Die Upon a Kiss (10 page)

Anne Trulove was the first to applaud, the first to step forward and take La d’Isola’s hands. John Davis was immediately behind, his face filled with admiration and, as he turned to Belaggio, with unwilling envy. A lover of opera, Davis recognized greatness, even in a man he disliked—January saw him hold out his hand, saw his lips move in words.

Belaggio drew haughtily back, eyelids drooping, and said something that made Davis drop his hand. Then the crowd intervened, and Anne Trulove caught January’s eye, and gave a commanding nod.

Obedient, he riffled the introduction to “L’Alexandrine” on the piano’s keys. Fiddles and cello, flute and clarionette bounded after him like fauns. Men and women paired again—French with French, American with American, like some absurdly politicized Noah’s Ark. Jeté and emboitté, glissade and pas-de-basque. The froufrou of taffeta silk and the amber slither of candlelight—kid-gloved fingers to kid-gloved palms. The rhythmed creak of slippers on beeswaxed oak. Belaggio was still handing out copies of his libretto to potential subscribers and didn’t even notice as La d’Isola slipped, trembling, away to the curtained alcove of a window, gathering around her shoulders her white-and-gold lace shawl, as if suddenly exhausted and cold.

And no wonder, thought January.

Perhaps she had learned a lesson, after all.

Despite what he’d said to Marguerite about the music at the free colored balls being better, January thoroughly enjoyed playing wherever he was hired to play. Music was his fortress, the shining world to which he’d retreated during a painful childhood; the brilliant spine around which he’d rebuilt his life during the dark months after Ayasha’s death. Listening and playing—especially a grand piano like Trulove’s—was the greatest joy he could ask for. Watching, too. A hundred minor dramas skirmished along the fringe of the dance, like a dance in itself, or an interlocking set of dances.

Trulove, Anne Trulove, and Oona Flaherty formed a minor cotillion as the planter attempted to cross the crowded ballroom to the Irish girl’s side, and his wife intercepted him with spun-steel graciousness, a sort of verso Odyssey in miniature. Pale little Mr. Knight performed a one-man
haie
as he encountered and spoke with every planter in the room who owned forty arpents or more—he evidently had scant use for lesser fry. A sort of ring dance developed around the Widow Redfern, bachelors of every age paying court to her available affluence, and like the illustration of a tract, Marguerite Scie stood alone. She wasn’t young, and she wasn’t marriageable, and unlike La d’Isola and Oona Flaherty, she had come without the patronage of a man. Only John Davis paused to chat with the ballet mistress in the midst of his own grand-right-and-left with the influential Creoles of the City Council. January saw her draw herself up in a burlesque of Belaggio’s snub; he saw Davis laugh.

“Vincent Marsan tells me you have a couple niggers to sell?”

The soft-muttered words lifted the hair on January’s nape, though he’d heard them in one form or another at every ball and entertainment given by white men that he’d ever played. As Shaw had complained yesterday, half the slaves sold in New Orleans never got near such public venues as the New Exchange.

“Ah, that I do, Signor Burton.” That was the voice that made January turn his head. Made his stomach curl sourly, and the music clink harsh in his ears. “That indeed I do.”

Punch-cup in hand, Jed Burton looked up into the face of Lorenzo Belaggio.

“Prime hands?”

The impresario kissed his fingertips, smiling proudly about the men he was selling as if he hadn’t written a song about loving that minutes ago had opened January’s heart like a scalpel. “They have cut the sugar-cane in Cuba, they have worked in stables, they are young, they are healthy—”

“How young?” Burton spit tobacco into the brass can discreetly tucked behind a potted fern. “And how healthy? Creole niggers?”

“Of a certainty,” agreed Belaggio, though January had seen the tribal scars—country marks, they were called—on the faces of both the stage-hands the impresario had brought from Cuba. “Louis is perhaps nineteen, and Pedro, twenty-two. Both were born in Cuba, and are acclimated against the diseases of this hemisphere. They speak English. . . .”

Another lie. But January guessed, with even a hundred-dollar knock-off in the average price of a cane-hand, that Burton wouldn’t care.

He turned his face away, as if the notes before him were a map that would lead him on to a better world.

At the age of ten he’d beaten up three of the quadroon boys from the St. Louis Academy for Young Gentlemen of Color, classmates he’d surprised in the act of drowning a puppy in the gutter. As the darkest boy in the school, January had little patience with those boys anyway—the ones who’d call him
bozal
and
country
and
cane-patch—
and he’d taken a split lip and a swollen eye in defense of the poor little cur, who had promptly slashed his wrist nearly to the bone and run away while its erstwhile tormentors howled with laughter at January’s pain and chagrin. His mother had whipped him, too, for getting his clothes torn.

The dog had been run over in the street by a carriage the following day.

As he’d said to Shaw, he understood that the makers of sublime art were not necessarily sublime themselves. And it was not necessary that they be, he told himself. Only that the art—the passion and the glory of Othello’s unwise love—be permitted to reach out to those whose loves were routinely denigrated, whose passions daily mocked.

Nevertheless he tasted bile in his mouth as his fingers skipped through the Pantalon.

“If only the man wasn’t such a damn huckster, he’d be easier to take,” sighed Davis, coming to the musicians’ bower between dances a few minutes later, to sneak Hannibal some brandy. “You wouldn’t have a friend or two in the Swamp, would you, who’d know where I could lay hands on fireworks?”

“I don’t know about ready-made fireworks,” said January, overhearing. “But if you can procure gunpowder and chemicals, Mademoiselle Vitrac—you remember Mademoiselle Vitrac, M’sieu. . . .”

“The teacher, yes.” Davis nodded. “And a chemist, too, if I remember rightly. Where could I send her a note, to ask . . . ?”

“Puta!”
Belaggio’s bellow of rage cut across the music’s opening bars.
“Puttana! Cattiva fica!”

“Consarn, as the Americans say.” Hannibal untucked his violin from beneath his chin. “Backed the wrong horse.”

Across the room, Belaggio ripped aside the curtain that half concealed the window embrasure, thrust apart Vincent Marsan and Drusilla d’Isola with such violence that the girl smote the wall. The water-ice she’d been holding spun from her hand, glass splintering. Marsan lunged forward, beautiful face transformed by a snarl of demonic rage—the men nearest him leapt to seize his arms. He twisted free of them with a movement more animal than human, stood facing the Italian, the two huge men towering over the girl like maddened bulls. For a moment there was deadly silence; then Belaggio struck Marsan across the face.

“Keep your filthy hands from that woman, you bastard
stronzolo!”

Marsan’s colorless wife stepped a pace toward them, but fell back at the sight of her husband’s face.

“Stay with your Negress concubines, for I do not take such an insult from any man!” Seizing d’Isola’s arm, Belaggio shook her until her head lolled on her creamy bare shoulders, her face ashen with shock.

“Devil’s whore! You will not dishonor me. . . .”

“You dishonor yourself, sir!” The Widow Redfern strode from her ring of suitors in a jangle of diamonds and crêpe. The men—who had applauded so wildly when the girl sang of how a true woman trustingly accepts abuse from her man—muttered and shifted and avoided each other’s eyes. January had seen the same uneasiness, less outrage than a disapproval of the inappropriateness of it all, when a white man punished a slave in the presence of other whites.

Mr. Knight, who was one of those who’d held back Marsan’s first killing rush, added in Italian, “Signor, we cannot have you speaking to a lady thus. . . .”

“Lady?” Belaggio let out a crack of laughter. “This lightskirt, with her wicked eyes?” He shoved d’Isola before him through the French door onto the broad terrace. Framed by the flambeaux on the balustrade, the girl seemed to hover for a moment like Eurydice on the threshold of Hell.

“Honestly!” Galvanized by visions of a season-wrecking scandal, James Caldwell moved to thrust himself between Belaggio and the infuriated Marsan, and Davis interposed his body in the embrasure of the window itself.

“Mademoiselle d’Isola surely never—”

“Keep back from me!” Belaggio retreated a pace from Davis and lifted his hand in a gesture hugely reminiscent of an overweight Don Giovanni confronted with the stone commander in his parlor doorway. “Assassin! I told you before this evening I have nothing to say to your blandishments. Will you call your hired bravos from the darkness now?”

Davis was so shocked, he stepped aside, open-mouthed, and Belaggio shoved past him and out into the pagan torch-glare of the terrace. “Bitch!” the impresario cried.
“Puta!
I’ll teach you to flee from me . . . !”

In point of fact, d’Isola had lingered for perhaps two minutes on the terrace before she fled, clutching her shawl distractedly about her, like Desdemona, awaiting her lover’s pleasure. As the tallest man in the room, January had watched her during Marsan’s altercation with Belaggio. Even when she’d finally descended into the dark protection of the garden’s hedge-maze she had paused, a glimmering white form in the blackness, turning back to watch . . .

. . . or to give Belaggio a chance to overtake her for a lovers’ quarrel and reconciliation among the ornamental hedges of orange and box.

“Where are you, faithless hussy? Do not flee from me, for I shall find you . . . !”

Of that, January had not the smallest doubt.

Then two things happened at once. At the same moment that he felt a tug at his coat—Uncle Bichet nodding toward Anne Trulove’s tight-lipped gesture to resume the music—January saw a lithe figure glide through one of the other French windows onto the terrace, a silver-haired man with the odd, almost boneless stature that characterized a eunuch.

Incantobelli.
January dropped back onto the piano-bench, swung into the Lancers. . . .

And, as he struck up the first gay chord, saw John Davis, after a moment’s hesitation, disappear after Belaggio into the dark.

If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Trulove stationing herself where she could keep an eye on both the orchestra and her husband, January might have tried to slip away after his friend and warn him not to put himself out of sight of witnesses, at least until the potentially murderous Incantobelli had been accounted for. But whatever might be going on in the garden, he had been hired to do a job, and would not be thanked for straying from that task.

Thus he had only a general idea of the subsequent chain of events in the room around him: couples trying to find their partners, their sets, their dance-cards, and their left feet; Vincent Marsan striding toward the French doors and being stopped by his factor, a spectacle rather like that of an Italian greyhound trying to down a charging stag. Marsan’s wife joined her voice to little Mr. Knight’s, and the planter lashed at her with words that sent her in white-faced silence back to the wall, where she’d stood for most of the evening, as alone as Marguerite. “I’d better go after them,” boomed Trulove as if the thought had only just occurred to him, and strode, not into the garden, but through the big double doors that led into the rest of the house. “Oh, faith!” cried Miss Flaherty, seconds later, to no one in particular. “I seem to have left me fan in the lobby. . . .”

“Signore, I beg you reconsider.” Caldwell joined Knight in his efforts to stay Marsan, but January could have told him he was wasting his time. He couldn’t imagine a white Creole who’d forgive being struck in the face.

“Incantobelli’s out there,” whispered January to Hannibal, glancing around for Madame Scie, who was, of course, nowhere to be found. “Somebody needs to get Davis back in here. . . . M’sieu Chevalier—Mr. Knight,” he corrected himself, switching back over to English. “Mr. Knight, there’s a man who’s gone into the garden after Signor Belaggio, a man named Incantobelli. . . .”

“Incantobelli?” Knight paused in mid-stride. “What’s . . . who is that?”

“Signor Belaggio’s former partner, sir.” January faked along as well as he could with the other musicians in time. “I know it’s none of my affair, sir, but I think someone ought to find Signor Belaggio, and warn him, before the situation grows worse.”

“That I shall do.” Eyes blue as pale china flicked toward the terrace doors, exasperated—as well they should be. The elegant jade-green figure of Vincent Marsan was nowhere in the room either now. Probably out in quest of seconds. If Belaggio were later found dead, and Marsan— or Davis—was without an account of himself . . .

January could see the swift calculation in Knight’s colorless eyes.

“Thank you. And your name is . . . ?”

“January, sir. Benjamin January.”

And that, reflected January wearily as the factor disappeared—like everyone else—through the French doors to the terrace and the leafy labyrinth beyond, was the most he could do. He looked around for Mrs. Trulove, but she, too, had vanished.
That’s all we need,
he thought as the players whirled gaily into the
grande
chaine. Incantobelli murders Belaggio in the garden AND
Mrs. Trulove slaughters her husband and the première
danseuse of Friday’s performance. . . .

Two dances later—a mazurka and the Basket Quadrille—Knight returned through the garden door with the air of a man who has supped on lemons. “Did you find him?” inquired Trulove, who had himself only just re-entered the ballroom, smoothing his silvery hair. “I’ve been searching all through the house.” He pretended not to see Oona Flaherty slip through the rearmost of the ballroom’s doors and pause by one of the room’s long mirrors to make sure the bows of her bodice were straight. They weren’t.