Hagar Read online

  HAGAR

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

  Copyright 2015 Barbara Hambly

  Cover art by Eric Baldwin

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  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 stuffi
ng 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.”

  Mostly the company assembled in the parlor at Belle Jour were those Rose knew from Benjamin’s work with the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society. The amiable perfumer Crowdie Passebon (a.k.a. D’Artagnan, for the night) and his family. The undertaker Beauvais Quennell. Basile Nogent the stonecutter, Fortune Gerard who sold coffee-beans and teas at the Sign of the Velvet Mask on Rue St-Pierre… children and grandchildren of the French and Spanish who’d come to New Orleans to make their fortunes, as her own father and grandfather had: white men who’d had the decency to free the women of color on whom they’d fathered children, and make sure those children had the education to make their way in the world. Arnaud Levesque, indeed, had risen in wealth to the point that he could purchase a plantation on the main river and slaves of his own, while his two brothers had remained prosperous carpenters to the end of their days. He and his wife greeted Livia with polite effusiveness and very proper admiration of her costume – Rose noticed (when she got close enough to see it clearly) that Candide Levesque was gowned in a startlingly accurate imitation of Marie Antoinette (always supposing that the late queen of France had darkened six shades and put on forty pounds), complete with the obligatory two-foot powdered wig. “No wonder your grandmother felt she had to dress up as Queen Elizabeth,” Rose whispered to Gabriel. Up on the dais at one end of the parlor, the musicians flashed Rose a succession of welcoming smiles without missing a beat. Jules Cassat was a perfectly adequate pianist, but he was young and new and Rose – and most of the musicians as well, she guessed – missed her husband Benjamin’s light, skillful touch on the keys.

  “I’ve had a letter from Benjamin,” said the fiddler Hannibal Sefton, two hours later at the first break in the program, when supper was announced. “Written from Baltimore, evidently the day they arrived.”

  “I have, too.” Rose donned her spectacles again – across the long parlor Agnes Pellicot, as Gabriel had predicted, had moulted her wings like a queen ant, and various other guests, having made their costumed entrances, were surreptitiously discarding their less convenient accoutrements in every corner. Anne Corbier, a grandmother to her bone-marrow, kept “Baby Isaac” in her arms.

  “He said he’d collected a vast amount of information about the man Madame Viellard has hired him to find, which he says is about as helpful as a description of the average needle when one is about to investigate a haystack – will you bring yours to dinner Sunday?”

  “I kiss your hands and feet.” Hannibal bowed. Cadaverous in his shabby long-tailed coat, he was the only white man in the room, and was keeping, Rose observed, as far away from the champagne on the refreshment table as he could without being obvious about it. “Nerine Galatea, thymo mihi dulcior Hyblae. I don’t suppose we’ll get word of the results of his search much before he arrives on your doorstep with them, but I must admit I’m curious as to how—”

  Out on the front gallery, a man shouted, “Fire!”

  Hannibal caught Rose’s hands and drew back from the sudden surge toward the French-doors onto the gallery. Her first glance showed her that sensibly, Anne Corbier – with Baby John in her arms – had likewise retreated: every other guest in the parlor was shoving like water sloshing in a dish-pan – What a stupid thing to shout, fire WHERE? In the kitchen? In one wing of this house? Should we flee, or…? – and as if in response to Rose’s thought someone else – also on the front gallery – yelled, “Looks like Marais!”

  The long room emptied: by the time Rose and Hannibal made their way onto the front gallery it was crammed with guests leaning over the rail. Like most plantations along the river, Belle Jour was built on seven-foot brick piers, and from its gallery the red-lit smoke was clearly visible beyond the trees to the immediate south.

  �
��It’s the house!” Arnaud Levesque was already stripping himself of court coat and red-heeled shoes. Indeed, Rose could see the glare of the flames was approximately in a line with the Big House of Belle Jour, and not farther back toward the woods and swamps, where the quarters and the workshops of a plantation customarily lay. Arnaud’s valet came running with his boots; every man on the gallery, like their host, was divesting himself of every portion of his costume that could conceivably hamper his abilities as a fire-fighter. Isaak Jumon, Vachel Corcet, and several others were already running toward the river road in the white tunics they’d had on under various forms of Roman toga. Arnaud shouted for someone to get to the quarters and turn out the slaves.

  Together Hannibal and Rose clattered down the gallery steps, and followed along with the crowd.

  It was indeed the Big House at Marais Plantation that was in flames.

  The Marais slaves had formed a bucket-line from the river, but there weren’t nearly enough to cover the distance. The men who’d come from town for an evening of dancing and chat with their friends filled in the gaps, shoulder to shoulder with Arnaud Levesque’s house-servants and field-hands alike. Back among the crowd of women, Rose observed that the fire seemed to be spreading from the front corner room of the main house’s downstream side. She automatically identified the room: in every French Creole house, that was the chamber occupied by the house’s mistress. Someone shouted, “Is your Master home?” and the man nearest in the line replied, “No sir. But M’am Leonie in there, I seen the light in her room!”

  Men ran toward the burning house along the sweating, struggling line. Rose, running among them, knew – they all knew – how smoke could overcome a sleeper, or panic trap one newly-awakened. Shouted fragments of information jolted over the roar of the flame: “Neuville’s in New York – overseer left last week – half the crop lost when the fields got waterlogged—”