Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (28 page)

“Do you see Peralta?” asked January worriedly at one point, dabbing the sweat from his face and scanning the crowd. The press of people raised the temperature of the room to an ovenlike stifle, a circumstance that didn't seem to affect the dancers in the slightest degree. Almost no breeze stirred from the long windows and the air was heavy with the smells of perfume, pomade, and un-cleaned costumes.

Hannibal, white with fatigue and face running with sweat, swept the room with his gaze, then shook his head. “Doesn't mean he isn't here,” he pointed out. His hoarse, boyish voice was barely a thread. “He might be in the lobby—I went out there a few minutes ago, it's like a coaching inn at Christmas. Or he might be next door.”

Or in Davis's gambling rooms up the street,
thought January. Or at some elegant private ball. Or riding back to Bayou Chien Mart tonight, to make sure no one comes asking awkward questions about his son.

In the cathedral, where he'd gone to make his Lenten confession early and pray desperately for the success of his journey, January had been tormented by the conviction that Peralta would walk in and see him, recognize him, somehow know what his plans were. It irritated him that he should feel like a criminal in his search for the justice that the law should be giving him gratis. Confession and contrition and the ritual of the Mass had calmed his fears for a time, but as the evening progressed and Peralta did not make an appearance, like scurrying rats the fears returned.

The band occupied a dais set on the stage, and with the temporary floor slightly below even that level, January had a good view of the dancers. Dr. Soublet was there, arguing violently with another physician who seemed to think six pints of blood an excessive amount to abstract from a patient in a week.

Though the buffet tables were situated on the opposite side of the room from the windows, Henri Viellard—duly garbed as a sheep—seemed to have chosen gourmandise over fresh air; he patted his forehead repeatedly with a succession of fine linen handkerchiefs but refused to abandon proximity to the oysters, tartlets, meringues, and roulades. In his fluffy costume he bore a more than passing resemblance to a bespectacled meringue himself, with an apricot silk bow about his neck. His sisters, January noticed, were likewise clothed as fanciful animals: a swan, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse (that was the little one who looked like she'd escaped from the convent to attend), and something which after long study he and Hannibal agreed probably had to be a fish.

“Which I suppose makes Madame Viellard a farmer's wife,” concluded January doubtfully.

“Or Mrs. Noah,” pointed out Hannibal. “All she needs is a little boat under her arm.”

He glimpsed both William Granger and Jean Bouille, moving with calculated exactness to remain as far as possible from one another while still occupying the same large room. As Uncle Bichet had remarked, Bouille's wife did seem to disappear up to the screened private theater boxes every time Bouille vanished down the passageway to the Salle next door. When the dance concluded and Granger and Bouille led their respective partners toward the buffet in courses that threatened to intersect, the master of ceremonies scurried to intercept Bouille before another disaster could occur.

While Monsieur Davis's eye was elsewhere, January rose from the piano and moved discreetly along the wall to the buffet. He didn't like the white look around Hannibal's mouth, or the way he had of leaning inconspicuously against the piano as he played. He looked bled out, the flesh around his eyes deeply marked with pain, and the watered laudanum, January suspected, was not doing him very much good. As he drew close to the buffet Mayerling caught his eye, signaled him to stay where he was, and wandered over himself to collect a glass of champagne and one of the strong molasses tafia, then strolled back up to the stage as January returned to his place at the piano.

“I wanted to thank you again for standing physician the other day,” said the fencing master. “You behold your competition.”

Soublet and his adversary had reached the shouting stage and were brandishing their canes: It was obviously only a matter of time until they named their friends.

“Maybe not being able to practice in this city is what the preachers call a blessing in disguise,” said January.

“And a fairly thin disguise at that. You know Granger is now claiming that he deloped—fired into the air—and Bouille is hinting to everyone he thinks will listen that his opponent flinched aside at the last moment —in other words, dodged out of cowardice, surely one of the most foolish things to do under the circumstances since most pistols will throw one direction or the other, especially at fifty feet.”

He nodded toward Bouille, deep in conversation with Monsieur Davis, who was steering him in the direction of a group of Creole businessmen and their wives. “So now we can only hope to keep them apart for the evening. After tomorrow, of course, they will both be sober more of the time.”

“Thompsonian dog!” screamed Dr. Soublet, his opponent evidently favoring the do-it-oneself herbalist school of that well-known Yankee doctor.

“Murderer!” shrieked the Thompsonian dog, and the two men fell upon each other in a welter of kicking, flailing canes, and profanity.

“Birds in their little nests agree,”
sighed Hannibal, draining the tafia, “And 'tis a shameful sight When children of one family Fall out, and chide, and fight.”

Monsieur Davis and half a dozen others hustled the combatants from the room.

Mayerling remained where he was, shaking his head in a kind of amazement. Hannibal picked up his violin again, playing to cover the chatter of the crowd; the music was frail as honey candy, but with an edge to it like glass.

“I never saw the point of dueling, myself.” January turned back to the keyboard. His hands followed the trail the violin set, a kind of automatic embellishment that could be done without thinking. “It might be different were I allowed to give challenges, or accept them, but I don't think so.”

“Of course not,” said the Prussian in surprise. “You have your music. You are an intelligent man, and an educated one. You are seldom bored. It is all from boredom, you know,” he went on, looking out into the room again. “It is like the Kaintucks in the Swamp or the Irish on Tchoupitoulas Street. They have nothing to do, so they get into fights or look for reasons to get into fights. They are not so very different from the Creoles.”

He shook his head wonderingly.

“. . . It's not like she's got room to be so damn choosy,” said a man's voice, beside one of the boxes on the stage. “If Arnaud sinned he must have had his reasons. No man whose wife is making him happy goes straying like that.”

There was a murmur of agreement. January turned his head sharply, saw that it was the Jack of Diamonds, Charles-Louis Trepagier, and another man, shorter than he but with the same sturdy, powerful build. The shorter man wore the gaudy costume of what Lord Byron probably had conceived a Turkish pasha to look like, ballooning pistachio-colored trousers, a short vest of orange and green, an orange-and-green turban with a purple glass jewel on it the size of an American dollar. An orange mask hid his face, orange slippers his feet, a long purple silk sash that had clearly started its life as a lady's scarf wrapped two or three times around his waist.

“It isn't like she hasn't had offers,” added another of the Trepagier clan resentfully. “Good ones, too—I don't mean trash like McGinty. She thinks she's too good ...”

“Too good! That's a laugh!” The stranger threw back his head with a bitter bark. He leaned closer, lowering his voice but not nearly enough. “If the woman's turned you down it's because she's got a lover hidden somewhere. Has had, since she shut Arnaud out of her bed. I've even heard she's put on a mask and come dancing.”

“At public balls?”

“Public balls, certainly,” said the pasha. He nodded back over his shoulder toward the discreet doorway of the passage to the Salle. “And other places, maybe not so public.”

“Sir . . .”

January hadn't even seen Mayerling move. The young fencing master slipped through the crowd like a bronze fish, a dangerous glitter of blue-and-black jewels like dragon scales, his big, pale hands resting folded on the gems of his belt buckle. Behind the modeled leather of his mask, his hazel eyes were suddenly deadly chill.

“I assume,” said Mayerling, “that you are speaking third-hand gossip about someone whom none of you knows. Certainly no gentleman would bandy any woman's name so in a public place.”

The Trepagier boys regarded him in alarmed silence. In his five years in New Orleans the Prussian had only fought three duels, but in each he had killed with such scientifically vicious dispatch, and such utter lack of mercy, as to discourage any further challenges. The wolf-pale eyes traveled from their clothing to their faces, clearly recognizing, clearly identifying.

“This is fortunate, since I only duel with gentlemen,” Mayerling went on quietly. He turned to regard the pasha in green. “Should I happen to find,” he said, as if he could see the face behind the garish satin of the mask, “that a woman's name is being spoken by those whose blood would not dishonor my sword, then of course, as a gentleman, I should have no choice but to avenge that lady's honor and put a halt to that gossip in whatever way seemed best to me.”

The yellow gaze swept them like a backhand cut. There was no cruelty in it, only a chill and terrifying strength. January could almost see the line of blood it left.

“I trust that I make myself clear?”

The pasha opened his mouth to speak. The Jack of Diamonds reached out, put a hand on his pink silk arm. To Mayerling, he said, “It was, of course, a woman of the lower classes of whom we spoke, a chaca shopkeeper who betrayed her husband, nothing more.”

“Even so,” said Mayerling softly. “Such talk disturbs me. Perhaps you should study to ape gentlemen a little more closely—whoever you are.”

None of them replied. Mayerling waited for a moment, giving them time to declare themselves gentlemen and offended, then turned his back and vanished into the crowd.

January leaned over, and touched Uncle Bichet on the shoulder. “Who was that?” he asked, the old man looked at him in some surprise.

“Just a couple of the Trepagier boys.”

“No—with them.”

The cellist turned his head to look, but the pasha was even then vanishing through the curtained doorway that led to the Salle d'Orleans, deep in conversation with the purple pirate.

The Trepagier brothers—there were at least four of them, two of whom were married and none of whom were boys at all—were bullying and insulting a much younger man who had dared flirt with a flustered and feathered damsel garbed as a gypsy, evidently secure in the knowledge that he would not dare challenge them, and they were correct.

Uncle Bichet shook his head, and glanced at the program card. “Those lazy folks been standing long enough,” he said, and January turned, unwillingly, back to his music.

Sally,
he thought. Whoever the green pasha was, he had to have spoken with the runaway servant girl Sally. Or he recognized Madame Trepagier at the ball Thursday night, either by her movement, stance, and voice—as he himself had done—or because she'd worn that silly Indian costume somewhere before.

And if that were the case,
thought January with sudden bitterness, for a man attending a quadroon ball he had a lot of nerve criticizing a woman he recognized there.

The dancing lasted until nearly dawn. Technically Lent began at midnight, but there was no diminution of champagne, tafia, gumbo or pate, though having made his confession that afternoon January abstained all evening even when the opportunity presented itself. Eventually Xavier Peralta made his appearance, clothed in the red robe and scepter of a king with his cousin the chief of police still at his side. The waltzes and quadrilles grew wilder as the more respectable ladies took their departure, the fights and jostling more frequent. Everyone seemed determined to extract the final drops of pleasure from the Carnival season, to dance the soles off their shoes, to dally on the balconies above the torchlit river of noise surging along Rue Orleans.

Also, as the night wore on, more and more of the wealthier men disappeared for longer and longer periods of time. The Creole belles, though perhaps not of the highest society, stood abandoned along the wall, whispering among themselves and pretending not to care. Most of them, January suspected, would stop at home only long enough to wash off their rouge before attending early services in the cathedral. The American women whose husbands were still in attendance whispered about the half dozen or so whose men had “stepped out for a bit of air.” Most of them appeared and disappeared a number of times, but the Roman soldier stayed gone. The deserted Cleopatra involved herself in an animated discussion with several other ladies but kept an eye on the door, and when the errant Roman at last returned, there was promise of bitter acrimony in her greeting.

They bring it on themselves,
January thought, but he knew it wasn't that easy. Like everything else about New Orleans, it was a bittersweet tangle, and you could not run from it without leaving pieces of your torn-out heart behind.

No wonder everyone tried to dance and be gay,
he thought, as he walked toward the livery stable in the tepid mists of predawn. Costumed maskers still reeled along the banquettes of Rue Orleans, and from every tavern music could be heard, brassy street bands and thumping drums. Under the flicker of the street lamps whooping Kalmucks pursued masked and laughing prostitutes. The air, thick with the smell of the river, was also weighed with wine and whisky and tobacco and cheap perfume.

He collected his rented horse from a sleepy stable-hand and rode down to the levee, where the flatboat captain he'd contracted yesterday waited for him in the white ocean of mist that rose from the river. The river itself was very still, the levees on either side rising like ridges of mountains from the thinning vapors. Behind them in the last starlight the town dozed, exhausted at last.

There was only so much—deception financial and romantic, the monstrosity of slavery, and the waiting horrors of yellow fever—that could be masked behind the bright scrim of music, the taste of coffee and gumbo, the shimmer of the moonlight.