Die Upon a Kiss (11 page)

“I convinced Signor Belaggio to return to his hotel,” replied Knight. His colorless tongue peeped out as if he were readjusting the set of his disapproval. “I have just now seen him away in a hack.” He went to the table by the corner of the musicians’ dais and collected the three or four remaining copies of the green-bound libretto.

“And Miss d’Isola?”

“Was with him.”

“Did all—er—seem well?” James Caldwell tried to look as if he were more concerned with La d’Isola’s happiness than the possibility of his impresario either firing his soprano or being shot by a member of the Opera Society three days before the season opened.

“If,” said Knight, his already long face further lengthening, “you can term my instructions to speak to Mr. Marsan’s seconds ‘well,’ yes. Though I must say . . .”

“Mr. Trulove.” Anne Trulove appeared at her husband’s side, gloved hands demurely folded and murder glinting in her eye. “Our guests are departing.”

And not a moment too soon, thought January. Belaggio would be lucky—Davis would be lucky—if the impresario lived to get out of New Orleans. “With luck Marsan will shoot him in front of witnesses,” January muttered as the musicians filed through the discreet demi-porte to the butler’s pantry. Richard, Trulove’s major-domo, was counting out silver Mexican dollars while Cochon, Jacques, and the others furtively cadged leftover pastries and ham from the heaped trays that servants were already bringing in for cleanup. “Assassin indeed.”

“Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument,”
said Hannibal gravely, licking sugar from his thin fingers,
“but greatly to find quarrel in a straw / when honor’s
at the stake.
Marguerite said she’d await us in the oaks at the end of the drive. Evidently no one offered to see her to the hotel.”

Miss it?
Marguerite had said to January once, many years ago, when they’d walked out to St. Cloud for a Sunday afternoon of riding the carousel and drinking water-lily tea. She’d pointed to the ruin of a beautiful gate-house on the way, and mentioned in passing that it, and the now-demolished
hôtel particulier
it had served, had belonged to her family.
Miss that constant enslavement to petty gossip,
the unending conflict with social rivals—Who can steal a
dressmaker from whom, how dare the coi feur visit that bitch
de Rochouarte four hours later than me on the day of Her
Majesty’s reception? Pfui!
She’d flung up her hand in disgust.
I saw the kind of women it made of my mother, and
my sister: women who’d sleep with a man only because he was
invited to the Queen’s parties, or because some rival loved
him that week. I saw the kind of woman it would make of
me.
Bien sûr, she’d added with a cynical shrug,
one must
pay for one’s freedom. . . .

And this, reflected January, thinking of that straight pale-gold figure standing alone in the corner of Trulove’s ballroom—this was part of the price she paid.

Gusts of chatter, laughter, and the creak of carriage-wheels floated on the damp night air from the front of the house. A little rain had fallen during the early part of the evening, enough to sparkle on the brick of the yard, where the kitchen’s lamplight strewed it. All the world smelled of greenness and damp clay. Steam, too: servants crossed back and forth past January, their arms full of napkins, tablecloths, pale-blue Wedgwood dishes, hundreds of them; hollow-ware like fragile mountains of diamonds, all to be washed tonight. He took a candle from the sideboard in the pantry and walked around to the terrace.

Like everything else in that graceful old house on the Bayou Road, the garden was immaculately trimmed and tended. The paths were clay, here and there mixed with the broken shells that were dredged by the ton from the lake. January paused under the bare trellis of the arch that led into the velvet gloom of Anne Trulove’s labyrinth, and crouched to see d’Isola’s light track in the damp clay of the verge, and over it the heavy striding smear of Belaggio’s wide pumps.

Davis’s tracks were interposed on them, the shorter stride clearly showing that the square-toed pumps were his. Therefore, guessed January—straining his eyes in the flickering glow of a single unsheltered candle—the longer tracks, the narrower feet that followed would have to be Incantobelli’s. Narrower than Davis’s or Belaggio’s— narrow enough for him to recognize again if he had to. For good measure he pulled his notebook from his pocket, and used two torn pages to mark the length and breadth of the foot, in case he’d need to prove at some place and time that Incantobelli had been in a certain locale, and John Davis had not.

As Shaw had said, a free man of color could still testify in the Courts of the State of Louisiana. If it was unlikely that a white jury would convict a white culprit on a
sang mêlé
’s testimony, there was still the probability they’d acquit on it.

He passed on into the maze. Its leafy walls were nine feet tall, smooth-trimmed as if planed. It reminded January of the cane-fields, where the hot, close-crowding plants cut out all visibility, all sound, all air. The night seemed suddenly very silent.

Close by him, he heard the crunch of a footstep. “Who’s there?” he called. He raised his candle, and the coarse pelt of the hedges seemed to drink its light. “Who is it?”

No one replied.

January moved forward a few steps, toward what seemed to be a gap in the hedge. Instead of a way through to the next passageway, however, he found a sort of niche, like a little bower, containing a marble bench, over which lay a woman’s white-and-gold lace shawl.

She’d waited here. Seated on this bench—he saw the marks of her heels in the wet moss, where she’d scraped them back and forth—then the clear print where she’d sprung to her feet when Belaggio’s huge dark form emerged around the corner of the hedge.

She could easily have fled farther, thought January, standing up again. Could have ducked into a less conspicuous turning, and waited for Belaggio to pass. Could even have slipped back to the house. Emily Redfern or any of a dozen gentlemen could have been appealed to for the loan of a carriage.

Instead, she’d waited. Waited for her lover to come storming around the turn of the hedge, as his tracks showed clearly he’d done. Waited for the obligatory tears, explanations, vows that would culminate in the inevitable caress.
Chastise Aphrodite,
says Helen to Menelaus when they meet in the sacked ruin of Troy and she gazes at him with melting eyes through the tousled curtain of her hair.
I deserve to be excused in this.

And like Menelaus—to judge by the green-and-white ostrich-tips scattered around one end of the bench with its smirking cupids, the rucked moss where heels had dug for purchase—Belaggio had fallen on her like a dog on a bone.

January walked back to the house.

SIX

“Concha Montero will tear her hair out,” remarked Hannibal. “A few token strands of it anyway. If she’d been here tonight she’d never have let him go out looking for d’Isola after the quarrel.”

“Does she care so much for him?” January reflected upon the Mexicana’s remarks about Milanese pigs.

“She cares about not being relegated to roles beneath her talents,” said the fiddler, hopping a little unsteadily over a puddle in the road and holding out a hand to steady Marguerite—who in spite of the tall iron pattens she wore over her shoes needed no more help walking than she needed help breathing. “Even in the wilds of Louisiana, she cares about who sees her sing Marcellina instead of the Countess.”

The light of January’s lantern glinted sharply on the water in the weed-thick ditches; the crushed clamshells of the Bayou Road crunched harshly underfoot. Sometimes a carriage, coming back in toward town from one of the other wealthy houses farther out toward the lake, would pass them, the jolting light of its lamps serving only to mark the vehicle rather than to illuminate anything in the velvet darkness: Marguerite looked after these without expression and January wondered again whether she missed the life of a woman of good family, a woman who could ride home from parties rather than walk.

A woman whom gentlemen—and ladies—would speak to at parties, rather than politely ignore.

“I think what rankles,” Hannibal went on, “is that La d’Isola is really so bad. She carried tonight by sheer pathos, you know. She didn’t have to fill a theater—only a ballroom. The galleries at Covent Garden would never have heard her.”

“That would be no loss,” returned Marguerite acerbically, and the two of them traded irreverent observations about the relative acoustics of La Scala, La Fenice, and the American Theater on Camp Street while January scanned the towering, inky wall of cypresses to their right, searching for the red gleam of light that would tell him they were coming to the outer fringes of the Faubourg Tremé.

“You do understand,” he said to Marguerite, when at last he saw the first firefly glints of lamplight far off through the trees, “that the gathering we’re going to now is completely illegal. Carnival or no Carnival, free or un-free, the whites—” he used the disrespectful patois term
blankittes,
“—have forbidden assemblies of people of color except when specifically licensed by the city.”

“Tcha!” exclaimed the ballet mistress, disgusted. “So much for the truths that Messires Jefferson and Franklin held to be self-evident.”

January, who had grown up hearing about the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence and being called
tu
by strangers, only shook his head. It was part and parcel of that web of unspoken assumptions about men of color, the assumptions that caused not only white men in New Orleans, but in Paris as well, to seek out white rather than colored surgeons. The assumptions that unconsciously turned even the free colored of New Orleans, such as his mother, to physicians of less wholeheartedly African hue than he.

And Rose, he thought, faced those same assumptions each time she sought employment teaching the chemistry, optics, and natural sciences that were her lifelong study. Without thinking much about it, the owners of schools would hire a man, mostly because it was a man who had taught them.

“We just ignorant folk here at the back of town,” he said, in exaggerated gombo French. “The truths that are self-evident here are that the City Guards may show up, and if they do, put out whatever light you can reach, get back into the trees and keep out of sight until they’re gone. Anybody there will help you.”

“And you still ask me,” grinned Marguerite, “why I would rather hear good music and funny jokes at parties that are not respectable, than talk of servants and dresses and the price of slaves, at parties that are?”

Returning from the garden maze, January had found the other musicians gone. Only Hannibal had waited for him, sitting with Marguerite on the back gallery step, drinking coffee and comparing notes about Mr. Trulove’s quest for his red-haired Dulcinea.

“We won’t stay long in any case. I must admit I’m consumed with curiosity about what Madame Montero actually wants with me.”

“It will be the worse for La d’Isola, whatever it is.” The ballet mistress didn’t sound particularly concerned. In her heart, January knew, whatever she liked to say, Marguerite was still the unassailable daughter of the Marquis de Vermandois.

“O formosa puella, nimium ne crede colori.” Hannibal stopped to cough; in the silence that followed, January heard the scrape and rustle of something moving among the cypress and palmetto near the road.

“Are you . . . ?” began Marguerite, and January held up his hand.

“Get to the center of the road,” he said softly after a long moment’s listening in which he heard nothing. “And let’s keep quiet for a little.” He listened again as they walked on, straining his ears for further sound.

Maybe only a fox, he thought. Or a slave, making his or her stealthy way to meet friend or lover in the swamp.

Or someone or something else that had nothing to do with the stealthy crunch of gravel among tall hedges in blackness.

But he felt better when through the inky night he descried again the golden needle of lamplight behind shuttered windows, and heard the muffled swoop and whirl of music. Instinct and familiarity rather than any visual clue led him across the Bayou Road to the entrance of Claiborne Street, a muddy and rutted track between rough board houses and long stretches of native cypress, swamp holly, creepers, and oak. He kept a hand firmly under Marguerite’s elbow as he walked, and stopped now and then to let Hannibal catch his breath. Out here at the back of the Faubourg Tremé, the City Guards seldom patrolled, especially during Carnival. What few neighbors Jacques Bichet had were all
libres
as well, and all invited to his parties: nobody thought of making it their business to complain. The damp darkness, and the faint vanilla scent of Marguerite’s perfume, brought back to January those expeditions to Monceaux or Mont Parnasse on the outskirts of Paris, to hear a fiddler or a singer said to be extraordinary, or to some cabaret in the St. Antoine district, where they’d sit talking half the night.

I’d always wonder how they lived,
Marguerite had told him once in a wine-shop in Vincennes, sharing a bread-and-cheese dinner under a courtyard vine.
When I was a
child, I’d look out the windows of the carriage and I’d wonder: what do they do when they go home at night? What songs
do they sing? When we were at Vermandois—the château,
you understand—and there’d be a wedding in the village, I’d
watch the torches and the dancers from the window. Or I’d
climb down the ivy of the wall. My mother beat me when
they caught me. She said, You will never learn proper manners if all you see is paysan oafs.

January had mimed a great start of astonishment and said, eyes round with feigned amazement, “My God, Marguerite, your mother . . . my mother . . . They must be sisters!”

“You are my long-lost cousin!” she had cried, and they’d spent the rest of the afternoon inventing a family history that included African royalty and the haughty de Vermandois.

“Well, here’s our man at last!” called out old Mohammed LePas from the darkness as the three friends picked their way through the primordial waste-ground of palmetto and hackberry toward the neat four-room cottage set among the cypresses. January smelled chicken-runs and pigs, the ubiquitous stink of outhouses and the sudden lorelei caress of cooking gumbo; heard music like a color or a scent in the air, a cotillion re-cut to African rhythm like a servant’s hand-me-down dress.

“Thought you’d gone home to bed, Ben.” Dark forms barely visible in the leaked jackstraw light from shutters. A smell of sugar and rum.

“Yeah, he’s givin’ a opera lesson in the mornin’.” Ramesses Ramilles’s light voice spun comic lasciviousness into the words.

“I’ll give you a opera lesson.” January led the way around to the back of the house, where hearth-heat rolled forth like a summer blessing from the candle-lit kitchen. Jacques’s sister Penelope, resplendent in the remains of a masquerade fairy gown from some earlier portion of the evening, stirred something in a cauldron at the fire. Trestles and planks lined the back wall of the Bichet cottage, laden with bread-puddings and gumbos, fried oysters and pralines white and brown, a scattering of burned-down tallow candles and a thousand varieties of dirty rice. Mixed in among everybody’s home specialties were whatever those who worked at the Verandah Hotel or the Café des Exiles had brought away from the kitchens at closing time. Across the yard, red curtains muffled the cottage’s doors, but someone had tied them in knots to keep them out of the way. Music rolled out the way heat did from the kitchen, filling the candle-starred black gulf of the yard, rich as tapestry and gold.

There were few candles in the yard, fewer still inside. Dark forms swayed and whirled. Feet slapped creaking floorboards. Loose happy voices: “Get them knees up, Philo!” “Whoa, look at her!” “Get after her, Isaak, you gonna take that from her?”

“This’s Madame Scie, my friend from Paris,” January introduced Marguerite to those gathered around the kitchen door. Hands extended, welcoming. “Is Mademoiselle Vitrac hereabouts?”

“Well, ain’t
that
just like a man?” sniffed Cora Chouteau, Rose’s best friend, looking like a half-grown skinny kitten. “Brings one lady and starts lookin’ around for another before his shadow even catches up with him on the ground.”

“I’d get rid of that one, honey, if I was you.”

“One accustoms oneself,” sighed Marguerite in her grandest de Vermandois accents, and flipped open her fan.

“ ’Scuse me, I think I hear trumpets blowing a retreat,” murmured January, and he crossed toward the house, whither Hannibal had already gone to join Cochon and old Uncle Bichet in playing for the dancers inside.

Musicians and cab-drivers at this hour, mostly, after the white folks had danced themselves exhausted and gone home to bed. The party would have started out larger, all the carpenters and milliners and furniture-makers of color, the
libre
craftsmen and artists, the workers in iron and marble and silk who made up this neighborhood at the back of the French town. Men and women whose work transfigured this low pastel city and embellished the lives of the rich. There would have been children earlier, too, racing around underfoot, sticky-handed with candy and shrieking with laughter, dancing dances of their own invention, now long carried home and put to bed. Old M’am Bichet’s bed would have been heaped with babies. It was the die-hards who were left, the ones who loved to dance more than they loved food or sleep.

From the doorway January tried to pick out Rose from the press of people inside. He saw his full sister, Olympe, two years his junior, face sheened with sweat— the little room was like an oven—and all her cool iron toughness dissolved, dancing the
pilé chactas
with her husband, a grin on her face like Judgment Morning. Though Paul Corbier had to wake early to get to his work, January knew he’d dance the world’s end to a standstill if he could do so with Olympe. Other friends were there, too, Isaak Jumon, the marble-carver, and little Vachel Corcet, the attorney, and Crowdie Passebon, who sold perfumes, dancing with the beautiful Mamzelle Marie, queen of the voodoos, her tignon off and her astonishing hair loosened down over her shoulders and her wise, wicked eyes bright. Paul and Olympe had been masking—half the people in the small double parlor had—and still wore bits of costumes. Olympe had gold-striped veils wound around her crimson dress and Paul wore old-fashioned doublet and hose.

In the corner near the street door Cochon Gardinier and Hannibal leaned back-to-back against each other, knees bent, eyes half shut, fiddle-bows flying so that the music spiraled and soared like mating dragons—Jacques and Uncle and every other musician from a dozen balls and parties had assembled here and whirled along behind them, the glory of the music fast and heartstopping and wild. January shut his eyes and let the sound fill him, and for a time he understood again why after Ayasha’s death— when the whole world stood open to his empty heart— the only place he could come to was here.

Music. The flesh that robed his soul’s chilled bones.

Family. Helaine Passebon’s dirty rice on a couple of sheets of newspaper and the sound of laughter in the shadows.

New Orleans on a Carnival night, at the back of town.

“Get on over here, Ben!” called Uncle Bichet, and everyone waved. Someone held up a guitar. January shook his head, got booed and shoved, sighed resignedly, and edged through the press along the walls. He put his foot on a chair and swung into the
chactas
mid-bar, fingers leaping and fretting and hammering at the strings, chasing the fiddles, dancing rings around the tune. Cochon winked one twinkling piggy eye at him and Hannibal grinned like a sweat-drenched Celtic elf, and everyone swooped into one more crazy chorus before the dance crashed to a conclusion amid laughter and panting and gourd cups of tafia punch.

“And what’s this I hear about you coming here with another woman?” Rose appeared at his side in a himation of bedsheets and a cardboard spear and Gorgon-decorated shield. Her nut-brown hair was plaited in those dozen soft little braids that adorned the maiden statues of ancient Greece.

January rolled his eyes. “Seems like people in this town mind everybody’s business but their own.” His face ran with sweat in the hot dark and he handed off the guitar to Jacques.

“You should thank the stars they do.” Rose retreated with him to one of the front parlor’s darker corners as the music struck up again. “The woman who works in the kitchen of the Fatted Calf remembers Silvio Cavallo and Bruno Ponte very well. They were in and out, she says, all the evening, in turns—first one sitting quietly and drinking coffee, then the other. She was most affected by the story of my putative mistress’s distress.
Would that it were
another woman,
she said. Another woman, you just go get some steel dust and honey from the juju doctor and that’s that—something
I’ll
evidently have to try. . . .”