Die Upon a Kiss (12 page)

“Madame Scie has no more interest in me these days than she has in Belaggio.”

“So
you
say.” Rose regarded him severely over the tops of her spectacles, which far from detracting from her personation of Owl-Eyed Athène in fact in a curious fashion increased it. “In any case, just before three, Ponte—whose turn it was evidently to keep watch—appeared in the doorway, gestured peremptorily to Cavallo, at which Cavallo rose and hastened from the room.”

“This woman didn’t happen to note what they were wearing, did she?”

“Cavallo wore the blue long-tailed coat that you described him wearing at rehearsal, with the velvet collar. I asked about it when I described him.”

“In other words,” said January, “he changed it at the theater, when he saw everyone there.”

“If he and Ponte were watching the place, waiting for everyone to leave so they could search Belaggio’s office,” said Rose reasonably, “he’d have wanted to rid himself of anything that shouted ‘I’ve been here since the end of rehearsal.’ ”

“Maybe,” agreed January. “But equally, Cavallo could have been—”

From outside the shutters, a voice called, “The Guards!”

The music stopped with a jerk and a squeal. A dozen dancers seized the nearest candles and snuffed them to oblivion, quite clearly forgetting that they needed at least some light to beat a retreat out the back; January cursed, and grabbed Rose by the hand. Bodies blundered in the dark. He heard Olympe call “Out! This way. Give me your hand . . .” and someone squeaked and laughed.

One hand on Rose’s wrist and the other against the wall, he groped through the darkness. The dimmest possible glow marked the rear door behind a heaving wall of shoulders. Astonishingly, the exodus was made in close to complete silence—curious, thought January, considering how few of the revelers had actually ever themselves been slaves.

They’ve only been treated like them,
he thought as he and Rose swiftly crossed the darkness of the yard and ducked into the deeper night beneath the trees beyond. You didn’t have to belong to someone if you more or less belonged to everyone; if everyone together had a reason to keep you down. People like Rose, and Crowdie Passebon, and Cochon Gardinier, second- and sometimes third-generation
libres,
still had the slaves’ instinct for swift, stealthy retreat. Their self-preserving watchfulness had been ingrained from a lifetime of working around the restrictions of the whites: you can’t smoke cigars in public (the yard and house had reeked with them); you have to cover your head. Don’t be uppity. Never look a white man in the eye.

Whatever you do,
whatever
you do, don’t fall foul of a white man at law. Because you will not, you cannot, win.

Silence fell on the yard. Those among the pitch-black shadows under the trees watched and listened, attention strained toward the yard. From here in the fleeting starlight, it looked like even the trestle tables and the food were gone
—Somebody had presence of mind.
A dry rustle of palmettos off to his right; a twig cracked underfoot to his left; a woman giggled. The other women in the kitchen must have hustled Marguerite into the woods with them:
That sound you hear,
he could almost hear her saying,
is Grandmère de Vermandois rolling over in her
grave. . . .

After fifteen minutes or so, when no torches came into sight around the corner of the house, January saw a dark figure—probably Jacques’s mother—leave the shelter of the woods and cross back to the kitchen. A light went up there—somebody must have simply clamped the firebell over the blaze on the hearth at the first alarm—and a moment later Old M’am Bichet emerged with a candle in her hand and went around to the front of the house.

“If this was one of your nephew’s practical jokes,” breathed Rose, “I hope his mother makes a gris-gris that turns him into a toad.” January tried to recall whether it had been a man’s voice that had given the alarm, or a boy’s, and couldn’t. It was the sort of thing his nephew Gabriel—or a half-dozen of the boy’s cronies—would have considered hilarious, now that he thought of it.

Or himself, he thought, at the age of twelve.

A minute later their hostess came back around the corner of the house, shielding the candle in fingers edged in pink light. Uncle Bichet and Jacques and Jacques’s wife, Jane, left the black wall of the swamp at three separate points and converged on her. Jacques lifted one arm, signaling all was clear. “I’m going to wear those boys out,” promised January grimly. It was probably past four, and if he was going to give “a opera lesson” of unspecified duration to Madame Montero, and play at a Blue Ribbon Ball for Davis at the Salle d’Orleans tomorrow night, he’d have to attend early Mass—a thought that made him groan inwardly.

Why couldn’t he be a heathen like Hannibal, and laugh God to scorn?

Others, it appeared, were also mindful of the nearness of dawn. As January and Rose returned to the yard, parties formed up for the walk home, Olympe already regarding her eldest son with deep suspicion. Penelope and Jane wrapped up dishes of food in sheets of clean newspaper for those to take home who would. “You take some dirty rice, Ben?” inquired Alys Roque, one of Olympe’s friends. “I hear M’am Bontemps don’t board.”

“Would you
really
want to eat anything she’d cooked?” retorted Cora Chouteau, and got a general laugh.

“Hannibal, where’d you go?—Take some of this, please. I swear I could put you in a candle-mold and have room for the wick. . . .”

“I didn’t yell ‘Guards,’ ” protested Gabriel’s voice over the general hushed babble of departure. “I swear I didn’t. . . .”

“Marguerite?” January scanned the faces limned by the threads of candle-light, but saw no twist of graying blond hair starred with flowers. “Have you seen my friend Madame Scie?”

“I was talking with her.” Mohammed LePas frowned. “Then some idiot whose name I won’t mention knocked over the candle in the kitchen. . . .”

“I told you it was an accident,” retorted Philippe duCoudreau. “You try movin’ around in there with ten other people and somebody yells
the Guards is comin’ . . .”

“I thought you came in and grabbed her, Ben,” said Cora.

“He did,” confirmed duCoudreau, nodding. “I saw him.”

January shook his head. “I was inside with Rose.”

Silence. And those looks that go back and forth between people, when nobody wants to be the first to say
Uh-oh . . .

They found every candle still long enough to sustain flame and spread out in the swamp. At this time of year, January found himself thinking, it was too cold for alligators—too dry for them to come up this far from the nearest water, which was Bayou Gentilly. . . . Besides, if someone were seized by a ’gator, he couldn’t imagine it would have been silent.

Someone.
As he edged through the harsh three-foot shields of the palmetto, the twining tangles of hackberry between the cypresses, January reflected uncomfortably on the way his mind phrased that thought.

Not
Marguerite . . .

Just
someone.
Spindly light glimmered greenish through dagger-shaped leaves, edged creepers snaking around the oak-trunks and the pointed goblin heads of the cypress-knees thrusting through last year’s dead leaves. Bobbing glints in the darkness, like unseasonable fireflies, and an occasional hushed voice: “M’am Scie . . . m’am, can you hear . . . ?”

Gabriel’s voice. “Here she is.”

Damn it,
thought January, hearing in his nephew’s tone what the boy had found.
Damn it, no . . .

She lay at the foot of an oak-tree. A little blood smudged a low-bending bough where her head had struck. But the wound was on the back of her skull, and the shoulder of her golden dress was torn. There was no possible way she could have simply run on the limb in the dark. The white flowers, fallen from her hair, strewed the dead leaves around her head. When January and the others bent over her and held the candles close, they could see the darkening bruises on her throat.

Huge hands. January had never met another man who had hands like that.

He didn’t need to turn his head to see people look at one another. Didn’t need to hear their silence. It was as if he felt the draw of everyone’s breath.

Gently he felt her wrist. There was no pulse under the thin white skin, but he thought he detected a fragile beat in the vein of her neck. When he plucked the skeletal nosegay from Hannibal’s buttonhole and held it before her lips, he saw the paper-fine petals stir. “Somebody, get a plank.” He wondered why there was no expression in his voice. “An old door, or a tabletop. Anything to lay her out straight to carry her back to the house.”

“Her neck broke?” Olympe knelt at his side, shrugged off her shawl. Hannibal brought up Marguerite’s gray cloak, all snagged with dead leaves and twigs, found among the oak’s twisted roots.

I should be feeling something,
January told himself, not remembering how many nights had passed between Ayasha’s death and the first onslaught of that hammering pain. “I don’t know. She has a concussion, how bad I don’t know.” He saw Philippe duCoudreau, and one or two others, draw back a little when he turned, and said again, “I was with Rose.”

“He was,” agreed Rose, and duCoudreau nodded, with eyes that said,
And you’re the woman who hopes to
wed him.

Isaak Jumon and Crowdie Passebon came back then from the house with one of the planks from the buffet. Holding Marguerite’s head steady, January and Mamzelle Marie eased the ballet mistress onto the makeshift litter, covered her with cloaks and shawls.

“What do we say about this?” asked Mohammed. People looked at each other again, then at Jacques and his family.

Whatever you say,
thought January,
it sure as hell can’t
be the truth.

No one spoke for a time, as the implications of January’s former relations with Madame Scie—known to a number of the other opera musicians present and almost certainly common knowledge by now among everyone at the party—and his present relations with Rose, sank into everyone’s consciousness.

“We say a carriage struck her,” said Mamzelle Marie at last. The voodooienne knelt on the other side of Madame Scie, listened to her chest, and gently touched her face and throat. “You know how crazy people drive, late, along the Bayou Road. You and Hannibal were walking her home, Ben, and a carriage struck her, going fast without lights. You carried her here.” She straightened up to her knees, regarded the fiddler with those dark, wise serpent eyes. “That sit with you, Hannibal?”

January felt Philippe duCoudreau looking at him, heard the silence louder than a thousand whispers.

The voodoo queen’s gaze passed from face to face of those standing in the raw dark of the swamp. “That sit with all here,” she asked, “until we can find the real truth?”

Uncle Bichet cleared his throat. Like everyone else there, the old man feared and respected Marie Laveau, but he had been, once, a prince of his tribe. He had been raised to love justice. “And what happens,” he asked, “when we find that truth?”

“Depends,” replied the voodooienne, “on what it is.”

With Jumon and Mohammed and half a dozen others keeping watch all around for the City Guards, they carried Marguerite through the streets of the old French town to Olympe’s house on Rue Douane. There they put her to bed in the rear bedroom, white and still as a corpse.

When January finally slept, much later in the day, he dreamed that he stood on a worn marble terrace in Cyprus, and through archways curtained in gauze heard Marguerite sing
Willow, willow, sing willow for me
in Drusilla d’Isola’s sweet, despairing voice.

SEVEN

By the time January left Olympe’s house, after ascertaining that Marguerite’s neck was not broken, the dense, misty blackness of the night had begun to thin to gray. In kitchens and slave-quarters all over town, men and women crept shivering from straw-tick pallets in un-lighted rooms to kindle up the fires they’d prepared last night. To heat water so that Masters—or husbands— could wash their faces, or oil to fry rice, flour, and egg for
callas.
Along the levees, at the foot of Market Street, and St. Joseph, and Madison and St. Philippe, pirogues and canoes and fishing-boats put in, unloading aubergines and apples by the yellow cresset-glare, beans and winter lettuces and crates and barrels of black oysters and silvery pungent fish. A glory of baking bread and coffee blessed the air.

Crossing through the pre-dawn bustle of the Place d’Armes, casting despairingly this way and that in his mind for something else he might do, some other treatment he might add to those futile efforts already made, January felt again the iron cold of other dawns, the damp, mossy stink of the morning streets of Paris. Marguerite beside him, sinews and heart loosened with the sleepy content that the young feel when they’ve made music three-quarters of the night and love for the rest of it, in quest of coffee among the grimed echoing torchlit stone vaults of Les Halles.

Don’t let her die. Virgin Mother of God, don’t let her die.

There’s not much you can do about a deep concussion,
Dr. LeBel had told him—the head surgeon at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris.
Just nurse them, and get them to drink if you
can once the danger of vomiting’s past.
He’d lifted back the eyelids of the man he and January were examining then, a laborer whose thin breath reeked of decayed teeth and cheap wine, to show the mismatched dilation of the pupils, their fixed, unseeing gaze.
It’s surprising how long
they’ll last, unconscious, if they can be made to sup a little
gruel or water.

One priest—probably Father Eugenius, January guessed—was already hearing confessions at the Cathedral of St. Louis. Three or four women in the gaudy, faded calicoes of the market waited on the benches near the wooden cubicle, hands folded in prayer. Only a few candles burned in all that shadowy space—at the far front of the church, votive lights before the Virgin’s altar picked out the beauty of a curved eyebrow, the intricate life-maps of wrinkled and arthritic hands. Where was that quiet beauty, January wondered, in music? Why did opera celebrate only the loves of the young and noisy?

He confessed himself, and sat on the benches at the rear of the church that were reserved for people of color, until a sleepy altarboy came out and touched flame to the candles at the high altar, and Father Eugenius emerged in a robe of white and gold to say Mass. Only a handful of market-women were present, and a dozen slaves at the rear of the gloomy side aisles. The places of the whites in the center aisle were empty.

A veiled and fashionably-dressed woman knelt near him, her elaborately-wrapped silk tignon proclaiming her in all probability a plaçée. She did not take Communion, but when January rose to leave, comforted as always by the words of the blessings and the prayers, she remained, rosary glinting faintly in her gloved hands.

Praying for expiation, he wondered, of a sin that the white man’s law would not permit her to rectify? Pleading for the well-being of others in her family, who might rely on her protector’s largesse to give them a security they might not otherwise have? Most of the plaçées, if they attended Mass at all, came to the eleven o’clock Mass—the fashion-show, it was called. A parade of silk frocks and new bonnets for the whites, of jewelry and stylish variations in color and wrap and feathers for the tignons of the free colored women.

Not that many came. Mostly the ladies of the Rue des Ramparts would exhibit their finery at the Salle d’Orleans tonight.

The image of that penitent, whoever she was, stayed in January’s mind as he crossed the Place d’Armes, like the air of a song that repeats over and over. He bought a bowl of jambalaya and a cup of coffee in the market, and sat watching the sea-gulls quarrel over shrimp dropped from the baskets on the levee, trying to wake up.

In the blue gloom of the market hall the last torches were extinguished. Light smote the waters of the river and tipped the leafless branches of the sycamores around the square with gold. Protestants and Americans said in hushed, disapproving tones that the population of New Orleans kept the Sabbath the way Bostonians kept the Fourth of July, and as if to prove this, slaves stopped to laugh and chat on their way to the market for their Masters, fishermen and stevedores sang in the morning chill as they worked, their breath puffing white. A melismatic holler was passed from crew to crew along the ranks of the steamboats unloading at the wharves, the words lost in the rise and fall of the voices: “Wayaaaaay, yooooo. . . .” January could follow the sound down the levee like the cloud-shadows that ran over the dark seas of standing cane.

At ten o’clock Consuela Montero would present herself for her session, and January knew from experience that it was easier and less exhausting to stay up than to get up. He could sleep in the afternoon—before or after returning to Olympe’s house to check on Marguerite—so as to be clear-headed for that night’s quadroon ball.

You can sleep during Lent.
Last winter, having gotten on the wrong side of a powerful Creole matron, January had lost nearly all his students and had been hired to play very few balls; Mardi Gras was the harvest of his year, far less grueling than the sugar-grinding seasons of his childhood. You didn’t sleep in either case, but at least at Mardi Gras you went to interesting parties.

You got her, Philippe duCoudreau had said in the lightless confusion of the Bichet kitchen last night. The candles had been out, the fire covered—jostling shoulders, crowding heads, features obscured in shadow. January passed his hand across his unshaven face, wondering how duCoudreau had been so sure. There was only one person at the party last night anywhere near January’s size, and that was his brother-in-law, Paul Corbier, who would scoop up the gross brown four-inch palmetto-bugs on a piece of newspaper and pitch them gently outside rather than crushing them like every other person in town did.

Why would Philippe have accused him? The worst January knew of the man was that duCoudreau was the most hapless musician in New Orleans, and relations had never been anything but cordial between them. January felt a deep uneasiness, and anger at that uneasiness: anger that he would have to so deeply fear the possibility of anyone mentioning the truth to the police.

Struck by a carriage?
He grimaced at the childishness of the lie. And what would the police say if they happened to see the huge bruises around Marguerite’s throat?

You were her lover, you who love another now. Why
would a white woman have gone with you to Bichet’s except
to demand something of you?

Of course your friends will all lie for you.

The people at the back of the Faubourg Tremé weren’t so very different from the Milanese and the Sicilians who said
sbirri
with that look in their eyes. It does something to you, to know in your bones that justice is something other people get.

Someone had tried to strangle her. Someone had seized her by the shoulder and slammed her against the low-hanging tree-limb when she fought free.

What would Philippe say if someone started asking questions of those who’d seen Madame Scie leave Trulove’s ball with himself and Hannibal last night?

Consuela Montero appeared on Madame Bontemps’s doorstep on the stroke of the hour, a copy of the score to
Le Nozze di Figaro
in hand.
“Mil reniegos
that I declined to go to the house of Señor Trulove last night!”

News,
reflected January,
travels fast.

She folded back the mantilla that sheltered her round, determined face from the winter sun and incidentally from the chance notice of passers-by. “Not that there were not some in the Opera Society who begged me to meet them there, but to go listen to
Americanos
tell one another about cotton and slaves,
qué fastidio!
How would I know the girl would be so stupid as to displease her patron so in public?” She opened her little purse of gold mesh and laid a stack of five Mexican silver dollars on the corner of January’s square six-octave piano. “Just so! One can only hope that foolish as d’Isola is, she will contrive to bring him to his senses herself.”

Briskly, she set the score on the music-rack, and removed her black-and-gold velvet pelerine. “It is as well to be ready if she does.
Buen’ dias,
Señora.” She nodded and offered two lace-mitted fingers to Madame Bontemps, apparently not in the least discomposed by that woman’s silent appearance at her elbow.

“Madame.” January selected one of the silver dollars and pressed it into his landlady’s palm. “This is Madame Montero, who is paying me for a private singing lesson this morning. You remember I sent you a note of this, yesterday afternoon?”

“I don’t forget things.” Madame Bontemps continued to hold Madame Montero’s extended fingers in her damp grip. “Even seeing the Devil last night doesn’t make me forget. I saw the Devil last night,” she added, released her hold, and settled herself into one of the nearly thread-bare—but spotlessly neat—green grosgrain chairs that decorated the front parlor. “It’s ten o’clock.” She folded her hands in her lap. “At ten o’clock I sit in the parlor.”

January glanced at the soprano, who was studying herself in the pier glass between the windows and making sure that the lacquered curls on her forehead remained perfectly symmetrical. If Montero heard the landlady’s intention, it didn’t bother her. And there would be odder distractions than that, he reflected, at the theater Tuesday night.

To do her justice, Consuela Montero was a far better Countess than La d’Isola. She had, as she’d said, sung the role only the previous year, and needed only to be taken through it. January, who had a very passable baritone, sang the parts of both Figaro and the Count for her, accompanied occasionally by his landlady, who had a habit of chiming in with fragments of “Fleuve du Tage” and “Les bluets sont bleus.” “You are good,” Montero told January after their Act Four garden duet. “Better than Señor Staranzano, who just stands there, waiting for the world to swoon at his feet. You would make a good Almaviva—always supposing Almaviva was a Moor. It is you they should put in
Othello,
and not that Austrian buffoon in black paint.”

That really WOULD have them burning down the
theater,
thought January, too amused at the notion of the reaction to such casting to feel much anger at the fact that in America it simply could not be. Probably not in Paris either, he thought, and be damned to your Liberté, Fraternité, and Égalité. “Maybe you could tell me,” he said, shuffling through the score to locate the point at which the Countess reveals her true identity to her baffled husband. “Was there someone in the Opera Society who tried to get Belaggio to change
Othello
for some other opera? Tried to get him not to put it on?”

The elegantly-plucked black brows pinched. “Not put it on?” Montero’s voice had the note of a queen who has been informed that her carriage isn’t ready due to the drunkenness of the grooms.
“De qué,
not put it on? It is a very good opera. Beautiful. And we have no other premiere, unless you will have
La Muette
as such. But
La
Muette
is years old, and is everywhere done. One must have the premiere.”

“There are those in this city,” said January, “who would not thank a man to put on-stage the love of a black man for a white woman. You do not know how it is here,” he added, seeing in her face the same incredulity he had seen yesterday in Belaggio’s. “I assure you, there are men who would do what they could to prevent it, as being ‘indecent.’ And I know Signor Belaggio is proud of it, as well he should be. But the pride could put him in danger.”

Montero’s red lips curled. “If what you say is true, Señor, I think you’ll find that Señor Belaggio is the last man who would place his life before his pride. And
á la
verdad,
I don’t know what cause he has to be proud. It isn’t as if he wrote
Othello.”

“What?”
Even as the word came out of his mouth, January knew she spoke the truth. A man doesn’t have to be good to write great music. But there must be something about him that is great.

And that, he understood, was what bothered him about Belaggio.

He was petty. A petty man can write excellent music, he knew. But not the aria La d’Isola had sung last night.

“De verdad.”
The soprano shrugged her fleshy shoulders. “Did you not know? Incantobelli wrote it. Why else do you think he made the threats he did, of murder and ruin? Why do you think Belaggio had that brother of his denounce Incantobelli to the Austrians so that he can never return to Milan? And even so,” she added, settling the finale score before January on the piano-rack, “Belaggio still dared not remain in Europe, knowing Incantobelli could be as close to him as Naples or Rome. No, he must come to Havana.”

Her onyx eyes flashed with a sudden ugly glint. “And like a fool, I signed his contract, not even making sure that it specified that I would be prima. I did not know then,” she added darkly, “that he had fallen in love with this hussy, and promised her a season. Come.” She tapped the music smartly with the backs of her polished nails. “Let us now return to this other pig of a lover Almaviva, and run him to confusion.”

“I saw the Devil last night,” put in Madame Bontemps from her chair opposite the windows.

“Did you?” Madame Montero tweaked a curl back into place. “No doubt he was looking for a fiacre—why are they never about when you need them? So. The finale. This time I will try a little fioritura, just to show these people what true singing is.”