John Davis, still awaiting trial in the same cell, was forbearing and affable to his newest room-mates but took approximately two hundred dollars in IOUs from Belaggio at faro, for which his lawyer was subsequently forced to sue the Assistant Police Commissioner of Milan. Knight’s clerk Tillich, who was also arrested that night at his lodgings near the Circos Market, spent some weeks in the prison before being hanged on charges of attempted murder against Marguerite Scie, accessory to the murder of Orfeo Castorini—known also as Incantobelli— and treason. Big Lou did not testify in court, but as he was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor, January assumed that he must have told Shaw enough to put him on the trail of evidence that led to conviction. With the papers found in Knight’s brief, there was very little question of Tillich’s guilt.

No trace was ever found of Gaio Tiberio, either in the gutted ruin of the American Theater or elsewhere. The theater itself was repaired, and re-opened the following autumn with a complete season of Italian Opera, which was extremely well received. The following year Caldwell opened a second and larger theater immediately behind it on St. Charles Avenue.

Drusilla d’Isola checked quietly out of the City Hotel the day after the theater fire, and took ship for New York.

“It may be that’s what hurt her most,” said January a few weeks later, when Marguerite Scie asked him about the events surrounding the St. Mary Opera Society’s first New Orleans season, “that after she did everything she could to make sure that her two friends had alibis for the night of the murder, they were lukewarm—to say the least—in trying to get her away from Tiberio.”

“What did they say about it?” asked Olympe, sewing a pinafore for Chouchou in a blazing halo of work-candles by the parlor fire. Lenten quiet blanketed Rue Douane, and a hard chill; Mardi Gras had fallen early that year, and now in March there was still the possibility of frost. Marguerite, who had continued to rent the rear bedroom during her convalescence, would take ship in the morning for Paris—Gabriel and Olympe between them had cooked a special dinner, and afterward Hannibal had played his fiddle, which Cochon Gardinier had retrieved from the theater when everyone started yelling
Fire.
The children were in bed. It would soon be time to go.

“That they were sorry.” January’s voice had a dry twist. “But Cavallo said that as a daughter of
la patria,
d’Isola would understand.” He had visited the jail that afternoon, after John Davis’s trial and acquittal: his general impression in the courtroom, which had been packed with Davis’s friends, had been that the jury was overwhelmed by the tangle of conflicting tales of Austrian spies, slave-smugglers, mysterious veiled ladies, nameless hired bravos, Italian politics, and enraged divas to bring in any kind of verdict against a man so universally liked. Prosecutor Greenaway had done his best, but with Tillich’s testimony discredited, the case had simply collapsed.

“The man has been in too many operas.” Rose’s spectacle-lenses flashed gold as she looked up from the hearth where she sat. “Did he really think she wouldn’t mind dying, in innocence, for the cause of a united Italy?”

“I don’t think he thought much about it at all,” said Marguerite. “One doesn’t when one’s obsession is with higher things. It was enough for Tiberio to say,
I shall
make sure she gets out.
Cavallo was absolved. He had done all he could, and he really did need to get on with his own crusade. He could weep about it when he learned the Awful Truth in Act Four, of course. One saw a good deal of that,” she added, “in the Revolution.”

The ballet mistress had been visited that afternoon by an extremely discreet lawyer, who had taken her deposition regarding her two assaults by Big Lou, had insisted on reimbursing her for her fare back to Paris, and had assured her that she would not be further troubled by representatives of the Vienna regime. “I have no idea who the man was working for,” she had remarked over supper. “The name on his card was Dutch. He seemed quite pleased that the connection of Big Lou to Chevalier through Marsan was so clearly established, so there must be trouble in it for the Hapsburgs somewhere.” She had sounded pleased.

“If Cavallo and Ponte hadn’t fallen under suspicion through their contacts with the Carbonari,” said Rose now, “would you still have had to spend the night out in Bayou des Familles?”

“Oh, yes,” said January. “I think La d’Isola started looking for a locally knowledgeable witness to establish her alibi the moment she realized her hired bullies had attacked the wrong man. It wouldn’t take many inquiries to ascertain that La Cornouiller was deserted, and it was the work of an afternoon to go out and fit the place with new padlocks and hasps. She needed someone who would believe her story of being kidnapped by slave-stealers; having decided to extend the alibi to include her friends, it was, of course, no accident that she ‘encountered’ them on her way.

“What she didn’t count on,” he added, “was us getting out from under the house, which she’d cleaned out pretty thoroughly of anything that could be used as a tool. She didn’t count on us ending up at Marsan’s—and speaking to people who remembered the murder of Sidonie Lalage in any detail—and she couldn’t have predicted that I’d have the occasion to learn that most Europeans don’t have the slightest idea what a pea-nut is, much less that they’re a favorite delicacy of rats.”

“White people don’t know rats love pea-nuts?” demanded Zizi-Marie, startled.

Then Marguerite asked, “What’s a pea-nut?”

“So I knew that it wasn’t a European behind the threat against d’Isola. And once I started thinking in terms of what grievance
would
be held by a person of color, I was pretty certain—in spite of all the evidence to the contrary—that it was Marsan who was the original target, not Belaggio at all.”

“She was good,” said Olympe softly.

Marguerite sniffed. “You obviously never heard her sing.”

“Perhaps not,” said Hannibal. “But we all saw her
act.
Marsan most of all, I expect—which must have taken the proverbial nerves of steel, to seduce a man whom you not only intend to kill, but who you know is capable of killing you in a jealous rage.
Trifles light as air / are to the jealous
confirmations strong / as proofs of holy writ. . . .
As she had more cause than most to know. My God, that would have taken courage.”

Looking across at his sister’s calm profile in the candle-light, January wondered suddenly if Olympe had guessed. Had realized that the Italian girl was, in fact, what the slave-dealers called a
musterfino—
the child of an octoroon and a white,
with features fine as a Spaniard’s,
as old Faon had said. And from that had guessed the rest.

Or did the slight half-smile on her lips mean something else?

“Could
she have stabbed Marsan,” asked Rose reasonably, “without getting blood all over the dressing-room? Whenever I attempt to cook a chicken, the kitchen ends up looking like the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. And she’d have been caught, surely, the first time someone went up that secret stair. You said it was all splashed with blood, even though Cavallo and Ponte must have just shoved their would-be doubles in through the door at the bottom. You and Hannibal had been up it only a week or so before.”

“You gotta take lessons in seduction, girl,” remarked Olympe, glancing up from her needlework. “With the whole evening to prepare, and just one or two candles burnin’, you think Marsan’s gonna notice a couple extra sheets on the floor?”

“Particularly,” added Madame Scie wryly, “if La d’Isola were in a sufficiently advanced state of undress at the time.”

“Since the stair led down from her room,” added January, “Marsan’s blood wouldn’t have been discovered until after she was gone. Possibly long after, if she made sure the stair was locked at both ends and she lost the key. The sheets themselves would have ended up in the river; there was blood smudged on the lining of her satchel where she carried them. I’m guessing she sent Marsan a note, arranging a meeting in her dressing-room Thursday night—maybe even telling him she wouldn’t be at rehearsal, or telling him not to go. The Gower boys having failed her, she wasn’t about to trust hirelings again. And she had the knife they’d left in the alley.”

There was a little silence, while the log hissed softly between the iron dogs.

“What was her name?” asked Marguerite at last. “Her real name, I mean.”

“Marie,” said January. “Like every other girl in New Orleans. Marie-Drusille Couvent. God knows what she intends to do with her life now.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know that herself,” said Olympe softly. “Some people can fight to the death as warriors, but then they can’t let the war be won. When there’s a chance at peace, they get edgy. They pick fights with everyone around ’em, and finally go look for another war. In a lot of ways, war is easier than loving, and learning to live day to day.”

“Maybe that explains Marsan,” said Paul, who up until this time had not spoken.

And maybe, thought January, it explained Othello as well.

He and Rose parted from Hannibal where Rue Douane crossed Rue Chartres, Hannibal turning his steps toward the City Hotel. Consuela was leaving the day after tomorrow, bound for Mexico City, where an Easter opera season was being readied for the grandees who made up a little court around the flamboyant dictator Santa Anna. John Davis, with whom January had spoken briefly after the trial that afternoon, had plans for another tour of the North—Philadelphia, New York, Boston—but looking at that haggard face, the exhaustion in his eyes, January wondered whether the little man would ever fully recover from his month in the cells of the Cabildo.

But at least he was free. He had clasped January’s hand in thanks before his white Creole friends and well-wishers had crowded around him. January had known when to step away.

Rose’s hand slipped quietly into his. After a moment, the streets being deserted, he put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned a little into him, like a wild bird settling, hesitantly, onto a human hand.

Walking back, late, from seeing Rose to Rue des Victoires, January passed the levee, and saw gold-threaded in the torchlight of the wharves not only the clumsy stacks of the steamboats, but the masts of the tall clippers, the squatter funnels of the ocean-going packets that would take Marguerite back to her home. Such were the turns of fate—especially given the fact that he himself was forty-two now, and she fifty-seven—that there was a chance he would never see her again.

But he would know she was there, he thought. Alive in that gray-walled city, with its twisting cobblestone streets and pewter river, instructing her bright-haired little rats at the Odéon, or shopping in Les Halles with its reek of fish and wet pavement when the chestnut trees along the boulevards put out their leaves. For two years now he’d walked the muddy brick banquettes of this pastel town beside the vast brown Mississippi flood, and had nearly forgotten Paris, and what it was like to be close to the heartbeat of something beyond sugar cane and money.

Hannibal was right, he thought. There was a miasma here that made you forget.

It was good to remember again.

Another thought came to him, and instead of turning up Rue des Ursulines when he came to it, he went two more streets to Rue Du Maine. For three days now, cold winds had flowed down over the town as if vengeful northern gods were trying to punish the gentler world for its Mardi Gras excess; January’s breath smoked as he passed beneath the iron lamps, burning on their crossed chains above the crossed streets. But he could tell this was the last of the winter. By next week the city would blaze with azaleas.

The pink cottage on Rue Du Maine was quiet. Through gauzy curtains he saw a woman sitting alone in the bedroom, coiffed and jeweled, and immaculately dressed.

Waiting, as Desdemona had waited. As all women wait who give their lives over into the hands of men. Women who hope against their better knowledge and judgment that things will change, and be all right.

He knocked gently at the French door and saw the woman startle. “It’s me, Minou. Ben.” She gathered her cashmere shawl from the chair, hurried to open the door.

“I can’t stay,” he said, meaning,
You don’t have to
worry about me lingering, in case Henri arrives.

“It’s all right.” Her smile was tired. In the Place d’Armes, the Cathedral clock spoke eleven.

He asked, “Are you all right?”

“Do you mean, have I made up my mind?” Her hand stroked her belly as her velvet eyes playfully mocked. He lifted his hand in a fencer’s gesture, acknowledging a hit. “Or is it already too late?”

“You tell me.”

The mockery melted to a genuine smile of grateful friendship, of warmth at being understood. “I have a note for you.” She went back and fetched it from the dressing-table where her open book lay. “Your friend Shaw brought it here, not knowing where to find you. I said you’d probably be by. To check on me, if nothing else.”