Hagar

by

Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Barbara Hambly

Cover art by Eric Baldwin

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Hagar

About The Author

The Further Adventures

Hagar

by

Barbara Hambly

Everyone in New Orleans agreed that it was
not possible to get all the way through Lent without some break in
one’s piety. God could not really have intended to chastise genuine
Christians (said Anne Corbier, when she stopped by Rose Janvier’s
house with the sewing) while all those uptown American Protestant
animal heretics got off scot-free.

“But they don’t,” pointed out Rose, setting
before the older woman – her sister-in-law Olympe’s mother-in-law –
a cup of black coffee (cream was absent for Lent) and a small dish
of strawberries. “Their ministers instruct them to be solemn and
gloomy all year round, so I suppose it evens out.” A logical Deist
after the school of Jefferson and Voltaire, Rose herself was
perfectly willing to eat beef – could the slender finances of the
Janvier household have supported such extravagance in this
hard-pinched, bank-deficient year of 1838 – had she not known it
would silently grieve her devout husband, and quite vocally grieve
Anne, the grandmother of the niece and nephew currently living
under the Janvier roof.

Benjamin had gone – as he was periodically
obliged to do these days – to mend the family exchequer by taking a
job in Washington City, but Gabriel and Zizi-Marie Corbier, in
addition to being lively young people and excellent company, were
of enormous help to Rose in the upkeep of the huge old Spanish
house on the Rue Esplanade. It was ostensibly to return
fifteen-year-old Gabriel’s neatly-mended shirt, and to present
seventeen-year-old Zizi-Marie with a new shift, that Anne Corbier
had come that chilly spring afternoon. In actuality it was with the
double purpose of inviting Rose and her young companions to a ball
(“Very quiet, very decent, hardly a festivity at all…”) at the
small sugar-plantation of Belle Jour in celebration of the birthday
of the wife of its owner, Arnaud Levesque (“Candide is such a good,
pious woman God Himself must celebrate her birthday, and cannot
possibly have any objections to us doing the same…”), and at the
same time soliciting Rose and Gabriel to be a part, as it were, of
her costume.

“Maître Corbier and I have been married so
long,” twinkled Anne, “and the old ruffian is still so sweet to me,
I thought we’d go as Abraham and Sarah, from the Bible. But since
everybody in town knows he has a roving eye – at his age he should
be ashamed of himself! – I thought we’d better have old Father
Abraham’s fetching Egyptian concubine Hagar along, and her son
Ishmael all dressed up in sheepskins…” She nodded at Gabriel with a
smile as he came in from the gallery, quite properly through
Benjamin’s room on the river-ward side of the house. “…and baby
Isaac for good measure.”

Gabriel exclaimed, “
Formidable
,
Granmere!” and in his wicker basket, five-month-old John January –
whom no one ever dreamed of calling Johnny – made a single muted
gurgle, as if to inquire whether he, too, would have to dress up in
sheepskins. “You’ll do it, won’t you, Aunt Rose?”

Rose rolled her eyes, asked why Zizi-Marie
couldn’t personate the Egyptian temptress (“T’cha! At her age? It
wouldn’t be decent!” and, “No, Aunt Rose, she’s already going as
Maid Marian with Antoine Mercelot…”) (“Does everybody already know
about this ball except me?”), and agreed. As far as Rose was
concerned, Granmere Anne was quite right in that nobody should be
obliged to remain at home and contemplate Christ’s sufferings for
forty days, particularly if one had doubts about what Christ had
actually said (the accounts in the Gospels, which Rose had read in
Greek, did not match up) and if he had existed at all.
Picture-books in the library – accumulated in those days prior to
the collapse of three-quarters of the banks in the United States
when Rose and Benjamin had operated a school – were consulted as to
what ancient Egyptian concubines would wear (“I am
not
going
to go out of the house in
that
!”), and when Rose refused
also to abandon her spectacles for the occasion it was agreed that
it was perfectly proper for Hagar’s son Ishmael to conduct his
“mother” about the gathering on his arm.

*

Belle Jour plantation lay some five miles
down-river from New Orleans. It was small, as plantations went,
only a few arpents of river-frontage, though it extended back from
the river for several miles into the swamp. While it wasn’t common
for a free man of color to own a plantation in these parts – most
free colored planters could be found in the western parishes of the
State, along the Cane River and in Natchitoches Parish – it wasn’t
unheard-of. Arnaud Levesque’s neighbors on both sides were of old
French Creole families who had no objections to his friends and
relatives from the New Orleans
gens du couleur librés
descending now and then upon his house for a little mild revelry.
It was technically illegal these days for that many people of color
to “assemble” unsupervised by whites, but “what
les animaux
Americaines
don’t know won’t harm them…” and in any case the
point was moot. Candide Levesque happened to share her birthday –
the fifteenth of March – with former President Andrew Jackson, and
every white planter for twenty miles up and down the river had gone
to New Orleans to participate in the glittering public subscription
ball and display of fireworks scheduled to commemorate the war
hero’s nativity.

From the deck of a small wood-boat, Rose
watched the landings of the downriver plantations slip past in the
cool spring twilight, and wondered if this fact had anything to do
with Arnaud Levesque’s decision to celebrate his wife’s birthday
with a mid-Lent ball.

“Only insofar as it gave him the chance to
make everybody he knows choose between his invitation and the
fireworks,” sniffed Rose’s mother-in-law, the beautiful – at age
sixty-three – and formidable Livia Levesque. “Anything Christophe
had planned, from a Sunday dinner to our wedding, Arnaud would
devise a fish-fry or a picnic or a ball on the same day, just to
see who’d come. Are you supposed to be Cleopatra?” She looked down
her nose at Rose’s close-fitted ensemble of old bed-sheets,
blue-and-gold Egyptian head-dress, serpent arm-band, and copious
eye-paint. “Because you look more like a servant.”

“I am a servant,” agreed Rose cheerfully.
“Hagar, concubine to old Father Abraham.” She indicated the rest of
the Patriarch’s family with a nod. “And personally, I’d be very
curious to see what the Americans can produce in the way of
fireworks, since Mr. Davis has asked me again to do them for the
Opera next winter.”

“I trust you turned him down,” said Livia,
who had little opinion of her daughter-in-law’s fondness for
chemical experimentation. She had sold her slaves (whom she’d fed
cheap and rented out at a profit) at the first sign of bank
closures, had re-invested in Bank of England bonds, and thus had no
need to make pennies stretch. “And as for Hagar, the little hussy
deserved what she got,” pronounced Livia, who had little opinion of
her daughter-in-law’s fondness for chemical experimentation. “I
only wonder that in the Bible Sarah didn’t turn Father Abraham out
of doors as well, taking her maid into his bed the minute his wife
got too old to please him, not that you could tell the pair of them
from Jupiter and Juno – or Father Time and Mother Goose – in those
horse-blankets and false whiskers. Did Louis Corbier shave off his
own beard to glue that atrocity to his face? It looks like half the
stuffing out of a mattress.”

There was no mistaking who Livia Levesque was
supposed to be at any rate, reflected Rose admiringly.
Where on
EARTH did she acquire an Elizabethan court gown
? The Mardi Gras
costume of some wealthy planter’s wife, probably – it must have
cost a fortune, even second-hand, and Rose wouldn’t have been
entirely prepared to bet that some of the pearls that decorated the
auburn wig’s snailshell curls weren’t genuine. The hairpiece itself
was of a dark enough hue not to contrast unpleasantly with Livia’s
complexion, though as the daughter of a full-blood African, the
older woman was duskier than most white gentlemen liked their
plaçées to be, even in her heyday. It didn’t matter. Embroidered,
bejeweled, farthingaled and corseted to within an inch of her life
and face framed in an explosion of lace, Livia Levesque looked
every inch a queen.

The spring night was cool. Lanterns had been
hung on the Belle Jour landing-stage, and in the trees on both
sides of the drive that led to the house. Every window of the
downstairs was illuminated, like an American Jack o’ Lantern, and
candles burned on the long gallery that fronted the house as well.
As the Corbier party – and those others, like Livia, who’d taken
the same boat down from town – mounted the levee, Rose could hear
the musicians striking up:
Bonaparte’s Retreat
, flute and
fiddle embelishing the edges of the tune like ruffles. The
mustiness of wet earth rose from the new-chopped cane-fields, and
the green scent of the half-grown fields further back from the
river, mingled with kitchen-smoke and the murky pong of the woods.
Rose handed off Baby John – in his role as Baby Isaac – to his aged
“mother” Sarah, removed her spectacles, and took her “son”
Ishmael’s arm, with a certain amount of regret. She dearly loved
the beauty of spring evenings and experienced mild annoyance that
she’d have to forego it simply because the Egyptian concubines of
Biblical patriarchs didn’t wear spectacles.

“Don’t worry about it, Aunt Rose,” Gabriel
consoled her. “You know Granpère’s going to get rid of that beard
in about half an hour and M’am Pellicot—” He named Livia’s
deadliest rival from the two ladies’ mutual glory days, who had
boarded the wood-boat with her daughters just before the craft left
the wharves, “—isn’t going to wear those silly wings much longer
than that.” Agnes Pellicot and three of her daughters had elected
to come as Queen Titania and her Fairy Court, and looked like they
were regretting it. They’d spent the half-hour voyage unsnagging
their diaphanous veils from gunwales, turnbuckles, the swords of
the Three Musketeers (perfumer Crowdie Passebon and his cousins
Laurent and Damien), and each other, and the fragile gauze was
laddered with caught thread-ends.

And in fact, reflected Rose as they walked up
the drive toward the lights and the music, other than her
mother-in-law and the Pellicot ladies, there were very few of New
Orleans’
libré
demimonde in evidence. Though there was no
enmity between the “respectable” world of the city’s free colored
artisans and the plaçées – as there would be in the white world –
most of the plaçées wouldn’t be caught dead attending a ball given
by such dowdy personages as artisans and clerks of color, or even a
free colored planter. It was the whites who had the power and the
money. And –declared most of the plaçées – the style as well.

No wonder the “uptown” blacks, the
Protestant, American blacks, call us stuck-up.

Livia Levesque was putting in an appearance
only out of courtesy to her brother- and sister-in-law – who had,
Rose knew, objected strenuously when the late Christophe Levesque
had fallen madly in love with a former plaçée… though probably the
acquisition of a gown that would let her parade as the Virgin Queen
had something to do with her acceptance of the invitation. Agnes
Pellicot – as Livia had informed Rose the moment the Fairy Queen
had stepped on-board the wood-boat with her court – despite having
been left fairly well to pass when her last protector had paid her
off was on the hunt for a husband. “I could have told her not to
invest in that fool steamship company.” (Rose was fairly certain
that in fact Livia HAD told her not to…) “And as for that hotel she
put her money into in Milneburgh… Who did she think was going to
stay on that side of the lake-front? Never trust an American,
especially when he’s trying to talk you into going partners with
him… Now she’s got to find some imbecile to marry her to pay her
debts.”